And I just, can you, I just want you to tell us what it would have gone down like if someone comes into the White House Counsel's office in Barack [laughs] Obama's presidency and says, "We are going to spend," and I don't know how much money it is, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars of federal government money on Barack Obama ads where he just talks to the camera, how that would have gone over [laughs] in the White House Counsel's office.

I mean, we used to have heart attacks when people's names would show up on a campaign flyer in their personal capacity, and someone unconnected to the administration accidentally mentioned in their biography that they also happen to serve as the Under Secretary of Agriculture, because we wanted to make sure that there was no mixing of the official government role of governing on behalf of all Americans with political campaigning.

There is a law called the Hatch Act, and it was, it was enacted in the early 20th century because in the 19th century, in the spoils system, it used to be the case that when a party was elected, they then used all of the levers of government, your taxpayer funds, your government building, your government offices, to run political campaigns to keep themselves in office.

It was machine politics at its worst.

And we banned it in the early 20th century because you know what? People don't like [laughs] giving money generally to politicians.

They certainly don't like their tax money being used for political purposes, and we want competitive elections in this country.

And the contrast is a country like Mexico, which allowed the PRI, the governing party-

Um, how are you thinking about w- [laughs] where we are and what you're sort of anticipating or expecting as they get more desperate down the stretch here?

can you just talk a little bit about how we seize that opportunity in your mind?

Yeah.

I mean, first, let's think about what are the moments in this country's history that have been sort of the most canonical great leaps forward for freedom and democracy and equality, right? If you were to look at the history of this country, you'd say, well, the first one is probably just the Union and the Constitution when we threw off a tyrannical monarchy and became self-governing.

That's probably our first moment of kind of freedom and democracy.

Well, that comes on the back of a violent and bloody revolution, right? That was a crisis period that produced that opportunity.

I mean, the second one we might look at is Reconstruction.

the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments.

I feel like a mass movement is absolutely necessary, but it feels like that's like that is a large part of the work that you are doing is trying to arm people and enlist them in the cause.

Um, and so i- i- it seems like the press realizes that if they don't draw this line, there won't be anyone there except, um, I don't know, the Pillow Guy's outlet.

Yeah, and, and I think that the, the fact that those news stories are taking place right now underscores, as Jessica noted, why the President might be trying to create this controversy right now as a distraction.

But we all know that that's just about timing, that this is what he has been trying to do since day one.

As you alluded to, this is a part of the autocratic playbook.

Uh, but I think what's happening right now helps us locate where we are in the battle between democracy and authoritarianism, because the way that autocrats consolidate power is they attack institutions that they perceive as standing between them and total control.

And when they attack those institutions, they create a climate of fear.

And in that climate of fear, institutions fail to check power.

Mm.

I mean, where do you put your concerns about the scenario Andrew is laying out?

Well, as you know, because you and I have talked about this over the years, I think Donald Trump is deploying every tool in the authoritarian toolkit that we have seen deployed across the world.

And he's showing that he is quite effective at breaking everything but his own bank account.

He's not nearly as effective at fixing things, but he's pretty good at breaking them.

But the one thing that he has fundamentally failed to do is he's failed to finish the his consolidation of power before becoming unpopular.

And I've never been to autocrat school, but I imagine one of the things they teach you in autocrat school is you want to consolidate the power before you do unpopular things.

And that way you're impervious.

Ian Bassam, what do you say?

What does the decision today from the Supreme Court mean for our democracy and for our elections?

Well, I want to agree with Lisa that it's a big deal because the Supreme Court, I think, is giving way too much running room to an administration that has signaled over and over again that it doesn't believe that elections should be in the hands of the voters, and disagrees fundamentally with the founders' design, that elections should be kept far from the person sitting in the Oval Office and should be run by the states and localities.

And President Trump continues to try to seize that power for himself and the executive, and I think the Supreme Court giving any room to that at all is deeply disturbing.

But I think the other thing to keep in mind here about where there is some saving grace here, and let's all just acknowledge the decision as far as I know, came out about 15 minutes ago.

