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- [00:00]
Jonathan Rauch
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- [01:27]
Jonathan Rauch
Acast powers the world's Best Podcasts here's the show that we rec
- [01:35]
Charlie Sykes
hey, it's Christy.
- [01:36]
Farnoosh Tarabi
And I'm Kelly.
- [01:37]
Charlie Sykes
You might remember us as the OG
- [01:38]
Farnoosh Tarabi
Partners in Crime from Dance Moms.
- [01:41]
Charlie Sykes
Well, this is Back to the Bar, the podcast where we drag out every
- [01:44]
Jonathan Rauch
insane, chaotic and iconic moment from the show.
- [01:47]
Charlie Sykes
We're spilling the tea, calling out all the BS and sharing stuff you definitely
- [01:52]
Jonathan Rauch
didn't see on tv.
- [01:53]
Charlie Sykes
New episodes drop every week and yes,
- [01:55]
Jonathan Rauch
we're laughing through the trauma for once.
- [01:59]
Charlie Sykes
Follow Grab a drink and join us
- [02:01]
Jonathan Rauch
as we go back to the bar. ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com
- [02:14]
Charlie Sykes
welcome back to to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. Some numbers we are in day 29 of the war with Iran, the stock market officially entered correction territory. Last week, Forbes ran the number and concluded that Donald Trump has added $1.3 to his net worth in the last year by leveraging the presidency for profit. You probably saw the story that Donald Trump is going to be putting his name on US Dollars, which seems like you know that he was going to do all of that. And today is also kind of an anniversary. We'll talk about that. And joining me on Our weekend podcast, our good friend Jonathan Rauch, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributor to the Atlantic and other publications. Being a journalist of, you know, many, many, many different sources. Jonathan, welcome back on the podcast.
- [03:09]
Jonathan Rauch
Always glad to see you.
- [03:11]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, I want to start off by doing something a little bit different. I wasn't going to spend much time on this, but the more I think about it is sometimes anniversaries are good times to look back and reassess things. And today is March 28, 2026. Ten years ago today was the first and only time I think that I ever spoke to Donald Trump. He called into my radio show. I was head of Conservative Radio show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was March 28, 2016. I had made no secret of the fact that I was never Trump. In fact, for six months, I've been pounding and pounding and pounding away. And in fact, Donald Trump was very unpopular in Wisconsin. He would go on to lose the Wisconsin primary to Ted Cruz. And so my producer calls me up and says, donald Trump wants to come on your radio show. And I thought, really, if he did 10 seconds worth of Googling, he would figure out that I'm never Trump and all the things that I've said about him. So I sat down at 8:30 that morning, as I did every morning, and frankly, I didn't know whether he was gonna call in. I think it was, thought it was maybe 60, 40 that he wouldn't, that, you know, why would he call into my show? So I sit down and it was only until the light went on that I realized that Donald Trump was on the line. And so we had a conversation that lasted for 17 minutes. I think you could describe it as somewhat contentious, but it was kind of a. I mean, it was kind of a milestone for me. And if I could just play. Jonathan, just a little, little excerpt starting about this is like 30 seconds into the conversation. I started off being really nice, very Wisconsin nice, congratulated him on the birth of a grandchild, which had taken place on Easter, on Easter Sunday. But then at the 33 second mark, we got into this. Let's possibly make some news. I mean, last week you tweeted out a threat to spill the beans on the wife of Ted Cruz, Heidi Cruz. You follow that up by tweeting out a picture that insulted her looks. You know, wouldn't it be a good way to start off your Wisconsin campaign by saying that wives should be off limits and that you apologize for mocking her looks?
- [05:21]
Donald Trump
Well, by the way, I think it's true, actually, Charlie. But, you know, if you remember, Melania was my wife, was a very, very big, successful model and she did a shoot, a cover shoot for GQ magazine. And it was, you know, a little provocative. It was gq, but then she was a model. But what they did is. And Ted Cruz knew totally about it. And he says he didn't know about it. He totally knew about it. And they sent that out to the people of Salt Lake City or the people of Utah, and it was, you know, with a very nasty statement on it. So he knew totally about that. If he didn't know about that, it would be a whole different thing. But he totally knew about it. It was done by people that he knows very well.
- [06:00]
Charlie Sykes
Well, it was. It was not Ted Cruz or his campaign. So is your standard is.
- [06:04]
Donald Trump
No, no, I'm just telling you, he knew. He knew.
