Trump’s 2025 authoritarian playbook and what it means for democracy

Donald Trump has openly admired authoritarians around the world.

Now, he’s pledging to rule like one.

Today, On Point: An examination of the promises, powers and plans of a second Trump presidency.

Aisha Woodward, head of constraining executive power team and policy strategist at Protect Democracy, a non-profit, nonpartisan anti-authoritarianism group. Co-author of "The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025: How an authoritarian president will dismantle our democracy and what we can do to protect it."

Genevieve Nadeau, counsel and head of the defending against authoritarian threats team at Protect Democracy. Co-author of "The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025: How an authoritarian president will dismantle our democracy and what we can do to protect it."

Part I

[MONTAGE]

DONALD TRUMP: I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.

We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

And we will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store. (APPLAUSE) Shot!

You're not going to be a dictator, are you? I said no, other than day one.

In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

(CHEERS)

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Donald Trump on the presidential campaign for this election year. Now, as you heard, Trump says that if he wins, he will not be a dictator, except for day one. But how many leaders can history truly provide who've been satisfied with being dictator for a day? Perhaps the word dictator though is too distracting to understand Trump's true and stated intent.

Authoritarian autocracy would be closer to the truth. A leader claiming absolute rule without caring for others opinions or established systems of government. Donald Trump, in other words, sounds very much like another ruler he's expressed deep admiration for, Hungary's Viktor Orbán, who now leads a country that, according to several Hungarian and political science experts we've spoken to, looks like a democracy, but only if you squint very hard.

Our guests today have compiled, in detail, Donald Trump's statements, promises, and plans of his supporters in packs and think tanks. And they've put their findings together in a new publication called The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025, how an authoritarian president will dismantle our democracy and what we can do to protect it.

Aisha Woodward is one of the authors of this new publication. She's the head of constraining executive power team and policy strategist at Protect Democracy, a non-profit, non-partisan, anti-authoritarian group. Aisha, welcome.

AISHA WOODWARD: Thanks, Meghna. Great to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Also with us is Genevieve Nadeau. She's the counsel and head of defending against authoritarian threats team, also at Protect Democracy. Genevieve, welcome to you.

GENEVIEVE NADEAU: Thanks.

CHAKRABARTI: So before we dive into what's actually in your authoritarian playbook for 2025, I want to just address something head on. Because these days, a lot of people listening, as soon as they hear the name Donald Trump, they want to turn off the radio or just stop their podcast for a variety of reasons.

One is they're just tired of hearing about Donald Trump and they want us to focus on what they think are more important things, economy, jobs, et cetera. Then there's another group of folks who every time they hear us talk about Donald Trump, they just automatically presume we're deeply biased against him and hate everything he stands for and don't even understand him or why people vote for him. So let me begin by asking you guys to explain a little bit more about your group Protect Democracy. Are you just a bunch of progressive left wing Trump derangement syndrome folks?

NADEAU: We're very happy to start there. So Protect Democracy is a nonprofit organization. We're a nonpartisan organization, but actually more than that, we are cross ideological. And by that, we employ Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and we work with the same sort of folks across the political spectrum. Our mission, very simply put, is to prevent American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government. I don't think we come to this with bias in terms of the political spectrum.

What we do come to our work with is deep expertise that we've gathered from experts in a variety of fields from democracy, democratic decline, authoritarianism. In fact, that's how we started our organization. Our founders and our initial staff met with experts to understand, and this was in 2016, shortly after Donald Trump was first elected, but to understand the ways in which our country is vulnerable and what authoritarianism looks like. So in addition to being cross ideological ourselves, we really draw on deep expertise and examples from around the world and throughout history when we make these kinds of evaluations.

CHAKRABARTI: I heard you say more authoritarian, rather than just authoritarian. I'll come back to that in a second. But Aisha, did you want to add to that?

WOODWARD: I would just say, one of the early things our organization did a few years ago was really to try to help folks better understand what we mean by this term, authoritarianism, too.

And I know we're here today to talk about a report we just put out, but it's actually a follow on to a report we put out a few years ago, which I'm happy to just give a quick overview of, if that's helpful.

