How the start of Trump’s second term looks like some autocracies

Geoff Bennett:

President Trump's social media post over the weekend, "He who saves his country does not violate any law," implying that he is above the law, triggered alarm bells from experts who were already concerned about the legal and constitutional boundaries tested in President Trump's first few weeks in office.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University. She studies the rise and fall of democratic governments. Amna spoke with her earlier as part of our new series On Democracy.

Amna Nawaz:

Kim Lane Scheppele, welcome back to the "News Hour." Thanks for being here.

Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University:

Very nice to be here.

Amna Nawaz:

So, many of President Trump's actions we have seen so far that are already being challenged on the basis of their legality or constitutionality, these are things he promised to do, said he would do as president.

He would say now this is what voters want him to do and so he's doing it as fast as he can through executive orders. How do you see that?

Kim Lane Scheppele:

Well, it's true. A lot of these are things he promised, but democracy isn't just about getting elected and meeting promises. You have to fulfill the promises, if you're going to do them, in the proper legal way.

So what he's just been doing is signing a lot of executive orders, and a lot of these executive orders directly conflict laws passed by Congress. They directly conflict with constitutional provisions, and that's not the way that you can do it.

Amna Nawaz:

This is also a president who has praised strongmen in other countries, authoritarian leaders in other nations, people like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary.

As someone who has lived in both Russia and Hungary, are you seeing patterns here that mirror what you saw there?

Kim Lane Scheppele:

Yes, absolutely.

So the thing about these strongmen leaders is that what makes them strong is that they have managed to escape legal constraints on their power. So they have neutralized their parliaments so that they don't talk back to them. They have captured their courts so that they don't override them. They have altered the election law so that no one can get rid of them.

And that seems to be the model that Trump is really finding very attractive. And so what he admires about them is that they have been able to govern essentially in an unconstitutional way. And you see him now really going after the constraints on his own executive power.

Amna Nawaz:

We have also seen the targeting with very specific groups like immigrants and transgender people. Is that something you have seen before?

Kim Lane Scheppele:

Absolutely. Picking

scapegoats is partly a way of generating public approval for people who don't like the scapegoats. But it's also a way of saying to people who might challenge this government, this could happen to you. So if you step out of line, you can see what happens. You fall into this abyss of arbitrary treatment, where the law cannot protect you and where we are going to come after you.

So it's really a way of generating fear not only in the targeted categories, but beyond the targeted categories, to people who are not on board with the president's program.

Amna Nawaz:

And, Kim, as someone who looks at how leaders govern and lead in these ways, are you seeing something markedly different in Trump's second administration compared to his first?

Kim Lane Scheppele:

Trump 1.0, I mean, he just flailed around. He had a lot of ideas. But he didn't entrench himself. He didn't attack the institutions. So he sort of dropped government on the floor, but he didn't try to completely change the way it operated.

Second time, he comes back and he's got lawyers. Everything is legal. That's why you see the flurry of executive orders. You see these memos going out saying the president has commanded this in law. And so he's going after the civil service, for example. And civil servants who work from one government to another, from Republican to a Democratic administration, and back again, are used to having somebody say, this is now the law, you follow it.

And so this is where he's trying to get the civil service to completely change the way the state is organizing itself. And those people who are not willing to do that, he's offering that they be displaced, fired, put on this kind of imaginary leave and so on.

And so he's trying to really control the bureaucracy doing it by law. So he's got lawyers this time. That means he can do way more damage than he could do the first time.

Amna Nawaz:

In the countries that you have lived and studied, strongmen and authoritarian leaders, what have you seen in the way of a public response to some of those actions? And did it shift anything? Was it able to sort of slow the decline in democracy or reverse it?

Kim Lane Scheppele:

A people who experience this have to know what they're seeing.

And so, in Hungary, for example, which was one of the first countries where it was just this blitz of everything everywhere all at once, people were so disoriented and everybody was being hit in different ways. You saw everyone just trying to protect themselves, their own group. They didn't really unify. They didn't know what they were experiencing.

So when it happened a few years later in Poland, then the Poles knew, aha, this is how the Hungarians did it. And you saw them rise up. You saw them try to defend the independence of the judiciary when it was being attacked. There was way more civil sector mobilization because they understood what was coming.

So the problem we have in the U.S. is that Americans haven't seen this before. So they don't know what it means. They don't know what it adds up to. They think it's Trump 1.0, but Trump 1.0 didn't do as much lasting damage as Trump 2.0 has already done in the first few weeks.

Amna Nawaz:

We should also say the U.S. is not Hungary. It's not Russia. It's not Brazil. There are people who say our democracy is different, and it's not susceptible to many of those same forces, that Trump couldn't do here what Putin did in Russia or Orban did in Hungary. What do you say to that?

Kim Lane Scheppele:

Well, there's something to that because the U.S. government is very big. It's very complicated. There are lots of choke points, lots of institutions things have to pass through. And the simpler a government is, the easier it is to knock over. We think we have all this protection.

But think of the kind of protection we have. The separation of powers and our federalism sort of depend on every institution at federal level defending itself and its own prerogatives. It relies on the states defending themselves and their own prerogatives.

But what we have now is something that some law professors have called not separation of powers, but separation of parties. And so if you get a party that is as organized as the present Republican Party is, the Republicans in Congress will defend the Republican in the White House. The Republican judges will rule in favor of the Republican in the White House. The Republican governors will also jump on board.

And so the institutional protections really fall apart when you have this kind of party discipline that runs through all the institutions and then the institutions don't provide the checks anymore. So the U.S. is way more vulnerable than I think our classic separation of powers model really would lead us to believe.

Amna Nawaz:

Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton University, thank you. We really appreciate your time and insights.

Kim Lane Scheppele:

Glad you're working on this topic.