- [06:07]
Charlie Sykes
So is this your standard, that if a supporter of another candidate, not the candidate himself, does something despicable, that it's okay for you personally, a candidate for President of the United States, and to behave in that same way? I mean, I expect that from a 12 year old bully on the playground, not somebody who wants the office help by Abraham Lincoln.
- [06:24]
Donald Trump
I did a retweet and it was a retweet by somebody else because I have a lot of support, a tremendous amount of very fervent supporters. And they were angry about what they did.
- [06:34]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, what they did. So, Jonathan, it went on from there. We talked about tariffs and actually I was trying to have him make sense of his tariff thing. And 10 years later, we still haven't done that. So, you know, I'm reflecting on the fact that back then, honestly, if you would have told me that we would still be talking about this guy 10 years later, I just, I couldn't believe it. I mean, I, I think I was naive enough to believe that the, the, the center would somehow hold and it was getting late in the process. But I really did think that, that maybe that, you know, this cup would pass from us and here. And here we are ten years later, and how the world has changed. I mean, how my life has changed, how journalism has changed, how the entire political culture of the country has changed in a way that frankly, I never would have expected. When I was talking with him 10 years ago today.
- [07:29]
Jonathan Rauch
If you had told me that the Republican Party, the party of Reagan, the party of George H.W. bush, the party, of course, of Eisenhower, would swing in unison ultimately behind this guy, I would have said you were completely nuts. It is a fascinating clip Though, Charlie, isn't it? Because it presages so much of what we've seen since. The no apology style, the strange rambling discourse.
- [07:55]
Charlie Sykes
Personal insults.
- [07:57]
Jonathan Rauch
Yeah, the personal insults. But. But also, I think it's. It's more strange as it is, more coherent and more cognitively. Okay. Than what we're seeing recently. I mean, I listened to that voice, and 10 years later, I think the guy's falling apart. Do you hear that? That difference?
- [08:25]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. No. It's interesting. Later On, I said, Mr. Trump, do you know what I have said about you? I mean, that I'm never Trump? And he said, no, I didn't know that. So frankly, at the time, in real time, I thought he was kind of being a good sport about it. But he. Yes. I mean, you have all of the traits that I think have developed. There's nothing about Donald Trump that we did not really know in 2015, 2016. But to your point, yes. You compare just his locution to what's happening now and yesterday. And we've gotten numb to this, I think, unfortunately. And I wrote my newsletter about this on Friday. The jibberfest of his Cabinet meeting. I mean, the usual North Korean style, you know, toe sucking and glazing and all of that, the whining, the usual stuff. And then there's just Donald Trump and the fact that this is the first Cabinet meeting since he launched the war with Iran. And he was off on these weird, weird, blathering rants about the cost of Sharpies. He talked about the cost of Sharpies for five minutes and his beautiful ballroom and his arc and about the various, you know, just his design of the Kennedy center and on and on and on. And quite frankly, we've gotten. We have been so numb by this that nobody's really willing to say, by the way, if you look at that transcript, these Cabinet meetings are insane. I mean, I'm not a doctor about dementia, but there's a level of crazy, not normalcy in Donald Trump's behavior, his decision making, and the way he talks that really is remarkable.
- [10:11]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, I'm working on an article at the moment with. I won't get into too many details because we're still an editorial process, but an article with a collaborator who worked for three Republican presidents in different parts of administrations. And we want to kind of denum people to what's happening right now by. By saying that. To describe Trump himself as a little bit crazy, incoherent, irrational. These qualities are true. But in the second term, they have projected downward and outward to the Administration as a whole. So we're seeing, we're arguing what amounts to a psychotic state. State is in government, the psychotic administration. And that's not. Yeah, and that's not entirely just a metaphor. It doesn't mean that the individuals in the administration who work for President Trump are crazy, though maybe some of them are. But it does mean that they have dismantled the policy review and coordination processes that normal administrations rely on to make coherent decisions that are in touch with reality. And that's the stuff like before you go to war, you would have multi agency consultations, gathering many perspectives and collating those and trying to build contingency plans, trying to make sure the right experts are in the loop. Of course, that's no assurance of success. It failed in the Iraq war. But in general, since the Truman era, this is how administrations have organized collective thinking. It's a cognitive process. It's literally what it is, except it's institutional. Instead of going on in your prefrontal cortex, which does planning and executive function, makes you less impulsive and more thoughtful. This goes on in the government to ensure that when choices reach the President, they'll have been thought through. Well, this president, his slogan, he stated his governing style in regards to Cuba, but it can be generalized, which is, it's whatever I want to do. He dismantled, he fired up to half of the people in the National Security Council, which does the security coordination. He instead of appointing a national security advisor who's supposed to be an independent voice that brings together others in the administration for a kind of neutral forum, he didn't replace that person. Instead he brought in the Secretary of State to do that. So he undermined that agency's independence. He closed the Iran desk at the State Department. He de staffed the Middle east bureau at the State Department. So he stripped the government of the cognitive process it needs to make choices. And the result of that is you see a war which, God help us, hopefully it'll come out well. But you see a war that doesn't have clear aims or a goal, hasn't thought through obvious contingencies like closing the Strait of Hormuz for literally 40 years. Analysts have been saying this is something Iran could do. Yet this administration managed to be surprised. It hasn't thought through things like does it have enough munitions to sustain this and it can't even explain itself. That's a psychotic administration. It's not thinking in a coherent, organized way.
