Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook
To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
Charlie Sykes
4.9 • 719 Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
Jonathan Rauch, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and contributing writer at The Atlantic, joins Charlie to explain why he thinks Trump is following a European authoritarian playbook.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Truth of Contrary Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. |
| 0:02.8 | Thursday is Martin Luther King Jr.'s actual birthday. He would have been 97. |
| 0:09.4 | Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to threaten Greenland. |
| 0:12.4 | Denmark is sending military reinforcements to Greenland. |
| 0:15.6 | The FBI has raided the home of a Washington Post reporter who was investigating the administration. |
| 0:22.1 | The president of the United States, actually, you may have seen this picture, flipped off somebody at a Ford plant who yelled that he was a pedophile protector. |
| 0:33.1 | So, yeah, the zone is really flooded today. |
| 0:40.8 | All right, to make our way through all of the things that are going on, we are |
| 0:44.5 | joined by our good friend Jonathan Rauch, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings |
| 0:48.5 | Institution and a contributing writer to the Atlantic. Welcome back, Jonathan. Thank you so much. |
| 0:55.7 | Always happy to be with you, Charlie. I always learn more from you than you do from me. Oh, well, let's let's reverse that today, |
| 1:02.0 | because I have a question to ask you. I'm trying to figure out. And we'll get to some of the specifics, |
| 1:07.0 | like the fact that we're even talking about whether or not we're going to invade Greenland, |
| 1:10.7 | whether or not the president is going to go ahead criminally prosecuting Jerome Powell, |
| 1:16.2 | whether or not, I mean, all of these things. |
| 1:18.2 | But let's, can we just like pull back a little bit? |
| 1:21.9 | Why Donald Trump right now is doing so much, so fast, and so many of his actions are really |
| 1:31.8 | unpopular. Somebody asked me earlier today, is this part of a strategy to distract from other things |
| 1:37.1 | that he figures that he will dominate the conversation by doing, you know, by a surge in Minneapolis, |
| 1:47.9 | by going after Jerome Powell, by threatening Greenland, you know, by a surge in Minneapolis, by going after Jerome Powell, by threatening Greenland. |
| 1:55.7 | You know, he dominates the conversation. Is that the strategy? And I guess my take was, yes, but none of those things are actually helping him. |
| 2:01.6 | The public is, there's a lot of evidence that the public is actually repulsed by many of those things. So what do you think, what do you make of this bizarre beginning to 2026? |
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