This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
In the early 20th century, there was an anarchist idea of the propaganda of the deed. It referred to forms of direct action — many of them violent, like assassinations and bombings — that were so spectacular when executed that everybody would hear about them. And when everybody heard about them, there would be copycats.
The idea was that you could rupture society itself and create the possibility of a moment of revolutionary upheaval by making the impossible possible, by making clear that society did not work how you thought it worked, that the state did not have the power you thought it had.
The Trump administration often operates through propaganda of the deed. They’re not an anarchist collective — they’re a state, a regime. But they operate not so often through the dull work of rules, laws, legislation and deliberation but rather through spectacle.
Venezuela was a spectacle. They do not seem to have planned for the aftermath. They were decapitating the Maduro regime, but they left it otherwise completely in place. Nobody — not even Trump or his administration — seems to know what it means for America to be running Venezuela. But it was an example, an act that showed something.
Even before the capture of Maduro, they had chosen not to fight the drug war, America’s fentanyl scourge, through laws and legislation on addiction and drugs. Instead, they chose to do very high-profile bombings of alleged drug boats, which, even if they were drug boats, were probably carrying cocaine.
It was spectacular. It was a message. It was showing what they could do. It was a deed that everybody could see and would talk about.
The Trump administration is an administration of spectacle. I’ve heard it sometimes described as a reality-TV administration, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Because what reality TV wants is ratings. And these spectacles, this propaganda — they’re meant to carry messages. They’re meant to make clear how the world now works.
My guest today is M. Gessen, my colleague here at Times Opinion. They grew up in the Soviet Union and have written remarkable books, including “The Future Is History,” which is about living under Vladimir Putin’s regime. They have been a clear, relentless and very perceptive voice on what it means and what it is like to live in a country that is turning into a different kind of regime.
So I wanted to talk to them about what propaganda is being spread through these deeds, what ruptures with the way things were done and what revolutionary moment the Trump administration is trying to instantiate through one spectacle after another.
Ezra Klein: Masha Gessen, welcome to the show.
M. Gessen: Great to be here.
On one level, the target of the recent operation in Venezuela was obviously President Nicolás Maduro. On another level, you’ve argued the target was the new world order of law, justice and human rights that was heralded in the wake of World War II.
Tell me about that.
I always feel a little like I have to make a lot of caveats when I talk about the post-World War II order. All these multilateral institutions were created, all these mechanisms: International courts, the U.N. and the Security Council. In many ways, it was an aspiration: an aspiration to create an order that would prevent, first, a new global war — something at which it has been very successful — and, second, prevent the disregard for human life that made the atrocities of World War II possible. In that, it has been much less successful. But the aspiration remained.
And I think even though the United States was historically one of the parties that violated this order, because it had the power to do so, it still did it under the cover of respecting those aspirations.
What I think has changed with the pullouts from all these different multilateral institutions and the blatant disrespect and contempt for them that Trump, personally, and his administration have articulated.
I think it culminated with Venezuela. If there’s an event that I think of as sort of the nail in the coffin of the new international world order, it would be Venezuela.
I guess when we talk about international law here, the history, including recent history, of what it has clearly not been capable of preventing or bounding is pretty long.
Israel and Gaza is ongoing. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is ongoing. There was much about the drone strikes and the Obama administration that were not working through, let’s call it, a normal set of due process.
And frankly, Maduro was not a peaceful, humanistic, democratically elected leader. He was a brutal, repressive dictator destroying his political opposition, remaining in power after losing an election.
So when we talk about there being a tipping point, are we just upset because it is Donald Trump doing it, but he’s just revealing the way the world really works and has worked, just stripped of its veneer of bureaucratic opacity?
Well, first of all, the veneer is important. It’s important that at least the George W. Bush administration felt it was necessary to lie to the U.N. rather than disregard the U.N. altogether out of respect for the institution. It sounds ridiculous, right? But there was a moment after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine when it seemed that all these mechanisms that were so painstakingly created and one step forward, two steps back, that they might all finally kick into gear. Because there was this unprecedented consensus, at least Western consensus, on Russia’s crimes in Ukraine.
And then with Gaza, that consensus fractured — and the hope for these institutions really kicking into gear dimmed. At the same time, there was the International Court of Justice hearing that was initiated by South Africa’s suit against Israel. That was itself a new phenomenon in international law, and it’s very easy to look at all the ways in which international law has failed. It’s much more difficult to be able to measure what it has prevented.
Certainly one thing that it has prevented over the last 80 years is another global war. And at least until Venezuela, it seemed that it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that the attempts to create an international rule of law were doomed.
I’ve been thinking about the differences and similarities of Venezuela and Iraq because ultimately, the invasion of Iraq is a betrayal of the international order.
