 Good afternoon. I'm Jonathan Hansen, a political scientist and lecturer here at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. On behalf of our dean, Michael Barr, and the Ford School of Community, it's a great pleasure to welcome you all to this Policy Talks at the Ford School event featuring the best-selling author, Sarah Kenziore. It's great to see some of you here with me in Wild Hall on campus and to welcome the many others of you who are joining us virtually through YouTube. Today's event is part of an ongoing series hosted by the Ford School and along with Wallace House and the University of Michigan. The series is called Democracy in Debate 2021 and 2022, Democracy in Crisis, Views from the Press. This series, which will continue in the fall, features award-winning journalists and their insights into the forces that are threatening our country's democratic systems. We hope that you will also join us for the final event of the semester featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, journalist and commentator Ann Applebaum here on campus in the Michigan League on Monday, April 4th. We also want to thank the Gerald R. Ford School of Library and Museum, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and Detroit Public Television for their support of this event and the overall series. Today I'll be joined by Sarah Kenziore, whose work centers on politics, the economy and the media, a self-described nonfiction horror writer. Her most recent book is the best-selling Hiding in Plain Sight, the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America. Sarah has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, where she research propaganda and state crimes in authoritarian regimes. She's the co-host of the acclaimed podcast Gaslit Nation and was named by foreign policy as, quote, one of the 100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events. The reporting has been featured in many publications including NBC News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Chicago Tribune, Teen Vogue, The Globe and Mail, and The New York Times. She's also been a frequent guest on the MSNBC show, AM Joy, where she's discussed corruption in the Trump administration, Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the January 6 insurrection. Sarah describes her book Hiding in Plain Sight as, quote, pulling back the veil on a history spanning decades, a history of the American autocrat in the making, revealing the inherent fragility of American democracy. How our continual loss of freedom, the rise of consolidated corruption, and the secrets behind a burgeoning autocratic United States have been hiding in plain sight for decades. A reminder to everyone that there will be time toward the end of the conversation for questions. I encourage our attendees here in the audience to write your questions on the provided no cards and pass them toward the center aisle of the room to be collected. Our virtual viewers can engage in us questions in the YouTube chat box or tweet your questions to the hashtag policy talks. With that, I ask you to please join me in welcoming Sarah Kensiore. Welcome, Sarah. Much of your academic research focused on dictatorships that were part of the former Soviet Union, such as Uzbekistan. You wrote in Hiding in Plain Sight that you began to see commonalities between the conditions in these countries and the United States, and that made you very concerned about threats to democracy in our country. What did you see that was so concerning. Yeah, first I want to thank everyone for organizing this event and for inviting me I'm happy to be here, albeit virtually. When I first started comparing Donald Trump's presidential run to the kleptocratic dictators of Central Asia. It was pretty early in the campaign. I saw similarities in the use of spectacle, the ingrained career corruption that both Donald Trump and the former Soviet apparatus that became lifelong dictators of post Soviet states and Central Asia embodied at that time in Uzbekistan it was Islam cream the move toward the dynastic kleptocracy which I saw something he was likely to do and he did it, and of course all the demagoguery, the hate rhetoric the targeting of ethnic minorities, and so on and so forth. At that time, I thought that this was more of a, you know, metaphorical connection, a sort of similar political manner. I realized how direct the connection was between Donald Trump and the former Soviet Union in particular Russia and the Putin regime, although it dates, you know, before that to his ties with various oligarchs and mafiosos. He hired Paul Manafort, a Kremlin agent who had long been involved with Kremlin operatives and and plots in Ukraine. I became deeply alarmed because it was clear that these connections were not just metaphorical but were an active connection that threatened the United States on multiple levels. You know, I have to say as a political scientist who has done some study of authoritarian regimes. I never quite expected my work to be directly connected to American politics as well was a rather shocking development in our history. Yeah, I did not expect when I wrote my dissertation about Uzbekistan that I would then apply it to the host of celebrity apprentice but you know life works in serious ways. Well, something had to change in America for these conditions to arise. We've long had the emergence of sort of demagogic figures in our history but none of them reached the position of power in the White House like Donald Trump did. And I wanted to trace with you some of the origins of, you know, what was behind this rise of authoritarianism in America. And I was struck by your writing in your book about Missouri as a bellwether kind of state, a situation which sort of exemplified a lot of the changes that America has undergone. You spoke of white flight from the city, the decline of the city itself, the destruction of the kind of jobs that could support a strong middle class, whether through corporate raiders coming in and buying up corporations and shutting them down for their own profits. So you describe these conditions happening in Missouri and you then trace those to the rise of Trumpism in American politics and I wonder if you can just kind of walk us through some of those connections. Sure. I mean, Trump is a product of broken institutions of institutions that were rotting before he launched this campaign, he then went on to exacerbate them he was there to break them further. But in a lot of parts of America, including where I live in St. Louis, things had been deteriorating for decades and that deterioration accelerated quite rapidly. After 2008 and you know when I think about St. Louis and about Missouri in general, the main thing I think about is abandonment. You know that's what we feel there are places in St. Louis, you could drive through I'll bring friends from out of town, and they think you know, did a riot happened here did a tornado hit here and you know no it's like the answer