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Episode: Free bonus podcast: Rachel Maddow guests on The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim

Author: Rachel Maddow, MSNBC
Duration: 00:57:24

Episode Shownotes

United States of Emergency? Rachel Maddow on her expectations for the US under TrumpMillions interned in camps? Assassinations? Political imprisonments? That is what America's leading liberal commentator Rachel Maddow - and The World's first guest - says could happen during Trump's next stint in the White House.Richard and Yalda also

bring listeners up to date with the conflict in Ukraine and the latest developments in the Middle East, as both are just back from the region.

Summary

In this special episode, Rachel Maddow shares her insights on the implications of Donald Trump's potential presidency, expressing concerns over extreme outcomes such as political imprisonments and societal breakdown. The discussion also touches on the challenges of providing aid to Gaza amidst conflicts, highlighting the rising tensions regarding Palestinians' status and the potential annexation of the West Bank. Additionally, Maddow reflects on Trump's past actions and authoritarian intentions, and emphasizes the role of public opinion in protecting democracy as the political landscape evolves.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Free bonus podcast: Rachel Maddow guests on The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
Hey everybody, it's Rachel Maddow. So, you know Richard Engel from NBC News, my old friend Richard. He's just started a new podcast for Sky News with Yalda Hakim from Sky News. And if you don't know Yalda, she's incredible.

00:00:14 Speaker_00
She has an incredible life story, but she's also just an incredible journalist and anchor. And since they started this podcast very recently, I've been totally hooked on it. I've been listening to every episode. It's great.

00:00:26 Speaker_00
The two of them, world travelers going to the most interesting and often war-torn places on earth, talking about what they're seeing in geopolitics. They obviously have been talking about what recently happened in the U.S. election.

00:00:39 Speaker_00
And they asked me to be the first ever guest they have had on their podcast. Every other episode has just been the two of them talking, but they asked me to come in and

00:00:48 Speaker_00
sit with them and be their guest for the first time, which was a great honor because they're both a really big deal and I really like this podcast. But the conversation itself was really interesting to me.

00:00:58 Speaker_00
Challenging, interesting, really different than every other conversation that I've had about the election and its implications. Anyway, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was great. I hope you want to listen to it.

00:01:09 Speaker_00
You can stay right here and listen to the full episode of The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim with me as their first guest. It starts right here, right now.

00:01:24 Speaker_01
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The World with me, Yalda Hakim. I'm back in London after spending a few days in Doha in Qatar.

00:01:33 Speaker_02
And me, Richard Engel, I am back home in Lisbon, and I have only just returned a few hours ago. I was also in Doha, and before that, I was in Jordan.

00:01:44 Speaker_01
And Richard, we're going to do something a little bit different this week, a little bit special. It's going to be in two halves is how we're going to deal with this episode.

00:01:53 Speaker_01
And first of all, we're going to talk about our trip to the Middle East with you and Jordan and me in Qatar, and of course, the latest developments in Ukraine. And then we have a very special guest, our first guest of the podcast series.

00:02:08 Speaker_02
Exactly. In the second half of our show for the first time, we will be joined by none other than Rachel Maddow. She is a very important voice right now in the United States. She is the host of her own show on MSNBC. And she is a controversial voice.

00:02:25 Speaker_02
Some people love her. Other people think in the United States that she is the worst person in the world and the worst that all that the American media represents. Far lefty, but she undeniably has a very important voice at the moment.

00:02:40 Speaker_02
We will also do some listener questions, which we love getting. Actually, I really enjoy hearing them come in. I am excited about that. And then, of course, our predictions.

00:02:50 Speaker_02
And with that, let's get started and make sure you're following the podcast wherever you're listening. And remember, you can watch the full episode on our YouTube channel.

00:02:59 Speaker_01
Let's get started. Lots to talk about. We've both just returned from the Middle East. You're in Jordan.

00:03:06 Speaker_01
Just tell me, you know, Jordan's played such a crucial role, both in ways partnering with Israel, but also being hypercritical of Israel and how it's prosecuted this war. Tell me what you were doing there.

00:03:17 Speaker_02
So I was there meeting with some very senior officials, the top level people, decision makers. I also went on an aid drop. And I went on one of these Jordanian cargo planes that flew over Gaza.

00:03:29 Speaker_02
And then once they're in a relatively low altitude, they open the back and they push out these pallets of aid in the classic, iconic image of boxes of food falling down, opening with parachutes.

00:03:41 Speaker_01
You've done this before.

00:03:42 Speaker_02
Yes, I've done it before. So I was there to do that and witness that. And it's one of the only ways that aid is getting into Gaza right now. And it's terribly inefficient.

00:03:51 Speaker_02
These crates can fall onto people, and they have in the past, killing people inadvertently. They can only carry so much, because at the end of the day, it's an airplane. And there were eight tons of material, each one on a one-ton pallet.

00:04:06 Speaker_02
And then they just open up the door, and then off they go. it's inefficient, expensive, it's a drop in the bucket. And it also isn't working because there's such lawlessness in Gaza.

00:04:17 Speaker_02
That's what I learned this time, because they pushed out the aid, all great, the chutes open landing, no problems, nobody's hurt. But they landed in an area controlled by this one particular family that is now because there's such

00:04:32 Speaker_02
Mad Max levels of desperation, that clans are sort of claiming territory for themselves. And this aid packet all landed on this one family's area, and they came out with guns and protected it. So nobody else was able to get anything.

00:04:49 Speaker_02
So they came back empty handed, we were filming with this guy who went out with his son and they're running to three kilometres to get there, only to have guns fired over their heads and sent back.

00:05:00 Speaker_02
And it just shows that just law and order has broken down in Gaza.

00:05:04 Speaker_01
It's exactly that. There's famine, there's hunger, there's desperation, there's death and destruction, there's looting, and there's such a lack of trust.

00:05:12 Speaker_01
And as you say, the most inefficient way to deliver aid is one of the main options now for those trying to get food into places like northern Gaza.

00:05:23 Speaker_02
there's plenty of aid that can go in. And there was almost going to be sanctions from the US, the US had threatened to limit the supply of weapons into Israel from American weapons.

00:05:36 Speaker_02
If they didn't, if Israel didn't comply within 30 days, that's another reason why I was there that that 30 day deadline ended while I was up in the plane.

00:05:45 Speaker_02
And actually, just after we landed, but that day, the Americans had threatened that they were going to do this unless more aid came in. And a little bit more is coming in that sort of went from a trickle to a drizzle.

00:05:58 Speaker_02
But it was enough that the US said we're seeing progress, and there'll be no change in policy. And the UN, of course, went crazy. And this is an outrage. Nothing has changed at all. Every humanitarian group said nothing has changed at all.

00:06:10 Speaker_02
But the US backed off.

00:06:12 Speaker_01
They did.

