The Paikin Podcast - World on Edge: Is Trump Turning America into a Mafia State?

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Is it authoritarianism yet? Jeffrey Kopstein thinks we should be asking another question about America.He joins Steve and Janice Stein to discuss his book "The Assault on the State,” if Trump is turning America into a “family business,” the global shift from the rule of law to the rule of men, how Trump and Viktor Orban and Benjamin Netanyahu are following in Putin’s footsteps, and why when modern states collapse it leads to arbitrary rule by authoritarian "fathers" and their extended households. Follow The Paikin Podcast: TWITTERx.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAMinstagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKYbsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.socialLINK TREEhttps://linktr.ee/thepaikinpodcast

Hi, everybody. Steve Paken again, and we thank you for joining us for the Paken podcast this week, World on Edge. Well, we have seen some very disturbing and controversial things coming out of the United States. I know we can say that as a general rule, but in particular over the last few months, people being scooped up off the streets by ice, the military being deployed in big cities, which just so happened to have Democratic mayors in an attempt the president says to control crime in those cities. You've got the president. of the United States welcoming what much of the world regards as a war criminal with red carpets and flybys, applauding, shaking hands, hugging. There are some unusual things taking place these

days in our neighbors to the south. The question is, is America slipping out of democracy and towards authoritarianism? We'll tackle that this week on the Paken podcast. As always, delighted to welcome Janice Stein from the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy to our program and to that question. Janice, you've been watching. What do you think? Is America slipping into authoritarianism? I go a little further, Steve, and say it is authoritarian. To me, the question is, can they walk it back?

okay that's the question you're asking that's what i'm worrying about yeah we will get into some of those answers actually with a guy you know very well i and we'll explain why you know him so well in just a second but we do want to introduce geoffrey copstein jeff is the co-author of a book called the assault on the state how the global attack on modern government and dangers our future he's a professor of political science at the university of california at irvine and of course he used to be at the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, which it may not have been named that when he was there. But anyway, it's old home week here on the Pagan podcast.

Jeffrey, how are you? I'm great. I'm great. Good. How are you guys? We are superb and we miss you from all of our days on TVO together when we used to do shows. Some days I do admit, why did I move to the United States? Well, let me just say, Jeff, how great it is to have you back even for this. And what a terrific book. Terrific. Thank you very much. Yeah, well done, Jeffrey. Now, I understand that you don't particularly love the question

that I just posed, that you may actually believe that the question of whether America is losing its democracy and sliding into authoritarianism, or as Janice believes, may already be knocking on the door of that. Do I have it right? You don't necessarily think that's the key question to be asking right now? Take it away. It's a super important question, and I worry about it. Obviously, anybody. he's living in the United States has to worry, are we going to have free and fair elections in 2026 or 28? I mean, that's where the rubber will really hit the road. Is the president acting an authoritarian way? Absolutely. But there's a, so that's one dimension you can think

of it as from kind of from authoritarianism to democracy. But think of it as a, think of a second dimension. And I think that's the second dimension that I worry about, that Trump is not only attacking democracy. He's attacking the state itself. That is, is the state bureaucracy that keeps us safe, healthy, wealthy. And so you can think of a second dimension. The way Trump thinks of the state is really as a family business, rather than a set of impersonal institutions that operate according to merit rather than cronyism, that operate according to procedures as opposed to whim.

So if on the one hand you can see democracy and bureaucracy, as one dimension, sorry, democracy and autocracy as one dimension. You can think of a second dimension that cross cuts it, that goes up and down as bureaucracy at one end and personalism, or what we call it, Steve Hanson and I call in the book, patrimonialism as a second dimension. And Trump is clearly a patrimonial leader, typical patrimonial leader. That is somebody who views the state as a family business, a kind of mafia state. Now, there are other leaders like this in the world, some Democratic, some not, right? Putin in Russia, classic case of a patrimonial leader.

