Interview Only w/ Dmitri Mehlhorn - Wargaming An American Coup

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Speaker 1: This episode of the Chuck Todd cast is brought to you by Chapter. Now, almost everything you hear about Medicare is somebody quietly trying to steer you somewhere. And you're skeptical of that, as you should be. I get it. I mean, there's a federal lawsuit going on right now over exactly this. Companies that branded themselves as unbiased while allegedly pointing people toward whatever would pay them the most as some sort of broker. So if your default is to distrust everyone in this space, honestly, I get it. I'm a bit distrustful these days myself. That's the whole reason I want to tell you about Chapter. They're independent Medicare advisors whose entire model is that their advisors are not paid to push any one plan. They're just trying to help. Yes, there's compensation that goes with it. but it's across the board is what they're trying to do. At the end of the day, they're advocating for you. They're not the insurance companies themselves. They're an actual person who actually goes through your doctors, your prescriptions, your needs, and then compares them to every single plan available to find the best one that will work for you and hopefully save you a couple dollars too. And here's the part that sets chapter apart. They don't disappear once you've been in They will keep advocating for you. They're kind of like almost like a concierge service. You're just there. I need help. You're like customer service. You know, the plan, you know, help me navigate this again. So you ever get hit with a wrongful medical bill, they'll help you fight it. They want to stay an advocate for you even after you've done this. So look, I get it. I think there's all sorts of space. You see a lot of people are throwing themselves in this healthcare space. What I like about these chapter folks, I've spent time with them. This is a very transparent organization. It is Medicare and all of its affiliated stuff can be very confusing. The whole point of this is to make this easier and less confusing. OK, so look, take the skepticism you already have in all of this, point it at your own plan for 20 minutes. It's free. There's no pressure. And then call chapter today at 980-734-4200. So about six months ago, I think I shared with you guys on this podcast, and I will make you remember this if I can, participating in a simulation. I didn't get into a full amount of the details of other people that participated in the simulation, but about how, if you thought about sort of how the the Trump administration, if the motivation was there, might try to hijack the system. And I guess the best way to describe this simulation was it was three groups. Essentially, the Trump team was represented by something called the nationalists. And then there was the institutionalists, which were not necessarily the blue team. That was more of the sort of, think of it as if Bush and Obama, that those forces got together, or the Romney-Obama forces as sort of one entity. And then there was the money people, essentially. And it was, I think I've said I was in a situation where the nationalists just sort of dominated the situation. Well, this simulation was put on by my guest that I have joining us today, Dimitri Malhorn. He has got a book out talking about everything he's been learning about this. It's part of something called the Atoll Society. And what this has been about is trying to help elected officials and other institutions figure out what happens if we have another January 6th? What happens if somebody attempts and what are the vulnerabilities baked into the system, baked into the constitution? And it's an eye-opening, event. Like I said, I did it about six months ago. There was a part of me that said, well, maybe we're exaggerating things. And then there was a part of me that realized, yeah, but you can see how vulnerable these institutions are. So without further ado, let me bring in my friend, Dimitri. Dimitri, it's nice to see you.
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Speaker 2: It's great to see you again.
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Speaker 1: So let me give you a second here to fill in the blanks of how, you know, I have, and I said this before, trying to explain what this was and the simulation and all of this. It's, you know, no different than when you hear about the military having a tabletop exercise about what would happen if the Iranians shut the Strait of Hormuz or what would happen if the Chinese created a an embargo on Taiwan or a blockade on Taiwan, what would happen next? And so in some ways, it's just that, a tabletop exercise on that front, but put it in your words. How do you tell people? How do you describe it to folks?
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Speaker 2: Actually, the way you describe it is pretty spot on. It may be that we're taking the dark view, but just in case those dark assumptions prove true, it's useful to sort of game it out. So my group was one of the groups that supported some of the tabletop exercises in 2020 that tried to game out how the Trump administration might try to keep power.
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Speaker 1: And this was before January 6th.
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: And it never happened.
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Speaker 2: Clearly our work was not sufficient because, you know, January 6th did happen. But yeah, before January 6th, we sponsored a bunch of exercises designed to figure out how we would respond if a regime tried to stay in office after losing an election. And so this simulation is a similar kind of a simulation. Imagine that there's a group, much like MAGA is today, that is sour on democracy and does not particularly seem to respect the rule of law that's been understood. How might they try to keep power and enrich themselves even if they lose a presidential election? And how might the institutionalists and the capitalists respond? And as you said, when we play this game a bunch of times, the nationalists win a lot of the time, not all the time, but about a third of the time you have the nationalists keep office and consolidate their power, even having lost a presidential election.
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Speaker 1: The scenario I participated in last, I think it was, I want to say it was April, the space-time continuum these days with me. But what was interesting about it is we were in real time, meaning here we are. So you're laying out, how do you use the midterms? The ultimate goal is staying in, is making sure your side wins, whatever winning was. For the capitalists, it was about increasing their wealth. For the institutionalists, it was about making sure they won a free and fair election. And for the nationalists, it was about staying in power regardless, whether it was free and fair or not free and fair. We can have all that. And how the midterms would be used to get to January 6th. And I will tell you, there were two things. And again, we're in Chatham House rules. There were two things in the simulation that I participated in that ended up being used three or four months later. One was the nationalists trying to pump up progressives, trying to help the furthest left candidates in primaries. And we saw exactly that within two months of what we were working on. And then the other was using federal lands to help the capitalists with data centers. And sure enough, Donald Trump has floated the idea of using some federal lands on this front. Look, I'm sure we're not outliers here. This has been throughout this. I mean, walk me through how many times you've seen something in a simulation only to see it actually used in the campaign playbook a few months or weeks later.
