This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
There’s an old idea about science fiction that I’ve always loved: It aims to create cognitive estrangement, to make the familiar seem unfamiliar, so it can be looked at anew.
But sometimes the opposite is needed: We need to make the unfamiliar into the familiar, to see what is old in what feels new.
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.
In a way, it’s no less true in his second term: An antivax conspiracy theorist for Health and Human Services secretary? That’s abnormal. A former “Fox & Friends” host for defense secretary? Abnormal. An underqualified hatchet man who has vowed to use the state to go after Trump’s enemies to lead the F.B.I. — and that the Senate would even consider him? Abnormal. Billionaire after billionaire trekking to the President-elect’s private club in Florida to curry favor with him? Abnormal.
Yet we also need to confront the reality that 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 — but we don’t spend much time detailing the rules he obeys.
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” — coalitions 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.
They also bind new administrations: If Kamala Harris had won the election, there’s no chance that she would have named a pro-life candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, because Democrats are a pro-choice party. If Ron DeSantis had been the Republican nominee and 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 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was useful to him, the fact that R.F.K. Jr. is pro-choice did not stop him from making that nomination. And it may not stop Republicans from accepting it. The fact that Republicans would even consider a pro-choice candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services shows you how much control Donald Trump has over his party. It shows you that party is working in a different way now.
There is this other kind of political party: 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. And when they emerge in democracies, they make backsliding into some form of hybrid authoritarianism a lot more likely.
That’s what’s different between Donald Trump’s first and second terms. I’ve been saying this for months: Don’t watch the man, watch the institutions. In his first term, Trump 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 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 are on the table: 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 Meta making these incredibly obvious Trump-friendly changes, like ending third-party fact-checking, and elevating Trump allies like Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship president, to their board.
In personalist 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 by 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 Frantz is a political scientist at Michigan State University and a co-author, with Andrea Kendall-Taylor, of “The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy From Within.”
Ezra Klein: Let’s begin with some definitions. What is personalist politics?
Erica Frantz: Personalist politics is where we see leaders have disproportionate political influence vis-à-vis other key institutional actors. We can see it manifest in both democracies and dictatorships, though it looks slightly different in the latter.
Essentially, rather than seeing politics as 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. How do you decide what is disproportionate influence?
I can imagine somebody saying: President Barack Obama was an international global celebrity. He had a level of prestige, power and media capacity far beyond anybody else in the Democratic Party. Wasn’t that personalist politics?
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. Even in authoritarian systems, some regimes are significantly more personalist and leadership-centric than others. 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. That’s in stark contrast to places like Putin’s Russia or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey and so forth. So it’s really a matter of degree.
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 leader’s choices.
What appealed to me about your book is that you’re less focused on the individual leaders than the institutional structure around them. You make this distinction between parties that choose their leader and leaders that choose their parties. And as I’ve been watching Trump’s second administration take shape, that’s felt like an important distinction to me.
In his first term, it felt like we had a traditionally Republican administration surrounding a somewhat nontraditional Republican president. And in his second term, it really feels just like it is his. With cabinet picks like R.F.K. Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, Trump has this capacity to impose his choices on his party with very, very little sense of constraint or pushback.
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?
Ideally, you want a political party to be based on a clear policy program. In a traditional programmatic party, we see elites really caring about the long-term reputation of the party. In personalist parties, instead, we see elites really fearful of falling out of favor with the leader. So it’s a very different institutional dynamic.
You mentioned the Republican Party, which is a traditional American political party and has had, for many years, a very clear conservative policy platform. But we now see a Republican Party that’s really centered on whatever Trump feels like promoting. This evolution of the Republican Party is consistent with trends that we’re seeing globally.
And I’m really glad you mentioned that the focus should be less on the individual and more on the institutions. It’s been somewhat frustrating, to me, the degree to which observers have focused on Trump as a person. I have a 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.
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. 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 clear policy programs.
One of the things I would like you to try to do in this conversation is make something that looks unusual familiar.
I have seen a lot of people responding to the structure of the second Trump administration — with these cabinet appointments, the unleashed way he’s speaking and the billionaires flocking to Mar-a-Lago — thinking: Oh, that’s strange. Or: That’s peculiar. That’s an odd appointment. That’s worrying.
But when I read your book, it all looked very familiar, like this is following a pattern we’ve seen elsewhere. So as you’re watching the Republican Party change from a programmatic party that cares about tax cuts or foreign defense to a personalist party that cares about the individual ambitions of Donald Trump — what looks like it’s going exactly as expected?
