The Ezra Klein Show - Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

The preview we’ve had into Donald Trump’s second administration already feels, by American standards, disturbingly abnormal: Picking a former “Fox and Friends” host for defense secretary. Billionaire after billionaire trekking to Mar-a-Lago to curry favor with the president-elect. The Washington Post withholding an opposing endorsement. Meta ending its third-party fact-checking.But all of this is actually pretty normal — not in the U.S. but in many other countries. Researchers call them personalist regimes, in which everything is a transaction with the leader, whether it’s party politics or policymaking or the media. It’s a style of politics that follows different rules, but there are still rules. And understanding personalist politics, and their tried-and-true playbook, is a way to help make the next four years legible.Today’s guest is one of the leading scholars on personalist regimes, in both their democratic and their authoritarian forms. Erica Frantz is a political scientist at Michigan State University and an author of “The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy From Within.” In this conversation, we discuss what personalist regimes are and how they operate, the personalist qualities of Trump and the signs of democratic backsliding that Frantz thinks Americans need to track in the coming weeks and years.This episode contains strong language.Book Recommendations:Dictators at War and Peace by Jessica L. P. WeeksAutocracy Rising by Javier CorralesThe Trumpiad by Cody WalkerThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein show. There's an old idea about the purpose of science fiction that I've always loved. It aims to create cognitive estrangement, to make the familiar seem unfamiliar so that it can be looked at anew. But sometimes the opposite is needed. Sometimes we need to make the unfamiliar into the familiar. We need to see what is old in what feels new and strange. This can be a challenge with Donald Trump. He can appear as a hurricane of strangeness.

It was a liberal rallying cry in his first term. Don't normalize him. Remember this is abnormal. And it's no less true in a way in a second term, an anti-vax conspiracy theorists for HHS secretary, that's abnormal. A former Fox and Friends host for defense secretary abnormal. An under-qualified hatchet man who has vowed to use a state to go after Trump's enemies to lead the FBI. That the Senate would even consider that abnormal.

Billionaire after billionaire checking to the president-elect's private club in Florida to curry favor with him? Abnormal. And yet we also need to confront the reality that this is all normal. We have seen it all before. Sometimes here, but much more often elsewhere. Donald Trump is something old, not something new. We spend so much time talking about the rules he breaks.

We don't spend much time detailing the rules he obeys. But the way I've been looking at this is that America is undergoing a regime change. We think of that term as describing a change in who is in power. But I mean it in the sense of the political system itself, the way that power works. We're used to our politics revolving around what the political scientists call programmatic political parties. These are coalitions that are bound together by shared interests and goals. They feature agreements that supersede the desires of any particular leader.

They have large collections of elites and staffers and functionaries who know how to work together across administrations and periods. And so they bind new administrations. If you'd seen Kamala Harris win the election, there's no chance that she would have named a pro-life candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Democrats are a pro-choice party. If Ron DeSantis had been the Republican nominee and he had won the election, you would also see a pro-life candidate lead. If Ron DeSantis had been the Republican nominee and he had won the election, you would also see a pro-life candidate lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Republicans are a pro-life party, but Donald Trump won. And because R.F.K. Jr. was useful to him,

the fact that R.F.K. Jr.'s pro-choice did not stop him from making that nomination, and it may not stop Republicans from accepting it. The fact that they would even consider a pro-choice candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, that shows you how much control Donald Trump has over that party. It shows you that that party is working in a different way now. There is this other kind of political party. It's called a personalist party, a party subordinate to a person. It works less like the political parties we're used to and more like royal courts. These parties have become more common worldwide in recent decades. They're nothing new. And

when they emerge in democracies, they make backsliding into some form of hybrid authoritarianism a lot more likely. And that's what's different between Donald Trump's first and second terms. I've been saying this for months. You don't watch the man, watch the institutions. In his first term, he led a programmatic party. He existed in this uneasy coalition with a Republican party that was there before him, that expected to be there in similar form after him. But he's conquered that party now. He's remade it. Now it's Donald Trump's party. Speaker Mike Johnson is there only with Donald Trump's support. It is Donald Trump who is a crucial voice in primary contests.

It's Donald Trump's daughter-in-law who co-leads the Republican National Committee. Personalist regimes, they revolve around transactions with the leader. That's why so many billionaires and elites are now dining at Mar-a-Lago. They understand what the terms on the table are. You win Trump's favor by being of use to him. And then maybe you prosper. You get power. You get money.

You oppose him. He's going to make you and your company and perhaps the people you love pay. And this, I think, is why you see companies like Metta making these incredibly obvious Trump friendly changes, like ending third party fact checking and elevating Trump allies like UFC President Dana White to their board. Honestly, I think they've come a long way. Metta. Facebook. I think they've come a long way. I watched it. The man was very impressive. I watched it. Actually, I watched it on Fox. I'm not allowed to say that. Do you think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past?

Probably. Yeah, probably. In Personnel's regimes, everything is a transaction with the leader. There are rules. There is a way things are done. What is already separating Trump's second term from his first is how many power centers in American business and politics are showing that they're willing to play about those rules, that they understand how things are going to be done now. My guest today is one of the leading scholars of these regimes, both in their

democratic and authoritarian forms. Erica Franz is a political scientist at Michigan State University and a coauthor of The Origins of Elected Strongmen, How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy From Within. As always, my email, Ezra Klainshow at NYTimes.com. Erica Frantz, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Let's begin with some definitions.

What is personalist politics? Personalist politics is where we see leaders have disproportionate political influence vis-a-vis other key institutional actors. And we can see it manifest in both democracies and dictatorships. It looks slightly different in the latter. But essentially, rather than seeing politics being part of this bargaining process through elites and the leader, we see that the leader is basically determining most outcomes. Disproportionate is a word doing some work there.

