The Manosphere Celebrates a Win. Plus, M. Gessen on How to Survive an Autocracy
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On Wednesday, we asked you, our listeners, a question. How do I feel today? I feel angry. It's not even some sort of electoral college thing. He won the popular vote. My goodness. From WNYC New York, this is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. Also on the show, after Tuesday night, the Manosphere is celebrating what it perceives as a win.

I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Aidan Ross, Theo Vaughn, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan. Plus, we speak to M. Gessen, who gives us a guide on how to survive in autocracy. American democracy is a very specific kind of dream. We're never going to have a country in which everyone is free and everyone is equal, but we could have a country that is becoming more like that every day rather than less like that every day.

It's all coming up after this. On the Media is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Hey, it's Latif from Radiolab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that?

Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcasts. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Wednesday morning, aka the morning after, Micah and I and OTM executive producer Katya Rogers got on a call to talk about what we were going to do on the show this week. Here's some of that conversation. All right, I'm setting up my Pro Tools.

What time did you go to sleep? I went to sleep at a reasonable hour. I saw the writing on the wall and I was tired and I figured there was nothing, nothing that couldn't wait until the morning. What about you? Well, we stayed up till two, but I just couldn't hang around for Trump. I knew I would hear it the next day or hear about it.

Hey, Kat. Well, wow. Let's not talk unless we're ready to record. We're recording. Don't you worry. Oh, we are? Okay. So, Kat, you threw up all night? I did. I slept in the bathroom floor for a couple of hours. It was a bug, but maybe it wasn't. So, we need to think about this week.

I don't think that we're going to need to talk about the coming legal challenges to the vote. Or disinformation around voter fraud. It wasn't a problem, I guess. It was all great. It was a great election. Free and secure. Move on. So those plans that we had on on the boil are fantastic.

are probably defunct at this point. My feeling is thinking about 2016 compared to now. Remember we spoke to Masha Gessen and they gave us this kind of roadmap, like how to survive

what we were going to go through. The courts will not save us, relying is the point, and all these kind of things. And it was like, okay, we'll just hold on to these instructions. We can make it through four years and then we're back to normal. And now I feel like the Biden four years was a post-pandemic blip, but this country is on a trajectory and it's a serious realignment. And we can't think we're off track and we'll just get back on track. This is the track.

Certainly, there's a possibility that we are on an anti-democratic trajectory and our institutions are so profoundly weakened that that system is in decline. But we don't know. I'm quite frightened that it is. It's just how do we cover, how do we filter stories? What's our frame? Like, honestly...

If this is a realignment, if this is as dramatic as it feels, I'm not even sure what the frame is now. Well, I think we can't know. I think we have to take it day by day. I love when you say that. I love when you say that. We're living in history. We don't have a roadmap, but we never have. I mean, the show has changed so much.

We keep talking about the messages that are out there, how they get out there, and hope that we can make a contribution. I'm not saying we don't serve a purpose. I really want to stress that I think that the need for good information is as high as ever. The need for great reporting on the upcoming Trump administration is absolutely paramount.

I just fear that the business model that supports it and the trust that powers it are falling apart. It's so...

upsetting for me to scroll on TikTok or listen to a podcast. And what I'm hearing is mainstream journalism filtered through people who present themselves as a foil to mainstream media. The source of good information is required to fuel everything. But somehow people have just completely lost faith in it. And it really scares me.

Well, you spend a lot of time on social media. Thank God. Someone has to. People are getting their information from everywhere. A lot of generational difference, but everybody's existing in the world. I don't know what else we can do. I mean, it's not like we have the answers. We know how to do this thing. Tell the truth, try to contextualize it, and send it out like a message in a bottle that you throw off the side of a

rowboat. That is our role. We can do it differently. We can see what kind of message resonates, but we don't run a campaign. We're just trying to be honest brokers. Yeah. I mean, I think the best we can do is just affirm the truth and reality to the best of our ability to the people that we reach. But what do we do this week? Ha ha.

I think we should talk about Joe Rogan. Didn't Trump call him a hero or the greatest of the great or something like that? Yeah, I think that his endorsement meant something. I mean, it's impossible to know if it won him the election, but I think Joe Rogan is emblematic of a new media environment that is so potent, that is so easily swayed by Trump's lies.

