Trumpocracy

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President Trump has been an X factor in the office of the Commander-in-Chief.

It's impossible to know what he's going to do next and what or whom he's most committed to.

But the chaos of the administration has revealed much about America, its institutions, and its place in the world.

How is America responding to Trump?

And how is that response shaping our democracy?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic, here with my co-host and editor-in-chief, the esteemed Jeffrey Goldberg.

Hello, Jeff.

Hi, Matt.

We are joined here in DC by two of our colleagues.

First, the Atlantic's global editor, Kathy Gilson.

And hello, Kathy.

Hey, Matt.

And once again, we welcome our colleague, David From.

Hi, David.

Hey.

David, the last time you were here with us on Radio Atlantic, I believe you were tucked away in Belleville, Ontario, surrounded by the legacy, if I remember correctly, of British loyalists to the Crown

who fled America after the Revolution.

And you were at that time working on a book.

Right.

And now that book is out.

And it is a characteristically perceptive and thought-provoking read.

And so congratulations.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Characteristically, are you sure?

Characteristically,

we'll go down that rabbit hole there.

All right.

It is called Trumpocracy, the Corruption of the American Republic.

And I would venture so far as to say that this book is partially about our president, Donald Trump, but almost more about what this presidency reveals about American democracy at this moment, about us.

And now that we're more than a year into the Trumpocracy, I'm curious, from your vantage point, how close or how far are we from how you feared that this would play out?

Aaron Powell, this particular month, I think we have realized exactly something that I have been worrying about from the beginning and that I talked about, indeed, 18 months ago in the very first big article I wrote for The Atlantic about the coming Trump administration, which is the nature of the pressure that the President brings on the press.

When I was writing about this at the beginning, I said, look, the First Amendment is there.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, none of us are going away.

The kinds of pressures that the President is going to bring are through social media and through economic pressures on the holding companies that own the media.

What the president has been doing to Amazon, which does not own the Washington Post, in order to punish its founder, Jeff Bezos, who does, is a perfect example of this.

The president's unrelenting threats

against Amazon have taken tens of billions of dollars off its shareholder value.

Some companies might crumble under that kind of pressure.

So far, Amazon and Jeff Bezos have not.

Would Comcast have been so robust?

Would Time Warner be so robust?

Because their term may come.

On the whole, are we, if you imagine

a poll,

the midpoint is

the status quo before the Trump administration.

Below it is worse than we were before the Trump administration and above it is better than we were.

Where do we stand now?

Aaron Powell,

there are a lot of things that people can be reassured about, and a lot of things that people can take pride in.

They can be reassured.

The courts have been as independent as they always are in American history.

The prestige media institutions have stood up well.

And many individual Americans have shown themselves more committed, more active in the political process than was the case in the half-dozen years before 2016.

Other institutions have behaved worse than you could imagine, and above all, Congress.

The way the system is supposed to work, it's ultimately not the courts and ultimately not the media.

Not ultimately, but it is not, it is imminently not the courts and not the media that check the president, it is Congress.

And

the big theme of the Trump years has been the extent to which Donald Trump has subsumed a Republican Party that was once so skeptical of him.

It now truly is his party.

I note that there's a primary race going on in Indiana for the Republican Senate nomination.

And the two candidates, one of whom had a past of being more Trump skeptical, are vying, each putting up one commercial after another, more obediently.

Trump proclaiming himself an absolute true believing Trump follower.

And that has been the mood throughout Congress.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: On that question of institutions,

I want to ask you a little bit about how you think the United States national security institutions have stood up to the Trump challenge, and in particular the military,

but also people on the National Security Council and the FBI and various intelligence agencies.

You've written interestingly about some of the ways in which national security institutions have acted as a check on the president in terms of investigating possible malfeasance.

But also, you know, the flip side of that,

we have a pattern now of leaks of things that you would never have seen leaked before from the National Security Council leaking the transcripts of President Trump's conversations with foreign leaders.

You could argue that Americans should know how Donald Trump is behaving on telephone calls with the Prime Minister of Australia, but you could also argue that these checks themselves might be worse than the disease.

So what do you think happens?

Well, we're recording this as it happens at the end of 36 hours in which we've had this amazing game on what the American role is in Syria.

Exactly.

Where the president has said, troops are leaving Syria, and the military says, no, they're not.

And the president says, yes, they are.

And the military again says, no, they're not.

And at the hour we're recording this, we're at the most recent round of the military saying, no, they're not.

And who knows after we finish or while we're talking what the president is saying.

It's all a cleverly designed plan to keep ISIS confused.

Don't you understand, David?

You don't understand how clever these guys are.