You know, Orban in Hungary, right, where you have actually a big democratic element there, right? The guy, these leaders are good at elections. They get elected over and over again. Netanyahu in Israel, right? Another guy who used to be very much a rule of law person, even if he was tough on the Palestinian issues. But he's also slipped into kind of a patrimonial world where the state, the party, or all the BB party, the BB state. And really what you have in the United States now, it's an attempt by Trump to put all his people, right, people who are not just loyal to his

ideas, but personally loyal to him in positions. Think of the Federal Reserve, right? There's a bureaucracy, right? Well, Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics. Health and Human Services. All of it. All of it. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission. All of it.

Yeah. Let me do a follow up. I'm going to do a follow up with Janice on this part of it. You know, what Jeffrey is describing is in fact, I think what Steve Bannon, years ago, described as, quote, unquote, the administrative state, which he believed needed to be deconstructed because he thought that administrative state was basically in the tank for the status quo. And those were not the people that he was representing. He thought the administrative state.

was screwing, frankly, lower middle class Americans and the base of the Republican Party under Donald Trump. What do you think of that argument? Is there anything to it? Well, you know, let's separate out what Jeff is just, I think, rightly described as the difference between bureaucracy and this personalist element. And that's a really important point just to underline. Steve, you know, as you were talking, Jeff, I thought about Egypt and about. And we'll about, Right. And long before 2011 and the revolutions in the Arab Street, it was all about the deep state. That's one of the earliest users of this phrase, the deep state. And that's why this is such an important book that as Jeff and Steve have written, the deep state. And what that's about is really, do I have my buddies in there? Do I control the levers? or does somebody else control the levers?

And those are the only options for those people, and it's personalist, right? It doesn't think about, well, Viberian bureaucracy, which is the way, you know, for the last, ever since Weber Roe, we think about a bureaucracy. We'll govern, process govern, which makes us all crazy. That process governing, you know, you're exhausted from thinking about going to, you're exhausted from thinking about getting through a process, but it's supposed to be blind to who you are. That's the core element of a functioning bureaucracy and a democracy. And I would go, and be interesting, Jeff, if you agree with this or not, if you don't have a blind bureaucracy that operates behind a veil. So I don't know if it's Steve Paykin and wants his driver's license today or me. It's irrelevant, right?

We're going to have to go through the same process. If you don't have that, you don't really have a democracy. I'm definitely, what do you say? Yeah, no, I mean, I think for most of human history, leaders ran their countries with a staff that was made up of cronies, crooks, criminals, magicians, soothsayers, right? People were looked at as, you know, did they cause things because they were impure foreigners? Are we back to that?

Is that what you're saying? A modern impersonal state is a relatively recent thing. And Americans love to hate the state, right? That's something we've done for a long time. You know, we don't like, nobody likes taxes. Nobody likes the Department of Motor Vehicles, right? We don't want all of our people running us like Newman on Seinfeld, the postman, right? Who was a kind of a lazy joke.

But think about what the world would be like without that. Our air would be poisonous. Our water would be impure. And what we're talking about here, we would. have our vaccines. Think about that for a second, right? And what we're really talking about here is not only an attack on democracy. It's an attack on modernity itself. What we're dealing with here is, in essence, is a kind of a demodernization. And this idea that the administrative state, right, is somehow a shadowy conspiracy that is run by secret people. This is something

which is an idea, which goes back, as Janice said, to Egypt, it goes back. It was actually interestingly, the phrase, Deep State, was first used in Turkey. Right. Yeah. A car accident with the head of the underworld, the head of the secret police and his girlfriend killed them all in a car and they found passports and guns and drugs in the car. There really was some kind of conspiracy there. But then it kind of moved from the Middle East to the American left. Right. And you had that, this was the military industrial complex, and then it migrated to the right, as you said, to Steve Bannon, who used actually Lenin's term, we want to smash the administrative state, we want to smash the deep state, right? But the problem is, is what are we going to be left

