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Jonathan Rauch
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Charlie Sykes
Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. Thursday is Martin Luther King Jr. S actual birthday. He would have been 97. Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to threaten Greenland Denmark is sending military reinforcements to Greenland. The FBI has raided the home of a Washington Post reporter who was investigating the administration. The President of the United States. Actually, you may have seen this picture flipped off somebody at a Ford plant who yelled that he was a, a pedophile protector. So, yeah, the zone is really flooded today. All right. To make our way through all of the things that are going on, we are joined by our good friend Jonathan Rauch, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer to the Atlantic. Welcome back, Jonathan. Thank you so much.
- [03:42]
Jonathan Rauch
Always happy to be with you, Charlie. I always learn more from you than you do from me.
- [03:47]
Charlie Sykes
Oh, well, let's reverse that today because I have a question to ask you. I'm trying to figure out, and we'll get to some of the specifics, like the fact that we're even talking about whether or not we're going to invade Greenland, whether or not the president is going to go ahead criminally prosecuting Jerome Powell, whether or not, I mean, all of these things. But can we just pull back a little bit why Donald Trump right now is doing so much so fast and so many of his actions are really unpopular. Somebody asked me earlier today, is this part of a strategy to distract from other things that he figures that he will dominate the conversation by doing, you know, by a surge in Minneapolis, by going after Jerome Powell, by threatening Greenland, you know, he dominates the conversation. Is that the strategy? And, and I guess my take was yes, but none of those things are actually helping him. The public is. There's a lot of evidence that the public is actually repulsed by many of those things. So what do you think? What do you make of this bizarre beginning to 2026?
- [04:58]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, I've, of course, been thinking a lot about that, Charlie, and I don't like the answer that I come back with, but it seems to me to be the most likely answer, which is that Donald Trump is not running a conventional presidential political playbook. He's running a European style authoritarian playbook. And the way I figure that is he's doing a whole lot of things that he was not elected to do that are very unpopular, that are making him more unpopular. His approvals are dropping. They're at record low for president at this point in his term, if I'm not mistaken. I think the compilation numbers, the averages have him around 42 or maybe a bit lower. And a lot of the polls have him well down into the 30s. And he knows all that. Now, the conventional thing a president would do in that kind of Trouble is, pull back and reassess and do what Bill Clinton does when he got unpopular and what Jimmy Carter tried to do and so forth. He's not doing any of that. He's. He's doubling down on being as unpopular as he possibly can be. Now, why would he do that? And I think the answer is he understands that he's in a kind of foot race. On the one hand, his popularity is flagging, and as that happens, his authority flags. He loses some of the control that he's wielded over the Republican Party. People get less frightened and intimidated by him. He knows that. On the other hand, he's doubling down on authoritarianism as quickly as he can in hopes of outrunning the popularity collapse. In other words, the. He thinks if he can move fast enough to put structures in place like isis, like militarization, like intimidating election officials and trying to, you know, putting in place things like subpoenaing voting machines, create a general sense of fear and intimidation, that he can produce an authoritarian atmosphere and avoid accountability through that route. Now, I would love to be wrong about that, but it's the only thing I see that makes any sense.
- [07:13]
Charlie Sykes
So let's talk about that. What would the end game be? What would those structures be? Would it mean that he would what, not relinquish power in 2028? Would it be what? What are we talking about here?
- [07:27]
Jonathan Rauch
I think the chances are approximately zero that he and MAGA Republicans would voluntarily relinquish power in January of 2029. We saw what happened last time, right? Why do we think it would be any different next time? In maga's mind? In their psychological world, they never lose an election. The only thing that ever happens is elections are stolen. They ran this playbook once. They ran it in a kind of ludicrous way. They won't be ludicrous next time. So I don't think this is a group which is looking ahead to conventional, normal politics and saying, how can we be popular to stay in? I think this is actually a group that's looking ahead and saying, look, what can we do to rig the system so that like Viktor Orban in Hungary, who is explicitly one of their movements models, we can tilt the playing field enough, we won't have outright tyranny or authoritarianism won't be put. But it might be Orban. And that's where you rig the system enough. You set enough obstacles in place on the other side, and you use enough legal machinations and you use the justice system, the criminal prosecution system, ICE and So on, to intimidate your, your opponents that you make the playing field unlevel enough so that you can keep either winning elections or just as important, claiming to win elections and thereby stay in power. It's just a guess, but what do you think?
