Trump's win may extend conservative control of the Supreme Court for decades

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The last weeks of Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president were a festival of crudeness. In light of this, Tucker Carlson’s warm-up act at a Georgia rally late last month was, if notably creepy, still typical of the sunken depths of rhetoric. Carlson offered an extended metaphor in which Trump was an angry “dad” with a household of misbehaving children (a 2-year-old who has smeared “the contents of his diapers on the wall,” “a hormone-addled” 15-year-old girl who has decided to “slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger”). The children in this metaphor, if it wasn’t clear, are the citizens of this country.“Dad comes home, and he’s pissed,” Carlson said to wild cheers. “He’s not vengeful; he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior, and he’s going to have to let them know.” Then came the grossest part: Carlson’s fantasy of Trump spanking “a bad little girl” as punishment.What America did on Tuesday was elect that dad—vengeful, disappointed, erratic, and in the minds of his followers, benevolent.A majority of voters preferred Trump, and likely for a variety of reasons; it may have been “the inflation, stupid” after all. But psychological forces also lie behind Trump’s appeal. Largely unexamined among these is the aura of paternalism exuded by the president-elect. Carlson, in his reptilian way, was getting at this idea in its most vulgar iteration. Trump wanted to be seen as a father figure for a nation he insisted needed discipline and defending. This felt like a role reversal from his 2016 persona: the class clown sitting in the back, lobbing spitballs at the establishment. If during his first administration he was a child dependent on “adults in the room” to make sure he didn’t fiddle with the nuclear code, this year he gave off the more assured air of an imposing patriarch in an overcoat; he’s been in the White House already and doesn’t need any help. This infused the slogan from his 2016 Republican National Convention, “I alone can fix it,” with new resonance eight years later.[Read: Trump won. Now what?]When Trump started using this line again, I immediately understood its efficacy. I have a fairly egalitarian marriage, yet a common refrain in my house, whenever something breaks, is “Aba will fix it” (my kids call me “Aba,” Hebrew for “dad”). My wife even laughs at how quickly our determination to avoid traditional gender roles breaks down if there is a dead bird in the backyard that needs to be disposed of or an IKEA shelf that has to be built. The notion of a dad who can—or at least will try to—“fix it” is deeply embedded in our cultural psyche, and not just among Americans who consider themselves conservative. Even for people who didn’t grow up with a father—maybe especially for those who didn’t—the longing for a mythical male protector can run deep. Just think of J. D. Vance, the vice-president-elect, who has written that the “revolving door of father figures” his mother would bring into his life was the worst part of his childhood. He longed for stability and firmness, and he has allied himself with a right-wing movement that aims to restore a “father knows best” nation of single-earner households tended to by stay-at-home moms.Consciously or not, Trump exploited this desire, and he did so at a moment of deep economic and social flux in the country. He painted an exaggerated (and often fictional) portrait of a nation of vulnerable children menaced by murderous immigrants, one that requires a paterfamilias to provide a defense—and to guard their reproductive rights (he is, of course, the self-styled “father of IVF”). At a Wisconsin rally late last month, Trump described a conversation with his advisers in which he told them he wanted to use this sort of paternalistic language on the stump. They disagreed, according to his story, and told him it would be “very inappropriate” for him to say, for example, “I want to protect the women of our country.” To this, he responded: “Well, I’m going to do it—whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.”Authoritarian leaders thrive on this kind of familial imagery. One of the most memorable photos of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is from 1936: He smiles as an apple-cheeked little girl named Engelsina Markizova sits on his lap and throws her arms around his neck. (The year after the photo was taken, Markizova later said, her actual father was disappeared one night; he was executed in 1938 as part of Stalin’s purge.) During Benito Mussolini’s 1925 “Battle for Grain” propaganda campaign to boost Italy’s wheat production, the leader himself went out, sickle in hand, to thresh, as cameras captured the image of a man vigorously pretending to provide for his family. And, of course, “father” is a title borne by generations of dictators, including Muammar Qaddafi, who often went by “Father of the Nation,” and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (who gave himself a surname meaning “father of the Turks”). Joseph Stalin, in 1936, in a fatherly photo op with Engelsina Markizova, whose real father would be executed under his regime two years later.(Russian State Film and Photo Archive / Alamy) Trump might be too undisciplined (or unfamiliar with history) to follow this script exactly—though even some of his flights of fancy might be generously described as dad humor of a sort—but his projection of paternalism does fit a recognizable mold. In the 1960s, the clinical psychologist Diana Baumrind identified three distinct parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. A good example of the “permissive” dad might be Tim Walz, a hugger and an emoter who is always up for a chat. As for Trump, all you needed to do was spend a few minutes at one of his rallies to see that he comes off as a classic “authoritarian” father: withholding, demanding, not open to negotiation over, say, curfew time.[Adam Serwer: There is no constitutional mandate for fascism.]The upside of the authoritarian style of parenting, according to Baumrind, is that it results in well-behaved, orderly children, and this is the society that Trump is promising: one without the flung diapers and slammed doors. But there is a clear downside to having a father like this.According to the National Institutes of Health, children of authoritarian parents can have “higher levels of aggression” and exhibit “shyness, social ineptitude, and difficulty making their own decisions.” They may have low self-esteem and difficulty controlling their anger. I’m not seeing a recipe here for good citizens—just loyal subjects. Is this who we might become? Trump’s paternalism, his projection of power and control, may have held appeal for his voters. It allowed them to project onto him all the things people project onto dads: that they are brave and indestructible and always there to kill an insect for us. Trump might have won his supporters’ love by fashioning himself as America’s father. But a democracy doesn’t need scared and obedient children. It needs grown-ups—vigilant, conscientious ones. And the president exists to serve them, not the other way around.

