What to make of the Trump administration backing down

0:00It's Consider This, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, the Trump administration backs down. We are not moving forward with the fund, period. The fund being the controversial$1.8 billion so-called anti-weaponization fund. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a House subcommittee this week the Justice Department would comply with a recent court ruling temporarily blocking the fund. Now, to be clear,$1.8 billion is not a lot compared to about$70 billion of spending, which the Senate advanced this week to support the Trump administration's immigration enforcement through the rest of his term.

0:37But Republican lawmakers were actually holding up that immigration package because of the weaponization fund. Many saw it as funneling federal money to the president's supporters, possibly including January 6th rioters. I led the charge against that so-called anti-weaponization fund. Pennsylvania Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick was one of those Republicans. He spoke to NPR Thursday. I think about what's good for America. If we start thinking about what's good for the Republican Party or the Democrat Party, we've lost sight about what our job is. This is not the first time in recent weeks that we have seen the Trump administration reverse course.

1:14In April, the Justice Department also backed off its investigation into former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, only after Republican Senator Tom Tillis held up confirmation of the new Fed chair in protest. Consider this. For a president who claims broad authority over nearly everything, what can we make of his administration backing down? We will ask a scholar of modern authoritarianism.

1:44From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

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2:20It's Consider This from NPR. The Trump administration has gotten its way so much over the past 16 months, from Republicans in Congress especially, that it feels unusual to see it back down anywhere. So what, if anything, do this week's events mean for concerns about Democratic backsliding? To answer that question, let's bring in Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of authoritarian regimes. Anne, welcome. Thanks for having me. Let me start with this. What to you was so particularly alarming about this$1.8 billion fund? It was alarming because, number one, it was the president illegally directing federal money, so taxpayers' money, towards his supporters, including some who had clearly and obviously broken the law.

3:09It was also disturbing because it seemed like the process by which they got to this figure was also less than legal. And so you saw the president bending the law in order to fund essentially his own political supporters. That's what happens in regimes where one party or one clique or one person has captured the state. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because you have written so clearly, whether it's about Trump or whether it's about many other countries where we've seen similar trends, an authoritarian or an authoritarian type leader will push and they'll push and they'll push and they'll push and they don't stop pushing.

3:45Here we saw Trump try to do something, his own party say, no, this is too far, and Trump backing off. What you're seeing now is the American system of checks and balances beginning to work the way it's supposed to work. When Trump first came to office the second time, it almost seemed as if his party in particular, his party in Congress, had decided to ignore the Constitution, to forget that they are also supposed to play a role in American government for reasons of intimidation, ideology, fear. They did it anyway. Now that the president is unpopular, now that he's lost some important court cases, now that some of the arguments that people have been making about him breaking the system are beginning to seep through, what you're seeing is the leaders of Congress.

4:36In this case, it's the Republicans who lead both the Senate and the House deciding to use the power that they have. And that's a sign that our political system still has some health in it. As somebody who's closely following and worried about anti-democratic drift, does it matter to you whether or not this pushback is happening because Republicans are worried about saving their own seats or because they have broader constitutional concerns? I mean, I suppose I would prefer it if Republicans had broader constitutional concerns and were thinking about the welfare of all Americans. But if it happens in some cases that their motivation is political, in other words, they see that these things are unpopular, and maybe they're unpopular also because they appear to a lot of Americans to be undemocratic, then so be it.

5:19Mm-hmm. You've studied leaders in other countries, Hungary, Russia, Poland specifically. Is overplaying hand part of the storyline sometimes? Is that sometimes something that kind of leads to losing power? Some of them do. So we just saw in Hungary, we saw a prime minister who'd been in charge for 16 years and who very much overplayed his hand, who captured most of the state institutions, who controlled 90 percent of the media. We saw that for a majority of Hungarians, that became too much. Finally, people recognized that that system had enabled quite a lot of theft, quite a lot of graft, quite a lot of corruption.

5:57and Hungary was becoming poorer, actually, very rapidly. And so you had a mobilization of voters and a pushback. And so it can happen. I mean, there are, of course, states where it doesn't happen. Usually that's because the authorities either find ways to cheat in the elections or they begin to use violence against their opponents. Do you think this is a turning point or could be a turning point? Or are you still a little skeptical to call it that? I'm skeptical to call it that because I want to see how the midterms play out. And by that, I don't mean who's going to win. I mean, are the elections fair?

6:31Are they conducted fairly? Do all states respect the rules? Does the federal government try to play any games with voter lists? Is ICE used on election day to intimidate voters? All those kinds of things that people have been talking about. That's the real test. Is this a normal American government in the sense that it is willing to lose power and will lose power with good grace if it does? Or are they going to try to alter the outcome of the election both by manipulating it or maybe by not accepting the results? That is The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum. Thanks so much. And I suspect we will be talking to you this fall.

7:10Great. Thank you so much. This episode was produced by Lina Mohamed, Karen Zamora and Alejandra Marquez-Hansa. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Wadananen. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning. Thanks to our Consider This Plus listeners who support the work of NPR journalists and help keep public radio strong. Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors and unlock bonus episodes of Consider This. Learn more at plus.npr.org. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. The surreal horror film Back Rooms is a smash. The director is a 20-year-old YouTuber, and it's based on his popular web series.

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