Aaron Powell,

don't you think there's also something where we're testing out a new theory of the Constitution where the President is no longer the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces?

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But ultimately, I mean,

that's not true, because ultimately, if he actually orders the head of CENTCOM to pull troops out of Syria tomorrow, the head of CENTCOM will pull those troops out of Syria tomorrow because that's what they're trained to do.

Aaron Powell, when you say ultimately, if he tweets, take the troops out of Syria, the military has demonstrated with the transgender

ban that it has a way of saying, obviously, if the president gives us an order.

But there are a lot of things that the president says.

All I'm saying is that I'm not worried about the military not listening to the commander-in-chief when the commander-in-chief is an actual order.

Here's what I am worried about.

I'm worried about a category of things that I've called autoimmune disorders, where in order to push back against an administration that is seen, or a presidency that is seen as in many ways dangerous and illegitimate, people in the government do things that they would never have done before that do stop the president and do stop negative things from happening, but that also have an ongoing consequence for the way American foreign policy is going to work.

Let me just invite you to consider this thing.

How informative do you think right now the president's daily brief is compared to those of his predecessors?

How much information gets left out?

The CIA knows that the President doesn't read it.

They also know that he shares it with more people than any President in memory has shared his brief with, including his son-in-law, who doesn't have a permanent security clearance.

I assume that if the President asks the CIA a direct question,

they will tell him.

But of course, asking a question often presupposes knowledge that you have to have and that without which you can't ask the question.

And another thing to consider is how informative is the flow of information from all of those agencies to the House Intelligence Committee?

Agencies have often been resentful of congressional oversight.

There has been a general consensus within the media world, well, we're on the side of these congressional oversight bodies.

You can't just have intelligence agencies not reporting to Congress.

But the recent behavior of the intelligence committees, and especially the House Committee, makes a pretty strong case that the agency should be very careful what they tell them, and yet then they will be very careful what they tell them.

Aaron Powell, there's a way in which the Trump administration has started to reveal reveal the glimmers of what happens when the executive actually goes away.

Even in the domain where the president typically exerts the most power, the Trump administration has, in arena after arena, seemed to diminish its own power, whether that is by ceding regulatory authority that had been hard-won or sought after in the Obama administration, or by leaving vacant or open diplomatic postings within the State Department.

I'm curious, Kathy, do you see that happening within American government?

Is that a fair way of couching the presence or absence of President Trump as an active executive, as a commander-in-chief?

And if so,

what do you see as the effects of that on our democracy?

Well, I think there are lots of different ways to approach the question.

And I suppose in the realm that I mostly focus on, which is the foreign policy realm, I think the main point is that America is such an important actor actor in the international sphere that even, you know, and as many of Obama's critics argue happen in Syria, that America's choice to be absent does itself shape events on the ground, right?

So no matter what,

through its exertion of force or through its choice not to exert force, it shapes events.

It's not so much that the American executive is absent.

The executive branch is doing a lot of things around the world.

And we can get back to this conversation about the military and this past 36 hours about what exactly the United States' role is in Syria.

Right before President Trump said publicly that he wanted to withdraw from Syria as soon as possible, the military was still deploying troops to the theater.

So the machine is still running in various ways.

And I think one of the effects

of

Trump's disinterest in directing world affairs is that there's sincere confusion about what America is going to do and what America is going to stand for, both domestically and internationally.

We're trying to parse out internally a question as simple and basic and important as whether or not the United States is going to be at war in another country and for how long.

And the fact that we can't figure this out, I think, is very disturbing, both at a domestic level and at an international level.

David, what happens when we actually have a new war?

All the things we're talking about are things that Donald Trump inherited, chronic conditions, if you will.

What happens if we have a new one?

Let's hope to goodness that we don't.

I mean, if right now all of the aircraft carriers were out of order, you would think, well, let's think very hard about going to war because we're not ready for it.

You need to find a way to postpone that.

If there had recently been some kind of mutiny in the armed forces and we weren't confident in the loyalty of the troops, you would say, hold on, let's have a modest foreign policy for a bit.

If you have a broken president, you have to think very hard.

And although my instincts are normally very hawkish in a lot of areas where I would normally advocate a hawkish policy, right now I would say the United States should not act because it cannot act effectively.

Aaron Powell, where specifically?

And what are the consequences of your

realization that you can't be as hawkish as you would like on behalf of the United States?

I think, for example, on Iran, I would want to see just steady status quo, whatever we were doing before, let's just keep doing that.

Don't make any changes because we can can't.