- [08:59]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I mean, the big question is whether he can get away with it. And I think the question in the Oval Office when Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are hanging by their feet in the closet is, well, who's going to stop us? Who's going to block us from doing that? But do you honestly think that Donald Trump could stay on for a third term? We do still have a Congress. We still do have a US Supreme Court, and of course, there is public opinion. So they may want to do this. Will they? Do you think they'll get away with it, I guess, is the million, billion dollar question.
- [09:32]
Jonathan Rauch
I think probably not. I don't, I wouldn't expect, you know, we're way out in conjecture land now. So nothing I'm about to say is, you know, is really very meaningful. I don't think we're talking about Trump trying to stay in office and hang around. I think we're talking about the MAGA movement and the Republican Party as an entity, as an organization refusing to turn over power to Democrats. I think that could well happen in 2027 in a midterm, if it's at all close. I think you'll see Republicans claim that it was stolen and you'll see results challenged, and you might see efforts by the Republicans in the House not to seat Democrats. But yes, 2029 would be the big year, and the question would be, whoever is the Republican nominee? The Republican candidate would not concede defeat, would demand recounts, would run the same playbook, but with a lot more efficiency, and try to hold power for the MAGA Republican Party. That would be my guess. There is precedent.
- [10:36]
Charlie Sykes
Well, there is precedent. And this is why I think that it's naive and irresponsible not to take this seriously. I think that there was a certain complacency after January 6th, that, okay, that's been taken care of and we've learned the price of that. As I've said a couple of times here, it's increasingly obvious that the, the attempt to overturn the 2020 election in January 6 might have been a rehearsal, like a dry run, and that he is in a far more powerful position to do it. You know, here's a historical deep dive which isn't that deep. You know, you go back to remember the essay the Flight 93 election for 2016. The mental, the, the, the mentality there is that the other party is so dangerous that we should be prepared to rush the cockpit, even if it means crashing the airplane. And that was Michael anton back in 2016. But there's still that lingering sense that, and you look at the rhetoric of the administration about the domestic terrorism, the domestic extremism, the people that are engaging in treason and sedition, that you are creating the predicate for saying whatever the facts on the ground are, we cannot let these people back into power because they are so evil and so dangerous. And it feels as if that ground is being softened up for something. Now, for people who think that being paranoid, look, the fact that it's happened before. Is Donald Trump capable of this? Well, of course he is. He's actually already attempted it. This is not strictly theoretical, is it?
- [12:13]
Jonathan Rauch
I would repeat what I said earlier, which I think is very well grounded empirically in Donald Trump's mind and thus in the MAGA movement's mind, they never lose an election.
- [12:26]
Charlie Sykes
Correct.
- [12:28]
Jonathan Rauch
And that's actually what they think and it's what they act upon. You asked something earlier which we should get to because it's awfully important. I'm not saying they have the capacity to turn America into Hungary. I suspect that this strategy that they're working will fail. I think they're underestimating the political forces of gravity that they're going up against when they make themselves as unpopular as they possibly can be. I think there's a reason that other presidents have not tried to go this route. So I would give their chances, 1 in 4, 1 in 3, of managing to pull off a Hungary style transformation that keeps them in power. But one in four is still a lot higher than we want it to be.
