The Daily Beast Podcast - The Sinister Source of Trump's Autocracy Playbook

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Joanna Coles is joined by Russian and American Journalist M. Gessen, whose reporting from both Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America has made them a singular voice on creeping autocracy. Gessen explains why Americans' faith in endless progress is misplaced—and how Trump, like Putin before him, overwhelms the system by attacking everything, everywhere, all at once: courts, media, universities, even law firms. They argue that the biggest danger isn’t sudden collapse, but slow adaptation—that Americans are already getting used to living in a crumbling democracy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Joanna Cole's chief content officer of The Daily Beast, and you are listening to watching, possibly cooking your breakfast or walking your dog to the Daily Beast podcast. Today's guest that I'm extremely interested to talk to is M. Gessen, the superb columnist for the New York Times, who's been writing some of, I think, the best political commentary that there is right now. M grew up in Russia, so they have a different perspective than a lot of American commentators on quite how dangerous what's going on in America could be.

So let's get into it. Thank you very much for joining us. What I wanted to start with was I think this assumption in America that progress is always forward movement. And you know you grew up in Russia that that is not true. And you say that if you're not feeling very uncomfortable right now, you're not paying attention. What are the signs you're seeing that make sense?

you feel so uncomfortable? What I think should be making us uncomfortable is feeling comfortable. And it's our survival mechanism as humans. We want to get used to stuff. We want to gain our footing. Otherwise, we really couldn't survive. But the problem is that's what happens when an autocracy takes hold, right, after the initial attack. And actually, in the column that you referenced, I make a comparison to countries of war. And I've observed that whenever I've reported, border war is, right? You get to a country, people are in shock if you get there in the first few days. They can't believe it's happening to them. Their lives are being destroyed. Their, you know, their favorite restaurant, their house, they're being displaced, they're under siege,

whatever. And like three days later, people are cooking on the sidewalk and acting like it's normal. Right. I mean, we get used to anything and we reunize everything and that's our strength as humans. But we also do that when our political order, in this case, somewhat democratic, is being destroyed. So let's talk about how you think it's being destroyed. One of the things you talk about is this sense that Donald Trump is bombarding us. It's everything everywhere all at once. We don't know where to look. The media doesn't know where to look. And so we either close down or we just sort of shrug and keep going on. Why is his flood of ideas, and it is a flood?

Why is it so dangerous? I mean, I don't know that it's more dangerous than other ways of creating what they call an autocratic breakthrough, but it's certainly unusual. Every autocracy that I'm aware of took its time, or every modern autocracy that wasn't brought about by a violent revolution, took its time sort of getting getting to the breakthrough. Well, Donald Trump doesn't seem to be taking any time. Exactly.

So we don't know what we're dealing with, right? So when we talk about the autocratic breakthrough, an autocratic playbook, in some ways he's following it, but he's breaking the sort of the time space barrier because it's all happening everywhere all at once. And the effect that it has that fascinates me is that we've gotten used to everything everywhere all at once.

Right. So like, for example, when I was living through Putin's autocratic breakthrough, he dismantled elections and we were like shocked. And then we got used to it. And then he invaded Georgia and we were shocked. And then we got used to it. And then he cracked down on protesters

and started jailing people for peaceful protests. And we were shocked. And then we'd get used to it. And he dismantled the media. Like all of these were discrete events that were happening over years. Donald Trump is doing everything at the same time. It's like in a war. It's like he opened all the frontlands at the same time.

You talk about democracies not only being about elections, which is what most people tend to think, but they're also about the institutions that uphold democracy in the years between the elections. So the courts, education, media, how significant do you think Donald Trump's attacks on law firms, on courts, on individual judges, and now even on the Supreme Court judges, how bad is that? I can't imagine anything worse, which is probably a terrible thing to say because tomorrow I'll be able to imagine something worse.

