100 Days That Shook the World: How Trump and the GOP Broke America’s Role in Global Leadership

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Welcome to Assembly Required.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

Since the inauguration, we've been unpacking the way the Trump administration and Republicans are aggressively implementing their vision of a unitary executive.

A nation where Congress is complicit in ignoring the laws and procedures they passed, and the judiciary unevenly tries to play its part as the arbiter of right and wrong in the face of defiance and disrespect.

In less than 100 days, the Republican Party, led by Trump, Musk, Russell Vogt, who is the author of Project 2025 and the head of OMB, and Stephen Miller, the architect of the anti-DEI and anti-immigrant attacks that are sweeping our nation, together have flouted the Constitution, gutted entire agencies and institutions, pulled us away from scientific and medical advancement, and dismantled our principles of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, just to name a few.

But their destruction of America's dedication to its founding principles extends beyond our borders.

Republicans in the White House and in Congress are forfeiting America's position as a global leader.

While the president is indeed responsible for foreign policy, Republicans in the House and Senate have either agreed to their bad actions or refused to wield their legal authority to block bad actions.

The United States has withdrawn from the World Health Organization, undermined the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.

It's retreated from alliances like NATO, slashed foreign aid to the weak, the vulnerable, and the oppressed.

And then there's the shambolic, incoherent trade war currently wreaking havoc on the global economy and here at home.

At a time when the world needs nations to work together to stave off disaster and doom, and when our interdependency was just proven by the COVID pandemic and economic crisis, America isn't simply turning its back on cooperation, it's destroying our ability to lead.

What's being sold as self-interest and preservation is instead a vehicle for our nation's rapid decline.

While we may be pulling away, The rest of the world, well, they'll work to move forward without us.

Other countries will find new partners and learn to adapt.

So we need to think critically and ask ourselves, what will happen when we come out of this national nightmare and find that we've been left behind?

Well, joining me today to talk about this cataclysmic shift in the global order and how we can still prevent it from taking root is Ben Rhodes.

He's the former deputy national security advisor for President Obama, the author of multiple books, including The World as It Is, and one of the hosts of Crooked's very own global news and foreign policy show, Pod Save the World.

Ben Rhodes, welcome to Assembly Required.

Happy to be here.

So I like to start with level setting, and you spend a lot of time thinking about and explaining to

everyone what's happening, but I want to get back to first principles.

How did America come to be in this position of world leadership that we seem to to be abandoning at a rabbit clip?

Can you talk a little bit about how we found ourselves in the 20th century sort of leading the world and what that means for the 21st century?

Yeah, I think

you can pretty much date it.

I mean, obviously it goes back before this, but to Roosevelt, to Franklin Roosevelt.

And the United States, even after World War I, had a strong isolationist streak, stayed out of world events, wanted to stay out of World War II.

And Roosevelt didn't just want us to be involved in World War II.

Even before we were attacked, he wanted to provide all the assistance that the British and even the Soviets depended on to survive.

But even before the U.S.

entered the war, he was talking about a system with the United States at its center that would be constructed after the war.

And so what you have happen is the British Empire collapses in World War II.

So even though the British, quote-unquote, win the war, they lose the empire because they've been so weakened.

All the European empires are essentially smashed by their own excess in that war and the post-colonial movements after it.

And the Soviets can't really take their place because they can only speak to a certain part of the world.

And so the system that was built after World War II was entirely one with America at its center.

A system of military alliances with NATO at its core, an international financial system in which the United States both hosted and kind of ran the international institutions like the IMF or the World Bank.

The dollar becomes the world's currency, which basically means if people need to do financial transactions, they got to run through the dollar.

I think Americans don't realize it's not just that we have NATO.

It's that the whole world is kind of set up.

The UN, the financial structure, the military structure, it's kind of set up where the United States was the only power big enough.

to be the hub for this.

And the United States, because we were fighting the Cold War, wanted to do that.

You know, we, because we had an enemy in the Soviet Union.

And I think, frankly, you know, that's endured for 80 years until fairly recently.

But it was starting to fray even after the Cold War because Americans are like, why are we spending all this money over here?

Why are we spending all this time around the world?

But I think until now, Americans didn't realize how much they were getting out of that.

They only looked at what they were putting into it.

And the reality is we were getting far more out of it than we were putting into it.

So let's talk a bit about what we were getting out of it.

And you talked about the economic and military, and I would say the diplomatic responsibilities we assumed.

So let's start with the economic.

We are in the midst of a trade war that is entirely of our own making.

And

China is our counterpart.

China has long used economic power as its soft power, and it spent a lot of time investing in nations, investing in continents.

I mean, Africa and the Belt and Road Initiative is an extraordinary thing to behold when you see it.

You have China investing in South America, building alliances.

Talk about what the economic impact of our global,

our new global disposition is and what you're seeing happen on the economic front.

Yeah, there's kind of a strategic piece of this, and then there's a piece that I think is going to hit Americans harder, which is just America being at the center of things.

On the strategic piece, we've been behind China for a long time in terms of seeing the future growth in the global economy.

So China looks at Africa, it looks at Latin America, and it sees the future.

It sees future influence, it sees, importantly, the industries of the future depend on raw materials from those places.

So the reason the Chinese spend a lot of money in Africa is they want to be the leaders on clean energy.

And a lot of the inputs, the kind of minerals and resources that go into batteries, that go into solar panels, that go into certain kinds of technology products, come from African resources.

I think in a sad way, the Belt Road kind of mimics some of the European colonialism in Africa.