I was thinking, I was hesitating because I know you're sick to death of the guy, Micah. I know what you're going to say. Stephen Miller, right? No. There was an amazing story about what Elon Musk stood to lose if Kamala Harris won. That, you know, probably Twitter would go or X would go just down the drain. And there were a bunch of other possibilities there.

for him in a Trump administration, not just as, you know, the commissioner of efficiency or whatever. Firing people. Yeah. But a lot of business stuff. Yeah. All those government contracts. I think it's useful context why he was willing to throw so much money into this campaign. I mean, massive quantities.

you know, the men of Trump or something. It's funny. It's like Kamala, just hours have passed. And that seems like a world that was like a million years ago. Tim Wall is like a traditional, like a guy, just a guy. We hardly knew ye. We hardly knew ye.

One thought I was having, I don't know if this will work for the show, is what Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, I think, have in common is they're both champions of the marketplace of ideas. They both presented an image of free speech, which is we'll just hear from all sides and the good things will rise to the top. That's what Joe Rogan does on his show. It's quote unquote that marketplace of ideas thing. Absolutely. And they both tilted their marketplaces for Donald Trump.

At the end of the day, this like radical neutrality thing was a farce whether or not they knew it, ripe for exploitation whether they knew it, and not honest. I mean... They always knew it. It's hard to wake up this morning, see the popular vote the way it was, and not feel...

Like the world is just completely turned upside down. Like the truth doesn't matter anymore. I don't know. I mean, I was posting on social media, like, how are you feeling on our socials? And I was, we were getting a lot of responses. A lot of them were negative, but maybe this is an opportunity to lean into our show being a community for people, a celebration of good journalism, a belief in the truth to our best ability to understand it and report it.

Could we say, you know, let us know what you want us to cover. Email us. Tell us how you're feeling. I don't know. I'd love to do a show where we collect how our listeners are feeling and make this a little bit more of a dialogue. Okay, so I think we should meet with the team. Let's wrap it up. We're going to make a show. Sounds good. All right. Okay. Pretty soon after posting that podcast on Wednesday, we started hearing from listeners.

Hey there on the media team. Good morning from Berlin. Hey, my name is Alona. I thought I would record a little voice memo. Hi Brooke, it's Kendra Hall in Fort Collins, Colorado. Hi on the media, this is Carlos talking to you from Europe. Hi on the media team. My name is Annie. I'm in Westchester outside of New York City. Hi on the media, this is Gretchen from Montana. We asked people to send a voicemail answering a simple question. Okay, so to the first question, how am I feeling today? Um...

I'd say just blah. I feel hopeless. Realizing people essentially vote on the nebulous idea of the economy is probably the hardest idea to deal with. When I saw the news when I woke up this morning, I was just like, what the f***? What the actual f***? It's not even some sort of electoral college thing. He won the popular vote. My goodness. This country has shown again and again how much it hates women, how little it values our lives.

disposable we are at all ages. We also asked you what you want us to cover as we wade back into another Trump presidency. The misogyny and racism...

Even though Kamala Harris was clearly the more qualified candidate, people would prefer to elect a white man, even one who is a convicted felon and rapist and all these other terrible things. I also really like the idea of covering Trump's men as...

I feel like the bro culture has really permeated the Republican Party and is almost the soundtrack of young men's lives. Maybe talk to some Trump voters today.

and see how much of his presidency are they aware of? How much of the scandals and all the chaos, the fact that he was impeached twice, January 6th, none of that stuff matters? I would like to hear more on a topic that Micah mentioned, which is that there's a disconnect between a lot of people's real life experiences and the

the media's portrayal of how things are going. - I would really be interested in you all talking and exploring the personality as a driver in these alternative media sources breaking away from mainstream media.

Do we just need more cool, charismatic people to tell the good, rigorous news? Do we have to be cooler than the radicals? I'd just be interested in y'all thinking through your own complicity in how this situation unfolded. And I think, you know, again, like the war on Gaza is a great example. Micah brought it up in...

the debrief and it just was completely glossed over and not really spoken about. And I think that's one of the big issues that lost the Democratic Party. Many of you seized on the question, what's next? How do we prepare ourselves for another four years? I'm actually glad that, I mean, I'm not glad Trump won, but...

Given that he won the Electoral College, I'm glad that he did win the popular vote because it cuts off this escape path for Democrats to say, oh, it's the Electoral College. There's nothing we can do about it. OK, cut that path off. Now Democrats have to actually look at ourselves and see what needs to change. What's actionable? Where is action?

