The Dispatch Podcast - How Democracies Fall and Rise | Interview: Larry Diamond

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

Jamie Weinstein is joined by sociologist Larry Diamond to explain how democracies rise and fall and what history might tell us about Donald Trump’s slouch towards tyranny. The Agenda: —Signs of a democratic crisis —Weaponizing the government —Missing the forest for the trees —Trump 1.0 vs. Trump 2.0 —‘Trump isn’t a fascist, he’s a golfer’ —All the president’s men —When to be concerned Show Notes: —Diamond: The Crisis of Democracy Is Here —Diamond’s Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency —Judge Wilkinson’s rebuke of Trump admin The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

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My guest today is Professor Larry Diamond. He is the Musbacher Senior Fellow of Global Democracy at the Freeman Spagoli Institute for International Studies. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a professor of sociology in political science at Stanford University. He has spent his entire career studying the rise and fall of democratic systems abroad and democracy here at home in the United States. And he is here to discuss what he sees as the crisis of democracy in America right now with

President Donald Trump. We get into what he sees as concerning, as alarming, what he fears, what he thinks about our institutions standing up to what he sees as the threats to democracy here in the United States. And we get into that in some detail. I think you're going to find this podcast alarming, I would say. I usually say interesting. I think alarming is the term I would go with on this one. So without further ado, I give you Professor Larry Diamond. Professor Larry Diamond, welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. Well, it's great to be with you. Professor, I want to begin broadly.

You've been studying democracy your entire career, the rise and fall of democracies. Can you just let us know or give us insight into whether there's a pattern on how democracies rise and fall, whether through all your studies of all the places where democracy has risen and fallen, whether you've seen a pattern? Well, there are multiple patterns, Jamie. Sometimes democracies emerge rapidly in a kind of revolution. Sometimes there's a gradual process of change that's an interaction between leadership from above, realizing it needs to hand over power to democratic forces and mobilization from below. So there's no one pattern for democracy rising. we were born in revolution.

You know, the Taiwanese transition to democracy unfolded over many years in a gradual fashion under an authoritarian regime. With respect to democracy falling, the same thing is true. It can happen gradually or it can happen suddenly. And I think what's noteworthy and relevant to our conversation is that most of the failures of democracy in the last 20 years have not come through a military coup, though there have been a few of those in Africa, or through a sudden overnight seizure of power

and a declaration that, say, closes down the parliament like President Kaisai'i did in Tunisia, what we call an auto-goppa, a self-coup. Most failures of democracy these days are happening, gradually step by step through a method that I've called the autocrats 12-step program. You caught my attention, and one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast was an article that you wrote for persuasion called The Crisis of Democracy is here. We will delve deeper into it.

But in short, what do you see as the crisis of democracy in Trump 2.0? Well, it's a lot worse now than it was when I wrote the article a few weeks ago. But I'd say it's authoritarian practice, authoritarian ambition, and authoritarian intent. It is defiance of the courts now on an almost daily basis, contempt for court rulings, even though he hasn't explicitly finally and irrevocably rejected or violated. a final decision of the Supreme Court. That test is still to come. It's the weaponization of federal power to intimidate and punish critics and enemies. Some of the examples of that are the weaponization of federal government power to deny funding to universities whose policies

he doesn't like in ways that are damaging the knowledge base and the technological competitiveness of the United States. It's the war on law firms who he thinks have harbored people who have wronged them and getting them to bend the need to him and offer tens of millions of dollars in free legal services. It's now, and it was totally predicted by me and others, the weaponization of the power of investigation and prosecution to go after two members of his previous administration who were simply worried about and trying to guard against election fraud in the 2020 election campaign. Chris Krebs from the computer security front and Miles Taylor, who wrote that book Anonymous, signing the alarm against the authoritarian drift

in the first Trump administration. And it's just on and on. In cabinet department after cabinet department, both facing outward to the world and inward to American society, it's a desire to dominate, to punish, and to have total control. Professor, even though I personally tend to agree with this analysis, let me just try to present what I would, what I think would, if a Trump defender was here, might say. They might say, Bob Jones University lost its non-profit status in the 1970s. It's not unprecedented that the Department of Justice or an administration would go after a school for violating policies that they saw as either illegal or wrong. They might say that the Tea Party was targeted in their view by the Obama administration

