But, is it true? Can non-MAGA Republicans stop Trump? Is there any hint of normalcy left in the U.S. political system, or are we doomed for autocracy?

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Lincoln Square’s Stuart Stevens, former Republican strategist and Lincoln Project adviser, joins Zeteo’s John Harwood to answer that question.

“I don’t think the Republican party is a traditional American political party now. I think it’s an extremist movement.”

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Watch the full, wide-ranging discussion above to hear Stevens and Harwood perform an autopsy of American conservatism, discuss why Stevens thinks “race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party,” and break down what it would take for a Democrat to win the 2028 election.

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This week, an immigration officer shot and killed a man in Maine on Monday. Last week, an officer shot and killed a man in Texas.

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It brings back into the headlines a key question: how do DHS and ICE seem to be able to kill civilians with impunity? Law school professor and top civil rights activist Maya Wiley joins John Harwood to break it all down. This was a Substack Live conversation where Zeteo subscribers could tune in live and ask questions.

Watch the full video above to hear the two discuss how Congress should respond to the killings, whether the Civil Rights movement is still winning 18 months into Trump’s presidency, and Zohran Mamdani vs. Jonathan Greenblatt.

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With Donald Trump’s authoritarian push eroding our democratic norms, the question is no longer about whether American democracy is under threat, but whether we are willing to fight for it.

So have we lost touch with the vision our founding fathers put forth? And is American democracy at its breaking point?

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In this Substack Live conversation, Heather Cox Richardson, renowned historian and author of the Substack newsletter ‘Letters from an American’, spoke with Zeteo’s John Harwood about the state of American democracy and what we can learn from the past 250 years of our nation’s history.

She warns, “We’re on a knife’s edge between rising authoritarianism and the rebirth of American democracy and the question is: which one of us is going to cross the finish line first?”

This conversation was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Feel free to share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live!

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“People who want to kill Americans, we are less prepared to stop them than at any point since 9-11,” says Taylor, as he answers questions from John Harwood and Zeteo’s subscribers during this latest Substack live.

Watch the full video above to hear how Trump could weaponize the U.S. Postal Service to jeopardize elections, the security threats political appointees like Kash Patel pose, and a special announcement from Taylor towards the end of the discussion.

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Marc Elias specializes in election law, voting rights and campaign finance and in 2020 founded Democracy Docket. He joined Zeteo’s John Harwood in a live conversation on Substack where subscribers tuned in and asked questions.

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Watch the full video above to hear Elias unpack:

• Why the US Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act was the “worst Supreme Court decision” of his life

• How he is actively fighting Trump’s election manipulation attempts

• What the legacy media isn’t telling you about Trump’s attempt to seize ballots

• …and much more.

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Watch the full video above …

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But in this Substack Live conversation, independent pollster G. Elliott Morris tells John Harwood that those counseling Democrats to move toward the center have got it wrong. There are no “median voters” there, as he describes to Harwood – just people who pay little attention, have mixed views, and want strong leaders.

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Watch the full conversation to hear Harwood and Morris also discuss Trump's unpopular Iran war, and the chances that Republicans might lose both chambers of Congress in the 2026 elections.

Morris can also be found on his Substack, Strength In Numbers.

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In this Substack Live, John Harwood speaks with ex-Republican and The Bulwark’s editor-at-large Bill Kristol about the broadening political opposition to Trump in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections.

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Kristol tells Harwood that while he thinks Democrats will have victory in the midterms, “I don’t think that crushes the MAGA movement. I think it stalls it.”

The conversation between Harwood and Kristol was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience.

Share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live. Free subscribers can watch a 4-minute preview. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription and never hit a paywall again!

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On Donald Trump’s first inauguration day, I wrote a New York Times op-ed I thought would prove prescient. I suggested his movement wouldn’t last.

After all, he owed his flukish victory to shrinking segments of America: whites, evangelical Christians, less-educated voters. Demographic, social, and cultural change would keep shrinking them, notwithstanding their supercharged enthusiasm in 2016. Trump’s 2020 defeat seemed to vindicate that analysis.

Then Trump’s second victory made me doubt. Not only did he capture every electoral battleground in 2024, he won the popular vote by augmenting his MAGA base with new Black, Hispanic, and young supporters.

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I’ve stopped doubting now. It’s not going to last much longer.

Trump’s shambolic second presidency has shown more vividly than ever what a MAGAfied America represents. And Americans don’t like what they see.

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“This is beyond me… if you have a government who can decide which protests you can cover, which you can’t… then this whole thing is over.”

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Lemon joins Zeteo’s John Harwood for a Substack Live conversation about being targeted by Trump’s Justice Department – and much more, including:

• The increasingly overt racism driving the Trump administration – and the role it may have played in Lemon’s arrest

• MAGA’s threat to the First Amendment through media consolidation, regulatory pressure, and bullying reporters

• Self-censorship inside the mainstream press: “The corporate owners said it… we want to move CNN to the right. One of them said, ‘We want CNN to be more like Fox News.’”