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But with more mixed results

I’ll be thinking about what my family and I can do on a local scale, no matter who’s in the White House. This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. My older kid knows this was an election week, but his biggest concern has been his school’s Scholastic Book Fair. My younger kid, who is 2, does not know what an election is. It is, of course, a privilege to be oblivious to national events, a privilege not every child has — the millions of children who live with unauthorized immigrant parents, for example, could be very deeply affected by Trump’s “mass deportation” plan if he’s able to follow through with it. And the outcome of the election will impact the future of all children, in the US and around the world, through its effects on climate change, American democracy, foreign policy, and more. I’ll be talking to my kids in the months and years ahead about all these issues. If you’re looking to start having more conversations with the kids in your life about elections and democratic participation, Vox’s Allie Volpe has tips on how to do that. I especially like her advice to teach children about civic engagement, something that can be easier to do on a local level.  My older kid wrote (okay, he dictated) to New York City Mayor Eric Adams earlier this year to protest proposed cuts to library budgets, and Adams eventually reversed those cuts, thanks in no small part to the more than 174,000 letters he received from concerned New Yorkers. It was a hopeful moment in what has been (at least for adults) a year of enormous political stress. I think my kid felt he could have a real impact on our city, however small (his campaign to reinstate congestion pricing has yet to bear similar fruit). Kids’ lives are often hyperlocal — they are affected most by their families, their schools, their immediate communities. In a way, though, that’s true of all of us — my colleague Marina Bolotnikova recently noted that her technique for managing election anxiety was to “realize how much my quality of life has to do more with state/local policy than national elections and adjust my attention accordingly.”  As we all process the results of this week’s election, I’ll be thinking about what my family and I can do on a local scale, and what so many are already doing, no matter who’s in the White House. I also want to hear from you — have the kids in your life been asking about the election? How are they feeling? How are you talking to them about what’s going on, and about the future? What’s bringing you hope and fear right now? Get in touch at anna.north@vox.com, and I’ll be back next week. What I’m reading Thousands of New Jersey students voted in this year’s New Jersey Mock Election, a project to teach kids about being an informed voter. “We realized how the citizens of America determine our leadership. It’s really amazing,” one eighth-grader told NJ Spotlight News. As kids’ school lunch accounts move online, payment processors are charging families fees just to put money into their accounts. Now the USDA is moving to ban those fees — but not until the 2027–28 school year. Kids are calling each other “chat.” Also, “Ohio” is over. My younger kid keeps demanding repeat readings of what he calls “raccoon” — actually Secret Pizza Party, by the team who brought you Dragons Love Tacos. SPP is about a raccoon who dresses up like a human to steal pizza, and then there’s a party, and everyone is wearing masks for some reason. Honestly, I don’t understand this one. From my inbox A Texas reader wrote in that he brought his 7-year-old son to the polls this year. “The biggest deal to him was the election workers who made a big deal about a ‘future voter’ being there,” he said. “Kids generally like getting stickers but he seemed particularly pleased with this one.” “My wife took our youngest daughter this week,” he added. “She seemed similarly pleased with the sticker and the big highlight was her loudly chanting, ‘Washington for president! I want Washington for president!’” It’s an unorthodox suggestion, but one apparently shared by several voters who wrote in “George Washington” on their 2020 ballots; other write-in candidates included Mickey Mouse, the Hulk, and “giant meteor.”