The best use of our energy right now, our collective energy. I am curious in hearing a conversation about action. I need solutions, not just more reporting on all the horrible stuff. And I need more concrete solutions than, you know, get involved. I'm going to increase my support for my local nonprofit newsroom, the Montana Free Press, which I love.

There are tons of local nonprofit newsrooms all over the country. They're doing amazing work in this time of uncertainty. It's helpful to look to a group of people who really care about their community and their state and their city. And I think the nonprofit newsrooms are doing that for us.

Thanks to each and every one of you who took the time to send us a voicemail. Unfortunately, we weren't able to include them all, but we listened, and we're going to keep listening to you. Coming up, the Manosphere celebrates a win. This is On the Media. On the Media is supported by Mint Mobile. You know when you discover a new binge-worthy show or a song that you keep on repeat and you have to share with your friends so they can validate just how great it is?

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How to turn a democracy into a dictatorship. Step one, plant a big lie and help it take off. A key false narrative this election season, perhaps the key false narrative, despite a lack of evidence, is that there is a risk that non-citizens could vote in large numbers. I'm Kai Wright. On the next Notes from America, we talk about how all the extreme rhetoric and lies you hear now set the stage for what comes next, no matter who wins. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. This is karma, ladies and gentlemen. He deserves this. They deserve it as a family. Dana White, CEO of UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship, on stage with Donald Trump on election night. I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Aiden Ross, Theo Vaughn, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.

White seems to think these podcasters help sway the vote. Maybe you've never heard or seen their shows, but their victory speech shout-out tells us a lot about how the internet has evolved, especially for young men. Take the Nelk Boys. When I first started watching their YouTube channel a few years ago, they seemed largely apolitical, still partying with college students.

Let's go baby! Look who's back in the dirt. It's after 10am, gotta have a dirt. I'm f***ing proud of the boys right now. I'm f***ing proud of them. Where are the boys? Just two weeks ago, they were sharing the stage at Trump rallies. I'm with your favorite people, the Nelk boys. They're having a good time at my expense. They're having a good time on my plane.

Then there's Aiden Ross. He's the gamer who gave Trump a Cybertruck while interviewing him on YouTube and Kik, a fringe live streaming platform. That's an Elon. It is an Elon. Wow. Shout out to Mr. Moss. That's beautiful. Ross molded his politics after his hero Andrew Tate, the notorious misogynist who was arrested in Romania on human trafficking charges.

Another name that Dana White listed off, Theo Vaughn, the stand-up comic. Not exactly a MAGA guy, though he hosted a viral conversation with Trump on this past weekend, his podcast. No, I would just do cocaine. That was really, yeah. So not just, yeah.

That's down and dirty, right? Yeah. And this is, yeah, this, I mean, it was, yeah. But you don't anymore? No, I don't do it anymore, man. But of course, the big story was the nod from the powerful Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump after interviewing him, J.D. Vance, and Elon Musk all in the final 10 days of the campaign. Kamala Harris got an invite too, but her team passed.

A big miss, according to some pundits. Yes, Harris should have been there and in places like it. Same for Tim Walz. As reclined this week. On YouTube alone, Rogan's interview with Trump was viewed some 46 million times. You're just going to abandon that?

In an election where you think the other side winning means fascism? And voters. It's been surprising how often the topic of the Joe Rogan podcast keeps coming up. An NBC reporter on the Arizona State University campus on election night. We've talked to several students now who say that they listened to that Joe Rogan podcast with the former president, and that was the deciding factor for them.

And they've also said that if Kamala Harris would have appeared on that podcast, they may have had their vote skewed. How did the former host of the network reality show Fear Factor become a political kingmaker?

For one, he was an early podcast adopter. Rogan realized that there was a deep hunger for alternative media that doesn't tell you what to think, or at least presents itself that way. A hunger for discussions that aren't bound by broadcast time constraints, stuffy talk show decorum, and editorial guardrails that favor mainstream experts and centrist politics. The thing that f***ed television, the thing that f***ed

entertainment in general is money. They were selling advertising. So everybody has to say certain words, don't say certain words, don't bring up certain subjects. You can't just express yourself because you're expressing yourself to someone who's selling advertising space. Joe Rogan as a guest on an internet talk show in 2007, which seems like the precise moment that he discovered the potential of podcasting. You just need to keep doing this.