CHAKRABARTI: Actually, why don't you do this instead? What has changed since 2016? Because regular listeners here will know that we've talked a lot about authoritarianism.

So why did you feel that there was the need to put out a new report now when, in a sense, Donald Trump was pretty clear about what he wanted to do, back in 2015, 2016. But what's more, are things more urgent now? And if so, why?

WOODWARD: Absolutely. So several things have changed, and we frame our current report around the promises, the powers and the plans, and that last word, the plans, I think is really important for your listeners to realize. That this time around there is a lot more proactive work going on both from the Trump campaign, but a whole ecosystem that has cropped up around him.

To enable him to take office in January 2025 and be much more successful at executing his agenda from day one. But you asked what's really changed. You mentioned the fatigue that folks are feeling, I'm thinking about another potential Trump administration, and that's part of one of the several guardrails that have really eroded over the past several years and what we're really worried won't exist in a second Trump administration, people have seen our norms be battered for several years and are walking away kind of feeling like it's hard to tell what is normal anymore.

The Overton window on what's acceptable has changed. There's also, though, these other guardrails that are not going to be as effective in a second Trump administration. And by that, I'm talking about the courts and Congress, both of which are supposed to be co-equal branches of government that can serve to constrain the executive.

But you've seen how Congress has changed dramatically over the past several years. The Republican conference and caucus are now wholly captured by Donald Trump. The recent border deal in the House that got blown up by Donald Trump, who isn't even president right now, but was able to convince scores of Republicans to walk away from even considering legislation.

I think demonstrates this, but the courts similarly were remade during the Trump administration by the Senate and are not going to be a reliable bulwark against executive overreach.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Courts. I do want to come back to that, because I think there may be some hopeful pushback to what you just said about judicial capture here, but one of the major things.

You start off the report with this, which is one difference that you argue is, it is time to take Trump both literally and seriously, which is quite different from 2015. I'll say, in the first campaign he ran. So let's actually listen back to that time. Seems like an age ago, but it was not in fact.

So here's a moment from October of 2016 and we're about to hear billionaire entrepreneur, and venture capitalist and stalwart libertarian and Trump supporter Peter Thiel of Silicon Valley. He was interviewed at the National Press Club and here's how he responded when he was asked about the rhetoric that Donald Trump was offering voters at that time.

PETER THIEL: I think one thing that should be made distinguished here is that, you know, the media always is taking Trump, literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump, take Trump seriously, but not literally.

And so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment or things like that, it's not, the question is not, you know, are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China? Or, you know, how, how exactly are you going to force these tests? What they hear is we're going to have a saner more sensible immigration policy.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Peter Thiel in October of 2016, and when he was mentioning, quote, the Muslim comment, here's what he was talking about, something Donald Trump said in December of 2015.

TRUMP: Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. (AUDIENCE CHEERS) We have no choice. We have no choice.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, So that was Donald Trump in December of 2015, and as you'll remember, in January of 2017, the first week in office, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, which directed the Department of Homeland Security to shut down entry into the United States by travelers from seven Muslim majority countries.

Now that went through several court, different court ... processes, I should say, but eventually a version of that executive order did pass here. I'm looking back at your report, and you quote things that people had said, like Thiel said, Lindsey Graham saying, Oh, Donald Trump was a joke.

The things he says, it's a joke or he has unique expressions, things like that. What's different now that you say we have to take him both seriously and literally?

NADEAU: I don't know that anything is different, but we just have more information, right? And I actually think it's important to start with the first Trump administration.

It's been a few years. I think memories have faded. And so I'm glad that you started with the Muslim ban. That was one of his early promises and as much as it was dismissed, he delivered on it in the early days. I was working at a state attorney general's office then. So remember very much what it was like in the chaos and fear that ensued then.

So it's important to remember what Donald Trump actually accomplished, including things that people had dismissed previously. But there are other things, going back to the question of why a second time will be worse. One is that Donald Trump and the people around him are more prepared than they were the first time around, right?

