Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a functioning democracy looks like? And how can you tell the difference?Two articles came out recently that offer very different perspectives on these questions. In Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote a piece called “Trump Is Losing,” which argues that Trump’s efforts to cow his enemies and consolidate power are not organized or strategic enough to make a serious dent in our democratic system. In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz published a piece that he reported in Hungary, about how life in a modern authoritarian regime doesn’t look and feel like you might expect: “You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if — still go on feeling as if — the big one is not yet here,” he writes.So I invited both Beauchamp and Marantz on the show to debate these big questions: What timeline are we on? What signs are they looking at? If we’ve crossed the line into authoritarianism, how would we know? Is Trump losing? Or is it possible he’s already won?This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt“The Path to American Authoritarianism” by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way“How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?” by Steven LevitskyLucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt“Don’t Believe Him” by Ezra Klein“The Emergency Is Here” by Ezra KleinDemocracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone by Astra TaylorRecommendationsPolitical Liberalism by John RawlsEichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah ArendtA World After Liberalism by Matthew RoseMelting Point by Rachel CockerellI’m Still Here (film)The Constitutional Bind by Aziz RanaThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the debate about Trump's political strategy?
A question we talk about a lot amongst ourselves on the show right now is what timeline are we in and how will we know? Are we watching the fundamental erosion of American democracy, of its liberties, of its safeguards? Are we on a path that is quickly becoming irreversible? Or are we in the timeline where the Trump administration is doing a lot and
where it is trying to arrogate new powers to itself. But to the extent it has a fundamental plan to reformat the way the American political system works, that it's simply running into too much opposition, and it has too little power to succeed. Two pieces recently came out that I thought created an interesting tension and interesting ways to look at this.
In Vox, Zach Beecham wrote this piece called, "'Trump is Losing.'" Beecham is an expert on competitive authoritarianism, the slide away from democracy and into something very different. His book, The Reactionary Spirit, looks at the way this has been happening worldwide. And his recent piece says, eh, it doesn't look like it's happening. That Trump is losing.
That if you think that what he is trying to do is consolidate a certain kind of power to fundamentally change the nature of how America works, that he is facing the kind of opposition that does not look surmountable. In The New Yorker, Andrew Morantz wrote a similar piece, but from a very different place, from Hungary. where it already did happen.
And I've read a thousand pieces on Hungary at this point. But this one gave me this felt sense of the way in which when this kind of authoritarian breakthrough succeeds, it may not feel in the moment like it is succeeding. Even after it has succeeded, it may not feel the way you think.
You can still be there in the opposition saying the things you want to say in a nice fancy cafe, drinking your Negroni, but the nature of your system is gone. This conversation is not an attempt to answer the question. We are not going to know what we are living through till long after it's over. But it is an effort to check in on the moment.
Because what moment people think they are living through, even in the time they are living through it, matters for the decisions they make and for what ultimately happens. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Zach Beecham, Andrew Morantz, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Thanks.
So Zach, you wrote this piece arguing that, at least from a certain perspective, Trump is losing. That he is not on track to achieve at least one version of his goals. Lay your case for me.
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Chapter 2: Is Trump failing to consolidate power?
So the argument is that Trump's central goal of his administration, he wouldn't put it in these terms, but I think that it's sort of pretty fair to say that this is what their policies indicate towards, is changing the American regime.
Turning what was a democratic government and has long been a democratic government into some species of non-democratic government in which power is wielded primarily through the executive with basically few checks. And potentially, even down the line, the fairness of elections is compromised. That part's speculative.
But we can say that there's an attempt to reconfigure the constitutional order without having to amend the Constitution. And that means not just Trump saying that he is doing things to consolidate power. but actually doing it. And so I think that you can use a series of benchmarks. It's a brief checklist, right? First is that I looked into sort of quantitatively the court rulings against Trump.
And I found that not only did he lose vastly more than he won whenever there was an actual decision, but in most situations, the administration has complied with the something like four to one ratio of court orders where they've lost. Look at the cases of the students that have been targeted, right? Courts have been consistently ruling in their favor.
