- Ever since 2016, we have imagined that there are all these red lines that, once they're crossed, that certainly Trump's supporters will start deserting him because they'll realize, this time, he really has gone too far.

And that moment has just never arrived.

January 6th is the clearest example of that.

[upbeat music] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World".

I'm Ian Bremmer, and let me give another big bear hug of a welcome to 2024, the year that everything finally works out just fine.

And if Taylor Swift can have a banger year, why can't the rest of us?

Okay, here's a serious prediction.

2024 will not be a good year, at least not politically, but it will be the most consequential for the future of democracy, both abroad and particularly here in the United States.

As you'll see in my interview with Stanford political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, the fates of governments around the world, from Turkey to Taiwan, may well rise or fall on the rollercoaster of a year to come.

But make no mistake, it will be the United States and its presidential election in November that will determine much of the fate of democracy more broadly.

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime".

- Even MSNBC will barely return my calls.

- But first, folks who help us keep the lights on.

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[transition whooshing] [upbeat music] - Here's a statistic that may dampen your noble efforts at a dry January.

A quarter of Americans believe that the FBI was behind January 6th.

Yes, that's right, 25% of Americans and more than three in 10 Republicans believe the falsehood that the Federal Bureau of Investigation conspired to cause the deadly Capitol riot.

Heck, you may even be one of 'em.

Shame, shame.

New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "You're entitled to your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts," but he was not around during social media.

The fact is this is how the insurrection at the Capitol started.

- We're gonna walk down to the Capitol.

[audience cheering and clapping] And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not gonna be cheering so much for some of them.

- Now, I'm nonpartisan, always have been, never been a member of a political party, and I don't count myself in either the red or the blue camp, but I do firmly count myself as part of the sky is blue camp, and I think we should all be able to agree on basic facts like that.

And yet, public trust in core US institutions, like Congress, judiciary and the media, is at historic lows.

Polarization and partisanship, historic highs.

To make matters worse, the two major parties' likely presidential candidates are uniquely ill-suited, if not unfit, for office.

Former President Donald Trump faces dozens of felony criminal charges, many directly related to his actions as president, January 6th being the tip of the iceberg.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden would be 86 years old at the end of his second term, a number that might match his disapproval rating by then.

The majority of Americans, in short, want neither Biden nor Trump to lead the nation, but sticking our heads in the sand we cannot, so let's game it out.

If Trump wins the election, Biden will concede, but while Democratic leaders may be less likely to claim the election was rigged than the former president, they will treat Trump as illegitimate, believing he should be in jail because he's unfit for office.

If Trump loses, he won't accept defeat.

Instead, he will do everything in his power, legal or illegal, to contest the outcome and impugn the legitimacy of the process, especially because the stakes for him are much higher this time, he faces the prospect of prison time.

And what if the world's most powerful country is unable to hold a free and fair election?

Unlikely, and I hate to even think about it, but plausible.

Efforts to subvert the election could come from cyber attacks, deep fakes and disinformation, physical attacks on election process and oversight, and/or even terrorism to disrupt voting on the day.

There's no more geopolitically significant target than the upcoming US ballot, with plenty of foreign adversaries that would love nothing more than to see more chaos from the Americans.

The United States is already the world's most divided and dysfunctional advanced industrial democracy, and the 2024 election will exacerbate this problem no matter who wins.

With the outcome of the vote essentially a coin toss, at least for now, I've no confidence in predicting who comes out on top, but just how we make that choice will determine if democracy itself wins or loses.

Worried yet?

Well, I'll say that's got the makings of a fun conversation.

So let's have it, I'm joined now by Stanford's Francis Fukuyama.

You can call him Frank.

[transition whooshing] Frank Fukuyama, one of my favorite political scientists in the whole world, thanks for joining us.

- Thanks for having me, Ian.

- So much I wanna talk to you about, but I wanted to start with, it is the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and they say that half the world's countries are suffering from democratic decline.

Now, I know we shouldn't trust the Swedes generally, but on this one, are they on board?

Are they right?

And what does it mean to you?

- Well, I think, broadly, there's been a recognition that we've been in a democratic recession really since about 2008 or so.

