Transcript
William Roberts: Hi, and welcome to Truth to Power with William Roberts. I'm here with Kim Lane Shepley, Professor. of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton. She is the Lawrence S. Rockefeller professor.
William Roberts: of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. welcome kim
Kim Lane Scheppele: Nice to be here. Good to talk to you again.
William Roberts: So, yeah, we've been talking for a few years or a couple of years anyways about the Trump administration and authoritarianism in the United States. We're rum We're looking at a midterm elections coming up in in a few weeks. and My assessment is we're looking at a... somewhat of an anti -authoritarian backlash against the president and and the republican party We'll see what happens. it's
William Roberts: A little hard to take the polls at face value because I think they have trouble capturing Trump's support. but It looks... It looks like the Democrats may take the House and the Senate is clearly in play.
William Roberts: You are an expert in authoritarianism. And this goes back to the the late 1980s when you. moved to Hungary and Russia and began studying.
William Roberts: the constitutional conversion of those those two countries. you're an expert on on victor orban and his government and how he used constitutional means to concentrate.
William Roberts: authority in his office. He's now been ejected by voters in Hungary, and there is a new government there that is cleaning up. Uh...
William Roberts: Tell us, if you would, about your experience in those countries. and How does that inform what we're seeing in the United States now?
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, so first of all, nice to be here. I moved to Eastern Europe after the wall came down in 1989. and I used to be a journalist before I was an academic. and And when the wall came down, I thought this is the biggest event of my lifetime.
Kim Lane Scheppele: I wanna go report on it. i was an academic i fortunately had the support of the American National Science Foundation. I need to shout that out because just this year the Trump administration cut the entire Social Sciences Division.
Kim Lane Scheppele: of the NSF. So. the funding that made my research possible is no longer there. So just want to shout that one out. So the National Science Foundation trusted me with a grant to go study the Hungarian Constitutional Court.
Kim Lane Scheppele: I went for one year. They renewed my grant for a second year. Then I wound up staying two more years after that and worked for four years in the 1990s. in Hungary. After that, I moved to Russia, worked at the Constitutional Court there for a year.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and then spent a lot of other time living in and around different parts of Russia as well. So the idea was to look at you know how constitutional governments get off the ground after dictatorships.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And you know how do they dismantle those old systems and set up democratic? institutions. And so I was just fast forward to when Viktor Orban, who, by the way, was prime minister of Hungary from 98 to 2002.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Victor Orban came back in 2010. And he immediately hit the ground running with this blizzard of laws, new constitution. whole series of of you know brand -new institutions and so on.
Kim Lane Scheppele: What you saw him doing. was rolling back. all the changes they had made. in 1989 -90. so let me just give you one example like the constitutional court of Hungary starts in 1990. It was the first new institution, it was put there in order to check the powers of what was a unicameral parliamentary system, so not a lot of other checks in the system.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And one of the first decisions of the Constitutional Court was to require the state to dismantle the personal files they kept on everybody, particularly members of the political opposition.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and there was a court decision the so -called pin number case. in which the court said, every agency of government. needs to develop its own system of keeping track of citizens.
Kim Lane Scheppele: so there isn't one uniform number. that the citizen has that enables the state. to compile all these files on them. in one place right No total surveillance.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Victor Orban comes to power. his He writes a new constitution. He nullifies that. pen judgment. He actually nullifies that all the judgments of the Constitutional Court.
Kim Lane Scheppele: But then they start creating. an agency. whose job it is. to link all the files of every citizen. just the way they did in the communist time. in order to create a surveillance state.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Okay. I mean, stuff like that was happening. every single day and if you were there when they dismantled the communist apparatus. what you could see Victor Orban doing. was reconstructing it all over again.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And the same kind of things were happening in Russia. They hadn't so... totally dismantled the Soviet era institutions. but after Vladimir Putin came to power. you know the first few years he was a good guy but then starts passing legislation.
Kim Lane Scheppele: that winds up again consolidating power. in the hands of the president and in the hands of his party. so that he winds up duplicating the Soviet regime all over again. So you know I went there hoping to find democracy.
Kim Lane Scheppele: but if you hang around long enough what you find is that autocratic leaders can come to power. and crashed the system.
Kim Lane Scheppele: so... i'll just say one last thing and then we need to get on to other things but When Donald Trump was nominated as the Republican candidate in 2016, My father, who's been a lifelong Republican, but who who has been massively supportive of my career, even though we've politically disagreed over many years.
Kim Lane Scheppele: he saw what i was doing in hungary he saw what i was doing in russia and when trump was nominated My dad called me up and said, This is the kind of thing you study, right?
Kim Lane Scheppele: And then we're off to the races.
William Roberts: that Yeah. the It's probably worth... worth a little bit of elaboration on.
William Roberts: As I understand it from the reading I've done about Viktor Orban in Hungary, is when he came back to power, I guess in 2010, he had a Is it a two -thirds majority in the parliament?
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yes.
Kim Lane Scheppele: elma
William Roberts: which allowed him to or allowed his party to engage in this rewrite of the Constitution. Is that right? So that it was. It was a constitutional process, a legal process that he undertook. now
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, that's right. So and this is sort of how dictatorship works these days, right? So if your idea of dictatorship is sort of Hitler -Stalin, you know,
Kim Lane Scheppele: They come to power maybe legally in the first few steps, but after that, it's just ruthless destruction of the rule of law. That's not how things work now. These days, I call them aspirational autocrats.
Kim Lane Scheppele: are typically elected. And then they use the power. of their elected office to undermine the rule of law. Okay, so that's exactly. what happened in in Hungary.