• How independent media can stand up for press freedom

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In this Substack Live conversation, Zeteo contributor John Harwood speaks with former Obama White House Special Counsel for Ethics Norm Eisen, who says Trump’s rapacious authoritarianism has improved the odds that legal and public pressure can halt his lawlessness.

Instead of slowly “boiling the frog” like subtler autocrats, Eisen says, Trump has “microwaved the frog” and ignited a potent backlash.

The conversation between Harwood and Eisen was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live.

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Norm Eisen can also be found on the Substack, The Contrarian.

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Watching masked ICE paramilitaries shatter car windows, abuse peaceable immigrants, and shoot protesters dead, millions of Americans wonder: How did we get here?

Cratered support for Donald Trump’s immigration policy makes it clear: Most of us do not want to be here. Anxiety about the changing face of America is one thing, dystopian street violence quite another.

We got here because of two Big Lies that Trump and MAGA allies tell. One casts immigrants as violent criminals; the other depicts them as welfare chiselers bankrupting the government at the expense of American taxpayers.

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Trump has slung the former smear from the day in 2015 when he first infected the body politic by condemning Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime.” By the fall of 2024, he had escalated the demagoguery to cartoonish levels, falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of eating the household pets of their neighbors in Springfield, Ohio.

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Halting and reversing it, Raskin says, requires a pitched political battle every single day: “We’re in the fight of …

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This week, I just can’t make myself write again about the brutality, corruption, and dishonesty of Donald Trump’s presidency. My soul needs a break.

Instead, consider a decent person who has spent decades trying to make the federal government an instrument for helping less fortunate Americans. Yes, such people exist, though that can be hard to remember sometimes.

I refer to Gene Sperling, one of those public servants around long enough to be vaguely familiar, if not famous. He has advised the last three Democratic presidents on economic and social policy. He’s not abandoning his work even though he’s out of power at age 67.

Georgetown University has announced the launch of an “Economic Dignity Lab” at its McCourt School of Public Policy. Sperling, who has championed the concept of economic dignity for years, created the Lab to cultivate ideas for improving Americans’ living standards amid the looming disruptions of artificial intelligence.

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In this Substack Live, Harwood and Acosta discussed the anti-American extremism of this authoritarian presidency and how the media should cover it.

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“If Trump can go after Don, he can go after just about anyone,” Acosta tells Harwood.

The conversation between Harwood and Acosta was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live.

Jim Acosta can also be found on his Substack, “The Jim Acosta Show.”

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In this Substack Live with John Harwood, the former Westchester County DA explains why juries tend to give so much leeway to law enforcement cases. She also breaks down why ICE agents don’t have absolute immunity, as Vice President JD Vance has suggested.

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The conversation between Harwood and Rocah was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This conversation was recorded before the latest tragic shooting in Minneapolis.

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In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan ousted Democratic President Jimmy Carter by consolidating the political realignment that followed the civil rights movement.

Reagan used symbolism to court aggrieved white conservatives, delivering a “states’ rights” speech in the infamous Mississippi town where Ku Klux Klansmen had murdered three civil rights workers 16 years earlier. But his rhetoric reflected the 20th-century evolution in right-wing racial politics, from raw and ugly to sly and subtle.

The following year, a young White House aide explained that evolution in an interview:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n*****, n*****, n*****,’” Lee Atwater began. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘n****r’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights’…abstract.”

“Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these…totally economic things. A byproduct of them is Blacks get hurt worse than whites. ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing.”

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Cynical though it was, the shift reflected progress; modern America had made overt racism broadly unacceptable. That’s why conservative politicians took umbrage when journalists like me spotlighted their veiled appeals.

Nearly a half-century later, Donald Trump’s throwback administration has discarded the veils. Its essence, in plain sight, is white supremacy enforced with violence.

The 79-year-old president also conjures even more repugnant demons. Before his rise, comparing political opponents to Nazis was famously considered too shrill and extreme to be credible.

That’s no longer true. With words, actions, and appointments, Trump invites those comparisons.

Trump 2.0 Rips Off the Mask

After serving in Trump’s first term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Gen. Mark Milley called him “fascist to the core.” Former White House chief of staff John Kelly says Trump yearned for military leaders like Hitler’s generals, and insisted, “Hitler did some good things.” (A spokesperson for Trump at the time denied he made the remarks.)

Trump 2.0 shows what they were talking about. His mass deportation campaign, sending masked paramilitaries to rough up and snatch suspected immigrants off the street, has even one high-profile supporter seeing shades of the Nazi agents Hitler deployed to maintain the purity of what he called the genetically-superior Aryan “master race.”

“Are we really gonna be the Gestapo: ‘Where’s your papers?’” Joe Rogan asked his Trump-friendly audience this week. “Is that what we’ve come to?”

Much more fills out the picture.

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The administration’s National Security Strategy warns European countries of “civilizational erasure” if immigration turns them “majority non-European.” That’s a euphemism for majority non-white – the same prospect for America that Trump uses to arouse supporters.

