Breaking News from Pod Save America - How Trump Normalized the Authoritarian American Presidency

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

Trump spent the past year checking every box of textbook authoritarianism. From corruption and power grabs to silencing critics. Ben Rhodes and Pod Save the World producer Alyona Minkovski break down how it happened in plain sight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everyone. I'm Alona Minkowski. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, good to see you. Good to see you in the chair. In the chair. It's been a long year. What we're doing today in this video is we are looking back at the first year of Trump in our authoritarian watch framing and kind of like the worst, least to worst things that have happened, which feels like a very weird way. Well, not least because if you made this list, I mean, there are many things that could have been on the list. So you've already cleared the bar, but essentially of like, what is the authoritarian playbook that we've seen deployed in many countries around the world that we are experiencing here in this country and how do we think about some of the worst things yeah with all of these news

events that are horrific you can sometimes miss like the forests or the patterns right yeah you can sometimes not be able to step back and think at what are the broader issues at play and so you and i made this list and oddly enough i'd say our least worst right i don't like the four that we came off list, yeah, was the normalized corruption that we now see on display. I'm going to list just a couple of things here and then you please, please go on, you know, and add to them. But we also, I mean, we obviously have the multiple cryptocurrencies. Yeah. You know, that Trump and his family have, which end up being just like a direct path to the Trump administration. accepting a $400 million plane from Qatar. At least. There are a bunch of pardons that just don't seem to add up, right? Like the former president of Honduras, one Orlando Hernandez, if we're actually going after drug traffickers.

There are political. Yeah, political people, the finance guy. Former Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of like literally trying to sell a Senate seat. People, multiple people who were donors. to Trump. And then on the flip side of that, you have the DOJ being politicized to go after Lisa Cook, right?

And like Leticia James. There is the disbanding of the Department of Justice's kleptocracy team, which looks into embezzlement by foreign politicians and disbanding the foreign influence task force, which looks at election meddling. Fired in 17 inspectors general, right?

But of course we let Doge just cut away without any kind of government. oversight and do what they want to do. And then multiple FOIA offices have been closed. That'll kind of get into our next topic discussion. But that's just a very short list. What else has really stood out to you in terms of how normalized corruption has become this administration? Look, I think that these, I like the way you presented that list because what they represent is the degree to which, and this is everything on this list, we should say, these are things that are a feature of Trump's authoritarianism, not a bug, right?

So the corruption is not incidental or even opportunistic. It's by design. So the way these different pieces fit together, right, is, okay, on the one end, you just have a massive amount of personal enrichment for Trump, his family, and his associates. So, you know, to just take the crypto piece, the UAE announces a $2 billion investment in Trump coin. or whatever, more liberty financial, you know. And then subsequently, not just a few days later, Trump is in the U.E and announces there were lifting restrictions on, you know, certain chips going to the U.E for AI purposes. There's a lot of that going on, right? Vietnam gets a tariff put on it,

you know, on Liberation Day. And lo and behold, Eric Trump shows up in Vietnam, and there's an announcement of a $1.5 billion Trump golf course in Vietnam. And that's not the meat and means government, but this is a communist government that controls everything. So presumably that investment does not happen without this. The point being is that this is large scale personal enrichment and it's tied to the functions of the U.S. government. You know, this isn't just like, hey, I'm giving you a bribe for one favor.

This is like, oh, you can have AI technology that used to be restricted. Oh, do you want a tariff or not? These are things that impact Americans. Like, how is AI going to move out in the world? Or are my prices going to go up because of tariffs? Or the only way the prices go down if somebody else basically pays Trump or his family in some investment. And so you have this kind of structural corruption, which we've seen in Russia, which we've seen in Hungary, which we've seen in Turkey, which we've seen in a lot of these other places where there's often a son-in-law involved on the outside. And he's getting really – Orban has a really wealthy son-in-law.

