← To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
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- [00:00]
Charlie Sykes
Foreign I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to a new episode of to the Contrary podcast. We survived the first 100 days of the Trump presidency and I'm really pleased to be joined once again by my good friend Nicholas Grossman, who is the editor of Arc Digital and a professor of political science at the University of Illinois. Welcome back, Nicholas.
- [00:30]
Nicholas Grossman
Thanks. Happy to be with you.
- [00:32]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I, look, I want to talk about, I know that you focus a lot on international relations. I want to talk about Ukraine, I want to talk about the terror fight. But can we just start off with the elections in Canada a couple of days ago? Because that was truly extraordinary, wasn't it? The Liberal Party was absolutely dead, written off, buried, resurrected by Donald Trump in effect. So Donald Trump has managed to completely tank the Conservatives hopes. I mean, the Conservatives were basically almost assured of winning that election in Canada a few months ago and, and they, and they lost. So, so, so talk to me about that because I'm trying to think of the last time that an American politician or president had that kind of an influence on Canadian politics, if ever.
- [01:23]
Nicholas Grossman
I can't think of a single time. I actually can't think of a single election anywhere where something like this has happened that the Liberal Party had been in power for a while. They had the anti incumbency stuff against them. They were trailing in polls by about 20 points and everyone had written them off. And then Trump starts with the Canada 51st state and other threats and starts with tariffs. And the then Prime Minister, the Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood up to it and then he stepped down and Mark Carney took the spot who, who just got reelected as Prime Minister and he stood up to it and they shot up in the polls. And the Conservatives then were caught somewhat flat footed because they have a base that likes a lot of the Trump stuff. And then a bunch of what you might call normal mainstream Canadian Conservatives who have basic national pride and who don't want to be treated like that and then who ended up flocking back to the Liberals and back to Carney. And I don't think there's been any election, at least not I can think of, where threats from a foreign country then rapidly flipped the outcome of an election that looked almost certain. And if anything, this is a maybe saving grace in that smarter move. You know, kind of if we had smarter fascists, we, the move would have been to stay out of the Canadian election, wait until a sympathetic person wins as the polls were going and then try to make them like, I don't know what Hitler did to Austria or what Putin has done to Belarus or a North American version of that. And instead Trump just, I guess, couldn't help himself making about himself. Even the morning of, morning of the election, he did another like 51st state, they're so excited thing, even as the conservatives were saying, please don't make this about you, stay out of it.
- [03:03]
Charlie Sykes
And yet, and yet he succeeded in tanking the conservatives. So, you know, for the people who are always thinking that there's a plan, you just need to follow the plan. There's, you know, four dimensional chess. There was none. It was, it was completely self destructive. And by the way, since we're, we're on all of this and I am, I'm reluctant to spend too much time on poll, but there's a couple of interesting polls that I wanted to ask you about. Here's the new Washington Post ABC poll that came out on Tuesday afternoon. Most Americans take Trump's Canada, Greenland and third term ideas seriously and oppose them. See, this is one of the big questions is whether or not people actually believe that Donald Trump is going to do what he says. Now in the past there's been a long pattern of people, you know, Trump saying outrageous things and very large number of voters thinking, well, he doesn't mean it or he's joking or I don't care. But there seems to be kind of a shift where people are now saying, you know what, A lot of the things that he's saying seem real. So first of all, do you take the Canada, Greenland third term ideas seriously? Because I'm moving on the third term thinking that he's much more serious about it. Where do you come down on this?
- [04:18]
Nicholas Grossman
Oh, very much so. So I think the, any of the third term talk is a very easy one in that we already saw him and the people around him try to keep power illegally when they were legally required to leave. And I see no reason why we should assume that they will willingly give up power this time just because the law requires them to do so. So I expect him to lie and come up with who knows what rationale, but just assert it and get more and more of the Republican Party on board, much as he was able to do with getting them more on board with excusing or even defending January 6, for example, with a lot of the foreign threats. I think it is serious whether or not the United States is really going to follow through that whatever action they do, it makes sense to take it seriously in part because Trump likes to float ideas and kind of see what the public reaction is and so if more of the public either shrugs or is enthusiastic, if more of his base is enthusiastic, that makes it more likely to actually happen. But also because things like national security, take long term planning, that countries like Denmark or Canada or Panama have to readjust their plans to account for the ways that the United States might be threatening. So even if the US doesn't follow through, even if Trump is just, let's just say hypothetically, he's just saying a lot, just kind of to be an asshole and put on a show and maybe get a tariff deal or something, even if he's doing that, the difference between going from trust that is completely taken for granted because it's been going for decades and is so robust into a lack of trust, like with Canada, good example of this is North American Air Command is joint Canadian and United States. It's not just the U.S. this is how we deal with air threats coming from, for example, Russia or over the Arctic Circle. And the Canadians can't really trust the United States on that anymore. And so they're going to start making different plans and they're going to hesitate to share information. And they're probably doing this already. And so it is serious, even if it goes no further, which it could, and I don't see why anybody would just assume that it'll be fine. Because a lot of things that people said, oh, he'll never do that, he's done. And so they should take this seriously, too.
