Are we witnessing the death of expertise?

Analyst Tom Nichols says the Trump administration is fundamentally incompetent. And he says there’s been a systematic erosion of expert trust for years — which is dangerous for American democracy.

Guests

Tom Nichols, staff writer at The Atlantic. Professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 25 years.

Transcript

Part I          

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: We’re a few days shy of one month of the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran. The war is projected to cost at least $30 billion by the end of this month. That’s at least $1 billion every day, and that’s only direct military costs. Then there are the much more massive costs to the global economy and the cost in lives.

At least 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed. Thousands of people around the region have also been killed, and there could be more than 6 million people who have been displaced. Now, what exactly is all this for?

(MONTAGE PLAYS)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:  Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.

PETE HEGSETH: We devastated the Iranian nuclear program.

REPORTER: Do you believe that some nuclear capability in Iran remains?

DAN CAINE: It would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.

TRUMP: It would be years before they could ever get going.

STEVE WITKOFF: They have 10,000 roughly kilograms of fissionable material. The 60% material can be brought to 90% — that’s weapon grade – in roughly one week. There’s almost no stopping them. They have an endless supply of it.

HEGSETH: When he says we obliterated their nuclear program, he’s right, we did. We dropped those bombs exactly where they needed to be. Set them back. But that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped their pursuit.

TRUMP: We’re not gonna let them have nuclear weapons.

HEGSETH: You can’t have a nuclear bomb. Radical Islamists can’t have a nuclear bomb that they wield.

TRUMP: Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas.

MIKE JOHNSON: They have declared war on us. We’re not at war right now.

HEGSETH: We didn’t start this war. But under President Trump, we are finishing it.

MARCO RUBIO: We would love to see this regime be replaced.

HEGSETH: This is not a so-called regime change war.

TRUMP: Based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were gonna attack first.

RUBIO: We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.

TRUMP: If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.

TRUMP: I don’t think it’s gonna be long. When it’s over, this is gonna bounce right back so fast.

REPORTER: When are you gonna know when it’s over?

TRUMP: When I feel it.

TRUMP: You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won. We won. In the first hour, it was over.

TRUMP: We don’t wanna leave too early, do we? Huh? We gotta finish the job, right?! (APPLAUSE)

CHAKRABARTI: So that is, of course, President Donald Trump. You also heard Secretary of State Marco Rubio, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, negotiator Steve Witkoff and others. Just over the past several weeks. Now the unpredictability of the President of the United States is leading to a war being fought on one man’s whim.

Other presidents have had irrational impulses. Let’s be clear about that. But the United States government used to operate with the presumption that a close cadre of experts would surround the President to provide factual analysis, reasoned pushback, and knowledgeable guidance to the commander in chief.

That is gone from the White House now, or at least evidence of expertise is getting much, much harder to find in how the executive branch makes its decisions. I want to say that this isn’t a sudden development under President Trump.

It’s actually the result of decades of political opportunism disguised as anti-elitism that has corroded the value of expertise in American political culture, so that’s why we wanted to bring Tom Nichols back on the show today. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and Professor Emeritus of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College where he taught for 25 years. He’s also the author of several books, including Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy and The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Tom, welcome back to On Point.

TOM NICHOLS: Thanks Meghna. It’s good to be back with you.

CHAKRABARTI: We wanted to make that assembly of contradictory statements from various members of the administration. Because most people probably heard them here and there like a cloud, but when you hear them one after the other, it really drives home the point that it’s hard to make sense at all of what is going on in the White House.

What did you hear in that montage of takes from the executive?

NICHOLS: What I heard is the president for his own vain glory and his own arrogance, that he knows better than any other living human being, has decided to go to war against a country of 92 million people.

And he thought it was going to be quick and easy and a one and done, and the regime would fall and he would be the liberator of Iran, and there would be statues to him in Tehran. And you can see this. He certainly expects that kind of glory in Venezuela. He’s expecting it again in Cuba.

And let me back up for a moment and say, as everyone does, if the Iranian regime falls, no one will shed any tears. And if Trump can pull that off, he’s certainly going to get some of the credit for eradicating a regime that I’ve referred to as a malignancy.

But as two of my colleagues wrote a great piece last week in The Atlantic where they pointed out that at this point, we are up to 10 different rationales for this war that go all the way from regime change to nuclear weapons, to terrorism, to they’re just generally bad people.

