Fukuyama: Well, I think that it has a much deeper significance than certainly a lot of Democrats were thinking. In 2016, he was elected to the surprise of everybody. And I think that many people, myself included, thought that this was kind of a fluke: that he had not won the popular vote and Hillary was a particularly bad candidate. And there were a lot of reasons that Democrats could give themselves for why that happened.
 
There was also an expectation that once he became a one-term president and Biden was elected that the world would kind of snap back to something like what it was before 2016. But now it's not just the fact that Trump succeeded in getting reelected. He didn't squeak his way in. He really won a pretty resounding victory. He defeated Kamala Harris in all of the swing states that were up for grabs. They got the Senate. They're very likely, as you said, to get the House as well. They already control the Supreme Court. So conservative power is consolidated in a way that makes the Biden administration look like the fluke, the last gasp of a dying order.  
 
It reminds me a little bit of the 1980 election. I wasn't a particular fan of Ronald Reagan, but he changed the tenor of the time in ways that I didn't expect at the moment of his election. Just to give you one example: I remember when I was a student, Adam Smith was not considered a serious writer and very few political theory people actually tried to study Adam Smith and read his books seriously. After Reagan was elected, all the academics actually got on board with that. It gave a legitimacy to a market economics that really had not existed when I was in college in the early seventies. Then, if you had said, “I want to go to business school,” most of my friends would look down on that person and say “you're just greedy” and so forth. And then after his election, it was okay to go to business school. And in fact people went to business school in droves.  
 
So I think that there's going to be a change in the tone of a lot of American society that will go deeper than just whatever policies Trump tries to enact. But this time around, I'm not quite sure what the leading ideas that guide this are, other than kind of resentment at the educated elites and this sort of thing. But that doesn't really define a positive set of ideas towards which we are moving. And so that's the kind of puzzle that I have right now.

Mounk: I'm wondering, Frank, about how we should reflect on this as political scientists. In 2016, one quite dominant interpretation of Trump's victory was that it was racial resentment which was driving it—that the voters for Trump really were whites who were resentful about the status that they had enjoyed in society and that was being undermined, and that this was kind of a last gasp. That was the last moment where they could arithmetically make their stand. And so Trump was an instantiation of a tyranny of a minority, and he could only really win by exploiting various ways in which non-white voters are supposedly excluded from the polls and so on. And all of this was comforting because it implied that this was a last-ditch attempt. But it is now clear that this is not just about white resentment, because Trump actually did very well among non-white voters, did very strongly in Florida—which has been a majority-minority state for a long time—and particularly expanded his share of the vote among Latinos. This doesn't feel like the last stand of a dying electorate, at all, since he actually has managed to diversify the Republican electorate in a broad way. And doesn't seem like the tyranny of a minority, because—though tyranny it may turn into—it would be the tyranny of the majority, since it looks like he's clearly on track, as we're recording this, to win the popular vote.
 
So, do political scientists have to really rethink the story of the last 10 years?
 
Fukuyama: Yeah, definitely. I really never believed the racial resentment story because it never really corresponded to my observation of what Trump was.  
 
In my book on liberalism, I said that liberalism was damaged by two distortions: one was neoliberalism—this worship of markets, Milton Friedman, and the belief that everything is just a matter of efficiency. And the other distortion is what you might call “woke liberalism,” which is basically identity politics. Both of those things, I think, played an important role in the Trump victory—the repudiation of both of those forms of liberalism. And in a strange way, the fact that Trump got so many black and Hispanic voters on his side was a return to class, or it was a case where class was trumping identity politics, because the people that voted for him were basically working-class blacks and working-class Hispanics, and not educated ones. So the assumption that a lot of people on the left made that minority groups would be attracted to identity politics has been pretty decisively refuted.  
 