is nothing. Nothing happened here. No one stepped in to take care of people no one stepped in to preserve, you know places and to protect human communities you know the basic functions of government or society had just eroded over a considerable amount of time and people came to, I wouldn't say accept it as the way it is but expect it. And then on top of that you had incredible exploitation of this pain, you had it through dark money in Missouri was very early in that we were the dark money capital of America. And then when the citizens united was passed. We had it in terms of radical movements like the Tea Party, which really, you know, took off from here a lot of the, you know, main members of right wing radical groups that gain prominence came out of Missouri pundits like Dana Lash or, you know, Jim Hoff from Gateway pundit. This is a place that I think breeds that kind of tension and also we've had quite a lot of civil rights activity as you saw during the Ferguson uprising so you know Missouri is a place where all these communities collide and they often do it in a violent kind of way that forces them to the forefront of American consciousness at a time where people who live in more comfortable places are denying that those tendencies exist and, you know, with Trump, he doesn't care about the public good. He doesn't care about helping America, but he can hone in like a vulture and pray on American pain he understood that pain that rage and especially economic despair. And at one time on the campaign trail, where he said that the unemployment rate in America is 45%. And all of these pundits, you know, they stickered and they laughed and they're like you know what kind of idiot, whatever believe that. And at that time, you know my family because my husband had lost his job months before we were hovering somewhat near the poverty line ourselves. And you know I knew of course that this is not a correct figure, but how it fell, how it fell at that time in 2015 and 2016 it felt like unemployment was 45% because everyone was struggling with part time got jobs with gig labor. And he knew how to exploit that and of course he did it in a racist xenophobic, you know incredibly corrosive way and we're still unfortunately living with the ramifications of that right now. So I think what you're saying is that Trump had a demagogic ability to exploit these feelings and this despair that had arisen because of economic dislocation. Around the world we've, you know, seen authoritarianism rise in conditions kind of like that. But what's happened mostly in the United States history is that when a demographic ruler arises or a demographic leader arises that there's constraints that are put on, you know, political elites from the major parties don't allow that person to get the nomination, for example. And it seemed in Trump's case that so many people underestimated what could happen. First the people thought there's no way that Trump could get the nomination. And then once he did get the nomination no one thought that he could actually win the election and rise to the White House. So a lot of the constraints that seem to operate against the rise of extremism and politics in our history failed us this time. And I'm wondering what you think is behind that. Yeah, that's a great question. You know I personally found his win predictable and I became increasingly alarmed that others didn't because along with the predictability of his win was the predictability of the threat you know that he would go on and he would rule like a kleptocrat and I'm sorry I like lost the main point of your question. Can you briefly summarize it again. I'm just wondering what it changed in American politics that. Oh, why was he not restrained. Yes. That's a great question you know we saw this throughout the Republican primaries we saw people briefly stand up to him and then stand down to him, you know coward to him. I think some of this is Trump as an individual. You know this is a guy who has operated as a, essentially a career criminal in New York City who used the brutal tactics of people like his mentor Roy Cohn, which is to threaten people blackmail people never back down smear people. I think he's extremely adept at using the media he has been for a long time from his tabloid days, you know, through his reality TV shows to social media, I think his campaign team understood very well how to weaponize social media, and they also knew how to the blind spots of the American political system they knew how to weaponize the fact that he was often underestimated because people just thought, well this outcome is impossible this outcome is not going to you know actually happen and therefore they refuse to prepare for it and that happened again and again, not just in the campaign but the presidency. People refused to believe he would actually attempt a coup they refused to believe the capital would be attacked they refused to believe he'd commit blatant crimes in office, and I think some of this is because of the reaction, you know people had more faith in institutions wasn't that they had so much faith in Trump, they had faith in the institutional ability to hold him in check and I think as those institutions failed to react with the urgency and the severity required people began to doubt their reality because it's much more horrifying to think that Trump is not an anomaly, but part of a broader broken system that not only will not withhold Donald Trump but will not withhold other elite criminals or dangerous political operatives who are very similar to him and who will inherit inherit that mantle, if he chooses not to run again. I mentioned the failure of our institutions to constrain Trump. I think we all learned and maybe middle school civics about you know the checks and balances of the American political system and how our Constitution was so well set up to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And I think one of the lessons that we learned from 2016 and after was the important of norms, nor democratic norms on the part of just not only average people but also among the political elite. And it seems like the erosion of these norms is potentially one of the problems that we're encountering in in our in our society so I just some examples that I was thinking of. You know, we've seen changes in the Senate with respect to judicial nominations, you know, President Obama had a nomination of Mary Garland and then never was considered, for example. On more personal or a lower voter level, we saw Trump give rallies where the chant locker up was a common thing as though it was just okay to say that our political opponents ought to be jailed. And this is a pretty unusual and scary development in American politics. And I'm wondering whether these norms are recoverable or what can we do in the face of the erosion of these norms. I'm not sure they're recoverable I think that they, it requires confrontation with the, the rock with the institutional weaknesses and failures