Scott Detrow

Can you recap kind of how we got from point A to point B without any of the steps feeling overly dramatic?

And a lot of opinion polls along the way showed that by and large, a lot of these steps did have broad, if not a majority, you know, from time to time, a good chunk of Americans were on board with each of these steps.

Mm-hmm.

And that all sets the stage for the most recent seizure of another country's president who's brought to the United States and put on trial.

And maybe as Steve Bannon put it, a lot of people who read The Atlantic are upset about this.

But maybe Americans are actually on board with a lot of this.

And the pushback to steps toward authoritarianism is a lot different than maybe what we thought it would be in high school social studies.

I mean, what is your sense a year into the second term

Reporting this story and many other stories.

Do you have a sense of what you think Trump's end goals are?

Is it I want to tear down democratic norms or is it something more straightforward of I want to be a notable famous president or or is it even more moment to moment and topic to topic than that?

Like, how do you think about this?

Yeah.

Ashley Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Thank you so much.

This episode was produced by Alejandra Marquez-Hance with audio engineering by Tiffany Vera Castro.

It was edited by Patrick Jaron Wadanana.

Our executive producer is Sammy Yettigan.

It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Scott Detrow.