The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Our slide into authoritarian rule continues. Over the weekend, Elon Musk raged on Twitter that people at CBS’s 60 Minutes deserve “a long prison sentence” based on a fabricated rationale. Meanwhile, President Trump tweeted out a line saying straight out that his presidency is above the law. And Trump nominated a dangerous new pick for U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., who has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the 2020 election being stolen from him and has elevated the idea that DOJ should have no independence from the president. According to scholars of authoritarianism, these are exactly the types of things that happen when a country is sliding into authoritarian rule. Today, we’re talking to one of those scholars, Steven Levitsky, co-author of a great new piece in Foreign Affairs that takes stock of how far along this downward slide we currently are. Steve, thanks for coming on.
Steven Levitsky: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Steve, let’s first talk about this Musk tweet. “They deserve a long prison sentence,” Musk said, calling 60 Minutes liars who interfered in the last election. The charge is completely fabricated—but that aside, here’s Musk, a very senior influential advisor to the president, openly declaring that people who work there should go to jail. In your piece, you argued that state pressure on media companies not limited to prosecution is something that elected autocratic governments tend to do. Can you talk about that? How does this fall into that context?
Levitsky: The open declaration that media should be jailed, that the journalists or editors or media owners should be jailed is obviously just outright authoritarian behavior. Unfortunately, rather than be shocked by each time Trump or one of his closest allies utter something openly authoritarian, we need to take a step back and realize that the Republican Party has become an authoritarian political party.
Over the last five years, it’s evolved into a party that’s abdicated its responsibility and allowed Trump to be nominated; into one that, through various purges and pragmatic conversions, has become overwhelmingly authoritarian, a party that knowingly nominated someone who attempted to steal an election to be its nominee in 2024. This is a party that is working against democracy, and either [is] on board with authoritarianism or [is] completely willing to tolerate it.
Now, I don’t think this is going to be the major mode of operation under Trump. I doubt they’re going to be jailing many journalists or media figures. What they are going to do—what they already have done—is begin to exert various forms of economic pressure on parent companies to either bully or induce media into changing its behavior. You see ABC News’s willingness to settle a defamation suit by Trump that it definitely would have won but the economic interests of its parent company have been manipulated in ways that it is in its own interest to toe the line. Using the levers of governmental power to pressure businesses and media into conformity—that is the authoritarian behavior that we can expect to see a lot of.
Sargent: The key thing you draw out in your piece, Steve, is this concept called “competitive authoritarianism.” In this phenomenon, people get elected by democratic means then use state power across the board to make future elections less competitive. We sometimes hear this specious idea, including from mainstream reporters and commentators who really should know better, that Oh, Trump got elected legitimately, so what he’s doing now can’t be anti-democratic. It seems to me that that misses the whole point: Authoritarians can get elected, seize control of the state that way, and then use it to make the system significantly less democratic. Can you talk about this concept?
Levitsky: Sure. First of all, it is very, very naive to suggest that because somebody was popularly elected, they cannot, by definition, be authoritarian. Juan Perón in Argentina was freely elected. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela was freely elected. Bukele in El Salvador was freely elected. Erdoğan in Turkey was freely elected. That did not inhibit them from then going on to jail opponents, to exile opponents, to close down media, to engage in egregiously authoritarian behavior. In fact, most authoritarian regimes in the world today were originally elected.
Sargent: Absolutely. And we’re seeing this autocratic capture underway already. On Monday, Trump nominated Ed Martin as the U.S. attorney in Washington, as the top federal prosecutor in D.C., Martin has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the 2020 election, and he retweeted a far-right influencer who said, “Where does it say in the Constitution that the DOJ is independent from POTUS?” Steve, this nomination is a pretty clear declaration that Trump wants to eradicate DOJ independence. And that really is a bulwark against the type of capture you’re talking about. We’ve also seen federal prosecutors pressured to drop the prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams, expressly to get his cooperation with Trump’s deportations. That’s caused resignations at the department. Given what you’ve seen from other authoritarians and autocrats, what do you think Trump expects this new U.S. attorney to do?