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Speaker 2: It happens, I mean, all the time, honestly. Before the Venezuelan decapitation, someone in the game proposed that. Before the murders in Minnesota, someone in the game proposed something similar. So unfortunately, the dark assumptions about what nationalists might do and the people who play the nationalists doing that has frequently happened. It is very commonly the case that the nationalists are just more capable of offering specific carrots and sticks to companies, whereas the institutionalists tend to just offer kind of a general pablum. And so if you're an individual capitalist, well, I've got the nationalists who promise to give me a bunch of money or particular things that I need. And I also, if I'm a company, I also know that the nationalists, if I anger them, they're going to come after me directly with the Department of Justice or with the FTC. They're going to make my life harder personally as the head of a company. Whereas the institutionalists, they're probably just going to regulate me and tax me more. And so it is a common theme that the nationalists are very good at picking off individual capitalists. And you absolutely see that happening here in the US with a lot of people who are business leaders who originally were very much in favor of the constitution and kind of horrified by Trump. A lot of them have come on side. You know?
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Speaker 1: Have you ever done this simulation with folks who are truly sympathetic to the nationalist cause?
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Speaker 2: No. We've done it with some people who were Trump voters. And some people who were sort of Trump, even Trump supporters for narrow issues like deregulation in health care or support for Israel or whatever. But we've not had any sort of MAGA true believers play.
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Speaker 1: Is that been intentional or is it just sort of where where there's interest in this or what would you would you be curious to see? You know how that would work.
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Speaker 2: I mean, maybe I should be. Unfortunately, I think I know how it will work. I've spent a lot of last 10 years really understanding how MAGA works. It's actually very predictable because it's the same playbook that Vladimir Putin had in Russia, that Viktor Orban had in Hungary, that Hugo Chavez had in Venezuela. There's a fairly predictable set of actions that they take And part of our theory in hosting these games is that the MAGA people already know how to play this game. It's everybody else who needs a little bit of a wake-up call. But I guess, you know, if there was some good reason to include some MAGA people, I guess we could.
00:11:26
Speaker 1: I only ask, it's sort of one of those where, here would be my one concern about the simulation exercise. That... The that those that play the role of the nationalists assume the most aggressive stance.
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Speaker 2: Right.
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Speaker 1: In some ways, it you've seen it. You know, the one I participated in, there certainly was a was a desire to watch that. Do you worry that it is or do you think that's actually healthy that you usually have a very aggressive set of players on the nationalists behalf because it's the worst case scenario?
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Speaker 2: Well, I got to be honest, usually it's the reverse.
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Speaker 1: Oh, interesting.
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Speaker 2: The institutionalists win a lot more often than I predicted. We've run this game probably for about 400 people now. And usually the nationalists are very, very soft. Interesting.
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Speaker 1: Because they're made up of folks that just can't, well, I can't do that or nobody. They wouldn't do that. And it's like, look, I come from, we have the person that, one of the people that helped, I think, bring you along to the group I participated in. He is the one that planted a line in my head forever. And he said, you know, the biggest issue we have is failure of imagination.
00:12:47
Speaker 2: 100%.
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Speaker 1: And certainly, you know, that was the attitude I know I went in with. It was sort of like clear your mind of what everything you think, you know, and just, you know. But I think the fatal flaw, and this is why it surprises me when you say the institutionalists win more often, is that institutionalists don't like to break norms or laws. And in order to win this game, you've got to break norms and laws.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, one of the things about the norm thing is particularly important. And one of the ways that we try to think about this game is to, you know, everybody who's playing these games has lived in America our whole lives. So our whole lives, we've been in a specific framework where the rule of law was supported. That is very unusual historically, and it's very unusual around the world. And so what we try to do is we try to help people live in a world that is more like other authoritarian nations, where an authoritarian or authoritarian-leaning leader tries to stay in power after an election. And in order to basically to prevent the authoritarian from prevailing, The rest of civil society has to credibly deter them from keeping office. I think this is a very realistic scenario. I think it's a realistic scenario that on November 15th of 2028, both halves of America will think that they won. And if that happens, this is not like the year 2000 where there was an agreed upon legitimate path.
00:14:26
Speaker 1: To decide to figure it out, right?
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Speaker 2: There's no, if the Democrat prevails according to everything we used to believe, like the news organizations and civil society and institutional international monitors, And the Republican president is seen as prevailing by the right-wing media ecosystem that talks about urban fraud and Chinese manipulation or whatever. Those two points of view cannot be reconciled. And so in that situation, you have a situation where civil society has to really demand that that the winner be seated. And that demand has to be associated with things that are norm breaking, like a willingness to engage in a civil strike or economic pressure or counter mobilization in ways that the Democrats have not really done in the United States.
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Speaker 1: Well, and it's interesting, just in the experience I had, shock and awe mattered. And I guess the question Do you think January 6th was the right amount of shock to get institutionalists in a headspace where they may have to violate a norm or two? And I have to say, I sit there and I utter this, and I worry about crossing that line.
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Speaker 2: Oh, for sure. For sure. Well, let me actually go back to something you'd said before about the MAGA people elevating progressives. It's not so much that they're elevating progressives. You know, if someone's a little bit more liberal or a little bit more interventionist on antitrust or whatever, it's not that they're elevating the Elizabeth Warrens of the world. They're elevating Chevalier in New York. They're elevating particular... kinds of Democrats and saying that that is what the Democratic Party is. So that's what sets up this conflict is that if you think about the true believers of January 6th and why they were there, they genuinely believed that their country was being taken from them illegitimately by people that they thought would destroy America. So The question in terms of norms and values, there are tools in the United States, in the Constitution even, and in the United States history that can be sufficient to demand that the winner of the election wins. But I don't think that the institutionalists learned what they needed to learn but from January 6, 2021. In general, people think that was a strange one-off and couldn't happen again. And ultimately, it failed. But the nationalists have had eight years to prepare to do it better. So will there be devices that prevent people from being armed when they come into the Capitol? Will there be more people? And the only way to address that is to have a mass civil society movement, which has to be broadly based. It has to include capitalists. It has to include people who believe in the Second Amendment. It has to include young people at scale. And those are the kinds of movements internationally, if you look at examples like Serbia or Czechoslovakia or Chile or the Philippines, where actually civil society was able to successfully demand that the winner be seated. All of those examples are cross-sectional civil movements. And by the way, if you cross the next set of boundaries and it becomes violent, that's a failure. That's Syria 2011. That doesn't work. So the game is designed to encourage people to understand ways that actually work in saving the country that you want to save without going too far in either direction, without being too soft to the nationalists, and also without ripping the country apart.