And they deserve to be driven from power. And I think he, the president, didn’t think this through. I think other people around him may have. But in this administration, you’re either on board or you’re out the door. And here we are with a war that the president was determined to begin probably with some nudging from the Israelis, from the Prime Minister of Israel.

The president didn’t think [the Iran war] through. I think other people around him may have. But in this administration, you’re either on board or you’re out the door.

But without any clear way to finish it.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me ask you, who do you think around the president might have had a clearer sense or better planning than he did himself.

NICHOLS: Oh, I’m sure the military spoke up and said, here are the things we can do, Mr. President. Here are the targets we can destroy.

Here are the operations we can conduct. However, the political ramifications are things that you have to think about because we can’t run the war. We need to do this according to what you want done. And I think when he was probably told we can’t get all of that fissile material.

I don’t know what, I think it was Witkoff. In your montage who said 10,000 kilograms, that’s 20,000 pounds of uranium. I’m pretty sure that’s not right. And probably someone said, we’re not going to get all of that. The regime might not fall. The Strait of Hormuz is probably going to be closed.

I suspect what happened, and from, I’ve heard this, similar stories from people that have tried to brief him that he just waved it away and said no, it’s not going to be a problem, we’ll take care of that. Because he is basically unbriefable. He just does not sit back and listen and process the way other presidents do.

Presidents have pretty strong feelings about what they want done, but typically they sit back, they listen, they take it in. Donald Trump kind of wish casts. He just tries to will things into reality. No. It’ll be fine. They’ll capitulate. The Strait won’t be a problem, et cetera, et cetera.

CHAKRABARTI: So obviously the president is at the center of this. And this particular president more so than ever, but how would you evaluate the expertise in the members of the cabinet who surround him in comparison to other presidents during wartime?

NICHOLS: There just isn’t any. This is the weakest cabinet in modern American history.

Most of these people have no business being in national politics. The Secretary of Defense, the one guy that you would think along with the Secretary of State is going to kind of huddle with the president. And say, look, this is a pretty dangerous thing. Normally, for example, if you look back at Barack Obama hemming and hawing and backing and forthing about whether to strike Syria, the people involved were the Secretary of State.

You had the Secretary of Defense involved. You had the chief of staff who turns out to have been instrumental in pulling Obama away from striking Syria. Who are the people that are going to take a walk with the president on the South lawn the way Denis McDonough did with Barack Obama?

Susie Wiles? That’s not going to happen. Pete Hegseth has no idea what he’s doing. He’s manifestly unqualified for his job. He’s a talk show host who’s deeply in over his head. Marco Rubio, a perfectly plausible Secretary of State, lot of experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But he’s also the National Security Advisor.

Which hasn’t happened since Henry Kissinger, and frankly, that didn’t go so well the last time. Someone dual-hatted themselves this way. Tulsi Gabbard, absolutely unqualified to be director of National Intelligence. All of them are, at this point, not only do they lack expertise, they lack courage, they lack conviction, and they’re all just trying to hang onto their jobs.

CHAKRABARTI: And so we’re going to spend the rest of the hour, Tom, talking about the consequences of this draining of expertise. But what do you think the consequence is first and foremost on the American people?

NICHOLS: The draining of expertise from the national government means people are going to die, whether they are in combat and being sent to try to spackle over the problems that Donald Trump left by waving away the consequences of a war of choice whether it’s people who refuse to take vaccines because Robert F. Kennedy, I can’t believe, in the same way that I have trouble saying Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. I almost can’t get my head around Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The draining of expertise from the national government means people are going to die.

But people are going to lose jobs. People are going to suffer economically. I think it’s easy to dismiss expertise in the government because most of the time the effect of expertise on your life as an American citizen is more or less invisible. Things just work.

Things just go, the lights go on, airplanes fly, oil gets delivered and so on. But I think what we’re seeing now is the collapse of government, of expertise in the government is much Hemingway once said about going bankrupt. How do you go bankrupt? Gradually, and then all at once.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Tom, earlier you had said this is the weakest cabinet in American history. And what I’d like to spend some time doing is we’ve collected some statements from various members of the cabinet.

And I just want to go through them with you one by one, because usually on this show when we’re covering issues, we’re talking about sort of one agency in particular. But I think it’s really instructive to hear them all together. Because the whole picture really tells us where we are as a country.

And let me start with something that’s very much on the minds of Americans right now, Americans who travel on an airplane. And that is the fact that the TSA, because of the lack of funding for DHS, the TSA has not had funding for a while, and which is causing huge backups at airports like Philadelphia.

