Is Trump A Dictator?

And what would American authoritarianism look like if he was?

Oh, hi! Sarah and Beth here with a light and breezy question for your Friday!

I understand that some people will hear us ask: “is Trump a dictator?” and yell “obviously, yes, what took you so long?” into their car speakers and headphones.

I understand that some people will hear us ask: “is Trump a dictator?” and roll their eyes so hard it hurts, thinking “here we go again with the liberal hysterics.”

I hope that by the end of this episode, we all have something new (or at least new-ish) to consider.

For me, this conversation was a lot of things. It was hard. It was sad. It was complicated. It was weirdly hopeful. That’s where I choose to leave this week—casting my lot with weird hope. I’m so angry and so heartbroken and so frustrated and so disappointed in so many ways and with so many people right now. I also believe in us. I believe it’s not the last day. I believe there’s a lot of good work being done and a lot more good work to do. I appreciate you doing it, in the myriad ways that I know you are. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• What Is Authoritarianism and Is Trump A Dictator?

• How the Branches of Government Are Functioning

• Outside of Politics: Dorm Room Decorating

Want more Pantsuit Politics? Subscribe to ensure you never miss an episode and get access to our premium shows and community.

Episode Resources

• More to Say About the Squanderer-in-Chief (Pantsuit Politics Premium)

• Inside Laura Loomer’s rise: ‘Obsessive’ research, Oval Office visits (The Washington Post)

• The New Competitive Authoritarianism (Journal of Democracy)

• Authoritarianism: How You Know It When You See It (Commons Library)

• Is this the beginning of the English revolution? (The Daily Telegraph)

• How Parents Hijacked the College Dorm (The Atlantic)

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

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To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:11] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.

Clip of Trump [00:00:13] So the line is that I'm a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, you know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator. But I'm not a dictator. I just know how to stop crime

Sarah [00:00:24] Today we're going to ask one simple question. Is Trump a dictator? The swirl of power grabs and corruption and declared emergencies feels so overwhelming. And we all know by now that's the point. So today we're going to take a deep breath and dive in anyway and talk about emergency orders, court decisions and the grasp for power coming from Donald J. Trump. Outside of Politics, we're going to take a real turn and talk about dorm room decorating and how adult experiences are happening younger and younger to our kids.

Beth [00:01:02] A compliment to this episode is the episode of More to Say that I released for our premium members yesterday. So I made the case that whether or not Trump is a dictator, fascist, authoritarianism, however you classify him, whatever else is going on, he is wasteful. A lot of what this administration has done and is doing, especially the smaller stories that bubble up day to day, it's just wasteful. It's taking something that we've invested a lot of money and a lot time in as a country that has a lot potential to do good and saying, I don't like it, get rid of it. It is, I'm told, both infuriating and cathartic to listen to. So if you're not a premium member, you can use your free trial period to listen that episode and all of our premium episodes during that trial period. And if being a premium number isn't right for you at this time, we hope that you'll subscribe to follow us for free on Substack, just to make sure you're getting our show notes, our Friday essays and our newsletter, and any news about what we have going on here at Pantsuit Politics.

Sarah [00:01:55] All right, up next, let's talk about authoritarianism. Beth, it seems worthwhile to define what we mean by authoritarianism and a dictator before we get into the specifics of Donald Trump.

Beth [00:02:23] A lot of these words are used interchangeably. It makes it really difficult to, one, parse out what's actually happening, and two, decide whether it's worth parsing out or not. So authoritarianism is typically characterized by concentrating power in one person or a small group. And the main thing is that that power is used in a way that makes it ultimately unaccountable, that people in those positions of leadership are supposed to be accountable through electoral politics, through representative government, through checks and balances, and somehow they wield power in such a way that it erodes those balances. And what we really think about in the modern world is competitive authoritarianism, people like Putin, we think of Hungary and Turkey, these leaders who are elected, but over time elected starts to go in quotation marks. Because they do the show of the election, but they are making the elections less and less competitive. They are suppressing dissent. They are preventing opposition parties from really working against them.

Sarah [00:03:29] So much of this authoritarian playbook has been in discussion since he entered the scene. The attacks on the press, the attacks on reality, the idea that I get to define what is true and what is not true, what is real and what not real. And so some of this to me began when he first entered the scene and has accelerated dramatically in the second term. But some of these, as you were talking about these checks and balances, started way before him. I think that we have doubled down so many times on not just executive power, and we'll get into that, but party power and the partisanship of it all, and the parties acted as a check on each other for a long time. And then we decided we didn't want that anymore. And so they're not checks on each, they're only checks on themselves. And, to me, that's where you see just this incredible concentration of power is his stranglehold on the Republican Party. Like. I think Maggie Haberman is right. It's the most successful venture he's ever undertaken. It's the just complete consumption of the Republican Party.

[00:04:37] And I think the history is still being written on the pivot points where choices were made, not just with regards to him, but with regards to this shrinking of partisan accountability. Because the parties do not check themselves. That's why we all feel so powerless right now. Like the Democratic party acts as no check on power really under our current structure and our current model of partisanship. It is only the Republican Party that can check the Republican party. And there's just nobody there to do that right now. I think that's why we all feel so powerless. We let processes, electoral processes, constitutional processes, legislative processes, weaken under the assumption that we would keep these parties as checks on each other. That is not born out. They're not checking each other anymore and so these processes are really straining. Be they the courts, be they the legislative process, be they checks and balances and definitely with regards to gerrymandering in the electoral process.

