Authoritarianism in the US isn’t just creeping – it’s accelerating in plain sight. Trump’s ‘Gestapo’ is racially profiling immigrants and citizens, and murdering Americans in cold blood. His military continues to kill people in boat strikes in international waters. He’s threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to sic troops on blue cities.
To break down America’s rapid descent into fascism, Mehdi is joined by former Trump official turned vocal critic of the president, Olivia Troye, who served as national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence in the first term, as well as philosophy professor, author, fascism expert, and Zeteo contributor, Jason Stanley.
With ICE operating as a private police force for Trump, Troye tells Mehdi she’s not convinced that the entire Department of Homeland Security will survive if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, adding that she believes there needs to be a “complete review” of the department.
“I think the department’s going to have to be completely rebuilt and reexamined,” Troye says.
Former Yale professor Jason Stanley, who left the US and moved to Canada with his family last year after Trump returned to the White House, tells Mehdi that any Democratic lawmaker who believes ICE can be reformed “is being incoherent,” noting that ICE has been used to lay the groundwork to get people to “turn off their empathy” before “being unleashed against the American population at large.”
Stanley also reminds Mehdi of the famous fascism definition that says fascism “is when you do to white people what you have long done to colonized people, non-white people.”
Paid subscribers can watch the full interview to hear Stanley discuss the president’s use of foreign intervention as a way to distract from domestic discontent, and whether Troye believes she may have to leave the country too, in order to avoid retribution from her former boss Trump.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview was recorded before the arrest of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort.
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