But through the quite long run-up to the Iraq invasion, you saw the Bush administration doing two things that at least reflected a view that it should be caught trying.
One is that there’s a very long period of deliberation in America itself: deliberation with Congress, deliberation on Sunday morning news shows. There is a long debate in this country, in which arguments are being made back and forth, in which bills are being considered, in which debate is being had.
There’s also a debate internationally: Colin Powell going to the U.N. and giving a presentation we now know — and, in some ways, knew then — had falsehoods.
Ultimately, the U.N. does not go along, and then you have the coalition of the willing. It is a betrayal of the order, but it has this idea that the U.S. should still be working within. So there is this way in which you see the total wiping away of that, and you can understand it as having both continuity and discontinuity. I’m curious how you see that.
Well, exactly. It’s very difficult to say: It’s better to lie to the United Nations than to disregard the United Nations. But I think maybe it is better to lie to the United Nations?
But I wouldn’t just look at the Iraq War as a precedent. Kosovo is a really interesting precedent. Kosovo was an air war launched by NATO, but without the sanction of the U.N. Security Council. That seemed, to me, even at the time, hugely problematic. But there was still lip service to, first, NATO, and, second, to respecting international norms.
We can point to times when the president didn’t get congressional approval. We can point to times when the United States didn’t get approval from the U.N. Security Council. We can point to times when it acted independently of NATO. We can point to times when it blatantly lied about what it was doing.
But I can’t really think of a time when it was doing all of that at the same time, demonstratively. And I think there’s a transition from the quantity of things that this administration is doing to a new quality of being in the world.
The Trump administration appreciates, but in many ways also governs, through spectacle. Where other administrations govern much more through rules and laws and regulations, they really focus on spectacle.
Venezuela was structured as spectacle. There did not seem to be a long planning process for what the post-decapitation of the regime would look like, but just: Go in. And then you have this picture of Maduro on the plane, blindfolded. You have this very triumphant news conference from Donald Trump.
What is the role of spectacle here?
There’s the level of this love of a particular aesthetic of strength, a particular aesthetic of dominance and organization that Trump seems to be instinctively drawn to.
We’ve known that since his first term. He has an obsession with military parades and, obviously, the spectacle of the transformation of the White House — both the creation of all the gold leaf and the destruction of the East Wing as a demonstration of dominance and power.
But I also think that Trump is always in a movie. He is always watching himself onscreen. That’s something that makes him different from anyone I’ve ever read or written about. There just seems to be this constant external observation of this character that he’s playing, which is in some ways his superpower. It’s what gives him the ability to shake his fist after literally dodging a bullet and shouting, “Fight, fight, fight” — and having that incredible photo op. Because even at a moment when he really did come face-to-face with death, what he’s thinking of is what it looks like from the outside.
There’s a whole other level of spectacle that we’re seeing here that we still need to understand.
Sometimes I think about the way in which Joe Biden and Donald Trump are not far apart in age, but Biden felt fundamentally of another era. Biden was a politician of the past who is somewhat governing as a caretaker of the present.
Trump, to me, sometimes feels like he is somewhat from the future. He’s hypermodern. What I mean by that is: He is always his profile picture.
I don’t want to say that truly there is no backstage to him, but I’m not sure there’s a backstage to him.
I just think that there is a way in which he fully inhabits himself as a public brand and has for so long that it is absorbed on a cellular level to him. Even many people who are understood as influencers or as famous are faking it a little bit. But for him, Donald Trump as a media spectacle, as a human being turned into a spectacle, is a fully inhabited persona.
Exactly. I think that’s what I’m trying to get at. I didn’t mean to say that he’s thinking: What will this look like online? Or: What will this look like on the front page of the newspaper?
It’s that all there is is the external view. There’s no internality there.
It would be one thing if it’s just him, but it’s no longer just him. And my sense is that people all over the administration understand this on some level — that this is what it means to be doing politics.
Kristi Noem going to the Salvadoran torture prison and posing in front of all these human beings stacked up behind each other in a cage — that’s not who Kristi Noem was 15 years ago.
That’s an attempt to learn, in an artificial way, what Donald Trump embodies in an intuitive way. But it has turned his instincts into not a governing philosophy but a governing mode.
I think that’s a great observation. I do want to temper it a little bit because I think there’s a craziness to what we’re living through that has to do with how we got here — which is that politics should have spectacle. Politics should have a public dimension.
In the preceding, more “normal” administrations, we didn’t have that. The Biden administration was a bizarrely closed black box — bizarre for any administration but particularly for a Democratic administration. It was an administration that utterly failed to tell any kind of story.
I’m sure a lot of it had to do with Biden’s deterioration and his inability to really be in public. But really, it was like a closed management company that was just trying to get stuff done without being distracted by doing public politics.