Beth [00:05:38] A lot of authoritarianism many things happens really, really slowly and then all of a sudden. And I don't know the exact order that I would go in thinking about how as a public, we just got frustrated with how slow and difficult democratic work is. But I think about the acceleration of the use of executive power over my lifetime and how dramatic that's been. So we're frustrated because the parties can't check each other within Congress, but we're also frustrated because Congress can't really check the president. The president has made a lot of the administrative state. That's Congress getting tired of using its power and vesting a lot of power in the executive. So this erosion of checks and balances has been a slow moving disaster in progress for a long time. And then you get somebody like Trump who says, well, all righty then. And here we are.

Sarah [00:06:36] Well, I think you can definitely track that expansion of executive power along not just with the growth of the country, but with the growth and change of our media environment. And that's why he was such a well-positioned figure to really push that to its fulcrum. To just say, okay, let's do this. Because I think for so long the media environment was creating such a nationalized narrative. Like we say we had local newspapers, but we were also building the sort of Walter Cronkite version of the world where politics was about national struggles like the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. And you see this federalization of so many things and that took trade-offs. If we wanted the federal government to step up and say to states enough with discrimination and the Jim Crow South, which of course we did. That was not a simple exchange. When we told the Supreme Court under the Warren Court, we want you to pursue justice. We want to push the boundaries of constitutionalism. And again, I'm not arguing for a different outcome. I'm just saying of course it's easy to Monday morning quarterback, but looking back on it, it's like well that was an exchange. Like there was-- what was the great...

Beth [00:07:58] The New Deal is like that.

Sarah [00:07:59] Right, absolutely.

Beth [00:08:00] The New Deal is like that, too.

Sarah [00:08:01] Yeah, he was expanding all that federal power because I don't even know if it was just like a deal with the devil. We got bigger. We had bigger problems that we talk about all the time. The states did not have the resources to address. Sometimes not the will, sometimes not the resources. And so as we got bigger and bigger, I think we saw the weak points in this constitutional system that was built and drafted under a completely different lived existence inside America. And I think they set up these processes. This is my frustration. They set up processes to ease some of that pressure and to say, okay, when this doesn't work anymore, here's how you make a new process. Here's how you exert change. And we just stopped doing it. I feel like the cross, the interchange of when we decided the president should do everything is really when we also decided to stop amending the Constitution.

Beth [00:08:58] Well, and maybe to your point about the media, another thing that happened is we would have these big problems that felt like a federal response was needed, but then we didn't turn around in relatively stable periods and say, okay, now let's invest in the states. Let's make sure that all the states are doing well. Let's makes sure the states that take more than they give to the federal government, we start to reverse that equation. We've never taken a pause because every incentive electorally, is to run on how big and bad things are and how you're the person who can solve those things. So we've never enjoyed the breadth of periods of relative stability and use those periods as a time to make sure that our system remains in check.

Sarah [00:09:41] Well, let's talk about how he uses those levers now and how it really, without a doubt, as I sit here and it feels like the sort of agreed upon conclusion, is that it has accelerated dramatically and has accelerated faster than people even with the worst predictions from his second term imagined. And it starts with that emergency. There's been so much reporting about his use of "emergency powers". It is through declaring emergencies, which he has declared almost a dozen of, which wow! Living at the same time as a war in Ukraine, and the complete devastation in Gaza, I don't look around at my everyday life and see just a domino of emergencies. I don't know about you, but he has declared almost a dozen. There's emergency in the fight of Venezuelan gang invasion, and so that's why we can deport people without due process.

[00:10:36] There's an emergency around crime, and that's what we can occupy American cities like Los Angeles and DC. There's emergency rulings that he needs all the time from the Supreme Court because these injunctions are just unacceptable. And again, this is not new. This is the playbook used in Turkey, in Hungary, in the Philippines. We use emergencies and he's not the first one. There was a great quote of a New York Times piece about Barack Obama saying, you never waste a good emergency. You never waste good fall apart because that's an opportunity to really strengthen processes if you have goodwill and expand your power if you have bad motives.

Beth [00:11:13] Well, and I think that the use of emergency characterization and power is the logical conclusion of a public that is impatient with the democratic process. He just declared an energy emergency. Does that make sense to anyone? Have you once gone to fill up your car and been unable to do so? That's what an energy emergency would be to me. If we actually are running out of the resources that we need to run our cars, our trucks, our homes, our air conditioning, things like that. Of course not. Of course we're not in an energy emergency. We are in a period of energy abundance and we could have more. He's using the energy emergency powers to cut us off from new forms of electricity. I think that's a really good encapsulation of how he has sized up the moment. He has heard people complain that politicians tell them that everything's really dark and bad and scary and then they do nothing. And he says, okay. Well, if it's really dark and scary and bad, then I will do something and I will do it hard and I'll put my foot on the pedal so you can never say I told you a story that wasn't true. But then what he does doesn't match the story that he sold at all.

Sarah [00:12:26] Well, and it's not just declared emergencies. It's also just the language of threat. I was horrified by Stephen Miller saying the Democratic Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization. And I didn't think I could be horrified by anything coming out of Stephen Miller's mouth anymore. But this pushing and pushing of anyone who doesn't agree with me or my version of events-- we see this with the firing of experts who say something he doesn't want to hear. Be it at the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, or be it back in the first term with the meteorologist, like definitely scientists, any sort of inspector generals. Like this idea of it's not just an emergency, but I'm the only one that can tell you the truth about how bad it is. Like I can see clearly. No, anything anybody tells you is not true. I'm the only one who can speak the truth to you about how things are, who's actually a threat to you, who's dangerous, and you have to listen to me.

