Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gailan. Today I'm joined by

Trig Veals, President of Viking Strategies LLC, a Washington DC-based public affairs

and political consulting firm. Trig Ve has worked in dozens of countries across the world

on behalf of pro-democratic forces against autocracies against authoritarianists. Trig Ve and I

have worked together many times over the last 15 years. We first met when we were working

for then Senator John McCain's presidential campaign in 2007. And so Trig Ve, thanks for

joining me today. Yeah, thanks for you. It's great to be here.

So today we're going to talk about some of the tactics that we see from autocrats and

some of the rules that you've developed as ways to deal with them. But before we get

to that, I want to set the stage for how we even get here. And you've identified what

you call the psychological pillars of political extremism. Four different and distinct things

that really make up political extremism psychologically. And I'll share them here. The first is psychological

distress, the second is cognitive simplicity, the third is intolerance, and the fourth

is overconfidence. And so I think we've seen all of these certainly from Donald Trump personally

more times than any of this can count. But I think it's also metastasized into a broader

would be autocratic movement in the US. So how do these pillars in your mind manifest

themselves and how do they relate to one another? Obviously the first one, which is psychological

distress, rests in events are occurring all the time. And when I would talk with various

people about this, sometimes I would reference Billy Joel song, we didn't start the fire,

right? When Billy Joel wrote that song, there were a lot of interviews afterwards where

he said he wrote it because he had been talking to a younger person who was saying things

have never been worse. So there's always things causing psychological distress for people

...