Trump 2.0 and Fears of Unbounded State Power (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and other MAGA luminaries often proclaim that the grave danger facing the West is civilizational erasure, which they claim is happening in Europe. Through its dangerous and misguided approach toward identity and immigration, Europe is destroying the West's distinctive legacy. But the West's defining character has not been tribal or religious solidarity. That describes most of the world. The West's precious, almost unique achievement has been the limitation of state power. Since Magna Carta in 1215, the West gradually placed constraints on rulers through rights for citizens, independent courts, a sovereign church, and the sanctity of private property. That inheritance is what made the West democratic and prosperous. It's also what made it stable. Citizens could dissent, businesses could invest, and civil society could flourish because power was bounded by law. The second Trump administration has moved sharply to erode these traditions. In Minneapolis, two people exercising their First Amendment rights were shot dead. There and elsewhere, federal officers have been operating masked, often in unmarked vehicles, making arrests without judicial warrants. The optics and the felt reality are of authoritarian policing. State power that is unbounded. And it's more than optics. This administration has used its powers in stunningly aggressive ways, often slow-walking its obedience of court rulings, delaying them so much as to be sometimes defying them de facto. The Trump administration has declared war on civil society, media, universities, non-governmental organizations, law firms, and even private businesses. The Justice Department's plans to investigate organizations like George Soros' Open Society Foundations, with the president describing it as racketeering, signal something dark – the criminalization of disfavored groups. It is the logic of Hungary and Russia imported into American politics. You don't rebut critics, you investigate them. Then there's the legal profession. When the government threatens law firms through security clearances, access to federal buildings, and the insinuation that representing the wrong client carries consequences, it's telling the country quietly but unmistakably the protections of due process are conditional if you choose a firm that the state does not like. Universities too have been frontally attacked and investigated on an unprecedented scale. You do not have to love the modern American university to see the danger here. The state is using funding to compel political concessions from independent institutions. The press, always the early warning system of a free society, has faced what can only be described as relentless intimidation. Media outlets are sued and regulatory powers used publicly in an apparent attempt to coerce owners to toe the party line. In August, a federal judge found that the Trump administration's Federal Trade Commission investigation into the left-wing group Media Matters likely violated the group's First Amendment rights and looked like political retaliation, not neutral regulation. The administration is expanding state power within the economy, less as a rule-setter than as a deal-maker and disciplinarian. There's a world of difference between industrial policy that works through published criteria and competitive grants, and a system where CEOs are summoned to the White House, punished, rewarded or encouraged to comply. When regulators hint that routine approvals, renewals or reviews may depend on whether companies adopt or abandon certain policies, capitalism stops being a competitive arena and starts resembling a patronage system. And then hovering over all of this is the administration's appetite for using security state tools not on extremists but on dissidents. Consider the push to designate some Antifa groups as foreign terrorist organizations, a concept so vague and ill-defined that even national security experts warn it could become a catch-all. Under existing law, knowingly providing material support for a designated foreign terrorist organization can carry up to 20 years in prison, and support can be construed broadly enough to include trivial assistance. That is how democracies decay, not by announcing that dissent is illegal, but by reclassifying dissent as something else. The administration talks about the West as if it were a heritage museum, symbols, slogans, identity. But the West's real genius is institutional, law that binds all, the strong and the weak, not by benevolent leaders, but by constrained ones, a civil society robust enough to oppose the state without fearing that opposition will be treated as a criminal act. The West is not a bloodline. It is a bargain, power constrained, rights protected, coercion accountable. The greatest threat to the West is not that it is becoming too tolerant or too concerned about individual rights, it is the expansion of state power, making the West just like every other society in history, where the strong rule the weak. When seen in that light, we can say plainly that civilizational erasure is indeed happening. But it's not in Europe. It is here, where the American government grows comfortable with unbounded power, and the country grows accustomed to living with it. The federal immigration raids in Minneapolis and the killing of two civilians there are sharpening a question being asked by many across the world. What exactly is happening in the United States? For more on how the world is viewing Trump 2.0, I'm joined by a great panel. Zannie Minton-Beddoes is the editor-in-chief of The Economist, based in London, and Chris Caldwell is an American conservative author and contributing opinion columnist for The New York Times. He's written extensively about European immigration and culture. Zannie, I was wondering what you made of this last turn. You and I were in Davos, and the last shooting had not taken place. What I'm wondering is, European populist conservatives have generally been very supportive of the Trump immigration crackdown. Is that changing now because of what's been going on in Minneapolis, you think?

[00:06:55] Speaker 2: I think we are beginning to see some signs of that. It is important to note that most, even of their supporters, are skeptical of Donald Trump, whether it is in Germany with the AFD or in France with the RN or even Farage here. But as you say, all of these parties have been pushing for much more aggressive deportations in Europe. And so you would think that what Donald Trump was doing would be sort of music to their ears. But I think the popular sense of revulsion and shock at what's happened is shaping the response. So Nigel Farage, for example, this week said that he thought ICE had gone too far. Jordan Bardella, as far as I can tell, hasn't said anything publicly about it. They've been very quiet. And in Germany, Alice Weidel and the leadership of the AFD have not said anything very much, although there are AFD politicians who have said, you know, good on them, this is robust policy. So I think they're kind of trying to thread this needle. And it's come on top of, remember, the whole Greenland episode, which was also very difficult for European populist right, because they all collectively had to say, absolutely, this was not on.

[00:07:57] Speaker 1: Yeah. Chris, do you make a distinction between on Greenland, they all, all of them, I think, almost actively denounced Trump. On immigration, as Annie says, they're being a little bit more cautious or careful. How do you read what they're trying to figure out? Like where, you know, they're obviously trying to figure out where their electorates are and how to thread this needle.

[00:08:20] Speaker 3: On Greenland, it's an interesting thing because populists in Europe tend to be really preoccupied with sovereignty. And Trump is now, you know, crossing the sovereignty of a, of a, of a major European, of a European country of Denmark. And I think that that's, that is even, even if you're not a supporter of the European Union, it is a, it is a bit of a humiliation for those Europeans who still think of their continent as able to throw its weight around on the, on the global stage. As far as Minneapolis is concerned, I think that, that nothing that's happened in Minneapolis has changed populists wish to see a kind of a, a resolute and forceful move against, against illegal immigration. But, but, but obviously this is a very bad look and any, any, any party that is going to have to fight elections as the, as the AFD is in several states this year in Germany is not going to want to get behind Trump.