Atlanta, Washington, D.C., et cetera, et cetera. Just this weekend the president said, Hey, let’s send ICE agents in to cover for TSA agents who can’t come or won’t come to work, because they’re not getting paid. Well, here’s transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. He was on ABC just this weekend. He was asked about the president’s plan to put ICE agents in airports.

SEAN DUFFY: I would say that one of the leverage points that Iran has is trying to drive up the price of oil. It’s leverage. Democrats want to see long lines at airports as leverage. President Trump’s trying to take that leverage away and not make the American people suffer. So TSA agents are law enforcement. They know how to pat people down. They know how to run the x-ray machines because they are, again, under Homeland Security with TSA. So if we can bring in other assets and tools to assist TSA to get rid of these lines. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And the president’s looking around every corner to make sure the American people don’t suffer during the shutdown.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Tom, when he says, when Duffy says they know how to pat people down, they know how to run the X-ray machines. He’s actually referring to ICE there, saying they are under Homeland Security with TSA. I have a lot of thoughts about how to read that part of Duffy’s statement, but I just want to turn to you first.

NICHOLS: First, one of the things that always happens to expertise in an authoritarian situation. We live in a free country and thank God for it. But the President runs the White House very much like an authoritarian regime, an authoritarian hot house. And so the key to survival is never to contradict the leader.

And so Duffy, who I assume, and others, the TSA Union, by the way, has also said this is ridiculous. Duffy has to come up with some kind of cockamamie rationale. I think given what we saw in Minnesota, the last thing you want is a bunch of ICE guys wandering around, patting down your grandma and your kids as they’re trying to get on an airplane.

What’s also going on here, and I think people need to be aware of this, Trump has been looking for some institution in American government that will be his personal muscle. He tried to do it with the military and that didn’t work out well. His attempt to militarize the streets really ended up fizzling out.

ICE, however, does not have the traditions and the history of the U.S. military and he clearly wants to turn them into some sort of paramilitary rapid reaction force that he can send anywhere at will, and this is probably a good opportunity for him to prove that. It’s just dumb. It makes no sense.

ICE will probably be in the way more than they’re going to help. They’re not trained for this. As I said, as the TSA Union had said, listen, we trained for a long time and we bring a lot of experience to this. I’ve been a critic of security theater at airports, but if you’re going to have anybody do it, have the people that are civilians who are trained.

Sending in immigration cops, is again, just a flex. It’s meant to intimidate people by putting guys in face masks and weapons roaming around airports. It’s gonna make things worse.

CHAKRABARTI: So it’s the part for me where Duffy says, they, being ICE, know how to run the X-ray machines because they are, again, under Homeland Security with TSA, this gets right to what you wrote about in your book, that it’s just an utterly ignorant thing for Duffy to say, because as you pointed out, ICE training is nowhere near what TSA training is. And the idea that an ICE agent could sit down at one of those X-ray machines, look at what’s passing in front of him on a screen and be able to understand what’s the difference between a suspect material versus not, it just, it defies belief.

The ICE agents themselves are barely trained to do their own jobs, as we’ve been learning over the past few months. But the fact that the Secretary of Transportation can utter a phrase like that, what does it tell you about his own knowledge of what kind of expertise it takes to run aspects of airport security?

NICHOLS: We have no clue. First of all, I doubt Sean Duffy, again, there’s no evidence that Sean Duffy is qualified to be a member of the cabinet. But it tells you, even if he knew about these issues, it won’t matter. Because in this cabinet, the most important thing is to always say that Donald Trump is right.

If Donald Trump said, we’re going to take the Federal Health Service. And because doctors know how to pat people down and examine them and we’re going to send 10,000 guys in white jackets, Sean Duffy’s answer would be a masterful plan. Because that is the culture of this administration, and that is why authoritarian leaders hate experts.

Authoritarian leaders hate experts.

Because experts are always the people in the room who raise their hand and say, I know you wish that it would happen that way, but there are things like the laws of physics, history, experience, that tell you it’s not going to happen that way. And people like Donald Trump hate being told that stuff because their approach to everything is to say, if I say it, it will happen.

Like with tariffs, you could think of a dozen other issues. Tariffs. Oh, tariffs will work. Now, nobody believes that tariffs are a good idea. There’s a reason that we haven’t touched that hot stove in decades upon decades, Donald Trump has been convinced. So of course, people who know better.

