Sasha Abramsky discusses his recent columns in The Nation covering the Trump regime’s open planning for a coup to manipulate the outcome of this November’s midterm congressional election, which most polls say Republicans will likely lose decisively. Abramsky is also author of The American Way of Poverty.
SCOTT HARRIS: We begin this evening by welcoming to our program our friend Sasha Abramsky. He’s a journalist whose Authoritarian Watch column is regularly published in the Nation magazine. He’s the author of books including The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Lives; Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small Town America; and American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and DOGE Butchered the U.S. Government. Sasha, thanks so much for making time to be on our Counterpoint program tonight.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Oh, it’s always a pleasure, Scott. Thanks for having me on.
SCOTT HARRIS: So your June 22 column really caught my attention and I’m sure people all across the country. It’s titled “The Warning America Can’t Afford to Ignore.” The Warning America Can’t Afford to Ignore. And it begins with a description of the—I’m just trying to find it here. I should have had it ready. Oh, here it is. It begins like this: “Trump’s vision of the country, it seems, is as a place of human cockfights, a place where eye-gougers and bare-knuckle brawlers grapple in front of crowds that would torment people placed into the pillary. It is a vision of a society where a spectacle-addicted populist would be ready to laugh, gawk and picnic as lynch mobs do their foul deeds. It is in short, the United States where all of the very worst, most violent instincts and practices bubble up to the surface. And this was inspired, of course, by Trump’s UFC cage fight on the White House lawn.”
I think it perfectly captures the dangerous and deeply depressing moment we’re living through here in the U.S. where most of the nation’s democratic institutions are failing us. So before we get to the election in the warning from a couple of former legislators that I wanted to talk about, I thought it would be good to have you launch into this moment, this very dangerous moment we’re living through.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Well, as we were getting ready for this interview, I was just perusing the news headlines and the headlines are just so extraordinary today. So you’ve got one set of headlines saying SCOTUS has green-lighted Trump’s attempts to curb mail-in voting, which basically means the Supreme Court is giving its approval for Trump to unilaterally take over the way states run their election system. That’s completely beyond the pale, has never been done in American history before.
On the other side of the headline columns, you have this series of taunts and tirades that Trump launched against Canada in the wake of the trade talks breaking down, a series of personal insults, a series of attacks against the sovereignty of the country, the kinds of things that if any country dared to do to the United States of America, the United States would regard it as a “casus belli.” It would regard it as a rationale for war.
Then you go down and you see that there’s a headline about the army officer, sorry, the Air Force officer who protested Trump’s politics, called for him to be impeached, and has now been arrested under Article 88 of the military code, which basically says that he is threatening and making unbecoming language regarding the president of the United States. So at every single level, when you look at the headlines, you are seeing a country, an authoritarian crisis where dissent is being outlawed; where we bludgeon allies; where we try to get people not to vote instead of to vote. I mean, this is extraordinary.
And you talked about the sort of crisis moment. This is a rolling crisis because all of the institutions that could stand up to Trump are bending the knee. That goes for the Supreme Court, that goes for Congress, that goes for major law firms and technology firms that have made their peace with Trump in pursuit of a quick profit. All of this is happening and the democratic infrastructure of the country is coming under a stress test, the like of which it hasn’t seen since the Civil War. And that’s a sort of pessimistic opening, but you asked for it. I look at what’s happening in this country, this wondrous country with this extraordinary part in the human story and it makes me want to weep. It makes me want to absolutely weep to see this great country reduced to prostration before a man of Donald Trump’s character.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well said, and it certainly is depressing and angering. Our institutions, as you said here tonight and have said often, are failing us. And, this important memo that you covered in June is certainly worthy of discussion tonight. Tell us about this memo that you talk about in the column, co-written by former House Majority Leader and presidential candidate Richard Gephardt of Missouri and former Colorado Sen. Timothy Wirth warning America about the Trump coup we seem to be blindly walking to in November.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Yeah, I mean this started circulating in mid-June and it was a document that these two very, very senior political figures, neither of whom are sort of known for their hyperbole, had written and started circulating in D.C. and then within the world of journalism. It was a warning that the things Trump was doing constituted a slow-moving coup d’etat. There wasn’t a coup d’etat in the sort of traditional sense where one day you wake up and there are tanks in the streets, but it a slow-moving coup d’etat which was attacking basic pillars that allow the democracy to function. So Trump’s takeover of regulatory agencies; his takeover of ombudsman agencies; his stacking of traditionally nonpartisan agencies with hyper-MAGA loyalists; his attacks on the voting system; his attacks on the U.S. Postal Service—that all of these things were happening basically in broad daylight, but because they were happening sort of scattershot individually, a lot of people weren’t putting the dots together.