- [06:26]
Charlie Sykes
No, and I think this is an important point that certainly one of the legacies of that first hundred days is the, is the shattering of many of our alliances. And, you know, that much of the rest of the world, some of our closest allies are no longer feel that they can rely on or trust the United States. And it's hard to put that together. It's hard to replace that, that level of trust. And I'm starting to think of the analogy that David Frum used. I mean, you know, the first time that Donald Trump is elected, you might think that it's just simply a fluke and things are going to go back to normal. But the fact that now that he's back in power, people are realizing there's a pattern. America has a problem. We cannot rely on swing voters in Wisconsin every four years to secure our national security. We're going to have to move on. The other thing that's interesting about these polls, though, is that there was a conventional wisdom that Donald Trump was going to be very, very strong on two big issues, the economy and immigration. Let's Start with immigration, that even if he was cruel and lawless in his mass deportations, that this was kind of his sweet spot. But there's growing indication that he's underwater on these issues. Most voters now had a number of polls showing that they disapprove of his deal, of his handling of the case of the Maryland man who was renditioned to El Salvador, including when it comes to sending US Citizens convicted of violent crimes to prisons in other countries. 71% of Americans think, yeah, Donald Trump is serious about that and yet they oppose it by rather strong margins. The idea. We also have an Axios poll showing that most Americans now see Trump as a dangerous dictator, which is remarkable. So I guess what I wanted to ask you is the cognitive dissonance. All of these things were brought up during the campaign. People made the warnings. Democrats litigated the issue of tariffs, I think rather aggressively, said it was a tax, it would be inflationary. Voters shrugged it off. They voted for Donald Trump, but now they seem to be taking it more seriously. What are you seeing happening here?
- [08:42]
Nicholas Grossman
I think for a lot of the voters, they either bought into some of his lies that or the way he was selling it and the way other people around him were selling it. So on immigration, for example, the pitch was not we're going to grab a bunch of innocent, either, you know, US Citizens or legal permanent residents, green card holders or other people who have all their papers in order. We're going to just grab them off the street and throw them in some foreign gulag without due process. That was not the pitch. The pitch was that he was going to go after criminals and remove all these dangerous criminals. And they're even still trying to cling to this. You might have seen the White House put out a row of mug shots of just on the front of the White House lawn, yard, yes, yard signs. It's pretty gross. And as people noticed that, look closely, they don't really have the names or alleged crimes on them. So people can't fact check it. It is just a bunch of photos of scary looking Latino men. And this in part strikes me as a sign of desperation that they thought this was going to go better and are trying to remind people of what the original pitch was. And that isn't working well when it comes to people who one are seem to be innocent, don't seem to have committed a crime, that have things like an American spouse or have a kid who's an American citizen. And so that wasn't who they were. You know, who get a lot of positive Things from the community that isn't who people pictured that were going. And the idea of innocent until proven guilty is one of the oldest, most core American principles. And seeing people then denied due process and even having the government assert that we don't give them any due process, or the only due process they get is being removed, and that's like, well, then how do you know that they're actually a criminal? And so that seems to be resonating more. One that struck me was where Joe Rogan was talking about Kilmer, Alberto Garcia, and saying a similar thing about like, well, can't you put him on trial and, you know, show the stuff that supposedly that he did wrong and then you can get him out? And so even someone who was a, you know, Trump, at least soft supporter early on is starting to ask those questions. Not that he's turning on Trump entirely or saying the whole thing is bad, but it is showing that when they go against these core American principles, things that are literally in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, when they go against that, that they anger a bunch more people or they make some people wake up a little and say, you know, oh, this wasn't what I voted for. This wasn't what I. I planned on, or just not liking it in a visceral reaction. And the more and more that adds up, the harder it is for them to operate, although they also end up getting more desperate and drastic.
- [11:20]
Charlie Sykes
Well, that's right. And I think that we need to realize that as bad as the last hundred days was, the worst may be yet to come, because they now have the infrastructure in place, and we know that they have a playbook. But let's go back to the reaction on due process, because I'm not sure that that was a given. I worried about that. You know, I've seen people on the right, when they push law and order, just gloss over many of those civil liberties. And the concept of due process is an abstraction. And one of the things we've learned over the last couple of years is sometimes how thin on the ground many of those abstractions, those norms are. And so Donald Trump, I think, was counting on this. He was basically saying, look, these are bad guys. You don't actually care how we deal with them, how brutal we are, how cruel we are, whether they get trials or not. And so in many ways, it's one of those. It feels like a rather rare surprise in public opinion to realize that there is that reservoir of belief and commitment to those, as you put it, you know, these fundamental American values, these fundamental, you know, what does it mean to be an American? It means the government cannot snatch you off the street, put you on a plane and send you to a gulag without a trial. And it seems kind of fundamental, right? And yet Donald Trump a lot. And he probably still thinks he's going to get away with that.
- [12:43]
Nicholas Grossman
I think so, but. And I think a big part of the difference, and you're right about the defending an abstract principle, but a big part of what happened here was that it moved from abstraction to real human beings. And yes, this is sort of another theme of maybe a saving grace of this is we could have had smarter fascists that if they had gone after people who, you know, really were criminal or really were, you know, bad and had somehow just sort of skirted the law a bit, and instead of having to do this absurd stretch of where Garcia is ms.13 because he wore some Chicago Bulls gear, and then anybody who wears Chicago Bulls gear thinks a, you know, if they hear about it, oh, wait, that could happen to me. And with some of the foreign students, the video of the student named who's less than Ozterk in the Tough Student, and a video went all around the Internet of something that a lot of people thought did not happen in America. That's the sort of thing, you know, that happens in dictatorships elsewhere over there.