It is very important to zoom out and see what’s happening globally to have some sense of whether this is normal or not.
Usually, these are parties that the leader created or was a founding member of. What was slightly unusual with Trump is that he basically leveraged these fissures in the Republican Party to co-opt it.
The other unusual thing is that oftentimes, when you have elections where you’re worried about backsliding, it’s because you think 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 the opposite direction of what we usually see.
But apart from that, everything that has happened with Trump — in terms of the direction of democracy in the U.S. and his policy choices and cabinet appointments — is really consistent with trends globally.
You mentioned that the party doesn’t look nearly as programmatic as it did during his first term. 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, Republican politicians frequently 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.
In the first Trump administration, you had this phenomenon of resistance inside the White House. There was a division between people who really liked Trump and people who saw part of their job as restraining him — people like H.R. McMaster, Gary Cohn and, arguably, even people like Jared Kushner, who was maybe not restraining Trump but pushing him in a more mainstream direction.
Now you have fewer of those. Why is that? And how do you see what emerges in the second term if you look at the political experience of the appointees in Trump’s first?
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.
When these leaders create parties — and again, the Republican Party is somewhat anomalous, in that Trump did not create it — they usually staff it with friends and family members. A really good example of that is El Salvador with President Nayib Bukele, where he created the party Nuevas Ideas.
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. That’s pretty common because these leaders tend to prioritize loyalty over competence where they can. We see that in authoritarian politics all the time.
The problem is that, as you might expect, it’s not good for decision-making to be surrounded by a bunch of sycophants. You want checks on the choices that leaders might float around. You want experience to inform the choices that leaders make. So when we see these leaders 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 Trump, the cabinet nominees who have been floated or announced 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 U.S. if the Republican Party stands up to some of these cabinet nominees and pushes back against them.
We’ve seen some of it play out in the media since Trump won the election, where there is some discord. That is pretty important, and something to really look to moving forward. We want our cabinet officials and attorneys general and all these people to have political experience that’s relevant to the job. It’s not only a very important check on Trump but also an important constraint in terms of ensuring that we don’t have volatile policies coming out.
You described the importance of experience as bringing a weight of judgment, maybe temperament, to administration decision-making. That struck me as different from how you described it in the book, which was more about how experience reflects 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.
Take Christopher Wray, whom Trump appointed to lead the F.B.I. in his first term. Wray was a bureaucrat. He had a lot of experience in Washington. Being known as somebody who corrupted the F.B.I. would be bad for him. He had his own ideas about his legacy and so on.
But when you look at somebody like Kash Patel, Trump’s new pick to lead the F.B.I., that’s very different. Patel would never run the F.B.I. under any other president. And he has no future in politics outside of Donald Trump’s favor or disfavor.
The Wray to Patel shift seems to reflect the difference between Trump’s first and second terms — where he’s now able to make loyalty paramount in one of the most important jobs in government.
That is an excellent example, and 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. 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 ensure that they can get a political post elsewhere.
So when leaders are able to select these individuals to surround them and 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 that you use quite a bit and which I found helpful: thinking about the capacity of the people or the party to oppose or curb a leader. What do you understand as the ingredients of this capacity?
We think about capacity in a couple ways. Using anecdotal evidence, we know that when individuals don’t have much experience working with one another and don’t have much experience in politics in general, they don’t have the political sophistication, let’s say, to know how to collectively act against the leader.
The other thing 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.
With personalist parties, we see instead a very top-heavy politics. And we can show in the data that, with personalist parties, the leader is more likely to control nominations, and political actors are fearful that if they depart from that individual’s messaging, they’re unlikely to win political office.
On top of this, we know that these leaders are also more likely to personally fund the political party. 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.
A good example of that would be from the country of Georgia with Bidzina Ivanishvili and the Georgian Dream party. 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. And 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 how Trump is similar to and different from some of the other figures mentioned in your book.
Compared with other American presidents, Trump has been unusually focused on his party’s nominating processes. He really understands that if he is seen as the crucial mark of favor in the primary-nominating process, then he has control over the individuals 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. You didn’t see anything like that with Barack Obama, with Joe Biden, with George W. Bush.
On the other hand, Trump doesn’t do it through money. He does it through attention and his own particular say-so. 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’s fairly similar, actually, to Bukele in El Salvador, who won power with a newly formed party and then was really effective at using social media to establish a brand and to get out his messaging. He was able to sideline traditional political institutions by 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, with his baseball hats that he wears at his events. And he’s really obsessed with media attention in ways that are similar to Trump’s.