- [13:58]
Charlie Sykes
This is a fascinating, I think, fresh way of looking at this because on one level we go, what's going on? Cognitively with Donald Trump or the batshit crazy things that members of his administration do. And what you're doing is saying that if you look at the administration as a whole and the way it makes decisions, that it can be described as psychotic, that they have denuded themselves of all of the normal cognitive processes that you would expect from an administration. Am I getting that right? Because this actually is really interesting as opposed to just simply focusing on. And by the way, I do think we ought to focus on the cognitive issues involving Donald Trump. I think that is completely a legitimate issue. But the fact that this has now been. This is now presenting through the way the United States of America is conducting itself and making decisions. So if this is a psychotic administration, are we a rogue state? Are we a. A rogue psychotic state on the world stage now?
- [15:01]
Jonathan Rauch
You know, Charlie, that is so interesting and difficult to think through. People like me and like you have gone through a whole series of labels and frameworks to try to make this administration fit into some predictable box, you know, authoritarian, populist, unilateralist, America first transactionalist, madman theory. It's now clear to us and our allies none of those things will work, and that we're dealing with a whole different kind of thing, which is psychosis, which is inherently unpredictable, which means that you have to plan for not being able to plan, and you have to rely on external constraints where they're possible, things like the courts and Congress and the markets and the allies to create a framework of rationality to try to put it around this administration. But, no, you're not going to be able to say, ah, I've finally drawn a bead on what the second Trump administration is all about.
- [16:12]
Charlie Sykes
You know, it is interesting. There are all of these attempts to sort of bolt on some sort of ideological coherence onto Trumpism. You know, the people will sometimes pretend that Trumpism is a series of principles, when in fact, Trumpism is about the cult of Donald Trump, whatever he says it is. And I think this is useful for the people who. And again, maybe we have this bias toward normality or normalcy to make up various words that we try to find some category that we understand in politics or government or history that explains this. And we've gone through all of that. We've gone through all of those phases. It's like the phases of grief or something. Because, I mean, look, I mean, is this. Is Donald Trump a fascist? Yeah, but that doesn't quite capture it. Is he like a Mafia don? Yeah, but that doesn't quite capture it. So let's go with this, that the administration as a whole and you're willing to concede that you could actually have a group of non psychotic individuals who brought together will create a psychotic government. Right. I mean that's in theory possible that you don't have to say that everybody involved in this is crazy. In fact, it is the collective non thinking of this administration that is psychotic.
- [17:32]
Jonathan Rauch
Yeah. And it's that even psychotic individuals aren't psychotic all the time. And so what happens here is you've got planning that's still going on in agencies around the government and they're doing their best, especially kind of the mid level bureaucrats. But at any moment, without any prediction or rhyme or reason, all of that work could simply be overridden, ignored, thrown out the window because the President wakes up that morning and this literally happened and said, I don't like the Prime Minister or President of Switzerland. So I was thinking about that increase the tariff.
- [18:13]
Charlie Sykes
I was thinking about. I didn't like the tone of her voice.
- [18:16]
Jonathan Rauch
Was that what. Yeah, I think it was like her face or her voice or something like that. And the problem is those episodes of entering this fugue state can happen at any moment. And so you'll have some of the wheels turning of policy planning. But when you get something as big as a war in which those mechanisms have been effectively neutered, then you're in a world where this becomes a global crisis. Right. And it's not something, as you said a minute ago, we don't have a rule book, a guidebook, a manual for dealing with a psychotic administration. In the United States, people have dealt with a lot of other things, but not this. So it's baffling.