So there has developed sort of an infrastructure, an ecosystem of individuals and organizations who are very explicitly making plans for a future Trump administration. So to the extent that inexperience was a guardrail the first time around, we don't have that anymore. And one of the things that is important in those plans is the focus on personnel, and that includes, Aisha in particular can talk more about this as we go along, but finding ways to replace large portions of the federal government with sort of political loyalist rather than career expert employees.

It also means people in key positions who are less likely to stop Trump, right? There were a lot of folks who went along with him the first term, but at the end of the day, drew lines, for example, Bill Barr and others who were unwilling to use the Justice Department to overturn the election, right?

There were people who stood up at the end of the day. To stop some of the most extreme abuses. I think we can expect that's not going to be the case. So that human guardrail won't be there.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Let's take a moment to listen to Donald Trump from March 21st of just last year, when he's talking about the plans he has in mind, not just him, but him and he and his supporters to reshape the federal government if elected.

TRUMP: Here's my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all.

And corruption, it is. First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.

CHAKRABARTI: Aisha, Trump is very, in a very savvy way using some trigger words there for his supporters. Deep state corruption, rogue bureaucrats.

But what exactly is he talking about there?

WOODWARD: So he's referring very specifically to an executive order that he did release in October of 2020 that would have created a new Schedule F within the Federal Civil Service. Now, the Federal Civil Service is over 2 million nonpartisan expert personnel who carry out the business of government every day.

And in Trump's executive order, he aimed to reclassify tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of those folks into positions in which they could be fired based on their loyalty to him or his agenda. So going back to something Genevieve said a moment ago, part of one of our concerns is that it's not just a promise without much substance.

This is work he tried to start in his first administration. Now he ran out of time before the end of the year to really make headway on this and Joe Biden rescinded this executive order right away in January of 2021. But to go back to this idea of plans, he and some of the infrastructure and ecosystem that is building up around him, such as the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, are putting in place plans to be able to resuscitate that executive order and push it out the door as soon as day one.

And what this would mean is that instead of having people hired based on their merit and expertise and experience in serving the public, people would be hired based on their loyalty to the Trump agenda, and in fact, the Heritage Foundation is running a kind of personnel recruitment effort right now where the chief criteria for being put in the mix for a potential appointment in a second Trump administration is your political ideology and commitment to the Trump agenda.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here for a second? Because I am very keen on making this as clear and concrete as possible for listeners. Because oftentimes when you talk about how the sausage is made in government, eyes tend to roll. So but what you're saying here is that historically, and normally, Donald Trump talks about rogue bureaucrats, but what he's specifically talking about are employees in government civil service, right?

Who are, as you said, hired for their expertise, not for their partisanship. They work in federal agencies regardless of who the president is, yes?

WOODWARD: Correct. These are people who approve small business loans to businesses in our communities, who help regulate clean air and clean water, who inspect meat and dairy products to make sure they're safe to consume.

These are not people who have an agenda. They're committed to the law. They're committed to data and science, not to any political ideology.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And Trump's suggestion or desire and backed by the Heritage Foundation, which I have to say, it says something that the Heritage has been very vocal about this plan.

They've even published it. There's no hiding, right? It's a thousand-page report called Project 2025. And they state clearly that they want to at least fire at least 50,000 federal employees, 50,000 and replace them with Trump loyalists to put it that way. Have they, has Trump or Heritage or any other group gone as far as to say, we would even make them sign a loyalty statement or somehow declare that they would be, their fealty would only be to Donald Trump and his agenda.

WOODWARD: I don't know if we've seen it quite as explicitly as that, but it's been pretty explicit. If you go on and look at the application that they're asking folks to fill out, the questions again are not about the length of your government service or your deep policy expertise in an agency in which you might want to serve.

The biggest interrogation is around your adherence to goals Trump has and how you would classify your own political ideology.

CHAKRABARTI: Paul Dans, who's the director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, also a conservative, I don't even want to call it conservative anymore. Trumpian group and he was a former member of the Trump administration, says we want to flood the zone with conservatives.

That's a straight quote. And it's a clarion call for people to come to Washington and serve Donald Trump, really, not the federal government.