- [13:42]
Charlie Sykes
And that makes off the street look like a kidnapping. Okay, so this is a, this is a really important point, and I do think that it is one of the things that's shaping the new dynamic is the fact that there are stories that when we talk on the, on the plane of issues Donald Trump can talk about, we need to get the bad guys out and everything and when, whatever. But now we're starting to see these tangible stories. There's a human face on these cases. And I sense that not just on the issue of immigration, but on a lot of the issues. Because in Trump 1.0, there was a lot of controversy in Washington, D.C. but it didn't really trickle down into people's lives until Covid, of course. And so I saw one analysis, I think it was on cnn, that at this time in Trump's first term, the most Googled term was Twitter. People want to know, what is Donald Trump doing on Twitter now? The most Googled term related to Donald Trump is tariffs. So people are being impacted. They know people who have lost their jobs or are affected by various cutbacks. People are thinking, okay, what's going to happen to Social Security? What happened to this family that lives down the street. And I think that's, I'm looking at some of these numbers and you get a sense that people are paying attention to those, those human details and it's not playing the way that he thought. And again, that was not necessarily a given given the media climate that we have. But it does seem these stories are breaking through. Like, for example, it's interesting how people will spontaneously bring up the fact that these small children who are American citizens are being shipped out of the country, even though some of them might be suffering from cancer. The family separations. This really hits people on a visceral level.
- [15:32]
Nicholas Grossman
I'm a parent. I feel it that I mean some in the first term, first term also. But the kid, deporting a kid who has cancer and not making, not even making sure he could get his medication on the way that that just an unnecessarily cruel thing that on top of other cruelty that resonates with people. I think also on the public opinion that it helps quite a bit that there is no longer a Democratic president to bash and blame a lot of things on. There's no longer a campaign and people choosing side where it's almost like go support your team. That it is just do you approve or disapprove of the president? That also the policies are so clearly different. And the biggest one where I expect a lot of this to hit is the economy and is the tariff. So you mentioned. Right. The way that people are starting to notice them, that hasn't really hit yet. That that's the sort of thing that is going to in the next probably few months, cause price increases, maybe have some empty shelves in stores, have people waiting on goods or having supply chain crunch in a way that they didn't experience since 2020. And those are also the sort of things that, where they are unignorable because they're happening directly to people. It's not like you said, just an abstraction in Washington. This is a my life got noticeably worse. And the obvious explanation, and granted, some people will deny this, but the obvious explanation is it got worse because the president did it, which also has the benefit of being true that he did.
- [16:54]
Charlie Sykes
But the president said he was going to do it. I mean, this is where we have the cognitive dissonance where this came up over and over and over again. Anyone who's followed Donald Trump for the last 30 years know that he has a fetish for tariffs. I mean, the one time that I spoke with him back in 2016, he was talking about a trade war with, with China. He's brought that. He brought this up. The Democrats made an issue of it. So why did, why was that not a decisive issue in 2024? Did people just not back, back then, were people in sort of a, you know, delusion of normalcy that he says lots of stuff, but it's not actually going to happen and now it's really happening. Is that what's going on?
- [17:38]
Nicholas Grossman
I think so. I think that's part of it. I think that a lot of it is also an example of an abstraction. And who was saying what? So Trump didn't sell people on. He might say, I'll do tariffs, but it was always, I'm going to do tariffs and everything will be cheaper and all these jobs will come back and you'll get all these other benefits and we're going to make so much money and I'm going to cut your taxes as a result. And so it was all a lie. And. But the people who were saying otherwise were either Democratic politicians or, you know, hated media figures or egghead professors or others that are, you know, all stupid and wrong about everything. And so if you take that as an attitude, then, you know, it was the experts having a lot of data and explaining why it wasn't going to work. And it was a politician, you know, charismatic politician, and Donald Trump selling people what was a fantasy. And I had discussions, I remember one where I was chastised for when I explained tariffs make things more expensive, that a woman got angry at me and said, well, well, maybe, but he's going to cut energy costs in half and that's going to make all the costs go down. And how do you not understand this? You're so stupid. And I didn't really have much of a response to this. I mean, I think I said something about how long oil projects take to get going or how the United States is already the world's leading oil producer. That that had been going up under Joe Biden. So that wasn't a problem. It doesn't affect energy costs right away. But that sort of thing was a not an emotional argument that I think in her situation, you know, she wanted to believe she liked the, the story of I'm going to get you something for nothing, I'm going to wave some magic wand and then things will suddenly get better for you in all of these great ways. And didn't want to think maybe too hard about what the alternative is. And no, I could never figure out, maybe it's a flaw in me. Maybe it's, you know, people I was talking to But I can never figure out a way to convince somebody like that. Even though I had facts and evidence and truth on my side, I don't know how to do that. Except for the, you know, analogy of touch the stove.
- [19:29]
Charlie Sykes
Facts, evidence and truth. That's so old school, it feels like so last century. Well, I have to. I mean, I think the entire business community just talked themselves into believing that he was bluffing, that this was just a negotiating point. There was no way that he would actually do it or that if he did it, it would be in a targeted way. Nobody thought that he would go, you know, hog wild on the tax, that the tariffs just throwing them off. And by the way, speaking of like, like facts and logic, can, can you make this make sense for me, Nicholas? On the one hand, he's saying that these, you know, that we're going to come up with deals so that we're going to, you know, obviously, which would mean that we would remove some of the tariffs or lower some of the tariffs. Right. If you actually strike a deal, that these are basically just cudgels. And yet at the same time, he's saying that the revenue from the tariffs will be so great that we can have this massive cut in the income tax. Now, first of all, the math doesn't add up to be able to cut the income tax. But also he's basically arguing that two completely contradictory things. We're either going to have such massive tariffs going forward forever that they replace the, the individual income tax, or we're going to be negotiating them and striking deals. So can you make it make sense for me?
