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- [00:00]
A
Hi everyone.
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B
Harry here. We're doing something a little bit different with this episode. We've got a twofer for you today. Up first, a conversation I had for the podcast with the great Ann Applebaum. But after that, there's a bit of a bonus. It's a recording of a Substack live I did earlier this year with another superb student of international authoritarianism, Ruth Ben Ghiat. If you're a Substack subscriber, you'll know that I host these live conversations on the platform every couple weeks. Paid subscribers get full access to the recordings starting a day or two after they are taped. We'll be doing more of these in the coming year, so if you enjoy the conversation with Ruth, consider heading over to the Talking Feds substack to follow along. One last piece of housekeeping about the conversation you're going to hear between me and Ann Applebaum. A few things have changed since we've spoken. The US has somewhat toned down its rhetorical willingness and support for throwing Zelensky under the bus, and the Europeans yet again have come forward to do their best to bolster Ukraine without American help. But largely, things are where they stood and the conversation is a really pressing one to understand the personal and political motivations behind Trump's willingness to abandon Ukraine's fight for freedom. Talk to you later. Welcome to Talking Feds. One on one deep dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives. I'm your host, Harry Littman. The Russia Ukraine war has seemed in recent weeks to have taken a bad turn for Ukraine, the good guys by any sensible and moral evaluation of US interests, but not by the calculations of Trump and his circle, some of whom are busy planning ways to enrich themselves with with deals with Russia. Ukraine's been absorbing drones and missiles almost every night and has posted few military gains in recent months. In the meantime, American negotiators have produced a one sided 28 point plan for peace that would require significant territorial and other concessions from Ukraine, and they seem to be trying to strong arm Ukraine into signing it. That's despite the fact that many Ukrainian officials and European allies see it as more a capitulation than a peace plan. We've become used to the idea that even with Trump's pro Russian sympathies, the war can just drag on. But we are in fact facing down a possible end game and final arrangement that in effect rewards the aggressor and punishes the democracy. It's always a great boon for Talking Feds to be able to welcome today's guest, Anne Applebaum, whose knowledge and insight about the war and that part of the world is unsurpassed. And it's especially lucky to have those insights right now with the conflict having reached such a critical juncture. Anne Applebaum is a journalist and staff writer at the Atlantic, where she writes about struggles between democracy and authoritarianism around the world. She's also a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins and the School of Advanced International Studies. She's the author of several books, some of which we've covered at Talking Feds, including the Pulitzer Prize winning Gulag History, her most recent book in the New York Times bestseller Autocracy Inc. And she has a superb substack Open letters from Anne Applebaum. Anne, thank you so much for joining.
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C
Thanks so much for having me.
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B
So I'm so glad to talk with you because after months in which Ukraine had fallen more or less from the headlines, we suddenly get reports that a new deal with some real US Backing behind it may be in the offing. And then we saw the deal, and I think it's fair to say it shocked a lot of people who've been following this closely. You had a brilliant piece where you described it as a proposal that, in your words, ensures future war. Why? What's in it? What would its adoption or acquiescence by Ukraine augur?
- [04:47]
C
So there are a lot of things in this document we could discuss, but maybe I'll just focus on three. One of them is that it requires Ukraine not only to give up territory that's already de facto occupied by Russia, but also to give up territory that's not conquered by Russia. In other words, Ukraine would have to pull back away from a group of cities and a part of the country that's quite heavily fortified and let Russia just have it. And this is territory Russia has been trying to conquer for 10 years, more than 10 years, because the Donbass, this eastern section of Ukraine, was first invaded by the Russians in 2014, and they've not been able to conquer the whole thing ever since then. And the document says they want the Ukrainians to give that up. Secondly, it wants Ukraine, in effect, to have no security guarantees. I mean, there's something about never joining NATO and there's something about having no Western troops on its territory. But what it means is that Ukraine. Oh, and reducing its army. Sorry. What it means in practice is that Ukraine couldn't defend itself in the future. And so just those two points alone mean that we could get maybe some kind of ceasefire for a while, and that would prepare the ground for the next war, which is what happened in 2014, that the Ukrainians allowed Russia to stay in Donbas, they kept Crimea, and then the invasion of 2022 was launched from those territories. In other words, they used Crimea and eastern Ukraine to launch a new attack on all of Ukraine. And, of course, what the Ukrainians are afraid of is that they'll do it again. I should also say that without some kind of security guarantee and some kind of assurance that the war is not going to just begin again next year or in two years, it's hard to see how Ukraine becomes a viable state. I mean, who wants to invest there? Who wants to live there if the attack is just going to begin again with a rested and restrengthened Russia? So it doesn't end the war in a way that gives Ukraine some kind of stable base to build from. I mean, I think the third point, the third aspect of the document was that there were a couple of suggestions that there are separately and secretly going on American Russian negotiations that are really business negotiations. So the Russians have been dangling some kind of deals before the Americans. I mean, remembering that we had a couple of decades to do deals in Russia before, so it's not like this is some kind of new thing, but they're dangling new promises, something in the Arctic, something about minerals. Some of the companies involved in this, we know from a Wall Street Journal story, seem to involve friends or people that the Trump family knows. And so what you have is the specter of the US Putting pressure on Ukraine to stop the war in an unfavorable situation while the US Goes on to do deals with Russia. And it's a very ugly document. It's ugly from the Ukrainian point of view, from the European point of view, really from the American point of view, because it makes American policy look as if it were beholden to some business people who are friends with Trump.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And basically mercenary. Right. It's a whole. You really could call it un American in the way that we used to think of American. And if I. Am I right, that there's a sort of added ugliness to it, that the deals are not simply between the US As a country and Russia, but literally the negotiators and the leaders of the push on our side, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, stand potentially to profit from the new commerce with Russia. Is that.