NADEAU: I think it's also important to really tease out what makes this so different, because it's not unusual for incoming administrations to set their own agendas and hire people, particularly at the political level, who are going to help implement those.

What's happening here is something somewhat different. It's not just about the scale of replacing employees, but it's about the focus, not just on ideology, but on personal sort of loyalty to the president. And if you read, the full project 2025 book. You see a constant emphasis on the power of the president as an individual and the desire to have more ability in that one person in his immediate office to control things.

So this isn't just about the sort of normal shift in politics from one administration to another. It's something quite fundamentally different.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, and in a sense, you can say it's the flowering of a long campaign to really create that unitary executive, that authoritarian unitary executive that some people on the right have had for quite some time.

But I'm going to get to the other parts of the playbook as you've written, but there's one thing that keeps popping up, regardless of what aspect of Trump's plans we're talking about. It's no longer just Donald Trump. For example, in terms of reshaping the federal government in the image of whoever is the president, we've had other presidential hopefuls, many of whom have dropped out of the race, but who have said they would essentially do the same thing.

Ron DeSantis has said that, for example. This is more than just one man, right? In a sense, this is a political ideology that's spread beyond Donald Trump himself.

NADEAU: We've long said that Trump is the symptom, not the cause of what we're experiencing right now. So while he is sort of the nominal head of the Republican party. What he stands for has really captured the party as a whole, and that's why you see other candidates, particularly in the primary context, I think, competing to be the most Trumpist right now. But it is a much deeper problem than just one person.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let's get to some other aspects of the stated changes that Donald Trump wants to make. A lot of them have to do with our judicial system. So for example, here is Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Texas, January 30th, 2022. And he said he was giving, thinking of giving out pardons to all of the January 6th defendants who stormed and attacked the U.S. Capitol. This is a promise, by the way, he has made several times.

TRUMP: If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6th fairly. We will treat them fairly. (AUDIENCE CHEERS) And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to get to another example here, but can you talk to me a little bit about how Trump conflates the de facto pardon that he would give these folks with that being a fair treatment in the judicial system?

Because I think that's a very interesting political sleight of hand that he has mastered that other authoritarians have used as well, which is unless things turn out in our judicial system a certain way, the system is corrupt. That's essentially what he's saying there, right?

NADEAU: Yeah, with Donald Trump, often up is down and left is right.

And you see a lot of projection. From him. And I think it's not a coincidence that he's talking about the January 6th rioters. In this way, when he himself is facing criminal charges on his role in the events leading up to and on January 6th, but yes, he has a way of inverting reality and spreading disinformation and the like in a way that sort of suits the overall narrative.

CHAKRABARTI: It's not just disinformation, though. I think authoritarians, as far as we've been able to learn over the many shows that we've done on this, has been that what they do is they plant deep distrust in what a functioning democracy actually looks like, right? And it sounds like this is one of those things that he's doing here that, you know.

If someone, if a judge or jury rules against these January 6th supporters, because of the fact that they were Trump supporters, the system has to be broken and so therefore the only way to fix it is for the individual of Donald Trump to pardon these folks, right? That's sowing distrust in the judicial system.

WOODWARD: That's exactly right. And we see it not just in the pardon power, but throughout all of the plans for 2025 to really undermine trust in government and its independence. And to take away any sort of ruling or check that we would view as appropriate and essential in our democracy has to be coming from a corrupt place that cannot be trusted. And is its own sort of inverted weaponization of government against Donald Trump and his supporters.

CHAKRABARTI: This is the long term, one of the long-term poisons, I think, that will outlast by far Donald Trump himself. And we'll come back to that. But again, within the world of reforms that he would want to make within the judicial system, here's another thing that Trump said. This is in Rapid City, South Dakota in September of just last year, when he talked about his plans to go after his political opponents, if he wins the White House once again.

TRUMP: If I win and somebody wants to run against me, I call my attorney general. I say, listen, indict him. He hasn't done anything wrong that we know of. I don't know. Indict him on income tax evasion. You'll figure it out.

CHAKRABARTI: So talk about this, because this is a major part of your report in terms of targeting dissenters or opponents.

