Trump would love to be a dictator. His affinity for strongmen like Victor Orbán and Vladimir Putin is no secret. But will he actually take the country down that road? What does authoritarianism look like in 2024? This week on How We Got Here, Max and Erin examine the president elect’s blustering and ask: will Trump really try to become an autocrat? Or is this just a lot of hot air from someone who doesn’t really understand how to work the levers of power. Cornell political scientist Tom Pepinsky weighs in on what we should be looking out for, and what we can learn from countries like Malaysia, Hungary and Turkey.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

Max Fisher: So, Erin, there’s this clip of Donald Trump from about a year ago that I keep thinking about. 

 

Erin Ryan: Max, I think I know where you’re going with this. And I’m so glad we’re finally going to do an episode investigating why Trump thinks that magnets don’t work underwater. 

 

Max Fisher: I wait, sorry, magnets?

 

Erin Ryan: You didn’t hear this one? He went, like, on and on about it at a rally. 

 

Max Fisher: I okay no, I’m thinking about a different moment. This was a Fox News host Sean Hannity, trying to handhold Trump into saying that he won’t be a dictator. Do you remember this? 

 

[clip of Fox News Host Sean Hannity] Under no circumstances. You are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody. 

 

[clip of President elect Donald Trump] Except for day one. 

 

[clip of Fox News Host Sean Hannity] Except for? 

 

[clip of President elect Donald Trump] Look he’s going crazy, except for day one. 

 

[clip of Fox News Host Sean Hannity] Meaning? 

 

[clip of President elect Donald Trump] I want to close the border and I want to drill drill drill. 

 

[clip of Fox News Host Sean Hannity] That’s not all, that’s that’s not that’s not retribution. [?]. 

 

[clip of President elect Donald Trump] I’m going to be. I’m going to be, you know, he keeps I love this guy. He says, you’re not going to be a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no. Other than day one, we’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator. 

 

[clip of Fox News Host Sean Hannity] That sounds to me like you’re going back to the policies when you were president. 

 

[clip of President elect Donald Trump] That’s exactly. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay. First of all, drilling. You can’t just do it in a day. 

 

Max Fisher: I know, it’s also not what being a dictator is. 

 

Erin Ryan: No, that’s a weird definition of being a dictator, somebody’s going to pull him aside and be like, hey, dude. 

 

Max Fisher: This is why I keep thinking about it. I think a lot of us are feeling torn between, on the one hand, everybody from Joe Biden to Trump’s own former chief of staff, John Kelly, warning us that Trump is going to be a dictator. 

 

Erin Ryan: But on the other hand, Trump mostly promised a more extreme version of his first term, which was very bad but didn’t end democracy as we know it, mostly because he was too inept a boss to build a team cohesive enough to do it. 

 

Max Fisher: Right, even when he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Democracy kept chugging along. 

 

Erin Ryan: Kind of. But that’s not making me less worried. 

 

Max Fisher: This is what I mean. We all get that Trump is a threat to democracy. Even Sean Hannity knows it. But we have this all or nothing way of talking about it that feels like it doesn’t quite fit. 

 

Erin Ryan: There’s probably a third option between Trump becoming a full on dictator or democracy being hunky dory. 

 

Max Fisher: There is, yes, it’s a third option that can be hard to recognize if you don’t know what to look for, but that Trump has a pretty explicit plan to carry out and would fundamentally change how our country works. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s what our episode is about today. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay, but we’re definitely circling back to the magnets thing. [laugh] [music break]

 

Max Fisher: I’m Max Fisher. 

 

Erin Ryan: I’m Erin Ryan. And this is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week’s headlines and tell a story that answers that question. 

 

Max Fisher: Our question this week, how will we know if Trump is actually endangering our democracy? 

 

Erin Ryan: What to expect when you’re expecting fascism? 

 

Max Fisher: [laugh] Well, well, that’s the thing. However bad it does or doesn’t get, it probably won’t look like what we imagine when we think of words like fascism. 

 

Erin Ryan: Well, first of all, they don’t have the graphic design. 

 

Max Fisher: I know the the Italian fascists, they they had a good typeface. 

 

Erin Ryan: They had it. They had a real you got to hand it to them. 

 

Max Fisher: They had some style. 

 

Erin Ryan: They had some typeface. They had some uniforms. I would say the American right lacks fashion sense and also a sense of design, but–

 

Max Fisher: They don’t have that graphic design. 