It's 37 pages.

We're all quickly digesting it, but here's something important to note.

The, the decision stays an injunction in one of three- Several cases that were pending against the president's executive order and attempt to get the United States Postal Service to block mail-in ballots.

Mm-hmm.

So I understand f- uh, there have been s- some scattered news reports that you and your group and, uh, other pro-democracy, uh, people and their groups have organized exercises involving Democratic members of the Senate, um, to go through essentially war games of what might happen if Trump tries to stage his second insurrection.

Yeah.

And, and I wanna, I wanna go into those war games, but, but I also was thinking, as you both were thinking about history and, and learning from it and how Trump has learned from his past attempts at this, it made me think of a conversation I had when he first came to power in 2017, um, with John Dean, the former White House Counsel to President Nixon, um, who by the way, whose abuses look like child's play compared to what we're seeing right now.

But at the time, um, I was talking to John about his observations and, and reflections, uh, throughout the Nixon presidency on what it might mean for us today, and he said something to me that has stuck with me ever since.

He said, "When Nixon came into the Oval Office, he had already been a governor and a vice president, and he understood the mechanics of how government worked, and yet he still didn't quite know how to really pull the levers of the presidency when he first got there.

But he learned it over time, and he got way more sophisticated at understanding how to pull the levers of the presidency." And Dean said, "Trump won't know what he's doing when he starts, but he will learn it, and he will get better at it, and he will be far more dangerous once he has time to understand how those levers work." And I think John was right about that.

Um, I think i- if you look at Hungary and, and Viktor Orbán, you see another model of that, where Orbán was, uh, in power for four years, governed as a relatively normal conservative, um, lost power, and it was only when he came back the second time that he really understood how to dismantle Hungarian democracy.

How do you go about doing so? Is this something that the senators are thinking about? Is it something the Democratic Party is thinking about? Is it something that you have any ideas about how we go about doing it?

Um, so law enforcement that has to, um, make this horrible visit, um, separate parents from their kids, subject two four-year-olds to, um, an invasive interview session away from their parents and any adults they know, um, says to the, the, the target of the, um, this effort that he, quote, "believes it was politically motivated."

Yeah, I mean, first, my heart goes out to Pete and Chasten and their family.

Um, I've known Pete probably almost twenty years, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more thoughtful and kind, public-minded person.

Uh, and I think it's not surprising that he speaks to the tragedy that has happened to his family here, but also to the broader implications when he gets to the point at the end about it-- this shouldn't be the consequence for raising your hand and wanting to serve the public, and that's the real danger here, is that we're gonna get to a place where, you know, sensible people don't want to step up and serve the public because these are the costs, and that would be horrific for all of us.

Um, and I think the other thing that's horrific for all of us is, is what this says about the direction we're heading as a country.

Uh, the person who bears primary responsibility for this is the person who made that call.

That sounds like it was probably criminal in nature and should, as Tim says, be prosecuted.

[laughs]

Yes

... that the US attorneys didn't believe were warranted, and eight US attorneys had to resign.

So in a, in some sense, it illustrates just how far the goalposts have moved that Trump is not afraid about saying it out loud.

Look, I s- I think he is, he is going to fail at this, but that doesn't mean that will happen automatically.

There's work for us to do to protect this election, and we need to start by understanding the game plan.

Trump is gonna deploy three Ds to try to rig this election: deceive, disrupt, and deny.

He is gonna try to deceive the country into thinking that there's something fundamentally broken and rigged in order to then persuade accomplices throughout the country to disrupt the rules and change the rules to fix a phantom problem that doesn't exist.

D- are you confident this is gonna be blocked?

Yeah.

And in that moment, one of the most overwhelmingly white states in the nation, um, voted to nominate a man that they were judging not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character.

And after Iowa, I was sent by the campaign to South Carolina, uh, one of the more heavily Black electorates in the primary season, where I was organizing people who were, who lived on the barrier islands off the coast of the low country that had been centers of enslaved peoples prior to the Civil War.

