A Stark Warning About the 2026 Election, with Robert Kagan

0:28It's like the cereal box. Freud said it was all about the transference. Is that what he meant? It's gold. Also, of course, it's made of gold. Yes, good point. I have a hunch, though, that even Midas would have been like, you know what? It's kind of pathetic for you to give me this. It's your prize. Yeah, you keep it. You keep it.

0:49Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm joined by my colleagues, Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer. Hey, Evan. Good morning, guys. Hi, Jean. Hey, Susan.

1:07You know, aren't we cheery and upbeat? It's an illusion. Here we are. Here we are. Another week. It seems like a year 2026, but that's really because the news is almost impossible to keep up with. We're watching multiple crises unfold all at once. We have domestic authoritarianism, the collapse of international norms, the threat of new wars, and our guest today warned nearly a decade ago that this moment was coming. Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an author, and historian. His books include The Jungle Grows Back, Of Paradise and Power. We want to talk today about his insights going all the way back to the spring of 2016 and his powerful essay, This is How Fascism Comes to America, published before Donald Trump even won the Republican nomination officially.

2:06Today, we're going to ask him how he was able to see that coming in 2016, what surprised him since, and whether American democracy can still pull back from the edge. Bob, welcome to the show. We're very glad to have you here. Thank you. Thank you. Good to see you all. It's great to have you. So, Bob, in May of 2016, not only before Donald Trump was elected, but before he even formally received the nomination of the Republican Party, you wrote a piece for the Post that was the first to use the F word in regards to Donald Trump. And I just reread it before this conversation this morning. It's called This is How Fascism Comes to America.

2:51I want to just read a little bit from the end of that piece because I think people will be shocked that you wrote this nearly a decade ago at this point. The clarity and the power of it, I think, is still framing for conversation that we want to have with you today. And what you wrote is that if he wins the election, his legions will likely comprise a near majority of the nation. Imagine the power he'll wield then, in addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following. He will also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command, the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military.

3:32Who would dare to oppose him then? Certainly not a Republican Party that lay down before him, even when he was comparatively weak. And is a man like Trump, with infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more judicious, more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his entire life? Does vast power uncorrupt? This, you concluded, is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes, but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac, tapping into popular resentments and insecurities. And with an entire national political party, out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear, falling into line behind him.

4:20I really, I get chills reading that now. So can you tell us about the making of that piece and why it is that you were able to see that at that time? Well, the part of it that's been hard for me is I never understood why everybody didn't see it, quite honestly, because it was very apparent what was happening, obviously. By the way, the only thing that I was probably wrong about is that there are the jackboots now. But, you know, that was failure of imagination on my part, I guess. Look, the two things that are relevant, and I think which were obvious then, was first of all that he personally is a megalomaniac, which is to say he seeks power and not just in order to accomplish things, or not really even in order to accomplish things, but in order to dominate.

5:10He is about domination. People talk about him like he's transactional or whatever. The transaction is, you admit that I am dominating you. And he has managed to get pretty much the entire world, except for the leaders of the other two empires, basically to accept his domination. That's what the tariffs are about. That's what his domestic approach is about. So you have a man like that. And then he placed himself quite deliberately in front of a movement that has always existed in America. And it is a movement that is fundamentally at odds with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. It is a movement that is fundamentally about white Christian supremacy.

5:58They have never accepted the idea of human equality. They were very frank about this throughout most of history, certainly the slaveholding South and then the South for 100 years afterwards. What we never anticipated after World War II when these people were vanquished effectively by World War II and the Great Depression and that whole conservative movement basically went off to the fringe. But it never went away. When Trump came along, how did he introduce himself to the world politically? He introduced himself with the birther conspiracy about Obama, which was a direct call to white Christian supremacists in the country, and they have followed him ever since.

6:40Just one other quick thing on this, you know, going back to 2016, you mentioned sort of the history of it. And I think to me, that's been my theory of the case about why you have always been so clear eyed is that it's the historians rather on some level than the political scientists who were able to see the moment in some ways most clearly. So many people have a time horizon that's too limited, sort of this kind of like exceptional post-World War II moment in American history rather than looking back. Where does that history, and you're working on a multi-volume history of the U.S. and the world over the centuries, where does that history perspective put us now 10 years later?

