How Bad Is It?: Trump’s Self-Dealing and the Question of Kleptocracy

25:11I don't think politics has stopped or American history has stopped. I think it's always politics and it's always history. The question is, at what point in that slide toward competitive authoritarianism, right, authoritarianism where there are still competitive elections? At what point do we start to worry about having crossed red lines? Yeah, like are you worried about even like what's happening with redistricting and like the recent news that Trump is trying to ban mail-in ballots? Like I guess even if the analogy doesn't fit perfectly, it does seem like there are constantly these new stories that complicate the picture.

25:46Yeah, the redistricting thing freaked me out a little bit, right? I mean, you know, as I said, in my experience, David Kirkpatrick, political scientist, it's that three-legged stool. If you've got the peaceful rotation of power and independent courts and the free press, you know, you're OK. And that's a pretty much a yes or no question. But if you can monkey with the midterms, if you can rig the midterms, then that's that's a meaningful change in the peaceful rotation of power. Well, so let's let's talk about the three legged stool in Turkey, where you also reported from. So in an absolutist monarchy, or for that matter, in one part of China.

26:28Let me jump in. I would say in Turkey, politics has stopped. There's not real suspense over Erdogan's re-election. He has enough grip on power that he can allow an opponent to become the mayor of Istanbul. Right, although he might go arrest him. But that's right. But he can always go arrest him. You know, my journalist friends in Turkey, they're afraid, right? They're not, the press is not free. The media companies are owned by his cronies. The judiciary has been corrupted. I mean, the things that you watch for are, you know, is the president going to create a special court, you know, or as in Hungary, a kind of higher court, you know, that's what happens when you work around the court system or you jerry-rig the court system, but we're not, you know, those are, those are yes and no matters.

27:22Well, I guess I would, I would question how yes and no they are in the sense of, you know, to your point, I don't think we should start at the end point. I think we should talk about where in the slide it becomes ambiguous. So if you go back in time in Turkey or Hungary, you know, maybe the moment we are in the U.S. now is, you know, Hungary in 2010 or 2011. Maybe it's, you know, Turkey, I don't know, 20 years ago. So there may be not as much suspense about elections now, although people do get excited every time there's a Turkish election, at least they did last time. They certainly get their hopes up about the next Hungarian election.

28:00But even putting that aside, you know, there were steps to get us there, right? So there were steps in the meddling in the independence of the judiciary, in the meddling with the free press, right? It didn't happen overnight. So how do you know when those lines are crossed? Well, I mean, you know it when you know it. But I just I question discussing this as a road because it almost implies a kind of teleology, like we know where we're going or like there's someone someplace planning how to get us there. And I guess the other big takeaway for me from covering the Arab Spring is that someone like Trump is a symptom, not a cause.

28:37And oftentimes, let me back up. The thing that makes democracy work is the trust of each side that there's going to be another election, right? that your opponent is not a kind of existential threat. It's someone you disagree with. And what worries me about our country right now is actually the polarization, the tendency of each party to treat the other like it's actually an existential threat, to delegitimize the president of the other party when that person is in office, of members of Congress to see defeat or their opponents as such a threat that they're willing to tolerate things from a president of their own party that they wouldn't otherwise be.

29:20And so to cycle back to where we started, what worries me about this whole, is he an authoritarian discourse is I feel like we risk participating in that polarization, right? By calling Trump an authoritarian, you're suggesting that he's not a legitimate president, or at least that extraordinary acts might be necessary to alleviate the threat that he poses. Yeah, great. So let's jump in on those distinctions. So first of all, totally think you're right not to be teleological. I have a jar where I have to put in a quarter every time I say something teleological. So, you know, that's not, I don't think we're on any kind of inexorable road to anything.

30:05I think the road becomes clear only in retrospect, but I still think we have to try to guess where we are. And so I think to that point, describing, and this is maybe a bit navel-gazy because it's, you know, journalists talking about how to do journalism, but I think it's very important, right? How do you describe the thing in front of your face without being tendentious or making the problem worse? I mean, when Tyler brings up, you know, potential attempts to meddle in the 2026 election, that's another textbook thing that a competitive of authoritarian system might try to do, right? Both Erdogan and Orban changed voting laws in these sort of small, gradual ways to make it easier for expats to vote, to make it harder for certain other people to vote, right?