Beth [00:13:25] I am really worried about the decision to bomb a boat in the Caribbean Sea coming from Venezuela on the justification that it was full of drugs that were about to be smuggled into the United States by Tren de Aragua gang members. And I'll tell you why I'm worried about it. I understand that defending drug smuggling is an unpopular political decision. I'm worried because it came about the same time that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fifth circuit, that's Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi. So it should be a very friendly court for Donald Trump. The Fifth Circuit court of appeals said you can't just deport Venezuelan gang members under this emergency power that you claim to have because we don't see in the law an incursion, an invasion, a war. The things that exist that would allow you to do what you want to do don't exist. Just because you said so doesn't mean that that's the case. And I am really concerned that in a bunch of places, as courts catch up to these actions, because work in court takes a long time, I'm worried that he will use the power he does have to try to create the circumstances that will allow him to continue doing what he wanted to do.

[00:14:49] The steaks have been raised and raised and raised around Venezuela by this administration in so many ways. And Maduro has now said, like, we will start responding with military power if this continues. And I worry that they're saying, well, let's bomb a boat and then he'll respond and then we'll have a war and we can do what we want to do. This whole idea of renaming the Department of Defense, the Department of War, I thought one of MAGA's most admirable qualities was a fatigue with war. A decision that we're tired of putting our citizens in danger. We're tired of spending our money this way. But I think that as courts check him, the incentive is going to be to lean more and more into this commander in chief role where the courts will be very hands off. And my alarms are going off more loudly than they have been because as the system is fighting back, his incentives get worse.

Sarah [00:15:50] Well, because what's the ultimate emergency in which you can justify all manner of things? You can go ask Benjamin Netanyahu. It's war. It's war, and it's the pursuit of violence. Now, I think this is going to come in real conflict with his pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize, but we have ships off the coast of Venezuela right now. Warships. And so I don't think you can ignore this escalation and this desire to continue to do, particularly around immigration, whatever he wants to do. And I think the appeals courts have checked him. I am not super hopeful about the Supreme Court checking him. They have given him, particularly through the shadow docket and this relief from any level of injunction, the ability to continue to pursue his power grabs without any accountability at all. And I don't really see that shifting from them at all And so he's not only doing that, it's all the emergency powers, it's all the language around threat and violence.

[00:16:55] But he is building up this army through ICE, which I find so horrific that this is the best-funded law enforcement agency in America right now. It's ICE- $37.5 billion a year. The just incredible expansion of the agents themselves without proper qualifications. So who are they completely loyal to is the person who got them this job in the first place, who allowed them to take this job, which was Donald Trump. And you just had masked agents, no due process, no questioning, and hiding behind this sort of attacks on officers where, oh, well, they threw a sandwich so they get a felony charge of attacking a law enforcement official. Thank God for grand juries who were like, absolutely not, we're not doing this. But the checks are just-- I mean, it really does. It feels like Holder and Game of Thrones. Hold the door, hold the door, hold the door. And I'm just not sure how hard it can hold or how long it can hold.

Beth [00:18:03] The Supreme Court, I think, is a reinforcement of the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think the Supreme Court tells itself, and I'm just imagining, I don't know any of the justices, that the Supreme court tells themselves the same kind of things that Paul Ryan told himself when he was speaker of the House in Trump's first term, right? I have to give him some room because if I squeeze him too tightly, it will get much worse. So I have to give him some room. I'm not going to provoke the constitutional crisis. I'm not going to walk us up to that line. If I use more of my power, then he'll use more of his power. I just think Trump is disproving that case, six ways to Sunday. And it may be premature to say that. We do have so many places the grand juries are significant. That's significant than our system. They have to come to regular people and get the green light to come down hard on a sandwich thrower. And I think ordinary citizens across the country-- I mean, there are people organizing, to track where these ICE operations are going down and make sure that they're there. They're following them around.

[00:19:15] We have a lot of opportunity to say, no, we'd prefer to not be an authoritarian country. Thank you so much. No, you are not going to be a dictator. We don't have a lot of models of resisting that. And the word resistance itself has become meaningless in a lot of ways. But people are taking really meaningful steps inside and outside the judiciary to push back against this. And that's what keeps me hopeful and the reason that I kind of look at him right now and think he's a wannabe dictator. He absolutely wants to be a dictator. He absolutely wants this to be an authoritarian regime. We are doing things to prevent that from just sliding and getting away from us. And we can do things to present it, but we have to choose it actively all the time. And we really need the Supreme Court, I think, to evaluate the effectiveness of its tactics. When you have lower court judges saying I can't understand what the Supreme court's decision making process is anymore because it's so opaque through the shadow docket that the rulings are emergency rulings issued without explanation. And then the court gets mad at judges for seemingly going against it. And the judges say like, I'm sorry, I just didn't understand. The Supreme Court really needs to have a think about what they're doing and how they're tackling this.

Sarah [00:20:42] I am not hopeful for that. I still maintain that the scariest part to me is the just obsequiousness of the Republican Party. Now, I see glimmers. I see glimmers, but there is a part of me that thinks we are stuck until he is gone. There's just a part of me that I don't see a way out. And not because I don't believe in the democratic process, and not because I don't think there are people that oppose him, but I just think it's going to have to come from the Republican party or from an electoral loss. I think we're stuck with him through this term. I guess I would say that. Even with the midterms, we'll see what happens. But the sort of dear leader approach today they have to him to me is so unnerving. When Ezra Klein talked about going on that debate show and how he felt like Kellyanne Conway and the guy from the Heritage Foundation felt like they were being watched. Like they weren't even presenting the best argument that could have won the debate because the best arguments is like, well, yeah, we're screwing up some things, but because you cannot critique dear leader.

