20th+: Democracy 2024

JR: Well, I can be very specific. There's lots of elements of that. There's, for example, the use of pardons to immunize people against wrongdoing. But what I mean by that specifically is the open defiance of court orders and the ability to get away with that politically.

SH: Do you expect that he would leave after four years?

JR: Well, I don't know.

SH: You imagine our institutions are so weak that even that could unravel? That there wouldn't be a 2028 election?

JR: Yeah, sure. It could unravel. Robert Kagan had a widely read article in The Washington Post saying here's how we could get to Mussolini under Trump. But I don't think we go to Mussolini. I think the model is Viktor Orbán in Hungary. And we know that because they're telling us, right? The right is having conferences over there celebrating the Victor Orbán model.
So we don't have to guess. So I think the way it happens is this: first thing he does is sign an executive order implementing something he tried to do in his first term, which is schedule federal appointees. And that turns a lot of civil service jobs into jobs that serve at the pleasure of the president. And that allows him to replace 30,000 to 50,000 top civil servants with loyalists. That gets some foot-draggers out of the way. And it means a lot of people are indebted to him for their jobs.
Then he goes through the military, and he makes a bunch of appointments to ensure that sympathizers won't do what Mark Milley did.
He goes through the Justice Department and does the same thing. So Jeffrey Clark, or the equivalent, is acting attorney general. He doesn't care if they get Senate confirmation, because he'll simply put in acting appointees. He did that in his first term. He told us he liked it. The Senate proved it was toothless to stop that.
So he's now suborned most of the government. He's turned the Justice Department, the FBI and so on into organs that can prosecute or persecute at will. People are afraid of them, even if they don't actually get targeted. He's done all that.
And then along comes, you know, it's six months, seven, eight months, and along comes a court order that he doesn't agree with. Maybe it involves, I don't know, the border wall, or unappropriation, or maybe the Supreme Court says, look, you've had your temporary appointees in for too long. You have to send them up to the Hill for Senate confirmation or remove them, because that's what the law says.
And he says, well, no, I don't feel like it, and tells his appointees to go to work as normal, and tells the civil service in the Justice Department, or wherever the appointee is, just do your job. This guy's in charge. What happens next? Well, if there's a large majority in Congress, they could try to cut off the appropriations for the Justice Department until he straightens this out.
Do you think that's going to happen? Very unlikely. You could have thunderous denunciations by Democrats on Capitol Hill, and the members of mainstream media, Joe, Josh, and John, and Sam.
Do you think he cares about thunderous denunciations? I think he doesn't.
You could have repercussions like people worrying that if they help him in defying court orders, their law licenses, or worse, their actual criminal records, they could, well, that they could lose their licenses to practice law, for example, or in fact go to jail. That will slow him down a bit.
There will be resignations, but he'll replace those people, and he will have the pardon. He'll be able to tell people, if you do what I tell you to, you can't be prosecuted under federal law.
He's already said he would pardon the so-called hostages.
So now we're in a situation where he's telling the Supreme Court, I won't follow this order.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party, the, for example, maybe I shouldn't single them out, but the Senator Lindsey Grahams of the world, who are very bright people, are spinning a lot of arguments on, well, why he's really not defying a court order, why he has the right to do what he's doing in this case, why it's constitutionally supported, why the Supreme Court is nine people in robes, who should not be governing this country, why the Unitary Executive Doctrine does not give him that authority, why this was a 6:3 or 5:4 court decision.
So it's really just all politicized. You can, you guys can spin this stuff out by the yard, as well as I can.
So you'll have this spin machine in the media and in the Republican Party, backing him up and saying, what he's doing is in fact fine, he's defending our democracy and so forth.
He'll defy another court order on a different subject. After a while, when it's clear three or four times that he can do this, it begins to be normalized, right?
We've seen this pattern again and again. Sam and John and Josh continue to be shocked by this. And we keep saying, how can this be happening in the country we love?
But most of the country is realizing that life doesn't change all that much. Gas prices don't go up if the president defies the Supreme Court. And in fact, they don't even know who to believe about whether he is defying the Supreme Court.
So after six months or eight months to a year of this, the party that backs down, I think, is the Supreme Court, because it realizes it loses its authority, its legitimacy, if it's issuing orders and no one is following them. So it begins to curtail its behavior in order to accommodate the president.
And now we're in Hungary. Now we have a president who has figured out how to game the rule of law in order to subvert checks and balances and the rule of law. So you tell me, what is unrealistic about that scenario and if the chief executive can defy the Supreme Court, does that mean the end of our liberal democracy, our rule of law as we know it?

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