And the situation in the Korean Peninsula is, I mean, where Trump has been super active because he's simultaneously damaging the U.S.-South Korea relationship while pursuing a very rhetorically adventurous policy against the North.

And

while also constantly telling the South Koreans that the people who can give you security are the Chinese.

If you want not to have a nuclear-armed neighbor, the people who can deliver that for you are the Chinese.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: With whom he's now having a trade war.

With whom he's having a trade war.

And

if you're just a cold-blooded, unemotional South Korean, you have to say, look, I don't love China both for ideological reasons, they're not a democracy, for nationalist reasons.

They've tried to exert control over the Korean Peninsula for a long time.

But looking out for my people's interest, I need to do business with this, with them.

I think the answer to the question you posed Richard Matt about making sense of this is this presidency has been strong, effective, and vigorous at doing the things the president should not do, like dismantling 100 years of ethical norms to the point where the president is operating a large-scale international business from the White House.

Meanwhile, they are disengaged from the areas where the president should be active.

And the most alarming of those, to my way of thinking, is not in the international sphere.

It's here at home.

We're in the throes of the worst drug epidemic since maybe the heroin epidemic of the 70s.

Maybe, you could argue, the worst in terms of absolute numbers of deaths ever.

There's no head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The drugs are job.

That's the office in the executive branch that coordinates all the many agencies that have many different approaches to drug abuse.

The drug abuse question is taken up by the Drug Enforcement Agency, which deals with interdicting flows of illegal drugs from abroad, from the FDA, which regulates manufacture of drugs at home, the Justice Department, which prosecutes, HHS, which has the mandate for rehab and also for funding the disability pensions of people who do have addictions.

And the balance of what is punitive punitive and what is rehabilitative and how do we work with other countries, all of those things, we have half a dozen agencies, each pursuing its own policy.

They have not gone away.

The brain at the center that brings some unity to all this, that

does not exist.

And that means that the whole bureaucracy is chugging along doing 87 different things at total cross purposes.

Well, tens of thousands of Americans are dying and suffering from addiction.

Can I ask you both David and Jeff, not necessarily in that order,

what you make of recent staff turnover, and in particular the appointments of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, respectively, because it seems as if these are people who have been described as effective in a lot of ways.

If the Trump administration becomes more effective at implementing whatever its foreign policy vision is, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

And what does that mean?

Are we moving away from what Ben Wittis called malevolence tinged with incompetence?

I think there are five questions in your question.

I'll just answer very quickly.

It does seem suboptimal

these changes because these are men who, in particular, Pompeo and Bolton, who share some of the more glandular proclivities.

of the president rather than uh

they might not serve as uh much of a check or a devil's advocate in these conversations.

They are competent.

I also assume that the reality of being in office, as opposed to sitting in a think tank and writing bellicose op-eds, or sitting in Congress and not having executive authority,

will restrain them somewhat.

Maybe David is more worried about it than I am.

Aaron Ross Powell,

I think the context for all of these actions, and it's not something that we like to think about very much, but is the context is the decline of America's relative power in the world over our lifetimes.

As America has a smaller and smaller share of world economic output, it just gets weaker.

And that means it becomes ever more important.

And its enemies, by the way, or potential enemies, conversely become stronger.

One of the things that is remarkable about China is China is the first geopolitical rival that the United States has faced since the Kaiser, which is both militarily and economically powerful.

Hitler wasn't, the Soviets weren't.

They had military power, but they did not have economic power.

China is what the Kaiser's Germany was.

I mean,

it's not a reckless, risk-taking regime like Hitler's.

It's not an ideological challenger like the Soviet Union, but it's a big, powerful, second-place contender.

And it has money, and their share is growing.

And the non-U.S., non-Western-oriented share of the planet's output is growing.

So as Jeff's wonderful phrase about the glandular instincts of the president, the president's deepest glandular instinct is not for confrontation with enemies.

It is for non-cooperation with friends.

That he does not have friends in his own life.

His deepest instinct is for money.

His deepest instinct is for money.

I read your book.

So he's also,

he is deeply corrupt.

But at a moment when, if you're going to be effective against Iran or North Korea, never mind against Russia, never mind the most difficult problem of them all, against China, you need to be able to build effective, workable global coalitions, including from countries like Vietnam and India, that are not so like-minded.

Is that a task that John Bolton and Mike Pompeo can do well?

Do you remember when President Obama told The Atlantic magazine, I recall,

he issued very, very mild criticism of David Cameron and Sarkozy for not doing quite enough in Libya, and it became a global firestorm.

Obama criticizes allies.

We're so far

beyond that, and I note this only to note that the Republicans who condemned Obama in really florid terms for shaking the unshakable alliance with Great Britain are noticeably silent when he serially criticizes or undermines relationships with a whole series of allies.

