The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
After a man named Vance Boelter allegedly assassinated one Democratic state legislator in Minnesota and wounded another one, President Trump initially said the right thing, stressing that political violence must not be tolerated in any form. But then late Sunday he uncorked a vile, unhinged tirade on Truth Social in which he promised to focus raids by ICE on Democratic cities, denouncing them as “sick.” This was exactly the wrong time for Trump to be talking about selectively unleashing law enforcement on areas controlled by his political opponents, particularly ones that saw huge outpourings of peaceful protests at the “No Kings” rallies over the weekend. And Trump’s lunacy comes as numerous MAGA media figures lied about the alleged shooter, painting him as a leftist. Kim Scheppele, a scholar of authoritarianism at Princeton, has a new piece for The Contrarian arguing that the events of the weekend clearly showcase that the bulk of political violence in this country is on the right, and that we’re now fully in the “danger zone.” So we’re talking to Kim about all this. Great to have you on, Kim.
Kim Scheppele: Nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Sargent: So let’s start with this horrific assassination. Vance Boelter, who appears to be the assassin, allegedly murdered Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounded State Senator John Hoffman and his wife. Boelter had a list with him of mostly Democrats and abortion providers, and his friends says he voted for Donald Trump. Kim, what was your immediate takeaway from all that?
Scheppele: Well, my worry about events like this is that we know that the United States has a problem with right-wing violence. And it’s not surprising that this person was described by his roommate as someone who was a very strong Trump supporter. In fact, there was a lot of violence over the weekend that looked like it was attributable to people on Trump’s side of the fence. And that’s in general been, I think, the assessment of the Department of Justice until Trump became president and redirected the priorities of the Department of Justice. So now they’ve basically abolished the unit that was tracking right-wing terrorism. Trump has pardoned the January 6 defendants, and he’s made it known that anyone who commits violence in his name can expect a presidential pardon. So it’s not surprising that this is interpreted by his followers as permission to do the kinds of things they do up to and including horrific things like this.
Sargent: It’s amazing that we don’t say this more clearly more often, but when Trump pardoned the January 6 rioters, he was essentially pardoning people who had committed, as you say, serious violence against the state in his name.
Scheppele: I think it’s important to note that Trump essentially gives permission over and over again to people, to his followers, to the Proud Boys. By the way, the Proud Boys showed up at some of these peaceful protests trying to stoke some anger from the protesters. Fortunately, they didn’t take the bait. But all of these militias that he told to stand back and stand by in his first term are still out there; now they’re out there and pardoned, and they are all waiting for his commands. I study authoritarianism in other parts of the world, and this is something that I’ve seen altogether too often in other places, which is that the leader gives permission in a sense for private actors to go in and bang heads and commit violence. And then what the leader does is pull back the police from policing his own side while he may unleash the police to go after the other side if they show signs of protest. That’s exactly the pattern that we’re seeing here.
Sargent: I want to get at that in a little while—but first, let’s just note that MAGA media immediately started describing the alleged shooter as a leftist. MAGA influencer Benny Johnson said that it was a massive false flag. Similarly, Infowars’s Alex Jones said the shooting has all the signs of a set up. Charlie Kirk vaguely suggested that the “No Kings” rallies were to blame for the radicalization that led to this shooting. Others picked up on the “No Kings” flyers and the alleged assassin’s car, as if that proves anything. The story they tell is precisely the opposite of reality. While of course there’s some political violence on the left and that’s to be condemned, the basic story is that the right is the party that is more aligned with political violence in this country. Law enforcement has said that before, but they’ve now essentially been directed away from that. Can you talk about that broad pattern?
Scheppele: Yeah. There may be some violence on the left—and I agree it should be condemned—but that is dwarfed by the amount of violence that we see coming from the right. The right is organized in militias. The right is much more heavily armed. The right is the only one that has tried to actually overturn the results of a free and fair election. And you see over and over again when you find out who these people are that are committing crimes that they really are allied with this whole network of violent groups that have supported Trump and that Trump dog-whistles to them absolutely all the time.
Of course, what the MAGA media said makes absolutely no sense if you look at the targets. Why would the left assassinate Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota? One of the little things that’s not reporting very much is that in Minnesota, both houses of the state legislature are absolutely tied, Republican and Democratic. Getting rid of one Democratic vote from each house would flip that legislature Republican. Why would even the left do that? That makes no sense. That’s why even before we found out much about this guy, I think it was abundantly clear that those targets were picked for political purposes.
Sargent: No question about it. Let’s talk about this rant on Truth Social that Trump unleashed. He said, “We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to … cheat in Elections…. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind.” Kim, what he’s really doing here is telling his supporters that blue America is made up of enemy zones, which must be pacified with overwhelming force. I don’t think it’s a small thing that he did this right after this horrible assassination. It’s almost akin to a call for more targeting of Democrats and liberals. What’s your reading of this timing here?
