Our Long Road Out of Autocracy

Kate is joined by returning guest and friend of the show, Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton, and one of the world’s leading scholars of democratic backsliding, autocracy, and the rule of law.

They discuss how the Supreme Court has been “captured,” the ways Donald Trump is attempting to remake Washington, D.C., in his image, and what Hungary can teach us about autocracy and how to recover from it. Favorite things: Kate : Emil Bove Defended Trump in Court.

Then Trump Made Him a Judge , Mattathias Schwartz (NYT); Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home , Stephen Starring Grant Kim : Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump , Maggie Haberman & Jonathan Swan; Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID , Nicholas Enrich; The Dual State , Ernst Fraenkel; The Origins of Totalitarianism , Hannah Arendt; It Can't Happen Here , Sinclair Lewis; Borgen - Power & Glory (Netflix); Gok Wan's Easy Asian (Prime Video) Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE on November 6th in Washington, DC: Buy Melissa’s book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader Buy Leah’s book, Lawless , now out in paperback Follow us on Instagram , Threads , and Bluesky For a transcript of an episode of Strict Scrutiny please email transcripts@