and flaws that were there to begin with and then I think from that point we have to create new norms and the problem is that we have a political establishment that is living in the past and that still seems to be clinging to this delusion that we can kind of, you know, move forward without really dealing with what's happened over the last four years, whether in terms of ongoing threats to national security that Trump and the people around him, particularly those who he pardoned at the end of his term, still pose or the broader assault on norms. That is what we need are for these norms to be codified in law, we cannot just assume that you know checks and balances as some sort of good faith effort are going to hold checks and balances are only as good as the people who enforce them and the Constitution is a piece of paper unless people actually act upon its precepts and to do that in this kind of environment which is essentially a mafia state culture with this group of individuals. It requires courage, it requires fortitude, and I think most difficult of all, it requires transparency and humility. It requires everybody to kind of admit how they failed in that this ever happened in the first place and I think that that is what people kind of confront, you know, as Trump's opponent said it took a village, you know, it took a village for this guy and his goon squad to get into this position of power and then abuse it in the first place and so it requires to look back in history and that's what I tried to to show in hiding in plain sight which stands, which spans for decades. There's a lot of blame to go around and very few people willing to kind of confront that openly. One of the most essential norms of the democracy is that when you lose an election, you engage in a peaceful transfer of power. We know what happened on January 6, but I note that Bill Crystal tweeted earlier this week, he said, Trump smashed that tradition and he goes around continuing to deny the legitimacy of what happened in 2020 election and just seems that millions of Americans are perfectly willing to follow along with that belief. Regular voters but also politicians at a wide variety of levels of government. So what do we do when a major political party, one of our two major parties, chooses not to adhere to these traditional norms of democracy that when you lose the election, you go home and live to fight another day. Yeah, the loss of a peaceful transfer of power is something that we could assume would happen as kind of a baseline expectation of American democracy you know that's a tremendous loss and it's going to be a permanent loss like every election from now on I think is going to be heavily contested but one way, you know to prevent that or at least try to slow that is accountability for the criminal elites who organized, not just the January 6 attacks specifically, but the coup leading up to it you know it's now been over 14 months and we haven't seen accountability and one thing that's interesting to me is if you look at polls that were taken in January 2021 when people asked if Joe Biden was the legitimately elected president of the United States. Overwhelmingly, Americans said he was and that includes Republicans they all agreed, you know that that this was nonsense that Biden had one, you move forward, about six months and then that starts to go down because they had the Arizona fraud it you know this constant barrage of Republican propaganda from places like Fox News, saying that Biden was illegitimate saying there were all these incongruities. Meanwhile, the Democrats are not inditing anyone, they didn't form the January 6 committee for about six months they're not acting like this is an urgent matter of democracy. They go forward a year, and it's even worse like I'm sorry I don't have the exact numbers at my disposal though they are in my upcoming book. They knew because I think what happens is the public reacts to how officials react to an event like that, and they assume it wouldn't really be that serious that what Trump and his coterie did that it was, you know, illegal, or at least very, very wrong, that if it was so wrong, there would obviously be a swift urgent and serious response that people had faced real consequences, and because they didn't, and at the same time you get this propaganda barrage from the other side saying Joe Biden is the villain here Joe Biden is the illegitimate cheating actor that starts to sink in to people's minds and so it's really the passage of time, you know time is a friend to autocracy and an enduring strategy of these folks is just to run out the clock and try to avoid consequences and I'm continually puzzled why the DOJ the Democrats and anybody who wants a democratic society keeps playing right into their hands by refusing to enforce consequences for the most dangerous actors. I've often wondered myself, you know, do we just carry on what politics as usual after an attempted insurrection for the election. It doesn't seem that much has changed. And I wanted to get to that question of why there's not been action if we have some understanding based on your own research into the situation why there's been no action or at least action directed toward organizers from the Department of Justice against organizers for the insurrection. We've seen some prosecution of you know the people who basically stormed the capital grounds but behind that was a layer of organization. And you've written a bit I've seen it on on Twitter, you've you've got some thoughts about this and I wondered if you could share those with us. Sure. I'll try to keep this brief. Basically this goes back to what I said before about humility and institutional rotten people refusing to look at their own at best negligence and at worst complicity in these situations you know this was planned in advance openly on the internet to the point that people were selling January 6 Civil War t shirts, making hotel reservations people like Steve Bannon Linwood, Michael Flynn were recruiting the insurrectionist Trump was openly encouraging this attack like it was all there. This is in the public domain and the people who have tried to stop this tried to stop what could have been a very violent attack on members of Congress you know multiple members of Congress came forward and said, you know their offices were ransacked people were threatening to kill them and we saw people saying they're you know going to hang Mike Pence, among others you'd think just purely out of self interest that they would take this seriously. You know you could look at what Jamie Raskin did for example, during the House impeachment hearings, all of those efforts were curtailed by the leadership, you know Pelosi cut that impeachment hearing very short she then, you know, insisted that the January 6 committee be bipartisan, knowing full well that that was never going to happen with a complicit Republican Party trying to cover up their own dirty deeds with Merrick Garland. He has also refused