He'll do it. And at least you're still imagining, right? It's not so bad that you've given up. Exactly. But the only theoretical check on Donald Trump's power considering that he has the trifecta of the House, the Senate, and the White House,

are the courts. and so to stage this kind of all-out attack on the courts, and it's really multi-pronged, right? He's attacking individual judges, but also they're ignoring court orders, but also they're writing into their big, beautiful bill provision that will allow them to ignore court decisions and perpetuity, but also they're attacking individual law firms, right? So all of this is really attacking the entire sort of,

conglomeration of things that make up our legal order. And what we have found is in the one country that in the West that has reversed an autocracy in living memory, which is Poland, it's very, very difficult to go back and repair a judicial system. It is also very difficult to create a judicial system more or less from scratch. We saw that in Russia, right? Judicial reform is, I mean, it's such an extraordinary set of institutions and people and a system of education and a system most importantly of belief and cultural norms that go into creating a judicial order. And so destroying it will really destroy the possibility of democracy in this country. Isn't one of the problems also that as this is going on, it's not a hugely

visible problem. The media write about it, but most people don't encounter it in their daily lives. Well, that's the general problem about autocratic breakthroughs. And I think this is why I have like a particular distaste for surely

well-intentioned and very beautiful Martin Neumeyer poem. First they came for and then they came for him. When they came for me, nobody was left to speak up. They never come from most people. Most people are fine. Right? And so most And to create this idea that people should care about living in a democracy because it will affect them personally is it's a kind of fiction, right?

It does affect people personally in the sense that everybody's life gets worse. It gets materially worse. It gets culturally worse. It gets stupid. It gets boring. But nobody's going to come for you and stuff you into an unmarked van. That happens to immigrants. So that happens to a minority of people.

The majority of people's life just generally gets worse. It just generally gets worse very, very slowly. And so it's hard to notice. And I don't know that it's realistic to say everybody in this country should care about him destroying the judiciary. It's always going to be a small subset of people, journalists, lawyers, activists, like truly politically engaged people who care about him destroying the judiciary. Right. So to create some kind of opposition to this autocratic breakthrough, we need a visionary leadership, a visionary party that says, look, there's a better way of doing this. There's a better way of addressing the anxieties that brought him to power.

So if you're a Democrat and you're criticizing Donald Trump for his quiver of very many, we would argue, bad ideas, how do you, age, defend democracy, which is amorphous and messy and complicated, and where are the good ideas? So those are the two million dollar questions. And I don't know that defending

democracy as a project, like as a rhetorical project, is worth it, right? The reason, and that's not, I'm not saying that democracy isn't worth it. I'm saying as a political rhetorical project, the bar is basically trying to convince people

that this system that we've been living in, which is a hugely imperfect democracy, is better than the alternative, considering that their lived experiences that it's not. I mean, not that they've experienced the alternative. Right, we haven't experienced it yet. But the system hasn't worked for them. That's what gave us Trump.

People feel dislocated, they feel anxious, they feel uncared for. They feel like this system doesn't, hear them, see them, take care of their needs, or promise them any kind of future. And so along comes Trump and says, I'll take you back to the imaginary past. And that seems like an incredibly appealing idea when you're feeling horribly discombobulated in the present. So we need a party that can come along and say, I'll take you to a better future. It's possible. This country has done it before.

It's invented a future out of nothingness, right, out of just an idea. So we could do this. We could have plenty. We could care for each other. We could be better people in a better society. And instead we have Democrats saying, you know, let's just fix things the way they are, but the way they are doesn't work. What did you think about Kamala Harris and Tim Walts' campaign?

They broke my heart because for about a minute or maybe like a few days, first after Biden dropped out. and then after Kamala picked Tim Walts, there were glimmers of this. And they came in very specific sort of places and messages. Like she out of the gate was talking about a future and a better future. And then like three days later she started just parroting Biden's policy messages. And she said she wouldn't do anything different. Exactly, which is like the absolute worst thing that you could have said.

And Tim Waltz, when he was first unfiltered, right, before he was picked, was really talking about a politics of care. And I thought, what a brilliant choice this will be if she picks him because here's a guy who, he was on the Ezra Klein podcast, and he was talking about breakfast for kindergartners and how that gives parents an extra 15 minutes in the morning to just talk with their kids instead of making breakfast and lunch for them. Oh my God, this is the politician. This is a politician who talks about politics of care. And also who understands people's lives. He understands people who sees into their kitchens, right? Who is not one key and who's clearly driven by love.