7:27Well, the project is virtually complete. I think it's important to understand that, again, while Trump is only interested in power and domination, the movement that he heads, if you read their leading ideologists, if you read Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, if you read Patrick Deneen, and all this also comes out of the mouth of Russell Vaught and Stephen Miller, They are very frank about the fact that what they're hoping to do is overturn the founders' government, not just liberalism, not just late left liberalism, not just AOC or whatever. We're talking about the founders' liberalism. They understand perfectly well that the founders created a system which is in favor of liberalism, which is to say in favor of equality of individual rights and a hostile to efforts to subvert that in the return to a world of hierarchy.

8:31They want to return to the world of hierarchy that existed before the American Revolution, where everybody knew their place, you know, starting with God and then starting with the chosen white race, etc. And so we are continually surprised. Well, I don't even know if people even realize it, the degree to which this is a project to overturn the founders' government. Bob, you mentioned a moment ago that this process of the fascist eclipse is, as you said, virtually complete. Virtually is an important piece of that description. And I wonder if you would flesh it out for us. Having imagined and predicted many of the steps that we've now gone through, what are you most mindful of and most concerned about that may be coming next?

9:21Well, what's coming next now is perfectly clear, which is that what we're seeing in Minnesota is both a dress rehearsal, but also an effort to desensitize the country to the idea of using overwhelming force by the federal government to effectively invade states, especially democratic states, and take control. And I think it is clear to me that what we're looking forward to, there is no chance in the world that Donald Trump is going to allow himself to lose in the 2026 elections because that will be the end of his ability to wield total power in the United States. Therefore, it seems to me perfectly obvious that where we're heading in 10 months will be sending ICE in, provoking riots through their brutal behavior, which the administration is encouraging, and thereby providing a justification, well, at least a phony justification for the deployment of the Insurrection Act, and then, if necessary, seizing ballots, which is what he wanted to do in 2020.

10:32They couldn't, unless they got up on the rooftop and said, we are going to subvert the 2026 election, they could not be more obvious about what their intention is. Well, Bob, in your analysis, which is absolutely chilling, you mentioned that this strain has always been here in America, in American history. But it has been, for the most part, outside of the slaveholding South, a minority or at least since then, a minority movement. How do you see the majority reacting to this? Do you see, in particular, if we're focusing on 2026, what do you expect will happen there? Is the majority going to go along?

11:23Well, that is unfortunately the problem. I can't say this with any specificity, but I believe that this is true. I think 40 % of the country is down with it. I think they are. 40 % of the country will say, yes, let's have a dictatorship led by Donald Trump. That's his approval rating now after he's made it perfectly clear how he's going to behave and what his intentions are. So whether it's 40 % or 35%, I don't know. They will be down with it. Another 30%, at least, will be either disbelieving until it's already happened and then even then questioning whether it's really happened or indifferent or not really that troubled by it, okay?

12:08I mean, I'm now talking about Republicans who we used to refer to as traditional Republicans who are absolutely going along with this. And, you know, I think it is absolutely the case that the leaders of the Republican Party in Congress, John Thune and Mike Johnson, are willing to support dictatorship if it means that they get to keep their jobs. And they are certainly not willing to risk their jobs in order to prevent dictatorship. Meanwhile, you have the elite in this country as completely rolled over. They've either rolled over or they're participants. If you want to ask me what's shocking about what's happened, it is how easily Trump has been able to do everything without facing the slightest resistance from very powerful people, very rich people.

13:00Even now, Evan, you asked me why I said virtually, because the question is why isn't it already over? And I think it pretty much almost is already over. But it's virtually because at any time, if four Republican senators had the courage to stand up to what's happening, Trump would have a really big problem being able to do what he wants to do. But there is no courage in the Senate, even among people who pretend to have courage. You know, they get up and they say, well, we're going to block the we're going to try to invoke the War Powers Resolution. And then three days later, they're back off of it again.

13:39And so this doesn't have to happen if the elites in this country step forward and not just elected officials, but previous powerful Republicans in the foreign policy establishment who have been utterly silent throughout this entire period, even as the world order that they claim to support is being destroyed. And maybe we'll talk about that in a few minutes. The failure of the elite is, to me, the most astonishing thing. The founders would be in disbelief, quite honestly. I just want to ask one corollary question, because we're talking about the failures of the elite and the leadership of the Republican Party in Congress.