Like, we're here to extract this from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

And we're not really, sure, we're building some roads, but we're building roads in a kind of East India company way to get stuff from the mine to the port so it can get to China.

But nonetheless, they were way ahead of us and they were spending a lot of money in these places.

I think there's something more fundamental here, though, which is that the tariffs

are dealing with a problem that doesn't exist.

And yes, there's a problem of deindustrialization.

There's a problem problem of outshoring of jobs from the United States.

And Americans would like to correct that in some fashion.

But what Trump was trying to fight in the trade war was trade deficits.

So essentially, the problem he's trying to solve is that we are, you know, we're spending more money in these places and then they're spending buying from us.

That's flawed for a whole number of reasons.

One is that some of these countries are just poor countries.

Cambodia, which has huge tariffs that were going to be put on it, can't afford to buy stuff from us.

I mean, Mauritius doesn't have excess dollars to be thrown around.

They're not going to start buying widgets from the United States.

But much more importantly, for Americans to understand, is that

we

consume far, far more than we produce.

Think of the trade deficit like a credit card.

We are essentially running these huge deficits that are financed in part by countries like China buying U.S.

treasuries, essentially parking money in US dollars, so that we can buy stuff from them that we can't afford.

So the trade deficits have basically, as bad as it feels for a lot of Americans out there, the trade deficits have been basically financing our standards of living.

And so if you try to eliminate them all, it's actually us who are going to get much poorer.

And these countries are going to stop

financing our debt.

And actually, that bill is going to come due faster for us.

We're not going to be able to run trillion-dollar deficits.

We're not going to be able to carry this huge debt load.

So, that's a little wonky, but the way to basically think about it is that Trump is trying to stop us from being able to purchase things from other countries that we already can't afford.

And that doesn't really solve any problem.

And it also completely disrupts

the global economy.

The one other piece of this I'd mentioned, Stacey, is that there's these other things that are beginning to be hurt.

Tourism, the plunge in tourism, which is over 10%, could cost us like $90 billion this year, tens of thousands of jobs.

The fact that we get these really skilled engineers from places like India, those are the people in part developing artificial intelligence in this country.

They're afraid to come here because they're seeing green card holders getting deported.

That's going to hurt us.

Then there's a kind of more you know, ephemeral thing, like if there's a big conference, it's going to be in the United States.

Like, it's not going to be here anymore.

And this may seem small, but it adds up to massive economic importance to the American people.

Just think of, just take tourism travel alone.

Like imagine like whole communities that are going to not really be able to maintain their economy without tourism.

Well, we know Nevada, I mean, Las Vegas is losing thousands of dollars a day because

this isn't something, you don't wake up in Paris and say, I'm going to have a conference in Las Vegas on Thursday.

You have lots of lead time and they're not seeing those plans being made.

They're not seeing those reservations being made, which means it's not just a short term, but it's a long-term issue.

Yeah, that's right.

And there'll be these anecdotes, you know, there was an anecdote

where like a French researcher who's quite prominent was stopped at a

stopped at a airport and they checked his phone and found anti-Trump kind of social media and didn't let him in the country, right?

That was a huge news story in France.

And just one anecdote like that can devastate.

tourism from France, United States.

And that is,

it's hard for me to get my mind around, put aside aside even this, the kind of social disconnection from the world, how much economic input that's going to end up being.

Because that is just pure money coming in here that is not going to come in anymore.

Nothing is more beneficial from a trade deficit standpoint than people visiting the United States and spending money here.

And that's going to go off a cliff.

Well, and we've already seen that cliff happen with our neighbor, Canada.

And today they're having an election.

Would love for you to talk again on the economic frame, what it means, not just the trade war, but just the fights that Trump and the Republicans have picked with Canada and how it's changed the geopolitical relationship we have with our, you know, one of our nearest neighbors.

So

the clearest indication of the impact is that the Liberal Party, which is the center-left party, was projected to get blown out in this election to a kind of Trump-ish Canadian conservative.

And the only thing that's changed, well, Justin Trudeau steps aside, but it's not just that.

It's Trump's trade trade war completely flipped Canadian politics in the direction of the liberals because the Canadians are like, well, we don't want a Trumpy guy.

We want this guy, Mark Carney, who's the Liberal candidate, who's standing up to Trump, who's kind of putting forward a Canadian brand of nationalism, which I've never seen before, and also has experience.

But also, Canada is beginning to sell its resources to China.

China has been bullying the Canadians for years.

Like, they've been arresting Canadian citizens who are critical of them.

They've interfered in Canadian politics.

Canada had a lot of reasons to get closer to us to deal with China.

And actually, if you accept Trump's

anti-China rhetoric on face value, what you'd want to be doing is building blocks of countries to stand up to China.

The U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, you want to be building your team so that we can stand up to things we don't like that China is doing.

Instead, because of what Trump's been doing, Canada, which usually just ships its energy, it has a a huge amount of natural gas and oil that it produces to the U.S., is now selling that to China.

So we've actually pushed Canada into the arms of China.

And again, if you look at the way in which the global economy is working, And we all learned this after COVID, supply chains are the most important thing.

Like, do you have an energy supply chain?

Do you have a supply chain for your clean energy?

And Chinese have thought a lot about this.

And what they're doing is they're kind of wiring their own alternative global economy that runs to them and not through us and if the canadians of all people are taking that option who's not going to take that option right and the last one i want to do on economics is the nearest neighbor for china which is you know for decades Japan, South Korea have been very closely aligned with the United States and very afraid of China.

