IHIP News - Experts Warn of Trump's Fast Decline & MAGA Panics to Pick Successor

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

We are joined by professor and author Jason Stanley to discuss the current state of Trump's totalitarian regime. Order our new book, join our Substack, shop our merch, and more by clicking here: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to IHIP News. Today I am joined by Jason Stanley. He is a professor of American Studies and Philosophy at the University of Toronto's Monk School. He is the author of several books, including erasing history, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future. That seems relevant. And also how fascism works, which seems incredibly relevant, considering I think we're living in the epicenter of it. Jason, how are you today? Decently, decent, and how are you? Well, hanging in there, I think it's really important. I want to always bring on experts on my channel so that our listeners can be armed with facts and expertise as to what is happening. You probably saw over social media and the news that ICE executed another American citizen. It seemed to offer no help afterwards and loaded 10 bullets into him. From your area of expertise, are they priming the public for something here?

Is this use of force intentional? Oh, well, I mean, I'm not sure how you would describe intentional. It's fully expected, right? I mean, you can't invade an American city with armed goons, masked goons, who have very little training in preparation, not that there should be training in preparation for something like this, for this kind of ethnic cleansing that we're seeing. But it's fully expected. And of course, they knew this was going to happen. And it's part of a preparation for gearing up, trying to incite resistance. And then they want to incite resistance to get a big backlog.

to perhaps invoke the Insurrection Act, to perhaps close down the midterm elections, to just generally give a sense of anarchy and chaos in the streets, and then give them license to crack down. It seems to me like this regime is governing and doing things that they think they're never going to be held accountable for in the future. And that terrifies me. What are your thoughts on that?

Absolutely right and very accurate insight. They are behaving like Democrats will never be in power again. They are behaving like public opinion does not matter. So they are behaving like they already have their dictatorship on lockdown. That's the goal, is a dictatorship, a one-party state. Right now it will be Trump. Then there will be some successor struggle. It'll be the next dictator.

Stephen Miller is very, it all seems very explicit. They want to say that Democrats, that anyone who calls them fascists like you and I do accurately is a domestic terrorist, is sort of in cahoots with motivating Americans to resistance. So they want a full one-party dictatorship, whether it's going to continue to be led by a dictator like Trump or not as something we're going to have to see. But they seem to believe they have that done. I don't believe they do. I think they have moved too quickly.

Yes. So I was speaking to your colleague, our mutual friend, Ruth Ben Guiat on this. And I feel like if you really wanted this to sink in, you would do it incrementally. You would incrementally get us to a place to where we didn't really. feel it. This is so jarring the whiplash of this. He's only been in, we're one year in, Trump 2.0. And he's moving so rapidly. And I have a question for you. He clearly has, is in really poor health. I mean, you could see at Davos, the bruises are bad. I mean, he's kind of swollen like a bubble tick. And in this regime, when the strong man,

like if he were to have a stroke or if he and he was in the ICU, or if he, He were to drop dead, Jason. Do you think there's conversations about who the era parent is? Or is that like never spoken about because he's immortal? Yeah, great question. So what we have is we have a kind of electoral autocracy, as Ruth Ben Guilla said on your show. And the big problem with autocracy, with the kind of dictatorship. that the United States is leaning into is the successor problem.

How do you appoint a successor? It's all like a mess and a disaster and reshuffling when there's a successor dispute, right? And sometimes those successor disputes roll into things, things might turn into a democracy. Other times, it's just like someone even worse. So the true answer to a question is we don't know. We do know that Trump is 79, that, you know, if he were 65, I think he would be in power for the rest of his life and the United States would be, you know, would be a straightforward dictator-ruled country. But he's 79. And so since he's 79, you can be sure that there are successor disputes happening behind the scenes. This machine thinks it's got the whole

set up on lockdown. They own the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is nothing but a device for keeping a far-right dictatorship and power forever. So they have good reason to think that they're going, that they have power on lockdown. But a successor, the successor's struggle after a dictatorship falls is always a period of anarchy. And it's never clear what. what's going to happen afterwards. And this group, they have varying levels of competence, right? So you have some super confident people like Russell, vote, Brendan, you see like the FCC is,

operating within legalistic parameters to shut down the media, to replace the media, to take it over. So Brendan Carr, very effective. Russell, vote, very effective. But a lot of these guys are not effective and not competent. And so we're really going to, for instance, you're still on the air. So it's really unclear what's going to happen with this kind of success or struggle. They've got the Supreme Court in their pocket.