[00:21:52] Even Axios had this thing about how to get through to him and how people are navigating it. And the very first thing was put a sock in it. There's nothing but downside to trashing Trump as policies of our allies. And the second one was put a stock in the mouth of others. You often pay for the sins of friends, partners, and associations who trash Trump. That to me is paradoxically like the glimmer of hope. That is unsustainable. You will have bad ideas and bad outcomes with no one saying, "But what about this?" The group think we'll reach such a disastrous proportion where you're attacking George Mason and Scalia Law School. What is this? What even is this? And I think I see it in like the way people are fleeing the Senate. Marsha Blackburn's running for governor. They're all like, ah, no, thank you. I went out. I want out of here. Now, that means there's even less of a check in the Senate. But to me, a governor's going to be a little less yes dear leader. They are trying to find a path out of this trap he's put them all in. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene standing out there with Thomas Massey and Ro Khanna talking about the Epstein files. To me, that's like a little bit of a glimmer. Surely they can all do math and just know there's got to be a next day and I got to be thinking about myself if nothing else.

Beth [00:23:24] Governorships are interesting to me because I do think that the most hopeful outcome of the second Trump term is a reinvigoration of federalism and a reinvigoration of local news. Because if we have States already forming public health consortiums, you are going to have to have coverage of what's going on at the state level. We have been able to let all this go because we kept the storylines relatively simple. We did say, well, if there's something wrong, the president's got to fix it. And I think that the good work that's happening right now is a lot of states-- and I think this is going to happen in red states too. I think the Ron DeSantis path is the dumbest possible way to navigate this and will be borne out as the dumb way to navigate it. I think in red states too, you're going to see states going, no, we're going to do our thing here. We're going to handle this the Kentucky way, the Texas way, the Tennessee way, whatever.

[00:24:30] And I feel really hopeful about that. Now I think the damage in the meantime is going to be extraordinary. And the waste in the meantime is going to extraordinary. All of this ICE activity to me screams waste. And it screams waste in service of the insidious unpopular Project 2025 kind of agenda, the worst caricature of Project 2025. When Pete Hegseth talks about war fighting and they recruit ICE agents as though you're going to get to live a video game now, it's disgusting and it's obvious the cabinet meetings are beyond parody at this point. And I think all of this has become so clearly like it is what you think it is, that I do feel like we're going to keep pushing back against it and it will crumble.

Sarah [00:25:21] Well, and I keep seeing like you can be free in an authoritarian dictatorship. Like you're going to parties, you're living your life, you're having babies, you're having joyful moments, you just don't have any real freedom. I don't know America's tolerance for that. My gut tells me it's a little lower than other places, but maybe that's just a lie I like to tell myself, I don't know. I am disturbed that the level at which we are completely desensitized to the corruption and the waste. I thought Americans cared that their tax dollars were being wasted or that people were being paid off to screw them out of deals and a better life. And there just seems to be no concern about the fact that people are just being completely bribed all the time.

[00:26:09] And I don't know if it's just because it's overwhelming. When Derek Thompson wrote that thing about we're going to lose population, probably for the first time in American history. Even through the Civil War, the population expanded. And I thought, okay, could I take this to my dad? Could I say, like, do you see that? It's make America small again. Like, is this what you wanted? And I think the problem is, though, he'll just say, that's not true. That's probably not true. We can't depend on that number. It's that combination with the distrust he has sown, and again just taking advantage of changes in the media environment and the artificial intelligence slop that's just everywhere, that I'm like, well, maybe it'll play out in people's lives and they'll get tired of it. Or maybe they'll just be able to be talked out of their lived existence, I don't know.

Beth [00:26:55] I don't know either. I am not going to say people don't care until we have the midterm elections. Because the truth is people haven't had an opportunity at scale to show whether they care or not. That's what the elections provide. It is a bummer to talk to people who are deeply into politics from either side of the aisle right now because it does feel like the people who have always been with Trump don't care. And that we haven't reached how bad it has to get for them to care and that maybe we can't reach it and that is depressing. And it is a bummer to talk to people who generally I am aligned with because they also think we are on the cliff and about to go over it. Maybe we've already gone over it, we don't even know yet and we're just all fiddling while Rome burns. And I just don't think that either of those stories are complete and we won't know. We won't know whether people care until we have an election.

Sarah [00:27:54] Yeah, I think there is a middle ground that I am finding in my own conversations where people just don't know what to do with it. And I think that's always been true. I think people for a long time have been frustrated with the state of American politics. They have been frustrating with the State of American economics. They have been frustrated with the state of technology in our lives and the degrading of the public schools and, and, and, and. I don't have a good answer to what do we do with that? I think a lot of the population decided we're going to let Donald Trump try to fix it. And he clearly is selling the narrative that he is. He literally wears this big stupid hat that says I'm right all the time; I can fix everything. Which is bananas to me, but I realize that it is not to a lot people. And I'm trying to figure out why that is and figure out what to do next. I do think that the reality is he is expanding his power while fundamentally weakening the federal government by removing the experts and the processes and the research and the data and all the things that makes the federal government powerful, because he alone cannot fix it. He needs the power of the federal government, he needs all those ICE agents, right?