And I had volunteers coming into my office carrying with them The deed that their great-grandparents had received from the Union Army when they liberated those lands, and showing it proudly to us in the office because they had been denied real opportunity, even in the modern era, to have a say in elections for who might represent them.

And now we're coming out to vote for Barack Obama.

And in the final days of that primary, uh, an unfortunate suggestion was made, uh, that it wouldn't actually count that much because it was just gonna be, quote, unquote, "the Black vote that voted for Obama." And I can't tell you the degree to which that deflated the hopes of the volunteers who had worked for so long on it.

And when Obama won that night, not just with the Black vote, but with the white vote, and the Asian vote, and an overwhelming vote, I was in a little crab shack on Saint Helena Island, and with volunteers who'd come in from all over the country.

[laughs]

Mm.

Donald Trump has been president during one other midterm election in his life, and that was in 2018.

And in 2018, the Democrats flipped 40 seats in the House of Representatives at a time when Donald Trump was more popular than he is today.

They cannot gerrymander their way out of a 40-seat shellacking, and he's less popular today than he was in 2018.

So they are gonna try to gerrymander their way out of it because they are otherwise losing unpopular, and they're gonna try to rig the rules.

But here's the thing.

Our founders, in their inimitable wisdom, made it so the president doesn't control the rules of elections.

Um, but it does feel like this branch of government that we've looked to over the last 15 months for its steadfast rejection of Donald Trump's lawlessness has just handed him two massive victories on the voting rights side.

The other reason, though, I think it's going to fail is

because what the Supreme Court, what Justice Alito ultimately said in the Calais case was, well, you know, you can really only bring these cases if you can show that there was really out and out racism that was at play and that needs to be remedied.

And normally in the history of this sort of litigation in the United States, it's very, very hard to show that because although Those of us with eyes and ears can tell that racism is at play.

It's infrequently that legislators get up on the floor of their legislative chamber and say, I am doing this to prevent those people who have a different skin color than me from voting.

But in the Donald Trump era, they actually do that.

That's the incredible thing.

It's both awful and also it is kind of a saving grace in this litigation is that they're not hiding it anymore.

Would you explain that please?

What does that portend, Ian?

Well, I mean, there, there's two plausible ways of understanding it, and both are probably true.

Um, one is that there's something deeply defective about his personality, um, which w- I think we've known to be true.

The second is that he thinks that the pol- the laws of political gravity don't apply to him because he's not really planning on, uh, honoring the American voters' will when it comes to the midterm elections, just as he didn't honor the American voters' will when it came to 2020, 2020.

In fact, he never has.

And this is where I think the, the data that you point out about the breadth and size of the no kings movement is so important because Donald Trump has never, uh, allowed an American election to simply take place while honoring the will of the voters.

He tries at every stage to deceive, as we've said, to deceive, disrupt, and deny, to deceive people about whether or not they can trust the system, to try to disrupt the system, to, to tilt the playing field in his advantage as his, as, as other, you know, strongmen around the world who he admires have done, and then to deny the results.

[upbeat music] Ian, in this moment when the American people seem to be putting more skin in the game than the people who've benefited from life in our democracy more than just about anybody else, what do you say in, um, a closed-door meeting with leaders of businesses, leaders of sports teams, leaders of corporations?

Yes

... you have to credit, you know, some of the major outlets, New York Times.

I hate to say it, this was true in the first Trump term, probably not the second Trump term.

The Washington Post in the first Trump term.

Um, so many other outlets, the, the Associated Press, um, I could go on, that have done incredible reporting, uh, incredible investigative journalism, and have, and have...

And so much of what we know about what's going on, uh, behind the scenes.

Now, sometimes Trump comes out and just says it, right? So that, that doesn't take a lot of investigation, but, but there's stuff that we found out behind the scenes has been because of incredible investigative reporting, and so that is true.

Is there-- Are there ways to undo all of this, and will it be in place if, in fact, there is a Democratic president in 2029?

Mm.

And the question is whether he, having really purged the Republican Party of those people who were willing to stand up to him before, whether he will have more accomplices within the Republican Party now.