So how do you decide what is disproportionate influence? I can imagine somebody saying, President Barack Obama was a international global celebrity. He had a level of prestige and power and media capacity far beyond anybody else in the Democratic Party. Wasn't that personalist politics? Right. So it's all relative. In general, most political leaders are disproportionately influential over other political actors.

But what matters here is the degree to which they have that sort of influence. So certainly we could say that Barack Obama was very influential in American politics, but not nearly to the degree of, say, Vladimir Putin in Russia, where all political choices are at the whims of Putin and no other actors can challenge him. And even in authoritarian systems, some regimes are significantly more personal and leadership-centric than others. So we might think of Singapore under the People's Action Party as an authoritarian regime, but most ordinary people wouldn't even know the name of the leader of Singapore because the

party is so central to that regime. And that's in stark contrast to places like Putin's Russia or Erdogan's Turkey and so forth. So it's really a matter of degree. And I can get into, if you'd like, the ways in which we can measure these sorts of things. But in general, we're looking at the type of bargaining that's happening between leaders and elites and the degree to which elites can serve as a constraint on the leaders choices.

Yeah, I do want to get into that. So what appealed to me about your book is that you are less focused on the individual leaders than the institutional structure around them. And you make this distinction between parties that choose their leader and leaders that choose their parties. And as I've been watching the Trump administration, his second administration take shape, that's felt like an important distinction to me. In his first term, it felt like you had a traditionally Republican administration surrounding a somewhat non-traditionally Republican president.

And in the second term, it really feels just like it is his, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, that Trump has his capacity to impose his choices on his party with very, very little sense of constraint or pushback. So can you talk a bit about where you see the dividing line between that party the leader controls and that party that can control the leader? Yeah, sure. So ideally, you want a political party to be based on a clear policy program. And in a traditional programmatic party, we would see elites really caring about the long-term

reputation of the party. And in personalist parties, instead, we see elites really fearful of appearing to fall out of favor with the leader. So it's a very different institutional dynamic where parties are personalists than where they aren't. And you mentioned the Republican Party, which is a traditional American political party and has had for many years a very clear conservative policy platform. It's shifted somewhat, but today we now see a Republican party that's really

centered on whatever Trump feels like promoting. And this evolution of the Republican party is consistent with trends that we're seeing globally. And I'm really glad that you mentioned that, you know, the focus should be less on the individual and more on the institutions. Because to me, it's been somewhat frustrating, the degree to which observers have focused on Trump as a person. And from my perspective, I have, I guess, more of a pessimistic outlook that most political

leaders try to become more influential. But what matters is the degree to which institutions can check them. And observers have noted for a number of years now that incumbent takeovers or autocratizations or whatever term you want to use are on the rise. So rather than seeing coups being the way that democracy is dismantled, we are instead seeing elected leaders slowly chip away at democratic institutions to consolidate power. And the common theme in many of these incumbent takeovers is that the leader is supported by a personalist party, where the party is basically geared around their career prospects rather than these kind of clear policy programs.

So one of the things I would like you to try to do in this conversation is make something that looks unusual familiar. Because I have seen a lot of people responding to the structure of the second Trump administration with some of these stranger appointments and the more unleashed way he's speaking and the billionaires flocking to Mar-a-Lago. I started thinking, how that's strange. That's peculiar.

That's an odd appointment, that's worrying. And when I read your book, it all looked very familiar, that it looked like this is following a pattern we've seen elsewhere. So when you look at it, what looks like it is going exactly as you would expect if you're watching the Republican Party move from this programmatic party that cares a lot about tax cuts or cares a lot about a certain stance on foreign defense to a personalist party that cares a lot about the individual ambitions of Donald Trump. Yeah.

So I think it is very important to zoom out and see what's happening globally, to have some sense of whether this is normal or not. So usually these are parties that the leader created or was a founding member of. So what was slightly unusual with Trump is that he basically leveraged these fissures in the Republican Party to kind of co-opt it. So on the one hand, it's unusual that Trump was able to personalize this kind of longstanding traditional party. Usually leaders create these parties.

And then the other thing that was somewhat unusual was that oftentimes when we have elections that are somewhat troubling or where you're worried about backsliding, it's because you think that the leadership group is going to somehow fiddle with the elections in ways that benefit them. And with Trump, he was alleging fraud against him, which is kind of the opposite direction that we usually would see. We did see in Brazil under Bolsonaro

that he started to follow that kind of new model. But apart from that, everything that has happened with Trump and the direction of democracy in the US and with his policy choices and cabinet appointments is really, really consistent with trends globally. You mentioned that the party doesn't even look nearly as programmatic as it did during his first term. So we've seen a shift in that regard where it's no longer quite so predictable.

And that's not to say that parties don't shift their policies, but that it is somewhat more of a predictable program where other elites have some sense of what the party is going to promote. Under Trump's Republican party, I think frequently Republican politicians don't really know what Trump's stance is going to be and therefore what the party's stance is going to be on political issues. So that is a big shift. So in the first Trump administration, you have this phenomenon of the resistance inside the administration. Sometimes it gets called the deep state,

but it existed also at the top levels of the administration. It wasn't just deep in the bureaucracy. And it's because you had this division in the White House of people who really liked Trump and understood themselves as serving him and his presidency and people who saw part of their job as restraining him. People like H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, and arguably even at times people like Jared Kushner, maybe not restraining, but pushing Trump in

a more mainstream direction. And now you have fewer of those. And it connects to one of the tells that you and your co-authors use to typify different parties, which is the political experience of the top appointees. Why first? And then how do you see what emerges if you look at the political experience of the appointees in Trump's first term and the second? So the research shows that as personalism in the party increases, the number of years of political and governing

experience declines among the key elites. So there's a pretty strong connection there. And when these leaders create parties, and again, the Republican Party is somewhat anomalous there in that Trump did not create it, but they usually staff it with friends and family members. And a really good example of that is El Salvador with Bukele, where he created Nueva Ideas. And first, I believe it was his childhood friend

that was the head of the party. Today, it's his cousin. Many family members have key positions of power, and yet none of them had any governing or political experience. And that's pretty common because leaders tend to prioritize loyalty over competence where they can.