Scott Bessent. Others, people who have experience in business, they know this is nonsense. But, and so they do have some expertise in these matters. It doesn’t matter. Their expertise is thrown to the wayside. They go out and say, President wants tariffs and boy, what a brilliant plan that is.

And then it blows up. And then the next phase is trying to explain why people, why the government and other people failed to properly implement the president’s plan.

CHAKRABARTI: You mentioned Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. a little bit ago. Let’s listen to a moment that from him, from just last month, February 2026, where Kennedy said or claimed that eating a ketogenic diet could, in his words, cure schizophrenia.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Dr. Pollan up at Harvard has cured schizophrenia using keto diets. There are studies right now that I saw two days ago where people lose their bipolar diagnosis by changing their diet.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Tom, just to provide some facts in opposition to what Kennedy said just there. As far as we can tell, there’s no Dr. Pollan at Harvard or elsewhere who has directly studied the keto diet and its impact on schizophrenia. The secretary may have meant someone named Christopher Palmer, who is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. But Palmer told Scientific American that, quote, I have never claimed to cure schizophrenia. I have never used the word cure in any of my talks or research.

He did co-author a 2025 study that reviewed evidence for the ketogenic diet as a possible treatment for schizophrenia. It found that some small pilot studies suggest that diet may improve some symptoms of the disorder in some people, but had no effect in other people.

So those are the facts. Tom —

NICHOLS: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: With Kennedy, we’re at a place where it’s not just ignorance, right? It’s an aggressive assertion of things that are just patently not true. Again, that mirrors the president as well, but here we have a person in charge of actually, what, the second largest agency in the United States Federal government.

NICHOLS: Yeah. This is beyond ignorance. This is sheer crackpottery. Kennedy shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the federal government. But again, look, two things about this cabinet. One is that they were chosen specifically for their transgressive nature. That almost Trump was very frustrated in his first term by actually having some adults who would say things like, this is a bad idea.

And so in his second term, he said, I’m going to appoint people and I’m going to force them down the throat of the Republican Senate as a way of trolling the country. You kept me out of office in 2020. Here’s your reward. You get Robert Kennedy, you get Tulsi Gabbard, you get Kash Patel.

And almost as a kind of malicious infliction of unqualified people on the American public, kind of as Trump’s revenge. The other thing is to ask why do people embrace this? And I think in Kennedy’s example, look, the world’s a complicated, scary place, especially after we went through a pandemic and people like Kennedy, with these crank ideas, come out and say, I can re-empower you.

The guys in the white jackets, they don’t really understand schizophrenia. You and I together can do our own research and if your son or daughter is suffering from this. Here’s, they don’t need, it’s not a tragedy that will have no end. Just get them on some high protein, give ’em some raw meat, and they’re gonna be okay.

And that, look, people cling to that in uncertain times because they feel like part of the death of expertise as a phenomenon is that people feel out of control. And you’ve had, I’ve had this when we’ve been ill and we go and we watch a doctor looking at a chart and kind of stroking their chin and going, it’s the most disempowering moment in the world. You’re sitting there in a gown saying, your life, my life is in your hands. What are you doing? And people hate, understandably hate that. And guys like Robert Kennedy say, you know what, forget those creeps from Harvard and the white jackets.

I can, here, eat some nuts and berries and you’ll be fine.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Tom, a little bit later, I want to come back to what you just said about why the Campaign Against Expertise has been so successful. But there’s another member of the cabinet that I just want to play some tape from. Because you also had mentioned her before, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. So we’ve got a couple of pieces of tape here. First and foremost, she appeared at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing just last week, and she insisted to Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, that the only person who can determine what constitutes an imminent threat to the United States is the president of the United States. So here’s a little bit of Ossoff questioning Gabbard.

SENATOR JON OSSOFF:  You’ve stated today that the intelligence community’s assessment is that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated, and that quote, there had been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. Was it the intelligence community’s assessment that nevertheless, despite this obliteration, there was a quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime. Yes or no?

TULSI GABBARD: It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat, that is up to the president. based on a volume information, no, it is precisely that he received.

OSSOFF: No, it is precisely your responsibility. As you noted in your opening testimony, you represent the IC’s assessment of threats.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s Senator Jon Ossoff, questioning Gabbard. We’ll come back to what he says or she said in just a minute.