[00:29:17] He needs this sense of I've got to think that he is running out of road on naming the problem. And that at a certain point people are ready for-- they voted for change. He's the change agent. They want change. And he is removing his capacity. He is breaking and shredding and setting on fire his capacity to create that change in people's lives and creating only chaos in its wake. And I think people feel that. I think that people see that. But I sincerely don't know. It's so hard. Polling is confusing and I'm not really sure what to believe there and how much anecdotal evidence of conversations and Facebook posts should I take in my own life. The reality is my life, my lived existence is not crumbling around me. I'm unhappy with the public schools, but I really think that's a brand new experience within the American experiment and there's like things I'm-- but I don't know. I don't feel like it's all crumbling around me. And that's the tension I'm always trying to hold with him. If we're selling that it's an authoritarian dictatorship and we're saying he is breaking things, but I don't have anything to point to while you take your kids to school about what's broken, I don't know what the politics of that is.

Beth [00:30:41] Well, I think that that's for me a lot because I don't live in a place that has people in military fatigues walking around patrolling the streets. I do think that the weirdness of being in a place where there are people being yanked off the street by ICE agents, where the National Guard is, I think that kind of experience is a bad, bad move for him to try to do this in more cities because I think that means more people will have to live it, not theoretically.

Sarah [00:31:10] Well, listen, it's not even big cities. That is the one thing that has bubbled up in my lived existence, is lots of people having experience with contributing members of our community being deported, being detained and deported. That is a thing I have heard at a football game people talking about.

Beth [00:31:25] Yes, so there's that piece. I do feel the economic pressure of prices are increasing.

Sarah [00:31:31] Absolutely.

Beth [00:31:32] You have to pay more for less all the time. All the time. And he told us he was going to fix that. I don't personally think that's the president's job to fix, but he told as he was going to and everything he's done has made that problem worse. So there are those components.

Sarah [00:31:50] Pay more for the less and pay more for worse. That's the part that's really getting me.

Beth [00:31:54] That's right, for worse. Absolutely. I think that if midterm elections roll around and Ukraine and Gaza are still in the condition they're in today, that's a really bad for him, especially if he has gotten us into new conflicts. And it feels increasingly likely to me that he's going to do that. I can't point to a place where I think now here's something they've really nailed. Now, I don't live in a border community. And I understand that those numbers are down. Illegal border crossings are way down. And maybe that's enough for some people. But that's a pretty, I would think, isolated experience of having something tangible in your life to say, boy, they've really figured this out for me.

Sarah [00:32:43] I'm not really sure if this is real or not. What I feel is an exhaustion and like people really turning away from politics and the partisanship. And I don't know how that works for him because so much of his declaring emergencies is built on getting people's attention and holding it. And so as I think people get increasingly sort of by variances bored, overwhelmed, confused, and just turned off generally by this sense of like there's another emergency, there's another emergency, there's another thing he's doing that's pissing everybody off. To the passive news consumer, to the pass of citizen who lets the news come to them and who lets politics come to them or who's made a choice to like that's not my thing, I don't pay attention to that; I don't know where we are in that life cycle. I'm not quite sure how much the turning away is people feel stable enough in their lives and they feel like they can turn away or there's just a generalized exhaustion with how he operates in the world. That's the part I can't quite grasp.

Beth [00:33:57] I totally agree. I think a lot of that is a generalized sense of I don't know who to trust. I don't know what's real. I don't have time to sort it out. I wouldn't know how to sort out if I wanted to. So I'm just going to dig into what's real. And there is what I know is real, what's right here in front of me, what I can control. And there's a part of me that thinks like, hey, long-term, that's good. Long-term that's pretty good. And maybe the best outcome, I don't know what that will mean for a midterm election or another presidential election. I know that I don't want more and more of our politics dominated by people who are really into politics. I think that that's been a net negative. A huge reason that I still like making this show is so many people tell me this is really the only place that I listen to it. That perspective is really, really important. That is the dominant perspective. I don't engage at a really deep level, but I care. If the ultimate effect of AI and Donald Trump and the erosion of trust is more people are like, "I'm not a political hobbyist, but care," I think that's great. I'm just not quite sure how we get there.

Sarah [00:35:24] I read an editorial from the Daily Telegraph. It was really about England, because England is having this real conversation about is it on the rise? Is it on fall? There's all these British crosses appearing. And I'm always fascinated by them because I feel like they're an older brother we can look to for a little bit of guidance or understating about what's coming. This editorial from Robert Tombs and the Daily Telegraph, it made me feel better. It was just like, look, a point we made before, there's no stasis. There's always these sorts of apocalypses. There's the Norman Conquest. There's The Black Death. There's the American Revolution, which they thought it's over for us. Then you have the Industrial Revolution and Victorian Splendor, and you have all these phases of history that roll across a country, but that you still have this place and belonging. That is English life that binds people together. And I think that is true here as well. That I think where I finally settled is, do I believe that Donald Trump is an authoritarian? Absolutely. Do I believe that that makes us an authoritarian country? No, I do not believe that.

[00:36:43] And so I think that while he is here, this is who he is. And I do, to be completely transparent, feel pretty powerless until there is an election, until he is gone from the scene to do much about it because of the structures that we've set. But I don't think it's like the death knell of American democracy. I think we've had other periods of real power grabs and real authoritarians at the helm of our country. And there will probably be another one years after he's dead and gone. So I think that's just where I'm at. I want to see it clearly. I don't want to run from it. I don't want to bury my head in the sand and say something's happening that's not. But I do cling to what we always say. It's not the final day. Like, we're not done here. He will be done eventually, but we will not be done. Whatever Xi Jinping and Putin think about trading out organs to live to be 150 and keep control, that ain't it. That ain't it. In countries very different from ours I don't think that this idea that we'll just cling to power and live forever is so foolish. But it's definitely a foolish, I think, conclusion in a country like ours. And so I'm trying to hold all of that together at the same time.

