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Intelligence Squared
The Age of the Strongman: Understanding Trump, with Anne Applebaum (Part One)
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- [00:01]
Anne Applebaum
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- [00:45]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with Pulitzer Prize winning historian and political commentator Ann Applebaum. Applebaum joined us at the Royal Geographical Society in London for the final instalment of our Age of the Strongman series. Understanding Trump. The morning after Donald Trump's victory over Kamala Harris in the US Presidential election, the New York Times front page declared, america hires a strongman, but is Trump really a strongman? And is it fair to put him in the same category as leaders such as Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping? Almost a year on from Trump's second electoral victory, Applebaum joined chief foreign affairs commentator for the ft, Gideon Rachman to explore whether Trump truly fits the mold of a strongman leader and how far his authoritarian instincts could go. Let's join our host Gideon Rachman now with more.
- [01:58]
Gideon Rachman
Well, thanks Connor, and thanks to Intelligence Squared and to you for arranging this whole series of four on the Age of the Strongman. I think we started with Putin and then we moved on to Xi Jinping and then Netanyahu and for the finale, Donald Trump. I don't know whether it's a tribute to Anne or to Trump, but we've had to hire a much bigger hall. It's great to have you, Anne, joining us to discuss Trump. Before we get right into it, I should just maybe for those who haven't been to all four, just give a broad idea of the theme. I actually wrote a book a while back called Age of the Strongman, and what I was trying to do was to track the rise of a series of leaders who seem to have some similarities in particular style of leadership. And that kind of forced me to try to think, well, what is strongman leadership? And is it legitimate to say that a Xi Jinping who's obviously operating in a pure autocracy, has some things in common with people who've been elected, like Donald Trump or Netanyahu. I mean, broadly speaking, yes, I decided there were, but I think key characteristics for me were cult of personality. And Trump himself probably put it better than any of the others when in 2016 accepting the Republican nomination, he describes this crisis as he sees it in the United States. And he says, I alone can fix it. And I think that is his central proposition and the proposition of all of these leaders. A couple of other things which I think we'll come to when we talk. All of these leaders thrive on the idea of a sense of crisis, that the nation is under threat. And I think they do that because that then justifies them to say, you know, we can't really have patience with institutions, with anything that blocks what I, as the strongman leader, needs, sees that has to be done. You have to give me all power to combat the enemies of the nation, the crisis that we're facing. And I think that, too, is characteristic of what Trump is doing. And those are the questions that I will ask with Ann. I'm sure you all know who she is. But just a brief recap. Famous historian, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Gulag and many other books. More recently focusing on the here and now. Most recent book, Autocracy Inc. But before we get going, I've been asked, apparently there's a poll. I'm not taking responsibility for whether it works, but the question there, if you scan that on your phone, you will be asked whether you think democracy in America will survive Trump.
- [04:40]
Anne Applebaum
So cool.
- [04:40]
Gideon Rachman
Actually, I've never seen that before. And you. Well, we'll see. It's cool if it works. And we'll see. We're going to poll you now and then after the conversation. So we'll see whether we make you more or less depressed by the end of the conversation. Okay, so if you vote on this little thing, then apparently we get a real time result. Okay, fine. Yeah, let's start. I won't ask you that question. Maybe I'll finish with that question. So one of the things I think that startled a lot of people is how quickly and how destructively Trump has moved in his second term. Because I remember when I was panicking ahead of the election, various people said, ah, calm down. We've had four years of Trump. We're all still here. You know, it's not great, it's manageable. But the second term feels more radical. Is that how it feels to you?