But Ossoff noted her opening statement in their testimony. Actually, Gabbard didn’t actually read her entire opening statement. The written version was submitted into the record, but she didn’t read it all. Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia questioned her about why she didn’t say aloud part of her opening statement.

SENATOR MARK WARNER: In your last paragraph on page six, “As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There’s been no efforts to try to rebuild their enrichment.” You omitted that paragraph from your oral opening. Was that because the president had said there was a imminent threat two weeks ago?

GABBARD: No, sir. I recognized that the time was running long and I skipped through some of the portions of my oral delivered remarks, sir.

WARNER: So you chose to omit the parts that contradict the president.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Tom, let’s you covered the, they won’t speak against the cabinet, won’t speak against the president part.

That’s reflected perfectly there in Gabbard’s interaction with Senator Warner. But going back to the interaction with Ossoff. It’s not just that Gabbard is saying we have different views about what imminent threats are. She’s saying it’s not even that we’re not experts in this. It’s that it’s not even our job to be the experts in it.

It’s one more step removed from any sense that knowledge, background or expertise is essential to the national security apparatus of the country.

NICHOLS: And Senator Ossoff was exactly right. No, it is exactly your job. If it’s not your job to determine what imminent threats are to the United States, then what is it you do all day?

And of course, Tulsi Gabbard, once again, no qualification for this job other than I think one reason she was chosen is because she is a strange personality who has some unusual thoughts about the intelligence community. And put her in charge of the intelligence community. That’ll make everybody mad.

Because, again, a great pick if you want revenge and heartburn and people rolling their eyes and not knowing what to do next. These people are all manifestly unqualified. We’re at war now, and of course, that means that we have terrorism threats. We have Kash Patel at the head of the FBI.

Once again, not really somebody you would’ve put there. But for her to say, this isn’t my job. I was thinking when I first heard that, Meghna, I used to do a lot of work on the old Soviet Union. And it’s very much that authoritarian cult of personality.

I was thinking about something I read in the ’30s, where a bunch of military officers were talking about military strategy and one of them finally said, look, military strategy is comrade Stalin’s personal interest and none of our business.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

NICHOLS: These were all generals saying, oh, it’s the leader’s personal interest.

It’s none of our business. And you’re seeing this over and over again in this cabinet. That the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Transportation, whatever the leader says, that’s the truth. And again, that’s why they don’t like having, governments like Donald Trumps don’t like having experts around.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Tom, there’s just a couple more clips here I want to play again to continue our journey around the cabinet of President Trump. This one I’m about to play is not from a cabinet member himself, but he actually has a lot of experience in the diplomatic world of the United States.

He was on our show last week. He’s Daniel Kurtzer, served as a U.S. ambassador to Israel and to Egypt as well. And we were talking about the State Department’s responsibility of aiding U.S. citizens abroad during wartime or times of any kind of crisis. And he told us there’s been such a spectacular lack of planning at the current State Department on this that he’s received calls for help from friends who are American citizens stranded in other countries.

DANIEL KURTZER: This administration is not protecting our citizens in the Gulf. And we basically have said to people, as someone told me the other day who called me from Israel and said, how do I get out of here? Told me that when they asked, the State Department said to them, call Expedia. This is extraordinary.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that’s the U.S. diplomat or career diplomat, Daniel Kurtzer on our show last week. Now let’s move over to the Department of Homeland Security as folks. Know Kristi Noem, the former secretary is out and likely on his way in is Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma. He’s the president’s next pick for DHS. At Mullin’s Senate Confirmation hearing there were a lot of testy moments. Here’s one of them where Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky asked Mullin whether he approves of using violence to resolve political differences.

SENATOR MARKWAYNE MULLIN: What I was simply pointing out is some of the rules that still apply to this body. For instance, dueling with two consenting adults is still there. I was just –

SENATOR RAND PAUL: It’s been illegal for 170 years.

CHAKRABARTI: Dueling has been illegal for 170 years. Says Senator Rand Paul to Senator Mark Wayne Mullen. Okay. Tom, I want to play the foil here for a little while in terms of adding some true rigor to this conversation. Some criticisms of both you and me could be, A, we’re just cherry picking the lowest moments from each of these cabinet members and that’s not a fair representation of their ability or expertise.

What would you say?

NICHOLS: That’s a pretty big cherry tree. There’s baskets and baskets of cherries to pick here. So I don’t think that’s fair, the fact that the government is limping along, going back to Ambassador Kurtzer’s comments, for example, means that there are still people in the federal civil service who are still trying to issue Visas and get people where they’re going, the rot is at the top. And again, that’s going to seep down sooner or later, even into places like the military and the diplomatic service, unfortunately. So I reject the cherry-picking argument because at some point you’ve picked the whole tree.