So the transition from that to this is even more bizarre.
We’re not seeing a juxtaposition of two different kinds of public politics. We’re seeing that this is what public politics in America now looks like.
I think that’s a really interesting point. Barack Obama was capable of spectacle and created spectacle during the fight over the Affordable Care Act. Deep in it, Obama functionally holds a public debate on C-SPAN with him and a bunch of congressional leaders in which they’re just arguing the details of health care policy in front of the public. For the Republicans, Paul Ryan ends up being the star and lead communicator.
There are many things happening in that, but in some ways it was a spectacle of deliberation. It was a spectacle very aligned with sophisticated policymaking in a democracy where the view was that people might align with whoever made the best argument.
The message of a lot of Trumpist spectacle, to me, is the wiping away of all that. Again, the absence of Congress here is a very important thing. I think, in part, because Congress is anti-spectacle: It’s slow. You get bogged down. It’s details.
But to the degree it is a spectacle, it is a spectacle of constraint.
You have a line at one point where you say that it is institutions and norms and laws that make a democracy. I think the spectacle here, the way the Trump administration does it, is actually about the contempt for those institutions, norms and laws — such that the message is: We are not that kind of system — we are this kind of system run by this one man.
Absolutely. I agree with everything you just said.
I would just add one thing. It’s not just institutions and laws and norms that make a democracy. It’s institutions and laws and norms functioning in public, transparently, that make a democracy. That’s what we’re lacking, and we’re lacking it demonstratively.
Your observation about why he’s not using Congress is spot on. Because even using the power that he has now with the trifecta to effectively rubber-stamp White House legislation would be empowering something other than himself.
You have a line in one of your pieces where you say that “Trump and autocrats like him are opposed to deliberation as such.”
I’ve been thinking about this line because the U.S. has just entered into — as Trump himself has now said repeatedly — a multiyear, open-ended commitment to, in some form or another, run Venezuela with zero domestic debate about it. The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations is not debating this. What it means for America has not been described by anybody.
So tell me both about the relationship between leaders like Trump and deliberation, and what it means that there was so little deliberation for such a profound assumption of responsibility and violence here.
There are two aspects to deliberation. One is just a way of exercising power. It’s hard to get inside Trump’s head, but I think that his conception of power appears to be something that’s wielded unilaterally, and it is diluted by any kind of public deliberation. There’s probably deliberation happening behind closed doors, but the concept of power that he projects is the kind of power that’s unilateral.
There’s also another aspect to deliberation, which is — and I’m using an idea that I borrowed from Bálint Magyar, a Hungarian political scientist who I think is just the absolute best and clearest thinker on autocracy out there — deliberation as an expression of our obligations to one another.
I think that’s a very useful way to understand what that projection of power is. It is a rejection of any kind of obligations to one another.
I was very struck by Stephen Miller, who I think is functionally the prime minister of the U.S. right now, talking to Jake Tapper about the possibility of America taking Greenland — which, again, under the structure of international law is unthinkable.
Archival clip of Stephen Miller: We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.
Let me start here: What do you think when you hear that comment?
I think Putin. I think that since the end of World War II, we’ve actually had two post-World War II orders. There’s the structural one, the institutional one, the rhetorical one. This is the order that aims to prevent another global war.
Then there’s the victor’s order. The order that’s summed up by Putin’s favorite photograph of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt sitting in Yalta — which is now in Russian-occupied Crimea — carving up the world. Putin refers to that constantly when he talks about his right to do what he has done and when he talks about the war in Ukraine.
That’s basically the argument that he has been putting forward: Look, strongmen carve up the world. And really, what I’m willing to sit down and discuss is how we draw the lines, not what any international institution has to say about it.
So what I hear Stephen Miller saying is basically the exact same thing.
There always seems to be an assertion not just about international institutions or nations, but also about human beings.
When I listen to MAGA and Trump and then its theorists and its followers, I hear something being said about this idea that we have restrained the animal, masculine, dominance-oriented, conquest-oriented instincts that made humanity great — that, in the Elon Musk version, will get us to Mars in the future — and tied them up in hollow, liberal values and self-restraints and debate, discussion, deliberation, rules and procedures.
There’s something being said that is operating at all levels, that the way America is acting under Trump is the way America should act, the way a superpower should act. That is what it means to be a superpower: To be unrestrained. But that the way Trump acts is also the way a man should act.
That’s a very astute observation, and I think you’re absolutely right. I’m going to use the word “fascism” here because I don’t think we can analyze this well enough without some kind of framework.
When we talk about fascism, we often talk about an ideology of a superior race. But it’s also a worldview. And what’s fundamental to that worldview is that the world is rotten, and everyone in the world is rotten. Anybody who pretends not to be rotten is lying, and part of the mission is to expose that lie.
