This is a lightly edited transcript of the July 13 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: This is the New Republic show Right Now. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. We have a great guest today. It’s Donald Moynihan. He’s a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan. Professor, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Donald Moynihan: Thanks so much for having me, Perry.
Bacon: And so Don has a great Substack that is about how we govern. I’ve forgotten the title for some reason—Can We Still Govern? is the title. I read it all the time, but I forgot. And it really gets into detail about how this Trump era, and the Trump administration, has affected... It gets into a lot of detail about how policy’s written, how it’s changed, how Trump is destroying the federal government, how we can rebuild.
It’s a really great Substack, Can We Still Govern?, that I highly recommend people read. But what I want to get into today is a post Don wrote in, I guess it’s August 28, 2025. This was early—this is about the time when Trump was sending the National Guard to Chicago and to LA, really in the height of the authoritarianism that we’ve had these last couple years.
And you wrote this piece called “The Authoritarian Checklist,” and you were arguing that we had now entered a competitive authoritarian period—that we lost democracy, and we were entering competitive authoritarianism—and you were describing the ideas that make an authoritarian administration.
And so I want to go through some of those. And what I’m going to ask you to do is rank them on a phase of one to 10, how much Trump has done these things—on a one to 10. Not because rankings are useful, but just to compare where he’s kind of been most successful in taking over and where he’s been arguably a little less successful.
And let me start by saying, this checklist you had is not some kind of—it’s not the political science authoritarian checklist. It was something you came up with yourself, right?
Moynihan: Yeah. I wasn’t drawing from another list of well-defined parameters that someone else had come up with. At the same time, I think it is a pretty standard checklist. I think if you look at authoritarian governments, they do basically the same thing. And so if you look at any textbook about authoritarianism, they might have a longer or shorter list, they might use slightly different words, but the patterns are very similar. The patterns really do look like each other across time.
The settings vary, the types of powers that authoritarians can tap into vary. But what we see with Trump—and this is part of the reason why I wrote the piece—it doesn’t look that different from what we see in Turkey today, or what we had seen in Hungary until Orbán was displaced. And this is also why I wanted to talk about competitive authoritarianism.
So it’s not like a light switch, where you’re either completely authoritarian or you’re completely democratic, but the idea that there is this sort of in-between—where you have some element of political competition, where you have some media, but at the same time the authoritarian force, the government in charge, has tilted the playing field so that it is very difficult for anyone opposing it to do so successfully.
Bacon: So let’s go through. There’s eight things you listed as elements of authoritarianism. So I want to go through, and we’ll discuss them all in order. You can give your one-to-10 ranking at the end—10 being the worst, one being the least bad, 10 being the most bad.
And first of all, control the bureaucracy.
Moynihan: Yeah. And I think this is maybe a nine out of 10 for Trump, and certainly an A+ for effort. And one of the reasons why I think they advanced so much in this space is because at the end of their first term, they really had this idea that the reason they did not succeed—and people who worked in the Trump administration were reasonably upfront in saying, We did not do what we wanted to do in the first term—is that they blamed the bureaucracy.
And so the deep state becomes a real obsession for Trump and the people working around him. And the types of people who worked in his first administration who came back to a second administration—a lot of them spent four years thinking very specifically, How can we use the legal system? How can we use executive orders? How can we push lawsuits in a way that’ll favor us, so we take control of the bureaucracy?
And so there was a lot of homework that went into this. If you look at someone like Russ Vought at OMB, this is very much his baby. And so Trump might have the broad outlines—very much supportive of the idea of making it easier to fire bureaucrats he doesn’t like—but there was an army of lieutenants who did the work of making this happen.
And I think from the start of the second Trump administration, we’ve gone from a system where you have public employees, about two million who had real civil service protections, to today, where they are de facto at-will. They can be fired for any reason, and that is not what the law says, but that’s the reality on the ground.
If you’re working in government right now and you cross paths with a political appointee, or if Laura Loomer finds some old post you did online, you can be fired, and your options for trying to retain your job are really not very good at this point. And the room for resistance within the bureaucracy at this point is pretty small.
Bacon: OK. So in other words, the bureaucracy was something of a check on them in the first term and isn’t now.