- [08:38]
C
I mean, we don't know that, but it's certainly a possibility. I Mean, both Witkoff and Kushner, they're not diplomats. They are people who are deeply involved in business. Witkoff has been doing business with Russians in the New York real estate market for many decades. Kushner is somebody who is not just the President's son in law, but is a recipient of a huge investment from the Gulf. So he's already somebody who's playing a strange role as both somehow close to the President and also earning money privately from that proximity. And we have to assume that he has some interests in this as well. It's also curious, the negotiator on the Russian side who was pushing this 28 point plan is somebody called Kirill Dmitriev, who is the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund. So in other words, also not a diplomat and also somebody who probably met Kushner in the Gulf because the Russian sovereign wealth fund does deals with the Emirates and the Saudis, which is where Kush Kushner also does deals. So they probably know each other through their business contacts. And the Russians have presented this clearly to the Americans, to Kushner and Witkoff as a kind of business deal. And because Kushner and Wydkoff don't have any experience dealing with Russia and they don't have any experience dealing with diplomacy at this level, either they don't care or they don't understand that this is a, as I said, it's a Russian plan to let the war continue later on. Russia's goal in Ukraine is not real estate. They're not interested in this piece of territory because they want to build hotels in Donbas. They're interested in this territory as a launching pad for future invasions and as a kind of trophy to show that we defeated the West.
- [10:32]
A
Fair enough.
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B
And I don't want to overstate the ugliness. It's ugly enough already, but there is the overall feel of business interests, kind of.
- [10:39]
A
Yep.
- [10:39]
B
Greedily carving up Ukraine, including even territory that they would have to concede under the plan that is not. Has not been in military jeopardy as of now. Well, let me, let me ask you, and I, you know, how tough is. So obviously this is an arm's length deal that if it were an arm's length deal, Ukraine would never take it. How tough is the pressure on them and what are the. Not just the prospects, but the mechanics for them to, For Ukraine to slip the noose, as it were.
- [11:12]
C
So I don't know exactly what kind of pressure the US really would put on Ukraine. I mean, another difficulty in understanding this whole situation is that President Trump is mercurial. He changes his tone and his mind almost weakly, seemingly depending on who's the last person who spoke to him. So I can't tell you what he'll do tomorrow because he himself probably doesn't know. And so it's pretty clear that there's no strategy here in the sense of grand strategy, in the sense of the United States thinking about how it's going to deal with Russia over the next decade. It's really about some business interests and Trump's whims. Trump is interested in what makes him look good at any moment and what makes him look like he's emerging victorious from this negotiation. So I can't predict at all what he'll do. It is true that the United States is no longer supporting Ukraine in the sense of offering them weapons or financing. That's all coming from Europe. Now it's something like 95% from Europe. There are two things the US still provides that matters. One is Patriot missiles, these very specific anti missile air defense technology that the US just has more of than anybody else. And that is now the Europeans are now paying for that. So they're buying that technology from the United States directly. And that's just another business deal, if you will. Also, the US has the ability to do real time intelligence for targeting purposes that the Ukrainians find very valuable. So I think, all things being equal, the Ukrainians would rather not break up with the us, even though, as I say, their main source of funding and support right now as European. Also, if you look back over the war more broadly, I mean, a lot of things depend on how much you think weapons, especially old weapons, are worth. But the us and Trump continuously just grotesquely overstates how much money the U.S. has spent in Ukraine. I mean, he talks about $300 million. I saw one academic estimate that had it at 50 million, which would be much smaller than the European contribution, which has been both financial and military. So there's a question in my mind as to what, what really the US did, and the US's most important role in the Biden years was as the motivator and leader of this very broad coalition, not just in Europe, but around the world of countries that were helping Ukraine. And obviously we're not doing that anymore. So the US has already pulled back, I don't know, 90% of what it did before. And so the Ukrainians now have to weigh the value of what still contributed. I mean, I think one thing the Trump administration, or perhaps Witkoff and Kushner don't understand is that I'm not sure that Zelensky, President Zelensky can politically give up territory in Ukraine that has not been conquered. And I'm not sure the army would let him do it. Ukraine's army is not exactly hierarchical, run in the way that armies are run in other places. It's very, it's very decentralized. A lot of commanders have their own power, some of them have their own funding streams. They raise money in different ways. I am not sure that Zelenskyy could command them to withdraw and that they would do it. I don't know that. But I'm saying it would be a big, huge political problem and it might also just not be possible. And so they're asking. Zelenskyy is being asked to do something that would be unpopular, dangerous, and maybe just not even feasible.
- [14:44]
B
What a wild card. I wanted to follow up a little bit on the military situation because when we last spoke, you explained to me that Ukraine's military might and prospects were stronger than they might have appeared because of their great drone technology. Now they really do seem to be losing their edge on the battlefield. Been a long time since they made any kind of significant change gains. So why is that? And what's become of what previously had seemed to be an almost equalizer in materiel based on the drones.