And there’s just too many examples to just wave away as one-off kind of moments.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So you got to mind the next bit of pushback I was going to offer that, yes, there may be a stunning lack of expertise at the cabinet level, but within each of these agencies, even after DOGE, there are still thousands of people who are career civil servants and they’re doing their jobs and they still have the expertise to keep the government running. It might be all politics at the top, but in terms of the practical functioning of the government, still okay. So we’re not seeing a death of expertise in federal operations.

NICHOLS: Yes, there are people in, at those levels trying to make the government work and the Trump administration is trying very hard to get rid of them.

The assault, I think one thing that has really flown under the radar for a lot of people, and I say this as a former federal employee, is the assault on the federal civil service. Donald Trump wants to take thousands of these jobs and turn them from apolitical jobs into federal presidential appointments.

He basically wants to replicate throughout the civil service the damage that he’s done at the cabinet level. So again, I keep saying, gradually and then all at once because Donald Trump is trying very hard to flush out those layers of civil servants who are not, who have sworn loyalty to the Constitution and try to serve the American people instead of swearing loyalty to Donald Trump and are serving Donald Trump.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, so I want to say that this truth is getting harder and harder to ignore, right? Because just a couple of days ago, ProPublica had this incredible piece of reporting about what DOGE has done at the nuclear regulatory commission. This is also an area of expertise for you, nuclear Tom.

I don’t know if you saw this story but they reported on what DOGE did when they arrived at the NRC because last spring the president issued some executive orders demanding a complete rewrite of nuclear safety rules in this country. And also, a massive build out of nuclear power in this country.

Doge comes in, and this is according to ProPublica, and basically fires more than 400 people. 443 people either fired or leave the NRC. Only 57 new folks arrive, so there’s a deficit of institutional knowledge in departments of the nuclear regulatory commission that run reactor regulation, nuclear material safety and safeguards, nuclear regulatory research, nuclear security, and incident response.

There’s actually only a small fraction of the number of people in those departments that used to be there.

NICHOLS: Yeah. DOGE was another example of Hey, wouldn’t it just be awesome revenge on all the people that didn’t vote for us? Especially in the federal civil service. If we just went in and let a bunch of 20 somethings who have no idea what they’re doing, start chopping jobs. Ironically, I actually think that the idea of building out more nuclear power, I’ve been an advocate of that for decades. But not this way. And if you’re going to do that, yeah, I want a bunch of guys in white jackets.

And Propeller beanies handling that and not a bunch of fist pumping bros from the frat house, firing those people. The other thing that expertise gets in the way of here, by the way, is profit. Which is one reason that I think you’re seeing Trump try to slash out all of this expertise. Because those are the people who say yeah, that might be a more profitable way, but that’s a more dangerous way, or that’s a less healthy way, or a more destructive to human health or the environment.

They don’t want to hear any of that. And I think there’s one other criticism, I suppose we should anticipate here, Meghna. Which is, yes, experts have gotten things wrong. Experts have made bad calls. There’s no, we’re human beings. I’ve worked for three politicians.

Sometimes my advice wasn’t great. And I got called on the carpet. But experts are more likely to be right than, again, a couple of bros from DOGE. And they are the people that you actually want to be accountable for their decisions. And their actions when they advise political leaders and government agencies.

And the idea that somehow, experts got things wrong in the first two weeks of COVID, so experts are useless. And now we’re going to have Robert Kennedy tell us about eating raw beef and drinking raw milk is the answer. And that’s just crazy.

But it’s emotionally satisfying to people who feel very threatened by experts and expertise.

CHAKRABARTI: Tom, I was really taken or really caught my attention when you said a lot of this reminds you of the old Soviet Union. Because we reached out to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, she’s a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert on authoritarianism, and we asked her about this, and she told us that autocratic decision-making works very differently than decision making does in democracies.

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Autocrats develop something called an inner sanctum, a small group of people who often include family members, friends from the old days, as well as other advisors, and sometimes even cabinet officials. These are people who are there because of their loyalty to the leader who is not there, or anyone who might raise points of view that conflict with the leaders’ own.

CHAKRABARTI: And Tom, as you’ve mentioned, Ben-Ghiat also says that President Trump has an inner sanctum, and it includes people like Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner who led the negotiations with Iran without taking a nuclear expert with them before the war.