So it’s impossible to talk to a person who is encased in that ideology, because everything you say is, a priori, a lie. If you say that you value human rights and human dignity and human life, well, obviously, you’re being a hypocrite, and you must be exposed.
That’s what we’re seeing, and that’s what we’re hearing from Stephen Miller.
I don’t always hear them saying that everybody else is lying. I hear them saying almost something different — like their idea of the “woke mind virus”: that something has happened and an ideology has taken over that is poisoning ambition and aggression — a set of forces, a vitality — that is what drove civilization forward.
I think that’s a great observation. They’re seeing a weakness virus.
A weakness virus — that’s a better way to put it.
I want to play for you a clip of Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, talking about one of the ways in which he wanted to change the culture of the U.S. military.
Archival clip of Pete Hegseth: Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are.
He goes on to launch an attack on beards.
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There is a real obsession with aesthetics across this administration — who to appoint and then what they want from the people beneath them. What do you make of that?
It feels so familiar to me. I grew up in the Soviet Union, where we watched parades on TV. One of the happiest days of my life as a kid was finally receiving the red kerchief.
What is a red kerchief?
A red kerchief is a sign of membership in the Young Pioneers, which is a kids Communist organization. And it’s amazing because I grew up in a dissident family. By the time I was 10 years old, which is when you get inducted, I was quite aware of where we lived and what we thought about it. And yet the aesthetics of it were irresistible. Because it was beautiful, and it was also like other people. You could march in formation. It’s so incredibly appealing — embarrassingly, right?
There’s this terrific documentary called “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which was filmed in secret by a teacher in a Russian school in a small town in the Urals over the course of a couple of years after the start of the full-scale invasion.
And it’s really about the imposition of propaganda in the school and how that school and all other Russian schools became sort of retooled as junior military organizations. But you can also see the imposition of an aesthetic. These kids start marching in information. They start carrying the flag. They eventually get these uniforms that hark back to those exact uniforms with the red kerchiefs that I wore 50 years ago.
It’s a fascist aesthetic. It’s what the 20th century taught us about what power looks like, what strength looks like.
This is something I’ve become slightly weirdly obsessed with: Why do fascist and authoritarian movements seem to care so much more about aesthetics and, in their own way, beauty than, say, Keir Starmer’s government or Joe Biden’s government?
Donald Trump came into office and, amid everything else he had to do, decided to chair the board of the Kennedy Center, as that was clearly the thing he really wanted to do. And then recently, he had his name etched into the institution. It’s now called the Trump Kennedy Center, if you go to the website or the building. He immediately signed an executive order about bringing classical architecture back to federal construction.
I do not share Donald Trump’s aesthetic — he filled the Oval Office with gold — but he really does have one. And he really understands it as a dimension of politics and power and cultural control.
And this applies to other leaders like him. Putin has his bare-chested photos and his aesthetic. And if you go back to the midcentury and early 20th-century fascists, it’s similar.
I have come to think it’s, first, a weakness of liberal politics that it does not see itself as having a relationship to beauty. That it does not believe beauty should be part of politics necessarily. It likes beauty, and it wants other people to do beautiful things. But we’re the people in the suits who have the charts and can tell you how the health care system is run, not the people who have views on what is and is not beautiful.
Why do you think these movements see spectacles, beauty and aesthetics as so much more central to how politics should operate and how power is wielded than liberal left-wing coalitions do?
I think it has to do with two things: One is the past, and the other one is race.
We’ve talked about how Trump is a leader of the future, which I think is a really interesting observation that you made. But he’s also, of course, a leader of the past. His singular political promise is: I will take you back to an imaginary past — before all this happened, before all the past bad things happened, before you felt uncomfortable, before you felt scared about what would happen to you, before you felt scared about being alienated from your children. It’s going to be warm and cozy and exactly as you imagine the past to have been.
Aesthetically, a representation of that past is classical architecture. It’s an entirely white American history. It’s the great monuments and whatever else that he has promised to bring back.
But it’s really interesting how the initial revolutionary movement of the Soviet Union was artistically experimental. Then very quickly, with the establishment of terror, it turned back into this classical architecture and extremely conservative art, and all of it, as though the Soviet Union was trying to transport itself back into the 17th and 18th century aesthetically. So I think that’s one dimension of it.
The other dimension of it is the assertion of a superior race. This is the other dimension of fascism. And aesthetically, it’s very present. Race can be defined differently, but what we’re seeing is it’s white cisgender men who are in excellent physical shape. That’s what the ideal of this administration looks like.
And of course, like every fascist administration, it’s not actually led by men who look like that. [Laughs.] But they want to look like that, and they want to be surrounded by men who look like that.