00:18:21
Speaker 1: Hey, this episode of the Chuck Todd cast is brought to you by Ethos. Look, let me tell you about life insurance. As you know, Ethos is an incredible portal for helping you find the right life insurance policy. I'm a huge believer in life insurance. I wouldn't have gotten to college in Washington, D.C. without life insurance. My father had a policy buried somewhere that we discovered, and it wasn't a lot of money, but it was an important bucket of money at a time that my mother, newly widowed, single mom, Me, I'm 16. It was of enormous, enormous help at that time. And this is why I believe in life insurance. You don't know what could happen to you on any given day. This is literally an insurance policy for that. So let me tell you a little bit about Ethos. Ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy. It's 100% online. You get a quote in seconds, you apply in minutes, and you can get coverage the same day you begin this process. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions. You can get up to $ 3 million in coverage. Some policies are as low as $ 30 a month. And you'll get your lowest rate from their network of trusted carriers. Ethos has gotten 4.9 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot with over 5,500 reviews. So, take 10 minutes to get covered today. Life insurance through Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash chuck. That is E-T-H-O-S dot com slash chuck. Application times may vary. The rates may vary. That Trust Pilot rating. as of August of 2026. You know, when I look at, when I always say I walk a line between alarmism and vigilance, I don't want to be an alarmist, but I'm not going to be naive and stick my head in the sand. I am convinced that any movement from the nationalists or from Trump will not be done in a way that looks blatantly against the Constitution, but instead will be handing people what they believe is a legal path that they don't that there is a. I mean, and you could see it actually at January 6th.
00:20:32
Speaker 2: Right.
00:20:32
Speaker 1: They wanted they didn't they weren't saying overturn the election. They were saying challenge the results.
00:20:37
Speaker 2: Right.
00:20:37
Speaker 1: They wanted they were going to use the system within. I think that's one of the things among those that worry about this, that they don't fully appreciate. I'm going to name a name here, Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller believes he can use existing law in the Constitution to get what he wants here, and that that will be the path because they're going to want to hand a judge some big leaf of legitimacy.
00:21:08
Speaker 2: I agree with you, and it's not just Stephen Miller. It's the entire– infrastructure of tech overlords and Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel and Jaden Vance, all these people believe that democracy is bad. They really do. They don't want democracy. They prefer, you know, kind of a.
00:21:27
Speaker 1: Illiberal. They really like the hungry model, really. I mean, sort of like a little bit of democracy, you know, on the local level, but not for the big stuff.
00:21:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so the way that they'll move the Overton window on the law is very aggressive. So the White House Counsel's Office is an assistant attorney general that basically describes what they think the Constitution means. And they have been incredibly aggressive under Trump in taking interpretations of the Constitution that had previously been unheard of. And so, for example.
00:22:02
Speaker 1: Well, they're doing one now with executive privilege for private citizens. They created an OLC memo, which is one of these weird loopholes in basically delaying a judicial ruling.
00:22:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Office of Legal Counsel, the OLC, they have been– super aggressive on this stuff. And by the way, the Trump versus United States decision in 2024 essentially held that the president cannot be held criminally responsible for anything he does in the scope of his office. That was never the understanding before. That would have been considered absurd. And yet that is now the law of the land. So you're right that they will want the veneer of legality. Let's just not be too hopeful about that veneer of legality. They can push and stretch it in a number of ways. And I'll give you one example if you're interested. We, you know, the institutionalists, Susan Collins and Joe Manchin, passed a law called the Electoral Count Reform Act, which was designed to tie up the glitches in the law that made January 6th possible by saying, you know, what it says is only the governors can hand a slate to Congress and the vice president has no authority to reject a slate. There is a fringe legal movement And by fringe, I mean MAGA, so who knows how soon it becomes mainstream, which is that the Electoral Count Reform Act is unconstitutional because the 12th Amendment has a different way of saying the role of the vice president. And so if you're really aggressive about that interpretation of the 12th Amendment, then you could say, well, maybe J.D. Vance does have the ability to throw out electors, at which point maybe you can say, say legitimately that there weren't enough votes. You didn't get to 270, at which point the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives. And the House of Representatives, as you know, in that situation, they don't vote as a Congress. They get one vote per state. And the total number of states that support MAGA is higher than the total number of states that don't. So that gives you that set of steps is one example, and there are others. of ways that they can stretch the meaning of the law to give themselves the fig leaf while still keeping power, having lost the election.
00:24:26
Speaker 1: Describe the guts of the game. It's an, I know you use AI to help with the, you know, creating the scenario and feeding, okay, if this, then that type of, but walk people through the guts of this. How did you build this simulation?
00:24:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very important for people who kind of wonk out a little bit on how artificial intelligence works. It is very important that you just don't set artificial intelligence loose because it's very sloppy, it's very messy, it hallucinates a lot of things. It may be the smartest thing ever, but it's not infinitely smart and it makes mistakes. So the game itself is what programmers say sometimes it's on rails. So there's a set of outcomes, and there's a set of specific things that are evaluated, measures for the legitimacy of the regime, the cohesion of the regime, the state of the stock market, the state of inflation. There's a set of several hundred variables that are tracked. And then the decisions that the teams make are then routed into that set of variables, and that creates a new game state. And then AI uses that new game state to say what the news would sound like. So as a team, you make a series, you come together and it's 2026, and you make a series of moves. The game engine then calculates that in a highly constrained reasoning engine. And the reasoning engine is built around these international models that I mentioned. So there are models where civil society is effective at enforcing an election. I've already gone through some of those. But there are plenty of examples where the autocratic regime just stays in power. Venezuela, Belarus, many, many other examples. And there are examples where there's a fracture in the Civil War as well. And so those historical examples go into the game engine. And so as a player, what happens is You and your team make some moves. You submit your moves with how much money you spent or what you did. That goes into the game engine, and then it rolls forward the calendar about 13 months. So you make a bunch of moves in September of 2026, and then suddenly you're getting a news drop that describes the state of the world in October of 2027, and then November in 2028, just after a contested election, and then December of 2029, when the dust has settled. So that's kind of how the game works, if that makes sense.