30:49Now, again, there's nothing inexorable about that. Things have gone the other way, too. But I guess the question is, when you see these things happening in the U.S. right now, right, you see federal troops in D.C., you see Trump clearly trying to meddle in business deals that would affect the freedom of the press. You know, we all we can go on and on down the list. At what point do you start describing that as intentionally authoritarian or proto authoritarian or anti-democratic without feeling that you're contributing to polarization? Because obviously the flip side would be not describing the thing right in front of you for fear of contributing to that discourse.

31:24Well, let's describe it carefully and accurately. So I don't think anybody would dispute that Trump has authoritarian impulses. But that doesn't necessarily mean we're in an authoritarian system or that authoritarianism has triumphed. I mean, I see lots of examples of Trump even now being checked by the legal order. And of your litany a minute ago, I'm not sure we actually have an example of him interfering in a way that would limit the free press. interfering in a i think you mentioned like a transaction uh i haven't seen that yeah well i mean i think we we know where he stands on the paramount cbs deal we don't know tell me more well we don't know that he has called and said if you do x y and z i will give you my presidential seal of approval i don't think he ever threatened to block it um i think he made his intentions very clear by levying lawsuits and saying that they were they mean these ridiculous claims of election interference.

32:25But I'm not sure. I mean, I don't think that lawsuit is meddling. I think that you might call that lawsuit a shakedown, but you also it's not new, right? He's sued lots of people for frivolous claims of libel his whole life. In fact, it seems almost instinctual. And if he succeeded in this case because he's the president, that's bad. But it's not censorship. It's just a shakedown. Yeah. Well, again, you know, the term censorship, I wouldn't say it's censorship, but I would say it is, I mean, this gets to the thing we were discussing before of can something be anti-democratic without being illegal?

33:02So I think we're both ready to grant that certain things are worrisome and we're having a dispute over whether they're bright line illegal. The category I think I'm most interested in is not against the law, but against the democratic rigor of the nation, right? So these points where the shakedowns of law firms, the shakedowns, attempted shakedowns of media companies, shakedowns of universities. You can make the case that they're illegal or not illegal, but I think they're clearly more than worrisome. To me, they're attempts at being anti-democratic. Even though Trump was democratically elected, he's trying to use that power for anti-democratic means.

33:40But one of the things that we've also agreed on is that American democracy has never been perfect. It's always fallen shy. some of the most important ways, which we are a rule of law country, are also ways that we're counter-majoritarian. You know, the Supreme Court, for example. So it's an oddball system, and it always has been, and it's always been imperfect. And he's not the first president to test the boundaries. Now, you might say he sure is testing them a lot, but that, to me, doesn't mean this is the time to prejudge the conclusion of those tests. No, no, we agree that we're not prejudging the conclusion, but it would also be prejudging the conclusion to say he's testing all the boundaries and they will all hold.

34:24Right. So if some of them hold and some of them don't, that's when we end up in this ambiguous hybrid state. And part of our ongoing sort of around the office debate about this has been to try to plant flags in the sand and try to predict where certain things will end up. I can give an example where you were right and an example where I was right to try to help us. You know, this is from memory, so it might be wrong. Yeah, let's hear him. I think so. In the transition from what I remember, David, you tell me if this is right or wrong. Before Trump was elected democratically, before he was inaugurated, I was sort of saying, well, what if X or Y crazy scenario happens?

35:02What if instead of just placating his campaign buddy RFK with some meaningless, you know, blue ribbon commission, he actually lets RFK like run HHS or run CDC? Like, that would be nuts. Or what if he really starts giving judicial appointments to out and out loyalists and cronies? Like, I don't know if I said Alina Habba's name or Emil Bovee's name, but that kind of thing. And you said, well, let's be reasonable. Let's not be hair on fire about this. Like, there's no evidence that he'll do that. Right. So that's point for me. And we don't need to keep all the, you know, whoever gets the most points gets a pair of Trump flip flops or something.

