Our Long Road Out of Autocracy

It's everywhere right now, the celebration of America is 250th and we're in the thick of it this month.

“Christian Nationalists are using this milestone not to unite, but to divide.”

They're pushing the lie that America was founded to be a "Christian Nation," or just one religious movement gets to decide who fully belongs. Instead of the truth that America was founded as a democracy committed to liberty and justice for all. The idea that America was founded as a "Christian Nation" is propaganda, not patriotism. It's a dangerous lie meant to justify censorship, discrimination, attacks on public schools,

assaults on LGBTQ+ rights, restrictions on reproductive freedom, and government favoritism, toward one extremist version of Christianity.

Americans united for separation of church and state is here to fight back against this dangerous

and agree to dismiss representation of our founding documents. A.U. fights daily for everyone's ability to live as themselves and to believe as they choose,

“so long as they don't harm others. It's a novel idea and the day and age when almost”

every day we're seeing Christian nationalism weaponize a faith to attack individual freedoms across our country. So do something patriotic this summer as you're dodging the propaganda flying at you from all angles. They come a member of Americans united. By supporting A.U. you're committing to standing up and protecting church-state separation in every area of life. You can learn more about how you can support A.U. and the protection of everyone's rights

at AU.org/crucket. Let's keep you guys distance by fleece forward. It's no joke, but when I argue, man argues against your beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the ladies work. She's small, not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity, she said, "I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet

or for my next." Hello and welcome back to strict scrutiny. Your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. I am your loan regular host today, Kate Shaw, and I'm delighted to be joined by a returning guest and friend of the show, Kim Lane Shepley. The Lawrence S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton

and one of the world's leading scholars of democratic backsliding, autocracy, and the rule of law. Kim, welcome back to strict scrutiny. Great to be here. So for those of you who don't know, Kim, let me just say a few words about her before we dive in. Her research examines the rise and fall of constitutional government, and she is recently focused on the rise of autocratic leaders who are elected on these populist political platforms and who then use the law to undermine

constitutional institutions and democracy. Her comparative scholarship and commentary is both broad and deep, and her work on Hungary has been particularly instructive in recent years, and we are going to get to that. But Kim, as you know, we typically begin our shows with breaking

“legal news. So I think if it's okay, we will start there and then turn to our deep dive on”

what's going on in Hungary right now and what we hear in the United States can learn from it. Great. Wonderful. Okay, so let's dive in. It has only been a week since Leah and Melissa and I sat down to take stock of the Supreme Court term that just ended. So before we turn to this last week's news, Kim, I haven't had a chance to really get your take on the term, right? So whether that's the opinion, narrowly invalidating Trump's birthright citizenship executive order that came down

in the last day, or its decisions handing him new power over independent agency heads with the big exception of the Fed. So those are just the term in general. Before we turn to breaking news, kind of what are your big takeaways from Scotus as a court watcher with a very particular perspective?

Well, first of all, thanks for having me on and thanks for starting there because in my background,

I worked for four years at the Hungarian Constitutional Court. And I worked for one year at the Russian Constitutional Court. These are both courts that got captured by the autocratic leaders that came in and decided that rule of law was a tool that they could use against their opponents. So I know a lot about captured courts. And by conclusion at the end of this term, is that the U.S. is living with a captured court. Now, why do I say that? I mean, a captured

courts, you know, sort of let clocks can be right twice a day. I mean, captured courts don't just rubber stamp what an executive does. Because the captured courts have to maintain the fiction that they're still courts that they're still independent, they're still doing law somehow. So what I've learned from looking at other courts elsewhere is that captured courts tend to rule against their

cold assac wants to change his mind, but doesn't actually want to appear to reverse what he did.

So the court will then declare unlawful whatever it is the autocratic did. The court will look independent. The autocrat will say great. I really wanted to do that. I will certainly honor the rule of law. I will follow the decision and everybody thinks things are normal. Think to National Guard case, right? How was Trump going to get the National Guard out of Los Angeles in Chicago without the court telling him he had to pull them back? And you'll notice that actually he was

eager to comply, right? So classic case, pack court getting the executive out of a cold assac. While saving face. While not appearing publicly to make an about face of any sort. Exactly. And they had to reach to find the arguments and, you know, Marty Leaderman, as I know, you've

covered on the pod, you know, gave them a very good out. And I don't think Marty's in advocate

of a pack court by any means, but the fact that they chose that case to stand up to him is an example of this, you know, leader in a cold assac means help kind of scenario. There's another kind of scenario, which is where the court starts to come under persistent criticism for being not independent, not doing law. So they have to appear to do law. So what they'll do is do law in a context in which the president has other ways to do the thing that the court is forbidding him from doing.

Think tariffs. Okay. Now with tariffs, what I was doing, thinking maybe this is what's going on. I was watching the countries that Trump was ranting against was a very specific set of countries. I mean China and Britain, the Canada, the UK. And there are other other authorities under which Trump can issue tariffs. And what he was doing in that long period between the oral argument of the decision, I mean, you know, the court can also just wait till June and give everybody a

heart attack by issuing decisions. It once liked they did this year. But you know, but that was

“a long time in a case that looked easy from the oral argument. So I think what the court was doing”

was waiting until Trump transferred a lot of those tariff authorities to other laws. So that by the time they struck down his, you know, tariff, tariff of the world, including Penguins act, right? He had already transferred the tariff, he cared about. And it was a little bit of a call to sack and we were like, how is he going to present the tariff on their own penguins, right? There were a lot of tariffs. You probably didn't care about. So again, it was and then Trump railed against them

to make it look like this is, I mean, I think he was genuinely angry because I don't think he knows the details of his own tariff regime, right? But the ones that he had single out had already been transferred to other legal authorities by the time that came down, right? And again, the court looked just deeply independent to many courtwashers. And so, you know, it still gets to do most if not all of the tariffing that he was doing under the prior regime. So win-win, okay? And then there's just

a third case. It's just really quickly what the pack courts do. And that is that, you know,

courts are supposed to uphold individual rights. And occasionally, you get a case where the

“individual rights at stake are so crucial that they've generated a huge amount of, you know,”

sort of public attention. And that for the court to back down in that kind of a context is something that would be deeply embarrassing to the court and expose the court is not doing law. Let's say, okay, think birthright citizenship. Okay, now what was interesting to me about the birthright citizenship case and what I saw in my cases in Russia and in Hungary on human rights issues was that very often when the court would rule against the executive on a matter that

involved human rights, they would do so while also sort of indicating in a scape root, you know, here's how it is that you can do what you want if you just do it in a different way. And this is where I take the Kavanaugh statutory argument to be not closing the door, right, but opening the door. And Trump has immediately, of course, jumped through that door and immediately said he's going to do something. So again, the court was getting a lot of credit, although I must say that

by now, so many people are aware of the way the court is just defending Trump's indefensible policies overturning precedent, not reasoning through, you know, two sort of logical legal answers. For example, I mean, how would you grade this stuff on a law school exam not well? You know, so by that time, by the time they got to the birthright