But I think we might be falling into an equivalency trap, and I’d be careful here. It’s not incumbent on us, whatever we want to call this politics — liberal, democratic, left, antifascist — to produce an equal and opposite aesthetic. It’s actually a much more complicated task, which is to assert an entirely different aesthetic direction that is oriented toward difference and variety and things that you haven’t seen before. That is, objectively, much more difficult.
How do you create an ideal of beauty that includes all sorts of things and all kinds of people and the kind of architecture that no one has seen before? I don’t know.
I want to talk about a different dimension of spectacle that you have written quite a lot about, which is the constancy of spectacle. Trump everywhere, all the time.
The Times had an amazing review of Trump’s media presence in 2025 that showed he was twice as available to reporters as he was in 2017. It kind of crowds everything else out. Tell me a bit about that dimension of using attentional capture as a tool.
During Trump’s first term, we used to talk about the shiny objects. It almost seems quaint now, the things that we considered shiny objects. [Laughs.] But I remember distinctly that sense of extreme fatigue. Because you always felt like you were looking at something that was occupying your attention fully, but you had a deep suspicion that there were other things that should also be claiming your attention that may be more important or equally important. And I think that gave rise to a lot of conspiracy thinking about distractions. I think we’ve moved past talking about distractions, and that’s a good thing. Because I don’t think there was a strategy of doing one thing to distract from another.
I agree with this.
It was just an overall policy of distraction.
Well, they themselves were also distracted.
Right.
Which I think is an important point. They don’t have some attentional reserve that nobody else has. They are running from one thing to another, not watching how the last thing worked out — which does create problems for them.
Distraction becomes everybody’s condition. It is Trump’s fundamental condition as a human being. He cannot hold a topic for a paragraph. He is distracted.
Absolutely. But he’s also driven. And he’s driven to create one attention-dominating spectacle after another. Again, that’s how he thinks power operates. That’s how he asserts his presence in the world. If there isn’t a movie to be shot today, then today is a wasted day.
Say more about how he thinks power operates.
I can’t get inside his head. I can observe from the outside. And what I see from the outside is that it’s a nonstop production of spectacle, of big events, of assertion: We have done this today. We have liberated Venezuela. We have protected the American people. All of this, obviously, in quotes. We have arrested criminals. We have deported them to El Salvador. We’re waging war in the streets of American cities to protect you from crime.
And we know, right? At this point, we’ve gotten used to the fact that if Venezuela happened three or four days ago, the chances that we’re still going to be talking about Venezuela next week are almost zero.
I mean, it happened really just days ago, still. And already today, there is a different spectacle.
I’m almost having trouble having this conversation because the thing I am thinking about is the public execution of Renee Good in Minnesota. It’s a little unclear what happened. Her car was in the middle of the street, and then you watch the federal agents rush the car, and she begins executing a multipoint turn to try to leave. And then an agent shoots her dead in the middle of the street.
The Trump administration is saying she was trying to run them over. But you can very easily see that she was not trying to run everybody over. She was parked first. They run at her, and she tries to leave. Not even speed out, just leave.
And it is a spectacle of its own. It is the kind of thing they’ve always been creating the conditions to see happen. I’m not saying they intended for this to happen, but everybody has predicted things like this happening, myself included. And it feels like a message to every protester.
I’m curious how you have understood her killing and this moment — what its meaning is.
I think this is a huge event, for lack of a better word. Which I also feel is important to say because in one sense, the spectacle of a driver being executed in an American street is not unfamiliar. It actually happens all the time. Police shoot Black men in their cars with stunning regularity. What was different here was that it wasn’t police — it was ICE. And the person they killed was a white woman, not a Black man.
So this is another one of those instances where we’ve been on this descent and then fell off a cliff.
And the particular cliff is: Trump has been, for almost a year now, talking in military terms and war terms about American cities. He has deployed ICE as a military force. Or I shouldn’t say as a military force — as his own paramilitary force.
Another essential component of a fascist dictatorship is to have a paramilitary force that reports directly to the president, that doesn’t have independent authority — which is effectively what ICE is. And ICE has been recruiting thugs all over the country and swelling its ranks. And Trump has talked about the protesters against ICE — particularly in Portland, not in Minneapolis, where this happened — as the criminals, as extremely dangerous, as people whom war should be waged against.
So the stage has been set for this execution for nearly a year. It’s almost surprising that this didn’t happen earlier, but now that it has happened, what happens as autocracy establishes itself is that the space available for action shrinks very rapidly.
I talk about this a lot when I do public speaking and people ask me: What should we do? And I say: Well, do something. Because whatever you can do today, you’re not going to be able to do tomorrow. So act where you can act.