- [13:12]
Charlie Sykes
No, that's. Yeah, you don't want to get on an airplane that has a one in four chance of crashing. So this is something I wanted to ask you about because thinking about some of the events of the last week, whether it is the saber rattling with Greenland, the seizing of the oil from Venezuela, what's been going on in Minneapolis, the attempt to intimidate the chairman of the Federal Reserve by criminally investig investigating him, there does feel to be, there does seem to be a strong whiff of hubris coming from this administration that we know that they're aggressive, we know that they're arrogant. But at some point, doesn't it morph over into a kind of hubris that carries within it the seeds of its own destruction? Because as you point out, a Lot of these things are generating huge backlash, huge blowback, and are deeply, deeply unpopular. So, you know, people have been speculating, is the Trump administration losing energy? Is it in a YOLO phase? I wonder whether or not we're in the hubris phase of this administration and that we're seeing some of these really extreme steps that in fact won't play out the way it has in the past. What do you think?
- [14:27]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, maybe our friend Pete Wehner thinks that maybe it's not the hubris stage, it's the beginning of the desperation stage, in the sense that as their popularity sinks and they understand that with lower approvals goes less freedom of maneuver, that they'll become more desperate and more dangerous rather than less dangerous, you know, in the manner of the proverbial cornered animal. So they will try more and more extreme tactics in order to, to escape that situation. And that's perfectly plausible. The individual things you talked about don't make a lot of sense. Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, rotates out of office in May few months, and Trump will place him probably with a crony. Why in the world would you criminally go after him in January when you know that that problem is about to solve itself? Well, one answer to that is that you're not interested in just, just putting in your new Fed chairman. You want to intimidate some people. You want to make a point about what happens if you cross Donald Trump. You get an activist shot. Renee Good in Minneapolis, you immediately go to, she's a foreign terrorist. You don't say, well, we'll investigate it. We'll look into it. You immediately go to foreign terrorists and you imply that others who resist you may meet the same fate and that those who mete out that fate to them will not face justice. Why would you do that? It looks like an effort to intimidate Venezuela. We don't need that oil. It's very expensive to produce. The major oil companies don't want to do it. There's no sign that the president or his administration is planning seriously any of the measures that you would need to actually, quote, unquote, run that country. So what is that about? Well, it looks like another gesture to show the world who's boss.
- [16:43]
Charlie Sykes
I agree. Let's go back to the Minneapolis shooting, because I think that has. It's not just dominated the news cycle. I think it's dominated the emotional reaction that a lot of people have had. So I wanted to get your take on that, on what happened. But also, and I think this is, you know, as disturbing as the actual event, the reaction and the response. The response from the administration to demonize her, to put out misinformation. And then, of course, the blow up in the Department of Justice where it's apparent that they have no interest in actually having a civil rights investigation into the police shooting they're going after, after the victim and her widow in this particular case. So give me your thoughts about the killing of Renee Good and the aftermath and the way it's playing out in the Department of Justice.
- [17:35]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, I'm not an insider to that case, to say the least, so I'm not sure that I have all that much to add to what's been said by you and others. Does seem to me that there are two separate threads here that should be separated to some extent. One is the actual incident and what happened. It's tragic and it's horrible. I actually heard about it before I saw the news reports when it floated across my social media feed and I clicked on the video and I felt physically nauseated by what I saw. It wasn't mediated by any coverage at that point. It was just the raw footage where she says, I'm not angry at you, dude, and and is dead 30 seconds later. And I think a lot of other people shared that visceral reaction. Nonetheless, I am open to the possibility she be it is when a federal agent who I think was uniformed in this case was properly identified, says, get out of the car. What you do is you get out of the car. That's the right thing to do. She did not. She began moving the car. There were agents around her. It is not implausible that one of those agents thought that he was in danger of life and limb and thought the way to stop that car is to stop the driver. That might be what happened. So tragic. If so, issue two, as you mentioned just now, is the administration response. They immediately signaled through no less than the Vice President of the United States. We're not even talking about law enforcement. We're talking about someone who has no constitutional or legal remit over law enforcement. Immediately went out and essentially said, I don't remember the quote, I may get this wrong. Essentially said, the person who was shot in this situation was a terrorist and communicated to the world that the administration has no intention of either conducting a fair and thorough investigation or allowing there to be a cultural and media environment in which any investigation could be trusted. In other words, they corrupted the process on purpose, essentially from minute zero. And that's got ramifications all the way down the Line. Right. Means maybe. Means we never know what actually happens. It certainly means we can't trust what the FBI is doing. And it means in future situations down the road, everyone's going to be thinking, well, ICE acts with impunity. That's what they're telling us.