So I think there are multiple routes to getting this sort of influence over your political system. But the core thing aligning 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.
Donald Trump is rich, but he isn’t rich in the way that Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or 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 C.E.O. class. I’m not saying there was nobody in that world who supported Trump — he had help from the Adelsons and others. But there was actually a lot of friction between him and that world.
That’s very different now. Elon Musk, literally the richest man in the world and also somebody who has a lot of power over attention, has put both that money and that attention in Trump’s service.
And I think this brings up the question of what Americans often call corruption — which I think for Americans sounds like stealing or looting but maybe gets called, in other systems, patronage or transactionalism.
I’m curious, as somebody who has 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.
Yes, that’s an excellent observation about the intricate ways in which the business community has aligned with Trump.
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, corruption plays an important role in enabling the leader to distribute perks to their base of supporters.
In these really personalist places, leaders rely on a fairly narrow group of supporters to maintain power. They don’t need the support of everybody — just 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. There’s a quote from Carlos Hank González, the Mexican politician, during his authoritarian regime in the 20th century: “A politician who stays poor is poor at politics.” And that gets at the fact that 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 the person was engaged in corruption.
We saw Xi Jinping do this with his big anticorruption 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 can be used at any moment to purge these people from positions of power, imprison them and so forth.
I’ve been thinking about the degree to which we’re watching the emergence of the kind of oligarchic Praetorian Guard that you see in Russia, where there is an alliance between the very richest people in society and the leader, and they shift money and power back and forth.
Elon Musk is 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 suggesting they would fund a functionally unlimited super PAC that would challenge any Democrat who deviated from what Biden wanted. Choosing to act as an enforcer of the president with your money is something different.
But I also recognize that, from the other side, this could sound like a liberal drawing a distinction without a difference — saying one thing is within the boundaries of institutions and another is not.
So how do you tell the difference between these things? What separates Putin’s relationship with oligarchs from Joe Biden’s relationship with richer people in American society?
In general, we think about corruption as an abuse of public office for private gain. 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 — I’m sure that there is corruption in the United States, even if not nearly the degree to which there is in Russia. But there are 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 into overseas accounts. Researchers have done studies on Russian legislators and have tried to measure corruption among those individuals. And they have been able to identify a disconnect between the salaries 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 individuals in these public posts. These corrupt legislators who 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, leaders are able to build close linkages with elites in the business community, often through corruption, that can be helpful for these regimes. But to my knowledge, there’s not a lot that gets at how 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. But when it becomes more discretionary, there becomes a lot to trade. And this struck me as one of the dangers — or possibly, from Trump’s 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 you think might become central to how 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. In general, greater state intervention in the economy creates opportunities for corruption.
It creates opportunities to establish deals and give access to networks where officials can store their money overseas and 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, yes, 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 a shift in the relationship Trump has with the wealthy and powerful in society who, I think, were in a more tense relationship with him in his first term.
Putting aside the billionaires who actively support Trump, like Elon Musk or Mark Andreessen, there’s been this procession of C.E.O.’s trekking to Mar-a-Lago over the past couple of months: Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Sam Altman from OpenAI — just a real who’s who of American business power.
And this is another one of these things that I think you could imagine looking at both ways: 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. On the other hand, this thing where they’re all flying to Trump’s club to pay him their respects — that feels different.
There’s an understanding that you need to be in favor with him, and they’re willing to make that transaction now in a way that they weren’t in the first term. Same people — very different behavior. And you’re seeing different behavior 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.
It looks like we’re entering an era of court politics, where everyone is flying to go get the ear of the new leader. And it’s not something that we’ve been familiar with in the past, where all sectors of the business community are descending on 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 if you don’t get into his good favor, 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: He might try to go after you. 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 U.S. have given up, for lack of a better word, in terms of trying to push back against Trump’s vision for society, and have instead decided that it’s in their interest to get on board.
All of this 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 sense of court politics, where everybody is trying to flatter the leader to ensure that their business futures and political futures are intact.
I really perked up when you said “court politics.” That feels descriptive of what we’re seeing, where, on the one hand, Donald Trump won the election in the traditional way — through winning the popular vote and the electoral college — and yet there’s something about this second term that doesn’t look like what we’re used to. So what does “court politics” mean to you?