We need to figure out how you make money from this. Definitely figured that out. Spotify have signed a multi-year $250 million deal with Joe Rogan. Rogan somehow caught lightning in a bottle. Justin Peters, a correspondent for Slate, profiled Joe Rogan. His podcast began with him generally just interviewing fellow comics fans.

stand-ups that he'd met on the road. He branched into interviewing MMA fighters because he's a big mixed martial arts guy. And then at a certain point, he started bringing on academics, evolutionary biologists, sociologists, people from the tech world.

I can't stand the guy, but I also have to acknowledge that his podcast can be incredibly entertaining. Boom. Thank you. Thanks for doing this, man. Really appreciate it. Hey, welcome. Very good to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. This is Rogan's 2018 interview with Elon Musk, that time they smoked a blunt on camera. So is that a joint?

Or is it a cigar? No. Okay. It's marijuana inside of tobacco. Oh, okay. So it's like pot, tobacco, pot. You never had that? Yeah, I think I tried one once. Come on, man.

I'd argue this was when Musk's hyper-online man-of-the-people shtick took root. I think you're right that this was the moment where Musk started really trying to reach out for the sort of alt-right intellectual dark web appeal. And smoking weed with Joe Rogan was the turning point.

Certainly. I'll buy that. For Rogan, politics were a bit more complicated. Even as he hosted buddy-buddy interviews with Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and the like, he was still reaching a politically diverse audience. And he was saying stuff like this on his show. I think I'll probably vote for Bernie. Him as a human being when I was hanging out with him. And I believe in him. I like him. Look at you, progressive. Yeah. Well, I've always been. Yeah.

What? Everyone says you're a right winger. I've never voted right wing in my life. Really? Never. Never.

I voted Democrat except for independent. I voted for Gary Johnson because he did my podcast. Rogan in 2020, part of a montage of clips that resurfaced on social media this week. 87% of scientists said that human activity is driving global warming. I'm very pro-choice. I'm very women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, trans rights. I'm even universal health care. Obviously this, um...

Protected status is driving me crazy. This thing that Trump's doing with children that were born in other countries and then brought over here as children. So how did Rogan the liberal end up endorsing Donald Trump?

I've heard several explanations. One is that Rogan gave up on the Democrats after they dumped Bernie Sanders in 2020. Another is that he's been slowly red-pilled by his guests. When someone keeps on saying, I'm a liberal, I'm a liberal, and then people with whom he talks speak incessantly about the evils of cancel culture, who talk about how the mainstream media is suppressive and so on and so forth —

And you're not actually a liberal. You're wearing a costume. And I think what's happened over the past five years is Rogan has finally taken off that costume and revealed himself for who he was all along. Since 2020, Joe Rogan has become a lightning rod for controversy and criticism, the kind of scrutiny that comes with the territory when you're the most popular podcaster in the world.

There was that time a couple years ago when he had to apologize after the internet discovered that he'd used the N-word repeatedly in old episodes. Look, I can't go back in time and change what I've said. I wish I could. Obviously, that's not possible. But I do hope that this can be a teachable moment.

for anybody that doesn't realize how offensive that word can be coming out of a white person's mouth in context or out of context. My sincere and humble apologies. There was his interview with so-called vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone. These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly against

illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg Code. They're explicitly inconsistent with the Belmont Report. Over a thousand doctors, scientists and health professionals are calling out Spotify over false claims about COVID aired by its most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan. Rogan would double down on the Vax stuff and even went on to sort of endorse his friend RFK Jr. after he came on the podcast. And then there was this. Ready for this?

My friend, his wife, is a school teacher. And...

She works at a school that had to install a litter box in the girls room because there is a girl who's a furry who identifies as an animal. He had to walk back this totally bogus story in 2022, saying he must have misunderstood his friend or something. More recently, he told a guest that Joe Biden faked the State of the Union address. The State of the Union was not live. And yes, it was.

No. No. Did you see that they found out that it wasn't? Someone zoomed in on his watch and his watch was the wrong time. How could that even be? I don't think all the Republicans would agree to it, too. Who knows what they knew?