- [20:48]
Nicholas Grossman
Sure. That seems like a lot of what, what Trump does is it's, you know, something for nothing. Have your cake and eat it too. And not a genuine argument in the sense that maybe you or I might make of trying to convince people, in which case we try to be consistent and use the same evidence and when we with various people, but instead just more like a salesman pitch of what is it that you want to hear? Well, I'll give you a bunch of things and you can, as long as you want to support me, you can kind of pick which one sounds good to you. And then when you get into arguments with people, you can say whatever, you know, oh, we're going to make so much money or oh, we're going to bring jobs back, or one or the other. What I find so striking, say with a lot of the deals is, or a lot of the tariffs is get the sense that what they thought was going to happen or what he thought was going to happen was there would be at least some that would do the oh, sir, whatever you want, you know, we're so scared, please don't hurt me. And not really thinking that other countries had same thing with Canada, for example. Not really thinking other countries had agency and have nationalism and have pride and that government leaders won't want to look weak to their people and in fact will want to stand up to foreign bullying. And even for the matter that trade deals take a long time to negotiate, that there's no possible way to get something like 90 trade deals in a short amount of time. And this isn't even really shouldn't be a surprise because a similar, albeit smaller version happened in the first term of that we had the Trans Pacific Partnership. It was a trade deal with 12 countries, took about six years to negotiate. It was all these specific rim countries and it excluded China. It was a good long term China containment strategy. And he called it a terrible deal. And he got into office and he got rid of it and he promised someone to get better deals with all these other countries one on one. And he got literally zero. And where that takes us now is a country good example I think of this is Vietnam, where Vietnam has been a very pro American country, especially this century. A lot of that is because they're frightened of China and rather deal with the US and when Trump put tariffs on Vietnam, which already has very low tariffs with the US they announced very quickly, we'll do zero, we'll do zero right away, zero percent. And the response from the Treasury Secretary was to treat it as an insult and say like, oh, that doesn't really matter. What we're worried about is all this other non tariff cheating. And the Vietnamese don't know what to do about that because they're not cheating in any particular way. And it looks like if you look into it, it's the fact that the United States buys more from Vietnam than Vietnam buys from the United States, which is not inherently bad. It means Americans want to buy things like, I don't know, Vietnamese rubber. And then just that week after Trump rejected them, Vietnam signed a supply chain and production agreement with China. So it doesn't mean that they are about to become a close Chinese ally. But we had Trump's time in office, took Vietnam from a pro American country that really wanted to work with the US and not work with China into one that is now has no idea how to deal with US Hostility and so is warming up to China in response.
- [23:37]
Charlie Sykes
I think one of the real shocks that people in the business community are experiencing is realizing that, I mean, they were absolutely sure that Donald Trump was going to be the most pro business, you know, pro growth president ever. And now they're starting to realize that he fundamentally does not understand economics, he does not understand how international trade works, and he doesn't even understand the entire concept of imbalance of trade. Right. The trade deficits, you know, are somehow robbing us, you know, robbing Americans of, of wealth, when in fact, that's not what it is at all. So his lack of understanding of the basics, I think is kind of breathtaking and has contributed to kind of the intake of breath of a lot of these guys who now are faced with the maximum uncertainty of an economy that is run by the whim of one man.
- [24:28]
Nicholas Grossman
I'm amazed, amazed at the group think that they managed to get to where they convince themselves that, you know, he's. He's a businessman, he thinks like me, all that stuff he's saying is just for the rubes. And yes, you know, some of, I mean, who's the rube now, guys? Yeah, that you had somebody like Jamie Dimon, you know, the head of CEO of JP Morgan, who was a Trump booster in the election and then who in January, February was saying like, oh, tariffs, everybody get over it. And now is saying like, oh, actually, I think we've reanalyzed what we expect and now growth expectations are zero or negative and we're expecting inflation and all these other problems. And if anything, it reminds me of the stupid group think that they had in the 2000s of where they convinced themselves that housing would never go down and that various derivatives and complex financial instruments had defeated risk. And so there was really no risk of what they were doing. And they crashed global economy with this. And similarly here they really did seem to tell themselves just, Trump will do what I would do in office and not listen to the things he said many, many times that he would do, and which he also then did some of in his first term. And yet still they told himself, I guess, maybe tempted by a tax cut or regulation cuts, who knows? But yeah, either way, just went with it. And I'm kind of floored by that one. It's amazing that these ostensibly smart, sophisticated investors made this sort of a mistake.
- [25:53]
Charlie Sykes
I think the key word is ostensibly. I think part of the problem is that at a certain point you develop this excessive confidence in your own talents. I mean, Elon Musk being a pretty good example. I mean, he has skills in certain areas and then you put him in charge of slashing government and you realize the limited transferability of some of those skills. Okay, I want to get to. Because I know that, you know, I want to tap your, your expertise about what's going on with Ukraine and some other things. But one last question on the tariffs. The actual impact has really not hit us yet. Right. But we are seeing stories. We started to see stories in the last week or so about the empty container ships coming from China and the reports out of the west coast ports that they are expecting massive drops in, in imports. And I think I saw a statement from the, the international longshoremen, the union, opposing the tariffs. But you feel, I mean, what does it look like to you? It looks like it feels like kind of this reverse tsunami where the, the goods that we were would normally have coming into the country are not going to be here. These ports are not going to see these products. So that we're what. When is this going to hit?
