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- [00:01]
Ivan Krastev
Listen, he promised his voters and followers a revolution, and revolution always lives in the shadow of betrayal. And the major question is, is he one of us or he's one of them? And from this point of view, basically kind of Trump biography does not make it easy for some of the MAGA voters to be sure that he's one of them. And as a result of it, this is a crisis.
- [00:23]
Yasha Munk
And now the good fight with Yasha. Well, you're in for a treat. Today we are doing an experiment, a panel show in which we get some of my all time favorite guests of the podcast and we talk about some of the interesting, exciting, confusing, upsetting news of the last week. And for this inaugural round I have assembled for you Mona Charan, who is a policy editor at the Bulwark and the host of a great relatively new podcast called the Mona Charon Show. We have Ivan Krustov, who is the founder of the center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Humane Sciences. I think that's the right translation from the German in Vienna. And we have of course, my co conspirator at Persuasion and American Purpose, which he founded, Francis Fukuyama, who is a senior fellow at the center for Democracy and the Rule of Law at Stanford. The way this is going to work is that we jump into a bunch of topics and hear very brief thoughts from each panelist about what they make of this topic. And then we have a bit of a free for all and think about it together. So one thing that's been on the news for the last week, but I have to say is a story that I've always sort of semi ignored as it's been bubbling in the background of our public discourse for the last 10 or 15 years because it just seems so sordid and unpleasant that now seems unignorable, is the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and the way in which Donald Trump and other major figures of the Mugaverse have promised great revelations about it. Allegedly. It now turns out that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, has informed Donald Trump a few months ago that he is mentioned in those files and suddenly Mr. Trump does not want to release them. And it looks as though there might be a little bit of a split in his coalition where some members of it are sufficiently upset about this u turn that there is some trouble brewing in that universe. Mona, what should we make of all of this? Is Donald Trump actually in trouble here?
- [02:40]
Mona Charon
So Yasha, what I think and by the way, thanks for having us all. This is great. So I propose that from now, on, when you're looking in the dictionary for the definition of hoist by your own petard, that this story be featured as the prime example, because Donald Trump and his minions have spent the last decade preparing the ground, training their fans and also the broader public to believe in absurd conspiracies, to believe that the QAnon fantasy, though it may be wrong in some details, is broadly right, that there are elites in this country who are engaged in a vast criminal conspiracy to abuse children and commit other crimes. And so they have ridden this horse. This is their doing. In fact, there was a quote in the paper just the other day from one of the people who. One of the influencers, MAGA influencers, who said, we have been created in a lab to want this information. So there you have it. They created this monster and now it is turning on them. So, yes, it is the first time we've genuinely seen Trump acting, running scared and seeming to fear his own people.
- [04:10]
Yasha Munk
Thank you, Mona. Frank, what do you make of this?
- [04:13]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, I think that, yeah, if you've been following Trump's statements about Ghislaine Maxwell and his statements about the scandal in general, it's obvious that from the beginning he was afraid of this and he did not want this to come out. He's now engaged in this ridiculous campaign to try to divert people's attention by calling for the criminal prosecution of Obama. And it's interesting that I don't think many people are buying this. The one thing that's occurred to me is that Trump has managed in a certain way to change the definition of what it means to be a conservative. I think that actually being a conservative now in the United States means that you believe in conspiracy theories, that that, more than any set of broader ideas, is what makes you a conservative. And it gets to the basic idea behind populism, that taking the red pill, you see that the world is really not what everybody else thinks it is. You have an insight to this alternative universe that's been created by elites and that is completely manipulated by them. And that's why this is the only issue that's actually managed to stir the group up. It's not inflation. It's not the border. It's not losing their Medicaid coverage. It's this.
- [05:42]
Yasha Munk
Ivan, this feels like such an American story. You, as someone who knows America well, is not an American, may not have much to say about it. But at the same time, perhaps this is the kind of strange scandal that lays populists down in other places as well.
- [05:57]
Ivan Krastev
Now, listen, he promised his voters and followers of revolution. And revolution always lives in the shadow of betrayal. And the major question is, is he one of us or he's one of them? And from this point of view, basically kind of Trump biography does not make it easy for some of the MAGA voters to be sure that he's one of them. And as a result of it, this is a crisis. I do believe that politically, most probably he was going to be able in the short term to discipline his base. But this scandal is one of the scandal that is going to. So when they're going to be disappointed by something different, they're going always to come back to abstain. And this is becoming a symbolic issue. I don't believe it's going to split his majority or his base on the short term, but you can see it always in a certain way. The most important for political leaders like this is not to allow anybody to be in this case on the right of them, because if you're not going to be able to discipline your radicals, you're always kind of in trouble. And here it's not simply Obama's story, even the story with the Wall Street Journal and kind of declaring 10 billion after Murdoch and so on. This is very important because he likes the title Trump versus Wall Street Journal. You can even not read the Journal, Trump versus Wall Street. So in a certain way he should try to reconfirm his anti elite credentials, which are going to be really very much kind of a challenge by this. So it's interesting. It's also interesting to what extent basically for the Congress people, they feel that their legitimacy comes from Trump and to they believe that their legitimacy comes from this more radical wing of their own movement.