NADEAU: It is. And it's a cross cutting part of our report. But in particular, what Donald Trump, I think, and that clip is referring to is the Department of Justice.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes.

NADEAU: Which is a particular fascination of his. And I think that's partly because of his own circumstances and partly because of the power of the Department of Justice and the power of investigation and prosecution by the government.

And so he, yes, he's talking openly about using the powers of law enforcement to go after his enemies, perceived enemies, or those who are critical or otherwise pose a challenge to him. And that, I think it ties in very clearly with the things he's trying to do around personnel, which is to grease the skids for making that easier to accomplish. And it's deeply problematic for a variety of reasons, of course, it's problematic for the targets, right?

Of the folks he's going after. But I think it also has the attendant effect of having a deep chilling effect on the country, right? It's not enough to just disagree with folks. You are actually putting yourself in peril if you speak up against him and the like. And to your earlier point, it really, that kind of use of law enforcement really erodes trust and faith in our institutions, which has a sort of feedback effect.

CHAKRABARTI: So more on that. Because keeping in mind again that there are many people listening who just are already quite dubious about any part of the government acting in a non-political manner, right? Because, I know a lot of folks would say every investigation currently coming out of the Justice Department, because the Attorney General is a nominee or approved Attorney General from a Democratic president, right?

They see those investigations as de facto political. And not based on the rule of law, but as political investigations. Similarly, Democrats or folks on the left look at things happening in Congress and would say the Republicans impeaching Alexander Mayorkas is a de facto political thing.

There's no real rule of law undergirding it. How would you convince people that's not the case in any one of these particular examples?

WOODWARD: This goes back to what Genevieve was saying about the kind of awesome power of law enforcement and investigations, and there's been actually norms and policies memoranda that have really, in the post-Watergate era, try to make very clear that the Department of Justice, given the powers that it is afforded, really does need to operate at an arm's length from the White House and the President.

This has been, we have colleagues who worked in the White House Counsel's Office who would talk about memos and policies that really strictly explain under what conditions the Department of Justice and the White House could be in contact, through which channels.

And so I think there's maybe not as much understanding of the fact that like prosecutorial independence at the DOJ has actually been the norm since the late '70s and something that presidents of both parties have strived, regardless of their political persuasion to uphold and maintain this careful distance to avoid any appearance of impropriety or political motivation, behind investigations and prosecutions.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And I think we should recall that, for example, Donald Trump was furious when then Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation.

That is actually, what Sessions did then was a normal thing to do, correct?

NADEAU: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. But Trump was like, no, I want you because you were my appointee to oversee the Mueller investigation.

NADEAU: He's being absolutely clear about that, right? One of the tricky things about authoritarianism is that the use of our institutions and the regular order start to seem suspect.

It's in part a reaction to the extreme things that are happening. We're seeing a former president being prosecuted for the first time. That's because, not because there's something wrong with the justice system, but because of the nature of the conduct. That triggered this. And it's actually our system working the way it should.

But of course, it has that appearance to some folks. But there are objective things that you can look at when you're sorting through competing claims of the government being weaponized. And we have a report from last year called Investigating and Prosecuting Political Leaders in a Democracy which is a thing that healthy democracies do, as funny as it may feel sometimes.

And those objective factors include the publicly available facts the public can judge for its own, what's in the public record. It includes looking at the rules and the laws that, for example, the Department of Justice is bound to, their own rules, and are they following them and then you look at what are other institutions, the grand jury, the courts more broadly. How are they reacting to what's happening? And if those three things all indicate that things are on the up and up, they probably are. And so we're not just stuck with competing claims.

CHAKRABARTI: So this gets us to a really important feature of actually both your earlier report and this new Authoritarian Playbook 2025 report.

And because you note that we're habituated to thinking that democracies are broken by violent coups, for example a coup d'etat, or something quick and sudden that transforms a democracy into something else. But that is not what you see potentially happening, or maybe already happening in the United States, because you mentioned the word getting more authoritarian.

So what's different or what's happening and what's the process that you see?