“citizenship, I think a lot of the legal commentariat was saying, look, this isn't the kind of”

when he expected. This isn't really just, you know, standing up for the 14th amendment. This is opening the door to something else. So those kinds of three cases, you know, but called a sack, you can do it another way and we have to appear to be doing the law, but we're going to try to give you an out. Our all signs of a packed court and in all the other

with a packed court. Yeah, and the one other case that comes to mind, of course, is his loss in the Fed case, but, you know, arguably, that's a category two case, because they don't say,

“you can't fire her just that you didn't afford sufficient process here. So I think that's potentially”

in that category, or maybe it's in the coldest category, maybe Trump did realize that actually being granted this plenary authority to remove governors or chairs of the Fed would be wildly

destabilizing and actually he didn't want to. He just wanted to kind of flex first. So it could

be either, I think, one of the first two. But I think those are really illuminating categories, and I'm going to, like, bottle this explanation. And the next time I think we witnessed somebody plotting the court for its kind of display of independence this term, I think I'm going to force them to, or at least try to force them to live this explanation because it's incredibly convincing. This episode of Strix Newtonese sponsored by Better Help. We talk about mental health more openly

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I for one I'm excited to spend a little time talking about things other than the Supreme Court, at least in this conversation and to a degree this summer while the court is not hearing cases. Next term is already shaping up to be a huge one so it's going to be a short reprieve there, hearing not only whatever litigation might crop up around the midterms and Trump's efforts to metal with them but we already have a lot of big cases on environmental protection and

religious freedom and whether individuals have a right to own an error 15, like not kidding, but we have a couple of months before we actually have to grapple with those cases. So let's talk

first about just a little bit of breaking news that we got in the last week and I just mentioned

the midterm elections. So one I think very concerning development from last week is that

which is kind of a low profile federal agency but it does some quite important work. So there were

three remaining commissioners after one resigned earlier this year, maybe it was last year, a two Democrats in a Republican. It sounds from the reporting as though he fired the two Democratic commissioners and allowed the Republican to resign but either way the upshot is that this 25-year-old agency is now without any commissioners at its head and in terms of what the agency does, it provides states with pretty important assistance in administering elections.

States stay in the driver's seat, that's the way the Constitution assigns authority for election administration and the statute that creates the EAC and gives it these powers doesn't change that, but it does give the federal government a role in distributing federal funds to help elections and maintaining the national mail voter registration system and helping test and

“certify state election systems. So this I think mass firing seems like one an important test”

of slaughter, the federal trade commission case. One of the big cases from last term where Trump is given the power to fire heads of independent agencies like the federal trade commission. It's not to my mind clear from slaughter that Trump even has the authority to fire the heads of this agency because it's an agency that's pretty different and relevant respects from the FTC. It's not clear. It does law execution of the sort of federal trade commission does,

but it also feels like a pretty obvious play to remove to defang an agency that might have done something to stand in the way of efforts to manipulate elections. So I guess Kim any reaction to this development, it also any sort of insight you can provide on how this fits with moves of other aspiring autocrats or authoritarians when it comes to seizing the infrastructure of elections to the extent that they can. Yeah, so this is worrisome for all the reasons that you say,

“I think it's also important to try to think about are we living in an autocracy or not”

to realize that the whole is often more than the sum of the parts. So this is really crucial,

but you combine this with his executive orders trying to federalize elections with the threats that have come out from the justice department to states that are refusing to turn over their voter rolls to what he's doing with the post office board that's going to refuse to deliver mail ballots to people who are not on these lists to the threats to withhold homeland security funding right to states that don't cooperate on and on and on and on plus gerrymandering and everything else, right?

Basically what they're doing is an assault on every single piece of our election machinery that can be controlled from Washington, right? And as you say, this is, I mean, what our greatest protection is is a massively decentralized system. But you know, if you think about what it would take to tip elections, you know, going after blue cities and red states where you've got red state election administrators that have already jumped in on sharing information and so on,

maybe enough to swing congressional districts along with the jerrymandering. So, you know, they're going to, they're launching a full-scale assault on the election system already and the firing of the members of the election advisory committee, which again is one of those things, I mean, who Edwin was scrambling this thing, what does this thing do? And there's a great explainer, by the way, on just security talking about how they're still a staff, they can still

issue grants that can still do stuff. And what I'm worried about is that the next challenge, right, is, is it lawful to regulate a civil service? You know, that's going to be the next test. So, I suspect that we're also going to start seeing firing down into agencies of people who are civil service protected. So, again, there's the election tampering part of this. But then there's also the getting rid of the civil service part of this, you know, and the extension of slaughter

to cover everything within the president's purview, and they're just pushing the edges waiting for the case. Right. And there are other cases kind of coming down the pike. There's a case pending before the federal circuit called Jack Lerr, about firings of two immigration judges who are

“members of the civil service. But I think it's definitely right. This is an important post slaughter”

test case with huge implications, potentially, for election administration. But also to my mind, suggest that they're going to be maximalist in their reading of slaughter and certainly test whether it's logic extends to the president's authority to summarily fire everyone of the two

million people in the federal civil service. I think they think the logic of slaughter supports them

in an effort to do that. I think they're very strong arguments against it. But I do think that it's a critically important next frontier. So, next piece of news I wanted to flag is that we had a development in the ongoing saga of the reflecting pool, aka metaphor for this administration writ large. As listeners will likely recall, this multi-million dollar renovation has gone seriously a lie, algae, blooming like daffodils, large swaths of blue paint peeling off. And the

administration has, as ever, sought to deflect responsibility and shift blame for this disaster.

Yeah, well, so first of all, I love these green hats that are come out with make-out

algae great again. Yeah, and there's the algae VTQ month and all kinds of things. So, I mean, anyway, so there's just no end of what you can do with the reflecting pool. So, you know what they've done now is to charge this guy who's an Olympic canoeist, actually. Whether pretty serious felony of destruction, a federal property for having reached his hand into the pool, and perhaps touched the peeling paint on the side of the reflecting pool,

who knew that was a crime, okay? So, what we've done is they've now tried to ramp up this narrative that it's not that Trump just hired his crony to do, to try to turn the reflecting pool into a swimming pool. By the way, I have a swimming pool. I've known what's happened when you try to repaint the bottom of it. It's like really not an easy task, right? Anyway, the point is that they just treated it like a swimming pool. It's not a swimming pool. It doesn't have the

filtration system of a swimming pool. And now they're trying to cover up the fact that Trump had no idea what he was doing and hired a crony and drove the beast and a whole entourage across the reflecting pool as I understand it, right? I mean, they drove on it. Anyway, it's some guy reaching in and touching the thing is really not where the action is, but it's where they want to divert

the story to. And I want to say again, like each of these things is always bigger than it looks.