- [27:08]
Nicholas Grossman
So I have a, I've been feeling this vibe that reminds me of kind of how I felt in January and February 2020 of the, you know, so Covid hadn't really made it here was here, but it was in a number of other countries. And I remember talking to people who, you know, I was telling people to buy toilet paper and I remember some, you know, like, oh, that's not going to happen or oh, come on, we're not Iran, we're not South Korea. Well, you know, we're not China. What do you think going to happen? And just kind of waiting. And I remember saying like it's no, the virus is already here. Just people haven't realized it yet. It just hasn't spread enough for that to be clear. And not saying it's identical, obviously no pandemic here, but economically somewhat similar in that the number of container ships that were arriving from China at major ports like Los Angeles and Seattle have, are going to dry up almost entirely within a week or two. And that means I've seen the numbers upwards of a million or more contracts with or truck routes that, so those containers go from the ships and they go onto a semi truck. And so those trucks are out of business. And the people who are relying on that either for consumption at a store or for especially something like inputs into any other sort of business that's just kind of not going to be there. And on top of that, we can pile things like the economic effects of the mass firings from Doge and others and both of those should plus all the chaos that is causing any attacks on Rule of law that's causing more loss of confidence in the United States. And all of that combined should hit in not that long. I mean, I don't have. I'm not going to give you an exact number, you know, because who knows when the tsunami is. Probably makes a lot of sense of the. The earthquake has already happened. Just the wave hasn't really made it here yet. Yeah. And I am expecting that probably pretty soon. And that with the container ships and the loss of products on shelves and products and inputs being the one that should become really evident within probably about two, three weeks.
- [29:02]
Charlie Sykes
You know, what really worries me about that is that if things really get bad, knowing Donald Trump, and you really do understand Donald Trump's style and his psychology and his playbook, that if things really get bad, Donald Trump will reach for a bigger distraction. He will come up with something different. You know, the. The assumption that somehow crisis brings Donald Trump down. That may be true, but it also makes him more dangerous. You and I were just briefly before we started talking, taping today, so talked about one of his more recent executive orders, which would basically empower or encourage the military to get involved in law enforcement. And this has always been sort of hanging out there as kind of the ultimate authoritarian nightmare. But right from the beginning, Donald Trump has made a priority to get control of the military, personal control of the military. We have laws and traditions and norms that keep the active military off the streets as much as possible of our cities. Give me some sense of what you think is happening there.
- [30:07]
Nicholas Grossman
So the. The order is somewhat ambiguous, as I think, you know, somewhat confusing, as I think a lot of these sometimes, you know, tend to be. And though, as I read it, it, among other things, instructs the Secretary of defense to put together different ways for US Military, both assets, you know, equipment and also personnel to be able to help in what the language of the order is preventing crime. And I don't really know what that means or what that would mean. You know, in a military, that's not really what the military does the way that you could, you know, you can maybe stop crime, perhaps, or say, catch somebody. But preventing. Is that what then deploy all around the streets and, you know, walk patrols and stuff like that. And it seemed also like they would put them under the purview of the attorney general. And the military doesn't work for doj. It likely violates passe comitas, the law. The law that says the military can operate on the soil, US Soil. That's a very old law. Although the Trump administration has tried different ways of getting around that or claiming things like this, similar to what they did with the Alien Enemies act, to claim just.
- [31:13]
Charlie Sykes
And they do have. And they do have the Insurrection act in their pocket. And there are very few checks on that. If he decides to invoke that. Correct?
- [31:23]
Nicholas Grossman
Yes. So, and there's also the problem that if he invokes it and gives an order, even if it's not a legal use of the law, at minimum, by the time that would get a potential court rebuke, it could already be underway and already be happening. I can do sort of bigger fears, long term fears. Is that questions like when faced within a legal order, will they follow it? If some of them don't follow it and others do, that's extremely dangerous. That's a potential for politicizing the military. The real nightmare scenario, splitting the military over something like this, depends on how far he would go. I think that's decently farther down the line. But I've thought since, I mean, I think in particular since 2020 and reactions to Black Lives Matter protests that Trump has been itching to use force and to order use of force against protesters. Nope. And you mentioned things he's been saying for a long time, Right, with tariffs. There's also his infamous words about Tiananmen Square in the protests, about how much he admired that China put it down with so much force and so ruthlessly how strong he thought that was. And you can hear similar admiration for Putin and the repression there. And he talks very positively about Kim Jong Un. So these are very repressive dictators who put down any sort of dissent with force. And I think he's been at least itching to try that. And the real open question is, what will the military do that? I do not think that all of the most senior officers are going to want to do this. I expect at least some of them are going to go to lawyers and come back saying, I'm sorry, that's an illegal order. I can't follow it.
- [32:58]
Charlie Sykes
But he's fired the lawyers, too.
- [33:00]
Nicholas Grossman
Yeah. You can always fire.
- [33:01]
Charlie Sykes
One of the first things he did was he fired the lawyers.
- [33:04]
Nicholas Grossman
Oh, that's right. Fire the jags. Yeah. Fire the military. That's right. So that they don't.
- [33:08]
Charlie Sykes
I mean, the reason I'm bringing this up is because, I mean, you want to talk about a dark scenario, you know, that we need to understand that, you know, the Supreme Court does not have its own army, the Congress does not have an army. Most of what we think of as the democracy movement doesn't have an army. Donald Trump has an army now. And I think we understand the asymmetry, that if things really, really go south, how bad things could be. And I've talked about this with others, including I think was Ryan Lizard the other day, you know, our failure of imagination about what Donald Trump is capable of doing, what he wants to do, even though Trump makes it clear what he wants to do, what he is itching to do, and yet people are shocked when he does it. But obviously he is fixated on the use of the military, the use of force, looking strong. And you know that he's going to be absolutely tumescent when he has this giant military parade in Washington D.C. on his birthday. Right. So I mean, this is something that is, he has, he has a number of obsessions and this is one of them.
