Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss why Donald Trump is flagging, whether American institutions are resilient enough to survive, and the future of Ukraine.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: We’re recording this at the end of 2025. It truly has been an eventful year, an impactful year. It feels like it unfolded in two phases.
The first phase was Donald Trump assuming office, and turning out to be impressively efficient at and taking control of the reins of power, much more so than during his first term. For a few months, it felt as though the entire architecture of the American government was changing.
In the last months, it has felt as though that revolution has begun to slow in various ways. The title of the piece you published recently in Persuasion is Don’t Panic, Trump Is Flagging. Where do you think we are now, at the end of this year, in terms of the Trump administration and its ability to transform America?
Frank Fukuyama: Well, Yascha, you’ve made that whole account in a morally neutral way. The question is whether he’s been transformative and effective rather than whether he’s been good or bad. I think the good-or-bad issue is probably the prior one.
To me, the surprising thing was actually how bad he became in his second term in office. I had written various things at the time of the election. Many centrist Republican friends of mine were saying he wasn’t so bad the first time around and that he would probably be good for the economy, and so on and so forth. I felt that this was not likely to happen, that he was going to be much worse the second time around.
Even I did not anticipate how much worse he would be. He has pursued a very explicit authoritarian agenda, trying to do everything through executive order, bypassing Congress, and trying to ignore the courts as much as possible.
He then engaged in a revenge tour. The Susie Wiles interview that appeared in Vanity Fair pointed to this. She thought she had an agreement that he would only pursue the revenge part of his agenda for 90 days, and he actually intensified it after that.
Mounk: That is an extraordinary thing to say in the first place: You have 90 days to take revenge and then we’ll get serious.
Fukuyama: He completely ignored that supposed agreement, and the revenge part of the term has really kicked in very powerfully. In terms of effectiveness, that is actually the one saving grace: a lot of the incompetence from the first term seems to have reappeared.
Part of it is that the things he wants to do simply cannot be done. You can’t invent a charge and get a grand jury to indict somebody who hasn’t done anything wrong. That is clearly the case with both Letitia James and James Comey. Only Donald Trump thinks they actually committed a crime, but they couldn’t get a legitimate prosecutor to make that case. When they did get an incompetent prosecutor to try, the grand jury rejected the charges, which is extraordinary, because grand juries in the United States almost never reject charges.
Mounk: The famous line from a New York prosecutor in the 1980s was, I could indict a ham sandwich if I so chose.
Fukuyama: That’s right. It turns out they couldn’t indict a ham sandwich. In fact, the felony indictment for the person who threw a ham sandwich at an ICE officer also failed to stick. You are retreating back into a comedy of errors of the sort seen in the first term, which I think is good for the cause of justice per se. It is also very revealing of the bad intentions now playing out.
I think people who follow the Justice Department are completely appalled by how Pam Bondi has succeeded in hollowing it out. The entire Civil Rights Division and a very large number of prosecutors and attorneys have either left the department or been forced out. Morale has plummeted because everyone can see what is happening, and they are not serious about law enforcement.
If we want to talk about what was unusual about this year, one major factor has to be the extraordinary level of political corruption this administration has engaged in. It begins with the pardons. Everyone expected him to pardon the January 6th defendants. He said he would not pardon those who committed serious violence, but that promise was abandoned almost immediately. He is effectively selling pardons. Any wealthy person who wants to get out of jail approaches him through an intermediary and walks free.
For an administration that claims to be waging a war on illegal drugs, why pardon the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of extremely serious drug charges? Those charges originated during the first Trump administration.
Mounk: That was remarkable to me. There are pieces of corruption where you can see how it serves Trump’s financial interests. There are other pieces where it seems like he is building political alliances. That case, though, seemed to defy logic even beyond the usual level of outrageousness.
Fukuyama: I suspect that, in time, we are going to learn why it happened. I suspect that there will be some personal element to it, where somebody in the Trump orbit is benefiting personally from his release, because that seems to be the way he is conducting many of these pardons and, frankly, foreign policy. India received a 50 percent tariff because Prime Minister Modi would not support his bid to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
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It is really hard to describe what his foreign policy is, since much of it is dictated by his personal needs and his desire for personal glory rather than any concept of national interest.
This is why he has been crosswise with parts of his MAGA base. They expected him to be a consistent isolationist, and he has been anything but. These are all surprises that occurred over the course of 2025, and things that I think even the most pessimistic among us did not anticipate.
