Podcaster Chuck Todd reacts to an article in “Foreign Affairs,” the magazine sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, which argues the United States is now operating under “competitive authoritarianism.”

CHUCK TODD: I call myself a political anthropologist. That means I actually read Political Science Quarterly. And there’s an extraordinarily important one that’s out this week. It’s an essay in Foreign Affairs, which is the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. This isn’t a partisan outlet. It’s not a resistance blog. It’s the magazine where American presidents, secretaries of states, national security advisers have gone for generations to debate how the world works and how the United States role it should be. So three of the most respected democracy scholars in the world from Harvard, Toronto and the Council on Foreign Relations, Stephen Levitsky, Luke Nguyen and Daniel Ziblatt. They’re not cable pundits. They’re not people you’re going to see in the roundtables of Sunday shows. They’re not political activists or simply political scientists who spent their career studying how democracies erode around the world, how they fail and occasionally how they recover. Well, they have an essay called about competitive authoritarianism. And in fact, this is what they write. And this is why I took it very seriously. This was not something I read, no offense to my friends at the Bulwark. It’s not something I read in the Bulwark, not something you’re going to see here on Pod Save America. Certainly not. You might. I doubt you’ll hear this from my friend Eric Erickson either. But here’s this essay. In 2025, the United States ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany or even Argentina are democracies. They’re just making a classification. And then comes the line. The game, however, is far from up. They’re not saying all is lost. It is an important essay because they deal with this tension of yes, we have had erosion and no, this isn’t permanent. OK, so they argue that Donald Trump’s second term, the United States crossed a definitional line into something political scientists call competitive authoritarianism. Here’s how they define it. A system in which parties compete in elections. But incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. So elections still happen, but perhaps you threaten lawmakers to redraw the maps to make more favorable elections. Opposition parties still exist, but perhaps you raise the threshold for petition signatures to get on a referendum or you change the dates and stuff. See, Missouri. But the referee is no longer neutral. Right. And the House rules keep changing. And importantly, they’re not saying this might happen because it’s already happened in this country. A year ago, this group predicted that this would be Trump’s trajectory, that he’d weaponized state institutions the way elected autocrats have done in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela and India. And those are the four most important examples to follow here, because Venezuela, obviously, they held an election. The leader lost and he wouldn’t leave. Turkey, Hungary and India have are what are considered fairish elections. But we’ll find out when the ruling party loses one day just how fair they are. But they write this. Indeed, the Trump administration has done exactly that. But here’s what the authors say they didn’t anticipate. What surprised even them wasn’t the speed, but it was the scope. And they write this one form of authoritarian behavior that we did not anticipate a year ago with the Trump administration’s routine subversion of the law and even the U.S. Constitution. Well, we’ve seen that with the strikes with that as well. I mean, there is very little, very little doubt here that this is not yet not constitutional. The question is whether they’ll even try to get can give some congressional authority on that. So let me outline a few more things that they write here. Weaponizing the state, they call it the blueprint. Every competitive authoritarian regime follows a familiar playbook. Purge, then pack. So removing professional civil servants who see their their job as the law and replace them with loyalists who see their job as the leader. Just look at the FBI. That’s exactly what they document happening inside the Justice Department, the FBI and other key agencies. When officials resisted, they were just simply removed. We’ve seen U.S. attorneys, deputy U.S. attorneys just summarily fired when replacements were chosen. They weren’t selected for experience, but for loyalty, including, as the authors note, Trump’s own personal lawyers installed as senior Justice Department officials. It’s just right right out of right out of sort of there’s a there’s a fun parody about authoritarianism called Moon over Peridot with Richard Dreyfus. I invite you to write that what seemed like parody is now real. Right. And then even when prosecutions don’t lead to convictions, the authors explain why that doesn’t matter. Such investigations themselves are the powerful form of harassment. Right. Making Adam Schiff hire a lawyer, making Letitia James deal with this, making James Comey deal with this legal fees, time, reputational damage, career disruption. The punishment is often the process itself. They don’t care if they get convictions. They just want them constantly made to be, you know, unhireable. Don’t get them on corporate boards. Make them seem as if they’re controversial figures. Then, of course, you’ve got to follow the money. Because this is what’s happened with their next move, going after civil society. How’s the Trump administration done this? They’ve ordered investigations into Act Blue, the primary arm of the Democratic Party, Open Society Foundations, the George Soros founded organization. The Wall Street Journal reported that that there are plans to target Democratic donors through the IRS. That’s right out of the competitive authoritarian handbook that these political scientists know. Then there’s the pressure campaign against the media. Trump sued The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The FCC opened silly investigations into ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Comcast, which owns NBC. We’ve seen the FCC chair act like a