- [07:39]
Mona Charon
There is a structural problem for Trump because of what Frank and Yvonne have both said. So Frank says that to be a conservative now is to believe in conspiracies. And I think that's obviously true. And you look at the fact that former Democrats like RFK and Tulsi Gabbard are welcome within the tent not because of anything they believe, except that they are conspiracists. And that mindset is now like the definition, almost the definition of maga. Okay, so the conspiracy mindset is in the saddle. And it has, as Ivan says, some very radical voices like Tucker Carlson and others. And for running for office, this is a perfectly great strategy. But now the structural problem is they are in office. And how do you navigate, how do you manage to be. I'm going to reveal all the guy who's going to reveal all the Secrets, throw open the files, et cetera, when you're actually in power and when you genuinely have something to hide, which, you know, it doesn't seem to have occurred to the MAGA faithful until now that the guy they believe above everybody else, you know, if he says there was no Russian interference in the election and 16 intelligence agencies say the opposite, they believe him, etc. They've believed him on every single thing, and they believed him on Epstein. And yet of all the celebrities and major figures in American life, he is the one who was closest to Epstein. Trump was.
- [09:29]
Yasha Munk
We finally found Pizzagate. Frank?
- [09:31]
Francis Fukuyama
Yeah. What I was about to say, it's interesting that the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, is the one that's standing up to him when CBS and ABC have all collapsed and, you know, paid him, you know, millions of dollars in tribute. They obviously were prepared for this lawsuit and the onslaught that he would launch after they published the article about the, you know, the letter that he had sent to Jeffrey Epstein. And they're continuing to. They're obviously sitting on a lot more information and it looks like Murdoch and the editors of the Journal are not going to back down on this. So it's interesting that the one kind of center right publication is the only one that actually has any balls to really stand up to Trump.
- [10:18]
Yasha Munk
I'm not a fan of Rupert Murdoch, but it was very interesting, the Faranos scandal, that he was one of the few people who came off relatively well on it. He was on the board of Faranos and Elizabeth Holmes went to appeal to him when the big investigative story in the Wall Street Journal was percolating to say, you've got to close this down. This is going to affect your investment interests. And Murdoch said, no, I can't do that. I'm going to let them do their job.
- [10:42]
Mona Charon
Yeah, that was probably his finest moment.
- [10:46]
Ivan Krastev
Can I just make one point which very much goes with something that Mona said. The art of being a populist in power is to be in office, but to pretend that you're never in power. This is the most important thing. Even when you're winning elections, even when basically you're appointing all people, it's very important for your own voters to believe that you're in opposition, that somebody else is ruling. Because in a certain way, if you really are in power, what about the idea of the all powerful deep state? What about the idea of all powerful elites? And I do believe this is an interesting type of a story and this is type of a balance that you should do. And here is where Trump should show how powerful he is and at the same time how weak he is. And this is not easy to balance and particularly not easy for Trump. But it's not typical for Trump. I do believe this was. You can see it in places like Poland, where Kaczynski was as if almighty and on the other side claimed nothing basically can be done because other people are running the show.
- [11:53]
Mona Charon
I remembered what I was just going to say about Frank's point, and it's this. Whoever leaked this information to the Wall Street Journal was obviously thinking very carefully about the dynamics of the American press at the moment and recognized that if the Journal went for it, it's a twofer because not only do you get the Journal going after Trump, but you get Fox defanged. Because normally Fox would be the cheering section to say this is all lies. There are the media's after Trump. This is, you shouldn't believe it, you should dismiss it. But they can't do that when they're also owned by Murdoch. So brilliant on the part of the
- [12:39]
Yasha Munk
leaker, I'd say very interesting. It does feel. This is something that a political scientist who studies scandals told me yesterday that we're kind of in the deadly drip, drip, drip phase of a scandal. We're sort of back to traditional scandal. We thought that Trump was beyond traditional scandal, but this feels a little bit like traditional scandal. And we're in the phase of. Of drip, drip, drip. I thought that was a very astute observation by this caller. The thing that I don't know is what is the payoff at the end going to be? I mean, with the scandals, the drip, drip, drip is so damaging because at the end there's an explosion right at the end, it turns out that they really have done the horrible thing. And with Trump, he obviously partied with Epstein in the 1990s. He obviously is somebody who has a complicated lifestyle. But are we going to ever find the piece of evidence that actually is super damaging or not? And probably how this plays out may depend on that. So I don't want to take up a whole conversation with Epstein, but I heard slightly different instincts from you about how damaging this is going to end up being for Trump. I mean, when we look back at his presidency in four years, is this going to be a weird side story, a weird diversion, or is this the moment when the wheels start coming off the car? And I'm just aware of the fact that, you know, both in the first Trump presidency and even in the last six months, we've Already fought the Russia stuff. Firing of Comey, the phone call with Zelenskyy, January 6th, Liberation Day. Right. Like we always think something is going to make the wheels come off a car and the car, for better or probably worse, is so far still going. How impactful is this actually going to be?
- [14:14]
Mona Charon
Well, I would just say that this differs from all those previous examples, Yasha, in that this is a problem from within the House, it's within Trump's own coalition that this is hurting him. And so there is that. And there are two outcomes, both of which, I mean, there are many possible outcomes, but two of them are both quite damaging. I think the first is that there really is a revelation of Trump himself engaging with, say, underage women. That's possible. Or. But I doubt that. I think he was probably just a hanger on and he socialized, didn't mind, obviously knew, didn't mind what Epstein was up to. But the second part of it I think could well be because with all of this pressure to release, release, release all this information, if what happens is they do release everything they can possibly lay their hands on, and by the way, some of it should not be released. But I'm not going to go down that as a matter of legality. But leave that aside for a second. They release everything they possibly can and what do they discover? It's not the vast conspiracy that MAGA has been pining for. It's not that there was this huge child sex ring that involved Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, et cetera, Barack Obama. It was, was just the very evil acts of a few individuals I do
- [15:51]
Ivan Krastev
believe politically on the short term is going to survive. But there are two things that makes it really important that this is a God that is going to come back. If you see all this paranoid imagination, it's very much about our children, this fear of the world to come. And by the way, you can see it in other places. Basically the first anti Western legislation voted in Russia was the Dimayakovlev woe, the ban of Americans for adopting, Russia, Russian orphans and so on. Everything is about the children. So you have basically the world that is threatening our children. So from this point of view, this is scandal that cannot go away. From this point of view, this is like with Monica Lewinsky, it's always coming when basically or politically, it's always coming. But secondly, in my view, it's going to change the way Trump is going to behave. He now really has a strong incentive to radicalize in one way or the other, because he does not want to stay in this abstain scandal for a long time. And this is, in my view, also interesting. Interesting. Not is he going to lose support and gain support, but how this is also going to shape his own strategies, what he believes that he's doing and not doing. And from this point of view, I do believe this is really a kind of a critical moment, but I don't believe this is the moment in which he's going to lose important part of his voting base. It needs much more time and the different type of stories for this to happen.