They've got ice, which is right now, I think, comparable to the storm uptiling in the 1930s. In Germany, it's, you know, they're sucking up, you know, Trump supporting UFC fans and NASCAR fans. So they've got a lot of power. But they also have power nowhere near lockdown. So I don't know what will happen with the successor dispute. Competence, with the varying levels of competence point, I don't think any. anyone knows.

All right. So one of the titles of your book is how fascists rewrite the past to control the future. And we're seeing that happen within a two-hour time frame right now. So we've all seen the video of Alex Prady. A woman gets shoved down. He has his phone in his hand. He goes to comfort the woman as an quote unquote alpha male would, you know, go to protect them marginalized.

Ice agents go bananas. they take his gun, which he did not have holstered, and I've seen all of this on video, multiple angles. And immediately, and then they execute him. He was on his hands and knees, executed. And then they immediately go out, call him a domestic terrorist, just like they did Renee Good. So you see them rewriting the past 10 minutes later. And this use of propaganda speak to this as it relates to this authoritarian regime and

of comfort to me and my listeners is knowing that this is a failed playbook. This is this, this, this fascism, this authoritarianism is the thing we've all studied in history. And it always ends up failing and not kindly worded in history books. So will you speak to that? Well, I think what you're seeing from Minneapolis is a massive resistance movement that's giving the world great courage. because to stand up against this fascist, autocratic regime, the most powerful regime in the world with a goon squad that is funded alongside some of the best funded militaries in the world, it's very heroic for the world to see. So Minneapolis is really representing.

And I think we can see that they don't have the manpower. to lock down every American city. If we can have Minneapolis and every American city in response to these ice invasions, then I don't think, I don't see how they're going to succeed. Now, they're doing what every autocratic regime does, which is declare the truth. So it's very obvious.

There's no connection between their declarations and reality. We know the roadmap they want, Stephen Miller has laid it out. NSM 7 has laid it out. They want to say that the opposition party is our domestic terrorists, that anyone who's not wearing a Maga hat is a domestic terrorist. Now, they've gone too far. I mean, I don't think they care about public opinion because they assume they have it all locked down. But public opinion is not going to go with them. At this point, you know, you've got to be pro-execution, pro-murder. And I think, you know, there's a lot of debate happening on social media where people are like,

where people are like, look, black Americans have been gunned down in an arbitrary system of lawlessness for decades and decades and decades for all of American history. And now, so this is really American history we're seeing. Actually, this is classic fascism because fascism, so according to the imperial boomerang thesis of M.A. Cesar, fascism is what happens when you treat your colonial population with brutality, and then it gets generalized to everybody. We're now seeing that generalization to everyone. We're seeing the brutal U.S. system, legal system, criminal legal system, being now to against protesters, being deployed against the regime's opponents. And it is just public opinion is really not going to go with them. So they're really making a big daring move here to say we can assassinate, you know,

middle class white people in broad daylight. We can execute them and still do whatever we want. And I'm just not, I mean, you know, we will see. I think it's really, really unclear what will happen. But this is not a super competent regime. And they've made a big play to just lay down, say, okay, we're just going to execute you. We're going to declare that you're a terrorist, even if you're a middle class white person, who is the treasured element of American society and this white supremacist regime.

And I just, you know, I'm not seeing a communication strategy. There's no question. What concerns me is for those of us that paid attention to the campaign, he ran on this. He very implicitly ran on the enemy from within. At the MAGA rallies at the Madison Square Garden one, where it really was giving all these Nazi vibes, intentional by Stephen Miller, the Nazis had rolled out there, the symmetry with that, in my opinion, was intentional to send to the white nationalist. We're doing this. We're taking this over the finish

line in MFers. We finally are going to do it. And he ran and then the mass deportations now, and they signaled that they were doing this. And so if we look at, okay, then why didn't people see this? We look at the fall of the media since Watergate. And just I had on CNN after the shooting of Alex Preti. And the Chiron at the bottom of the screen, Jason, said DHS, Preti was violently resisting arrest. And that was on the Chiron. And I thought, you know what, F CNN for that.