Moynihan: I think that’s true. And I think if you were someone who supports Trump, you would say they were engaged in resistance and democracy says the president gets the final say on these things, and therefore we’re within our rights. When you look at the specifics of many of the cases that are under dispute, it’s often bureaucrats saying things like, That’s not what the science says about pollution, or, The law tells us something different about how you’re supposed to use these powers.
Take a super-specific example here, where Kash Patel fired senior FBI officials because they wouldn’t fire their own FBI colleagues, because Patel wouldn’t give them a cause—and you’re supposed to have some sort of cause for firing people related to performance. And they were saying, Look, we think the law says this, and Trump officials were saying, That’s not what we want to hear, and therefore you’re going to be fired.
And so in many cases, resistance was simply people trying to draw on their expertise, or people saying, The law says this, and you’re saying something different, and so we’re going to try to follow the law here.
Bacon: Control the military.
Moynihan: I think that this is probably something more like a six or a seven.
And what we’ve heard are a lot of stories about Hegseth being incredibly active here, in a couple of dimensions. One is, early on, we heard stories about Hegseth basically rewriting military history. So if you go to government websites and you learn about military heroes, or if you go to a graveyard, or if you go to memorials, Hegseth has removed a lot of what he saw as DEI—but basically highlighting women and non-white military heroes and erasing them from military history.
That can be fixed, but that is real. Part of the way the military maintains its esteem in American society is by telling these stories, and who is included, who’s represented. That’s an important part of what they do.
The second thing is the personnel. And obviously Hegseth immediately pushed out the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We’ve seen an unprecedented degree of turnover in senior military officials, and we’ve also seen unprecedented action, with Hegseth intervening on promotion lists and seemingly specifically targeting, again, typically Black officers, female officers, or officers who were deemed woke—like they might have participated in some sort of event around LGBTQ. And so if there’s any of those measures that Hegseth doesn’t like, your opportunities to advance in the military decline quite a bit.
And the reason why I think they haven’t gone further here is, the US military is popular, right? And there’s a lot of former service members in society. It’s a big constituency. And so in some ways, politicizing that institution is harder than politicizing our civil service. And the US military is also, among the militaries across the world, one that has a very strong track record of honoring civil-military relations, protecting the Constitution.
We don’t have coups in our history in the US. And so the sort of education that senior military officers get historically has emphasized protecting democracy. Now, that education itself is also being politicized—so if you’re in West Point now, what you’re being taught in the classrooms, or who is teaching you in the classrooms, is different than it was a couple of years ago.
But I still think you haven’t seen the sort of mass change across the board in the military that you’ve seen in perhaps the civil service, where, you know, in the civil service, more than 400,000 people have left the government over the last year and a half or so.
Bacon: Control internal security to suppress. I assume internal security means police departments, DHS, ICE, et cetera. Is that what you mean by internal security?
Moynihan: Yeah. And here again, I think it’s like a seven or eight. Massive efforts by the Trump administration, but also reflecting our federalist system, there are a lot of state and local cops, right? And so it’s very hard to control all of them.
Trump has leveraged something called 287(g) agreements, where—if you go back to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, one of the features of that act is tens of billions of dollars are directed towards Homeland Security. Some of it is effectively a slush fund that you can do whatever you want with, and some of that money then goes to state and local police departments, where they’re told, If you work with us and help us on immigration, we’ll give you this money. And so they have some resources there.
And then also you look at ICE and CBP. And here, I think that is the first thing that jumps into your mind. You remember the images from Minnesota. Just last week we saw someone killed in Texas, and that’s happened over 20 times in the last year or so, where you’ve had an ICE official, typically masked, typically pointing a gun into a car, shooting at a person in that car—in five cases, killing that person—and then saying, Oh, that person was weaponizing their vehicle against me. In no case have we actually seen credible evidence that’s true, and in many cases, the evidence that pops up shows that it’s not been true.
But the point is, from a governance perspective, those officials are not being investigated by the federal government. Any investigations that result from those altercations are investigations of the victims. We don’t see a pattern where, as a result, ICE officials on the ground feel fearful that if they shoot someone, they’re going to be suspended or they are going to lose their job. And I think that is quite dangerous.