“It's why it's important to talk about, which is that Trump is in the process of reconstructing”

Washington, D.C. He's doing the reflecting pool. He's doing the east wing. He's going to try to put up this triumph for arch. He's trying to do this golf course. He's, you know, you just look at it and they've also covered the North Portico of the White House with tart, like who knows what they're going to do. And our suspicion is that they're going to take those, you know, rather simple columns that hold up the North Portico and turn them into, you know, those kind of great columns

that you only use, you know, to kind of show off. So, I mean, anyway, he's remaking things. And what this is saying is that if you touch any of that, you are liable for the destruction of that

or property, right? So it's a much bigger thing. These are meant to be changing the narrative

and also chilling effects on the limits of criticism and the limits of protest around the way he's defacing Washington, D.C. Yeah, no, thank you for that sort of broader contextualization. I think it's so important. And this hern this former Olympic canoeer, as you said, is charged with a serious felony, willfully and violently damaging federal property. He is represented by our friend Norm Eisen and hern says that he was out biking. He stopped at the pool. He touched a piece of

floating liner that was already detached. And the next thing he knew he was under arrest. So I do think that, obviously, this is a high stakes sort of scenario for him personally, but in terms of what the administration is trying to do, right? It is trying to send a message that like, you shall not mock, right? You shall not challenge. You shall not question, right? The leaders, yeah, kind of physical reconfiguring of Washington, D.C. Our nation's capital that does belong to all of

“us that he is unilaterally trying to remake in his image. And so it does feel, I think this is why”

the kind of pool saga has really struck such a note. It feels like it's about a lot more than one decorative reflecting pool. And on that note, something else that was a one-off, but also feels really significant. And so even though it's a story that people may have kind of lost track of, I want to sort of mention because I do think it's part of this whole is greater than the some of its parts narrative. And that is the recent development with Wisconsin State Judge,

I'm not sure if it's Doug and/or Doug and we'll say, Judge Doug and people may remember was charged with allegedly helping an undocumented Mexican national evade ice when leaving her courtroom in Milwaukee. She was then charged with and convicted of obstructing federal agents and then sent in last week. The sentence was just to $5,000, not just to. That's a significant sum, but there was no jail time and it was just a fine. And so I guess that is a good result in that there was, you know,

“I think almost up to two years of a potential federal sentence on the table. DOJ had just pointed”

to the sentence in guidelines range, but actually not as I understand it advocated for a specific sentence, but seems unhappy with this fine only sentence. So clearly did want some time. And I just, it seemed the entire episode feels so chilling to me in particular in light of the judges, you know, now defendants, former judge, I guess she's not a judge at this point statement, that kind of referenced her conduct in the context of her obligation to her duty as a judge

and to the sanctity of court houses. And to the extent she did do what the indictment alleged,

Yeah, so, you know, in some of the other legal systems that I work in, there's an option in criminal trials to find somebody guilty, but not dangerous. And then not impose any sentence, like yes, you've strictly violated the law, but really we're not going to make a big deal out of it.

“I think the biggest deal and the judge dug in cases here again, chilling effects. A lot of what”

the Trump administration is doing is singly out, particularly individuals, for doing things that are minor. And in fact, under the evidence it was really highly contested, whether she was helping this particular person to escape ice. The person went through a back hallway into the public hallway and right past the ice agent. So either that was a bungalow attempt to get them to fully or it

was just not what they charge. The crucial thing is that she's off the bench.

Right. And so what this says is that they can they can swoop in and bring these charges for what does not look like intentional or harmful conduct and get any judge off the bench at a moment's notice. Right. So that's the part that worries me. How many judges are now thinking twice about every time the handles a case involving somebody who may be undocumented and also with courthouse rules. What you see is a lot of states now coming out with rules about ice not being permitted on state

property, for example. And this was a state court as I recall. So you know, so we're going to have a federalism battle here over whether the states can protect their own state institutions as sites of federal enforcement. I know when New Jersey, there've now been almost a dozen laws passed that restrict where ice can operate and all this kind of stuff. And I'm just waiting for

“the lawsuits that challenge states abilities to push back. So those are, I think, some of the”

bigger considerations here, but intimidation of the judiciary is something they're doing on many fronts. This is one of many. Indeed. Okay. So another development in the judiciary that involves I think an effort to kind of delay, but maybe not intimidate judges. And that is the one involving Eugen Carroll, who may finally maybe getting some of the money that she was awarded in her lawsuit

against Donald Trump. I mean, never underestimate his ability to delay, but it does seem like

he may be out of or almost out of options. In that, people may recall that the Supreme Court denied his last ditch attempt to get the court to grant cert in his petition challenging the award of $5 million dollars. That denial led to an order by the District Judge before whom this trial unfolded. Judge Kaplan basically ordering this money in escrow be paid to Eugen Carroll. Trump has gone to the second circuit already to challenge that order. He said he's going to ask

scotists to reconsider the denial of search. But it seems like even if he does all of those things at most within a couple of weeks, this money should actually be transferred to Eugen Carroll. Although, again, remember, is the other lawsuit and award that she still hasn't seen. I don't

“think a dollar from. So that all remains to be, you know, kind of finally resolved and I think there's”

a certain petition pending out of that second case as well. Finally, one thing I wanted to flag

before we moved on, there was another killing by ice last week. This time of Lorenzo Salgado Arajo, a Mexican national who's been in the United States for decades, as has become horrifyingly familiar at this point. Agents claim that he, he was definitely in a car and the claim is that he, you know, steered toward them or went to hit them with his car, the companions in the car with him, vehemently deny that account. But I did open fire. Shoot him any died shortly thereafter. So

I am sure that more facts will emerge about that Houston incident over the course of the next few weeks. We're going to take a quick break. But first, we believe the answer to right-wing authoritarianism and all of the studios who uphold it is a massive pro-democracy movement. And we want you to be part of it. So we are hosting a strict scrutiny live in Washington, D.C. on November 6th, that is one day before the all-day Crocodcon event on November 7th. Crocodcon will take place just

after the midterm elections, so there is going to be a lot to discuss. Like wondering aloud, why God has cursed us with both Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas at the same time? Join us for all the jurist nonsense you can handle to kids for strict scrutiny live and all day Crocodcon are available at Crocodcon.com. Strix Heronies brought to you by Remi. Guess what folks? I went to the dentist and she told me that

the back mullers look like maybe I was a little tense at night and I was grinding my teeth in my sleep. Kel's surprise actually not really a surprise at all who wouldn't be tense and grinding

I'm not going to let this court get in my way and I'm not going to let them grind down my mullers.

