Ramble On: What Does the Interim Government Look Like? (video)

Morning thoughts on Gene Sharp's "From Dictatorship to Democracy," the shape of the interim government, and two big announcements

Good morning from Baltimore, Maryland. Here is today’s ramble:

And here is the transcript:

Good morning and happy Friday. It is indeed Friday morning. We’ve made it through the week. Probably the craziest week so far, the week that we’ve had in the Trump Redux—which is saying something. Lots of crazy stuff happened this week, with the Signal chat and the ICE Gestapo basically disappearing people from college campuses.

It looks pretty bleak, and we’re gonna talk tonight on The Five 8 about dictatorship and what this all means. But this morning, as you can see, I am in a hotel room in Baltimore, and I have to hurry because I think the sun is gonna come up and ruin the lighting in the background unless I talk quickly.

So a couple of weeks ago on The Five 8, we had Molly McKew on as our guest, and she knows so much about dictatorships and how this stuff works. And she recommended that everybody read a book called From Dictatorship to Democracy, by Gene Sharp, which was written in, I think, 1993. So before social media, it was written. And what I did is, I bought this book. And here it is. Readily available. I think you can even get it in PDF format. I read it on the train on the way down.

Twenty-five percent of it doesn’t really apply to the United States, happily. So I wanted to take some things away from the book. And I’m still gonna be marinating on this for a while, I think. But first, a couple of positive things. There are many, many methods of nonviolent action, scores of methods, which he lists in the back of the book. And that was in 1993, before social media. So now there’s even more. And as I went through and read the list of what one can do to resist nonviolently, a lot of these things are already being done. People are doing these things. And that made me feel heartened, because I think people instinctually know what to do to stick it to the man.

There’s a quote in the book by the political scientist Karl Deutsch. And he basically said the same thing they say in Andor, but less poetically, which is that for a dictatorship, a tyrannical dictatorship to function, it has to kind of be able to breeze along. It depends on participation from people in the dictatorship to keep it humming. Because if it has to flex its muscle, it’s exhausting. And it runs out of energy quickly because it doesn’t actually have that much power at all, unless people are helping it, propping it up by participating in it by, I don’t know, for example, like a large law firm just capitulating to the demands of the State would be an example of something not to do and something that if they didn’t do that…if right now all of these fucking asshole law firms, these white-shoe law firms weren’t capitulating to the administration…if the university system wasn’t capitulating to the administration…if the legacy media—they wouldn’t because they’re all Trumpies—but if the legacy media had stood up for itself more, we wouldn’t be as far along in dictatorship as we are. But I am seeing a lot of people, regular people, people like us, doing things to help. And I think that’s great. That’s one of the positive things that I took out of the book.

Another positive thing is that, the last quarter of the book is what happens after. Okay, you’ve disintegrated a dictatorship, right? Because they end very quickly. Once they end, they fall fast. Then what? Then what happens? What happens to the dictatorship then? There’s always the chance that some other dictator will take over and it’ll be worse or different or whatever. Left wing, right wing, still a dictatorship, still oppression, still tyranny. We’re not gonna have that problem in the United States. We’ve had 249 years of democracy, so-called, imperfect for sure, but...it’s been more and more progressive during the course of that time, meaning that more and more people have been given rights, equal rights in that time. And this pushback on DEI, what they call DEI, is really a pushback on that. It’s a rollback of rights of anybody that isn’t a white, moneyed man, propertied-class voter—in the conception of what the founders wanted originally, which is for white men with property to vote, right? MAGA wants to scale everything back and get back to that point. Well, it hasn’t been scaled back. I’m 52 years old; my whole life, we’ve enjoyed these quite radical shifts in rights, civil rights for lots of different groups of people, in my lifetime, particularly the LGBTQ community, which is wonderful.