- [15:20]
C
So that's still the case. And it's also still the case that a lot of what Ukraine does is either not reported or is hard to see. So the Ukrainians every night are still hitting Russian refineries, Russian oil and gas infrastructure. You know, they hit targets just over the border, but also much farther away. They have these long range drones that can travel for many hours that are hitting factories and oil infrastructure quite far from the Ukrainian border. So that all continues. I mean, I think the change, there's been some tactical changes in the last month, but I think also the Russian decision that they will accept any amount of casualties and will pay any price to gain 20km of territory has shifted the war. In other words, Ukrainians reckon that they've killed and that these are numbers that are verified by video evidence. They have killed or critically wounded 26,000 Russian soldiers in the month of November, which is more Russian soldiers than died during the entire Russian Afghan war. And it's coming to a third or half of the number of Americans killed in Vietnam, which was considered to be a horrible tragedy for our country. And this is in one month of fighting. The way the war works is there's a kind of kill zone, so there's an area in between the two armies where drones cover the sky at all times, and anybody who walks into the killing field is at risk of dying. And the Russian tactic is simply to keep sending people into the killing field. And. And as I said, I mean, hundreds of people die every day. And I think the numbers have begun to affect Ukraine's ability to fight back because of the quantity. And I remember somebody saying to me a long time ago, is it quality or quantity that will win the war? And we still don't know the answer to that. I would still stress that one of the towns that's in danger, which is the city of Pokrovsk, which is a very small city, you never heard of it before the war. People have been talking about the battle for Pokrovsk off the top of my head, I don't remember. But it's been going on for many, many months. Last summer, last spring, people were talking about, pokrovsk is about to fall. It's about to fall. It's about to fall. And here we are weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks later, and it still hasn't fallen. And the Russians keep lying about whether it's fallen, and they'll plant flags on some building there and then run away in an attempt to get a kind of propaganda edge and to try to get Western newspapers to write that Pokrovsk has fallen so that that can play into the defense negotiation, into the peace negotiations. And they're using this surge of soldiers and people as a part of their negotiating strategy. They want to say, look, we're overwhelming the Ukrainians and we're winning. It isn't clear to me that they can continue to do this indefinitely. I mean, as always, there are. There has to be a limit.
- [18:23]
B
Although it feels almost like a historic hole card for Russia to just be indifferent about their own casualty and be able to absorb, you know, almost without any sort of worry, death after death. Anne, you had a great piece about corruption in Ukraine, Russia, and the United States. And we know it costs Zelinsky his number two person who had a lot of other advantages that he brought to the table that. That are now not. Not at Zelinsky's fingertips. Can you just talk a little bit about what's happening right now with this corruption inquiry, Operation Midas, I believe, in Ukraine, and how, if at all, it dovetails with the war effort.
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C
First of all, what you need to understand is that this corruption investigation is being conducted by the Ukrainian state and by Ukrainian civil servants. And so what it represents is not. I don't know, the IMF or some foreign journalists discovering something. It's the state itself. In other words, this is the state working the way it is supposed to work and functioning as Ukrainians want it to function. And the bodies that are carrying out the investigation were created after 2014. And if you remember, that was the year that the Ukrainians overthrew or frightened actually their authoritarian and profoundly corrupt pro Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. He fled the country after murdering some protesters. He seems to have.
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B
That's the whole first impeachment of Trump story, basically his preference for.
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C
Yeah, yeah. And so after that event, there was a new election and there were new institutions created that were designed to allow the Ukrainian state to investigate so called high level corruption, meaning ministers, presidents, leaders of the country. And this is the body that's conducting this investigation. And what it has uncovered is a kind of kickback scheme in the Ukrainian energy industry. So there were people who were demanding a percentage off government contracts. And it's a bad story. And there are people close to Zelenskyy who have been connected to it. As you say, his number two, Andrei Yermak, has resigned. I mean, I have to tell you, Yermak is not popular in Ukraine at all. I mean, he's extremely unpopular and his resignation was welcomed by a lot of Ukrainians. So, you know, there are two ways to look at that story. But he did resign after an investigation of his apartment or of his files. He hasn't been charged with anything yet, so we'll see. Zelensky is continuing to lead the country and I think is, as I understand it, is being praised for allowing the investigation to continue. Even at this particular moment, what struck me is I actually called, called one of the detectives, the chief detective who's running this operation. Somebody suggested I speak to him so that I could understand it better. It was really while I was talking to him, I didn't intend to write anything necessarily or about him, but while I was speaking to him, I was very struck by his life story. He's from Luhansk, which is a city in eastern Ukraine, was one of the parts of Ukraine that was conquered in 2014. He came then to Kiev. He'd been a police detective, you know, after that. It was, it was after that, you know, that revolution that he joined the, the National Anti Corruption Bureau. This is the naboo. This is the, this is the organization that's doing, running the investigation. And he describes him, the way he describes himself reminds me a lot of how the Ukrainian civic activists I know talk about themselves. It's about how a lot of Ukrainian soldiers describe themselves as, you know, we're conducting these corruption investigations took strengthen our country, not to weaken it, because we think corruption weakens Ukraine. And he even said to me, corruption equals Russia. This is a Russian way of doing things and we don't want it in our country. And we will be able to fight better and we will function better if we're not corrupt. And this is the result of a decade of activism, the fact that people like that are in the government and are beginning to run the country. And by contrast, look at who Ukraine is negotiating with. So Putin is somebody whose career we know began with him stealing assets from the city of St. Petersburg, sending them abroad, laundering them, bringing them back into the country, and then using them to buy property. We know he presides over our kind of mafia state in. In which the owners of the largest companies are the rulers of the country. And in which there is no, you know, there's no difference at all between the ruler and the largest property owners. And in which there's no rule of law of any kind. Instead, there's rule by law and the courts do what the President says they're supposed to do. The one attempt to create an activist movement in Russia like the one that won in 2014 in Ukraine. This was led by Alexei Navalny, the late dissident. He did run very popular and very kind of attention grabbing anti corruption campaign. He created these documentaries. He did big investigations into Putin's corruption and the corruption of people around him. One in particular into a palace that Putin owns or has owned through other people for him on the Black Sea. It was kind of grotesque palace with hockey rinks and hookah bars and its own vineyards and so on. He published that.