as that was a political weaponization of the IRS, even though, as you might point out, there is no tie like there is with Trump for signing an executive memo to go after a political enemy. In short, they would say some of this is not unprecedented where a president would use his power to go after either institutions, that he disagreed with, or even organizations that he disagreed with, using the IRS and other means? I think that we should not be any more inclined to engage in the game of what aboutism with respect to what Trump is doing, then we should be in playing this game as Putin plays it with respect to Russia. You can point to specific incidents of specific and very limited cases in the past and say, well, there's a precedent this way or that. It is the case that at one point Bob Jones University was refusing to admit black applicants in a pretty racist practice, and that was, I guess, what, 50, more than 50 years ago.

But there's never been the kind of full-on assault on universities and their academic freedom and their federal funding that we're seeing now. And there's never been in effort to completely take control of every aspect of university policy and violate academic and intellectual freedom this way. There's never been anything like the assault on law firms that we're seeing now and the demand that they purge anybody who has been involved in a lawsuit against Trump. We're seeing an effort at retaliation of anybody who opposed him, who denied his claim, which has been shown to be false over and over again in courts and decentralized, electoral administration venues, his claim that he won the 2020 presidential election. You have to put the whole package together of intimidation, punishment, weaponization of the

federal government, threats to former high-ranking military officers that they could be court-martialed if they speak out. The fear that people have in the Congress now, that if they violate Trump and his demands and resist his program and his cabinet appointments, that they could not only be targeted for political extinction through a primary challenge. Well, I mean, that's not illegitimate in a democracy, but that they could be targeted for physical extinction. And the number of death threats that Republican members of Congress have been getting when they even hint at opposition has been a major factor in their refusal to or their reluctance to resist and oppose Trump, which is why they're getting these death threats. To my knowledge, none of them have been investigated by Donald Trump's Justice Department or FBI, and it's part of the continuing pattern that we saw leading up to and most dramatically

during January 6th of the wink and a nod utilization of violent extremist forces to carry out his will. How does the pardoning of January 6th, all of the people involved, play into that? In some ways, you know, at least some of the people convicted were probably the hardest, I mean, the most active elements, the most willing elements to engage in that sort of thing, and to release them all and pardon them. What sort of message does that send to amplify what you were saying, the death threats, the risks that might attain to someone who opposes Donald Trump? Well, I think it's obvious, Jamie.

First of all, it legitimates what happened on January 6th. It describes it, as Trump has described it, as a patriotic act, and therefore the prosecutions and convictions, which were for, you know, pretty obvious criminal offenses, violent attacks on police officers, violent destruction inside the Capitol building, that these were just acts of patriotic defense of Trump's claim of a stolen election. So that's the first thing. It's legitimation of violence as a tool to pursue political ends. Second of all, it's freeing the people who were convicted to do it again and become now emboldened agents of both nonviolent and violent support of Trump's authoritarian project. And some of these people we now know are running for Congress. And the third thing it does, which is at least as ominous as the other two, is send a signal to future potential violent offenders that if they summon new conspiracies or acts of

violence, that to the extent that these would be prosecuted under federal law, they can be confident that Trump will pardon them once again. So it gives them a feeling of immunity and enables them to feel emboldened. Were you in any way surprised on how the second term has unfolded so far? I mean, when he was elected, reelected in 2024, did you immediately get alarmed that this is what would happen or has the scale of what occurred surprised to you? I was immediately alarmed. I was expecting what we are seeing broadly, the most serious assault on democracy and our kind of institutional checks and balances and constraints by an American president in history. I'm not going to see.