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SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk onstage at the Roxain Theater on October 20, 2024, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. | Michael Swensen/Getty Images Elon Musk spent Election Day on X praising men, amplifying anti-immigrant conspiracies, and accusing Democrats of voter fraud. It was all pretty on-brand for the billionaire, who has become one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters and a one-man misinformation machine. When it was clear early Wednesday morning that Trump would win, Musk told his followers: “You are the media now.” A statement like that would have been laughable even a month ago, when estimates showed that X, formerly Twitter, had dropped nearly 80 percent in value since Musk purchased the platform for $44 billion in 2022. Until its transformation into X, the platform was regarded by some as a once-vibrant place on the internet that Musk utterly destroyed. But after Musk spent at least $119 million to get Trump elected and turned his platform into a MAGA megaphone — and then Trump won — the social media site’s real value is starting to take new shape. From the day his Twitter purchase went through, Musk vowed to make free speech central to the platform’s future. He purged the company’s trust and safety staff, setting a precedent that other social media companies followed. Since then, however, Musk has been willing to let authoritarian regimes dictate how X will work in their countries. In the United States, more free speech on X meant more misinformation and an embrace of right-wing politics.  X is certainly not the biggest social media platform, but as other major platforms continue to shy away from policing content and Trump heads back to the White House, X certainly looks more influential than it did last week. You might not like this. Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year.  Gone are the warning labels that Twitter once used to flag false or misleading information. Musk replaced that system with a crowd-sourced fact-checking program called Community Notes. He called it “the best source of truth on the internet.” Unfortunately, the new system doesn’t work very well. So if your feed feels as though it’s especially full of right-wing voices and conspiracy theories, that’s because it probably is. It’s not exactly a coordinated effort by Musk’s lieutenants to push your views to the right. It’s just how X is designed these days.  It’s way too soon to tell just how big a role X played in Trump’s reelection. We also don’t know what, if anything, Musk will do differently with the platform as he eyes some sort of role in the new administration. You can count on continuing to question everything you see on social media, though. “The problem will get worse because there are no guardrails in place right now,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “All the trends are moving in the wrong direction.” Indeed, thanks to the apathy of social media platforms and the rise of AI, lying on the internet has never been easier. And if you’re on X, it’s part of the appeal. The right will continue to rule X Leading up to the election, opinions on the fate of X were grim. There were plenty of reports on the dangers of election misinformation on the platform or Musk’s broken promises about what X would do by now. Bloomberg columnist Dave Lee argued that the platform was simply failing, losing users and relevance. That seems less likely now.  Despite rumors of its demise, X is still quite big. X told advertisers as recently as September that it has over 570 million monthly active users, dwarfing right-wing platforms like Truth Social and Rumble, whose users are in the hundreds of thousands. It is also much bigger than platforms like Mastodon and Blue Sky, which progressives fled to after Musk bought Twitter.  Meanwhile, Meta recently said that its Twitter-replacement platform, Threads, has 275 million monthly active users. A big difference between the two platforms? Meta limits the amount of political content you see on Threads. It looks like people are either staying on X or flocking to it for unfiltered politics news. Political news on Twitter used to be marginal, where celebrities were the main draw. The celebrities have left, and now X is the most popular major social media platform for keeping up with politics, according to a Pew survey published in June. There has also been a major partisan shift. Democrats historically dominated political discussion on the platform, but X has become dominated by right-wing voices in just the last couple of years. Posts from Republicans are far more likely to go viral on X, and once-popular Democrat accounts have seen their audiences disintegrate, according to a recent Washington Post investigation. Republicans have also changed their minds about the platform’s impact on democracy. While Twitter was once framed as the platform that censored conservative voices, X has become the right’s favorite place for freedom. Only 17 percent of Republicans thought Twitter was good for democracy in 2021, but 53 percent said X was good for democracy in 2024, according to the Pew study.  “Democratic users are much more likely to think people getting harassed is a major problem on the platform, and on the flip side, Republicans who post about politics are especially likely to do so because their views feel welcome there,” Colleen McClain, one of the authors of the Pew study, told me this week. McClain added that “in recent years, we haven’t seen any mass exodus or flocking to or from X in our data, either overall or by party.” None of this should come as a huge surprise if you’ve spent any time on X. But the partisan split took on new dimensions leading up to this year’s election, if only because the Republicans who felt like their voices were heard on X also felt heard at the ballot box.  Their guy won, and maybe the weird, violent memes on X helped. Elon Musk is just getting started We don’t know if X will grow or change — or just stay its same problematic self — as Trump prepares to take office again. We do know that Elon Musk isn’t done with politics. Musk was at Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago as the results rolled in on election night, and there’s good reason to believe we’ll see the SpaceX owner in DC soon enough. As far as politics go, Musk says he’s not done funding political races. In a livestream on X, the billionaire said his America PAC would “keep going after this election, and prepare for the midterms and any intermediate elections.” Trump, meanwhile, said in his victory speech, “We have a new star,” Trump said. “A star is born — Elon!” In September, Trump promised Musk a role heading up a task force to review federal expenditures, one that would make “drastic reforms” to the federal government. This makes sense because Musk had been the one who pitched the idea for such a task force to the president-elect. Trump even suggested a new job title, “Secretary of Cost Cutting,” while