Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2024

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I’ve been watching since the election to see what timeline we’re in. And Donald Trump’s first wave of selections for appointees were pretty straightforward. But then came the turn: Pete Hegseth, a former “Fox & Friends” host, to helm the Pentagon; Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence; and the real gut-punch, the former representative Matt Gaetz for attorney general. In the parts of government that can be weaponized most dangerously — the military, the intelligence services, the Department of Justice — Trump is putting true lackeys and loyalists in charge. I fear we’ve entered the bad timeline. Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and the author of a new book, “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.” In this conversation, we discuss how she’s been processing Trump’s picks, what to make of Elon Musk’s role in Trump’s inner circle, the indicators to look out for when governments slide in an autocratic direction, the appeal and excitement of autocratic regimes that often get missed in our history books, the relationship between autocracies and futurists, the politics of performance and more. Mentioned: Join our team as a story editor Book Recommendations: Moneyland by Oliver Bullough Offshore by Brooke Harrington American Kleptocracy by Casey Michel This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio.

Transcript

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1:02.9	From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. Think back two months.
1:04.6	Imagine it's September.
1:07.9	You're reading the substack of some resistance era liberal.
1:12.0	They're ranting about the dangers of the orange man coming back.
1:18.0	Imagine what his second term is going to be like, they write. You're going to have Robert F. Kennedy,
1:23.1	Jr. for HHS Secretary. Tulsi Gabbard is going to lead the intelligence services.
1:29.8	Matt Gates is going to be the Attorney General. Maybe he's going to make a Fox and Friends host, Secretary of Defense.
1:38.3	I think most people reading that would have said, oh, come on. Donald Trump might be a menace. He is a menace.
1:44.8	But that's a parody of what a Trump-hating liberal imagines a Trump administration was going to be.
1:51.2	Let's be real about this. But here we are in the real. And that is not what a Trump-hating liberal imagines a Trump administration is going to be. That is what Donald Trump imagines a Trump
1:56.3	administration is going to be. It is what he is trying to make it be. One of the hardest things about covering
2:03.4	Donald Trump is that it is hard to talk about him without sounding unhinged. And that is because he
2:08.6	acts in ways that are by any reasonable standard unhinged. It is this remarkable transference
2:15.3	Trump is able to effectuate. He makes his opponents look like rabid antagonists by making them respond to a reality that
2:22.9	leaves no room for neutrality, no room for a wait-and-see open-mindedness.
	...

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