- [17:19]
Yasha Munk
That's enough, Epstein, for today. I think another thing that's happened this week is that there's an important development in the Trump administration's war on American universities. It looked for the last months as though the administration is really fighting to kill, as though it really has just decided that it wants to damage these institutions like Columbia and Harvard as much as it possibly can with the power of federal government, which is quite a lot. On Wednesday, the Trump administration appears to have reached a settlement with Columbia University in which Columbia will pay a $200 million fine, promise to undertake certain steps, including fight against antisemitism on its campus, including putting the Department of Near Eastern Studies under certain kind of superv by appointing a senior administrator who will have oversight over it and other kinds of steps. And in return, federal funding, particularly from scientific bodies like the NIH and so on, is being restored to the university. How should we think about this? I mean, is this a great victory for the Trump administration that's going to completely cow universities? And obviously, I think there's real sacrifices of academic freedom involved in the settlement that should concern academics? Or is this a relative climb down in which the administration says, our goal is no longer to destroy you. We just want to make you a little bit pliable, and then you're allowed to get on with your job. How should we interpret what just happened there?
- [18:55]
Francis Fukuyama
You know, there was a report issued by the conservative Manhattan Institute talking about this, and I think that it kind of revealed the long term plans because they made a lot of, you know, reasonable critiques about anti Semitism and the lax, you know, enforcement of academic freedom by universities, which most people could agree with. But then the solution wasn't an institutional one. I mean, it wasn't, you know, there ought to be some oversight board that, you know, looks at the behavior of universities and the way they guard academic freedom. It was that the federal government, you know, ought to centralize authority over things like curriculum and basically put it in the hands of one person, meaning the president. And I think that it kind of indicates the direction of their thinking that they really do want not just this temporary victory over Columbia, but they want to be able to dictate to all universities what it is they can do in terms of hiring, in terms of academic speech and the like. And so I think that this is just the beginning of a much longer, much longer struggle.
- [20:12]
Yasha Munk
Ivan, you've seen, you know, in Central Europe, Central European University jumped out of Hungary through pressure from the Hungarian state. Relocate to Vienna where you live part of the time. Is this the beginning of something like that? How concerned are you for American universities?
- [20:27]
Ivan Krastev
You know, there are many reasons to be concerned for American universities, but in my view, I see a logic which is not so different than the trade wars where Colombia is in the position of the United Kingdom, where you are making a kind of a fuss deal in order to make a pressure on other universities. And also it's quite important to see how the students and professors are going basically to buy this deal, to what extent this is going to affect the internal dynamics. And this is from this point of view, interesting because you have all these young people and young people, more than anybody else, wants to be heroic. And you can see how difficult for the American universities to be heroic and to defend and to basically try to mobilize. And also the way the administration is using the anti discrimination language, which was very much basically the language that was used against them. I'm saying this because the difference with the CEO and others was that CE was removed legally on a very kind of a technical grounds. He wants to kill the university. You go on the legal language. I do believe here you are part of a much bigger cultural worldwide goes beyond one university. And in my view the most important to know has he won or not, is try to see how the other universities are going to behave, how this is going to affect the strategies of the other big universities, Harvard, but not only Harvard.
- [21:53]
Mona Charon
So there's a number of layers to this that disturb me. First of all, I do not believe the administration. I don't take that as acting in good faith when they say they are worried about anti Semitism. And I do think the universities are vulnerable on that matter and they deserve a slap on the wrist about the way they handled the aftermath of October 7, et cetera and many other things. But this is an administration that has surrounded itself with some quite vicious anti Semites. And Trump himself has dined with Fuentes and ye at Mar a Lago. So that's a fig leaf. That's a way of a weapon to bludgeon universities for other reasons. And they regard universities, many of the people like Russ Vogt and the other sort of semi intellectuals in the administration, they regard the universities, which tend to be on the left side of the spectrum, as the enemy. And they do want to destroy them. So that's the anti Semitism piece. But the fact, the way this has unfolded is really disturbing because what the administration is doing is counter to so many laws and traditions in this country. So the idea, you know, universities get so much of their funding through contracts with the federal government, okay? And the contracts are between the NIH and the, you know, Department of Biology or whatever, you know, I'm simplifying. But contracts are legal documents. The federal government cannot, just as any other entity that enters into a binding contract cannot just abrogate it for no reason. In the normal course of things, the response of the university should have been to sue and say, you can't abrogate these. We've abided by our side. You can't just do this to put pressure on us on other matters. It's not legitimate and they have not done that. This university certainly has not chosen to do that, not chosen to sue, which I don't really understand. There are certain limited situations in which the government can assert through sovereignty that it doesn't have to fulfill a contract. But that's usually in matters that are very, very narrow. So, so the federal government here is being lawless by attempting to abrogate a contract for no good reason. And the universities, cowed, are saying, okay, what can we do to placate you? And I'm not sure whether it is pressure from alumni, from donors. I'm not sure why they are so timid. But the fact is the administration is asserting power here that, that it does not have.
