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Aug 7, 2026
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Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, last year wrote an essay that included an “authoritarian checklist” of common moves by autocratic leaders around the world. His intention was to track how successful President Trump would be in consolidating power. In the latest edition of Right Now, Moynihan assesses Trump’s progress on that list. The professor argues that Trump has been very successful in dominating the federal bureaucracy, the military, and the legal system. Businesses, the media, universities, and other parts of civil society largely bowed to Trump last year but have been more resistant in 2026. Where Trump has been least successful, according to the professor, is in controlling the U.S. election system. That’s partly because U.S. elections, more than those in other countries, are largely managed at the local and state levels.
A source told reporter Renee Dudley something she found hard to believe: that Microsoft was running tech support for the Department of Defense through China, the country’s biggest cybersecurity adversary. The arrangement was called “digital escorting.” She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it. This is the story of what she found and how her investigation changed government policy.
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A transcript of this episode will be posted soon.
