B (1:41)

He's a dictator. He's a dictator.

A (1:43)

And you absolutely should be acting right now to do things. So I think that sense of pressure is important.

B (1:49)

I don't like a dictator, but sometimes.

A (1:52)

It can feel overwhelming and panicky, like you're just running from crisis to crisis. So today I want to remind you that one day Trump will be gone. And I want to talk about not just skittering from crisis to crisis, but instead planning for the long run. And at the end of the episode, I'll consider some ways to take action that don't just feel like using a thimble of water to put out a forest fire. Our current president has long embraced some of the most atrocious world leaders whom he counts as his peers.

B (2:26)

You have said positive things about Putin as a leader.

A (2:29)

He's likewise styled him some of history's worst dead tyrants and about China's massacre.

B (2:35)

Of pro democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square.

A (2:37)

Remember his defending, tweeting Mussolini's words by.

B (2:41)

Saying, it's a very good quote. It's a very interesting quote.

A (2:44)

Trump has recently even been talking more about a possible third term.

B (2:50)

Look, Mussolini was Mussolini suggesting that the.

A (2:53)

US Seems to want a dictator, but.

B (2:56)

What difference does it make whether it's Mussolini or somebody else?

A (2:59)

It's worth looking at him through the framework that he wants to apply, that of dictators and dictatorship, to talk about how the coming months or years might go.

B (3:08)

You want to be associated with a fascist? No, I want to be associated with. Interesting quotes.

A (3:15)

First of all, President Trump is an old man. His hands are bruised, his ankles are swollen. The White House released a memo from Trump's physician addressing the controversy. The report diagnosed him with chronic venous.

B (3:29)

Insufficiency, a benign circulation issue that is.

A (3:32)

Relatively common in older adults. And it's a reasonable thing to think that he's not in good health and might die soon. There was no evidence of heart failure.

B (3:41)

Kidney disease, blocked arteries, or dangerous blood clot.

A (3:46)

Still, speculation has not gone away. His absence will offer a window to reject so many harmful policies that have already led to death around the globe and are likely to lead to tremendous harm here at home. A new report from the Lancet Medical Journal estimates the USAID cuts could cause 14 million deaths over the next five years. The cuts have led to the closure of food kitchens and health clinics, as well as a halt in shipments of medication, water purification tablets, and nutritional packets for starving children. But how much advanced knowledge will we have? And what signs should we be looking for? What other times have powerful national leaders been ill and concealed sealed the truth? So let's talk about all that for a little bit. This is a dynamic that happens to a certain degree with any older or infirm leader, in part because most cultures have absorbed at least a whiff of a fascist ethos in which weakness is seen as shameful.

B (4:46)

Is there anything you can do to get them to the end? Doing everything we can. Thank you, sir. You disappointed by Mrs. Burford's letter?

A (4:59)

I'm not thankful. Think of FDR hiding his disability. Think of Kennedy with his pain pills for his back. Think of the degree to which Biden was presented as perfectly on his game, though his daily acuity had clearly declined. But the dictator faces even greater pressure to lie about his health.

B (5:19)

So Trump is a dictator.

A (5:20)

Fascism is a fleeting attempt by a leader to eradicate time and pretend he has the power to inflict a permanent presentation set in the historical moment of his choosing.

B (5:33)

Not that I don't have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the President of the United States.

A (5:37)

In the dictatorial ruling party's vision, the leader himself actually embodies the country. So that sense of immortality has to be preserved through constant deception. Meanwhile, a vicious jockeying for power takes place as rivals strive to become the next immortal leader of the authoritarian state.

B (5:58)

I said, Mr. President, so long as you behave, I won't say anything. And he just chuckled a little bit.

A (6:02)

So when someone who's embraced dictatorship gets sick, it's a next level phenomenon entirely.

B (6:09)

You are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace. This Nobel Award was ever talked about.

A (6:16)

The whole political project is built on the illusion that the dictator will live forever.

B (6:21)

Thank you for your leadership, for your.

A (6:22)

Boldness, which necessarily leads to a long tradition of hiding the dear Leader's illness. This is a well known and benign side effect of aspirin therapy. And the President remains in excellent health, which I think all of you witness on a daily basis in a medical crisis that would not only change the Middle east, but reshape the US relations in the region to the present day. Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, developed cancer in the 1970s.