Because that's just for the casual news watcher, they see that and they go, oh, he was a violent resistor by, and they put the DHS colon before it. So from your professional, like you've studied this, you're an expert in this, if you go back, how big of a role did the same washing of the media play in priming the public for this? Fantastic. The media was completely complicit. Constant normalization, constant, sane washing. Basically, you know, the, you know, the, the New York, Brett Stevens in the New York Times published in December column, no more, never Trump, you know, the, in October 2020, Ross Dow that that published a piece in the New York Times. There will be no Trump coup. The New York Times

has elevated all of the normalizers. They did bring M. Gessen on, which was really essential. But basically the media has been trying to normalize insanewash. I noticed after the Davos speech, my journalist friends in Africa were all passing around on social media, not that I'm a big social media person, but they're passing around on Instagram, the one thing I'm a, the part about Somalian refugees, where Trump was at his most explicitly racist, most extreme, most Nazi, most unhinged. And that that clip was not used, was not prominently featured. It was total fascist, white supremacist, you know, extremity, extremism. But it was just like you see even the legacy media here trying to sanewash,

to normalize, trying to find reasons, writing as if there are reasons. Now, we've seen CBS, CBS, the Ellisons have already taken overseas CBS. Barry Weiss, who pioneered the culture war side of Trumpism, is a major, major figure in the ideological center of Trumpism, the panic about critical race theory, all of those culture war structures, she helped pioneer. She runs CBS. Now, why is that important that CBS is a Trump network, is a regime network now? Because everyone knows not to cite Fox. But if CBS says something, now CBS will be sort of giving you this kind of, okay, we're giving you the sort of official newsy news versions of things.

But it's going to be a Trumpified newsy news version of things. So you're going to have the legacy media, the CBS, the standard bearer network giving you sort of neutral-toned Trump versions of things. And we're going to see that. We're going to see more and more networks fall into line like that. We're already seeing. Brendan Carr is a very effective employer of the structures. So we're absolutely the networks, the one network that did call it like it is was MSNBC, MS Now, which was ridiculed by the left, by many of the left, my fellow leftists, says MSNBC liberals, you know, but they actually were calling, you know, Joy Ann Reid, Medellin. These figures were saying we face a fascist movement.

So we have to ask ourselves, why wasn't this taking? I think networks like fell over themselves to try to provide balance where all that was, you know, and talk about polarization and bemoaning. You know, I mean, if you look at the networks, they completely paved the way for Trumpism. They completely just lay down a golden road. for the attack on DEI, for the culture war, for the attack on universities. The New York Times just had op-ed after op-ed about leftists on campus. And the encampments at Yale were filled with my Jewish students.

And again, the media represented them as anti-Semitic protests, entirely misrepresenting what was happening. and just going right into this sort of ideology of the Trump campaign, hysteria about DEI, hysteria about leftists on campus as if they were the big threat, authoritarian threat, hysteria about anti-war protests. And so I think we will look back at the media as deeply complicit, as completely, as you said, It was like these extremely clear dog whistles, like the Madison Square Garden rally, which was intentionally evocative of the Madison Square Garden pro-Nazi rally in February

in 1939. It was, I believe, intentionally. I mean, how could it not be? So all of that was, and then again and again and again, you know, the media just, you know, the media just got, you know, the people who normalized got elevated, and the people who were calling it out as it is got shunted aside as hysterics. And that was presented as maturity. And I would even argue as an armchair historian, an observation that I see is that the Trump administration, the Trump regime, is moving too quickly with layering effects of competence that

you said, but the media has moved incrementally. The media has really done the most damage to the culture effect of, like, I will see people in my home state of Oklahoma that will say, well, both candidates were just terrible. And I don't like either side. And it's this horrible false equivalency that the media, long before Trump's descending on that escalator, you know, they really failed to cover the lie into the Iraq war. I believe it was the New York Times. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they rubber stamp that lie? And that's their fucking job. You're journalists. You're supposed to, you don't just believe the government. That's what Barry Weiss is going to do. But this has been a long march. And that's what scares me more because the media has

incrementally embedded the lack of critical thinking and curiosity into the culture of the American psyche. Yeah. I mean, if you, if we look back at, you know, the media's role, the whole structure we're seeing has a long history, like, you know, mass incarceration where the United States has the highest incarceration, has now the second highest incarceration rate in the world. behind El Salvador, but I mean, you know, we have, you know, the second highest incarceration rate in the world, eight times the incarceration rate of Canada, six to eight times the incarceration rate