- [20:24]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, it is interesting. A few years ago, the slogan abolish ICE was pretty much confined to the fringes of the progressive movement. Now there are public opinion polls showing that ICE's public support is cratering. More people think that ICE is endangering us than keeping us safe. And a plurality of Americans are now saying in a recent poll that they would favor abolishing ice. So this is another one of these things where this is clearly. This is the ID of the administration. They are not going to pivot away from this. They are going to double down, triple down, quadruple down on all of this in the face of public, Deep public disillusionment with. With the way immigration is being enforced.
- [21:12]
Jonathan Rauch
Yeah. What is it that Bill Kristol said, which is, who do I go to to apologize to the. To the people who said, abolish ice? Yeah, well, you know, Stephen Miller said that thing. Again, I don't have the quote in front of me, and. And I'll get it wrong. But Stephen Miller, the most powerful aide in the administration and some kind of spokesman for Trump's id, said very publicly that the way the world works is the rule of the strong. I think he called it the iron law, the strong dominate, the weak. And he said that in the context of foreign policy. But that's, I think, the same principle that they're operating under domestically. We're gonna show you how strong you are, and you're going to lose the will to resist. Yeah.
- [22:05]
Charlie Sykes
And, you know, the thing about. Michelle Goldberg has a column in the New York Times which says, you know, the resistance libs were right. And by the way, I wouldn't say just the resistance libs were right, you know, pointing out that, you know, Donald Trump was a. Whether you want to call him a fascist or not, that in the past, all he had lacked was basically the, you know, street muscle to enforce his imperial designs. And he's kind of filled in the blanks there. But what is ICE going to become? What is extraordinary to me is that in the wake of the shooting of Renee Goode, and by the way, I'm a little bit more skeptical than you are about the police officer who shot her, especially as the car was going past. I understand that he may have panicked for a moment, but in any case. But what's very clear is that the ICE agents have been emboldened by this and are going to be more aggressive.
- [22:58]
Jonathan Rauch
So.
- [22:58]
Charlie Sykes
And the rhetoric. Have you been following this? The rhetoric coming from the Department of Homeland Security and from ice, the things they put out on social media, this just sort of raw brutalism of the, you know, kind of, you know, how we're going to ethnically cleanse the country. And again, the money and the resources that they're pumping into to ICE would certainly suggest that what's ever happened is going to get worse, it's not going to get better. They are not going to back off.
- [23:28]
Jonathan Rauch
I'm not expert in. Expert on ice, but people who know a lot about it say, you ain't seen nothing yet. Wait till you see what they can do with $150 billion. So, yes, I think that's right. You know, if you're a law enforcement agency and you. That's what you're serious about, you put out measured statements, you know, you keep a low profile. Except when you can't keep a low profile, you go about your business in a minimally disruptive way. That's not what ICE is doing. They're not behaving that way at all. We're seeing political theater from ice.
- [24:11]
Charlie Sykes
No, we're seeing political theater. And by the way, that's by design. Remember when they attacked that housing project in Chicago and they repelled from the helicopters, Kristi Noem had basically a sizzle reel created. Looked like a Michael Bay movie. They put music behind it. They actually go out of their way to put on these performances. Although I have to say that again, we are living in this era where everybody has a camera, everybody is videotaping. And these stories of, you know, the ice, the ICE agents, you know, pulling people from cars, you know, throwing teenagers to the ground and everything, this has had a cumulative effect. I mean, this is not. This is not one where they can control the narrative the way that they would hope.