to seriously pursue these elite operatives people like Bannon and Flynn, who are planning coup to like the sequel to the coup. I mean this is incredibly dangerous to me so it's kind of mind boggling that only Garland won't rise to this occasion you know only kind of rolling up the rando Q and on folks and whatnot, but that Biden isn't applying more pressure because our sovereignty is at stake or democracy is at stake. There's some shady financial ties that I've looked into I would just recommend people go to gasletnationpod.com that's the archives of my podcast and you can look through. Yeah, which dirty donors gave to all these folks who are standing in the way as obstacles to accountability. I think there's a long story there but I'll let you move to the next question for the interest of time. So I do want to shift gears a little although I want to come back to this line of questioning later I want to switch gears and talk about the media environment that we're in these days. For the reason that you know for democracy to function well, we need to have freedom of the press vigorous debate in the media. We need to have the expression of ideas so that at the very least voters can get a sense of what the issues are and make wise decisions when they go to the ballot, cast their ballots. And what I'm wondering about is to what degree we've seen change in the media that makes that kind of democratic dialogue very difficult. So, for example, we've seen the decline of traditional journalism newspapers at the local and state level in particular have been really devastated by the rise of the internet and the ability to maintain its traditional business model. And with the rise of social media as an alternative means of presenting information to people we're sort of just a wash with all sorts of information. And it's often very confusing to wait through all that and figure out what's right and what's not right. And I wonder to what extent as a former, you know, a journalist yourself. To what extent you think that some of the problems we're encountering with democracy have to do with the erosion of the media as a form of information that we can trust. I think it has to do with that a great deal. I think the loss of local newspapers, local reporters people feeling like a journalist is part of their community and they can trust them has played a big role not just in politics but say it with with COVID with people's willingness, you know, to believe various things about the pandemic. If you're part of a local community, and you see, you know, the obituary section or just stories about, you know, what is happening your community in the virus. I think that you're less likely to fall for disinformation operations that come from other places or that are national. What has happened is a lot of these communities that don't have a local paper, turn to national news and then the new thing that kind of happened in 2021. Is that a lot of media outlets a lot of ones that do, you know, more or less accurate reporting or at least they try to do accurate reporting have paywalled their content and so it's difficult for people to get basic information about you know what happened in January six what can I do to keep myself from getting COVID what's going on with the elections what's going on with anything. Meanwhile, cable news is free, Fox News is free, Facebook memes are free. Get in your pandemic info from next door.com is a thing people are doing and Lou of other resources like that presents a problem misinformation and disinformation are free, and they move quickly. The traditional reporting and investigative reporting that takes time is slow and quite costly and everything's becoming more and more bifurcated like even with streaming you see all these little news networks, popping up that you have to pay money to subscribe to and on top of that sub stack Patreon, and this of course emerge from the fact that big giant corporate conglomerates and media, we're refusing to pay their staff and their reporters a fair wage so of course people go off and they start their own thing and you know hopefully try to keep it free because I you know even though it kind of hurts me financially I feel it's important to get the information out there but you know it but I understand why folks do this for for for us to be part of a society part of a country where we need to have a shared set of facts we don't need to all agree on the meaning of those facts or the interpretation of them but we need to agree that on the baseline reality. This is very very detrimental to that. So in this environment we've seen the rise of a lot of conspiracy sort of thinking, you know, the rise of QAnon was a very notable feature in the 2020 election and we continue continue to see conspiratorial thoughts behind a lot of the discussion about the election outcome and all of that. And I know you've been doing a lot of thinking about the role of conspiracy thinking in American politics and what what can we expect to will be happening as we look ahead with this. Well I think that you know I write about this in my new book which is called they knew there's a difference between an actual conspiracy as in an organized plot made in secret by powerful actors generally to profit and to hurt the public good. A conspiracy theory, which is just questions about the nature that conspiracy which is hidden from the public so of course it you know it raises various inquiries, and then weaponized conspiracy theories which is when somebody like Alex Jones, you know dangerous harmful lies about events like for example that what's going on with his trial and Sandy Hook is a perfect example of this. You know, the latter group where you are lying about real people you're making things up out of thin air and it's meant to hurt people it's meant to be cruel. It's obviously unacceptable and it's a form of propaganda, but I think conspiracy theories on the whole. It's not bad inherently to have a theory about a conspiracy and the people of theories is because the government refuses to provide them facts, it refuses to hold transparency, and this is not new this has been going on for decades I also think you know the advent of the Internet allowed people to kind of open up things that happened in the past and pose new questions about them and I think Trump's rise to power. I don't want to say there's anything real, really good about this but Trump allowed the American imagination to expand as to kind of corruption and criminality and government is possible so if people had suspicions about a prior historical event. And they might start to look at that event again, especially since so many of the same players people like Roger Stone or Bill Barr for example, they recur again and again and things like Watergate Iran Contra the aftermath of 911 the financial collapse you know his whole cabinet was like a celebrity apprentice of D list federal felt that you just sort of dredged up and installed into power, and you have to