NADEAU: So I'll get started, and then Aisha, you should jump in. I think that's a really important point and I'm going to borrow from an analogy I've heard someone else use, that you shouldn't think of democracy and authoritarianism as opposite poles on a light switch, right?

You're either on or you're off or you're one or the other, but rather authoritarianism, particularly in recent decades, can creep up on you. It happens in piecemeal fashion. And so we talk about declining into a more authoritarian form of government, because any sort of movement on the slide towards authoritarianism is dangerous.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Aisha, I wanted to hear more from you about what Genevieve was talking about, you call it the salami slicing technique of whittling away a democracy that looks very different from what I think we've become habituated to that thinking there will be like tanks rolling to a presidential palace. And that signals the beginning of an authoritarian government.

WOODWARD: Yeah. One thing that we try to make clear in the report is that almost every single threat that we outline actually has precedent in the first Trump administration.

So the seeds were sown early on for the vast expansion of executive power in particular that we're anticipating to see in a second Trump administration. And so you're right, in lieu of a violent coup, what we're seeing is the introduction of the deep politicization of personnel. Or the weaponization of law enforcement, or in particular, the introduction of even the domestic deployment of troops on U.S. soil, all of which began in the first Trump administration, sowing the ground for a deeper and more steep decline in a second Trump administration.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let's get back to some of the specifics again in this authoritarian playbook that you've laid out. We talked about the stated desire to completely reform the federal government and replace career civil servants with loyalists.

We talked about reshaping the Justice Department or using the law to target political enemies. Here's another set of things that Donald Trump, again, himself has said clearly and there are plans to back him up as well, not just talk now, but actual plan.

So here's Trump at a campaign rally in December in Durham, New Hampshire, where he shared what he thinks about the influx of migrants into the United States.

TRUMP: When they let, I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country, when they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They're poisoning the blood of our country.

That's what they've done.

CHAKRABARTI: That language, first and foremost poisoning the blood of the country that has very dark history, the implications of poisoning of blood. But tell me why you think it's indicative of authoritarianism, that language.

NADEAU: One thing that authoritarians do across different tactics is divide and conquer, right?

Scapegoat certain communities, pit people against each other. And immigrant communities, those who are migrants coming here from other countries, provide Donald Trump with a sort of easy foil for that and an easy way to flex the muscle of Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement.

And that will start out, as we lay out in the report, start out focused on immigration, but it's really about both shifting the Overton window about what's normal and the use of force and also securing the federal law enforcement foothold that will then be expanded and used in other ways.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let's put a little bit more detail into that. Because Trump has talked about explicitly wanting to round up millions of undocumented migrants already in the United States, detain them essentially in sprawling detention camps and scour the country more with, I guess, federal officers or even members of the military to search for undocumented immigrants in this country.

Talk about that.

NADEAU: Yeah, I think we should also start with a little bit of history there. The language that you quoted and some of the authorities dating back hundreds of years that he's citing to, the Alien Enemies Act, which is the last remaining piece of the Alien and Sedition Acts hasn't been used in a long time, but hearkens back to Japanese internment in the World War.

He's referencing really, I'm not even going to repeat the name of the operation in the 1930s, the Eisenhower model of rounding people up in a sort of militarized and really racial way. And promising to return to that and more. So I think it's important to understand that context and why he's doing that.

And yes, he is promising wide scale immigration activities that will require, I think, for implementation as they've confessed, relying on the military. And really, as I mentioned before, it has a lot to do with flexing the law enforcement muscle and doing that, not just at the border itself, but more broadly in the country.

And just think about the effect that will have on our immigrant communities, not just people who are here without legal status, but communities more broadly.

CHAKRABARTI: Aisha, do you want to add to that?

WOODWARD: Yeah, I would just say another one ... and I think it's telling that the laws that Trump is talking about invoking are from the 1700s, but another one of the laws that he's talking about invoking is the Insurrection Act, which we can also talk about in greater detail.

CHAKRABARTI: Talk about it right now because it's what he turns to frequently to say I have legal justification for using the military in different ways.