with? The alternative is not going to be a libertarian freedom. It's not going to be a Christian national state. It's not even going to be a unitary executive state, which is what Trump's legal people are you're arguing for now. What you're going to end up with, instead of the rule of law, you're going to end up with the rule of men, right? And that is much older. But it does raise the question, yeah, Janice, it does raise the question about whether or not bureaucracy or the administrative state, call it what you want, whether those public servants and the people who champion them have done an inadequate job explaining why we need to value them as much as you two obviously believe, we do. How much, how much, you know, responsibility do they have to

take for not making the case to too big a part of the population that they're in it for them, too? You know, I'm going to give you a funny answer to that question and then ask another one as we go through here, because I don't think it's only the bureaucrats who then a lousy job, because bureaucrats are supposed to remain anonymous. You know, I think about our own parliamentary system. We're not even supposed to know their names. They are supposed to execute within the law and by the rules, what their ministers want them. Without fear or favor. Without fear or favor, what their ministers want them to do, right? And you don't get ahead, as you know, Steve, in the public service. If your minister is embarrassed or all of a sudden

the spotlight is on somebody is on their deputy or anybody else, this is not a recipe for longevity. So I think and you know, we have newspapers whose sole goal is to expose bureaucrats who make mistakes as if none of the rest of us make mistakes in our lives. So I think this has been a concerted attack on the administrative state that doesn't come only from the political class. It's much broader and we own some of the responsibility. Let me go to Jeff on that. Just one before you, because the book was so interesting because it's history. And it says, this is not a new problem. You need to know something about the past, which is always helpful.

And actually, the book does a wonderful job, I think, of looking at the Soviet bureaucracy. And there's a really interesting case because, look, for a long time, that bureaucracy did good science, was innovative, improved public health. So is it a turn, is an attack against modernity, or is it be modern as long as my guys, because it's guys, as long as my guys are running the show. Sometimes hard to disentagnal that. Jeff, let me get your take on this issue, but whether or not the political system pre-Trump, and you can define that how you want, elected politicians, the bureaucracy itself,

whether they did an inadequate job convincing the public that they actually had their interests in mind. Well, you know, I think they did. And for a long time, we've been kind of making the bureaucracies have been the kind of the butt of jokes. They're the kind of the mother-in-law jokes, if you will, right? And, you know, I think it's not only the bureaucracy that, you know, we don't valorize. You know, Michael Lewis, the guy who wrote Moneyball, has a new book out where he has a series of chapters that are simply stories of state bureaucrats, right? The stories of these people who've done, who could have made way more money doing almost anything else. But they were interested in public service, whether it be public health, whether it be the banks, whether it be the labor statistics. All these things are super important. We couldn't run our world without them.

But it's not simply the bureaucracies. It's also expertise as a whole. And I know you've had people before on when you used to, when the agenda, you had people on who talked about the importance of expertise. Tom Nichols wrote an entire book on that subject. And, you know, you think about universities, the attack on universities. Really, the entire attack on expertise is very patrimonial because what it's saying is anybody who does not agree with the wonderful insights of the leader. That's the danger we at universities, represent. We question the insights of the great leader. And so when Trump stands up there during the

middle of COVID and says, you know what you guys should do? You should drink bleach. Remember that? Right? We all remember. We were all throwing things at our television at that moment, right? And who was sitting there? The expert, Debbie Birx, was sitting right at the side. Shaking her head. Turning red, right? Wanting to slip under the seat. And, you know, we've all sort of been there in that situation before when a blowhard stands up there and goes out of their zone of expertise and says, I can't believe they're actually speaking that way. Well, we're having that all the time now, almost on a daily basis. When Robert Kennedy stands up and starts kind of spewing nonsense, spewing BS, you know, my friends who are professors here at the university and Janice's friends at U of T, right, at the medical school, they're saying,

