Is the U.S. Sleepwalking Into Autocracy Under Trump 2.0?

Amanpour

CNN

News

4.2 • 929 Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Less than two weeks into Donald Trump's second term, the president is flooding the zone with executive orders, testing the very institutions that uphold democracy. The question now is how far can Trump bend these democratic institutions before they break? To find out, Christiane spoke to Princeton Professor and autocracy expert Kim Lane Scheppele and Norm Eisen, a former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee and U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. Then, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returned to what is left of their homes in northern Gaza this week, and while hostages are released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, Christiane sat down with Oliver Mcternan, a former Catholic priest turned hostage negotiator. They speak about possible next steps in the ceasefire deal and how to break the endless cycle of violence in the region. Plus, eighty years ago this week, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. It marked the beginning of the end of the Holocaust, the darkest chapter in human history. From her archives, Christiane's 2008 reported from Auschwitz for a documentary called "Scream Bloody Murder" which chronicled the stories of those few brave souls who tried to expose genocide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:58.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Ammanpur Hour. Here's where we're headed this week.
1:13.6	People have wanted to do this for decades. With a raft of quasi-legal executive orders,
1:20.6	Trump bolts out of the box, critics call it a massive power grab. Warnings from recent history
1:25.6	about democracies using the law to change the law.
1:30.1	This was the week that the alarm went off.
1:33.3	I ask a former White House ethics czar and an expert on autocracy.
1:38.7	And clean out Gaza?
1:41.2	It was so unfortunate that President Trump used those words clean out.
	...

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