- [24:55]
Jonathan Rauch
I think that's right. You know, we. We do need to keep circling back to. At least for my part, I'm not saying this is going to work for them. I don't think it will. I think there's some chance that it will work, but it's not a 50% chance. It's more like a 20 or 25% chance. But I think it's a theory of the case that they're executing on.
- [25:18]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I think the other thing that they're doing, though, is it feels like we've gone through Kind of a masks off stage of this administration where you and I, if we would have said these things were happening, if we would have said this six months ago, we would have been accused of Trump derangement syndrome. And now they say that quiet part out loud. Right. Over and over again, they're doing these things. So let's talk about the other sort of hubristic act. You know, if we said Donald Trump will try to intimidate everyone who opposes him politically or in policy with criminal investigations, people would have said, okay, well, that's going a little bit too far. And yet here we have the Jerome Powell case. The Jerome Powell case, which I thought was extraordinary on a couple different levels. Number one, did you have in your bingo car that Jerome Powell would stand up to Donald Trump this way? That Donald, that Jerome Powell would blow the whistle by coming out with that video the other day? Because the blowback and the backlash on this is pretty dramatic, isn't it?
- [26:14]
Jonathan Rauch
You know, I know someone who knows Jerome Powell for 40 years who is not surprised that Chairman Powell did that. Said it isn't his character. Apparently Chairman Powell's a tough cookie.
- [26:27]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, obviously.
- [26:28]
Jonathan Rauch
And the Fed has a culture over there. They zealously guard their independence. And this is a make or break situation for their independence. Right. If what Trump's administration is trying to do, by the way, I'm not completely sure Trump is lying when he says that he didn't do this. This might have looks like it may have been something that Bill Pulte, the guy is at the Home Loan Bank Board. He goes through, according to news accounts, he goes through the files and goes fishing for things that can be prosecuted and then mails them over to the doj. So that may have happened here, we don't know. But in any case, this is an extinction level experience for the Fed. Right. And so I think they probably understand that this is a moment where if they don't stand, they'll be swallowed up.
- [27:18]
Charlie Sykes
Well, but a lot of institutions have faced those kinds of events and have decided to roll over or cave in or find some way of doing it. And he stood up and he pushed back. And I think the level of the pushback is extraordinary. Watching all the Fed chairman, all the former Treasury Secretari, the heads of all of the foreign national banks, even Republicans in Congress doing something they haven't done before, push back against them. Now, in terms of whether or not Trump ordered them, I kind of have a Henry ii, Thomas Becket thing that's going on here where he says, who will rid me of this troublesome priest. And then the knights go out and they murder the Archbishop of Canterbury. Trump has made it clear, you know, who is going to be more aggressive in going after my targets. I thought it was interesting the Wall Street Journal had that piece yesterday where there was that photo op. Did you read about this? This photo op of all these US Attorneys that come into the White House to meet the president and it's like a happy, happy thing. And he berates them as a bunch of weaklings. You know, you people are, you know, you're not being aggressive enough. And this was the day before they issued the subpoenas to the Fed. So, you know, people like Jeanine Pirro, they know, I mean, these are just total creatures of Donald Trump. When Donald Trump expresses anger, they treat that as an instruction, which again, is not reassuring in any way whatsoever.
- [28:38]
Jonathan Rauch
Correct? Correct. And is all consistent with the reading that I'm so. The interpretation that I'm so unhappily transmitting today, which is a concerted campaign to use force and intimidation to undermine our Constitution.