And due to the tariffs and the trade war, they are now having trilateral talks that should be deeply concerning to anyone who pays attention to what happens in the Asia-Pacific geopolitical realm.

Can you talk a little bit about what a sea change, Nepun intended, it is that Japan and South Korea, that Vietnam and Cambodia are now having closer talks with China in response to where the U.S.

stands?

It's incredible because the Japanese and South Koreans generally hate each other.

The reality is there's a lot of history there in World War II when the Japanese essentially colonized Korea.

And so it was tough to get them in the room with each other.

But the thing that got them in the room with each other and us was always their shared concern about China and North Korea as a kind of a proxy for China.

And now, overnight, all of a sudden you've got Japan and South Korea talking to China about how to deal with American tariffs.

Because what do these countries see?

They don't like the Chinese Communist Party, but at least the Chinese Communist Party is very predictable.

So they know the deal.

The deal's not a great one.

The Chinese are going to steal your intellectual property.

They're going to pour money into their own companies from the government, which kind of gives them a comparative advantage over companies in Japan and South Korea that don't get government subsidies like that.

But at least you kind of know the score.

Whereas with America, it's this unpredictability that is so damaging, even more than even just the tariffs.

And so they're doing that.

Vietnam is a great example.

Like Stacey, when I was in government, we were negotiating a free trade agreement that would eliminate all tariffs with Vietnam.

Trump pulled out of that.

And that, by the way, that deal went forward without us.

But Vietnam was actually a place where, okay, we didn't like that all the Apple's iPhones and iWatches were being made in China.

They were moving.

A lot of American companies are moving their operations to Vietnam because they're like, well, you know, someday this, you know, China-U.S.

relationship may just sever.

So we want to, we're going to move, you know, we're going to make sneakers and phones and stuff in Vietnam.

Well, now Vietnam's being tariffed.

And the Vietnamese are going to say,

they had rivalry with the Chinese for a thousand years, but same thing.

They're like, well, you know what?

At least we know the deal with these people.

And this is what's going to happen around the world is this gravitational pull towards China and away from us.

And that's really going to hurt Americans where it hurts.

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Ben, so one of the reasons I like doing this show is to help people really understand

how we got where we are and what it means.

And then what do we do next?

And we're going to get to what we do next in a second, but I want to move from economics to military.

And I know if people want to do a deeper dive on this conversation, Pod Save the World is a great place.

And you're going to have some extraordinary experts coming up soon to talk about Ukraine.

But I want to give people a bit of a primer.

Right now, the United States is not only abandoning its economic leadership, we are forfeiting our military power.

And the two places I want to talk about, one, I want to start with Ukraine and what that means in terms of Russia's rise.

Can you talk a little bit about, you know, JD Vance yesterday, we're recording this on Monday, on Sunday, made an announcement that essentially

gives Russia everything it wants at Ukraine's expense.

But can you talk a little bit and unpack a little bit about where we stand with the war being waged against Ukraine?

Yeah, so

when Putin did his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, what he clearly wanted was to either kind of completely conquer Ukraine or to defeat it militarily, annex a huge chunk of its territory, and make sure that there was kind of a Russia-friendly, you know, corrupt leader in place in Kyiv

as part of a broader project of

intimidating all their neighbors, maybe taking territory from other places.

There are other former Soviet republics that Russia would like to annex or annex pieces of them, but also importantly to kind of break apart the U.S.-European alliance so that Russia once again was kind of a power in that part of the world on par with at least the United States, right?

And the U.S.

support for the Ukrainians, and above all, the Ukrainians being willing to fight and stand their ground kind of foiled that plan.

But what you still have is you have Russia essentially in about 20% of Ukrainian territory from before the war and kind of grinding them down.

And if the United States were to withdraw its support from Ukraine, it could not sustain the war against a much larger neighbor.

You know, maybe the Europeans could fill some of that space, but they couldn't make up for what the United States provides to the Ukrainians.

Now, Trump comes in and says, I don't want to keep providing this, you know, support for the Ukrainians.

I would like to make a deal to end the war.

First of all, Americans should understand the money we spend on Ukraine, most of it is spent in the United States.

We basically are paying American defense contractors to produce more stuff that we then ship to the Ukrainians.

So you may not like the military-industrial complex.

I'm not a huge fan of it, but it is kind of a misnomer that we're like writing a check to the Ukrainians.

We're writing a check to American defense contractors who employ Americans to produce stuff to send over there.

But put that aside.

What the Trump administration has done in the negotiation is said, all of the

best outcomes of any, you know, if you're someone like me or, you know, looks at how could this war end, Trump is basically saying like, all the outcomes that Russia wants.

We are going to,

picture a negotiation between two sides and you enter that negotiation and say, I'm just entirely taking this person's side and demanding that the other person take it.

Because what they're saying is Russia gets to keep all the territory that they're in, basically 20% of Ukraine, that Ukraine does not get to be in NATO or get any kind of security guarantee, which means that

after this quote-unquote peace settlement, they are incredibly vulnerable because they've just lost a fifth of their country and they have no alliance structure.

So if the Russians decide they want to take another 20% of the country in two years, they can just probably do that militarily.

And we're going to cut the Ukrainians off, and we're going to lift sanctions on the Russians so that they can start growing their economy.

So, basically, if you're Putin, you're getting every single thing you want without having to win it on the battlefield.

You're getting it gifted to you by Trump in the negotiation.

