Gideon Rachman and Edward Luce November 7 2024 He’s mentioned a lot of names. Susan Glasser That’s a different issue, you know, because the way it could work in America’s system — and this would be an act of extraordinary vengeance, unbelievably divisive and controversial — but in our military system, I don’t know how it works. In the UK, you can recall to active duty even very senior military officials. So Mark Milley is now a retired four-star army general. The commander-in-chief could cause him to be recalled to active duty and then face court martial. So in the case of the generals who turned on Trump, that would be the extraordinary sanction that he would be looking to pursue. I don’t know if he would do that. Then there’s the question of the actual, you know, using the civilian court system, the justice department, the FBI, to go after his political enemies, which, again, he has said out loud repeatedly in just the last few weeks that he believes that he should go after the, quote, enemies within, the political enemies within this country. Edward Luce He’s also said he shouldn’t have left office in 2020. So, I mean, to him, this is a referendum on 2020. He won the referendum. It was a stolen election. He now has a mandate to hold to account those who stole the presidency from him. And, you know, the Orbán, Viktor Orbán book or the Narendra Modi book is not necessarily to put these people in jail. It’s to bankrupt them in legal fees. If just a nuisance like FBI investigations, DoJ investigations, all kinds of subpoenas, inquiries, tax audits from the IRS, you bury them, you turn their lives into a living hell. And the chilling effect on all other forms of dissent out there, knowing this can be done at a whim, even if ultimately you will be exonerated by a court and it will all prove to be you were innocent all along, you’re a victim. It doesn’t matter what happens in 2028, you are terrified now of being ruined. And he can ruin and he will ruin. He is a vengeful character. Gideon Rachman I mean, I’m struck, Susan — you know I’ve just been here for this week in the run-up to the election — by how much talk there is, you know, in embassies and parties about people leaving the country, getting out ahead of time. Have you heard that? Susan Glasser Believe me, this was the, you know, sort of morbid, you know, kind of joke for really the whole last year, Gideon, in Washington. I don’t treat it all that seriously. I remember when Donald Trump first was elected and so many painful conversations with friends, colleagues, people here, you know, they’re gonna change their lives. They’re gonna focus on stopping this terrible thing that’s cropped up in our society. And, you know, people can accommodate themselves to just about anything. And I lived through the first few years of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And, you know, people accommodate themselves. They can normalise anything. We are not on day one of the Trump era in American politics. We are on year nine of this. OK? So people have already accommodated themselves to a great degree and the vast majority of them have already made their peace with this. Gideon Rachman OK. Well, you know, people presumably, most people didn’t vote for a vengeance campaign. They voted for something else. And that’s how democracy works. So what do you think, Ed, that Trump might deliver in a positive way or you know that his supporters will be looking for? What kind of agenda beyond this person who have been locking up his enemies is he going to be trying to do? We talked about the deportation. We talked about the tariffs. What else? Edward Luce Well, I mean, I think he’s going to, if you want this to be the positive side, I can tell you what active things he will do that do not involve an Orbán playbook. Gideon Rachman Positive, and not necessarily that you approve. It’s just that there’s a political agenda that people have voted for. Edward Luce Yes. OK. You know, people focus on the Supreme Court ruling giving him immunity. But there is another equally important one on the Chevron case, which is essentially that agencies in town do not have the right to write their own rules, even if Congress has explicitly given them the autonomy to do so. That is the old Steve Bannon deconstruction of the administrative state. And Trump has promised, now repeatedly, Elon Musk the role as cost-cutter-in-chief. And Musk has talked about cutting a third from the federal budget, $2tn worth of spending. I mean, I would be astonished, even in this sort of hyper-urbanised environment, with the trifecta in Republican control, meaning both chambers of Congress and the White House, I will be astonished if you could get anywhere close to that. It would be a form of self-immolation at the beginning of Trump’s time to impose that much pain on this multiracial, working-class coalition that chiefly for economic reasons, have voted him into power. But he owes Musk a lot. Musk considers himself to be the real vice-presidential candidate in this election and a sort of de facto sharer in the winning of it. And so he’s gonna get some kind of role in this administration. There are several investigations going into Musk’s companies by federal agencies right now. All of those will end. Into work practices, into discrimination, into share manipulation, into what have you — there’s a whole range. All of those will end and we will see an extraordinary deconstruction, I think, of the administrative state, that we will see Steve Bannon’s dreams realised. And people like Musk and the super sort of libertarian tech billionaires and others and the private equity billionaires, the Steve Schwarzmans are going to have, at least in the short term, a field day. They’ll have this SEC off their back. They’ll have the DoJ off their back. They’ll have the FTC off their back. It will be . . .  Gideon Rachman