- [28:57]
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- [30:59]
Charlie Sykes
Well, speaking of which, and honestly, every single day I think, I cannot believe that we're actually talking about whether or not Donald Trump is going to take Greenland. I mean, do you remember when you first heard this? I think the smart kids all said he's trolling or this is the art of the deal or something. But here we are. And despite international blowback, domestic blowback, the polls that show that no one wants this, Donald Trump is again saying we have to have Greenland, otherwise Russia or China will take it. And NATO's going, no, they're not, they're not going to take it. And so they ask for a meeting and they get J.D. vance, which to say, you know, is rattling people is putting it mild. So give me your thoughts on again, Donald Trump obsession with his legacy, his power, what that he's talking about the possibility of actually attacking a NATO ally.
- [32:01]
Jonathan Rauch
I have to ask you, Charlie, just your emotional temperature. What are the odds that the United States takes some kind of military or coercive action against Denmark in Greenland? Maybe not a full on invasion, but you know, a blockade or sending a carrier group out there. What do you think are the chances of that?
- [32:21]
Charlie Sykes
I'm sorry to say, not zero, not, not zero. Which is why I'm really, I'm encouraged that Denmark is reinforcing. I wish NATO, I wish all the NATO countries, I've said this numerous times would send, you know, a company or a battalion as tripwires to Greenland. I think that's the only language that Donald Trump understands. But I don't think, I think at this point it's non zero. What do you think?
- [32:44]
Jonathan Rauch
Oh, I think it's certainly non zero. I wasn't one of those cool, smart kids who said ignore him when he talks about Greenland. I have learned over the past 10 years don't ignore what Donald Trump says. Like most authoritarians, when they tell you what they're going to do, believe them. So it doesn't seem, it's not a very rational thing to do. You don't need to do it. It's going to be unpopular. If he actually pulls the trigger on something rash, I think it's going to be a dise disaster for the alliance. Very unpopular with the public, it probably won't even succeed. I think in his mind what he thinks he's doing is using intimidation to force the Danes to the negotiating table where he'll make some kind of offer to them and they'll have to accept it. And then he can go down as the James K. Polk or William McKinley figure who expanded the territorial United States and that will put him on Mount Rushmore. I suspect that's his theory of the case. The most insightful single thing I've ever heard said about Donald Trump, which again, I will mangle the quote, but if you want to put it in the show notes, I can get you the source. I wrote it all down. John Bolton about a year ago gave an interview in which he said the thing to understand about Donald Trump, he's not a full on fascist because and he's not organized enough mentally to be a full on fascist. But he looks at guys like Putin and Xi and Kim and thinks, why did they get all the fun? And I think that's a big component of it. He's a guy psychologically predisposed to say, you know, there are strong big men in the world and I want to be top dog of those people. And all of these things that he's doing that we're talking about fit into this pattern of a psychological need to dominate and to have the same kind of fun that President Putin has.
- [34:50]
Charlie Sykes
I think it's also important to note that with his mob boss tactics here, Donald Trump has actually so far been quite lucky in his imperial adventures. He was able to pull off the bombing of Iran successfully with no casualties. He was able to pull off the attack on Venezuela, the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro with no casualties. So he hasn't had any military disasters. He hasn't had a Jimmy Carter helicopter in the desert incident. He hasn't had the kind of thing that happened to Joe Biden in Afghanistan yet. I am curious to know what would happen. He feels like he becomes emboldened thinking, I got away with that, that worked, I can continue to try things. But what we don't know is what will happen if there comes a real price for it, which obviously I do not want to see because the real price would probably be paid in American lives and American blood. But so far he is, I think he's been banking on his luck. Right. Giving him the wind at the back.