They're all there live while he's doing it? Yeah. Rogan had his producer do a mid-interview fact check. They pulled up an article debunking a photoshopped image of Biden's watch. Yeah, there's a fake image. They got me. How do you fall for this stuff? It's been pointed out by many of his critics that Rogan doesn't seem to prepare enough for his interviews.

he exercises poor judgment. Rogan says he's a victim of cancel culture. I think that's a big reason why he likes Trump. There's probably no one in history that I've ever seen that's been attacked the way you've been attacked and

and the way they've done it so coordinated and systematically. This is how Rogan set up his three-hour interview with Donald Trump last week, by telling their shared story about the media and the political establishment. They hate us, not because of our behavior, but because we threaten them. Do you just assume because people loved you on The Apprentice they were going to love you as a president? Well, I figured it would be so easy.

You know, it's very interesting. Well, it probably would have been if the media didn't attack you the way they did. If they didn't conflate you with Hitler. I mean, even today, like...

Kamala was talking about you and Hitler. They're going to take what you said about Robert E. Lee. We'll never know whether Rogan's endorsement moved the needle on Tuesday, whether Kamala Harris's appearance would have made any difference. But all the spilled ink about it this week says a lot about where it feels like political influence is headed. I hope that this is the last Democratic nominee who says no to Joe Rogan. Like, even if you have to go to the studio. I would go further than that, Ryan. You

You need your own Joe Rogan is the bigger point. That's the bigger problem. One of the closest analogs to a left-wing Joe Rogan is 33-year-old Hassan Piker, a Twitch streamer and political commentator. He's big and burly, fluent in memes and gaming culture. He gets the internet. But as a socialist, he's likely seen as too radical to be embraced by mainstream Democrats in the way that Republicans have harnessed their right-wing influencers.

I watched Hasan Piker deliver the results on election night with some 200,000 concurrent viewers. As the news began to set in, he started raging against Trump supporters who joined his chat to rub in the loss. Donald Trump winning the presidency is not going to improve your life. It's actually going to continue making it worse because there are major material issues that you are experiencing and neither party is actually providing any adequate solutions to that.

But owning the libs is not going to improve your life. It is a way for Donald Trump and the Republican Party to distract you away as they pick your pockets and rob you blind. For years now, he's been sounding the alarm on the rise of the manosphere. There is a massive amount of right wing radicalization that has been occurring, especially in younger male spaces.

Here he is speaking on Jon Favreau's podcast, Offline. If you're a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever, whether it's playing video games, whether it's working out, whether

Whether it's, I don't know, listening to like a history podcast or whatever. Every single facet of that is just completely dominated by right-wing politics. As he watched Dana White shout out the podcast bros during that victory speech we heard at the beginning of this piece. Hassan Piker reacted on his live stream. The mighty and powerful Joe Rogan. And thank you America, thank you.

Thank you. Have a good night. What is this country? We're done. The news monoculture of old is dead. It seems that to many, the New York Times, a company that employs 2,700 journalists, is just one source of information and perspective. Joe Rogan, another.

The incoming administration has shown us that it will lean on a new generation of personalities and media networks to spread its lies and shape hearts and minds. Here at OTM, we'll do our best to keep up. Coming up, rules to survive an autocracy. This is On The Media.

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The most consequential election of our lives is over, and Donald Trump will return to power. Next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll talk with our Washington correspondents about the unbelievable election of 2024 and the profound uncertainty about what comes next for America and the world. Susan Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos join me next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

In 2016, after Trump won that election, writer M. Gessen wrote a list of rules to survive an autocracy. On this show, they explained how American exceptionalism gave rise to a perilous failure of the imagination, blinding us to what could happen here.

and Masha's wisdom was hard won. They grew up in and later fled Russia, and now Masha's on Vladimir Putin's wanted list, a dangerous place to be. I don't know if I would call this wisdom, but I certainly have had some experience, and

And I think I have a somewhat different set of optics. M. Gessen is the author of the 2020 book, Surviving Autocracy, and also an opinion columnist at the New York Times. I think this is the gift of living in exile. I think actually a lot of exiles have a kind of way of not taking for granted things that natives take for granted. But watching this election campaign,

was a similar sort of experience to what I experienced eight years ago in the U.S. watching the election and thinking, you people don't seem to be seeing what I'm seeing. So when it comes to autocracy, you've said it's more useful politically to think of the past and the present rather than of the left or the right.