WOODWARD: Yes, exactly. Trump wants to deploy the military on U.S. soil effectively as a domestic police force. And he wants to invoke this 18th century law, the Insurrection Act, which was intended to be used for really truly emergency type situations, rebellions against the federal government or instances in which the federal government or local authorities were unable to enforce federal law, federal civil rights law.

He wants to use non emergency situations like protests in opposition to his policies or protests on Inauguration Day as a pretext to deploy the federal armed forces in this extraordinary way that could truly disrupt civil military relations and put people in increased opportunity for escalation of violence.

And as your listeners may know, there's a long history around this question of domestic deployment in the United States and a real aversion to using the military for law enforcement against its own citizens. This dates back to, honestly, English law and the Magna Carta, but also found its way into the Declaration of Independence, famously charging King George III with quartering armies among the civilian population and rendering the military superior to domestic authorities.

So this was codified, not until the 19th century, but it goes back as a principle of American democracy, as a really truly foundational thing. Now, Trump, as with so many of the things we're concerned about, actually attempted and found a workaround to the Insurrection Act during his first term.

So he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act in June of 2020. During the protest that followed across the country, the murder of George Floyd. And in Washington D.C. specifically, he asked his senior officials to draft an Insurrection Act, order and deploy the military in the D.C. area to put down protests.

Bill Barr and others pushed back against this at the time and instead found a creative, and we might say, legally dubious work around to basically solicit the forces of national guards and neighboring, mostly Republican states, to deploy to D.C. to put down the protests in Lafayette Square. But Trump and Stephen Miller and others are now talking about not only trying to replicate that strategy in blue states and cities across the country in 2025 but also simply evoking, invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow for the mass deployment of federal armed forces on the U.S. soil.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So once again, just to reiterate, this is, these are not just things that our two guests are saying that Trump wants to do. These are things he's clearly said he will do. Words from his own mouth. For example, to your point, Aisha, here is Donald Trump in June of 2020 reacting to the national protests that went on after following the murder of George Floyd.

And Trump had a specific message for governors in blue states.

TRUMP: If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I guess this gets us to, I think, what is a particularly challenging truth in terms of the moment that we are in now as a nation.

And that is for every one of Trump's authoritarian plans, he and his supporters or his advisers can look to parts of U.S. law and say, we are justified in doing this, right? The president does have the power to deputize, with a governor's permission, members of that state's National Guard. That is totally legal.

It's very unusual, but it's legal. This gets me to the issue of, in a sense, the United States, we've been maybe lucky for 220 years that we haven't been confronted with this situation before, because is our body of law regarding the limits of executive power robust enough to stop a president from becoming an authoritarian autocrat.

NADEAU: Yeah, I think that's a great observation. And one thing that's become painfully clear in the last eight to ten years is the extent to which so much of our democracy exists in norms and informal rules and the extent to which we rely on humans of good faith to enforce them. Aisha and I both spend time on legislative and policy advocacy, so we absolutely think that it's become clear we need better, harder guardrails.

But it's more than just laws and courts enforcing those laws. So one of the reasons that we wrote this report in the first place is to highlight the threat of authoritarianism in a second Trump term and importantly to contextualize that. But also the reason we do that is to begin building a coalition of pro democracy forces who recognize the threat and are prepared to respond, because that sort of pro-democracy alliance is an important guardrail in and of itself.

So yes, we need maybe need better laws. We need to close some of the loopholes that Trump and others are exploiting. But there are other tools in the toolbox as well, and the people in the system.

CHAKRABARTI: Such as?

NADEAU: Such as the use of sort of coalition, such as, we engage in strategic communications and research and analysis, and that's about this sort of Overton window context, right?

It's important to to win the battle of conventional wisdom, right? To establish for the public and others what's normal and what's not, what's in line with the spirit and the intent of the law and what's not. And that can be itself a guardrail on behavior. It's much harder for Trump to engage in certain extreme behaviors.

It's generally understood that it's not okay.

CHAKRABARTI: Some people who are very much aligned with your concern about authoritarianism depart a little bit from your recommendations of what to do, simply because they believe it's not fast enough, right? There are many people out there who believe that reform is, coalition building, while important for long term democratic health of this country, is not going to happen quickly enough to meet the authoritarian threat.