- [34:18]
Nicholas Grossman
Yeah, I think that the failure of imagination has been one of the big running problems. The sort of it can't happen here complacency.
- [34:25]
Charlie Sykes
Right.
- [34:25]
Nicholas Grossman
AD will be fine, somebody will stop it. And we keep on seeing, okay, who, you know, who will actually stop it. And so if anything, I think maybe this is me having national security brain, but that the way I've been trained to think about stuff like say terrorism is to look for what they call low probability high impact events, meaning if it would be a really big deal if it happens and it is possible to happen, we should take it seriously. And so by that standard, if I had to ballpark, what are the chances that Trump orders use of force against peaceful protesters in the United States? I mean, way higher than like the 1 or 2% that would cross that threshold of low probability. We need to take it seriously a lot higher than that. And I see no reason not to assume that, that he might. If anything, I think it's been the opposite problem that people assuming that they can was someone like, like those Wall street guys, no, he won't or never do it or someone stop or any of those other complacent assumptions. And I don't do that.
- [35:20]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, so let's switch gears and talk about what's going on with Ukraine. We had the last weekend we had the funeral of the Pope. Donald Trump goes there and has that remarkable 15 minute sit down with Volodymyr Zelensky for the very, very first time. You got the little bit of criticism of Vladimir Putin that maybe doesn't want peace, but at the same time, Marco Rubio is out there saying, we may just walk away from the whole peace process. So where are we at right now? Because up until this Weekend, it was very, very clear that Donald Trump has completely aligned his rhetoric and his positions with that of the Kremlin. And yet Vladimir Putin is not, feels like he's playing with him, that he's not giving him the win. He's not allowing him to come out of this with some sort of a face saving deal. So what is the state of play, Nicholas?
- [36:13]
Nicholas Grossman
I think it's basically the same in that the fundamental fact of this war that a lot of people have either been in denial about or just sort of refuse to recognize is that it is Russian aggression. And so the real implications of that, that Putin attacked, he didn't have to, and he ordered the troops to invade, certainly didn't have to do that. He can order them to stop at any point and hasn't. And there has been this misnomer among, I think, decent amount of, you know, Trump Musk has made these arguments. A lot of the maga, right. And also some of the, some of the left that people like, well, Pope Francis was one who said this and Lula de Silva of Brazil and maybe American thinkers like say Noam Chomsky had argued that they're treating the war as if it is somehow America's fault or it's Ukraine's fault for resisting. But basically assuming that Putin wants peace and so that when you say something like, oh, we're going to get the Ukrainians to stop fighting that, as if they're expecting a reaction, that Putin's going to say, oh, thank God, you know, finally we can stop this devastating war. I'm so upset about all these people dying. Great, I will make some concessions if you give me some concessions. Let's make a deal. And instead the way that he thinks is, oh, look at them, willing to compromise. They're weak. They're coming to me because they're weak. If we just push harder, if we push harder, they're going to fold and I'm going to get it all. And this makes people uncomfortable that to deal with a murderous dictator out for conquest simply because he wants it, you know, that's mine and I want it. And I don't care who I kill on my side or the other in order to get it. And that, you know, makes a lot of people uncomfortable. A lot of people thought that was left behind in history. You know, that's, that's very 20th century. That's, we read about that. We don't experience it. And so whenever the approach, if, even if, say I'll give Trump and team the benefit of the doubt on this One, even if we do, you know, even if we do that, then they're going into it thinking that they're going to get Putin this favor, and so he's going to want to do them a favor back. But they're doing him a favor, even if they don't totally realize it or whether or not they do. But they're doing him a favor by weakening the Ukrainians and by showing less U.S. support for Ukraine and Europe, and that ends up then encouraging Russia more. That that is what they wanted. That's what they were banking on with the US Election. That's why, I think, when there was possibilities of negotiations in 2023, 2024, why Russia was so adamantly against them and or would undermine them and with bad faith, in part because they saw this lifeline of maybe America will flip. And so there's no particular reason why they would stop. I heard Marco Rubio made this statement about how, oh, and just, you know, it's like yesterday these innocent children were killed in Ukraine and, you know, we so we need this war to stop. And I thought about it like, that's not quite right, Mr. Secretary of State. The people didn't just die like it was from a hurricane or some sort of natural disaster. Russia killed them. And Russia targeted civilians on purpose. And it did it because it's trying to conquer Ukraine. And they want the Ukrainians to surrender and to bow down to them. And of course, the Ukrainians don't want to do that. And Americans of all people should understand why, no, we're not going to bow down to a foreign dictator. Give me liberty or give me death. And, you know, that attitude would make perfect sense that the Ukrainians are choosing that on their own. But the conspiracy theory about it was the Americans tricked them into it somehow, that they wouldn't want to resist on their own. They're only doing it at the behest of the United States. So as soon as the United States stops the warmongering Ukrainians who are just defending themselves, then there'll be peace. And as long as that is the American attitude towards the war, then there won't be peace. Or they'll be at least, you know, they're going to fight it out for a bunch longer. And part of the problem is this means then what's the strategy have to be? How do you get Russia to change its mind and to agree to some sort of peace deal or just to unilaterally withdraw or for its military to collapse? And the only answer to that is to help Ukraine resist Them more to thwart the Russian military's advances, to make them spend resources to do, as Ukrainians have increasingly been doing, striking inside Russia, especially at military and related industry, munitions factories, drone factories, oil depots, things like that. And make it that Russia either cannot make war anymore or reaches a point where it decides it's no longer worth it anymore. And that is not a pleasant thing. It's not a quick ending, it's not a relatively low cost ending, but it is the only way to deal with aggression, as history has told us many times before.