Mounk: There’s a great, if depressing, tour d’horizon, and I agree with you that I had low expectations of a Trump administration, but they were significantly exceeded in how bad things have been. Before we get more into the substance of things, I’m struck by the fact that the Trump administration is proof that shamelessness really works in life.
The level of shamelessness around some of the corrupt behavior and some of the personality-cult elements is striking. There was a recent newsreel that really pales in comparison to many other things that have happened over the last twelve months, but it stood out to me. There used to be free entry to national parks on Juneteenth for the past few years and on Martin Luther King Day for much longer. Both of those were cut by the Trump administration, which is part of a broader cultural agenda that is perhaps unsurprising coming from the MAGA movement.
They then granted free entry to national parks on Donald Trump’s birthday. Who cares which days people have free entry to national parks? There are much worse things happening in the U.S. government. But Trump’s entire career has been proof, over and over again, that this form of shamelessness works.
You’ve thought a lot about human passions, the importance of thymos in politics, and the way some people like Donald Trump might be driven by megalomania, by an attempt not just to have self-respect but to dominate others. What explains the way we seem to forgive the shamelessness of people like Donald Trump?
Why does that behavior not lead us to rebel in the way we would if a friend or acquaintance behaved similarly in our daily lives? We would say we want to cut this person out of our lives. We’re sick of them. Yet when it appears on a larger political canvas, we forgive it.
That is what I find so interesting about Donald Trump. Many people who vote for him are good Americans who are polite and kind and would not tolerate a neighbor or acquaintance who behaved the way Donald Trump does. Yet they vote for him.
Some may vote for him grudgingly, thinking they share his political views but dislike his conduct. Others seem to enjoy, on the large political stage, what they would never tolerate in their personal lives. I’ve never quite been able to make sense of that.
Fukuyama: I do think that a lot of this is facilitated by the internet. We now have this electronically mediated form of communication with other people that does not impose any barriers on the most base instincts people have.
If you think about it, when I was young, say in the 1960s, if you wanted to openly insult people on a large scale, how would you do it? You would go to a bar and yell at somebody, but that would be the limit of the reach of what you could say. Now you can speak to millions of people at the same time, and you are going to get more people engaged if you say something insulting or gross.
There has also been an element of fear that has induced many sensible Republicans to toe the line with respect to Trump, because he has this fanatical base that he can threaten people with. That will be interesting now, because I do perceive that there are cracks in that front. The moment people begin to lose their fear of Trump, the whole thing could come crashing down fairly quickly.
We have been waiting for this to happen for the last eight years, and it has not yet. But people are now realizing that he is only going to be around for at most another three years. They have to think about their future after Trump.
Mounk: Is that a matter of Trump getting old, being term limited, or becoming unpopular? Is it a mix of those three things?
Fukuyama: I think it is all three of those things. His health and his mental state are clearly deteriorating. He always rambled and said strange things, but it is getting worse. Yesterday or the day before, he posted on Truth Social around 160 times. Somebody compiled a list of those posts, and most of them are completely deranged. He is reposting the most bizarre conspiracy theories out there. I think of it as being a little bit like the emperor Caligula, who made his horse into a senator or consul. At a certain point, it goes to your head.
This is a general problem with presidents and presidential systems. The whole system is designed to feed the ego of whoever is president, because in a presidential administration, everyone around you wants something from you and fears you. Even a mild-mannered president like Jimmy Carter ended up acting in uncharacteristic ways because of the power the office gives you.
When you take somebody like Trump, who is already a narcissist and very self-preoccupied, and give him that kind of power, along with the narrative that he was persecuted and then proved everyone wrong by getting re-elected, you end up with a personality that believes it can do absolutely anything. That is the behavior we have been seeing. At a certain point, that fear is going to erode, and we are already seeing some signs of that.
Mounk: If, in 2026, Democrats do take back the House of Representatives and perhaps have a strong showing in the Senate, that will accelerate that process. That is one of the big things to watch in the coming year.
If your thesis is that the administration is getting stuck at the moment, there are two ways of projecting that into the future. One is that it has run out of energy. It had a set of agenda points it wanted to put in place at the beginning. It had a theory about how to transform the United States. Through a mix of the limits of that program, incompetence, and some pushback from other branches of government, including the judiciary, which I think has been more consequential than some people have portrayed, it has gotten stuck.
The result could be a kind of flailing about for the next three years. The other way of thinking about it is that, as the administration realizes it is stuck, it becomes more desperate to get unstuck. Trump is clearly someone who is always hyperactive. He is not someone who fades quietly. There are presidents who get stuck in a second term, run out of time, look ahead to their presidential library, and accept that they are fading away. It is very hard to imagine that trajectory for Trump.