Chapter 3: How is media and civil society responding to Trump's actions?
They've issued statements publicly saying, we will never back off from defending what is right. And it looks most likely, based on the current legal trajectory, that they're going to be released. In fact, courts have ordered a significant number of student visas that have been taken away, restored. And the State Department has complied with that. So that's one thing, right?
Failing to consolidate institutional power. A second thing is failing to neutralize sources of opposition. And so I think the press is a really good example. Like, one of the first things that any of these guys does when they want to try to move towards an authoritarian state— is suborn the press in some way, silence it, make sure there isn't effective criticism coming out of the media.
And clearly, there are instances of self-censorship by the media, of Trump putting pressure on media organizations. But on the whole, if you look at the media landscape in the United States, there's no shortage of Trump criticism. We aren't having the entire country turning into Fox News. And the third thing is civil society. And here, the thing that really changed my mind is universities.
Where you had at first Columbia basically doing whatever Trump wanted to try to get the threat of funding cuts, federal funding dollars being shut off off their back. But then it looked like Harvard might be about to do the same thing. And then all of a sudden Harvard becomes the leader of the resistance, right? They're organizing this thing. There's a compact among big 10 schools.
That's been ratified by faculty senates in which they pledge. Basically, they call it a NATO for mutual legal defense. If Trump comes after one of them, they'll all defend each other with resources. There's a strategy group privately for Ivy League and other like top tier elite schools where they're planning collective resistance against the Trump administration.
This is not what happens when you effectively consolidate power. And you can see this in a number of different spheres ranging from business to law.
So let me ask one other question about what you said at the beginning, because another interpretation is that you we are being unfair to Donald Trump. Right. And he doesn't want authoritarianism, that he wants the literal things he's going after. He wants his concessions from universities because he or the people who work for him or advise him think they became anti-Semitic and woke. Right.
He wanted to, you know, push the press on certain things, but he actually does not want to destroy the free press. He's always said he will abide by court orders. And as you say, largely, though not, I think, entirely, is that one reason it's not going the way you fear is that the model in your head, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Modi in India, is actually not the right model.
It is a hysterical resistance lib, fear casting onto Donald Trump.
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Chapter 4: What is competitive authoritarianism and how does it relate to Trump?
And then when my wife asks where I'm going, they say, we're taking him somewhere because we didn't like his political speech. See you later. I would have said, you're insane. This is the United States of America. What are you talking about? There's no law anywhere that says they can do that.
If you told me that on March 9th, after they did that to Mahmoud Khalil, I would have said, yeah, you're right. You shouldn't go outside.
And this is something you also say in the piece, but that some of what is happening here is worse than what is happening there. There are places where you can say, well, they've not, figured out how to consolidate control in the way Viktor Orban has. There are also places where they're going much further with the power of the state than Viktor Orban seems to have dared.
Well, I think that's one of them. I think the disappearing of political prisoners for squarely protected political speech, that's more out of the Bukele or Duterte or Pinochet playbook than out of the Orban playbook. And so it's a patchwork, right? It's sort of, it's not all of one or all of the other. I mean, the Hungarians I spoke to were like, whoa, what is that?
We are not familiar with that, which was pretty shocking to me. But also, as Zach says, in other pillars like the media, we're faring way better than they are.
Let me talk to you about that felt sense because I think it's really important. And let me lay out my own position, which I don't think we know what timeline we're in because it is not coherent into a timeline yet. It's too early. We're in quantum superposition. A lot of things might happen. We'll see who opens the box.
One reason I take Zach's argument on this seriously, though, is that the felt sense of it has changed a little bit for me for where we were three months ago. One of the things that I've been watching for myself is does it feel like opposition is weakening or strengthening? Are people losing backbone or are they gaining it?