And again, three days after he was picked, he went into that sort of robotic speech that is written by consultants, who say that they've tested it and it tests well in their alternate universe and they're like a bunch of insane people who keep trying the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result.

Yeah, you're not the first person who said that the Democrats should now get rid of their political consultants and actually listen to what real-life people are talking about. Is one of the issues also that we've reached a stage where people don't have much confidence in government and they don't think government

does anything, even though. a lot of what government does actually do is sort of silent, it's administrative, it's hidden. And they see Donald Trump's energy, which is a real thing, and they think he's doing something. Is that part of the sort of strong man appeal that works in autocracies? Yeah, I think that's part of the reason. And, you know, I think we somewhat underestimate how much people understand what's happening, what government does. And I'll give you an example. I was in Asheville, North Carolina over the weekend.

And the lift driver saw a guy on the corner who was holding up a sign that said, Air Force, please help. And she got really mad. And she said, you know what? Like, I hope nobody sees him with that sign because our VA hospital takes such good care of all the vets in the city that there's no way. he'd be, RVA hospital and RVA administration here in Astral.

There's no way he'd be standing here on the street corner if he were actually Air Force. Interesting. Right. People know things that happen locally. Right. The problem is there's such a disconnect between what, and I realized I just became a journalist who quotes taxi drivers,

but you know what? I know what? Lyft drivers do other things too. Yeah, exactly. But what's happened is that we've turned our federal politics into an abstraction. And it's just a bunch of talking heads on TV. It's like watching reality TV. They dumb down their message.

They don't think that people understand policy. And so in that dumbed down environment in which people are already not trusted to understand what's happening in Washington, comes along Donald Trump, who actually seems to cut through the bullshit. And that's part of what works. And hold that thought. We're just going to take some messages from our sponsor. We love our sponsors. Now we're back with M. Gessen, the columnist from the New York Times.

What does Putin think about what's going on in America? Well, I haven't been in his head in a minute. But you're not likely to be right because you can't go back to Russia. There's a warrant out for your arrest. But, I mean, there was a time in my life when I was like spending all my time in his brain, like listening to everything he said. trying to analyze it. But last I checked, he thought that Donald Trump was a buffoon. And I think that that's something that Trump really doesn't understand about Putin. It's a little fun to watch,

if only people weren't dying, and we weren't on the brink of nuclear war as a result of this incredible reality show. But Putin has zero regard for him. And that's why Trump's plan to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours isn't working out. And we can see Trump getting very frustrated with this. But the basic truth is that Putin thought it would be better to deal with Trump than with Biden, which so far is true. It's easier for him to continue his war in Ukraine with Trump than with Biden, although Biden could have made it a lot harder and should have a long time ago, and we wouldn't be dealing with this problem at all. So what do you predict happens with the war in Ukraine? And I'm just, I'm conjuring up the idea of you inside Putin's brain

and you must be very relieved that you're not spending as much time in there. Look, I mean, it's bad for journalists to make predictions, and it's particularly bad to make predictions about war because the one thing that we know about wars, that war is unpredictable. I mean, who could have predicted the incredible drone attack? Mm-hmm. The Ukraine drone attack in Russia. Right, which is like, you know,

bringing in a whole bunch of trucks like Trojan horses and releasing very cheap drones and causing, billions of dollars of damage to the Russian Air Force and really probably significantly hobbling Russia's ability to fire long-range missiles at Ukraine for an indefinite period of time. So we can't predict these kinds of turns of events. And the timing of this was brilliant. But the basic fact is that Putin has no interest in ending the war. There's no win for him in ending the war. His retooled economy. to feed the war. He has reoriented the population to support the war. There's no cause for people