Kamala said, we're not going back. And at that point, I think you thought she got it. I did. I thought, wow, between we're not going back, joy, and Tim Walz. She really gets it. Because I could see her saying, we can be happy in the face of a future. We can be joyful. We can be deeply caring in the way that Tim Walz is deeply caring.

you will wake up in 10, 15 years in this country and feel good about where you live and feel good about your family and feel good about your economic situation. Instead of saying that, they sort of got stuck on Trump as a fascist

It's true. But she also talked about – I think she used the phrase too much because it became kind of a cliché, the opportunity economy. But she did talk about helping people purchase their first home, which is the American dream, with a nice pile of money to provide better childcare.

These are a politics of the future. I know that she did say pretty much that she wasn't going to depart from Biden's policies on a whole range of issues.

But I think her program was more progressive. Well, to the extent we even know what her program was, it was more progressive. She spent a lot of time avoiding questions. The only question she really leaned into, and I mean that physically, she would physically lean forward and talk with passion about abortion rights.

And next question, she would lean back, her shoulders would sort of come together, and she would be in this defensive posture. But again, I think it's much more useful to try to understand the emotional valence of her message. And I couldn't help feeling after the first couple of weeks of the campaign that emotional valence was of voters being handled.

And that a team of advisors has read the polls and said, OK, so we're not just not going to talk about this other stuff. We're only going to talk about abortion rights because that's enough to carry us over. They've read the polls and they're handling us instead of she is one of us and she is going to help us face this future. And it's going to be less scary. I just don't know how you manifest that.

I understand the technocratic approach to politics and campaigning doesn't put enough weight on the value of emotion. And you've said that, you know, people know when they're not being offered a genuine vision. I think it would manifest something like this. It would be Kamala Harris and Tim Walz saying, look, we live in the greatest, most prosperous country in the world. There isn't a problem we can't solve.

We have more Nobel laureates than any other country in the world. We have the intelligence. We have the resources. We have the care. Tim Walz plays his sort of dad thing where he's taking care of the people of his state. And I don't say that cynically. I say that with the utmost admiration. He did an interview with my colleague Ezra Klein. That was music to my ears. I mean, he was like a real guy talking about

how Americans need somebody to make breakfast for their children so they can spend more quality time with their kids before school. That was real and relatable and deeply caring. And that just vanished. The technocrats took over. The technocrats took over. That's my interpretation. I have no inside knowledge. You also said that condescension is the Achilles heel of the Democratic Party, and I've certainly felt that way.

There's also this trope that people who vote for Trump vote against their own interests. And I can't imagine a more condescending attitude to the way that people use one of the very, very few instruments that they have of speaking to power. What they're saying when they vote for Trump is not that they're voting against their own interests. It's that they're so deeply interested in

In letting the government know that they feel unseen, unheard, not taken care of, generally failed by the system, they will vote for somebody who may or may not create policies that will benefit them just to send this message. That's not called voting against their self-interest. It's called being so fed up that the interest of sending this message trumps all the other interests.

And then you get the Democratic Party looking at that and saying, these people obviously are ill-informed and don't know what they're doing. So we have to tell them that Trump will destroy democracy and that will fix everything. And it's really not effective when you have a campaign and an administration saying, no, objectively, you're fine. Objectively, you're better off than two or four or six years ago. Well, what if I'm subjectively in a panic?

And you're refusing to see this panic. And Trump doesn't refuse to see the panic. How do you address that panic if it's based on, as we have so often heard, people being worried about being displaced? You know, great replacement theory. You know, so much of what Trump was framing was in essentially racist terms, you know, otherizing things.

You're not expecting Democrats to embrace those ideas. Absolutely not. So what do they do? I think they appeal to the opposite. I think we've seen this and we saw it not that long ago with Barack Obama.

He had an extraordinary talent, I think, for appealing to the best in people. I happened to be in the United States for the academic year of 08, 09. So I was observing the election very closely. And what struck me was that the mood in the country after the presidential election, you know, when you couldn't find that day's newspaper because they had all been bought up in the first hours of the morning was...

People woke up in a country that was better than they thought it was. And that's a hallmark of great political leadership, is to go out and to say to people, look, you're better than the worst in you. Together we can be strong, and together we can be good, and together we can be generous. And together we can change because we'll take care of each other. So your work has largely been shaped by your own lived experience in Russia, but what

Also the work of a Hungarian sociologist, Balint Madjar, who studied Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at length. It seems it's not all that uncommon for an autocrat to do what Trump did, which is to leave power for a term or two and then take it back again. I actually talked to Balint this morning.