There's only a small group of academics that, for some reason, disagree, but I think that if you consider both quantitatively the number of backsliders and qualitatively at the kind of backsliding that's occurred, it's hard to come to the conclusion that democracy is in good shape globally.

You have the successful consolidation of two big authoritarian great powers, Russia and China, who succeeded in developing an economic model that looks sustainable, they're politically stable, but I think that the more troubling thing is what's been going on inside democracies where a lot of democracies simply have not delivered in terms of economic growth.

They're governments haven't been able to provide that.

In terms of levels of corruption, there are many countries, democratically elected governments that are stealing from their own people.

And so there's a lot of reasons why democracy does not seem to be the kind of system that actually delivers the outcomes that were promised.

And there probably was a little bit too much high expectation-setting at the time that the Berlin Wall came down.

- Now, when I look at some of the countries that have been serious backsliders, so Hungary, for example, Turkey for example, I mean, the leaders of those countries, you wouldn't say that they are legitimate leaders as a consequence of that.

- Well, I think that both of them won elections.

I think, in both cases, the government had so much control over the various levers of power that it's hard to say that either of them was elected through a free and fair electoral process.

On the other hand, I do think that we shouldn't kid ourselves that this was just the work of a tiny elite minority that pulled the wool over everybody's eyes because there's some genuine popularity behind authoritarian government.

And a better example of this is really El Salvador.

El Salvador legitimately elected Nayib Bukele as president, but he embarked on this massive effort to simply round up people that he thought were gang members and put them in prison, no trial, no judicial process to find out whether they're actually guilty or not.

And as a result, 10% of the young men in the country are now sitting in prison and it's been quite successful in reducing the level of gang violence in El Salvador by like 90%.

- And meanwhile, his approval ratings are also something like 90%, right, right.

- That's right.

- I mean, looking at this one in particular, and I remember, of course, when he came on board, he was well-known for that and for being a crypto tech bro.

The latter hasn't worked out so well.

But when this problem is so persistent through so many administrations across the political spectrum, why does it take a strongman who doesn't care about democracy to do anything about it?

- What the rule of law does is it puts constraints on the use of, among other things, police power.

And so Bukele has been putting these gang members in jail.

In Salvador, it's a little bit easier because the gang members [laughing] all have these tattoos that pretty clearly identify them as members of gangs.

So they just round up anybody with a tattoo and stick 'em in jail.

There's no court proceeding.

And in the process, they arrest a lot of innocent people.

So I think that in a liberal democracy, we deliberately constrain power.

That's what makes a liberal democracy liberal rather than just a populist majoritarian democracy, but it does mean that there's certain things that we don't permit ourselves to do in the area of security and other things.

- So I mean, there's a good chance, right, I mean, that after they've arrested all the thugs, that for decades, El Salvador will never have a representative government again if this guy decides that he's going to do whatever he wants on corruption, on basic economic services, and the rest.

The people, they'll have no method to address that.

- Well, this is a age-old problem of authoritarian government.

The Chinese have this story about good emperors and bad emperors, but what's happened in Chinese history is that you get good emperors on occasion, but more often, you get bad emperors.

And when you get a bad emperor, then you're really in trouble, because don't have any institutional constraints and that bad emperor can do an incredible amount of damage and there's really no way of stopping him until basically they die physically.

And that was, I think, the problem with Mao Zedong.

And I think he was the last really bad emperor.

We'll have to see about Xi Jinping, he's not looking so good either, but certainly Mao Zedong launched The Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution that were unbelievable catastrophes for the society.

And because you're relying basically on the good will of one individual, your chances of getting good outcomes at the other end over an extended period of time are low.

- Xi Jinping, you said, not doing as well at this point.

Now, certainly economically, he's not doing as well, the political consolidation seems very high.

Kind of put your crystal ball on right now, where do you think the Chinese leadership and the political system is likely heading?

We've had 40 years of this unprecedented human development under the China model, but we now have a much stronger leader than at any point since when that model started, since Mao.

And he's also, no more term limits, so if he wants, he can be in charge for life.

Where do you think that's going?

- Well, I think it leads to a potentially dangerous situation.

I think that we probably hit peak China maybe five years ago, before the pandemic started.