to unite around, and he still cares about that, right? And every totalitarian leader cares about mobilizing the population. So there's nothing for Russians to unite around if they end the war in Ukraine without something that he can sell as an out-and-out victory. What would cause him to end the war then? Is there no incentive for him to stop this? You just think of all those young Russian lives. Oh, he doesn't care about the American lives. And there's an endless supply of Russian lives. I mean, that's part of the preconditions for totalitarianism

is you have to have a huge country not care about depopulating it. And not my idea, Hannah Arn's idea. And I think that profound military losses are the only things that could possibly get Putin to negotiate. Like if Russia's territorial integrity is actually threatened. And does that look plausible? It certainly seems more plausible after the drone attack. I don't think the drone attack is enough

because that damages Russia's ability to wage war, but it doesn't threaten Russian territorial integrity. So it would take a mammoth amount of foreign aid, probably including boots on the ground to actually present a profound military threat to Russia. So does the current uneasy situation just carry on? Because obviously Donald Trump has failed in his ability to create a ceasefire or end to the war within 24 hours, as you pointed out. Does it just keep limping on then? I think that's a distinct possibility, yeah, just a forever war.

Oh, what an absolutely appalling thought. So you're a Democrat. You're thinking about 2026 and 2028. Who are the people out there that you see that you think could make a difference? I mean, I actually think that the Democrats, even from what we can see, right? And at this point in 2025, we can't even predict who's not visible to us at the moment. But they've got a big disadvantage if they're not visible to us. because it takes time to lodge in the public mind, I think.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the Obama phenomenon was pretty impressive. Right, but people say that about Obama, but he still spoke at the convention. He had a prime slot at the convention, and everybody said, oh, my goodness, who is this guy? He's going to be the guy in four years. So it wasn't like he completely came out of nowhere. He'd only had two years in the Senate, but he had had the speaking slot at the convention. That is true. That is true. Look, I think AOC can really mobilize people.

I think Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, is super interesting. I think Chris Murphy maybe is also interesting. I don't think it's Gavin Newsom, right? I don't think it's anybody who's going to try to outflank Trump on the right. That is a losing strategy. It has to be someone who is brave and confident and speaking about a different path. Not like, yes, let's get

trans girls out of trans girls out of girls' sports and secure the border and thinks that that's going to get him closer to voters. But we have to do other stuff before we get to the 2028 election if we are going to have an election.

Go on. I mean, we have to have really robust resistance to Trump now, and we have to make sure that we secure the midterms as meaningful elections. I mean, we don't, people will say, oh, you know, Trump is not going to run for a third term. Oh, yes, he will. He's very serious about this. He'll find a way.

But also, we're going to have elections because we're America and we're exceptional. That's not exceptional at all. All the modern autocracies have elections. It's what the two political scientists who read so beautifully about democracies call competitive authoritarianism, which I think is not a great term because it's not actually competitive, but it has the illusion of elections. But if Putin, for example, hobbled elections by destroying the media. And so you have elections, but you don't have free and fair elections,

and just to be on the safe side, they would also rig the numbers. But the biggest thing was that was the media. It wasn't rigging the numbers and was also preventing people from campaigning. So it was the silencing of the media that, right. But I want to say, you know, in this country, I think what they're doing with election laws and what they're doing with IDs and what they're doing to citizenship, that's the space where I would look. Because if you have to prove that you're a citizen definitively in order to vote,

if you have to show two forms of ID, which is something that I easily can imagine happening across the country in order to vote, then we don't have elections. It looks like we have elections, but we don't have elections. Right, because I was going to ask you, there are many differences between, obviously, America and Russia, not least that.

He may be going after legacy media, but there are so many more platforms here where people can speak. And in a sense, legacy media is less relevant than it was 10, 15, 20, years ago because I can still go and criticize the president on X. I can criticize him on true social. I can go anywhere in the social media space and do that. So we still have freedom of speech. It's just in a different place. What do you mean what's in a different place? Our freedom of speech is in a different place? Well, right. Right. The freedom to criticize America

is still open to people. It's just in a different place. And arguably, more people have access to say what they want than they ever did before. That's absolutely true, but you know, that was also true in Russia for a while, and it's still true in Hungary. Media as institutions still have a really big place in our cultures, even if it's a smaller place than they used to have, and even if they sometimes seem irrelevant. But something, you know, when a media universe functions in a problem, in a problem, you know, proper way, for lack of a better term, things bubble up from social media,