that this is the greatest crisis that American democracy has ever faced, because it has to compete with, you know, World War II, the Civil War, the War of 1812, you know, some things like that. But we've never had an instance where the threat to American democracy has come squarely from the President of the United States, so that there is no precedent for this. And I think that this is an extremely ominous and very plausible threat to the survival of American democracy. It did not surprise me. Many of us knew it was coming. And frankly, anyone who'd been reading his rhetoric and reading the literature and social media conversations, around the Trump network, I think wouldn't be surprised by the overall ambition

and the overall tenor and tone of this administration, which is to demand total personal loyalty to Trump himself. There were some things I think none of us had foreseen. I don't I think we foresaw the war on law firms, and some of the other things are playing out in ways that I think were not anticipated. But the overall character of an effort to marginalize the courts, marginalize intimidate the Congress, threaten opposition, threaten the media, threaten the business community, weaponize the IRS, the Justice Department, the FBI, federal agencies. All of this was anticipated and all of this I identified when I specified or articulated the nature and progression of the autocrats 12-step program in my book, Ill Wins. I just want to say one other thing, Jamie, what I didn't anticipate and what I think many observers did not anticipate who worried about a second Trump term was the raw incompetence of the Trump administration in managing the economy and in shrinking and really massacring government employment in such an arbitrary, radical and destructive fashion that it risks really severe damage to the

American economy and social services, anyone who thinks that Trump's own constituents don't need their social security checks or support from and reliable functioning of the Veterans Administration and the Veterans Hospitals or to get their kids into Head Start doesn't know anything about the, you know, social topography of American politics and the Trump support base. Well, that leads well into my next question, Professor. During Trump 1.0, my old podcast, I had Jamie Kirchick on, who is a writer. And I think he was quoting an old saying, but he applied it to Trump, that Trump isn't a fascist, he's a golfer. And the thought process, was that he's not focused enough to be an authoritarian. He's not competent enough, as you were

saying with what is going on here. I guess there's two parts of this question. One is, do you think it is Donald Trump's intent to end democracy as we know it in America, to stay on in power for as long as he can? And whether the answer to that question is yes or no, is he, is he, is, is the mishandling of what you were just saying about the mishandling and the incompetence, does that make you less concerned that someone in an administration not competent enough to, you know, send the right memo to Harvard, as we may have learned that they failed to do, may not be competent enough to end democracy as we know it? So I think we need to separate a few things here.

We need to separate Trump from the people around him, as separate analytically. and separate out analytically different pathways and degrees of authoritarianism. I have absolutely no doubt as a political scientist having watched this man for the decade that he's been in the political arena that Trump is an authoritarian personality with authoritarian ambitions who would like to create in the United States what Orban is created in Hungary, which is what we call a competitive authoritarian regime, with the exterior or the facade of a continuing multi-party electoral system, but without any real chance that the ruling party can be defeated,

and with a reality where everybody has been reduced to fear and trembling, I think that he already is well exceeding the pace at which Victor Orban assembled an authoritarian regime in Hungary. He's moving more rapidly, more radically. It's starting to look a lot more like Turkey under Erdogan. So this is where he wants to go toward a regime that will still have the facade of multi-party competition. an opposition party in the Congress, opposition controlling some states in the United States, but cowed and subdued into a secondary role that enables Trump and the people around him, essentially to do whatever they want, to assemble as much corrupt wealth as they want,

to enforce any policies they want, and to demand obeisance, in compliance with all of their policies and whims and fantasies. Now, secondly, can Trump himself pull all this off? No, of course not. He's not focused enough. He's not competent enough. But there are people around him who I think are very intelligent and, you know, have made a lot of mistakes of incompetence, but we can't write off the possibility.

And this is what I think should alarm us, is that they'll learn and become more focused and more competent over time. And here I'd cite the Deputy Chief of Staff, who I think is really running of the White House, who's really running this project now, Stephen Miller, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, at Russell Vote, who is, or VOT, who is the most powerful OMB director, I think, in history. And, you know, is the intellectual organizer and architect a Project 2025? These are extremely intelligent people. I respect them intellectually. I don't think they're committed to democracy.

I think their goal is to construct VOT is written about this in imperial presidency, unfettered by the Constitution, by checks and balances, by the Supreme Court, et cetera. And over time, you know, Trump might fire some people and replace them with more competent people. But I do think that his instinct is impulsive, arbitrary, ill-considered, and likely to result in continuing profound mistakes. So I think the probable scenario is that they're going to do severe damage to the economy, severe damage to global confidence in the United States and in the American economy. The value of the dollar is continuing to decline. The bond market is declining as well as the stock market.