- [05:25]
Anne Applebaum
It Absolutely feels more radical, and it was predictable that it would be more radical. One of the things that happened in the United States after January 6th was that different contingents of people in the US who, for different reasons dislike the American political system or want it very, very radically changed, saw that Trump had tried to overthrow the results of an election. They saw how far he was willing to go. And while that repulsed many people in America, including many of Trump's colleagues in the Republican Party, it attracted other people. So a different kind of person was already attracted to him after January 6th than was there before. And ranging from people in Silicon Valley, in the tech world, who think the US Government should be reconfigured to help them, and that should be its main function in America. They're called Christian nationalists. So people who believe that the United States should not be a secular state, it should be a Christian state, and they would like to reform it and change it radically in order to change the nature of the US Political system. And then there's a. Some people, it's not clear whether it's a third group or a fourth group. But then there's another group, maybe traditional maga, who dislike what they would describe. They would call the woke left elements of the government, or the pieces of government that support what they would call an American ideology. And so those are three groups. Some people think it's four groups. Some people would break it down a little bit differently. But all of those people saw that Trump might win again. They were attracted to Trump, and they began planning for the second administration. And famously, you've all heard of Project 2025. This was a written, very long written document put together by somebody called Russ Bout, who's now head of the Office of Management and Budget, which sounds like an extremely boring piece of the US Administration. But in the same way that it turned out that being general Secretary of the Communist Party was the most important job, it also turns out that being the guy in charge of management and budget inside the US Government is also an incredibly important job.
- [07:52]
Gideon Rachman
And it's interesting. So I was at the Republican Convention when Trump was nominated in Milwaukee, and at that point, oh, so can American democracy survive? Good news, 79% say yes.
- [08:02]
Anne Applebaum
Yes.
- [08:02]
Gideon Rachman
Well, let's see if you'll still think that by the time we end.
- [08:08]
Anne Applebaum
At.
- [08:08]
Gideon Rachman
The Republican Convention, they were very much running away from Project 2025 and saying, oh, no, that's just like some. I think they even sacked some of the people who wrote it. They were so keen to distance themselves from it.
- [08:18]
Anne Applebaum
So Project 2025, a lot of what was in it was very unpopular and actually remains very unpopular. And it's very important to remember that a lot of Trump's agenda is very unpopular. And so one of the reasons why they're pushing so hard and moving so fast, and also we, I'm sure we'll get into this pushing the boundaries of what's legal and what's not is because they know it's unpopular and they want this done as soon as possible. I mean, they, again, they're different groups and they have slightly different goals.
- [08:47]
Gideon Rachman
So which brings me to the question of, you said there are these groups that wanted him, that saw what he represented and wanted that, and yet the majority of the voters wanted that. Do you think they knew what they were voting for?
- [08:59]
Anne Applebaum
I don't want to make a judgment about voter, but no, I don't think most people voted for, for example, the destruction of the white.
- [09:06]
Gideon Rachman
Yes, we're literally bulldozing the White House.
- [09:08]
Anne Applebaum
We're literally bulldozing those of you who haven't seen the pictures. The east Wing of the White House has been taken apart this week. And of course, that's a metaphor. No, I don't think most people were consciously voting for the end of US Aid or the pulling apart of the State Department or the destruction of the Environmental Protection Agency. I mean, most people who voted didn't think that's what they were voting for, as far as I understand from polling. Of course, I don't see into the brain every voter, but I mean, those.
- [09:40]
Gideon Rachman
Are policies, but they don't necessarily which may be good or bad, they don't necessarily in themselves spell an assault on democracy. No. What elements to remind us do you think that Trump is doing that actually are a threat to American democracy?