BEN-GHIAT: The problem with these inner sanctums is that they increase the echo chamber that the leader works in. So that over time they can come to believe their own propaganda and they rely on fewer and fewer people before making momentous decisions.

This is what happened with the runup to the war on Iran, where we had Vance, Hegseth and Rubio only, many military advisors and all of the due diligence and protocols that normally would be evoked and done, they weren’t done or they weren’t listened to.

CHAKRABARTI: Russia’s Vladimir Putin also has an inner sanctum right now, Ben-Ghiat says, and a similar thing happened to Putin in the lead up to the war, or Russia’s war with Ukraine.

BEN-GHIAT: He had isolated himself after COVID, he was feeling very beleaguered and he started the war on Ukraine without gaming out the consequences, the economic sanctions, the state of the military. And so at the first six months to a year of the war in Ukraine, it shocked the world, the state of disrepair of the Russian military. So none of this was addressed by Putin and his tiny inner circle before he declared war.

CHAKRABARTI: Back to the United States. Ben-Ghiat says authoritarians purge or hollow out institutions, meaning they get rid of people across the board who won’t be loyal to the leader.

BEN-GHIAT: What’s really disturbing and has been going on in the United States is that they’re not just firing experts.

They’re firing them in ways that destroys institutional knowledge. And so when you have a crisis, none of that is available to you and then it’s handled badly. This has happened in many places where government service becomes politicized. You’re remaking the judiciary and the other agencies into tools of your propaganda and tools of your authoritarian ambitions, not serving the public.

CHAKRABARTI: So we asked Professor Ben-Ghiat, given the actions by the Trump administration that we’ve discussed, is the United States still a democracy or has the country slipped into autocracy?

BEN-GHIAT: Our democracy is severely damaged, but it is still a democracy. Insofar as we have a robust opposition party, the Democratic Party, we still have people like myself able to speak out.

We have the right to protest, and one of my maxims, which I’ve formed from studying authoritarians for so long, is you want to use every tool and space that you have for peaceful resistance. Because you never know when it will be gone.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University.

She also writes a Substack called Lucid. It’s about democracies around the world.

Okay, Tom, we’ve just got a couple of minutes left here. And with what Professor Ben-Ghiat said there in mind, I just want to ask you, we’re at the point where it’s not just the idea of an expert that has been torn down in this country.

It’s the whole concept for the necessity of expertise. Now, you wrote about this in your book, the Death of Expertise as a decades long campaign against the concept that some people actually do know a lot, and that’s useful. How do we begin to undo the effects of that campaign?

NICHOLS: The first thing is I very much agree with Ruth’s point that we’re still a democracy and people should use all of the levers of democracy while they have them, including voting.

This is a case where, you know, if Trump loses the House, we talk about these terrible effects that Trump’s having on the government. But if Trump loses the House in 2026, his presidency is more or less over, which is why he’s visibly panicking at this. Before people lose heart and say there’s nothing that can be done about it.

There’s plenty that can be done about it. What’s interesting about the way that this suspicion of expertise, which long predates Donald Trump, factors into the political problem is that Trump has identified experts as the enemy. And one of the things that I think is very interesting about this is the way that he has cast experts and federal civil servants and other Americans as not Americans. As an enemy to be rooted out, as communists as traitors. This is, we’ve gone through a bunch of historical analogies here. Mussolini, Stalin, but this is McCarthy on steroids. That everyone who disagrees with Donald Trump is suspicious and an enemy of the country and a traitor.

He’s done that to the media. He refers to the media as the enemy of the people. An old Soviet phrase. He thinks of experts as people who are just there to frustrate him and his brilliant plans. And so I think one way we get back to this is stop, to tell our neighbors, to tell our friends. You’re not going to convert Donald Trump or the MAGA base, but to remind our friends and neighbors, we’re all in this together.

We’re all American citizens. One of the reasons that this country has prospered is that we’ve looked at experts as our fellow citizens who despite their faults and their errors are doing their best to make this a good country, a healthy, safe country for the rest of us. Trump has really attacked that concept, along with the concept of expertise and cast millions of Americans, not just as people who are opposed to his plans or politically uncooperative, but as real enemies of the people.

And that is something that all of us can help put a stop to by shaming it. Whenever that pops up, by shaming that notion and reminding our fellow citizens that we are all Americans.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.