- [19:04]
Charlie Sykes
Well, it is baffling and it's one of the reasons why we feel so discombobulated all the time, why there is that sense of disorientation because nothing seems to make sense. And I think this is what we're wrestling with, you know, going back to 10 years, you know, after, after the first Trump election. The book I wrote was called how the Right Lost Its Mind. And I, I was, it was sort of two ways. Number one, the, the poss, the rejection of the conservative intellectual tradition and conservative intellectuals, but also how it lost its mind, as in, but I hadn't put it together in the way that you just put it together. Also, the rest of the world seems to be getting closer to understanding this. I think that the last year of Donald Trump insulting, threatening our allies has led them from sort of a hopeful optimism to transactional to realizing we can't trust and rely on this guy. I mean, the rest of the world is looking at this. And I mean, I think, you know, one of the big stories of the year is obviously the, the collapse of the NATO alliance. I mean, give me your sense of that. When, when he, you know, asked them to come and fix what he broke in Iran and he got that wall of no from them. That was, that was a real turning point in post, in post war history, wasn't it?
- [20:31]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, there are a couple of turning points there. One is the breakdown of trust in the United States and that from their point of view, the US will always be potentially one election away from being openly hostile to them. And then building on the theme that we've been talking about, there's a second layer to this, which is the state. The executive branch won't be psychotic forever because psychosis is self destructive, self undermining. You can't run a presidency like this. So Trump's successor will rebuild the mechanisms of policy deliberation and return to something more like normal because they're not Trump. But what you alluded to just now is true. The damage that this has done will be lasting because from our allies point of view, they can no longer count on America to behave in predictable or rational ways. It's finally sunk into them that they're dealing with a country which can go not even rogue, but psychotic. And that's going to be built into their long term decision making. So that's a little bit different from just mistrust of American motives. It's kind of a mistrust of American basic sanity. Right. We've never lived in that world before. It's very hard to understand how that ramifies. I don't know.
- [21:58]
Charlie Sykes
Well, one of the way it might ram. Speaking of terrifying ways that it might ramify, we're talking about, you're describing a psychotic nation with nuclear weapons. We've never been at that point where the people were the government in charge of the greatest world destroying arsenal that we've ever known. Is psychotic, right? I mean, isn't that the whole point of civilization is to keep the psychotic individuals from having the power to destroy the planet? Wouldn't that have been one of the major goals of civilization over the last 2,000 years? You know, not just the last 10 years.
- [22:39]
Jonathan Rauch
So I'm going to go with we have not reached the point of administrative psychosis that's gone so far that someone is going to whimsically start a nuclear war. They maybe whimsically started A conventional war. But I'm not yet worried about that. And I would just on the brighter side. Brighter, not bright. I'd emphasize something I said a minute ago, which is, this is not a psychotic country. It's not even a psychotic government as a whole. The courts are still firmly anchored in reality, and they are exerting more and more pressure on this administration. I mean, you saw that. What was it yesterday that they overturned the administration's bizarre attack on anthropic. They just said, you can't do that. Congress, on a good day, doesn't have that many, but on a good day, it performs oversight. It has quietly nixed something like four dozen of the wilder appointments that the administration tried to make. It has restored funding for science. So where it can. Congress is trying to act rationally. The state governments are using both lawsuits and state policies to try to demand accountability, put borders around this administration and the American people. As you know, Charlie, I've heard often on this show, they didn't vote for a government in some kind of fugue state. They wanted lower prices and maybe less drama around the border. That's not what they're getting. So when you've got a psychotic person in your midst, you begin surrounding that person with barriers and obstacles and constraints to try to minimize the damage. And that's what we're seeing now. It's backed off the president at places like cdc, which went haywire, or ICE, and dhs, he finally got rid of nome. So it's constrained him in some ways. The problem when you're dealing with administration psychosis is it'll keep popping out in other places and it'll not be somewhere you expect. Right. It's going to be like geysers that go off hot geysers. So I don't know. Three years of this. Pretty chaotic. Yeah.