What do you think about that?

WOODWARD: I think it's a question of an all of the above strategy. It's certainly the case that legislation can move slowly. But we also saw, even under the first administration, Congress periodically standing up for itself or learning lessons from the Trump administration.

Enacting protections for inspectors general, for example, reforming the Electoral Account Reform Act. And so some of that work is being continued now around key issues like Emergency Authority and the Insurrection Act. And I think we need to continue that in tandem with more short-term strategies, which we can also talk about, because there may well be a moment when Congress is actually able to do those things and that work has to begin now in order to really be able to effectuate it down the line.

CHAKRABARTI: I wonder what you think about some even more extreme possibilities. I mean if the authoritarian threat is as keen or urgent, keen is not the right word, urgent as you say it is, very recently in The Atlantic, Russell Berman, one of their really top-notch reporters there, published an article saying how Democrats could disqualify Trump if the Supreme Court doesn't.

Okay, so as we all know, the court recently heard oral argument from the case out of Colorado, about whether a state could keep Donald Trump off the presidential ballot in that state, right? We don't know how the court's going to decide yet.

But Berman, in talking to a lot of Democratic sources, he says the question is, will the Supreme Court be clear in its ruling, whatever it is. And if it's not perfectly clear, that Trump is either 100% eligible or not, here's what Berman's reporting says. He says, quote, In interviews, senior House Democrats would not commit to certifying a Trump win, saying they would only do, they would commit to certifying the win, if the Supreme Court affirms his eligibility.

This one sentence has popped up in a lot of conservative media saying, actually, it's the Democrats who are authoritarian and who would undermine democracy if Donald Trump wins again. I do just wonder what you think about even the thought of some more extreme action that could take place.

NADEAU: I think it's a really scary prospect if we get to that point.

There's a legal argument, a historical and legal argument as to why that actually might be okay as a matter of pure law. I agree with scholars and others who have said, the Supreme Court really should do this, whatever it does, with the Anderson case in a definitive way, so that it's decided now, because nobody wants Congress deciding elections, right?

But that's also an important reminder that we haven't had an election yet, right? It's nine months away. So we talk about coalitions being slow, potentially, but there's a reason we're starting now and issuing this report now, because it's not just about withstanding authoritarianism. It's also about preventing it.

So I don't want to lose fact that we have time for pro-democracy organizations and individuals on the left and the right to prevent this from coming to pass.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, in a sense, that's what brings me back to the thing that you both talked about earlier, about Trump having really successfully put a lot of his nominees in the court system, right?

And so maybe can we look at the judicial system as any longer as a bulwark against creeping authoritarianism? I'm going to offer this and let you respond as a closing thought. I think we can. Because first of all, right now, even with those judges in place, the court systems are functioning, right?

We may not like, people, various different perspectives may not like the cases that are working their way through the courts, but they are working their way through the courts. That first and foremost. And second of all, thinking of 2020 and the elections, not just in the court system, but also at the level of the states.

There were very brave individuals, Republicans, who stood up for the rule of law in their states. I don't see any reason why that can't happen again, regardless of who ends up being the winner, but to stand up for a system of democracy as it's supposed to work. It's already happened.

So why wouldn't it happen again?

WOODWARD: Yeah I think that is something that we're hoping to marshal with this report. And I think we should take comfort in the fact that in 2018, and 2020 and 2022, vast pro democracy coalition of Republicans and Democrats and independents turned out to say and push back on the Trump agenda and say, this is not what we stand for.

We stand for the rule of law. We stand for democratic institutions. We think that the work needs to happen now to remind people about why they need to turn out. But I think we have faith in the American people that there is a pro-democracy majority out there that just needs to be reactivated and reengaged in advance of the fall.

CHAKRABARTI: So maybe call your Secretary of State's office and tell them you support clean and fair and democratic elections. But nevertheless, with the idea of the salami slice in mind, I encourage everyone to read this report. It's called The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025 by Genevieve Nadeau and Aisha Woodward.