It's really a remarkable exercise in hypocrisy.

Aaron Ross Powell, and here's something that isn't happening.

We talked about the things that don't happen.

So right now, the European Union is going through a crisis as Britain is negotiating the terms of its exit with other countries, but meaning basically Germany.

And the European Union, in order to discourage anyone else from leaving, is giving the British a very, very hard time.

And the British, their decision-making is broken, so they're not able to act effectively.

And the United States is utterly absent from this conversation.

And when you talk to people in the British and German governments and ask them,

are there people on the phone to you saying, you guys have to work this out?

And by the way, we have some ground rule.

No, we're not there.

And this is potentially even more than what is going on in Asia.

This is the biggest foreign policy challenge of the moment.

It's boring.

It's complicated.

It's technical.

It requires all the tools of diplomacy, and the United States doesn't seem even to be interested.

One of the pre-existing conditions, as you describe it in your book, for Trump ascending to the presidency, for him being successful in his bid for the office, was the diminishment of other branches of Congress, most notably.

There is a case to be made.

There was a case that was made very actively during the Obama administration that the executive had far outstripped its authority in arena after arena, whether that comes to the use of military force or whether that comes to making deals and trade agreements with other countries.

Ostensibly, there's an argument to be made that Congress would take advantage of this absence of Trump's vacuum, the vacuum that he's created everywhere where, as you put it, the executive should be bold and vigorous and assertive.

There's an argument to be made that Congress should step in and fill that void, that it should retake what power it had been given to actually authorize military force to govern the set of arrangements that America undertakes in the world.

What role do you see Congress ideally stepping up to take at this time?

Well, one thing that you would hope for that was promised by the Republicans and that with united single-party control of government you would expect Congress to be able to do is to pass budgets.

Congress and the President are basically on the same page.

They should be able to produce a proper budget of a kind that we had a generation ago that says, here's what we want to spend,

here's how we're going to pay for it, and if there's a gap, here's how we're going to finance it.

There's no budget process.

We're at the point now where there aren't even annual budget resolutions, where the government is stumbling along over 90-day interval to 90-day interval under united party control.

We're on our way to having deficits of nearly a trillion dollars in conditions of prosperity and comparative by post-9-11 standards peace.

And you wonder,

what is this, the finances of the United States, if should the Republicans lose one branch of Congress or two,

should there be some kind of real crisis, as Jeff was asking about, or even a shooting war, what happens to the finances of a country that cannot write a budget under the circumstances of today?

Silence on that one.

It's very frightening.

You know, it's interesting.

We could sit here for an hour and do a list of so-far-averted horribles, but

my question is always: when does our luck run out?

When, David?

When does our luck run out?

Next Tuesday at 5.

Yeah.

So, America's depressing.

After the break, we'll turn to the world.

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And we're back with Jeff, Kathy, and David.

We left off with Jeff's depressing question, when does a democracy's luck run out?

Any takers?

Kathy?

Well, the other question that's brought up by a lot of David's recent work is, would we necessarily be able to pinpoint that?

Because as you write, you know, movingly in your book, the degradation of democracy is slow and not sudden, and it happens by small drips.

And so I guess you could look overseas.

We have the Hungarian elections coming up this weekend, and you write about this as well in your Atlantic article about how to build an autocracy as sort of a comparative case about how it happens since Orban's latest government took charge in 2010.

So talk a little bit about what it looks like.

Well, the Hungarian election is an example of how something that shouldn't continue does.

I mean, Orbán, who's the authoritarian ruler of Hungary,

he lost a bunch of local elections because the opposition parties in Hungary coordinated.

And the Hungarian opposition is tremendously fragmented.

It runs from former communists, it runs from Social Democrats, it runs pro-EU liberals, but it also includes this kind of neo-fascist party called Jobik that is very, you know, very pro-Russian, openly anti-Semitic, but also, also importantly for Hungary, very committed to clean government.

Jobik does something that no other party does.

Hungary has disclosure, various kinds of disclosures for members of parliament.

But Jobik voluntarily releases statements not only for members of parliament, but for their immediate families.

Because one of the things that is a common practice in Hungary is: I myself, I'm a member of parliament, and I do nothing wrong, but my brother has the largest gravel company in town, and he has a bunch of contracts.

But don't ask me about that because he's my brother, and I have no idea how he got those contracts.

So, when that spectrum of parties unites, they were able to inflict some defeats on Orban.

But we have an interview coming up with the leader of the largest independent media company in Hungary, Direct36, and he makes the point that there are no prospects for that kind of unity in the general because Orban has been campaigning on the theme of stop the influence of George Soros, the Hungarian-born Jewish financier.

