In the early 20th century, there was

this anarchist idea about the propaganda

of the deed. The propaganda of the deed

was that there were these forms of

direct action and many of them violent

assassinations, bombings, that when you

did them, they were so spectacular,

everybody would hear about them. And

when everybody heard about them, there

would be copycats by making clear that

society did not work how you thought it

worked. that could rupture society

itself and create the possibility of a

moment of revolutionary upheaval.

I think there is a way in which you

should and can understand the Trump

administration as operating often

through propaganda of the deed. Now,

they're not an anarchist collective.

They're a state. their regime,

but they operate not so often through

the dull work of rules and laws and

legislation and deliberation,

but through spectacle,

through the meaning of particular

spectacles. Venezuela was a spectacle.

They do not seem to have planned for the

aftermath. They were decapitating the

Madura regime, but they left the regime

otherwise completely in place.

>> For us to just leave, who's going to

take over? I mean, there is nobody to

take over.

>> But it was a object lesson, an example,

an act that showed something. And even

before the capture of Maduro, they had

chosen not to fight the drug war, the

fentinel scourge through laws and

legislation on addiction and and and

drugs, but instead do these very

high-profile bombings of alleged drug

boats that 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.

Liberation Day. You can keep going on

and on and on like this. The Trump

administration is an administration of

spectacle. And I've heard it sometimes

described as reality TV administration,

but I don't think that's quite right.

Because what reality TV wants is

ratings. But these spectacles, this

propaganda is meant to carry messages.

It is meant to make clear how the world

now works. My guest today is Masha

Gesson who grew up in the Soviet Union

who's my colleague here at times opinion

has written remarkable books like the

future is history about living under

Vladimir Putin and who's been a clear

and 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. As always, my

email is Kleinshowny Times.com.

Ashen, welcome to the show. Great to be

here. So, on one level, the target of

the recent operation in Venezuela was

obviously President Nicholas 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.

>> Right.

>> So, you know, I always feel a little

like I have to make a lot of caveats

when I talk about the the post World War

II order. All these multilateral

institutions were created. All these

mechanisms, international courts, the

UN, the Security Council because it was

in many ways an aspiration, right? an

aspiration to creating an order that

would a prevent a new global war,

something at which it has been very

successful, and b prevent

um the kind of disregard for human life

that made the atrocities of World War II

possible. And in that, it's 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.

And what I think has changed with the

pullouts from all these different

multilateral institutions and the

blatant disrespect for them and actually

contempt for them that Trump personally

and his administration have articulated

and I think it sort of culminated with

Venezuela, right? I think that if

there's a an event that I think of as

sort of the nail in the coffin of the 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. I mean, you know, Israel

and Gaza is ongoing. Uh, Russia inside

Ukraine is ongoing.

there was much about you know the drone

strikes in the Obama administration that

was not working through let's call it

you know a normal set of due process and

frankly Maduro himself right which I

think is very important to say in all

this he 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.

And so when we talk about, you know,

there being a tipping point, you know,

are we just upset because it is Donald

Trump doing it, but he is 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 that it's important that at

least the George W. Bush administration

felt it was necessary to lie to the UN

rather than disregard the UN altogether

out of respect for the institution. I

mean it sounds ridiculous, right? is

there was a moment after the full-scale

invasion of Ukraine when it seemed that

actually all these mechanisms that were

so painstakingly created and you know

one step forward two steps back that

they may all finally kick into gear

because there is this unpreced

unprecedented consensus at least western

consensus on uh Russia's crimes in

Ukraine and then with Gaza

that consensus fractured and the hope

for these institutions really kicking

into gear

um dimmed. At the same time, there was

the international uh court of justice

hearing um initiated by South Africa's

suit against Israel. Um 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 very it's much more

difficult to be able to measure what it

has prevented, right? Um 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 uh an

international rule of law were doomed.

I've been thinking about the differences

and similarities of Venezuela and Iraq

because ultimately Iraq is also uh the

invasion of is a betrayal of the

international order.

But you you watch through the quite long

runup to that invasion, the Bush

administration doing two things that at

least reflect

a view that it should be caught trying.