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Your menopause specialized doctor will tailor your skin care to your needs. Plus, you get zero dollar unlimited messaging with your doctor. Just head over to MYALOY.com and use code strict to get $20 off your first order. Let's now turn chem to hungry. I already gave you a general introduction but I'm going to just briefly now give you hungry specific introduction, which is to say for our listeners that

“Kim's research on hungry has been just totally essential to understanding how Victor Orban,”

who was the Prime Minister from 1998 to 2002 and then again from 2010 to 2026, really transformed what was a robust democracy inside Europe into an entrenched autocratic system and her work is now playing a central role in understanding this new political chapter that Hungary isn't barking on because in the spring of 2026, despite facing this incredibly unequal playing field with mass media entirely arrayed against the challenger

own party named Peter Majar and his brand new party, one over 70% of parliamentary seats that's

knocking Orban and his feet as party out of power and pulling off an electoral upset that many experts thought was just utterly impossible. So this is obviously a time of real turmoil in the United States and so I'm super grateful to have you here to shed some light on kind of what is going on in Hungary, what the consolidation that Orban was able to affect looks like and then how this new government is trying to go about rebuilding democratic institutions and the rule of law.

Okay sorry that was a long wind up. Let's start just by contextualizing what Majar was going up against in the 2026 election. Can you talk about what he was facing and how he was able to overcome

“all of it to walk away with his really resounding victory? Yeah I think that Peter Majar has a”

lot of lessons that we can learn here in the United States. The election system in Hungary was just totally rigged. Victor Orban had been getting less than half the vote and two thirds of the seats in the parliament for more than a decade and the secret to that rigging was that votes in the countryside counted two to three times as much as votes in the cities. Because what you saw in Hungary is the pattern we see almost everywhere which is that you know the liberal elites are concentrated

in cities, the voters who upholds the sort of populist autocratic leaders are in the countryside and so and you know in prior elections in Hungary the unified opposition mostly campaigned in cities and the system was so rigged against them that even if they got a substantial vote they couldn't win majorities in parliament. I mean people were estimating before this election that the opposition could win a bear majority only if they got 55% or more of the vote and that Orban could

“get two thirds of the seats if he got 45% of the vote. Okay so that's how rigged the whole system was.”

So Peter Maudiard jumped out of Orban's party I mean no one had heard of him before February 2024 you know so a little over two years ago he jumped out of Orban's party because there's a pedophilia scandal not involving him not involving Orban but involving the pardon of a guy who had run a state school where a lot of the staff had been involved in a pedophilia ring. Okay so this pardon generated a scandal the Justice Minister was forced to resign the President was forced

to resign the Justice Minister was that we're going through a contentious divorce at the time with a guy called Peter Maudiard. Okay so he jumped out of the woodwork to defend his wife's honor as they're going through this whole messy divorce by saying to Orban like how dare you hide behind women's skirts I mean you can't make up this drama right but the point was he was not somebody who was on the political radar screen before that moment and then you know all the

women listen up like would you trust a guy who did this he had taped his wife's conversations over dinner in which he exposed the corruption of the Orban government which was apparent in which he knew about and which we don't know the extent to which he participated but she talked about it so he comes out and says how dare you know he hide behind women's skirts to Orban and then he says and I've got the tapes okay so he goes on like by this time all the media are captured there are

no TV stations no radio stations so that the opposition can even get their people on to for interviews Peter Maudiard goes on to this YouTube channel that the opposition had set up which

turned out to be crucial and gives this to our interview exposing the tapes exposing the

corruption for inside Orban's government and gets this huge following now I can go on and on with this level of detail but let me just say the reason for mentioning this is that you know sometimes people just pop onto the scene who aren't the expected folks and this guy came out of Orban's

“machine so he understood how it worked which was also I think crucial to his success he also came out”

not with a left program or a right program or the usual kind of political program but first he was against corruption and then as crowd started to gather and as people wanted to hear more from him he started to say and you know the current government is massively corrupt lots of evidence of that and that's the reason why your hospitals are decrepit the public transportation doesn't work the school system's falling apart they're stealing all the money so it's not going for these things

that kind of appeal he stayed with through the entire campaign so is that a left-wing program

or a right-mean program right really hard to say so people you know always say to me oh well he's just

hot button issues of the right so he said virtually nothing about immigration for example he also

“avoided hot button issues of the left so he said nothing about LGBTQ issues which were really on the”

table since Orban banned the pride parade and 500,000 people showed up here before not including Peter Majer so he just avoided all that and kept talking about their corrupts so you're not getting anything and the reason why is that you've lost your voice book for me I will be that voice okay so that's the campaign he then spends two years going out to every single little village I mean they're more than 700 settlements I mean hungry is the size of Indiana okay imagine if you can figure out

if there are 700 municipalities that he went to all of them somehow sometimes you know with no budget he would go in no security often driving a little pickup truck he'd get on the back of it start singing national songs get people in the countryside to recite those poems with him that everyone had learned in grade school and then you would do this pitch about corruption and the breakdown of public services and there's a map which shows you by little dots like all the places where

he actually showed up in person and overwhelmingly all those places voted for him and so he broke the stranglehold that Orban had on the countryside because the whole system relied on that and it had this trick in it that if you want enough of the votes on the countryside you'd get bonus seats okay so in the last election and Victor Orban had Jerry Mandarin all the districts there are 166 districts in the last election Orban 185 of the 166 this time Peter Maudier 196 of the 166

which is to say he mostly won by flipping parts of the country that have voted for Orban for 30 years so so the lessons here are you need somebody who understands how the system works if you're run a campaign that's hard to classify as left or right but that focuses on corruption and what it's done to your life you know and then you figure out how the system is rigged and you run your campaign

to play into the rigging rather than you know because you got to win that first election so

anyway so Peter Maudier one with two thirds of the seats in the parliament in a system where the constitution can be amended by a single two thirds vote of the unicameral parliament so here we are off to the races okay yeah and I do want to talk more about sort of what he has done what in what is on the near term horizon but a great set of lessons there one that's focusing on corruption but connecting it to the material conditions of people's existence not some abstract

moral message about anti-corruption but a tangible one that connects it to people's lived experiences and then that interesting combination you described of first using mass media so I gather you know

at my understanding is that Orban had basically captured much of mass media but using one of the

pockets that is not captured right the ability to go via YouTube directly to the people and then I presume continuing to speak directly to the people wherever possible on mass but going at this very retail level to meet people where they are in particular in the countryside although that last piece is a little hard to imagine scaling in a country as big as hours but you know a lot

“of it does seem potentially like you know it holds important lessons for some successful anti-Trump”

anti-maga movement here but maybe I just I want to ask a question and this kind of comes from this terrific piece you want to think in your sub-stack things that our solid can melt into air that covers a lot of what we're talking about today you talk a bit about why Orban was able to consolidate and hold power as fully and for as long as he did and so I want to sort of

describe the argument there and ask you to talk a little bit about it so you basically say

the Orban government was able to be as successful at consolidation as it was by achieving four main goals by having a tolerably functioning state having a steadily growing economy, a credible moral message and the projection of invincibility and you say in the run up to 2026 where Majer topples him all four of those pillars start to crumble so the crumbling is one thing the communicating to people about the reasons for the crumbling as I think you were starting

to get into maybe something different but can you talk a little bit about how Majer capitalized