It is obviously good news if the administration is getting stuck. There is also a concern that this could lead to desperation, which could make the administration even more radical than it has been in its first year.
How do you think this dynamic is going to play out? We are recording a 2025 year in review. Trump took office on January 20, 2025. We are less than a quarter of the way through this term, with a little over three years left. I do not want you to be too cheerful at the end of the year, but how is this going to play out? What are they going to do to get the cart out of the mud?
Fukuyama: One immediate fear is the coming midterm election in November 2026. By intention, Trump and his fellow Republicans would be perfectly happy to try to manipulate that election the way they tried in previous ones. It is going to be hard for them to do that because midterm elections are handled by states and municipalities, lower levels of government. The federal government, fortunately, does not have a major role in administering elections.
It will also be difficult if the polls are right about the size of the potential blue wave next November. It is one thing to manipulate an election that is off by two or three points, as in many previous elections. If the Democratic challenger is ahead by ten points, that becomes much harder. At that stage, you are stuck with the citizens’ choice.
If escalation were to happen beyond that point, it would require actions such as calling in ICE or the military to prevent an opponent from taking power. That is the point at which, without wanting to sound overly Pollyannaish, it is hard to imagine that if Trump tried to use one of these power agencies to overturn election results, they would simply salute and obey.
That concern sits in the background of discussions about going after Mark Kelly and other national security Democrats who advise soldiers not to obey unlawful orders. Trump is likely anticipating that he may issue unlawful orders and wants to ensure personal loyalty.
This ultimately comes down to a question we do not know the answer to: how would they react? One particularly worrisome area is ICE. It now has a budget larger than the FBI and larger than any other domestic law enforcement agency. It is recruiting very rapidly, and the people willing to join ICE at this point are likely to be strong Trump supporters.
It is possible that by next November he will have a coercive instrument that is personally loyal to him, which creates some frightening possibilities for how it could be used. Still, it is hard to believe that this would not be a bridge too far, even for him, to use what would amount to military force to stay in power. What do you think?
Mounk: Frank, you asked me a question that I want to respond to, but I am going to respond with another question. I think the assessment depends on the answer to the following issue.
There is one way of understanding what has happened over the last nine months that would make us relatively optimistic about the robustness of American institutions. This is a government that is breaking norms and rules, doing real damage, engaging in corruption, and committing serious abuses. Yet it does not seem close to concentrating power in a way that makes it impossible to report on the administration or criticize it. There is no media subjugation. The New York Times is not praising Donald Trump every day.
As you noted, there are concerns about local-level interference in the midterm elections. Still, I agree that it seems unlikely they could prevent a Democratic majority from taking seats in the House if Democrats win. The question then becomes why this is the case.
Is it because American institutions are undergoing an extraordinary stress test and, imperfectly and at great moral cost, are actually holding? Are they stopping Trump from concentrating power in the way Erdoğan has done in Turkey?
Or is it because the Trump administration is less competent than it initially appeared? Does it have less of a plan than it seemed in the first months? Is Trump too focused on personal revenge, too distracted, too consumed by posting rants on Truth Social? In that case, despite the extreme norm-breaking, we are not seeing a true stress test.
How are you reading this? How much confidence should we take from the apparent resilience of the system so far? To what extent is this simply good luck that, alongside his contempt for democratic norms, Trump is distractible, irascible, and more focused on personal advancement and corruption than on a systematic effort to dismantle the checks on his power?
Fukuyama: Both of those things can be true at the same time. It could be that he is not as competent at dismantling democracy as he could be, and that there is also much more resistance than he anticipated. I am fairly confident that American institutions are going to survive the next year and that Democrats are likely to win the House. If that happens, Trump’s power will be significantly diminished.
The reason I say this is that a more coercive scenario, in which election results are ignored and force is used to maintain power, does not seem to be actively discussed by insiders. Republican loyalists and Trump loyalists are scrambling to decide what they will do once Democrats take over the House. They are not talking about going to Trump and telling him to call out ICE to prevent Democrats from taking their seats. Nobody is speaking that way.
I take that as a sign that people still respect basic democratic institutions. If voters clearly say they do not want this administration, there is a widespread assumption that power will have to be handed over. To plot a much more dangerous takeover would require a level of planning and coordination that I do not see evidence of.
I also think this goes beyond Trump himself. If you look at how he behaved around past elections, his efforts were always slapdash and reactive. I do not see signs that he is seriously contemplating the use of ICE or other coercive forces to overturn an election at this point.
