The preview we’ve had into Donald Trump’s second administration already feels, by American standards, disturbingly abnormal: Picking a former “Fox and Friends” host for defense secretary. Billionaire after billionaire trekking to Mar-a-Lago to curry favor with the president-elect. The Washington Post withholding an opposing endorsement. Meta ending its third-party fact-checking.But all of this is actually pretty normal — not in the U.S. but in many other countries. Researchers call them personalist regimes, in which everything is a transaction with the leader, whether it’s party politics or policymaking or the media. It’s a style of politics that follows different rules, but there are still rules. And understanding personalist politics, and their tried-and-true playbook, is a way to help make the next four years legible.Today’s guest is one of the leading scholars on personalist regimes, in both their democratic and their authoritarian forms. Erica Frantz is a political scientist at Michigan State University and a the co-author, with Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Joseph Wright, of “The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy From Within.” In this conversation, we discuss what personalist regimes are and how they operate, the personalist qualities of Trump and the signs of democratic backsliding that Frantz thinks Americans need to track in the coming weeks and years.This episode contains strong language.Book Recommendations:Dictators at War and Peace by Jessica L. P. WeeksAutocracy Rising by Javier CorralesThe Trumpiad by Cody WalkerThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) 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.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer 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.
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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. There's an old idea about the purpose of science fiction that I've always loved. It aims to create cognitive estrangement, to make the familiar seem unfamiliar so that it can be looked at anew. But sometimes the opposite is needed. Sometimes we need to make the unfamiliar into the familiar.
We need to see what is old in what feels new and strange. This can be a challenge with Donald Trump. He can appear as a hurricane of strangeness. It was a liberal rallying cry in his first term. Don't normalize him. Remember this is abnormal. And it's no less true, in a way, in his second term. An anti-vax conspiracy theorist for HHS secretary? That's abnormal.
A former Fox & Friends host for defense secretary? Abnormal. An underqualified hatchet man who has vowed to use the state to go after Trump's enemies to lead the FBI? The Senate would even consider that abnormal. Billionaire after billionaire trekking to the president-elect's private club in Florida to curry favor with him? Abnormal.
And yet we also need to confront the reality that this is all normal. We have seen it all before. Sometimes here, but much more often elsewhere. Donald Trump is something old, not something new. We spend so much time talking about the rules he breaks. We don't spend much time detailing the rules he obeys. But the way I've been looking at this is that America is undergoing a regime change.
We think of that term as describing a change in who is in power, but I mean it in the sense of the political system itself, the way that power works. We're used to our politics revolving around what the political scientists call programmatic political parties. These are coalitions that are bound together by shared interests and goals.
They feature agreements that supersede the desires of any particular leader. They have large collections of elites and staffers and functionaries who know how to work together across administrations and periods. And so they bind new administrations.
If you had seen Kamala Harris win the election, there's no chance that she would have named a pro-life candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Democrats are a pro-choice party. If Ron DeSantis had been the Republican nominee and he had won the election, you would also see a pro-life candidate lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Republicans are a pro-life party, but Donald Trump won. And because RFK Jr. was useful to him, the fact that RFK Jr. is pro-choice did not stop him from making that nomination, and it may not stop Republicans from accepting it. The fact that they would even consider
a pro-choice candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, that shows you how much control Donald Trump has over that party. It shows you that that party is working in a different way now. There is this other kind of political party. It's called a personalist party, a party subordinate to a person. It works less like the political parties we're used to and more like royal courts.
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