Good to be those sons-in-law, man. Erdogan, you know. So, but the pardons are interesting, too, because some of those pardons are part of the corruption. Like, you know, like you said, political donors or people in some way that Trump can profit from. But some of it is also just like, I'm going to show you that, you know, I'm pardoning Rod Blagoivich, a Democrat, who's just a corrupt politician. Because this is the kind of Putin playbook of like, everybody's corrupt, you know. Yeah. And we're kind of almost trolling the people who are concerned about things like corruption

by being outrageous with this pardon power. And we're dismantling all the tools in the U.S. government, whether it's a DOJ unit or whether it's an inspector general and agency that might investigate it. So it all fits together, right? No investigations or oversight that are focused on corruption or at least minimal. Massive personal enrichment from the functions of the U.S. government. and this kind of trolling of like, and yeah, Eric Adams gets a part in, and Rob Blagojevich gets a part in.

You just hand him out, but why don't people care more? You know, I think I'm trying to figure it out in my brain why this isn't a bigger story and why it doesn't resonate with people more, and I wonder if it's just because it feels kind of farther removed, right? Like, oh, okay, like corruption theoretically, we all understand it, but it's not something that I can, like, touch and feel. So, theory on this, which is, and again, you know Russia better than me, but I sang Alexei Navalny said to me once

when I was talking to him for my last book and he said Putin doesn't need to convince you, the Russian citizen, that he's not corrupt. He just needs to convince you that everybody's corrupt. And I think the thing that Trump has done for 10 years now, and with a lot of help from the Republican Party,

is he, people don't care because they think, oh, this is whatever he does. Everybody's doing it. I'm sorry, I just got like Will. barrel saying everyone's going streaking in the back of my head. Yeah, yeah, no, but it's like that. That's literally the message of Trump is everybody's going streaking to the quad. And that's not true. Now, the Democratic Party's made some mistakes along the way.

I mean, like Bob Menendez was corrupt and had gold bars and the Democrats didn't kick him out of the Senate caucus when they should have. But you know what, like the Democrats, you know, Joe Biden or even Hunter Biden, you know, Hunter Biden, there was like some whiffs of corruption there. but like Hunter Biden wasn't collecting billions of dollars for crypto, you know, like I think Americans have been so cynical and jaded about politics that they, on some level, they do think everybody does this. And I think it's, you need to do more work and Democrats need to do more to make people understand like, no, this is of a whole order of magnitude different in its scale and on its impact on you. Because this is not just about whether they're getting rich, it's affecting actual outcomes, you know, it's, it's affecting tariffs. It's affecting AI development, which is going to

transform everybody's life. I mean, they've, there are no regulations. The Biden administration was building some regulations around AI. Trump dismantled them. Guess who you dismantled them for? The people who are building his ballroom, you know, the people that are donated to his inauguration committee, the people that showed up at that inauguration. And, and so this will actually, it's both of a bigger scale and it's more impactful. But I think that people are less enraged in the should be because deep down too many Americans are like well I mean he does it which is getting that Putin playbook but I think actually that's a really good point that you make because yes right it does feel like it was this kind of slow build to this like those citizens united and we just have money

all over our political system that's right that's how everything goes and so that did put this seat into everyone's head that like the whole system is messed up but now that Trump is wielding the power of the entire government yes exactly for his personal benefit you know like when you frame it that way I think that it really makes sense. Let's move on to our next one, shall we, because it kind of falls into that, too, which is the massive amount of media consolidation that we've seen and kind of like oligarchical ownership in a sense, right? I mean, you obviously have like the Paramount and Skydance merger. And now, which includes CBS and CBS News. And then what really has trickled down to is that just all of the media

is suddenly being owned and controlled by the people who are in control of these corporations, either, you know, Bari Weiss being put in charge of CBS News or just the fate of certain news channels being kind of up for grabs. And CNN, we don't really know what the future of it is going to be after Warner Brothers' sale. MSNBC had to be spun off. MSNANO. Sorry, MSNLOW. I can't get it right.

I can't get it right. It feels like there really is no, like, quote-unquote, liberal media anymore, right? Like, we were pushed and kind of taught this lie, in my opinion, right? That there was a liberal media bias had completely taken over our whole system. But now it's disappeared, right? Even if it existed just a tiny bit, it no longer is there. And this is also a bigger story than I think people fully realize, because you also have to look at other countries again. So when Putin comes to power, let's look at Russian hungry real quick.

