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Jane Coaston: It’s Wednesday, October 1st, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that has experienced some cold rooms, but nothing quite as frigid as the response to this remark from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to a room full of top military brass. 

[clip of Pete Hegseth] To our enemies. F. A. F. O. If necessary, our troops can translate that for you. 

Jane Coaston: For Hegseth, I assume FAFO means flail around and freak out. [music break] On today’s show, President Donald Trump announces his latest business venture, Trump Rx. And FBI Director Cash Patel smuggles guns into New Zealand. Whoopsie. But let’s start with the government shutdown. The government has shut down, and Trump even seemed to be looking forward to it. Here he is speaking in the Oval Office Tuesday afternoon. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] So we’re doing well as a country, so the last thing we want to do is shut it down. But a lot of good can come down from shutdowns. We can get rid of a lot things that we didn’t want. And they’d be Democrat things, but they want open borders. They want men playing in women’s sports. They want transgender for everybody. They never stop, and they don’t learn. We won an election in a landslide, they just don’t learn. So we have no choice. I have to do that for the for the country. 

Jane Coaston: Nonsense town, as always. But it’s telling how Trump views forcing the government to close up shop. Typically, a government shutdown is a sign of failure to get something important done, which no president and no political party really wants. Because remember, no one really ever wins a shutdown. But to Trump, it’s another opportunity to extend his power even further, by potentially firing more government employees and pushing Congress out of the decision-making process altogether again. Since Trump retook the Oval, he has assumed a mantle of overwhelming authority over what TV show hosts are allowed to say and which protest causes get to have First Amendment protections while refusing to take any responsibility for absolutely anything. He wants to post mean videos about Democrats, celebrities, and pretty much anyone else, and he wants to make it illegal to say mean things about him. It feels authoritarian, but it also feels incredibly, unbelievably stupid. Tuesday’s much-ballyhooed televised meeting with America’s military leadership is a great example. During the exact same speech, in which the president of the United States seemingly declared war on American cities he doesn’t like, he also had a lot of thoughts on paper quality. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Beautiful paper, they’re gorgeous paper. I said throw a little more gold on it, they deserve it. Give me, I want the A paper, not the D paper. We used to sign a piece of garbage, I said this man’s going to be a general, right? Yeah? I don’t want to use this. I want to use the big, beautiful, firm paper. I want to use the real gold writing when you talk about the position, and they’re beautiful. 

Jane Coaston: So what can people who have studied authoritarianism and seen what such movements do to other countries teach us about what Trump is doing, what Trump wants to do, and how to fight back? To find out, I spoke to a friend and former colleague, Zack Beauchamp. He’s a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers the crisis of global democracy and right-wing populism. Zack Beauchamp, welcome back to What a Day! 

Zack Beauchamp: Jane Coaston, I’m happy to see you again, old friend. 

Jane Coaston: You’ve been writing about Trump and authoritarianism since we worked together like eight years ago, but can you define authoritarianism specifically and explain as briefly as you can how exactly Trump has moved the government in that direction since his second term began? 

Zack Beauchamp: Sure so an authoritarian regime is any system of government in which the rulers are not elected. Right? So all different kinds of non-democratic governments, those are all authoritarian in one way or another. Right? So China is authoritarian. Russia is authoritarian, Iran’s authoritarian, Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian. Those are very different governments, right? But in our context, right, when we’re talking about democracies that are turning authoritarian, in the modern world, this usually turns into something, a specific kind of authoritarianism called competitive authoritarianism. This is a weird one because it pretends to be a democracy. So you still have elections, you still have formal freedoms, like freedom of the press, you usually don’t have the police rounding people up in the streets because they criticize the government. What you do have are subtle tinkerings with the system that make it such that those elections are not held under fair conditions. So it’s nearly impossible for the opposition to win. So the media is controlled by allies of the government, so civil society organizations that might be aligned with causes the government doesn’t like. Those folks are basically unable to do their work in an uninhibited way. And so no one of these policies you know destroys a democracy. But when you put them together, it makes it such that the incumbent government has an awfully difficult time losing, right? And there are models for this in Hungary, in Venezuela, in Turkey, and we’re going there. We’re moving there pretty quick. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, I want to talk more about that, because you wrote about how the FCC suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live was proof that authoritarianism can come to America. And you said, and I quote, “I mean that literally.” Now, we’ve seen a lot of efforts by this government to stifle speech. I’m thinking about the arrests of pro-Palestinian activists or in one case, the arrest of a woman who co-authored an op-ed the government didn’t like. Why this event specifically of all the things that have happened in the last six months?