- [24:12]
B
He was like the big East Wing Ballroom. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
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C
It's like east wing Ballroom times 3,000, right?
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A
Yeah.
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C
And he was arrested and he eventually died in prison and his movement was destroyed and everybody involved with it was repressed or else they left the country. There are no investigations of Ukraine in any kind. The idea that the state would investigate Putin is ridiculous. But also there's no journalists, there are no ethics monitors inside the government. There's nothing. So this is one of the most corrupt states in the world. On the other side you have Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who are. They may not be running a kickback scheme, but they are not acting in the interests of the United States of America or in our global interests or in the interests of our allies. They're acting in the interests of their milieu, maybe of themselves personally, as I said, we don't know that, but certainly of the companies in their milieu. This is a different kind of corruption. It's a kind of grand scale corruption of a kind we haven't had in the United States, at least in modern times. And it does resemble Putin's Russia. In Putin's Russia, political deals are business deals and vice versa. And that was not the case, certainly, as I said, in the US in recent times. So we have on the one hand a Ukrainian state investigating itself, trying to find and put an end to a kickback scheme of a kind that I suspect exists in many corners of the United States as well. And on the other side, the most corrupt country on the planet and a country that's sliding rapidly in that direction in the direction of kleptocracy.
- [25:56]
A
Yeah. I just want to point out your.
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B
Most recent article in the Atlantic from.
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A
Just a couple days ago details that conversation. And for everyone out there, it's, you know, this continual kind of coverage by Anne in the Atlantic. It's not just the grand vision of it, but the really particulars that I think for me it's been the most.
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B
Valuable way to sort of get up to speed.
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A
But you know, you made the point of it whether it's in America's interest, and I think this is one of the grander points I take from your continuing coverage is what that means seems to be up for grabs. I wanted to just note the recent publication of the latest U.S. national Security Strategy. And there's lines in it that feel, you know, more at home in a far right kind of regime than our document expressly refuses to to adopt a moral preference for democracy or human rights.
- [26:52]
B
And it says we seek good relations.
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A
And peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world. It really seems to define national interest according to how much money the US can make from other countries. So it lacks binding force, but it's a huge departure from previous statements. I wonder how worrisome you think it is or what you think about it.
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C
Yeah, I haven't written about it yet. I'm going to, but I wanted some time to think about it and to hear how people were reacting to it, especially in Europe, because the document very explicitly attacks Europe. One never knows with these things whether they're just some ideological drivel that doesn't really matter. And actually, if you think about national security statements in the past, I mean, we didn't worry a lot about them and some of them had a relationship to reality, and some of them didn't. And this one, Was it even seen by Donald Trump before it appeared? I doubt comes from a particular ideological faction of the MAGA movement, which cares about this kind of stuff. And it's very identifiably connected to Michael Anton, who's used some of this language before. It also talks about Western civilization in a very strange way. It talks about Western civilization as if that meant white people, essentially white Christians with the overtone is racial, you know, as if there was a racial element to Western civilization. Actually, Western civilization, it's a big word and it can mean a lot of things, but certainly the way it's been defined by the United States over the last hundred years has been quite different. Western civilization was about human rights, meaning universal rights. And the origin of the idea of universal rights is in Catholicism mostly. You know, the idea that every human being is recognized by God and has a purpose on earth is a very Christian idea. And so that idea comes from. Also comes from the deep roots of Western civilization. Democracy comes from the deep roots of Western civilization. I mean, if you think Greece and Rome, those are our antecedents, the idea of democracy comes from Athens and from the Roman Republic. These are very, very old ideas, I mean, as old as European civilization and therefore Western civilization. So it's a peculiar way of even defining that phrase. I mean, even if we want to talk about Western civilization, which we don't normally do in national security strategies, it's a weird thing to do. It's also, I mean, there's an element of it that's suicidal. You know, the United States, when you look at the United States with its allies, with its European allies, with its Asian allies, you know, with Japan, with Korea, with Germany, with the European Union, with the uk, when you look at the US with its allies, it's clearly the strongest power in the world, economically and militarily. In every other way. When you take away the US's alliances, and when you take away the US's intense and deep trading relations and military relations with all over the world, then the US looks a lot weaker, especially by comparison to China. And also when you take away that assumption of U.S. reliability, that the U.S. is a predictable and reliable country where you're safe to invest and you're safe to do deals with, then you've done terrible economic damage to the United States, and you may do political damage as well. I mean, there are quite a few countries in Asia and maybe Europe as well, that when they begin to calculate, they look at a document like this, and they think about their relations with the US and with China. Many of them will think, well, actually, maybe we better hedge the US Is not going to defend us against China. If you're an Asian country, maybe we better have a different kind of relationship with China. And you may get some of that elsewhere. As I said, once the US Is not an automatic. It's not even about military defense or it's more about reliability, sharing, values, being on our side. Once the US Isn't that anymore, then I think you'll see a lot of alliances. Nobody's going to say it out loud, at least not very many people will, but they will kind of rot from the inside. And you'll begin to see shifts away from the United States and you'll begin to see alliances against the United States. And so I'm worried about what this could do to the United States in the longer term, medium and longer term. And I think it's incredibly dangerous.
