This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Donald Trump and the autocrats’ playbook’
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about the American presidential election. My guest is Ivo Daalder, a former American ambassador to Nato and currently chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He thinks this is the most important presidential election in America since 1860, when Lincoln was elected, the year before the outbreak of the American civil war. So is American democracy itself on the ballot on November the 5th?
Donald Trump voice clip
They are poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country. Nobody’s even looking at them. They just come in. The crime is going to be tremendous. The terrorism is going to be . . .
Gideon Rachman
In case you didn’t recognise the voice, that was Donald Trump. The Republican candidate’s use of language like that has led some people to accuse him of being a fascist. The label fascist has been used by, among others, Trump’s former chief of staff, General John Kelly, and by General Mark Milley, who was America’s most senior military officer during the Trump administration. Trump supporters, however, say that kind of accusation is hysterical and completely unjustified. Ivo Daalder has told us a lot about Trump and about fascism his parents lived in the Netherlands during the second world war under the Nazi occupation. So I began our conversation by asking Ivo why he thinks that this is the most important US election since the eve of the American civil war.
Ivo Daalder
Because it’s an election about the future of the United States. It’s not an election between two presidents and two parties and two sets of policies. It’s about whether the United States as a country is something that has been around since at least 1776, based on a set of ideas and a set of values, will still be the same country. In 1860, the election was about slavery fundamentally, but it led to the break-up of the Union and the civil war that killed more Americans in any single war ever.
And I think we are back at a choice, not necessarily one that is going to be as violent or even lead to the fundamental break up of the United States, though that’s possible, but a choice between, on the one hand, a continuation of the kinds of democracy and policies that this country has pursued for most of its time, and frankly, a new kind of dictatorial authoritarian kind of policy by a person who is a wannabe fascist.
Gideon Rachman
Yes, you use the F word, fascist, and you’re not alone in that. John Kelly is former chief of staff has to use that term. And General Mark Milley, who was the joint chiefs head, has also called him a fascist. But in the past, people chucked the word fascist around very loosely. But I think you believe that he means it in a quite precise way. So justify the term.
Ivo Daalder
Yeah, I do think it’s quite precise. I think it has to do with where it came from in the 20s and 30s. This is a leader who creates a cult of personality that generates a movement that is loyal to him and him alone. It used to be the Republican party, but frankly, the Maga movement has taken over the Republican party. Anybody who watched the Republican convention in Milwaukee, there was very little Republican. There was a lot about Maga and it was really all about Trump. And it was about a party that puts nationalism in its own definition of what nationalism means upfront that defines itself not by who they are, but by who they are against. By the enemy that is both the enemy from the outside, primarily immigrants, which has been the standard threat that Donald Trump has pointed to since the day he came down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and continues to this very day talking about the United States being an occupied country.
But increasingly, you also hear him talking about the enemy within. In the last few weeks, he’s again said that the enemy within which he defines as the leftist, the communist, frankly the media, the deep state, the judiciary, which he believes has been weaponised and politicised against him, and that he’s willing to use force, military force, not just the National Guard, perhaps the military, to go after the enemies within. If you go back through history, whether it’s 1920s Italy or the 1930s in Germany or the Venezuela in the early 2000s, or indeed Orban today, these are the kinds of things you start to witness when you are dealing with a deeply authoritarian movement that in its core and its corporatist core, given the corporate support that he is getting as well, has deep roots in traditional fascism.
Gideon Rachman
And some of the language certainly is reminiscent. I mean, you quoted in your recent article for The Atlantic, the poisoning, the blood, immigrants poisoning the blood. And that’s language that Hitler used.
Ivo Daalder
Yeah, it came straight out of Mein Kampf. It’s completely Hitlerian. He talked about enemies as a vermin. Again, something that Hitler used to do. Remember Hitler in 1933 when he came to power was a despicable human being but he wasn’t the kind of person who had launched the Holocaust and exterminated 6mn people. He was just laying the foundation for finding a way for people to be moved in his direction and to create the kind of loyalty that over the next few years evolved into a system of mass extermination and aggrandisement of Germany through Lebensraum and everything else that it needed.
Now the United States doesn’t have the same historical territorial problems that in Germany that had lost world war one had. So I don’t see this necessarily as the beginnings of a very expansionist military movement. I’m much more worried about what is happening inside. He believed that there are some people who are on our side and then there are others who are not and they’re defined by their nationality or where they come from. There’s nothing against the possibility that even legal immigrants will be deported.