Kim Lane Scheppele: the election law. in hungary and the constitution were both written in 89 .90. And at that time, they didn't really know how many political parties there'd be, you know, how the government would sort of grow into these new institutions.
Kim Lane Scheppele: But by 2010, there was... functionally a two and a half party system. There was the socialists. They had just run the country into bankruptcy during the financial crisis.
Kim Lane Scheppele: there were there was this far right. party. little tiny liberal party of young people who weren't very clear about what they stood for. and then there was fetus okay so You could tell way ahead of the election, Fidesz being Orban's party.
Kim Lane Scheppele: You could tell way ahead of the election that Orban was going to win. And it turns out the election law was designed for a system of many more parties than that. So it put its thumb on the scale of the plurality party.
Kim Lane Scheppele: to give the plurality party more seats. Orban won 53 % of the seats. in especially percent of the vote. in 2010. and the operation of the absolutely ordinary.
Kim Lane Scheppele: election law. gave him 67 % of the seeds. And when they changed the Constitution in 89 -90, they kept the old Soviet amendment rule, which said,
Kim Lane Scheppele: A single vote of the two -thirds. a single two -thirds vote of the unicameral parliament can change anything about the Constitution.
William Roberts: It sounds a little bit like the gerrymandering that we've been seeing here in the United States, where you have
Kim Lane Scheppele: So finally...
Kim Lane Scheppele: Well... Exactly.
William Roberts: a minority of voters claiming a majority of seats in the U .S. Senate.
Kim Lane Scheppele: exactly in fact you know when you
William Roberts: And. and in the house.
Kim Lane Scheppele: That's right. In fact, when you look at a lot of these how these aspirational autocrats come to power, It's very often. because of these counter majoritarian elements of the existing election law.
Kim Lane Scheppele: You know, so it's true. Look at how Trump came to power the first time. lost the popular vote, won the electoral college. That's
Kim Lane Scheppele: counter -majoritarian feature of the US elections.
Kim Lane Scheppele: so, you I mean, around the world, you see that. that basically
Kim Lane Scheppele: Autocrats these days very often come to power. by exploiting these counter majoritarian features. of perfectly normal electoral systems.
Kim Lane Scheppele: So, for example, you look at the government in the Netherlands of a few years ago.
Kim Lane Scheppele: when he heard filders who was the far right candidate He's got this political party that consists of two members. himself. and himself as a corporation.
Kim Lane Scheppele: but he's this kind of far -right provocateur. he His party got more votes than any other party in the Dutch system, where they've got you know dozens of parties. And he wound up in the governing coalition.
Kim Lane Scheppele: not because he had a majority. right but because He had the biggest minority. in that system and so you see this all the time where these anti -system parties.
Kim Lane Scheppele: When I say anti -system, I mean... parties that are devoted to undermining of the Constitution that they have. Those parties very often come to power through quirks in the election system that allow them to get you know a plurality of votes.
Kim Lane Scheppele: often because they're the only party running in that lane. where the normal you know the normal party split the rest of the vote. you know And that that's actually how Trump came to...
Kim Lane Scheppele: the nomination in 2016 if you remember there were goodness i think there was something like 12 candidates 11 running in the mainstream lane and one running
William Roberts: yeah know no
Kim Lane Scheppele: in the Trump lane.
William Roberts: one Yeah. What I'm hearing is...
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah.
William Roberts: that they're that that this authoritarian trend We're seeing elsewhere in the world. is...
William Roberts: finding its way here in the United States. we I mean, we are historically, constitutionally, Hey. a liberal democracy, a classic liberal democracy, lowercase l.
William Roberts: in many ways. President Trump and his political allies have kind of rejected. liberal democracy as a as a governing. mechanism.
William Roberts: What? what are What are the links you see between... the the history of Orban and Hungary and Putin and in Russia and now. the the patterns that we're seeing emerge.
William Roberts: with with Trump
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, so this is part of what has been described as a... as a democratic backsliding wave. you know ever since the turn of the money.
William Roberts: Democratic backsliding wave.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, so this is but this is something happening.
Kim Lane Scheppele: around the world to what we used to call consolidated democracies, democracies which you couldn't ever imagine not being democracies. And of course, it's also happening.
Kim Lane Scheppele: in marginal democracies like Russia or Turkey or so on. What you find is that these aspirational autocrats are coming to power. They're borrowing tactics and tools from each other.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And they use those tactics and tools, legally speaking, like most of this is done. by law. and they attack the checks and balances. that hold executive power in place.
Kim Lane Scheppele: they attack judicial independence because the courts or the branch that might tell them no. And then they rigged the election rules. so that the public can't vote them out of power.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And because all of that is done through law. And because some of it's frankly kind of technical, you know, it's very hard to explain why these very long bills that pass through parliaments.
Kim Lane Scheppele: are a danger to a democratic system. what happens is they wind up winning and they borrow their tactics you know from each other. So it's something that is a kind of contagious wave. and by contagious, I mean. literally one one of these you know aspirational autocrats will look to another.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Figure out. How did they do something? and then duplicate it at home. So let me just give you one example that goes from Orban to Trump. and And I might say that, of course, you know Trump gave us plenty of warning.
Kim Lane Scheppele: what he was going to do because this project 2025 blueprint blueprint that was put together by the Heritage Foundation in conjunction with a lot of different conservative groups, you know, said, here's what we're going to do. Now Trump disowned that before the election, but they've been marching along.
Kim Lane Scheppele: achieving a lot of the goals.
William Roberts: and he He put the chief author of it, Russell Vogt, in as director of the Office of Management and Budget, which is...
Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly. at that offers.
William Roberts: possibly the most powerful agency in the entire government.
Kim Lane Scheppele: That's right. OMB, the head of OMB is like the choke point. of the entire administrative state and he put the author of of Project 2025 in there. so So there are a lot of tricks that Project 2025 borrowed from the Orban government. and I might say that you know during the time that the
Kim Lane Scheppele: Heritage Foundation was amassing this, Viktor Orban was bragging, you know, we have people inside the Trump machine, you know, that he'd say and to his audiences in Hungarian, and then he would show up in Washington and go to the Heritage Foundation and his people would be going back and forth. There was an investigative journalism website in Hungary.
Kim Lane Scheppele: backed up by reporting from the New Republic. that discovered a formal memorandum of understanding between the Heritage Foundation on the American side. and a group called the Danube Institute on the Hungarian side.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Danube Institute was an offshoot of Orban's it's something called the Matthias Corvinus Collegium which was a kind of combination university think tank propaganda machine and so on that was training Orban's cadres.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and also trying to promote their vision of how to turn a democracy into an autocracy around the world. and Danube Institute was their English language.
Kim Lane Scheppele: spin -off. So Danube Institute and Heritage had this formal agreement. So let me just give you one example of something Orban did. that then Trump immediately did. And that was.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Study the national budget. before you come to office. And as soon as you come to power, you immediately cut the funds. to everything that might oppose you. Okay.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Now, you know, Orban did that in 2010, 11. He cut back. universities by 40 percent. He cut all the funding to the civil sector. He cut advertising in any medium, you know any TV, radio, print medium. internet too that was opposed to him.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And so what happens is that the entire civil sector. and the media and the universities. Are all. staggering around. with no money trying to figure out how to even just keep going until the next day.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and as a result they're not focused on what Orban then does, which is to shovel tons of legislation through the parliament. at a rate that nobody can keep up with. And all of that was able to happen because he first disabled the opposition through budget cuts. okay now think about what doge did in those early days right those early traumatic days when basically federal funds were just frozen to universities.
Kim Lane Scheppele: when you know you had grants to any like the entire democracy promotion sector. was cut because of the cut of USAID
William Roberts: Yeah.
Kim Lane Scheppele: So you just sort of go around and you look at all the things that got cut. in those first few months. And those would have been
William Roberts: Department of Education.
Kim Lane Scheppele: department of education those would have been the places from which you would expect opposition to emerge. right And also then slamming the media. you know with one threat after another after another and threatening broadcast licenses and you know, threatening libel actions, Orban also sued everybody for libel as well. So you just disable the whole opposition with this legal blitz.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And then you're off to the races.
William Roberts: you know Speaking of the media, one of the things we've seen is an accumulation of media ownership by billionaires. uh the paramount warner bros merger.
William Roberts: into a new company called Skydance being the latest example where David Ellison the son of Larry Ellison, who's one of the richest men in the world. acquired the company that owns CNN. They already owned CBS.
William Roberts: And... you know the it's You have Jeff Bezos on The Washington Post. Have Elon Musk on his... Twitter now known as X.
William Roberts: the The list says gets longer. i mean What? Hey. it's It's interesting because i when we talked...
William Roberts: a year and a half ago right after the election you predicted. this is what would happen. And you've turned out to be right. I mean, you described a terror phase. We did see it with Doge. We saw Elon Musk on stage with a chainsaw.
William Roberts: and and Looking back now. how much of it do you think you got right and And. What is... What are you surprised by today?
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, well, unfortunately. you know, if you if you knew they were going to follow the Orban playbook, you could guess quite a lot of it. And in fact, that. teraphase followed by people staggering around you know being numb is is what we're in now.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Orban. by the time he was voted out of office. controlled 80 % of the Hungarian media landscape. And what was left were small. mostly intellectual publications that only the educated elite would read and he neutralized them in other ways. so you know And how did he come to dominate the media? It's exactly what we're seeing in the U .S.
Kim Lane Scheppele: regulatory efforts that weaken certain media outlets that are causing trouble. followed by oligarchs swooping in and buying them. That was exactly how Orba hunted this.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And so again, you know because all media. especially news media. are fragile because nobody's, maybe except the New York Times, has been able to figure out how to monetize going online.
Kim Lane Scheppele: you know And so they're all kind of staggering around looking for funding. None of them have a very big cushion. So if you start to threaten their advertisers, if you start to threaten... you know their broadcast licenses if you start to threaten them with antitrust actions or with libel actions, which is you know Trump's specialty, but it was also Orban's specialty.
Kim Lane Scheppele: eventually you can weaken them enough. so that they become cheap for oligarchs to buy. you know and And then, once the oligarchs have them, the oligarch's trade.
Kim Lane Scheppele: favorable media coverage. for other favors that increase their fortunes. and again. That's exactly what we're seeing. So Hungary was just a precursor of what we're seeing in the U .S.
Kim Lane Scheppele: But, you know, there are some ways in which What I said was. too optimistic and you know too pessimistic. so let me So let me just say that the thing that was the most surprising to me, because I was expecting...
Kim Lane Scheppele: an Orban -like blitz. Okay, now, Orban, also Putin. They're both lawyers. They're both. Control freaks doesn't quite. capture it but they both Nothing happens without their approval.
Kim Lane Scheppele: since These systems are very centralized. Trump on the other hand, Trump really doesn't have much interest in governing. Right? He's a showman. He jumps in front of the camera. He makes outrageous statements. The part of his government that he's really in charge of are like ballrooms and reflecting pools.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Right. And golf courses, I guess. now Right. So.