Mounk: But what if he did? That is the counterfactual. I agree that it does not seem likely, but in terms of our confidence that the American republic is going to survive not just Trump, but Vance or Donald Trump Jr., or whoever may come down the pipe in the next twenty years, do the last months give you more or less confidence that institutions could withstand a more systematic, cool-headed attempt to bring them down?
Fukuyama: A lot of it has to do with the senior leadership of all the power institutions. Although Pete Hegseth has been trying to replace “woke” senior officers, I think that the socialization of the officer corps in the U.S. military is actually pretty thorough. They are going to have to purge a lot more people if they are going to find generals who would be willing to order their troops to support a totally illegal and unconstitutional seizure of power.
I think that even within the power institutions, it is divided. Governors theoretically control the National Guard. Police forces are completely separate. ICE is a new organization. Can they actually be used as the tip of the spear to take over the U.S. government? I do not know. That seems like a pretty difficult scenario to imagine, given that there are a lot of other organized groups with guns that might resist that.
I am not sure that anybody wants to walk down a path where you are fighting one of these organizations against the other.
Mounk: I think there is a lot of very loose talk about civil war. Certainly, on some of the definitions of civil war that are current in political science at the moment, you can imaginably get to a civil war in the United States, but that is because they have defined a civil war down to about a hundred people who die from political violence over the course of a year in the United States.
We probably already have a few dozen a year in various ways, including assassinations and people who die in protests and other things. Might you get across the hundred line? Yes, that is absolutely imaginable.
To get to anything that a lay person would actually recognize as a civil war, you would have to have different strands of the administration of the American state squaring off against each other because of different interpretations about who is in charge or whether they should obey an unlawful order. I do not think that is completely unimaginable, but I think we are quite far away from that.
Fukuyama: We have also had some examples where he sent National Guard troops from other states, from red states into blue cities. When we were imagining what a conflict would look like, it would be something like that, where the local authorities would resist these federal incursions.
They have been pretty cautious. They have done terrible things like arresting U.S. citizens and so forth, but they have not really pushed things to a real confrontation where the potential for that existed. Again, it gives you a little bit of hope that when push comes to shove, it is really not going to lead to violence.
Mounk: I have to say that nowadays, one is not always impressed when dealing with various agencies of the American state. But every time that I have dealt with senior military officers or been invited to institutions like the Naval Academy, I have seen deeply serious people and deeply serious institutions. I think that this is a great asset that the United States retains.
We have not quite dealt with or covered the judicial element here. There are very different interpretations about whether the Supreme Court is doing Donald Trump’s bidding, which is the most extreme interpretation, whether it is trying to sidestep the biggest conflicts in order to avoid incurring Trump’s wrath, or whether there are more optimistic interpretations according to which it has a conservative majority that roughly reflects what the Federalist Society would have wanted in 2013 or 2014, before Donald Trump entered politics. Under that view, it really is a constitutionalist force that is going to rein in straightforward abuses of power and extreme abuses of power by Trump. Where do you fall along that interpretive spectrum?
One of the ways in which a Trump administration might try to get unstuck is by starting to ignore judicial rulings in a more extreme way than it has so far. This year, there were various points when a judge said that you cannot deport this person, and the administration said, they are already on the plane. We did not get there in time. Some of that was not sincere. Sometimes they did want to flout those rulings to some extent. But so far, they have not simply said, in response to a major ruling about what they have to do going forward, we are just going to ignore the Supreme Court. How many troops do you have?
That is a dog that has not barked yet. Might that dog bark in the next three years? How do you see the balance between the executive and the judicial branches going forward over that period?
Fukuyama: Well, the lower levels of the federal judiciary have been very good, I think. They have actually pushed back against some of the patently illegal things that Trump has tried to do through executive order. So the big question is really the Supreme Court. I would say by the time we all come back from Christmas break, we are going to know there are three really big cases that are in front of the Supreme Court right now where there is probably going to be a decision.
Not waiting until the end of the term in June, but within the next few weeks. So one is the 14th Amendment birthright citizenship case. The second is a tariffs case. The third is the overturning of Humphrey’s Executor. My prediction right now is that Trump is actually going to lose on both the tariffs and the 14th Amendment cases, and he will probably win and succeed on the Humphrey’s Executor one.
Mounk: Which is roughly consonant with the Federalist Society theory of the case? The Federalist Society before Trump entered politics would likely have been in favor of overturning something like Humphrey’s Executor, but not have suggested the other two points.