coherer in legacy media, trickle back down into social media. You take out that big, old-fashioned element of legacy media, and you leave just social media, and you end up with a picture that's so much more fragmented than we have now. So Donald Trump is attacking some of the things that feel vital to America. He's attacking the courts, the education system, a big free media. To what extent do you think Donald Trump is actually anti-American? I think he's more anti-government than he is anti-American. And I think that actually that's something that he has in common with European far-right parties, which are Eurosceptic. But when they say that they're Eurosceptic, what they're really saying is that they're anti-modern governance. They're anti-expertees,

their anti-regulation, their anti-coordination, and he's all of those things. I think he's also anti-American in the sense that if this country was founded on an idea and ideals, he can't stand that. He can't stand good new ideas and he can't stand idealistic thinking. This is going to sound like a ridiculous question, but it fascinates me nonetheless. Why is everybody so scared of Donald Trump? Who's everybody? Well, good point. I mean, business leaders seem extremely fearful of him.

Increasingly, legacy media is fearful of him because he, you know, you look at the settlement that ABC made, because often legacy media is owned by corporations that have bigger business deals that they want to resolve. And it does feel like people are nervous to take him on. It's a great point. And I think there are probably two answers. One is that he's a madman, and madmen are scary. Madman, as a political term, he's unpredictable. He can do anything.

But the other thing is that it probably says more about us than it does about him. I think that American businesses, the corporate parents of media, are fundamentally fearful. They're fundamentally risk-averse. And so if there's a threat, they would rather throw a lot of money at it now, hoping that it goes away, then do battle. There is something very interesting about watching the American businessman who appeared on the dais at the inauguration and thought they could do business with him

and have still, nevertheless, in Mark Zuckerberg's case, is facing his antitrust case. In Jeff Bezos's case, has felt all sorts of the wrath of Trump. And similarly, Tim Cook, who's been criticized very publicly by Trump, despite them turning up and so-called bending the knee. And one is mindful of the oligarchs who thought they could do business with Putin, some of whom have literally been thrown out of windows or poisoned, and others who fled the country and live in fear of their lives.

Is there a similarity there? Well, can you just talk a little bit about people thinking they could deal with Putin? And then Putin being so much more unscrupulous than the, they could have imagined. I think, you know, we're not actually have to go as far afield as Putin. We can just look at universities, and specifically at Columbia University, which has shown us exactly what this looks like. They negotiate with the administration. They think they can negotiate with the administration. They make all sorts of concessions only to face another attack. They make more concessions,

only to face another attack. And that's going to continue until they either stand up or are completely destroyed. I think there's an understandable, maybe this brings us back to the beginning of the conversation about sort of our human proclivity to get used to things and tell ourselves comforting stories. If you are actually forced into negotiating with somebody, it's very, very difficult to say to yourself,

this negotiation is worthless. I can't do it. They are all forced into some kind of conversation. with this administration. And the administration makes unreasonable demands, and they think, well, at least we're talking to them. So maybe they see a human being across the table or on Zoom or behind an email,

and they think maybe we can make this work. At least we have a direct line of communication. It's very difficult at a point to sort of stand up and say, as Harvard did, but when it was pushed into a corner, and say, you know what, no, we'll see you in court. Right, enough is enough. And are you confident the courts will hold? I'm not confident that courts will hold.

We need to help the courts hold. The courts do not work like magic by themselves. We need people out in the streets demanding that court decisions be carried out, demanding that this provision be taken out of the budget bill, and just like being watchful and mobilized. So if there's one thing that listeners or what, of this podcast could do to be an effective opposition, what would it be? Something.

Do something. Do something. Yeah, anything you can do. I mean, there's a, it was a Chinese dissident who gave a great bit of advice, which is just be more brave than you think you can be. Great way to end. M. Gesson, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for having me. If you have been cooking your breakfast or walking your dog while listening to The Daily Beast podcast,

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