 

Erin Ryan: No. 

 

Max Fisher: Which is crucial. 

 

Erin Ryan: No crucial. But when people like John Kelly call Trump a fascist, they’re talking about his impulses and values. They’re not saying he’s going to put tanks in the street and declare himself dictator for life. 

 

Max Fisher: Which is not really how authoritarianism works anymore anyway. It’s an outdated image. But to be clear, what Trump is promising to do would be authoritarianism. 

 

Erin Ryan: So let’s remind our listeners what Trump’s promises are. 

 

Max Fisher: Sure, he has promised to take personal control of the Justice Department, which would allow him to direct it to prosecute Democrats and political rivals as he has also promised to do. He’s threatened to impose punishing regulations on media companies that report critically on him. He said he would deploy the military against, quote unquote, “the enemy within and the radical left,” which he has previously defined as meaning peaceful protesters and Democrats. He’s also pledged to use the military to deport millions of people, including legal immigrants. And he’s promised to purge tens of thousands of civil servants from independent government agencies, including the top ranks of the military, to be replaced by political loyalists. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay. An appropriate music cue for that paragraph would have been the Star Wars Imperial March, which, by the way, I just listened to. It did not have to go that hard. 

 

Max Fisher: It slaps. 

 

Erin Ryan: John Williams made it slap. 

 

Max Fisher: He’s got it. 

 

Erin Ryan: So hard, but we don’t have the budget to license John Williams. 

 

Max Fisher: Unfortunately. 

 

Erin Ryan: Unfortunately. Okay. Because that does sound awfully fascist. 

 

Max Fisher: Right? Which brings us back to our big question. Is he a dictator or is this just a lot of hot air from someone who doesn’t really understand how to work the levers of power? 

 

Erin Ryan: I do think there’s some danger in focusing so much on the worst case scenarios that we don’t notice the smaller ways he could chip away at democracy. 

 

Max Fisher: I have spent a lot of time reporting in countries that elected people like Trump, and that gradual chipping away is how they all got turned slowly but steadily from genuine democracies to places we now consider to be authoritarian or at least no longer fully democratic. 

 

Erin Ryan: You’re thinking of places like Turkey or Hungary? 

 

Max Fisher: Right. Venezuela, India, Russia, once upon a time. But because the process was so gradual and it happened mostly with leaders tinkering around with the mechanics of their country’s political systems rather than doing anything as dramatic as a military coup. Most people didn’t even notice that their democracy was being taken away from them until one day they woke up and realized it was gone. 

 

Erin Ryan: Max, do you remember that viral video of the woman doing the workout video in front of the tanks going toward the gate? 

 

Max Fisher: In Myanmar? Yes.

 

Erin Ryan: Yes. 

 

Max Fisher: Incredible. That is not how it is going to play out. But it was an incredible moment in 21st century politics.

 

Erin Ryan: One of the most cinematic moments of a coup ever. And we never get those. We never get them. 

 

Max Fisher: But big me vibes for sure. 

 

Erin Ryan: 100%. But just so that people don’t think we’re being hyperbolic about comparing Trump’s second term agenda to the soft authoritarian takeovers we’re seeing around the world, here’s a clip of Trump comparing himself to Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban. 

 

[clip of President elect Donald Trump] As president, I was proud to work with Prime Minister Orban, by the way, a great man, to advance the values and interests of our two nations. We cracked down on illegal immigration, protected our borders, created jobs and defended our traditions and Judeo-Christian values. That’s so important. Judeo-Christian values. 

 

Erin Ryan: He repeated Judeo-Christian values, which is a tell that he just learned that word. [laughter] That was from Trump’s video Love Letter to Orban, aired at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Hungary this spring. 

 

Max Fisher: Mm hmm. That line about protecting Judeo-Christian values is important for understanding how this works. A leader like Orban or Trump will claim to fight for the quote unquote, “real” Hungarians or the “real” Americans against the Fifth Column Enemy Within. And it doesn’t really matter if those enemies are immigrants or religious minorities or the Deep State. The point is creating an excuse to clamp down on dissent and seize control of independent institutions bit by bit. 

 

Erin Ryan: So, Max, here’s the thing. I believe that Trump would love to be a dictator. And I believe that he admires strongmen like Orban and Putin. But that’s not the same thing as Trump actually taking America down that same road. 