what is this guy, what is this guy saying? And we represented danger, right? We represent a danger to that because we don't buy their insights. We don't buy what they're saying. So it's an attack on bureaucracy. It's an attack on science. It's an attack on expertise. And it's an attack on modernity. Now, you asked a very important question at the beginning. To what extent is this also an attack on democracy? And the answer is yes. Of course. Democracy itself requires bureaucracy. If you're going to run an election, you need, think about how it's actually run. You need to register people. You need to know who is eligible to vote. You have to be able to see society. Society has to be legible to the state. We do that through censuses, right? We do that through

all sorts of systems of registration. And the act of voting itself requires election workers. Think about the attacks on election workers. All of that is designed. Think about gerrymandering. The idea there in the United States is to ensure not that people choose elections, people choose politicians, but the politicians choose their voters, right? And that itself. That's so outrageous. It's just so outrageous. I mean, the fact that we have in Canada, judges and neutral people picking our election boundaries to me is one of the great advantages we have over the United States where politicians cook it for themselves in such an egregious way. It's so true, Steve, it's one of the things I wanted to write, and I have lots of families still in Canada. I wanted to write an op-ed

before the last election. Now, you know, I'm not here to sit and say whether the conservatives were a version of Trump or not. There are Trumpy people there, right? But I really wanted to write an op-ed to say, don't do it. Don't do it. You don't want to give up that those impersonal bureaucracies, right, which ensure that things basically run fairly. And we sit and laugh at those people. They're easy to laugh at. They're not highly paid. They work according to rules. It shuts down at five, right? All of that stuff, we know all of that, right? But we have to understand what the alternative is.

The alternative is not the free market. The libertarian, the libertarian dream, right, of having no state, that leads you not to a free market. It leads you to patrimonialism. It leads you to the rule of that. Yeah, let me get Janice's take on this angle of it. And I will acknowledge here, maybe I was being a bit naive about this. I thought after COVID, particularly in Canada, let's talk about the experience that, Janice, you and I know better, which is Canada versus the United States. I thought after COVID, in the way that, for example,

the administrative state managed to get the serve benefits out to people in record time. Okay, we were a little behind everybody else in procuring vaccine, but once we did it, the public, 85% went out and got their shots. There was a very small minority in Canada, which was mistrustful of all of that, I thought that might have led to a rethinking about the value of bureaucracies, public servants, and that kind of thing. And if it did, I don't know, am I wrong, Janice?

If it did, it didn't seem to last very long. You know, it's a really, really interesting question because the public health community in Canada, which by and large, you know, the results tell the story, right? we had fewer deaths from COVID for capita than many other developed democracies. So there is something right here. You just look at the fact. But what do people talk about now?

And you hear this. Jeff, you missed this. We're the longest lockday of any big city in North America. And that's what people talk about. And you're furious with the public health people that they insisted on that. And they forced the politicians to do it. And I probably is worried. I mean, when I watch what's happened to the CDC right now,

the Center for Disease Control, it's terrifying. It's terrifying. But I actually think we will have just as big problem in Canada. And how did this get framed? And it's not only the Trump be right that talks about it this way now. It's they took away my freedom. They locked my kids down. My kids are still having trouble in school because they missed two years of school

and they've never recovered. That's what they're focused on. And inside the public health community, by the way, there's a lot of critical self-reflection now, where these same bureaucrats are asking themselves, hey, look, we got something wrong. What do we do better next time? Yeah. But I guess the question at this point becomes, all right, you've identified the problem very clearly in your book. We know where, you know, anybody who flips on a newscast nowadays or picks up a newspaper or read stuff online can see what's going on in terms of the attempt by the American administration to do all of the things that you think are so bad, what do we do

about it? Is there anything that can be done about it? It's a good question. So right before the election, the thing I'm most proud of in that book, it's weird, because you never know when you guys are both authors, you never know when you're writing a book like what's going to be important or not. We sort of predicted Project 2025, which was this attack on the state before it was even written. We said, look, something like this is going to have to happen. And so we wrote the book. We wrote this, you know, an op-ed in the New York Times. And just before, after Trump was elected and just before the inauguration, Francis Fukuyama, of end of history, Francis Fukuyama, he also started to understand that

