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Jane Coaston: It’s Friday, October 17th. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, where we want to celebrate Illinois Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker’s apparent talent at Blackjack. According to his 2024 tax return, the governor won more than $1 million playing the card game on a trip to Las Vegas. On Thursday, he said that he would be donating the money to charity, and honestly, I’m just impressed by anyone actually being good at gambling. [music break] On today’s show, a grand jury indicts another one of President Donald Trump’s least favorite political adversaries, while Trump himself plays You Hang Up, no You Hang Up, with one of his most favorite political adversaries, Russian President Vladimir Putin. But let’s start with the No Kings protest scheduled for this weekend. If you attended the last No Kings protest back in June, you were among more than five million people joining an estimated 2100 events across the country. And this weekend’s events might be even bigger with more protests scheduled. Which is tough news for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who seemed very mad about it on Wednesday. 

[clip of House Speaker Mike Johnson] We call it the the Hate America rally that’ll happen Saturday? Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you see pro Hamas supporters, I bet you you see Antifa types, I bet you see the Marxists in full display, the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic, and we do. 

Jane Coaston: Okay, buddy, calm down. But this seems to be a newly recurring theme on the right. While June’s rallies got criticism from Republicans for being quote, “intersectional clown shows,” this weekend’s rallies are getting a very different response. Apparently every attendee is a Hamas super soldier who obviously hates America. And that’s why, obviously, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott has decided to deploy the National Guard to Saturday’s rally in Austin. And Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall thinks troops might be needed in Washington, DC too. 

[clip of Senator Roger Marshall] This will be a Soros paid-for protest where his professional protesters show up, the agitators show up, we’ll have to get the National Guard out. Hopefully it’ll be peaceful, I doubt it, as well. 

Jane Coaston: Very normal and cool. Of course, you can’t talk about the GOP’s attacks on the No Kings protests without talking about the Trump administration’s efforts to curtail left-wing speech and weaponize the government against its opponents. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration is working to target left-wing groups and donors through the IRS. So to talk more about the government’s efforts to limit speech it doesn’t like and how protests can work anyway, I spoke to Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist who studies protest, social movements, and democracy. Erica, welcome to What a Day. 

Erica Chenoweth: Thank you so much. Glad to be here. 

Jane Coaston: First off, I feel like our audience probably knows a lot about these protests and has already attended an earlier iteration, but can you tell us a little bit about the No Kings protests this weekend and who is actually going to the No Kings protests? 

Erica Chenoweth: Well what I know about it is that it’s being organized as kind of a second version of what was widely considered to be quite a successful protest mobilization on June 14th. And the idea is to reprise that and to draw potentially even a larger crowd. Who’s going? I don’t know. I suppose we’ll be finding out. One thing that my team has just published today is a study suggesting that we’re seeing a lot more protest happening in counties where Donald Trump won the election than we did during any really at any period in a persistent way during his first term. And so I do think we’re seeing people from unlikely corners of the country, what many people would consider to be kind of deeply red areas showing up and participating in protests in ways that might be otherwise surprising to your listeners. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, in response to the first iteration of these protests, there were a lot of complaints from the right that everyone who went was old and useless, boomers, whatever. Now they seem to be arguing that the No Kings protests are only attended by Antifa super soldiers and funded by, I don’t know, the got, actually that’s a great question. Who is funding these protests? 

Erica Chenoweth: I don’t know the answer to that myself. I actually think most of the people who show up are certainly not paid protesters. I don’t know any of those. One thing I’ll say is we can what we can observe makes clear a few things about these protests. One is that they are overwhelmingly peaceful. So, you know, episodes of violence are things that we can observe. We can look for indicators at protest events of injuries, of damage to property, of injuries to police. Those are things we can observe and that are widely reported when they happen, and that we can keep track of. And what we found is that the current movement that’s associated with No Kings has produced almost no significant injuries or property damage or anything like that throughout its entire duration this year. It’s something like 99.7% of the events feature no property damage, no injuries to protesters or police. Like these are overwhelmingly nonviolent and peaceful actions. 