And that's both dangerous for obviously the Ukrainians, but it also kind of unravels the basic premise that the United States is a backstop for Europe's security.

So everyone in Europe is going to be left to wonder, well, what happens if the Russians invade the Baltic countries, the three countries that are north of Ukraine?

What if they, you know, push into, you know, Poland?

And look, I don't think that's likely, but it's not impossible.

I mean, the reason you asked we started this whole conversation of why did the U.S.

do this in the first place, it's because after World War II, it's like, you know what we've learned?

Every now and then, like a really shitty dictator comes along, and we just can't trust that we can put together an ad hoc team to beat that dictator.

So we need like things like NATO to stop that from happening.

And so what I worry about is maybe Putin is that guy.

Or you know what?

If it's not Putin though, it could be another Russian leader in five years, you know, or it could be somebody else.

But the point is that without that kind of U.S.

backstop for security, I mean, what I'd say, Stacey, is if you look at the places that do have U.S.

security guarantees in the world, that's most of Europe, that's Japan, that's South Korea.

Look at how well those countries have done.

Look at how good that's been for us economically, politically, diplomatically.

Why would you remove that security guarantee?

So let's talk about that.

Why should we still do it?

I mean, if you're talking to some neocons, they would say, look,

we took care of them in World War I.

We came back in World War II.

We've been there for 80 years.

We're tired of it.

You know, Europe should take care of itself.

They're an ocean away.

Why should the United States care about what happens in Europe?

Why should we care if Russia decides that it likes Finland again?

I think that there's an extreme risk issue, and then there's a, you know, a more

pragmatic risk issue.

The extreme risk issue is, again, like we fought World War I and then we were tired from having done that.

We didn't join the League of Nations that they created after World I, which is kind of a precursor to the United Nations.

And basically, our absence made it easier.

for Hitler to rise because he was just dealing with the British and the French and not us.

Whatever you you want to say about the international system after World War II, it stopped World War III from happening.

There was, you know, there were a bunch of terrible things that happened.

Can you say that again?

Yeah, yeah, no, but this is, I mean, Obama used to always say this to me, like, that is not a small win.

This is like, especially when you have nuclear weapons involved, right?

And so the point is that if there's suddenly not like a security anchor, if there's suddenly not these institutions, you're just betting.

that a Putin or G or Trump for that matter is not going to be the person that

knocks over the domino that leads us right back into a world war with nuclear weapons.

Aaron Powell, speaking of which, the lines of control between India and Pakistan, there are skirmishes happening that most Americans aren't paying attention to.

Can you talk about why it is dangerous that we are in a moment where the United States is diminishing in its sort of world cop role at a time when we are seeing these skirmishes happen between India and Pakistan?

Yeah, I mean, if you take this one conflict in in Kashmir, which is this disputed territory, right?

So you have the partition of India after World War II, the independence of India and Pakistan, very bloody,

very contested, and Kashmir was the one piece of territory that was unresolved.

Both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir.

As India has gotten stronger, and under Naren Ramodi, who's kind of their version of Trump, kind of this nationalist, ethno-nationalist right-wing leader, they've tried to, and they have, asserted more and more control over Kashmir, to try to kind of directly govern it.

Recently, you had a terrorist attack inside of Kashmir that killed dozens of people.

And the Indians obviously blame Pakistan for this.

These two countries have fought multiple wars over Kashmir.

Most of those wars they fought before they had nuclear weapons.

Now, both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.

I believe in a more normal international environment, you know, this would be a topic of flurry of diplomacy diplomacy and there'd be meetings at the UN.

That kind of doesn't exist anymore because Trump, Putin, G, the main powers, like don't really care about international peace and security.

And so what you, the, the, the scenario you'd be worried about is India feels like they need to respond to this.

That could probably be airstrikes into Pakistan itself in the coming days.

And then you're just kind of betting or hoping that it doesn't escalate.

Because if it escalates and there's like, and again, I don't think this is likely, but it's, not impossible.

If there's a nuclear weapon used in that conflict, that

I mean, and apart from the absolute human calamity of that,

that destroys the global economy.

Nuclear weapons use, it's a risk to people way beyond where it could be used.

India is an important market.

Like, it would be an incredibly disruptive event.

But what worries me, Stacey, is that if you look at the world today right now,

you've got that nuclear arms stalemate in Kashmir.

You've got China's designs on Taiwan.

You've got this ongoing war in Ukraine.

And you've got this Israeli kind of state of war against multiple countries in the Middle East, including Iran, which is trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

That's four flashpoints I'm looking at that

could very well get worse.

And there's not a system in place in the same way that there had been.

Again, not that the system was perfect, but the system was meant to prevent the worst outcomes from happening.

And I just, I feel like we're, to use an economic term, we're just carrying way too much risk.

We're just kind of counting on the fact that people will only escalate so far.

And if you look at the nature of the men, and they're all men who are running these countries, you know, Putin, Xi, Trump, Modi, Netanyahu, doesn't give you a lot of confidence that these are people that might not do the wrong thing, you know.

Okay, so we've done economic, we've done military.

Let's talk about diplomacy and foreign aid.

So we watched in the first 100 days the absolute decimation of USAID.

We saw the hostile takeover of the United States Institute of Peace.

We have seen repeated attacks on the National Endowment for Democracy and the two subcomponents thereof.

And in disclosure, I sit on the board of one of them.

We have watched national disasters hit around the world, global disasters hit, and the United States has not been prepared to respond.

There is the economic, there is the military, but part of diplomacy is people knowing they can trust you to help when they're in need so that

they look to you when there is no need and they start to trust you in other conversations.