Gideon Rachman
Well, that’s something they’ve begun to talk about in Austria, isn’t it? And there are these cross-currents between what’s happening in Europe and what’s happening in the United States.
Ivo Daalder
Yeah, the worrying thing is not only is this an important election for the United States, an important election for the rest of the world. And you know, you and I, as foreign policy commentators have been talking for months — years, really — about the consequences of a return for Trump, for Nato, for trade, for the kinds of things that we spend a lot of time thinking about. I’m increasingly worried about what does the return of Trump mean for stability in democratic politics, particularly here in Europe, where there are large, far-right, some even fascist-based movements that are very much doing the same thing that Donald Trump is trying to do.
And they are already advancing politically. They’re in government in the Netherlands. They’re in government in Sweden. They will soon be in government, in fact, lead a government in Austria. They’re in government leading in Italy, in Slovakia, of course, in Hungary. And you see a movement of these far-right, semi-fascistic, whatever you want to call them, movements gaining political power.
The incredible example that a Donald Trump winning in the United States, the oldest democracy in the world, the oldest constitutional democracy in the world, to set that example leads a Meloni to say, wait a minute, I don’t have to play the game that the EU wants to do. I can play a different game. It strengthens the hands of Le Pen in France, where she already is critical for the government. It strengthens the hands of the AfD, the Alternative for Deutschland in Germany, and the possibility can’t be excluded that after the next election a German government would have support from or even perhaps include extremists within their own government in order to make that possible. So yeah, this is a very important election with very important consequences, not just for Americans but for many others.
Gideon Rachman
So as we talk, I mean, I do agree with a lot of what you say, most of it, but I can sort of read the comments when I write similar things. And people have accused you of Trump Derangement Syndrome. So let me put it to you the case that you’re suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. And yes, he uses this very distasteful language, but the implication that you made that he could become a Hitler, that he could kill millions of people, surely that really is a stretch, isn’t it?
Ivo Daalder
Yeah, I think that’s not necessary in order to be fundamentally transformative. I do think it’s much more likely that we’re in the 1930s than we are in the 1940s when it comes to thinking about Germany. I don’t think he has the idea of an extermination of an entire people as the core of his basis but the same language, the same ideas and the same willingness of people to suspend belief.
Remember, Hitler did not have a majority of the vote. He had only about a third of the vote when he became chancellor. And the people around him said to President von Hindenburg, it’s OK, we can control him. We are able to guide him in the right kinds of way. He’s not really majority. We’ll find a way out. And you hear the same thing from many of my Republican friends who say, you know, one, you’re exaggerating what you’re saying. It just isn’t that bad. We have a supreme court, a congress. We have checks and balances.
The core problem with democracy is that it’s based on norms, on rules and on guardrails and the idea that people consent to those norms, rules and guardrails. And if you don’t, it’s really easy to break from. Donald Trump for the last 10 years has broken every norm, every rule and every guardrail. And he has had institutional support, probably the most important Supreme Court case in at least 50 years. And you could argue in some ways since the beginning of the republic is the idea that the president is immune from criminal acts while he’s president. That’s what the Supreme Court ruled in July, at least if those acts can be in some ways defined as official, well, who gets to define what is official and unofficial?
Gideon Rachman
Do you think that would give him a mandate, for example, to arrest people arbitrarily or assassinate them?
Ivo Daalder
As long as he can make the case that this is part of his official duties, yes, because that’s what the Supreme Court has said. And, in fact, these were the exact examples, including the example of sending out a Team 6 to assassinate his political opponent that were discussed openly by the Supreme Court as one of the issues that perhaps would go too far. And the court ruled no. As long as it’s an official duty, he can do what he wants. And that led Justice Sotomayor to say we now created a system in which a democracy dies and we have a return for a king above the law.
Gideon Rachman
So let me get this straight. You seriously think that if Trump were to, say, institute a domestic version of the drone program and start killing American citizens, that there would be no legal check on that?
Ivo Daalder
According to the Supreme Court, as long as that is justified as an official act, the answer is no. Now the Supreme Court can change its mind. It can then have a new ruling. Then the question becomes who enforces the Supreme Court ruling? It was probably an apocryphal story, but it was President Jackson who, when ruled against by the Chief Justice Marshall on a particular case in the 1830s, refused to implement this as well the Supreme Court justices ruled now let him enforce it. We live in a nation of laws. We live in a nation that the norm is that you accept the law. But if you don’t, who’s going to tell you not to? So unless the institutions themselves decide, particularly the military institutions, and that is an important element, decide that no, no, actually, we have no loyalty to this man. We have loyalty to the Constitution.