thug in threatening Jimmy Kimmel, Disney and NBC. What makes this so dangerous and so effective is not just what happened, but because of what didn’t happen. In fact, the authors are arguing that the most insidious change isn’t the repression. It’s been the self-censorship. They point that outlets have become realigning and pull back. Like The Washington Post, the editorial page, is kind of a clown show now. Outside of George Will, there’s not a readable columnist left in that place. It is just a joke. The editorial page itself, it’s like they have one thing they do every time. If there’s some economic controversy, they write some convoluted editorial attacking Elizabeth Warren. I guess that makes Jeff Bezos feel better, but it has nothing to do with the point itself or any of the actual rational debate that’s going on. You’ve had the Teen Vogue has sort of gotten rid of their political coverage. CBS clearly just has a new owner, and they just wiped out, brought in, virtue signaling new editors to run things. We’ve seen Disney cave in. We’ve seen plenty of, again, all of these legacy media, these corporate-owned, shareholder-driven media organizations that all fall under Donald Trump’s potential influence due to government regulation. They’ve all capitulated, which is why, frankly, we’re doing so well here at the podcast. In some ways, thank you, but unfortunately, this is why we’ve all gone down this independent road, because if you want to be honest and if you want to tell the truth, you’re going to have to find a different outlet, because you’re not going to be able to do it at The Washington Post. You’re not going to be able to do it at the major legacy TV networks that are left. I’m not saying individuals aren’t trying, but collectively, they’re not even giving me a chance. Here’s the other thing. Here’s the part we don’t know. What makes self-censorship so insidious is that it is virtually impossible to ascertain its full impact, so wrote these authors. We can see a firing. We can see a cancellation. What we can’t see are the stories that are never pitched, the investigations that get quietly abandoned, or the headlines that are softened out of fear, or the questions that don’t get asked on camera because executives in New York tell their correspondents, please don’t do it because our corporate overlords are afraid of blowback from the president. That is happening. You can guess where that’s coming from. That’s how democracies hollow out, and this is where the essay draws a crucial historical line. America has had its dark chapters. Jim Crow, Red Scare, Japanese internment, McCarthyism, Nixon. But the authors also argue that after Watergate, the overt authoritarian abuse largely disappeared. Since 1974, no Democratic or Republican administration had systematically politicized law enforcement or targeted political rivals the way Donald Trump is doing. George W. Bush, his Justice Department investigated Republicans and Democrats. Barack Obama appointed James Comey, a Republican, to be the head of the FBI. Joe Biden kept Christopher Wray as head of the FBI, an appointee of Donald Trump, mind you. Merrick Garland bent over backwards as Attorney General, sometimes to a fault, to avoid the appearance of political interference. So the conclusion is one. In each of those critical areas, the Trump administration stands alone in its authoritarianism. Now, none of this is inevitable, and here’s where the essay shifts from diagnosis to prognosis. He says the U.S. still has advantages that most competitive authoritarian regimes do not. There’s still an independent judiciary. There’s still a professional military, though Pete Hegseth is trying to erode it. There’s still strong federalism. I mean, look at the way Ron DeSantis has pushed back on the AI issue and the AI moratorium that Trump has done. There’s still a vibrant civil society. Hello. And there’s a unified opposition party. And Trump himself lacks the single most important asset the authors note for authoritarian consolidation, overwhelming popularity. Successful autocrats often rule with approval ratings over 80 percent. Trump is stuck in the low 40s, and it’s actually trending downward. That matters. So that brings us to what they argue is the greatest danger of them all. The gravest danger is not repression, but demobilization. It’s not tanks. It’s not mass arrests. It’s acceptance and resignation. It’s people deciding not to run, not to donate, not to sue, not to vote. And then this line, which is really the thesis of the piece. The outcome of this struggle remains open. It will turn less on the strength of the authoritarian government than on whether enough citizens act as though their efforts still matter. Because for now, they still do. So there you go. Levitsky way and Ziblatt. They aren’t telling Americans to panic. They’re just telling you what is. OK, this is what has happened to America the first year of Trump’s second term. We have slipped into something called competitive authoritarianism. He is trying to create an authoritarian regime. There is democracy still. There is still competition. OK, and our future is not set in stone or the cement is still wet. OK, they’re warning against two equally dangerous instincts, complacency and fatalism. The future is going to be unstable. OK, neither full democracy nor entrenched dictatorship is going to happen. It’s going to be a struggle. It’s going to be a fight. The next elections may be fought in theory over policy differences, but they’re really going to be about the larger issue of what kind of system are we choosing to live under. And that danger isn’t that democracy disappears overnight. It’s the danger is people stop believing that they can defend it. So please go read this piece. It’s extraordinarily important. It’s well argued. It is, you know, evidence based. It is data driven. It is not just alarmist cable commentary. And that’s the most important thing. And it comes from a place in the Council on Foreign Relations where important ideas sort of get launched for debate. And this is one that more and more mainstream Americans need to understand what is happening and what is taking place. There’s a reason results matter more than promises.

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