We speak with the acclaimed Russian American writer M. Gessen, who says Donald Trump has entered his second term prepared to enact his radical Project 2025 agenda, including a crackdown on LGBTQ rights and dissent. Gessen, who has spent decades writing about authoritarianism at home and abroad, argues that while he was something of an “accidental president” in his first term, “Trump has been transformed by power” and is now increasingly “imperialist” and “totalitarian.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
As the Trump administration continues to hold Mahmoud Khalil in ICE detention for organizing against Israel’s war on Gaza, we turn now to take a broader look at the Trump administration’s efforts to chill speech and silence critics.
Our next guest has spent decades writing about authoritarianism at home and abroad. We last spoke to the Russian American writer M. Gessen in December of 2023. At the time, they were in Germany to receive the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize, but the initial ceremony was postponed after some of the award’s sponsors withdrew support over Gessen’s comparison, in an article, of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. Gessen later won a George Polk Award for that article. “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” it was called. M. Gessen is the author of numerous books, including Surviving Autocracy. They’re also a columnist for The New York Times.
M., welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us.
M. GESSEN: Thank you, Amy. It’s good to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Back in November, you predicted Trump, quote, “will likely begin by getting rid of experts, regulators and other civil servants he sees as superfluous, eliminating jobs that he thinks simply should not exist.” You also write in that piece, “A major target outside of government will be universities. … Civil society groups — especially those that serve or advocate for immigrants, formerly incarcerated people, LGBTQ+ people, women and vulnerable groups — will be attacked.” Start off by talking about how you saw all this coming, and then the response.
M. GESSEN: So, a couple of things. One was I listened to what Trump was saying, and it was very clear that — well, you know, he kept going on about trans people, about DEI and about universities. And these were the novelties. His attacks on government as it was constituted before his second term actually date back to his first term. He made it very clear that he doesn’t think that government should be constituted in the way it has been. He didn’t have the number of people and the expertise and just sort of a sense of how things worked sufficient in his first term to carry out his agenda, but it was made very clear in Project 2025 and, even if you didn’t read Project 2025, in Trump’s speeches, if you listened. So, that was one way to understand what was going to happen.
Another way was, sort of one of my great intellectual inspirations and sources is the Hungarian political scientist, sociologist named Bálint Magyar, who has over the last 15 years written a lot about ascending autocracies, about mafia states, about what happened in Hungary and, more broadly, what has happened in Europe. And he talked very convincingly to me, for that article, about getting rid of societies — getting rid of institutions of deliberation, institutions where our obligations to one another are worked out. And I think that that’s a really interesting and illuminating prism to look at this through. It’s the way that Elon Musk summed it up in one of his tweets, that empathy is the bane of Western civilization. And really, they do think that. And they see these expressions of empathy, expressions of mutual obligation, of mutual interdependence in our institutions. And that’s what they’re going after. So I think it’s very important to understand that their going after things like Medicaid or Social Security is not an externality. It’s not an unintended effect. It’s very much what they want to destroy.
AMY GOODMAN: You also write about his second term being different from the first, saying, “During his first term, you could really tell that he felt like an accidental president. This time, he seems to feel genuinely chosen. There is a new messianic quality to his behavior. He is not just making deals so he can accumulate wealth while he is president, as he did during his first term. It seems to me that he is now planning to rule for a long time — forever, in his imagination? — and he wants to wield genuine power in the world.” Going to, I mean, just yesterday, meeting with the head of NATO in the Oval Office and talking about, once again, he’s going to take Greenland. There’s a bill in the Congress now, by the way, to rename it “Red, White and Blue Land.” And if people think that’s just funny and ludicrous, think of AP being banned from the press pool at the White House because they refuse to just say “Gulf of America,” because he renamed the Gulf of Mexico. If you can talk about the significance of all of this? He says he’s, yes, reaffirmed he’s going to take Greenland, has now told the Pentagon to prepare to take Panama, and talks about, once again, getting rid of the Palestinians in Gaza and rebuilding it for the world’s people, he said.
M. GESSEN: And don’t forget Canada, the 51st state, which really — you know, I was listening the other day to a bunch of interviews from Canada that The Daily was broadcasting, and I was thinking, “This sounds so much like the way we used to talk about Russia and Ukraine” — by “we,” I mean Russians and Ukrainians — “before the invasion.” And, you know, there are all these tropes like “We’re so close, we’re practically one people. So many Canadians live — or, so many Ukrainians lived in Russia. So many Canadians live in the United States. The border has been porous. We couldn’t possibly exist without each other.” And at the same time, you know, “We’re so close, you practically don’t exist as a country.” And it’s, at once, unbelievable and completely real and extremely dangerous.