Scheppele: Yeah, I think the timing has exactly the structure that you suggest, which is that he’s egging on more violence and he’s telling his supporters where to aim that violence, which is at these so-called Democrat-controlled states. But there’s another thing that’s going on here, too, and that is that Trump had just done a little TACO—“Trump always chickens out”—in the face of what his deportation orders have done to some of his supporters, particularly farmers, people who run hotels and restaurants. He had just announced this big exception to the sweep that ICE was supposed to be conducting against everybody who was unlawfully in the country. And I’m sure he got a lot of pushback from his team of people who are really banking on him deporting everyone in sight, so here’s how he takes it back.
He never takes back exactly what he says, but by giving this exhortation to ICE to go after everybody without the exceptions that he just announced, he’s in many ways caving in back to the supporters who must have given him hell for actually reneging on his promise to deport everybody. So I think it has these two different functions. It’s Trump again chickening out on what it was he said is a more modest policy about workplace raids over the weekend.
Sargent: Just to build on what you just said there, I think you can actually construct it in a way that’s much worse. In his insane rant, he said explicitly that ICE should go after blue cities.
Scheppele: Yes.
Sargent: Right? He didn’t say go back and go after everybody. He said go after blue cities.
Scheppele: Right. And he names the cities in case they were in doubt about which ones they were.
Sargent: Yeah, exactly. He named some of the cities. So what I read from this is, in addition to what you’re saying, again, he had previously admitted that these deportations are hurting the economy. He had previously pulled back from deportations in industries like agriculture and hospitality. And as you say, that infuriated some inside the White House who were caught blindsided. And of course, Stephen Miller is out there currently trying to juice those numbers as high as possible. And Trump faced some blowback from MAGA—from people like Laura Ingraham—who said, Don’t you want to deport as many people as possible? So his answer to that was to say, We are going to get the numbers as high as possible. We’re going to do it by deporting huge numbers of people, mainly in blue areas and blue cities, while sparing our people from the detrimental effects of that policy. It’s just an outrage.
Scheppele: Yeah, no, I think you’re right that he’s redirecting the efforts to blue states. Now this also has some other effects, which is to say—this was after these massive protests over the weekend—he’s still trying to scare people. He’s trying to scare anyone who looks like they might be stopped by ICE, whether they have papers or not. He’s trying to suppress opposition in exactly the places where opposition is going to come from. And he’s also alerted ICE to reprioritize its raids in exactly the places which are [not only] going to be politically most unfriendly to ICE but also most unfriendly to Trump, right? So it is siccing the dogs on his enemies, so to speak, and I do think that’s a big chunk of what he was doing here.
But also, of course, he’s lying again and again. Just the way that he lied about the protest before federalizing the National Guard in California, the conditions under which he can do that were not factually met on the ground. And ditto here. There’s no evidence that these blue cities that he’s singling out are any different with respect to documentation of workers than other cities. In fact, we know that a lot of the red state industries are the ones that are really dependent on migrant labor. So again, this is a way to try to get the numbers up and cause pain to his enemies at the same time. It’s a dual-use technology, so to speak.
Sargent: Yes, and spare his friends from the direct detrimental impact of his own policies. There are a lot of undocumented immigrants in places like Florida and Texas, and, as you point out, they’re concentrated in industries that are Republican-friendly a lot of the time. I want to go to your piece. You had this great piece where you connected a bunch of these dots: the assassination of Democrats; the hypermilitarization of blue areas; as you mentioned, the sending in of troops to Los Angeles; and of course, Trump’s military parade this weekend, which was clearly supposed to send the same message. As you described all of this as a hallmark of the slide into authoritarianism. You said that we’re in transition, and that we’re in a “danger zone” for civil violence. How far along on this transition are we?
Scheppele: Well, I think you can see we’re in the middle of it. One of the things that political science research shows—and Barbara Walters’s work on civil wars in particular I want to give a shout out to—is that in absolute authoritarian regimes … like North Korea doesn’t have a lot of street crime or violence. And ditto with really open democracies. You really have much less civil violence, especially of this political sort. Where you get a lot of civil violence that has a political overtone like this is when governments are in transition, either from democracy into authoritarianism or actually for that matter back again.
So I wanted to point out that we’re in that danger zone because we’re literally moving quite quickly from not a perfect democracy but a relatively well-functioning democracy into something that looks much more like an authoritarian government. And it’s in that zone when you’re going from one to the other that civil violence tends to become the most extreme. This weekend just figured lots of symbols of violence all at once. And that’s why I thought, Here we are, we’re literally in the middle of this transition—and you know where we started so that tells you what we’re transitioning to.
