Francis Fukuyama on 2025

So if we want to get into things that were unusual about this year, I think that, you know, one of them has to be just the extraordinary level of political corruption that, you know, this administration has engaged in, where they are, you know, it it begins with the pardons, right? So everybody expected he pardoned all the January 6th people. He said that he wouldn't Pardon the ones that had done criminal, you know, real violence, but that went by the wayside right away. He basically is just selling parties.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. What a year it has been, I think, after Donald Trump won re-election last November. We all expected this year to be eventful. We all worried about what it might bring. But it turned out to be even more turbulent and in many ways even more concerning than we might have expected.

So to make sense of how the first eleven months of Donald Trump's presidency have transformed the United States, to assess whether he has been able to impose his will on American institutions. to take a health check of whether the separation of powers is working, of whether other branches of the US government are able to contain some of the ways in which the Trump administration is ignoring the basic rules and norms of American democracy. I invited, well Francis Fukuyama, perhaps at this point my most frequent podcast guest, the author of many deeply influential books, and of course my co-conspirator here at Persuasion as the founder of The American Purpose, as the author of a Frankly Fukuyama blog, as well as a new podcast by that same. name.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (65 minutes, 11,680 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.