Jane Coaston: I wanna ask you a broader question because we’ve seen with how the administration is talking about the No Kings protest, a lot of talk about how they need to figure out who’s funding these protests full of Antifa super soldiers or something like that. And there was a Wall Street Journal report earlier this week that Trump is trying to use the IRS to go after his political enemies. Can you tell us a little bit about what they’re actually trying to do here? 

Erica Chenoweth: Sure. I think there are two things that are going on that’s quite familiar that we see around the world among people you might describe as aspiring authoritarians. One is to just systematically mischaracterize the political opposition as criminal. And that’s just a way that they try to delegitimize their opposition using whatever kind of tools they have at their disposal, whether they’re legal or rhetorical or otherwise. And I do worry very much about the chilling effects that this might have. And I worry very much about the actual effects it might have on people who are engaged in lawful, peaceful assembly that’s protected under the First Amendment. You know, it’s it’s like number one, the First Amendment, like that’s the thing. So the government actually has the burden of protecting the right of people to do that, not trying to find ways to undermine it through legal or quasi legal means. 

Jane Coaston: I think that this whole moment seems a little reminiscent of the time after 9/11, which is such a baffling comparison to need to make. But the way that Trump talks about Antifa and his political opposition reminds me of the war on terror, where you have a vague decentralized ideology and you put all of the things that you’re worried about on that ideology and call that terrorism. And basically it allows the administration to call anyone who disagrees with them a terrorist. What’s the reality of how these crackdowns on political opposition are going to play out given the First Amendment, given that there is some legal backing to speak out against this particular government. 

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, I mean, it remains to be seen how deep the overreach will be, and also whether legal challenges and other ways of pushing are gonna uphold the First Amendment or whether we’re in a situation where, say, the Supreme Court interprets the president’s power in a way that’s more aligned with the way Donald Trump would like them to. So we there’s a bit of uncertainty about this, but I think what we know now is the First Amendment is the first amendment and longstanding jurisprudence around it is that, you know, the government cannot punish or censor people for expressing ideas it disagrees with. Like that that’s the fundamental point. And so the important thing for folks to know is that that’s where things stand. And and if we don’t express our rights, they’re not self enforcing. Like we we have to use them in order to keep them in a way. 

Jane Coaston: You famously calculated that authoritarian governments around the world have been overpowered when three point five percent of a country’s population is mobilized in resistance. How did you come to that figure? Like what does resistance mean here? What how does this particular number prove to be so effective? 

Erica Chenoweth: Yeah. So this comes from a study that I did with Maria Stefan between like 2008 and 2011. And what we did was we looked at all of the mass mobilizations that had happened around the world from 1900 to 2006 that sought to oust an incumbent national leader, usually a dictator, or to create an independent country through secession, self-determination, or ousting in a sort of foreign military occupation or colonial power. So that was limited to those types of cases. And then what we did was we looked at whether the mobilizations were primarily people power mobilizations, where it was unarmed ordinary people, engaged in protest, strikes, demonstrations, et cetera, or whether it was armed insurgency and armed rebellion. And in our book, what we reported is that those that relied on people power at that time were more likely to have succeeded. And when we were sort of um engaging with activists and others around those ideas, there was one activist who asked me if there was like a critical threshold for popular participation that guaranteed the success of the people power movements. And I didn’t know. So I opened the data set and I looked to see if there was one. And the answer was like none of the movements had failed after they had mobilized 3.5% of the population. So that is the story about where the statistic came from. I would say the key thing to know about it is that it’s a historical observation around a specific set of cases. There have been exceptions to it since those cases were published. And it’s not a predictive or prescriptive number, right? We don’t know what happens when movements are actively trying to mobilize 3.5% of the population and aiming at that number as a target without the other trappings of what makes movements succeed, like building, you know, a broad base of support, building a strategy that allows them to licit defections within the opponent’s pillars of support, whether they’re building leadership, whether they are building a kind of staying power. And so that’s just to say the way that it should be interpreted in a kind of prescriptive way should be with caution. 

Jane Coaston: Erica, this is super helpful. Thank you so much for your time. 