00:26:56
Speaker 1: Yeah. And what I look, I had somebody on about a month ago where we who wrote in Lawfare about the vulnerabilities of the midterms. And just to reinforce here, you are this is simply a 2020 exercise with the midterms as a vehicle.
00:27:14
Speaker 2: Right. Yes, although the midterms can be an important vehicle. If you're on the MAGA team, you want to use the midterms to build muscles, to build the narrative of urban fraud, to get people used to the idea of challenging election. Mostly, I think it's unlikely that... that they will use all their guns on the midterm because Mr. Trump does not really care about Republicans. He and his care about themselves. So I think they want to use the midterms to practice so that they will be more effective at keeping power in 2028, 2029. What does practice look like?
00:27:54
Speaker 1: What do you think that looks like?
00:27:55
Speaker 2: It looks like experimenting with messing up the mails with the United States Postal Service. It looks like experimenting and driving the narrative of urban fraud and Chinese manipulation so that their base is worked up about Democrats cheating and stealing the election. It looks like practicing things like setting a norm that it's okay to have federal agents near polling places. So that combination of getting the bureaucracy in place, getting federal agents used to the idea of being in polling places and getting citizens used to that idea, getting citizens used to the idea that even an overwhelming Democratic win, which might happen this time, still can't be trusted because they believe in the narrative of urban fraud and Chinese manipulation. And it also means making sure that the electorate understands Democrats as being represented by people like the extreme democratic socialists like DAC. So those are the things that could be good practice so that they can try to keep power in.
00:29:02
Speaker 1: 2028, 2029. The two vulnerabilities that the Lawfare reporter sort of pointed out, one was the Lange certifications. delayed certifications. Look, I think there's a landmine sitting out there right now. It's Missouri. And if the margin in the house is close, a big margin, it's harder to use one state for manipulation. If the margin's close, like we're just staring at now, then one state can matter here a lot. Missouri's putting themselves in a situation where I think that you can't see that delegation, especially if they go forward with elections featuring nominees that the courts said was an invalid map. And yet they're going to try to use these nominees anyway, which I just, I'm at my wits end that that looks like the path we're going to head down because it It seems to me an easy way to invalidate these elections. And I hate to see if we go down the path of an invalidated election, even for legitimate reasons, just feels like that opens the door to something. What other midterm manipulations do you think people ought to look out for that might be test runs in your head?
00:30:21
Speaker 2: Well, I think you're absolutely right that if it's a close election, the Republican speaker has a lot of leeway to just refuse to seat delegations. I think you're also right that Missouri is a classic example. But there are some examples in California because they count late. I mean, there's really enormous discretion. I think if it's a big election where civil society understand that Democrats won by 20 seats, it's going to be very hard for them to do that. But if it's close, I agree with you. That's one of the big things. The second thing in the midterms that people are really worried about is ballot intimidation and federal agents deterring people from voting. I'm less concerned about that in the short term, because the first time you do something like that, there's actually a little bit of a backlash effect. So you might actually get more people to vote against you than otherwise might have because, you know, there's a push.
00:31:21
Speaker 1: Oh, I think he's I think what he's done with the Postal Service already is going to change some voting patterns on the Democratic side. But it isn't going to limit the turnout on the Democratic side, like, you know. You know, I joke, I mean, you could change your polling location the day before and Democrats are going to find it. Everything he's doing probably harms his own people more than it will harm the other side.
00:31:45
Speaker 2: Oh, completely. Yeah. I mean, part of this is why I think that the midterms are not the ballgame for these kinds of electoral shenanigans. I think the midterms are the setup for the real ballgame. And the reason I think it's the real ballgame, the executive branch is extremely powerful. And it's only become much more powerful over the last few decades. And under Trump, it's become insanely powerful. They issue pardons all the time. That means Congress cannot subpoena and cannot investigate. They put in acting officials so that deprives the Senate of its power over appointments. And they move budget items around, limiting the Democrats' power of the purse if they were to take the House. So this executive branch is extremely, extremely powerful. And everything that they're doing, like they've decapitated, like they've taken out a bunch of four-star generals from the Department of Defense, They've completely replaced the senior leadership of the Departments of Justice and State. All of that makes sense in a context where the ballgame— is to keep power in 2029, because then things can keep going. So that's why I think that that's the key ballgame. Obviously, if you don't want that to happen, you have to win in November of 2028. The bigger the margin of victory, the better. But you also have to be prepared for making sure that in the next 75 days, civil society is firmly united around the idea that the winner should be seated.
00:33:21
Speaker 1: The premise of your book Is it lessons from this? How would you describe it?
00:33:29
Speaker 2: The premise of the book is to try to think through how the Enlightenment era survives in some of these darker cases. So in the book itself, the specific scenario, and I'm not predicting this, I'm just taking it as a for instance, is that in 2029, America fractures. And so red America becomes focused on the extractive industries. and even more theocratic and even more tightly aligned with Venezuela and Russia. And so it becomes kind of an extractive block, maybe including Alberta and Canada. And then the rule of law states, the blue states, they form an alliance with Canada and perhaps with Costa Rica. And that coalition becomes a constitutional alliance. And then you now have a global struggle between the extractive authoritarian states and the rule of law states. In this struggle, the rule of law states have real advantages. They're more innovative, they have a better, more reliable base of knowledge, but the authoritarian states also have an advantage, which is they can move very fast. In the scenario that I just outlined, if the United States executive branch is no longer subject to the peaceful transfer of power, then you're talking about the United States, Russia, and China that are now functionally authoritarian. So the authoritarians control something like 85% of the world's military power. And so my book, Archipelago of Light, coming out October 6th, my book is about if that happens, how does the rule of law survive? How do diverse communities use artificial intelligence to actually find new ways of organizing society? And it's really about authoritarianism and artificial intelligence together what's the way through that the enlightenment.