00:06:12 Speaker_01
And as you say, on the aid issue, I was interrogating and asking an Israeli official about it, because their own stats and figures show that from the month of October through to now, the aid that was, I mean, there's very little aid going into Gaza anyway, but it just fell off the cliff completely, especially northern Gaza.

00:06:33 Speaker_01
I mean, there's literally nothing going in. The Israelis say that Hamas, as you say, criminal gangs, Hamas are looting and stealing the aid. And you've seen evidence of that.

00:06:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, these people weren't Hamas. And that's part of this whole issue. There's no police on the streets. The Hamas, for better or worse, mostly for worse, it's on October 7th, a lot, a lot, a lot for the worse.

00:06:54 Speaker_02
But Hamas had been the government and now the government is gone. So not only are Hamas fighters gone, But there's no police. There's no traffic cops. There's no nobody. Not any kind of services functioning at all. There's no medical services to speak of.

00:07:09 Speaker_02
It's total societal collapse.

00:07:12 Speaker_01
And when I asked the Israelis about this, I said, listen, the UN's criticizing you. The Americans are criticizing you. All of your Western partners are criticizing you.

00:07:20 Speaker_01
They're asking you if you have a deliberate policy of starvation, especially in northern Gaza. And the Israeli official pushed back and said, absolutely not. This is Hamas stealing the aid.

00:07:31 Speaker_01
I said, no, the aid actually isn't making it through yet across any of the border crossings for it to be looted. But it's interesting that you're saying that it's all the criminal gangs and elements.

00:07:43 Speaker_02
You just did a big special on Gaza and it was a big piece of work.

00:07:48 Speaker_01
Absolutely. On exactly these issues, the political office of Hamas is in Doha, in Qatar. And last week we spoke about whether their office would be closed, whether the Qataris had asked them to do so. doesn't appear to be the case.

00:08:01 Speaker_01
And when I pushed back with the Qataris on this, they said, look, it's more of a warning shot.

00:08:07 Speaker_01
If you don't get your act together and agree to some kind of ceasefire deal, they feel the pressure of Trump breathing down their neck and about to come into office.

00:08:16 Speaker_01
And interestingly, Hamas, when I sat down with this guy, his name's Dr. Bassem Naeem, he was very confident and defined. He said, we're not going anywhere. We've got our political office here. I said, have you guys been decapitated?

00:08:29 Speaker_01
He said, listen, this has happened to us multiple times. Leaders have been killed. Others emerge. You know, don't worry about Yahya Sinwar being killed. Don't worry about Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the political office, being killed. We're strong.

00:08:40 Speaker_01
We will prevail. We're strong. There'll be others that will emerge. What you need to worry about is the killing spree that's taken place inside Gaza, what that will produce.

00:08:50 Speaker_02
Did you find him convincing?

00:08:52 Speaker_01
You know, even after the interview ended, we chatted for 19 minutes after when the cameras stopped rolling.

00:09:01 Speaker_01
And because I had interviewed him about six months ago, and when I asked him about October 7, he said, oh, God, why do you keep talking about this issue? And I said, are you kidding me? Why do you think? And I asked him this question.

00:09:14 Speaker_01
That answer says it all. It does.

00:09:15 Speaker_02
Exactly. What's the big deal of October 7?

00:09:18 Speaker_01
You know, this conflict didn't begin on October 7th. You know, we had 20,000 dead from the early 2000s. He was going into all that. And I said, yes, but never in the history of this conflict have you had 43,000 people dead.

00:09:33 Speaker_01
As you say, Gaza turned into a wasteland. Do you not register what has happened and been triggered as a result of your actions 13 months ago?

00:09:41 Speaker_02
So I just got back from Jordan meeting with senior officials. And I can tell you what they're really worried about. They're worried about what happens over the next four years because Israel right now, Benjamin Netanyahu looks secure in his position.

00:09:57 Speaker_02
He looked very weak right after October 7th, but now he's maybe at the peak of his power. And his friend, his confidant, his ally, Donald Trump is now back,

00:10:10 Speaker_02
in the White House yet but on his way and already sort of making pronouncements and putting together his staff. We're going to talk a lot about that with Rachel Maddow coming up and that's going to be really exciting.

00:10:22 Speaker_02
What they're worried about in Jordan is that over the next four years, that the Israelis aren't going to necessarily do what they did in Gaza. They're not going to flatten it, but that they could annex the West Bank.

00:10:34 Speaker_02
So if they annexed the West Bank, the settlers would no longer be settlers. The Palestinians would effectively be guests somehow. They would have to have permits and permission to be living there and would end up in like more reservations.

00:10:50 Speaker_01
One of the things that I'm hearing that Donald Trump is asking behind closed doors is why are we giving so much money to the Egyptians when they can't just take these Palestinians from Gaza?

00:11:01 Speaker_01
Why are we giving so much money to the Jordanians if they can't help us and take these? Why? Why do they need to be there? He's saying things like, why can't we just give them 50,000 each to go to safety and go and live in Egypt, go and live in Jordan?

00:11:15 Speaker_02
And a real question. 50,000 to leave your homeland, to leave your tradition, to leave the place where you were born or where your ancestors are buried. Just 50 grand and go for it. And they think that's a good deal?

00:11:29 Speaker_01
As you know, Richard, even Netanyahu has said, look, despite all the noise, our policy is not to push them out, right? That is what he's maintained from the get-go. Whether or not they have these conversations behind closed doors and things are said,

00:11:45 Speaker_01
Publicly, when he's questioned, or his government is questioned, when people are saying, hang on, the policy here appears quite suspicious. Not to be expulsion, yes. Yes, it's not expulsion. It's not expulsion.

00:11:57 Speaker_02
Before we move on to Ukraine, I really want to get to Ukraine, and we got a lot to talk to, because then Rachel Maddow's coming up.

00:12:02 Speaker_02
There was one Jordanian official who described it to me this way, and he thought maybe he could approach talking to Trump the same way. He said, just think of it like an immigration issue. Forget about who's right and who's wrong.

00:12:14 Speaker_02
how could how could you accept 2 million people crossing the border, whether the policy is expulsion or the lives are made so difficult that people people leave or violence or whatever the reason is that forces them out? He said what?

00:12:28 Speaker_02
How could you accept 2 million people just coming in? And you know, we're a small country, that's a big percentage of the population, it would have a major impact. So maybe on an immigration level, he could understand it.

00:12:37 Speaker_02
The Jordanian official was was one.

00:12:39 Speaker_01
It's really interesting. And again, I spoke to a Jordanian official as well, and her approach was slightly different to what you're hearing.

00:12:46 Speaker_01
Yes, there were concerns, but she said this administration, the Biden administration, has been so difficult to deal with that we know the Trump administration is going to be tough, but we kind of are welcoming the opportunity for the challenge.

00:13:02 Speaker_01
for clarity, and we kind of will have some understanding of where he might sit. Whereas he said this particular administration for the last year has been so frustrating. It's been all procedure and little action.

00:13:15 Speaker_01
At least with the Trump administration, we may see some kind of action, even if it's not action that we like.