Fukuyama: That is right. You can see this. The Wall Street Journal has been very critical of birthright citizenship and the tariffs, certainly, but actually are all in favor of overturning Humphrey’s Executor, and they kind of represent traditional conservative republicanism. I think that based on the oral arguments before the court on the tariffs, it is a real uphill struggle to defend the current policy. I think that the 14th Amendment one is just so contrary to the obvious text of the Constitution. That one revolves around this one little phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
The 14th Amendment says that all persons born and naturalized in the territory of the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. The conservatives are trying to overturn this on that little phrase, that somehow immigrants, illegal immigrants, are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. First of all, if you are an originalist, this is a completely fraudulent argument because what that is referring to is actually Native Americans, because at the time that the 14th Amendment was passed, you still had Indian tribes that were regarded as sovereign nations.
I think what that phrase is referring to is the fact that they are still sovereign and we are going to respect that they do not simply come under the jurisdiction of the United States because they have their own sovereignty. It is also just not the case that illegal immigrants are not subject to the laws of the United States. They may be evading those laws, but they are certainly subject to them.
I really do not see grounds for seriously overturning the 14th Amendment. Then the political question becomes: if Trump suffers these two major setbacks, what is he going to do ? I am not sure he can do much of anything except flail around. Certainly with the tariffs, he will try to find other legal authorities to keep them in place. But it is going to be really messy. There are going to be all these lawsuits trying to get back the tariff money that companies had to surrender to the government. It does not look good for him if that were to happen.
Mounk: When you look around the world, the picture of the United States is in a sense mixed, which is to say that it has really been a very, very bad year for the United States, but you can also see perhaps Trump’s time in the limelight beginning to end.
It is not that hard to imagine Democrats winning in 2028, though of course the Democratic Party has its own deep challenges of unpopularity which remain. You look around the West more broadly and it just becomes extremely obvious that this political moment is not over. We thought that Poland might have turned a corner in recent elections, and then the presidential elections went for the representative of a Law and Justice right-wing populist party.
You see Giorgia Meloni quite firmly in office in Italy, even though at least in foreign policy she has proven to be more moderate than might have been expected. Most importantly, you see in polls Nigel Farage’s Reform leading in Britain, Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen, depending on who will run, which turns on a court ruling, leading quite clearly in presidential polls in France.
The Alternative for Germany is the number one party in national opinion polls. That does not mean that it would be likely to rule those federal elections, which are quite a while away in any case, because it is a system of proportional representation and they are not anywhere close to an absolute majority. They may very well enter government in the first state parliaments in East Germany and may even get an absolute majority in one of them.
Clearly, whatever this moment is, it is not over. Whatever is driving the rise of these populist parties is continuing. The phenomenal weakness of the moderates on the center left or on the center right is continuing to deepen.
I do think that that should give us an expectation for the United States that, in conjunction with what is happening in Britain, France, and Germany, and what you have seen in Poland with a quick backlash to a more moderate government, I very easily can imagine Democrats winning in 2028 because the Trump administration is going off the rails and is way outside the cultural mainstream of the United States.
Trump is now quite unpopular and it is not clear that he has a successor who has his charisma and all of that. It is not hard to imagine a Democrat winning in 2028, a Democrat winning in 2032 and 2036, even if Republicans run very extreme candidates. Democrats actually building the broad political majority that will be required to last and move beyond this moment is much harder to imagine given the international context. How do you assess this overall moment for democracy outside of the United States, or beyond the United States?
Fukuyama: Well, those are two separate questions which we should discuss in turn. I think that the danger in Europe is clear, but there is also a danger that if you catastrophize too much, you get discouraged and think that you cannot really fight back. I think there are plenty of ways of fighting back. One of the most important things about Europe is actually the fact that they have got proportional representation.
That leads to none of these populist parties actually getting a majority in their legislatures. At that point, even if they do better in the coming elections, the other parties have two choices. They can actually form a coalition or they can form a cordon sanitaire. That is what the Austrian parties are doing right now to keep the Freedom Party out of power.
Either way, I think that reduces the threat from these populist parties. Going into a coalition with them may be the better of the two strategies because, generally speaking, this happened both with Geert Wilders’ party in the Netherlands and with the Danish People’s Party. They were part of coalitions, and they had to govern, and they had to actually make compromises.
They could not pose as these radical outsiders that were going to change everything. People just lost interest in them. I think that there are ways of dealing with them. There are also things that we do not know, like Jordan Bardella in France. From a lot of his behavior, it seems like, at the moment at least, he is much closer to Giorgia Meloni than to Viktor Orbán.