But my point is that we have a model that we could just simply revert to. Most countries don’t have that. Most countries have no idea what they’re doing. They toppled this dictatorship. They’ve lived under a dictator for years and years. Look at Russia, right? Russia, since the time of Ivan the Terrible in the mid to late 16th century, has lived basically under tyrannical, oppressive rule, one way or the other. The Communists, the Bolsheviks, I suppose, in 1917 took over, and maybe it was slightly better for like, I don’t know, a year and a half. And then Stalin came in and it was basically the same thing all over again, but in different form. Hammer and Sickle instead of Romanov, double-headed eagle: same tyrant. And then Yeltsin came along and you had again a little bit of a reshuffle of power in the nineties. And now there’s Putin, same thing. And one of the reasons that keeps happening there is because there is no precedent. There’s no way that the Russian people can look back and say, “Let’s go back to the time of this.” You know, they don’t have that cultural model like we do in the United States. It’s a wonderful thing that we have, and we’re blessed to have it. And it’s going to help us coming back out of this, if we can come back out of this, and we will.

Those are the two positive things. What I really want to talk about this morning is what’s going to happen in the future. Gene Sharp talks a lot about the grand strategy, and what that means is overarching, “What do we want out of this?” Okay, there’s going to be protests, there’s going to be boycotts, there’s going to be sand in the gears—I don’t know, Tesla dealerships are going to go up in flames. (We don’t condone that, but you know, we roast marshmallows when it happens.) But all these things are happening on the ground. What does it add up to? Where’s the grand strategy?

And the problem I’m having is that I don’t know what the interim government is going to look like. Right now there’s already been a coup. And I think that’s what people have to get through their heads. We’re going to talk about this more tonight on The Five 8, but there’s been a coup. We are already living under a dictatorship right now. It’s flexing its muscles. It’s an inchoate dictatorship, but it’s still a dictatorship. The old government of the United States does not exist anymore. Only on paper, right? Because the checks and balances have been collapsed and Congress has no power. The judiciary has no power. So functionally, it’s a dictatorship.

Where do we go from here? Impeaching Trump is not going to solve the problem because you still have Vance. You still have Mike Johnson in the house. You still have this Cabinet of knuckleheads and traders and Kremlin assets and people like RFK who just want us all to die. All of that has to go. And there’s no way in the existing framework of things to achieve that. You know, we need to have some kind of Nuremberg trial kind of thing—eventually. Ultimately, what we need to do is have a new election, like as soon as possible after the collapse. Then we can set everything back up again and hope for the best and hope that we’ve learned from our mistake. But what does the interim look like? What does the interim government look like? Because there needs to be, I think, an interim government between what this Trump dictatorship is and the reemergence of the 48th president on the other side. That’s what needs to happen. (Or I guess the 47th; Trump doesn’t count. This is not a presidency anymore.)

And I don’t know what the answer is. You know, I’ve been thinking about it. It needs to be as close as possible to what we have. It needs to be, you know, not people coming out off the street to lead the people. I think it needs to be people who are already in positions of authority, who have already been elected to positions of authority, who people can trust not to abuse the power. Maybe it is some combination of people. So it’s not one person, maybe it’s three people or five or whatever that makes these ultimate choices just in the short time that it’s going to take to get from the dictatorship back to the next presidency. And I don’t know who those people will be. It could be, I mean, if Johnson is gone and we have non-traitors in the House and the Senate, maybe it’s that, maybe it’s the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader and the Chief Justice, for now. I don’t like those people, but at least that’s a functional thing that looks like what we had before, that can keep everything humming until the things revert back to normal. Maybe it’s some coalition of governors. Maybe it’s the governor of New York and California and Illinois together or whatever. Because that’s executive power, all of these people have been elected, et cetera. And then we go from there.