“on all of that in his opposition campaign and then maybe if you want to connect are those how”

we fit all to those pillars project on what Majer has been able successfully to do in so far as it's been able to well they were you know they had a one-term and power and obviously Trump was able to then successfully return to power so or are those pillars kind of distinct the Hungarian

Trump has capitalized on these same pillars so tolerably functioning state I mean the U.S. mostly

“had a functioning state before doge took a chainsaw to pieces of it right but he inherited a functioning”

state so this was sort of not the problem you also inherited a booming economy you know thanks to the prior regime but also the world was on its way up to and you know he had a moral message part of it was drained the swamp although he seems to have created a swamp I mean the other thing about the reflecting pool is that there's the swamp but anyway I mean so there was this kind of anti-corruption message that Trump was actually using and also the state is too big and it's too

much in your life and you know I can say to you and I have your vindication and so forth so he had

all of that and what's been interesting to me about Trump because you know Orban had all those things

too when the reason why Orban lost them was because of the corruption the state stopped functioning

“because of the corruption the economy was challenged in part because and I have to admit my”

conflict of interest here because I've been working on hungry for a long time after my court was captured in Hungary and it was clear the legal system wasn't going to help us. I in a group of my friends under a project called Reconnect tried to lay the groundwork for the EU to cut the money they were giving to Hungary. It was in some years 6% of Hungarian GDP and a lot of the corruption and Orban's government came from the fact that the EU was you know generating this fire hose

of money which Orban then diverted to his crony said all of us knew that's where the corruption was we had to convince the EU to stop and they stopped the money in December of 2022 this was a 10 year project by some of us to get them to do it and sure enough they stopped the money to hungry and Poland actually which also had an autocratic government wasn't as entrenched as Orban's but was still on that track Poland switches governments at the next election

and now Hungary switched governments at the next election so it's the economy stupid you know still kind of matters and so what we're seeing now of course in the US is that between the tariffs and Iran and the oil prices and whatever Trump seems to be doing exactly the things that are going to link the economy you know and I don't understand whether he doesn't get it or whether he thinks that rigging the election is going to mean it doesn't matter because Orban also rigged the election

being worried that all this stuff I mean Orban started rigging the election in 2013 but even so he rigged it even more for this last couple of rounds so you know I'm just the all of that stuff started falling apart under Orban and I'm wondering if we're seeing this and the moral message doesn't I mean if Trump was campaigning against corruption he doesn't really look like he's doing that anymore

“right so so the same pillars I think are also weakening here so it's not just a savvy campaigner”

you know but I do want to say just one thing about media because you know Orban really controls 80 percent of the media and hungry by one estimate and the opposition really had no traction in any TV any radio any of the major print media they have a few online news portals and so on what was

crucial was Facebook areas are on Facebook okay and the EU again this was another campaign a

lot of us were trying to engage in at EU level the EU had banned political advertising on Facebook and Orban had done a huge amount of political advertising on Facebook and suddenly he was caught off guard because that was one of his major tools so what happened is that the opposition was great at using Facebook if I can just give you one example the there was this great anti-corruption crusader in the parliament this independent member of parliament aquashad hazy who is I guess we

would say a large animal veteran area right dealing with like not with cats and dogs but cows and horses and so on he orban's father was building of sort of their satellite palace outside of Budapest and everyone knows its orban's money it's nominally his father's money anyway hazy rinsed drone flies the drone over this complex and discovers that there are 10 zebra inside this thing and of course you know hungry natives you know zebra's are not native to hungry

it's this you know and and everyone probably in hungry would recall that when victory on a COVID the Russian backed president of Ukraine fled they discovered his own private zoo with all these autocanomals as kind of a symbol of the corruption of Ukraine well what happened this is the Facebook

zebra's right so like the zebra's were everywhere people would then show up at Maudier Valley's were zebra costumes but were they put little zebra insignia on things and it just became

“the mimified symbol of all that's wrong with her that's corruption right so that's how to use social”

media right because it you can I mean here's this thing that actually happens and there's this better in air in news then files an animal cruelty complaint with the authorities saying I want to go check the zebra then on the lounge to check the zebra so he drags out the story for a long time about the zebra right but but but the youthful followers of Peter Maudier are mimifying the zebra's and they mean the fight a lot of stuff so everything had a great

comes team like every time there was an attack there was an instant response on Facebook so you

know social media are not always an enemy of democracy you know sometimes they can be like the

only thing that provides an opening for the opposition if the government has counter-controlled you know most of the media to defend what the government is doing so interesting you know 15 years ago or so it did seem as though social media was actually an an hugely important tool of kind of building democracy and democratic resilience and then in recent years that has seemed much more like an enemy but that's really an important I guess counter to kind of now congealed a conventional wisdom

which is that you know the tech oligarchs have been changing the rules to stifle democratic movements

“but actually the kind of anti-political advertising move which I think was very controversial when”

Facebook adopted it actually has it did end up really ignoring to the benefit of the Hungarian opposition that's such an interesting point and I had not heard the zebra story so that all feels really encouraging and exciting so you have a combination of internal collapse somewhat as a result of this external EU spigot being turned off maybe we are doing the collapsing internally ourselves without any such spigot being required in the United States and then the kind of multi-platform

mobilization that obviously is ultimately successful so now I think let's shift to the kinds of

challenges that a new leader like my genre my genre in particular face after sending to power following these you know autocratic or aspiring autocratic regimes so you emphasize including in your things that are solid can melt into air peace that post election euphoria fades quickly

“especially when a new administration as in Hungary inherits broken infrastructure and budget”

deficits and you know there's an entrenched opposition so how are my jar and his team approaching this project of democratic repair from rebuilding agencies to restoring expertise to replacing fear with professional norms and getting basic services to work again so like how are they doing that and then I want to turn to some potential lessons for us from all of that yeah so we're only a couple months in to the new government most of the people of that Peter Mario brought into his

government have never been in government before he did build a cabinet of experts so for example

the new foreign minister has a PhD in law and diplomacy from Tufts and she left her job as vice president for communications at vote of phone London in order to take this job so she's had experience in the international business sector the guy who's now the health minister actually if anyone seen anything about the election both on election night and then on the inauguration night the guy who became the health minister did it was dancing it's a incredible dance oh that guy yes that's

