owning pieces of companies by the state. That's called communism, folks. That's communism, by the way.

Yes. I keep like, I'm like, I can't when they're like, oh, these socialist, Democrats, the communist,

the Marxist. I'm like, you're the ones suggesting you own part of Intel, suggesting you take over

part of medical companies. So like, that's the communist manifesto right there. Exactly. State-owned enterprises.

S-O-E's from academia. That's a phrase we talk about when referring to China and other

communist countries, not the United States of America. Hello, and welcome to the Politics Girl podcast. I'm your host, Lee McGowan. Let's get into it.

Well, Donald Trump and his team are testing us. We had a wonderful, joyful day of protest on No Kings Day, where the only people arrested

were MAGA counter-protesters, and 7 million people got into the streets of America to express

their displeasure with the administration, and Trump's response was to take a wrecking ball to the White

House.

I think that despite the fact that most of us know how much of America's institutions, norms, and values he has

destroyed over the past eight months, somehow seeing it visually represented hit a lot of us hard.

It was difficult not to find your spirits dampened, watching a historic building that technically

belongs to all Americans demolished in front of our eyes. We are clearly in a new America now, an America where the

autocrat is challenging everything we know. So I thought it was important to speak to someone who

spent their entire career dealing not only with autocrats, but whose new book Autocrats versus Democrats,

China, Russia, America, and the New Global global disorder discusses the very issues we are dealing

with now. So today we're lucky enough to speak to Michael McFaul, the former ambassador to Russia,

the director of the Freeman Spoli Institute for International Studies, a senior fellow at the

Hoover Institute and Professor of International Studies and Political Science at Stanford.

Michael served five years in the Obama administration,

first as a special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia and Eurasia Affairs

...