B (6:56)

The Shah, like most dictators, was surrounded by yes men. It was a remarkably repressive regime, a regime that existed only by the power of both the army and the SAVAK secret police.

A (7:10)

Rather than acknowledge his illness when it was found in 1974, the Queen didn't.

B (7:16)

Find out about his cancer for three years.

A (7:18)

He hid the diagnosis across the next five years.

B (7:22)

Persian culture had a 2,500-year-old history, and the Shah was trying to replace that in the few years he had left. And his reforms were being undermined by corruption. After months of violent riots and protests, in February 1979, the revolution was complete.

A (7:39)

In some cases misleading even doctors who were treating him.

B (7:43)

He wound up in Mexico, where the doctors thought he had malaria and suggested that he be transferred to New York for specialist treatment. And despite the risk this would seriously irritate the Ayatollahs, President Jimmy Carter agreed.

A (7:58)

The fury of Iranian students over the Shah being admitted to the US for treatment shaped the emerging dynamic between the two countries and seeded the hostage crisis that defined the end of the Carter administration and set the stage for Ronald Reagan's ascent.

B (8:15)

There was, in fact, a secret effort by the Reagan campaign to sabotage the Carter campaign by urging the Iranians to hold the American hostages until after that year's presidential election.

A (8:27)

The illusion of health may be so widespread that the doctors who participate in it and reflect it back to their patient when he's a dictator, may even shape the leader's belief about his own health. After a 1976 stroke and secret reports of significant heart issues, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev developed a hand tremor and slurred speech, often dozing off in public meetings. At the time, he wrote in his diary, they checked my brain cells, said everything was good. You should be envied and congratulated. You're strong and healthy. Well into his dotage, Brezhnev was celebrated by the Politburo as a hero and given a special World War II medal decades after the conflict had ended. When he did finally die, Brezhnev was replaced by Yuri Andropov, who managed to live only 15 months in office. Andropov was followed by Konstantin Chernenko.

B (9:37)

From ABC News, this is the Weekend Report. Good evening. From the mysterious inner chamber of the Kremlin, a surprise. Today, Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko reemerged. He popped up at a polling place. Moscow correspondent Walter Rogers has details. This was President Chernenko's first public appearance this year, although his frail condition, evidenced in these pictures, did little to dispel speculation about his health.

A (10:04)

Who made it just over a year before dying, as the Washington Post would report only one month after, Communist Party officials congratulated him on claiming victory with 100% of the vote. But perhaps the most famous example of the decline and death of an autocrat is the death of Stalin in 1953.

B (10:25)

Through the 30 years of his rule, he remained unchallenged even by members of the Supreme Council, the Soviets administrative machine.

A (10:32)

Immortalized in the film of the same name. The obsequiousness of the rivals who might succeed him as they publicly. Further, the cult of personality that they've been subservient to for decades was outdone only by their viciousness as they tried to eliminate one another once he'd actually died.

B (10:51)

Now Molotov, chief of secret police Beria and Stalin's right hand man Malenkov, are among those tipped as Russia's new ruler.

A (11:01)

And we've already had a taste of that dynamic in Trump's first term during the pandemic. The President's medical staff had long been telling obvious lies about everything from his height to his weight.

B (11:12)

I would say the answer to your question is he has incredibly good genes and it's just the way God made him.

A (11:15)

But his coterie's praises of him when he was very clearly ill with COVID became entirely comic. I spoke with the president yesterday and he was his typical self, hard at work, dictating a statement, remarks to me, and very meticulous about the precise wording. In a photo op during his hospital stay at Walter Reed Military Hospital Hospital, Trump signed what turned out to be a blank sheet of paper in a staged attempt to prove that he was still on the job, while his daughter Ivanka claimed that, quote, nothing can stop him from working for the American people. How sick is Trump today?

B (11:55)

You know, you. You are so big.

A (11:57)

He seems both mentally and physically unsteady. But we have little more than outward signs of illness. The bruises and the ankles and his incoherent public statements to go on. Hello?

B (12:10)

Who is that back there? Get out of the room.

A (12:14)

The administration is currently bent on lying to the American people about nearly every aspect of governance. And leaders in the Republican Party who denounced him just a few years ago.

B (12:25)

Trump is a really bad candidate, and frankly, I think a really bad person.