 

Max Fisher: Totally. And I wanted to understand how to identify the early stops on that road and where it leads. So I called up a guy named Tom Pepinsky. Tom is a political scientist at Cornell who spent time in countries that go down this path. And he’s written about how life there doesn’t resemble what most Americans think of when we picture autocratic backsliding, which is part of why it’s hard for us to spot it. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay, so what should we look for? 

 

Max Fisher: I asked Tom that. How will we know if this is happening? And here’s what he said. 

 

[clip of Tom Pepinsky] The answer is that you might not know. You may not have a single indicator that is able to tell you that we have crossed some line. And I think ordinary citizens are going to have to become very savvy at identifying when the barest foundations of democracy have been affected. So, for example, if the government establishes that there is one social media organization which is acknowledged as the official place that public communications happened, that would be a bad piece of information. If there were a law passed, for example, that a newspaper that is incorporated in any state in the United States may not endorse candidates. That is how you would know. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay. Just want to jump in here. It doesn’t feel very likely that we’ll wake up one day next year and learn that Trump has banned every social media platform except Twitter. 

 

Max Fisher: It doesn’t. No. 

 

Erin Ryan: But he did a softer version of this in his first term, threatening social media companies with punitive regulations unless they promised to tilt their platforms in his favor. 

 

Max Fisher: He did, and it worked. Meta deliberately engineered its algorithm on Facebook and Instagram to boost Trump and MAGA aligned voices. And that, to be clear, is not just me speculating. We know this from the company’s own internal documents and testimony from people who were in the room when that happened. Trump also pressured the company into setting special moderation rules that gave pro-Trump people special leeway in spreading right wing conspiracies and misinformation, which I think ended up mattering. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, it did matter, but it also made Facebook so annoying that nobody I know uses it anymore. Young people fled in droves, and now it is only people that want that sort of content. 

 

Max Fisher: It’s true. Yeah. 

 

Erin Ryan: Max, did you see that a few months ago, speaking of Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to a senior House Republican saying that he regretted removing medical misinformation during the pandemic?

 

Max Fisher: I did, Yeah. It read to me like a preemptive surrender to Trump. I promise to cater to your conspiracies and false claims about social media censorship. So please don’t regulate me. 

 

Erin Ryan: And Jeff Bezos pulling the Washington Post’s Harris endorsement felt like him caving to Trump too. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. Trump has threatened Bezos, who owns the Post, with all sorts of fines and regulations explicitly as retribution for the paper’s reporting. 

 

Erin Ryan: Bezos claims he pulled the endorsement for other reasons. But come on, man. 

 

Max Fisher: Tom actually has a phrase for this. He calls it institutional compliance. And the idea is that a lot of what effectively amounts to authoritarian pressure plays out through implication. Instead of shutting down newspapers or nationalizing Facebook. Trump makes some vague threats and gets big institutions to bend to him all on their own. Here’s Tom again. 

 

[clip of Tom Pepinsky] In countries like Hungary and in countries like Turkey and in other countries that have had this sort of authoritarian system in place, the experience is not one of just shuttering institutions or rounding everybody up and throwing them in jail, but it’s specifically using the tools of the legal system and the mechanisms of finance and taxation to encourage institutions to behave in certain ways. I work in a university. Our tax exempt status depends on, in the last instance, the government granting us tax exempt status and our university cannot work the same way without tax exempt status or, for example, our ability to pay for activities using our endowment. If they decide to tax endowments, we will take a large hit and it will affect our ability to do our business. 

 

Erin Ryan: Wait, Max, this isn’t some hypothetical. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did this. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh right. Didn’t he call it the war on woke colleges? Something like that. 

 

Erin Ryan: I don’t know. You toss the word woke into a bunch of other words, and that could be anything. 

 

Max Fisher: You would expect some soft fascism to follow.

 

Erin Ryan: 100%. So DeSantis signed a law banning state colleges from using public money to, quote, “promote social activism” or, quote, “advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion,” which sure seemed like a threat to revoke funding from schools that taught anything he personally disagreed with. 

 

Max Fisher: I mean, talk about the Hungary playbook. Orban did this six years ago to his country’s most prominent university, which forced it out of the country entirely. 

 

Erin Ryan: You can’t ban liberal thinking, but you can make it harder to access. 

 

Max Fisher: Exactly. Yeah, DeSantis also signed the quote unquote, “don’t say gay” laws threatening to revoke funding for public schools that taught gender identity, whatever that means. 