- [40:40]
Charlie Sykes
So what's going to happen with Donald Trump, though? I think you could make the case that among all the people that are dealing with Donald Trump, that Vladimir Putin is the only one who really seems to understand how to deal with the bully. Everybody else is bending the knee. It's like, oh, we have to be nice to Donald Trump. We have to give Donald Trump everything he wants. And Vladimir Putin, who Donald Trump thinks is his good buddy, is kind of humiliating him in public. So is there some breaking point where Donald Trump says, you know what, you're playing me, you're insulting me. You're not my friend. I'm not gonna, you know, turn over Ukraine, or is he just stuck? Where do you think? Where's he going to go on all of this? This because he has no emotional attachment. Yeah. Yeah, okay. What do you mean?
- [41:21]
Nicholas Grossman
I think it's completely stuck. I also just want to say on the. The other people, you know, perhaps not pushing back on him, that there have been a few. You know, we mentioned Canadians earlier. Claudia Scheinbaum of Mexico is another one who just sort of given a no. And some domestic institutions in one way or another. I'd say something like Harvard, for example, recently telling them no in a way that Columbia University did not. And that's very helpful.
- [41:43]
Charlie Sykes
Some of the big law firms.
- [41:44]
Nicholas Grossman
Yeah, some of them. Right. Not others, but some. And those ones that did the. Agreed to do the pro bono work under bullying are going to find themselves defending things like, say, military officers that ordered people to fire on civilians in the United States. Something like that. Which I don't know if they realize they signed up for. But with. With Putin of. No, I think that Trump is. Is all in on this. That it's been whether how much element of psychological or the idea of losing face of. He has committed so much to this for so many years. So cons that he cannot possibly back off in any way while accepting exactly what Putin's doing to him or taking it as some sort of personal insult. And without losing an immense amount of face or maybe even his sense of self. This was one of the things I just thought was so weird about the fantasies of people before the election of he'll be tougher on Putin. He'll help the Ukrainians because he loves deals and he'll be embarrassed if he doesn't get a good one. And no, no, he just really has affinity for Russia or heard a similar one of he's going to be so much tougher on, on Netanyahu in Israel because, you know, otherwise Netanyahu will embarrass him and it's no, no, no, he, he agrees or if anything, he wants, you know, Netanyahu to do it more. And so the, he'll never, he'll never drop then. This is why you see people, both Trump himself and others like Rubio or Hegseth, they are working to try to blame the Ukrainians, to try to blame the Europeans. The fact that even Zelensky got Trump to acknowledge maybe Putin isn't, you know, interested in ending the war seems more like one of those Trump infamously agreeing with whoever he spoke to last, rather than something that would actually change U.S. policy. I don't think there's any way around it that the way he'll do it is the same thing he does with pretty much every foreign policy, including the tariffs. Is that the first goal for him always is to lie to the American people and try to make himself look good. And after that, maybe some of the actual policy might matter, but. So don't expect them to bail.
- [43:40]
Charlie Sykes
But did you see the editorial in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday? I mean, when you lose Rupert Murdoch and they're saying, you know, Trump 2.0 is in trouble. And I thought the editorial was going to be about the tariffs, but it really zeroed in on, you know, the, you know, catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan really was a turning point, tipping point for the Biden presidency. A cataclysm in Ukraine could do the same thing for you. And you are so narrowly focused on this, you know, Russ, Russia first policy. So you have people on the right who are now warning him that there's significant risk and downside if you abandon Ukraine and Vladimir Putin goes in there and the world sees those, those, those pictures, do you think that has any influence on him whatsoever?
- [44:28]
Nicholas Grossman
Honestly, probably no one. If Wall Street Journal and other bankers can't get him to reduce the tariffs and help the economy, I don't know how they're going to get him to change stances.
- [44:37]
Charlie Sykes
It's hard to argue with that.
- [44:39]
Nicholas Grossman
Two, because actually doing something about the war is hard and just kind of bailing on it and blaming other people is easy. And three, because one of the larger problems, and you mentioned very early in the discussion about how the, with the first term, that, that was sort of our, that was our mulligan. That was the, oh, it'll just pull over. It's just the fluke. And that now the message to the world is this could happen every four years, that just, you know, you're relying on the whims of American voters. It's not going to be the institutions can't get, contain it. And so this is just another example of that. I think that what one of the things Trump absorbed and a lot of his people learned was that the experts who say stuff like that are wrong. So you think of how many people told him that if you, I don't know, if you commit these blatant crimes, you're not going to get reelected. If you, you should take something, you should take one like on the classified documents case, take the avenue that people like Mike Pence and Hillary Clinton did of go, oops, you know, my bad, and return it, and then they won't prosecute you. But no, no, because otherwise you'll lose. And they say this over and over again. And the result was not Trump losing and it was him regaining power despite going that way. And so they seem to be operating more with a, oh, those people don't know what they're talking about. They're, they're just weak or they're scared. They're holding me back and they can't do anything about it anyway. So I don't expect that. The Wall Street Journal talked him, if anything, now he's talking about, you know, how Rupert Murdoch lost his way or trying to bully Fox, bully Wall Street Journal, bully the New York Post into saying something different. And that is his move pretty much all the time. The just, you know, bluster more, bully more. And there are some things you can maybe get to do it, like maybe some law firms or maybe some media organizations, but others that you can't. And that includes Russia and Ukraine and Europe. It seems to include China, include, for that matter, Canada and Mexico, and especially including the bond market. You can't just yell at the bond market and get people to take their money and trust that the United States will be reliable enough to loan the US Money, that they just simply put their money somewhere else. And so yelling at it won't change it, but they're doing it anyway.