A (12:30)

Are now given two very Soviet style encomiums about his physical prowess and his intellectual health.

B (12:37)

The President is in incredibly good health. He's got incredible energy.

A (12:41)

Nevertheless, Trump is far from immortal. He's an old man in serious decline. The day after he dies or when he leaves office. If the two aren't simultaneous, the past can offer some help about what the situation will look like on the ground. What we should hope is that it isn't more like the death of Vladimir Lenin, whose role as leader was followed not by liberation, but by three decades of rule by Stalin.

B (13:06)

Soviet propaganda built up a picture of Stalin as a kindly man who loved his people. Yet when Lenin died, it was he who destroyed those same people, it is believed nearly seven millions of them, to make his position secure as Russia's dictator.

A (13:19)

As I talked about last week, defeat in war is one way that concentration camps can end. That situation is also a chance for a national reset. After wartime defeats, whole governments are removed, parties obliterated, constitutions get rewritten. But outside of that dramatic situation, one that's very far removed from the current situation in the United States after the death of a demagogue, countries struggle to eliminate authoritarian power structures built around personal relationships to the dictator and his circle. More often, particularly when society has had a polarization driven by an extremist party, a deep divide remains, a culturally induced fissure that becomes difficult to cross and which prevents the country from healing. We see these in many places around the world, including in South America, in the wake of late 20th century dictatorships.

B (14:17)

The Chilean oligarchy were completely behind the dictatorship. The ruling class are now in a way fighting to defend that legacy, Pinochet privatized state companies that still belong to the richest people in Chile. It's not right that in our country that happened 50 years ago should continue to take up so much space.

A (14:37)

This is the long term political divide most likely to frame national elections in the coming decade or longer, that there will be two narratives about America and they will be completely divergent. You are really the transformational President of the American worker, along with the American flag and President Roosevelt. To move forward, societies need some kind of clean break or fresh start.

B (15:08)

Seldom, if ever in history have winners been as generous towards losers as the new leaders of South Africa have been towards the men who inflicted apartheid on them.

A (15:17)

And though it had flaws, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in the wake of apartheid offered a powerful example of how this might be done.

B (15:25)

Here's how it works. Victims tell their stories, stories of atrocities which were literally unspeakable under the old regime. Then the perpetrators get a chance to own up to their crimes and by doing so become eligible for amnesty. All they have to do is tell the truth.

A (15:43)

Other countries have brought their military juntas or former leaders, along with collaborators to justice. Given the human rights abuses currently underway here in the us, legal and political accountability projects should have a place in any future American efforts at reconstruction. Such projects have a long history in our country and could be framed as the setting for another try at entrenching real democracy in the United States.

B (16:12)

No memorial, oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights bill for which he fought so long.

A (16:27)

If fascism is nothing more than the attack to turn the present into a past that never existed, Trump has been busy trying to do exactly that. He's been working to remove people of color from public spaces and high ranking positions. He's been ordering the return of a Confederate statue to dc. Fort Cavazos is once again Fort Hood. The army just made that change hours after President Donald Trump made an announcement during a visit to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. This comes two years after nine military bases were renamed to remove titles that honored Confederate leaders. Fort Cavazos was chosen to honor General Richard Cavazos, a Texas born veteran who became the first Hispanic four star general. He's been trying to roll the clock back to sometimes as far as 1798 in his treatment of aliens in the country and trying to ignore the US's own history of extending protections and rights to the vulnerable, as he does so the administration invoking an obscure law, the Aliens enemies Act of 1798, which allows the government to deport people with little to no due process and was last used to ro Japanese Americans during World War II.

B (17:35)

Why does Trump always have to pick the oldest, most racist laws to do what he wants to do of cutting taxes under the authority of the it's okay to drown Italians law of 1863?

A (17:47)

Trump has been openly racist for decades, so small wonder he's left much of the Detention and Deportation project to sadistic imp Stephen Miller.

B (17:56)

Instead of thanking him for that, they're saying president Trump, how dare you save our lives.

A (18:02)

Other Trump apparatchiks seem to be acting out power fantasies, like Russell Vogt, the Project 2025 guru.

B (18:08)

We want to put them in trauma.