We can’t know whether he’s going to go after Greenland or Gaza or Canada or Panama Canal first, because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do first. But I think that we have to believe that he’s deadly serious. He’s deadly serious about this new imperialist identity for the United States — I mean, not exactly new, but sort of rediscovered. We haven’t seen an explicitly expansionist political leader in generations in this country. But it’s certainly a thing that exists, and it is particularly a thing that exists among leaders who want to be totalitarian leaders. Imperialism and totalitarianism really go hand in hand. That’s axiomatic. And that, I think, is what we’re watching.
And I think another thing that — you know, we often make this mistake both about political leaders and about ordinary people: We don’t notice how much they change. And I think it is important to look at how Trump has been transformed by power, by winning two elections, by winning this last election quite convincingly. Yes, he exaggerates how he won it, but I think that — the margin by which he won it, but I think that the sense that — and particularly surviving the assassination attempts — the sense that he is chosen, that he has a mission, that this is something that makes him — sets him completely apart, not just from other people in the United States, but from any other president, any other political leader in the world, these are really important things to look at and to understand that this is a very different phenomenon than we saw during his first term.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to ask you about the Democratic response, which you’ve also written about. For example, right now you have the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announcing he’s voting for a Republican measure to keep the government funded, splitting from many Democratic senators and congressmembers. Now, you write, “Trump understands politics as the interplay of power and ideology. His opponents see politics as procedure. The contrast has never been starker.” And you write, “and never has the Democrats’ technocratic, legalistic approach been more detrimental to the cause of democracy.” Talk about the span of response, everything from, you know, that golden escalator — which was repurposed yesterday, as Jewish Voice for Peace, a hundred people got arrested, and they went up and down the escalator, and they decried what’s happening with Mahmoud Khalil, with immigrants, with trans people, etc. — to Schumer.
M. GESSEN: Right. Well, so, I think that we’re seeing a real failure on the part of organized politics on the part of the Democrats. And on the part of the Democrats, the response has really ranged from selective expressions of outrage — if you can call it that — like, certainly, Congressman Al Green shaking his cane during Trump’s address to Congress. But the rest of the Democrats were sitting there with paddles. With paddles! Right? Which is such — I think they probably thought they were being incredibly principled and sending a strong message. But it looked like —
AMY GOODMAN: And just to be clear, when you say “paddles” —
M. GESSEN: — we’re going to stay —
AMY GOODMAN: — you mean these little signs that said things like “lies,” and they would put them up and down.
M. GESSEN: Right, quietly, in an orderly fashion, without risking being removed from the chamber, without — you know, I mean, they could have just sat it out, if they wanted to make a strong statement. But the sort of raging takeover, raging “nothing will be politics as usual” on the right, and this kind of quiet “we’re going to stay within the bounds of procedure” response on the left, or what we call the left within Congress, that contrast is so dispiriting to me.
And within the Democratic Party, the response has really ranged from “we pick our battles” to James Carville’s article in The New York Times in which he argued for playing dead — literally for playing dead — for a year, thinking that Republicans are just going to destroy themselves. And that, I think, is such a huge mistake. And it’s probably a mistake that’s systemic, that it’s a heuristic that is really letting the Democratic Party down. And the heuristic is that they believe that there are going to be midterms. They believe that there’s going to be an election in four years, that they don’t have to defend those basic assumptions, that these things are just going to happen. But we can’t take anything for granted anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: M. Gessen, I wanted to ask you about the House subcommittee hearing that abruptly ended Tuesday after the Texas Republican Representative Keith Self intentionally misgendered the new Democratic Representative Sarah McBride, the first transgender person to be elected to Congress, by introducing her as “mister.” As Chairman McBride delivered remarks, the Democratic Congressmember Bill Keating interrupted, demanding Self to reintroduce McBride. This was the exchange.
REP. KEITH SELF: I now recognize the representative from Delaware, Mr. McBride.
REP. SARAH McBRIDE: Thank you, Madam Chair. Ranking member Keating, also wonderful —
REP. BILL KEATING: Mr. Chairman —
REP. SARAH McBRIDE: I’m sorry.
REP. BILL KEATING: — could you repeat your introduction again, please?
REP. KEITH SELF: Yes. It’s a — it’s a — we have set the standard on the floor of the House, and I’m simply —
REP. BILL KEATING: What is that standard, Mr. Chairman? Would you repeat what you just said when you introduced a duly elected representative from the United States of America, please?
REP. KEITH SELF: I will. The representative from Delaware, Mr. McBride.
REP. BILL KEATING: Mr. Chairman, you are out of order. Mr. Chairman, have you no decency?
AMY GOODMAN: That was Congressmember Keating: “Have you no decency?” What hasn’t been commented on as much is, after Mr. Self introduced McBride as “mister,” McBride responded, “Thank you, Madam Chair.” But, M. Gessen, if you can respond to this overall attack on not just trans people, but the overall LGBTQ community, including the national federal website honoring Stonewall removing the “T” from ”LGBT,” despite the fact that it was trans women who led the protest that really gave birth to the modern-day LGBTQ movement in this country?
