Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists Jamelle Bouie, Ross Douthat, M. Gessen and Lydia Polgreen about Donald Trump’s preparations for a second term and what they signal about America’s future.
Patrick Healy: Folks, I want to take you back to November 2016, after Donald Trump was elected president. Much of what we saw in that first Trump transition process foreshadowed his four years in office: the pressure for loyalty from his cabinet picks and other government officials; the jockeying for power and influence among conservative, campaign and establishment G.O.P. factions; Trump’s constant tweeting; the lack of policy planning; the leaks to news media. I’m curious: As you look at the second Trump transition process, what do you see happening that you think foreshadows his next term in office?
M. Gessen: What I actually remember most about 2016 was Trump choosing people whose qualifications and opinions were antithetical to the agency they were picked to lead: Betsy DeVos for education, Ben Carson for housing secretary. Trump had promised to destroy government as we knew it. Of course, compared to this time around, his 2016 appointments seem almost conventional. And that, to me, may be the most informative thing now — this measure of how far we’ve devolved.
Ross Douthat: In 2016, Trump mostly made the kind of cabinet picks that any Republican would have made, like DeVos, with a few personal flourishes — a fondness for generals, the odd Rex Tillerson experiment. This foreshadowed a presidency in which Trump’s chaotic impulses were often channeled through the personnel of a normal Republican administration, which, like other Republican administrations, left the normal infrastructure of the federal bureaucracy entirely intact.
This time, some of the picks follow the same pattern (Marco Rubio at the State Department, say), but in other cases you have people being picked explicitly because of the critiques they’ve lobbed at the institutions they’re assigned to lead — Pete Hegseth with the Defense Department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with everything associated with American health care, and so on. (This was part of the idea behind the late, unlamented Matt Gaetz appointment, as well.) So this sets up potential scenarios for sustained intra-bureaucratic warfare — but with the proviso that because none of these nominees have substantial managerial experience, if they actually go to war with the bureaucracies they aspire to lead, it’s a decent bet the bureaucracies will win.
Gessen: Ross, I have far less faith in the resilience of the bureaucracies. I remember visiting the State Department about a year (maybe less) into the first Trump administration and noticing how much had changed in such a short time. The line at security was gone, because there were so few visitors. Inside, the place was a ghost town. In a very short time, the Trump administration had fired some people, induced others to quit and, perhaps most important, paralyzed the work of those who remained. Everyone I talked to said that they didn’t know what would happen to whatever programs they were running or employed by. All of this is to say: Bureaucracies have less inertia than we might imagine, especially when the person or people at the helm are dead set on destroying the actual thing.
Lydia Polgreen: For me, the most significant development is what seems to be a broad infrastructure built to ensure fealty, not just to Trump but to a broader hard-right agenda that goes deep into the guts of government at many levels. Last week there was a report in ProPublica that the state of Georgia had disbanded the committee that examines maternal mortality, apparently in response to ProPublica reporting on women who died as a result of the state abortion ban. At the same time, the House just passed a bill that could quite easily result in nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica being targeted as “terrorist” organizations. It is a neat trick to ensure there is less information about the impact of abortion bans and less investigative reporting exposing that impact. Yes, the picks for several of his cabinet positions are terrifying, but it is also the way policy cascades through people’s lives that is really pretty alarming.
Jamelle Bouie: Those cabinet picks are revealing, though. Trump’s decision to nominate a set of cranks, charlatans and apparatchiks for key positions — and his threat to force them into office through essentially extra-constitutional means — is a clear indication that he intends to govern as a strongman. I would add that the elevation of men accused of varying degrees of sexual assault and abuse is a signal that this administration will be even more culturally reactionary and hostile to basic ideas of equality among citizens as was his first one.
Healy: Masha, you wrote a recent column about Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban in which you argued: “Trump’s first term, and his actions in the four years since, tracked the early record of Putin and Orban in important ways.” And then: “Looking closely at their trajectories,” you wrote, “gives a chillingly clear sense of where Trump’s second term may lead.” So I want to ask you: How do we know that things in America are really getting as bad as all that? That we are slipping in the direction of authoritarianism, if not autocracy? Where are the lines? What should we watch for?