We see that in authoritarian politics all the time. The problem, however, is that, as you might expect, it's not good for decision-making to be surrounded by a bunch of sycophants. You want some sort of checks on some of these choices that leaders might float around. You want experience to inform the choices that leaders make. So when we see these leaders kind of become surrounded by yes men, we see a lot of really bad policy choices that often have really harmful foreign policy outcomes. In terms of the discussion of Trump, some of the ideas of the cabinet nominees that have been floated or published or announced,

what have you, are very much consistent with what we would expect with a personalist leader in that we are seeing loyalty prioritized over competence. And it will be very important for the health of democracy in the US if the Republican Party stands up to some of these cabinet nominees and pushes back against it. We've seen some of it play out in the media since Trump won the election, where there is some discord. And to me, that is pretty important and something to really look to moving forward.

We want our cabinet officials and attorney generals and all these people to have political experience that's relevant to the job. It's a very important, not only a check on Trump, but also it's an important constraint in terms of ensuring that we don't have really volatile policies coming out. You described the importance of experience there as bringing a weight of judgment, maybe temperament to administration decision-making. That struck me as different than how you described it in the book, which was more related to the way that experience tends to reflect other sources of power, ambitions that might stretch

beyond any single administration, and as such a willingness and even a necessity to oppose things that are out of line. When you think of somebody like Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump to lead the FBI in his first term, Wray was sort of a bureaucrat, right? He had a lot of experience in Washington. Being known as somebody who corrupted the FBI would be bad for him. He had his own ideas about his legacy and so on. When you look at somebody like Cash Patel, that's very different.

Patel would never run the FBI under any other president, and he has no future in politics that is outside of Donald Trump's favor or disfavor. And so there's this way in which the the the Ray to Patel movement, again both of them Donald Trump appointees, really seems to me to reflect the movement of Trump either wanting or feeling able to make loyalty and you know the willingness of somebody to serve as your personal political executioner paramount in one of the most important jobs in government. That is an excellent example, and I'm going to take note of that because it does illustrate

a lot of the dynamics that we point out in the book. It is very important that political elites see a career outside of the leader. And so when these leaders appoint their friends and loyalists to these key positions of power, those individuals know that they pretty much only have that position so long as they stay in the good favor of the leader. They don't have years of experience to fall back on to ensure that they can get a political post elsewhere.

So when leaders are able to select these individuals to surround them in their support group, they pretty much know that these individuals are not going to push back against anything that they promote. And in fact, in some instances, they might endorse things that they know are unhealthy for democracy. So in that way, the lack of experience can be very harmful for democracy because there's little incentive for these individuals to push back against the leader.

And on top of it, they tend to not have the same political experience when it comes to collectively organizing to push back against the leader. This gets to a concept you all use quite a bit and I found helpful, which is to think about the capacity of the people around the leader, of the party around the leader, to oppose or curb the leader. What do you understand is the ingredients of capacity? What when you're, you know, coding your data set are the things that you include in the model to estimate the capacity of a political party or an administration to act when it

needs to act? So, we think about capacity in a couple ways. One is that we know using anecdotal evidence and so forth that when individuals don't have much experience working with one another and don't have much experience in politics in general that they don't have the political sophistication, let's say, to know how to collectively act against the leader. And then the other thing that we can look at is the party structure in terms of the strength of local party organizations.

Ideally, you want a party to be this robust political organization where there are local organizations that are strong and where it is not super top heavy. And instead with personalist parties, we see very top heavy politics. And we can show in the data that with personalist parties, the leader is more likely to control nominations. And where political actors are fearful that if they depart from that individual's messaging, that they are going to be unlikely to win political office. So basically, more likely to steer the careers of party officials and

party members. And then on top of it, we know that these leaders are also more likely to personally fund the political party. And so right from the get-go, if the leader is playing a dominant role in funding the political party, they're going to have disproportionate influence. They can control the direction of the party. And a good example of that would be from Georgia with Iva Nishvili and the Georgian Dream. He's this billionaire individual who was able to create the Georgian Dream, personally

funds it, and we've seen significant democratic backsliding in Georgia as well. So both capacity and incentive are important for understanding when we're going to see incumbent parties push back. In some instances, they have little reason to want to do so because they have no political future outside of the leader's longevity. In other instances, they really don't have the tools to be able to do much to challenge the leader besides defect and leave the party and threaten their own career. This struck me as an interesting place to think about the ways that Trump is similar

to and different than some of these other figures mentioned in the book. He is compared to other American presidents and has been very unusually focused on and present in his party's nominating processes. The Trump primary in which these Republicans line up for Congress, for governor, for Senate, and as he has put it with JD Vance, kiss his ass in order to receive his favor. You didn't see anything like that with Barack Obama, with Joe Biden, with George W. Bush. Trump really understands that if he is seen as the crucial mark of favor in the primary nominating process, then he has control over the individual in the party because they know

that he can destroy them. He can simply back somebody else the next time there's a Republican primary for their seat. On the other hand, he doesn't do it through money. He does it through attention and his own particular say so. But Trump, it seems to me, uses attention in the way that other figures in your data set and research use money. I'm curious what you think of that.