Levitsky: Well, I think he’s been very clear. Trump has been very open, very honest since 2020 about his desire to politicize and weaponize the state. In our book, How Democracies Die, Daniel Ziblatt and I show that the first move by the vast majority of electoral authoritarian regimes—whether it’s Hugo Chávez, or Orbán in Hungary, or Modi, or Erdoğan in Turkey—is to capture the referees, to politicize the key state agencies that have either regulatory power or power of investigation and prosecution so that the state can be wielded as a political weapon to reward supporters, to buy off powerful actors, and, of course, to punish critics.
Trump has been very clear about his desire to do that. And he’s already, as you point out, begun to do it. I think the most egregious case, the most outright authoritarian case is that of Eric Adams in New York. This is case [where] a mayor of New York, elected by the people of New York, who in a democracy has to respond to the voters of New York, is now in a position via a open quid pro quo in which he is responding to the Trump administration rather than the voters of New York. Because of the weaponization of the DOJ, he has agreed to carry out policy that Trump wants in order to be cleared of charges.
Sargent: That’s a really good point. He’s putting Trump’s desires and whims and diktats over the desires of his own electorate.
Levitsky: And that’s what happens to mayors in an authoritarian regime, not a democracy.
Sargent: So Trump had this tweet in which he said the following, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” That was all in the tweet. Your response to that?
Levitsky: This is something that goes beyond what I and many of my colleagues had anticipated. We expected that the law would be manipulated and would be weaponized. That’s already happening. But to refuse to obey, to openly violate the law and potentially not to comply with judicial orders, judicial rulings saying that you’re in violation of the law—that is outside competitive authoritarianism. That’s the realm of outright dictatorship.
So far, it’s mostly been huffing and puffing on the part of Trump and JD Vance and others. We don’t know that they’re going to take that step. But if this government decides to openly violate the law and to try to circumvent the judiciary—it’s already circumventing Congress—as well, that would be frankly worse than I anticipated. And I was pretty pessimistic.
Sargent: I want to try to put that tweet in context in another way too. He’s saying he doesn’t view himself as bounded by the law because he’s supposedly saving the country. We need to look at that alongside Trump’s frequent claim that “the enemy within” is putting the country in existential danger. By the way, Trump had this angry rant over the weekend on a far-right podcaster show calling Democrats “sick” and “very bad people,” and he had another tweet just a few minutes ago promoting a book arguing that progressive authoritarians have seized control over the deep state and it will now be liberated. Take that all together, he’s clearly signaling a new level of rage and threats at this enemy within, and an aggressive effort to target it, is he not?
Levitsky: It’s new, but at the same time this is the oldest authoritarian discourse around. Authoritarians everywhere do two things. First of all, they paint their political rivals as an existential threat, as enemies, as subversives, as criminals, which justifies authoritarian behavior. If the opposition party is somehow not legitimate, if they’re enemies, if they’re an existential threat to the nation, then that justifies extraordinary behavior against them.
The other thing the authoritarians very often do, and this goes back to Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, is declare that there’s an emergency that requires going beyond the Constitution or the rule of law—that saving the country or that fending off some existential threat, in this case entirely invented, requires authoritarian behavior. Trump has been ramping up this rhetoric of an emergency and this rhetoric of the opposition as subversive or existential threat. Again, whether it’s Pinochet, Franco, Stalin, Mussolini—autocrats throughout history have engaged in precisely this rhetoric.
Sargent: I want to add here in reference to what you said earlier: Many of Trump’s allies are out there including judges in this enemy class. Judges are getting in the way of “the people’s” effort to save the country. That seems highly ominous.
Levitsky: Again, we need to see whether the administration is willing to act on these threats to circumvent the judiciary. If does, that will be a new level of authoritarianism.