14:20What about the Supreme Court? Is that something that you think could still put the brakes on this? There's no indication of it so far. There are certainly at least two or three members on the court right now who also will favor this dictatorship. It is in accord with their political philosophy, which is contrary to the founders' vision. It's clear to me. And the others seem willing to go along. I don't know at what point we expect them to step in. For one thing, the minute a president starts declaring national security issues, which is what they will be doing, the court always tends to back away, as they did in Korematsu, for instance.

15:00So you can't tell me the court has frequently throughout history supported oppression, supported in the South dictatorship. I don't I don't know why we should be shocked to see the court doing it again. Yeah, no, that's exactly unfortunately where we are right now. We kept waiting for a decision that never came, never came. So we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll look at how Trump's authoritarian impulse is playing out on the world stage. The political scene will be back in just a moment.

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16:44Okay, Bob, so let's talk about Trump and the world. This metaphor of yours, which, you know, sticks with me, of course, is this idea of the jungle grows back in some ways. Donald Trump is the jungle. We've heard this incredibly stark enunciation of that principle from the very beginning of this year. That interview that Stephen Miller did on CNN in which he said, essentially, since time immemorial, the world has been governed by sheer power and the law of might makes right. And that's the world we're going into. So many people, when Trump first came into politics, they looked at his America First rhetoric and they said, well, he's going to be a neo-isolationist.

17:24isolationist. But as you pointed out, in fact, he's been a sort of not only a unilateralist, but basically a narcissistic unilateralist. I think that's the phrase I've been using. You know, it's a foreign policy of me, me, me. And where is that going to take us? I mean, is he going to get us into a full-fledged war? Well, eventually, but I don't know in the near term. I don't know if there will be an actual war when he tries to take Greenland, which I think he is almost certainly going to do. I think it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the fact that we now have European countries who are members of the NATO alliance sending troops to defend NATO territory against possible aggression by the United States.

18:12I mean, just to say that is to understand the degree to which the world we've known is now completely shattered and will not be repaired, by the way, ever, in my view, until there's some global catastrophe, which then leads to some kind of reset. Which means that the world that we're entering, it's the world that existed before 1945. It's the world that existed before the United States became the guarantor of global security with dozens of partners and alliances around the world. If the Europeans haven't figured it out yet, I think they have. They now must understand that they have two aggressors on their flanks, one in the east with Russia and one in the west with the United States.

19:00And if they do not want to become a collection of fiefdoms of one or more of the three empires, they are going to have to come to the realization that they need to be able to be self-sustaining in terms of security, which means substantial rearmament, not marginal rearmament, but really completely reconfiguring their societies in order to become great powers again. or they can become subjects of one or more of the three empires. I think when that happens, we're going to see a return to the multipolar world, which many people seem to have a very romantic concept of. But, you know, in the 19th century, which was one of the best managed multipolar worlds in history, there was a major war, a major war between two or more great powers almost every single decade between 1815 and 1914.

19:57So imagine a world in which the United States, Russia, China, and I will say Germany and Japan and India and who knows how many, because now the message to the world is you're on your own. You are in a world of aggressive powers, and you better become an aggressive power or at least a power yourself. we have the prospect of just moving into a period of repeated major conflicts, which is the world that exists. There were two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. Americans have fallen into this dreamland that all began after 1989 and the end of history. And they cannot imagine all those things that happened back in the past with Hitler and Imperial Japan, etc.

20:45That was all like a weird thing that happened that can never happen again. We are now in that world again. And I can only say Americans could not be less ready for it. Yeah. Can I just say, talking about the eastern flank here for a second here, I listened to you talk about the multipolar world. And it's just haunting to me because the people who saw this the most clearly actually were the Russians, Bob. As you know, when we arrived in Moscow at the end of the first decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was the Russians who were talking about a vision of a new world instead of the U.S.

21:24monopower. They were the ones who went around the world. They went to China. They went to India. And they said, we're looking to rebuild a multipolar world. And that was their phrase used by Yevgeny Primakov in the late 1990s. 1990s. It was their vision for a foreign policy in which Russia would reassert its historical role, not of the Soviet Union, which Americans were obsessed about at the time, but of the Russian Empire. They were thinking back to the post-Crimean war. And how did Russia get back on its feet after an embarrassing defeat? And so I listen to you and I think, OK, what does that mean for Vladimir Putin now that his dreams are coming true in a way?

