SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Today is different than before. That's the subhead of a new essay written by historian Garrett Graff. Graff has written bestselling books about key moments in U.S. history, everything from 9/11 to D-Day to Watergate. And earlier this month, he was on NPR's Weekend Edition talking about his oral history of the creation of the atomic bomb.
But we have asked him back to discuss his analysis that the United States has, quote, "now tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism." Garrett Graff joins me now to talk about it. Welcome to the show.
GARRETT GRAFF: Thanks for having me, Scott.
DETROW: You say that a line was clearly crossed in the past month. Walk me through how you came to that conclusion.
GRAFF: Yeah. I think Americans have sort of wrongly thought that there would be a light-switch moment where sort of everything before that is democracy and everything after that is authoritarianism. And I think what we have seen over the course of the month of August is the way that authoritarianism really will actually arrive, and I argue has arrived, in America, which is this ever-escalating federal takeover of Washington, D.C., the arrival of armed military units in the capital, the search of John Bolton's home as the president is weaponizing federal law enforcement to go after political opponents.
You know, we've seen the president go after our history with the Smithsonian, our arts with the Kennedy Center. Even sports heroes. You know, remember he was trying to pressure this month the Major League Baseball to go and induct Roger Clemens into the Hall of Fame. And I think, to me, this represents the arrival of something in American life that is fundamentally different than anything we have experienced before.
DETROW: I live in Washington, D.C. I've seen the National Guard around me. The other day, I saw masked federal agents questioning somebody within a block of my kids' school. I mean, to you, is what's happening in D.C. with the deployment and with these federal agents - and I'm going to point out yet again that they're often masked because that feels important to this conversation - is that the biggest warning sign?
GRAFF: I think it is, and it's the behavior that we're seeing from these federal agents, the idea that they are operating in masks, operating without normal law enforcement identification and credentials, operating with unmarked vehicles - things that we would recognize normally as abuses of civil rights and civil liberties.
And it's also, I think, something that you can see in the way that D.C. is reacting to it, which is you can tell that this is something that is being done to the city and not to aid the city because you have residents sort of refusing to go out. You know, restaurant reservations are down. Tourism is down. This is a statement from the people who are being policed.
DETROW: I want to talk about more specifics in a moment, but because you're talking about the public response in Washington, I want to talk about public response in general. This past Tuesday, President Trump said this in a cabinet meeting.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: So the line is that I'm a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, you know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator.
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: But I'm not a dictator. I just know how to stop crime.
DETROW: You know, there's a few things I want to ask you about here. One is that you go through all of the things that have happened over the last few months and a lot of the things that you're writing about. Just about every single one of these are things that President Trump promised to do on the campaign trail. And then Americans voted for him and he was voted into office.
And the other thing is that a lot of these individual moves that Trump is making, nobody's pushing back on it. Nobody's actively trying to stop him. And it doesn't seem like the general public is up in arms. I wonder what you make about all of that.
GRAFF: Yeah. I don't know that I buy the premise that no one is pushing back on it. You know, I think we've seen...
DETROW: Effectively?
GRAFF: ...A very - whether there's an effective pushback, I think, is a very different question.
DETROW: Fair. Fair.
GRAFF: And, you know, I would argue that the Democrats nationally have not been anywhere near as sharp in their response to this or as forceful in their response as they should be. And you are seeing some of that type of response from governors like Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker, where Trump is, again, threatening to follow suit with these military deployments to those states.
And I think this is one of those things. We wouldn't have trouble naming this if this was happening in another country. You know, if we were watching this reporting unfold where a president was pulling in red-state National Guard units and deploying them to punish or seize territory held by opposition political figures in separatist provinces, we would know how to talk about that and we would know what that represented.
DETROW: One of the reasons that your piece jumped out to me was the amount of specifics you got into. We already talked about the National Guard and what's happening in Washington, D.C. Can you pick one or two other moves that Trump has made within the past month that really jumped out to you and made you think, OK, I think this line has been crossed?
GRAFF: Yeah. To me, there's a whole other layer of this that's been taking place in our economy, where, you know, you are seeing the president basically become the sole arbiter of what companies get to have what set of rules. We've seen Apple's Tim Cook show up in the Oval Office and hand the president literal pieces of gold in order to curry favor for Apple. You know, the president has threatened Intel and then announced that the U.S. government is taking 10% of the company in order for Intel to be able to continue to do the work that it tries to do.
With Nvidia - that he has levied what many say is an unconstitutional export tax on Nvidia being allowed to sell chips to China - you know, this is just not the way that business is used to being done in the United States, where sort of the president gets to pick the winners and losers in the American economy and CEOs have to kowtow and curry favor with him personally in order to be able to sell their products effectively around the world.
DETROW: How are you thinking about the elections that are going to be a little more than a year from now?
GRAFF: Yeah. I have never been one who believes that Donald Trump was going to cancel the '26 midterms or cancel the '28 presidential election. You know, every country has elections, effectively. You know, Vladimir Putin is regularly reelected the president of Russia. Saddam Hussein was regularly reelected the head of Iraq.
What I think you're beginning to see, though, is the outlines of how the Trump administration hopes to hold on illegitimately to power in 2026 and beyond, where you can imagine the Texas redistricting as the sort of first step of this and the ways that they hope to subtly shape who shows up for those elections.
You know, imagine in the 2026 midterms, you have the National Guard holding, you know, major urban areas that tend to vote Democratic and that they are flooded with checkpoints on election day. Well, it's going to be a lot more intimidating for a lot of people to vote in person in 2026, and you don't have to discourage too many people away from voting in the midterms or the '28 presidential election to radically remake the electoral map in the United States.
DETROW: I want to get out ahead of some criticism of somebody who might be listening to this. You're somebody who's long been critical of President Trump on social media or elsewhere. And I'm sure there are people hearing this going, oh, more liberal alarmism. And I'm wondering what you would say to that response.
GRAFF: Well, I think my criticism is grounded in studies of American democracy and American institutions. As you mentioned, I wrote a book on Watergate. I carefully and closely studied how our country responded to a corrupt and criminal president in the Oval Office in the guise of Richard Nixon.
We are living through something that is fundamentally different than the experience that America had in 1972, 1973, 1974. And a big part of what I'm worried about now is that we are watching the collapse of the checks and balances in the Constitution by Congress and by the Supreme Court that were central to holding a president's abuse of office and abuse of power and abuse of civil liberties to account in that period in Watergate. Whereas today, we see Congress appearing to not really care about many of the abuses that we are seeing President Trump do. And we've seen the John Roberts Supreme Court grant him a blanket presidential criminal immunity that Richard Nixon could have only dreamed of in Watergate.
DETROW: That is Garrett Graff, a journalist and historian. Thank you so much for talking to us.
GRAFF: Thanks for having me, Scott.
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