He has been meeting with business leaders, and I think that the French people themselves are not willing to give up on the EU and turn hard against it the way the Hungarians have. They have got a presidential system. They have got a winner-take-all system, even though it is a two-round system. There is going to be one president of France, but I am not convinced that if it is him, it is necessarily going to be such a disastrous outcome.
Again, all these things are interdependent. By the time these European elections happen, if Trump really looks like he is on his way out, that is also going to affect them and make the populist parties not seem like an inevitable wave that is going to hit everybody, but rather like a shot that was taken and just missed the target.
Mounk: I agree with much of what you said, just to play devil’s advocate on two points. The first is that neither Britain nor France really have a proportional representation system. In Britain, you are right that Nigel Farage is far from having 50% of the vote in opinion polls. But if the polls do not change from what they are at the moment, he probably would have a clear majority of his own in Parliament.
Obviously in France, as you pointed out, it is a runoff presidential system. Bardella is very likely to be in the second round of the election, and he is leading in most matchups, certainly against any left-leaning candidate. Against some center, center-right candidates like Édouard Philippe, it looks around 50–50, and that is a little bit harder to call. But that is actually extraordinary.
Even against those center-right or center-centrist candidates, he really is leading. When you match him up against somebody like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left candidate, Mélenchon may very well get through to the second round because he has a big personal following, even though he is very unpopular among the French electorate as a whole. Bardella may win by 75% or more. It would be the inverse of that famous election in 2002, where Jacques Chirac was running for a second term in office against Jean-Marie Le Pen, when 80% of French people voted for the center-right, moderate candidate.
This time around, it may be the far-right candidate, the inheritor of Le Pen’s movement, that may win a supermajority in that election if it really ends up being a matchup against Mélenchon. Then what does that do to where Europe stands?
I agree with you that Farage and Bardella are probably more moderate figures than Trump in a number of ways. It is certainly true. Farage was an enemy of the European Union and one of the reasons why Britain left the European Union. Bardella is not saying that he wants to leave the European Union. I have heard, though, that he has said in private conversations to people that he is going to go to Frankfurt, to the European Central Bank, as one of his first acts in office and say either you are buying our debt and helping us out of our budgetary crisis or everything is going to blow up, and France is too big to fail.
There is certainly, I do not think he wants to leave the EU, but I think he wants to make demands of the EU that are going to be very hard for Germany and the Netherlands and other countries to swallow, in a way that would lead to a significant political crisis in the EU.
The final point I want to make is that if you can take populist parties in as a junior coalition partner, that seems to have been a good strategy in certain circumstances. That has happened in the Netherlands and some other countries where they ultimately were forced into taking decisions and having responsibility for government. They were unable to deliver on all of their aspirations, and that led to them bleeding support.
However, in many of these countries, it is now going to be a question of whether the center-right party wants to be the junior coalition partner that puts them into the prime minister’s chair, that puts them into the president’s seat, that is going to make them take power altogether. That seems to me like a much harder calculation.
Fukuyama: Although even having a junior coalition partner is still going to force you to back off of certain extreme positions. Look, I am not looking forward to Europe’s future, particularly the lack of really inspiring leaders. Keir Starmer has been one of the worst. Everybody breathes a big sigh of relief when he was elected after all these crazy people that conservatives were putting up, but he has just been so uninspiring.
Mounk: Starmer, I think, is a genuine warning for the Democrats in the United States. Starmer won a big electoral victory, a relatively narrow one in terms of popular vote, but with a huge parliamentary majority, a very successful election. He won it because people were sick of a Conservative Party that had ruled poorly, that had gotten more extreme in various ways, even though Rishi Sunak, the last Conservative prime minister, was a relative moderate.
They were relieved that the Labour Party was run by somebody more moderate than Jeremy Corbyn and others, and that was enough to get him elected. Once you are in office, people do not judge you by the alternatives they have evaded in the past. They judge you by whether you have a programme and whether you have a vision. Keir Starmer does not have that. That is a big difference to the Third Way, which had flaws of its own.
Back when Bill Clinton was elected in the United States and when Tony Blair was elected in Britain, they did actually have a program. Part of that was a program of cultural renewal, which felt real at the time. The whole moment of Cool Britannia, not Rule Britannia, but Cool Britannia, the more modern, exciting Britain.
I remember when Gerhard Schröder was elected in Germany, not somebody who ended up having a distinguished chancellorship and certainly not somebody who ended up having a distinguished post-chancellorship as a stooge of Vladimir Putin’s. I was 16 years old. I had been ruled all of my life by Helmut Kohl. Schröder signified this kind of cultural liberation, this moving on from this dodgy Germany of the 1980s and early 1990s. There was a moment of excitement.