00:13:21 Speaker_02
Look, and that is the big appeal that Trump has always cast over the world and to the people who voted for him, that he can be decisive, and you can pick up the phone, get an answer, and have something delivered. We will see. We will see.

00:13:34 Speaker_02
But in the last few days of the Biden administration, you see that smooth segue right there? Like butter. That was like butter.

00:13:42 Speaker_01
I like how you did that.

00:13:45 Speaker_02
days in the White House and one of his last sort of decisive foreign acts, I think, what we'll see, maybe there'll be more.

00:13:53 Speaker_02
President Biden just said that the Ukrainians are going to get these longer range weapons, and they can they can fire them inside Russia. And that was something that the Ukrainians have been asking for from the beginning.

00:14:04 Speaker_02
And by the administration has said, No way, that's too risky for us, you start firing our weapons that go a long way into Russia, you're going to bring the US or and or NATO into war with with Russia. We're not doing it. Now he's doing it.

00:14:20 Speaker_01
Well, a few weeks ago, we talked about, you know, what it would mean this period. We talked about this lame duck period that Joe Biden is in, where I sort of said he's a lame duck, but he's not totally impotent.

00:14:32 Speaker_01
And he has this period of sort of 70 plus days. And what he could do is flood Ukraine, saturate it with weapons and give them what they want and have lobbied for for the last year. So another prediction we got right.

00:14:45 Speaker_01
And it's something, as you say, Richard, that the Ukrainians have been asking for for at least a year. And in fact, just a few weeks ago, you know, we make these predictions at the end of every program. We predict.

00:14:57 Speaker_02
So you're shamelessly, you're shamelessly tooting our horns again.

00:15:00 Speaker_01
Well, we seem to get them right every single time.

00:15:03 Speaker_02
When we get them wrong, are we going to keep repeating them as often? And as we got wrong again last week.

00:15:08 Speaker_01
Probably not. every week. So far, we've been right.

00:15:12 Speaker_02
But yes, we did.

00:15:13 Speaker_02
We did say that this was that they were going to flood the zone with weapons escalate before de escalating with some sort of peace deal that that inevitably is probably going to see not inevitably that I think inevitably is going to see Ukraine cede some territory.

00:15:29 Speaker_01
And I remember speaking to his Secretary of State, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and asking him about this. I said, you know, is it on the table? He said, absolutely, everything is on the table.

00:15:40 Speaker_01
But we are not sort of... What was that, about three weeks ago? Yeah, I would say about four or five weeks, maybe like three, four weeks before the election, right?

00:15:49 Speaker_01
I interviewed him and I said to him, listen, is this something you guys are considering? And he said to me, everything is on the table. We're not ruling anything out, but we do understand the risks involved.

00:15:59 Speaker_01
We don't want to trigger a wider sort of conflict. And this is something that Putin has always threatened, hasn't he? He sort of said, if you allow this to happen, this is a declaration of NATO basically getting directly involved on Russian territory.

00:16:13 Speaker_02
And you know, the Russians are freaking out right now about this new Polish base, this new NATO base in Poland, as well. So they're feeling very nervous about that. More NATO presence right next to Ukraine. Breathing down their neck.

00:16:27 Speaker_02
But what's the cost? Putin, we haven't seen what he's going to do yet.

00:16:34 Speaker_01
So we'll have to wait and see how this plays out. But Zelensky has, I also think, sees the writing on the wall with this new administration and feels like I need to now position myself where we are going to have to sit

00:16:46 Speaker_01
at the negotiating table, and you know what? One of my predictions, I'm going to make one of my predictions now.

00:16:51 Speaker_02
Oh, you're jumping the gun.

00:16:52 Speaker_01
I'm jumping the gun.

00:16:53 Speaker_02
Why don't you hold it? Why don't you hold it? Okay, go. Let's widen this conversation right now, and let's hear some of these questions, and then we'll do the predictions. Deal?

00:17:01 Speaker_01
Deal. Go. Okay. Let's go. You go first.

00:17:03 Speaker_02
Come on, I'm not that technical. I got to pull them up. I got to put my reading glasses back on.

00:17:07 Speaker_01
Oh my gosh.

00:17:08 Speaker_02
Nobody knew that I wore these reading glasses online.

00:17:12 Speaker_01
And now they're all commenting.

00:17:14 Speaker_02
Somebody did comment on them. And by the way, they're the best thing ever. I had been hesitating to get reading glasses. The greatest thing I ever did, or not that greatest, but one of the greatest things I've done recently.

00:17:26 Speaker_02
Question is, what is preventing Hamas right now from releasing all the hostages? You just met with the guy and what did he say?

00:17:35 Speaker_01
Well, I asked him this exact question, why are you not releasing the hostages? And he described them as prisoners, they're prisoners.

00:17:43 Speaker_02
And I said to him- Was this with the air quotes?

00:17:45 Speaker_01
Yeah, the air quotes.

00:17:46 Speaker_01
And I said to him, they're women, they're children, they're elderly, they're Holocaust survivors, they're people you've dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, early hours of the morning, when you took them away into Gaza.

00:17:56 Speaker_01
And he said to me, And when have you asked Israelis about when they rounded up Palestinian children? He said, just as they have thousands of Palestinians in their prisons.

00:18:07 Speaker_01
And I said, well, the Israelis would say some of those people have committed crimes and they see them as bargaining chips, having, you know, in their custody, women and children and thinking

00:18:17 Speaker_01
13 months on, that they can still use them as bargaining chips is, you know, again, we know this, but sitting across from them and listening to them say this, and describe the prisoners, you know, the hostages, with air quotes and sort of be quite dismissive about who they were, was really quite disturbing, actually.

00:18:44 Speaker_02
And do keep asking your questions, comment on our YouTube channel, or write to us at theworld, one word, theworldatsky.uk. And now the time has come for our predictions. So, Yalda, you want to start?

00:18:57 Speaker_01
Yeah, you know, we've been talking a lot about Ukraine, the Middle East, in the context of Trump presidency the second time around, what is he going to do?

00:19:08 Speaker_01
And frankly, I do think that the Afghanistan model is going to be the model going forward for the Trump administration. What I'm trying to say is that what we're going to increasingly see is

00:19:22 Speaker_01
Donald Trump cutting deals with the enemy, selling out partners and allies in order to have a deal and be able to get to some kind of agreement to end these conflicts.

00:19:33 Speaker_01
Joe Biden did it in Afghanistan, so I'm not going to totally blame Trump for this one. But what I will say is that that is what increasingly these countries, Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East will have to prepare themselves for?

00:19:47 Speaker_02
I think, I'll make a more time sensitive one. I think we could see a Lebanon ceasefire soon, like within the next week or two.

00:19:57 Speaker_02
I think the Israelis have, this is also what I'm hearing, I think the Israelis have basically hit everything that they wanted to hit with Hezbollah. They've decimated the leadership, they've taken out

00:20:10 Speaker_02
huge percentage of their missile capacity, particularly their medium and long range capacity, they're kind of done.