this was coming up, too. And he organized in Washington, D.C., a kind of a small group of about 30, 30, 40 people to try to save the civil service, right? You know, because they knew this was coming down. But that group, it's not only Democrats. There are lots of Republicans in that group, too. And it's the idea that, you know, there's nothing wrong with talking about reforming all of this or downsizing it or tax levels. Like the old debates that we always used to have, there's nothing, there's no problem with saying, look, we should have different rules for procurement. It's too slow. It should be easier to hire and fire people in the civil service, right? That's all. fair game, right? And so the crisis that's being caused by all this, there's nothing wrong with

saying, that's the crisis that's causing us, there's nothing wrong with saying our administrative state can be improved, right? Everything can be done better. But the idea that we can get rid of it completely, that it can be taken apart completely. Couldn't have said it better myself. We shouldn't we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I think, you know, we have to both revalorize the lifetime of public service, right? All three of us here, right, talking to each other right now, right? Even you, Steve, state bureaucrats. That's what we were. That's what we, we, that's what Janice and I are, and that's what you were. I know you don't like to look at yourself that way. I'm not buying that. You are working for the state of Ontario. You certainly were.

I will confess, no, no, hang on, Jeff. I can't let you get away with that. I will confess that the Treasurer of Ontario signed my paychecks. There you go. But I didn't work for him. I work for the people. So, well, I could say that same. Janice and I could say the same thing, too. But so does any public servant. That's the point, Steve. Yeah.

That's the point. Right? So the institution of tenure, for example, without which, you know, I'd have to worry about what I said all the time. And that's why I didn't write that op-ed in the Canadian newspaper. I didn't want, because if somebody was the wrong person had gotten elected, I didn't want all my relatives having their taxes audited. right? And so, not that they would be, they would be fine if their taxes were audited, but, but, right?

But who needs the headache? And also the institution of tenure. That could be taken away. The institution of civil service protections. Trump, his last act before leaving the presidency back in 2020 was putting in this thing called Schedule F. Schedule F was reclassifying civil servants so he could fire them, right? So they would lose senior civil servants. Biden got rid of it completely after he came to office. The first thing Trump did is he put it back in place, right? And now, of course, we know, right? You have this guy, you have a kid who graduated two years ago from high school called Big Balls, right, who is running around the bureaucracies in the United States firing people, right?

You have a 21-year-old guy who works for Doge, who, you know, Musk used to run Doge doesn't anymore, running around firing people. I have a student who was at the United States Institute for Peace. He said it was like something out of Vichy. You walked in one day. There was somebody working for the, we're actually working for Doge secretly, one of the bureaucrats. All the people were brought in. There were police. You had to go to your office, get your stuff and leave, and they walked you back to the car.

And you walked by all your former workers, right? That's what was happening. And there's a building now. the United States Institute for Peace, if you've been to Washington, D.C., it's a beautiful building. It's empty, right? It's basically empty, right? They're running it on. It's on life support. That is what is going on in the government today. And we don't see it now. The short-term consequences of this could be things like shabby airports, you know, LAX, everything will look like LAX. The long-term consequences of, you know, not collecting proper labor statistics, we're going to be flying blind.

We're not going to even know what the inflation rate is. And of course, if you don't know what the inflation rate is, and if people think it's high, you'll want to have your own people at the Federal Reserve to make sure interest rates don't go up. So those two things are actually connected. We'll be flying blind, and the long-term impact of this could be catastrophic. That's why we have government. It's a hedge against catastrophe. Janice, come on in.