Zack Beauchamp: So the reason that Kimmel is important, it’s not just that, um you know, Kimmel himself was briefly forced off the air. It’s the mechanism by which they did it, right? The FCC threatening to pull licenses from local television stations and then the media conglomerates that owned those television stations, Nexstar and Sinclair, pulling Kimmel and strong-arming ABC until ABC strong-armed them back, apparently, right, that is how competitive authoritarianism works in a very real and specific sense. It uses the power of the state to coerce private actors into doing their bidding, to doing the repression. So the state itself doesn’t have to do it, right? It’s about corrupting regulatory tools like the FCC to use them for essentially partisan political purposes for the idea of repressing the opposition. And so that was a very specific example of how this strategy works. Now, the fact that it failed is just like a really great sign for American democracy. I like, I don’t know, I’m not a Kimmel fan. I never thought that I would be saying, Jimmy Kimmel, of all people, the old host of The Man Show, is the bellwether for American democracy. Uh. But that’s a sign that there’s still significant antibodies to this kind of authoritarianism in the US, right? And Brendan Carr in the Kimmel area, he was, I think his mistake in part was that he was too blunt, right. He was too honest about what he was doing and that led to a mass pushback. But competitive authoritarianism is best when it operates in the shadows. And the Trump administration is stumbling towards figuring out how to do that, even if they’re not very adept at it. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, I will get into this a little bit, but I think that one piece of this is that they don’t like the shadows. Like they want you to know everything. Like Trump is going to live tweet himself, attempting to take control of every entity available. But you cited another strategy that authoritarian leaders have used to take control of their countries called news distortion. Now you use this in reference to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. How did Orban use that strategy to take control in Hungary? 

Zack Beauchamp: Well, in reality, news distortion, the specific legal principle in the US has not been used successfully because it runs into a series of First Amendment problems. And I suspect that Brendan Carr would have as well. But the broader idea, right, of saying the news is biased, so therefore the government is justified in going in and enforcing uh its own perspective. I mean, they wouldn’t say that, right? They’d say enforcing fairness. Right it sounds, this is a strategy that Orban used, right? He and various other different people, right. So Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel has complained about the media in that country. And then he was, you may know that he’s on trial for corruption charges. The most serious ones relate to his efforts to try to correct for through corrupt means. So this is a very common tactic of would-be dictators using claims of media bias as a shield for efforts to impose their own control over media entities. 

Jane Coaston: Now, we’ve talked about this before, but something that’s struck me for a long time in my work talking about the American right and American conservatism is how the American right fell in love with Orban specifically. Yes, there’s been a lot of talk about how the far right loves Vladimir Putin, but it’s Orban that got several conservatives to even move to Budapest. Tucker Carlson did a lauding trip to Hungary, talking about how great it was. What do you think it is about Orbanism that is appealing to the American right in a way that other right wing authoritarian movements might not be as appealing? 

Zack Beauchamp: What what Orban represents for the American right is like two things. I think one, he’s a culture warrior like they are. The way that he presents himself is fighting an existential war for Western civilization, um one that he is waging against the left, which aims to corrode it and specifically using mass migration as a tool for destroying the soul of the West. This is all very racial, obviously. Uh. But he presents it in race neutral language most of the time. One time he said mixed race and it was like, okay, we got you. We know what you’re doing right. And that brings me to the second point, right, which is that he represents a way of attacking your enemies that can be plausibly defended as democratic. When you talk to these people, they don’t say we are authoritarians, right? They don’t claim that the purpose of the Trump movement is to destroy democracy in America. They claim the left is doing that. And they’re saving it. And that’s what every kind of competitive authoritarian system does, right? It’s a whole legitimation strategy. But the key point is that Orban gives them a model for governance that allows them to use the power of the state against their enemies without feeling like they’re, they’re you know, they’re Nazis or whatever. 