00:20:16 Speaker_02
So I think they probably are going to announce some sort of ceasefire and have Hezbollah pull back to the latani as they had agreed on before, because I think Hezbollah has taken a serious beating and is at a point where they're going to have to accept a ceasefire.

00:20:30 Speaker_01
We're just going to pause there. And when we come back, we'll have Rachel Maddow with us.

00:20:40 Speaker_02
And here we are with the one and only Rachel Maddow. It is so great to see you like this on our podcast. Thank you for agreeing to be our very first guest.

00:20:50 Speaker_00
I am honored and nervous. I'm sure you guys aren't nervous because you're total pros, but the fact I've been listening to every podcast, every episode that you've put out, I think it's fantastic. I'm so happy you've brought this podcast into the world.

00:21:01 Speaker_00
I don't know that it deserves guests, and I certainly don't believe it deserves me in the sense that I don't know if this is going to make it any better.

00:21:09 Speaker_02
Well, then we're over. That was Rachel Maddow.

00:21:12 Speaker_00
Thank you very much for joining and tune in next week. I just I love the dynamic between the two of you and the different perspectives that you bring and the mutual respect that you bring to every conversation.

00:21:22 Speaker_00
So I'd rather just listen to you, but I'm honored that you guys asked me to be here.

00:21:27 Speaker_01
We're so grateful that you've joined us.

00:21:28 Speaker_02
Because you're not just an author and a host of a television show. I think in the United States, you represent significantly more than that. And you also are a kind of a leading figure for, let's call it the left in America.

00:21:41 Speaker_02
People who agree with you, love you. And on the other side, you represent everything that is wrong in America. I don't know if you agree with that setup. How would you describe yourself?

00:21:50 Speaker_00
I think the person who is least capable of analyzing their own influence is the person him or herself. And so I don't know what my resonance is in the world, but I do a cable news show. I am liberal-minded.

00:22:04 Speaker_00
I am allowed to express my opinions as well as delivering the news, and the Democrats did just lose an election. So I'll give you all of those.

00:22:13 Speaker_00
I'll give you all of those fact based things in terms of what it means in the country and what people think of me. I don't know.

00:22:19 Speaker_00
I feel like ever since I was in local morning zoo radio in an unranked tertiary market back in my back in my 20s, I've had sort of an equal amount of love letters and death threats. And that's that's the same as it is today.

00:22:32 Speaker_01
Yeah, someone once told me, obviously it's not on the same scale as Rachel, but never read the love letters and don't read the hate mail. Just do your job. And I think you do that so well.

00:22:42 Speaker_01
But, you know, you just talked there about the Democrats have just lost an election. What does it all mean? And we look at these polls time and time again, and they seem to get it wrong.

00:22:51 Speaker_01
Just if you could talk us through a little bit about the lead up to and sort of what the mood was like and what you were thinking at the time.

00:22:57 Speaker_00
So the science of American polling has fallen on hard times. For the last few election cycles, both those one on the left and those one on the right, the polling has very often been wrong.

00:23:12 Speaker_00
And I think some of that is just the state of the science as the way you communicate with individual humans has to change when we've left landlines and moved to cell phones and there's a lot of spam and people don't answer their cell phones.

00:23:25 Speaker_00
There's also something that's happened in the United States where there is sort of bad faith partisan polling, which is effectively press release and messaging by another name.

00:23:35 Speaker_00
It's an artificial attempt to create a perception of momentum on one side or the other with trash polls that are then very highly publicized. There's a lot of noise.

00:23:45 Speaker_02
So aside from the sort of technical problems though, you are in it every day in immense detail. Rachel's famous for her opening monologues. Nothing, no graphics, no movement of any kind.

00:23:59 Speaker_02
And I'm just going to talk at you for 15 minutes and encapsulate the day's story or the point that you want to make. It really works. You were inside, as I say, as a daily analyst, but also part of this larger body politic. So how was it?

00:24:19 Speaker_02
What went wrong? How did you feel? How are you feeling now?

00:24:22 Speaker_00
I know a lot of people, particularly on the left and on the center left, have spent tons of time thinking about what Kamala Harris's campaign could have done differently and what democratic messaging, how it could have been tuned in a different way or where their media strategy could have been calibrated to hit different types of... There's been a lot of that.

00:24:41 Speaker_00
I have not done a lot of that. I feel like from a global perspective, right now we're in a moment where governing parties and industrialized democracies lose office when people have a chance to vote on them.

00:24:53 Speaker_00
As well, I also think that people who market strongman leadership tend to find an audience for it. It's something that resonates with people emotionally.

00:25:04 Speaker_00
And I feel like it's been kind of a nine-year project of the Trump movement within the Republican Party to acclimatize Americans to the idea that our system is bad.

00:25:15 Speaker_00
and weak and what we need is a strong man who breaks all the rules and breaks all the laws and doesn't care about doing things that are offensive and hurtful because he has a vision for the country and we ought to just ride him to it.

00:25:27 Speaker_00
And that is a message of strength and an exciting message to a lot of people. It is a message that is about undoing what American governance is and undoing America's role in the world in a very big way.

00:25:40 Speaker_00
It's a very radical decision that I think the American people just made, but I don't think it's all that mysterious.

00:25:46 Speaker_02
Let's talk about where we are now and where we're going in the future. And that's where you were just starting.

00:25:51 Speaker_02
Do you think that he's going to, as you described, tear up the laws of the United States, fundamentally change what Americans think about being American and what people outside the country think of the United States?

00:26:06 Speaker_00
I do. I don't see any evidence of moderation or I didn't mean it or I just said that to get elected in his behavior since the election. I might yet be wrong. It may be that he's pounding his chest in the transition just to try to intimidate

00:26:24 Speaker_00
his critics or the opposition or anybody in his own party or in the government who might try to impede him. And this is just a show of force and he's not really going to try it.

00:26:32 Speaker_00
But if you look at his nominees and you look at the things that he's demanding already of people within government, it's everything he said he was going to do. And I expect that it will be mass deportations.

00:26:46 Speaker_00
It will be millions of people in camps managed by the U.S. military. I expect it will be military raids in civilian areas to try to take on this extreme anti-immigrant agenda, which I think he means every word of.

00:27:02 Speaker_00
I think that it's the end of American participation in NATO in any meaningful sense. I think it's really, really bad news for Ukraine. I think ultimately it's bad news for Taiwan.

00:27:12 Speaker_00
I think that it is a big, big leap toward the multipolar world that Vladimir Putin has been dreaming of and preaching for a long time.

00:27:21 Speaker_00
And I think internally in the United States, they will start arresting their enemies and bringing bogus prosecutions and Justice Department civil lawsuits against everybody who disagrees with them. I think all of that's going to happen.

00:27:34 Speaker_02
Oh, my God, you're anticipating the end of America as people know it.