And one of the things that we talked about was that Viktor Orban was voted out of office in 2002 and was out of power for two terms.

And he spent that time consolidating a movement that was based on the premise that the only legitimate representative of the people's will was Orban and his party. Why? Because they were the true Hungarians. Uh-huh. Because they understood the people. And the government that people had actually voted for was fundamentally illegitimate. And, of course, we know that Trump did it much more literally from the moment that he lost the election.

He insisted that the Biden administration was illegitimate, and he was the only legitimate representative of the will of the people. Right, that was stop the steal. And you're talking about something called exclusive legitimacy, meaning only he is legitimate in this case. Or does it mean only he and his supporters are legitimate? Well, he's the only legitimate leader, and his supporters are the only true Americans. It's a feedback loop. And we can expect more of the same in the next term.

I mean, first of all, we're sort of technically getting more of the same with what appears to be full control of federal power. The trifecta, the House, the Senate, the White House. Exactly, by Trump's Republican Party. So even on paper, he has exclusive legitimacy. But then what Orban and his party did in Hungary—

was moved very, very quickly to change the constitution to pass a huge number of laws that gave them the power, as Magyar put it, he's really good at coining aphorisms. So he has a new collection out that's called From Rule of Law to Law of Rule. Right. Because Hungary went from

A very well-designed, right, European democratic system. Because remember, it was only 20 years after the fall of the Soviet empire. So the system was sort of crisp and new, not like ours, very rickety and full of holes. And yet they were able to redesign it very, very quickly to serve their needs. And one of the ways in which they did it is by passing these bills on.

late at night, without discussion, in huge batches so that legislators didn't have time to read them. This is not unfamiliar to us, right? The Congress and the Senate already do this a lot. But when this happens by design...

It's a way of entirely destroying what remains of the deliberative process. Right. It happens in the Supreme Court, too. The shadow docket, making decisions without even signing them necessarily, but they're in law. And I think Madjar was saying that there's something called autocratic breakthrough. That's another one of his phrases, I guess, which means you take something

the system that elected you, and then change it so it has more trouble unelecting you when that time comes. Right. So he divides autocracy into three stages, autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation.

Autocratic attempt is what we saw during Trump's first four years in power, and I would argue January 6th. That was a real autocratic attempt. That was an actual attempt to seize power by force. Autocratic breakthrough happens when it is no longer possible to reverse autocracy by electoral means. So, for example, in Hungary, Fidesz, Orban's party, had a supermajority. So they changed the constitution with two-thirds of the vote.

As one of the legal scholars that I was interviewing said, nobody's ever going to have a supermajority again. Like all of this is irreversible. Like even if we imagine, and this is in 2012, that we throw Orban out and we throw Fidesz out and we have a democratic coalition, it will be a democratic coalition. It will not be a supermajority. It will not be able to change the constitution back. So it will be dealing with an autocratic system. We see it in Poland now.

where the so-called Law and Justice Party was in power for not as long as Orban was, but was able to change the system in ways that the new liberal democratic government is finding very, very difficult to reverse. Should we expect autocratic breakthrough under Trump? What would that look like?

Yes, I think we should expect an autocratic breakthrough under Trump. Obviously, we look at Project 2025. That's a kind of program. But I'm thinking more and more that it's much more about the how than about the what, at least in the immediate term. There's going to be a huge barrage of bills, attacks, public statements, hearings, all this stuff. And

I expect these attacks to be on various institutions of public deliberation. And this is just based on the Hungarian playbook. He will use the power of the pardon, and he will immediately pardon himself for his federal crimes and the January 6th gang and anybody else who needs a federal pardon. We saw that, again, in the first term, we saw the hollowing out of entire agencies, including the State Department. Mm-hmm.

But I think it will be much faster now and more decisive and more devastating. Back in 2016, you offered some rules for surviving autocracy.

It meant a lot to us when you came on to talk about it and you expanded it in your 2020 book. One of those rules was to truly grasp that lying isn't just a strategy. Lying is the point. Autocrats want to create chaos, doubt in everything, so that they can dictate what is real. And one more mantra, your institutions will not save you.