- [25:05]
Francis Fukuyama
It's basically extortion, right? I mean, you extort something from a business by threatening an innocent person that matters to the business owner, and you say, I'm going to shoot this person if you don't, you know, pay me a certain amount of money. And that's what they're doing. They're holding, you know, the medical research at Columbia and Harvard hostage, and they're going to shoot that hostage if the universities don't pay up. And so, yeah, it's completely illegal. And it is very mysterious why they're not trying to fight this thing out in the courts.
- [25:35]
Yasha Munk
One of the things I've heard from friends in the sciences is sort of, you know, we are just trying to do the scientific research. And we're being punished for the crazies over in the Department of fill the blank. And of course, the reason for that is what the administration has power over. The administration would love to continue funding some of that scientific research for. Obviously, there's anti scientific voices in Washington as well and close down the Department of Comparative Literature, but the Department of Comparative Literature doesn't get federal funding. And so the leverage that the administration has is over things like the sciences, which is sort of a paradoxical element of this situation. There's a real debate among academics, and I've seen a few iterations of this in a very lively way at lunches and dinners over the last weeks between people who are saying universities are under attack from the Trump administration in a deeply illiberal way. Whatever concerns they claim to have about free speech and anti Semitism are clearly hypocritical. Even if there are some genuine problems at universities, our task is just to defend the university and we shouldn't air our dirty laundry in public. We shouldn't be upfront about some of the things that are actually wrong on campuses. Other people would say no. The reason why the university has become so vulnerable to attack is that there are real short shortcomings. And unless we use this opportunity to fix and reform them, we are going to continue bleeding and eroding the support from the American public. Is there a way of walking and chewing gum at the same time here? Is there a way for universities to use this moment to address the genuine shortcomings on campus and also resist Trump on the obvious overreach of the administration? Or do universities have to choose between circling the wagon and surrendering to Trump?
- [27:19]
Francis Fukuyama
No, I mean, I think they obviously can walk and chew gum at the same time. I mean, there has to be a recognition on the part of, you know, progressives that the excesses that they were supporting at a certain point really was one of the reasons why you've got this ferocious right wing reaction. But you can also say that these are not comparable threats, that the threat of cancel culture and identity politics and so forth is a genuine threat to academic freedom. But right now, the big threat is putting the power of the state behind an attempt to control academic speech. But, yeah, I think you can make both of those points simultaneously.
- [28:05]
Mona Charon
I would just phrase it in terms of the immediate threat and the medium term threat. The immediate threat is this attack by the Trump administration, but the intermediate term threat is the very radicalism that has come to dominate these campuses with which they have not. The left has not Grappled. And it does, I mean, just, it does bother me that for the last 10 years, people who were Republicans in their earlier lives are constantly fielding the accusation of, you, you created this, you created Trump. It's entirely your fault for ever having thought that rent control was a problem or that the schools are a public sector monopoly that doesn't work well, et cetera. And the fact is the left needs to look in the mirror too, about itself and say, what had we done that caused a backlash of this ferocity? And some of that is the kinds of things that happen on campuses.
- [29:14]
Ivan Krastev
Yeah, I want to agree very much because in my view, part of this strategy of attacking universities to try to defend everything that Trump is attacking, and in my view, this is the most wrong strategies of everything. And talking to some colleagues in American universities, they're going to say it works so well because even many people on the liberal side did not really believe some of the things that have been running in the universities for a long time. And from this point of view, going and trying and saying we're changing it, but not because Trump is doing this and that, but because we're in a way, in a period in which all positions are going to be redefined because Trump basically totally reinvented the Republican position in the United States is going to be about reinvention of everybody else. And I believe this is an important question. And from this point, if you're staying on a defensive, he's going to push more and more to defend certain things that nobody wants to defend but everybody feels obliged to defend because he's attacking it. And as a result of it, you're allowing him to shape the agenda. And in my view, this is the most important.
- [30:24]
Yasha Munk
So I agree with all of you. I mean, just to motivate my question, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, spoke at the Heterodox Academy recently and took strongly the other position. He said, you know, your complaints at the heterodox conferences for almost 10 years now about being too woke, about not having enough to jobs for white people, about too many women in the academy, too many women in the academy. I don't think NBA, the Heterodox conference has complained about that, have found resonance with an authoritarian push to control our spaces. We can make nice and not say that and we won't get investigated or we can do our job, which is to call the indecent attack on our sector. Indecent, wrong headed, lawless, authoritarian, fascistic. Choose your own words. But if you sit there and worry about the Sociology Department and whether Eastern studies is really anti Semitic, I think you're doing the work of authoritarian. So I think that's interesting and telling because on university campuses, the swing constituency that's often decisive is the center left liberals. And I think under the Biden administration, you could gain the cooperation of center left liberals for pushing back against some of the obvious excesses of the previous years to a limited extent on things, for example, like getting rid of mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring, which as we know from lots of documents were really just used as an ideological litmus test where if you're not sounding like a critical race theorist, you're ruled right out of contention from the very get go. And I worry that now that Trump is attacking the universities in ways that really are deeply concerning, as all of you have also said, the deep instinct is going to be to sound exactly like Michael Roth. But a lot of those center left faculty are going to say, even though we privately have some concerns about what's going on in some of the departments at our university and what some scholars are doing and perhaps are not doing rigorous research, and they really have just become ideological activists, we have to circle the wagon and shut up. And so I'm worried that universities aren't going to do the work of self reform precisely because of the attacks from Donald Trump.
