Transcript: Trump’s Angry “Dictator” Rant Unnerves Experts: “Wake Up!”

Sargent: Yes, I think there’s no question about it. There’s this new Pew poll I want to bring up. It finds Trump’s job approval at 38 percent with 60 percent disapproving. That’s abysmal. And it’s gotten some attention, but there’s a finding in here that hasn’t gotten attention. It’s this: 56 percent of Americans are not confident in Trump’s ability to effectively handle law enforcement and criminal justice. Only 44 percent are confident. That’s striking. This poll was taken while all this stuff has been unfolding in U.S. cities. I think it’s backfiring for Trump. They are absolutely convinced that the public will mindlessly, robotically march behind them if they just say, Crime, and, We have to send in the military and we’re going to bait Democrats into opposing it. But Americans don’t want the military roaming their streets. They understand the principles that I think you laid down earlier. This is not something that is going to be popular over time. I think it gets worse for Trump. What do you think?

Vance: I think the problem is whether Americans will wake up in time, right? There’s a breaking point, a tipping point past which Trump has normalized the use of law enforcement, maybe of military troops on American soil. It’ll require sign-off from the Supreme Court. It’s unclear what will happen when these issues reach them. These would seem to be clearly established legal principles that would prevent what Trump wants to do, but the court has gone there in the past. And so I don’t think that we have confidence about how the Supreme Court will rule on these issues. And it may be that Americans wake up only when it’s too late.

Sargent: Well, that actually gets to a dilemma that I wanted to ask you about. On the one hand, there’s a downside in acting too frightened of what Trump is doing because part of his game is to scare us and cause us all to think that politics is hopeless, that they’ve won. But on the other, there really is a slippery slope here. Even if some of these initial moves by the National Guard are toothless looking—the selfies and so forth, and there were reports that in Los Angeles they were just lying around for long periods of time—nonetheless, it is acclimating American voters to the presence of the military on U.S. streets, acclimating them to potentially illegal abuses of power, [and] really in a way, I guess, acclimating them to authoritarian rule, potentially. How do we navigate that odd tension?