Putin comes to power in 2000, pretty quickly he begins to basically take over the media via, you know, friendly oligarchs, you know. And actually, the Kursk submarine incident happens. And Putin was getting criticized on television for the management of the rescue of this Russian submarine. And then he really clamped down, right? And, you know, within a few years, what had been a pretty, you know, rambunctious Russian media, environment was suddenly, you know, mostly compliant media with some islands of independent media. Hungary, we saw a similar playbook, not quite as like brute force, but essentially Orban

friendly oligarchs that he enriched through corruption, then started to buy up media. And sometimes they bought it up and turned it into kind of pro-Orban mouthpieces. Sometimes they just shut it down. Like they literally like buy newspaper and close it, you know? or, you know, they starve an independent newspaper of advertising revenue by, like, getting people, you know, and lo and behold, you look up and suddenly there's just kind of pro-Orban media and these kind of islands of independent media. Well, it doesn't happen accidentally. No, it's by design. It's by design.

This is what you're pointing out. It's the autocrat and the oligarchs working together for the common goal of having a certain kind of viewpoint that is the absolutely dominant viewpoint in most households. And if there's some liberal intelligentsia that's still reading certain websites, or newspapers, whatever, you know. That's kind of what's already happening here. So you saw Trump at the beginning member, he sued all these people, right? And they capitulated. Disney settled with him over like an outrageous lawsuit that said,

because George Stephanopoulos, you know, referred to his sexual assault in a certain way. CBS, like, settled over an absurd claim that they'd edited Kamla Harris's interview. So the opening warning shots were like, we'll come after you. I will use certain tools to come after you. Yeah. And that has a censoring effect, you know, like self-censoring effect. Self-censoring. We don't want the president suing us.

And, you know, so you start to have self-censorship creep in. Then Trump gets in there. And what he has realized is, okay, like if Putin's tool would be like, you know, let's have the Gazprom oligarch just kind of buy this media outlet or in some cases I'll shut it down. Trump has enormous regulatory control over media consolidation. And so at a time when these kind of tech oligarchs or super rich guys want to be buying up media properties, they know they can't do that without Trump's approval, right? Because they could make an antitrust claim to block the sale of some property.

This is why Stephen Colbert gets canceled, right? It's why Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily pulled off the air. Because if there are people that Trump doesn't like who are his critics, like easier, push him the side. shut him up yeah and so the quick you know skydance owned by david elson who's larry ellison's son larry ellison one of the two richest men in the world owner of oracle big right wing donor um big trump supporter um big a i investor so he benefits from all these deregulation that we talked about on ai he buys up paramount gets control by the way not just of cbs news but also like a major movie studio don't think that that doesn't matter because is paramount can be

making edgy, you movies about political subject matter? Are they going to get greenlit over there? Like, the media is bigger than just even the news. But then the CBS News thing was so hackish. We're just going to be Barry Weiss who's never run a news station. Like, doesn't know anything about, like, I'm running a television station. And we're going to put her in charge of CBS News, obviously, for her ideological point of it. People don't even to know how to run things anymore.

Yeah. To be in positions of power. And now we have, like, Warner Brothers, which encompasses CNN that's going to be taking taken over either by Netflix that will then spin off CNN in the same way that Comcast spun off MSNBC or it'll be bought by David Ellison, who's also making a bid. And I think Americans feel like this isn't happening or they, some people like take comfort in like, well, Jimmy Kimmel's back on the air. Well, guess what?

Like we could look up a year from now. And that won't be the case. And Stephen Colbert will be off the air. the CBS News will be reflective of Barry Weiss's politics. CNN might be either owned by the same people that did that to CBS or by some other Trump-friendly oligarch, and they'll certainly change CNN's editorial event. And you start to wonder, and even like ABC, we've seen Disney settle.

Like there's got to be a little self-censorship that creeps in there. What's left is like, you know, of what used to be the mainstream media, I'm doing air quotes for, you know, or the liberal media, what's left is like the New York Times. And, you know, MS now. But then, you know, it's podcast. But it's starting to feel like early stages Russia

where, yeah, sure, there's opposition. There's independent media. But it's very independent. It's kind of shrinking. It's very independent. It's on the side. It's kind of something that people are consuming in like New York and L.A. and San Francisco and Chicago.