Beth [00:38:16] I don't want to argue with anybody's feelings of powerlessness, but let me do that for just a quick second. You just said that you feel powerless. You are enormously influential in your community and in your internet community, right? That's not powerlessness. You are shaping the way that people think about this every single day in a massive way. That's not powerless. On my episode that I made about how wasteful Donald Trump is, there were a lot of people saying, "I feel really powerless, what do we do?" And there were other people saying, "I wrote some of these stories down and I'm going to roll them out. I'm going to test them out. I'm to test out this concept of wastefulness in some of my conversations and see how people react to that." To me, what is your definition of power? We can't fix it right away. That's not our system. If you respect the system, you accept a certain level of powerlessness in that you alone cannot fix it. That would just make you the equal and opposite of Donald Trump, right? We have enormous power if we choose to see it in the people that we influence in the way we live our lives. The people on the grand jury probably feel pretty powerless, but they made a huge difference in our system. Every time you're called to serve in that way, you're making a big difference.

[00:39:46] The nonprofit people who are holding it together with duct tape out there because their funding has been jerked around are making a huge difference. I don't want to disregard all of the power that is being exercised constantly. People are busting it to get ready for the next election cycle. So many people in so many different ways. It's like we say all the time; we keep putting good stuff in the river and it matters. It's still a river and there's a lot of crap in it too. And it might feel like it's running in the wrong direction, but I just don't want to get down on the fact that because we can't impeach him tomorrow and then figure out a way to get Vance out too, and then what, upend the entire MAGA movement in a day? No, we are a long time getting into this as we spelled out at the beginning of this conversation. We're going to be a long getting out of it. But I'm not down on The American People right now. I see people going, oh, I don't like this. And I believe that when they have a chance to vote, they will vote and say so. And I am not interested in reading another piece about how tough the map is for Democrats. What I'm interested in are the people who are out there saying, "It's a tough map. What are we going to do about it?" We got a year. What are we going to do it about it? And doing those things

Sarah [00:41:10] Yeah, I think it's just, maybe powerlessness is not the right word or maybe it's a component of the heartbreak. There's just an inherent powerlessness and feeling heartbroken about what you're seeing happen to people in the name of your government by the actions of your governments. Watching masked people pull people off the streets and put them into vans is heartbreaking. And so there is this inherent sense of grief and devastation that you cannot detach from a sense of powerlessness when you're watching these things happen in your own country. But I tell myself that there has never been a moment even in the golden age, however you define it or whatever decade of American life you think was the Golden Age, when really horrific things weren't happening to people perpetuated by your government.

[00:42:09] And that doesn't mean there's no place and belonging inside America for all of this. Just like it doesn't that for England either. Like, it's always a mixed bag and it's never the last day. And I try to remember that, but I can't also ignore the fact or talk myself out of the fact that there is real grief about watching these really, really dark things happen and thinking about what's being lost when we abandon research or abandon wind turbines or abandon due process or watching reasonable people leave the Congress and all these things. It could open up things we can't contemplate and maybe it will push us down the road to real changes and a real strengthening in our institutions. I think that could be true as well, but it still hurts. It still hurts to be here among the rubble and the injury and the grief.

Beth [00:43:16] One hundred percent. It's infuriating. It's dark. It's depressing. It' scary. It's all of those things. I just want to hold alongside it the fact that it doesn't have to stay that way. And also for every person who signs up to be an ICE agent right now with this promise of power and authority and masculinity and whatever else we're trying to do, it is amazing to me to see videos of people saying, do you have a warrant? Just regular people. When Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, people with unbelievable power, all kinds of captains of industry and media are putting a sock in it. To see somebody who works down the street at the dry cleaner say, "Do you have a warrant?" I freaking love it and I don't want to take anything away from that.

[00:44:14] And I want to take anything away from a woman I just met within my community who for zero dollars works more than a full-time job to help build up good candidates and squash misinformation in our community. There are just so many people doing so many things. And getting down on each other and being divided by it and being depressed is part of the playbook. That is necessary to authoritarianism to prosper. A widespread sense of powerless confusion, that sense of I don't know what to believe, that is the authoritarian's playbook. And so I think being able to step up against that line every time and say, no, actually you can know what believe. Actually you can sort this out if you want to. Actually, there are plenty of people worth trusting. I think all that really matters.

Sarah [00:45:07] Yeah, part of the road we walked to get here was, it doesn't matter. It doesn’t' matter. They're all corrupt, it's all broken, institutions are all crap. And that's why in lots of places I'm pushing back on this narrative. We had a very robust conversation in the comments of a post I wrote about Travis Kelce around marriage. Because I've just started articulating, like, I'm tired of the narrative around marriage, that it's this totally broken, detrimental institution. That's not my lived experience. It's not a lot of people's lived experience. I'm ready to speak more positively about parenting. If there's all these places that you can assert that all is not lost. And I don't think all is not lost in the places where it feels the most bleak. Where it feels the most cruel, including around immigration and including around ICE. And I think there are places where we started down this road and the attacking of the press that are still strong. They are still out there reporting all the time, getting the records, pointing out that Tiffany Trump's fiancé got all these payments to try to get access to the president from Saudi princes. Like all that stuff matters. It adds up. And so I do try to hold that.