One is 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 and there's

also a debate internationally Colin

Powell going to the UN and and giving a

presentation we now know had falsehoods

in it um and in some ways knew then and

ultimately the UN does not go along and

then you have the coalition of the

willing and and it is a betrayal of the

of the order but it it has this idea

that the US should still be working

within and and you can understand as

having both continuity and discontinuity

and I'm curious how you see that.

>> Right. Well, exactly. It's very

difficult to say, you know, 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. Um, but I think I

wouldn't just look at the Iraq war as

president. Um, I think Kosovo is a

really interesting president, right?

Kosovo, which was an uh an air war

launched by NATO, but without sanction

of the UN Security Council. And that,

you know, that seemed to me even at the

time hugely problematic.

But

there there was a kind of there was

still lip service to uh first of all

NATO um second of respecting

international norms. Um, and there

wasn't, you know, we we we have, we can

point to times when the president didn't

get congressional approval. We can get

uh we can point to times when the United

States didn't get approval of the UN

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

kind of transition from sort of the

quantity of things that this

administration is doing to a new quality

of being in the world. And the Trump

administration

both I think appreciates but in many

ways governs through spectacle

where other administrations governed

much more through rules and laws and

regulations. They they really focus on

spectacle and Venezuela was structured

as spectacle, right? not a long planning

process for what the post decapitation

of the regime would look like, but just

you go in and you know you then you have

this picture of Maduro on the plane

blindfolded. Um you have this like you

know very uh triumphant press conference

from Donald Trump. What is the role of

spectacle here? So I think I think

there's the level um

of yeah of this love

of

a particular aesthetic of strength,

right? Um particular aesthetic of of

dominance and organization that Trump

seems to be instinctively drawn to,

right? And we've known that since his

first term, right? his obsession with

military parades and and obviously, you

know, the the the spectre of the

transformation of the White House, both

the the creation

of all the the gold leaf and the

destruction of the East Wing, right? The

demonstration of dominance and um and

and power. But I also think that Trump

is always in a movie, right? He's always

watching himself on screen and um and

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 um

that he's playing

which I think is in some ways his

superpower, right? It's what gives him

the ability to

shake his fist after

literally uh dodging a bullet. Um and

saying fight and you know having that

incredible photo op because even at a

moment when he really was

when he really did come face to face

with death what he's thinking of is what

it looks like from the outside. Um, so I

think there's a whole other level of

spectacle that we're seeing here that

that we still need to understand.

I think sometimes about the way in which

Joe Biden and Donald Trump are not far

apart in age.

Biden felt fundamentally of another era.

Biden was a politician of the past who

is somewhat governing as a a caretaker

of the present.

Trump to me sometimes feels like he is

somewhat from the future, right? He is

hyper modern.

And what I mean by that is

he is always his profile picture.

There's no I don't want to say truly

there is no backstage to him but I am

not sure there is 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 in

the way that even many people who are

understood as influencers or or famous

or they're a little bit faking it. But

for him, Donald Trump as a media

spectacle, as a as a human being turned

into a spectacle,

is a fully inhabited persona. Yeah, I

exactly. That's um I think that's what

I'm trying to to get at. Um and I didn't

mean to say that he is thinking what

will this look like on online? What will

this look like on the front page of the

of the paper newspaper?

It's that all there is is the external

view, right? 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

levels like what it means to be doing

politics. Christy Gnome going to the El

Salvadoran torture prison and posing in

front of all these human beings stacked

up behind each other in a cage. That

that's an that's not who Christome was

15 years ago, right? that that's a an

attempt to learn in an artificial way

what Donald Trump embodies in an

intuitive way, but it it's turned his in

like his instincts into not a governing

philosophy exactly, but a governing

mode.

Um, I think that's a great observation.

I do want to temper it a little bit,

right? Um because I think there's

there's a craziness to um to what we're

living through that has to do with how

we got here

which is that you know politics should

have a spectacle.

>> Politics should have a public dimension.

We

in the preceding

more quote unquote normal

administrations we didn't have that. Um

the Biden administration was a bizarrely

closed, you know, black box. Um

bizarrely for any administration, but

particularly for the Democratic

administration. Uh it was an

administration that utterly failed to

tell any kind of story.