Erica Chenoweth: Thank you so much. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist who studies protest, social movements, and democracy. We will link to their work 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]

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

[sung] Headlines.

[clip of unnamed news reporter] Mr. President, John Bolton was just indicted by a grand jury in Maryland, do you have a reaction to that?

[clip of President Donald Trump] I didn’t know that, you’re telling me for the first time, but I think he’s, you know, a bad person. Uh. I think he’s a bad guy, yeah, he’s a bad guy. It’s too bad, but it’s the way it goes. 

[clip of unnamed news reporter] Have you reviewed the case against him? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] That’s the way it goes, right? That’s the way it goes.

Jane Coaston: The way it goes when Trump doesn’t like you. John Bolton was Trump’s national security advisor in his first term, and the federal indictment in Maryland Thursday involved mishandling classified information. Bolton had served Trump for more than a year before Trump gave him the boot in 2019 over disagreements on how to treat despotic regimes like North Korea and Iran. He then became an outspoken critic of Trump. Prosecutors allege Bolton stored top secret records at home. Were they in his gilded bathroom too? And shared classified information in diary-like notes with relatives. The eighteen count indictment also alleges that the personal email account Bolton used to share the information was hacked by an entity believed to be associated with Iran. Though the investigation into Bolton started before Trump’s second term, the case will unfold against the backdrop of Trump weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies. So far, the running list includes New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey. In a statement Thursday, Bolton hit back, writing, quote, “Now I have become the latest target in weaponizing the Justice Department to charge those he deems to be his enemies with charges that were declined before, or distort the facts.” This week, the US Senate failed for the tenth time to pass a funding bill to reopen the government. One of the core demands holding up a deal to reopen the government is extending Affordable Care Act subsidies. Senate Majority Leader John Thune appeared on MSNBC and floated a compromise. Republicans would guarantee Democrats a standalone vote on the issue. 

[clip of Senate Majority Leader John Thune] I’ve told him. I’ve said and I’ve said we are willing to have the conversation. I’ve said if you need a vote, we can we can guarantee you get a vote by a date certain. Um. At some point Democrats have to take yes for an answer. But I’m I agree totally. We are all about getting health insurance down, making it affordable to more people. 

Jane Coaston: A Republican guarantee? Sure. Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin said that while Thune’s suggestion of a guaranteed vote on the subsidies was progress, he was clear that quote, “it’s got to be more than a promise that we might get around to it later.” When asked about the offer from Thune, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was slightly less optimistic. 

[clip of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer] Look, we’re not negotiating in public, plain and simple, and Leader Thune has not come to me with any proposal at this point. 

Jane Coaston: The Senate is set to vote next week to pay some federal employees, including active duty members of the military, as the shutdown drags into its third week. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday that the Admiral in charge of U.S. Military forces in Latin America will step down at the end of this year. Admiral Alvin Holsey took the job late last year, and the position usually lasts three years. The announcement did not provide a reason for Holsey’s early exit, but an anonymous source told Reuters that Holsey and Hegseth had been butting heads over the last few days. Is it a coincidence that also in the last few days, Trump confirmed that the CIA is carrying out covert operations inside Venezuela, and that he declined to rule out conducting military strikes on Venezuelan soil? Must be. I’m sure it’s also just a coincidence that over the past few weeks, alleged drug smuggling boats have been extrajudiciously bombed by the U.S. Military, without providing evidence to Congress that the boats have anything to do with drug cartels. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro addressed Trump’s threats in a speech on Wednesday. [clip of Nicolás Maduro speaking in Spanish plays] He says there, quote, “No to regime change, which reminds us so much of the endless failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on.” Maduro also cited US backed coups in Argentina and Chile, after which right wing dictators killed or disappeared thousands of people. So, point to Maduro. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked during a press gaggle whether Trump believes Maduro’s days are numbered. 

[clip of Karoline Leavitt] I think President Trump believes that Nicolás Maduro is an illegitimate president leading an illegitimate regime that has been trafficking drugs to the United States of America for far too long and we’re not gonna tolerate it. 