Musk suggested he’d be head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which does not exist and whose acronym is a reference to a dog-themed cryptocurrency. Musk later said at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally that he wanted to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, which would be very difficult. It’s easy, however, to see how Musk’s many companies stand to benefit immensely from a close relationship with the Trump administration. SpaceX is already one of NASA’s primary contractors, pulling in hundreds of millions if not several billions of dollars with every contract. Musk’s contact with Vladimir Putin reportedly put these contracts in jeopardy, although knowing what we know about Trump’s affinity for the Russian autocrat, the president-elect might not mind this. Tesla also stands to benefit, which explains why the company’s stock soared after Trump’s victory was secured. The EV company wants to roll out a massive fleet of robotaxis, a tall order that comes with significant regulatory challenges. Tesla’s self-driving car program in general has faced pushback from federal authorities, including a recently announced investigation into the system. Regulatory approval and investigations can be easier, of course, if you bankrolled the president’s final push to reelection.  Musk’s bet on developing artificial general intelligence, xAI, can also look forward to more cooperation from the federal government. The second Trump administration could pave the way for xAI to get access to cheap energy, especially as it faces heat for running gas generators without permits to power its data center in Memphis.  On top of these lucrative potential deals, the idea that X might win new relevance and influence must feel like a bonus to Musk.  For its right-wing users, though, X is finally the digital town square they were promised so many months ago. It seems like just yesterday, Elon Musk was carrying a sink into Twitter’s headquarters on his first day as the company’s owner. (“Let that sink in” is supposed to be the joke there.)  Musk paid tribute to that post on X just after midnight on election night. Except this time, in a doctored photo, he was carrying a sink into the Oval Office. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsHow do you know when a democracy slips into autocracy or fascism or some other less-free and less-savory form of society? Do they hang out a sign? Post it on X? Announce it on the newly state-controlled news channel? In the run-up to Donald Trump’s election, and even all the way back to his first administration, people who study autocracies in other countries have shown us how to spot the clues. One reliable teacher has been Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc. and co-host of the podcast series Autocracy in America. Over the years, Applebaum has situated Trump’s musings in a broader historical context. She’s pointed out, for example, that when Trump fired government watchdogs in his last administration or talked about deploying troops against protesters, those are actions that other dictators have taken.In the last few months of his campaign, Trump was free and open with his dictatorial impulses as he talked about punishing “enemies from within.” Now that he’s won, have we crossed the line into a different kind of country? In this episode of Radio Atlantic,Applebaum joins political writer McKay Coppins to help us know how to find the line. Does this resounding win mean the electorate gave Trump a mandate to act on all his impulses? Does he mean what he says? And how will we know?The following is a transcript of the episode:Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. So Donald Trump won. It’s looking like he won every swing state and, also, like there was a rightward shift even in the states he lost. He won even though, in the last months of his campaign, he was at his darkest and most crude. None of that mattered, apparently.So here to help us understand what happened are two Atlantic staff writers: Anne Applebaum, who covers threats to democracy—hi, Anne—Anne Applebaum: Hello.Rosin: —and political reporter McKay Coppins. Hi, McKay.McKay Coppins: Hey.Rosin: So, McKay, what do we know about how he won? The particular coalition, the demographics—what do we know so far?Coppins: Well, you just got at it. I think that the most surprising thing is not that he won—because the polls were so tight, and everyone was warning us to be prepared for either candidate coming out victorious—but the fact that he won so decisively, making gains in almost every state and almost every demographic group is something that I think most people were not prepared for.Just to run through a few of the highlights: He made major gains with Latino voters, according to exit polls. It depends on which exit poll you’re looking at, but Harris won Latinos by between eight and 15 points. That is a lot less than Biden’s roughly 30-point win among Latino voters four years ago.He made some more modest gains with Black voters, especially young Black men. A lot of Trump’s gains were concentrated with men. One exit poll showed him narrowly winning Latino men; the other one showed him narrowly losing them. But in either case, that is dramatically outperforming his performance in 2020.And so, you know, you take all this together, and what you see is that there is a rightward shift at almost every section of the electorate. And, you know, that includes parts of the Democratic coalition that Kamala Harris and her campaign thought they could take for granted coming into this race.Rosin: And is it just men? Like, everyone you mentioned were men. It’s like, Latino men, young Black men—Coppins: It definitely was. He definitely did better—Rosin: (Laughs.) Sorry, McKay.Coppins: (Laughs.) Not to speak for my entire gender here, but he did seem to do much better among men. Though, I will note that, coming into the campaign, a lot of Democrats had pinned their hopes on the idea that Dobbs would motivate a surge of women to support Harris.And we’re so early now that it’s still hard to tell from the exit-poll data how much that happened, but it is worth noting that Trump won white women in this election. He won them narrowly, but there was some hope among Democrats that Dobbs would push independent and even former Republican white women to the Harris camp. That does not seem to have happened in the numbers that they were planning for.Rosin: So all of that is somewhat surprising and things we have to reckon with over the next many months and years.Anne, you have been helping us understand, over many years, what it looks like when a country or democracy drifts towards autocracy. How do you read this moment?Applebaum: So I read this moment not so much as something new but as a continuation of things that we’ve seen in the past. I felt that, during the campaign, it would be useful for me to record some of the things the president was saying, to say how they echoed in history, to comment on how those things compared to what has happened in other