And

I'm sure you a lot of it had to do with

Biden's deterioration and his not

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 to

to doing public by doing public

politics.

So the transition from that to this is

even more bizarre, right? We're not

seeing a justosition 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 and and I I began thinking while

we were talking about this about a

moment I haven't thought about in a long

time, which is 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 of

which for the Republicans, Paul Ryan

ends up being the star and lead

communicator in which they are just

arguing the details of healthcare policy

in front of the public. And there are

many things happening in that. But in

some ways, it was a spectacle of

deliberation. It was a spectacle very

aligned with,

you know, sophisticated policym

in a democracy where the view was that

people might align to whoever made the

best argument. And the message of a lot

of Trumpist spectacle to me is the

wiping away of all that. Again, the

absence of Congress here, I think, is a

very, very important thing. the absence

of Congress in so much of it. I think in

part because Congress is like

anti-spectical.

It's slow. You get bogged down. It's

details. But it also is itself a kind of

to the degree it is a spectacle, it is a

spectacle of constraint.

So you've allowed one point where you

say that it is institutions and norms

and laws that make a democracy. And I

think the spectacle here, the way the

Trump administration does it is actually

about the contempt for those

institutions and 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. Uh and 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.

And that's, you know, that's what we're

lacking. And then we're lacking it

demonstratively, right? I think that

that's your observation about why he's

not using Congress is spot on, right? Um

because even using this um

using the power that he has now with the

trifecta to effectively as we might

imagine rubber rubber stamp white house

legislation would be empowering some

something other than himself.

You you have a line in one of your

pieces where you say that Trump and

autocrats like him are opposed to

deliberation as such. And I've been

thinking about this line because

the idea that the US just entered into,

as Trump himself has now said

repeatedly, a multi-year an open-ended

commitment to in some form or another

running Venezuela with zero domestic

debate about it. Right. No real debate.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee is

not debating this. What it means for

America has not been described by

anybody.

So tell me in your view 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.

>> So I think there are two aspects to

deliberation. one is just a way of

exercising power, right? Um I think

Trump it's it's hard to get inside his

head. Um but I think that his conception

of power appears to be something that's

wielded uni unilaterally, right? And it

is diluted by any kind of public

deliberation. there's probably

deliberation happening behind closed

doors. But the the concept of power that

he projects is the kind of power that's

unilateral.

Um there's also another aspect to to

deliberation which is that deliberation

is and and I'm using

uh an idea that I borrowed from Balin

Per who's a Hungarian political

scientist who I think is just the

absolute

best and clearest thinker on autocracy

out there. And he talks about

deliberation as an expression of our

obligations to one another.

And and I think that's a very useful way

to understand what that projection of

power is, right? It is a rejection of

any kind of obligations to one another.

I was very struck by Steven Miller who I

think is functionally the prime minister

of the US right now talking to Jake

Tapper about the possibility of America

taking Greenland which again under

structure of international law is

unthinkable. 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. Mhm.

>> Um and and this is, you know, I think

that we've had actually since the end of

World War II, we've had two post World

War II orders. There's the the

structural one, the institutional one,

the rhetorical one, right? This is the

the order that is that aims to prevent

another global war. Um, and then there's

the victor's order, the order that's

that's summed up by this by I think

Putin's favorite photograph of Stalin

Churchill and Roosevelt sitting in

Yaltta, which is now in in Russian

occupied Crimea, um, carving up the

world.

and he refers to that constantly when he

talks about sort of his right to do what

he what he has done and most for the

last four years when he talks about the

war in Ukraine

and that's basically the argument that

he's been putting forward is look strong

men carve up the world

and really you know 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. And so

what I hear Steven Miller saying is

basically the exact same thing.

>> There always seems to me to be here an

assertion

not just about

international institutions

or nations but also about human beings.