- [36:02]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, there are interesting aspects to the tactics he's using and whatever his, his psychological infirmities, he is doing some interesting, innovative things. And one is this theory of the case that you do these short, sharp interventions and that I think one of the things. And you're done. One of the things that I think he believes is that nation building is a mistake, and so we just don't do it. And what you do is more. It's like the old fashioned imperialism of the 19th century when you'd go in with your army and you'd pretty easily topple the existing government in a country, Northern Africa or Africa or India or wherever it was. And then you'd go find the biggest boss in the place and you'd hand them a top hat and a scepter and you'd say, okay, you're in charge now. You're running it for us. It's your job to make sure that we don't have any trouble. Goodbye. And very often that worked for quite a while. Now, of course it led to rampant corruption, tyranny in these countries, all kinds of abuses. But I think the theory of the case is if you outsource the administration of these countries to the biggest gang boss on the ground, you're okay. It's a very old, it's a very old model. Frank Fukuyama just did a wonderful little podcast where he just said, you know, it's not going to work in Venezuela. They're just, they're just too many different forces there that are vying for power. There could be a civil war, for example, and the government won't have legitimacy, so it'll fail. And then what do we send in the troops?
- [37:54]
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- [39:44]
Charlie Sykes
Well, let's talk about Venezuela because, you know, in Venezuela, this started off as a drug interdiction campaign and then it became about the indictment of Maduro, who's a bad guy, you know, as the leader of a drug cartel. And now it's like again, masks off, it's all about the oil. So I want to talk about that. By the way, that meeting that Donald Trump had when he invited all the CEOs of the oil companies, you know, to come into the the White House in Baldini, it kind of reminded me of the generals meeting with Pete Hegseth because all the CEOs of the oil companies are going, okay, we don't want to make him mad. But no, we're not going back into Venezuela. We're not going to be investing there. It didn't work.
- [40:29]
Jonathan Rauch
There is no commercial case that is heavy sour crude. It is not economical to exploit. They'll go bankrupt if they try to do it well.
- [40:42]
Charlie Sykes
And you know, the administration is making no secret of the fact that he actually thinks that he runs Venezuela, he's controlling everything. But that's only true as long as he controls the oil. And I guess one of the questions that I had not seen addressed, maybe you have seen this, how long are we going to keep those carrier? You know, I mean, everything down there, we have a lot of our military assets now devoted to Venezuela. There may be some other uses for those military. I mean, are they going to stay there for a year? Are they going to stay there for two years? How long are we going to leave them there? And again, nobody really knows the answer. I don't think Donald Trump knows the answer.
- [41:14]
Jonathan Rauch
That's a good question. I'd love to see the answer to that. I'd also love to see the answer of, as I understand it, another this is a international law and maritime law is a rabbit hole, which I don't begin to be acquainted with. But what the administration seems to be doing is effectively blockading Venezuelan oil exports and turning that on and off in order to obtain compliance from the Venezuelans. Now, last time I checked, that kind of behavior was an act of war.
- [41:46]
Charlie Sykes
Yes.
- [41:47]
Jonathan Rauch
So that's not going to be sustainable in international law. You're going to start seeing things like UN resolutions and you're going to start seeing things like demands that the United States not blockade the Venezuelan fleet. So, you know, there'll have to be some decisions there about whether to escalate too, I assume. I don't know. Well, have you heard anything about that?
- [42:06]
Charlie Sykes
No, I have not. And again, this is one of those things, you know, going back to your description of Donald Trump likes these short, sharp incidents and then you move on because he wants the show. The complicated stuff afterward interests him a lot less. So I don't know that he has a plan for that as well. So in the few minutes we have left, let's shift domestically. I am really struck by the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2026 feels so different given the fact that you have an administration now that is not just in the process of dismantling dei. And I had a lot of problems with dei. There seems to be a wholesale erasure of a lot of American history, rewriting of a lot of American history. The Republican president now saying that the passage of the Civil Rights act of 1964 led to all these terrible things that victimized white people. So can you just. Let's talk a little bit about how we got here and what Martin Luther King Jr's legacy is in the era of Donald Trump. See, I give you the easy questions near the end.