Gessen: Funny you should ask about lines, Patrick. I always think back to an incident, I guess about 10 years ago now, when yet another Russian publication had its editors fired and replaced with people loyal to the regime. When they met with the staff, the new editors explained that the change was inevitable, because the old team had “crossed the hard line.” One of the staff members asked where exactly the line was. “It’s always shifting” was the response. And that’s the honest truth. It’s always shifting.
Consider this: Think of autocracy and democracy not so much as systems of government but as vectors — at any given point, a society is becoming more democratic or more autocratic. And we are on an autocratic trajectory already. The other day, for example, I heard the head of a major foundation say that they’d started communicating with grantees by phone rather than email, to avoid leaving a FOIA-ble trail on topics (such as critical race theory and D.E.I.) that will get them in trouble with the new administration. Boy, is this familiar, as are the threats to which this foundation is responding: the threat of having its nonprofit status revoked, the threat of being declared a “terrorist” organization, as Lydia mentioned. I’ve lived through this. It’s the same sense of familiarity I felt when The Washington Post and The L.A. Times yanked their presidential endorsements just before the election.
Polgreen: One of the things I find hardest to accept this time around is blithe assurances that it just won’t be as bad as all that — that liberals are being hysterical about the range of possibilities here. And there will be those who blame the #Resistance for overreacting last time, so why should we listen when they cry wolf this time? Who among us can forget the comforting assurances of Trump’s acting chief of staff four years ago that he would leave office peacefully if defeated? But I believe that everything we are seeing from the Trump team so far, and from the Republicans who genuflect before him, is that their plans are deadly serious and should be resisted.
Douthat: I will play my part, as one of those who did think that a lot of #Resistance rhetoric last time was a sustained overreaction, and say that it is not “autocracy” or anything remotely like it for an administration or its allies to use entirely legal means of obtaining internal communication to try to figure out whether, say, American universities are complying with the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. Or generally, for a Republican administration to fight the culture war using bureaucratic and administrative power, something that the Biden administration did often enough from the other side of the aisle. Signifiers of creeping autocracy have to be more serious than that! I’ll suggest some: a Trump presidency openly defying a definitive Supreme Court ruling and getting away with it. Or a Trump presidency somehow manipulating election returns to help the G.O.P. keep the House of Representatives in 2026. One could multiply such dire scenarios — but they have to actually be dire, something more than aggressive culture-warring, to justify this kind of framing.
And you would think a budding autocrat would at least be able to push a controversial attorney general nominee through a Senate controlled by his own party, wouldn’t you?
Healy: Ross, you wrote a long essay after the election arguing that under Trump, “the new future is much more open and uncertain than that dark vision” of America entering an authoritarian or even autocratic age. Now, the essay emphasized the uncertainty of what lies ahead and that we can’t predict the outcome. But I wonder, when you look at the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard, Kennedy or the now withdrawn Matt Gaetz — people who seem to see the state as the enemy and give off authoritarian vibes in different respects — do you see any signs of darkness ahead?
Douthat: In what sense do you think that Kennedy, whose potpourri of positions combine old-school lefty critiques of everything from nuclear power to big pharma with libertarian-inflected support for alternative medicine, psychedelics and fad diets, gives off “authoritarian vibes”? His most deplorable position is his anti-vaccine advocacy, which has nothing authoritarian about it; it’s a form of crunchy libertarianism taken to a regrettable extreme. Not everything unwise or reckless can be collapsed into the category of creeping authoritarianism; there are plenty of errors that run in the opposite direction!
Healy: Ross, I concede I don’t know what’s in Kennedy’s heart. But I’ve yet to see evidence that he is led by science, scientific expertise or peer-reviewed research in his ideas or decision-making. Trump has said that he will let Kennedy “go wild on health,” which might be a Trumpian rhetorical flourish but might also be a free hand to push past norms and guardrails — like science! — and use strong centralized power in the Department of Health and Human Services and his agencies to push an agenda that no political plurality in our democracy gave a mandate on.