The one aspect that is still out there has to do with gender. And that was quite interesting in this election because a lot of the support in those racial and ethnic minority groups was coming from men. They didn't mind that much the anti-immigrant rhetoric. The racial part I think was not that important. I think the gender part was very prominent. In my humble opinion, there's been this massive social change that hasn't really been talked about sufficiently; as a result of the transition to an information economy, you've had this massive move of hundreds of millions of women into the labor force over the last 40 years, which has completely changed the dynamics within families. Especially with working-class families, there are a lot of families that are supported primarily by the wife's income or the girlfriend's income. And that's led to this real sense of anxiety.
 
Kamala Harris spent all of her time trying to mobilize women around abortion—I would say that that's an issue that most and especially young men really don't care about. And I think that may have played some role in stoking this kind of resentment. So in a way, I think gender has become more important than race as one of the things that divides the country and around which polarization occurs. But I completely agree with you that this old interpretation about the centrality of race is just not right.

Mounk: Let's get to the heart of the matter. How dangerous is Donald Trump going to be for America's democratic institutions over the course of the last four years? How should we think about assessing the extent of that danger?
 
Fukuyama: Well, I think the primary threat is to the rule of law. He's been very clear in the last few months and weeks that he's really out for revenge. He wants to take revenge on all the people that he believes have been prosecuting him and or persecuting him. And I think that this is where Schedule F really matters because, in his first term, he couldn't get his own Justice Department to go after Hillary Clinton, even though he wanted them to. But he understands that that was a weakness of his first term. And I think he's going to put people in key positions in the Justice Department that will enable them to open up investigations.
 
Let me just give you one concrete example. The head of the IRS is subject to what they call “for cause dismissal,” meaning that he's got to commit some crime or some really overt offense before you can fire him. Schedule F is going to get rid of that. There are hundreds of these “for cause” positions throughout the government. So if Trump can fire the head of the IRS, and put a loyalist in there, then you could open up a tax audit against a journalist or head of an NGO or the NGO itself, that will be incredibly harassing and will tie the organization or the individual up in all sorts of legal fees. So, you're not talking about a Putin-style putting everybody in a gulag, but you are giving the executive incredible power against individuals and against organizations. And I think that that'll be kind of one of the primary lines of attack.
 
The whole discussion about fascism I thought was a little bit misplaced because that conjures up pictures of concentration camps and then a sort of action on a scale that I don't think we're going to ever see. In terms of replicating Viktor Orbán's behavior in Hungary over the past 15 years, however, I think that's extremely predictable, actually. And I think that that's what the Trump administration is going to look like: this kind of steady, slow erosion of one check and balance against executive power after another. And he’s also angrier in a way that he wasn't in 2016.
 
Mounk: You made the comparison to Orbán. And I think that in terms of how to understand Donald Trump, that's absolutely right. I think we both agree that we should think of him, roughly speaking, as an authoritarian populist who's comparable to people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, or Narendra Modi in India, rather than to try and compare him to past historical figures under the label of fascism.  
 
Now, it is much easier to capture power in a small country with unified political power than a large country with a deeply federally distributed political power. It's much easier to do so in a relatively small economy in which most businesses and media enterprises are reliant on government spending or funding, and so on, than it is in a large, wealthy country in which enterprises are more independent, and in which media companies like The New York Times have millions of subscribers that allow them to work somewhat independently of financial pressures put upon them by the federal government.
 
Yes, the stress test applied by Trump to these institutions is going to be much harder than it was in 2016. But aren't American institutions also likely to be more resilient than those of Hungary, for example? And if that's the case, and if we have, as I put in a recent article, a very strong force meeting a kind of immovable object, how is this going to play out?
 
Fukuyama: I think you do have to look at specific institutional rules. For example, I think that the strongest institution was actually the judiciary in Trump's first term. And the reason for that is that we have lifetime appointments of judges. And it's very difficult to change the federal judiciary. He did it in some cases, with retirements and deaths and so forth. But that's something that you can't do. Whereas I think in some countries you basically could retire the entire court within a year. They did that in El Salvador, for example. Bukele got rid of all of the judges in one fell swoop. And it would be much harder to get away with something like that in the United States. That's why I think most of the judiciary didn't go along with the election denialism back in the 2020 election. So, yeah, I think you're right that things are stronger.