And on that question, Joe Bica is a boy,

they may be for clean government, but they're against Hungarian-born Jewish financiers.

Well, and the other thing is,

Orban is popular, right?

So this brings up another question, is what do you do

when the popular will seem to be verging in what we would call an illiberal direction?

Orban is popular in many ways because of his economic illiberalism.

He did, this takes us to more about Central Europe than probably most people want to know, but after the Euro crisis, the small countries of Central Europe were hit by a terrible mortgage crisis because it's very hard to get a mortgage in Hungary.

So what people who want a mortgage would do is they would get a mortgage, not in Hungary, but in Switzerland, where it's easy to get a mortgage.

Problem with the Swiss mortgage is it's denominated in Swiss francs.

So you are making a currency gamble.

And a lot of people in Croatia and in Serbia and in Hungary and in Austria, I remember, this was all very vivid to me, this crisis, because I had breakfast on the day the crisis erupted with

an Austrian

who was very moody at breakfast and who explained to me that he was 50,000 euros more in debt than he had been when he got on the plane to start the breakfast than he was.

What do you have for breakfast?

Jeez.

At that point, he might as well have the bleenies with caviar.

Why the heck not?

And with a shot of vodka to chase it down.

But Orban, ruthlessly and in violation, he imposed all of the losses of the Swiss foreign conversion on banks and especially foreign-owned banks.

He set up a series of practices, which we've detailed in articles in the Atlantic, where he made the German and Austrian and Swiss-owned banks, which are active in Hungary, not the Hungarian-owned banks, eat eat the loss on these mortgages.

And people remember, and Hungarians were not put out of their houses in a way that Croatians and Austrians were.

Aaron Powell, are there any similarly populist, let's say, moves that Trump can undertake to both cement and broaden the coalition of his ardent fans?

Cheap Hungarian mortgages for all.

If we get through this,

the country may owe Paul Ryan a real debt of gratitude.

Because

this is called a hot take right now.

No, no, no.

Go on.

This is good.

Once I say I want away, this is good.

Because Ryan persuaded Trump to adhere pretty rigorously to orthodox Republican economics, which are very unpopular.

Donald Trump could have followed Steve Bannon's advice and done a bunch of things that were different.

You know, not done the big corporate tax cut, spent the trillion dollars instead on roads, bridges, airports, highways, rural broadband.

They could have done a tax cut very directed to middle-income people.

They could have been very explicit.

We are running a deficit on purpose in order to stimulate things.

He could have courted inflation as a way of reducing the burden of student debt.

He could have done a lot of imaginative Orban-like things.

And instead, the economy of the country has been run more or less by Paul Ryan.

And if there's one thing that the past few election cycles have confirmed, is that Ryan's economics are not popular.

That was a good take.

Congratulations.

No, No, no, no, no, that was a bit of a stretch.

But you're right.

I mean, they could have gone, he did not go populist and probably resents that he didn't go populist.

I have to assume he resents that he didn't go populist.

But I thought Republicans liked free trade.

Do they not do that?

We're not talking about, I mean, Republicans do like free trade.

Well, Republican economics, what I'm saying is like not the entire economic program is classically conservative in the way that you would expect.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

Trump has been more in the past, again, this is maybe a change in the past 72 hours, that the administration has become much more provocative on the trade front.

I think it's an interesting question

whether this persists

and whether the actions live up to the rhetoric that the president is running.

And

if so,

he may make some friends among the beneficiaries of protectionism, but he also is going to run some risks.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: One of the things you write in your book is that President Trump may not have had, quote, policy ideas in the conventional sense, but he had a sure grasp of the emotions that impelled the Republican voting base and how those emotions could be manipulated to empower himself and enrich his family.

What has President Trump wrought on the conservative coalition, on conservative voters?

Well, he has moved questions of ethnicity and immigration to the very top of what it means to be a Republican.

Those questions had always been there.

They'd been contested inside the party.

I think we saw an example of this again in the past few days with the president's reaction to an annual protest march that takes place inside Mexico of

Central Americans who are in Mexico in some kind of status, often as refugees, and they march

toward the U.S.

border to demand entry to the United States.

This has happened a number of times.

I forget exactly how many, at least two or three.

And the Mexican police cooperate with American authorities in turning them back.

And anyway, the whole point of the thing is symbolic.

This was profiled on Fox News this past weekend, and Donald Trump reacted to it as if it were an invasion force.

No, right?

Right.