Douthat: Part of the argument of my essay was that we are entering a much more ideologically complex, contested and potentially chaotic era, in which a lot of ideas excluded from consensus politics in the post-Cold War era come creeping back into debates — or even get handed the keys to cabinet departments! That could certainly include everything from Kennedy’s often crankish left-meets-libertarian impulses on health care and science to Gabbard’s sometimes Oliver Stone-esque skepticism of the national security state. But it will not be helpful in understanding what’s actually happening in this landscape if every departure from the post-Cold War consensus is collapsed into a baggy category of “authoritarianism.” If Gabbard becomes director of national intelligence and starts declassifying a bunch of C.I.A. secrets to howls from the national security establishment, maybe that would be bad (though I’m eager to know a bit more about the John F. Kennedy assassination and the Saudi role in Sept. 11, personally), but it won’t be a sign of looming fascism.
Healy: Ross, do you reject the premise that “creeping authoritarianism” is possible in a second Trump term, or do you think that it’s simply too soon to talk about it?
Douthat: I think that Trump himself obviously has authoritarian impulses, and creeping authoritarianism is always possible in American politics. I would argue that people worried about that creep should focus on clear presidential power grabs at the expense of the other branches and broader attempts to subvert the Constitution and the rule of law, and not use the language of authoritarianism to critique other aspects of a second Trump presidency’s policymaking that might be bad — as I think, again, that many of Kennedy’s approaches to health policy might be — but represent a very normal American clash between populism and expertise, outsiders and insiders, and not some sort of Putinesque drift.
Bouie: I think this demands a little more clarity, since narrowing “authoritarianism” to mean “presidential power grabs at the expense of the other branches” would render something like the indiscriminate roundup of suspected “illegal immigrants” as merely a policy disagreement. To use a historical example, I would label the Wilson administration’s efforts to deport lawful residents of the United States for alleged “sedition” as “authoritarian,” even though the Wilson administration was not intruding on the domain of other branches.
Douthat: Yes, it’s fair to say that there are things Trump could do that are within the purview of the executive branch that would have an authoritarian drift. But here, too, it’s important to make a distinction between things liberals currently oppose and things that represent incipient fascism. Donald Trump will certainly attempt large-scale deportations in response to the unprecedented wave of border crossings under his predecessor. But large-scale deportations have featured in American politics before. We do not remember Barack Obama as more Putinesque than Trump because the Obama administration deported more illegal immigrants than Trump did in his first term. We don’t remember Dwight Eisenhower as a fascist because he ran a large-scale deportation program. We may condemn the Eisenhower program on other grounds — as inhumane, racist and so on — as critics will have every right to condemn the excesses of any Trump crackdown. But a big crackdown on illegal immigration still falls well within the historical range of American policymaking.
That’s why I’m stressing the constitutional issues: A world where some element of Trump’s immigration crackdown gets struck down by the Supreme Court and Trump just ignores the justices and goes ahead — that would be a clear abuse of power! (With, yes, its own parallels in the American past, but more exceptional ones.) And if you’re worried about an authoritarian presidency or era, those are the lines that matter.
Healy: Jamelle, in a recent column, you explored how Trump wants fewer adults in the room — how incompetence and chaos are assets to his “lawless intentions.” How will America know if and when darkness is coming?
Bouie: If Donald Trump is sending red state National Guard soldiers into Democratic-led cities to round up suspected unauthorized immigrants and act as a de facto occupation force — if ICE agents and deputized local law enforcement are going workplace to workplace and neighborhood to neighborhood sweeping up anyone who can’t prove his citizenship — then we will know that we are in a dark place. Of course, this doesn’t mean there won’t be apologists for Trump and his administration who will insist that there’s nothing wrong with mass roundups and detention camps.
Polgreen: I worry about all of the things Jamelle does, and I also worry about the slightly softer terror of incompetence and stupidity. For example, what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are cooking up at their Department of Government Efficiency could cause a tremendous amount of suffering very quickly. Sharp, thoughtless cuts to Medicaid, for example, will have an immediate effect on the health and well-being of millions of poor Americans, especially children. Not to mention the economic impact of throwing potentially millions of federal workers out of work. The government would save money on salaries, but individual communities across the country would lose earners who contribute to the overall economy in many ways. It is all just so heedless.
Gessen: I don’t love the word “authoritarian” because I think its definition is a little mushy. But let’s agree that one aspect of authoritarian government is decision-making by one person or a small group of people, outside of any transparent deliberative process. This is what makes Kennedy’s wacky positions on things such as vaccines “authoritarian” — it’s not what he thinks, necessarily; it’s his rejection of expertise and the deliberation that has produced existing policies.