So yes, it's true that in some instances, leaders have used money to gain influence, and Trump has certainly used his dominating media presence to gain influence. But I think that that's fairly similar actually to Bukele in El Salvador, who won power with this newly formed party and then was really, really effective at using social media to establish a brand, to get out of his messaging. He was able to sideline traditional political institutions by just resorting to social media to put out his message. He's very much an attention seeker, just like Trump.

He brands himself as this kind of ordinary cool guy, I guess you could say, with his baseball hats that he wears at those events. He's really obsessed with media attention in ways that are similar to Trump. I think that there are multiple routes that you can get this sort of influence over your political system. But the core thing that is in alignment in all these places is that we don't see political elites envision a future outside of the leader's influence. Money then brings up this way in which Trump's second term is shaping up to potentially be

different than his first. So Donald Trump is rich, but he is not by the standards of being rich, all that rich. Maybe he was in his first term a billionaire in the low billions. People argued about what the true nature of his wealth was, but he wasn't rich in the way that Bill Gates is rich, that Mark Zuckerberg is rich, that Elon Musk is rich. And in his first term, really rich guys largely didn't like him that much. He didn't have a ton of support from America's CEO class.

Again, not saying there was nobody in that world who supported him. He had help from the Adelson's and others, but there was actually a lot of friction between him and that world. And that's very different now, led by Elon Musk, the literal richest man in the world, also somebody who has a lot of power over attention, and has put both that money and that attention in Trump's service. And I think this brings up this question of what in American politics, we often talk about is corruption, which I think for Americans sounds like stealing or looting, but maybe looks or gets called in other systems, patronage

or transactionalism. But I'm curious, somebody studied a lot of these systems, how you understand the ways that these trades, power for money, money for attention, are used not just to enrich but to bind a coalition together. Yeah, that's an excellent observation about the intricate ways in which the business community has aligned with Trump. So I study authoritarian politics primarily and corruption is very common in authoritarian politics. It's kind of the norm.

Democracies are not immune from corruption either. But what we see is that, particularly in personalist dictatorships where power is really concentrated, that corruption plays an important role in enabling the leader to distribute perks to their base of supporters. So in these really personalist places, leaders rely on a fairly narrow group of supporters to maintain power. So they don't need the support of everybody, they just need the loyalty of a select group of individuals. So what they do is ensure that these individuals have access to the perks of power. And this often happens in a corrupt fashion. One of the things that's interesting to observe is that corruption can also help the leader gain greater control over these individuals.

So there's a quote from Mexico during its authoritarian regime in the 20th century that a politician who stays poor is poor at politics. And that gets at the fact that, you know, many politicians are going to be corrupt in an authoritarian system. So it's not unusual that they take the bait and engage in these corrupt activities. But once the leader has established this relationship, ensuring that these individuals are getting the spoils of office in a corrupt fashion, the leader kind of owns them. Because at any moment that the leader suddenly questions their loyalty or grows suspicious of their intentions, they can charge those individuals with corruption and purge them

by saying that, oh, this person was engaged in corruption. We saw Xi Jinping do this with his big anti-corruption effort a while back where he went after his big opponents. But we see it in a lot of other personalist environments where corruption is used strategically. The leader is relying on corruption to secure the support of key elites and also owns these elites by virtue of this because he has access to information about their illicit activities that they can use at any moment to purge these people from positions of power, imprison them, and so forth. One thing that has been on my mind is a degree to which we're watching the emergence of the kind of oligarchic praetorian guard that maybe you see in Russia or in a number

of post-Soviet block countries, where there is an alliance between the very richest people in society, the leader, and they shift money and power back and forth. Again, I've watched as Musk is really putting himself in Trump's service with an explicitness you rarely see. It's not that Joe Biden didn't have rich supporters, but they weren't saying or suggesting they were going to fund a functionally unlimited super PAC that would challenge any Democrat who in any way deviated from what Joe Biden wanted. Choosing to act as an enforcer of the president with your money is something different.

But I also recognize from the other side, it could sound like I am drawing a distinction without a difference between these two things. This is a kind of liberal drawing of the lines around one thing and saying it's within the boundaries of institutions and another and saying it's not. So how do you tell the difference? What separates Putin's relationship with the oligarchs and the way he uses them from that of Joe Biden's relationship with richer people in American society?

Sure. So I don't know all of the details of Biden's relationship with the super rich or of Russia's relationship with the oligarchs. But in general, we think about corruption as an abuse of public office for private gain. So usually robust institutionalized democracies like the United States have a lot of rules in place to ensure that public officials can't use those posts for private gain. It doesn't mean that these things aren't always breached. You know, I'm sure that there is corruption in the United States, not nearly the degree to which there is in Russia. But in general, there are some sort of processes for ensuring that this doesn't

happen and those processes are, for the most part, respected. In a place like Russia, under Putin, there are all sorts of breaches of these rules and all sorts of funneling of money overseas into overseas accounts. Researchers have done studies on Russian legislators and try to measure corruption among those individuals and they have been able to identify a disconnect between what the salaries are of those legislators and the types of cars that they're driving. So we have more solid evidence that there is private gain happening among these individuals in these public posts. These corrupt legislators that are driving the fancy cars in Russia are less likely to show up to vote for individual policies and more likely to support regime

legislation. But there isn't a ton of research that has looked at some of the synergies that you're talking about with the ways in which backsliding elites have aligned with the business community. We do know that in existing authoritarian contexts like Hungary and Russia, that leaders are able to build these really close linkages with elites in the business community, often through corruption, that can be helpful for these regimes. But there's not a lot, to my knowledge, that gets at the way in which it can facilitate the process of backsliding. When we're talking about corruption or this kind of favor trading, there is this relationship

with the structure of policy. When policy is made in a flat and universal way, there's a tax code and it has tax brackets, there's not all that much to trade. When it becomes more discretionary, there becomes a lot to trade. And this has struck me as one of the dangers or possibly from his perspective, the virtues of tariffs. Tariffs are discretionary. You put them on some things and not on others.