Kim Lane Scheppele: He's interested in. in the real estate part of this he's interested in enriching himself But what Russell Vogt is doing over there in the Office of Management and Budget, I'm sure Trump is not paying attention to.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Voters and
William Roberts: Yeah, let's talk about that.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yay.
William Roberts: that's That's interesting because what they've been doing is, and it's somewhat under the radar in terms of the public dialogue, but they have been publishing proposed rules, finalizing rules. The way that happens in the federal government is they, you know, agencies will publish in the in something called the Federal Register, which is printed every day by the government printing office.
William Roberts: it's It's pretty dry regulatory legal language. sometimes quite complex and hard to understand. You've been following that. What? What are you seeing?
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, so the Federal Register is full of rules rulemaking okay so The way things work in the US, s and by the way, there's a similar process in Hungary that I was following. Well, the way things work is that you know Congress will pass a law.
Kim Lane Scheppele: The law is very general. It needs more specifics. to come into effect. And so there is a process called rulemaking, which is an executive branch -driven process.
Kim Lane Scheppele: where the executive branch comes out with more specific. legal enactments. that say here's how a law is going to be enforced. Okay, those rules have to be published.
Kim Lane Scheppele: There has to be a time for the public to comment on them. The comments are supposed to be taken into account, and then the final rule is issued. Okay, so they're following that process. for a very large number of rules.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Except that in many cases, the rules don't have... They're not. specifications of statutes. They're just rules, you know, like they're just executive legislation.
Kim Lane Scheppele: is coming out of the executive branch. So so let me give you just one example. and you know I follow the higher ed sector. for obvious reasons because I'm in it, but that's one of the places. where they're really trying to do a cram down and what's getting all the attention are these individual threats you know They threatened Columbia, then they threatened Harvard, then they threatened... Dartmouth and Brown. and And so on. And and Yale is on under the microscope now.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And they're sort of going around and just trying to do deals with individual universities. And that's getting all the attention because it's kind of dramatic. What they're doing under the radar, though, is completely changing the way the federal government will interact with the universities.
Kim Lane Scheppele: So, First, they they passed a rule. It was under the first Trump administration. It was called Schedule F. They changed the name of it so that people wouldn't notice it was the same thing.
Kim Lane Scheppele: but they reclassified. by about 50 ,000 federal jobs. as political appointees, not career civil servants. And one of those things that they reclassified.
Kim Lane Scheppele: where everyone with final grant authority, anyone in the federal government, who can say yes or no to a federal grant. is now a federal. a political appointee.
Kim Lane Scheppele: okay That goes all the way through the sciences. right It goes through the National Institutes of... of health that goes to the National Science Foundation. all those people who used to be academic experts in the field.
Kim Lane Scheppele: who could sign off on the final grant allocations. are now political appointees, right? So that's stage one. And so then stage two, new rule. comes out that basically says any university that accepts a federal grant.
Kim Lane Scheppele: must sign on to the whole litany of Trump executive orders that are our new world order. Okay, and by that I mean everything from anti -DEI initiatives to no, you know, uh you know, trans supporting medical care and your medical centers. all the way through i mean just the whole litany of you know so -called anti -woke
Kim Lane Scheppele: executive orders In order to accept a federal grant, now universities the whole university. has to sign on to all of that. And at the same time, something I didn't know, but if you're in a university and you've ever been through this, you'll know that periodically there'll be some regional accrediting authority.
Kim Lane Scheppele: that will come. in In Princeton's case, it's the Middle States evaluation. system.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and you know you do this big self -study and these experts come in and they assess your university and they give some recommendations for how you can improve you know on your overall operation And then they accredit you. Okay.
Kim Lane Scheppele: what that accreditation does. is it doesn't just give you the kind of seal of approval that you're a real university. But it turns out that the Department of Education credits the accreditors.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And when the accreditors accredit the universities, It gives the green light for the Department of Education to authorize the federal government to give grants to that university.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and that also covers student loans, and everything else that the federal government supports. at a particular university. So if you lose accreditation, you lose all your federal funds across the board.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Okay. So what's what's happening now is they've passed a series of regulations, you know, dull gray matter in the Federal Register. that makes it easier for new accreditation authorities.
Kim Lane Scheppele: to come online And we've already seen it in Texas and Florida, but these new accreditation authorities are not the old traditional, we're looking at educational quality, student -faculty ratios, how many books are in your library, none of that stuff.
Kim Lane Scheppele: They're looking now for accreditors that will accredit universities. for how far they follow the Trump program. And once those accreditors are in place, again, the rule's already gone through,
Kim Lane Scheppele: permitting these new accreditors to come online. the the remnants of the Department of Education. can then unaccredit. the traditional accreditors, and accredit the new ones, right? Which is to say, you'll suddenly have, this is how you get.
Kim Lane Scheppele: wholesale cram down. on every university. of the Trump plan. which has been rolled out by doing one university at a time. okay That's pretty inefficient, but it's shock and awe.
Kim Lane Scheppele: They're getting a lot of universities that are not under the microscope to pull back a lot of their programs that would offend the Trump administration. once this new accreditation system is in place. And it's really speedy, right? We're only we're less than two years in.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and the system is more or less already constructed, then what they're going to start doing is unaccrediting universities. and thereby cutting them off. from all federal funds.
Kim Lane Scheppele: student loans, federal grants, in all of the federal programs that support universities. Go on. And then you're going to start seeing.
William Roberts: Well, that's really dramatic.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, yeah. Under the radar though, right?
William Roberts: All right.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Like what's getting...
