Podcast Summary: Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick — "The Three Faces Of Trumpism"

Date: November 29, 2025
Host: Dahlia Lithwick
Guests: Jedediah Britton-Purdy (Duke Law), David Pozen (Columbia Law)
Theme:
An exploration of three competing frameworks for understanding Trump-era American politics: authoritarian crisis, enduring dysfunction, and constitutional regime change.

Overview

This “thinky” episode dives deeply into big themes on the state of American democracy under Trump’s leadership. Drawing from their recent Boston Review piece, law professors Jed Purdy and David Pozen join host Dahlia Lithwick to interrogate three narrative “scripts” about Trumpism and today’s constitutional reality:

1. Authoritarian rupture
2. Deep-seated dysfunction
3. Constitutional regime change

They analyze what these perspectives capture or miss, their historical roots, and their implications for action in a fractured political and epistemic landscape.

Key Discussion Points

1. Origin of the Three-Frames Project

• Genesis: The guests’ collaboration stemmed from their own and others’ bewilderment at current events and the constantly shifting sense of crisis.
  • David Pozen: “In the course of a single day, I think Jed and I found ourselves toggling across wildly different diagnoses of where the country is at.” ([04:01])
  • Jed Purdy: Many colleagues “found themselves skidding uncontrollably across the various three positions over the course of a day.” ([04:51])

2. The Three Explanatory Frameworks:

a. Authoritarian Crisis (Frame 1)

• The dominant liberal/centrist interpretation, seeing Trump’s era as a rapid, foreign-influenced slide to autocracy:
  • Jed Purdy: “Consolidation of unaccountable power in the executive... using the power of federal law enforcement to target enemies... deliberate erosion of the stability and credibility of the electoral system... a shift in the tone of politics... to an explicit friend-enemy kind of logic." ([06:17])
  • External comparison: Playbooks from Orbán’s Hungary, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Modi’s India.

b. More of the Same / Deep Dysfunction (Frame 2)

• A perspective from the political left: Trump as a symptom and intensifier, not a fundamental rupture.
  • David Pozen: “[Trump] is best seen as a symptom of rather than a cause of democratic decline and constitutional rot… Many of the things Trump is accused of breaking were already broken.” ([09:09], [11:32])
  • Example: Americans’ policy preferences not reflected in government; due process rights long denied to minorities and immigrants.

c. Constitutional Regime Change (Frame 3)

• The "White House narrative": This is routine constitutional transformation—a new majority shifting the system from within, as it did under FDR or during the Civil Rights Era.
  • Jed Purdy: “The way we change constitutional regimes… is by transformation from within… usually under pressure from democratic political movements. So the New Deal changed the American order, the civil rights era changed the American order.” ([12:53])
  • He notes Trump supporters’ claims that “we have a mandate… we are just doing what FDR did.” ([12:25])
  • Distinction: This is normal American politics, not a loss of democracy, say defenders of this view. ([15:35])

3. Historical Roots & Diagnosing the Present

• Each script pulls from how one interprets pre-Trump America:
  • Those who see an abrupt crisis likely believed in a previously healthy democracy.
  • The "more of the same" camp saw US democracy as fundamentally and chronically flawed far earlier.
  • Regime change theorists see prior liberal hegemony and now its overturn.
• Pozen: “[Deep] constitutional change… does generally require sustained, strong majority support… and that is… conspicuously lacking here.” ([23:58])

4. All Three Lenses Have Value, But Where To From Here?

• Lithwick: The challenge: “Trump is gobbling up what's left of those [institutions]… at a really accelerated rate... he has broken with alacrity and in ways that might not come back.” ([25:42])
• Defensive bipartisan “anti-authoritarian” minimalism (e.g., Harris + Cheney coalitions) risks leaving root dysfunctions untouched.
• Pozen: “If you're right that Trump has both exposed, you know, deep rot in Congress… then the more of the same diagnosis suggests we need much more fundamental reforms.” ([26:57])
• Ambitious reforms—court reform, ending the filibuster, fighting plutocracy—may be needed to prevent future Trumpism, but are made difficult by polarization.