- [31:25]
B
I think it's a really important point. I had a talk not long ago with Michael McFaul about his new book, Autocracies vs. Democracies. And he basically pauses. This is already happening. And I would just add to your litany of things that we're abandoning our traditional stance on.
- [31:41]
D
You use the word values, but, you.
- [31:44]
B
Know, is an amoral United States that doesn't stand for the enforcement of certain norms of democratic rule, is it the United States in the same way to the rest of the world? We're almost out of, out of time. Thank you so much for being here. I want to just ask you not to answer the $64,000 question, but to tell us where you think we kind of are on it. You've long warned, and I'll quote your last book, given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will. And that was the, you know, the real fear the United States was facing that moment with, with Trump's reelection. I'm just wondering if, if you think we've, you know, dodged the worst case.
- [32:32]
A
Scenario, that would still leave quite a.
- [32:34]
B
Lot of, you know, Herculean cleanup. But do you still see that as a concrete risk in the cards in Trump's second term?
- [32:44]
C
Oh, it's absolutely a risk. Not everyone in the Republican Party, but they're clearly a part of his coalition, maybe even a pretty big part, do want to change the rules so that they can't lose. And that means a lot of different things. That means seeking to capture the media as much as possible. It means Seeking to use state government institutions against private companies or against individuals. We saw this. The FCC used against a television network to block a comedian. I mean, this kind of stuff, but also the use, the weaponization of the Justice Department, of the FBI, against the president's enemies, maybe against Democratic donors. All these things are intended to kind of reshape the playing field. I mean, the real test will be in the midterms and whether. I mean, they will try to reshape the midterms. They're doing it already with this push to get states to redistrict in a.
- [33:49]
B
Way that would be many different ways.
- [33:50]
C
I think in many different ways favorable to Republicans. They're doing it. They've been. They've been demanding that states, some states, hand over their voter rolls. They're looking for ways to keep people off voter rolls. So there's all kinds of prospect, you know, games being played. I mean, there's the possibility that several governors have suggested, Governor Pritzker suggested, I think, Governor Newsom as well, that maybe there will be armed troops on the street during the election in a way that's designed to prevent. Prevent or frighten people away from voting. So there's all, as I said, on many different levels, they're playing this game. And whether they concede, I don't know. I mean, they might lose, and they might even lose disastrously. But are they trying to reshape our political system so that they won't ever be able to lose again? Yes, they are. I mean, I don't think there's any doubt about that. And so the risk remains very high and very real. And I talk about it not to scare people, but just to have people be aware, understand what's going on. Because this is the purpose. This is the purpose of many of their actions, is to change the system so that they don't lose ever, and so that they can stay in power indefinitely. And this is a way of doing politics that I've seen in other places. I lived through it. A Polish ruling party that tried to do the same thing. I lived part of the time in Poland. I saw what happened there. So I know this can be done. And I. What they're doing has lots of precedence from other times and other places.
- [35:20]
D
You know, I think that's really right.
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B
Including places where elections remain.
- [35:23]
D
But the game has been so rigged.
- [35:26]
A
Ann Apple.
- [35:26]
D
I'm so valuable to talk to everybody.
- [35:28]
B
The Atlantic articles that she puts out once a week or so, and the indispensable substack open letters couldn't recommend them. More highly. Hope to speak with you again soon.
- [35:39]
C
Thank you.
- [35:41]
D
We are live. Hello everybody. Welcome to another sudstack Live on Talking Feds. We have all of us under both Trump terms groped to understand the implications of the broad span of authoritarian power that Trump has claimed and in particular the concrete prospects that I think we can call without hyperbole that the end of the democratic experiment might be before us. Life goes on as it's wont to do. And Justice Barrett tells us the Constitution is alive and well. And yet so many others tell us we are really looking at going down quickly a sort of cliff of autocracy. So for that reason, I gotta say I start with I've been a derelict substack host, which I can only defend by saying I've my recent plunge into this whole ecosystem. But look, my dereliction is precisely failing yet to sit down one on one and substack live with the great and obvious expert on these topics, Ruth Ben Ghiat, professor of history and Italian Studies at nyu. She writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, democracy, protection. She's the recipient of Guggenheim many other fellowships, appears all over the place and for the first time on Talking Fed's Substack Live. Ruth, so good to see you. Thanks for being here.
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E
Sure. I will add because we're on substack that I have a substack called lucid.
- [37:21]
D
My bad, lucid.
- [37:22]
E
And indeed it is because it's all those topics that you mentioned and I always, it's great to be here because what I'm not is a lawyer or prosecutor. And so it's always great to bring our complimentary fields of knowledge together.
- [37:43]
D
There you go. Well, you know where to find me. And look, I actually wanted to zero in your expertise. You've made a great name for the all kinds of historical expositions from, you know, Mussolini and beyond. But yours, Lucid, which everyone really should check out, is very much focused on the day to day current stuff. What Trump is doing with ice, what he's doing with some of the maneuvers in the cities and the like to really it's much more than historical lucid in particular about what's going on. So I had in mind looking at a few of the articles you written recently.
- [38:25]
A
This is very well known also for.
- [38:27]
D
Her, I think it's 2021 study on strong men from Mussolini on Forward gives her great background. But I'm here to say it's really about the present that I wanted to talk. Okay, look, you've said this, you've had a very interesting take on the rise and empowerment of ICE in these different. What we taken as immigration operations. But you've said that dictators commonly build parallel security forces. Talk about Iran or Saddam to counterbalance. Exactly. The regular army and protect the regime from being overthrown. Positing some role that might happen where a military steps in. And the insurance about that is the sort of semi private kind of gang of goons that answer directly to the maximum leader here being Trump. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how it is that viewing through the prism of history, you see the empowerment and rise of ICE.