William Roberts: I can't imagine that happening. but i
Kim Lane Scheppele: It's happened.
Kim Lane Scheppele: It's already there, okay?
William Roberts: Wow.
Kim Lane Scheppele: i mean so this is what i'm saying about how the new autocratic legalism as i've called it works right they do the shock and awe stuff i mean this is what the trump administration is really good at you know we're going to attack harvard university right and so the press runs over and covers the harvard university case which is important and
Kim Lane Scheppele: Columbia, and so on.
William Roberts: You mentioned the National Science Foundation.
William Roberts: And as I understand it, the Trump administration. has ordered the foundation to disband its
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yes. Social sciences, yeah.
William Roberts: operations. And so even if Congress restores the funding.
William Roberts: There's nobody there to... do the programs i mean this is we're seeing this at usaid and education and
Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Right.
William Roberts: other agencies where the the you know. tens of thousands of professional staff across the federal government have left the building for one reason or another, many of them because they don't want to be part of this.
Kim Lane Scheppele: who
Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly.
William Roberts: Uh, and
Kim Lane Scheppele: Okay. Yeah.
William Roberts: and And so the statutory mandates. of these agencies are just not being fulfilled. i mean that's
Kim Lane Scheppele: Right.
William Roberts: But but but tell tell me about the National Science Foundation because I know you.
Kim Lane Scheppele: oh
William Roberts: you've worked with them.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, so i I should say, you know, I'm not exactly a neutral observer of the NSF. I've had, I think, 12 or 13 by now NSF grants over the course of my career.
William Roberts: Fair enough.
Kim Lane Scheppele: I mean, it's...
Kim Lane Scheppele: it's powered my research it's powered the research of my students it's been the most important source of funding for the social sciences and and I must say the most vetted. I mean, when you apply for a grant from and NSF, I mean,
Kim Lane Scheppele: when i on my really big grants i would get sometimes a dozen reviews i mean it's a more rigorous system than the peer review system for journals. you know to get screened for these grants.
Kim Lane Scheppele: But you know again, it's it's a major.
Kim Lane Scheppele: source of social science funding. And so what happened last year was the president's budget. went to Congress. He had zeroed out funding for social science. Congress put back in almost the same amount. for funding of social science.
Kim Lane Scheppele: that had been there the year before. Okay, so the Trump administration, then I think. i mean i'm not in their heads but what they did for the next year was they just went in, they put their own people in at the top of all these agencies, which of course the Supreme Court has said they could do. This is the point of the unitary executive.
Kim Lane Scheppele: if and NSF is considered just a mere executive branch agency. and not an expert body you know allocating. federal funds for scientific grants. If it's just a political body then Trump put his people in on the board.
Kim Lane Scheppele: The board then went through and they they dismantled. They literally fired all the people and took away the offices. of the social science directorate. Then the Trump administration zeroes out the social science budget, sends it back to Congress.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And if Congress restores the budget again. you know As you said, there is no one to give out the grants. Okay, they haven't even given out the grants for this year. they're down i forget the percentage but you know they they didn't come close to giving out that grants that word.
Kim Lane Scheppele: congressional allocation of funds. for these grants this year. So they just you know, they fail to spend the money Congress allocates. They deconstruct agencies that Congress has created.
Kim Lane Scheppele: They don't. follow the mandates of the statutes. Right. I mean, and this is the most shocking thing to me. I mean. I keep... You know, i've i I'm not presently a law professor, but I've been a law professor at different points in my career.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and you know you tell law students on day one here's how the system works, you know. we have this hierarchy of laws, you know, the Constitution's at the top. treaties, statutes, regulations, executive orders, in that order.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And nothing lower on the hierarchy can override something higher up. That's like day day one of law school, okay? what we're seeing. and this is the constitutional revolution.
Kim Lane Scheppele: that I've been talking about with regard to Trump is is that, well, let me me say, let me just say one thing and I'll come back to my constitutional revolution. In many of these autocratic captures elsewhere in the world,
Kim Lane Scheppele: in Hungary and in... in Ecuador in Venezuela, in Turkey, and Russia. the the autocratic capture was accompanied by massive constitutional change.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And so you could see the Constitution itself was changing, either totally new or big amendments. in turkey for example went from a parliamentary to a presidential system by constitutional amendment to give this platform for Erdogan to control everything. okay So you see these massive constitutional changes. so How are we going to do this in the U .S.? We can't even enact a tiny constitutional amendment because our amendment process is essentially broken.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And wait there is this process in the Constitution for calling a Constitutional Convention. similarly broken. So how are you going to massively change the US Constitution. And the answer is...
Kim Lane Scheppele: the Supreme Court. If you pack the Supreme Court,
Kim Lane Scheppele: and feed it new laws, and the Supreme Court upholds those new laws.
William Roberts: This was the question I was about to ask you next, yeah.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, this is the thing. So what you're seeing is that these Trump executive orders. including on and NSF. right including on National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, across the board, all of these executive orders.
Kim Lane Scheppele: invite litigation because they conflict with statutes Congress has passed.
William Roberts: So we should probably pause here to just level set.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah.
William Roberts: The recent history of the Supreme Court at the end of President Barack Obama's term
Kim Lane Scheppele: Mm hmm.
William Roberts: He nominated Merrick Garland. to be justice on the Supreme Court almost a year before the end of his term.
William Roberts: And Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said, no, we're not going to. we're not going to address this nomination and they They ignored it. And... they waited for the next president who turned out to be Donald Trump.
William Roberts: and Trump. nominated Neil Gorsuch. uh who is what would be might be called an originalist, meaning he interprets the Constitution according to the original meaning of the text.