I mean we all saw it just take it all the doubt like two days ago for one of like the coolest people in the world you know it got it back out a lot of headlines in Hungary he was like 37 seven fun list of 39 cool people anyway but I mean that guy I mean he's an orthopedic surgeon who spent ten years working at the National Health Service in the UK having pioneered some orthopedic surgical techniques that they used there so you know real expert and I could go through a lot of the rest of the cabinet but it's

people who know the portfolios well that they're working on and they've all been given license to just fix your sector so move fast and fix things is sort of the inverse of move fast and fix things I like it I like it let's use that slogan yes great so his cabinet is doing that kind of stuff the bigger problem is what do you do with all the entrenched autocrats because there are roadblocks so the president of the country you last to sign all laws and constitutional amendments

is a fetus holdover and he signed everything were about to put before him he's been involved in some of the worst of the worst abuses of the urban government we slowly stamping them because he was president of the constitutional court before he was president of the country you can just give this laundry list of stuff that he approved suddenly he's coming out and saying we need checks

he's there Peter Maudier once to fire him has put a law before the parliament that would result in the president being fired did it with the constitutional court so they have a court it just handles

constitutional questions so it's part of our Supreme Court docket but very powerful and they have

a role in everything and it's totally packed after 16 years of urban 15 of the judges were pointed without any serious inter party discussion so and that's the other roadblock so according to this new law that Peter Maudier put on a table the president would just be fired and the judges of the constitutional court five of the judges would be fired because they instituted a new retirement age of 70 which was the old retirement age that were of unlifted in part to put these people

into place and now what's happening and this is really something I didn't expect human rights watch and we don't know yet about the Venice Commission but other human rights groups human rights

groups are saying you can't just fire people like that they have due process rights and I'm thinking

really I mean so and the Venice Commission which is this a consultant of body in Europe that looks at weather governments are meeting European standards did the same kind of thing when Poland and Ukraine tried to undo the corruption and the autocratic capture in their systems so we're running into this conflict between the human rights advocates who say the people who are in those jobs deserve due process and you can't violate the rule of law by breaking the law and firing them

I mean think about the contrast with that and slaughter for example right the good news is that in the US with slaughter if we can get a president and who is interested in actually restoring expertise and bipartisan participation and multi-board panels and stuff like that a new president can do it no trouble maybe that's good right so in in Hungary what they're confining is this wall of

“opposition now and I think Peter Moder is going to go through and fire them and make them sue”

but it's not a very elegant solution the problem is there aren't very many elegant solutions just

to say one last thing the what Orban did was to so the president could have been impeached by the parliament they changed the law last December to make that impossible the people who are on the Constitutional Court the current president who's turned by the way last until 2037 was just installed last year as the result of an ad hominim law that allowed him to go straight from heading the public prosecution into the court when that move had been barred by lobby for so one of the other

ideas is to go through an unravel all the ad hominim ad personum you know laws that were that were constructed in order to put specific orban loyalists into these jobs the other thing is to reduce the length of terms of these offices but at the end order for it to be effective it has to apply to the current occupants and then we get into a situation like we're talking about with the Supreme Court here circling back to packed court right as a theme if you've got institutions

that are packed how do you unpack them what's going to happen is that there will be challenges like the ones we're seeing in Hungary you can't fire the judges because they have life tenure you

“can't limit their terms because they weren't limited before you have to if you're thinking about”

putting term limits on I forget what the estimates are I think you'll remember more than I bet it would take what 20 years before you had a meaningful rotation with the current on the 24 or something yeah something like that right so when you have these transitions you need a immediate change yeah and and just to say one last thing I mean I think our court's been packed you know since since Trump won at least since he got three seats on the court and what that

happened and you've covered this on the pot in great detail when you have a packed court and when you have these institutions and then you get an election that flips things these are called in the political science literature you turns right so you were democracy you go down into an autocratic capture then you try to make a you turn back up into democracy there is not a single case in the political science literature of any country that's made a successful you turn that

“lasted longer than five years going back I think 50 years now okay why is that it's this problem”

that if you've got autocratic capture of institutions those institutions veto what the new government does so the new government doesn't look effective they lose support and because these

they veto of Biden's initiatives all the things that would have made Biden look instantly

“effective they let slide everything that had long-term consequences but if you just think about it”

this way and just student loans as like the first example that comes to mind but there were things

Biden was trying to do to achieve immediate results yeah that's where the court swept in and said no you can't do it so when Biden was going to be up for reelection or when Harris replaced him the argument was what did they do with four years and that was largely the fault of the packed court okay that's happening in Poland where the pack constitutional tribunal and the president as a veto player have prevented the new pro-democratic government from achieving the change

that they promised Peter Maudier knows those cases right and and so he's come in hit the ground running and he's just going to try to fire all the veto players and now you've got human

rights groups human rights groups I just anyway don't get me started on this way I had a conversation

with the leader of one of them yesterday and I said look you know what about democracy he said that's somebody else's lane we just do human yes unless you fire or really get rid of the road blocks left over from autocratic capture what you get is the reelection of Trump the reelection of peace the reelection of both scenarios and in Brazil we can talk about that one so they're all on that track to have one good election and then go back to the old system because these autocratic

institutions are captured right and if you're not sufficiently ambitious in the project of undoing what was done and it's going to be a flip sort of a fleeting you know reversion to the pre-autocratic norm and then and not actually fundamentally affect enough change that it's going to alter the trajectory that the society's on wow nothing more than five years in terms of recovery in a half century is a really really stark statistic. Strix Newton he's brought to you by three day

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“i think you're anticipating some of what i'm gonna ask you about the u_s_ and uh”

hypothetical post Trump world but a couple more hungry questions that what you were just saying

which you said but you know was largely captured under or bond and he had a circumvent in order to get to the people at all when he was seeking to build this opposition and then since we're talking about judges there's been this judicial reform movement called operation purifying fire

“that is distinct i think from this effort to remove some of the judges on the constitutional”

court so can you talk both about operation purifying fire and the media just to say a bit more about you know to pull a little bit more on some of the threads that you were just identifying yeah so the media peace has gone even faster than operation purifying fire so

the first thing is that they have a public broadcaster most European countries have a public broadcaster

when you get the state you get the public broadcaster okay and orbun had packed the public broadcasting system with his loyalist they have been broadcasting fake news for 16 years okay Peter Mordier came in and the first thing that was very interesting was that there were a couple hundred employees of the public broadcaster who wrote this petition to Peter Mordier that said were sick of producing propaganda we would love to produce real news they were trying to keep

“their jobs okay but they're also willing to switch sides um and they invited Peter Mordier on”

for an interview with the chief news you know reader and the evening kind of the name the Walter Kronkite of Hungary then anybody remembers Walter Kronkite that will date me but you know some major news presenter and Peter Mordier gets on the television and he says to her he said you have been nothing but a factory of lies and I am going to make sure this stops he says this to her and the first

opening interview because he'd never been interviewed on the primary news channel through the entire

campaign okay so that was public broadcasting what they've done with public broadcasting is they just shut it down about four days ago this statement appeared on people's television screens I have a million pictures of all my friends sending me the picture of this appearing on the screen and what it said I'm not getting a course was this has been a network of lies we are going to remake it so from now on it will bring you only certified facts stay tuned okay and this kind of

stays on the screen and then they start broadcasting all these old communist era films that hadn't been broadcast for a long time because they were critical criticisms of the communist regime and once you broadcast them in the context of Warbane it's clear that it extends also to them so they've been doing this like anyway this kind of film festival would create Hungarian films what they're doing is they're redoing the whole system announced a new editor chief they brought

on board real journalists I mean people who have been stringers for the international press people who really have backgrounds so they're going to remake public television okay that's part one part too there's a commercial station tv2 which is really the one that most people watch the day after the election it's run by a private company the private company fired the news director in the entire new step and has not had any news since okay they were also a propaganda channel and

finally Warbane had set up this thing called a media council which was a public agency

headed by for the last 10 years this guy under a school guy and what they did was they had the mandate to ensure that broadcast and print and linear and online media were broadcasting news that was they even borrowed the Fox News slogan translated into Hungarian free and fair and so what this agency would do is go in and find news outlets that were not producing Warbane friendly news and in some cases shutting them down I mean media precarious financially everywhere you add these crippling

fines and the media would be staggering under debt and then Warbane's oligarchs would swoop in