I think when when I listen to MAGA

and Trump and then its theorists and its

followers,

I I hear something being said

about this idea that we have

restrained the

animal, masculine, dominanceoriented,

conquesttoriented instincts that on some

level made humanity great that you know

in the Elon Musk version that will get

us to Mars in the future

and

tied them up

in

hollow liberal values and

self-restraints and debate and

discussion and deliberation and rules

and procedures and and there's something

being said that is operating really at

all levels.

The way America is acting under Trump is

the way America should act. The way a

superpower should act. is what it means

to be a superpower. It is to be

unrestrained.

But the way Trump acts is also the way a

man should act.

I think I think that's a very astute

observation and

I think uh I think you're absolutely

right and you know I'm going to use the

word fascism here because um because I

don't think it we can analyze this well

enough without some kind of framework

and we often talk when we talk about

fascism we talk about ideology of of

superior race right but it's also a

world view and what's fundamental to

That world view is that the world is

rotten and that everyone in the world is

rotten and anybody who pretends not to

be rotten is lying and part of the

mission is to expose that lie. Right?

Um, and so

it's impossible to talk to a person

who is who who is sort of encased in

that kind of ideology because everything

you say is a priorial lie, right? If you

say that you value human rights and

human dignity and human life, well then

obviously you're being a hypocrite and

you must be exposed.

And I think that that's that's what

we're seeing and that's that's what

we're hearing from Steven Miller. I

don't always hear them saying that

everybody else is lying. I hear them

saying almost something different like

their idea of like the woke mind virus

that something has happened

and an ideology has taken over

that is

poisoning

ambition and aggression and a set of

forces a kind of vitality that is what

drove civilization forward.

>> Right. No, I think I think I think

that's a great observation. Yeah,

they're seeing a sort of a weakness

virus.

>> A weakness virus. That's a good a better

way to put it.

>> I want to play for you a clip of Pete

Hegath, the Secretary of Defense,

talking about at least one of the ways

in which he wanted to change the culture

of the US military. 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 also in that

there is a real obsession with

aesthetics across this administration.

who appoints and then what they want

from the people beneath them. What do

you make of that?

>> I mean, it feels so familiar to me,

right? Um I grew up in the Soviet Union

where

I we watched parades on TV. We um one of

the happiest days of my life uh as a kid

was finally receiving the red

kurchchief.

>> What is a red kurchchief? I read

Kirchief as was as a sign of membership

in the young pioneers which is the the

kids communist organization.

Um 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

um I had I was quite aware where we

lived and what we thought about it. And

yet the aesthetics of it were

irresistible

because I mean it was it was beautiful.

Um, and it was also like other people

and and you could march in formation and

it's so incredibly appealing.

Um, and embarrassingly, right? Um, and I

I just watched there's there's this

terrific new documentary called Mr.

Nobody against Putin, which is

uh which was filmed

uh in secret by a teacher in a Russian

school in like a small town, a town of

10,000 people in the Urals over the

course of a couple of years after the

start of the full-scale invasion. And

it's partly about it's it's it's really

about sort of the imposition of

propaganda uh in the school and how

um that school and all other Russian

schools became sort of retoled as um

junior military organizations. But you

can also see the imposition of an

aesthetic. These kids start they start

marching information. They start

carrying the flag. They eventually get

these uniforms that hug them back to

those exact uniforms that uh with the

red curves that I wore 50 years ago.

It's,

you know, it's it's a fascist aesthetic.

Uh, and and it's it it's what we have,

it's what the 20th century taught us

about what power looks like, what

strength looks like. Why do this is

something I've become slightly weirdly

obsessed with.

Why do

fascist movements, authoritarian

movements,

why do they seem to care so much more

about aesthetics and in their own way

beauty

than

Kier's government or Joe Biden's

government? Even

Donald Trump

coming into office and amidst everything

else he had to do, deciding to chair the

board of the Kennedy Center as that was

clearly the thing he really wanted to do

and then recently having his name etched

into the institution,

the Trump Kennedy Center, it's now

called if you go to the website, if you

go to the building,

he immediately signed an executive order

about bringing classical architecture

back to federal construction.