Especially—we’ve also learned about training that’s happening in ICE, because of whistleblowers who’ve come out and have told us effectively they’re telling these new recruits to ignore constitutional norms about, for example, entering someone’s house.
And so there’s an element of—there is a lot more people working in the national security state. It’s the only part of the government that’s really growing. They’re being told to do things that are not consistent with the Constitution, and then in practice, they have all sorts of protection from the federal government. And that is pretty worrying. And if you criticize ICE, if you say something nasty about ICE, there’s a possibility that they’ll come to your house, and they will have a printout, and they will say, “You can’t do this.” And that’s pretty intimidating.
If you think about the movie version of the police state, where you post something and say, I think this is bad, and then someone from the state comes to your house and says, “You can’t say this”—that’s intimidating.
Bacon: Control the legal system.
Moynihan: Again, I think this is like a nine out of 10, and this is a part where there’s been two aspects to this. One is, first of all—again, this goes back to Trump’s first term—one of the lessons is, the deep state was out to get us. The other is, we need to control the lawyers in government.
And we didn’t do this in the first term. We had general counsels who told us, “No.” We need to find lawyers who will say yes. And they have been quite successful in that. And I think part of what Stephen Miller was doing between 2020 and 2024 was looking for lawyers who would always say yes to them.
Bacon: Let me stop you a second, because when I asked this one, I thought you were going to say something lower—because if you look at the Supreme Court, it has been fairly pro-Trump. The lower courts have not been. So when you mean legal system, you mean government lawyers internally, or do you mean law as a whole? Because I think that might be worth distinguishing between.
Moynihan: I think it’s both, right? I think the operation of the legal system is the use of governmental power in how the law is constructed, and that includes the Department of Justice. It includes which cases the FBI chooses to investigate. It also then includes how the courts adjudicate those cases.
And so I think within the government, the Department of Justice has been captured, the FBI has been captured. The traditional norm that there was a separation between the legal parts of government and the president, which we had post-Watergate—that is completely gone now.
Bacon: They prosecute the president’s enemies and exonerate his friends all the time.
Moynihan: Yeah. Our first attorney general was the president’s personal defense lawyer. The person who was nominated to be our second attorney general was the president’s personal defense lawyer. And their incentives and actions are very much consistent with that.
And even people who are not lawyers—you take someone like Bill Pulte, who is now our acting head of the intelligence services—he’s getting in on that game, where he sees political rewards for using government resources to target the president’s enemies. And that is very worrying.
So then you get to the court system, where I think you’re right—the lower courts have actually been quite good at saying, This is unprecedented. A lot of what’s happening here violates the law. And that has been working pretty well, until you get to the Supreme Court. And I think if you want to hold some actor other than Trump responsible for the moment that we’re in, it is the Supreme Court.
They are the group that has the standing, they have the role, they have the authority to say, This administration is violating the Constitution, it’s violating the law. And again, they haven’t done that. And in fact, they’ve done the opposite. They’ve bought into Trump’s legal theories.
Bacon: Yeah. OK, so that was the legal system. So everything’s been high. Control civil society—and I, if everything’s high for a reason, that’s where we are, I think. But control civil society, particularly businesses.
Moynihan: I think a year ago, I would’ve said this is maybe a seven, and now it’s more like a five.
And so one of the things that has happened here is that Trump immediately starts coercing, say, law firms, universities, the media. And a lot of, for example, white-shoe law firms signed agreements with the administration as a result of executive orders, saying that they would effectively stop doing pro bono work to support the president’s opponents and instead would support the president’s supporters. And that seemed astonishing to a lot of us—that law firms, who presumably should be the ones capable of defending themselves, would fold so easily.
There are examples, however, where when these claims, or claims against universities, have been tested in courts, the administration has not succeeded. But I think what the administration has done with universities, for example, is exploit the fact that—I’m in my university office today.
We are very dependent on federal funding, and if you remove all of that funding without any sort of due process and just say, We’re just going to stop it completely, then that puts our organizations in a really bad financial place. And Trump has exploited that in a way that no president has ever done before.
