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American Prestige

Bonus - Homeland Empire and Trump 2.0 w/ Nikhil Pal Singh (Preview)

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

History, News, Politics

4.81.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2026

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Subscribe now for the full episode. Nikhil Pal Singh joins Danny and Derek to discuss Trump’s second term and the consolidation of executive power. They talk about how Trump’s second term differs from the first; revenge politics and the liberal “lawfare” frame; mass deportation and the war on migrants; “domains of rightlessness” and undocumented people as a lever to expand state power; the imperial presidency and unitary executive theory; how the carceral state and the war on terror laid the groundwork for Trump 2.0; the breakdown of postwar liberal anti-fascist constraints and the collapse of the Nazi taboo; and China and spheres of influence. Read Nikhil’s essay “Homeland Empire.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening to American Prestige.

0:03.2

To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at AmericanPestigepod.com.

0:08.3

Find the link in our show notes.

0:11.8

Liberal hegemony was justified via the defeat of the Nazis.

0:16.2

Like flat out, consciously over and over and over again for decades.

0:19.5

Right.

0:19.8

And what goes with that, which is like opposition to eugenics, an opposition to genocide,

0:25.2

an opposition to, you know, various kinds of overt, explicit racism.

0:29.2

And being very pro-Israel.

0:31.0

Right, and being very pro-Israel.

0:32.8

So it all, it's all gotten re-scrambles, right, in this moment.

0:37.5

And, you know, Trump is a great scrambler because to go back to your earlier point, It's all gotten re-scrambles, right, in this moment.

0:44.8

And, you know, Trump is a great scrambler because to go back to your earlier point, you know, he doesn't have, like, settled ideological convictions.

0:51.8

He's happy to play with this, play in this dirty sandbox and just kind of mix and match, you know.

0:57.5

And the racism is sort of, it's omnivorous and kind of, kind of can choose for many different sort of menus at many different times, right? And so the homeland

1:04.1

empire then in some sense at that kind of, then that ideal grows out, I mean, that's the ideological

1:09.8

soup of it.

1:15.1

But the mechanics of it are like really pretty specific, right? So if it's the expansion of a domain of rightlessness, it then operates through like a kind of spatial and temporal collapse.

1:24.9

So the spatial collapse, of course, is the idea, and this is really paradoxical

1:29.4

when you think of what these guys supposedly are for, you know, national sovereignty and all this,

1:33.4

but the spatial collapse is the idea that this isn't really a country. Like, this isn't really about

1:38.6

sovereignty or about restoring something like popular sovereignty. It really is about, like,

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