Trump Points, Justice Shoots: Jonathan Rauch Looks Back (Without Anger) at the First Six Months of 2026

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Earlier this week, we did a show with my friend, David Maschiotta, left-wing cultural critic, looking back at the first six months of 2026 We called it A Time For Monsters. He sees all sorts of monsters on the left. Of course, the term, a time for monsters, is one that Antonio Gramsci used in terms of making sense of what he called interregnums. When it comes to the first six months of 2026, it does seem like an interregnum.
Maschiotta looked at that interregnum from the left. Today, we're going to look at it, if not from the right, certainly from the center with another old friend of the show, Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, best-selling writer, commentator. John, as the first six months of 2026, does it bring to mind Gramsci's remarks that we know that something's dead, but we're not quite sure what's replacing it?

**Jonathan Rauch** (1:35)
Yeah, I think actually that's a good framework for a conversation. I am significantly less alarmed than I was a year ago, when the Trump administration was just running rampage, putting agencies out of business and demanding Greenland.
Things are a bit more confined now. Their approval ratings have dropped, so he has less political space, the courts have pushed back, so he has less judicial space. But we don't know where this is headed. We know that the old order in terms of Europe and in terms of Iran, and in terms of a lot of big constitutional changes happening at the Supreme Court, all of that's happening and we don't yet know where it lands. So yeah, something's being born.

**Andrew Keen** (2:27)
Although maybe we're just returning to something that existed in the 19th century. There was a piece earlier this week in The New York Times describing Marco Rubio as the viceroy of Venezuela, all sorts of pieces in foreign policy magazines about a return to the Monroe Doctrine. Is America just becoming a regional imperial power?

**Jonathan Rauch** (2:47)
There are elements of all these earlier moments, Andrew, aren't there? There's the McKinley style imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. And then you've got this strange World War I style combat that we see in Ukraine.
And then we see the revival of socialism, the kind of left wing of the party that dates back to the 40s and 30s, 40s and 50s, the Henry Wallace wing of the Democratic Party. So there's all these bits and pieces floating around of different earlier eras. But I don't know where we're headed, actually. I just really don't. It's different, that's all I know. Throw AI into that mix, and then where are we?

**Andrew Keen** (3:30)
Exactly, well, we'll come to AI in a few minutes. You wrote a very controversial piece, maybe not quite controversial, certainly quite influential in the Atlantic two or three months ago, describing Trump and MAGA as fascists. Do you regret that now, given that you say that you're a little calmer about the situation, or do you still stick to the F word, John?

**Jonathan Rauch** (3:59)
Do I regret it? No.

**Andrew Keen** (4:00)
I don't mean regret in the sense you wish you hadn't written it, but are you slightly ambivalent or have we seen this return to fascism?

**Jonathan Rauch** (4:10)
I've gone back to being more confused, because I think you were ahead of a lot of us, Andrew, in understanding the slipperiness of the Trump phenomenon. Every time you try to put a box on it, and every time you think you've nailed it to the wall, it just morphs or it creeps or it slides away. The behaviors and talk that we were seeing by the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, I thought had, as I wrote, 18 distinct and unmistakable signs of something that looks like a modern American reinvention of fascism. Those things are still around, but the thing about Trump is he's such an improviser, and he is so disorganized.
Stephen Miller, who was leading that wing of the Trump administration and seemed to be firmly in control in December and January, now is nowhere to be seen. Then they were doing imperialism for a while in Venezuela. They're still trying to do it in Cuba. But in Iran, they never really developed a rationale. So there's this element of randomness, which means I may never crack the code.

**Andrew Keen** (5:20)
But there is a code, John. There always is in history. I mean, we talked before we went live, or maybe we emailed before we went live. You asked me for my opinion. I see Trump as an early example of what we might think of as an attention president, where his only interest really is being on the front page. He's always on the front page in every sense. He even got on the front page when it came to the World Cup. I'm not entirely sure why he wants to be on the front page. Maybe he's just a madman. Maybe he's an extreme narcissist.