I'm curious if that has been a feature of these regimes elsewhere and if that is something that you think might become central to the way Trump doles out favor and disfavor here. You know, I actually had not thought about tariffs from that perspective, but that's pretty spot on actually in that in general where we see greater state intervention in the economy, it creates opportunities for corruption. It creates opportunities to establish deals and give access to networks where officials can store their money overseas and all sorts of things lie on the books. The list is fairly long of the ways in which governments can take advantage of those state

interventions. So from that perspective, yeah, it certainly does generate more opportunities for corruption if there is greater state intervention in the economy and tariffs would fall under that category. We've also seen this shift this time in the relationship Trump has with the wealthy and powerful in society, who I think we would have grouped in his first term as in a more tense relationship with him. So put aside the billionaires who very actively support Trump like Elon Musk or Mark Andreessen, there's been this procession of CEOs trekking to Mar-a-Lago over the past couple of months.

Mark Zuckerberg and Apple's Tim Cook and Sam Altman from OpenAI and just a real who's who of American business power. And this is another of these things which I think you could imagine looking at both ways that if Kamala Harris had won and I had heard that she had calls with some business leaders, that wouldn't strike me as all that unusual. And on the other hand, this thing where they are all flying to Trump's club to pay him their respects, which feels to me like what is actually happening. That there is an understanding that you need to be in favor with him and that they're willing to make that transaction now in a way that

they were in the first term. Same people, very, very different behavior and different behavior that you're seeing in other places too, like Jeff Bezos killing the endorsement of Kamala Harris in the Washington Post. What do you make of that shift to the extent that you buy that there has been a shift here? It does seem like there has been a shift, at least observationally, for all the reasons that you just mentioned, in that it looks like we're entering an era of court politics where everyone is, you know, flying to go get the ear of the new leader. And it's not something that we're familiar with in the past, where all sectors of the

business community are descending in Mar-a-Lago to try to get Trump's attention. And I think that this is really a reflection of an understanding that what Trump wants is what's going to happen, and that if you don't get into his good favor, that you're not going to get what you want, And you could even potentially be punished. So it's unclear what sorts of attacks Trump is going to implement against his opponents. But the overall energy is one in which most people have the impression that if you're against Trump, you might be persecuted in some way, that he might try to go after you, that your business could be at risk.

So there's that component of it. And also, I think there's an extra layer where in some ways, many key sectors of society in the US have kind of given up, I guess, for lack of a better word, in terms of trying to push back against what Trump's vision is for society here and have instead decided that it's in their interest to get on board. All of this kind of falls outside of my area of expertise in terms of analyzing some of the intricacies of what's happening with Trump and the business community. But the major thing that would come to the fore is this kind of sense of court politics,

where everybody's trying to get around the leader, flatter the leader, to ensure that their business futures and political futures are intact. I thought I really perked up when you said court politics. Oh. I'll tell you something about our prep process here. Please don't take offense to this. We all hate the term personalist politics. That's fine.

It just doesn't feel like it describes anything, right? So much of politics is personal. So many politicians emphasize who they are personally. I know it's a term of art and has a definition. We've talked about that definition. And so one thing we ended up doing is spending a bunch of time as a team throwing around other things we could call this. We had Godfather politics and boss politics and Capo politics and I had Chet GPT give

me suggestions and nothing quite worked. We abandoned the hunt. But court politics, that feels very descriptive of what we're seeing. And again, in this effort to make a structure that many people are treating as aberrant or seem strange, familiar, this feels like some of the conceptual bridge that has to be crossed that on the one hand, this was all done very democratically. Donald Trump won the election. He won it in the traditional way. He won it through winning the popular vote and the electoral college. And yet what it seems to be resulting in is something that doesn't look so much like the

regimes we're used to in America, but court politics. So what does that term mean for you? Well, it basically means a situation where you can envision, you know, a monarch and the members of their court sitting around the throne, on bended knee, there to flatter the monarch, there to make sure that, you know, that everything that the monarch wants is implemented. You know, I often think about the story think about the story of the emperor with no clothes. That sort of dynamic translates to these settings. Again, I've talked earlier about disproportionate political influence, but the monarch is in

the throne lofty above these other individuals. You can visualize that sort of power dynamic. That's what we see in places where power is concentrated. I think there's been some interesting paradoxes emerging, or internal contradictions in the second Trump term, things that you have to use a different framework to think about clearly. So here's one, when we think about a more autocratic ruler

winning an election in a democratic society, I think we think about a closing down. We imagine autocracies to be more closed. But there's been, certainly within the Republican Party, that Trump controls a widening. There's just no doubt in my mind that the ideological range in Trump's second term is much wider than in his first, right? If the first term featured something running roughly from Jared Kushner in the moderate centrist vein all the way over to Steve Bannon, now you have something running from people

like RFK Jr. in the crunchy, hippie, conspiratorial world all the way to the Silicon Valley right and reactionaries and the futurists all the way to pretty traditional small government types over to more national conservatives like Stephen Miller. And what has seemed to me to make this possible, this strange openness that the Trump coalition has evolved towards, is that the whole thing relies on winning Trump's favor. Because Trump himself is not that ideologically interested on a lot of issues, he's more interested in loyalty and his transactions with the people he is in relationship with, that it is strangely, dramatically widened the range of outcomes and possible servants he can have.