But I think that’s going to be something that people really need to think about in the days ahead. I’m not a political scientist. I am a novelist and a journalist now. But I don’t know what the answer is to these things. I really don’t. And I think that’s something that smart people need to be thinking about in the days ahead, because we need to chart the pathway back. And the pathway back is not as simple as impeaching Trump or impeaching Trump and Vance even, because you have Johnson and you have these Cabinet people that are all horrible. You go down the list of succession, the presidential succession, and it’s a shit-show of nightmare.

So I urge people to think about that. What do think it would look like? Because I think it’s important to come up with a plan that everybody can agree on to get to the point where we can have a new election.

You know, we don’t have to have an election every four years. It’s nice that we do. I have often on this show made fun of my guests from Canada and the UK, for never knowing when the election’s happening. When is it happening? They don’t know. No one knows. To me, that’s odd, but it doesn’t mean that we have to have it this way. So, you know, it makes it easier to memorize when you’re in school. Okay, well, four years, eight years, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, maybe the next person takes over for the shorter term and then we have a new election in 2028.

But the way things are going now under Trump, I am not confident that there’s going to be any kind of midterm that’s fair in two years. So I think operating under that assumption is a big mistake. I think it’s a mistake they’re depending on, on their side. They’re depending on us assuming that these norms are going to hold—when they clearly are not, have not been.

So that’s what we need to think about. What is the interim government going to look like? How do we get from point A, dictatorship, to point B, interim government, and from interim government back to the United States of America?

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Big Announcements

So a couple of announcements up front. Again, watch us on The Five 8 tonight. We have a very big announcement on The Five 8 tonight about a new project we’re doing. So I encourage you to watch that, 8 o’clock PM Eastern Daylight Time.

And the other announcement I have is exciting for me. And let me explain a little bit. When I was contemplating what I was going to do back in the summer, I sort of assumed Kamala would win. And I thought, “Okay, well, I don’t know if people are going to want to read about Trump now after he’s gone. So maybe I have to kind of like phase out of this sort of writing and back into something that I would rather be doing.”

And I landed on the idea of sort of expanding my small press, which is called Four Sticks Press. And as you know, I write these “Sunday Pages,” which I enjoy a great deal, and which now I have a huge archive of. And I thought, okay, well, what if I, what if I take a “Sunday Pages” and make that like the introduction to a novel that’s old, that’s in the public domain. And the example that I cited was: Stephen Crane, who wrote The Red Badge of Courage, also wrote a book called Maggie, Girl of the Streets, which came out in, I think 1890 or thereabouts, which is about New York City. And it’s kind of cool. And I had already written a piece about Stephen Crane. And I thought that piece could be the intro and the text could be the book and I’ll make the book and put it up. And that was the idea.

And then Kamala did not win. And I sort of forgot about that for awhile. So, fast forward to now, I said, “Well, you know, maybe I can go back to this and start putting out these kinds of books on my press.” And that’s one of the reasons why I did my, the other book that I just did, The Age of Unreality, the essay book, because I wanted to experiment and see if I could make the book, which I did. And I think it came out really nice.

So, right now I have a new book out which was not written by me. I have written the foreword to the book. I’ve written an essay in the back of the book, and I’ve enlisted two of my friends and my favorite writers, Ronlyn Domingue and Diana Spechler, to write essays about this book, which in April of 2025 will be a hundred years since it was originally published by Scribners. And this book is called The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books, and now I have an edition of The Great Gatsby.

This is the proof copy, but the actual copy is now available. I know it’s available on Amazon. It’s gonna be available now at other bookstores, but Ingram Spark is still rolling that out, but it will be available.

On Sunday for “Sunday Pages,” I’m going to share the introduction to the book that I wrote. Gatsby at a hundred, man. And let me tell you, the more, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because you look at this Trump administration, and they’re all Tom Buchanans. They’re all very familiar characters that we find in Gatsby, a hundred years ago—which is something else that I find refreshing and reassuring. Because we’ve been here before. And if we’ve been here before and we’ve gotten through it before, we can get through it again.

So I guess what I’m saying, in short, is: we shall prevail.