Kim Lane Scheppele: everybody who analyzes their decisions knows that that interpretation is far more opportunistic than principled these days.
William Roberts: It is, especially recently with the 6 -3 conservative majority.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah.
William Roberts: And then you and then you got...
Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly.
William Roberts: He got Amy Coney Barrett at the end of of Trump's administration when Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. weeks. before the election and And Mitch McConnell and the Republicans rammed through Barrett's.
William Roberts: completely discarding whatever. principle they might have espoused four years earlier.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And then they had Kavanaugh in between, of course. So they got.
William Roberts: and and And Kavanaugh.
Kim Lane Scheppele: one third of the court.
William Roberts: So you got three.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Okay.
William Roberts: So now we have a 6 -3 majority. that has been produced by a Republican majority in the Senate that represents a minority of Americans through uh,
William Roberts: parliamentary means that Oh. the left and Democrats. and and mainstream jurisprudence would would consider to be a gaming of the system.
William Roberts: So here we are with a Supreme Court that is... I don't want to say packed. But... certainly loaded with conservative justices.
William Roberts: Who? uh have have been ruling in in the trump administration's favor
Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly. so I mean, I think, I mean, I'm not afraid to call it a backcourt in part because the two courts i worked on the hungarian constitutional court and the russian constitutional court were eventually packed. So I know what packed courts look like. Both of my courts wound up being politically packed. and But here's the thing about PAC courts is that.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Again, in the U .S., this has happened over a very long period of time. and I mean basically going back to Reagan and a lot of the people a lot of this conservative majority came out of the Reagan Justice Department Unitary Executive.
Kim Lane Scheppele: set of ideas right so some of this is hardwired Reagan republicanism and some of this is what i might call rogue republicanism right which is to say not the party of reagan but the party of we have to win at all costs for autocratic capture.
Kim Lane Scheppele: party. But the point is that. when you have up a Supreme Court. where the a majority of the members. have been selected in order to achieve a particular political vision,
Kim Lane Scheppele: It doesn't mean they rule. in every single case in favor of the executive that stands to benefit, right? So for example one place again this is judging from my other courts and like when i would watch them you know act with respect to Orban and Putin. So sometimes courts run against the president that appointed them.
Kim Lane Scheppele: or the prime minister that appointed them. In cases where the president or prime minister has sort of walk themselves into a trap. And they want to when they want a reverse course, but they don't want to be seen to be backing down.
Kim Lane Scheppele: So the court will then declare what they've done unconstitutional. And then they say, oh, we'll follow the court decision. And this is relief. So think of. the National Guard. deployment in.
Kim Lane Scheppele: in you know Chicago and so on. I mean, once he put them in, how was he going to get them out? The Supreme Court gave him a way out. Then there are things where you know the court's coming under question. Is the court really a court or is it just a...
Kim Lane Scheppele: mouthpiece for the executive. And so then you know you the court will look for a case. where it can turn down the president and appear to be independent. while giving him another bout for doing the exact same thing.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Think tariffs. Right. Because again, what the court said is you can't do it this way, but you've got seven other authorities under other laws through which you could do the tariffs. And by the way, while the tariff case was pending, I was looking at.
Kim Lane Scheppele: So what's happening to the big tariffs that Trump cares about? remember his universal tariffs did things like tariff penguins right so obviously if that went away, it didn't matter. And they were taking all the big tariff cases, you know, China and UK, Canada, EU, etc.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and moving them to other authorities. even before the Supreme Court knocked down. the IEPA, the International Economic Emergency Powers Act tariffs.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And gave him another way out. So like. What did he really lose? Actually, he ranted a lot but not much. And then the third set of cases where pat courts rule against their founders are in cases where there's some very high profile public rights -based case.
Kim Lane Scheppele: where the right at question isn't really completely central to the president's program. but where ruling against the right would really cause a backlash against the court. And then they'll rule.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Thank you. birthright citizenship. Although that case was.
Kim Lane Scheppele: You know much closer than any expert thought it would be. right? And so if you look at the places where the Supreme Court has landed,
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, his hand to trump his defeats. It follows this pattern of pack courts. And so, you know. So then back to what I was saying about the unitary executive, that what we're seeing now is that is Trump is engaged in radical constitutional change.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And he's doing that by issuing executive orders. that completely changed the understanding and meaning of the Constitution as we knew it. It invites the litigation. We're seeing it now you know on the shadow docket with... with you know fights over injunctions.
Kim Lane Scheppele: but all of the ones that have to do with concentrating power in the hands of the president. The Supreme Court has signaled it's all there. so starting with the immunity decision even before Trump came to power, giving President widespread immunity for almost everything he does.
Kim Lane Scheppele: while in office. this can you dissolve an agency USAID yep no problem we're going to go ahead can you mass fire people who have terms of office.
Kim Lane Scheppele: fixed by Congress. trying to establish either expertise or political balance in the agencies. Can Trump come in and fire those people? Yes, slaughter. except for perhaps perhaps the Federal Reserve.
Kim Lane Scheppele: mass firing civil servants. through reduction.
William Roberts: The slaughter case was the FTC.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, that's right. And that was going back to the old, you know, I mean, Humphrey's executor. Okay, so basically... The president has now been given the power. to not spend the money that Congress appropriates.
Kim Lane Scheppele: to fire any employee that Congress has said must meet certain criteria. and to to substitute people who don't meet the criteria. to mass fire civil servants. dissolve agencies,
Kim Lane Scheppele: All of that, and then also to have to be immune from criminal law so that when he violates court orders, as he arguably did last weekend by cutting down 450 trees on the national golf course right and then there's the kennedy center reflect i mean all that stuff but they're even more consequential
Kim Lane Scheppele: things in the area of of immigration law where they're just violating court orders left and right.