- [39:37]
A
As being something that potentially folds in to a whole kind of Trump authoritarian takeover.
- [39:47]
E
Sure. So, first, regardless of how President Trump uses ice, the fact they've been so empowered that their budget will be increased to be more. This is incredible. More than the full militaries of many sovereign nations, Brazil included. Brazil is a very large nation and.
- [40:10]
A
The largest in the whole Federal government now.
- [40:12]
D
15 billion or whatever. Yeah.
- [40:14]
E
Yes. So every regime has its pet projects, its places, ideologies and projects where fanatics can gather. And, of course, this is immigration. And immigration allows. It's an excuse. And it was set up during Trump's presidential campaign. There's no secrets here. He had people holding signs for mass deportation. And so immigration is an excuse to build an infrastructure of repression, to build those giant prisons, to build those camps, whatever we're going to call them, penal colonies. They have different names and different regimes and places, but without immigration on a vast scale. Remember, Trump gave an interview to Time where he said 15 to 20 million people. So that's part of it. Now, it's not just the camps that you need and the vehicles. You need people to do this. And thus ICE comes in. Right. And it's very interesting to me, though, that from the beginning, ICE has been allowed to distinguish itself from past Department of Homeland Security procedures by customizing their attire, by being part state security forces in their attire and part just street thugs. They can wear their own T shirts, their tattoos are showing, and of course, they're masked.
- [41:46]
D
Masked, yeah.
- [41:47]
E
And that's very important. And so they become more like a paramilitary or a secret police in their function. And so they have, from the start, had an authoritarian kind of mandate. So there's that.
- [42:04]
B
And I'll just add quickly to it.
- [42:05]
D
I know.
- [42:06]
A
I don't want to interrupt you. I know.
- [42:07]
D
You go on another point. But within the realm of law enforcement, I'll do my lawyer thing here. There are a lot of people who understand how derelict and abnormal everything he's Doing is. But these are the guys specifically who have been armed, put together, given the power to roam the streets and be tough guys. The parallels to force, former strong armed forces of previous dictators, is pretty darn striking.
- [42:38]
E
Yes. We want to look at their behavior and how they're protected. So they recruit lawless people, and then they protect them. And a culture of lawlessness, which is different than in other areas of state security forces, it allows them to be the ones who are gonna be doing the worst abuses. So that's very important. And, of course, the whole mask thing is key. They get anonymity. They also. It's very terrifying to people to see masked men. And many of the people. It's terrifying for everyone. But many of the people who are being targeted come from places or just maybe they're not being targeted. But America is full of people who escaped regimes all over the world, and they know exactly what masked people with, you know, who look like that do. Right? So sometimes in lucid, I have somebody else. I have a guest, a guest author. And so I asked a fellow expert in autocracy who's in Germany, Marcel Doursis. He wrote this piece where he came up with this idea that ICE could be used by the autocrat, in this case Trump, to protect himself, that ICE was being groomed to be a force that was not only different, for all the reasons I've already said, procedurally, operationally, but they would be loyal to Trump. And so in the event the military or somebody else wanted to depose Trump, ICE could be used to protect him, because Trump doesn't totally trust the military. So from the time of Mussolini, and Mussolini founded his own militia. He called it the Militia, and they were loyal only to him. They were under his control. They lasted over 20 years. So this fellow expert on autocracy was looking at ICE like that, and it's super interesting. And that's. This loyalty only to Trump is what makes this doubly dangerous.
- [44:54]
A
And can I follow up, please? Because you write, I think it's in your September 5 subsect, that it could.
- [45:01]
D
Be the difference, a force like this.
- [45:03]
A
Of, you know, sort of, sort of Trump goons between the military stepping in and the military not stepping in. I wanted to follow up on that, but I also wanted to. Wanted to press you because I've understood from some of your colleagues that the model we have in mind of boots on the ground and mass military folks, you know, banging heads and stuff, is, in fact, kind of obsolete, and that the more. The more, well, obsolete, the more recent Regimes that have degenerated from democracies like Hungary, et cetera, have followed a kind.
- [45:42]
D
Of pseudo legal model.
- [45:44]
A
And I can talk about that or speak to that, but you're, but you focus. Do I have it right? You know, very much on the concrete. And we certainly saw it in Trump 1.0. Right. Mark Milley basically, let it be known the military won't let this happen. But the positing of an, of an analog to, you know, Mussolini's, the militia, et cetera, kind of suggests that you foresee the concrete risk his final move being to paralyze the military, or that would be what you're looking for. Is that fair, Ruth, in terms of your own thinking?
- [46:25]
E
No, no, I'm not really thinking that he's trying to paralyze the military. And this was an essay by my colleague who was just saying that autocrats do this thing called coup proofing. Because when, now even if they nowadays don't come in as much by coup, they come in by elections. But the thing that's always bothering them and keeping them up at night is that somebody would try and get rid of them. And so often they have these, it could be their Revolutionary Guards for Saddam Hussein. They have these bodies that are kind of their insurance policy. And that's what my got it against.
- [47:03]
D
Literally somebody taking them out, I mean for the greater good or whatever the briefcase under Hitler's table.