 

Erin Ryan: God. DeSantis is America’s worst Disney adult. Trump has already threatened to seize the endowments of schools that teach things he considers ideologically unacceptable. Here’s a clip of a video he posted last July. 

 

[clip of President elect Donald Trump] I will direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination and schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity will not only have their endowments taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment. 

 

Max Fisher: Something Tom said to me when we started talking was that one of the first things these elected authoritarians tend to do is set an official ideology and use the power of the state to enforce it. And I have to be honest, I thought maybe Tom was being hyperbolic until I dug up that clip. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, it sounds like from what Tom is saying, these sorts of steps might start a culture war for the sake of culture war. But each one forces institutions like colleges or high schools to think twice about teaching things that might displease Republicans. 

 

Max Fisher: Right? Which is not the same as banning left wing parties, of course. But if it tilts the playing field against left wing politics because teachers are afraid to teach ideas that might get them fired, then the effect isn’t all that different. Here’s Tom again. 

 

[clip of Tom Pepinsky] So it’s going to be very subtle regulatory changes to what private enterprise or what individual firms or organizations or unions or movements are allowed to do. That’s where you’re going to see it. But it won’t be something like they announce one day that there’s going to be no elections the next day. You’ll have to find little subtle indicators of the limits of organization. And the places that I would watch for sure are going to be unions. They’re going to be educational institutions. They’re going to be firms. And they’re going to be the marketplace for ideas. 

 

Max Fisher: Tom brought up another way he thinks we could see a second Trump administration follow in the footsteps of other elected authoritarians, which is in how it could pursue mass deportations, which are obviously horrible in and of themselves, but could also become an excuse for Trump to grab more power. Here’s Tom and how that could start. 

 

[clip of Tom Pepinsky] It’s not a situation where they’re going to drag you into some police station and tell you the name of all the immigrants, you know. Rather, you’re going to be working for a company that has to file tax returns, and they’ll want to know a little bit from those tax returns that they don’t already know from the tax returns. Those lawful demands are going to put us in impossible situations and they’re going to have legal ways to figure out which students at which universities are legally there and which are not. Either institutions will comply with lawful demands or they won’t. And if they don’t comply with lawful demands, they’re taking a very large risk. 

 

Erin Ryan: So he’s obviously thinking about this from the perspective of a university professor. But some democratic state governments are already thinking through how to slow or resist mass deportations, too. 

 

Max Fisher: Well, the Trump team is raring for that fight. Tom Homan, the incoming border czar is doing wall to wall Fox News hits getting revved up to order workplace raids and trample through blue states. Here’s Homan on Fox and Friends a few days ago. 

 

[clip of Fox News Host Sean Hannity] I’ve seen some of these Democratic governors say they’re going to stand in the way they’re going. They’re going to make it hard for us well I I you know, a suggestion. If you’re not going to help us get the hell out of the way [?] we’re going to do it. So if we can’t get assistance from New York City and I may have we may have to double the number of agents we send in New York City because we’re going to do the job. We’re going to do the job without you or with you. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay. You know what? I used to live in New York City, and those people need directions to the 9/11 memorial. So I’m going to say just nobody give them directions and it’ll buy you a few minutes to like–

 

Max Fisher: Absolutely. Maybe a few years. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, exactly. But joking aside, it’s a pretty stark message. Democratic cities and states better fall in line or flooding them with armed federal agents who are going to drag families out of their homes and workers out of their workplaces. 

 

Max Fisher: Like the threats to schools and universities, it does seem like part of the point here is to threaten city and state governments into preemptive compliance to avoid the worst. And the effect would be to erode those governments autonomy from Trump. [music break]

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Erin Ryan: Let’s not get too spun up here. Back in Trump’s first term, he threatened to do all sorts of terrible things that he never followed through on because of infighting or incompetence or let me let me pose a third option. I think Trump’s real lazy.

 

Max Fisher: I agree. Yes.

 

Erin Ryan: He’s got a lot of things on his authoritarian to do list, and I think he’s kind of lazy. 

 

Max Fisher: I agree. And I think that Trump picking Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard makes me think that incompetence will be a big factor again, too, for sure. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, he’s assembling a real Harvard of chuds and dipshits. 

 

Max Fisher: [laugh] But Tom made a good point about what’s different in Trump’s agenda, at least this time around. One of his first term slogans was Drain the Swamp, which he meant, you know, fire all the civil servants, weakened institutions. 