And one interesting dynamic you're seeing is that oddly it's some of the fringe characters, the Alex Joneses of the world, the Candace Owens of the world, the Tucker Carlsons of the world, who are fleeing from him now, whereas some of the more mainstream Republicans are the slower to move.

I mean, it is a, it is a wild sort of Alice in Wonderland where Alex Jones sounds sane in response to what Donald Trump is saying about Iran, but Todd, uh, Young, the senator from Indiana [laughs] doesn't, right? And so I think the question here for the Todd Youngs of the world is when are they gonna read the writing on the wall that the Donald Trump ship is sinking, and their future political fortunes...

This is, I'm not even appealing to their altruism or their oaths of office.

I'm appealing to their self-interest.

Their self-interest is to get off that ship as fast as possible.

And, and I wonder how you see sort of the public waking up to the very real threats to the midterms.

So what, Ian, happened there?

Yeah, I mean, it's actually remarkably similar.

So in this case, the Pentagon was negotiating, uh, a contract with Anthropic to use Claude in the classified setting at the Pentagon.

And Anthropic basically said, "You can use our system for anything that you want, except there's two things that we really don't think Claude is ready to handle and shouldn't from a, from an ethical and constitutional standpoint.

One is mass surveillance of Americans, and the second, to put it colloquially, is killer robots," right? Autonomous robots that kill without a human in the loop.

Um, and the Pentagon and the Anthropic were negotiating the terms of this.

Um, the negotiations seemed to be amicable.

You know, there was, uh, obviously a note of optimism, and I wanna ask you to kind of elaborate on that and take a sort of broad view for our listeners of kinda where you think we stand 14 months into this administration in the fight between democracy and, you know, call it autocracy or authoritarianism.

Is that the play here?

So, yes, I think it is.

But, you know, again, as with all things, it cuts two ways.

It's not a good thing.

And we're going to fight it tooth and nail.

And there is an attempt to normalize it to say we're going to be able to do this.

But normalizing it also normalizes and recalibrates people's risk tolerance and might actually have the effect of dulling people's reaction to it come the election.

But it ends on this note that I think is really important for listeners to hear, which is what should we be doing now? to make sure that this election isn't a squeaker? And what should we be doing, not starting the first week of November 2026, but starting like, let's say today?

Is that the play here?

So, yes, I think it is.

But, you know, again, as with all things, it cuts two ways.

It's not a good thing, and we're going to fight it tooth and nail.

And there is an attempt to normalize it to say we're going to be able to do this.

But, you know, normalizing it also normalizes and recalibrates people's risk tolerance and might actually have the effect of dulling people's reaction to it come the election.

Oh, yeah, I've gone to the airport, so I've walked through this, and so I'm going to go vote, right? But let's zoom out a little bit because you're right that we have to anticipate the fact that a wildly unpopular autocrat has only one way to hold on to power in a system that still has elections, which is to undermine the fairness and the freedom of those elections.

But it ends on this note that I think is really important for listeners to hear, which is what should we be doing? to make sure that this election isn't a squeaker? And what should we be doing, not starting the first week of November 2026, but starting like, let's say today?

[laughs]

Um, but you know, again, as with all things, it cuts two ways.

It's not a good thing, um, and we're gonna fight it tooth and nail, and there is an attempt to normalize it to say we're gonna be able to do this.

But, you know, normalizing it also normalizes and recalibrates people's risk tolerance and might actually have the effect of dulling people's reaction to it come the election.

Be, "Oh yeah, I've gone to the airports, I've walked through this, and so I'm gonna go vote," right? But let's zoom out a little bit because you're right that we have to anticipate the fact that a w-wildly unpopular autocratHas only one way to hold on to power in a, in a system that still has elections, which is to undermine the fairness and the freedom of those elections.

And so here's the bad news and, and then also the good news, right? The bad news is we know that Trump is going to try to undermine the fairness of these elections 'cause he's already doing it, [laughs] right? I mean, this is not speculation.

This is the thing that I find wild about the people who are still wondering what's gonna happen is like the guy lost an election one time so far and refused to leave without inciting a violent insurrection on the Capitol.

