The United States has “about a year” before “democracy completely leaves us,” director Rob Reiner told Ali Velshi on MSNBC Sunday. Reiner cited recent deployments of National Guard soldiers to Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois, as part of the basis for the claim.
“I mean, your whole first part of your show is about these ICE agents and national troops that are going into these cities to ‘curtail violence,’” he told Velshi. “This is just the beginning, and people have to understand our democracy is being taken away from us, and we only have about a year.”
On Saturday, Trump appointee U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut issued a temporary restraining order that blocks the president’s plan to deploy National Guard troops to Portland.
“The relationship between the federal government and the states, between the military and domestic law enforcement, and the balance of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government,” Immergut wrote.
Reiner added that Velshi and others are “doing a great job, and a lot of other people are doing a good job to tell people what is actually happening in this country” but warned that the present moment is important.
“But make no mistake, we have a year before this country becomes a full-on autocracy and democracy completely leaves us,” he continued. “And we’re looking at the election in 2026, and Donald Trump knows, he knows that in a free and fair election, he will lose. He will lose the House. The House will flip and will become into Democratic hands. There will be committee chairs that will be able to hold hearings, and this is the last thing he wants.”
To stymie that possibility, he said, Trump is ramping up political action in hotspots around the country. Reiner predicted the military will be present at polling locations during the 2026 midterms, and “when you see violence breaking out, which there will be protests, there will be inciting violence, there will be some violence, and then you’ll see the commandeering of voting machines, ballot boxes to make sure that that election is secure … what that means is that he will then commandeer the election.”
The immediate solution falls on storytellers, Reiner insisted. American citizens are concerned about their rights but perhaps not what the loss of democracy would look like in their day to day experiences.
“People care about their pocketbook issues, the price of eggs, they care about their health care, and they should. Those are the things that directly affect them. But if they lose their democracy, all of these rights, the freedom of speech, the freedom to pray the way you want, the freedom to protest and not go to jail, not be sent out in the country with no due process, all these things will be taken away from them, and we have to educate the public that this is what’s happening right now in America,” he said.
“But our job now as communicators is to start communicating to the rest of the country to let them know what is going to happen to them. The two big things that an autocrat needs, they need control of the media, which is what they’ve tried to do, and they need military control of the streets,” Reiner said. “And that’s the other thing that we’re seeing. So we’re in it right now, and we’re sliding downhill in a very, very fast way, and we have to find a way to stop it. And I believe the way to stop it is to educate people who may not understand what democracy is.”
The Trump administration has come under fire this year for perceived interference with media and reporting, and even attacks on the free press. Trump has fired off several lawsuits against newspapers and news channels and cut $1.1 billion in funding to NPR and PBS stations.
Watch the interview with Rob Reiner in the video above.