- [47:09]
E
So sort of, yeah, they, they, they worry, they worry about these things. But I think today, sure, we have something called electoral autocracy and, and, or called autocratic legalism where you don't, it's less common to have one party states with no elections. You keep a semblance of democracy, of legal, that's the legalism and autocratic legalism. You keep elections going, you have a multi party system, the veneer of multiparty system. And then you do various tricks. And yes, Orban, but also Erdogan in Turkey have been very skilled at kind of gaming the system so that the elections you have come out the way you want to. A very good example because we don't think about Turkey often enough that Erdogan jailed the only man who could for sure beat him in the next presidential election. If that is what gaming the system looks like in Turkey. You just like you take the rival out by putting him in jail. And of course Viktor Orban has his own skills at doing this and that's why the GOP was so interested in him and so adulatory of him. But you still need the boots on the ground. And that will never go away. And I'll remind everybody that we had January 6th, and what was so innovative about January 6th that Bolsonaro in Brazil copied it and now he's been held accountable is that Trump couldn't get the military to play his game. And so he had what I call a bespoke army of thugs. And they did his work. He didn't pull it off, but they did his work. And then Bolsonaro actually had a copycat of this. And Bolsonaro was president of a place that had a military coup and a 20 year long military dictatorship. And so the military wouldn't follow him either. So he had a bespoke army of thugs. So that's something that is kind of new in the 21st century. You don't have to depend only on the military. You have these other forces who also, as in the Philippines and in El Salvador, they cooperate with gangs. So there's a murky line between state and non state official thugs and unofficial thugs. Yeah, so that's really good point today. Yeah.
- [49:49]
D
And I think there's something else going.
- [49:50]
A
On that's characteristic to me of Trump.
- [49:53]
D
2.0 this Constitution Day.
- [49:56]
A
By the way.
- [49:56]
D
Happy Constitution Day, everyone. But it's not the biggest thing ever.
- [50:00]
A
But this morning, Ben or Jerry either.
- [50:03]
D
Whatever, said I'm outta here because my.
- [50:06]
A
Corporate parent won't let me say anything.
- [50:11]
D
It's just striking how successful he's been.
- [50:13]
A
This, I think is largely Project 2025, driven at cowing or suppressing dissent in civil society. Not even with direct kind of government. So, you know, people are afraid. People are afraid. The way you read people, having been afraid in sort of former autocratic societies.
- [50:37]
D
All right, you and I often will.
- [50:39]
A
Be part of a. We'll talk, you know, with some regularity. A lot of shit's going on for sure. But when you think of historical precedents and being genuinely afraid.
- [50:52]
D
We are on a cliff here.
- [50:55]
A
What sorts of. So I guess one aspect, Ruth, that definitely alarms you is the growth and almost constitution, as in constituting of ice. What else are they? You know, they're messing around with all kinds of stuff. They just announced a program based on the assassination to go after people on the left. Cash Patel yesterday called Adam Schiff, who would normally be a loyal opposition, the biggest joke for a senator ever. What stuff do you. So everything's obviously the corrosiveness, the vulgarity guarantee the absence of public spirit are paramount. But what sorts of things happen week by week that you say, oh man, this is bad news, and that's my next lucid commentary.
- [51:54]
E
I mean, there's domestic and there's geopolitical. There's a lot going on. And I want to say to people that if you feel overwhelmed, it's also because we're in, what, the ninth month of this. And there is no parallel, historical parallel. You mean even. No, even people there today. If we look at the first nine months of Putin, of Putin, of Erdogan, of any sitting autocrat, and some of these people have now been there for like 15, 20. Erdogan and Putin have been there for over 20 years.
- [52:31]
D
Right.
- [52:33]
E
But it doesn't resemble the speed and severity of what is going on in the United States. So we have more of a situation, our situation resembles less somebody the aftermath of somebody who came in by an election and more the aftermath of somebody who came in by a couple. That's how fast it's been. And it's been like an across the board holistic design to wreck the country so that they can consolidate power, but also allow their allies of foreign autocrats to prosper. And the reason they've been able to do this is they use their time out of power very, very well. They had Project 2025 as a shadow government. And you know, Viktor Orban, it was such a shadow government that Viktor Orban, when he, when he came to the states twice, he didn't see Joe Biden, a head of state usually goes to see another head of state. He was snubbing democracy. Instead, he went to Mar a Lago and he went to the Heritage foundation, which was the head of Project 2025. So they've been able to do this very fast because they were very well prepared. So that is very disturbing, the speed of everything. And of course, sometimes I feel like when I look at the news, the things that Stephen Miller, others are saying, I feel like I'm reading speeches from 2013 or 2014 in Russia, because the whole playbook, for example, Stephen Miller said the other day that the Democratic Party is a domestic terror organization. It's an extremist organization.
- [54:26]
D
Orban made the same comment about our domestic politics vis a vis the assassination. Right.
- [54:32]
B
Amazing.
- [54:33]
E
Who then? That's the place. So then now in the case, we have only a bipartisan system. So it would be very difficult in practice for them to just ban the entire Democratic Party. There's only two. It's huge. It's not like in other countries with multi party small parties that can be banned easily. But this is the playbook they're using is to declare people and things as terrorists. And also the whole, the other thing is the whole idea of the left. We don't have a huge left in this country like in other countries. Adam Schiff is not really anybody's idea of the left, but that's polarization. Everyone has to be called the radical left, even if they're centrists, even if they're moderates. And that way they can act against them. So the rhetoric that they're using is extremely alarming, as is the, as you mentioned, everybody running to salute the leader and put aside their principles. And I've written about this in Lucid as moral collapse. Moral collapse is what I'm calling it. That's, that's what I'm afraid of too.