ask why, and you have to ask, you know, is there not accountability, why are all these people back from that you end up with theories and you know one of the things that the worst thing that happened with Q and on I think is you know obviously the vast majority of things that Q and on put out our I keep wanting to say bullshit I don't know if I'm allowed to electric but you know, of course no that's not better they were they were lies in propaganda and just not factually accurate, but there's a grain of truth within all that when they would look at something like the Jeffrey Epstein case for example a real case of sadistic pedophile elite traffickers involved in international relations that was a real thing. And because people kept accusing them of lying about that, when that was proven solidly true with the arrests of Epstein and then Maxwell, it gave a veneer of validity to their more wild and unproven claims and that's what happens when the government and the media are not transparent and honest about corruption so there's a lesson to take away from that it's that we need more honesty, even if the truth is painful because you know the truth may hurt, but the lies will kill you. I wonder if the traditional media is up to the task of handling an existential threat to our system. Traditional journalistic standards for coverage of politics tend to take sort of a both sides or all sides approach to things where you know these people say this these other people say that and try to remain sort of objective and neutral. With respect to these different opinions, but when one side is arguing for, you know overthrow out of election. How can you both sides that and I'm just wondering if if traditional journalism needs to change the way it approaches these issues. Yes, it absolutely does they need to get the horse race coverage the constant reliance on polls and especially treating an existential threat, like it's a game and I think here you'll notice a real difference in coverage from journalists who have always been in an existential threat in America if you look at what black journalists for example, we're writing about Trump from the beginning throughout the campaign, throughout, you know his time in office I mean obviously there's there's great range within this group but I haven't met a black American you said wow it was so unbelievable to me that this incredible racist career criminal managed to ascend to power without anybody stopping him and then went on to do sadistic and horrible for your country because that is the history of being black in America it's a history of selective autocracy it's autocracy aimed at a particular group. So I think journalists from that particular group and you know this also includes Native Americans this includes it's often immigrants who are, you know, subject to discrimination and to a different justice system than what white Americans are facing. They caught on to this pretty early so you know, one thing is to pay attention to folks who got it right along, kind of ask yourself why and then you know follow in their footsteps but also this whole meaningless model of pundits blathering on TV, feigning shock to avoid accountability feigning that, you know things that have happened throughout American history although not quite as severely and quickly as they did in the last six years are somehow new, and that we were in some kind of, you know, perfect American exceptionalism paradise before. That's got to go I mean folks can see through it and it doesn't do it just doesn't do us any favors, you know this is not informing the public. I also wish there is more hardcore investigative journalism particularly on financial matters and for a brief time. Basically during the early stages of the molar probe where it seemed like that kind of journal that kind of journalism is going to be backed up by the government there was that and then it came to kind of a crashing down both for financial reasons within media corporations, but also because I think the political culture changed, and you know the dominant narrative became move on move on move on. Don't look back, consider this an anomaly consider this over. It wasn't an anomaly. It's definitely not over and it still needs to be investigated. So I'm trying to now want to turn to sort of what lies ahead. I mean, we haven't seen the kind of prosecutions that you're talking about with response to January 6, at least yet at this point in time. What do you, I mean, if in the absence of any significant action on the part of our law enforcement agencies. What do you think will happen in the next in 2024 with Trump potentially running for office again. And I'm very concerned about that I'm concerned about 2022 as well. The main thing I'm concerned about in terms of elections is voting rights and these new voting rights laws that not just disenfranchised people but allows state legislatures to toss out votes if they don't like them. You know we're seeing this in Georgia and Texas and we may see it in other places by the end of the year and then at the same time, you know the fact that Trump committed a multitude of crimes in office he's individual one in a federal probe he was impeached twice he's confessed to a number of crimes I mean he confessed to obstruction of justice the first time on TV in 2017 and nothing happened so he confessed to it again in 2022. You know sometimes I wonder like does he want to be apprehended like sincerely does he want this to end because it's like he's, I think he's trying to push people like to see how far you could go with this how weak our institutions really are. They're very weak because they're refusing to hold not just him, but his partners accountable and I'm worried about this broader apparatus because it's not just about Trump. It's about the entire GOP at this point which basically functions as a crime cold surrounding him emulating him obviously quite fearful of him. And then you know the Democrats are basically enablers at this point not uniformly you know that's the difference I think between the Democrats and the Republicans is you do have diversity and approach diversity and opinion and less of a culture of fear and but it's still there and they are not acting like people who are gravely concerned for the survival of our country as a sovereign democracy I think if they were they would have been attuned to voting rights they would have pushed for immediate accountability for the coup plotters simply to prevent this from happening again and not to normalize it just send a strong message that of course this is unacceptable of course there must be a peaceful transfer of power. There are things that Americans should be able to take for granted and we clearly cannot so we have to you know course correct and and look at what went wrong and how to fix it. Instead it's this kind of head in the sand attitude and as time goes on that becomes more and more dangerous. One of the changes that might have happened during this past year was