It basically means a situation where you can envision a monarch and the members of their court sitting around the throne and on bended knee: there to flatter the monarch, there to make sure that everything the monarch wants is implemented.
I often think about the story of the emperor with no clothes — that dynamic translates here. The monarch is in the throne lofty above these other individuals. You can visualize that sort of power dynamic, and that’s what we see in places where power is concentrated.
I think there’s been some interesting paradoxes emerging in the second Trump term. Here’s one: When we think about a more autocratic ruler winning an election in a democratic society, we often think about a closing down of a political system. But in the Republican Party that Trump leads, there’s actually been a widening of ideologies and factions.
Trump’s first term arguably ranged from Jared Kushner, in the moderate, centrist vein, to Steve Bannon. But now you have something spanning people like R.F.K. Jr., in the crunchy, hippie, conspiratorial world, all the way to the Silicon Valley reactionaries to the traditional small-government types to more national conservatives like Stephen Miller.
The fact that Trump is not that ideologically interested in a lot of issues — and is more interested in loyalty — has strangely widened the range of outcomes and possible servants he can have.
It was striking to see Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy seemingly win over the fight about high-skill immigration. Because if Trump is associated with anything, it is with anti-immigration sentiment. But Ramaswamy and Musk are able to offer much more to Trump than, say, Laura Loomer and some of these more troglodytic supporters he has.
So there’s a strange openness that seems to 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.
Yes, that’s a really interesting insight about the broadening. And it makes sense.
In places with more concentrated power, we do see more volatile policy choices, because policies are based on the whims of the leader. 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, Saparmurat Niyazov — in his court was his former dentist, who ended up succeeding him, I believe.
So these leaders are really going after people whom they think will be their loyal advocates. And even if those people have bizarre or unexpected ideas, we might see those policies implemented if they’re in the leader’s ear.
In this instance, high-skilled immigrants might be something that economists argue is good for the health of the U.S. economy. So it might not always be a bad choice. But the fundamental problem with 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 year ago, I more bought into the idea that a second Trump administration would be more cohesive because they were vetting candidates this time and he had governed once before.
And now I actually think Trump 2.0 will be, in certain ways, more fractious. Because the understanding at almost 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 big conflicts.
It has to be managed or it can become a toxic dynamic. What separates the leaders who manage that well from those who don’t?
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. They intentionally 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.
There’s a study of Russia that shows that the legislators who 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. 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.
Even as I’m saying there are dimensions of Trump’s second term that have a distinctive openness to them, 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.
Something I’ve noticed, with some alarm, is how Trump and his allies are much more intent on cowing the media this time. You’re seeing defamation lawsuits. 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. That poll ended up being wrong, as a lot of polls are wrong.
But even if he can’t win, it costs money for The Des Moines Register to take on that suit. 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.
At the same time, Trump now has a much larger right-wing media ecosystem. He’s got X through Elon Musk. He owns Truth Social.
How do you see the way that the Trump world is coming after the media and trying to create a structure of favor and consequences for his second term?
You’ve identified a number of things that are fairly troubling from a democracy expert perspective. We might think of the media as 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.
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: We nearly always see leaders that are intent on securing more control target the media.
And they’re going to do it by sidelining the media, through lawsuits that could bankrupt them or by gaining more control over the media. We saw this with Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in Hungary, where now the media are pretty much fully under the Orban regime’s control.
Circling back to the bankruptcy thing — it’s interesting you said that. In Singapore, under the People’s Action Party, one way that they are able to prevent opponents from gaining much influence is by suing them in these libel lawsuits that bankrupt these individuals.
That’s a very effective tactic because it’s not an easily observable red flag that democracy is falling apart. But it is a subtle thing that accumulates to a larger problem. If there are enough of these media organizations that go out of business or that are self-censoring, we no longer have that kind of fourth check on the executive that I mentioned.
There’s this strange dynamic where, even though the Trump world has a hatred for the mainstream media that the Biden world did not, they’re much more engaged with it in a lot of ways.
The media is Trump’s antagonist, his villain. And at the same time, there is this striking, almost symbiotic relationship happening — people point out that Trump is often good for ratings. How do you think about that?
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 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. 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 were stories of Mobutu Sese Seko, the former president of Zaire, on the news, making sure that he was descending from the heavens on the nightly news every day.
That is part of this personality cult and obsession with having a positive image in the media. Leaders don’t want news headlines that are critical of them.
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.