A (18:10)

Who is now deliberately inflicting trauma on the federal employees and government programs designed to help Americans and which have in fact benefited his own family in the past. But the success of fascism is always dependent on the tyrant who sits at the center of an insular world and becomes the manifestation of the backward looking project.

B (18:33)

I can do it.

A (18:34)

This is in part why I'm a little worried about Gavin Newsom's approach to dealing with Trump. On the one hand, his social media staff does brilliant send ups of Trump's unhinged communication blasts, and Newsom, in aping the president's exaggerations, shows how ridiculous the man is. Why am I giving him advice? You have to stop it with the Twitter thing. You are making a fool of yourself. Stop it. But my concern with the language of Trumpism is that the more we adopt it, the smaller our responses and our world become and the more dependent it remains on Trump himself. It keeps him at the center of everything. Newsom, in the words of the Onion, may be watching porn, ironically taking on the trappings of Trump to mock him, only to wind up as sincerely caught up in the show as any non ironic follower. He is willing to fight, which is great and which shows more spirit than many other Democratic leaders have shown. But his dramatic social media policy and actions with his podcast I think the.

B (19:42)

Sports issue really opened that door for me.

A (19:43)

Raised the question of what beyond himself and his own power, he actually stands for. And that's a question we might each ask ourselves. It's not necessary to be on constant news alert over Trump's cankles, waiting for him to die. Trump's health is something over which we have no control in terms of what to do. Instead, I've been thinking about the Miccosukee tribe of Florida, which recently had a judge rule in favor of their argument that the Everglades detention camp that the government has named Alligator Alcatraz is a threat to their land and their way of life. Florida officials have said that there's not much other than pythons and alligators in the area. What do you want people to know about this location?

B (20:27)

Well, if there's only pythons and alligators, I'm wondering what I'm doing in that area and what my people and my family have been doing in that area for centuries.

A (20:36)

There's no doubt that some Miccosukee are repelled by the project that Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have inflicted on their community.

B (20:42)

We were not consulted, and as soon as we got wind of it, it seemed like it was already there in our face.

A (20:48)

One of them compared it to some haven of dark tourism, saying they put people in cages in tents and then they put up a sign on the highway with this clever, funny, stupid name. Then people come taking photos like it's Disneyland. But the Miccosukee fight isn't some simple battle that changes day to day. They've drawn a circle around what matters to them.

B (21:13)

Since we have been the people here before there's even this type of government around us, we've seen the full changes, have the context to provide, and I think that's why it's important that our voice is not discarded in this process.

A (21:25)

And they work at the world they want to live in. Across decades, across generations. It's a bigger cause and a bigger fight than any one tribe member, than any one outside leader threatening their way of life. It's a fight they've been in for a very long time now. That fight was forced on them. But at the same time, it's critical to understand your personal beliefs and what matters most deeply to you. Use that as a guiding star by which to navigate your actions. You don't have to be reactive and switch gears with every new outrage. It's possible to instead picture which part of existing culture or community you want to preserve, to look to what future traditions and protections you want to build. Your involvements can follow from that. Every tyrant falls in the end. What do you want to have ready for that moment? What part of your vision of the world will you work to build? It can be as small as a project to document local history or as large as an effort to guarantee the rights of a targeted group in your state. You might imagine a community program that would reach every elementary school age child in your county, or that fights for automatic voter registration and the removal of barriers to civic participation.

B (22:58)

It is time now to write the next chapter.

A (23:03)

Sometimes figuring out these bigger goals that you want to work toward can take a while, and so if you're looking for something to do in the meantime, you can absolutely head out this weekend. Over Labor Day weekend, there are countless events that you can look up@maydaystrong.org the workers over billionaires, protests and many other kinds of activities around the country will give you some immediate options and maybe even some communities to plug into. They have the money, we have the people. Right now billionaires are hijacking our government.

B (23:34)

And using it against us.

A (23:36)

What you choose might be an effort that you'll start knowing you will never see the end of it. Or it can be something with specific milestones that can be achieved along the way. If you're struggling with the day to day whirlwind, pick what you want to see in America when Trump is gone. Something bigger than just a personal fight against him. You may be waiting for the day that he vanishes, but you can begin to build a better world, one that will absolutely outlast him right now. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and thank you for watching. If you do have the means, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber and you can do that@Andreapitzer.com and just go to the newsletter link which is in the first paragraph of the homepage and you can sign up from there.