Donald Trump has openly admired authoritarians around the world. Now he’s pledging to rule like one. An examination of the promises, powers and plans of a second Trump presidency.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally Sunday, Dec. 17, 2023, in Reno, Nev. The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday, Dec. 19, declared Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.
Our guests today have compiled, in detail, Donald Trump's statements, promises, and plans of his supporters in packs and think tanks. And they've put their findings together in a new publication called The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025, how an authoritarian president will dismantle our democracy and what we can do to protect it.
What we do come to our work with is deep expertise that we've gathered from experts in a variety of fields from democracy, democratic decline, authoritarianism. In fact, that's how we started our organization. Our founders and our initial staff met with experts to understand, and this was in 2016, shortly after Donald Trump was first elected, but to understand the ways in which our country is vulnerable and what authoritarianism looks like.
CHAKRABARTI: Actually, why don't you do this instead? What has changed since 2016? Because regular listeners here will know that we've talked a lot about authoritarianism. The Overton window on what's acceptable has changed. There's also, though, these other guardrails that are not going to be as effective in a second Trump administration. And by that, I'm talking about the courts and Congress, both of which are supposed to be co-equal branches of government that can serve to constrain the executive.
You start off the report with this, which is one difference that you argue is, it is time to take Trump both literally and seriously, which is quite different from 2015. I'll say, in the first campaign he ran. So let's actually listen back to that time. Seems like an age ago, but it was not in fact. CHAKRABARTI: So that's Peter Thiel in October of 2016, and when he was mentioning, quote, the Muslim comment, here's what he was talking about, something Donald Trump said in December of 2015.
The things he says, it's a joke or he has unique expressions, things like that. What's different now that you say we have to take him both seriously and literally? So there has developed sort of an infrastructure, an ecosystem of individuals and organizations who are very explicitly making plans for a future Trump administration. So to the extent that inexperience was a guardrail the first time around, we don't have that anymore.
And corruption, it is. First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. And what this would mean is that instead of having people hired based on their merit and expertise and experience in serving the public, people would be hired based on their loyalty to the Trump agenda, and in fact, the Heritage Foundation is running a kind of personnel recruitment effort right now where the chief criteria for being put in the mix for a potential appointment in a second Trump administration is your political ideology and commitment to the Trump agenda.
These are not people who have an agenda. They're committed to the law. They're committed to data and science, not to any political ideology. The biggest interrogation is around your adherence to goals Trump has and how you would classify your own political ideology. What's happening here is something somewhat different. It's not just about the scale of replacing employees, but it's about the focus, not just on ideology, but on personal sort of loyalty to the president. And if you read, the full project 2025 book. You see a constant emphasis on the power of the president as an individual and the desire to have more ability in that one person in his immediate office to control things.
Ron DeSantis has said that, for example. This is more than just one man, right? In a sense, this is a political ideology that's spread beyond Donald Trump himself. CHAKRABARTI: I want to get to another example here, but can you talk to me a little bit about how Trump conflates the de facto pardon that he would give these folks with that being a fair treatment in the judicial system?
WOODWARD: That's exactly right. And we see it not just in the pardon power, but throughout all of the plans for 2025 to really undermine trust in government and its independence. And to take away any sort of ruling or check that we would view as appropriate and essential in our democracy has to be coming from a corrupt place that cannot be trusted. And is its own sort of inverted weaponization of government against Donald Trump and his supporters.
NADEAU: It is. And it's a cross cutting part of our report. But in particular, what Donald Trump, I think, and that clip is referring to is the Department of Justice.NADEAU: Which is a particular fascination of his. And I think that's partly because of his own circumstances and partly because of the power of the Department of Justice and the power of investigation and prosecution by the government.
They see those investigations as de facto political. And not based on the rule of law, but as political investigations. Similarly, Democrats or folks on the left look at things happening in Congress and would say the Republicans impeaching Alexander Mayorkas is a de facto political thing. And so I think there's maybe not as much understanding of the fact that like prosecutorial independence at the DOJ has actually been the norm since the late '70s and something that presidents of both parties have strived, regardless of their political persuasion to uphold and maintain this careful distance to avoid any appearance of impropriety or political motivation, behind investigations and prosecutions.
But of course, it has that appearance to some folks. But there are objective things that you can look at when you're sorting through competing claims of the government being weaponized. And we have a report from last year called Investigating and Prosecuting Political Leaders in a Democracy which is a thing that healthy democracies do, as funny as it may feel sometimes.
So the seeds were sown early on for the vast expansion of executive power in particular that we're anticipating to see in a second Trump administration. And so you're right, in lieu of a violent coup, what we're seeing is the introduction of the deep politicization of personnel. Or the weaponization of law enforcement, or in particular, the introduction of even the domestic deployment of troops on U.S.
TRUMP: When they let, I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country, when they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They're poisoning the blood of our country.CHAKRABARTI: That language, first and foremost poisoning the blood of the country that has very dark history, the implications of poisoning of blood. But tell me why you think it's indicative of authoritarianism, that language.Scapegoat certain communities, pit people against each other.
And yes, he is promising wide scale immigration activities that will require, I think, for implementation as they've confessed, relying on the military. And really, as I mentioned before, it has a lot to do with flexing the law enforcement muscle and doing that, not just at the border itself, but more broadly in the country.
He wants to use non emergency situations like protests in opposition to his policies or protests on Inauguration Day as a pretext to deploy the federal armed forces in this extraordinary way that could truly disrupt civil military relations and put people in increased opportunity for escalation of violence.
Bill Barr and others pushed back against this at the time and instead found a creative, and we might say, legally dubious work around to basically solicit the forces of national guards and neighboring, mostly Republican states, to deploy to D.C. to put down the protests in Lafayette Square.
It's very unusual, but it's legal. This gets me to the issue of, in a sense, the United States, we've been maybe lucky for 220 years that we haven't been confronted with this situation before, because is our body of law regarding the limits of executive power robust enough to stop a president from becoming an authoritarian autocrat.
It's important to to win the battle of conventional wisdom, right? To establish for the public and others what's normal and what's not, what's in line with the spirit and the intent of the law and what's not. And that can be itself a guardrail on behavior. It's much harder for Trump to engage in certain extreme behaviors.
But Berman, in talking to a lot of Democratic sources, he says the question is, will the Supreme Court be clear in its ruling, whatever it is. And if it's not perfectly clear, that Trump is either 100% eligible or not, here's what Berman's reporting says. He says, quote, In interviews, senior House Democrats would not commit to certifying a Trump win, saying they would only do, they would commit to certifying the win, if the Supreme Court affirms his eligibility.
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