What does it mean that the United States is no longer seen as just a good,

we're not good people in the global order anymore?

I think it's severed like the, you know, one of the things I always noticed in government, Stacey, is that like people around the world

tended to like the United States more than they liked the United States foreign policy at a given moment, you know.

And some of that was cultural, but some of that was, you know, you have things like USAID that are providing food or vaccines or health support or response to natural disaster.

Like if something, there's a crisis around the world, America is going to be part of not providing all the resources, but providing the critical resources.

Like our inputs, our 30% is what allows everybody else to come in on top, right?

And just pulling the plug on that in the way that we did with no warning, no glide path, no nothing.

First of all, it's already killed far more people than

Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine has killed civilians.

But also, like, if you were an African, if you're the Kenyan health ministry or you're a person who receives that treatment in South Africa, and all of a sudden you're,

this is just turned off.

You're never going to trust America again.

Like, you're, how you think about this country has changed.

It's not just like, oh, there's a president there I don't like.

It's like, wow, those people, those are some bad people.

We created dependencies in part because it advantaged us.

You know, like, I mean, it allowed us to have massive leverage over countries if we were responsible for their entire health system, right?

You know,

it gave us an entry point that we now no longer have.

The example I give is on something like Ebola, where Americans were understandably afraid in 2014, the Obama years, and there's an outbreak of Ebola in West Africa.

Certain cases start to show up in the United States.

Well, what do we do?

Through USAID, we set up essentially a public health system in West Africa.

We didn't fund all of it.

Like, other countries came in on top of that, France and the UK, but also China and others, sent doctors, sent money, and we stopped the Ebola outbreak through USAID in West Africa.

I think Americans should care about the fact that we're causing humanitarian crises around the world by killing USCID, but it's not also not unlike the conversation we're just having about war.

Stuff is going to happen around the world.

It's going to happen.

There's going to be an outbreak of conflict.

There's going to be a tsunami.

And removing USAID is going to make it impossible for the United States to deal effectively with whatever is going to happen.

And I worry that this is part of what is going on with Trump is that we are dismantling all of our tools.

And then when something happens and people are like, oh, grab the toolbox, it's not going to exist anymore.

What's the end game?

Like if you're, and I hate to do this to you, but if you go inside,

you know, I wouldn't say Trump said, because I think we give way too much.

We kind of sandwashed Trump, yeah.

Well, and we also assume that he is the architect of these ideas.

And if you read not just Project 2025, but if you've read a lot of the fever dreams of foreign policy over the last decade, there is this tendency to believe that if the United States just cared for itself, we don't have to worry about the rest of the world.

But you also have

these

thinkers and policymakers and now secretaries who seem to have forgotten everything they knew.

What is their end game?

If you are in the Trump administration, if you are a Republican in 2025,

when you watch this dismantling of American power, what's your point?

That's the question.

And I think it kind of depends on there are these different buckets of MAGA, right?

In terms of, I don't mean people wearing red hats.

I mean the ideas people, right?

So the tech people are particularly scary to me.

And J.D.

Vance, I think, is illustrative of them.

Because I think that they're not dumb.

And they know full well that they're creating a world of kind of chaos.

Well, guess who's going to win in that world?

They are.

They are going to become exponentially more powerful than they already were.

And not to paint a dystopian picture, but some of these people are into crypto, for instance, right?

Crypto is premised on the idea that international financial stability is going to collapse and there's going to have to be some alternative form of currency, you know?

And that's a pretty big bet.

I'm not sure I'd make that bet because actually I think crypto kind of benefits from having some order.

But the point is that these people will be rich enough and will own enough and will be able to move their resources around enough that they will thrive in chaos.

They may want

the world to be a mess because if you control massive technology platforms, have massive resources, can diversify into different currencies and crypto assets, you're going to be that much more powerful as everybody else gets that much weaker.

You're kind of eviscerating your competition, whether your competition is literally a government or like a traditional corporation.

Then you have these kind of heritage people that you know better than me who've had this like, you know, post-60s like obsession with basically just dismantling the U.S.

government and because they genuinely, I guess, believe that government is a force of liberal social engineering.

And I want it off my back and I want everything in the hands of closer to ground, you know, old Confederacy kind of states rights arguments.

And but what's scary to me is how their interests overlap with the tech nihilists, you know, because it's like they both don't like government, but for kind of different reasons.

So I think you kind of have this convergence between like extreme anti-government Heritage Foundation right-wing Project 2025 people and extreme chaos agent oligarchs like Elon Musk.

And Trump has just been this kind of vessel

for an ideology that is just chopping the world order to bits and chopping the U.S.

government to bits.

And it's an experiment.

One of the things I've been trying to get across is we've never seen an experiment on this scale.

You know, this isn't just like Reagan coming in and cutting some taxes and deregulating.

Look at, by the way, what that did.

We're still living with the outcome of that.

This is a whole other order.

And so if we don't arrest it soon,

you know,

we're going to be living with it for the rest of our lives.

So you just published this fantastic op-ed that I encourage everyone to go and read.

And then you talk about what comes next.

How do we emerge into the next iteration of the U.S.?

And I still want people to go read the op-ed, but tell us what you think.

Well, I think, first of all, we have to kind of remember that for all the conversation we've been having, a country is bigger than its government at any given time.

America's relationship with the world is bigger than what its government is doing at any given time.

And there are things that American institutions and Americans can be doing right now

to maintain connectivity.