- [32:17]
Mona Charon
Yasha, that is an across the board challenge. It comes up in so many other contexts as well. For example, I was just having a conversation with somebody about Mamdani, the candidate for mayor of New York. Some of us find some of his statements really problematic. We have criticized him. But when you find that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene are accusing him of wanting to impose Sharia law and that some of the crazier voices in MAGA are saying absolutely absurd and hysterical things, there's a problem where you find yourself feeling not wanting to be associated with that kind of rhetoric. And so you almost want to defend Mountani, whereas he does deserve criticism, you know, and that, and it happens again and again on the issue of trans rights, you know, you think, well, there really is a middle position here that's cautious about how we handle children, but that respects absolutely, you know, adults. And you find the people on the right are saying very hateful and damaging things and suddenly it makes it so much harder, but no less necessary, I would say, to make those critical distinctions and not to have the Roth reaction of we just have to circle the wagons.
- [33:44]
Francis Fukuyama
If I could make a prediction about the future. Always dangerous. But I do think that the total effect of the Trump administration is going to push the Democratic Party to the left and it's going to further entrench its progressive wing for exactly these sorts of reasons. And I think that you could have a Jeremy Corbyn kind of outcome where the first attempt to counter the Trump administration in 2028 is a yet more radical person on the left who's going to go down in flames. And so you have another four years of a conservative Republican administration. And, you know, I mean, I personally would like to see the Democratic Party move to the center, kind of stout defensive liberalism position. But I'm afraid that, you know, it's not going to happen.
- [34:37]
Yasha Munk
And this is why I fear that the reports of the death of Wokeness are much exaggerated or at least much premature. But we will keep tracking this on the podcast. Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, a bunch of people who have never been seriously interested in defending the sovereignty of Ukraine, a bunch of people who were really just making excuses for Russia's terrible illegal invasion of Ukraine, have claimed that Vladimir Zelensky is really just a dictator. And by and large, I think that has been just empty, inconvenient rhetoric in not very savory ideological, ideological course. There are now protests in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities against some of Zelenskyy's recent decisions, including, as I understand it, a move to suppress the corruption watchdog that is quite important in Ukraine. And a number of people inside the country who obviously care about their country's sovereignty and autonomy, who are very much on the side of fighting off a Russian invasion and are voicing concerns that Zelenskyy at this stage has started to consolidate power in ways that are concerning. What are we to make of these developments and of those protests? How concerned should we be about Zelenskyy's recent decisions and how is that going to affect the country's ability, under increasing desperate circumstances, to defend itself against the Russian onslaught.
- [36:08]
Ivan Krastev
Listen, this is very much a continuation of the previous discussion because the story is when your country in a war, how openly you should talk about your concerns about corruption, the fear that basically anything that you can say can be utilized and weaponized by your critics. And from this point of view, what has happened is for sure there is corruption and war, and corruptions rhyme easily anywhere. So there is nothing specific about this. This is the moment in which people are doing incredibly unimaginable, heroic stuff. And it's also also other people doing other things, trying to buy themselves out and trying to make money, and nothing particularly about Ukraine. What we are seeing now was something Different. And this is that because of the very difficult situation on the battlefield, because of the fact that Zelensky administration understand that there is a kind of a growing disappointment that they're going to press to make an unpopular decision. There was the instinct that they should consolidate power. And it went is the attack on these anti corruption bodies. And to be honest, they made a mistake because three things happened. And there is a development from the last 48 hours. Factually what happened was that President Zelensky much more the head of the administration, Mr. Yermak started attack on the two independent anti corruption agencies. Some people have been arrested. Those new legislation was being voted and on the same day signed by the president which put them under the control of the general prosecutor who is appointed by the president. But then suddenly you have thousand people on the streets, not only Kyiv, but some big cities. And listen, this is not simply citizens. Some of them were citizen soldiers. And secondly, you have very strong reactions from European Union particularly. And both Merz and Macron talked to basically Zelenskyy. And what I hear from Kiev is that basically Zelensky, Zelensky is going to withdraw this legislation and he's going to come with a new kind of legislation that is going to keep the independence of this anti corruption bodies. And this is difficult because it poses a question which is very, very important. There is a lot of kind of anti corruption move as you can imagine also on the Russian side where they basically change half of their ministry of Defense and general stuff because of the corruption accusation. But you're never going to have people on the street in Russia who are protesting corruption and the story of competitiveness and the weaknesses of democracies in a time of a war, and particularly when the war does not go well. This is an important issue. I do believe that Zelenskyy got the message and also he understood that probably the Trump tolerance and total uninteresting corruption is going to be shared by the Europeans on this because this was his idea. Anti corruption was the Biden stuff. Now I'm going basically to move beyond it. It's not the case. And this is a good news. This is a good news for Ukraine because in my view democracy, you understand, is it there or not there? When you understand what cannot happen? In a certain way we know where the line is and in a certain way there was a line and this line was not crossed. And they are going to be revision of this kind of a legislation.