- [09:56]
Anne Applebaum
So, I mean, first of all, step back for a second. If you're an administration that is doing a lot of very unpopular things, creating tariffs, creating effectively high taxes on people, firing lots of government workers, and that affects a lot of communities all over the country, including places like Idaho, where there are a lot of people work for the Park Service. If you're doing all of these very, very unpopular things very fast, then surely if you're in a democracy, you have to be worried about the backlash, that there will be a voter backlash in next year when we have midterms or three years from now. And yet they don't seem to be worried. And so the question is, why aren't they worried? And one of the answers that some people are coming up with is maybe because they're Looking for ways in which they won't suffer the backlash from voters. So, again, taking a step back, maybe there are different sort of different. Different categories of things they're doing. Number one, quite a lot of what Trump has done, and this has nothing to do with the midterms, but quite a lot of what he's done is technically illegal. I mean, for example, bulldozing the White House. You're not supposed to be able to renovate the White House unless you have the permission of various historical commissions. And, I mean, Nobody could bulldoze 10 Downing street without getting permission from somebody. Right. I think. But this is. And yet his tactic has been he. And I think it's more the people around him than him, but has been to go ahead and do the thing that comes close to breaking the law and then worry about whether the courts try to stop you later. And this is something he's done repeatedly. I mean, the end of usaid, the American Aiden Institution, it's still not clear whether that was legal because the USAID was created by Congress in the United States. Congress decides about budgets. Congress makes decisions about what's funded and what's not funded. And yet the Trump administration disbanded it and sent everybody home and shut down the building and ended all the programs and actually caused huge chaos all over the world. And it's still not clear whether it was legal. But now it's almost too late. I mean, so what a court says that was illegal. Now what do you do? And that's been their modus operandi in all kinds of spheres, in the way they're using ice. This is the American Immigration Enforcement Body. I'm sure that's made it across the Atlantic that new term ice. The way they're behaving and acting also appears to be in the violation of all kinds of laws and norms.
- [12:45]
Gideon Rachman
Well, they're picking people up the on streets.
- [12:47]
Anne Applebaum
They're driving around not wearing uniforms. They drive unmarked cars, they wear face masks, and they grab people off the street and put them in the unmarked cars. And that there's no, you know, there's no American tradition of that kind of political police or secret police, which is what it looks like if you've ever seen, if you've seen any of the films of it.
- [13:06]
Gideon Rachman
Yeah.
- [13:06]
Anne Applebaum
And so all these things are there. They simply push the envelope. So this is one category of things, you know, this is that you have to describe as undemocratic, you know, seeking to break institutions and break the law. The second category of things are the things they're doing that will actually affect the outcome of the election. So one of them is to encourage Republican states to change their electoral districts, which is something that's normally done every 10 years after a census. And the Trump administration is asking Republican governors to change, to redistribute in ways that would benefit Republicans. So, I mean, it's openly saying, we want you to cheat, you know, we want you to cut, you know, rewrite the border so that it's easier for Democrats to win. And they've successfully done it.
- [13:51]
Gideon Rachman
Republicans to win.
- [13:52]
Anne Applebaum
Excuse me, Republicans to win. They've successfully done it in Texas, they're putting pressure on Indiana, a number of other states. And so they're open. This is never the open, open way in which the federal government is trying to encourage the states to do that is something that we've never had that happen before. I mean, gerrymandering, an old tradition in the United States, and you are now.
- [14:14]
Gideon Rachman
Beginning to get what I think people anticipated right at the beginning is he's going after his political opponents legally. So the arrest of John Bolton, charges.
- [14:23]
Anne Applebaum
Against, I was getting, that's the third category. But they're more to do with the election itself. I mean, the federal government has been demanding from several states the voter rolls, which is also. Nobody's ever been forced to turn over the lists of voters to the government before. And there seems to be a project to look at ways to kick people off the voter rolls. And that's a longer, detailed conversation. So multiple ways in which they're trying to shape the outcome of the election. And then thirdly, they're going after Trump's political opponents, using the arms of the state, using the Department of Justice, using the irs, using other kinds of regulatory bodies, using regulatory bodies to silence people. I mean, you all know the famous story about the American comedian who was silenced because the company Disney, actually, which was the company that owned the television station he was on, was threatened by the broadcast regulator. So, you know, using the arms of the federal government to put pressure on critics. And now there's the language that they're using right now. They're talking about the left wing terrorism and left wing violence that need to be investigated and suppressed. And people fear that that means any institution that organizes protests or that raises money for the Democrats or that holds fundraisers for the Democrats, any of the stuff that we used to consider normal politics, they may be looking to politicize that. That seems to be the direction they're going and all those things. I mean, obviously, if they can cut off funding to the Democrats, then That gives them a big advantage. I actually have a friend who has made donations to a kind of sort of left ish. It's not even that far left organization. And she was told by her accountants, are you sure you want to be a donor to that organization? Because maybe it could get you audited.