But most American households, you know, where people watch television news or cable news or used to have a newspaper and don't anymore, you know, they're either getting their news from Trump-friendly TV, self-censoring TV, or Facebook, which is owned by Mark Zuckerberg, who's now all in with Trump. Yeah. We could do a whole episode basically about media because, of course, like. Well, you were television. Yeah. I mean, the tech companies, you know, have so much to do with the death of just local media and the way that search engine. engines have killed the revenue models.

And so, again, these are all things that have been building for quite some time. And now I feel like we are just seeing like the final like steps of major consolidation. But one thing that is a huge danger of like the reason why having an independent media is important, right, is so that you can question those in power so that you can hold them accountable. And so that you can push back against like very obvious framing and spin that comes from. the government that is so damaging to society and untrue, like blatantly false, right? And so that's what we've seen them employ to start sweeping up immigrants, you know, hundreds of thousands of people all over the country.

And so first is Trump just saying we're only going after violent criminals and their murderers and they're rapists and their gang members. That has not been the case. Let me just show you some data, which shows that from the ICE arrest between January 20th to October 15th, nearly 75,000 people with no criminal records have been swept up in these immigration operations. And only 5% of the people had violent convictions. And I mean, I'm sure your social media feed, right, or your news consumption, media diet is similar to mine where I'm just constantly seeing one story after another of like, oh, here's a father who was driving with his toddler. And they pulled over the car and they took the father away and then nobody knew what was happening with the toddler.

the time where their ICE is barging into daycare facilities and pulling out child care personnel, you know, caregivers in the middle of the day while the little kids are there. You know, now Trump is canceling citizenship ceremonies. There are people who are going in for a green card interviews. A woman went in with her baby in her arms and they detained her. It's just so vile and sickening and upsetting, you know, and I think maybe I feel specifically passionate about it too because I'm an immigrant and I'm a naturalized citizen. It's not lost on me like when Trump says that maybe we should start deporting naturalized citizens.

And you're a parent. Yeah, and I'm a parent and I'm just, you know, I'm very fortunate that like I'm a white immigrant, right? Probably won't be targeted unless it's for something I say. You know, who knows? But it's so many millions of people are not in that same position and are so much more vulnerable and it just goes against to me like everything that we supposedly stand for, you know, as a country, but it's also just.

it's really terrifying that people have to constantly now question their status. Like not just those who maybe are here undocumented, but those who have been documented, who have green cards, who have citizenship now no longer know if like this is going to be the country where they can safely be and feel, you know, confident in that. Yeah. And yeah. And the the authoritarian playbook part of this is really important to because as you said, the worst part of the immigration crackdown is what's happening to human beings, like family separated, people unjustly detained, kind of terrorizing communities. I think it's also really important, though, to see it as part of an authoritarian movement

in the sense that what does this immigration crackdown give Trump? Well, it gets some more power. ICE is now a militarized force operating inside the border of the United States at Trump's control. They, in the one big beautiful bill, which I hate saying, tens of billions of dollars in ice too. What might he also do with that power? You know, he now is the ability to just randomly, you know, we're going to have an ice rate in this city, then in this city, you know. And so at core, it's also that fear that an autocrat can compel in a society. Like, we don't know when ice is going to show up in our community. If, like, the mayor of some

city does thing I don't like, maybe I'll send ice in there to just kind of muck things up like I did in Chicago, you know? But also, like, again, like, just to use your imagination on this, like, what else might ICE end up doing later in the Trump term? You know, like, there's a like a paramilitary force inside our borders that, like, seems to not, that it's masked men, like, I mean, what is more authoritarian than masked people asking people to show their papers? You know, like, like, this is the stuff, I mean, Americans, the frog has been boiling for so long that we don't realize, like, this is literally like the plot of like an autocratic takeover of a country. Suddenly mass people can come into communities, demand to see your papers, and just detain you without any rights, you know. And so it has to be seen as that, and there's a white nationalist component too in the sense that they're whitening America. Like that's Stephen Miller's agenda, you know, and if you think I'm being hyperbolic, the only refugees that are now admitted in the United States are white South Africans. Yeah. And the preponderance of people, as you say, are being deported are brown people and black people, you know.