And one of the places where people have been able to act is ICE Watch — protecting their neighbors against ICE. It hasn’t been terribly effective, but I think as an organizing mechanism and as a community-level action and as protest, it has been extraordinarily effective. It’s what has really brought people together to protect their common values and their neighbors. And that may no longer be possible. That’s what this execution signals: The danger of us engaging in that kind of activism has just grown exponentially.
What I was thinking about when you were thinking through the ways in which it is or isn’t different than Black men who are shot in their cars is that as much as the administration is claiming this was a form of law enforcement violence — that she was threatening the officers and they had to act to defend their lives — this was, in my view, political violence.
And again, you can watch the video. It was state repression. It was an act against civil disobedience, or resistance, to what ICE is doing. It is being functionally defended in those terms, at least somewhat. So I agree with you when you say this is a huge event.
There’s this favorite journalistic cliché or political cliché: This is not us. But, of course, this is us. This is us now.
It’s very significant that this was carried out by ICE and not by the National Guard.
Because this propaganda is not just: This is what we do. It’s: This is what we do. Join us.
But the other thing that’s happening is the way that we analyze and frame this administration and compare it to historical precedent.
There are certain things that we have come to consider unthinkable. Concentration camps are unthinkable. Fascism is unthinkable.
These are words that we try to avoid using because they are, by definition, hyperbole. Part of the reason that they’re hyperbole by definition is because we’ve said that only happens in this past that we have set aside from our lived reality. So if this is happening in our lived reality, if Alligator Alcatraz is being built in this country now, then either we’re living in a country that’s building a concentration camp or it’s not a concentration camp. If protesters are being executed by paramilitary forces in the streets of the city, then either we’re living through fascism, or this is not fascism.
That choice is so stark and so desperate.
One of the things that I found very disturbing, among many things, was the way the administration has acted after Good’s killing.
Trump posted a video of the Renee Good shooting on Truth Social, and he said the video showed Good was obviously a “professional agitator” who “violently, willfully and viciously” ran over the ICE officer. On X you could see people arguing over this and analyzing it frame by frame.
I think there’s something about this moment where you have this video and people can’t even agree on the reality of it.
Second, which picks up on something you’ve talked about here: Often you hear the administration describing citizens and constituents as a domestic enemy within. Political opposition, judges — I remember the administration describing a judge as a legal insurrectionist.
The real insurrection is the people who got pardoned from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. But now there’s this language that anybody trying to protest the Trump administration is the enemy who needs to be dealt with by force — at least as the internal logic of this looks.
And when that happens, they’re not going to investigate or say: This is a great tragedy, we need to see what happened. They’re going to say: You were the enemy, and we were right to kill you.
Well, totalitarian leaders need to wage wars, and sometimes they wage wars externally. More often, they wage wars internally or both. They always designate an enemy within.
Trump did it as soon as he assumed office. His main enemies within were immigrants — and protesters. But the number of the enemy then has to expand constantly. Because that’s the only way that you can wage war continuously. The war needs to escalate.
And that’s what we are seeing. It was unthinkable, until it happened, that a white, presumably middle-class protester, would be executed on camera in broad daylight in an American city. And now that it has happened, it’s the sort of thing that can happen here.
How does all this look similar or different to you from what you saw in Russia?
It’s so much faster. And it’s so much faster, not just than Russia, but than Hungary, Israel or any country that I have covered that we can say has become autocratic. It’s comparable to the speed at which countries that experienced an actual violent revolution — that I have studied but not lived through — have transformed.
We can use some of the tools from the electoral autocracies in Eastern Europe to understand some of what has happened here. But I don’t have any tools for understanding the rate at which this country is being transformed.
Do you think that the rate and the speed also reflect a fragility within it?
Very famously, Putin has — or at least had, but still has, I believe — high approval ratings. Trump does not. In the 2025 elections, Republicans got routed everywhere they competed.
I think Venezuela might, over time, turn into this, too. They don’t have a plan for Venezuela. If it goes easily, and we never think about it again, that will be fine for them. But if it ends up in civil strife, and we do need to have American boots on the ground — as Trump has said he is open to — people may not like that.
Liberation Day was constructed very much as a spectacle, with Trump and his big poster board of tariffs on islands full of penguins. And the tariffs have been politically quite disastrous for the administration. I often say to people that if anything is going to save American democracy, it’s Donald Trump’s tariff regime.
There is a lot of speed here. And sometimes the speed feels like it is covering up for a hollowness. They have to move so fast because they have not actually built the underlying consensus, support, infrastructure. But then they’re not planning for what happens after they’re not ready for it. They’re also just reacting to the situations they create. And — if you look at Donald Trump’s polling, if you look at recent elections — not effectively for their political standing.