Kim Lane Scheppele: What's going to happen? i mean Criminal contempt of of court is one of the things that a court can do. to enforce its its orders. But if the president's immune from criminal contempt.
Kim Lane Scheppele: or if criminal contempt of other employees relies on the Justice Department. also captured to carry it out. Essentially what you're getting is a dictatorship.
Kim Lane Scheppele: under the guise of law right? supported by a Supreme Court. that has reduced all of the options for any other part of government including by the way itself i don't think it realizes that you know down the road, it's going to get ignored too. It still thinks it can reign in the president, right? but We know how this turns out in these other countries, right? So the Supreme Court doesn't seem to realize it's teeing up its own destruction.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And all of that. is happening. by law So what we're seeing. is a radical constitutional Transformation. In plain sight. By law.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And there's so many other outrageous things going on. that most of the public is directed at all the other outrageous things. which are outrageous. I mean, the idea that we've got masked men you know kidnapping people off the streets, whisking them off in unmarked vehicles.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and the people who fought back.
William Roberts: Running them over.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Right, and this is...
William Roberts: with vehicles.
Kim Lane Scheppele: I mean, there's a lot going on, but.
William Roberts: It's... Or that you know a woman has punched in the face at a Trump rally and he celebrates it from the podium.
Kim Lane Scheppele: as constitutional Trump.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly. Exactly. so a lot of that
William Roberts: or or that you have members of Congress. uh trying to solicit law enforcement to seize the the the recording device of a reporter is asking a tough question about the iran war
Kim Lane Scheppele: Right, right.
William Roberts: which we saw in Maryland.
Kim Lane Scheppele: or they raid the house of a washington post reporter
William Roberts: Or they raid the house of a member of Congress.
Kim Lane Scheppele: who was Yes. in a couple of days
William Roberts: Ilhan Omar.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly. so that'
William Roberts: because they don't like her.
Kim Lane Scheppele: So there's plenty of outrage to go around.
William Roberts: It's... There is a lot of outrage.
Kim Lane Scheppele: but
William Roberts: and and I think I want to ask you about that because the the popularity of this president is pretty bad.
William Roberts: We see. We see going into this midterm election that Democrats are likely to control the House when we come out of it. They may or may not. uh control the senate as well uh they plan to use the gavel of of house committees at the very least to investigate the the actions of this administration.
William Roberts: after the election. So we're going to get a different political phase. But i'm I'm curious about your take on the Iran war. and One of the things that dictators do is they surround themselves with sycophants who are yes men who just say, yes, yes, boss.
William Roberts: I mean, we know that Hegseth's proposed this war and that uh trump was warned that the strait of hormuz could be closed and he dismissed the the risk and said that it it wouldn't happen or if it did, the United States could handle it. That has not proven to be the case.
Kim Lane Scheppele: sure
William Roberts: We've had a massive energy shock that's global. that is costing the the world economy trillions of dollars and costing Americans billions. uh, Diesel prices are above six bucks a gallon. Truckers are paying. for it.
William Roberts: you know working class folks who run pickup trucks are are are paying for it And gasoline prices are above $4 a gallon nationwide. Uh, That.
William Roberts: has caught the attention of the American public. and they're not happy. All of these other legal things we've talked about, they may not necessarily see. But there does seem to be an understanding.
William Roberts: at a civic level. that this administration and this party is authoritarian. We see the No Kings rallies. What?
William Roberts: what What is your assessment of of where we are and and and what the election might deliver? and I'm going to guess you'll say that one election is not the answer, but.
Kim Lane Scheppele: That's true.
William Roberts: Tell me what you think.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, so one election is not the answer. But here's the thing. like People assume that you're living in a democracy. If the current person in charge. was elected the last time.
Kim Lane Scheppele: But actually, you're only living in a democracy. if future elections. can change your leadership. when you get fed up with it. right So I think of democracy as a...
Kim Lane Scheppele: forward -looking concept. What we're seeing here for the midterms is a massive set of
Kim Lane Scheppele: of assaults. on our... voting system. Now, you know, voting, I think, overwhelmingly if every you know This is not to discourage anyone from voting. In fact, it makes voting more important, right? That everybody.
Kim Lane Scheppele: exercise their rights. Vote early. Make sure your vote is counted. Many states have ways of tracking whether your ballot has been received, if you're a mail -in voter and so on.
Kim Lane Scheppele: But the election is absolutely crucial. Everybody should vote. Okay. That's it. The administration is using all of the powers that it has. to try to disrupt and fuzz up, shall we say, the results of the election.
Kim Lane Scheppele: This week, the Trump administration, the Department of Justice, delivered a thumb drive to the election officials in California. saying there are 20 ,000 people on this thumb drive. Here's a password. they They write it out by hand. and paste it on the thumb drive.
Kim Lane Scheppele: say go through the thumb drive and eliminate the voter registration. of thousands of Californians. Okay. because we think they're not citizens. Mail ballots have already gone out. the election You say the election is going to be in a couple weeks.
Kim Lane Scheppele: The election is now. you know, November 3rd is just the day it stops.
William Roberts: True.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Okay.
William Roberts: Yeah.
Kim Lane Scheppele: So everybody's voting now.
William Roberts: Voting has already started.