And what Wirth and Gephardt said was, “Look, let’s look at this in its entirety.” And if you look at it in its entirety, what you see is an authoritarian power grab. What you see is a deeply insecure president who’s fearful that he and his party are going to be suffering electorally in November and who are doing everything they can to preempt that by sowing chaos, sowing discord and using that chaos as an excuse to do these emergency interventions. I think everything they’ve warned about in June, if you fast-forward two months later, it’s starting to come true. You look at the round-the-clock tweets and social media posts that Trump is putting out, attacking the democracy, the system of voting, attacking the integrity of the electoral process, doing everything he can to sow doubt and discord about the elections. That’s fundamentally un-American. I mean, if America means anything, it is a story of expanded access to political participation.
In zig and zags—it hasn’t been the sort of one directional thing—but if you look at the entirety of the 250-year history, it has represented a unique expansion in political participation, much of it in the last 40, 50, 60 years with the Voting Rights Act. Trump is doing everything he can to roll back that expansion. We talk about him rolling back the Great Society in the 1960s. Now we’ve started seeing his assault on programs from the New Deal from the 1930s. We’re seeing attacks on regulatory agencies that go back to the progressive era in the early 20th century and now we’re seeing attacks on voting rights that go back to the post-civil war period. So if you look cumulatively, what you’ve got is an American government with the ambition—they may not have the power—but has the ambition to roll America back to the pre-Civil War era.
Now that’s just absolutely stunning to get your head around, but that’s what Wirth and Gephardt are warning about.
SCOTT HARRIS: As it pertains to the election, I have on this program attempted to keep up with all the dozens and dozens of presidential executive orders, legislative moves, shuffling election deniers into positions of power all over the government. I’m just going to read a quick summary because it’s stunning, as you said, and as they appeal to people to look at all these things, not as separate attempts to manipulate or interfere in the November election, but they’re part of a piece, a larger pattern of a well-thought-out authoritarian strategy to overturn democracy this November. As we all know, Trump pressured Republican states to redraw congressional districts in an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering, restricting mail-in voting through presidential power. As you said, the Supreme Court at least preliminarily has given the green light to go ahead on that, using the postal service to enforce new ballot rules; demanding states turnover databases, expanding federal citizenship checks on voters; pushing documentary proof of citizenship through legislation in the Save America Act; planning on precedented federal monitoring operation.
A thousand election monitors will be actually deployed to the polls; calling for federal control over voting; keeping possible federal intervention around polling places with ICE or the military; continuing on supported claims of widespread election fraud to justify all this; laying the groundwork for challenging unfavorable results. If Republicans or Trump loses, there’s always fraud, right? When they win, it’s legitimate. Targeting the institutions that administer elections, actually dismantling them almost entirely. Sasha, I share Gephardt and Wirth’s fear hat the Democratic party is by and large complacent, not at all preparing for worst case scenario in the election where Trump could declare a national emergency, call out the U.S. military and ICE, then seize ballots or close down polling places in the days before the election. Certainly they’ll target key state Democratic majority cities. I’ve read how the Democrats in the House and Senate have met over the last couple of months to discuss their response to Trump’s likely intervention in November to prevent a free and fair election where Republicans are likely to lose control of the House and maybe the Senate if it’s free and fair with the prospect that Trump and Republicans could be held accountable if the Democrats did take the House and/or the Senate.
So I guess the question is, as you see it and as Gephardt and Wirth see it, are Democrats at all aware of the realities of the jeopardy here given Trump’s track record of actually calling for political violence as he did on Jan. 6th, 2021, we all saw it. And then he pardoned all these guys who attacked and were responsible for the deaths of police officers on that day.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: I think Democrats are aware of the dangers. I mean, I’ve certainly spoken to secretaries of state around the country who are most—They’re the ones most on the front lines and they are all too aware of what Trump’s trying to do. I’ve spoken to the secretary of state in Nevada, in Arizona, in Colorado, I think in Michigan, and there’s no doubt about what Trump’s trying to do. So the challenge then is what do you do about it? And in states where there are Democratic governors, Democratic secretaries of state, Democratic attorneys general, and states where there’s Democratic majority legislatures, there’s more room to push back because you can pass state-level laws trying to protect from federal seizure of ballots. You can pass state level laws to ensure the continuity of the chain of control over ballots and so on. You can do all these things, but when push comes to shove, states don’t control the U.S. Postal Service, that’s federal.