00:27:38 Speaker_01
I have just come back from the Middle East, Rachel, and speaking to several leaders, prime ministers, members of Hamas, for example, Israelis, the Lebanese, and the feeling that I get from the Middle East is that, and again, ambassadors to Gulf states in the United States, Jordanians in the United States, who've said to me, there just wasn't clarity with the Biden administration.

00:28:07 Speaker_01
We had no clarity. It felt like things were in absolute disarray. There was process, but there was no leadership. That American leadership felt like it was completely absent, certainly when it came to the Middle East, for example.

00:28:20 Speaker_01
And that what they got from the first Trump presidency was at least they knew where they stood, for better or worse. whether they were happy with it or not.

00:28:31 Speaker_01
The feeling is that perhaps there will be a level of clarity which they didn't have from the Biden administration.

00:28:37 Speaker_00
Clarity is of virtue in the abstract, I suppose. But if somebody is being very clear about terrible things they want to do, I don't know that it's helpful to have it in a muddy way or a clear way. I mean, certainly Donald Trump uses short sentences.

00:28:53 Speaker_00
And when he tries to use longer sentences, the sentences can't be completed. And certainly, Trump uses blunt force when it comes to threats and extortion against especially American allies.

00:29:06 Speaker_00
And he's literally proclaimed love toward America's supposedly most lawless, unpredictable, and dangerous enemies, a la North Korea.

00:29:18 Speaker_02
To do the scenario you're describing requires having emergency powers. And when you have emergency powers, they generally stay.

00:29:27 Speaker_02
So is that what you're imagining that there's a state of emergency, the military is used, there's military roundups, and what Americans just clap, they sit on the sidelines, what do they do?

00:29:39 Speaker_00
I mean, Trump said, somebody else spelled out, there will be a state of emergency declared and the U.S. military will be used for these roundups.

00:29:47 Speaker_00
And Trump overtly stated in his own social media account, all capital letters, TRUE, with multiple exclamation points.

00:29:54 Speaker_02
Do you think people know what that means? Do you think Americans have a concept of what a real emergency law actually looks and feels like?

00:30:01 Speaker_00
No, because I think that the idea of an emergency as proclaimed by the government is something that's been watered down in terms of our sense of what it could mean. But what he's talking about is using the U.S. military inside U.S.

00:30:14 Speaker_00
borders, on American streets, going into people's homes, and forcing local law enforcement to do it if they don't want to. But lots of local law enforcement will want to do it.

00:30:25 Speaker_00
And so I think there will be a lot of enthusiasm for this effort, but there will also be resistance to it. And they have talked openly about using the military to suppress resistance, to go after American protesters in the streets.

00:30:41 Speaker_00
Trump, while in his first term in office, asked for the U.S. military to shoot civilian protesters in the streets, and the military said no.

00:30:49 Speaker_01
Richard and I work in the Middle East, we work in North Africa, we work in these volatile, dangerous parts of the world where we see how authoritarian leaders operate and function.

00:31:00 Speaker_01
And then I just wonder about the United States in terms of the way that Trump is being described at this moment in time. He did ask for protesters to be shot at, but then the military didn't do it.

00:31:11 Speaker_01
I mean, I just wonder, do we still have faith in American institutions and the military and the fact that in the last Trump administration, there were those who were putting guardrails in place to prevent bad things from happening.

00:31:26 Speaker_01
And so I guess it wasn't the end of democracy. It wasn't the end of America as we know it. Because you yourself, Rachel, have said that we should sort of judge people by what they do rather than just what they say.

00:31:36 Speaker_01
Do you think it's going to be a case of that with Trump?

00:31:39 Speaker_00
The thing that you're describing, I think, that has the benefit of not only being true, but being universally acknowledged in the United States, left, right, and center, as the most important lesson of what happened in the first term, which is that Trump had undeniably

00:31:53 Speaker_00
authoritarian and violent intentions. And there were guardrails put up within U.S. institutions, places like the military, places like Congress, places like other people in other parts of his administration who pushed back and hemmed him in.

00:32:09 Speaker_00
And everybody agrees that's what happened. The left and the center think that's a good thing. And the right thinks that was the problem. And so they have taken steps for the second term to correct for that problem.

00:32:21 Speaker_00
He has announced nominees who are explicitly, I think they would acknowledge, designed to be the opposite of guardrails. He's chosen people who will do what he wants. He's chosen a lot of green lights and rubber stamps.

00:32:35 Speaker_00
And it's because of the diagnosis that you just gave.

00:32:39 Speaker_01
If we think about the issue around migration, it's such a heated topic and it was something that Europe dealt with.

00:32:46 Speaker_01
In 2015, you'll remember, we had over a million people arrive on European shores and some countries locked migrants up and pushed them out. And other countries like Germany, Angela Merkel was the leader at the time and she said, let everyone in.

00:33:00 Speaker_01
and didn't have quite an immigration policy. Ten years on, you still see children drowning to the bottom of the ocean in the Mediterranean, trying to get to these different places.

00:33:11 Speaker_01
Immigration is such a heated topic and as a child of immigrants, as parents who fled a war-torn country, I feel quite passionately about the issue of immigration.

00:33:22 Speaker_01
But I also understand that someone who grew up in Australia and they had very strict immigration policies, what would be your report card in terms of the Biden administration's

00:33:32 Speaker_01
tackling of the immigration issue, and why then the pendulum moved so far the other way, where millions and millions of Americans voted as a result of the way the Biden administration handled things, and then they thought, well, Trump might fix it.

00:33:46 Speaker_00
Certainly, the politics of immigration is red hot all over the world. And it is certainly a racialized political point.

00:33:53 Speaker_00
I mean, the candidate who was just elected has openly wistfully mused about, oh, what we really want is immigrants from the Scandinavian countries. What we don't want is immigrants from these asshole countries.

00:34:07 Speaker_00
I mean, he's very overt in the racial coding of this as a political issue. Listen, the most recent American president who has deported the most people is Barack Obama.

00:34:22 Speaker_00
And was that rewarded in terms of the Democrats being seen as hardline and doctrinaire and law and order on the issue of immigration? No, it wasn't.

00:34:33 Speaker_00
Donald Trump decided to make immigration his issue coming in after a president who had deported more people than anybody ever in US history, and who deported actually more people than Trump did once he was in charge of the presidency.

00:34:46 Speaker_00
So there is a dislocation between what's actually happening at the border, which is actually happening with the way that immigration policy is being run and effectuated. and the political mobilization around it.

00:34:58 Speaker_00
I would argue that what Trump has done is just used immigrants as a scapegoat in a traditional authoritarian strongman campaigning sense rather than having mastered anything about the actual policy of immigration that moved the needle for the American people in anything other than an emotional way.

00:35:17 Speaker_01
I mean, Obama was known as deporter in chief. Do you think that he did it in a more kind of sophisticated way without sort of screaming about it the way that Trump does?

00:35:26 Speaker_00
Yes, exactly. He did it as policy. Trump is doing it as scapegoating emotion and let's have a strongman form of government and get rid of democracy.