But it ends on this note that I think is really important for listeners to hear, which is, what should we be doing to make sure that this election, uh, isn't a, a, a squeaker? And what should we be doing not starting the first week of November twenty twenty-six, but starting like, let's say, today?

You know, after the, the horrific tragedy of World War I, uh, the historian Barbara Tuchman famously wrote a book called The Guns of August.

August.... about all of the fateful decisions that led to Europe falling into this incredible conflagration, and they were dumb decisions, they were unstrategic decisions, and they were orders of magnitude more [chuckles] logical than what's going on here.

We don't have the Guns of August today, we have the madman of January.

Uh, you know, Gerard Baker, [chuckles] no, no lefty in the Wall Street Journal, wrote a piece the other day talking about an envisioned future after the US wins a, quote-unquote, "battle for Greenland," in which, in the future, the US has lost its global financial dominance, it has lost its technological advantage, it has lost its domestic prosperity, and it is left clinging to its only remaining allies around the world, El Salvador, Qatar, and Senegal.

It's a world that nobody should want, and frankly, it's a world that nobody does want.

Americans don't want this, and that's the incredible irony, right? Is that after Donald Trump famously is credited by political pundits of having won an election with a campaign ad that said, "Kamala is for they, them, Donald Trump is for you," what voters are finding out is that Donald Trump has always been only for him.

That is who he has always been.

Is that your point?

[chuckles]

That's right.

That's right.

Um, but, but your question gets at one of the hardest things that we have to wrestle with at an organization dedicated to preventing the US from declining into a more authoritarian form of government.

As you know, we have limited resources, how do we focus them? And I will say, one of the things that we recently went through over the last couple of months was really, um, putting the screws to ourselves on answering this question because as we've seen, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump have talked about this idea of flooding the zone, uh, of shock and awe, of doing so many things at once, that in a very-- in a, in a, in really a kind of, um, a strategy that borrows from some of the great military theorists of the past.

Sun Tzu talks about this.

If you can spread your d- your opponent's defenses thin enough, it becomes easier to defeat them.

Is the energy in our political system where you would expect it to be, given the nature of the explanation? And that's, I think, also one problem for the economic explanation, because I think a lot of people would like to think, "Well, it's because of inequality and so on," but then why aren't the left-wing populists winning, right? Why is it mostly the right-wing populists who are winning? And so, you know, I, I don't think social media explains everything, but I do think that it, it is the one that most obviously passes the temporal, the geographic, and the phenomenological test.

What was that?

I mean, we, we've, we've been Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy's football now for too long to put too much faith in the fact that the Republicans in Congress are gonna grow the spine that's necessary, but we can hope.

And, and, and what I mean by that is, you know, the best case scenario for the moment that we're in is that the checks and balances that the founders had established, that have been really eroding for some time, particularly on war powers, where the Congress has really abdicated for decades to the executive and allowed executives of both parties to claim broader and broader unilateral powers to initiate conflicts, that perhaps some of the really egregious things that Donald Trump is doing and talking about doing perhaps could shake some of our checks and balances out of their slumber and create an opportunity for us to reassert some of those.

And so the, the procedural vote that the Senate took today, 52-47 with five Republicans breaking ranks, uh, to at least advance to the next stage the possibility of putting a check on some of this military adventurism, is at least an early positive sign.

Um, and I think, you know, it's important that we look at these positive signs about the checks sort of reviving themselves across the board, and one thing, Nicole, I meant to mention in our last segment is we're seeing some of those checks start to revive in other ways as well.

We were talking in the last segment about the horrific shooting in Minneapolis by ICE, and one thing we're seeing in response to that is states take the initiative to start passing legislation that could create greater constitutional accountability mechanisms against federal officials who violate the Constitution.

And so I wanna shout out Governor Hochul in New York-

But there are other antibodies that can be put in the system, and I wonder if you can say a little bit more about other things happening right now to protect the country and protect democracy.