When push comes to shove, states don’t control ICE, that’s federal. There are so many levers of power that the federal government has that even if Democrats are all too aware of the dangers, they’re kind of on their back foot because they can strategize, they can plan, they can prepare legal countermeasures, they can do all of that. But so many of these basic institutions are in the hands of really ruthless election deniers who have no sense of decency, no sense of morality, but a desperate desire to cling to power. Now again, I don’t want to over hype this. I don’t want to say, “Well, the Republicans are all powerful, the Trump administration’s all powerful, there’s nothing we can do about that,” because I don’t believe that’s the case. I believe that if record numbers of people come out to vote, they will swamp the attempts to suppress the electorate.
And we saw that in Hungary recently where Victor Orban had been in charge of the country for 16 years. It was an authoritarian project that in many, many ways resembles what’s going on in the United States today. They had control over the media, they had control over the judicial system, they had control over the economy, they had all of the cards stacked in their favor, and yet by the millions, voters came out and swept them out of power. So I think there is room for the electorate to sweep this gang of hoodlums out of power. But it does involve a tremendously high level of voter participation and engagement and a willingness to stand up to these thugs and not be intimidated by these thugs.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’re speaking with Sasha Abramsky this evening on Counterpoint. Sasha’s a journalist and you can read his Authoritarian Watch column in the pages of The Nation magazine at thenation.org and—Thenation.com, excuse me. I think there’s an overconfidence on the courts and lawyers to save us from Trump’s authoritarian fascist threat. And I wonder what your reaction is to that, Sasha, given the lessons of history, when you have a tyrannical would-be dictator who’s attempting to overturn democratic institutions, it seems that the courts and lawyers do not usually stand in the way of such a threat.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Yeah, I mean I don’t think there’s any evidence that if you just step back and you just rely on the courts and you just rely on the goodwill of Chief Justice Roberts, there is no evidence that this leads to success. All the evidence of history suggests that for a people to stand up to an authoritarian government, it involves the people doing the standing up, not the courts doing the standing up, not the elites doing the standing up, but ordinary men and women, ordinary people saying “enough is enough.” And I do think there are millions of people in this country who are all too well aware of the stakes. There are millions of people who, if they can’t vote by mail, they will stand in line to vote in the polling places. And if I saw any other agency comes out to try and intimidate them, they will still stand in line to cast their legally allowed votes.
I do think that that’s what history says. If you read Eduardo Galeano, for example, about the grassroots groups in Latin America who stood up to dictatorship; if you read some of the writings on apartheid era South Africa and how people stood up to dictatorship, you see that it always involves mass public political participation. If you look at what’s gone on with democracy protests around the world in recent years, whether it’s Hungary and the efforts to get rid of Victor Orban, or whether it’s the brave people in Iran who have stood up to dictatorship there, or whether it’s the brave people in Hong Kong who have tried to stand up to dictatorship in China, it always involves large numbers of people being willing to protest. And America’s no different. If we want to stand up to Donald Trump, to the corruption, to the graft, to the unconstitutional activities, to the authoritarianism, to the assassination squads, the ISIS unleashed on American streets, if we want to be able to stand up to that, we have to be willing to protest.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right. I think it’s worth reiterating what you just said, that the lessons from our own nation’s civil rights movement and democracy movements all around the world, they had one and only one real strategy that worked to stop a tyrannical authoritarian government from overthrowing a democratic system. And as you said, massive numbers of people in the streets to stop business as usual. Now, Wall Street traders may not generally care about protecting a democracy. I think we’ve seen that over the last two-and-a-half years, but when the economy comes to a halt and they lose their profits, all of a sudden they may care more about preserving the economic privilege that they have now than maybe caring about Trump tax cuts. I think stopping business as usual is the only way to stop Trump.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: I mean, you’re absolutely right about corporate leaders and their desire for profit. They’ve made a devil’s bargain at the moment. They’re supporting Trump because he gives them tax breaks. They’re supporting Trump because he’s anti-union and so on. But there are an awful lot of things that Trump’s doing that hurt American businesses. His tariffs are disastrous for most American businesses. His attack on the immigrant community is disastrous for huge numbers of businesses, whether you’re talking about construction industry or the healthcare industry or entrepreneurs, you’re talking about huge parts of the economy that get broken by Trump’s assault on immigration. If you look at the breaking of alliances, the fact that there are so many countries that though they could depend on America that are now realizing, you know what? We got to go alone. We’ve got to find new alliances. We got to find new trading partners.