- [16:21]
Gideon Rachman
Right.
- [16:21]
Anne Applebaum
So people are beginning to be afraid to give money to organizations that Trump doesn't like to back, institutions that Trump doesn't like, you know, to criticize the president, you know, in ways that could incur the wrath of the federal government on themselves and all of that. You know, it's not the same thing as stealing or rigging the election, but it does shape the playing field, and I think that is their goal.
- [16:43]
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. So many different direct questions I want to ask you, but does you know somebody who studied the way in which authoritarianism spread in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, encouraged by the Soviet Union? Is this reminiscent or is that overdone?
- [17:01]
Anne Applebaum
So there's no mass violence? I mean, there is some targeted violence. You know, we see it in some cities in Chicago and Portland right now, for the moment, it's focused on immigrants, although there are U.S. citizens who are also caught up in some of the ICE raids. But what's interesting to me is that the categories of people who. When the Communists took over Central Europe, this is the book I wrote 10 years ago, the categories of people that the Communists were interested in controlling are the same ones. It's not just Trump, but any of your strongmen or anybody who's seeking to change the nature of a political system needs to control. Right. So it's education and universities, you know, science and research, the media, information. And obviously in Russia would be called the power ministries. You know, so the military and the police. And, you know, in the case of the US we didn't have a federal police service, but the creation ICE is now taking on the characteristics of one we didn't have. You know, police was something that was always done by the States. There was no federal troops, no Interior Ministry troops in America. But he seems to be creating so the same institutions and the same parts of society that you need to influence in order to have control are the same ones that they're interested in. But this is not unique to Trump. This is what anybody would do.
- [18:20]
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I mean, again, one of the things I said briefly in the introduction is that one of the warning signs and the enablers for authoritarianism is the declaration of a state of emergency. And Trump has talked recently about invoking the Insurrection act, which would be a kind of state of emergency. And indeed, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, various people, I think on Twitter, as it's no longer called, the phrase Reichstag fire was trending because people thought, okay, maybe this is the moment. Do you think he needs to declare a state of emergency, or can he do a lot of he wants to do anyway?
- [18:57]
Anne Applebaum
So he's already declared several kinds of emergency. So the tariffs actually again, in the US System, the president is not supposed to be able to decide by himself to impose tariffs. That's actually a power that Congress has. And Trump is doing it on the grounds that there's an emergency of some kind, which is now being challenged in the courts. But he uses the language of emergency and sometimes the legality of emergency to do quite a lot of things already. Again, I don't want to get too far ahead. You know that there's a series of US Military actions against Venezuela taking place right now. And that's a long story. I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for the Venezuelan opposition. I understand why they would hope that, you know, that that regime would come to an end. But it does look also like the administration could use that as another kind of look, we're at war with Venezuela. We're at war against crime and drugs and immigrants. Therefore, we need emergency. So they're beginning to use the language of emergency already. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quotes with rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this episode@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
- [20:48]
Gideon Rachman
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- [21:23]
Anne Applebaum
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- [22:39]
Gideon Rachman
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
- [22:42]
Anne Applebaum
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [22:43]
Gideon Rachman
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty.
- [22:47]
Anne Applebaum
Liberty.
- [22:48]
Gideon Rachman
Liberty Savings Fairy underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates.
- [22:51]
Anne Applebaum
Excludes Massachusetts.
- [22:56]
Gideon Rachman
And is there, for lack of a better phrase, a climate of fear. I mean, the last time I was in the States was in May, and I did. People were already saying that they were being careful at work about what they were saying. Do you notice that? And are institutions sort of buttoning their lips?