I 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 and this goes through other leaders

like him. I mean, Putin has, you know,

his bare-chested photos and his

aesthetic. and you go back to the the

the mid-century and and early 20th

century fascists and you see an

incredible

uh you know I have a whole book on Nazi

aesthetics at home. I have come to think

it's first a weakness of liberal

politics that it does not see itself as

having a relationship really to beauty

that it does not believe beauty should

be part of politics necessarily. It it

it likes beauty. It wants other people

to do beautiful things. But but you

know, we're the people in the suits who

have the charts and can tell you how

healthcare system is run, not the people

who have views on what is and is not

beautiful.

Why do you think it is that that these

movements see spectacle, see beauty, see

aesthetic as so much more central to how

politics should operate and how power is

wielded than certainly, you know,

liberal leftwing coalitions do. So, 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

is a really interesting uh observation

that you made, but he's also of course a

leader of the past, right? His singular

political promise is I will take you

back to an imaginary past before all

this happened. before all the best 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. Um, it it's it's

going to be warm and cozy and exactly as

you imagine the past to have been.

And aesthetically, a representation of

that past is classical architecture. Um,

it's

it's an entirely

white American history. It's a um you

know it's the great monuments and

whatever else that um he uh has promised

to to bring back. But it's really

interesting how the Soviet Union sort of

the initial revolutionary movement was

artistically experimental and 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 as 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. Right? This is the other dimension

of of fascism. And aesthetically it's

very present. Right? It's and race can

be defined differently. But what we're

seeing is white cis 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,

but they want to look like that. And

they want to be surrounded by men who

look like that.

>> And they appoint men who look like that.

>> And they appoint women who look a very

certain way too,

>> right? But I think it I think we might

we might be falling into a sort of

equivalency trap. Uh and I'd be careful

here, right? It's not incumbent on

whatever we want to call this politics,

liberal, democratic, left, uh,

anti-fascist. It's not incumbent on us

to produce an equal and opposite

aesthetic, right? It's it's actually a

much more complicated task, which is to

assert an entirely different aesthetic

direction, right? which is oriented

toward difference and variety and things

that you haven't seen before and 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 a kind of

architecture that no one has seen

before? I don't know.

>> So I want to talk about a different

dimension of spectacle

that you have written quite a lot about.

which is that the constancy of spectacle

Trump everywhere all the time, right?

That there is a way and the times had an

amazing review of Trump's media presence

in 2025 and showed that it was he was

twice as prevalent as he himself was in

2017. Right. It has gone up from his

first term that it kind of crowds

everything else out. Tell me a bit about

that dimension of

using attentional capture as a tool.

So, you know, during Trump's first term,

we used to talk about the shiny object.

Um, and it almost seems quaint now that

we thought the things that we thought

about as shiny objects, but I remember

distinctly that sense of just extreme

fatigue because

you always felt like you were looking at

something

that um that was occupying your

attention fully, but you had a deep

suspicion that there are 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

um about distractions, right? And I

don't think

um I I think we've moved past talking

about distractions and that's a good

thing because there was never I don't

think um 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 are also

distracted

>> which I think is an important point.

>> They don't have some attentional reserve

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. I mean there is distraction

becomes everybody's condition and 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. Uh 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 that. How how you think

he thinks power operates. I mean it's

again I don't I you know I can't get

inside his head so I can observe from

the outside. What I see from the outside

is that it's it's a non-stop sort of

production of um 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. Um, we have

uh 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. Uh,

and we know, right, we know that um at

this point we've gotten used to the fact

that um that if Venezuela happened 3 4

days ago, the chances that we're still

going to be talking about Venezuela next

week are almost zero. Well, I I mean it

happened really just days ago still and

already today

there is a different spectacle that I'm

I'm almost having trouble having this

conversation because the thing I am

thinking about is the public execution

of Renee Good in uh Minnesota

and it's a little unclear what happened.

their car was in the middle of the

street and then the you you watch the

federal agents rush the car

and she begins executing like a

multi-point turn to try to leave

and then a agent shoots her dad in the

middle of the street and the Trump

administration is saying she was trying

to run them over and 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

and not even speed out, just leave.

And it is a spectacle of its own.

And it is a kind of thing they've always

been creating the conditions to see

happen. I'm not saying they intended for

this to happen at the top, but everybody

has predicted things like this

happening, myself included.