And conservatives will say, What about when Obama weaponized Title IX to target people for sexual assault on campus? You could argue that’s a precedent, but there was never a case where Obama was saying, All of the federal funding going to your institution is now under threat. There were much lesser penalties.
And so, working in higher education, it is certainly a much more chilled environment, where it’s harder to talk about—you can’t really talk about DEI any longer. You are much more concerned about federal investigations.
The other part of civil society I think about a lot is the media. And here, I think—
Bacon: Let me stop you, because you actually wrote in your essay—civil society, businesses, one; higher education and media, you separated those. Let’s go individually a little bit. So in terms of businesses, let’s focus on that one first, because I think civil society, businesses, is an important one.
Has the threat to businesses gone down, up? It felt like in the first term—I guess right now, whether we’re going through these mergers right now, where it seems to me if you want to have your company merge, you are sucking up to Trump. CNN anchors, I’m sure, are very worried about where they are right now. So in terms of controlling businesses, where are we on a one to 10?
Moynihan: Yeah. You’re right. And in some ways, it is hard to separate these, because the media is a business.
Bacon: The media is a business. That’s a good way to put it. Yes, that’s true.
Moynihan: And if you look at, for example, relative to the start of the administration, you have the Ellison family one of the president’s big supporters, now controlling CBS News, bringing in Bari Weiss, now also trying to take control of CNN—and relying very much on the president’s support to do these things.
With the expectation—and Trump is nothing if not honest about the transactional nature of his presidency—with the expectation that they will tamp down on criticism of Trump. And we’ve seen flashpoints like 60 Minutes, I think, reflecting some of those tensions. Much of the time, those tensions will just happen at a level where we don’t see them.
We’ll see people being fired or leaving organizations in a way that’s going to be less dramatic. But right now, a lot more of the media is owned by people who are sympathetic to the president.
Also, look at the Washington Post, which is a shadow of what it used to be, I think, in terms of the quality of the reporting there. But the editorial page is now somewhere to the right of the Wall Street Journal. And this is purely the function of the billionaire owner of the Post, Jeff Bezos, deciding that he is going to realign his political priorities. And looking beyond the traditional media, you look at the Ellison family having a stake in TikTok. You look at how Meta has realigned itself to be more supportive of Trump under Zuckerberg.
So it’s not just the traditional media that has been captured, it’s also elements of social media as well, where Trump has a stronger sense of control over those outlets.
Bacon: So let’s put a bucket of civil society where we say businesses, media, higher ed. I think that gets into your answer some. So you’d say it was a seven and is now a five. So talk about, what’s the good news there? Why has it gone from a seven to a five?
Moynihan: I think the good news is there are court cases where Trump has lost, and I think especially in higher education, some of the institutions that pushed back were successful in court. I think the bad news is there is more just silent acquiescence to Trump’s policies.
And certainly in business and media, the sort of vibe shift has been where CEOs have decided, It’s a better deal for me to give money to the president, or make sure I appoint people in my media businesses that are not going to offend the president, so I continue to do business the way I want to. And that feels very much like the sort of deal that Putin offered the oligarchs. Make sure you’re with me and you’ll be allowed to do your business, but if you cross me, I will go after you.
Bacon: Let me interrupt you to say this. Part of this civil society—civil society in America, the businesses, media, was probably a little less supportive of DEI and other things than it portrayed itself in 2020, right? So some of this is probably these institutions moving back to their norms. Some of this is moving toward Trump.
Some of this might be just—working in corporate America, working in a news institution, I could tell some of these, there were over-the-top displays of, We love diversity. We must hire more women. We must... I think some of that was in the university, in media context. Some of this stuff was, like, adjusting to—people were making decisions maybe they didn’t necessarily agree with, to comply with a vibe shift in 2020 that was pro-diversity. Now they’re moving back to a vibe shift that is anti-diversity. But either way, this is not just Trump, right?
Moynihan: Yeah, I think so. And I know people who work in corporate America, or people who work in government and sitting at a university—there certainly was a sense that some of this felt performative. And it felt like this was a great business opportunity for people who do training in DEI, but not necessarily for the people that they’re claiming to help. That it’s not solving underlying problems.