- [23:14]
Anne Applebaum
So I am extremely lucky in that I work for a magazine that wants me to say what I think. And so I don't, you know, I'm.
- [23:22]
Gideon Rachman
The Atlantic.
- [23:23]
Anne Applebaum
Yeah, the Atlantic. I work for the Atlantic magazine. And so I. And I understand that it's lucky. I have a. I had a conversation some months ago with the president of a large university and who was very, very upset about many of the things happening, especially the pressure on science and what's happening to the study of medicine. And he said to me, I would love to be able to speak out, but I can't because I have hundreds of people working for me who have federal grants and I don't want the federal government to take revenge on them because. Because of something I've done. So there's quite. It's not exactly fear of going to prison. It's not that the Stasi is watching you. I mean, I don't want to make it sound like the United States is East Germany, but there is a sense that you have to be because the federal government is so powerful in so many different spheres, because it controls university funding, especially in science, because they have these regulatory bodies, because the FBI can do anything it wants, because they can use the IRS to investigate you. A lot of people are careful, either for themselves or for the institution that they run and the people who work for them. Nobody wants lots of people to be fired because of something they've said. So I wouldn't say fear makes it sound like, as I said, they're waiting.
- [24:43]
Gideon Rachman
For the knock on the door.
- [24:44]
Anne Applebaum
Yeah, it's not exactly that, but. But there is a. People are very careful about what they can say.
- [24:50]
Gideon Rachman
Well, I suppose going to prison is one thing, but losing your job is also quite a powerful incentive, and people are worried about that.
- [24:58]
Anne Applebaum
Losing your job or having your colleagues lose their jobs or your employees lose their jobs. Nobody wants to inflict mass unemployment on their institution. So, yes, and that's true of both the private sector and it's true of certainly anybody who gets federal funding or has a relationship with the federal government of any kind.
- [25:19]
Gideon Rachman
Right. And that was indeed the justification for the law firms when Trump essentially shook down firms like Paul Weiss and so on.
- [25:27]
Anne Applebaum
Yes. I mean, law firms have divided. So some law firms have decided to fight back and they are suing Trump and working together. And the same thing actually has happened with universities as well. There are a number of big lawsuits where people are working together. And of course, that's ultimately the way to do it, is for either companies or law firms or other institutions to work together to push back. And some of the lawsuits have been successful. A number of institutions have stayed open instead of being closed because they've won lawsuits. So it's not hopeless. But it is true that when, if you're going to be the only institution by yourself facing the power of, as I said, the FBI, the irs, the Department of Justice, you know, the media. And don't forget how much. How important Twitter is and other forms of social media in that, you know, nobody. People are more used to it now than they were a few years ago, but nobody in a position of power wants to be suddenly the focus of some kind of online firestorm or online campaign. But that now can happen, too. And I actually said that's the fourth way in which you could talk about the Trump administration trying to shape the ground for next elections is, again, I don't know how much coverage this has gotten here, but the sale of TikTok, in which the control of TikTok is effectively going to be given to a group of very wealthy people who are close to Trump at a very low price. Is another way in which they. And TikTok is a very, very powerful form of media.
- [27:04]
Gideon Rachman
Now, I think most young people in America get their news from TikTok. Yeah.
- [27:08]
Anne Applebaum
And so having. It's also a very opaque form of media. We don't really know how the TikTok algorithm works. It's very hard to study for various reasons. I know people who've tried. And so that's another way in which controlling the information space.
- [27:23]
Gideon Rachman
And that actually is very reminiscent of other sort of soft authoritarian systems where, say in India or Turkey, you don't close the media down, but it's helpful if your mates buy the newspapers.