legislation to protect voting rights across states in the face of this sort of onslaught that's that's happening at the state legislative level. And there's been a lot of support within the Democratic Party for that but not enough with the with the Senate being divided 5050 and not every Democrat on board. Now, potentially we see that, as you say, the Democrats and Democratic Party itself is not taking this seriously and then on the Republican side. It seems like we're seeing an effort to remove from the party anyone who has a dissenting voice after the events of January 6. So for example I noted this past week that many Republican members of Congress were at a fundraiser for Liz Cheney's opponent in the upcoming election. This is just once and then recently Trump has in, you know, try has endorsed the opponent of Governor Kent in Georgia on the idea that he was insufficiently active in, I guess, overturning the Georgia's electoral vote. So I'm wondering what the prospects are for change if our political elites aren't willing to take the lead. What can we as Americans do to push this along. That's a great question. And it's, it's a difficult one I mean the main thing I say is you know you have to remain resilient like resilience is more important than hope in this situation you know you have to stay the course, regardless of the odds you have to be honest about this situation I still I said this when Trump was elected in 2016, you know right down what is happening right down how your expectations and other people's expectations of what democracy means of what elections mean of what you know any of this political democracy means now and watch how they shift over time because that's how they get you that's what they're banking on is a kind of passivity, a kind of complacency that becomes complicity over time. As to what people can do as individuals I mean it's such a hard thing to say because in 2020, the American people really did something unusual in that they managed to out vote and attempted coo during a pandemic I mean people really went all out to the campus they organized, they stood in line for hours and hours on end, often facing severe threats and they did that because they wanted a platform past, and hardly any of it is even really, you know, smaller parts that you think would be something Biden could fix easily like let's have the postal service work again, have not come into play and so I'm gravely concerned about this election, not just in terms of who won't be able to vote but who won't want to, because they feel so let down abandoned and as I said in the beginning of this talk when people feel abandoned, they're drawn to these demagogues they're drawn to anyone who just seems to be doing something, even if that something is destructive and horrific. They want to feel part of something and it's, it's alarming to me that that we're seeing, you know, these same tendencies repeat once again. Hopefully a more positive note is there anything hopeful that you see happening in American politics right now that might point in a better direction for us all. Oh, I don't know I mean, it's hard to say I think our institutions are rotted but our people are still pretty good I don't think our institutions are embodying the will of the people which is a very unfortunate thing but I you know when I talk to just anyone including people who like our Republicans are at least more conservative than me they all see these problems, they see the lay of the land, they see the corruption, they're frustrated they're angry, and that's kind of like half the battle is to get people, at least recognizing the same challenges that we're facing. So I have faith in America I have faith in the American people. It's just our leaders and our institutions are broken and we need to make you know moves to replace them and that process is that process is a difficult one but I don't know I pray to the unexpected and I look at Ukraine honestly right now. I see how they're pushing back against much much more serious, severe odds, and I think that they've been inspiring to a lot of people and if they can push back in that kind of way. We certainly can do the same in our, you know, less immediately terrifying situation. Yeah, I've been looking through some of the questions that our audience have presented and they're all along the same line. You know what's the most realistic best case scenario we have for holding Trump accountable. I'm always scared when I read your posts, should I be you've been frightening your impressions to date just how f up are we is their hope. Another person says, if officials aren't going to take swift action against organizers of the insurrection what can we as individuals do to make the best use of our right for accountability seems like we're all having some of the same thoughts. People feel powerless, you know I just spoke to a local Democratic group here in St. Louis and that was the emotion that people were expressing over and over again. And it's a horrific feeling and I think the pandemic has exacerbated it because it's made everything feel surreal and uncertain and I think people are just still kind of trying to get their their bearings about the incredible trauma and tragedy that we've witnessed over the past two years so first I would say those feelings are normal. The other thing I'd say is you know I don't offer hope and I also don't offer hopelessness like that's not really. That's not my style. I also don't think that that's what keeps the democracy going I think it's it's perseverance. It's looking out for each other. It's, you know, being loyal to your moral core regardless of people are saying you it's speaking the truth even if people don't want to hear it. I've rarely made concrete predictions about the future the things that often horrify people about what I say are simply things that have happened in the past that are either considered unimportant by the media, or that have been buried by them and then I unearth those things I unearth those back stories and the pieces begin to fit together, and they form a really terrifying picture to me too like I'd rather not have this be the truth you know I get no satisfaction out of being right and I get no satisfaction out of you know finding these abhorrent corrupt connections but that's just how it is but my advice is you know regardless of your feelings just keep going think about who is worst off in this situation you know I doubt it's it's any of you you know there are people who are suffering out on the street there are people who've lost multiple loved ones. You know if you're debating about whether to vote I think despite our important political system right now go vote because you're not just voting for yourself you know you're voting for the people who are worst off and as bad off as they may be under the current Democratic Party they're going to be way worse off under the apocalyptic death cult that is the Republican Party so I guess my main advice is you know put