You know, obviously that starts with like institutions not capitulating, like law firms and universities.

But, you know, going that extra mile, no, foreign students are welcome in these communities.

Like, we want to maintain our connections with our international business clients, customers.

We want to go that extra mile to make tourists feel welcome or recently arrived refugees feel welcome.

If we are states and municipalities, we want to stay a part of the global effort on climate change.

There's a lot that can be done to just kind of maintain that connectivity.

But then I also think what we need is a broader kind of reimagining.

Through the Trump era the last decade, there's been a kind of binary where it's like Trump was a disruptive force trying to tear down the establishment and Democrats were like about actually restoration.

Like we want to save these institutions.

We want to restore them.

Joe Biden's kind of slogan internationally in his campaign was like, I want to say America's back.

Like we have to let that go because that's not coming back.

just practically, but also like the rest of the world is not going to accept that.

We can't just be like, hey, we're back.

And, you know,

assume we get an election in three years and Trump loses and or Vance loses, whoever it is.

Nobody's going to want an American president to be like, we're back and everything's going to be the same.

So we need to spend this time both fighting back against Trump, but kind of imagining what is a more normal way for the United States to be a country in the world.

You know, we are on a glide path out of these institutions, but what can better take its place?

I would argue, from a policy side, that's basically a negotiation like we had after World War II.

Let's sit down with the Chinese and say, you know what?

We got to negotiate.

take an issue like artificial intelligence, which has the potential to transform life on this planet, to dismantle the remaining jobs that we have, huge security risks.

Like, instead of fighting with them about who's going to get it first, we're all going to get it.

You know, why aren't we negotiating how that moves out into the world?

Just like we should be negotiating on how we're going to deal with clean energy instead of creating different economies that are the worst way to deal with climate change.

So, I would argue that America should be thinking about how do we negotiate our way back in to a more durable set of arrangements with the rest of the world.

And there's some excitement in that.

Like to take USAID, like it's horrifying that this happened and should not have happened.

Okay,

what is

the next Democratic president?

What is the international development agency that they build that could be better than USAID?

Like that's an exciting thing to think about, even if you wish that we weren't here.

And then the last piece is what you do here, which is I don't think any of this is possible without like a degree of mobilization in this country

in which people feel some sense of civic identity.

I mean, mean, part of what Trump is taking advantage of is we don't have a shared identity.

How do you build it?

What's that identity for the 21st century?

I mean, we spent,

we've nicknamed at least two of our generations based on, or three, based on our interaction with the international world order.

We had our silent generation, our baby boomers, Gen X.

They just kind of gave up when they got to us.

Yeah, me too, me too.

They started just throwing letters at us.

Exactly.

So what is that next identity?

Is it an identity where we say we're one of you?

Is it an identity where we still try to assert some leadership because we hopefully still have a currency that people use?

Like where, ideally, where do you see that emergent identity beginning to be shaped?

Look, I think that we will matter a lot because we will still have the most powerful military.

We will still have the biggest economy.

What we will not have is all that trust and credibility.

I think we can find that trust and credibility in a different way.

Number one,

we should have an advantage because we have everybody here.

Like, we are actually like the world in miniature.

Like, there's not another country that has the, I mean, and here I lean into diversity as a strength.

You mean diversity, equity, and inclusion are positive foundational benefits that should be leveraged in order to build the American narrative in the 21st century?

Yes.

It is a massive

comparative advantage that we have everybody here.

You know, like from there's not a country on earth that does not have a diaspora population here.

If we can figure this out, then the world can figure it out.

And the world knows that.

They know that about us.

And they also, by the way, know that when we cared about immigration,

like their cousin was successful in America.

Like they created all these intangible ties.

So one thing is, is yes, embracing...

full diversity as a strength but and and total diversity too.

I mean more foreign students like like like a legal immigration system that

should be a huge advantage for us.

That's one thing.

I think another thing, though, that's really important is I think the next,

what is ripe is people everywhere are, as someone who travels a lot around the world, at a government level and an individual level, are terrified about what technology is doing.

They don't like what social media has done to their politics.

They don't like what AI might do to their economies.

They don't like that we're kind of all being reprogrammed.

And actually, a lot of these technologies emanate from the United States.

There is some very interesting grassroots stuff happening in this country already around, hey, I don't want phones in school, or we have to think about like the public health aspects of this more methodically.

America, because if we're willing to be tough with our own tech companies, which I think the Democratic Party should be willing to do after what's just happened, like it is time to lead.

Because so many of these issues, whether it's AI or climate change, are very tech dependent.

If America can lead a global conversation about a safer, saner, more shared way of managing both the opportunities that tech presents on things like climate change, but also the risks, we can get, instead of like fighting the old arguments about like, you know, we can jump ahead to the next one.

You know, what if we flip the script and suddenly we are the ones that are trying to help define how we're going to make this safe for our kids, for our economies, for our security?

So I think tech, weirdly, if we're not, because, you know, and I fault the Obama, you know, we were the ones that we deferred too much to Silicon Valley, you know, because we saw these as good net positives.

Well, they turned out not to be.

I think the tech industry has given

Democrats plenty of reason to be like, you know what, we shouldn't just defer to Mark Zuckerberg when it comes to the health of our kids.

Ben Rhodes, I'm going to ask you one last question.

So everyone needs to be listening to Pod Save the World.

Who else are you listening to, reading, thinking about when you're trying to figure out how to navigate?

Who else should we be listening to, reading or watching?

Oh, that's a really good question.