00:35:18
Speaker 1: Survives so it's not dystopian is what you're trying to say it.
00:35:22
Speaker 2: Is not dystopian it is it is not a summer read uh but it ends hopefully.
00:35:29
Speaker 1: You know in listening to that scenario the election of a democratic governor in texas really is quite the quite the shot in the organizational arm of the nationalists is it not 100 a big big you are counting on texas being a part of that coalition in your fracture and the fact that it looks to me like texas is at least at a minimum is more interested in being a battleground state and look gonna start looking a little bit more like ohio and a little bit less like uh oklahoma.
00:36:05
Speaker 2: Yeah if texas flips blue That makes it much, much harder for the MAGA movement to keep power if they lose the election.
00:36:15
Speaker 1: Having Texas in a Democratic governor's hands is a bigger deal for 2028 than you think any other governor in the country?
00:36:26
Speaker 2: Than any other governor that's plausibly up for grabs. And let me give you a specific example of why. States have state militias by law. This is not the National Guard. They have state militias. So in states like New York and California, these militias are used to fight cybercrime. In states like Texas and Florida, they are combining forces to do live fire exercises in the field to police the border. So the red states are very much gearing up for kinetic warfare internally. Doesn't mean they're going to do it, but they're definitely preparing. And Texas is, in many ways, one of the richest and most powerful red states. And if all of those gun owners and all of that military power is suddenly on the side of the rule of law, that changes the dynamics greatly.
00:37:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, what an added sort of... stake to throw on the, to really screw up my metaphors here, to throw on the Barbie there when it comes to that Texas governor's race, which is, you know, I think it's already a fascinating race for where, you know, when the Democratic nominee is using a January 6 rally goer as an endorsee, you know that this, the dynamics of this race are unique.
00:37:46
Speaker 2: Oh, for sure. Although you had a guest on not that long ago, Scaramucci, who kind of mentioned the institutional power of the Republican Party. The Democrats are going to have to win by a lot to get Greg Abbott out of there, but it's possible.
00:38:01
Speaker 1: That's interesting. You think a half a percentage point win by the Democrat won't be enough to get Greg Abbott out of there?
00:38:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think a half a percentage point win would be enough. The question is more on the other side of the equation. Is there a half a point win? Just the lines in the urban areas are so long in Texas because of what they've done to consolidate voting centers. There's all kinds of that stuff that they can do. And look, even if you're a really committed midterm Democrat, eventually, if the lines are long enough, you got other things to do.
00:38:39
Speaker 1: So- That's interesting. You just see that just the way they've made it harder for Houston, Dallas, San Antonio to vote versus the rural parts is potentially a big advantage. Although I think part of the Republican Party's problems in Texas right now is how voters feel in rural areas about schools and about what's been happening, right? Like it's a– it is– I mean, it's possible that we're watching democracy save itself.
00:39:13
Speaker 2: I know. Right.
00:39:14
Speaker 1: Like, I mean, meaning like this is this is why I still have faith. Like eventually voters, they don't figure it out on your timeline or my timeline, but they figure it out. The question is, do they have enough room and enough space? And is our system going to let them?
00:39:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I mean, there is a global conflict between two different aspects of human society. Like it's us. We're the ones who choose authoritarianism. We're the ones who choose the rule of law. And that fight is very, very close. And when the fight's close, that's more reason to be involved, right? Yeah.
00:39:54
Speaker 1: What'd you learn from Hungary? And what should the institutionalists, right? Which is, you know, that's what I said. When I say institutional, you're very careful not to assume party in this. You know, what should the, you know, the sort of the Romney wing, right? Of the Republican Party, Romney-Cheney wing of the Republican Party and the institutionalists on the Democratic side. And I do think there are some who are not such institutionalists on the Democratic side. Like people need to understand that. The horseshoe is real here and they could be touching. What did you learn from Hungary and what do you hope the institutionalists have learned from Hungary?
00:40:32
Speaker 2: Well, Hungary is a very important lesson for how to win in 2028. So Magyar is, I mean, my view, I think similar to yours, is that the Democrats need a unity figure. There's a single issue. The issue is take power away from those people. That's the issue that Magyar won on, is that team is corrupt and bad, and we have to take power. Magyar was not talking about defund the police. He was not talking about wealth taxes. He was not talking about any of that other stuff. It was one issue, which is to take power away from those guys. That's important for winning the election. Unfortunately, I don't think Hungary gives you very good lessons at all about how to enforce the victory because Hungary is a part of the European Union. So I also think the same is true of Giorgio Maloney in Italy. Victor Orban and Giorgio Maloney absolutely were authoritarians, but they were in a system where there was so much money, the European Union subsidies and everything else, so much money at stake that the coalition around them would not have stood for them to try to keep power after having lost because it would have been just too expensive. That is also indirectly a lesson for the United States. People have to understand that supporting the regime and staying in power, even if they've lost, that would be expensive because there will be a general strike or tax withholding or a tax strike. or tax, like if, you know, one thing that we've talked about is if every citizen who believes in the rule of law makes a public declaration that if the constitution has been violated, then that means the 16th amendment is no longer valid, which is the one that authorizes income taxes. That creates a credible deterrent. Things like that need to happen where if the winner is not seated, is not inaugurated on January 20th, then there are real consequences for the people around the regime.
00:42:43
Speaker 1: How much of damage, let's say, let's assume Team Trump wants to find a way to stay in power in 28, right? This is the presumption of the simulation. They're overseeing a very unpopular economy. And, you know, I was just talking with my producer earlier, and I said, you know, there's not a revolution that's happened that doesn't happen, that basically it's usually because people are frustrated by the cost of things. That ultimately, and that in an odd way, the worse the economy, the better we should feel about the inability of Trump to stay in power. Am I being naive?