00:35:33 Speaker_02
My head has been spitting since we started talking because that is the sort of the, is that really what's at play here?

00:35:41 Speaker_02
You're painting a very vivid picture of, again, what Trump has said he's going to carry out and people who are close to him have already laid out. So if you game this forward,

00:35:53 Speaker_02
and the world starts shrinking, and there is more censorship, and there is more division, and sometimes violent division in America, you represent a very powerful and active voice on one side, can you still have that voice?

00:36:06 Speaker_02
And or do you become a you become the de facto spokeswoman or leader of that movement, whether you want it or not?

00:36:13 Speaker_00
Do I become their leader? Richard, what are you talking about? Well, I don't know. Before I try to answer that, I feel like you keep saying your head is spinning and you're really focused on this and that's what you want to talk about.

00:36:23 Speaker_00
When I was describing, when I was laying out what I think is going to happen both domestically and internationally with the United States, did I say anything that you disagree with? I feel I'm surprised by your reaction, Richard, in particular.

00:36:35 Speaker_00
Am I painting a picture that's darker than what you're seeing?

00:36:38 Speaker_02
You're saying it very clearly.

00:36:40 Speaker_01
I don't want to say I'm an optimist, but I sort of looked at the Biden administration and certainly from foreign policy for the past four years, the fall of Kabul, you know, done in such a sloppy way where literally people were falling out of the sky because

00:36:57 Speaker_01
America let people down. And I know that people say, well, bad things happen in Yemen, bad things are happening across the world. There was a 20-year American investment in a project, Project Afghanistan.

00:37:08 Speaker_01
And in the end, it was sort of betrayal and abandonment because they wanted to get out. Then you look at the Middle East and tens of thousands of people in the hundred-year conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

00:37:20 Speaker_01
More people have died in the course of the last year than at any other point where American leaders were able to put a stop to the killing. I just wonder, on one level, how much worse

00:37:33 Speaker_01
can it get for the state of the world at this point with a Trump administration? And maybe I'm just not grasping it because I've been so frustrated with the way that the world has been going in the last year.

00:37:45 Speaker_00
How much worse can it get is the scariest question that looms over all of us right now, I think. I mean, when I think about all the things that you just described, the fall of Kabul, the situation in the Middle East right now, I mean, it's all

00:38:00 Speaker_00
It's more than a parade of horribles. It's the worst things you can imagine in the world, unless you can imagine it worse.

00:38:07 Speaker_00
I also think that as much disappointment as you're expressing, and I think that we all feel about what America has been able and hasn't been able to get done in the world, and particularly in support of our allies and innocent people, and all of the scenarios that you just described, I think having a United States government that just doesn't function,

00:38:25 Speaker_00
um that just doesn't that isn't capable and that has withdrawn from any constructive role in the world other than making alliances with dictators and strongmen literally including kim jong-un i mean i think that's i think that's likely a recipe for things being even worse so rachel you said my uh

00:38:44 Speaker_02
When I said my head was spinning, it's not because what you're saying is blowing my mind that I've never had these thoughts before or entertained them.

00:38:52 Speaker_02
My head is spinning because there's so many different directions we can go in, so many things to ask.

00:38:57 Speaker_02
What you mentioned in the beginning and how this is happening all over the world and that it's on the rise that these authoritarian leaders or leaders with authoritarian tendencies who say that they can fix all the problems with the stroke of a pen and their charismatic personalities will win over the day.

00:39:14 Speaker_02
Is it all just about nostalgia?

00:39:16 Speaker_00
In a way. I mean, I think that's the text of the message. The text is make America great again, like the again is doing a lot of work there. It's about this idea of former greatness, former simple glory that has somehow been lost.

00:39:31 Speaker_00
And how did we lose our glory? It wasn't because of our so-called enemies in the world. Actually, our so-called enemies in the world, those ought to be our friends. The real enemy is the enemy.

00:39:41 Speaker_00
within, which is people within our own country who are our enemy. We're going to have to use force. It's going to be extreme, but we will get rid of those people. We'll silence them. We'll win once and for all, and then we'll rule forever.

00:39:57 Speaker_00
And that idea is eternal in terms of what strongmen offer and what authoritarians, I mean, that's the, it's the basic thesis of fascism, which is why the word fascist has been thrown around so much in this election cycle.

00:40:10 Speaker_00
It's because it is a, it is a classically fascist message. And I think it works in different countries.

00:40:15 Speaker_02
Do you think Trump is a dictator and or fascist?

00:40:17 Speaker_00
We'll see how he rules, but his message is a classically fascist message. His appeal, what he's promising, this idea of lost glory and an enemy within and a need to suspend the rules and take violent action.

00:40:27 Speaker_00
I mean, that's, if you look it up, that's the definition.

00:40:30 Speaker_01
I just wonder on that, described as a fascist, as Hitler, authoritarian tendencies. I'm just curious to know why so many millions of Americans went out and voted for him. I mean, what do you think the reason for that is?

00:40:45 Speaker_01
And, you know, we talked about the border. There was a high turnout of Hispanics, for example, who turned away from the Democrats, voted for Trump. It's sort of trying to understand what is happening within America, why they've chosen

00:40:59 Speaker_01
Donald Trump, after the chaos of the first term. I think people liked the message that Trump was selling.

00:41:04 Speaker_00
I mean, I think there's a structural dynamic at work, which is that governing parties in the post-COVID era have all 201. In every industrialized democracy that has had an election, they have all been voted out.

00:41:19 Speaker_00
And so the Democrats were ripe to be voted out, I think, just for all the same reasons that every other governing party all over the world was in the post-COVID era.

00:41:27 Speaker_00
A. B, I think that Americans are susceptible to the type of authoritarian messaging that Trump was selling, and this idea that, you know, we're going to go back to a time when men were men, and men are in charge, and if you have a feeling of racial animus or prejudice against

00:41:50 Speaker_00
against either people in your community or people who you imagine are the bad people who aren't really the Americans among us, then sing it, sister. Let it go. Don't feel afraid. Wear it as a badge of honor.

00:42:03 Speaker_02
Do you think that people have a shift if they're cops kicking down doors and detention centers with searchlights operating just outside of major American cities, black sites in America, you think people will say, well, this isn't what we voted for.

00:42:21 Speaker_02
Forget this.

00:42:22 Speaker_00
Maybe.

00:42:22 Speaker_00
I mean, I think we saw a moral uprising in the United States when it emerged that the Trump administration had decided that as a matter of government policy, the United States government would take little kids away from their parents and not only deliberately separate them, but make no plans for ever reuniting them.

00:42:46 Speaker_00
And when the American public realized that was happening, there was a moral uprising in response to that. And if you remember the resolution of that, they didn't do a very good job ending the policy.

00:42:56 Speaker_00
There are still more than a thousand kids who were never returned to their parents, but the policy was ended.