So the example I give is I don't just follow the Times.

I read The Guardian every day, right?

Like, because The Guardian is going to give you this kind of, yes, it's British, but it's kind of,

you know, a bit of an outside in look, right, at what's happening here.

But then I also will like, if there's an issue that comes up, like I want to read, and I'll acknowledge generally like-minded, but the media from that region.

So if I want to see what's happening in Israel and Gaza, like I want to read Haretz, the Israeli Luffing publication, and I want to look at Al Jazeera and see what the Arab world is seeing in terms of what's happening in Gaza.

I think it's also a very rich time for documentary film.

And so if there's a topic that I want to go deeper on, like

one service or another is going to have like a pretty interesting documentary.

So the point is that I kind of shop around for my information and try to get out of what can be the trap for people like us, which is like Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, you know,

those are great.

And I read those in the New Yorker and whatever.

But I try to bring in international media to that picture.

Ben Rhodes, host of Pod Save the World.

Thank you so much for being here on Assembly Required.

Thanks, Stacey.

Thank you.

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Well, I am always delighted to welcome our producer, Alona.

Welcome.

Thank you so much.

I'm thrilled to have you in studio rather than over Zoom.

It's nice to be here.

So we have a listener question that is a voicemail.

And this one is from Aaron.

And let's take a listen really quick.

Can't wait to hear what you have to say about this.

Awesome.

Hi, Stacey.

My name is Aaron.

And I'm really struggling with the

lack of movement and activity by the Democrats.

And I'm wondering why are no Democrats coming out with a project 2026 or 2028 or 2029 going,

how they are going to methodically and systematically reverse the damage that has been done by the Trump administration.

How do we know or how can we

policy-wise

create a map to undo all of these things that the MAGA groups have spent so much time and effort putting together?

How do we unwind that?

Where is our project 2026?

Where is our project 2028?

Where is our project 2029?

I would follow somebody with a good plan to the ends of the earth.

I just don't feel like anybody's really structured and focused and pointing their responses to what it is that has actually happened to us in the last hundred days.

Thank you so much for your time and thank you for everything that you do.

You're an incredible inspiration and a hero of mine.

Aaron, thank you so much.

So I'm going to take that in parts.

I think the first and most important thing for us to recognize is that it's been 100 days.

And so to the extent that we are ready to respond, we haven't seen all of what's to come.

And I don't say that to scare us, but I do say it to prepare us that as bad as it's been, there's more in store.

And we're going to spend time through this show walking through phase two and phase three and phase four of Project 2025.

So I think what we need to do for ourselves is just level set and prepare for what's to come.

The second is to say that people are doing this.

Right now, you have organizations that are quietly collecting data.

They are mapping what is happening.

They are trying to preserve what is being erased.

And they're not saying a lot out loud because it would put a target on them.

And I think, Alona, you and I have talked about this a little bit.

When you are trying to build something new, you got to make sure that you have the freedom to build.

And so a big piece of what we need to hold to is that there are good groups out there doing important work.

I try to name them as we go through these shows so that people understand that folks are working.

But we're not going to see this sort of coalescing just yet because for a lot of those groups, they will be the targets of what's going to come next.

I mean, I personally am facing some challenges right now because of how vocal I've been.

And I'm in a pretty good position to say things.

Imagine if you are one of those groups that's trying to map the erasure of history, that's trying to restructure how we delivered foreign aid, as we talked about with Ben, the groups that are trying to understand what this carnage not only has meant, but will mean.

And that brings us to the third part.

We are all

responsible for what comes next.

And Aaron, what I love so much about your question is that you're thinking about it.

I'm in this posture right now where I think we have to stop thinking about who are our leaders and we need to start looking for what is leadership?

What does leadership look like?

What does it look like at the local level, at the state level, at the federal level, at the international level?

Leaders will emerge.

We will start to see more people who take on the mantle.

But where we are starved right now is that individuals, organizations, people have to show leadership.

We've got to take our small small domain and do what we can with it.

And so I'm proud of you for listening and thinking about this.

And I would urge you to start mapping what are the questions that you think need to be answered.

Not to say that you have to have the answers, but the way the Heritage Foundation came into being, the architects of Project 2025, they took information from lots of different organizations, lots of different people.

It wasn't this monolithic construction.

They went to small organizations that had one tiny idea that could could dismantle America and said, tell us about your idea.

And they went to larger organizations.

We've got to do the same if we want to build the next America and rebuild what we have, but also build the things we need.

Our responsibility in this moment is to understand where we are, but we also need a vision for tomorrow.

What does tomorrow look like?

Because I don't think it is doing what we had done before, because a lot of that wasn't good enough.

And it was why they were able to winnow in and convince 90 million people that it wasn't worth speaking up.

So I would argue that we should be using this time not just to build project 2028, 29, but what's project 2040?

What do we want next?

And I want us to decide.

I don't want it to come from the top down.

I want us from the bottom up to start saying and dreaming and imagining and then sharing that information.

Because if we want to build what's next, if we don't want the wrong people to build it, then we need to be the ones to do it ourselves.

Yeah.

Those are such good points.

And I feel like, you know, ultimately what's at the crux there is that it's short-term versus long-term thinking.

I know just, you know, as myself, as like a person in the world, I think we all tend to get impatient, tend to get frustrated, say, why don't the Democrats have a response?

Why aren't we doing XYZ?

But all of that.

organizing, planning takes a lot of time, right?