countries.I did a podcast about this with The Atlantic. It’s called Autocracy in America. When he was last in the White House, Trump ignored ethics and security guidelines. He fired inspectors general and other watchdogs. He leaked classified information. You know, he used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, kind of deploying troops in American cities.Obviously, he encouraged the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. When he left the White House, he took classified documents with him, and then he hid them from the FBI. I mean, all those things are indicative of somebody who is in defiance of the rule of law, who thinks he’s above the rule of law, who’s seeking to avoid normal rules of transparency and accountability, who wants to help his staff get around, as I said, things like security, clearance, guidelines, and so on.And those things do represent a break with all previous presidents in modern history: Republican, Democrat, left wing, right wing—all of them. We didn’t have a president before who defied those kinds of rules and norms and laws and respect for some basic principles of the Constitution before.The fact is that people either liked it that he was doing that—they found the transgressiveness attractive, along with the language that he used about his enemies, you know, calling them “vermin” and the “enemy within” and so on. Either that was appealing—and, of course, that kind of language historically has been appealing; it does appeal to people—or they didn’t care.But that means that there has been a shift in how Americans see their government, what they understand the Constitution is for. And that shift clearly precedes Trump. I mean, probably he helped shape it during his first term. He helped shape it during the four years he was out of power. But we now have a country that is prepared to accept things from their leader that would have tanked the career of anybody else eight years ago.Rosin: So did you wake up on Wednesday morning and think, I live in a different country than I thought I did?Applebaum: No. I mean, I thought from the beginning of this election campaign—I thought it was possible that he would win. I mean, I suppose, particularly the last couple weeks of his campaign, when he became darker and darker and more and more vitriolic, you know, I wondered whether some of that would bother people.You know, the imagining guns trained at Liz Cheney, you know, talking about his enemies as the enemy within, talking about using the expression vermin or poison blood—these are terms that are directly taken from the 1930s and haven’t been used in American politics before. So I wondered whether people would be bothered by that.But am I entirely surprised that they weren’t? No, I’m not. I think the population is now immune to that kind of language, or maybe they like it.Coppins: Yeah, I would just say: I think that is one of the legacies of the Trump era, is how much he has successfully desensitized the country to this kind of rhetoric and behavior that, in an era not that long ago, voters would have deemed disqualifying.He has managed to convince enough Americans that this kind of behavior, this kind of rhetoric is okay or, at least, that it doesn’t matter that much. And looking forward, I do think that’s going to be something we live with in our politics long after Trump is gone.Rosin: I mean, there’s one way of looking at what you both are saying, which is: We woke up today; we have confirmation that we live in a failing democracy. But we actually don’t. All we have confirmation of is that people either don’t care that he talks like an autocratic ruler, they don’t notice, they like it, or they don’t put it in a broader historical context, which is that these are actual signs of actual autocracies, which happen all the time in history and across the world. Right? That’s all we know so far.Applebaum: Yeah, that’s all we know. That’s all we know. We also don’t know whether Trump will do some of the things that he said he would do. I mean, he talked about mass firings of civil servants. He talked about having people around him who were loyalists. That’s what political scientists would describe as “capturing the state”—so taking over government departments, government institutions, putting them not in the service of the nation and of everybody but making part of your political machine, using them for your political purposes.He talked about doing that. Will he try it again? Maybe, if he has a House and a Senate that will support him. As we’re speaking, we don’t know about the House, so we’ll see. They might make it easy. Will the judiciary support him? Some of it will. So will he do it? I don’t know.General John Kelly, who was his former chief of staff, has said that last time Trump was president, he talked about: We should investigate or get the IRS on—at that time he was talking about the former FBI director, James Comey, or his deputy, Andrew McCabe. Maybe now he’s talked about punishing Adam Schiff—who’s a congressman, now a senator, who he doesn’t like—or Nancy Pelosi.Will he do it? Will he use the IRS to go after people? I mean, that’s another thing that happens in failing democracies. And it’s also something that has happened in U.S. history before, so it’s not unimaginable.So I don’t know whether he’ll do these things, but it’s now on the record that he has said he would, or he said he wants to. In some of the documents written by people around him, there have been plans to do that. That’s what Project 2025 was, in part. And none of it bothered people, and so we have to assume that it’s a possibility.Coppins: I do think, to answer your earlier question, that it’s worth noting that, while a lot of voters went into the ballot box thinking about democracy—and in fact, according to one exit poll, around a third of voters said democracy was their top issue—a lot of voters were not thinking about these things, and they were not voting based on hoping that Donald Trump would weaponize the IRS against his political enemies. For example, a third of voters said the economy was their top concern. And I think when we talk about the shifts among those demographic groups, we have to acknowledge that a lot of it was a very simple response to groceries costing more, inflation being up, feeling like the economy was on the wrong track, and responding to a deeply unpopular incumbent president.And while we can sit back and look at the broad scope of history, it is clear that not all voters who went in to vote in these last few weeks were thinking about democracy. But I think it’s also good to point that out because Donald Trump is going to claim a mandate, coming out of this election, and say: I swept the swing states. The voters want me to have all this power. He’ll implicitly say, They want me to abuse my power. They’ve given me permission to do whatever I want. And I think that it’s worth noting that for a whole lot of people who voted for him, they just wanted him to make groceries cost less.Applebaum: Yeah, but that’s not really an excuse. I