of any European country. That was the media doing its kind of demagoguery about crime throughout the 90s, for example. Then we have the media in the Iraq War. Then we had all of the, the post 9-11 stuff. So all of these antecedents are building up. They've built up to the current moment. We had all this essentially, essential lawlessness, lawlessness against our black American population, lawlessness against our Muslim population. And now, you know, that has given us lawlessness

against anyone who disagrees with the regime. And the media has simply, you know, the media, I don't know what they've, has it been selling papers? I think there's a desire to appear sober and rational and to make sense out of what is happening. But there is no, like, like you see this, for example, when they try to rationalize Trump's reasons. Like, well, you know, I mean, the fentanyl moving from Canada to the United States. It's madness. Trump's reasons have no connection to his goals. He's just saying anything.

And then the media is off trying to take seriously what he's saying. And, you know, because they're like, oh, it wouldn't be serious unless we, you know, acted like his reasons at some relation to his goals. So, no, I think the media, I think only extremely recently has the media gotten on board with what is happening. And I think then a lot of people just, you know, just like you said, like in Victor Klemper's, language of the Third Reich. He talks about, and in several his works, he talks about how people just didn't take Hitler's anti-Semitism seriously in like 1931, 1932, 1933. It was all for

political reasons. And we're seeing a repeat of history. People think, okay, this stuff is just for political reasons. I was in Hungary in 2009 and 2010 in the summer, running summer schools. And people were like, oh, and I was like, I think this guy or Bond sounds really scary. And people were like, oh, no, no, no. He just wanted to win an election. So that just seems to be, it seems to be so baked in that kind of denial seems to be so baked into people. And I just think that the through line here is how easily people are bullied into caving on their conviction. The media, the right wing can go, you're not putting up both sides.

you all are crazy liberals and blah, blah, blah, instead of somebody at the newsroom saying, you're liars, wealth never trickled down, your policies are racist, and we will report them as such, bully us all you want to, like Medi Hassan did, like Joy Reid did. And the same thing with the Marco Rubio's and the J.D. Vance's, who had crystal clear clarity just eight, nine years ago on Donald Trump, who have now done a complete 180. There's no conviction. That's what's so devastating for me is how many people have no conviction. If I am a woman from Oklahoma City that was an interior designer and I have a channel and I can stand

up to these people fearlessly every single day and all of these alpha males and heads of media just cave, fold like cheap suits, it's so depressing. But talking about the resistance, we have to leave our listeners with hope. And rule number one, I believe, is never obey in advance. And will you tell us how we keep coalescing and keep building this resistance to this regime to save our country? So what we're seeing is a leaderless movement. And that's incredible. That is wonderful because leaders, they can always co-opt, as Carter G. Woodson just said in his book in 1931.

This is a leaderless movement. This is ordinary Americans saying, you know, we don't want this to be us. Now, you know, the whole this is not us is a little exaggerated because clearly a majority of Americans did vote for Trump. But it's up to us to clean this up. So we are seeing a leaderless movement, people joining their local community groups. We're seeing pastoral leaders. We're seeing show up. We're seeing rabbis travel to Minneapolis.

We're seeing people join local groups to defend immigrants. What you need to realize right now is how, you know, I've been disturbed at how the media talks about what immigrants are going through. My father was a hidden child for about a year in Germany and Berlin in 1939. And it affected him for his whole life for like eight months, between. Kastanav and July 1939. It affected him his whole life. These kids who are hiding from ICE, their kids and their grandkids will be hearing about this experience. And we're not hearing about their voices. This is terror that's happening to generations right now. And I am so heartened

to see ordinary Americans, not backed by spineless Democrats, but actually just ordinary, American's showing up, getting their whistles, showing up for their neighbors. And that's all that needs to happen. They have gone way too quickly. No one is buying this. They are not going to win public opinion. They're not even trying to win public opinion. Everyone right now has to look in the mirror and say, what am I going to tell my children about this time?

At least I can join my other neighbors out there and protect my fellow human beings. Jason Stanley, thank you so much for coming on. It is so therapeutic for a nation that's being abused to hear from experts and to understand what's going on. And I hope that maybe you could join me once a month because it's like a balming salve. So I just cannot thank you enough. I really appreciate your expertise and hopeful friendship moving forward as we keep fighting this regime. Thank you for doing the work you do.