Starmer did not have any of that. When you lack all of that and all you are is I am not Boris Johnson and I am not Jeremy Corbyn, then very quickly you are going to be judged very negatively. Are we meeting the moment intellectually? Do we need to renew the liberal tradition in order to get out of this moment? Do we need to renew what it is like for people committed to liberal democracy to make a real offer to voters?
Do we need to throw the kind of assumptions that I was raised with as somebody who came of age politically in the early 2000s overboard in a much more radical way in order to start from scratch? Or do you think we have the intellectual building blocks of what a world after Donald Trump and Nigel Farage looks like, and we just need to get politicians to buy into it and build on it? How lost are we intellectually, do you think?
Fukuyama: Well, I do not know the answer to that. I do think there is a way forward for liberals. As you know, I have been very much a fan of this abundance agenda, but it has to do really with state power and executive authority. So one thing that Trump has done that is going to outlast him is that he has changed the nature of executive authority.
I think that one of the reasons that you get these strongman populist leaders appealing to people is that existing liberal governments are just stuck. They cannot do stuff. They have accumulated way too many rules and constraints and so forth. It shows up in a lot of ways. The shoot-him-in-the-legs instinct comes from police forces that are very constrained in the way they go after criminals.
This is very much an issue in Latin America, where they really do have an out-of-control crime problem, and democratic governments following strict rule of law have simply not been able to deal with this issue. In the United States, I think it really does have to do with things like infrastructure and the ability to do public projects, which really are very constrained.
We just had this example of a public toilet, one public toilet, just one toilet, one toilet seat costing $1.7 million and taking years to construct. I think that, as Mark Dunkelman has argued, we have gone through these phases, either Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian. The Hamiltonians want to use state power effectively to do things in the common interest, and the Jeffersonians are extremely suspicious of concentrated state power and therefore want to spread it out as far as they can.
Really since the 1960s, we have been in a very Jeffersonian moment where power is really pushed down to civil society, to localities. Here in California, a lot of cities have been able to block really important statewide and, in fact, nationally important projects because of that shift in the balance of power. So I think that what abundance signifies is a recognition that state power, democratically legitimated and staying within the boundaries of the rule of law, can actually be used for good purposes.
We have had a couple of generations of young Americans who do not believe that it is possible, that the enemy is the government. There they join hands with traditional conservatives that never liked the government. So I think that any vision for reviving liberalism has to be built around a different conception of the state, that a democratically legitimated state can actually do things. It needs to be freed to do things in many different domains, not simply building things, but also dealing with a lot of problems that just seem beyond the capacity of contemporary government.
That is my general feeling about it. It is not a departure from liberalism, because liberal societies used to be able to do this. I keep using this example, but in the early 1930s the United States built the Golden Gate Bridge and the Tennessee Valley Authority. All of these things happened within the space of three or four years. That was kind of peak Hamiltonianism, when the Roosevelt administration used the government to do a lot of progressive things. I think that is a vision that we could and really need to return to.
Mounk: To what extent is the problem that liberalism with a capital L, or just democratic norms, are often being invoked to justify things that are deeply inefficient and unjustifiable in ways that are not exactly right? It is not that liberalism or democratic norms require those things. One example of this is that there is so much process around getting anything built.
Supposedly this is because of the rule of law, and because of liberalism and individual rights. But it is really because of a set of legal procedures, administrative procedures, and environmental laws that we have chosen. We absolutely had the rule of law in periods of American history where you could build a railway, and in fact a railway is good for the environment. It is not required by that.
Another area of this relates to immigration. When you look at Europe, a lot of very basic abilities to close the border and deport people are being undercut by extremely generous interpretations of a European charter of human rights and other doctrines by European judges. You are effectively forcing a lot of people to choose between whether they want to respect the rule of law or whether they want to have some sense that their politicians are able to do something about borders.
You frame the question that way, where people say they care more about limiting immigration than they care about democracy, and you end up with a huge problem. The third area of this is public safety. There you have comparative differences. Europe has more of a welfare state and, in general, lower levels of crime than the United States.
But also in a European supermarket, if you go in and steal a bunch of stuff, there is going to be a security guard who will tackle you and detain you until the police arrive. You are probably not going to go to jail for very long because European laws are not particularly punitive, but they will stop you from doing this.