Sargent: Well, at the same time you have, with these outpourings of protests across the country, a bit of a sign of civic health, I think. There was this enormous, enormous outpouring in blue and purple America across the country saying, No, we’re not doing this, as an answer to the parade, as an answer to troops in L.A., and, as it turns out, as an answer to the assassination of Democratic officials. It’s almost like there’s a split screen here, Kim. On one side, you have these vast peaceful protests standing up for democracy and tolerance. And on the other, you have this hyper-torqued-up machine of hate and rag determined to create the propagandistic impression that blue America isn’t what it actually is, that none of that stuff is actually peaceful, [that] it’s actually a cesspool of criminality and violence that must be pacified. Can you talk about that weird split screen? I don’t know what to make of that.
Scheppele: Yeah. So I think the split screen is not the right way to frame it, with all due respect. I think what happened was that Trump knew those protests were coming, and he was doing everything he could to override it with something else. Which is to say that what he wants is for the protest to vanish from the headlines as quickly as possible. And he’ll do that by having another rant on Truth Social. I don’t think he set up this assassin to do these horrible things—and [that] Trump is the mob boss who never has his fingers on anything—but certainly, I think, there was a run-up to these protests. In which—between the military parade, between the call out of troops to Los Angeles, and all of this—what he’s trying to do is to steal the headlines back from the peaceful protest so that they’re not actually visible for very long. And so I don’t think he wants a split screen. I think he wants to be the only screen. And if somebody else is grabbing attention, he’s got to override it with something else.
Sargent: I want to remind everybody—in sync with what you’re saying—that it’s already been forgotten, but a few days ago, Trump threatened to meet any protests that weekend with “heavy force.” You have in your piece, and you said a few minutes ago, that we’re in the middle of this transition and we’re going the wrong way. Is there a prayer of reversing this, and how central are popular mobilizations to it?
Scheppele: Yeah. Well, I think popular mobilizations become absolutely crucial once the crucial institutions get entrenched and get attacked. Already we have a Supreme Court that’s singing from Trump’s song sheet on the unitary executive theory and the unlimited expansion of executive power. That’s my fear. We’ve seen the lower courts really hold the line—but when these cases go up to the Supreme Court on questions of executive power, so far the Supreme Court has always given in to these executive power claims. So that means we’re far along toward entrenchment of Trump in office for a very long time. So once you lose the institutions, then popular mobilization is the main device that you’ve got. You’ve got to make people realize they’re not alone in thinking that this government is not one that they should be willing to put up with. And that’s why going to the streets is so crucial.
It’s also crucial that Trump tried to suppress people going to the streets with this threat of violence against them—and that people went anyway. So what we’re seeing is the emergence of people who realize that unless they stand together, Trump is actually going to win this thing. So it’s very important to show visibly how much opposition he actually has. And I think that was very effective this weekend: The protests were peaceful and they were massive and they were everywhere. That was a very good start, but you can’t just do it once. This is something that has to be repeated, and it has to be supplemented.
I think people need to organize wherever they are—state and local governments, if you’ve got good local governments. Even some red states are starting to realize they’re losing out with a lot of Trump policies. So we just have to keep pushing publicly because we cannot count on the institutions to save us anymore. And even so, it’s a long way back once you have a captured high court. I know this from my work in Hungary and in Poland and Russia. Once those high courts go, then you really have a big struggle ahead. But there isn’t any other way out of this except through it to the other side.
Sargent: And is there a way through? What does it look like if we actually turn this around? Because, again, your construction of this is that we’re moving the wrong way. How do you turn around and move back?
Scheppele: Yeah. I think one of the things that we have to do is to rethink exactly what the values are that we stand for as a country and to think about how we mobilize reforms when we get the chance. That will actually not just go back to the way we were, which was obviously unsatisfactory for way too many people, but to think about how to move ahead and actually change things. The biggest challenge when you try to overcome autocratic entrenchment, when you’ve already lost some of the institutions, is to figure out how to remake those institutions. Because otherwise, the Supreme Court will go on voting down everything that any new government could do, for example—which they already did quite a lot of under Biden after Trump got to put three judges on the court, if you remember. So we have to think about some creative ways to remake these institutions.
I think we have to rethink our party system. That’s going to be a big struggle. But right now we’ve got two parties that aren’t functioning particularly well in times of crisis. We also have to rethink how to uncapture a captured court, which may mean doing things like changing the structure or rules of that institution. And we have to think about how we run elections because right now Congress—the House in particular—hinges on only a few competitive seats across the entire country. So there are bigger issues at stake once we try to figure out how to just blunt this particular attack. I’m hoping that a lot of us are out in the streets blunting the attack, but I’m hoping also that a lot of us are thinking about what, if we get the chance, we replace this with so that this doesn’t happen again.
I have some ideas about how to do that—I’ve worked on this in multiple countries—but this really has to be a collective conversation. This can’t be something where one expert comes in and says, Here’s the right answer. This has got to be something we arrive at together, and so far we have not had that conversation as a democratic country.
Sargent: Folks, you heard Kim Scheppele. You got to get out there right now. Stakes are incredibly high, and it’s all hanging in the balance. Kim, thank you so much for coming on with us.
Scheppele: Well, thank you. Sorry for this depressing news, but it’s good that we’re all in this together.
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