- [39:33]
Francis Fukuyama
Yeah, I think that they've probably Zelensky has pulled back on this because of the foreign pressure. And so that's good. It would have been incredibly damaging if he had really tried to dismantle these anti corruption bodies. But this has been brewing for a long time. A lot of my Ukrainian friends have said that Zelenskyy's problem is for all that he's been a leader of a democratic country, he doesn't understand institutions, that it's been a matter of personal power ever since the beginning of the full scale war. He has no longer term plans for if there is a ceasefire, if the war winds down. How do you make a transition back to regular institutional rule? How do you recreate political parties that actually have some independence and can actually have a debate over policies? All of this has been suspended and I think it's going to continue to be a problem in Ukraine because they are going to have to unwind this power centralization at some point. And I think it's very worrisome that if I were Ukrainian I'd be out in the streets demonstrating as well. But this is really a bad look for the country. I think the demonstrations at some point could actually spiral into something bigger because there's a lot of unhappiness, there's obviously tremendous war weariness in that country. So it's a very critical moment.
- [41:08]
Yasha Munk
And part of the concern is that if it's the foreign pressure that has made Zelenskyy desist, and the foreign pressure of course, is so effective in part because Ukraine needs help from abroad in order to survive, that kind of pressure may not be available once a peace comes.
- [41:22]
Mona Charon
What are. What makes me grieve about this story is that I am seeing all of these Ukrainians in the midst of a war, taking to the streets on a matter that is important for a democracy, for a republic. That is corruption. It is not a kitchen table issue. It isn't the price of eggs, et cetera, it's the nature of their system. And they care enough to show their displeasure by taking to the streets. And in our country, we are witnessing the most florid corruption that we have seen in a very long time. We have seen our president accepting an airplane from Qatar, floating a meme coin. You know, the level of personal enrichment and corruption that is now being shrugged off by the American people is shocking. And it seems that somehow that impulse or that antibody has been disabled. In America, we're not that concerned about corruption and that's a deeply dismaying thing.
- [42:49]
Yasha Munk
What is the stage of the war in Ukraine? Obviously I get reports that the situation on the battlefield, as one Peter said is pretty challenging and dire for Ukraine at the moment. Europeans are doing what they can, or at least claim to be doing what they can to support Ukraine. The United States has zigzagged and gone back and forth in really odd ways for the last months. Obviously, Trump has not historically been in any way sympathetic to Ukraine and Zelenskyy. And those were really the unseemly spectacle of his dressing down of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. At the same time, it seems as though Trump has had a little bit of a falling out with Putin, as though he had perhaps naively expected that Putin really did want peace and really would strike some kind of peace deal on favorable terms. And even after offering Putin very favorable terms, Putin has not bitten. And it seems, at least right now, as though Trump actually has gotten angry about that and started some forms of support for Ukraine again. Is there any prospect for this horrible war ending on terms that are in anyway fair to Ukraine? What's the end game here?
- [43:53]
Ivan Krastev
We don't know what's the end game, but we know one thing, that Russia started a major offensive believing that they can break the Ukrainian defense. The problem is, do they have resources for another offensive? It's not going to work now. And in a strange way, even these 50 days that Trump was saying, I'm waiting to see this, and that is trying to see basically what they can get and what they can lose. And this is going to be, of course, very difficult situation because what has disappeared is the idea of the Ukrainian victory. But on the other side, the Russian victory also does not look in the way probably President Putin is seeing it. So this autumn is going to be critically important. And it is going to be critically important because on the long term, President Putin is going to have a much more structural kind of constraints to go with this kind of a mad story. There is a demographic issues, the economic issues and other. But what Frank said is totally true. Ukrainians are extremely exhausted. Listen, we are strange people. When the war started, people say Ukraine is not going to stay for two weeks. And then after they showed their resistance, we believe that nothing can change them, nothing can break their will to stay. They're normal people who defending their countries, they felt betrayed by everybody. Europeans, of course, are doing certain things, they're not doing others. But also what Ukrainians starts to believe that, that most of the European support is much more against Russia than particularly for Ukraine. And this is an issue. And I do believe that we are going to have certain things at the end of the autumn for President Trump, the Biggest surprise was he believes that for the Russians, the most important is the relations with him. And then suddenly he realized that for Putin, Ukraine is much more important than Trump. And for somebody like Trump to understand that something is more important than him, of course, is making him very much unhappy. But this is the reality. And I do believe that all these kind of expectations that you're going to have a major deal with the Russians and saying, let's talk about Arctic, let's talk about this and stop fighting is not going to work. There is one thing on which, to be honest, Trump helped and it helped now the Ukraine and the west to be the peace party. So now the idea that basically Ukrainians wants to fight and the Russians want peace, even the pro Russian kind of circles in Europe at least cannot stay this anymore. It's quite obvious that basically this is. It started as a Putin's war, it continues as a Putin's war.
- [46:35]
Mona Charon
Well, it's a fact of the times in which we live that the fate of Ukraine rests upon the moods and whims of an unstable 13 year old boy who can be flattered and who can be deceived easily. And so that is the depressing part. The less depressing part, I suppose you could say, is that Putin's naked aggression has awakened the Europeans and that in a way that I think none of us quite saw before, that they really are getting serious. I was just looking at a piece in the Financial Times showing that they are filling in many of the gaps of funding for weapons that the US Paused or whatever. So. So I'm not saying that they are perfect, not saying that the US can even be replaced, but just that the strengthening of European resolve is a good thing. But not sure where this will all lead.