Well, all of that in the long run is a loss for America. When you look at what’s happening in the bond market and the fact that lenders are getting more and more nervous about lending to an American government that is so unstable and so unwilling to tax to fund what it’s spending on. There are many, many things happening now that are detrimental to American businesses. And at some point, major corporate titans are going to break with Trump, not because they’ve suddenly seen the light.
Not because they’ve suddenly had a Kumbaya moment and realized just how immoral Trump’s activities are, but they’re going to start breaking with Trump because they realize that the negatives for the bottom line, the financial negatives outweigh the financial positives, that this government is so unstable that Trump’s willingness to go from one extreme to another in a series of sort of manic overnight social media post is so detrimental to America’s standing in the world. Eventually some, not all, but some of those corporate titans are going to break with Trump, and I suspect they’ll end up doing so very, very publicly.
SCOTT HARRIS: I think you’re right. And also another feature of that eventual break with Trump in the corporate world may be the corruption because Trump is very out front demanding tribute, demanding millions of dollars in payments to give certain corporations advantages or to withdraw prosecution. And of course, to do business, they feel they have to pay off this guy. It’s pay-to-play. It’s just out front bribery. It’s just blatant bribery.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: It is. So there are a few ways this is happening. One of them is Trump personally is demanding money. So people are investing in his cryptocurrency; they’re investing in all kinds of things, not because they think they’ll genuinely make money on it, but because it’s a way to get money to Trump and therefore get his ear and get his favor. That’s just naked pay-to-play corruption on a scale we’ve never seen in this country before. And Trump personally has made more than $2 billion out of his presidency. That’s criminal. I mean, it’s immoral, it’s unethical, it’s completely against the principles of democracy because this is grift on a master scale. But the other thing that’s happening is they’re basically demanding pay-to-play in tariffs. They’re saying, “Well, you do these things, you give us a percentage of your company’s profits, you give us a percentage ownership stake, and maybe we’ll roll back the tariffs.”
So whenever you have a regime of tariffs like Trump’s creating now that’s personality based, basically Trump wakes up, he says, “I’m in a bad mood with Canada. I’ll impose Canada tariffs. I’m in a bad mood with South Korea. I’ll put tariffs on South Korean cars.” Whenever you have personality-driven economic policy like this, there’s tremendous room for corruption because companies realize they have to sweet talk Trump; they have to bribe Trump’s people; they have to do all kinds of things in order to get carve-outs so that they’re not part of the tariff regimen. And people like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman have been writing about this all the time, that tariffs are almost definitionally an economic system that generates corruption. And Americans can see that. Americans are reading the news, they’re listening to podcasts, they’re watching cable shows and so on. Americans can see the level of corruption that’s going on. They can see the grift. They can see the profits being skimmed and going into the inner circle and Americans don’t like that.
All the polling suggests that there is a massive, massive revulsion against this corruption in the American country and the American electorate at the moment.
SCOTT HARRIS: One of the things that I’m really worried about, and I’m sure you are too, is that a wounded Trump, a Trump that’s seeing his lowest public opinion poll ratings ever in his two terms in office. And then of course we’re on the cusp of the Democrats possibly taking over one or both houses of Congress and with some accountability that might happen to Trump. He’s openly said he’s convinced he’ll be impeached for a third time. That in this situation, a wounded Trump becomes ever more dangerous. And this is a guy who’s erratic, irrational. We see it play out every day, who has the nuclear launch codes? This should keep us all up at night.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Oh, it should. And it also should trigger the 25th Amendment because Trump is increasingly unstable. He says and does things that even on his own terms literally make no sense. He insults allies in a way that is pathological almost. I don’t know if you or your audience has had time to read the things he’s been writing about Canada in the last 24 hours, but it’s a combination of senile, malignant, manic and completely and utterly detached from reality.