In the United States, for reasons I have never fully understood, there is a new pharmacy in my neighborhood in New York where half of the things are locked up. This is a famous talking point. It is striking. Part of the reason is that if I went in there, picked up a bunch of things, and walked out, the security guard would not stop me because of rules they are told to follow.
Perhaps that is because there are more guns in the United States, or insurance, or whatever the reason. But there are democracies in Europe that are able to set things up so that when a store has a security guard, the guard will actually stop you from stealing. That makes things more functional than saying you will let someone go and perhaps a police officer will later review the video footage and arrest them. Most likely that is never going to happen.
How is it that we can diffuse this real conflict between the rule of law and democracy and our ability to get things done, a conflict that is real not for unchangeable reasons, but because we have made bad choices?
Fukuyama: Well, I think that most of the constraints on our ability to do things are the result of bad choices and are completely unnecessary. I could entertain you for the next hour just telling you stories of ridiculous rules that make it very difficult to build things or make decisions. You are absolutely right.
For example, in Britain, why is Nigel Farage making a comeback right now? In 2016, the British people voted narrowly, to be sure, to leave the European Union. The thing that was most upsetting to them was high levels of immigration. Despite that vote, and despite the trauma of leaving the EU, levels of immigration went up after that vote.
I think that the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights did play a role in making it very hard. I remember David Cameron at one point, there was a Syrian terrorist in Britain who had actually committed violent offenses in Britain, and they wanted to send him back to Syria, and the European court would not let them do that. That seems to me a perfect example of there being too much rule of law.
It is very difficult, it seems, for any modern liberal democracy to actually roll things back. They have a hard time making a trade-off between having yet more rules and procedures and goals like efficiency and effectiveness. But it has got to be done. I think that if you do not do it, you are going to be constantly subject to these strongmen who are going to say, “I am just going to ignore the rule of law completely and smash everything.” There has got to be a middle ground between those positions.
Mounk: Another striking example of this comes from Rory Stewart, the British politician, back when he was in charge of the UK Development Agency. He was Secretary of State for International Development. He discovered that some part of the money was going through to an organization that he had reason to mistrust. I forget whether he was basically certain that it was going to support terrorist violence or whether it was a suspicion, but he thought we really should not be giving money to this organization.
He goes through this kind of extraordinary process that he had to go through, and the extent to which he had to keep getting senior civil servants into his office and corralling them to say, have we stopped paying the money? It was because of bureaucratic procedures and hurdles and the rule of law and all kinds of things that it was virtually impossible for him to make sure the British state would stop giving money to this dangerous group.
It is extraordinary. None of that justifies any of what Trump has been doing, but it explains why people look at something like that and say, perhaps that is what we need. I think getting that under control from within, by people who actually care about good governance and the rule of law and protecting it, is exactly the case.
I do not want to go on too much longer, but a little bit more of an international outlook. What is the situation in Ukraine at the end of 2025? Are we going to see an end to that horrible war in 2026? Is there any chance left of seeing an end to that war, not a just end to that war, because I do not think that is realistic at all, but at least one that avoids that conflict being reignited by Russia within the next few years and gives some relatively basic security guarantees to Ukraine?
Fukuyama: Well, I am very worried about Ukraine after four years of really horrible fighting. Anything that is on the table right now is only going to delay a Russian attempt to take over. It is quite remarkable that Putin has not given an inch. There was this recent meeting with Zelenskyy and European leaders where they were trying to modify the 28-point document to actually strengthen some of the guarantees and walk back some of the territorial concessions.
Even if they can get Trump to support this, it is not clear to me that Putin is going to agree to any of it. I think it probably will require much more unilateral measures on the part of the Europeans. They have got to overcome the reluctance of Belgium to release the sequestered Russian money.
Ukraine needs about $30 billion of budget support every year. The Europeans have been giving that, but they cannot do that forever. There are ways of getting around it, but European decision-making being what it is, it can be vetoed very easily by one reluctant party. Right now, I do not know exactly where that stands. They are certainly trying to get past that veto, and that of Hungary and Slovakia, but whether they will succeed is still very dicey.
The most outrageous thing, I think, is the capitulation, the moral capitulation, involved in this idea that we are actually going to make business deals and that our major objective in this negotiation should not be the security of a democratic Ukraine, but new opportunities for joint US–Russian business ventures that the whole Trump family can get involved in. It is so repulsive and appalling. I am not really optimistic about any of that. Even if all the optimistic things I said about next year’s election come true, I do not think it is going to happen early enough to really help Ukraine much.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Frank discuss what to look out for in 2026 and whether Europe has any hope of renewal. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