I don’t think I share your optimism, but I hope you’re right. Your optimism is also tempered, but I think I’m more pessimistic than this.
First of all, I suspect that the reason they’re moving so fast is because Donald Trump is old. I think he feels a particular urgency. When Putin came to power, he felt like he had his entire life ahead of him, and he was going to move slowly and deliberately — with intention. And Trump has to ram this through very fast.
But I also think that speed generally benefits the autocrat. Democracy is very slow. This is how they’ve hacked the system.
It’s the inherent fragility of democracy. Institutions even protect themselves very slowly. Look at U.S.A.I.D. Now we know that there wasn’t necessarily a plan to completely demolish U.S.A.I.D. when they first went after it, but within a few weeks it was functionally destroyed. And you can’t just put something back together after it has been destroyed — especially if there’s no political will to do so.
So I just think that speed is to his benefit. Whether it’s covering up a hollowness is maybe irrelevant.
The other point is the issue of popularity. We have a problem here, which is that there are different kinds of metrics. I think there are democratic metrics and there are autocratic metrics. Democratic metrics no longer apply. Do autocratic metrics apply fully? I don’t know.
Say more of what you mean.
For example, we talk about the scenario where Venezuela goes all wrong, and there are boots on the ground, and American soldiers are dying, and nothing is working as intended, and the oil wells are not sprouting fountains of gold that fund this whole operation and enrich the United States. When none of that is happening, does that have consequences for the midterm elections? That would be democratic metrics.
I very much doubt that it will have consequences for a couple of reasons. One is what has happened to the media universe. The pictures that MAGA voters, for lack of a better term, see, and the pictures that you and I see are completely different. Will people who need to see what’s happening in Venezuela have any idea about what’s happening there? Will people who don’t read The New York Times have any idea what’s happening there? I doubt it.
The other has to do with the elections themselves. We tend to think of elections in black-and-white terms. Either they’re free and fair — or they’re not. But actually there are many ways to degrade elections, and some of those ways have been operative in this country for many, many years — much longer than Trump has even been a political actor. And that has sped up greatly over the last year. So we’re going to see this fractured media universe and a hugely degraded election later this year — and the combination of those two things.
Let me try to take the other side of this. I don’t love talking in terms of optimism and pessimism, because I don’t actually consider myself optimistic. I’m more trying to have the best picture of reality that I can.
But if I were to take the other side and I do think I see this somewhat differently — I am not yet seeing things that would make me think that there has been some deterioration either in the media universe, such that there’s no capacity for backlash because nobody knows what’s happening. And in fact, when I look at nonaligned media like “Joe Rogan” or “Flagrant” or things like that — the sort of bro podcasters and people just being a little more upset about the immigration and unsure of what they’re seeing — I seem to see a turn on Trump.
We don’t know how the 2026 elections will go. Maybe it will go the way you’re saying. But to the extent we have signals, the signals seem very bad for Republican performance in elections.
Starting with the Wisconsin Supreme Court election — but then of course moving through to the New Jersey, New York City and Virginia elections, moving through to the Proposition 50 redistricting ballot initiative in California, moving through to every House and so on special election — where Democrats have been overperforming by about 14 points in one of the analyses I’ve seen — although there are different ways of thinking about this and different ways of measuring overperformance.
But I would ask why the 2025 elections, which were so uniformly against the regime, haven’t made you rethink this somewhat?
Well, I think you’re right. I have my own heuristic, which is that I think everything always gets worse — [Klein and Gessen laugh] — which doesn’t mean it couldn’t get better.
I think that we’ve all become accustomed to thinking in a kind of split local/federal screen.
A split local/federal screen?
A lot of the 2025 elections that we’re looking at had to do with local politics. I think that projecting that onto even how people will vote for their local representatives of Congress is somewhat risky business. Because the Trump-Mamdani voter isn’t necessarily acting on their disillusionment with Trump. Their politics are entirely internally consistent.
So I think that Trump’s influence on the midterms will be much greater than the influence that he tried to exert on some of the other elections.
To what extent do you think the politics of the Trump-Mamdani voter, the Trump-A.O.C. voter — of which there are some, perhaps not actually that many, but they exist — are the not highly attached, “I don’t like how much everything costs,” voters?
I think that in Trump’s tariffs, economic mismanagement and his evident inattention to cost, you see him beginning to absorb this as a political threat, talking about the affordability hoax.
How much do those voters now turn on Trump? Which is why his poll numbers are bad? You have economic sentiment at levels that look like the Great Recession, that look more like moments of economic rupture.
So when I think about those voters, they often seem to be anti-system, “This whole thing isn’t working for me” voters, not voters who are kind of Trump cultists but who are willing to support a charismatic democratic socialist.
