from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Ler. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday, September 8th.

Brian Ler on WNYC, we'll check in now as we've been all year, on the state of the legal battles over President

Trump's campaign to take as much government power as he can for himself. The big picture of this,

of course, goes beyond individual policy disputes to the essential question of whether he's

trying to turn the U.S. into less of a democracy and more of an authoritarian state. There was, as you've been hearing, Trump's post over the weekend,

showing him as the Robert Duval character from the movie Apocalypse Now,

with Chicago in flames in the background, the words Chicapolips now,

and the chilling language that Chicago is about to find out why they call it the Department of War.

That was an actual post from the President of the United States. And all that only adds to the

concern that people like Illinois Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker had already expressed last

week. This is a part of his plan to do something really nefarious, which is to interfere with

elections in 2026. He wants to have troops on the ground. So we'll touch on democracy in the

26 elections, which Pritzker raises there, and the possible Chicago deployment, like the ones in

L.A. and D.C., are wedge issues, right, using

means that might be authoritarianism to address concerns that are real and to possibly build

support in enough of the electorate for that consolidation of power. Here's Trump yesterday

on his fiery Chicago Post.

We're not going to war. We're going to clean up our city. We're going to clean them up so they don't

kill five people every weekend. That's not war. That's common sense.

Now that has definitely happened in other countries in recent years, the populist and electoral

route to authoritarianism

through issues that most of the people are on the side of the leader about. And remember Trump said

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