My impression, and I'm not saying my impression is right, is that they're gaining it, not losing it. That the view is that the law firms that folded are embarrassments, that they'll go down in history with a black mark, that the ones who stood up are looking better. It was just a story the other day. We don't really know what's behind it, but it is notable Microsoft moving
some core work from, you know, one of the law firms that folded to one of the law firms that was fighting. That struck people as an interesting sign. Harvard looking a lot better than Columbia and sort of creating more backbone among other universities and the Trump administration coming out and saying, oh, this was a mistake. Maybe we could just go back to the table together.
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Chapter 5: How does anti-Semitism manifest in Trump's movement?
And then the flip side of this, of course, is that these power grabs target institutions and even arguably the sort of entire liberal ideology that has been the cornerstone of American Jewish flourishing. Andrew, what's your take on that?
Yeah, I think that basically sounds right, and it explains how the figure of Soros or the international Jew is kind of used in different ways. I mean, you don't have to look much further than Elon Musk doing what looked a lot like something that sort of seemed like a Roman salute, and then... And then Steve Bannon doing it. And then Steve Bannon doing it.
And Elon Musk at a different point when somebody was just offering extremely vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on...
You have said the absolute truth.
You can be a friend of Israel and be anti-Semitic. Yes.
Breaking that news here. But I do think that it's important to have that framework. It gets to this point of ambiguity, hybridity, plausible deniability. What are you? Are you anti the Jews or are you for the Jews? You know, it cuts against this idea of a kind of clean, quantifiable checklist. And also it cuts against the idea of
you know, did Columbia fully exceed and did Harvard fully join the resistance, right? Before Harvard became the hero of the resistance, they adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. They kicked out the head of their Middle East study center. All of this, you know, what Tim Snyder would call anticipatory obedience. And then the administration pushed them too far, maybe by accident.
And then they joined the resistance, right? So it's always hybridity all the way down, I would say.
Your first book was about the rise of the online, what now is a MAGA, right? And you have these great scenes of being on these neo-Nazi podcasts. And there's a strangeness in the degree to which that is broken through, which I'd be curious to hear how you've absorbed. So you have much more mainstream figures now, like Joe Rogan having these World War II revisionist historians on.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of fear and resistance under Trump's administration?
The thing about Bukele, and I think this is important for something that you touched on a second ago, Andrew, is Bukele is popular. He is overwhelmingly popular. Viktor Orban has been popular. You mentioned a second ago him winning re-election at a time when the opposition thought it was massing an effective case against him. Modi is hugely popular. Modi is hugely popular.
The thing about Trump is that they are not, as best we can tell, conserving popularity or building on it. There is a version of this. I mean, Trump came in more popular in his second term than he was in his first. He came in with allies he didn't have in his first term. And they are spending that popularity very quickly. Some of it is on overreach, like the Obrego-Garcia case.
But more of it is on a betrayal of this central promise of the Trump campaign, which is that things are going to be cheaper. And Trump has lost public opinion altitude very quickly. Now, he's not up for reelection. But Republicans, I know, as far as we know, Republicans, not in the next election.
Anyway, the next one is the midterms.
Republicans I know think they're going to lose the midterms. They are not operating on the assumption that Donald Trump is going to save them. People around Trump that I know have told me explicitly, we got to do this fast because we're probably going to lose the midterms and then we're not going to be able to do as much after that.
Some of their Blitzkrieg strategy has to do with a view that they are not going to consolidate power. If you ask me what is strengthening the opposition to Trump, I would say it's the tariffs. It's not the court cases. It's not some invisible change in the winds.
It is a fact that Trump is alienating many of his supporters and the business community by lashing himself to the mast of an incredibly dumb economic theory and then seeming to double down and double down on it, coming out and saying, well, American kids have too many dolls. You might have too many pencils. My toilet is made of gold, but you have 30 pencils and you only need five.
I mean, so to be clear, I would agree with Zach's broad point that Trump is not doing it the Orban way and that Trump is impulsive and that the tariffs hurt him. And so I think we all broadly agree that the laws of political gravity have not been suspended.
I mean, one of the important points that people made to me over and over again while I was reporting this piece is even if you call it authoritarianism, and many of the people I spoke to did, many of the political scientists I spoke to, including some of the, we spoke to some of the same political scientists, they told me flat out, America is currently not a democracy. And yet in the next breath.
