A Stark Warning About the 2026 Election, with Robert Kagan
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Washington Roundtable is joined by Robert Kagan, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, for a conversation about the pressures facing American democracy, the security of elections, and how these domestic tensions interact with the collapse of international norms. Nearly a decade after his prescient 2016 column for the Washington Post, “This is How Fascism Comes to America,” Kagan contends that the U.S. has moved beyond the warning and into a full democratic crisis. “There is no chance in the world that Donald Trump is gonna allow himself to lose in the 2026 elections, because that will be the end of his ability to wield total power in the United States,” Kagan says.
This week’s reading:
- “The Minnesota War Zone Is Trump’s Most Trumpian Accomplishment,” by Susan B. Glasser
- “What It’s Like to Be Trump’s Closest Ally Right Now,” by Sam Knight
- “A D.H.S. Shooting Puts Portland Back Under the Microscope,” by James Ross Gardner
- “Jay Powell, the Prepster Banker Who Is Standing Up to Trump,” by John Cassidy
- “How Donald Trump Has Transformed ICE,” Isaac Chotiner
- “How Colombia’s President Reached an Uneasy Détente with Donald Trump,” by Jon Lee Anderson
- “Iran’s Regime Is Unsustainable,” by Robin Wright
- “The Supreme Court Gets Back to Work,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
- “The Lights Are Still On in Venezuela,” by Armando Ledezma
- “How Marco Rubio Went from “Little Marco” to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler,” by Dexter Filkins
The Political Scene draws on the reporting and analysis found in The New Yorker for lively conversations about the big questions in American politics. Join the magazine’s writers and editors as they put into context the latest news—about elections, the economy, the White House, the Supreme Court, and much more. New episodes are available three times a week.
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| 0:00.0 | It's like the cereal box. You know how they used to have the prizes in the cereal box? |
| 0:04.5 | He's like, look, I want a Nobel Prize, Mom. |
| 0:06.7 | You know, there is a word for this if you do this in the military. |
| 0:10.3 | It's called stolen valor. |
| 0:13.5 | Is it stolen if she gives it to you? |
| 0:15.7 | Stolen pacifism? |
| 0:17.6 | Is that what you get from a stolen Nobel? |
| 0:19.5 | By the way, when the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is trolling you. When they have to disown this, the transfer. Oh, man. I mean, in the other part of this. And the framed. Freud said it was all about the transference. Is that what he meant? It's gold. It's the also, of course, it's made of gold. Yes, good point. This is not where Trump is going with this. I have a hunch, though, that even Midas would have been like, you know what, it's kind of pathetic for you to give me. |
| 0:42.8 | It's your prize. |
| 0:42.8 | Yeah, you keep it. |
| 0:43.6 | You keep it. |
| 0:45.6 | Welcome to the political scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm joined by my colleagues, Evan Osnose, and Jane Mayer. Hey, Evan. Good morning, guys. Hi, Jane. Hey, Susan. |
| 1:07.2 | You know, aren't we cheery and upbeat? |
| 1:12.6 | It's an illusion. |
| 1:22.5 | Here we are. Here we are another week. It seems like a year 2026, but that's really because the news is almost impossible to keep up with. |
| 1:26.3 | We're watching multiple crises unfold all at once. |
| 1:30.5 | We have domestic authoritarianism, the collapse of international norms, the threat of new wars, and our guest today warned nearly a decade ago that this moment was |
| 1:38.0 | coming. Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an author and historian a historian. His books include The Jungle Grows Back of Paradise and Power. We want to talk today about his insights going all the way back to the spring of 2016 and his powerful essay, This is How Fascism Comes to America, published before Donald Trump even won |
| 2:03.6 | the Republican nomination officially. Today, we're going to ask him how he was able to see that |
| 2:09.8 | coming in 2016, what surprised him since, and whether American democracy can still pull back |
| 2:16.0 | from the edge. |
| 2:19.2 | Bob, welcome to the show. |
... |
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