[00:46:27] And I really believe in the march of history. And I believe it's often very rough to live through it. All of that is true at the same time. And I think the midterms and the candidates that are coming out and the launch videos and the way people are articulating what they want and what they're offering and what believe in, it will matter. It is a public service and it contributes to the sense that this is still worth fighting for because it absolutely is. Beth, my long-term beloved friend Megan Francis wrote a piece for the Atlantic about dorm room decor and how it has spread beyond the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi where I feel like I first saw the like over the top dorm room décor into all the schools. Everybody wants what they saw on social media. There's like professional dorm room decorators. And I saw Jennie Garth of 90210 schlepping all this stuff up to her daughter's dorm room and fitting it out and making it look like a million bucks. So, listen if Jennie Garth is out there schlepping and sweating in pursuit of this situation then we have really reached peak dorm room decor.

Beth [00:48:05] I guess this should not be surprising given that we are what 15-20 years into featured nurseries in blogs and Pinterest boards and magazines. I mean if we think that our beloved newborns need to live in a restoration hardware spread, then of course our college students deserve this.

Sarah [00:48:26] Full transparency, Amos' nursery was in fact featured in the pages of Parents Magazine. I fully participated in the nursery decor trend.

Beth [00:48:35] And so I think we keep doing this. We keep shoving everything that makes life feel special and fun and like you've arrived earlier and earlier and earlier. And I have a tension around it because as we've talked about, I love a party. I love a celebration. I loved a theme. I do think that we are setting ourselves up to be really disappointed and that a lot of what you hear about people who are in their 20s and younger is just a ton of disappointment. Because for a lot of reasons, but partially because we have set the expectation that life should be luxurious really, really early and not left them a lot places to go.

Sarah [00:49:19] Well, and I don't think this is new in a lot of ways. So my mother's rule was that I was not allowed to go to prom until my junior year. No, worked out fine, nobody asked me. But she was like, if you go off for years then your prom, your junior prom, you're senior prom, are not special. And I saw that with my friends. A lot of my friends went freshman and sophomore year. So by the time our junior prom came around, I was like thrilled, so excited, and they were over it. So I don't think this is a new trend. And I think it's the maximalization and the parenting trend that my job as a parent is to give my children the absolute best experience. And so much of that is defined by other people's experiences. And so much of that is defined by status and the most you can get out of your pocketbook, your social media following, your appearance, whatever the case may be. And then, of course, so much of that is defined by adulthood and getting the max adult experience, which my mother was, to her eternal credit, pretty allergic to. My friends that wore makeup in kindergarten and she was like absolutely not. I was allowed to wear clear mascara. First of all, clear mascara. What a joke. Clear mascara and maybe pressed powder in middle school and that was it. And then she was like, no, you're not going to start doing all this stuff. You're a kid. You can do the kid things and then we will save the adult things for later.

Beth [00:50:51] Here's another theory I have about this. For those of us in long-term committed relationships, I think usually one person is more into the kid experience than the other person. And often you work out stuff for your kids that you don't have to negotiate with your spouse. It's easier to go decorate the dorm room to the hilt than to get your spouse on board for renovating the kitchen. Or it's easy to say, well, we're going to do this big fun party for the kids than, hey, let's sit down and work through the hard thing of a bigger expense like a family vacation. I think that there are lots and lots of things going on around the dorm rooms and the decor. And some of it is performance; look at what a good mom I am. I made this happen for her, look how creative I am. Look how artistic I am. But I think it's deeper than that too. I don't want to just like shit on people who do this, but just recognize I think that this is an outlet for a whole bunch of things. I feel like I'm struggling as a parent in certain ways, but I've really nailed this side. We're all under a lot of pressure. And I think that this an outlet for a lot of that pressure.

Sarah [00:52:05] I also just think, and this is not new, but I would really like us to evolve past this point because I think it's really toxic. I think people just want their kids to be popular. I stumbled upon a reel where this woman was like, here's how to get your kids invited to the thing. Host a thing and then invite other kids and then they feel obligated to invite your kids and blah, blah, blah. And I was like whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up. It's also okay if you don't get invited. I spent a lot of time not being included. Again, told you I wasn't invited to the prom, didn't have a boyfriend. And my mom was not out there hustling to get me included into these popular girl experiences. She wasn't hustling to make sure that-- I have so many friends whose kids are popular, my kids are not, who they're trying to navigate relationship conflicts, but they're not trying to navigate relationships conflicts.

[00:52:58] They're trying to navigate and make sure their kids stay in the popular group. And again this is not new. We cannot even blame the foes for this one. Because I think there is so much of people's lived experiences and versions of themselves and feelings about themselves that get defined in high school and around popularity and who was in and who is not, that people struggle to shake off. But it just creates so much drama and the teenagers can smell it. They can smell what you really want for them is for them to be accepted by other people and have that status. And they both resent you from it and internalize that that's what they're supposed to be pursuing.

Beth [00:53:43] Yeah, I think that's dead on. I'm not immune from those pressures. I try really hard with my girls and we are in it with the girl stuff. I have a 10 year old and a 14 year old. I try to just really clearly name what I do care about. We're talking about this because I really care about this for you. And I try and get them to really name what they're feeling or what they really care. And that's complicated. They don't always know. And so there's not a feelings math problem to be had through it. But sometimes I will think like if she doesn't find a dress that she loves, that is not a failure on my part. I just need to sit back and go, "You might have to wear something you've worn before; you'll be fine."

Sarah [00:54:35] Lisa did not care. Again, mad credit to my mom. My mom was I think really at her peak parenting prowess when I was a teenager. And some of it like hilariously is because my mom was very popular. She was straight up the homecoming queen. I would wear her tiara all the time. But I think the vibe I got from her was like this was not the pinnacle of my existence. It was fine. It didn't make my life easier. It didn't make my live better. I was still divorced at the same young age. It didn't solve all my problems because I was the homecoming queen. It wasn't when I was happiest. I'm not trying to get back there. The vibe I got from her was like, yeah, I was popular, it was fine. It didn't change that much. It's not worth you sacrificing all this stuff to get it. And so she really gave me permission to just detach from that pursuit and detach from other people's opinions of me.