The institutional press certainly hasn't saved us, though its coverage of Trump, I think, has improved since 2016. So how should the press approach a second Trump term? With trepidation. I mean, here's what the press shouldn't do. And unfortunately, I've heard a few editors say, oh, we know what to do. We just need to do journalism. Uh-huh. Well, let's be honest. We don't know what to do. Anything that we do...

makes us in some way complicit. Covering Trump doesn't make us complicit? Well, let's go back to the first term for a couple of examples again. The New York Times approach, which was we will cover this administration as critically as we can, but basically the way we always cover any administration, which is when Trump does something crazy like write a love letter to Kim Jong-un,

we're going to call it diplomacy and foreign policy. Well, on the one hand, it is obviously wrong to call it diplomacy and foreign policy. On the other hand, that was American diplomacy and foreign policy at that point. And how do we invent a new word every time we write about Trump? We can't. So that's why I say that in some way it makes us complicit. Give me an example of a non-complicit way of addressing an outrage.

I think you take sort of the Kim Jong-un story and you say, it seems crazy to call this diplomacy or this is what's happened to American diplomacy. That's an editorial. We editorialize all the time. And easy for me to say, I work on the opinion side. The news people have a lot of rules, but there are rules also shift and change. And again, it's really, really hard. There are no easy answers here.

When Trump was president, it was normal for Trump to be president. When Trump was producing completely insane news, it was also our daily reality. So how do you write about this stuff, pathologizing it just the right amount?

I don't know the answer to that. I don't think we did a good enough job during the first Trump term. I think we did a somewhat better job during the election campaign. But I think it's ultimately an attractable problem. And so we can just aim to do the least bad job.

You half-pathologized. You said, just enough. I took that to heart. The question is, how much is enough? How much is too much? It's like prunes. How much is too much? Another one of your rules, Masha, it's worth remembering now, is do not be taken in by small signs of normality. We want to reassure ourselves that maybe things aren't so bad, but that's a distraction.

It's going to be normal in the sense that the sun will come up and it will come down and we will have good food and good friends. And then there comes a time when you sort of say, oh, maybe I can live with this. Well, this is one of the most painful things for me because...

I've said this to myself, not about Trump, but when I was living in Russia, things were getting worse and worse and worse. And I kept saying, you know, I can live with this, I can live with this. And I finally couldn't live with it because my family was in danger. And so we left and my friends stayed and I was watching them live the life that I was missing. They had fulfilling work, which amazing. I don't know.

I didn't believe that it was possible, but it was possible. They had each other's company. They had the city that I loved. And at a certain point, I thought, well, maybe I didn't have to get out of here. Maybe I could have lived this life. This was a month before Russia staged its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So if our institutions won't save us, what can? Rule number six is remember the future. We don't want to do anything that we don't want to live with.

So a good example is pro-democracy, pro-democratic, large D activists who are arguing for electors to switch their votes in order to prevent Trump from taking the presidency. A worthy cause, but at the expense of invalidating elections forever, delegitimizing elections forever, right? So we're going to have another election after that. And then in 2020, we see Trump trying to do the same thing. In your book, you wrote...

Well, your rules believe the autocrat and a lot of Trump followers don't. They say he's not going to really do what he says, although we've seen in the past that he does.

do not make compromises, be outraged. You said, we will have to do more than vote and more than campaign. We will have to abandon the idea of returning to an imaginary pre-Trump normalcy when American institutions functioned as they should, which actually brings me to the last question. You know, someone tweeted recently that, you know, it's a bad day when they're sharing poems. Yeah.

You end your book, Surviving Autocracy, with a famous poem by Langston Hughes. Oh, let America be America again. The land that never has been yet and yet must be. The land where every man is free. Why did you choose that? Because it's the most beautiful poem I know about. It's exactly the thing I was trying to put into words. Democracy is a dream.

An American democracy is a very specific kind of dream. We're never going to have a country in which everyone is free and everyone is equal and everyone participates in governance. But we could have a country that is becoming more like that every day rather than less like that every day, which is the condition that we've been in for a number of years now. Masha, thank you so much.

Thank you. Masha Gessen is an opinion columnist for The New York Times and the author of, among other books, Surviving Autocracy.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candice Wong, and Katerina Barton. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Kathy Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Onger. Turns out voting works.

It's real. As much as we thought they had it rigged, as much as we thought there were shenanigans and it's just a puppet show and there's no way anybody could buck the system, turns out voting is still real.