His on-again, off-again unofficial adviser, Elon Musk, whose maternal grandparents reportedly backed the Nazis, endorsed social media posts calling for “white solidarity” and immigrant “remigration” while mourning the lost benefits of apartheid in his native South Africa. A stiff-armed Musk gesture during Trump’s inaugural festivities last year resembled a Nazi salute.

“Remember who you are,” the Labor Department implored in a social media post containing an English-language variant of an old Nazi rallying cry. “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.”

ICE recruits new muscle with $50,000 signing bonuses to repel “foreign invaders.” Homeland Security posted a dreamscape beckoning Americans to envision life “after 100 million deportations.”

The administration feeds the anger of struggling white men by casting them as the real victims of racial discrimination. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas dangles reparations by publicly inviting them to file complaints.

It all shows the presence of appointees like Paul Ingrassia (“I do have a Nazi streak”) and Darren Beattie (“competent white men must be in charge”) – whose appalling baggage would have rendered them unemployable under previous presidents, including Trump 1.0 – is not accidental.

Nor is the violence with which masked ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Nicole Good. Not long after the killing, another agent approached a woman filming his activities with an ominous warning: “Have you not learned from the past couple of days?” A fundraising appeal on Ross’s behalf attacked “anti-American traitors like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (who is Jewish).”

Trump’s paramilitaries use intimidation and brutality to thrill supporters and punish targets. That formula applies abroad as well, for suspected drug smugglers (slaughtered in the ocean), foreign adversaries (invaded for seizure of natural resources), and NATO allies (threatened with conquest).

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“We live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” fanatical Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared in a CNN interview. The president sent that message by pardoning January 6 convicts who attacked police at the Capitol.

Among those pardoned: Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who spoke at Trump’s New Jersey golf club after federal prosecutors described him as a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer. Before becoming Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel appeared eight times on the podcast of a man who posted a picture of Hitler’s Mein Kampf captioned, “visionary leadership.”

Trump’s biography provides context.

His father, the son of German immigrants, was once arrested at a KKK event in New York (Donald Trump denied his father was arrested). Trump first gained national notoriety when a Republican president’s Justice Department sued him for anti-Black discrimination in apartment rentals (the case was eventually settled). He has long linked virtue and success to “the right genes.”

The late Ivana Trump once reportedly noted a remarkable book her then-husband kept near his bedside. It was My New Order, a collection of Hitler’s speeches.

John Harwood is the former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. Sign up for ‘The Stakes with John Harwood’ to get all of his columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

Don’t Miss It: If you’ll be in the DC area later this month, Zeteo is hosting a special LIVE in-person event you won’t want to miss to discuss ICE, the Epstein files, Trump, Venezuela, Iran, and more: Join Mehdi, Swin, Rep. Ro Khanna, Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Sarah Matthews, and Miles Taylor for a powerful evening at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Jan 20, 2026!

Click HERE for tickets

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In this Substack Live, Zeteo contributor John Harwood and Brown – who recently joined Substack – talked about Trump and Epstein, what's in the files that have been released (and the 99% that haven’t), and whether the Trump administration can continue to ignore calls for the full release.

The conversation between Brown and Harwood was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live.

NOTE: An unfinished version of this post was sent in error last week.

Don’t Miss It: If you’ll be in the DC area later this month, Zeteo is hosting a special LIVE in-person event you won’t want to miss to discuss the Epstein files, Trump, ICE, Venezuela, Iran, and more: Join Mehdi, Swin, Rep. Ro Khanna, Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Sarah Matthews, and Miles Taylor for a powerful evening at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Jan 20, 2026!

Click HERE for tickets

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Join Zeteo’s John Harwood in a live conversation with Julie K. Brown, for years the leading journalist on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, this Friday at 2pm ET/ 11am PT/ 7pm GMT. They’ll talk about what Trump is trying to hide in the Epstein files and take your questions.

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Forty years of covering politics and government in Washington leave me wondering: Where’s my cut of the fraud?

You’d think I’d know by now. But actually I only learned of my missing vigorish days ago from Elon Musk, when he angrily answered my social media post on the deadly costs of his “Department of Government Efficiency” fiasco.

“You just want your fraud money, you pos scammer,” declared the world’s richest man. (POS, if you don’t already know, stands for “piece of shit.”)

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Alas, as with most things outside of Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink, Musk has no idea what he’s talking about. I get no “fraud money.” Unlike this colossal weirdo, whose companies have received at least $38 billion in government funding over the years, I do no business with Uncle Sam beyond reporting what public officials do.

But the snark Musk sent to 231 million followers on his social media platform reveals a lot about his warped psyche and that of the MAGA movement itself.

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Heather Cox Richardson, author of the newsletter ‘Letters from an American’, spoke with Zeteo’s John Harwood about the two visions of America that have competed throughout our history: the welcoming message of freedom and equality for all etched on the Statue of Liberty, and the crimped conception of “real Americans” preserving power over their “inferiors.”

The conversation between Richardson and Harwood was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Please share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live.

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