00:43:24
Speaker 2: No, I think, well, when I was a consultant in the business world, we used to refer to something as directionally correct. So directionally correct. The question is, is it far enough? And it is definitely the case that economic dissatisfaction can swell the ranks of the movement that is trying to house the incumbent. The problem is, there are a couple problems though. One problem is that people tend to really anchor on direction. So if you remember, Ronald Reagan was very unpopular in 1982. But by the time things felt like they were getting better, he rolled to a re-election victory. So it's the direction of change that will matter. And a lot of the cost of living issues are self-inflicted. There are specific reasons why the Trump team is using tariffs very heavily, and there are specific reasons why they're continuing to engage in Iran, those could change. And you could have an economy that is starting to recover. So that's one thing. The second thing is that The Democrats, if I'm right, that the Democrats have lost most of their power, meaning they can't, you know, their power of subpoena, their power of budget, their power of appointments, that these are all now limited because of the way in which Trump is managing the executive branch. Then all the Democrats have left is their power to set the agenda. with their committee chairs and with their investigations. And if the Democrats mess that up, then they provide a really good foil for Trump and MAGA to say that the problems are with the Democratic Party. The reason you're feeling this pain is because the Democrats are getting in the way of the things that will help you. And that is definitely something that Democrats are capable of, is messing that up. So those are the two things that I worry about a little bit in terms of the economy.
00:45:27
Speaker 1: One of the other things that I always push back on in this idea that we could fracture as states is how we're geographically divided, but not along state lines, along urban, suburban, rural lines. And Milwaukee and the suburbs and Madison would be on perhaps team institution. And the rest of Wisconsin might be on team nationalists. You'd see these divides all over. We just described Texas, right? Dallas County, Harris County, Bexar County, Travis County. Those counties are all blue. A lot of the rural counties would be red. There isn't, you know, and because we're not as regional as we once were, right? We're in this, is that a, is that security? Should I take that as some comfort that it's actually harder for us to fracture physically because we're kind of– even though we've self-sorted, we're with– but we are sort of convoluted in every rural area is red, but it's in all 50 states. Every urban area is blue, but it's in all 50 states.
00:46:49
Speaker 2: So a couple of things that you said, one thing I just want to underscore, the relationship between population density and two-way voting is the most important relationship in American politics. It is more important than race, than gender, than education. If you do a X-Y grid where along one axis you have population density and along the other axis you have two-way voting, it is a line. It is a line that varies very little from 2008 to 12. So it's very important. And you're right, that does make it harder to fracture. The other thing that makes it harder to fracture is that it is really difficult to separate these kinds of close-knit economic arrangements. So both of those are good points.
00:47:37
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll be honest, Dimitri, I think that watching the fact that China cares more about Europe and North America as a consumer market, they chose not to help create an energy recession from the Iran war, right? Because they didn't buy the oil they normally buy. They went ahead and used their strategic reserve. And it was, for those that argue that an interconnected world on our economy actually minimizes the chances of war, you know, the less free trade you have, the more chances for war. I mean, is that what we're in the middle of witnessing at the moment?
00:48:22
Speaker 2: It certainly could be. It's very hard to draw lines through these kinds of examples because they're all so specific. What I would just say is that the international order today is very similar to the international order as it was prior to World War I.
00:48:40
Speaker 1: No, I'm with you there. It's scary. It's very scary when you see the similarities.
00:48:46
Speaker 2: And there was a lot of free trade prior to World War I. So, you know, and people said.
00:48:52
Speaker 1: We were pretty tariff. We were pretty tariff. We were.
00:48:54
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, yes. Smooth hauling.
00:48:56
Speaker 1: United States.
00:48:56
Speaker 2: And so forth. Triggered it. But look at what the United States is doing now. Yeah. It's a modern and smooth holly, and you're forming these blocks. And the other thing that is a source of some concern is Brexit happened. There are examples that were previously considered real. Russia invaded Ukraine. physically. There's these examples that maybe a decade or two ago would have seemed fantastical that are happening now. So I think you're right that the scattering of human beings, rural and urban across states, and the interconnection of the global world through trade, both of those, I think, are good and potentially help us against the threats that we face. But I don't think they're rock solid reliable. History suggests otherwise.
00:49:49
Speaker 1: As long as human beings are involved, right? Nothing's worse. fully reliable. Let me land the plane this way. I know some lessons I took away from the exercise and what, frankly, constitutional reforms are needed. I think, frankly, more than anything else, there's certainly plenty of rules changes I'd love to see in how the House operates, how the Senate operates. And ultimately, no constitutional change is going to matter if Congress doesn't understand that it's Article I in our Constitution. But given everything you've watched and witnessed, are there three or four constitutional reforms that you think are necessary to limit the ability of your simulation to be so successful by the nationalists?
00:50:40
Speaker 2: So– I actually believe that the prior era of, you know, there are people like Bruce Ackerman on the left and Mike Ludig on the right who say that the prior constitutional order is now gone. And we're in this interregnum period because the way that the right understands the constitution is so radically different from the way that the Constitution used to be understood by institutionalists that we kind of have to go one of two directions. Some of the reforms that I used to be opposed to, I actually think are now critical. That includes expanding the number of Supreme Court justices to have one for every circuit. It is only with that sort of a thing that you can potentially overturn Trump versus the United States, which I think is just a foundational issue. Trump versus the United States, I think, is a foundational rewriting of American constitutional law. And you've got to get back to a system where the chief executive is subject to the law. You can't have otherwise. There are other reforms that I think would be really good.
00:51:41
Speaker 1: I mean, the.
00:51:42
Speaker 2: Classic mix, ranked choice voting, nonpartisan redistricting. You can even have mandatory voting as a way of giving everybody a stake. I think those are all realistic reforms, but at the very top, I think that the, yeah, there's gotta be much more power in the hands of Congress. And if I may say one other thing, People on the left, for as long as we've been alive, have been hostile to certain parts of the Constitution. They've been hostile to the free assembly cause of the First Amendment because it was used to justify segregation. They have been hostile to the Second Amendment for guns. They've been hostile to the Ninth and Tenth for federalism. And it is going to be very, very important for those on the left to understand that those constitutional tools were designed to limit central power. And they're going to be very, very important in a world where central power is occasionally held by, you know, essentially these authoritarians.