I mean,

or, or, and here's the resonance, a book that Donald Trump has not read, but Steve Bannon has, Camp of the Saints, a 1974 French-language dystopian vision of a world in which hundreds of thousands, an armada of hundreds of thousands of people from India show up on the southern shores of France.

The weak-willed French government lets them in.

They subsume France.

They put the white women in brothels.

They conquer.

They impose a new racial order on France.

And this book, probably most Atlantic listeners have never even heard of it, but it is there in the subconscious of a lot of Trump's closest fans.

And it's in Trump's subconscious.

And he was speaking to that.

And the whole thing went away because the Mexicans, as usual, they let them do this for three or four days.

And then Mexico's a state with a police.

And you can't just walk toward the American border and create an international incident without anyone caring.

But Trump saw something there.

He was both a victim of Fox and Friends, but he was also a partner.

But if he follows Paul Ryan's economic, unpopular economic program, and yet inflames the worst, perhaps nationalist tribal passions of his base, what's the end game of that?

What happens

on the other end of those actions?

Aaron Powell,

well, of course, I don't know.

What do you worry about and what do you hope for?

Well, we're doing a real

We're doing an experiment with the United States, and we will find out the relative strength of these passions.

What we'll also find out, and this is maybe the darkest, deepest fear within trumpocracy, with the book of trumpocracy, because look, in the end, the majority of the country is against Donald Trump, and that is normally a powerful resource.

But while the country is a given fact, the political nation is not given.

The political nation is shaped.

Who participates, who does not participate.

And that can be shaped both unconsciously, but also consciously.

You can change the rules to determine who participates.

And you can also make things difficult at the margin in ways that shave off participation.

One of the things that makes a Victor Orban different from his predecessors of three-quarters of a century ago is that Viktor Orban is having an election.

And the votes that are cast will be counted fairly.

They may be run through a very gerrymandered and unfair system.

But not everybody's going to cast a vote.

And there are going to be a lot of ways to determine who casts and who doesn't.

And you can shape how the votes are, not that the votes are counted, but how they have impact.

And that could be happening here.

And you see in many, many states, and not just southern states like North Carolina, but in the North and Wisconsin, there's been quite a conscious effort to shape the environment in which votes are cast.

And these nationalist fears, they can also become powerful justifications.

Because if there are, we don't know exactly how many illegal aliens there are in the United States.

Maybe as few as 10 and a half million, maybe as many as 15, and some people people think possibly more.

We don't know exactly how often it happens that one of them casts a vote.

It doesn't seem to happen that often, but it surely must happen sometimes.

And depending on

how you think about those quantities, you can create voting regimes that

have the effect of not only screening out all illegal aliens in the country, but screening out a number of other people.

And some people may see that as a lamentable mistake, and other people may think of that as an additional attractive feature.

Kathy, as a student of democracy around the world, what does the best version of the other side of,

let's say,

the popular populist version of Trump?

It's interesting because I was actually going to put a version of this question to David.

I can't, off the top of my head, think of a comparative example where the democratic recession sort of that we've been experiencing recently sort of snaps back, right?

Like, what happens when these systems are created, as in Hungary, as in the the United States, these gerrymandered systems that are designed to keep one party in power.

And then, once that party is in power, it has incentives to maintain these systems.

So, it becomes very, very difficult to change them.

And I'm not sure that I know of an example of those kinds of trends snapping back.

But, so, and then, so in the American case, maybe Jeff knows.

Jeff, too, is a student of democracy overseas.

Well, I have a question for Jeff about this question, which I'm not taking any more questions to answer.

I'm just going to read my statement and leave.

Is what is happening in Saudi Arabia an example of systems opening or closing?

You had the big interview.

Good question.

I'm sorry to say this line.

I'm sorry to use a line that I hate, but it's too early to tell.

Well, if he achieves, if the crown prince survives,

and by survive, I mean literally survives, he has a lot of enemies,

and he's sincere in his plan and can carry out this plan over many years, yes, then he'll move Saudi Arabia in some reasonable and and modern direction.

Let's acknowledge that this is all relative here,

in part because it's all about his relatives.

Sorry about that.

I couldn't help it.

I walked right into it, right?

I just can't help it.

It's a family business.

The family is not going to give up control of the business.

Within a certain framework, it'll have a feeling of modernity.

But

I would still put Saudi Arabia in the camp of, and I would put it in for a while, of countries that

won't be democratic and don't value democracy.

What's new and what's very interesting about this is that, and this is a more benign example, but in a way we did not see before Donald Trump, leaders of places like Saudi Arabia and a whole bunch of other places are openly, outspokenly devaluing or dismissing democracy as an ideal.

Donald Trump has opened the door for people to say, you know what?