- [24:59]
Charlie Sykes
I mean, and that's the thing that I can't get past is that no matter what happens in the midterm, he still has this power for the next three years. And the more desperate he gets, you know, the more desperate he gets, the more dangerous I think that he gets. But, you know, let's grab onto this hopeful element here, because I actually did a podcast with a British host yesterday, and it was pretty dark. And one of the conclusions was he was saying that the Europeans finally opened their eyes and they understand, you know, who Donald Trump is, that they had been hopeful that they could manipulate him or somehow work around it. And the whole Greenland episode apparently just. Just hammered in that, no, we live in a completely new world. But I did end on the hopeful note saying the polls would suggest that, exactly as you just said, Jonathan, that, you know, even voters who voted for Trump did not vote for this necessarily. His approval rating is now in the mid-30s, which. Which means. And I was trying to say that I hope that when people look at the United States, they recognize that what Donald Trump is doing does not have the support of a strong majority of Americans, that this is not who we are as a country, that there is kind of a. There is kind of a decency backlash going on in public opinion. I hope now whether Democrats are going to be able to capitalize on that going forward long term. You know, that's a topic for another day. But the erosion of public support for what's. What was happening is, I think, heartening, because I think there was a moment there when we kind of talked ourselves into thinking that nothing matters. You know, this whole thing that nothing matters, nothing will ever move the needle. He can do anything. And for a long time, it seemed that was correct. And that was one of the most distressing things.
- [26:47]
Jonathan Rauch
The laws of political gravity still apply. They don't apply the way you and I thought when we were, you know, 10 or 20 years ago, when we lived in Ronald Reagan's world, but they still apply. Yes, that's right. And the way I think about what we're looking at through January of 2029, maybe beyond, but hopefully not, is that when people do threat assessments, they look at two things. One is the intent of your opponent, but the other is the capacity of your opponent. And you have to look at both. Because if you look at only the intent of Al Qaeda and you decide that it's an existential threat to the United States, you overreact. Well, Trump's, as he gets personally cognitive as that slide continues, assuming that what we're seeing is accurate, and as he gets more desperate, if he starts, the midterms don't look good for him. And of course, if Democrats capture the House, there's going to be oversight like he's never seen before. He will get more desperate, which makes him more dangerous. So the intense side gets worse. At the same time, his capacity to do harm is diminishing as his political numbers drop because Republicans will start abandoning him. Maybe not in a big, dramatic way, but especially if the midterms go badly. If they lose a majority in the House, he'll be a lame duck. His power is already seeping away because of those wretched poll numbers, because the public's unhappy with him, because Democrats have finally begin to find their voice and figure out how to push back. That'll continue. So you have this horse race between the increasingly malevolent intent on the one hand and the diminished capacity on the other. And again, you tell me how that comes out.
- [28:55]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, no one knows. But I do think that in terms of his frustration, you can see how frustrated he is with the courts, with the judges who are pushing back. His campaign of retribution and revenge has run up against judicial roadblocks, including something that was unheard of, grand juries actually rejecting the indictment.
- [29:18]
Jonathan Rauch
And so, you know, Andrea, I just have to interject.
- [29:21]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah.
- [29:22]
Jonathan Rauch
So extraordinary and, and such a good example of how rational people can respond to psychotic actions.
- [29:29]
Charlie Sykes
Well, exactly.
- [29:30]
Jonathan Rauch
They just say, well, we're going to put a, we're going to put a frame around that. But, but yes, that's, that's all exactly right. We're seeing all those levels of pushback happen, and it's very significant. This has surprised me on the upside, Charlie, but In August of 2022 in the Atlantic, I confidently predicted that in his second term, Donald Trump would openly defy the courts, especially the Supreme Court, because he did that in Mar a Lago with, with those papers that he had. Court said give them back, and instead he hid them in the bathroom. He has not done that. I mean, he's fiddled in all kinds of ways around the margins of defying the lower courts, but he has not defied the Supreme Court. And I'm now starting to suspect that he won't because due to those declining popularity ratings and the fact that the public and so many others are pushing back, I don't think he thinks he has the political margin anymore to get away with defying the Supreme Court. I hope that's true.