- [27:37]
Anne Applebaum
Yeah. No, I mean, if you look at, for example, how did Viktor Orban take control over media in Hungary? You know, a lot of us still think of censorship as like in George Orwell, you know, there's a guy in a booth and he's crossing things out of the newspaper. But now what he did is instead was he didn't censor anybody. He simply arranged for. There were different kinds of pressure you could put on media to make them lose money. And actually, you don't even have to try that hard anymore. Most media lose money just happening by itself. And then he enabled people close to him, business people close to him, to help them buy media. And so once the media had been a lot of it was still technically private, but once it had been bought up by friends of the prime minister or friends of the ruling party, then there was less and less competition and it was very hard for people to read anything that wasn't pro government. Again, that's not going to happen in the United States. It's too big and so on. But there is more pressure, and they have been able to exert more pressure, especially on, for example, the big broadcasters, abc, NBC, cbs, then I would have thought possible.
- [28:45]
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And in fact, I think one of your former employers, the Washington Post, was bought by Jeff Bezos, who gave this wonderfully paradoxical instruction to the op ed page. From now on, you can only write about freedom.
- [28:59]
Anne Applebaum
Yes. No, it's actually, I mean. And the strange thing about the Washington Post is so, yes, that Bezos has changed the Post, especially the Opinion section, quite a bit. And the strange thing is, it's had a terrible impact on the paper. I mean, the paper's subscriptions have collapsed. Lots of journalists have left. I mean, I don't know the exact numbers, but many have come actually from the Post, of the Atlantic or gone to other places. And the business rationale doesn't seem clear at all. And the only thing it looks like is that Bezos is doing this as a way of sucking up to the Trump administration because his real business interests are elsewhere.
- [29:32]
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And in fact, when we were back there, you said, ask me about corruption. And that reminds me, because of course, another thing that Bezos has done, and I should say, actually I do have friends on the Washington Post who say their news reporting is still pretty solid.
- [29:44]
Anne Applebaum
I think their news reporting is solid and they have good foreign reporters. Yeah.
- [29:47]
Gideon Rachman
So, you know, it's not an entirely one sided story. But another thing Bezos has done is commission a documentary about Melania Trump for an insane amount of money.
- [29:57]
Anne Applebaum
$40 million.
- [29:58]
Gideon Rachman
$40 million, yeah.
- [30:00]
Anne Applebaum
Yep. And. And I'm sure it'll make $40 million worth of profit.
- [30:04]
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. Anyway, so that is a small example, but how central do you think corruption is? Because again, you mentioned Viktor Orban and one of the things about relatives of Orban, old school friends have become very rich in these years. I mean, the Trump family and their associates are doing well.
- [30:24]
Anne Applebaum
So there was an article in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago that, that reckoned the Trump family have made well over a billion dollars since inauguration.
- [30:34]
Gideon Rachman
Oh, yeah. Well, we, if I can cite the ft, we did a piece on their crypto empire and one of the reporters rang up Eric Trump and said, we're going to say you've made $3 billion. I checked the figure, but I think it's 3 billion on crypto since the election. Is that right? And he said, oh, it's more than that.