- [47:58]
Yasha Munk
We started with Trump, and I suppose it's a sign of the times that we'll have to end with Trump on the last segment as well. One of the big stories over the last few weeks is Trump's attempt to really undermine the independence of various agencies that have historically had some amount of separation from the will of the president. The Supreme Court this week allowed the administration to fire the three members of the consumer protection board that had been appointed by Democrats. And so this is a way of turning potentially agencies that were supposed to have a kind of balanced, bipartisan composition into much more partisan bodies. The other dog that has barked very loudly, but not quite bitten yet, to bowderize that metaphor, is the independence of the Fed. You know, it's been clear for a very long time that Trump is hoping Hoping to remove Jerome Powell as the chair of the Fed, he appears to have waved in front of Republican legislators some letter that would demand his resignation. So far, Powell continues to be the chair of the Fed. How worried should we be about attacks on the independence of the Fed, in particular when it comes to things like the value of a dollar and America's ability to borrow in international markets? And how it should be more broader about these attempts by the White House to really turn every aspect of the administrative state into a kind of executioner of what the. How many years did he give Mona, the 13 year old child or the 7 year old child in the White House wants. Frank, why don't we start with you?
- [49:38]
Francis Fukuyama
Well, there's two different issues. So there's a short term issue with the Fed and then there's a broader term issue about the unitary executive and Trump's control over the whole of the the US Government. So in terms of the Fed, I think that what Trump has been demanding shows you exactly why you need an independent central bank. Of all of the times in recent economic history, this is absolutely the worst time to have a Fed chair that will do what Trump wants, which is to lower interest rates because we have inflation that is creeping up, we have a lot of economic uncertainty, but meanwhile the country is doing pretty well. The economy continues to grow and we don't need to lower interest rates in order to. I mean, he obviously wants to juice growth up a little bit, but it's going to have disastrous inflationary consequences if interest rates are lower. But there's a bigger problem that has not been broadly recognized. Trump has been dismantling all of the multi member commissions in turn, the eeoc, the fec, there's a whole bunch of other commissions other than the Fed that have been traditionally run by boards where there's a balanced partisan representation on a kind of rolling basis. That ability or that system was supported by a 1930s Supreme Court decision called Humphrey's Executor. A lot of conservatives, including the conservatives on the current Supreme Court, have been gunning for this for a long time. It's not a surprise that they are supporting Trump's effort to be able to fire individual commissioners on these commissions. The one thing that they haven't touched is the, is the Fed because they know that politically that's really, you know, that's like touching a hot stove. And politically that's going to be very damaging. And so, you know, they've procedurally allowed Trump to go ahead, but they put off, you know, simply overturning Humphrey's executor, but that's going to come in the next year. However, there's a bigger issue that has not gotten any coverage, which is in addition to these very high level policy positions, the Trump administration has wanted to basically have put everybody in the federal government on at will employment on an at will employment basis, meaning that all million members of the federal civil service could be replaced by a political appointee. Now, the United States before Trump, Trump had about 4 to 5,000 so called schedule Cs. These were political appointees that are put in positions. I was a Schedule C when I was in the State Department. So 4,000, 5,000 is about 3,900 more than in any other parliamentary democracy where you have a permanent bureaucracy. You don't have this kind of political control reaching into lower levels.
- [52:59]
Yasha Munk
The striking thing in the United Kingdom, Frank Soy, just to illustrate this point, is that I believe even senior cabinet ministers, senior ministers of the British government get to appoint basically two people, two spat special assistants, one of whom does policy and one of whom does media, and that's it. Other than that, they have to rely on a nonpartisan civil service in the United States. As you're saying, for a long time we've had this tradition of thousands of political appointees which is really quite unusual compared to other democracies.
- [53:26]
Francis Fukuyama
Now it's going to be hundreds of thousands. And I think that, you know, the big. So this is the situation that existed during the patronage era in the 19th century and it was walked back by passage of the pendleton act in 1883 that established the principle of a merit based bureaucracy. I mean, every other modern country in the world has a merit based bureaucracy. It's almost the definition of being a modern country. We only got to this by the 1880s and even so, we didn't fully apply this merit principle. And so this is a fundamental attack on the basic idea that you ought to have qualifications in order to serve in the US Government. Before the Pendleton act, every postmaster in the United States would turn over if there was an election and the other party. And I think this is one of the big motives for the Republicans wanting to. They've actually created. It used to be Schedule F, there's now a new Schedule G that would basically put everybody at risk. And I think they want to have employment for their loyalists. All the MAGA people that really don't have the qualification to run anything from a post office on up can be given jobs under this situation. And so you're going to return to the this total politicization of the entire federal bureaucracy, patronage, huge opportunities for overt corruption. So I agree with Mona that it's kind of depressing that the high level corruption has really not produced much blowback. But you're going to have corruption from the top of the federal government to the bottom if they continue down this road.
- [55:15]
Yasha Munk
I didn't think that it was possible to make my local branch of the USPS less efficient than it is, but I guess having it run for five years by some mugger person and then for five years by some super woke person designed by the Democrats, that's going to do the trick. It'll somehow get even worse.
- [55:29]
Mona Charon
Yeah, I completely agree with what Frank said and I think it's one of the longer term dangers of what Trump and populism are doing because they don't recognize that the strength of this country is that it's very solid, firm institutions, the rule of law, the expectation that the Fed, for example, will be independent. You can trust putting your money here. You can trust lending us money, which we borrow a lot, and you can trust building a factory here and so on, because the laws and rules aren't going to change the next day. All of these things have to go through procedures and those things are solid. And what this crowd is attempting to do is to undermine all of that, to make it all subject to the whims of those in power, which will make us much less like a first world country and more like Argentina and other places, places that have not done well. Leaving aside what Melee is doing now,
- [56:41]
Yasha Munk
which apparently is okay, listen, in my
- [56:44]
Ivan Krastev
view it even goes deeper. I don't believe that President Trump believes that they are neutral institutions or independent institutions. You are either with us or against us. And from this point of view, this is a classical Schmidtian understanding of politics. And in the Schmittian world there is not much for Max Weber and his idea of bureaucracy. The real issue is that even if this is over, the independence of the institutions is not easy to be restored. You're seeing this in the case of Poland and others. It takes time when the party loyalty is overtaken by the loyalty of the institutions to which you start to work in a certain way. You are not born kind of person who is going to be serving in the independent institutions. This is a type of socialization and so on that can be brought. So as a result of it, the moment you're politicizing as much the administration as you do is that after Republican state, you're going to have a democratic state and you're going to change and you're always going to have two administrations which are just you changing everybody. In Greece, the story was that when you change the prime minister in 1970s, you're changing also all the cleaning ladies in the government. And I do believe this is the story and this is the long term effect of polarization and this is something that comes naturally to populist leaders here. Trump is not in a group of his own. This is the general logic of this understanding of politics.