mean, you are, as a voter, obligated to know what the person you’re voting for stands for. And the responsibility of the president of the United States is not merely to control inflation. The president also has a lot of power over the U.S. government, over U.S. institutions, over American foreign policy, and by deciding you don’t care about those things, you do give him that mandate.Coppins: But my concern is that there’s a risk of a kind of democratic fatalism coming out of this election, where we will decide that: Look—Americans voted for this aspiring autocrat, therefore he will be an autocrat, and democracy has failed. And I think that it’s worth parsing this electoral data a little bit and acknowledging that a majority of Americans did not necessarily give him an autocratic mandate. Whether they were thinking about the things that they should have been thinking about, weighing the priorities the way that we think they should have been, I don’t think we should let—it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy if we let Trump and his allies claim that, because he’s said and done all these things and he won the election, he now has permission to do whatever he wants.Rosin: Yeah. One way of seeing the vote is that it wasn’t at all a referendum on Trump. It was people saying: My life was better in 2019, so I’m going with Trump. And I think why what you’re saying is important, McKay, is because people who didn’t vote for Trump can get discouraged and overwhelmed and tell themselves, People who voted for him voted for everything he stands for. And what follows from that is a sense of alienation. Like, This is not my country, and I don’t understand what’s going on.Anyway, Anne, you mentioned that Trump ran an explicitly vengeful campaign, that he would come after “enemies from within,” whether they were immigrants, Democrats, or us, the journalists. And you have taught us to take leaders’ words seriously. And yet a lot of people, not just voters, have said, Oh, this is hyperbole. Stop taking it so seriously. So how do we know the difference?Applebaum: We’ll know by his actions. Maybe it’s true that by saying those things and by acting out vengeance, maybe that was appealing to people who want some kind of vengeance, who are angry at whatever—the economy or the system or the establishment or the media or Hollywood or the culture—whatever it is that they’re angry at or feel deprived by, that he acted that out for them, and that was appealing to them. I’m sure that’s a piece of the explanation.And then another piece of the explanation is that there were people, like The Wall Street Journal editorial board or the writer Niall Ferguson, who said, Oh, these things just don’t matter. It’s just hyperbole. You know, That’s just how he talks. So we’ll see, and we’ll wait for it.Rosin: McKay, Project 2025, which came up a lot in the campaign and has been described as a blueprint for the next administration, includes transformative ideas about everything from abortion to tax policy. How much do you think that’s a realistic roadmap for what the administration might do?Coppins: I would take it seriously. I think that there is a risk that—because Donald Trump, realizing it was a political albatross around his neck, decided to distance himself in the final months of the campaign—that we collectively take him at his word, and I don’t think we should.I think that what he ends up doing in his next term will rely a lot upon who he appoints to his administration. I reported, back in December, that, in talking to people in Trump world about future appointees, the watchword was obedience. They talked about how Trump felt burned in his first term by appointees, people in his cabinet who saw themselves as adults in the room, who believed that their role was to constrain him, to keep the train on the tracks. And he doesn’t want people like that in his next administration. He doesn’t want adults in the room. He doesn’t want James Mattises or Mark Milleys or John Kellys. He wants absolute loyalists, either people who share his ideological worldview or, out of a sense of ambition or cravenness, are willing to do exactly what he says without questioning it.And so when you look at Project 2025 and the part of the plan, for example, that has to do with politicizing the civil service, taking 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy and making them political appointees subject to the whims of the president, it will matter a lot whether he follows through on that and who those people are.A big part of Project 2025 was identifying loyalists, partisans, conservatives who could fill those roles. And so I think, when we talk through his next administration, what his agenda will look like, a lot of it comes down to this kind of truism of Washington that personnel is policy. So does Stephen Miller return to his administration in some kind of role where he gets to oversee immigration enforcement? It’s entirely possible, but that will make a big difference in terms of how much he follows through on his threats of mass deportation.Who does he appoint as attorney general? That was one role that everybody I talked to in Trump world told me he was very committed to getting right because he felt the two men who served in that role in his first term betrayed him. So is it somebody like Josh Hawley or Mike Lee or Ted Cruz? These are the questions that we’re going to have to be answering, and we’ll get a lot more clarity in the coming weeks and months as we see those appointees and those short lists emerge.[Music]Rosin: After the break, we’re going to get into what mass deportations under Trump could look like.[Break]Rosin: Something else I’ve been thinking about a lot that Trump has threatened is mass deportations. They are expensive. They’re actually quite difficult to carry out. They require a lot of manpower, local and national. Is that bombast? Is that a realistic threat? How will we know the difference?Coppins: Yeah. Again, this is where I think personnel will matter a lot, who is head of the Department of Homeland Security, for example. But just to go through what Trump promised on the campaign trail: He said that he would build massive detention camps, implement mass deportations at a scale never before seen in this country, hire thousands of additional border agents, use military spending on border security.He even said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel people who were suspected of being in drug cartels or gangs, without a court hearing.He said he would end “catch and release,” reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy. And I think it’s notable that he did not directly answer whether he would reinstate family separation, which was the most controversial aspect of his immigration policy in the first term.Take all these together—I think there are some of these things he could do pretty easily on his own with executive orders, and there’s not a lot of evidence that he could be constrained by the courts or by Congress. There are some things, like building