22:04His vision of the world is now made manifest by Donald Trump. Yeah, I mean, we're moving back into a spheres of interest world. And again, I am astonished at the number of American foreign policy intellectuals who seem to welcome this. The level of ignorance is astonishing to me. But if you ask what is the natural Russian sphere of interest, it certainly includes the Baltic states. That goes without saying. It also means the end of Poland as an independent sovereign state. Russia has always insisted on the full domination of Poland whenever possible. Stalin was insisting on it during World War II in negotiating with the Americans and the British.

22:46And then, of course, he got it at Yalta. Ukraine is the beginning of the restoration of the Russian sphere of interest. What is China's natural sphere of interest from the Chinese point of view. Surely it includes, obviously, Taiwan. It includes all of Southeast Asia. And honestly, it includes Japan and Korea, too, who at least have to be subservient, not independent. Which means, by the way, Japan is already reacting to this. I think it is only a matter of time before Japan engages in a major military rearmament, including with nuclear weapons. I think Korea will turn to nuclear weapons. The European states are going to have to rearm individually.

23:27I would like to think there would be a European United Army, but I don't think that's in the cards. Poland will need nuclear weapons for the reasons that I've stated, that their worst nightmare is to live between a rearm Germany, which I think is coming, and Russia on the other side. I could go on, but I think we are used to a world that is pretty pliant. We spent all these years complaining about the post-Cold War world and the forever wars. this is going to seem like a picnic compared to the world that we're now entering. Well, I know that there are some listeners who are climbing out on the ledge as they listen to this, but I'm not willing to give them relief quite yet because we need to talk about what the impact of a war abroad would mean for the conditions in the United States that we started talking about.

24:14You wrote not long ago that a war with Iran, for instance, would be, as you put it, There is nothing more perilous to American democracy right now than that prospect. Play that out for us. What would a war allow a president like this to do? Yeah, a war with anybody. And honestly, part of me believes that the Venezuela intervention was very much driven by domestic motives. I never understood why Stephen Miller—well, I do understand, but I don't think a lot of other people have thought about why Stephen Miller was such a big supporter of this operation. The administration is trying to militarize American society.

24:55They are trying to make the military, well, first of all, is his personal weapon. It's his military. That's already true of this sort of basige that he's created with ICE, which is a paramilitary organization that is essentially like any fascist military organization. It reports strictly to him. The Justice Department, the CIA reports strictly to him, etc. And I think, you know, he's trying to get Americans used to the idea that it's about military power. And so we're killing people overseas. We're wielding that power. This great weapon of ours and our military is, in fact, outstanding and unbelievably capable, as they showed in the Venezuela operation.

25:40They could do this to a lot of states. And by the way, there may be beneficial results in some cases. This is not, you know, I would like to see the Iranian regime overthrown, you know, but right now the last and as Lincoln said, best hope. And now I would say the only hope for the survival of liberalism in the world, that battle is occurring right here in the United States. And this militarization of American foreign policy has domestic purposes. I mean, in a simple sense, obviously, again, if we are at war, it gives the executive branch, which already has enormous power, even more power, and the courts can do nothing about it.

26:20I really do think that being in a state of war provides opportunities. What if people protest against the war? Everybody is already a domestic terrorist if you yell at anybody. This is going to be another reason to silence protests in this country. It's all part of the oppressive apparatus. And of course, we've seen historically examples of how, there was no question, by the way, and God forbid I should make this analogy, but there's no question that one of the things that Hitler was trying to do with his wars was to toughen and regiment Germany on the inside. He did not think that the German people were ready for the task he had before them, but which also included the purification of the German race, etc.

27:06All these things were tied. The wars and the domestic oppression were all one and the same. It's very much a model that I see playing out right now in this country. Is this the foreign policy or even the domestic policy that MAGA voted for, do you think? I mean, there was talk, I mean, you said that people expected him to be a non-interventionist. And there was, to some extent, talk when Trump was running that he was running against stupid wars, supposedly, and that he was going to focus on the war at home, making America great again. Do you expect any kind of backlash against this within his own coalition?

27:48I mean, there have been some, obviously, occasional complaints here and there. Tucker Carlson, you know, is out there opposing this stuff. But look, MAGA's devotion to Trump is complete. As we all know, their number one interest is in going after the people in this country that they hate. And Trump is always doing that for them. So I have no confidence that MAGA is going to rise up. And it's a suggestion that they have foreign policy principles which are meaningful to them. But that's not what this, that's not what this movement is about. So we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, talk a little bit about where this might all lead and what it means for American democracy.

28:34The political scene will be back in just a moment.

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