- [30:51]
Anne Applebaum
Right. So also, many people don't understand the, the World Liberty Financial, which is their crypto company, I didn't understand this until very late in the game, sells coins. And at least initially, the people who bought the coins, first of all, you can buy them anonymously, so you don't have to say what your name is. But presumably Trump knows who bought them. The money went directly to the company. And at least initially, you bought the coin, but you could not sell it or trade it. So you were buying nothing really. You were buying, I don't know, a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge. And so what is the purpose of buying that if it can't be sold or traded? The purpose was to pay the president. And so that company by itself. But there are the numerous shakedowns of, as you say, law firms of companies. You know, Trump will sue somebody and then say, try and settle the suit. And a lot of people want to settle the suit. They don't want to be in a lawsuit with the President. So they will pay off into some fund or some, I don't know what it is, charity. The White House. Actually, the renovation of the White House renovation, I mean, defacement of the White House, destruction, the construction of a $250 million ballroom that's apparently also being paid for by private companies. But again, so people are paying money into this project. We don't know what they get in exchange. Why would a company, I don't know, spend 2, 3, 4 million dollars on this project? What are they getting for that? So there are all kinds of different ways in which money is changing hands almost every day. The Trump company, there are minor things, you know, there's a. Trump is continuing to participate in, for example, golf tournaments that have at his golf course in Mar a Lago. And who comes to the golf tournaments and who are the other sponsors? Oh, yes, some of them are Saudi companies. So he has relationships with especially the Middle east, but not only with foreign business people and foreign politicians and foreign state owned companies that are also the companies that he deals with as the President of the United States. And so when he's dealing with Saudi Arabia, is he dealing with them as a business partner or is he acting in the interests of the American people? And I don't even know how you splice that or answer that question. And this is, I should also say, for those who don't know, I mean, maybe, I guess you could go back to, I don't know, the 17th century in Britain and you would get lots of that kind of scale of corruption. But in the United States, this is genuinely new. So of course there's corruption, of course business people have influence. Of course, rich people were influential in politics before and there have been presidents who were too close to some scandals or, I don't know, Ulysses S. Grant supposedly let his brother in law get access to government contracts. I mean, there's been stuff like that before, but the scale of this, the amount of money involved, the conflict of interest is on a level that we have never seen and people I don't think really can even comprehend.
- [34:08]
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, it comes back to this question of are people going to respond? I mean, so I was on another panel a while back with the famous Francis Fukuyama who made, I thought, quite an astute point where he said the trouble is that the left talks about process and Trump talks about results. And that's quite popular with some people. So he can say, you know, they're complaining about all this legal stuff, but I have sealed the border and he has. So do you think he might still be popular nonetheless.
- [34:42]
Anne Applebaum
So, I mean, I can only tell you what polls say right now. Polls say he is not popular. I mean, it's actually now fairly common for politicians not to be popular. So. So it's kind of universal. I gather you have some unpopular politicians in the UK now, so maybe that's not so strange. But even polled, even on immigration, people don't like ice. They don't like the way it's being carried out. I mean, the majority. And that's, I think, his best issue. So, no, I mean, it doesn't look popular. It's also, I know that from here it's hard to see. There are a lot of people responding to him. You may not see it and maybe it's not on the BBC, but there's a, you know, on social media and in different fora, there is beginning to be a pretty large response. It's coming from a wide range of Democrats, some on the center, some on the left. There was a series of protests across the United States last weekend, the no kings one, which attracted 7 million people. I think, I think it's probably the largest single day protest in American history. So it's not as if there's nothing happening. And it's true that Democrats are looking for the right language and some of them are finding it and some of them aren't. And so some of you may have followed Gavin Newsom, governor of California, who decided to flip the script and use Twitter and use social media in a sort of offensive way to described the president and got lots of attention for it. And you know, for all I know, maybe that's how you break the bubble or get through to people. Maybe that's what works now. I mean, we'll see. There's some interesting, very interesting candidates who will be running for the Senate next year. There's two interesting governors races now. I mean, there, it's not as if there's. It's not. It's also the other thing that's confusing, I think, for Europeans is that the US Is not a parliamentary system and so there's no leader of the opposition. So there isn't a single person who's responsible for leading or organizing the Democrats. And actually in our system that's maybe better because midterm elections take place in every state in the country and a lot of states have very different politics and there are a lot of local issues. And if there was a single person that everybody had to have an opinion about, that's maybe not, you know, that would be hard for next year. I mean, there will eventually be another presidential candidate and then that person de facto becomes the leader of that position. But until that time, and that won't be for another couple years, there won't be. And so expecting there to be a single person who emerges is wrong.
- [37:20]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Conor Boyle and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member at intelligencesquared.com forward/membership. And to join us at future events, head to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full live events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us Mr.
- [38:01]
Gideon Rachman
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Anne Applebaum
Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro.
- [38:30]
Gideon Rachman
Copyright McDonald's.
- [38:31]
Anne Applebaum
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