- [46:46]
Charlie Sykes
So let's go back to where we started with looking at some of these polls. Does it actually matter that public opinion is shifting against him? Now, I'm not saying will it matter to Donald Trump, but just overall, in, you know, drawing lines, containing him, strengthening guardrails, does this shift in public opinion matter? Because so far, I mean, the big caveat here is you're not seeing any elected Republicans really, you know, peeling off. He still has solid support. So even if there is a coming blue wave in 2026, certainly seems in the interim as if congressional Republicans are absolutely content to be potted plants and absolute Trump loyalists. So what is the significance of the public opinion? Or are we in an era where it doesn't really change anything? What do you think?
- [47:37]
Nicholas Grossman
I think it matters. I think it matters more than many anticipate or many assume that not really because of the Congressional Republicans. I think you're right. I have no faith in them to do anything to stand up for the Constitution at all. The, if anything, I thought January 6th was the line for that. If you would go along with that, you'll go along with anything. And I, I still can't believe that Mike Pence's brother voted for it even after they tried to kill Mike Pence. That, you know, where I have brothers, I'd like to think that they would not vote for people who tried to kill me. But you would. So I have no faith in them. And on top of even just the political incentives. So they don't seem to either, you know, have principles or at least have the spine to back those principles up if they have them. And politically they are more afraid of Republican primaries than they are of general elections, that even in worst case scenario for them, right, they, they win the primary, they lose the general election, well then as long as you stuck by Trump, then you can get a media contract or a consulting job or something. And so I don't really expect them to change there. But the public opinion is a hard to really, we can measure it, you know, in numbers, but hard to really determine the effect, but is always having an effect on politics that more entrenched authoritarians than this one have fallen. And the way that they fall is by losing a lot of the public that you get more people. Courage can be contagious. And people who had a sense early on of, oh, the vibes have shifted, everybody's going along with this, I gotta go along too, right? Then start increasingly thinking, oh, you know, a lot of this isn't going well and a lot of people are objecting to this. And I don't want to get on their bad side. And you know, there will be a future after this. And this goes for a bunch of business leaders of, you know, how strongly do they want to be associated with this when long term, when it comes to long term things, I think law firms, another good example of that, more of them instead of worrying, oh, Trump attacking us is going to make us lose some corporate clients, that we need to work with the government and instead start worrying things like if we don't even stand up for ourselves, how can we convince clients we're going to stand up for them, them. And so there's more of this can add up over time that things like this growing protests of, I think the Democratic Senator Van Holland going to El Salvador and getting a Garcia, you know, on TV and, and getting the, the Salvadorans to admit that the US was paying them to keep them there, that that all is valuable. And there's no real way to see where a tipping point is in advance. We never know exactly where that is, where it happens. And they will pretend to be, meaning the administration will pretend to be very popular and you know, acting on the will of the people and calling every poll that says otherwise, fake news or anything like that. And they'll keep doing that right up to the point that it doesn't work. But with even some actions of like how much will they violate a court order versus how much will they adhere to one and maybe try another, stretching the law but not outright breaking it path that public opinion is a constraint on that. It's the sort of thing that they worry about, that they have a sense of if they lose too much, and I don't know where that number is. I don't think they do either. Maybe he's got to get below 30%, something else. But where they become less able to govern, less able to abuse power, and more people are either resisting or standing up to it. And that is outside of electoral politics.
- [51:01]
Charlie Sykes
I think you just made a very, very important point there because we tend to focus, I think too much on the elected officials, on Congress. You know, I'm really, at this point, you write them off, but it is the rest of civil society. Will they have a backbone? Do they, will they buy that narrative that resistance is futile? And I think you're going to see that in the law firms, in the private industry and universities throughout the country. You know, is there, you know, is, is, is it really, is it prudent to cave in at this, at this point? Because there are no limits to what Donald Trump can do. I mean, you know, I mean, let's be honest about it, though. They are facing this unprecedented challenge. An administration that's willing to use all of the levers and cudgels of power, whether it's the FCC or the SEC or potentially the IRS to go after you, make your life absolutely miserable. So I don't think we're out of the woods yet. I don't think we're at a tipping point yet because if anything, I think the Trump folks are going to be more aggressive. I think it was Olivia Troy who pointed out that the, that the Project 2025 agenda was not 100 days. It was like what, it was a 1, 150 or 180 days. So we're not, we're not there yet, even in terms of their own blueprint. So they're, you know, strap on. Nicholas Grossman, it has been great talking with you. You can read Nicholas's stuff at the Arc Digital. He's a professor of political science at the University of Illinois. Nicholas, thanks for coming back on the podcast. We'll have to do this again soon.
- [52:32]
Nicholas Grossman
Sure, Absolutely. My pleasure, Charlie.
- [52:34]
Charlie Sykes
And thank you all for listening to today's episode of to the Contrary Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. You know why we do this? You know, we do this multiple times a week because it's never been more important than it is right now to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. Thanks.