Because the thing works like a court. If you can convince him it serves him or you'll serve him, he will agree to things that are pretty far outside where you would have expected. It was striking to see Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy seem to win over the holidays, this fight over high-skill immigration, because if Trump is associated with anything, it is with anti-immigrationist sentiment. But Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are able to offer much more to Trump than Laura Loomer and some of these more troglodytic supporters he has.

And so there's this strange openness that I think can emerge when the only thing you need is the nod of the leader as opposed to working within the established framework of, as you called it, a programmatic or more ideological political party. Yeah, that's a really interesting insight there about the broadening. And it makes sense because in these places with more concentrated power, we do see more volatile policy choices. And that's because policies are based on the whims of the leader.

And if a particular leader happens to stick to an ideological platform, then you might not see so much dramatic change. But leaders can change their minds very quickly. In Turkmenistan, which is very different than the United States, the leader there, Sepumar Niyazov, in his court was his former dentist, who ended up succeeding him, I believe. So they're really going after people who they think are going to be their loyal advocates. And even if those people have kind of bizarre ideas or ideas that are counter to what you might expect, if they're in the leader's ear, we might see those policies implemented. In this instance, with the skilled immigrants, that might be something

that economists would say is good for the health of the economy in the US. So it might not always be a bad choice. But the fundamental problem with these leaders, these personalist leaders is that there's no predictability in terms of what they might choose to pursue. And oftentimes, they make bad choices. A way I've changed my own views about what Trump's second term is going to look like is I think a year ago, I more bought into the idea that it would be more cohesive because they were vetting candidates this time and he had governed once before. And now I actually think it'll be in certain ways more fractious because the understanding of almost everybody at all levels of American society, that transactionalism is how you relate to Trump and he's not going away, has meant a lot more people are showing

up to the court with gifts for the king and trying to win his favor. And because his favor really matters, that's creating a lot of, and will create, I think, a lot of big conflicts. It has to be managed. It can become a toxic dynamic. What separates the leaders who manage that well from those who don't? So that's an excellent insight.

And there are some really nice parallels to authoritarian politics, in that personalist leaders in those contexts often pursue what we call divide and conquer as a strategy. So it is intentional that they want a divided elite. They don't want any risk that the individuals around them could behind their back coalesce to challenge them.

So from the perspective of a power hungry leader, you want to have a less cohesive internal circle. You want people to fear that they're in a game of musical chairs. The smallest sign of disloyalty, that person's going to lose their office. They want to create an environment of total uncertainty among those in their elite circle. And one way that they do that is by, again, like pursuing this game of musical chairs.

I think I mentioned this study from Russia that shows that the legislators that are in the pocket of the Putin regime are actually rotated out of office fairly quickly. They gain office, are in the legislature, get a few luxury cars, and then they leave power. And, you know, this musical chairs is intentional because they are ensuring that individuals can't coalesce to join forces to challenge them, that they're divided, and that they aren't very powerful as individuals, that no individual is very powerful apart from the leader. So even as I'm saying there are dimensions of Trump's second term that have a distinctive openness to them compared even to other Republican administrations, I think that reflects that everything depends on clearing the bar of loyalty.

And if you don't clear the bar of loyalty, the consequences can be more ferocious. And something I've noted with some alarm is the way in which Trump and his allies are much more intent on cowing the media this time. So you're seeing defamation lawsuits brought, ABC settled one with Donald Trump, he brought another against the Des Moines Register, simply for publishing a poll that showed him down in Iowa. I mean, that poll didn't hurt. It ended up being wrong as a lot of polls are wrong. But even if he can't win the suit, it costs money for the Des Moines Register to take

that suit, right? Someone like Elon Musk can bring a lot of these suits. Peter Thiel, another Trump ally, basically destroyed Gawker. So there is a, you know, you really can use lawsuits if you're deep pocketed to drain and even destroy media organizations and make them really think twice about how much trouble they're willing to work with. And at the same time, now Trump has a much larger, you know, right wing media ecosystem. He's got ex-Ru Elon Musk, he owns Truth Social, which is also something that he's able to profit from personally because it is a platform that is traded and there's

money in it. How do you see the way that the Trump administration or the Trump world is coming after the media and trying to create a sort of structure of favor and consequences for its second term. Yeah. So you've identified a number of things that are fairly troubling in terms of like from a democracy expert perspective. And that is that we might think of the media as like a fourth branch of government. The media play a critical role in keeping our leaders in check

and calling out corruption scandals and all sorts of things. And so the obsession that we are observing from Trump in terms of ensuring that nothing negative is stated about him, even if it's something as minor as the poll, as you mentioned, is troubling because that's a classic part of the playbook where we nearly always see these leaders that are intent on securing more control target the media. And they're either going to do it by sidelining the media, either through lawsuits, as you

mentioned, that could bankrupt them or by gaining more control over the media. We saw this with Orban in Hungary, where now the media in Hungary are pretty much fully under the Orban regime's control. Circling back to the bankruptcy thing, though, I did want to mention, it's interesting you said that because in Singapore, under the People's Action Party, one way that they are able to prevent their opponents from gaining much influence is by suing them in these libel lawsuits that bankrupt these individuals. So by targeting these individuals through these kind of minor libel lawsuits, they're able to bankrupt them and minimize the threat. And that's kind of this very effective tactic because it's not this like super easily observable red flag that democracy's

falling apart, but it is a subtle thing that cumulates to a larger problem where if there are enough of these media organizations that go out of business or that are self-censoring, that we no longer have that kind of fourth check on the executive that I mentioned. One of the things that has been an interesting dynamic to me is a way that even though Trump world has a hatred for what we might call the mainstream media that Biden world did not, they're much more engaged with it in a lot of ways. And it strikes me as getting at this strange dynamic in which the media is an important character in the Trump story.