And it feels like a message to every

protester. I I'm just curious how you

have understood

her killing this moment, what it what it

mean, what what its meaning is.

>> Yeah. Um

I think this is a huge

event, right, for lack of a better word.

Um,

which I also feel is important to say

because in one sense the spectacle of a

driver being executed

um in an American street is not

unfamiliar,

right? Um, it actually happens all the

time. Uh, 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 that they killed was a

white woman uh and not a black man.

So, this is another one of those

instances where we've sort of been on

this descent and then fell off a a

cliff. And the particular cliff is you

know Trump has been for almost a year

now talking in military terms and war

terms about American cities. has

deployed ICE as a military force. Uh or

not actually I shouldn't say as a

military force as his own paramilitary

force which is 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

uh against ICE in particular in

Portland, not in Minneapolis where this

happened, but um uh as

criminals, as extremely dangerous, as

people that 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's happened

um this

you know what happens as autotocracy

establishes itself is that this space

available for for action shrinks very

rapidly.

And you know I talk about this a lot

when I when I do public speaking. 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."

Uh, so act where you can act. And one of

the places where people have been able

to act is an ice watch uh and protect

protecting their neighbors against ICE.

it hasn't been terribly effective, but I

think as an organizing mechanism and as

as sort of a community level

um action and as protest, it has been

extraordinarily effective. Right? It's

what's really brought people together to

protect their common values and and

their neighbors. And that may no longer

be possible. that's what this execution

signals or the danger of you engaging

that kind of activism has just grown

exponentially. Well, what I was thinking

about when you said that and when you

were sort of thinking through the ways

in which it is or is not different than,

you know, the 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,

she was threatening the officers and

they had to act to defend their lives.

And again you can watch the video.

This was in my view

political violence.

It was state repression.

It was an act against

civil

disobedience or resistance to what they

are doing. It is being functionally

defended

in at least somewhat those terms.

I agree with you when you say this is a

huge event. You know, there's this

favorite uh journalistic cliche or um or

political cliche, you know, this is not

us,

>> but of course, this is us, right? Um

this is us now. Uh and 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 uh and compare

it to historical precedent. There are

certain things that we have come

to consider unthinkable. Right?

Concentration camps are unthinkable.

Fascism is unthinkable. These are words

that we try to avoid using because they

are by definition hyperbole. And part of

the reason that they are hyperbole by

definition is because we've said, "Okay,

that only happens um in this

past that we have set aside from um from

our lived reality. And so if this is

happening in our lived reality, if if if

alligator Alcatres 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 this is not fascism. and um and that

choice is

so stark and so desperate.

>> One of the things that I found very um

disturbing among many things about the

way the administration has acted after

Good's killing. So Trump posted a video

of the Renee Good shooting on Truth

Social and he said the video showed Good

was quote obviously a professional

agitator who again quote violently,

willfully and viciously ran over the ICE

officer

and Ox. You could see people arguing

over this and you know analyzing the

frame by frame. Um, but I think there's

also something about this moment where

you have this video and people can't

even agree on the

reality of it. But then secondarily, and

this picks up on something you've talked

about here,

how often you hear the administration

describing

citizens, constituents as a domestic

enemy within political opposition as

something I mean judges as, you know, I

remember the administration describing a

judge as a legal insurrectionist, right?

The the real insurrectionist, the people

who from the capital on January 6th,

they got pardoned. But but now there's

this language that anybody trying to

protest etc. the the Trump

administration is the enemy needs to be

dealt with, you know, at least as of the

internal logic of this looks by force.

And 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.

Totalitarian leaders need to wage wars.

And sometimes they wage wars externally.

More often they wage wars internally or

both. And they they always designate an

enemy within. Trump did it as soon as he

assumed office. His main enemy within

uh were immigrants. But the and

protesters, right? But the but the

circle the or the the the number of the

enemy within has to expand constantly

cuz that's the only way that we you can

wage war continuously and the war needs

to escalate.

