Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Radley Balco. He is one of the country's leading journalists on

criminal punishment and police abuses of power. The veteran of the Washington Post and the Huffington Post.

He now writes his own newsletter at radley-belko.substack.com.

It's called The Watch.

He joins us today to discuss some of his deeply, deeply alarming recent work on Donald Trump's plans for a second term in office.

Radley Belko, thank you for joining us on Code Affairs today.

My pleasure. Thanks for having the on.

Before we get to your most recent piece, which is called Trump's deportation army and is about

how Donald Trump might implement his plans on immigration

in a second term. Let's talk more broadly about Trump's authoritarianism, because you have

written a few posts now that have been, essentially the message I take from them is, this shit is serious.

There is a really, really deep and scary threat here.

I posted this on social media earlier today, but I mean, on the one hand, we're in the

middle of what I think is a pretty fascinating experiment and also a pretty terrifying one, which

is, you know, what would happen if you had a

candidate for the presidency in the U.S. who was openly promising authoritarianism, openly

promising corruption, openly promising, you know, autocracy, kleptocracy, openly promising to wield

the government as a weapon against itsocracy, openly promising to wield the government as a weapon against his enemies,

openly promising to end the free press, lock up its enemies. I mean, normally we think that

these kinds of things are, you know, they're a danger and a threat in politics, but there's

the kind of things that candidates hide and

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