- [30:34]
Charlie Sykes
I'm going to go with earlier Jonathan Rauch on this one. I think you ought to stick with your original prediction because we haven't seen what he's capable, because, of course, he's angrier, he's more bitter. If, in fact, his power is diminished, he becomes more desperate. And here's the thing about the psychosis to continue this. It's one thing for someone to be psychotic, but. And maybe there are these guardrails forming around him, but the inner circle are all people telling him, oh, you know, you are the smartest, funniest, bravest, sexiest man we have ever seen. Donald, you are never wrong. And, you know, the whole Iran attack seems to be a result of this hubris that he had that he feels that he could get away with Anything. That this was a war of his choice, of his whim, that he could start it and end it whenever he wanted. Every other thing he's done, he feels he's gotten away with. He's flexing his muscles and everyone's around him. The chorus of people telling him how wonderful and great he is, how he will be greeted as a liberator, et cetera. So in many ways, though, that. That psychotic dynamic, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna have for the next three
- [31:48]
Jonathan Rauch
years, that won't change.
- [31:49]
Charlie Sykes
Whether or not now you say he has a sense of his political. He's not looking, to me like he has a sense that he's losing political clout, because who in his circle is telling him, Mr. President, you are in the shitter when it comes to these polls. Look at these. This is just terrible. This is crazy stuff.
- [32:06]
Jonathan Rauch
I don't know that it's. I mean, I can't get in his head, especially in his head, and I can't get in anyone's, but especially not his. But I don't know that it's. He's sitting down, looking at poll numbers and. And doing what a rational president would be doing right now, which is what Clinton did when he got off track, which is say, okay, what do I need to do to get back on track? Clinton move to the middle and that sort of thing. I don't think anything like that is going on. I just think that at some level, like the cat and the hot stove, when he's burned, he knows it. When the markets go haywire, he pays attention.
- [32:42]
Charlie Sykes
He does pay attention to that.
- [32:43]
Jonathan Rauch
When people just tell him, when the outside world says, you can't do that. When the Danes begin moving troops, actual forces to defend Greenland, stuff like that gets through. Remember, people, individuals and organizations that are psychotic are not completely impervious to reality. It's just. They're not consistently in touch with it. But if they touch a hot stove, they'll still jump back. So, no, I don't think there's any significant chance that we'll see in this Trump administration the reconstitution of an independent National Security Council that runs all the traps and says, Mr. President, this is something that could happen. We need to think about it before you do X, Y or Z. I think he'll still be getting up in the morning and doing what he wants to do. And as you say, he'll be surrounded by people who will make that happen, and then we're stuck with that. The only question is, can these outside Constraints that are beginning to form around him as people realize what they're up against. Can they contain some of the worst damage for the next two and a half years? And there you tell me.
- [33:57]
Charlie Sykes
Hi, I'm Darina, co founder of Quo. If you run a business, you know the team that responds first wins the customer. You've probably opened your phone to a bunch of missed calls and no voicemails.
- [34:08]
Farnoosh Tarabi
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- [34:11]
Charlie Sykes
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- [34:24]
Farnoosh Tarabi
That's Q-U-O.com tech.
- [34:27]
Charlie Sykes
It's tax season. And at Lifelock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one
- [34:32]
Donald Trump
you need to hear.
- [34:33]
Charlie Sykes
Billions. That's the amount of money in refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it. Guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com specialoffer for the threats you can't control. Terms apply. Well, you know, let me focus for a moment on just one aspect of Trump's, of the Trump decline that I think is very, very noticeable. Whether it's cognitive or not, I can't say. It used to be that I don't think of him as a strategic thinker, but he had what I described as that reptilian instinct for public opinion. He would go out to the rallies and he would see what played. And I mean, the whole idea of Build the Wall was basically because it was a call and response at one of his rallies, but he's not doing the rallies. And increasingly he feels like he is out of touch. Okay, let me back up just a bit. I think one of the strongest appeals that he made was that I am your voice. I am the voice of the forgotten America. One of the most powerful ads that he ran against Kamala Harris was she is for them. I am Trump is for you. It's that question, are you for me or against me?
- [36:01]
Donald Trump
And.
- [36:01]
Charlie Sykes
And right now, all of the optics, you listen to him talk about affordability, and this is a man who clearly has not been to a grocery store, you know, in his lifetime. But he's also not hanging around with anybody who's been into a grocery store for some time. He is increasingly the optics is, you know, the ballroom, the, you know, the arc, all the things that he's obsessed with at a time when there's real economic anxiety, strikes me as this is not the Trump that got elected in terms of his ability to claim that I am the champion of the little man. And I think that's why you're seeing some of this erosion. So the megalomania, I think, is that's probably going to get worse and worse and worse. But from a political point of view, it means that in conventional terms, he's
- [36:48]
Jonathan Rauch
increasingly tone deaf and increasingly unpredictable. And that's the nub of the problem. Right. You want to be able to have some notion of what the United States might do next. And if you're sitting at Europe right now dealing with the consequences of the Iran war, the rising prices, the fact that they've been summoned to do things that they can't do, the sheer unpredictability of the matter, the fallout in Ukraine, all of that will become much harder for them. They're pulled into this.