- [58:13]
Francis Fukuyama
Just a little history lesson. The Pendleton act had actually been introduced by George Pendleton several years before its passage. It was only passed because President James A. Garfield was assassinated by would be office seeker who was mad that he didn't get the position as a Consul General to France. And so he killed the President. And that was what finally shamed Congress into voting for this act. That created a merit based bureaucracy. And even then it took another 40 years to get the number of political appointees down to 4,000.
- [58:55]
Mona Charon
I was just going to mention the office seeker problem. And by the way, there's just an amazing book about Garfield's assassination. The poor man lingered for a month with the bullet inside his body. And had it not been for the incompetent interventions of his physicians who kept putting their filthy fingers inside his body attempting to extract the bullet, he probably would have been able to survive. But they gave him sepsis and he died.
- [59:25]
Yasha Munk
Oh my God. Thank you for this lovely story. Even I think you're describing, I think even what you're describing is a kind of post populist dilemma, right? You have populists who are in office and degrade the institutions and norms of the system. And then you have new people come in. And one problem, as you're saying, is socialization that just everybody in the state has gotten used to the idea that they're spoiling. They've gotten used to say the supporters of the other side got to be consul in France. Why am I not getting to be consul in France? The other problem that you're seeing very clearly in a place like Poland is how do you restore the rules without breaking the rules? If people have been appointed in illegal ways, how do you fire them without yourself breaking the rules? How is that going to play out? Let's dream for a moment and say in 2028, Trump loses a Democratic election to a good, sensible, energetic, reasonable Democratic candidate. Are we going to be far enough down this path that America is going to face this post populist dilemma? And what advice can we give that candidate? What do you do in that situation,
- [60:45]
Ivan Krastev
listen, it's very difficult because you are going to need some job seeker to do something bad here or there because in a certain way you should try to see the result of this total politicization. But it's very difficult. If you see a party loyalist put in a position, be in the Federal Reserves or in other positions when the other party comes to power, they know that they cannot trust on their cooperation. They're seeing them simply as the soldiers of the other party, which is the case of Poland, which Tusk is seeing. And then you either try to basically change the institution or you're trying to create other and as a result of it you're going to appoint other people. But even if you're kind of a noble minded, the story is to what extent anybody else is going to see them as an independent players. So for me this is the very destruction of the idea of the possibility for independent or neutral institutions which is so important for any liberal society that have been destroyed. And I'm saying from this point of view, America is no different than many other places and it's going to take time when you see what they're going to do it. Unfortunately, I do believe that before seeing the excesses of this, before seeing a doctor who is competent to the idea that basically is going to kill his patient, when you try to understand that in a strange way you should go back to a different type of selection of be it public servants being basically people whom you're putting on high position. And here the strengths of the professional communities are incredible. They're very important because this peer pressure when it comes to judges and so on, whom you're going to put on the Supreme Court and so on are very important. And if this is going to disappear, it's going to take even a longer time.
- [62:32]
Mona Charon
It's a tough, tough thing. It's so much easier to destroy than to build. And we will face this I think right away. Just for example, if Kash Patel is still director of the FBI in 2028 in the the FBI director is supposed to serve for 10 years. Trump destroyed that norm. Is an incoming president going to uphold the norm by firing Kash Patel or not? I mean, it's actually quite tricky. But in the end I guess I feel the need since I've said so many grim things, to say at least something somewhat hopeful. In the post Watergate era in this country, we did see a public appetite for reform and we saw serious people undertake to try to prevent anything like Watergate from happening again. And so there are moments when the public is receptive.
- [63:39]
Yasha Munk
Let's end on a hopeful note. I'm not sure how many we're going to get. Ivan Frank Moner, thank you so, so, so much for your insights and for being our guinea pigs. Hopefully you all had fun. I had a lot of fun. So perhaps we can do it again. Hopefully, dear listeners, you all had fun. Thank you everybody.
- [63:56]
Francis Fukuyama
Thank you. Yasha.
- [63:57]
Ivan Krastev
Thank you, Yasha.
- [63:58]
Mona Charon
Thank you.
- [64:03]
Yasha Munk
Well, I have to say that was the most fun hour I've had this week. I hope it was not the most fun hour you've had, but a fun hour for you as well. It was kind of an experiment. And as long as lots of you all also listen to this episode, I think we're going to try to make this a regular feature. Today's episode is free for all listeners to the Good Fight in its entirety. In future episodes, we may put a segment behind the paywall or perhaps sometimes have whole episodes that are not available to everybody. So if you want to make sure that you get access to these more regular panel shows, which will be starting in force in early September, I think please become a paying subscriber. Please support us. Please go to yashamung.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [65:24]
Mona Charon
this recording carries a
- [65:25]
Francis Fukuyama
Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.