Democracy is not, is not the end state, to borrow from Fukuyama, is not the ideal state to borrow from, oh, most Americans.

It is a way that some people ought to live, but we have another way.

Democracy is on the back foot.

And what I noticed with MBS, with the Saudi crown prince, is that there's no even lip service anymore from a whole range of world leaders toward this seeming American ideal because they see that the president of the United States himself does not value American democracy as an ideal.

This isn't just among world leaders, right?

You've cited research from Yasha Munk, which I think is somewhat debated, but at least that research shows that there's declining enthusiasm for democracy among, as you touched on, many Americans, many young people in Western democracies that are basically used to it and arguably see the kind of chaos it can bring and think, hey, maybe

wouldn't it be nice to have a system where we understand what the leader is saying when he says it and where things are orderly?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I think we underestimate.

I think one of the things that I do believe the Ashamonk research sort of corresponds to voting behavior, the rise of people like Jeremy Corbyn and the five-star movement in Italy.

I think we underestimated for the generation that lived through the Depression and the war and then the post-war boom, how much of when they said they were for democracy, they meant, I'm for peace.

and economic improvement.

And democracy seems to do that and all the other systems fail.

But if you're in a world post 9-11, post-the Great Recession, post-the Euro crisis, where democratic governments are not synonymous with peace and economic improvement, then the number of people who really care about process, you know, that turns out to be an unsurprisingly small group.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, but to get back to democratic trends, I do want to pick up on Jeff's point about Saudi Arabia, because I think what we have seen in recent history is basically the decline and democratization of authoritarian regimes.

And, you know, the first

democratic wave that we often talk about is the spread of democracy in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So it is possible to get a democracy.

But my question is what the examples are of regaining a democracy that has decayed in this manner that we're talking about with Hungary and in Eastern Europe.

Well, normally,

till now, the way democracy has recovered is the authoritarian regime leads its country into a war, loses, and loses prestige.

And that's true both with the extreme cases like the fascist dictatorships of the 1930s and 40s and also milder cases.

That's how Greece and Portugal became democracies in the 1970s after unsuccessful wars.

Let's hope there's another way.

Now,

that leads me to my next question, which is that you conclude your book with the chapter called Hope.

Yes.

In that chapter, you recount some of the brighter elements of what Trump has revealed in American culture.

And so as a final salvo, what makes you optimistic about America after Trump?

I have found in the past few months myself

feeling increasingly hopeful, which is not my natural state.

But let me point to a couple of things that I, and it's not just, it's not in our political system,

it's outside.

There are intervals of the awakening of moral conscience movements in America.

Some of which have a good reputation today, abolition, the civil rights movement, some of which have a less good reputation today, the temperance movement of the 19th century.

But the people who are in these movements didn't see them as different.

The people who were in abolition were also in temperance, almost entirely overlapping and believing they were actually fighting for some very related causes.

I

have increasingly begun to perceive the Me Too movement and now this post-Parkland movement among the young and among women as the next steps.

in this tradition, this ambiguous tradition of American moral reform.

But there is this kind of waking up of conscience in private capacity.

Women saying, I want to be treated in a certain way, and there's this way I've accepted for a long time as sort of just part of the nature of things, as sub-political.

I don't want to put up with it anymore.

And the reaction to Parkland, which is doing a lot of mobilization among some of the least political people in America, young people, suburban mothers.

Central Floridians.

So there is this conscience revival.

I've also noticed something else.

In the course of promoting the book, I've done a lot of speaking.

And granted, it's self-selected, right?

I mean, I'm speaking to people who might conceivably buy a hardcover book, and that is not a randomly selected sample of America.

But when I started, especially when I started talking about the article that appeared in early 2017, the dominant mood of the audiences I spoke to was fear.

They did not know where the country was going.

They did not know who was in charge.

And they themselves felt powerless.

And the question, almost always, question one or two is, what can I do?

What I've noticed in the past three months, the fear's gone.

People are still anxious, and they're often very angry, but they're not asked, the question, what do I do?

They don't ask that anymore because they have found something and they've made a decision about it, whatever that thing is, whether it's political work or whether it's these kinds of nonpartisan mass movements or whether it's simply speaking up at the office to the Human Resources Department about how your experiences and what you expect in the future.

I think there is this cresting wave of that moral, American moral

revival.

And as with temperance, it can sometimes lead to some pretty weird.

I mean, no one wants to say prohibition was not a success.

But the temperance movement was, all the same.

Thank you for that.

If people get too optimistic, I'll just send them to Jeff.

So with that, we turn to our closing segment.