- [43:19]
Jonathan Rauch
Yeah, that's a quick one to wrap up with. You know, Charlie, I don't know that he'd have been surprised. He faced again and again the full on fury of white hatred and backlash. He understood as, as well as any human being on the planet the importance of status to white people. The other person who really understood this was lbj, who according to Bill Moyers once said, if I give a man someone to look down upon, there is no amount of money I can't pick from his pocket. And there are a lot of people in the country who have legitimate or sometimes not so legitimate grievances, and they blame that on their loss of cultural power and they want the old America back. Way back in 2016, at the Republican convention, the New York Times was interviewing Trump supporters and they were saying things like, I want my old country back. And I don't think that would surprise Reverend King at all. I think he said, of course, what do you Expect this is what he dealt with for his entire career. And it wasn't going away by the time he finished, for heaven's sake, he was shot.
- [44:54]
Charlie Sykes
Yes, well. And was unpopular at the time because he was willing to come out against the Vietnam War. And a lot of his aides said he shouldn't get involved in that. And I think his approval ratings dropped. But I want to point out, just to remind people, because it's so easy to forget now that civil rights used to be broadly supported on a bipartisan basis. I actually looked up the Civil Rights act of 1964. 136 Republicans voted in favor of it in the House of Representatives. And in the Senate, 27 Republican senators voted in favor of it. So the vast majority of Republicans in 1964 voted in favor of the Civil Rights act that year. And you know, fast forward to today. The other thing that I think that sometimes gets lost in our discussions, and this is a conversation that you and I have had many times, I think, is remember this is the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. And remember the role of the faith communities of the churches in making a moral case for the civil rights in 1960. I have perhaps an irrational hope that the churches, the faith community, will step up again. I think they've been such a disappointment in the last few years. I'm hoping that. And you and I have talked about this, the new pope, his aggressiveness in challenging what's going on here in this country and mobilizing the Catholic Church to again make this moral appeal, to say, look, you can call yourself a Christian, but if you support these policies, you are not. So Martin Luther, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. Was a faith leader and you can't understand his role and his legacy and his appeal without understanding that. So I think that if we're looking to ask how do we come out of this, I have some minor hope that people like Peter Wehner and David French and folks at Christianity Today and the Catholic Church are going to step up to this particular moment. Is that reasonable or is that excessively optimistic?
- [47:05]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, some of them, of course, including the ones you, you name already are. I've sometimes wondered, Charlie, this may be just whistling past the graveyard, but I've wondered if history wouldn't someday write that that rally after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, that juxtapose Erica Kirk and Donald Trump won't turn out to be in history's eyes something of a turning point, because there you saw Erica Kirk give some of the most full hearted and beautiful Christian testimony that any of us have ever seen a moment of profound and even shocking Christlike forgiveness. And then immediately following her saying that she loved her enemy, Donald Trump got up there and said, I hate my enemies. And the whole world could see at that moment that you can be a Christian or you can be a Trump supporter, but you can't be both. At that point, it became nakedly apparent. And I just wonder if, you know, if we'll see in the future that that's when maybe people begin to wake up and peel off. I don't know. Another thing about Reverend King, I always like to say Reverend and not doctor because I think it's really the more important credential was a Christian and deeply informed by the idea of original sin. And I think some of us, me included, you know, remember that, that ecstatic feeling we all had in 2008 and at the inauguration, 2009, the inauguration of a black president. We had finally closed the books. We turned the page. The age of racism was over. Yeah, King knew better. King knew that we are fallen. We are deeply flawed. He knew that evil exists in all of us. And I think he would have cautioned us, he would have said, he did say the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice. We tend to focus on the bending toward justice part and not the long part. Long means generations. It can mean centuries, it can mean millennia. We are far, far from where he hoped that we will eventually be.
- [49:26]
Charlie Sykes
Jonathan Rauch, thank you so much for joining me. It's always incredibly value added. So again, thank you for your time today.
- [49:35]
Jonathan Rauch
Thank you. I always enjoy our conversations and I.
- [49:38]
Charlie Sykes
Want to thank everybody listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. Do you know why we do this? Why in 2026, it's more important than ever to remind ourselves every single day we are not the crazy ones.
- [50:06]
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Jonathan Rauch
Recommend.
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