Trump himself says, said out loud, like, why can we have people from like, you know, Norway or something? I forget, you know, not people from these shithole countries, right? Like, so the nexus of kind of the racialized right-wing politics and the kind of authoritarian tool that is ICE, I think, is that, again, the feature that people have to see. This is not just some deportations. It is kind of part of an authoritarian playbook. Well, and now we've come full circle to, sorry, we spent so long talking about the other ones, And now we have like two minutes before someone else needs to get in the studio to talk about what we think is the worst of Trump's authoritarian offenses. But again, it all kind of builds up to this, right?

Because it's attacking institutions. It's, you know, executive power grabs, like neutralizing branches of government politicizing, you know, the Department of Justice, quashing dissent, controlling the media. And then you get up to the kind of violent power that the government has and can use over everyone, which is, of course, using the military domestically, right? The National Guard has been in over 10 cities, Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, New York, and then the way that we use the military abroad, which in the current case, we've now killed over 80 people extrajudicially in the Caribbean, you know, by launching strikes supposedly against anarcho traffickers. So what do you leave us with here, Ben, when we talk about this year in review and where we're at? You and I, way back when before you. Yes, our like first authoritarian watch.

The first one we did the military. And what we said about that at the time was, gee, watch out to see if Trump starts using the military as an extension of his personal interest, if he starts using it in American cities, and that they purge generals to kind of put his people in. All those things have happened. And again, the worst case scenario is like the military becomes an extension of the leader. Like that's what happened in Russia. That's what happens in total authoritarian takeovers. Thus far, we've seen. The military using extrajudicial force in potentially launching a regime change war in Venezuela, right? Never good when the autocrats starts a foreign war, like see Ukraine, right? It's something that autocrats often do. He's ended like eight of them. Well, Maddwell, we have to do a whole show on that. Because that's kind of part of the nationalism play.

You know, like we're at war and I need emergency powers because we're at war, right? But we've also seen him transform the military in like Pete Hexas image. Like they are firing generals that they don't like mostly women and people of color. I, they are clearly aiming to promote a kind of MAGA type of person to be a general officer. They've had a parade for Trump's birthday with the military. And they've crossed this rubicon of deploying the uniform military into American cities here in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and threatening to do it in more places. is. And there has been pushed back, I have to say. By the way, governors have done a really good job

here, standing up to Trump. They've gotten sued. So this is not all doom and gloom. We're finally seeing the Congress decide to start investigating the strikes abroad. What's going on in Venezuela? So the bad news is Trump is exhibiting the tendencies of an autocrat who wants to use the military for his own purposes. And the worst case scenarios are the military in our streets and a war abroad. There's a little bit of that happened. There's boats and National Guard deployments, and there's also pushback happening. But I think, again, to tie this all together, the reason we did these subjects with all the things Trump is doing is if he can silence independent media, if he turns the government into kind of a personal vehicle for his own corrupt interests, if he is able to use immigration to kind of fuel the politics of kind of racialized white nationalism, but also the kind of creation of this.

you know, paramilitary force through ice in our borders. And then if he incorporates the military in his own politics, like those are the components, the building blocks of the kind of soft autocracies to become less soft going forward. Again, the good news is here in December of 2025, there is a lot more pushback than there was in February, you know. Now, it's still not enough. And the Republicans still don't get off the hook just because they've, you know, had a couple hearings about Benito on boat strikes, but it is something. Well, everybody, like, get off the bench before it's too late, I think, is what we're trying to say. We're not trying to be alarmist. I think we've laid out and all the reasons why we are not

being alarmist. Yeah. He's going to try to do what Orban did and Erdogan did and all these people did. The question is, will he succeed? And he doesn't have to succeed. Yeah. He can only do it if we let them. So I think that's important to remember. All right. Well, Ben, thank you for leaving us on such a positive hopeful note at the end of this year. To many better things in 2026. Well, Alona, that was an inspiring conversation. Thanks, Ben, as always. I do want to say, like, if you like Podsaid the World, please subscribe to the Podsaid the World YouTube channel.

It helps people find our stuff. You'll get more content like this conversation, which we intend to do more of going forward. So hit that subscribe button.