00:43:02 Speaker_00
And Trump signed a document rescinding the policy and taking credit for having ended this terrible policy that the American people wanted, which was his policy.

00:43:11 Speaker_00
public opinion matters, and I think the institutions, to get back to your earlier point, Yalda, the institutions matter, Congress matters, all of these things matter.

00:43:19 Speaker_01
That's where I'm trying to find the distinction here. I hear you and I understand what you're saying and the concerns you have. I'm trying to grasp that between that and thinking about the bad things that Trump could do, but also the pressure that

00:43:33 Speaker_01
American institutions can put on, the media can put on, that we're public opinion.

00:43:37 Speaker_01
And by the way, in two years' time, there's no need for civil war because in two years' time, the way that your election cycles work, they can be the midterms and we can have the Democrats back. And we saw that with Roe v. Wade, right?

00:43:50 Speaker_02
To yell this point, what would you say to people who say, Rachel, you're being hysterical. This isn't going to happen.

00:43:56 Speaker_00
Listen, I'm talking about what Trump's intentions are and what Trump wants to do. I believe him when he says what he wants to do. Like, I really think it is not hysterical to write down what he says and figure out how he's going to do it.

00:44:11 Speaker_00
I think that's what he's going to try. That said, I don't think it's over. I think that the American people now have a say, and I think that what does get pushed back against will happen slower and less.

00:44:25 Speaker_01
does he talk a big game? I look at the arc of history and how much changes in a space of time. I sometimes wonder, speaking to reporters who are covering the border, for example, they said to me, it's utter chaos here. There's no policy.

00:44:41 Speaker_01
I feel like the right latched onto that. He said he's going to build a wall. It never happened. He said a lot of things that just never happened. I know you're saying that he's trying to correct it this time, but I just wonder if it's

00:44:54 Speaker_01
big game that he's going to talk. It's going to be chaotic. There's going to be a lot of firing and hiring, at least in the first year. I'm not sure we'll end up seeing Tulsi Gabbard sell American secrets to the Russians. I don't know.

00:45:06 Speaker_01
I just wonder if I'm being naive about all of this.

00:45:10 Speaker_00
I want to live in your world, Yalda, I really do.

00:45:13 Speaker_00
Had he not nominated, actually nominated Tulsi Gabbard, of all the people in America, to nominate Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence, at a time when you are saying there will not be background checks for security clearances,

00:45:30 Speaker_00
I mean, just think about what that means, given what Tulsi Gabbard has done in public in the last few years.

00:45:36 Speaker_00
I mean, the only thing she is famous for in American politics, the only thing, is regurgitating verbatim Russian government disinformation talking points.

00:45:48 Speaker_02
Is it too late? Is the government too much in his pocket? Richard, this is what we- You wouldn't be doing this if you thought there was no hope.

00:45:55 Speaker_00
This is what we trained for. This is what we were built for. This is why we are here on Earth. So it's game on. Exactly. I mean, we have a First Amendment in the United States Constitution that protects free speech. It doesn't protect nice speech.

00:46:07 Speaker_00
It protects the worst speech. We call ourselves patriots. We say we believe in democracy. You don't only do that when democracy is doing great and all the policies are working and everybody's happy. You stand up for democracy when it is threatened.

00:46:20 Speaker_00
And why is it threatened? Because people are dissatisfied, right? This is hard work, but this is what we are on Earth to do. If we're here to stand up for

00:46:28 Speaker_00
democracy, freedom of speech, pluralistic, multiracial democracy that we have lived in this country for a quarter of a millennium, this is the time we have to do it.

00:46:37 Speaker_00
It doesn't mean it's going to be easy, but we have a million levers to pull and we need to pull them all. We need to pull them all.

00:46:43 Speaker_01
As you say, it's game on for those who think that this is a direct threat to democracy as we know it. It's four years. It's Trump. It's chaos.

00:46:55 Speaker_01
But if I look at Trump's four years in terms of foreign policy, he did things and put sanctions in place against the Russians, whether it was him or the administration, that the Obama administration, for example, didn't do.

00:47:08 Speaker_01
He encouraged or threatened NATO partners and allies and said, up your defence spending. Spend more than the 2% that you're doing because we're not going to pay for it.

00:47:19 Speaker_01
And now you've got the NATO Secretary General, whether he's kissing the ring or not, saying Trump is right. We need to spend more on defence spending. The problem with Trump, I think, is he knows how to speak thug.

00:47:30 Speaker_01
He knows how to use power, but he just speaks thug with both allies and adversaries as well, you know, with his enemies, with his friends. That is where I think where it gets murky with him, because things are transactional.

00:47:41 Speaker_01
But whether, you know, all of these things that you're saying that he's threatening to do, I just think that American institutions and the American people are bigger than that.

00:47:51 Speaker_00
I absolutely agree. I think that the American people, at least, are very much not going to be interested in what he is selling in the long run. But in the short run, they certainly are.

00:48:04 Speaker_00
And so when he makes decisions that are – I think he has authoritarian intentions.

00:48:09 Speaker_00
When he makes decisions that are moving the country in that direction, the American people and every institution that can muster the will and the courage to do it needs to push back and say, no, you're not going this far.

00:48:19 Speaker_00
And we see that already in the transition before he has taken power. He told Within days of being elected, he told the newly Republican-elected Senate, I expect you to go into recess. The Senate is supposed to confirm his nominees.

00:48:33 Speaker_00
He said, I don't want you to confirm my nominees. Go into recess, and I'm going to put all my nominees in without confirmation votes, without confirmation hearings. And the Senate is still quietly mulling that.

00:48:42 Speaker_00
And whether or not the Senate decides to consent to it, they seem to have cooked up a sort of a trick where they may, and it's something that's never been attempted before, that they think they have constitutional room to do, they may have the House adjourn and the Senate, even if they don't adjourn, Trump may forcibly adjourn them.

00:49:02 Speaker_00
Again, and what's the purpose of this? To take the legislator out of government. This is an authoritarian project to consolidate the entire US government to one man's will, and he is already working on it.

00:49:12 Speaker_00
And every institution and every agency along the way has the opportunity to push back and say, no, we just don't know yet whether they will.

00:49:20 Speaker_00
And it's up to the American people, I think, to try to put some steel in their spines, even to put some steel in the spines of Republicans, so that they recognize what this is and stop it as soon as he starts it.

00:49:32 Speaker_02
Rachel, you know what I do and what I've been doing for the last several, it's coming out to 30 years now.

00:49:37 Speaker_00
I was going to say, it's not even years, it's decades, my old friend.

00:49:40 Speaker_02
So I cover rapid political change. Yalda and I often meet up in the same places covering rapid violent political change. And I've seen states capitulate to a strongman. They generally do.

00:49:51 Speaker_02
And people like heroes, whether the hero is a villain or has villainistic, you know, tendencies, people like superheroes. And they always have.