And the pandemic has simply underlined the degree of economic decline because they're simply never gonna go back to the kinds of growth levels that they experienced as recently as 2019.

But they're still big and powerful, and they've got a lot of assets.

And I think that one thing a lot of strategists worry about is that a great power that's past its peak and sees that it is going into a longterm decline may actually become more aggressive than one that's kind of secure in its thinking about its future.

That's not a prediction because I don't know how the Chinese leadership is interpreting their current situation, but certainly they have not backed off this rather forward and aggressive kind of foreign policy that they've been running for the past, well, really through much of Xi Jinping's leadership period, and that worries me a lot.

[laughing] It worries me particularly if you look at the balance of power because the US isn't doing well right now.

I think we've been severely weakened by our internal divisions, and I think that there may come a point where China feels that if they're going to ever move to reincorporate Taiwan, that this might be the point where they're maximally strong and we're maximally weak.

And that might set up a very risky decision on Xi Jinping's part.

- Well, certainly the US is not maximally weak economically, militarily, or technologically, but politically and political will is a different story.

And people, I'm sure, have been waiting for when we're gonna turn to the United States.

You've been outspoken, you are personally concerned about the state of democracy right now and certainly don't want people thinking it can never happen here.

What can happen here?

I mean, how worried should the Americans be, proximately, in the near term, in other words, after the next election, about the, quote-unquote, "End of democracy," in the US?

- Well, I think they should be very, very worried, and this is not reading tea leaves.

If you listen carefully to what Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican candidate in 2024, has been saying, he's been pretty explicit.

He wants to pull a Bukele-type move.

He was saying the way you deal with shoplifters is you just shoot 'em dead as they come outta the store, right?

No due process.

- Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.

[audience cheering] Shot.

- He has explicitly said that he wants to turn the Justice Department against his personal enemies, not just the so-called Biden crime family, but all of the people in his own first administration that have criticized him and turned against him.

The other thing that's quite worrisome is that he was limited in what he could do in his first term by incompetence, unfamiliarity with the way government worked.

He didn't come in with a big cadre of loyalists to help him.

And so for the first three years, he really had to rely on the advice of so-called normie Republicans.

This time around, they are busy compiling lists of people whose primary qualification is going to be loyalty to the Trump agenda, and they wanna hit the ground running in terms of accomplishing things that they couldn't accomplish.

So it's not just the border wall, but increasing the weaponization of the Justice Department.

They wanna clear out the Civil Service and fire, be able to fire tens of thousands of ordinary civil servants and replace them with people that will listen to the president and not to the Constitution or to the rule of law.

And so I think that this is really what's happened in other countries that have slipped into dictatorship.

The problem is that I think a lot of people on the left have been crying wolf for a long time.

And so they have accused many Republicans over the years, people like Mitt Romney, who now [laughing] looks like a saint [laughing] for his willingness to criticize Trump.

I mean, all of these Republicans made mistakes and they had policy differences that were quite serious with people on the left, but they were never threats to democratic institutions in themselves.

And I think that's really the choice that we're gonna face in the upcoming presidential election.

- If Trump wins, clearly, he will almost certainly have the House of Representatives with mostly loyal members.

He will very likely have the Senate with somewhat less loyal, but still reasonably loyal, members.

The judiciary is different, of course, it remains independent.

The military remains professionalized and independent.

Those seem fairly significant repositories of democratic resilience in a country like the US.

Tell me why they won't matter as much as they should.

- Well, they will matter, but I think that we may be facing a really unprecedented situation.

So for example, the courts in this country don't have any independent power, they don't have their own police or their own enforcement mechanism.

And if the Supreme Court says, "You cannot ban all Muslims from entering the country, you can't impose a religious test," as Trump has sort of suggested he might, what's gonna happen if a future court, even a Republican-dominant or a conservative Supreme Court says, "No, no, Mr. President, you can't do that," and he simply disregards that?

I think that's entirely within the realm of possibility given the direction that he has been going.

The military, he is not going to have yes men at the senior ranks, but he can replace them as he finds people that are loyalists.

And from what I hear from some of my friends in the military, the senior leadership is still normal.