 

Erin Ryan: It always makes me think about those reports of entire wings of the State Department sitting in darkness because Trump had emptied out so much of the building. 

 

Max Fisher: Right and this time around their slogan is Take America Back. And you see that reflected in their plan for federal bureaucracy, which isn’t just to fire all the civil servants now, but also to replace them with political loyalists who wield all that institutional power, at least in theory, to enforce Trump’s will. 

 

Erin Ryan: Like seizing the endowments of universities that teach ideas to counter to Trumpism or threatening to break up tech companies that don’t tilt the Internet in favor of his politics. 

 

Max Fisher: Tom told me that in countries like Hungary or Turkey or India that have gone down this path the way it often starts isn’t that the right wing leader is like rubbing his or her hands together, plotting to take down democracy. He said it usually starts with a leader taking on this idea of what’s called national conservatism, which says that the government should use the state to remake culture and society by promoting certain ideas and social hierarchies. 

 

Erin Ryan: Right? That’s the whole conceit of Christian nationalism and why we should maybe expect movies and music to get real shitty over the next four years. 

 

Max Fisher: Totally. But executing this agenda requires bulldozing over the normal checks and balances, because democracy means putting the rule of law first or giving equal rights to minorities. So if you want to impose your vision of society, you have to start by circumventing or knocking down those normal Democratic checks. Here’s Tom on how Trump’s plan to close the Department of Education, for example, shows this in action. 

 

[clip of Tom Pepinsky] I think that we’ve seen an expansion of executive authority very clearly, the balance of power shifting in favor of the courts and the executive at the expense of the legislature. And the more that you put policy in the hands of the courts and the executive, the more independence you have for those partisan forces that take a big slogan idea like close the Department of Education and subject it to political wrangling. So if this were a decision that were made within Congress, there’s no chance the Department of Education would be closed, it’d be changed. For it, and there’d be some negotiation about it. This way they can just make the decision. 

 

Erin Ryan: Woof, once those institutions have been wiped out, it’s kind of hard to bring them back. Like, it’s a lot easier to burn down a house than it is to build one. Not like I’ve done either. 

 

Max Fisher: That’s right. One big concern I have is that Trump could try to do some of this to the country’s electoral institutions too. Trump world has already spent a lot of energy since 2020, getting election denialists installed in county clerk offices and the like. Obviously, we continue to have free and fair elections, so that has not been effective. But the impulse is clearly there to forcibly re-engineer these institutions to enforce Trumpism. 

 

Erin Ryan: Even if it never comes to that. There are plenty of other government functions that Trump is signaling he wants to bring under his personal control. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh. Sure. Just this week, Trump’s transition team reportedly drafted a plan that would allow him to fire top military officials who, quote, “lack requisite leadership qualities.” And that sure sounds like a way to fire generals who, as happened in his first term, tell Trump he’s not allowed to, let’s say, deploy the military against protesters or overturn unfavorable election results. 

 

Erin Ryan: Well, and to Tom’s point about smaller steps, Trump has also implied he wants to be able to dictate to the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to be independent, to prevent political meddling in the economy. Trump can’t legally fire the Fed chairman, but he can load on public pressure and ridicule to make his life hard for him, which is pretty much like page one of the one page Trump playbook. Be a dick relentlessly until people give you what you want. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. Get him to think twice about the personal costs of defying him, a.k.a. institutional compliance. 

 

Erin Ryan: And then there’s law enforcement, plans like Project 2025 also call for labeling leftwing protest groups like Antifa as legally banned terrorist organizations. 

 

Max Fisher: Even if he doesn’t do this again, it forces protest groups to think carefully about how much trouble they want to cause Trump if there’s even a chance it could mean getting your assets seized or getting thrown in jail. 

 

Erin Ryan: I mean, housing is pretty expensive and jail is a house, so, you know. Oh well, he promises to pardon January 6th rioters. 

 

Max Fisher: Which if he does, sends a signal to far right loons across the country that certain kinds of political violence are effectively legal now if you do something big enough to get Trump’s attention. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay. I’m still skeptical that Trump could really pull all this off. Again, because I think he’s inept. 

 

Max Fisher: Sure. 

 

Erin Ryan: And kind of lazy. 

 

Max Fisher: Totally true. 

 

Erin Ryan: Like, how is he going to fit in a year of golfing if he’s doing all this stuff? 

 

Max Fisher: Also becoming a dictator? Yeah.

