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Trump’s second-term behavior mirrors the same autocratic indicators once used to assess foreign strongmen.
National-security guardrails—legal, cultural, and ethical—are being dismantled faster than they can be rebuilt.
Surveillance capability becomes a civic threat when detached from lawful purpose and institutional restraint.
Edwin Eisendrath raises the question of how a democracy preserves its freedoms while maintaining powerful intelligence tools. His guest this week, Steven Cash, Former Senior Advisor with the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence & Analysis, answers with the blunt truth that capability without purpose quickly becomes coercive. He’s part of The Steady State , a bipartisan group of more than 340 former national security officials who remain committed to their oaths to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
One point Steven makes—that stripping away lawyers, oversight, and culture leaves “just a weapon”—is less an observation than a challenge about what happens when institutions lose the values that once defined their limits. Democratic erosion often looks administrative rather than dramatic: a quiet reclassification of threats, a quiet expansion of access, a quiet normalization of fear. The line between safety and state power now depends on whether citizens recognize the slow movement of systems being repurposed around them. A public that learns to read those signals—like analysts once did abroad—changes the political terrain by refusing to be governed through intimidation or confusion.
Tune in to this urgent conversation with Steven Cash and subscribe to The Steady State today.

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