Kim Lane Scheppele: They're still trying to disqualify voters, mass disqualify voters, even though there's a court decision that says. you may not mass disqualify voters. including at the Supreme Court.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And so they're going to try everything they can. You know, I know people are worried about ice at the polls. There is a federal law that prohibits federal armed agents from going to polls. So the bigger worry is. ICET checkpoints.
Kim Lane Scheppele: What if you have a small town where there's one road going in, one road going out? ICE sets up checkpoints. People snarl up the traffic. And then it you know no one has time to wait. before they have to go to work to vote. Right.
Kim Lane Scheppele: What are they going to do?
Kim Lane Scheppele: So everybody needs to be very alert because we know they're going to try to disrupt. the election and many of these things. our trial runs for stuff the Supreme Court has already said they could try.
Kim Lane Scheppele: for the presidential next time. And so let me give you. One example of in the weeds legally is people aren't paying attention because it's, you know, there's so much to pay attention to. And we all know that the Trump administration tried to stop mail -in ballots for this election.
Kim Lane Scheppele: The Supreme Court, to its credit, said too late.
Kim Lane Scheppele: you can't do it now They didn't say you can't do it next time. Okay. So watch that space.
Kim Lane Scheppele: But what people forget is that and and this is where, you know, unfortunately, I wish Biden had been. better at so many things at idiot -proofing the system before he left office. Biden left open four seats on the federal post office board, okay? Another one of those obscure agencies. Who knows, you know?
Kim Lane Scheppele: Hit. Trump immediately fills the post office board, gets a majority on the post office board. Last December, the board voted to change the rules about postmarks.
Kim Lane Scheppele: I bet you haven't heard this yet, right? So it used to be like, you know, old -fashioned old fashioned people who bounce to the post office. You go to the post office and they postmark your.
Kim Lane Scheppele: you know your deposit there the day it arrives in the local post office okay As of last December, they changed the regulations again. Deep in the weeds, legalese, all this kind of stuff.
Kim Lane Scheppele: so that now local post offices are not supposed to postmark things. You hand mail to your local post office or drop it in your local post box.
William Roberts: please
Kim Lane Scheppele: and then it goes to a regional distribution center which postmarks it. But there is no rule about how long it takes to get the mail from the local post offices to the regional distribution centers.
William Roberts: I don't like where this is going
Kim Lane Scheppele: The postmarks, yep, the postmarks can be late. And what we this rule was changed in December. And what we've already seen in the all -male ballot states of Washington and Oregon,
Kim Lane Scheppele: was that the number of ballots disqualified for late postmarks more than doubled. already. in this year's primaries. Right. OK, so this means anybody watching this before the polls.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Take your ballot to a drop box that is run by your election officials and don't put it in the U .S. mail. Right. Because this is how they're going to slow things down. Nobody's challenged that rule. Nobody's noticed that rule. Right.
Kim Lane Scheppele: And so, again, this is how I'm saying that legalese in the weeds. is how these governments function. And they've made such a stink over, you know, the ballots and the whatever, the whole drama. around Trump's executive order on mail ballots.
Kim Lane Scheppele: that nobody's paying attention. to the you know the regulations in the Federal Register. of the post office.
William Roberts: Yeah. Yeah, Kim, this has been fabulous.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Right? So. yeah
William Roberts: Detailed, substantive, terrifying. I know you've got to go. What? what What final thoughts? would you have for us? What what do you expect the landscape to look like?
William Roberts: after the midterms or in in the days and weeks following it.
Kim Lane Scheppele: So look, any way that you can put up barriers, speed bumps in the road. to an autocratic government consolidating power is a good thing. Okay, so voting. trying to switch the House, trying to switch down -ballot votes because, of course, gerrymandering is done by state legislatures. So, like, all the down -ballot votes matter, too.
Kim Lane Scheppele: All that really matters. But the other thing is that we've just seen this ray of hope in Hungary of all places. Peter Moldyar, this guy who sprang, wasn't known to Hungarians three years ago.
Kim Lane Scheppele: sprang out of kind of nowhere. and managed to mobilize against all odds a rigged election system, a media totally dominated by the Orban people. He had no money, no media, no party.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Nothing. And he wins this election. by such an overwhelming vote. that his new party has 71 % of the seats in the Unicameral Parliament.
Kim Lane Scheppele: and therefore can change the Constitution. How did he do that? you have to ignore and downplay left -right divisions. He campaigned by saying they're stealing all the money.
Kim Lane Scheppele: That's why you don't have the stuff that you expect from government. That is also happening here. He builds this center just straight down the middle, good government.
Kim Lane Scheppele: He doesn't get distracted by right -wing issues. He doesn't get distracted. by left -wing issues And he builds a very big tent. And he uses social media effectively. He's got young followers who are all out there. This was a campaign run on Facebook, YouTube.
Kim Lane Scheppele: TikTok and Instagram. Okay. That's all they had. They overcame a completely rigged election system by understanding how it worked. and campaigning into it so that they were You know, the the system in Hungary was rigged so that votes in the countryside counted lots more than votes in the cities, like the US system, by the way.
Kim Lane Scheppele: They campaigned mostly in the countryside. to overcome that. So if you understand how a system is rigged, and if you can get a big enough tent whose single issue is restoring good government.
Kim Lane Scheppele: then you can win a landslide victory because Even autocrats have to have elections. And every time there's an election, there's always a possibility. that you could restore democracy.
Kim Lane Scheppele: through an election. If your support. is absolutely overwhelming. And that's what I think the US needs to work toward. before the next presidential.
William Roberts: Thank you Kim. Kim Lane Shepley is the Lawrence S. Rockefeller. Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. Thanks so much.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Thank you for paying attention to this subject, the most important of our time.