 

Erin Ryan: Yes, but even if he did, that’s not the same thing as ending democracy. Right. It’s not like you’re talking about Trump throwing all the Democrats in jail and imposing martial law. 

 

Max Fisher: So Tom wrote this essay a few years ago talking about this, and it had kind of a provocative title, Life in Authoritarian States is Mostly Boring and Tolerable. And in it, he talked about living in Malaysia, which spent 60 years ruled as an authoritarian party state. But it had elections, it had protests, and it had free-ish universities and media. It was just that, like a lot of soft or electoral autocracies, the ruling party had curbed opposition just enough to ensure that they never quite lost power. And here’s Tom on what that feels like. 

 

[clip of Tom Pepinsky] What you see really is nothing for for most people’s daily lives. And the changes are are either zero or very minor. The difference is not in what sort of activities are are available to you, but what is the meaning of those activities. So you would experience this as an ordinary citizen, as a very minor change to what you’re individually allowed to do, but but a fairly substantial change to the societal implications of your individual actions. 

 

Erin Ryan: I think it’s important to keep in mind that Tom is talking about a gradual transformation. That makes it important to stay vigilant and be aware of how Trump could chip away at our system. But it also means that we can resist this as it’s happening. 

 

Max Fisher: At least some Democratic governors and mayors are girding or say they are girding to shield their constituents from the worst of Trump’s abuses. California Governor Gavin Newsom, for example, has said he will work to Trump proof the state. Here he is in Washington a few days ago after a meeting with Biden. 

 

[clip of Gavin Newsom] So I just left the White House. Met with senior officials, met with the president himself, talking about everything we need to do to prepare for this transition, to prepare California, protecting our environmental leadership in California. Issues related to health care, disaster recovery, disaster relief, FEMA funding. It’s a great day at [?]. 

 

Erin Ryan: Something that makes me nervous about Newsom’s newly national profile. I mean, in California, he’s everywhere. But you know what, people have been daddying him like they like they did with Governor Cuomo. And I just got to say, you have to be careful of of really–

 

Max Fisher: Putting too much stock in. Yeah.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. Lionizing your politicians. I mean, he’s he’s promising to do all that he can, but there are limits to all a governor can do. 

 

Max Fisher: It’s true. And it’s a good reminder that we all have to think about what we can do individually within our own institutions, within our workplaces. Right. Like Tom lives in New York. He lives in a blue state, but he’s also thinking about what can he do just around the office to prepare for the possibility of getting orders from the government, saying, hey, give us the naturalization status of all your students? 

 

Erin Ryan: Mm hmm. Yeah. And I mean, I have relatives that uh I have one relative who just swore his oath of citizenship. He’s–

 

Max Fisher: Oh wow. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, and um he’s a new citizen, and he is bilingual. But after Trump takes office, he’s going to be carrying a copy of his passport card with him everywhere. 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

 

Erin Ryan: Because you just don’t–

 

Max Fisher: Who knows?

 

Erin Ryan: You just don’t know. 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

 

Erin Ryan: You just and it’s it’s really it’s really sad that we’re leading in this direction. 

 

Max Fisher: Well, I feel like on some level, Trumpism has been moving us in this direction since day one of it. He’s always taken the view that there are real Americans, which means white Christian conservatives who are loyal to him. And that is the group that is rightfully in charge and the government exists to represent and serve, and the rest of us are enemies within to be combated and resisted. It seems like what changed between his first and second terms is that now he’s positioning to actually remake our system around that idea, which is, after all, what a dozen elected strongmen who talk and think exactly like Trump have done in a dozen other democracies in the last decade. 

 

Erin Ryan: Well, at least he’s like 82 years old. 

 

Max Fisher: I honestly that is the best thing that we have going for us. Yes.

 

Erin Ryan: I mean, that’s dark, though. And there’s a part of me that and I don’t like making light of this, but gallows humor is like all I have right, right now. Um. Have you ever read The Testaments by Margaret Atwood? 

 

Max Fisher: No. 

 

Erin Ryan: It is the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. So I I gave up on watching the TV show because it was just like too, too much, you know. 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah, sure. 

 

Erin Ryan: Like, I, message received. I got I got it. Um. But the Testaments is is great. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but it sort of is about how a major character from the first book has existed within this, like dictatorship by pretending to go along with the dictatorship. And right now there’s a part of me that’s thinking, how many people are going to actually go along with this. 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

 

Erin Ryan: And how many people are going to pretend to go along with whatever is about to happen. Is there anybody who is like pretending currently who’s waiting in the wings to pull some kind of emergency safe cord? 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

 

Erin Ryan: And then I’m like, but this isn’t a novel. This isn’t a movie. 