Sargent: Yes. So Steve, here Trump is openly declaring that he’s above the law, and Musk is openly demanding the jailing of media figures who displease him. Is there a risk here that American voters could get overly acclimated to this kind of talk and come to accept it as normal?
Levitsky: Absolutely, there is. We’ve seen earlier precedents of this. For example, Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the results of elections was unprecedented in American politics. I don’t think there’s another individual in American politics who would have done what Trump did in rejecting the results of the elections in 2020, but that shaped public opinion to the point where a majority of Republicans no longer believed that you had to accept the results of elections.
And I fear, as you do, that this kind of rhetoric, that repetition that we don’t have to obey the law, we don’t have to comply with the judiciary, we can jail journalists is going to be ... Not to say that he’s going to be able to pull it off, but he will be able to acclimate a good chunk of the electorate, certainly a majority of Republicans, to make it part of the legitimate acceptable discourse. Very, very dangerous.
Sargent: Do you think Democrats are a little bit complicit in this as well to the degree that they fail to indict this stuff? Don’t we need an opposition out there saying what you and I are saying here, that this stuff is unacceptable, it’s outside the boundaries of democratic conduct, it’s in some cases, as you put it, outside the boundaries even of competitive authoritarianism, that it’s the stuff of dictatorship? We need that said loudly by the opposition, don’t we?
Levitsky: We do. I should say that we really need the Republicans to do it as well because even today, most Republican politicians, most Republican senators know this. And they say some variant of it; they admit to as much in private. So the Republicans who have a lot of power over what goes on in the next two years are the front line, and they’re the ones who are abdicating the most.
You’re right: Democrats responded in a very, very weak way to the 2024 election outcome. I think they were really shocked by Trump’s popular vote victory. That gave him this tremendous amount of legitimacy, and Democrats were a mix between shrugging saying, What can we do, and buying this notion that, Well, the first Trump administration wasn’t so bad, so let’s stop fretting about democracy.
They conflated defense of democracy with campaign platform. There was all this talk in the media about, Well, talking about democracy doesn’t win votes. Talking about democracy defends democracy. That’s more important than winning votes. And there are important exceptions, like Jamie Raskin has played a very important role, Elizabeth Warren, Brian Schatz recently, but we need to see Democrats realizing this is not the time for complacency, this is not the time for weakness. It’s a time for opposition.
Sargent: Saying this is another way of essentially saying that what elites telegraph to people about whether they should be alarmed matters. It is a signal, and the political science shows that. Steve, what can ordinary voters do at this point to try and resist this slide?
Levitsky: Well, ultimately, ordinary voters have to turn out and vote. Not enough small-d or large-D Democrats turned out to vote in 2024, which is why we got Trump. People have to be engaged, and they have to be engaged in person, not just online. There’s no single strategy. There’s no single organization. There’s no single movement. There’s no single cause. But it’s incredibly important that people be involved, that they speak out, whatever the issue is that they care about—and there are 200 that one could think of. People need to join organizations, attend protests, write letters to their congresspeople. The fact that Democrats, and Republicans in some case, have begun to reach out to their congresspeople, write letters, call in, attend town meetings, has begun to pull Democrats out of their lethargy, which is important. So getting involved is important.
Just to say one more thing: This idea that the resistance failed in the first time around is a total myth. It’s completely wrong. The resistance, first of all, prevented Trump from getting away with most of his most egregious abuses his first term. Second of all, and most importantly, [it] defeated Trump in the 2018 midterm elections, defeated Trump in the 2020 elections, and removed an autocratic threat from power. There’s really nothing more you could ask of a resistance than to defeat the incumbent authoritarian. So what we need is more resistance.
Sargent: A hundred percent endorse that. Steve Levitsky, thank you so much for coming on with us. Alarming stuff, but stiff medicine. We need that stiff medicine, man.
Levitsky: Thanks for having me on, Greg.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.