[00:55:23] Her and my stepdad we just spent hours and hours in conversation about how it did not matter what people thought about you. It's okay that you're not everybody's cup of tea. That's fine. Just putting it in my cells minute after minute, day after day. Also I didn't have to pursue approval from my peers because I had such a wide support and love from all the adults in my family. There just was a lot of like we think you're great, they don't, who gives a shit? And I did. I still gave a shit because I was a teenager and that's developmentally appropriate. But I really try to pass that down to my kids and they don't care. I probably still care a little bit more than they care about like status and approval and what people think about them because my boys do not. They do not care. I don't know if it was like trial by fire through middle school. I don't know if was COVID. I don't know what it is, but they really don't care.

Beth [00:56:26] My girls I think do a little bit but it feels pretty healthy to me. Right now it feels like it's in a healthy range. What I got from my parents I think is a sense that my real life was going to begin later. This wasn't my real-life yet. My real- life was going to begin later and I think from that I both got a sense that I'm okay because I'm loved and supported and there's something great waiting for me. And I got a since of real detachment. Like not a huge desire to be back in my hometown very often. I felt like a little bit of learned yearning for that next moment to come. And then it took me a while as an adult to be like this is the later. This is the time that we need to dig in. We're running out of time for there to be later for your life to start. So we do need to start life at some point. And that's not a criticism of how they approached it. I'm glad that they didn't make me feel bad that I wasn't ever going to be the homecoming queen. I distinctly remember a conversation with my mom where I said, "I'm never going to be the homecoming queen." And I started crying. And she was like, "Yeah, and the home-coming queen from my class does not have a life that you want right now." Like it's later. You don't want to peak here. It's later down the road that you want to peak. And that was true.

Sarah [00:57:45] I do tell my kids a lot, you do not want to peek in high school. Ask Tim Riggins. You just don't want that, okay? And so we can watch Friday Night Lights if you'd like to see what happens if you peek in High School. But also I definitely got my other experiences and she was protecting those. She was articulating like you don't want to experience everything now. There's a lot left to experience. But also this matters and the people here matter and it will shape who you are. I think what I learned from my mom a lot and my stepdad is I am very present oriented and so are they. There's not a lot of being consumed with what has happened. There's a healthy pursuit of what could come next, but they're really happy where they are right now kind of all the time.

[00:58:33] But my mom changed careers, went back to school, was kind of always reinventing herself and taking on new challenges as was my step dad. And so I think it was that sort of present orientation. I never felt like they were sort of blowing off what was important to me in high school, but that they were just holding it with probably what I deemed an appropriate level of importance. But what I now see was about right. It matters to you right now, but it's not the end of the world. And look, you know what? That's true at 44, too. That's true at 34. It's true 24. It matters to your right now, but it's not the end of the world and that's important.

Beth [00:59:17] I saw really good advice in I think it was one of Emily Lay's post about how you don't want to be more excited or more upset about something than your kids are. Like just calibrate your level of investment to their level investment. And I thought that's helpful. That is a strategy that makes sense to me because when I dip in either direction, I can feel the relationship swinging out of balance. And I don't know, I'm just really trying to work on what is our relationship? What is the relationship that will hold us through these really hard years? And I think that that's why the dorm decorating happens because it is an easy high to take my girls shopping. It feels like that is where the relationship feels like it's at its peak. We're having a good time. We're picking things out. You feel so supported by me. I feel like I'm being so supportive. Like that experience of let me go out and get you things feels like you are really making an investment in the relationship. And I think that some of the things that are trendy around dorm rooms just reflect that as like the pillar of it. And I think we're losing a lot when that's the pillar of it, but I'm struggling through that too.

Sarah [01:00:35] Well, let me tell you, the consumptionist easy connection does not exist between me and my boys. They do not want to shop. They do not give a shit. There's like a whole world of reels out there where the moms are like, if you think you're going to have this blessed dorm experience with your son, you're lucky if he lets you put up a come in strip. Like, get over it. That's not going to happen. And there is a lot of that you just have to let go of with boys. I'm not going on a shopping trip to bond with them. Like they can't get out of there fast enough. They hate it. Now, I think there is a lot of travel that works that way for us. Like that is the easy connection. They like being out in the world. I like being in the out in world. We can like really connect with each other.

[01:01:21] But there's like definitely a gendered component of this. You don't see reveal after reveal of boy’s dorm rooms. In fact, I was thrilled when my friend actually had her son's dorm room and it looked nice. And I was like, wait, you got to actually put up some nice things? And she was like, yes, don't believe all the lies. They'll let you put up some nice thing. And I'm like, okay, good, thank God. I do want a little bit. I don't want throw an Ikea bag worth of his clothes at him and be like see you later either. Can we like find a happy medium? That'd be great.

Beth [01:01:47] No, you cannot find a happy medium in parenting. That's what it feels like to me.

Sarah [01:01:50] No, it's not available.

Beth [01:01:51] It's really, really hard.

Sarah [01:01:52] Not available to you. All right. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics. We will be back in your ears on Tuesday with more news. Until then, make sure you subscribe to our Substack or YouTube or any podcast player, whatever makes the most sense for you and your life. You find the happy medium with this podcast consumption. Have the best weekend available to.