It's a maximalist view of executive power carried out with the bravado of a president who knows he's out of the reach of prosecutors, lawmakers, and courts who tried to punish him for threatening the transfer of power five years ago." Your thoughts?

Well, he, the president essentially views those rules, uh, those laws, the Constitution as for fools and suckers, and we've talked about this before.

His worldview is that, as Stephen Miller articulated, might makes right, power and strength are the only thing that matters.

And, you know, I think Stephen Miller is right in one sense, that that was the iron law of how human civilization operated for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and it was miserable.

Life was nasty, brutish, and short, as Thomas Hobbes wrote, and Hobbes wrote that as part of an enlightenment movement that tried to move us past living in a world where we had to fear at every moment that someone was going to murder us from behind, because nobody wanted to live that way.

Nobody wanted to live under decades, as Europe did, of war between people who had different ideas of what the good life should be.

And so first, the enlightenment and then the American founders built a system that said we should have rules, we should have laws, we should have elections.

Ian, what does it mean that America has used the military, um, to remove an indicted leader and our president is saying that Colombia, uh, Greenland, um, maybe Mexico and others are in his sights? What does it mean if you've woken up in, in Kyiv or Taiwan and this is what America is saying out loud and in public?

(laughs)

Uh, uh, well you know at the time I said that I was looking at a couple of data points, right? I was looking at the wha- the Pentagon press corps, including Fox News refusing to accept Secretary Hegseth's gag order.

I was looking at America's airports refusing to air a propaganda video about the shutdown that Secretary Noem had sent around.

I was looking at the universities which a lot of which had initially caved to some of the administration's demands, but more recently rejecting the sort of preferred status, uh, in exchange for their academic independence.

And I was looking at all those as signs that maybe America's institutions were starting to see that the emperor was maybe not naked but wasn't fully clothed, and were willing to stand up.

And I think since then, we obviously had the electorate in, uh, districts around the country, states and localities bo- both fundamentally, uh, in opposition to the direction that Trump was taking the country, and now we're seeing the polls like the one you just showed with him hitting really kind of rock bottom lows for both of his two terms in office, and the reason why this is important in the battle between democracy and authoritarianism is because it is very difficult for extremely unpopular leaders to consolidate authoritarian control.

We saw this in South Korea when President Yoon tried to declare martial law when polls had him somewhere between 13 and 19% approval, and that just didn't work.

Where do you see this reporting sort of intersecting with reality?

What say you?

The duality of the moment we're in.

I think this is one of the hardest things we all have to wrestle with, which is I want to look at two of the people I look to for guidance in this moment with very different thoughts on the present moment.

So one is Steve Levitsky, one of the co-authors of the book How Democracies Die, an expert on how democracies have been lost in the last century.

And he wrote recently that if you live in a country where where you have to think twice before you can criticize the government for fear that the government might retaliate against you for doing it, you have already entered an authoritarian-type country in some way.

And I think we all understand that we now live in a country where people do think twice, unfortunately, because of the way the president and his allies are acting in terms of retaliating against him.

But another person I look to often is the Russian dissident leader, Vladimir Karamurza.

So what does it say about the moral character of this moment in the country that we are where we are because this is where we want to be?

Um, what do you make of the public's awareness, um, not just in the pro-democracy side but beyond, about all these dots that The Times and Senator Slotkin are trying to help the public connect?

connect?Well, a- as you mentioned, we've been talking about this, you and I, for eight years or so because it was pretty clear the symptoms that were beginning to infect our body politic.

And every doctor with experience diagnosing this has found every symptom in this country under Donald Trump to be a check mark for the disease of creeping authoritarianism.

He's doing all of the things, no matter what metric you use.

But the key, I think, and Elissa Slotkin alluded to this, is when the tipping p- point comes, because we're really in a race where Trump is absolutely trying to put himself in a position where he is immune to the normal mechanism of accountability in this country when the people don't like the direction the country is going in, which is elections.

We know the only time he's ever lost, uh, an election here, he refused to gracefully exit the stage.

We know he will try to hold onto power.

And Ian, how would you grade, grade us, the public?