He said that Canada will no longer be treated like a state. He said they’re the worst country to deal with. He personally insulted the Canadian prime minister, called him Gov. Carney. He went after regional leaders like (Premier of Ontario) Doug Ford. He spent hours and hours today denouncing Canada, which historically has been America’s closest ally, both geographically, but also politically.
This is an incredibly dangerous moment because as you said, this man is in control of the nuclear codes. He feels cornered. His brain clearly isn’t functioning the way a normal human brain should function, and he’s more thin-skinned now than he’s ever been. He’s not able to take any criticism. He’s not able to recalibrate in any way. He chooses a course no matter how pig-headed that course is and he sticks with that course. We’re seeing this in Iran now where everything he’s done in the Iran war has been a fiasco and now he’s doubling down. He’ saying the Strait of Hormuz will be declared American territory. Well, A, that’s completely illegal under international law. B, it shreds any pretense that the American foreign policy is anything but predatory. And C, simply saying something on Truth Social doesn’t make it a reality.
Trump hasn’t been able to win any aspect of this war that he launched on Iran, but suddenly he’s saying to the world, “We’re going to declare the Strait of Hormuz to be American.” Well, what on earth makes him or anybody else think that the Iranians or any other government in that region will accept American seizure of that water mass? It’s just not going to happen. So this is a sort of politics of delusion, a politics of fabulism and fantasy.
And again, you said it keeps you up a night. It should keep everybody up at night because his is the most powerful man on earth and he’s retreated into this essentially make-believe world that comes alive in his head late at night when he’s on Truth Social.
SCOTT HARRIS: Sasha, just one last question that could be a program unto itself, and we’ll just get the bumper sticker answer here to this one. If we survive the coming Trump coup attempt, which I think we’re both pretty confident—most of the country is confident is going to happen—it seems like there’s an urgent priority need to repair our broken democratic system to rebuild the guardrails to protect democracy that Trump has methodically and systematically crushed one by one. I’m not sure the Democrats are up for that, but that to me should be one of the campaign promises if they win control of the House and Senate or the presidency in 2028. But that should be “let’s repair democracy that would benefit everybody, all parties.”
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Absolutely. Look, I’m not a Democratic party strategist. I’m just a writer. But if I were a strategist, I would be running an election campaign saying, look, when we come into power, we will expand the Supreme Court to 15. We will dilute the power of the six Troglodyte Supreme Court justices who are coming up with one manufactured legal rationale after another to expand Trump’s power. We will find a way to reform the Electoral College so that the popular vote winner nationally becomes the president like in every other modern democracy.
We will find a way to restructure the U.S. Senate because at the moment, those half-million people in Wyoming send two senators to D.C., just like the 40 million people who live in California, which means Wyoming has 80 times the Senate representation per person that California has. Again, that’s completely antithetical to modern understanding of democracy. If I were a strategist, I would say we are going to resurrect and reestablish the structures of the Voting Rights Act because it was an absolute scandal to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, and we’re going to ban political gerrymandering and undo the mid-decade gerrymanders that Trump ordered Republican state governments to do, especially in the South. There are many, many things that can be done to repair the American democracy. All of these should be on the Democratic party slate.
And here’s the other thing that should be on the Democratic party slate. There is so much naked open-air corruption going on in this administration that it should be an absolute priority to hold House investigations of that corruption and to launch judicial investigations. It is absolutely imperative that that corruption be reined in, just like at the end of the 19th century. It was imperative and it led to all the reforms of the progressive era. Unless we rein in the cronyism, unless we rein in the pay-to-play, unless we rein in all of these grifts that Trump has unleashed on the American people, the democracy dies. So that is an absolutely core part of any democracy project—to hold accountable those who sold the country for personal profit.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well said, and a great way to conclude this otherwise depressing conversation. There is hope and I think that agenda you just ran down should be a real major part of exercising that hope when we put pressure on our elected officials to do exactly as you outlined. Sasha, thank you for joining us this evening and I’ll advise our listeners read Sasha’s recent columns at the nation.com. He writes the Authoritarian Watch column for the nation. As always, Sasha, great to have you here this evening to talk about these important issues.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Good to be on, Scott. Take care.
SCOTT HARRIS: You too. Bye-bye. That’s Sasha Abramsky, journalist, and as I said, the Authoritarian Watch columnist at the Nation magazine. This is Counterpoint. My name is Scott Harris here Mondays 8 to 9:30 p.m. here on listener-sponsored WPKN in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