Mounk: What should those who are worried about Donald Trump do in the next year? I have to say that I am a little bit concerned that Democrats will basically rerun the script of 2016 to 2020— that they will bring out the “#resistance” again, and cast not just Donald Trump as a dangerous politician, but also all of his supporters as terrible people. And that they will fail to introspect about the reasons that they have not been able to build a much broader electoral coalition.
 
All of that might suffice for a few years. For the reasons you outlined earlier, Trump might very well overstep and perhaps that's enough for Democrats to win back the House in 2026, perhaps even to win back the Senate, which might prove more difficult. But it's not clear to me that that will be at all enough to put a lasting end to the Trump era which dawned yesterday.
 
Fukuyama: Part of it is what Kamala Harris should have done during her brief campaign, and it actually should have started under Biden. The two big issues really that drove people away from the Democratic Party were the border and identity politics. And especially with identity politics, that's something that didn't have to cost any money—having a Sister Souljah moment where you say definitely “I'm not in favor of gender transitions of a twelve-year-old” and make the case about why that's wrong and dangerous and then actually admit that it was a big mistake for Biden not to have tightened control over the border. (Having done it at the last minute meant that nobody believed that he was serious about that.) Just say openly “yeah, that was a mistake and we're not going to make that mistake again if we come back into power.” So that would be at least a start.
 
Mounk: I have a simpler and cleaner Sister Souljah moment that I suggested Kamala Harris take at the time and that I still regret she didn't. When her candidacy was very quickly elevated, it became clear within 24 hours that she would in fact be the Democratic Party nominee without a real primary process. And all of her supporters started organizing, following the instincts and the practices in their political professional milieu, by race and gender—culminating in the call for White Dudes for Kamala. It was a little bit more self-ironic and a little bit less grating than I imagined it to be, but what a wonderful opportunity this would have been for Kamala Harris to go out and say, “I'm so excited. There's so much support for me. Thank you, everybody who's organizing. But I really would rather that my followers do not organize themselves by race and gender. Let's have calls where everybody does this together.” What a nice way—without alienating anybody in particular, without calling anybody out in a hostile way—to demonstrate “this is not the kind of candidate I want to be.”
 
Fukuyama: I agree completely. And like I said, border enforcement actually is a serious policy that takes investment and so forth. But this kind of break with foolish identity politics is really costless. It's just making a statement.
 
And it's too bad that she didn't do that because it really has driven a lot of the opposition. One thing that's pretty clear is that Trump's favorability ratings still are pretty low and they were below Harris's just as an individual. And so I think a lot of the vote for Trump was actually a vote against the Democrats and the fact that they hadn't made these kinds of decisive breaks against things that people don't like about the Democratic Party.
 
One other thing that I think could be done is an area that I've been focusing on a lot in the last few years, which is building things. One of the things that the left in the United States is famous for is believing that you get legitimacy by adding procedures and regulations that get in the way of actually accomplishing anything. It takes us almost 10 years to get the permitting done for transmission lines to get alternative electricity from Texas and Oklahoma to California. And if you want to solve the housing crisis, especially here in California, you just have got to cut through all of the ridiculous red tape that exists before you can do anything, the way Josh Shapiro did in Pennsylvania when he rebuilt I-95 after it had had that big accident a year or so ago. If a Democrat stood up and said “we have way too many environmental regulations, we really need to cut through all this nonsense and really get things done and go back to building things again,” I think that would also be a very positive message, but it was a route not taken in this campaign.

Elon Musk devrait logiquement intégrer la prochaine l'administration républicaine. Pendant la campagne, Donald Trump a déjà annoncé qu'il chargera son ami d'un audit du gouvernement en vue de réformes profondes. On ne sait pas encore quel poste il occupera à la Maison Blanche, ministériel ou plutôt conseiller spécial.

Despite their concerns, some farm operators still support the former president and prefer his overall economic plan.

GLOBAL BOMBSHELL:
 
President Trump Planning To Launch Federal Task Force That Will Target The Giant Human Trafficking Networks Controlled By The Democrat/UN System