Regardless, there is this obsession, in lots of these incumbents, 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 we’ve seen with leaders who are at the helm of personalist parties that 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.
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?
Probably one of the first regimes where we saw this play out that got some media attention would be Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. Since then, we’ve seen a number of other places experience similar dynamics — like Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary. The list is actually really long of these democratically elected leaders taking over power.
We often forget that Venezuela had been one of the strongest democracies in Latin America when Chávez 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 Chavismo 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. This included things like messing with the judiciary — by which I mean changing the rules so that Chávez 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. Eventually, leaders start messing with the electoral process, which is the fundamental core of a democracy, and we see democracy erode.
In your book, you point out that we often look at all of this in retrospect. We see a country that has backslid, and we say: Ah, see, that was populism. Or: That person was always going to become an authoritarian.
Here we are, at the beginning of the second Trump era. What signs of democratic backsliding are you looking for?
I’m really glad you asked that, because back when Trump got elected in 2016, there wasn’t too much interest in my research — 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 U.S.: 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 U.S. had going for it.
We know that countries that have really long experiences with democracy are less likely to backslide and that wealthier countries are also less likely to backslide. So democracy in the U.S. should be fairly protected. I did think, at the time, that the chance of backsliding in the U.S. was somewhat higher than it had been in years past. But overall we were at a far lower risk than, say, a place like Venezuela.
But the big shift that happened — circling back to personalism again — was the control that Trump got over the Republican Party, even since he left power in 2020. 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 failed because of the Republican Party and, in particular, Vice President Mike Pence’s 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 Trump has really established full control over the party.
The key things to pay attention to in the years to come — and in the months to come, to be quite frank — are: How will the Republican Party settle following this election? We’ve already witnessed a number of divisions within the Republican Party. How is that all going to play out? Are we going to see key elites throw up their hands and say, There’s nothing we can do. We have to get fully behind Trump?
Are we going to see all of these bizarre and inexperienced nominees go through in the Senate? Or are we going to see an intense divide play out? From the perspective of the democracy expert over here, we want the Republican Party to be more divided. We want to see thorough discussion of some of these things. So that’s probably the first thing on the horizon.
And then, moving forward, are we going to see any efforts to mess with the judiciary in ways that ensure more loyalists are within key courts? Are we also going to see further attacks on the media?
I guess I should mention a third thing, as well. Trump has stated 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. 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 attempts 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: whether to treat Trump as a political emergency — or to try to beat him the way you might have tried to beat Ron DeSantis.
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 the core features of opposition groups that are successful in pushing back against backsliding.
But there are a couple of things that we know, one of which might be fairly obvious: Where opposition parties are divided, they’re going to be less likely to be successful at 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: You need to do something to prevent this. 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 personalist parties get a majority in the legislature, the door is often really wide open for the leader to do what he wants to do.
Once Bukele won election in 2019, it was pretty clear that he was going to be trouble for democracy. But things didn’t really gain momentum until the legislative elections in 2021, when his Nuevas Ideas Party got the legislative majority. 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, but those calls are going to be pretty impotent if they lack legislative representation.
But Trump had a legislative majority when he took office in 2017, as well, and democracy survived. This is something I hear a lot from people — that this guy was president before, and it was, from their perspective, fine.
So does it worry you because you feel the Republican Party and the legislative majority Trump 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 a very different political landscape than a few years ago. It turns out that this old-school 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 around saying: Oh, Trump is harmful for democracy, and a new Trump term is going to be so bad. A lot of ordinary people are tired of that messaging.
But if we zoom out and think about what the evidence shows about what happens when a leader has this much influence over their political party as well as a legislative majority, the reality is that the chance of democratic collapse goes up fairly dramatically. And that’s taking 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 — combined with the Republican legislative majority is really an alarm bell.
Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
First, I would recommend Jessica Weeks, who has a book called “Dictators at War and Peace.” This is our go-to book for explaining why personalist dictatorship is bad for foreign policy. It’s a very good read.
I also would recommend Javier Corrales, who has a book called “Autocracy Rising: How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism.” This is a really detailed exploration of how Venezuela’s democracy fell apart. And given that was like one of the first incumbent takeovers we paid attention to, and has been a model for subsequent ones, it has a lot of really interesting information in it.
Lastly, for some levity, I would recommend Cody Walker’s poetry collection called “The Trumpiad,” from 2017. It has poems that are very humorous, that could provide some optimism, I guess, in pessimistic times of war.
Erica Frantz, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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