It is his antagonist, his villain, right? The Democratic Party is too, the liberals are, but the media almost centrally. And so there's a real value to them to going into this place for combat because that's the whole story. And when they're treated with a hostile interview, that just goes to show and it's so unfair. And at the same time, there is this sort of striking, you know, at times almost symbiotic feeling relationship. I mean, people often point out

that Trump is often good for ratings. He is good for subscriptions, only was in his first term. How do you think about that? So I tend to think that the personality of the leader is unimportant, and that instead, politics is an outcome of institutions and institutional bargaining and things in relationships and so forth. But one thing that we do observe is that when individual politicians personalize their party, let's say. That type of power and influence tends to lead to more narcissistic behavior.

So rather than seeing this underlying narcissism as something that is going to predict power concentration, I think it's important to identify the ways in which power can shift the attributes of these leaders. And they tend to become obsessed with their own image and obsessed with the ways in which power can shift the attributes of these leaders. And they tend to become obsessed with their own image and obsessed with the ways in which they're portrayed in the media. This is not something that is unique to Trump. We see it in a variety of contexts, particularly in authoritarian contexts, where leaders become obsessed with their own image.

They build these personality cults. There's stories in Mobutu Zaire of him on the news, making sure that he was descending from the heavens on the nightly news every day. So that is part of this personality cult, an obsession with having a positive image in the media. So leaders don't want news headlines that are critical of them, right?

It is going to be a challenge. And Trump has been very savvy at navigating the media and at developing his own media company and so forth, similar to the ways in which Bukele has been really savvy. And perhaps Bukele has been even more effective in that we haven't seen the same sort of general societal concern for his relationship with the media that we do here. But regardless, there is this obsession that we see in lots of these incumbents that degrade democracy with the way in which they're portrayed. And in some ways, it is somewhat comical. But in other ways, it's something we should take fairly seriously because it degrades the ability of the media in many instances to speak truthfully.

So on the one hand, we've seen that leaders who are at the helm of personalist parties, once they get elected, the chance of democratic erosion and backsliding goes up considerably. And the playbook that they use to undermine democracy follows a similar format. So- Let's talk about that playbook. If you were to describe what the play is, or what the example of the play is in another country that looks most like what we're seeing here,

how would you boil that down? Yeah, so probably one of the first regimes where we saw this play out that got some media attention would be Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. And since then, we've seen a number of other places experience similar dynamics like Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary. The list is actually really long of these democratically elected leaders taking over power. And in places like Chavez's Venezuela, we often forget that Venezuela had been one of

the strongest democracies in Latin America when Chavez got elected in 1998. So we have this very robust democracy, and this leader comes to power via free and fair elections. He had created his own movement to back him, this Chavista movement, the name of which has shifted over time. And slowly he started to implement policies that gave him greater control and that undermined the power of his opponents. And this included things like messing with the judiciary, And by that I mean changing the rules so that Chavez could ensure that he had more loyalists in key judicial positions.

Leaders in other countries have done a variety of things to take control over the judiciary. They have changed things like the age that a judge must be to retire, to ensure that there's some forced retirement so they can staff the courts with their loyalists. They also go after the media and either they take over existing media outlets and staff them with their supporters or they sideline the traditional media and basically see it as some sort of evil operated against them. They also implement policies that make it more difficult for their opponents to win office.

And then what we see is that over time, the ability of these traditional institutional checks on the executive to constrain the leader degrade, and eventually leaders start messing with the electoral process, which is the kind of fundamental core of a democracy. And we see democracy erode. One of the things that you make a point of in your book is that we often look at all of this in retrospect. We see a country that is backslid and we say, ah, see, that was populism.

Or that person was always going to become an authoritarian. And that one of the arguments about focusing on the institutional context, the party context that surrounds them is it helps you think about the conditions through which these changes might happen rather than only being able to see them after the fact. But here we are at the beginning of the second Trump era. And there is gonna be this constant need to look at what is happening before us and deciding, does this reflect something dangerous?

Or is this just a Trump administration? Are these CEOs going to Mar-a-Lago, just people doing their jobs on behalf of their companies and trying to get the ear of the president? Or is a deeper transactionalism at the heights of American business and power emerging? What are you looking for? What if you saw it or if it continues would constitute an alarm bell to to Erica France, scholar of this kind of thing? And what would reassure you?

So I'm really glad you asked that actually because when Trump got elected in 2016, you know, I study authoritarian politics and democratic backsliding and at the time there wasn't too much interest in my research, right? So at least not from journalists covering American politics. And at the time, it seemed like everyone was really quick to say that democracy is falling apart in the US. So we have democratic backsliding happening in Hungary and Turkey and Poland, and certainly it's going to happen here. And I kind of pushed back against that because there were a couple of factors that the US

had going for it. We know that countries that have really long experiences with democracy are less likely to backslide and that countries that are wealthier are less likely to backslide. So democracy in the US should be fairly protected. And I did think at the time that the chance of backsliding in the US was somewhat higher than it had been in years past, let's say, but overall we were at a far lower risk than, say, a place like Venezuela. But then the big shift that happened was really, circling back to personalism again, but the

control that Trump got over the Republican Party since he even that he left power in 2020. And so that was a critical shift. On the one hand, it was a big positive that Trump's efforts to stay in office after losing the election in 2020, they failed, right? Because of the Republican Party, and in particular, Vice President Pence rejecting the plea to overturn the election. So that was a big testing point for American democracy, and we got through that one.