Indeed, the conversations we’ve been hearing in recent weeks from General Kelly, General Milley trying to make this point over and over again to the president, we’re not loyal to you. we’re loyal to our country. And one would hope and I think this is where my optimism comes in, that those who are charged with implementing the laws by fulfilling the duties that come from being an officer of the law, whether it’s in law enforcement or in the military, would at some point say, no, we’re not going to do this. We are going to stand up and do the right thing.
Gideon Rachman
I mean, very interesting you should say that. I mean, I, on a relatively recent trip to Washington, saw people in the Pentagon who were already thinking through some of this, and they were worried that Trump, if he were to win, would put in a loyalist very high up, maybe a secretary of state for defence, and then start purging all those people. And even if the current military would refuse to do things because they regarded them as unconstitutional, he’d find generals who would do it.
Ivo Daalder
Yeah, I think that’s certainly one of the things he will try. The question is whether there are a sufficient number of people who have joined the US military, particularly in the officer corps, which is, after all, a profession who’ve come out of the academies and have been inculcated in an idea of what it means to be a military within a civil society, a democratic civil society, that they would resist.
Gideon Rachman
The trouble is that I mean, one of the things we think about the military is that they don’t disobey orders from a civilian commander. We seem to be getting into a sort of a strange world where they’re doing their duty by disobeying the civilian authority.
Ivo Daalder
Well, I mean, clearly their commander-in-chief, which is what Donald Trump would be, would order them to do one thing. But it is also a code of military conduct that you cannot accept an illegal order and you have to resist an illegal order. The question is who decides what’s legal and illegal? And that comes to the individuals. And it would take a significant number of senior generals to decide, no, we’re not going to go down this direction. Now, go back again to the analogy of the 1930s. Of course, there were plenty of generals who opposed Hitler, there were at least four attempts on his life. Didn’t go well for those generals. And ultimately, the only way Hitler was killed was by his own hand.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And one of the things, again, I mean, I’m interested in this because, after all, you’re former ambassador to Nato, you know the American military very well, that my contact in the Pentagon put to me was she said that the Maga movement were already trying to sow dissent between the officer class and the enlisted men on the grounds that, as you said, a lot of the officers class are quite educated into a particular idea of what the military should and shouldn’t do. The enlisted men, Trump famously said, we love the poorly educated. They’re more likely to be his guy.
Ivo Daalder
Yeah. And, you know, if you look at history, military juntas and coups happened not generally with generals, but by the colonels and those below them. This is uncharted territory. It is too easy to say it will never happen here or it just can’t happen because it actually can happen here. And it often does. And these things are the ones that people like John Kelly and Mark Milley, who have now spoken out publicly — I wish many more would — people who have worked day in and day out with Donald Trump.
I mean, John Kelly was the longest-serving chief of staff, and spent probably more time with him in the Oval Office than anyone else in the administration. And he’s now come out in this interview in The New York Times, in a piece in The Atlantic, making very clear that this is a man who should be nowhere near power, and saying this is not a political statement. It’s not saying, you know, I’m a Democrat and therefore I don’t want a Republican to win. And I think it’s very important that we understand that an election like this is not about one party being better than the other. It really is an election that, as Benjamin Franklin said, we have a republic if we can keep it. And we are first time since 1860 asking the question, can we keep this republic?
Gideon Rachman
Thinking back again to the analogies of the 1930s, it seems to me when a would-be authoritarian attempts to take over a local government state, they tend to look for a state of emergency to declare a state of emergency, so famously in Germany was the Reichstag fire. And then you have the suspension of the constitution. Do you think Trump and the Maga people are already thinking in those terms? And because I think some of the ways he talks about immigration, in particular, the crisis at the southern border and, you know, when I was at the Republican convention, it was striking how many people were waving banners saying, mass deportation now. And that could be the excuse to deploy the military.
Ivo Daalder
Yeah, no, I think that’s exactly it. I mean, he has described the country as being occupied. That’s a military term. It’s a war term. You only are occupied when you’re in the middle of a war. You always talk about the invasion. So he’s using militaristic and warlike terminology. And I think it is very possible that they will invoke a state of emergency and that they will invoke the American Sedition Act of 1789 that allows them to get rid of all foreigners, legal and illegal immigrants, and deploy a significant number of our troops to get it done. And they start in the big cities where the greatest number of immigrants are.
