Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a functioning democracy looks like? And how can you tell the difference?
Two articles came out recently that offer very different perspectives on these questions. In Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote a piece called “Trump Is Losing,” which argues that Trump’s efforts to cow his enemies and consolidate power are not organized or strategic enough to make a serious dent in our democratic system. In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz published a piece that he reported in Hungary, about how life in a modern authoritarian regime doesn’t look and feel like you might expect: “You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if — still go on feeling as if — the big one is not yet here,” he writes.
So I invited both Beauchamp and Marantz on the show to debate these big questions: What timeline are we on? What signs are they looking at? If we’ve crossed the line into authoritarianism, how would we know? Is Trump losing? Or is it possible he’s already won?
This episode contains strong language.
Mentioned:
How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
“The Path to American Authoritarianism” by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way
“How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?” by Steven LevitskyLucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt
“Don’t Believe Him” by Ezra Klein
“The Emergency Is Here” by Ezra Klein
Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone by Astra Taylor
Recommendations
Political Liberalism by John Rawls
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
A World After Liberalism by Matthew Rose
Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell
I’m Still Here (film)
The Constitutional Bind by Aziz Rana
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Плейлист
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a funct...
I honestly don’t know how I should be educating my kids. A.I. has raised a lot of questions for schools. Teachers have had to adapt to the most ingenious cheating technology ever devised. But for me,...
A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now, the rest of us will likely be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s soci...
Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is one of just 13 Democrats to represent a district that Donald Trump won. Her distinctive economic message, and a willingness to buck her own party, helped her...
The U.S. dollar is the lingua franca of the global financial system. The fact that so much of the world relies on our currency has long been understood as our exorbitant privilege — the reason we have...
“Abundance,” the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, hit bookstore shelves a little over a month ago, and the response has been beyond anything I could have imagined. And it’s generated a lot of inte...
I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation. It’s about religion and belief – at this moment in our politics, and in our lives more generally.My guest and I come from very different persp...
After last week’s episode, “The Emergency Is Here,” we got a lot of emails. And the most common reply was: You really think we’ll have midterm elections in 2026? Isn’t that naïve?I think we will have...
The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists: a prison built for disappearance, a prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, a...
My colleague Tom Friedman thinks we’re screwed.That’s the first thing he told me when recounting his recent trip to China. It’s not just because of the trade war that President Trump is escalating rig...
After a week of market chaos, President Trump pulled back from the brink. But he didn’t pull that far back. He left a 10 percent tariff on most of the world and launched a trade war with China. It’s u...
The tariffs President Trump unveiled this week were both bigger than most people expected and a lot more confusing. These aren’t the flat tariffs he proposed during the campaign. And they aren’t recip...
There’s something of a policy revolution afoot: As of March, more than a dozen states — including California, Florida and Ohio — have passed bills or adopted policies that aim to limit cellphone usage...
It’s our first subscriber-only “Ask Me Anything” of the year. The show’s executive producer, Claire Gordon, joins me to discuss your questions about the risk of a constitutional crisis and how Democra...
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is great branding. Who could be against a more efficient government? But “efficiency” obfuscates what’s really happening here.Efficiency to what end?...
To mark the release of our new book “Abundance,” my co-author Derek Thompson had me on his podcast, “Plain English,” to talk about it. We’re on book tour right now, so we’re doing a lot of talking abo...
After the last election, there were all kinds of theories about where Democrats went wrong. But now, four months later, we have a lot more data – and it tells a few clear stories.David Shor is the hea...
It’s hard to understand the economic logic of President Trump’s tariffs. In our last episode, we tried, but with limited success. And that might be because the logic here isn’t entirely economic at al...
Wall Street thought Donald Trump was bluffing about his tariff plans. The stock market rallied after his election. But the reality has started setting in. Trump is doubling down on tariffs, even as he...
Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approach has failed. This audio essay is adapted from my...
The economy has started blinking red. President Trump’s tariffs have been roiling markets. Consumer sentiment was already down. G.D.P. forecasts are predicting slower growth. And on Tuesday night Trum...
Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, r...
If you’re looking for a single-sentence summation of the change in America’s foreign policy under Donald Trump, you could do worse than what Trump said on Wednesday:“The European Union was formed in o...
In 2016, when Donald Trump won the first time, a little-known book became an unexpected phenomenon. It was “The Revolt of the Public,” self-published two years earlier by a former C.I.A. media analyst...
After the elections, I started asking congressional Democrats the same question: If the elections had gone the other way, if they had won a trifecta, what would be their first big bill? In almost ever...
What happens when ambition no longer checks ambition?Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Sh...
We are moving into the next phase of Donald Trump’s presidency. Phase 1 was the blitz of executive actions. Now comes the response from the other parts of the government — namely, the courts.A slew of...
Elon Musk has been on a slash-and-burn tear through the federal government — gaining access to I.T. systems, dismantling U.S.A.I.D. and unleashing a firehose of attacks on his platform, X, accusing th...
There are two pieces to this episode. First, a tour of what Donald Trump has done — and what he has backed down from doing — over the last few days. There’s a lesson there. Perhaps Democrats are start...
Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.c...