They're probably going to mess up the delivery of social services. And so then I think they're headed toward a glide path of a pretty severe correction at the ballot box, first in 2026 and then in 2028. But given their authoritarian intent, I think we should have no confidence that they're going to be fully free and fair elections in the United States. And we should expect that they're going to try and do things, both through the passage of legislation and through administrative action, that would limit the ability of the voters to deliver them a course correction in a free and fair election. And this is what most alarms me, and I know it is increasingly alarming members of Congress privately. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace

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Voight. Don't they need more, though, than those two? I mean, is Marco Rubio part of the project? Is Pam Bondi part of the project? Is the other cabinet members signed up for this increasing authoritarianism, effectively ending the democracy, even if you have elections? Are they signed up for it and will participate?

Do you need more than Stephen Miller and Russell Voight and maybe some people on the outside who are cheering it on? saying Donald Trump should run for a third term? So they have a lot more in terms of committed loyalists to Trump and architects of this project than vote at OMB and Miller in the White House. I think the White House staff is now generally fully behind what Trump is doing. The Defense Department, certainly the Defense Secretary, the director of the FBI, and, you know, you could go down in other agencies.

He's placing a lot of people, some of them competent and some like Pete Hexeth, massively and obviously incompetent, who will serve his agenda. I am not going to name the people who I have more hope for because that would probably be the kiss of death for them. But there are at least a couple of people who stand out on most, people's list and who I think are trying to push back a little bit publicly and a lot more privately. But, you know, the more they go on in justifying this publicly and assenting to this, the more they become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. So I want to say also

that there is very little chance under any scenario of the Democrats capturing the Senate in 2026 because the math is not very favorable. The more plausible scenario for the Senate is that you might get a few senators beginning with Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, but I have hoped for Senator Tillis in North Carolina. I've hoped for Senator Curtis in Utah, maybe a couple more to say,

we just can't go along with this anymore. It only takes four Republican senators to say no more, and they won't have the votes to continue with this. In the House, the Democrats are highly likely to take back the House if there's any semblance of a free and fair election. And that alone would put a stop to a lot of this. But, Jamie, many of us think we can't wait until November of 2026. And so we really need some courageous Republicans in the House and Senate to stand up and say we will not vote for or collaborate in a drift to an authoritarian regime. I know you have a heart out in about 10 minutes, professor. So I'm going to try to get through with some of my remaining questions.

Trump came in clearly with a revenge on his mind of his political enemies real and imagined. John Bolton, as you mentioned, Chris Krebs, Tisha James, and so many others in various ways, either taking security from them or having an executive memo saying that there should be an investigation of them. How far do you think this revenge tour could go? So far we haven't seen a prosecution yet. Do you believe that he could have his enemies prosecuted? Do you think he could have them audited? Obviously, the concern with El Salvador, is, he's talking about U.S. citizens there. The worst case scenario in my mind, I don't know how likely this would be.

I would say unlikely, I'd like your opinion, is that, you know, he has one of his political enemies convicted of a crime, and then if U.S. citizens are allowed to be sent to El Salvador, you send them to a place where they have no recourse to ever get out. Are these scenarios that are, are these fever dreams of people that oppose Trump, or are these things that we should actually be concerned about? I think we should be very concerned about them. I have some very specific scenarios by which I think the freedom of any American citizen or not could be put at grave immediate and arbitrary risk. I'm not going to spell it out here because, again, I don't want to give them ideas, but there are scenarios and by which they could act against any individual citizen or not, and they might.