M. GESSEN: Well, first of all, this isn’t the first time that this has happened to Representative McBride. She has been the target of systematic, explicit, humiliating, aggressive attacks since she began her term earlier this year. And the fact that we just are watching this as a country and accepting it — not that the sort of television- or whatever-watching public has much power to stop it, but just being subjected to this spectacle of public humiliation over and over again is something that is so destructive to, I think, everybody’s psyche.
And I have a piece actually coming out in the Times this weekend talking about this attack on trans people. And it’s not an attack on trans rights; it’s an attack on trans people, of whom I am one. And I think it’s most useful to think of it in the Arendtian framework of denationalization. She argued that before people could be herded to concentration camps and death camps by Nazis, they had to be denationalized, pushed out of the national community, stripped of their, what she called, their right to have rights. Right? We think that we have these rights guaranteed to us because we’re born. But, in fact, we have rights because we’re part of a national community, because courts will enforce these rights, because communities will enforce these rights.
And when they are taken away — and they’re taken away through a series of both legal and public rhetorical moves — what happens is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has dropped cases of anti-trans discrimination, even though there’s a Supreme Court decision from 2020 that makes it very clear that trans people are protected by discrimination because they’re covered by the clause “on the basis of sex.” And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is basically refusing to enforce the law of the land, because trans people have been placed outside the law.
Trans people have been receiving — whoever needs to renew their passport have been receiving passports with the birth sex indicated on them instead of the gender marker that they’ve been living with. And I want to make very clear what that is. It’s not just an insult when you get this passport in the mail or pick it up from the passport agency. It’s a real obstacle to moving through the world, both sort of on a daily basis — opening bank accounts, applying for loans, applying for financial aids. If you have discordant documents, those are very hard things to do. If you have documents that you’re traveling with, whether inside the country or outside the country, that don’t match your gender presentation — you know, I was once detained in Russia by an officer who thought that I was a teenage boy — I mean, this was obviously years ago — a teenage boy who was using his mother’s driver’s license, because my driver’s license had a woman’s name and gender marker on it. This takes away trans people’s right to freedom of movement, one of the fundamental rights of humans, we think. But they’re very easy to take away.
So, that’s what we are watching. We’re watching the denationalization of a very small, vulnerable minority group. We’ve seen in this country already the denationalization of noncitizens. Right? Noncitizens are not members of the political community. Noncitizens don’t have the same civil and legal rights as citizens. And now trans people are being put in the same category.
AMY GOODMAN: McBride, by the way, actually had a really interesting reply to her accession to the bathroom rule, that the true act of civil disobedience was to occupy the congressional seat, not a toilet seat, and that she wouldn’t take the bait, and that she seemed to be living rent-free in the minds of many Republicans. I wanted to —
M. GESSEN: She’s brilliant and incredibly brave, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to switch gears for a moment. You mentioned Russia and your growing up there, and I wanted you to quickly let people know why you left and what happened. But I also wanted you to respond to Moscow saying, the latest news now, that Presidents Trump and Putin will discuss on the phone a possible 30-day ceasefire in Russia’s war on Ukraine, following Russian talks with the U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff. Putin signaled he’s open to a truce proposal, but listed a series of conditions and concerns around ending the war. Ukrainian President Zelensky accused Putin of “manipulation,” explaining, “Putin often does this — he does not say ‘no’ directly, but he does it in such a way that … only delays and makes normal decisions impossible.” As we begin to wrap up, your response to what’s happening right now around Ukraine?
M. GESSEN: Well, what’s happening right now around Ukraine has been very painful to watch, because, basically, Putin has made his ambition very clear for many years. His ambition is to restore a kind of Yalta world order, one in which the United States and Russia divide the world, carve it up. They have spheres of influence, spheres of domination. He doesn’t necessarily want to restore Russian domination over Eastern Europe, but he wants to — over the exact same part of Eastern and Central Europe as the Soviet Union dominated, but he definitely wants to divide up the world with Trump, with absolute lack of regard for the will of any of the people who live in those European countries, including but not limited to Ukraine.
Now, the only hope we have here — and this is a very slim hope — is that, yes, indeed, he is clearly stalling. He clearly wants to bite off a lot more of Ukraine than Trump thought, going into these negotiations, was going to be possible. I watched the inauguration of Donald Trump from Odesa with an Odesa defense analyst whose own apartment was destroyed by a Russian drone a few months ago. And she said that her greatest hope was that Putin would be so incalcitrant, that Trump would eventually grow frustrated and start helping Ukraine again. I don’t think that’s a very likely outcome, but it’s also a very desperate kind of hope to think that Trump’s propensity for acting vengefully is your country’s best hope for survival.
AMY GOODMAN: M. Gessen, I want to thank you so much for being with us, opinion columnist for The New York Times. We’ll link your articles. M. Gessen won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. They’re the author of 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy.
Coming up, we speak to a former federal judge about President Trump’s escalating attacks on judges who rule against him. Back in 30 seconds.
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