- [55:50]
D
And can I follow up here? Because lucid I, I think has been singular maybe and really focusing on the kind of international sets of relationships. So the way that put in her she that it really would be in Trump's, I mean, he seems to us in so many ways to be erratic, not really know what he's doing and truth be told, probably Never read Project 2025. On the other hand, you suggest there's a method to the madness of the incredible kind of inconstancy and kind of footsieing up to certain leaders that we thought of as the axis of evil and not to others and the switches. Can you explain your thoughts about how his inconstancy and then kind of friendliness with who we think of as the world's biggest tyrants feeds into this project of his that you fear?
- [56:52]
E
So I think that in June 2024, when he was campaigning, Trump said something very revealing. He said if you're a smart president, North Korea. And he was referring to Russia, China and North Korea. What I'm about to say, he said if you're a smart president, they don't have to be enemies. You'll make them do great. And so he has, and this is part of the wrenching changes that have shocked Europeans. They shouldn't be shocked, but they were that really the United States is now an ally and an ally of autocrats and is doing everything possible to wreck democracies to defend around the world. Yes, that's why they were trying Trump administration was trying to punish Brazil's government for holding Bolsonaro accountable. Obvious links, very long standing links with Putin, but also acting in ways that allow China to prosper. And so this is just a fact that, and I think that what we're going to see is because of this kind of fact, whether it's tacit or explicit with these autocrats. The US has been receding its footprint as a global power. It will become perhaps more of a regional power, interfering more in Latin America, leaving Asia to Xi, leaving Europe.
- [58:31]
A
That's very good news for China, right? If that were to happen.
- [58:35]
E
Yeah. So it's a sea change, and it's predicated on making the US an authoritarian state.
- [58:46]
D
Let that sink in everyone for about two seconds.
- [58:50]
A
Okay, look, we're not here. I'm not here to sugarcoat things. I'm here mainly to try to pull point out. And in my own legal.
- [58:56]
D
I hope you'll invite me to Lucid.
- [58:58]
A
And I'll give you my legal perspectives on some of this and I'll answer the questions. But look, you must get asked every day as much as I do, what is to be done, what can be done, et cetera. So I just, without being Panglossy and really, I just want your. Do you have a sense a.
- [59:19]
D
You know, just looking at it as.
- [59:21]
A
If we ever are in the position where we're cleaning out the stables, can only imagine what we need to do to help fix the damage and help to prevent it from happening again. What's your answer to the common question from the, you know, what is to be done?
- [59:37]
E
What do we do? Yeah, I'm actually optimistic because I wrote in February an essay saying that a reckoning is going to come because the scale of devastation as people get sick, as their Social Security payments stop, as their businesses go under, people who maybe didn't vote or even voted for Trump and regret it, we're already seeing that among people whose kids and husbands are now being taken away by ice. And there's going to be an opening of the eyes collectively at what this regime means. And I think we're already seeing it's very important that resistance be nonviolent. But the number, it's going to be decentralized, I think, in America, but the numbers are picking up. So there's a kind of grassroots moral outrage that is growing, and that's really good. I think it's really important to get people to vote, to help register people to vote. I'm always haunted by tens of millions of people who don't vote. We can't afford that. We can't afford that anymore. And I think now people are going to see the stakes. And it's like every day we're getting a lesson in how government should operate and things that perhaps we took for granted that government was not trying to make us sick, was not trying to. To deport us to foreign loggers, doing.
- [61:12]
A
Lots of divide us, disparage us, exploit us for its own power.
- [61:16]
E
Yeah, yeah. And obviously we had lots of bad things, structural racism, racialized policing going on. But I'm hoping that all of the abuses that we're living through, all of the corruption we haven't even talked about, the corruption will open people's lives.
- [61:35]
A
And I can talk about that.
- [61:36]
D
Yeah.
- [61:37]
E
Yeah. To think about how we can come together and become involved in ways we would perhaps not before some of us, and make something better out of this.
- [61:53]
A
Ruth Ben Guillet, really a pleasure to be with you. Let's do it again for everyone else. Talk to you later. And lucid again is Ruth's very useful substack. Bye bye.
- [62:06]
E
Thank you, Harry.
- [62:09]
B
Thank you for tuning in to One on One, a weekly conversation series from Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts. And please take a moment to rate and review the show. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube, where we are posting full episodes and daily updates on top legal stories. Check us out on substack harry litman.substack.com where we're posting two or three bulletins a week breaking down the various threats to constitutional norms and the rule of law. And Talking Fez has joined forces with the Contrarian. I'm a founding contributor to this new media venture committed to reviving the diversity of opinion that feels increasingly rare in today's news landscape, where legacy media seems to be tacking toward Trump for business reasons rather than editorial ones. Rest assured, we're still the same scrappy independent podcast you've come to know and trust just now, linked up with an ambitious and vital project designed for this pivotal moment in our nation's legal and political discourse. Find out more@Contrarian.com thanks for tuning in, and don't worry, as long as you need answers, the Feds Will Keep Talking Talking Feds is produced by Luke Cregan and Katie Upshaw, associate producer Becca Haveian sound Engineering by Matt McArdle, Rosie Dawn Griffin, David Lieberman, Hamsa Mahadranathan, Emma Maynard and Hallie Necker. Here are our contributing writers, production assistants by Morgan Chisholm and Akshaysh Turbailu. Our editorial interns are Bridget Ryan and Troy Neville. Our music, as ever, is by the amazing Philip Glass. Talking Feds is a production of Deledo llc. I'm Harry Littman. Talk to you later.
- [64:20]
D
Sam.