And it's something that we actually, just to bring it back, since we're doing a foreign policy-themed episode that we talk about a lot on Pod Save the World, which is that if you look at China, if you look at Russia, like these are countries that have very long-term plans and long-term goals in terms of their foreign policy.

And so they don't care what Donald Trump is doing to wreak havoc for the next four years or for however long, because they know where they're going down the line.

And I think that like we need to be thinking about that a lot more.

Can I just ask a follow-up question to what Aaron was saying, which is that, you know, have, has, has the right just been better at doing that than

the left?

Like have conservatives been more effective at doing that type of long-term thinking and planning?

I would say that they've been more

able to coalesce around singular ideas.

There's a homogeneity to how they approach government.

I mean, let's think back to Reagan's emergence in the 1970s.

Ronald Reagan articulated a vision that was very different than Gerald Ford.

If people remember, and there's a great podcast called Landslide that really maps this, they were as fractured then as Democrats are now.

But what happened was that they decided to, this coalition of hyper-conservatives decided that they were going to take the next, however long it would take, to manifest their dreams.

And so they didn't have agreement across the board.

What they had was determination that their vision of the world would take hold.

And that's what we saw happen election after election, year after year at every level of government.

It's why I talk so aggressively about state and local government because they didn't start just by trying to go after the White House.

They went after school boards.

They went after county commissions.

And so what they did better than us is that they recognized that their outlier ideas could become central ideas if they were intentional, assiduous, and committed to making it so.

We've got to do the same thing, but we've got to do something slightly different because we are inherently diverse.

We respect equity.

We want inclusion.

And that's harder because you're trying to bring a lot of folks with very divergent ideas together.

And so I think our opportunity is not to say that they're better at it than we are.

I think they're more dedicated to holding to it.

They try to win hearts and we try to win elections.

Our responsibility is to win the hearts of the people so that the elections follow.

Politics follow.

They should not lead.

And we have so many groups and so many people who believe that too.

We have to give them better platforms.

We have to give them more attention.

We have to give them more resources.

It is not that the other side is better at it.

It's just that they've been more successful at it because they didn't give up when they lost an election.

We abandon our people, we abandon our premises, we abandon our principles too often when an election doesn't go our way instead of saying, how do we push the beliefs that we have as opposed to trying to win the election that we want?

Yeah, we get scared.

We do.

So we got to think big, start small.

And just on that note, too, I want to say that we've been reading a lot of the comments on YouTube, the emails that people send in regarding some of our latest episodes or

we had the small business owner and we had the farmer on.

We had Zane on last week, who is the co-editor-in-chief of a student newspaper at a university.

And people are really loving that.

And I just feel like that's what is so great about this show is that you can have both these really expert, big,

big picture thinkers on to give us that 10,000-foot view.

And then we hear from real Americans.

And that's what politics is all about too, right?

Is mixing those two and figuring out what do people need and who are the people who have been studying this, who have been looking at this effectively for a really long time.

So, we'll keep having more of that and keep working on it.

But, you know, to your first point, a lot of people are scared to speak out.

And so, it's a tough one right now.

Well, I'll tell you this: Assembly Required is a safe space.

And if you have something you want to tell us, let us know.

All right, thanks, Stacey.

Thank you.

First, I'm glad that so many of you took part in our Assembly Required recommended reading of On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder.

For our next read, we're going to dive into the dictator's learning curve by William J.

Dobson.

Especially in light of today's conversation with Ben Rhodes, the dictator's learning curve offers some important insights about recent authoritarians, but it also spotlights citizen actions against the rise of tyranny, and it gives us some really critical lessons on how to meet the moment.

And I think you'll enjoy it.

As always, on Assembly Required, we like to give our listeners actionable tools for facing the challenges of today.

So here's this week's toolkit in which we will encourage you to be curious, solve problems, and do good.

First, be curious.

To learn more about what's happening in the world every week and get some guidance on how to interpret it, listen to Ben and Tommy's analysis on Pod Save the World.

Number two, we want to solve problems.

Like Ben said, we can't give in.

We have to imagine more.

Our current government doesn't have to define us as a country.

And so do what you can where you are.

Volunteer to help refugees.

Make certain that you are encouraging foreign students who are coming to your community to stay.

Show them that we care and be a part of solving the problem of reversing our departure from the world stage.

And finally, do good.

The demise of USAID means that a number of nonprofit and non-governmental organizations have had to step into the gap and try to save lives.

So I encourage you to visit care.org, which delivers vital health care, nutritious food, clean water, and protection from violence against women and girls around the world.

So go to care.org and make sure you contribute.

Thanks to our producer Alona for that opportunity to talk to our supporters and our listeners.

And I am incredibly grateful for the support and the engagement from all of you.

But I'd like to reach even more people because we're doing some good stuff here.

We've got amazing guests and we know that there are others who are looking to better understand where we are and people who want to pitch in as we fight for a fairer America and for a world that we can dare to imagine.

You can help by sharing an episode that you've liked with someone who may not know what they're missing.

And please remember to subscribe to Assembly Required on all of the places that carry our show, including Apple, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast.

Like

and subscribe.

Even more, if you like what you hear, rate the show and leave a comment.

And of course, please continue to tell us what you've learned and solved or want to hear more about.

You can send an email to assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod like we did today.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

Remember, we can fix what they are breaking, but there will be some assembly required.

So I'll meet you here next week so we can get to work.

Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Alona Minkowski, and our associate producer is Paulina Velasco.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Vatopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, and Samantha Slossberg for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long, Madeline Herringer, and me, Stacey Abrams.

Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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