5. Hybridization and Mutual Learning

• The three camps are less mutually exclusive than in Trump’s first term; more are integrating elements from multiple views.
  • Purdy: “There is a kind of convergence that's incipient now… that's some real learning about the points that the competing sides have.” ([28:58])
  • For example, even leftists now better appreciate the value of due process.

6. Epistemic Crisis – Are We Living in Three Americas?

• Lithwick: Are these frames reinforcing epistemic silos—are we living not just in disagreement, but in different realities?
  • Purdy: “It is not at all evident that we can get ourselves out of our epistemic fragmentation... the political community basically learns how to imagine itself… through a series of fragmented for profit platforms whose motive… is not to get you civically useful, actionable information, but to hold your attention…” ([44:31])
  • However, online platforms could also build new forms of democratic overlap if harnessed well.

7. On “Butter Knife to a Gunfight”—Norms, Hardball, and Democratic Resilience

• Can liberal or institutional norms hold against illiberal onslaughts? Is tit-for-tat hardball the only answer?
  • Pozen: “There is a structural disadvantage that parties who want to rebuild institutions have against a wrecking ball like Trump... I generally think that the best case for Democrats playing hardball themselves is when it's in the service of what I've called anti-hardball.” ([36:40])
  • Use hardball to achieve reforms (e.g., anti-gerrymandering) that reduce incentives for further “dirty play.”

8. Reflections and Takeaways

• Purdy: “I came to a fuller appreciation in the process of writing of the depth and incorrigibility of the differences and that we really were talking about both views of history and views about constitutional legitimacy that are hard to get onto the same page.” ([50:25])
• Pozen: “I think for my own sanity, it was important to try to charitably reconstruct the Trump advisor's own account of what they're up to… There's always space for the next generation… to push in a new direction.” ([52:25])
• Both see hope in coalitions between anti-authoritarian liberals and leftist reformers, but stress these are generational projects, not quick fixes.

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “We all change our minds about everything… we are all toggling between split screens.”

  • Dahlia Lithwick ([05:40])

• “Trump is best seen as a symptom of rather than a cause of democratic decline and constitutional rot.”

  • David Pozen ([09:09])

• “The way we change constitutional regimes in this country… is by transformation from within the same constitutional text…”

  • Jed Purdy ([12:53])

• “There's a kind of convergence that's incipient now... that if nothing else represents some real learning about the points that the competing sides have.”

  • Jed Purdy ([28:58])

• “We say [epistemic polarization] has gone beyond… disagreeing on policies or parties or candidates, but goes to the level of our basic understanding of the kind of country we're living in…”

  • David Pozen ([48:31])

• “Politics really is about living within a space of ongoing, deep, deep disagreement… disagreement is rooted just in our being different people who are trying to find a way to live together.”

  • Jed Purdy ([50:25])

Key Timestamps

• [04:01–05:40] — Origins of the collaboration and the challenge of finding common diagnosis
• [06:17–12:25] — Dissection of the three explanatory frames: authoritarianism, deep dysfunction, regime change
• [20:35–24:33] — Historical roots and how prior assumptions affect current interpretations
• [25:42–28:57] — Institutional collapse accelerated by Trumpism; incomplete fit of available frameworks
• [28:58–31:49] — Institutional learning; increasing hybridization of the crisis and dysfunction lenses
• [36:40–40:08] — The “hardball” dilemma and institutional fragility
• [44:31–48:31] — Epistemic siloing and the future of democratic discourse
• [50:25–55:28] — Guests’ reflections on what they learned and where action/hope may lie

Conclusion

“The Three Faces of Trumpism” invites listeners to critically engage with the assumptions guiding their political analysis, not merely to choose one script, but to see the value—and limitations—of each. The episode closes with a double call: for analytic humility in the face of deep-rooted, unresolvable pluralism, and for bold thinking about new coalitions and reforms that could shore up both democracy’s structure and its spirit.