00:50:00 Speaker_02
If you look at all the statues at every museum, it's full of some awful of tyrants and dictators and authoritarians. They just happen to be 2000 and 4000 and 5000 years old. Does he have enough popular support? Does he have the skills?

00:50:12 Speaker_02
Does he have the people around him who can break the institutions to allow this, this executive takeover?

00:50:20 Speaker_00
He won a very narrow election in order to take power the second time. He won less than 50% of the vote in order to come back and take power. He won six more electoral votes than he had in his razor-thin margin in 2016. It's a narrow win.

00:50:36 Speaker_00
The popular support is, I think, strong among his supporters, but it is not broad. So it's deep, but it is not broad. And so most people in the country voted for somebody else and not him.

00:50:48 Speaker_00
Now, what that means in terms of whether that translates to institutional and individual bravery for people trying to stop what he's doing, part of that depends on whether people recognize the authoritarian intentions and consequences of what he is proposing.

00:51:04 Speaker_02
Do they see what's going on?

00:51:05 Speaker_00
Do they see it? And that's where the media comes in.

00:51:07 Speaker_01
We are seeing a decline in legacy media. I mean, this election wasn't the election of podcasts, right? More people were listening to podcasts. The candidates felt they needed to go on podcasts.

00:51:18 Speaker_01
in terms of the role that we have as the media to hold these leaders accountable and their actions. So how do you think this is all going to play out as we sort of move forward and hold these people accountable going forward?

00:51:32 Speaker_00
Well, this is a moment for self-awareness because we're talking about ourselves as people who work in the legacy media, but we are talking on a podcast.

00:51:40 Speaker_00
So there's clearly, clearly we all intrinsically have a little bit of an understanding of what's going on here and are trying to meet the moment.

00:51:47 Speaker_00
I mean, listen, I don't think authoritarianism is new, and I think one of the interesting dynamics when you look at it, even just in an American context, is that sort of every authoritarian, every demagogue in particular, sort of rises to meet the media moment.

00:52:03 Speaker_00
And so, you know, a father, Charles Coughlin, who was our great radio demagogue in the 1930s, mastered that medium and spoke to close to a quarter of the population of the United States on a weekly basis. incredibly radical.

00:52:17 Speaker_00
I mean, he was explicitly endorsing fascism, and he organized his followers into platoons that were armed, that were prepared to take over the U.S. government.

00:52:25 Speaker_00
I mean, like, and he had 30 million people listening to him at a time we only had 130 million people in the country. You think about the influence of talk radio during the 1990s when people talked about

00:52:37 Speaker_00
the rise of not just radical but incredibly schismatic partisan republicanism, hard right republicanism.

00:52:45 Speaker_00
So we're in another moment like that and maybe we're shifting from the social media era, which I think most social media platforms, their iterative nature has been destroyed by bad ownership and bad decisions.

00:52:58 Speaker_00
And we're moving into the sort of influencer and podcast era instead.

00:53:02 Speaker_00
And that will drive different forms of demagoguery and will have small D Democrats playing catch up because I think those media are better suited to authoritarian messaging than they are toward the sort of pluralism that small D Democrats are preaching.

00:53:20 Speaker_02
And correct me if I'm wrong here, you don't think this starts on day one, you think it's already starting now.

00:53:25 Speaker_02
And is that day one is just that when the when the starter gun goes off, but that it's already happening that the runners are lined up on the at the tape, and they're getting ready to go.

00:53:36 Speaker_00
Oh, yeah. I mean, the intimidation of critics and the media and, you know, would-be guardrails, to use Yalta's term, like, for example, within the military, the intimidation stuff has already started.

00:53:50 Speaker_00
It's all just trying to clear the ground so that they can operate freely, and that's happening before they take power. This demand that the Senate

00:53:58 Speaker_00
literally shut itself down, that the Senate take itself online so that Trump can act without their constitutional role in his way to install whoever he wants in whatever position.

00:54:08 Speaker_00
Their decision already that they're not going to use background checks for security clearances or for vetting nominees. means that they are handing out security clearances.

00:54:17 Speaker_00
They are handing out access to classified information to people who are never even checked for being foreign agents, criminals associated with organized crime, sex predators, drug addicts, whatever they are.

00:54:30 Speaker_00
They're giving classified information to anyone who Trump says should get it without any check from an institutional background check like, for example, through the FBI. So that's all happening in the transition.

00:54:43 Speaker_00
That is all to lay the ground, and I think to shock the American people into thinking that the institutions cannot hold.

00:54:50 Speaker_00
It's our job to prove them wrong, to not be shocked, to know that this is what they promised and this is what they're going to try, and to say no, and to make the things, the worst things they want to do really hard for them to do.

00:55:01 Speaker_00
And that's the project now. That's what we're all involved in.

00:55:04 Speaker_01
So what is your prediction? We do predictions on this program and this podcast, as you know. I think she's qualified for that. I'm curious to know what your short-term prediction is.

00:55:19 Speaker_00
And long-term, where do you think we'll be?

00:55:22 Speaker_00
The thing that I am most worried about is what we've seen in other modern democracies or proto-democracies that have gone through the authoritarian shift, which is that scary stuff starts to happen in the public space and in the political space.

00:55:37 Speaker_00
People start to get hurt. People start to get in prison. People start to get assassinated. There starts to be mass violence. There starts to be repression in a way that affects regular people.

00:55:46 Speaker_00
And the effect of the fear is for people to just leave the public space and to retreat only to their private lives and to say, I don't want anything to do not only with politics. I don't want anything to do with anything public facing at all.

00:55:58 Speaker_00
But we need support. We need support from the American public. We need to stay in the air. We need to keep telling the truth. We need to not be afraid. I don't feel afraid. I feel energized. I feel like I was made for this moment.

00:56:08 Speaker_00
And I think a lot of Americans feel that same way. And this is a time when there's real clarity of purpose to standing up for the structure of American government, for the democracy that we've got, standing against autocracy.

00:56:19 Speaker_00
It's a really clear to-do list. We're all going to be really busy, and I've never felt more clarity about what I need to do.

00:56:26 Speaker_01
And we'll take that as your prediction, but that's what I wanted to get to, that sort of fighter spirit that you have.

00:56:33 Speaker_01
Of course, we've talked about the darker side of this, but also the fact that you're talking about being energized is quite exciting.

00:56:41 Speaker_02
And you're going to be right at the center of it. That's what I was asking earlier. I was saying, one day, are we going to see you on the burning barricades? I think even you said, what is he talking about? But we don't know where this is going.

00:56:52 Speaker_00
I'm not a person who leads these things, I'm a person who talks about these things, but I think that's, you know, that's needed in its own way. Listen, in terms of fighting spirit, too, I mean, you guys don't sell yourself short.

00:57:01 Speaker_00
You guys have been literally through the wars, and your clarity and your sense of purpose in what you're doing is inspiring to me, too, so keep going. Long may you wave, you guys.

00:57:11 Speaker_02
Thank you very much. Our first guest, what a great episode. Thank you so much for joining us.