Jane Coaston: Donald Trump, the peace president. Trump says he phoned Russian President Putin Thursday to kick up momentum for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. I mean um, peace in Ukraine. His Truth Social post about all this said that the conversation was productive and that it could lead to a face-to-face meeting in Hungary. Things have been icy between Trump and Putin lately, especially after that summertime summit they held in Alaska turned out to be a low cal nothing burger. There were no peace deals, and Russia kept unloading drones and missiles on Ukraine. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been getting more FaceTime with Trump. Zelensky dressed to impress Trump at the White House in August, and he’s set to be there again today. The stakes are high. Trump threatened to provide Ukraine with tomahawk cruise missiles that can strike deep into Russia. Ukraine’s made a habit of destroying Russian oil and gas facilities, and the missiles could put more of them in reach. As for whether Trump can get Putin and Zelensky to talk face-to-face, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt fielded that one to reporters. 

[clip of Karoline Leavitt] President Putin discussed meeting together in Budapest. And President Trump will talk about that opportunity with President Zelensky when he’s here at the White House. 

Jane Coaston: Trump says cooler heads might eventually prevail, though, thanks to him. His Truth Social post boasts, quote, “I actually believe that the success in the Middle East will help in our negotiation in attaining an end to the war with Russia/Ukraine. And that’s the news. [music break] One more thing. It’s been a tough time in America lately for everyone who values values. You know, respect, dignity, not being a racist on a group chat. It can feel as if the worst people in the world just keep benefiting from being the worst. But not always. Sometimes, the worst people fail [pause] miserably. Take Ryan Walters. Until very recently, he served as Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, a position he seemed to view as a license to make Oklahoma schools as Trumpy as humanly possible. For example, in November of 2024, Walters announced that he was requiring all Oklahoma schools to show a video of himself praying for Trump. Here’s a portion of that video. 

[clip of Ryan Walters] I will now say a prayer, and to be clear, students, you don’t have to join, but if you so wish, I’m going to go ahead and pray. Dear God, thank you for all the blessings you’ve given our country. I pray for our leaders to make the right decisions. I pray in particular for President Donald Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change to the country. 

Jane Coaston: That’s after he decided that all schools in Oklahoma should teach the Bible in grades five through twelve And getting copies of a certain Bible for every school would cost $3 million. Which is odd because you can find the Bible for free online like easily. And earlier this year, Walters decided that any teachers coming to Oklahoma from quote, “progressive states” would need to pass a test to ensure they weren’t too woke. Now, here’s where I usually have to tell you that Walters had tons of support from his fellow Republicans for his fight against socialism or something. But he didn’t. Because during his time in office, lots of Republicans in Oklahoma seemed to think Walters was too focused on culture war bullshit and not focused nearly enough on his actual job. See, besides the nonsense I just listed, things just kept happening to Ryan Walters. Like the time somehow images of nude women were playing on a TV in his office during a meeting. Or the many times he made the state pay for his out-of-state trips to, for example, go see a quote, “anti-abortion horror film,” or meet with the creator of Libs of TikTok. The total for those trips for himself and his staff, $30,000. So when Walters unexpectedly resigned to lead a conservative group aimed at quote, “destroying teachers’ unions,” even his fellow Republicans seemed thrilled to see him gone. Oklahoma’s attorney general said Walters was, quote, “an embarrassment to our state.” One of the first acts of Walter’s replacement, Lyndell Fields, he canceled that whole Bible curriculum thing Thursday, saying he has, quote, “no plans to distribute Bibles or a biblical character education curriculum in classrooms.” Instead, he wants to do something wild and crazy. Focus on Oklahoma’s schools. [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 the horrible news that the wine industry is in trouble, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how yes, we told you yesterday that alcohol is linked to dementia, but also the wine industry is facing challenges from climate change and consumer dissatisfaction, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and look, if the wine industry needs me to step up, I will meet the challenge. [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 Allport. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Sean Allee, Gina Pollack, and Caitlin Plummer. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of News and Politics is Adriene Hill. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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