massive detention centers, that would require a lot of money. Hiring thousands of more border agents would require a lot of money. So this is where control of Congress is going to matter a lot.Rosin: Are there others on his list that are top of mind for either of you? Aid to Ukraine is one that I’m thinking of. Are there others where you’re going to be vigilantly watching: Okay, he said X. Is he going to do X? Applebaum: Aid to Ukraine is in a slightly different category. It’s not about American autocracy and democracy. It’s a question of our position in the world. Are we going to remain the leader of a democratic camp, which is opposing the growing and increasingly networked autocratic camp? Will we oppose Russia, which is now in alliance with Iran and North Korea and China? Or will we not?And this, again, from Trump world, I know a lot of people who spent a lot of time in the run-up to the election trying to find out what Trump meant when he said, I’ll end the war in one day, which has been his standard response when asked about it. And you can literally find almost as many interpretations of that expression as there are people in Trump’s orbit.I mean, it ranges from, We’re just going to cut off all the funding, to, We’re going to give Ukraine to the Russians, to something quite different. There are people who said: No. We’re going to threaten the Russians. We’re going to tell them we’re bringing in a thousand tanks and a thousand airplanes unless you pull back. And so that’s another version that I’ve heard. There are versions that suggest offering something to Russia—you know, some deal. But honestly, I don’t know.Rosin: But those are legitimate foreign-policy debates. You can be an isolationist democracy. Those are not fundamental threats in your mind to the nature of this country and what it should be?Applebaum: No, although there are connections and have always been—we haven’t always acknowledged them—between America’s alliances and America’s democracy. So the fact that we have been aligned in the past with a camp of other democracies, that we put democracy at the center of our foreign policy for such a long time during the Cold War, was one of the reasons why our democracy was strengthened.It’s well known that during the Cold War, one of the reasons why there was an establishment shift towards favoring civil rights and the civil-rights movement was the feeling that: Here’s this thing we stand for. We stand for democracy. We stand for the rule of law, and yet we don’t have it in our own country. And there were a lot of people who felt that very strongly. And it’s not a bad reason why that happened, but it’s part of the explanation.You know, Who are your allies? Who are your friends? This affects, also, what kind of country you are and your own behavior. Who are your relationships? You know, if our primary political and diplomatic and economic relationship is with Russia and North Korea, then we’re a different kind of country than if our primary relationship is with Britain and France.Coppins: The only other kind of policy area that I’ll be keeping an eye on is tariffs. He has said that he would impose between 10 and 20 percent across-the-board tariffs on all U.S. imports and a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods.A lot of economic experts pointed out that this would very likely cause massive inflation. And given that he was just elected, in large part, on voter frustration with inflation, it’s an open question whether he’ll follow through on this. He clearly does not believe—and this is one of the few issues that he’s been pretty consistent on his entire life—he does not believe it would cause inflation. Almost every economics expert disagrees with him.And in his first term, there were people in the White House who blocked him from imposing more tariffs than he actually did, in fact to the point where we saw reporting from Bob Woodward that his staff secretary was literally taking executive orders off his desk before he could sign them and kind of losing them in the bureaucracy of paperwork. Will there be somebody like that this time? Will there be somebody who can get his ear and convince him not to go through with this? That is something that I think a lot of people will be looking at because the economic implications for this country and globally could be pretty profound.Rosin: And what are the bigger implications of tariffs? Like, that could just be a legitimate economic debate. Some people believe in tariffs. Some people don’t believe in tariffs. And it’s an experiment and, you know, economic protectionism.Coppins: I would not say that this is one of those kind of core democratic issues, that certainly, to various degrees, there have been protectionist policy makers and politicians in both parties over the last several decades. It could cause a trade war. It could interfere with our diplomatic relations with the countries that we’re imposing tariffs on. There are a lot of trickle-down implications.But yes, I do think it’s important. And I like that what you’re doing here is separating the issues that are kind of more typical policy disagreements from those things that Anne has been talking about, which are fundamental to American democracy. I don’t think tariffs are, but they could have an effect on a lot of Americans, and so that’s why I think it’s worth keeping an eye on.Rosin: Okay. There’s obviously going to be some resistance to Trump. Let’s start simple: McKay, who is going to be the leader of the Democratic Party?Coppins: So, obviously, if Democrats take control of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, the next speaker, would, I think by default, become the kind of leader of the Democratic opposition to Trump, at least for a while.If Democrats don’t take control of the House, I think it’s a very open question and, frankly, it’s one that Democrats probably should have been trying to answer two years ago. Joe Biden deciding to stay in the race after the 2022 midterms will probably go down as one of the most consequential political decisions in this era. The fact that he stayed in for so long, only to drop out in the final months of the election, meant that Democrats didn’t really have time to have the big intraparty debate about what they should stand for, who their standard-bearer should be.That debate will be happening now. And it’s going to be contentious and noisy and unsettling to a lot of left-leaning voters. I also think it’s healthy to have these conversations. And I think Democrats, in some ways, are kind of innately averse to that kind of contention. And I think that they might need to kind of get comfortable with it, because one way to look at the two elections that Donald Trump has won is that he really benefited from the fact that Democrats cleared the field for the two nominees he ended up beating: Hillary Clinton in 2016, Kamala Harris in 2024.One takeaway that I think a lot of Democrats will have is that Democrats need to decide that they’re okay with a little messiness in letting their voters decide who