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Chapter 7: Are American democratic institutions still strong?
And I am very much not into the norms will save us, the courts will save us. Like I get all the critiques of that and I share many of them. But to say that Trump doesn't have the formal power to do X, Y, or Z, I think ignores the ways in which he's already done those things. So can he disappear people? Yes, he can. He already has. Can he freeze and impound funds? Yes, he has.
And you've written when he did those things.
But the fact that he's been turned back on a bunch of this, they're not sending a bunch more people to the El Salvadoran prison at the moment. They've been like that authority got blocked for the moment. They're not sending them back either. They're not sending them back. But there are policies you can achieve and then the policy is done and there are powers you are claiming.
It does matter whether or not those authorities get entrenched. Sure. I guess what I'm saying is they can be... Can you use disappearance as a tactic is different than whether or not you've... And I'm as fucking hair on fire about the disappearances as anybody.
I get it. But what I'm saying is that whether they're entrenched, to me... is not merely a measure of whether they're written down on paper in a judicial order. Whether they're entrenched also has to do with when you do them, what happens informally to you.
So all I'm saying is I don't think we're all going to end up in a gulag, but I don't necessarily think that that power is unentrenched because it is informal. So let me back up. There's this idea of political orders. I know you're a Gary Gerstle head, as am I. Gary Gerstle has this whole notion of what a political order is. It's this big hegemonic, right?
So he has this notion that there was the New Deal political order, which was succeeded by the Reagan neoliberal political order. It's not just, oh, people used to like Democrats. Now they like Republicans.
It's the Reagan-Clinton neoliberal order. And if anybody wants to get Gerstle Pilled, you can search in the archives of the show for our Gary Gerstle conversation right before the election.
Great episode. And so what I sort of see that political order thing as doing is trying to get outside, trying to get on a much bigger timeline. And I sort of see, I don't know if Gerstle would co-sign this, I might be out on a limb here, but I sort of see it as like a structure of scientific revolutions of politics. Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of Trump's popularity and political strategies?
And when Donald Trump dies, the glue that holds the Republican coalition together is gone. This is a very common problem in authoritarian states, the succession problem. When so much is glued together, and I think really, if you look at the details of the Republican coalition, a lot of disagreements are being papered over by the overwhelming charismatic force of one man.
And when he's off the scene, What happens to the right at that point? And that's a very open question, especially in a world where this political project looks like it's a failing one, which may or may not be true in four years.
Yeah, I don't disagree that there are fissures and tensions within the Republican coalition. I mean, one thing about the BAP and Yarvin and all this stuff, the cadres are interested in reading them, but the, you know, chief ideologists in the White House are retweeting them.
The vice president.
And not only is the vice president reading them, but he's saying things like, when the Supreme Court gives us an order we don't like, we should say, the justice has made his order, now let him enforce it, right? So I think you could put together some worrisome signs. I also think the strength or weakness of the opposition matters enormously in this too.
So in every place in India, in Hungary, in Israel, the reactionary right is able to rampage to victory precisely because of the weakness and division within the opposition. So none of this, I agree, is foretold. One of the things I worry about is it kind of overly rigid reliance on the kind of playbook stuff, like this isn't how it's supposed to be done.
Because I agree, he's doing different things than what Orban is doing. He's doing some Bukele stuff. He's doing some improvisation. I just woke up today and thought of something weird and put it on Truth Social. It's a hodgepodge of stuff.
I mean, Kim Lane Shepela has this term, the Frankenstate, where you can kind of Frankenstein a bunch of legitimate seeming things and make your own new form of an illegitimate state. Now, I don't think anyone would disagree that Trump is not as patient and diligent and well-read as Victor Orban. But, you know, Bolsonaro did a version of this in Brazil.
And yes, he ended up getting defeated in the next election, but he came very close to rigging it in his own favor. And Bolsonaro was not a disciplined, well-read guy either. So there's different playbooks and you can invent new ones as you go. Let me turn this question around, Zach.
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