Jane Coaston: So you wrote, quote, “we are where Hungarians were in 2010, where Russians were in 2000 and where Germans were in 1933,” but here’s my concern and something I want to hear your thoughts on because I think that it’s worthwhile for the people listening. I hear that and lots of people hear that and think we are fucked. There’s no way out. 

Zack Beauchamp: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: And you and I have both encountered a lot of liberal doomerism, both online and in person. How can we operate in a world in which we are in a very dangerous place for democracy and there are ways out, so you shouldn’t just give up on everything and move into your basement? 

Zack Beauchamp: Yeah, I mean, the answer is that you need to redouble your efforts to participate in democratic politics. Like that’s the way that you beat competitive authoritarianism is you win elections and you engage in activism that prevents their ability to consolidate control before those elections, right? So what do you do? You know, go join local protests, find an activist group that’s doing significant work. If you’re thinking about running for office, do it, right. But when I chose those dates, I did that really deliberately. Right. It was before the system of control in those countries had been fully consolidated, right? Where there was an opportunity for effective resistance and choices of political actors and people in society could be really significant. You know, I heard a story from a Russian protester um from around the time that Putin was inaugurated, who said something like, we didn’t know what was going to happen. At one point we attended a protest and we left a little bit after it because it was cold. And we didn’t want to be here anymore. And we thought we’d get to do this again and it would matter. And then we didn’t. We couldn’t. Right? And that story stuck with me because of course they didn’t know, right? How could they have anticipated that? Right. Putin, it was, it was a different time in history, but now we have 25 years of examples of competitive authoritarian regimes or in Russia’s case, actual outright authoritarian regimes taking power. We know what it looks like and we know what’s happening and we don’t have the same excuse, so we have to do something, we have that. 

Jane Coaston: I have actually one final question for you. 

Zack Beauchamp: Okay. 

Jane Coaston: And, but I also think it’s useful to be thinking about this. 

Zack Beauchamp: Okay. 

Jane Coaston: What do you think Trump’s end goal is? 

Zack Beauchamp: I don’t think Trump personally has a well thought out end goal. I mean, if there is one, it’s, you know, uh, the, the quote from Conan the barbarian. It’s to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women. Like, I think that’s how Donald Trump thinks about the world. He wants revenge. He wants to destroy everyone who opposes him. The end result of that is authoritarianism, but I don’t think Trump is like, I have an ideological goal for revolution, right? In America. He just thinks I want to win and winning means crushing my enemies. And so that’s why all of this is happening. Other people in the government have more sophisticated ideological goals. J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, right? Those folks. Yeah, they’ve got, they’ve got plans. Trump, he, you know he just does things. 

Jane Coaston: Zack Beauchamp:, thank you so much for joining me. 

Zack Beauchamp: Thank you, Jane. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox with a focus on global democracy and right-wing populism. We’ll link to his reporting in the show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] I can’t tell you how big this is. 

Jane Coaston: Sure. Trump announced Tuesday that Pfizer one of the largest US drug makers has agreed to lower the cost of prescription drugs for Medicaid. He spoke at the White House just hours ahead of the government shutdown after a partisan stand off over what was it again? Oh yeah. Health care. Under the deal Trump said Pfizer will charge most favored nation pricing to Medicaid and guarantee that pricing on newly launched drugs. That involves matching the lowest price offered in other developed nations. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] This is a critical step forward to our work and to improve health care and hard working low income Americans especially low income Americans who will be helped so greatly. 

Jane Coaston: But wait there’s more. Pfizer also agreed to participate in a new website the administration said it plans to start called you guessed it, Trump Rx. The website would be operated by the federal government and allow people to buy drugs directly from manufacturers. Will the prescriptions come in gold tea bottles? Will R.F.K. Jr show up to personally yell at you if he doesn’t like what you’re taking? The whole thing is a little ironic though because while Trump was supposedly focusing on drug costs. Democrats were focused on reversing Medicaid cuts in the sweeping law Trump signed the summer. 

