Transcript: Why So Many of Trump’s Authoritarian Moves Have Failed

Source: The New Republic · Bias: Left

Summary

This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 11 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, host of the New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Thomas Zimmer. He’s a historian, he grew up in Germany. He spent some time in the States a few years ago—we got to know each other—he’s back in Germany now. He’s a really great historian and has done a really great job writing about this period of American Trumpism and this question of democracy. But he asks it in a much smarter way, which is: We’re not always debating democracy as such, we’re really debating how much democracy, and for whom. That’s a phrase he’s used a lot, and I’ve borrowed it from him. Thomas, welcome.Thomas Zimmer: Thank you so much for having me—and again, apologies for keeping people waiting.Bacon: That’s all right. So what we’re going to do today is talk about the democracy-versus-authoritarianism question, but I want to talk through it historically, because you’re a historian. I want to go through this first year of Trump, look at some of the things that have happened, and think about them in this democracy context.So much has happened—so much bad has happened, is what I would say—and I want to think through some of it. I want to start at the beginning and ask [about] DOGE and this general layoff of federal workers, the destruction of USAID. What did you think about that at the time, and ... I’m sure you thought it was bad at the time, but is there anything different about it now? Zimmer: Yeah, DOGE, that started immediately. And the first two to three months after Trump took power is when I was generally speaking the most concerned, the most alarmed, the least optimistic about the fate of the republic. Three things stood out to me.One is the speed and the scope of the DOGE destruction. It was so aggressive—a historically completely unprecedented level of self-sabotage. No country has ever done that to itself.Bacon: No country has laid off its federal workforce in this way, you mean?Zimmer: No country has ever just deliberately, for absolutely no external reason whatsoever, gone on this kind of rampage to completely destroy its own state capacity. Because that’s basically what’s happening—completely unprecedented destruction of state capacity. I think the consequences of that will be felt in the United States for decades. For decades, really.The second thing that stood out to me: It was not just Elon Musk and the DOGE boys—it was also Stephen Miller, it was also Russell Vought. All of these different MAGA factions, basically a feeding frenzy from all the different corners of MAGA world, all unleashed at the same time. Go destroy the system. It was a complete unleashing of the destructive energies of MAGA, which I don’t think necessarily had any cohesiveness to it, but it added up to this vast destruction.At the same time, we didn’t see any kind of systematic pushback—at least not from America’s civic institutions or America’s civic elites. There were protests from the ground up, but on the civic-institutional level, there was this pervasive tendency to acquiesce and align with the regime. That all happened within the first eight to 12 weeks or so.So by the end of March, early April 2025, I was thinking: Wow, they seem to be actually succeeding with this strategy. They had this strategy going in: We’re going to go quick ... we’re going to overwhelm the system quickly. For those first two or three months, it looked like they would actually succeed. But if you ask me today, I’m feeling less pessimistic. I think this initial strategy of overwhelming the system and overwhelming any resistance has largely failed. The societal resistance has hardened. We’ve seen a significant counter-mobilization from American society, and now, in terms of how close they got to actually consolidating authoritarian rule across all spheres of American life, they’re further away from that than now they were after those first 10 to 12 weeks.Bacon: Let me follow up to ask: One thing that happened immediately was that Elon Musk was very involved in the government for about two months and then walked away. Was that because of the protests, or was it because he got bored? What’s your sense of how that happened?Zimmer: I think what happened is that: If you look at the different factions of the MAGA coalition—Trump is basically a representative of this tech feudalism, these weird tech-feudalism that they want to install. And then you have the Christian nationalists, you have the America First nativists. If you really think through what kind of America they are envisioning, they’re not all envisioning the same thing.

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Transcript: Why So Many of Trump’s Authoritarian Moves Have Failed
The New Republic

Transcript: Why So Many of Trump’s Authoritarian Moves Have Failed

Left

This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 11 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, host of the New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Thomas Zimmer. He’s a historian, he grew up in Germany. He spent some time in the States a few years ago—we got to know each other—he’s back in Germany now. He’s a really great historian and has done a really great job writing about this period of American Trumpism and this question of democracy. But he asks it in a much smarter way, which is: We’re not always debating democracy as such, we’re really debating how much democracy, and for whom. That’s a phrase he’s used a lot, and I’ve borrowed it from him. Thomas, welcome.Thomas Zimmer: Thank you so much for having me—and again, apologies for keeping people waiting.Bacon: That’s all right. So what we’re going to do today is talk about the democracy-versus-authoritarianism question, but I want to talk through it historically, because you’re a historian. I want to go through this first year of Trump, look at some of the things that have happened, and think about them in this democracy context.So much has happened—so much bad has happened, is what I would say—and I want to think through some of it. I want to start at the beginning and ask [about] DOGE and this general layoff of federal workers, the destruction of USAID. What did you think about that at the time, and ... I’m sure you thought it was bad at the time, but is there anything different about it now? Zimmer: Yeah, DOGE, that started immediately. And the first two to three months after Trump took power is when I was generally speaking the most concerned, the most alarmed, the least optimistic about the fate of the republic. Three things stood out to me.One is the speed and the scope of the DOGE destruction. It was so aggressive—a historically completely unprecedented level of self-sabotage. No country has ever done that to itself.Bacon: No country has laid off its federal workforce in this way, you mean?Zimmer: No country has ever just deliberately, for absolutely no external reason whatsoever, gone on this kind of rampage to completely destroy its own state capacity. Because that’s basically what’s happening—completely unprecedented destruction of state capacity. I think the consequences of that will be felt in the United States for decades. For decades, really.The second thing that stood out to me: It was not just Elon Musk and the DOGE boys—it was also Stephen Miller, it was also Russell Vought. All of these different MAGA factions, basically a feeding frenzy from all the different corners of MAGA world, all unleashed at the same time. Go destroy the system. It was a complete unleashing of the destructive energies of MAGA, which I don’t think necessarily had any cohesiveness to it, but it added up to this vast destruction.At the same time, we didn’t see any kind of systematic pushback—at least not from America’s civic institutions or America’s civic elites. There were protests from the ground up, but on the civic-institutional level, there was this pervasive tendency to acquiesce and align with the regime. That all happened within the first eight to 12 weeks or so.So by the end of March, early April 2025, I was thinking: Wow, they seem to be actually succeeding with this strategy. They had this strategy going in: We’re going to go quick ... we’re going to overwhelm the system quickly. For those first two or three months, it looked like they would actually succeed. But if you ask me today, I’m feeling less pessimistic. I think this initial strategy of overwhelming the system and overwhelming any resistance has largely failed. The societal resistance has hardened. We’ve seen a significant counter-mobilization from American society, and now, in terms of how close they got to actually consolidating authoritarian rule across all spheres of American life, they’re further away from that than now they were after those first 10 to 12 weeks.Bacon: Let me follow up to ask: One thing that happened immediately was that Elon Musk was very involved in the government for about two months and then walked away. Was that because of the protests, or was it because he got bored? What’s your sense of how that happened?Zimmer: I think what happened is that: If you look at the different factions of the MAGA coalition—Trump is basically a representative of this tech feudalism, these weird tech-feudalism that they want to install. And then you have the Christian nationalists, you have the America First nativists. If you really think through what kind of America they are envisioning, they’re not all envisioning the same thing.

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