“and buy them so the media council was crucial to a lot of the media takeover and and Coltay was”

being called by people in the merger orbit but also in the traditional opposition the chief sensor they just passed a law last week dissolving the media council fire in Coltay and setting up a new sort of broadcast authority whose members will be appointed by journalists so yeah operation purifying fire so that's the one to get rid of what one do you call Warbane's puppets so it's the job to get rid of the president the constitutional court president of the Supreme Court

president of competition authority procurement authority there's a whole list of the audit office and so on and so they've started this process now of trying to get rid of them they're using a lot of Warbane's tactics and reverse so Warbane got rid of a lot of people by suddenly instituting a new retirement age they've just done that they've also got rid of a lot of people by dissolving agencies and creating new ones in their place that's what just happened

worry here because he has this constitutional majority if he does this there are no checks on this

“power okay I do believe in checks and balances but you can't the checks can't be the checks left over”

from the autocrat okay so there are a couple things that are hopeful here one is that one of the first

the first constitutional amendments that Peter Maudier pushed through was an amendment that limits the lifetime term of office of any prime minister to eight years Warbane's already had 20 right so he's disqualified but Peter Maudier said he would also abide by the amendment so that limits his power okay that's good part of Operation Purifying Fire also says that members of Parliament are limited to three terms or 12 years in the Parliament and then they have to step down

trying to push rotation of power this is also controversial because it gets rid of Warbane's people but it also gets rid of the traditional opposition parties that backed Maudier

and his people who are all brand new have a longer run at it so that's controversial but they're

just they're trying all kinds of things to get rid of the autocratic placeholders and you know what I really wish the international human rights organizations and the international monitoring bodies would do is to come in and say when you're making these changes in order to restore democratic checks and balances it's different than when you do it to entrench autocracy by sticking your people into those positions and so far I must say we're running into a wall of

formalists right to say nobody can fire a judge ever and it's like really yeah well I remind you of something that Leah said on a recent podcast which is that you know at least in our system motive matters in constitutional law so if you're trying to change the rules in order to entrench an autocrat in power that is just fundamentally different from trying to change the rules to restore democracy and we don't have to pretend in this hyper-formalistic way that those

two are the same and as also reminded while you were talking of something that your colleague Yan Werner and the former Hungarian judge Andres Shio have talked about this kind of militant

“democracy or militant rule of law sometimes you need to use fairly aggressive tactics that”

don't fly and shouldn't in normal times in order to restore democracy and the rule of law and I take you to be making the point throughout this conversation that these kind of retreats to formalism are fundamentally self-defeating in extraordinary times like this one and that's true in Hungary and it's true for ever in a post-Trump moment here so maybe let's turn to that what would a post-Trump moment look like and what should individual seeking to rebuild and restore prioritize so I guess what

would you say is the first one or two or three kinds of reforms that need to be undertaken

quickly before the old regime has a chance to regroup if say we are in 2020 nine in a post-Trump presidency they could be a single term and then there's a return of maga in some form or there could be long-term restoration of real broad-based multiracial participatory democracy in the United States like what would that kind of top three say priorities look like to you

“yeah so I think the first thing is doing something about the Supreme Court okay”

because it has been packed the entire years come yeah lots of things you can do I must say that the the the proposal that's mostly floated which is let's just go up to 13 you know let's just pack it it's too easy to do that in reverse or a couple ways to do that differently um one was some a trick actually that orevine and air to one used when they pack their courts we can use them to unpack ours which is um if you increase the jurisdiction of the Supreme

Court so that it has to hear more cases take away its discretion to make it hear more cases and then say because there are more cases we need more judges that would be one way to do it the other way to do it is a proposal that I've heard that I really like right which is Constitution says there shall be one Supreme Court okay we've got that it says it has this jurisdiction limit the Supreme Court to original jurisdiction create a separate court underneath it

which is the general we call it the general court the federal court which handles all the other business at the Supreme Court with no appeal sirter otherwise to the Supreme Court because Congress has the power to make other courts this is consistent with what the Constitution says the Supreme Court should do and we just make another court I like that one and then you can figure out how not to just pack that court right it it can't just be that if you get a democratic atric of you know

all of the relevant you know the presidency in both houses that they just take it over right you've got to actually make it literally a check on the power of that triumvirate you know that's hard

slaughter is awful and slaughter is a gift right which is to say a new president come in and fire

all the holdovers that's the problem Peter Bonder is having we won't have that problem because slaughter will give the president the power to fire those folks now the question is how to then entrench expertise and bipartisanship and other kinds of checks on the executive agencies and you know here's where I mean constitutional amendments are impossible I think there may be ways for Congress if we could get Congress to move on something to actually entrench at least we can

start with some things about expertise and civil service and so on so but I think slaughter is actually

“a gift to whoever's going to come next but important gift and the third thing is that I think”

we've got to make our system somewhat more we have lots of choke points and so on but I think we also have to think about federalism we can do that now right the blue states are kind of a refuge from some of the stuff that the federal government is doing the blue state agencies have been probably the most active single you know group of litigators they've played on the on the landscape so far a federal law I think we need to bolster state law I think we have to increase the

powers of states and try to cut back some of the doctrines that have allowed the federal government to override states the reason why is that if we get an autocratic comeback this is the this is the bowl right and that's going to be hard for a government that will want to centralize things but I

think we also have to boost the powers of states you know who knew I never thought I'd be a state's

right person when I started in this field but I looking at this the thing that saves you from autocracy is complexity right you need more choke points that have to be captured before an autocratic gets it all and with our one captured supreme court and with our paralyzed congress I'm afraid that's made us incredibly vulnerable yeah okay so that's a great sort of agenda for the first say a hundred days are there specific things that you can identify that are particularly dangerous

mistakes that opposed autocratic democratic government might make in say that same first one hundred days I have some sense of what you might say based on the conversation we just had but I'm

“curious what you'd identify yeah so I think that you need an election victory like the one”

Peter module had which is to say overwhelmingly big one the problem in places like Poland and actually in the U.S. and Brazil these are close cases right and it's very hard to do big reform with close cases close elections so what you need is a big tent and you need that big tent to provide the checks and balances if you can capture the hatric right of the presidency and both houses of congress and that by that I mean after the election the big tent becomes a set of factions

that have to be satisfied so that if you're going to set up a new court it's not just you know one particular it's not just the homeless Republicans or the social Democrats are like whomever but they have to figure out among themselves a way of trying to develop and build checks into a system it's hard to make that transition from big tent we're in this together to win an election to now we're going to govern and we have to be mindful of the fact that we can't grab