35:40But this is just to, you know. I feel like you're just stalling until you get to say the thing that David was right about. Well, I was even more he was even more right about this one. He was. And I think in both of these, we were sort of taking a stronger version of our position than we otherwise would. But when Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador with no due process and when Mahmoud Khalil was disappeared, I said, OK, well, now is it foolish to say that we may not live in a rule of law nation? And you said, no, I think we still do, because I think those were overreaches, but they will be corrected and those people will be returned.

36:15And so I took the side of the prediction that was they will not be returned. They will be either disappeared or deported. And I was flatly wrong about that one. So there's one case on either side. Now, like, Tyler, what do you think about, first of all, who's better? Who's more right? And second, what is that? Where does that lead? Well, I guess the latter example feels way more anti-democratic. Like had those people been, yeah, disappeared forever, like that would be more concerning than Trump, you know, appointing RFK Jr. to a position in the government. Like that just – that sucks, but it's not indicative of democratic backsliding really.

36:50I should say I don't actually remember the example where you were right. I don't remember saying that. But the – on Abrego Garcia, let me caveat that further. The thing about Obrego Garcia is that he's actually not a U.S. citizen and he entered the country illegally. So the only country where he legally has a right to reside is El Salvador. Well, that's also the only country that an American judge said he could not be deported to. Right. So he's in a complicated position, right? So, you know, is he going to walk free and return to his family and live happily ever after in the United States of America?

37:24I don't on that. I don't want to make any predictions. But I also don't think that the status of our democracy hinges on it as much as on some larger questions. Well, two things on that. One is I want to hear what are what the status of our democracy does hinge on. Like, where are the bright lines that we should keep looking for? And also, I mean, I guess what this brings up for me is that there are going to be places. I mean, I don't know when I'm making these predictions whether I'm going to be right or wrong. I'm kind of making them, you know, for the sake of argument. My question, though, is not, you know, is this the one thing that will be the death knell of American democracy?

38:01But the question of if we tally up some in the we're relieved by this column and some in the we're worried by this column, like, where does that leave us? Like if we if we keep ending up in this hybrid regime or kind of mixed system, that's why I keep going back to the examples of Turkey a number of years ago, Hungary a number of years ago, precisely because we don't know where the road ends. The question is, if we have some in column A and some in column B, we don't say democracy is over, but I don't think we can then also say democracy is fine. Right. So how do we describe that? Yeah, I mean, I think everybody on both sides of the aisle would agree that right now American democracy is not as healthy as it might be for a variety of reasons.

38:46An accumulation of presidential power, an erosion of congressional power, a tendency by the Congress to defer to the Supreme Court to avoid responsibility. Lots of other people would say that the campaign finance system is problematic. you know, even the acute polarization itself is a threat to democracy. And again, I think people on both sides of the aisle would agree about that. So nobody's saying, thank God, American democracy has never been better. For sure, it is, you know, it's time for regular checkups. At the same time, as I said, like to pretend that Trump is the problem, I think misstates the problem and arguably contributes to it, right?

39:29If polarization is part of our problem, then pinning the ills of American democracy on this particular president is contributing to the polarization. And it does talking too much about his authoritarian impulses, which are real. Nobody, you know, many Republicans close to him have said publicly that he would like, He's an aspiring authoritarian, no doubt about it. You know, in retrospect, some people say that about FDR. But if we talk too much about that, it sounds like you're saying Trump is not the legitimate president. And that's something that I don't want to contribute to because it goes against our democratic principles.

40:14But you can have a legitimate president who's acting undemocratically in office, right? Yeah, sure. I think I just gave two examples. FDR and Trump, definitely. But let's not go too far by extrapolating from Trump's impulses to the state of our democracy. Yeah, I think we're in agreement about a lot of this as usual. I think probably where we part ways is in how much it's worth describing it as it's happening and the sort of costs and benefits of that. I take your point that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. And I think because, you know, my underlying analogies are places like Hungary, I think that can be true.