- [37:21]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and the markets.
- [37:22]
Jonathan Rauch
And the market.
- [37:23]
Charlie Sykes
The markets also, really, how unpredictable are they going to go up and down every time he puts out a bleat? You know, I mean, what happens when the markets think, hey, we're being manipulated by this guy, and placing a bet on anything he does or says is a very, very risky thing? What does that do to the marketplace in terms of. Again, we don't know. We've never been in this.
- [37:44]
Jonathan Rauch
This gets back to where we started, which is people waking up around the world to the sheer unpredictability that we're all facing here. And being in a disorienting world where you just don't know what will happen from one day to the next, you just can't tell.
- [38:03]
Charlie Sykes
Right. Well, and that's the world we've been living in. So I occasionally will bring up what movies and TV shows I'm watching for therapy. And I don't know whether you've ever watched it, but I'm watching the most recent season of man in the High Castle, the alternative history reality. It's loosely based on Philip K. Dick's book. And for people who aren't familiar with it, it basically starts with the premise of what if we had lost World War II? What if the Nazis had won? If they got the bomb before we did? What if the Japanese occupied Western United States and the Reich Empire dominated the eastern half of the United States? So it's a completely alternative reality. And what I like about it is you start thinking about, okay, how would Americans react to all of this, what would it be like? And let me connect the dots here. So 10 years ago, when I was talking with Donald Trump, I actually was probably among those who never imagined that all of our institutions were as fragile, that it couldn't happen here. You know, what I'm saying here is that I think we suffered from this very great failure of imagination, that I think a lot of Americans thought that we were immune from history. We knew that other democracies and republics fail, but we didn't think that we were that vulnerable, that all the institutions would crumble. If we had someone like a Donald Trump in the White House, if I would have said back then all the things that have actually happened, people would have, they would have locked me up as psychotic. They would have said, you suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. And this is just crazy stuff because none of us imagined that what in fact has happened over the next decade was even possible.
- [39:52]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, the main. Not all institutions have crumbled, of course, and that's the saving grace in America. And in fact, as this administration has gone on, I have become more and more confident that America would get through it and still be recognizably a liberal democracy. Because Trump simply does not have the power to dominate our sprawling, immense media establishment. Though he's tried every trick in the book, he's running the whole Orban playbook to try to compromise that. But it's not going to work. It's now clear that he cannot dominate the courts, it's clear he cannot dominate the state governments. It's clear he cannot dominate public opinion. And that was not clear a year ago. That's an important comparison. You remember In March of 2025, we were looking at a bunch of 25 year olds running rampant through the government, dismantling entire agencies. Usaid, which is congressionally chartered and strongly supported by Trump's Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, suddenly ceased to exist. We didn't know a president could do that. We thought Congress could abolish an agency. This was a moment when it seemed that his power to project his vision or his non vision or Elon Musk vision or non vision or big balls vision was essentially unbounded. And a year later, you tell me if you think this is right, but I think that situation has basically been contained. We still have the situation we're talking about where a tariff can go up or down or a war can start at any moment and who knows what to do about it. But we no longer think that the executive branch is basically in a position to commandeer the entire rest of the government, the private sector, universities, law firms, corporations, and everything else? Or am I being too rosy?
- [42:01]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I hope you are right. I earnestly hope that you are right. And, you know, since you are right more often than I am, I think there's reason for some optimism. I take a somewhat darker view because I just don't know the extent of the damage and how we are going to recover from it. Right now it feels as if we are, you know, on the liner that has crashed into the iceberg, and the iceberg has put a giant hole into the ship. The orchestra is still playing, and they are still serving orders, hors d', oeuvres, and there may be dancing, but this ship is going down because nobody can repair that particular hole. The political culture has been changed in an ugly way. You know, we're talking about 10 years. There's an entire generation of people who have grown up thinking this is quasi normal. And the damage that you described earlier in the show, the ripping apart of centuries worth of experience and expertise, it is going to be incredibly difficult to restore that. It's going to be incredibly difficult to restore faith in the rule of law. Law. Very, very difficult to restore the faith of the rest of the world in the United States. And, you know, quite frankly, I wonder whether or not we're going to go into a vortex of, you know, just, you know, back and forth, you know, as the two sides become more polarized. I just don't know. The big failure of the Biden administration, which I'm now, you know, taken to calling the Biden parenthesis, was to think that after Trump 1.0, that things were going to be easily fixed, that the fever had broken and that we could go back to more or less business as usual, when in fact, the prime directive was to shore up, you know, democracy or to shore up, you know, constitutional. The constitutional republic, rule of law. And I wonder, what if there is a Democratic administration in 2029, what position they're going to take? And when they come in, when they walk into the rubble, how long is it going to take them to fix it and restore it? And what will the headwinds be to doing that?