others first put the people who are most vulnerable first. One of the things you just mentioned as we wait for for more questions from the audience is is about how Ukraine the situation in the Ukraine has you've shown you know there's a resilience there a desire to defend a country against an incursion. And now and I've been wondering pondering a bit how this war changes domestic political dynamics here because what we saw with Trump's first impeachment was an effort to extort someone who's now regarded as almost heroic leader of Ukraine Zolensky as you know trying to extort political promises out of him for Trump's own political gain in exchange for stinger you know access to the kind of defensive technology that would have helped prevent or ward off potential Russian attack. And right now Americans are pretty united behind supporting Ukraine. But if you look at the politics of it we have Trump being closely tied to Putin and even in recent weeks saying things that are pretty sympathetic about Putin's you know strategic brilliance and things along those lines. And I'm wondering how you react to that as someone who's followed this over the past several years is our Trump's previous actions finally going to be brought to light in a way that will hurt him politically whereas in the past it didn't seem to do so very much. Yeah that's a great question because I think you know one the failure of anyone to act on the molar report and also the you know the lack of urgency and intensity of that probe hurt the public perception of Trump as what he is which is a Kremlin asset who spent his life you know having his broken businesses and bankruptcies built back up by a system of organized crime, mainly the Russian mafia and oligarch networks, and then began you know working more directly with the Kremlin with with Putin later on and bragging about it I mean he was not subtle you know he hosted the Miss Universe and in Moscow and asked Putin to be his best friend he asked you know the Kremlin to get him Hillary Clinton's emails, and then of course you know change the US foreign policy in a way that made Putin's current invasion of Ukraine. It's easier you know and this is part of a broader transnational strategy we saw the same thing happening in the UK with Brexit a weakening of international alliances a weakening of NATO and of you know the relationship between the US and its European partners. I know folks didn't really want to look at this and I think they especially didn't after their failed to be consequences it's like people, they shied away from reviewing this history because it, you know, nothing was done and again that gives the impression of the to the public that it was somehow not serious or some sort of obscure concern particularly regarding Zelensky in the first impeachment that didn't really affect their daily lives. I think we all now see that and I hope that people bring home how incredibly dangerous. The connections of not just Trump but people like Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn have to the Kremlin, how it helps Putin's war how it's you know hurting Zelensky and Ukraine. We have in as of recent unprecedented unity that's bipartisan. That's very broad in the support for Ukraine over Russia. And normally that would make me feel somewhat optimistic but we saw that same unity in the immediate aftermath of January 6. We saw some brief unity in March 2020 April 2020 in terms of how we were going to handle the pandemic and the narratives of what happened those times as well as a general kind of culture of public empathy became eroded over time through propaganda from the right and inertia from the left and so I hope folks do see both history in the present clearly but I also know how easy it is to manipulate this for political gain and I just hope you know the same thing doesn't happen again that this isn't streamlined and normalized as well. Audience member questions. Is there a country you've studied that has successfully stopped the erosion of their democracy that we could use to follow as an example. That's a good question I mean you can obviously look at all of the revolutions of 1989, you know in Eastern Europe, and afterwards you could sort of look at the collapse of the Soviet Union, although that obviously yielded very different outcomes for the Baltic states you know Russia or Belarus or the authoritarian states of former Central Asia but you know there have been, you know peaceful revolutions in my lifetime there have been moves from autocracy to democracy I think it's much more complex now for a variety of reasons one of which is digital media and this sort of sense of you know we're part of a globalized interconnected community where the actions of one country very much affect another in a way that they didn't quite so inherently before you know our finances are tied up our politicians are tied up. I think that we have the ticking clock of climate change bearing down and I think that that affects how people make political decisions, how they evaluate things like natural resources and how to handle them. There's just a lot of different variables in play, and I certainly don't want to dismiss the past I encourage everyone to you know study history intently, but I do think we're in an unprecedented era where it's hard to find like a direct analog to the past and try to emulate it we're in a new terrain. And again I do think it's very interesting what Ukraine is doing you know this is a country that said a lot of its own corruption for decades on end, they're in the process of trying to clean that up, which is one of the things that Putin found so important because you know it screwed with his finances with his claims to power and that's one of many reasons he felt that he could invade. So, you know they still fought though and that's the thing is like even when the odds are bad, you fight anyway. I wonder if that when you were doing your doctoral work you study the color revolutions. And I wonder if there's anything that we can learn from from that era that gives us any lessons for today. In the back of my mind I've wondered if we might need a little color revolution of our own. If things got really bad. Are there parallels to that at all. I think so. And I think also you can look at the color revolutions and the diversity of how they played out you know where you found some, you know more concrete democratic gains you found other places like Kyrgyzstan kind of going forward and then backward and you know forward and backward again. I think one thing that people don't seem to realize is that there is more protest in the four years that Trump was in office than in any other point of American history, including at the peak of the civil rights movement like people are especially from other countries they sometimes ask me, you know why are Americans rising up why weren't they out protesting against Trump or against corruption or against you know all these problems that you're having and I'm like, they