This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

In the last few days, we seem to have crossed a threshold.

President Trump is ratcheting up the authoritarianism and threatening to arrest his enemies in a new kind of way. He's angrily hinting at arresting

Barack Obama and other members of his administration. He's openly saying that Obama committed

sedition, and he's raging that Senator Adam Schiff is also guilty of crimes, explicitly calling

for him to be put in prison.

Critically, however, all this has been accompanied by a new type of manipulation of the bureaucracy,

one clearly designed to manufacture pretexts for the prosecutions of those enemies.

Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, put it all very starkly on blue sky, saying that authoritarianism is right here in front of us.

Ryan added this. You either fight it or you accept that this is our future. So we're talking to Ryan today about his warning.

Thanks for coming on, Ryan. Yeah, thank you. I'm glad to be here talking about this.

So let's start with Trump's threat toward Barack Obama. The basic gist of this is that Tulsi Gabbard,

the director of national intelligence, put out this supposed finding that the Obama administration faked the conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. A reporter asked Trump about Tulsi Gabbard,

who referred this to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Listen to this.

Tulsi Gabbard has submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice.

From your perspective, who should the DOJ target as part of their investigation? What specific figures in the Obama

administration? Well, based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President

Obama. He started it. And Biden was there with him, and Comey was there, and Clapper, the whole group was there. This was treason.

This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the

election. They did things that nobody's ever even imagined, even in other countries.

...