[clip of Hakeem Jeffries] We are fighting to lower the high cost of living and to protect the health care of everyday Americans. And Mr. President the next time you have something to say about me. Don’t cop out through a racist and fake AI video. When I’m back in the Oval Office, say it to my face. [applause] Say it to my face.

Jane Coaston: That’s House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on the Capitol steps Tuesday responding to a deep fake AI video the president of the United States posted on social media after shut down negotiations stalled Monday. The video shows Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer outside of the West Wing where they spoke to the press after their meeting with Trump. But instead of their real comments the video shows Schumer talking about how much Democrats suck while Jeffries stands by with a super imposed mustache and sombrero. He’s not Hispanic or Latino. He’s just not you know white. Here’s the AI video in full, head to our YouTube channel to see the insanely racist video which again the president of the United States posted online. 

[clip of AI Deep Fake of Chuck Schumer] Look guys there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Nobody likes Democrats anymore. We have no voters left because of all of our woke trans bullshit. Not even Black people want to vote for us anymore. Even Latinos hate us. So we need new voters and if we give all these illegal aliens free health care we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us. They can’t even speak English so they won’t realize we’re just a bunch of woke pieces of shit. You know. At least for a while until they learn English and they realize they hate us too. 

Jane Coaston: That’s a rendition of the Mexican hat dance folk song playing in the background in case you didn’t think the video could get any more racist. Schumer responded to the video Tuesday in a press conference. 

[clip of Chuck Schumer] If you want another indication of how serious Republicans are about funding the government look no further than the deep fake AI video the president tried to put up last night after our meeting when we were actually trying to fund the government. His video was dumb. It was childish. It was petty. It’s something that a five year old would do, not a president of the United States but it shows how unserious they are. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. Sounds about right. In a rare moment of cooperation between the United States and Iran, the U.S. will deport hundreds of Iranians back to their native country. The first 120 deportees are being prepared for a flight in the next day or two Iran said Tuesday. At the time of this recording the announcement has yet to be publicly acknowledged by the U.S. Government. Tensions have been high between the two countries since the whole Trump blew up their nuclear facilities thing back in June. The deportations marked the latest effort by Trump to ship out migrants regardless of human rights conditions in the receiving country. It’s also a sharp reversal from decades of U.S. practice that welcomed Iranian exiles after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Hmm. An anonymous U.S. Official with knowledge of the plans told the New York Times quote, “Iran’s foreign ministry was coordinating the deportees return and that they had been given reassurances that they would be safe and would not face any problems.” Again we are talking about the Iranian government. Anytime a government official feels the need to say out loud that people will not face any problems you can be sure they’ll face problems. FBI director Kash Patel visited New Zealand to open the FBI’s first standalone office in the country but that’s not what’s making headlines. Patel gave New Zealand’s police and spy bosses 3D printed inoperable pistols. Because when America visits we don’t bring gifts we bring guns. Unfortunately for Patel, inoperables weapons are treated as though they’re operable in New Zealand if modifications could make them workable again and therefore illegal. New Zealand has extremely strict gun laws. Laws that were strengthened after the horrific 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting. It wasn’t clear if he even tried to get permission to bring the weapons into the country. A spokesperson for Patel told the Associated Press Tuesday that the FBI would not comment. I guess we’ll just have to wait for the Twitter rant. The pistols were judged by gun regulators in New Zealand to be potentially operable so they were promptly confiscated and destroyed. The good news, America finally achieved gun control. The bad news it was in the wrong country. And that’s the news. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show make sure you subscribe leave a review contemplate how a self driving Waymo got stopped for making an illegal U-turn but didn’t get a ticket because you know self driving car and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how police near San Francisco pulled over the Waymo on Saturday but couldn’t write a ticket because quote, “citation books don’t have a box for robot,” like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and now I’m contemplating a gritty Waymo crime movie where Waymo’s run rampant but there’s no one to punish. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Fohr and Chris Alport. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Gina Pollack and Caitlin Plummer. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. 

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