But the critical red flag to me is that the Republican Party has a majority in the legislature this time, and that Trump has really established full control over the party. So the key things to be paying attention to in the years to come are mainly in the months to come, to be quite frank. We want to see how is the Republican Party going to settle following this election. We've already witnessed a number of divisions within the Republican Party. Well, how is that all going to play out?

Are we going to see key elites throw up their hands and say, you know what, there's nothing we can do. We have to get fully behind Trump. Are we going to see all of these nominations of some of these bizarre and inexperienced nominees go through in the Senate? Or are we going to see intense divide play out? And from the perspective of the democracy expert over here, we want the Republican Party to be more divided. We want to see some sort of thorough discussion of some of these things. So that's probably the

first thing on the horizon. And then moving forward, the additional things to look at are the way in which the Trump administration engages with the judiciary. So are we going to see any efforts to mess with the judiciary in ways that ensure more loyalists are within key courts? And then are we also going to see further attacks on the media and efforts to silence and sideline the media? I guess I should mention a third thing as well. Trump has made some statements that he intends to go after some of his political opponents once he gets power. Are we going to see that play out? Those are the key things in the authoritarian playbook that we're used to seeing.

And are we going to see him go after Liz Cheney, let's say. Those would be some red flags to look for in the years to come. What tends to typify successful or unsuccessful opposition parties when these attempts are being made? Do the ones that tend to block the attempt, do they focus on the abuses of power, the corruption, the authoritarianism or the attempted authoritarianism, or do they focus on the abuses of power, the corruption, the authoritarianism or the attempted authoritarianism? Or do they focus on unpopular policies and bread and butter issues and making prices

lower? I do feel like there's this branching path of political choice that Democrats are trying to face right now as to whether to treat Trump as a kind of political emergency or to try to beat him the way you might have tried to beat Ronda Santis. Yeah, that's a great question. And there is not a lot of research on successful opposition movements to democratic backsliding. This is kind of a new field. So we don't have a strong sense of what the core features are of opposition groups that

are successful in pushing back against backsliding. But there are a couple of things that we know that one of which might be fairly obvious. So where opposition parties are divided, they're going to be less likely to be successful in pushing back. And it's important to note that oftentimes, the very attacks on democracy that the leader is pursuing can split the opposition because it can create all this uncertainty in terms of how to respond,

kind of what you're mentioning here with the Democratic Party. So we know that a split up and fragmented opposition is going to be less likely to be effective. But the other key thing to point out is that when we see democratic backsliding, it's really tempting to look to the opposition and say, okay, you need to do something to prevent this. Like, this is the key group that's going to prevent this from happening. But it's really difficult for opposition parties to do much when they lose majority representation

in the legislature. Once we see these parties get a majority in the legislature, the door is often really wide open for the leader to do what he wants to do. From the get-go, it was pretty clear that Bukele was going to be trouble for democracy once he won election in 2019, but things didn't really gain momentum until the legislative elections in 2021, where his Nueva Ideas party got the legislative majority. And right after that, he started fiddling with the judiciary in ways that advantaged him.

So the opposition can sound the alarm bell that democracy is under threat and all of these things, but those calls are going to be pretty impotent if they lack legislative representation. But he had a legislative majority when he took office in 2017 as well, and democracy survived. And this is something I hear a lot from people that all this hair on fire, look, this guy was president before, and it was, you know, from their perspective, fine. So when you say it worries you, does it worry you because you feel the Republican Party

and the legislative majority he has now are different than they were before? Or is it something else? Yes, it is precisely because the Republican Party is different than it was in 2017. We now have individuals completely fearful that if they don't get in line behind Trump, they're not going to get the party nomination. That is just a very different political landscape than a few years ago. And I agree with you that the term personalist is definitely overused and perhaps not super flashy.

It's also true that a personalist party is kind of a boring term. That's one of the interesting messages that comes out of it, that if we want to help support democratic health globally, we need to help build political parties, which sounds super boring. But it turns out that this old school political concept of political party is really valuable for preserving and protecting executive constraints and helping democracies flourish.

And I fully agree that there is a bit of fatigue about saying, oh, Trump's harmful for democracy and a new Trump term is going to be so bad. And I think a lot of ordinary people are kind of tired of that messaging. But if we zoom out and think about, okay, well, what does the evidence show about when a leader has this much influence over their political party and when they have a legislative majority? And the reality is that the chance of democratic collapse goes up fairly dramatically. And that's taken into account a ton of other factors, levels of wealth, political polarization, whether citizens support democracy and so forth.

So from that perspective, this shift in the Republican Party, where it's just Trump's party and the fact that we have the Republican legislative majority is really an alarm bell. And then always our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience? Sure. So first I would recommend Jessica Weeks, who has a book called Dictators at War and Peace. And this is our go-to book for explaining why personalist dictatorship is bad for foreign

policy. So it's a very good read. I also would recommend Javier Corrales, who has a book called Autocracy Rising. And this is this really detailed exploration of how Venezuela's democracy fell apart. And given that that was like one of the first incumbent takeovers that we paid attention to and has been a model for subsequent ones, it has a lot of really interesting information in it. And then lastly, for some levity, I would recommend Cody Walker's poetry book called The Trumpiad from I think 2016 or 2017. And it has a collection of poems that are very humorous that I think could provide some

optimism, I guess, in some pessimistic more times. Eric Afranz, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. This episode of The Ezra Klanjo is produced by Elias Isquith, fact checking by Michelle Harris, mixing by Isaac Jones with the female Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Similuski and Shannon

Basta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.