So that’s really the great question. I always think back to my series of interviews with this great Russian sociologist Lev Gudkov, who would show me these graphs of Putin’s subjective economic well-being and Putin’s popularity.
And for about the first dozen years of Putin’s being in power, they moved in concert. So subjective economic well-being dips, Putin’s popularity dips. It rises, Putin’s popularity rises — which is normal. And then subjective economic well-being takes a dive, and Putin’s popularity skyrockets.
And his interpretation was that this is when people accepted a trade-off: You are going to be poor, but in exchange for being poor, you are going to belong to something great. And that’s the totalitarian trade-off. People made it in the Soviet Union; people make it all over the world. Are people going to make it in this country?
That’s what Trump is offering them. He’s going to wage war. I don’t know whether he’s going to try to take Greenland or Cuba next, but this is going to be an imperial politics for the next year. A politics of expansion, a politics of greatness, like everything that we’ve been seeing, but much more aggressive on the global scale. Are enough Americans going to accept that trade-off?
Let me ask you a question that actually does relate then to Russia on that, because you know it so much infinitely better than I ever will. Certainly, the conventional wisdom in America on the politics of Russia under Putin has been that there is a dimension of national revenge and restoration. That the political psyche of Russia was: We were a great power, we were the world-spanning, globe-spanning Soviet Union. And now we have been humiliated and contained and shrunken. And the deal at some point Putin offered was: You’ll not be rich, but Russia will again be powerful.
The American psyche, as I read it, and also as I read in the 2024 election, specifically, is almost the opposite: Americans feel America is powerful.
It is powerful. And what they want is to be richer. And what they were mad at, in many ways, and what Trump very effectively potentiated in the electorate was: Why is Joe Biden getting us involved endlessly in Ukraine and in Israel and Gaza, and why doesn’t anything seem to be happening here?
And what Trump said was: We’re going to chill out on America’s role in the world. Stop it with all this endless engagement with foreign quagmires, and I’m going to make you rich again like me.
And now we’re moving into foreign quagmires and domestic fighting. People are upset about political division again, and you’re seeing your countrymen being murdered on national television, and you’re not getting richer, you’re not part of something. It’s just more of people doing things that are not in your interest.
When I talk to people on the right, that is the vulnerability they see for themselves. But it reflects, maybe, at least in this telling, a difference in what Americans were worried about and what Russians in the period in which Putin was rising were worried about.
But you would know better how fair or unfair that characterization is.
I think it’s fair as far as it goes. But I think what’s interesting and instructive about Putin is that for the first decade of Putin’s reign, he really offered Russians an authoritarian, not a totalitarian, bargain. And the authoritarian bargain is: You’re going to live better. Your life is going to improve immeasurably as long as you stay out of politics and focus on your private life.
This was a politics that suited the oil boom, which was a moment of unprecedented economic prosperity in Russia. So he was accumulating power while Russians were eating better, living better, refurnishing their apartments, buying new apartments and generally just enjoying a level of well-being that nobody in that generation had ever enjoyed.
And once that money started running out, Putin offered the totalitarian bargain, and Russians accepted it. So the question we’re really asking is: Are Americans at all primed to accept that bargain? Is it going to have any purchase in this country?
Because Trump hasn’t invented a new totalitarian politics. He’s using exactly the same politics. He’s now saying, “Make America Great Again” not in the sense of: You are going to be able to afford a bigger house. But in the sense of: We’re going to take Greenland.
Is that going to get traction? We don’t know. Then the next question is: If it doesn’t get traction, is he destroying the democratic mechanisms in this country fast enough that it’s not going to matter that it doesn’t get traction? So these are just two unanswered questions.
I’ve lived most of my life among people who looked to a future and to more powerful political actors to restore a kind of justice. I thought I would someday be in the Hague writing about the Putin trial. And I think that the most powerful country in the world unilaterally canceling the moral order is an assault on hope.
I think that’s a place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Late last year, I spent probably three or four months just reading books about Israel/Palestine. And two of them are standouts. One is called “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” which I think you’ve talked about on the podcast.
The authors, Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, have been on the show, if people would like to check that one out.
I’m not just saying it because I wrote a book called “The Future Is History.”
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley. One of the incredible things about that book is just how well written it is ——
Beautifully.
Yeah. I never expected a book written by two people together, but also two policy people, to be so beautiful.
The other is a book that, after I read it, got the National Book Award, which is “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” .
And then I just read a galley of an autofiction novel by a writer named Harriet Clark. It’s called “The Hill.” It’s a book about a girl who is raised by a mother who is serving a life sentence in prison. And it’s just an absolutely extraordinarily beautiful and intelligent novel.
Masha Gessen. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes 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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