Douthat: I’ll just say again that I don’t think the rejection of expertise is authoritarian — if so, then Americans have always been authoritarian — unless it is enforced by actual dictatorial means. (And I say this as someone who has rejected medical expertise from time to time in my own life.)
Healy: So what are the guardrails now that would stop things from actually getting pretty bad, however each of you would define that? And do you see eventual correctives? Using a Roman analogy, who will be Claudius after Caligula? Or do we skip Claudius and go from Caligula to Nero? Ross, I’m teeing up this Roman fantasy for you first.
Douthat: Because, God help me, I wrote a column early in Trump’s first term looking for Roman parallels? Back then, I compared Trump to a few late-republican figures, from the brothers Gracchi (turbulent populists) to Marcus Licinius Crassus (“notable for his greed and pride and folly,” I wrote, “but eclipsed by even more dangerous figures yet to come”). I think Trump now looks more significant in our own late-republican or early imperial drama than I did back then, but I don’t have a better analogue as yet.
I do think, though, that the strongest corrective to power in a democracy is usually another form of power — not institutional “guardrails,” per se, but the resistance created by rival leaders and rival factions and their strength. So the strong “corrective” to Trump this time, if he bursts through various restraints, is likely to be the same corrective we saw last time: a midterm drubbing and a revitalized Democratic Party, which just needs to find its Lucius Cornelius Sulla to Trump’s Gaius Marius (look them up).
Healy: Lydia, what do you think? You had a strong column last week about the fact that you don’t generally panic, but lately you’ve been panicking. Do you see any guardrails, or any future correctives?
Polgreen: There are potentially guardrails on some issues. I do not think this Supreme Court will give Trump a blank check on every single action. But I do think there will be broad deference from every branch of the federal government and legal challenges will take a long time to get resolved. It feels quite possible that we end up with a somewhat conventional set of Republican economic policies, for example, despite Trump’s promises of wrecking-ball action on tariffs, the Federal Reserve and so on.
But these should offer us no comfort. There is a tremendous amount of damage ready to be done, with very little restraint. So much depends on the courage of lawmakers, bureaucrats, soldiers and judges. That is not a sturdy guardrail in any sense of the word.
Bouie: There are no guardrails, there are only choices. Will congressional Republicans choose to bend to Trump’s most authoritarian demands? Will courts give legal sanction to moves that violate the foundations of the constitutional order? Will bureaucrats choose to break the law if asked? Will soldiers choose to follow illegal orders? Will red state lawmakers choose to go along with an unconstitutional effort to administratively end birthright citizenship? Will blue state governors choose to allow a roving deportation force to round up residents? And so on and so forth.
Healy: Are there better, more useful analogies for us about signs of darkness in policy or executive action or authoritarianism — in Eastern Europe, yes, but also in Asia or Latin America?
Gessen: The playbook varies little from country to country — not because autocrats and would-be autocrats are coordinating, but because the forces against which they whip up resentment are similar, and because they all similarly want to dismantle systems of checks and balances. One idea I find useful is the Hungarian academic and politician Bálint Magyar’s breakdown of autocracy into three stages: autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, autocratic consolidation. An autocratic breakthrough occurs when it is no longer possible to reverse autocracy by electoral means (e.g., Orban changed the Hungarian Constitution in ways that are likely impossible to reverse, because that would require a supermajority that’s extremely unlikely to materialize).
So I will keep asking myself: Are the changes Trump is implementing reversible? Examples of changes that would be very difficult to reverse may include constitutional amendments (for example, repealing the 22nd Amendment), the wholesale destruction of federal agencies (for example, it took the Biden administration nearly the full four years to repair the damage done to the immigration agencies, especially the asylum system — and I’m talking here just about the staffing, not the politics), a capture of the judiciary (a project on which Trump made great progress in his first term), media capture (e.g., bringing media outlets to heel by exerting pressure on owners, often using their other business interests). There is more, but those are some examples.
