Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Kim Scheppele: Nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Scheppele: Well, my worry about events like this is that we know that the United States has a problem with right-wing violence. And it’s not surprising that this person was described by his roommate as someone who was a very strong Trump supporter. In fact, there was a lot of violence over the weekend that looked like it was attributable to people on Trump’s side of the fence. And that’s in general been, I think, the assessment of the Department of Justice until Trump became president and redirected the priorities of the Department of Justice. So now they’ve basically abolished the unit that was tracking right-wing terrorism. Trump has pardoned the January 6 defendants, and he’s made it known that anyone who commits violence in his name can expect a presidential pardon. So it’s not surprising that this is interpreted by his followers as permission to do the kinds of things they do up to and including horrific things like this.
Scheppele: I think it’s important to note that Trump essentially gives permission over and over again to people, to his followers, to the Proud Boys. By the way, the Proud Boys showed up at some of these peaceful protests trying to stoke some anger from the protesters. Fortunately, they didn’t take the bait. But all of these militias that he told to stand back and stand by in his first term are still out there; now they’re out there and pardoned, and they are all waiting for his commands. I study authoritarianism in other parts of the world, and this is something that I’ve seen altogether too often in other places, which is that the leader gives permission in a sense for private actors to go in and bang heads and commit violence. And then what the leader does is pull back the police from policing his own side while he may unleash the police to go after the other side if they show signs of protest. That’s exactly the pattern that we’re seeing here.
Scheppele: Yeah. There may be some violence on the left—and I agree it should be condemned—but that is dwarfed by the amount of violence that we see coming from the right. The right is organized in militias. The right is much more heavily armed. The right is the only one that has tried to actually overturn the results of a free and fair election. And you see over and over again when you find out who these people are that are committing crimes that they really are allied with this whole network of violent groups that have supported Trump and that Trump dog-whistles to them absolutely all the time.
Sargent: No question about it. Let’s talk about this rant on Truth Social that Trump unleashed. He said, “We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to ... cheat in Elections.... These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind.” Kim, what he’s really doing here is telling his supporters that blue America is made up of enemy zones, which must be pacified with overwhelming force. I don’t think it’s a small thing that he did this right after this horrible assassination. It’s almost akin to a call for more targeting of Democrats and liberals. What’s your reading of this timing here?
He never takes back exactly what he says, but by giving this exhortation to ICE to go after everybody without the exceptions that he just announced, he’s in many ways caving in back to the supporters who must have given him hell for actually reneging on his promise to deport everybody. So I think it has these two different functions. It’s Trump again chickening out on what it was he said is a more modest policy about workplace raids over the weekend.
Scheppele: Yes.
Scheppele: Right. And he names the cities in case they were in doubt about which ones they were.
Scheppele: Yeah, no, I think you’re right that he’s redirecting the efforts to blue states. Now this also has some other effects, which is to say—this was after these massive protests over the weekend—he’s still trying to scare people. He’s trying to scare anyone who looks like they might be stopped by ICE, whether they have papers or not. He’s trying to suppress opposition in exactly the places where opposition is going to come from. And he’s also alerted ICE to reprioritize its raids in exactly the places which are [not only] going to be politically most unfriendly to ICE but also most unfriendly to Trump, right? So it is siccing the dogs on his enemies, so to speak, and I do think that’s a big chunk of what he was doing here.
Sargent: Yes, and spare his friends from the direct detrimental impact of his own policies. There are a lot of undocumented immigrants in places like Florida and Texas, and, as you point out, they’re concentrated in industries that are Republican-friendly a lot of the time. I want to go to your piece. You had this great piece where you connected a bunch of these dots: the assassination of Democrats; the hypermilitarization of blue areas; as you mentioned, the sending in of troops to Los Angeles; and of course, Trump’s military parade this weekend, which was clearly supposed to send the same message. As you described all of this as a hallmark of the slide into authoritarianism. You said that we’re in transition, and that we’re in a “danger zone” for civil violence. How far along on this transition are we?
So I wanted to point out that we’re in that danger zone because we’re literally moving quite quickly from not a perfect democracy but a relatively well-functioning democracy into something that looks much more like an authoritarian government. And it’s in that zone when you’re going from one to the other that civil violence tends to become the most extreme. This weekend just figured lots of symbols of violence all at once. And that’s why I thought, Here we are, we’re literally in the middle of this transition—and you know where we started so that tells you what we’re transitioning to.
Scheppele: Yeah. So I think the split screen is not the right way to frame it, with all due respect. I think what happened was that Trump knew those protests were coming, and he was doing everything he could to override it with something else. Which is to say that what he wants is for the protest to vanish from the headlines as quickly as possible. And he’ll do that by having another rant on Truth Social. I don’t think he set up this assassin to do these horrible things—and [that] Trump is the mob boss who never has his fingers on anything—but certainly, I think, there was a run-up to these protests. In which—between the military parade, between the call out of troops to Los Angeles, and all of this—what he’s trying to do is to steal the headlines back from the peaceful protest so that they’re not actually visible for very long. And so I don’t think he wants a split screen. I think he wants to be the only screen. And if somebody else is grabbing attention, he’s got to override it with something else.
Scheppele: Yeah. Well, I think popular mobilizations become absolutely crucial once the crucial institutions get entrenched and get attacked. Already we have a Supreme Court that’s singing from Trump’s song sheet on the unitary executive theory and the unlimited expansion of executive power. That’s my fear. We’ve seen the lower courts really hold the line—but when these cases go up to the Supreme Court on questions of executive power, so far the Supreme Court has always given in to these executive power claims. So that means we’re far along toward entrenchment of Trump in office for a very long time. So once you lose the institutions, then popular mobilization is the main device that you’ve got. You’ve got to make people realize they’re not alone in thinking that this government is not one that they should be willing to put up with. And that’s why going to the streets is so crucial.
I think people need to organize wherever they are—state and local governments, if you’ve got good local governments. Even some red states are starting to realize they’re losing out with a lot of Trump policies. So we just have to keep pushing publicly because we cannot count on the institutions to save us anymore. And even so, it’s a long way back once you have a captured high court. I know this from my work in Hungary and in Poland and Russia. Once those high courts go, then you really have a big struggle ahead. But there isn’t any other way out of this except through it to the other side.
Scheppele: Yeah. I think one of the things that we have to do is to rethink exactly what the values are that we stand for as a country and to think about how we mobilize reforms when we get the chance. That will actually not just go back to the way we were, which was obviously unsatisfactory for way too many people, but to think about how to move ahead and actually change things. The biggest challenge when you try to overcome autocratic entrenchment, when you’ve already lost some of the institutions, is to figure out how to remake those institutions. Because otherwise, the Supreme Court will go on voting down everything that any new government could do, for example—which they already did quite a lot of under Biden after Trump got to put three judges on the court, if you remember. So we have to think about some creative ways to remake these institutions.
I have some ideas about how to do that—I’ve worked on this in multiple countries—but this really has to be a collective conversation. This can’t be something where one expert comes in and says, Here’s the right answer. This has got to be something we arrive at together, and so far we have not had that conversation as a democratic country.
Scheppele: Well, thank you. Sorry for this depressing news, but it’s good that we’re all in this together.
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