 

Max Fisher: Right when people get close to power, they usually are like, I’m actually kind of into this. I don’t know if I want to like, upend–

 

Max Fisher: Right. 

 

Erin Ryan: Everything that I’ve worked to get close to. 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

 

Erin Ryan: In order to liberate other people. Um. And I know that’s like a dark thought to end on, but that’s that’s kind of what I’m thinking about right now. That’s where my head is. 

 

Max Fisher: I mean, something that Tom talked about is an idea of minimal compliance of doing the absolute minimum to not get yourself–

 

Erin Ryan: Done. 

 

Max Fisher: –in trouble. 

 

Erin Ryan: Absolutely done. [laughter]

 

Max Fisher: And he said, you know, think about how much fun it is to frustrate your bosses and just think about that as a tactic for getting through the next four years or however many years. 

 

Erin Ryan: Uh huh. 

 

Max Fisher: And the like, just to kind of continue the contrast of The Handmaid’s Tale. The good news is that part of how this works is that, of course, you don’t wake up one day and all of a sudden it’s in The Handmaid’s Tale because it is this very we’ve seen in every other country like Hungary, Turkey. It’s very, very gradual. And part of that is scary because it’s hard to identify that moment when you cross the line. But the good news is that means that there’s not a moment where it becomes too late to turn back. And, you know, a lot of these countries have gone down this path and figured out ways to reverse it. So it’s definitely not even if all the scary stuff starts to happen, it’s not too late and it’s not over. 

 

Erin Ryan: I love the idea of weaponized incompetence on a mass scale. The government is like, do this and you’re like, I don’t know how to do it. Can you tell me where to find the things that I need to find in order to do the thing you’re asking me to do? And I think that that this episode and everything we’ve talked about and everything Tom talked about is a really good lesson that I think, I’ve seen a lot of people compare what Trump is planning on doing with things that happened in like Nazi Germany, like shock and awe type dictatorships where suddenly things were different. Romania. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. 

 

Erin Ryan: You know, suddenly like, boom, you wake up one morning and a decree has been issued. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. 

 

Erin Ryan: Or a bunch of businesses have been smashed. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. 

 

Erin Ryan: And the reality is the likelihood of it happening like that is low. 

 

Max Fisher: Is very low. Yeah, that’s not how it happens anymore. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. And we should keep that in mind as we’re moving forward. Because just because all the windows are intact doesn’t mean our democracy is intact. 

 

Max Fisher: That it’s fine. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah, totally. Well, Erin, we got through the tough stuff, and now it’s time to come back to the issue near and dear to your heart, which is magnets. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yes. 

 

Max Fisher: And how did Donald Trump think that they work? 

 

Erin Ryan: Finally, thank God I sat here this whole time waiting to get to the magnet section. Okay. Here’s Trump at a rally earlier this year talking about aircraft carriers, which led to him talking about elevators and then the 1950s TV series Victory at Sea, as one does. 

 

Max Fisher: Sure. 

 

Erin Ryan: Then airplane catapults. Which brings us to the point where we come in on magnets. 

 

Max Fisher: Yes. 

 

[clip of President elect Donald Trump] They had an almost billion dollar cost over on on the magnetic elevators. Think of it, magnets. Now, all I know about magnets is this. Give me a glass of water. Let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets. Why didn’t they use John Deere? Why didn’t they bring in the John Deere people? Do you like John Deere? I like John Deere, but, with the hydraulic. Right. So I said, you’re wasting your time. You ought to get rid of it. And then I I was angry about it because, of course, this thing cost, I think, $18 billion. Can you believe it? One ship. There’s never been anything like it. What a disaster. 

 

Erin Ryan: Wow. That is the point at which I get up and walk ten feet away from the bus stop and wait until the bus arrives and no longer engage with that person. 

 

Max Fisher: Well now it’s now it’s President Bus stop. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. [laugh] [music break]

 

Max Fisher: How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher and Erin Ryan. 

 

Erin Ryan: Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. 

 

Max Fisher: Evan Sutton mixes and masters the show 

 

Erin Ryan: Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landes and Vasilis Fotopoulos.

 

Max Fisher: Production support from Leo Duran, Raven Yamamoto, and Adriene Hill. [music break]

 

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