A Stark Warning About the 2026 Election, with Robert Kagan

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Robert Kagan, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, for a conversation about the pressures facing American democracy, the security of elections, and how these domestic tensions interact with the collapse of international norms. Nearly a decade after his prescient 2016 column for the Washington Post, “This is How Fascism Comes to America,” Kagan contends that the U.S. has moved beyond the warning and into a full democratic crisis. “There is no chance in the world that Donald Trump is gonna allow himself to lose in the 2026 elections, because that will be the end of his ability to wield total power in the United States,” Kagan says.

This week’s reading:

• “The Minnesota War Zone Is Trump’s Most Trumpian Accomplishment,” by Susan B. Glasser
• “What It’s Like to Be Trump’s Closest Ally Right Now,” by Sam Knight
• “A D.H.S. Shooting Puts Portland Back Under the Microscope,” by James Ross Gardner 
• “Jay Powell, the Prepster Banker Who Is Standing Up to Trump,” by John Cassidy
• “How Donald Trump Has Transformed ICE,” Isaac Chotiner
• “How Colombia’s President Reached an Uneasy Détente with Donald Trump,” by Jon Lee Anderson 
• “Iran’s Regime Is Unsustainable,” by Robin Wright
• “The Supreme Court Gets Back to Work,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
• “The Lights Are Still On in Venezuela,” by Armando Ledezma
• “How Marco Rubio Went from “Little Marco” to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler,” by Dexter Filkins 

The Political Scene draws on the reporting and analysis found in The New Yorker for lively conversations about the big questions in American politics. Join the magazine’s writers and editors as they put into context the latest news—about elections, the economy, the White House, the Supreme Court, and much more. New episodes are available three times a week. 

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