And that's that's what we're seeing,

right? It was it was unthinkable until

it happened that

a white presumably middle class

protester

would be executed on camera in in broad

daylight in an American city. And now

that it's 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 than Israel than

any country that I have covered that I

think we can say has become autocratic.

It's comparable to

the speed at which countries that

experienced an actual violent revolution

um have transformed uh that I have

studied but not not lived through. But I

think that this

this really is you know we can use some

of the tools from uh particularly from

the electoral autotocracies in Eastern

Europe to understand some of what's

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

of it also reflects a fragility within

it? And and one way I mean that is very

famously Putin has or at least had but

still has I believe very very high

approval ratings. Trump does not. Um in

the 2025 elections Republicans got

routed everywhere they competed. Some of

the spectacles we're talking about I

think Venezuela might over time turn

into this too. Like they don't have a

plan for Venezuela. If it goes easily

and we never think about it again

that'll be fine for them. But if it ends

up in civil strife and other things 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, you know, with this big

poster board of tariffs on islands full

of penguins. And the tariffs have been

politically quite disastrous for the

administration. I've I 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 to me feels like

it is covering up for a hollowess. They

have to move so fast because they

actually have not built the underlying

consensus, support infrastructure,

but then they're not planning for what

happens after. They're not ready for it.

They are 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. Uh, and you know,

your optimism is also tempered, but um,

but I think I'm more pessimistic than

this. Um, I think that uh well, first of

all, I suspect that the reason that

they're moving so fast is because Donald

Trump is old. I think he feels a

particular urgency. Um I think 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

not in the not in the deliberative sense

of the word but um but with intention.

Um and Trump has to ram this through uh

very very fast. But I also think that

speed generally benefits the autocrat.

Democracy is very slow. the one way and

I think this is this is how they've

hacked the system and it is an inherent

fragility but it's the inherent

fragility of democracy right um

institutions

even protect themselves very slowly

right look at USAD now we know that

there wasn't necessarily a plan to

completely de demolish USAD when they

first went after it but within a few

weeks it functionally destroyed and you

can't just put something back together

after it's been destroyed, right? Um

especially if there's no political will

to do so. So I just think that speed is

to his benefit. Um and whether it's

covering up holiness is maybe

irrelevant. The other is the issue the

the other point is the issue of of

popularity. And I think we we have a

problem here which is that we there are

different kinds of metrics. Um 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.

>> Well, say more when you say democratic

metrics no longer apply.

>> Right. So, um, for example, we talk

about how Venezuela,

uh, when it goes all wrong and their

boots on the ground and and American

soldiers are dying and and nothing is

working as intended and the oil wells

are not sprouting fountains of gold

that's uh that fund this whole operation

and enrich the United States. when none

of that is happening, does that have

consequences, for example, for the

midterm elections? Right? That would be

a democratic metrics. And I very much

doubt that it will have consequences for

a couple of reasons. One is

um what's h what's happened to the media

universe and how completely different

the pictures that

um say MAGA voters for lack of a better

term see and you and I see are and um

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.

And the other has to do with the

elections themselves, right? Um we tend

to think of elections in black and white

terms. Either they're free and clear are

there 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 speeded up greatly

over the last year. And so we're going

to be to to see this fractured media

universe and a hugely degraded election

uh 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 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 non-align media, Joe

Rogan or Flagrant or things like that, I

seem to see a turn on Trump, right? the

sort of bro podcasters and and and

people just being like a little more

upset about the immigration and and not

sure of what they're seeing. And I mean,

we don't know how the 2026 elections

will go and so, you know, maybe maybe

it'll go the way you're saying, but to

the extent we have signals yet,

the signals seem very very bad for

Republican performance in in elections,

starting with the Wisconsin Supreme

Court election, but then of course

moving through to the New Jersey and New

York uh city um and Virginia elections,

uh moving through to the Prop 50

redistricting ballot initiative in 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

guess I would ask why the 2025 elections

which were so uniformly against the

regime

haven't made you rethink this somewhat.