The problem is the military is terrible at figuring out who’s legal or illegal or who should be deported. That’s number one. Number two is where do you put them? And it wasn’t that long ago that people were deeply upset about the idea that we had internment camps in the United States during world war 2, which we did for Japanese. We are likely to have internment camps.
Gideon Rachman
Well, I asked Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, about exactly that at the Republican convention, and he said, we just sling them over the border into Mexico. He was pretty uncomplimentary about Mexico. I mean, I don’t know whether that’s just bluster, but sure as Trump would say, you’ve got to be very rough.
Ivo Daalder
We’re going to be very rough, even for very little time. But deporting 10 to 15mn people is a massive, massive undertaking.
Gideon Rachman
But how seriously do we take this stuff? Because if you remember when he came in, he briefly attempted to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, and then they just kind of gave up on that.
Ivo Daalder
Well, no they banned them from seven countries, and that was never changed. We just had an outcry for a week and then it just happened and legal immigration went down significantly. And then he resorted to all kinds of efforts to reduce the inflow across the southern border. Remember, family separation was designed to send the warning, if you come with your family, we’ll separate you and you won’t see your kids again. So you probably don’t want to come. It was a deterrent measure. Didn’t work very well. And there are still now families who are still looking for their kids five years later. So don’t underestimate how bad it was last time around, but it will be much, much more difficult because he won’t be surrounded by people who will refuse to do his wishes.
Gideon Rachman
Indeed, one of the things that concerns me a little bit among all the things to be concerned about is how radicalised some of the people around him. And if you think Steve Bannon will be coming out of prison, I would imagine a fairly angry man. Peter Navarro spoke at the Republican convention fresh out of prison. These people want vengeance.
Ivo Daalder
They do. They do want vengeance. I mean, what’s interesting, everything that Trump accuses Democrats of doing is what he wants to do. When he talks about the weaponisation of the judiciary, that is what he wants to do. When he talks about they are undermining the system and they’re anti-democratic is, in fact, what he wants to do. You know, we can argue whether certain steps were not the right thing to do about Democrats, and that’s a legitimate argument. But it’s really about the projection constantly of his own perspective that he’s using when he talks about how lazy other people are and then turns out to be pretty exhausted himself. Just another one of those projections. So, yes, I think he’s going to be surrounded with people who learned how to exercise power because they’ve had it for four years. They will all be loyal and they will all be subject to loyalty tests.
And the entire transition process, his son Don Jr has already said that the number one thing he’s going to spend time on is to make sure that there are no people who are not 100 per cent loyal inside the government. And they know what they want to do. And it’s a pretty consistent program, which is to get rid of as many other people as possible, either putting them in jail because they’re political opponents or frankly, to get rid of them because they’re immigrants of one form or another. And they believe that tariffs will solve all of their problems, that somehow the income generated by putting massive tariffs on lots of other imported goods will solve the problem in terms of inflation and everything else.
Gideon Rachman
So we talked about the checks and balances or possibly lack of them in terms of the Supreme Court. But there’s also just ordinary people. And a lot of the catastrophising — and we’ve done a fair bit of it today but, you know, I think fair enough — concerns Trump’s possible reaction to a defeat and we’ll talk about that. But it occurs to me that if Trump wins and then starts really trying to deport 11mn people or even 2mn people, and as you said, the military sent into cities, people aren’t going to take that lying down are they? There’ll be civil disobedience.
Ivo Daalder
Well, I think there will be some civil disobedience. And this is the big unknown. This is the big unknown how societies react. I think there is a possibility that there is some civil disobedience. There’s probably some violence. But ultimately, as we have tended to see . . .
Gideon Rachman
They’ll start saying that it’s antifa and they’ll use it as a . . .
Ivo Daalder
And they’ll use it as another way. And people are scared and they, you know, they close their doors and hope it goes away. And I think that’s more likely. I mean, whole societies have adjusted to internal repression and violence, adjusted either because when they did resist, they didn’t make it. But knowing that that was the case, then probably you don’t resist. I mean, after all, Germany wasn’t destroyed from the inside. It was destroyed from the outside. So was Japan. So was Italy. So that is the most likely thing. The one thing that’s different is, of course, the United States has a history of being a federal system, and it was built out of the idea that the states resided the real power.
And I do think there is a possibility you will get a serious discussion about do we want to be part of this system. You could argue that California, fifth-largest economy in the world, together with like-minded states, Washington and Oregon certainly, the west coast of Washington, Oregon, as opposed to the inlands and others, might decide that we just don’t want to be a part of this and we don’t want to have this kind of conversation. I don’t think it’s likely. But then in 1860, who would have thought that the election of Abraham Lincoln would immediately lead to the cessation of South Carolina and other states and then a bloody civil war that lasted another four years?