And then if you were in those trainings and you find them condescending and irritating, that makes you less supportive of the idea of fixing underlying problems. You see how this is how the institution is dealing with it. And so I think Trump has been expert in exploiting that frustration, but going much deeper, right? And so we’re far past the point of removing DEI in the federal government. We’re now at the point of removing civil rights. Like that—
Bacon: We’re firing the generals because you’re Black, functionally, is like what’s happening now. Yeah.
Moynihan: Or dismantling the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice and replacing those spots with people who fundamentally disagree with the notion of civil rights as a race-based phenomena, except for white people who’ve been discriminated against. And so it went from, We’re going to get rid of the excesses of George Floyd, to, actually, We’re going to get rid of the excesses of the Martin Luther King era.
Bacon: That was interesting. That’s a way to put it. OK, I like it put that way. That’s helpful.
Moynihan: And I would have arguments with colleagues in the hallways of my institution, where they might say, “I think things have gone too far.” And I would always say, “Maybe, but as long as we have autonomy to make those decisions, we can correct them ourselves.” We will have an internal conversation where people say, “We need to do this.” People will push back, and we’ll come to some equilibrium eventually where people are reasonably happy with that. Institutions will solve their own conflicts.
It’s very different from having the federal government say, “No, we are going to be the ones who will solve your institutional conflicts, and we’re going to be the ones who dictate the language you can use in your classroom or in your boardroom.” And that’s where we are right now. There’s a much more intrusive federal government project than we had in this previous era.
Bacon: And the final one you listed was control elections. I’m really curious what you’re going to say about this one.
Moynihan: So I think this is—when I wrote the piece last year, I said, “Look, this is the part where there are some structural differences in America relative to Hungary or Turkey.” The federal government does not control elections, right?
Bacon: Or at least doesn’t right now.
Moynihan: Doesn’t right now, but according to the Constitution these are state functions. And that makes it much more difficult for any president to say, I’m going to start messing around with the elections. And the reason that was the last item on the list is, that was the area where Trump had made the least progress, because of those structural factors—but it was also then the area where he had the most reason to pursue that domain, right? To try and make progress.
And so what we are seeing is Trump is investing effort here. But I don’t think to the point where he’s overcoming his structural disadvantages, where the states still control things. And I’ll give you some specific examples here. So he fired a part of the Department of Homeland Security that investigated cyber threats to elections. These were the people who said, “Look, the 2020 election was not fraudulent.” Those people are gone from government.
He’s written executive orders about mail-in voting, asserting a federal power that he doesn’t actually have. He is still trying to pass the SAVE Act even months before the midterm elections, which would be a massive federal intrusion into elections, and also practically unimplementable at this point. If you’re talking to a local election official, this will completely break the election system. Last week he fired the federal heads of the Election Assistance Commission. So he’s doing what he can. He’s launching investigations into previous elections.
Bacon: Particularly in Georgia. They’re raiding offices in Georgia. Yeah.
Moynihan: And if you’re a local election official—and this is one of the things that I think people don’t understand about elections—we depend upon this army of local election officials who are not terribly well-paid, who are mostly doing it as a civic duty. And in the last few years, a lot of those people have been leaving their jobs. A lot of those people have been facing threats and intimidation.
Once that army disappears, it’s not obvious what will replace it. And I do worry that just the culture of intimidation and threat that Trump is creating will lead a lot of people to say, This is not for me. But up to now, the structural barriers remain.
And so maybe Trump will do more—maybe he will send national guards to election sites, maybe he will ramp up more intimidation—but up to now, he does not control how people vote. And this does make the midterms all the more important. And so here again—
Bacon: So it’s like a two, but—
Moynihan: I would say last year, maybe it’s a two out of 10, and now maybe it’s a three or four out of 10.
Bacon: OK, so it’s lower. But—
Moynihan: But still, yeah, he does not have a button he can press that fundamentally changes the nature of our election experience in America.
Bacon: So just to summarize: in terms of controlling bureaucracy, military, internal security, legal system, you feel like there’s a lot of progress he’s made, unfortunately. Civil society, you feel like there’s a mix. In elections, he’s been pretty weakened. So is that a good summary?
Moynihan: Yeah. I think that’s fair.