00:52:42
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the irony is to watch the right wing of our country be so enamored with centralized power, when for all of my adult life until this moment, the right was the biggest advocate against centralization, right? They were the biggest, you know, for And you could say the motivation goes back to segregation and it goes back to states' rights. But the basic principle, I thought it was a principle. That's all. I think a lot of us thought that has to be a principle, right?
00:53:18
Speaker 2: The biggest mistake that I made in 10 years of trying to fight against Trump's reelection was I assumed a larger percentage of Republicans meant what they said. By the way, the Republicans who didn't mean what they said are heroes. I'm sorry, who did mean what they said have become heroes. They have stood up. My book launch is on October 6th. And I'll be in conversation with my friend Sarah Longwell, who is, I think, a leader in this movement, and my friend Rick Wilson, these people who had been Republicans who say, like, actually, what I really cared about is the things I said I cared about. And therefore, when the Republican Party is no longer those things, I'm no longer Republican. That's going to be a critical constituency to win in 28 and to actually have a peaceful transfer of power in 29.
00:54:08
Speaker 1: If there is a flaw in your concerns, it sounds like it is the fact that the, that there could be infighting among sort of the institutionalists over what to focus on. I mean, you know, I mean, I think we know if, if the, if the stakes were truly people saw what the stakes were, I actually don't think this would be as big of a problem. The concern I have is, and I count myself as somebody that vacillates between these two sides of, Is this really about to happen? Or do you need to meet people where they are first? And that's the other thing. How do you go about doing it? Do you go about focused on the concern about this? Or do you instead, hey, help people make ends meet. And if you help people make ends meet, they're going to trust the institution again.
00:55:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, I... I mean, look, I have a strong point of view about this, which is that it has to be a single issue. So people on the left will sometimes say, everybody's got to be involved. We've got to bring everybody in. And I think that math is fundamentally unrealistic. If you bring in Chevalier and platform her, you're going to be losing people on the other side. You know, it has to be, you know, the bottom part of the horseshoe. It has to be a, that's what the example of Hungary proves. It has to be a coalition of people who say, we can disagree about everything else, but the winner of the election needs to be seated. That's the kind of movement that, that can actually ensure the peaceful transfer of power. And then there becomes a debate, like, you know, how do you get enough of the former Republicans and the capitalists and the gun owners while also keeping enough of the kind of white-hot activism of the progressive left? You know, you gotta find that balance.
00:56:03
Speaker 1: I have to say that I'm not convinced that this current Democratic Party I don't think the two major parties are ever vehicles for reform. And if you look at our history, it's taken an outside effort, right? Either a brand new political party, the Republicans, a Teddy Roosevelt who left a party, right? Who got us the constitutional reforms, arguably that were necessary in that moment to sort of to rebalance labor and corporations. Ross Perot in his own way, right? Had success. You know, the... The problem with ever getting a political party to do reform is they don't wanna give up power. When they have the power to do it, they're more concerned about keeping power than they are saving the Republic. I'll just be frank.
00:56:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, I actually agree with you. I'm not sure that the Democrats can't do it, but if I look at the list of things that need to be done, the electoral coalition that you need to build, the will to do things like give up, term limits. I don't know if it's the right answer, but it could be a part of the package. If I think through the list of things that need to be done to win the election in 2028, to make sure that the election is enforced in 2029, and then to reform the institutions to establish a new American republic that works, very hard for me to see those things emerging out of the Democratic Party as it is right now. Now, one thing I'll say as a just a flag of potential hope, is that the presidential nominee has a lot of power to reshape the party. We saw that in the Republican side with Trump. And so it's not impossible to imagine a Democratic nominee emerging who could rise above and champion those sort of things. But, you know, who knows at this point?
00:58:00
Speaker 1: You're still going to, that nominee is still going to answer to the voters they think got them there. Yes, it depends a lot on- What the makeup of that coalition looks like.
00:58:12
Speaker 2: 100%. The Democratic Party is still the Democratic Party, and they are still the ones who are going to choose the nominee, so. Yeah.
00:58:22
Speaker 1: What's your level of alarmism versus vigilance? Where do you put yourself?
00:58:28
Speaker 2: I have historically been very alarmist. And the reason is that when- You feel better at all?
00:58:36
Speaker 1: Because of what happened in Hungary? Did that help change your mindset at all?
00:58:40
Speaker 2: No, because that was just an electoral victory. And that's not the thing that I'm most worried about. When I started working against Trump in 2017, I had a bunch of very dark assumptions that I put down in writing about how bad things could go. And mostly I was on the most alarmist side of the rooms that I was in. And mostly those things came to pass. including some version of January 6th. So on the other hand, I thought that America today would be much darker. I thought somebody like Jim Comey would be dead by now. And so the courts have resisted in ways that I didn't predict. And we're still in the game.
00:59:25
Speaker 1: Do you have a theory as to how that happened? Is it that- I mean, what's your theory as to why the worst impulses haven't happened there? Because when it comes to Sarah Brennan or Comey or something like that.
00:59:39
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I had thought that MAGA was going to follow the direction of Vladimir Putin because I had thought that the Trump regime was essentially taking their playbook from Putin. And Putin was very, very thuggish. He would kill people. He would arrest people, etc., What has happened is that the Trump regime has been less thuggish than I thought, but more rapacious. And I think they're just making too much money. So the amount of money that they're making is so vast that they decided, what the heck? Why don't we stand down away from the protests in Minnesota and make sure that our ICE agents, masked federal agents, only kill civilians on American soil when there are no cameras around? It's a worthwhile trade-off. I can move ICE around. I can still build up ICE's capacities. But I don't need to have the direct confrontation. And so taking out a Jim Comey, that just makes it hard to rake in my billions. But if that theory is right, if it is just a matter of thuggishness versus rapaciousness, the key date is January 2029. Because on that day, if the institutionalists take power, then suddenly all that criming becomes illegal and they can't keep crime. Even if they pardon everybody, they can't pardon people from future crimes. And that whole regime has gotten used to making money by doing things that have been previously considered illegal. So things have been better than I feared.