“all the power that we have so that's the pivot that's hard and that's what the modular government's”

going through right now and I I'm not sure they have the pivot exactly right you know there's always

a danger that an autocratic force can replace an autocratic force right the things set up to just go into the driver seat and drive drive that truck to the road you know especially if it's someone who comes from inside the party that captured things as in the case of Hungary so you know there you need immediate checks that may not be institutional but may need to be public may need to be civil society as government is being remade so you need checks and balances all the way through the system

right but just maybe not the ones that we have become that we've been accustomed to thinking about they can take different forms so exactly yeah kind of like a standard imagination in terms of what that what those checks might look like I think that's a great point okay before that you go I just actually wanted to ask one specific question we have referenced Poland a couple of times and there's this really interesting new initiative called justice in motion that is based on

something that a bunch of Polish judges did so justice in motion is a US advocacy organization backed effort that I think a few of the organizations democracy rising collaborative keep our Republican Ohioans for the rule of law put together for this last week and this was modeled after something that Polish judges did in 2020 and 2021 when Poland's ruling parties started dismantling

towns and villages to talk to the people about why preserving and independent judiciary and the rule of law was the foundation of a free society so these groups in the US are trying to do something similar with this bipartisan group of sitting and former so not just former but also sitting judges and lawyers and civic leaders so I'm just curious if this is something that's on your radar that is the an example of the kind of creative civic engagement and the kind of direct to the

people effort that sounds a lot like what much our did in building his campaign in Hungary and what you make of efforts like this. Yeah so I love this idea and you know it was very effective when it was carried out in Poland I might say that one of the ways that the Polish case was a little different though was that the Polish judges who had been incredibly beleaguered called in their colleagues from all over Europe so when they did these marches of the judges you know all in their robes it was not

just Polish judges but judges who came from the Netherlands and from Germany and from France and it was thousands of them you know now I'm not sure that the US listens much to judges in other countries so I guess that wouldn't really wouldn't happen here but still this idea that you get judges I mean because judges are not politicians and people need to see that judges are not politicians and that the

rule of law is not the same thing as democracy although crucial to it right and so the judges are

the best ones really to explain that and of course many judges are talking to the public all the time they talk to juries they talk to litigants they're trying to explain the law to non-loirs

“like your podcast right and I mean this is something that we all need to start doing and I think”

that this seeing judges and robes out of the courtroom you know rule of law doesn't just happen in one place it's just such a great idea that is I think a wonderful place to end maybe before we go can I ask you to stick around and recommend a couple of either pieces to read we've you know veered off into music movies etc recently I was just going to recommend a book and an article so maybe I'll go first yeah and the first is Matt Schwartz at the New York Times had a kind of eye

popping profile of now third circuit judge Emil Bovey last week in the times that opens with his anecdote about Bovey still having his like screen saver on his cell phone a picture of Trump which is not something that judges typically do so you know I definitely recommend that profile to people and the other is a book I'm reading right now we've talked now about the civil service a couple of times in this conversation the book is a memoir it's called The Mailman by Stephen Starring Grant

and it's just about life as a rural male carrier only for a brief period um this author had a different career before that and then COVID hit needed to find a job with health insurance and took up delivering mail in uh rural apolacha where he's from and it's just a pretty incredible

account of life inside this crucial part of the federal government that is both visible because we

actually do know our mail carriers a lot of the time but also invisible and that there's so much about the way the post office works that I just didn't know even though I've actually you know

“read about it a good amount uh and it's a fascinating memoir that I'm really enjoying and I think”

kind of is a sort of quiet reminder of the nobility and importance of public service and so highly recommend that over to you Kim oh that's great yeah well it's summer so you know a lot of summer reading so why I'm about halfway through Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's regime change which is I mean I'll tell you if you were alarmed before this will make you more alarmed just the detail of the way that I mean we were talking about the reflecting pool but the way that

Trump has just been obsessed with um trees maple trees you know anyway so I mean just what you

see what the president's thinking is just kind of alarming but it's also crucial because you get

to see so who's actually doing things in the way nice um I have another half-finished article it's called Trump is a they not a he because I think if we sit here and try to psychoanalyze

“Trump is if he's like the only thing running all of us we miss the fact that he doesn't know”

most of what's happening in his name and I think you see and and that you know exactly how that works um another book that I can't recommend enough is um is Nicholas Enrich's book into the Winshiper this is a book this is a guy who has a ID right if you want to see what this Trump destruction look like from the inside I mean that's just such an amazing amazing book but then you know I think another thing to do is to just pull out and read some things

that put this into kind of the historical perspective so Sinclair Lewis it can't happen here

really worth reading that all over again if you want something longer more elevated and harder to

“read but still you'll make you feel good about yourself um Hannah Aaron's origins of”

totalitarianism is a real classic there's just a whole bunch of stuff in there that will resonate with our current moment um Ernst Trankles the dual state there's another one of those kind of a slog better for lawyers because this is a guy who's a Jewish lawyer in Berlin in 1938 reporting on

what he's seeing happening as the you know as the legal system under the Nazis starts to fall apart

so you know those are all things but then again you know we should actually also have fun so

“the thing I feel they've been fascinated with it's on Amazon Prime actually Gock 1's easy Asian”

this is this style maybe who teaches you how to cook Asian food okay so if you want something is nothing to do with politics the guy has hilarious so anyway that's that's a a little escapist

recommendation that we all need some of them actually one other thing so um I recommend this to my

students and I think actually it has now a really good a reason for seeing it now there's a Danish series called "Borgon" it's actually a decade and a half older so it's like the West Wing

“for parliamentary government so if you want to see a parliamentary government operates it's great”

but season four which was released only a few years ago is about a potential takeover Denmark by competition between Russia China and the U.S. for Denmark I think Trump saw that season four again and that gave him ideas so you want to see season four of Borgon if you want a political escapist thing to watch that's the thing to watch out he's watching prestige European television but maybe someone in his world can't quite imagine doing that I doubt it's not like it really does

resonate you're okay all right well we'll have to check all of that out um can we check what a great set of insights thank you so much for joining me today oh thanks for talking to me and thanks for all the work you do strict scrutiny is a crooked media production our show is produced by Melody Raul and Michael Goldsmith Jordan Thomas is our intern our team includes Matt DeGroat then Hethko Johanna case Kenny Muffett Eric Shoot and our music is by Eddie Cooper

our production staff is proudly unionized with the writers guild of America East quick question are you politically engaged and spiritually exhausted if you said yes to both welcome home I'm Aaron Ryan and I'm Alyssa Mastermonico and we're the host of hysteria the podcast for women who care about democracy culture and not losing their minds in the process we break down the news call out the nonsense and spotlight the women actually

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