might think that they could do so beyond the reach of the courts. I think the courts could stop it, but this is why I think it is so important to establish the principle that this administration and any other administration cannot openly defy a court order. And I really urge your listeners to read Judge Harvey Wilkinson's recent decision about the importance of respect for and fidelity to federal court orders. Keep in

mind, this is a man who was appointed by Ronald Reagan. He's one of the most respected conservative jurists, I'd say, in recent American history. And more and more people like him and Judge Bozberg, who was, I think, appointed by President George W. Bush, are saying these same things. No president no matter how righteous they think their cause is, can violate a court order. And if they can do so and get away with it, no Americans' liberty will be protected. And if it's one type of person now with a political point of view, it can be another in the future. So I think we are, freedom is at existential risk right now. And I would stress as well that these things intensify over time. You look at every authoritarian project in Hungary, in Turkey, obviously before that, in Venezuela and Russia, in India now, and in El Salvador. And these presidents are prime ministers, they start at one level. But once they can get away with one thing, they keep cumulating and expanding in their authoritarian ambition and

arbitrariness. So this thing will mutate and become more vengeful, more arbitrary, and more punishing over time. The Supreme Court does seem to have been willing so far in some cases to stand up to the president, even those justices. In fact, all three of them have gone on cases against him, the ones he is appointed. What happens and what are the consequences if Donald Trump sees a Supreme Court order, which he has not done yet, and just says, I don't know if it was true or not by the apocryphal saying to Roger Tani, you know, you made your decision now enforce it. What happens if the president just defies a Supreme Court order? Well, I think that is, we've talked about a break-class moment, right? And that is the true, like many of these break-class moments

The threshold shifts, right? The bar keeps being raised, and people have a rationalization. At that point, open defiance of the Supreme Court order, there's no more rationalization. I think that there needs to be an impeachment and a conviction in the Senate and removal of Trump from the White House. And I think that is at the moment at which there needs to be massive organization and pressure on some Republican members in the House to strip Mike Johnson of the speakership, hand it over to an independent Republican, and begin impeachment proceedings. I also think there'll be mass demonstrations around the country. there'll be mass forms of civil disobedience, religious leaders, universities, everybody needs to speak out at that point. And ultimately, the markets will speak. I think that there will be a good deal of turbulence in the country. There will be not just a kind of incremental, but immediate

full-blown constitutional crisis, I think that the American economy will be severely damaged. And at that point, all bets are off. But to my mind, does that make you hopeful in a way? I mean, in a way, is that a hopeful signal that if... No, I don't wish for this. Look at what devastation people will suffer in their retirement savings. Look at the recession that we will have as a result. Look at the higher prices. People will be paying for imports because of the loss of value of the dollar. And the remaining couple minutes, criminal contempt. Can he just pardon? If the court held one of his underlings in criminal contempt, does he have the power, the president, just a pardon? Does that mean nothing if the president

is okay with what he's doing? I don't think so. You'll have to ask a legal expert. on this, but a finding of criminal contempt, and by the way, the courts can also find civil contempt and impose financial penalties, such a finding, I don't think, comes under the president's powers of pardon. Moreover, I think any lawyer who cooperates with some of the blatantly undemocratic things that Trump is demanding that they do is, facing a very, very serious risk of disbarment. Let me just close with this final question, Professor. What are the odds that, you know, what we're talking about here doesn't exactly come to

pass, that Trump steps back from the ledge before going too far, and that, you know, we're, you know, this interview, my questions and your answers were viewed as alarmist 10 years from now, that we never got to the point of Trump stepping over the line fully. Do you have any hope that what we're talking about here, that Trump will decide not, because he said that he won't so far defy a Supreme Court decision, that he does not go as far as we're discussing? I'd say the odds that we're going to avoid a much deeper, more acute and immediate constitutional crisis than the one we already have, probably no better than 25%. I think he's clearly committed to this court. of imperial ambition and control. The odds that he will succeed in really destroying American democracy, I think are less than 50%, but very, very real. The odds that he would be able to stay a third term, even if he drags American democracy down below the minimum threshold,

of what any of us would recognize as a democracy, that's lower. That's not a probability I worry about because the Constitution can't be amended, and I think that's too hard a bank shot. But look, we could have an authoritarian regime that Trump brings off in his second term and then passes off to J.D. Vance or Donald Trump Jr.

There are plenty of other terrifying scenarios. Professor Larry Diamond, and thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. Yeah, thank you, Jamie. Thank you.