Polgreen: I have been thinking a lot about India under Narendra Modi as a model for how this is likely to unfold. India and the United States have a great deal in common: big, diverse, polyglot nations with long traditions of democratic governance under a constitution based in ideas rather than ethnic or religious identity. Both also have a majority (Hindus in India, white people in America) who can be made to feel embattled and marginalized by a large minority (Muslims in India, immigrants and nonwhite people in the United States). Modi’s playbook already seems to be in use here: Intimidate the press through legal harassment and by threatening owners’ other business interests; target civic groups with antiterror laws; whip up resentment for an internal other. The success of this model in a constitutional democracy of such long standing is really a powerful demonstration of how it can indeed happen here.
Bouie: I’ll indulge my parochialism and say that Americans should look at their own history here before trying to draw analogies to events abroad. In our popular representations, Jim Crow is little more than separate water fountains and segregated public facilities. In reality, Jim Crow was an authoritarian political and economic order, defined by state imposition of rigid social hierarchies, profound democratic backsliding (many whites were as effectively disenfranchised under Jim Crow, as were Blacks), oligarchical control of most institutions, a degraded public sphere and a highly stratified economy where most workers earned low wages and had fewer rights. And several Jim Crow states, such as Alabama and Mississippi, devoted state resources to the surveillance, harassment and intimidation of dissidents and political opponents.
We have, in other words, a homegrown tradition of authoritarian governance. And given the social base of the Trump movement in right-wing evangelicalism — a political/religious tradition whose roots lie in the South — I’d say that this tradition is probably a better guide to what we may experience than anything else. (I’ll concede here that the other point of reference is Latin America, where authoritarian, personalist rule of large, multiethnic societies is an enduring part of the region’s history.)
Douthat: I will just take up Jamelle’s last point and say that if you’re worried about authoritarianism in the current American context, with our increasingly multiracial coalitions and rather starker ideological polarization, I think Latin American parallels are more useful than the experience of the Jim Crow South.
Healy: I want to end with an upbeat provocation: Is there a path or scenario for America in 2025 that you see inklings of that could be better or different from what you are currently expecting?
Gessen: First, I’d like to register my objection to what I think of as a very American tic: “Let’s end on an upbeat note.” (Remember the excruciating moments in the 2016 Clinton-Trump debate when the moderator asked the candidates to say something they liked about the other? That, to me, is the quintessence of this habit.) I am not actually seeing any inklings of better things at the moment, and I am feeling generally pessimistic about the prospects for resistance (lowercase “r”). I think people are likely to look away, retreat into their private lives and in general mobilize much less than during Trump’s first term. This is actually the classic definition of authoritarianism (as distinct from totalitarianism): The people go home and the authoritarian does what he does, with little scrutiny.
That said, I also know that nothing is preordained. And that public sentiment can shift very quickly. We have seen this before, in this country and elsewhere, and we could see it again. So it behooves us not to surrender in advance.
Polgreen: I agree with Masha that our instinct for looking for the bright side might not serve us well in the years ahead. But one thing I hope we can have a more robust debate about is the paradox of regulation in America. It certainly makes it harder to do important things like build housing and move quickly toward greener forms of energy. And the complexity also seems to somehow make us less competitive, and sometimes even less safe, as the reporting around the Boar’s Head listeria outbreak seems to make clear. The culprit is also clear: Lobbyists write most of our regulations. If the great bipartisan breakthrough in 2025 is an agreement to bring that grand tradition to a close, we’ll be better off for it.
I also think that the racial and geographic depolarization offer some real possibilities for more competitive and contested politics across the country in a post-Trump era, which can only be a good thing. People who are frustrated by blue state problems move to red states, but they miss aspects of blue state life, like higher minimum wages, more robust cultural offerings and better funded schools and social services. So they will change those states, and blue states will have to become more competitive in terms of governance, infrastructure and the like to continue attracting new arrivals.
Bouie: There seems to be a growing interest in political reform that I find heartening. There are many ways in which the American political system is out of balance, from the sheer power of the courts to the absence of meaningful representation for millions of Americans. Greater interest in solving these problems is a good thing.
Douthat: America is a rich and stable country whose economy has outperformed all our competitors since the pandemic, whose start-ups and technology companies are the envy of the world, whose politics have become less racially polarized over the course of the Trump era, and whose vast scale and diversity and complex system of government are all likely to frustrate attempts by either political coalition to establish some sort of authoritarian settlement. I think we have a great many challenges at the moment, but I don’t think it’s just an American tic to say that our best days may well be still ahead of us.
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