Bacon: And I guess you wrote a piece, I think it was last July, where you argued America had become, instead of a full-fledged democracy—America had moved from democracy to competitive authoritarianism. Is that still how you feel?
Moynihan: Yeah. No, I think so. I think you ask yourself, Do you want to live in a country where masked federal officials can shoot citizens or non-citizens as they go about their business and never feel consequences? Do you want to live in a country where they can come to your door if you complain about this? Or do you want to live in a country where the president’s enemies are targeted by the justice system? Do you want to live in a country where we see massive corruption that is being ignored by the justice system?
And mostly, I think we would say no, right? But none of these are unfair descriptions of what is happening in America today. And those characteristics are not consistent with a functioning democracy that is holding its politicians accountable, that is holding the agents of the state accountable to the people.
Bacon: I’ll finish by talking about the role you’re playing yourself. You are an academic—you could just probably teach your classes and go home—but instead, you’ve written a ton of great Substack posts. You’re writing for the Times, you’re writing for The Atlantic, you’re doing interviews like this. Because we’re in this moment where the academy, universities, are being attacked, the president is saying, The problem with universities is they are too liberal. They are against the state. They are against me, and therefore they are biased. His supporters are saying that.
To some extent, I worry that particularly some of the boards at universities, the board members of universities themselves, are saying some of these same things—that academia is too anti-Donald Trump, too anti-right. Talk about what you’re doing and why this charge is wrong.
Moynihan: It’s a great question. And again, if you look at the pattern of authoritarianism, it’s not a coincidence that the first places authoritarians want to exert control includes universities, because historically, universities are always a source of dissent and disagreement.
Bacon: And authority, probably, too, in a certain way. Authority as in academic authority, wisdom, their prestige—I’m trying to think of words. People respect what you all think, in a certain sense.
Moynihan: In theory—we’re not always right, but we specialize in having knowledge about key topics, and in general, we’re rewarded for not just acquiring that knowledge, but using it in a non-ideological way, in a way that’s different from if I worked for the Democratic Party or if I worked for a liberal-leaning think tank.
We do have some career incentives that align us towards independence. And I understand that the grand narrative is that that is not true, and that liberals have infested the academic framework. But generally, when I try to publish research, if it’s shoddy, it doesn’t get published.
And so the integrity of how I think about analysis is really important for my career, and that then gives us a certain amount of authority, maybe, to talk about things. And it’s important that we use that authority well, and we stay within our lane of expertise.
And so for me, for the last few years—you ask yourself, if you were living in some other period of history, like Germany in the 1930s, or Eastern Europe in the 1950s or ‘60s, or America in the 1960s, and you say, What would I have been doing in that time period? The answer is, whatever you’re doing today.
And if I study government—most of my career, the study of public administration, I promise you, was incredibly dull. Very few people were interested in civil service laws, right? And suddenly it’s very relevant.
And if you’ve spent—like, I got my PhD in 2002—you spent like a quarter of your life or half of your life working on this topic, and suddenly it’s relevant, you have some obligation to bring that knowledge to the table. And I also think there are degrees to which I’m advantaged here.
So I’m a full professor, I have tenure, I’m at a very good university where generally our university has not penalized people for being critical of the government. I don’t work at a university in Florida or Texas where plausibly I could be fired for saying the things I’m saying. And this is why these structural factors do matter. And some of these are structural factors at the state level—where you have co-partisans of President Trump helping him in his project of limiting dissent by removing structural protections to people working in universities, making it easier to fire them for speech that is critical of the government. And I think in the long run, that’s very bad for our society.
Academics can be very annoying, I’ll be the first to acknowledge, but it’s better that you have some contrary people in the corner who have a little bit of independence to say, “Hey, historically, when you’ve done the things that we’re seeing now, it has not worked out well for society,” and bring that knowledge to the table. And I think we have an obligation to do that. And I also think we’re more likely to do so when we are protected.
Bacon: Good place to end on. Donald Moynihan, professor at University of Michigan. Can We Still Govern? is his Substack, which I highly recommend. Don, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.
Moynihan: My pleasure. Thank you, Perry.
Bacon: Good to see you. Bye-bye.