40:59And it's also worth describing. You know, Viktor Orban did not invent anger and populism and polarization in Hungary, but he sure did exploit it. And I think we both agree that this problem predated Trump and will post-date him. I think, I guess one thing to close us out is, given that Trump is a symptom, not a cause, and given that all of this, I would call it soft corruption, you wouldn't, has predated him in the American political system, does the scale of this make you think that we are dealing with a horse of a different color situation? Or do you think it's more of the same? Well, Trump is sui generis.

41:37everybody would say that, you know, Republican lawmakers would say that. At the same time, I think the right way to pose the question you asked before is not to check in on what is happening, it's to check in on what may be happening. I just think it's really important as you ask this question and try to take the temperature of our ailing democracy, not to already be drafting its obituary. You know, we actually don't really know, and you'd be the first to agree we don't actually know how this is going to turn out um and definitely our country like all history zigs and zags and so it may be that uh there's a reaction to attempted excesses of the trump administration that restores and codifies new norms or maybe not absolutely we can't pre-write the obituary and we also can't pre-diagnose that the health will be permanent and that our democracy will live forever.

42:36So we have to be stuck in confusion. Thank you, David. Yeah, thank you so much. It's a pleasure.

42:45We'll have more of the political scene from The New Yorker in just a moment.

43:00All right, Andrew, would you say that you won that one? I dominated that debate. No, I actually... We can both say it now that he's gone. Yeah, you killed it. I think we unfortunately ended up agreeing on a lot of stuff. I promised myself I would bring the fisticuffs. But no, I mean, I think we agree on a lot. I think a lot of where we end up differing in addition to semantic things like what is censorship, what is corruption. I think Kirkpatrick and I agree that we don't know where this leads. I think the question is, when we look at the kind of ambiguous hybrid situation in front of us, do we describe that as would-be authoritarian or proto-authoritarian or not?

43:43And I think one thing that I've talked with him about and would love to have more time to talk to him about in the future is like, OK, you take a case like Turkey. We are not at the end stage of where Turkey is now. The encroachments on press freedom, the erosion of the independence of the court system. The American case is not as far gone as the Turkish case and may never get there. But are we analogous to Turkey in 2015, 2016? And if you were living in Turkey at that time, should you have called Erdogan someone who is attempting to become an authoritarian or would that have been unnecessarily contributing to polarization?

44:23Right? Right. Yeah. No, I think that's a good point. Like all of the things that David mentioned as being sort of like the pillars of democracy that still sort of show that we have a functioning democracy, like, you know, the freedom of the press and free and fair elections. Like those are all things that are currently under threat at this current moment. And so it's hard to while I totally agree that it's too early to be like, well, it's just, you know, we're totally cooked. It's all over at the same time. It's hard to be like comforted by the, you know, the current state of things. Right. And I mean, I think to be fair to David's point that we don't know where this ends up, I think the question is just all of this ambiguity, these different stools, these different legs of the stool being under attack at various kind of rates.

45:07It's it leaves us in this place where it's very hard to pinpoint and say anything objective about exactly where we are, which is why I think David's piece is such a contribution. Right. Because we are putting really hard numbers to one part of the problem, which is the profiteering part. And I guess part of the question is if more reporting comes out about the other parts, you know, if we do know more in a year or two years about, let's say, Trump is really personally trying to meddle in media mergers or personally instructing his IRS or his FCC or whatever to punish his political enemies or personally instructing his DOJ to arrest political opponents more so than we realize.

45:57Right. How would that future knowledge retroactively color what we know about the current moment? Yeah, like at that point, it would be very safe to call what is happening here corruption, whereas right now it's just kind of, I don't know, flamboyant self-enrichment, which doesn't seem that great either. I mean, I think that we sort of took pains to create a distinction between a kleptocracy where you have someone who's just like actively kind of stealing government money versus what you have with Trump, whereas like where he's coming up with money from other places and yet still very much profiting.

46:29And there's something about the overtness of it that is really uncomfortable, even if, you know, it's technically legal. Right. So I think there are many ways that an Orban or an Erdogan or potentially a Trump can break democracy without breaking the law. That's one thing. The other thing, all this pay to play stuff is not being covered up by the Trump family. Right. They're not denying that they're in the crypto business. They're filing all these disclosure forms. And so it makes it easier for them to get away with it because they're just doing it out in the open. Again, though, I think there's a wrinkle there, which is it's good that we have disclosure.