01:01:16
Speaker 1: I comfort myself by always saying Trump's too lazy to be an authoritarian.
01:01:20
Speaker 2: Could be. Could be.
01:01:22
Speaker 1: But you've got to be willing to. I mean, I just look at January 6th. I look at that day and he didn't have the guts to fire the acting attorney general. He didn't have the guts to fire the defense, the acting defense secretary, which and it was all within his power. He could have pushed this envelope and he chose not to. Because one of the things that's the hallmark of him is that he always wants somebody else to do the dirty work. He doesn't like to actually write. He's the irony to the guy who fired people on TV is he doesn't like to fire anybody.
01:01:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, you may be right. There are many. The reason why I'm less hopeful about that is if you look historically at Mussolini or Hitler or even the later years of Robert Mugabe, everybody who interacted with them thought they were clowns. Right.
01:02:16
Speaker 1: You're right.
01:02:16
Speaker 2: And yet, as Charlie Sykes sometimes says, a clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower. And Donald Trump will be eight years further into his malignant narcissism, into his aging, his senescence, eight years further into having this regime around him that is preparing. You remember, for January 6th, he cobbled together some losers in a couple of months. Now he's got eight years of bringing together a full team. You know, maybe. It's just hard to know.
01:02:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, as Peter Thiel observed, he goes, they're quite loyal. They're not competent, but they're quite loyal. I don't know if you caught those comments.
01:02:54
Speaker 2: I did. Peter Thiel and I happened to be in school together in college, and he's kind of always been like this.
01:03:02
Speaker 1: He's not as liberal Democrat as he's small, meaning small L, small D, not ideological.
01:03:09
Speaker 2: No, I think he genuinely believes that women's suffrage is wrong. And that democracy is wrong. He has this statement that democracy and freedom are not compatible. And he doesn't mean your freedom when he says that.
01:03:25
Speaker 1: It's his freedom.
01:03:26
Speaker 2: Right.
01:03:28
Speaker 1: No, I. Let me let me put anybody very close to him. Do you find them? Are you more concerned about them? I mean, I'll just state it. Vice President Vance is very close with Peter Thiel. Do you think that's a relationship that scares you more than Donald Trump?
01:03:46
Speaker 2: I don't know. Yes, maybe. I mean, the relationships that scare me the most, probably in order, are Vladimir Putin and then the Peter Thiel crowd. But they're both very scary.
01:04:01
Speaker 1: How do you sleep? How do you make yourself feel better? I will tell you this. My wife always says, hey, you got to give people a little bit of hope. What's the hope that you give people?
01:04:13
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, everything that you've said, like the bits of hope that you've said, I've pushed back on all of them, but all of them are directionally correct. This is a close thing. I could imagine a unifying figure, and I don't, you know, just to make one up, imagine a John Ossoff.
01:04:31
Speaker 1: I'm for Captain America, General Donahue. If your nickname is Captain America. Yeah. No, I'd like to, I'd like, I have no idea whether he is ready to be president of the United States. But a forced out four-star general whose nickname was Captain America, I'd at least like to try.
01:04:48
Speaker 2: 100%, or I'm forgetting the name of the admiral right now, McRaven.
01:04:55
Speaker 1: Bill McRaven, yeah.
01:04:57
Speaker 2: For sure. I'm just throwing a name out there. Someone who's unifying and centrist and a good speaker and kind of invokes, like imagine that Joe Biden was 30 years younger and he ran the Soul of America campaign.
01:05:12
Speaker 1: Same campaign, right, yeah.
01:05:13
Speaker 2: That kind of a campaign, if you win by... four or five points, you get a slingshot effect where it's very hard for the regime to keep power. And there's an enormous amount of motivation to fix the problems and create what I would consider a new American republic. that is more robust. And I think that's the problem is that the official future that we all had is wide open. Things that we thought were impossible are now possible. And that's very scary on one side. But on the other side, if hope prevails, that could be very exciting. And I also take great comfort in the way Canada is positioning themselves in the way, you know, there are parts of the global alliance for freedom that are beginning to realize they need to stand up. And that's a good sign.
01:06:02
Speaker 1: Dimitri, I did not know what to expect when I participated. And it's one of the things, one of the most important things I've participated in in the last year. The work you're doing, how can people, is there a way for people to participate or how... Because I know I'm going to have some listeners going, I'd like to try this. How does it work? Is there an online portion? I know in some ways it works better, frankly, as a role-playing game.
01:06:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have done some Zoom versions, some online versions. We haven't yet scaled to the place where it's easy. But for example, we've had students and high school teachers, law school students play the game virtually.
01:06:51
Speaker 1: And where can they find you if they wanted to do that? Some high school civics teacher who I've got a few that I'm sort of pen pals with over the years. They want to contact, how do they do it? How would they come find, get your help?
01:07:05
Speaker 2: So my book page, and if you go to www.truthsurvives.com, you can get to my book page, and you can contact me through that. The organization, the philanthropy that I run that sponsors these games is called the Atoll Society, and there's a contact form there. So I'm not that hard to reach if you want to learn anything. um how to how to play this game or you want to run it yourself.
01:07:34
Speaker 1: Look i think it's what i would love to see a lot of high school civics teachers um and intro political science uh professors um think about this because it's just a terrific way to get folks to get frankly smarter about the constitution the rules that do exist and how it works and you know even even simply as a way to educate the less knowledgeable about our system. It can be a terrific teaching.
01:08:06
Speaker 2: Well, I'm very grateful for your feedback. And just to build on it, it's very hard to get out of this day, this week, this month, this life that I've lived to date. And these simulations allow you to at least briefly inhabit a different set of assumptions that are maybe more historically grounded and less narrow, just in case they're true.
01:08:29
Speaker 1: Dimitri, congrats on the book. October 6th, we'll be looking for it. And I have a feeling I'll get quite a few podcast listeners checking it in. So thank you.
01:08:40
Speaker 2: I appreciate it.
01:08:41
Speaker 1: Good to see you.
01:08:42
Speaker 2: Good to see you.