They really do believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, but there's a lot of support for Trump in the enlisted ranks and people further down.

And so I think that it may take a little bit longer to subdue an institution like that, but I think that in four years, it could happen.

And then there are shortcuts, like the Insurrection Act, which Trump threatened to use at the time of the George Floyd protests.

He didn't follow through on that, but again, the law there is poorly written and it's not clear that he wouldn't be able to actually call on the US military on day one to actually put down a protest against him.

But the other thing that is very, very worrisome is that, in a way, Trump is preparing for this moment when there's massive protests.

And he's got a lot of supporters, many of them are armed, And I think that on January 6th, he showed that he was completely comfortable with calling on his friends to use violence to support his ends.

So he might be able to get police and military to help him out this time and he may use his own armed supporters.

And that really sets up a scenario for serious violence.

It is kind of remarkable that we have had a lot of threats of violence in the last several years, but we've not actually seen assassinations or overt gun battles between different armed groups.

But that's something that we may unfortunately see down the road in the United States if things keep going in this direction.

So I'm really very worried about the guardrails and whether they're really gonna be in place next year when we really need them.

- I mean, to what extent is the problem that the United States hasn't really faced an internal crisis?

I mean, January 6th, at the end of the day, right, I mean, it looked horrible, but that evening, majority of Republicans in the House could go back in and vote to refuse to certify the election because they were complacent because they said, "Well, there's no real threat to the democracy."

- Well, look, ever since 2016, we have imagined that there are all these red lines that, once they're crossed, that certainly Trump's supporters will start deserting him because they'll realize, this time, he really has gone too far.

And that moment has just never arrived.

And January 6th is the clearest example of that.

I spent the whole day glued to my computer screen, watching those events, and I said to myself, "This is it, they can't possibly continue to support them."

And yet, here we are, three years later, and they're all busy trying to normalize what happened on that day.

So I'm really very worried about the guardrails and whether they're really gonna be in place when we really need them.

- Frank Fukuyama, he's concerned, maybe you should be, too.

Thanks for joining us today.

- Thanks very much, Ian.

[transition whooshing] [inquisitive music] - And now to "Puppet Regime", where it's nine o'clock on a Saturday.

The regular crowd shuffling in, there's two felty men sitting next to me making love.

No, I really hate that intro.

Roll tape.

And now, more on the war in Gaza, where, as casualties from the conflict continue to mount, online people across America continue to attack each other viciously.

[transition hissing] [pensive music] - I never thought we'd end up here at Forgotten Wars Bar.

What a dump.

- Life, man, life comes at you very fast, Volodymyr.

- I don't belong here, surrounded by, who even are these people?

- Well, at the end of the bar, that's the Syrians, and way back there by bathrooms is the Yemenis.

- It's incredible.

Until recently, I was focus of global attention, giving speeches at United Nations, sunflower emojis everywhere, people even stopped calling it The Ukraine.

But now it's all Gaza all of time.

Even MSNBC will barely return my calls.

- Ah, yes, it is always ones who love us who hurt us most.

It's really sad, man.

I get it.

- Wait a minute, what are you upset about?

You love it that we're here.

- Well, of course, I'm happy we're here.

Every day that your ugly mug isn't on TV pleading for money and weapons is a brighter day for me.

My problem is that this is all just so incredibly unfair.

- What do you mean unfair?

You have invaded like half of.

- Shh, I know that, but I'm old enough to remember when creating massive refugee crisis and destroying civilian infrastructure was something that got you sanctioned, isolated, canceled, treated like, uh, like Will Smith in Hollywood.

- Ah, true, that certainly doesn't seem to be case now.

- It looks like we can finally agree on something.

We are both unhappy.

Now, speaking of agreeing on things, why don't we just agree that our little forgotten war here just ends where it is and I will keep the parts of Ukraine that.

- You keep my country's name out of your.

♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week, come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you're feeling a little ennui, and you like ennui, you don't know how to spell it, but you like it, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com?

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music] - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

[upbeat music] - [Announcer] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains, with a portfolio of logistics in real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by.

- [Announcer] Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO".

We're working to improve lives in areas of communication, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

- [Announcer] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and.

[upbeat music]