- [44:13]
Jonathan Rauch
Yeah, we're all wondering, what do you do about the Justice Department, about the FBI?
- [44:17]
Charlie Sykes
Exactly.
- [44:18]
Jonathan Rauch
Who've had decades worth of acculturation to be politically neutral, that all that's been shattered? What do you do with the people who've been hired because they're loyal to Donald Trump? And that's a problem. No one knows the answer to when I think about the long term damage, and don't get me wrong, when I said I think it's now clearer than it was a year ago that we won't lose our liberal democracy. I'm not saying things are good. I'm just saying that I'm no longer seeing a spiral toward rapid authoritarianism. I'm seeing a chance now for some amount of stability that will allow for rebuilding. Whether the rebuilding succeeds, I don't know. But if you ask me, what worries me in the long run, apart from the alliances and all the damage that's been done over there, the first thing is the transformation of the Republican Party and the group that now controls it is not going anywhere. Post Trump, a lot of people will still be very afraid of them and they may still control one of our two great political parties. The second thing is what you just alluded to, Charlie. It's so important, the normalization of behaviors that were literally politically inconceivable when Trump came on your show. You know, the kinds of memes that are coming out of the department, Homeland Security under Kristy Noem, the blatantly white supremacist stuff, the hate, the celebration of violence and destruction. Pete Hegseth, you know, holding apparently, or I guess it was his pastor, not Hegseth, but saying in Jesus's name, kill our enemies, no mercy. This, the, the dark manosphere stuff that's not going anywhere. And, and to a young generation, that worries me. A lot of them don't know that that's not supposed to happen. And then the third thing related to that, I think maybe this worries me more than anything is I talk to college audiences fairly often, and I'll ask them routinely now, can you name an institution, one or more institutions that you believe operate with integrity and would have your back if you needed it. And generally speaking, they cannot. The one that comes up the most often, you'll never guess, it's the local fire department. They believe the fire department will show up and put out a fire. But the courts, the Congress, the military, this is a joke to them. So they're traveling through life at the age of 2021. Well, they have high ideals, but they have no faith in an institution in which to reposit, to deposit those ideals. You and I can't even imagine that world. Right. We came up through a series of institutions that we thought that we could believe in, that made mistakes, but generally behaved with integrity. They don't have that. And that leaves them wide open to a kind of nihilism and cynicism.
- [47:37]
Charlie Sykes
I hear this over and over. Yeah, no, and I don't think that's merely anecdotal. I do think that that's part of the problem. And liberal democracies rely upon the faith and the confidence of the public. They don't survive and that's when they become vulnerable. So that's part of my concern as well, that we've hollowed out much of what's going on. And also I do think that in some ways, and I don't want to be too dark, it does feel like we're in a potential pre revolutionary state with the incredible disparities of wealth and the incentives for stoking anger. The madness of crowds is not a new phenomenon, but the crowds are bigger and they're more angry and they have more weapons. And I do worry about where we're going as a country, but I do hope that your somewhat more optimistic point of view prevails.
- [48:31]
Jonathan Rauch
Let's go with somewhat less pessimistic point of view.
- [48:34]
Charlie Sykes
Let's go somewhat less pessimistic. Jonathan, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, even though I was a little dark today. Sorry.
- [48:40]
Jonathan Rauch
Thank you.
- [48:41]
Charlie Sykes
And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. And again, I think this episode underlines why we do this, why it is so important to continually remind ourselves we are not the crazy ones.
- [48:56]
Donald Trump
Thank you.
- [49:10]
Farnoosh Tarabi
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Jonathan Rauch
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Charlie Sykes
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Jonathan Rauch
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