their nominee will be.Rosin: Anne, when other countries have faced a moment like this—a moment when you have to be vigilant, things are in the balance, the opposition feels alienated, it’s unclear who the opposition leaders are at the moment—how do you move through a moment like that? Like, how have other countries successfully moved to a healthier place?Applebaum: I mean, it almost entirely involves building broad coalitions. The only real example I can give: I live part of the time in Poland. We had an autocratic, populist government takeover in 2015. They did try to capture the state.They did it pretty successfully. They took over state media, which is a big deal in Poland, and they made it into a kind of propaganda tube. Poland has some state companies, and they took over the companies and began using the money to fund themselves and their party and so on. They enriched themselves, and they tried to create a system whereby they would never lose again.Remember that another sign of autocracy and a very, very important thing to watch for is corruption. Because when you remove guardrails and when you remove inspectors general and when you weaken the media, then it becomes much easier for people to be corrupt. And we’ve already got that problem in our system, and it’s going to get a lot worse.Essentially, what happened was the building of a coalition that went, in their case, from the center-left to the center-right—kind of center-left liberal, center-right—of people who wanted something. It was, in part, an anti-corruption coalition, so it wasn’t so much built around fighting for democracy, although that was a piece of it.The coalition was also seeking to fight against corruption and for good government. But it took eight years. It was a long process. And along the way, a lot of money was stolen. And the institutions declined, and the country is worse governed, and there are a lot of problems that are not going to be easy to solve.But there’s a look for coalitions. There was some internal soul-searching about what it was we did that—Why did we lose? But I’m not sure even how useful all of that was. I mean, what mattered, in the end, was the reconstruction of an opposition that had a clear message, that had a clear critique, and offered a vision of a different kind of future that was led by somebody who was charismatic.Rosin: Yeah. That is actually really useful, even to know that the coalitions don’t have to be for the restoration of democracy. They can be against mass deportation, against tariffs. Like, you can form coalitions, if you tell yourself, No, the voters did not give a mandate to Donald Trump to do whatever he wants and carry out all of his policies. That is not what happened in the last election, coalitions can form—popular coalitions—around all kinds of issues.Applebaum: Yeah. I mean, you could have a coalition that really cares about women’s issues and women’s rights and abortion rights. And you can have another one that really cares about the environment. And you can have another one that really cares about corruption. And you link them together, and then you have a movement.Rosin: Right.Applebaum: And that’s sometimes more effective. I mean, democracy is an abstract word that doesn’t necessarily mean things to people. It has to be made real through something that people experience. And maybe that’s how we have to look at it too.Rosin: Yeah. I think the thing that catches me in this election, which we haven’t quite touched on, is the truth-and-lies problem. I find that so overwhelming, like, the idea that people believe an untrue thing about what happened on January 6 and an untrue thing about what happened at Springfield, Ohio. And, as a journalist, I always find that an impossible barrier to cross. But maybe you’re suggesting ways to cross that barrier is: Well, people believe smaller truths.Applebaum: It’s one of the ways. We now have an information system that enables the creation of alternate realities. For me, one of the really striking things about the election campaign wasn’t so much Trump. It was Musk. Elon Musk, who owns a big and important social-media platform, was saying things that he must have known not to be true: falsehoods about immigration, about the election.He was allowing the platform to deliberately promote them. And he seemed to be doing that as a way of demonstrating his power. He was showing us that he can decide what people think. And he was working hard to create this alternate world in which things that aren’t true seem true. And that—I’m afraid it was really successful.Rosin: Right.Coppins: And the other thing that I think we’ve seen is that a big purpose of propaganda and disinformation is not even just to convince people that a certain thing is true but to almost exhaust their ability to tell the difference between what’s true and what’s not, and make them cynical and fatigued and disinclined to even try.I remember in 2020, I spent a lot of time covering disinformation in the campaign. And that was the thing that I would encounter when I talked to Trump voters. It wasn’t so much that they believed everything he said. Some would even acknowledge that he would lie or exaggerate. But they would throw their hands up and say: Yeah, they all lie, right? Who even knows what’s true? And that, I think, is the thing that we need to guard against over these next few years.Applebaum: That is the essence of Putinist propaganda. It’s not so much that you’re expected to believe everything he says about whatever, the greatness of Russia or the horror of Western civilization. But you’re expected to become so confused by the multitude and number of lies that you’ve been told that you throw your hands up in the air, and you go home, and you say, I don’t know anything. I can’t be involved in this. I don’t want anything to do with politics. I’m just going to live my life.And that turns out to be a really, really successful form of propaganda, probably more successful than the old-fashioned Soviet thing of telling everybody that everything is great, which you can disprove pretty easily.Rosin: Well, Anne and McKay, with your idea of coalitions, I had almost succeeded in finding us a practical path of thinking about a future. But now we’re back at this big veil of disinformation, which is not the place I want to end. Is there some way to turn that ship?I’ll ask you again, Anne: How have people turned that ship when you find a culture, a populace that’s just become cynical and overwhelmed by lies? How have other countries successfully crawled out of that disinformation?Applebaum: You build relationships of trust around other things. I mean, almost as we were just talking about, you find alternative forms of communication, all different ways of reaching people. That’s the only way.Rosin: All right. Well, Anne, McKay, we will have many more such conversations, but thank you for helping us be more discerning.Coppins: Thank you.Applebaum: Thanks.[Music]Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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