47:06It's better than nothing. But because our democracy has not worked perfectly even before 2016 and has often worked really badly, some of the disclosure can be like a tree falling in the forest, right? You can disclose and disclose and put out all the forms, but it's very hard to say that the voters are then rendering their judgment based on that. Right. So if we know all these things about Trump, but he keeps flooding the zone and he keeps doing more and more stuff, you know, in one week his base is mad at him about Epstein. And then the next week he sends troops to D.C. and, you know, maybe the slate is sort of wiped clean in terms of the attentional marketplace.

47:44Then it's sort of like, OK, there's disclosure, but but does it lead to any sort of like democratic with a small d outcome? Yeah. I'm wondering if after that conversation, you have gotten anywhere on the question of what it is that we should be calling this. I know that you kind of prefer the phrase competitive authoritarianism. And, you know, that seems preferable and probably more accurate than just kind of straight up fascism. You know, we talked about why kleptocracy and oligarchy don't work perfectly, although I do think that there is a strong argument to be made for oligarchy. But are you still kind of sticking with competitive authoritarianism?

48:23Yeah, I as a rule, I like to use as many syllables as possible. So that has that going for it. I think I mean, one term that I keep throwing around in my mind is hybrid. This is another thing that political scientists talk about as a hybrid regime. and at its most basic level it means you know it has some elements of a classic liberal democracy some elements of something else maybe an autocracy maybe a quasi-monarchy whatever and they're all kind of kludged together which is how you get this like ship of theseus situation that we're in exactly so you know at what point does the ship of state cease to be a democracy is this kind of ship of theseus paradox question that no one can definitively answer but But the hybrid thing, I think, helps us.

49:09Like, there is no one red line. And I think that's part of why it's going to be possible for, you know, David and I to keep having this debate no matter what happens. Because we can always be looking at different parts of the ship. There is no one final day that American democracy did or didn't die. That's what makes it so confusing. And so I think instead of, you know, Trump the king or Trump the ineffectual clown, it's like Trump in the bardo. It's like Trump in limbo. You know, it's constantly hybrid. It's constantly ambiguous. And that's kind of the new competitive authoritarian playbook. You know, Kim Lane Shepala has this concept of the Franken state where different proto-autocratic or right populist or whatever different kinds of anti-democratic regimes can cobble together different things.

50:02one of them has more power in the judiciary one of them has less power in the judiciary one of them has populist economics one has centralized economics whatever but they kind of frankenstein together a solution to this problem of broadly speaking how to get around the institutions and the will of the people and yeah i mean if we're living in a franken state i think david is right that it took many many decades to build it trump didn't build it overnight but i think it gives us more flexibility to interpret where we're going next. And I guess the profiteering is just one more aspect to keep our eyes on.

50:39Yeah. And it may be the central pillar in terms of what the Trump family is most interested in. We don't know, but it seems plausible. But it doesn't mean that it's the only pillar worth worrying about in our democracy. Well, I have to say it was very illuminating to hear you guys go at it. I felt very comfortable just kind of, you know, watching you both make terrific points. We will do more over a drink and we will stream it on Twitch. So subscribe. Yeah, that's what we needed. We needed two more hours of it and a lot of alcohol. And yeah, next time then. Subscribe to our Discord now. You get a tote bag and you get eight hours of me and David yelling at each other.

51:16Well, thanks so much, Andrew. Thanks.

51:24If you have any thoughts on this episode or if you have any questions that you'd like us to talk about on this series, please send us an email to themailatnewyorker.com with the political scene in the subject line. David Kirkpatrick and Andrew Marantz are both staff writers for The New Yorker. You can find David's latest piece, How Much Is Trump Profiting Off the Presidency, at newyorker.com. This has been The Political Scene from The New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggett. This episode was produced by John LeMay, with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by Pran bandy our executive producer is steven valentino chris bannon is condé nas head of global audio our theme music is by allison leighton brown thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next wednesday