did. They really did. It just wasn't considered important. A lot of times by the media or people would forget it they forget the George Floyd civil rights protests they forget the women's barge the protests about climate the giant protest about gun violence that happened I believe it was in 2018 the protest to impeach Trump there are a whole bunch of those. So just to get the Russian investigation going like these all happened, and they've been kind of memory hold by people, maybe again because they didn't produce any kind of concrete result but they are important in terms of activism building community, and also just rejecting this consensus that everything is okay that things will magically work out that the corruption is not bad or that Trump can't do his administration can't do that much damage. You know and so on and so forth. So I think in some sense this is kind of goes back to what I said like I feel like the American people are in a better place in terms of understanding their political system, then the people who work in the system itself you know that's where the problem is people are you know, on the ball I think we're all really tired after two years of coven and all the other things you deal with but there's a sense of understanding. And it's just a matter of do our leaders feel accountable to us, how much leverage does the average person have anymore and I think if you look at wealth inequality if you look at the hoarding of wealth and opportunity, you may find your answer there as to why we don't seem to have the kind of leverage that we did in the past but we're also going through a lot of economic changes now, you know in terms of labor shortages and so forth and I think that you know folks should think about that think strategically about how we can get what we want which I hope everyone everyone wants a free democratic fair society where we're not struggling to survive and crumbling under corruption. Thank you. Another questions come in says on gas at nation you've discussed the troll farm that supports Merrick Garland on social media. And is the quote, we only have one shot response to postings on Garland's lack of action, part of that same coordinated effort. How is it possible that the Department of Justice only has one shot. Yeah, that's a great question they do not have only one shot they have many, they have many perpetrators and those many perpetrators have committed many many crimes, all which should be investigated at the least and prosecuted if merited. I would say that the DOJ has a troll farm. I mean I really mean that I don't know if the DOJ runs the troll farmer has any hand in it at all but there are identical responses like identically worded responses a script that will appear if you criticize even particularly Merrick Garland on Twitter or other social media platforms and they'll come at you and waves they'll threaten harass you. It's ridiculous they also make up lies you know Merrick Merrick Garland personally caught Timothy McVeigh Merrick Garland personally caught the unabomber you know they invent this fictitious superhero past for Merrick Garland that he just doesn't they get upset when you correct it. It's a very strange phenomenon I mean I really don't like those analogies that are like if you saw this in another country we think because we do share so many commonalities with other countries that people you know normally like to think of America as being similar to but you know if you heard another country had a troll farm cult of personality bot threat machine based around worship of the attorney general and the justice department and passing journalists you know what kind of country would you think that is because I know I would think you know that's a mafia state and so it's a really strange phenomenon and I wish that there'd be more investigative journalism about the roots of that. Thank you. You know we're here in a school of public policy we have many master students and some undergraduates who are who all I would say want to make a difference in the world and what they hope from their studies is to go out and change things and one of the things I struggle with sometimes is the things that we're training them to to learn which is how to look at policy from a technical standpoint to see what works and what doesn't work and how to make policy change in a way that through rational discussion and dialogue and compromise and then I look at how our political system actually works and it's it's hard to translate that into what's actually happening in the real world so I'm wondering if you have a message you can share to our students about how they can make a difference when they go out there given the political difficulties that we face. Yeah that's a great question and I can understand why today working in public policy would be disheartening I mean I guess you know the upside of living in such a tumultuous time is that there's an element of unpredictability and like I said I think a lot of the systemic rot the corruption that we've been contending with for decades is out on the table and if you approach that you know with bravery with the courage of your convictions with innovative ideas. You know when you're not just being careerist you're not just aiming to please people but you're really aiming to serve you know to serve the public to try to improve the public good. I think that within this chaos is an element of opportunity to do that I think the public is responsive to new idea in a way that they haven't been in a while some of those new ideas are great those are like the Q and on new ideas. But there's a flip side to that which is I think people are more open to you know reconsidering what is justice what does the public deserve what is the role what should the role of government be what part do I have to play in a society like people are people are thinking long and hard about those questions after being cooped up especially or just dealing with you know the the horror of the pandemic. So I just encourage folks to be creative. Don't try to please, you know, sort of a status quo, because that status quo is is, you know, tumultuous it doesn't really exist anymore. And that's both a tough situation but also possibly a really positive one. I think that's a good note at which to bring us to a close. I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed our conversation today on these really really important issues. A struggle I think that is much deeper and more entrenched than any that I've ever expected our country to be in at this point in time. It's really important for us to continue this kind of dialogue about the threats to democracy in America. Yes, thank you so much and thank you everybody for your questions they were great. Well that brings an end to our discussion today reminder next Monday April 4 and apple bomb will be here at the University of Michigan at the Michigan League. So look for those announcements on the internet. Thank you very much. Thanks everybody.