The Sinister Source of Trump's Autocracy Playbook

The New Abnormal

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joanna Coles is joined by Russian and American Journalist M. Gessen, whose reporting from both Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America has made them a singular voice on creeping autocracy. Gessen explains why Americans' faith in endless progress is misplaced—and how Trump, like Putin before him, overwhelms the system by attacking everything, everywhere, all at once: courts, media, universities, even law firms. They argue that the biggest danger isn’t sudden collapse, but slow adaptation—that Americans are already getting used to living in a crumbling democracy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Joanna Coles, Chief Content Officer of The Daily Beast, and you are listening to watching,
0:09.0	possibly cooking your breakfast or walking your dog to the Daily Beast podcast.
0:14.5	Today's guest that I'm extremely interested to talk to is M. Gessen, the superb columnist for the New York Times, who's been writing
0:22.3	some of, I think, the best political commentary that there is right now. M grew up in Russia,
0:28.9	so they have a different perspective than a lot of American commentators on quite how dangerous
0:35.4	what's going on in America could be. So let's get into it.
0:42.7	Thank you very much for joining us. What I wanted to start with was I think this assumption in
0:48.5	America that progress is always forward movement. And you know you grew up in Russia that that is not true. And you say
0:56.4	that if you're not feeling very uncomfortable right now, you're not paying attention.
1:02.2	What are the signs you're seeing that make you feel so uncomfortable?
1:06.1	What I think should be making us uncomfortable is feeling comfortable.
1:11.5	And it's our survival mechanism as humans.
1:15.0	We want to get used to stuff.
1:17.7	We want to gain our footing.
1:19.5	Otherwise, we really couldn't survive.
1:21.9	But the problem is that's what happens when an autocracy takes hold, right?
1:26.5	After the initial attack.
1:27.9	And actually, in the column that you referenced, I make a comparison to countries of war.
1:32.6	And I've observed that whenever I've reported on wars, right, you get to a country, people
1:37.5	are in shock if you get there in the first few days.
1:40.3	They can't believe it's happening to them, right?
1:42.3	Their lives are being destroyed.
	...

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