Yeah. So the question and I, we're. worry about now all the time is what can change this trajectory? Because I don't think there's any disagreement with a picture that Jeff is painted, frankly, by people who pay attention to how important this state is. But what can change this current? And look, I don't think any of us have an answer. Steve, you ask that question. How do we get democracy back? But how do we get the state back too? Because those two things are intimately connected, because you can't have democracy that a functioning state. How do we get that back? The destruction in the United States is horrific already

of state institutions and it could happen here too. It can happen anywhere. So how do we get about the answer can only be politics? It goes back to politics. You got to win at the ballot box. You got a win at the ballot box. And I was just talking to Stephen saying it was an interesting poll yesterday, which Jeff, you'll know well, which actually love. at public attitudes. It was John Seitz, who does really, really good work. And he said, 55% of the American public, you know, there has to be some optimism, but then there has to be a lot of hard work. Fifty-five percent of the American public self-depoints as a moderate, either an independent or a moderate Republican or a moderate Democrat. There's no vehicle

right now as the parties polarize. So the biggest job, I think, if we're care about the state over the next three or four years is to rethink politics and how we do politics. So that big moderate center, which we have in Canada, which I still believe they have in the United States, I really do. How do they get a voice? You know, Margaret Outwood, Jeff, I don't know if you saw this, but she said something that I thought was so smart. She said, how stupid to hate Americans, how stupid it is on the part of Canada. Canadians to hate Americans. Most Americans, the majority, 55% is the majority, don't like what they have now and want something different already. And Americans say to me all the time, we're mortified

about what our president is doing to you guys. I hear that all the time. But what's the political strategy to give these people a voice in the election? We have a built-in two-party system. That's where primaries, we're war, the most extreme elements of both. parties. And cable television gives the biggest voice to the most radical people who are making the most noise. This is hard. This is really hard. It's hard. It's hard to make a call. I mean, really what we need is we need to reconstruct a coalition of the center of some sort. Yeah. And it's very hard. It's very hard to do that. It requires compromise. In the United States, you know, you have, you have kind of liberal centrists and then you have the progressive wing.

And right now it's a circular firing squad. I mean, they're just basically going after each other. other. And the interesting thing, of course, is that the right in the United States is mostly pretty unified. They're all around Trump, right? The old Republican Party has sort of either it's cowed, right? At Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska, said she's scared. And she left that whether she's unclear, whether she's physically scared or politically scared. Those are pretty different things. But both, you're right, Janice. It's probably both. And so, yeah, I think, you're you're going to have to construct some kind of coalition of the center. You know, I've been thinking internationally.

I think a lot about Canada because my entire, you know, extended family lives there. But I'm pretty disconnected from the, you know, day-to-day politics. So I'll say something that is going to sound kind of crazy. But really, given the kind of challenge, there is a kind of not only a patrimonial attack on the state, but a patrimonial attack on the global order. the old legal, rational view of the order is the boundaries between states are legal, right? The Trumpist view or the patrimonial view, Putin's view, Warbon's view, Netanyahu's view of the international orders, borders are historical. They're fuzzy.

They're to be changed when you need them. Or when it's our property. Trump never really lets go of these ideas once he gets them. Right. And if the 51st state idea is gone this week, you can be sure it's coming back to a theater near you. Let me just finish off with a couple of numbers here that I found somewhat illuminating. There's a group called Bright Light Watch, which is about 500 American professors. Jeff is nodding. You guys both know of them. Yeah.

And they are gauging. They are monitoring this story. Yeah. And they say, you know, if zero is dictatorship and 100 is Athenian democracy, as we imagine it, Where is the United States? Back in November of 2024, when Donald Trump got elected, they had the United States at 67 out of 100. So that's clearly more towards democracy than authoritarianism. As of February 2025, one month into Trump, they've got that number now at 55 out of 100. So barely Democratic. Now, that's back in February. We're in August now. Sorry, we're in September now. so we can imagine where the number is right now.

For sure below 50, Steve. It's for sure below. For sure below 50. I want to not only thank Janice Stein, who's with me every other week on this world on edge and boy, is the world on edge these days, a part of our podcast, but I'm happy to recommend for people's further edification. Jeff Koppstein, who co-authored The Assault on the State, how the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future.

Jeff, it's great to see you again. and let's do it again sometime down the road. And read the book. Buy the book and read it. Peace and love, everybody. Until next time. Bye, everyone.