Zack Beauchamp
speaker
75 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Zack Beauchamp’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So the argument is that Trump's central goal of his administration, he wouldn't put it in these terms, but I think that it's sort of pretty fair to say that this is what their policies indicate towards, is changing the American regime.
Turning what was a democratic government and has long been a democratic government into some species of non-democratic government in which power is wielded primarily through the executive with basically few checks. And potentially, even down the line, the fairness of elections is compromised. That part's speculative.
But we can say that there's an attempt to reconfigure the constitutional order without having to amend the Constitution. And that means not just Trump saying that he is doing things to consolidate power. but actually doing it. And so I think that you can use a series of benchmarks. It's a brief checklist, right? First is that I looked into sort of quantitatively the court rulings against Trump.
And I found that not only did he lose vastly more than he won whenever there was an actual decision, but in most situations, the administration has complied with the something like four to one ratio of court orders where they've lost. Look at the cases of the students that have been targeted, right? Courts have been consistently ruling in their favor.
They've issued statements publicly saying, we will never back off from defending what is right. And it looks most likely, based on the current legal trajectory, that they're going to be released. In fact, courts have ordered a significant number of student visas that have been taken away, restored. And the State Department has complied with that. So that's one thing, right?
Failing to consolidate institutional power. A second thing is failing to neutralize sources of opposition. And so I think the press is a really good example. Like, one of the first things that any of these guys does when they want to try to move towards an authoritarian state— is suborn the press in some way, silence it, make sure there isn't effective criticism coming out of the media.
And clearly, there are instances of self-censorship by the media, of Trump putting pressure on media organizations. But on the whole, if you look at the media landscape in the United States, there's no shortage of Trump criticism. We aren't having the entire country turning into Fox News. And the third thing is civil society. And here, the thing that really changed my mind is universities.
Where you had at first Columbia basically doing whatever Trump wanted to try to get the threat of funding cuts, federal funding dollars being shut off off their back. But then it looked like Harvard might be about to do the same thing. And then all of a sudden Harvard becomes the leader of the resistance, right? They're organizing this thing. There's a compact among big 10 schools.
That's been ratified by faculty senates in which they pledge. Basically, they call it a NATO for mutual legal defense. If Trump comes after one of them, they'll all defend each other with resources. There's a strategy group privately for Ivy League and other like top tier elite schools where they're planning collective resistance against the Trump administration.
This is not what happens when you effectively consolidate power. And you can see this in a number of different spheres ranging from business to law.
Yeah, so I thought about this.
No, I thought about this objection a lot while I was working on the piece. Because, you know, Trump has never said, I'm going to be an authoritarian. He said he'd be dictator on day one, but only on day one. Just on day one.
But Victor Orban doesn't say that. I want to seize control of the Hungarian government and make myself dictator, right? It's in the structure of modern authoritarianism when you're dealing with backsliding from democracy that they want to claim democratic bona fides. They want to be able to say, I'm still ruling on behalf of the people. Elections are still legitimate.
In fact, my legitimacy flows from my popularity. So the way that you assess whether or not backsliding is happening is you look at the cumulative intent of the different policies put together. What would the output be if these policies all succeeded, if Trump actually got what he wanted in these cases. And we can see what that would look like, right?
It would look like a series of deals like the ones that Columbia and Paul Weiss made. It would look like the courts declining to challenge him for fear that he wouldn't be obeyed, or sorry, that they wouldn't be obeyed in this case. It would look like the media self-censoring.
I mean, we're on this podcast saying that Trump is an authoritarian and none of us are afraid that Donald Trump is going to shut us down because we were on this podcast. That to me is a significant marker of failure.
I mean... Antisemitism has since, I mean, honestly, since the existence of Christianity, been a conspiracy theory. It started with the idea that the Jews collectively killed Jesus and has become an explanatory framework for everything bad that has happened since.
And in that way, it's protean because antisemitism can be adapted as an explanation for whatever bad thing you want to happen, you can blame it on the Jews. But what you can also do is reconstruct the figure of who the Jew is and what they are doing in ways that are useful for your political project.
So, it also centers on an old idea, but one that Trump has explicitly appropriated, the idea of there being good Jews and bad Jews. And the good Jews are one that fit the dominant political characteristics and acceptable political characteristics at the time, right, of this area. You see this in Hungary, actually, right?
There's an Orthodox community led by Chabad that's aligned in many ways with the regime.
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