Keepers, what have you read, experienced, watched, listened to, heard recently that you do not want to forget?

Jeff, what do you not want to forget?

Well, I actually sort of want to forget this movie I just saw.

I know it's an old movie, Concussion with Will Smith, but it just really,

it was a very effective piece of, I don't want to call it propaganda, but it made its point in a pretty blunt way that

football is really bad for people's heads.

And

I don't know if I'll be able to get it out of my mind next time I watch football.

And I don't know that I really want to watch football.

I think it's very, very interesting to watch as a piece of art and as a piece of as a sort of a political weapon.

I'm not saying the cause isn't just.

I just think it was

done in a way that would cause anyone watching it to think, I don't know, this sport might not be worth it.

Concussion.

David Frum, our author of honor, what do you want to keep?

I find it very easy to remember facts and very very hard to remember moods.

And when I look back on key moments of my political life, the moments after 9-11 and the Iraq War, what is hard to recapture is not what happened, but who you were and who your friends were and what they felt.

I'm trying to hold on to that sense at this moment where we are transitioning from the most fearful moments of the early Trump presidency to the next phase.

I'm trying to...

hold on to that moral and emotional temperature because that will be, once it's over, that transition will be the hardest thing to describe and remember yeah absolutely kathy gilson in what do you want to keep david is blowing my mind right now can i keep his last two things yes yeah um the other thing i want to keep on a sillier and less hopeful note uh my my colleagues know that i like to collect foreign policy clichés um such as

china's increasing assertiveness and you know reaffirm our commitment to the liberal rules-based international order whatever whatever i will say that among the many privileges of working with David Fromm is I do not have to deal with that kind of stuff from him, even though I occasionally have to look up words like purblind.

Can you please define purblind for our audience?

No, I can't.

David Frum can't.

But

so

there's a wonderful national security publication called War on the Rocks that ran an article called Strategies of Attainment on April 1st, 2018.

And the date here is important for reasons that will become apparent.

It starts to read like an ordinary foreign policy article.

In this era of disruption, the accelerating pace of change is propelling the world toward a historic inflection point, something you might see in the Atlantic.

As you read through, you gradually realize that every single sentence is a foreign policy cliché and it gets gradually more demented as it goes.

And it includes policy suggestions like articulate a vision, focus on the economy, embrace American values, deepen engagement, and so on and so forth.

So with that, I would like to keep that.

And I would like to advise anybody who would like to write for the Atlantic.com international section, read this article and don't write like that.

Wonderful.

Yay for clichés.

My keeper is Emily Wilson's incredible translation of The Odyssey that appeared a few months back.

I have been wanting to talk about this translation for a while, and finally the blogger Jason Kaki gave me the perfect way into it.

One of the things that Emily Wilson explains in her introduction is she talks about translating the Odyssey, being the latest in a long line of until now all men to have translated Homer's epic poem.

One of the things that she explains is that she took the opportunity basically as a translator to make this Emily Wilson's Odyssey.

The book is certainly Homer's Odyssey, but it includes a number of creative and wonderful decisions that she made in how to tell this story that's been told for centuries of human existence.

She mentions one phrase, for example, that appears, as she says, some 20 times in the Odyssey.

Typically, in a usual translation of the Odyssey, the moment of dawn, the start of a day happens over and over again, and it's always written the same way.

Something like, when early born rosy-fingered dawn appeared.

Emily Wilson decided to translate that differently a number of ways throughout the book.

And here are just a few of those translations that Jason Kaki collected all in one place.

The early dawn was born, her fingers bloomed.

When newborn dawn appeared with rosy fingers.

Soon dawn was born, her fingers bright with roses.

When vernal dawn first touched the sky with flowers, when dawn with dazzling braids brought day for the third time,

then dawn came from her lovely throne and woke the girl.

As Kotke puts it, what a great illustration of Wilson's skill and the creative latitude involved in translation.

Emily Wilson's Odyssey, go pick it up if you haven't.

And with that,

David.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining us.

David Fromm's book, Trumpocracy, the Corruption of the American Republic, is out at a bookstore near you.

David Fromm, thank you very much for for joining us.

Thank you.

Kathy, thanks.

Thanks.

And Jeff, thank you.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Our executive producer of Atlantic Podcasts is Katherine Wells.

Thanks to our colleagues David Frum and Kathy Gilsonen and to my esteemed co-host Jeffrey Goldberg, Alex Wagner will be back with us next week.

The dazzling braids of John Batiste's Battle Hymn of the Republic play us in every week.

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What do you not want to forget?

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May you greet the rosy-fingered dawn of every morning with a renewed sense of possibility and wonder.

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