Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss Donald Trump, claiming he's not a dictator,

but that some Americans might want one. Is he right? Democrats are actually in disarray.

They're more unpopular than they've been in decades. What's their plan to remedy that? And

will it work. And finally, and not worth your time, we'll revisit our heated discussion of backer inners from last week in light of an overwhelming amount of listener feedback.

I'm joined today by my dispatch co-founder Jonah Goldberg, our colleague Sarah Isker, and Megan McArdle from the Washington Post.

I want to dive right in today by sort of pulling back the camera, as it were, and this is

probably a conversation that we could have had really at any point over the last eight months.

But I thought we'd have it now because there was some joking in the Oval Office this week,

led as always by Donald Trump, who mused about the possibility that he was a

dictator. I kind of laughed at people who were concerned that he is assuming dictatorial

powers and shrugged off the claims that I'm not a dictator, but hey, people might like a dictator.

People want

somebody you get something done, and if you need strength to do it, that's popular. It is the case that

if you look at what's happened over the past month, over the past six weeks, I think the

administration has taken a much stronger authoritarian turn. There are many examples we can point to. We've

discussed some of them sort of on an individual basis on this podcast, but I want to just look at them

collectively and get your sense on kind of where we are and how worried we should be.

You have masked agents grabbing people off the streets, some with no due process.

That's not necessarily new, but it's been going on for a while.

You have armed troops patrolling the nation's capital.

You have a president threatening his political opponents on a near daily basis.

You have his top advisors labeling the political opposition,

...