>> Well, I mean I I think I think you're

right. I have my own heristic um which

is that I think everything always gets

worse,

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

>> as you know what a lot of the 2025

elections that we're looking at had to

do with local politics

and

um and I think that projecting that onto

even how people will vote for their

local representatives of Congress is a

somewhat risky business, right? because

we're, you know, the Trump Mandani voter

isn't necessarily

acting uh on their dis disillusionment

with with Trump. They're actually their

politics are entirely internally

consistent.

Um and so I um I think that Trump's

influence on the midterms will be much

greater than the influence that he tried

to exert on. to to what extent do you

think their politics the the Trump Manni

voter the Trump AOC voter of which there

are some they're not I want to say

actually that many um but they exist but

how much are those not highly attached

I don't like how much everything costs

voters and the thing as I was saying I

was saying I was I'm not even joking

that I think Trump's tariffs and

economic mismanagement and his his

evident in attention to cost, right? And

you see him beginning to absorb this as

a political threat, saying talk about

the affordability hoax, right? How much

do those voters now turn on Trump, which

is why his poll numbers are bad? I mean,

you have economic sentiment at levels

that look like the Great Recession, you

know, that look more like uh moments of

economic rupture. And so when I think

about those voters, they often seem to

me to be anti-system. this whole thing

isn't working for me voters, not voters

who are kind of Trump cultists but are

willing to support, you know, a

charismatic democratic socialist.

>> Right? So that's that's really the great

question, right? Um, and I always think

back to my series of interviews with

this great Russian sociologist, um, Lev

Kov, who would show me these graphs of

Putin's, uh, subjective economic

well-being and Putin's popularity.

And for about the first, I think, dozen

years of uh, Putin being in power, they

moved in concert, right? 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 the this

is when people accepted a trade-off,

right? um I you're going to be poor, but

in exchange for being poor, you're 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 this make it in this country?

That's what Trump is offering them,

right? Um he's going to wage war.

He's he's going to I don't know whether

he's going to try to take Green

Greenland or Cuba next, but but this is

going to be an imperial politics for the

next year and politics of expansion,

politics of greatness like everything

that we've been seeing, but much more

aggressive um 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.

But 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

that we were a great power. We were the

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 will 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

that we're going to chill out on

America's role in the world. stop it

with all this endless engagement with,

you know, foreign quagmires and I'm

gonna make you rich again like me. And

now we're moving into foreign quagmires

and domestic fighting and, you know,

people are upset about political

division again and you're seeing your

countrymen being murdered on national

television and you're not getting

richer. That 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.

Um, but it 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 about and

instructive about Putin is that for the

first decade uh of 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. you're

going to you know your your life is

going to improve

immeasurably

as long as you stay out of politics and

focus on your private life. And this was

a politics that suited the oil boom that

you know it was a moment of

unprecedented economic prosperity in

Russia.

He was accumulating power while Russians

were eating better, living better,

refernishing their apartments, uh 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,

um 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? Um is it going to have any

purchase in this country? Uh you know

because Trump's using exactly the same

politics he's now saying make America

great again. Not in the sense of you're

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. Right? And 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. You know, I've

I've lived most of my life among people

who looked to a future and to more more

powerful political actors to restore a

kind of justice, right? Um, I thought I

would someday be in the H writing about

the Putin trial.

And I think that the the most powerful

country in the world uni unilaterally

cancelling the moral order is an assault

on hope.

>> I think that's a place to end. Always a

final question. What are three books

you'd recommend to the audience?

So late last year I spent probably three

or four months just reading books about

um Israel Palestine and two of them are

standouts. One is called Tomorrow's

Yesterday.

>> Mhm.

>> Um which I think you've talked about on

the podcast.

>> The authors have been on the show if

people would like to check that one out.

>> Right. Um and I'm not just saying it

because I really future history.

>> Yeah. We say aa and Rob Mali

>> and um one of the incredible things

about that book is just how well written

it is. It's notautifully.

>> Yeah. I never expected a book written by

two policy two people together but also

two policy people to be so beautiful. Uh

the other is a book that after I read it

got the national book award which is uh

one day everyone will have always been

against this. And then I just read a

galley of an autofiction novel by a

writer named Harry Clark. Uh and it's

called The Hill.

Uh and it's a book uh about

uh 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, thank you very much.

>> Thank you.