The Making of an Autocrat

The list of people Donald Trump has punished or threatened to punish since returning to office is long. It includes the likes of James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, as well as members of the opposition, such as Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly and Kamala Harris.

In fact, he has gone so far as to call Democrats "the enemy from within", saying they are more dangerous than US adversaries like Russia and China.

According to Lucan Way, a prof...

In democratic systems, the courts are a vital check on a leader’s power. They have the ability to overturn laws and, in Donald Trump’s case, the executive orders he has relied on to achieve his goals.

Since taking office, Trump has targeted the judiciary with a vengeance. He has attacked what he has called "radical left judges" and is accused of ignoring or evading court orders.

The Supreme Court has already handed the Trump administ...

Donald Trump has sounded the alarm, over and over again, that the United States is facing an “invasion” by dangerous gang members. He blames immigrants for the country's economic problems and claims protesters are destroying US cities.

Trump is not the first would-be autocrat to manufacture a crisis to seize extraordinary powers.

So, is the United States really facing a national emergency? Or is this just a tactic on Trump’s part to ...

Every autocrat needs a clan of loyalists, strategists, masterminds – these are the figures behind the scenes pulling the strings.

They’re unelected and unaccountable, yet they wield a huge amount of power.

This is the role Stephen Miller has played for Donald Trump – he is the architect in chief for the second Trump administration. He has so much power, in fact, he’s reportedly referred to as the "prime minister"

So who is Stephen Mil...

We used to have a pretty clear idea of what an autocrat was. History is full of examples: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, along with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping today. The list goes on.

So, where does Donald Trump fit in?

In this six-part podcast series, The Making of an Autocrat, we ask six experts on authoritarianism and US politics to explain how exactly an autocrat is made – and whether Trump is on his way to becoming ...

We used to have a pretty clear idea of what an autocrat was. History is full of examples: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, along with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping today. The list goes on.

So, where does Donald Trump fit in?

In this six-part podcast series, The Making of an Autocrat, we are asking six experts on authoritarianism and US politics to explain how exactly an autocrat is made – and whether Trump is on his way to be...

Every day that he was locked up in a scam compound in Southeast Asia, George thought about how to get out. "We looked for means of escaping, but it was hard," he said.

Scam Factories is a podcast series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. It accompanies a series of multimedia articles on The Conversation.

In our third and final episode, Great Escapes, we find out the different ways survivors manage to escape, ...

A few weeks after Ben Yeo travelled to Cambodia for what he thought was a job in a casino, he found himself locked up in a padded room. “It’s a combination between a prison and a madhouse,” he remembers. He was being punished for refusing to conduct online scams.

Scam Factories is a podcast and multimedia series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. The Conversation collaborated for this series with three resear...

Scam factories is a special three-part series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to work in these scam factories. Many were trafficked there and forced into criminality by defrauding people around the world.

The Conversation collaborated for this series with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne, Ling Li...

The neglect of working-class voters in the past few decades has had profound consequences for British political life. Disillusioned with the two main parties, many have turned to Nigel Farage’s Reform and others are simply not voting at all. With the next election likely to be a tight race in many key constituencies, something must be done to win these voters back.

But as we find out in this fifth and final part of Know Your Pla...

After the 2024 election, the British parliament looks very different, with a large Labour majority for the first time in more than a decade. Several cabinet ministers come from working-class backgrounds, including the prime minister, deputy prime minister and foreign secretary. What impact will the upbringing of this new parliament have on the way Britain is governed?

In the fourth part of Know Your Place: what happened to class...

In the third part of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, we explore how class is defined and measured, and how the UK’s changing class identity interacts with identity politics. 

Featuring Daniel Evans, lecturer in criminology, sociology and social policy at Swansea University, Gillian Prior, deputy chief executive of the National Centre for Social Research, John Curtice, senior research fellow at t...

In the second episode of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, host Laura Hood, senior politics editor at The Conversation, looks back at a century of class in British politics to understand why Tony Blair's decision to move Labour away from the working class was such a watershed moment. 

Featuring Mark Garnett, senior lecturer in politics at Lancaster University, Martin Farr, senior lecturer in conte...

In the first episode of our new podcast series Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, host Laura Hood, senior politics editor at The Conversation, explores when the relationship between class and voting broke down and why. 

Featuring John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, Paula Surridge, professor of po...

The relationship between class and political preference in Britain used to be clear cut – Labour for the working class, the Conservatives for the middle class. But not any more.

In a new five-part series, Know your place: what happened to class in British politics, Laura Hood, senior politics editor at The Conversation, explores what fractured the relationship between class and voting in the UK, and why no politicians can take ...

We’re changing our name, from The Anthill, to The Conversation Documentaries! 

Over the last few years we’ve used The Anthill podcast to run in-depth series on a range of issues. And that’s exactly what we’ll keep on doing. But we’re changing our name to better reflect that what you’re listening to are documentaries from The Conversation. We’re a not-for-profit independent news website and our editors work with academics to...

The quest for a theory of everything – explaining all the forces and particles in the universe – is arguably the holy grail of physics. While each of our main theories of physics works extraordinarily well, they also clash with each other. But do we really need a theory of everything? And are we anywhere near achieving one?

Featuring Vlatko Vedral, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, ...

What’s the difference between a living collection of matter, such as a tortoise, and an inanimate lump of it, such as a rock? They are, after all, both just made up of non-living atoms. The truth is, we don’t really know yet. Life seems to just somehow emerge from non-living parts.

Featuring Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Surrey, and Sara Imari Walker, professor of physics at Arizona State University.

It is hard to shake the intuition that there's a real and objective physical world out there. If I see an umbrella on top of a shelf, I assume you do too. And if I don't look at the umbrella, I expect it to remain there as long as nobody steals it. But the theory of quantum mechanics, which governs the micro-world of atoms and particles, threatens this commonsense view.

Featuring Chiara Marletto, Research Fellow of Physics, and ...