Gideon Rachman
Well, what we’re talking about sounds like Vladimir Putin’s dream really, doesn’t it?
Ivo Daalder
Of course. I mean, the fundamental problem that we have had for so long in every talk that I’ve ever given on the geopolitical risks that we face in the world starts with Russia and China. It’s happening in the Middle East. But the biggest risk is us. We’re the only ones who can undermine American power. We’re the only ones who can make what happens internally to us more important than what happens externally. We’re the one who can undermine the greatest achievement in American foreign policy in the last 80 years, which is build strong, capable alliances with like-minded states throughout North America, Europe and Asia. All of that could go away very, very quickly.
Gideon Rachman
Doesn’t it astonish you that half the country is going to vote for them, and that’s almost the most disturbing part?
Ivo Daalder
So half the country is voting for this, not really realising what this is. What I find more disturbing are the people who know better, the people who know what he does, where he stands for, and for partisan or other reasons decide that, you know, I’m a Republican who I’m going to vote for, to which my answer is I’m not sure that Donald Trump is a Republican, he’s certainly not a Reagan Republican. So that’s the disappointment that the entire electoral party is standing behind him. Very few voices like Lynne Cheney are voices in the wilderness who’ve been excommunicated.
Gideon Rachman
Or just sort of retired like Paul Ryan where you never hear from him again.
Ivo Daalder
Well, the interesting thing is, in Milwaukee, at the Republican National Convention, not a single person who had either been president or vice-president or run on the Republican ticket as a president or vice-president other than Donald Trump was there.
Gideon Rachman
So, I mean, an unbelievable amount riding on the election if we take you even half seriously. But obviously it’s very close and Harris might win. Is the danger over at that point?
Ivo Daalder
The danger is still there, but it is a lot less than if he were to be in power and of course, worried about him denying the results. And we probably see the kind of chaos and violence we saw last time around. We’ll see worse. But I have more confidence in the ability of an administration is now in power to make sure that ultimately on the 20th of January, the person who actually won the election will be sworn in as president. But the movement is there and the movement persists.
And if this election is saying, well, he’s now lost four times and everything will be fine, I think that would be a wrong attitude. There are deep structural problems in the American political system that have allowed and enabled this to come forward and some serious, serious reform when it comes to money and politics, when it comes to gerrymandering and the way that the parties have been really moved on both sides to the extremes and other kinds of legal reforms of the political system that don’t require constitutional change.
I mean, be great to have a constitutional change and get rid of the electoral college. But you don’t have to do that. Lots of things you can do. And in this article in The Atlantic, I lay out a whole bunch of steps that can be done in order to create a politics where parties once again vie for the voters at the centre. Because that’s how healthy democracies persist. Right now, the parties are really looking for voters at their bases and at the extremes, and that’s when something like this can happen. So there’s a deeper structural issue in American politics that will have to be addressed if Kamala Harris wins.
Gideon Rachman
And the Trump movement, I mean, you said it’s there, it’ll persist. But he is 78 and he’s a pretty unique individual. Isn’t there an argument that once he goes, he’ll have changed the nature of the Republican Party, but there isn’t another Trump there?
Ivo Daalder
I think the chances of the kind of worries that we have talked about in the first part of this conversation persisting for the long term are significantly lessened because he won’t be around. And it may be that there are others who will try to take over, including his son or JD Vance, who have very, very dangerous ideas. It’s not clear to me that they have the same charisma, the same ability to be the kind of salesman and showman that Donald Trump has uniquely shown to be able of. But, and this is important, Donald Trump was not just enabled by who he is. He was enabled by a structural set of circumstances in the body politic that allowed a party to be taken over for the purpose of maintaining power. A party that most likely since whatever happens in the election, Kamala Harris is likely to have more votes than Donald Trump. Most likely a party that now will have lost eight out of the nine presidential elections. In terms of the popular vote, something that’s never happened in the history of the country.
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Gideon Rachman
That was Ivo Daalder, chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week when America will have voted and I will probably be bringing you a discussion from Washington, DC.
Gideon talks to Ivo Daalder, a former American ambassador to Nato and chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, about the potential threat to US democracy if Donald Trump wins next week’s presidential election. Clip: Politico
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Free links to read more on this topic:
How Trump learnt to love big business
Trump is the man who would be king
America isn’t too worried about fascism
Kamala Harris warns of ‘more chaos’ under Donald Trump and vows ‘different path’
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