Anne Applebaum: Trump's Firehose of Lies

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Bulwark Podcast

Episode: Anne Applebaum: Trump’s Firehose of Lies
Date: June 11, 2026
Host: Tim Miller
Guest: Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic; author of Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc.)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the international fallout of the Trump administration’s “firehose of lies,” with Anne Applebaum analyzing the disorienting, contradictory foreign policy and propaganda strategies in Iran, Ukraine, and elsewhere. The conversation highlights the administration’s incessant distractions, ambiguous war aims, and the impact on both global events and domestic engagement. Applebaum provides insight into the realities on the ground, especially in Ukraine, and explores the deeper implications of a post-truth political environment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Trump Administration’s Approach to Iran

• Chaos & Contradiction

  • Trump claims of fresh strikes on Iran and the possibility of seizing Carg Island (“we are looking in the not too distant future into taking Carg island” [01:16]).
  • Frequent changes in narrative: threats of invasion one day, denials the next.
  • Applebaum observes, “It’s not just the Boy Cried Wolf. We're really beyond that now. I mean, he's almost doing the Russian style firehose of falsehoods…” ([02:39]).

• The Firehose of Falsehoods

  • Technique floods the public with contradictory messaging, resulting in confusion and disengagement.
  • “It's very hard to know what's true and what's not true. And so you kind of throw up your hands and say, I just don’t know…” (Applebaum, [02:39]).

• Disregard for Real Motivations or Human Consequences

  • Trump repeatedly returns to the notion of “taking their oil,” signaling a self-serving war aim (Applebaum, [04:49]).
  • Host Tim Miller: “What is the possible justification, if you took him at his word, for spending $250 million to bomb Iran last night? We have no purpose.” ([06:09])

2. Propaganda as Policy

• Deliberate Confusion & Emotional Numbing

  • Applebaum: “You just flood people with massive contradictory stories, and sooner or later, they won’t pay any attention…” ([06:35])
  • Discussions about Aaron Blake’s count of 38 times Trump has claimed an Iran deal is imminent illustrate the repetition and confusion ([07:59]).

• Example of Flippant Rhetoric

  • The Secretary of War’s press conference features nonsensical soundbites (“tap, tap, tap bombs dropping on key facilities…”, [08:24]), underlining the unseriousness of administration communication.

3. Neglect of Actual Human Impact

• Lack of Concern for Iranian Citizens

  • Reports of US bombing civilian infrastructure, e.g., reservoirs and water treatment facilities, leading to water cutoffs for 20,000 people ([10:00]).
  • Applebaum notes the disconnect between official rhetoric and the effects on ordinary Iranians: “...the explanation of the war shifts constantly and it's always being shaped for consumption. It's Trump saying something grandiose... It's very hard to know how they relate to reality on the ground” ([09:08]).

• Contrast with Iraq War Rhetoric

  • Unlike Bush-era justifications, current policy ignores Iranian civilians, their needs, or desires for democracy (Applebaum, [11:32]).

4. The Post-Truth Information Landscape

• Emphasis on Social Media & Engagement

  • Applebaum: "They care about, you know, the visuals, the engagement, what the podcasters will say...that's the stuff they read, that's the stuff they react to" ([15:34]).
  • Discussion about California political campaigns being more focused on online reality (X/Twitter/TikTok) than actual voter realities ([18:03]).
  • Elon Musk’s amplification of misinformation in the UK as a case study of how isolated events become national narratives ([18:48]).

• Real-World Consequences of Online Distortion

  • One-off incidents in the UK (e.g., violence in Belfast) are twisted into anti-immigrant narratives online, fueling riots and hate ([20:00]).
  • “Once you go down to the story, it doesn’t have anything to do with the police being anti-white, which is the language that Elon Musk and his pals on X are using. ...But it isn’t a political story in the way that it's being made to be.” (Applebaum, [20:47])

5. Ukraine: State of the War and Information

• Technological Shifts and Stalemate

  • Applebaum provides an update from Ukraine, revealing a “20 or 25 mile wide zone, which is totally transparent” with constant Russian casualties: “As many as a thousand people a day that’s killed and wounded” ([25:36]).
  • Increasing Ukrainian success with drones, automation, and long-range attacks into Russia ([26:51]).

• Decentralized Innovation

  • The strength of Ukraine’s decentralized, experimental approach to technological warfare—“hundreds of small companies” working with the military ([30:15]).
  • “One of the few good examples at the moment of how a more open society can...stand up to a much larger closed society.” (Applebaum, [31:51])

• Impact on Russia’s Regime & Propaganda

  • Internal Russian anxieties and cracks visible as real war results diverge from official victory proclamations ([28:27]).
  • Speculation on Putin’s next moves—potential provocations or a forced ceasefire ([29:35]).

6. Venezuela and Rule of Law

• Leopoldo Lopez’s Op Ed

  • Ongoing lack of rule of law; political prisoners and uncertainty for international investors.
  • “Why wouldn't the government expropriate your oil company's investment should you want to make it?” (Applebaum, [35:52])
  • General dangers for journalists and ongoing corruption: “Until there is a real change...you're not going to have a lot of change in Venezuela.” ([37:20])

• CEOs Speaking Truth to Power

  • Notable moment: Tim Miller highlights the rarity of corporate leaders like ExxonMobil’s CEO bluntly disputing Trump administration’s narrative ([38:22]).

7. U.S. Immigration and Hypocrisy

• Performative Cruelty
  • US deports at-risk Iranian women to dangerous third countries while simultaneously denouncing Iran’s regime ([40:05]).
  • FIFA’s muted response to a Somali referee’s exclusion from the World Cup signals complicity with administration’s cruelty for political points ([41:51]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Trump’s Strategy:
  • Anne Applebaum: “It’s not just the Boy Cried Wolf. We're really beyond that now. He's almost doing the Russian style firehose of falsehoods…” ([02:39])
• On Propaganda and Public Response:
  • Applebaum: “It's an actual propaganda technique. You just flood people with massive contradictory stories, and sooner or later, they won't pay any attention to anything at all.” ([06:35])
• On the US War Rationale:
  • Tim Miller: “He doesn't even know what the war is for anymore. Nobody does.” ([06:09])
• On State of Ukraine:
  • Applebaum: “When you talk about a stalemate, the stalemate doesn't mean that nothing is happening... you have this very, very high Russian casualty rate now. Sometimes as many as a thousand people a day…” ([25:36])
• On Social Media as Reality:
  • Applebaum: “...they are entirely focused on the online world... That is more real to them than reality.” ([15:34])
• On FIFA and Immigration Policy:
  • Applebaum: “The only explanation is it's a display of cruelty. It appeals to Americans who also want to demonstrate their strength and cruelty and desire to exclude others.” ([41:51])
• On Venezuela:
  • Applebaum: “Why wouldn’t the government expropriate your oil company's investment should you want to make it?” ([35:52])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:16] — Trump’s claims about new strikes in Iran and threats to seize Carg Island
• [02:39] — Applebaum introduces the “firehose of falsehoods” propaganda model
• [06:09] — Discussion of the lack of clear rationale for war in Iran
• [08:24] — Satirical discussion of administration war rhetoric (“tap, tap, tap bombs…”)
• [10:00] — Reporting on US attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure
• [11:32] — Comparison with Bush admin’s focus on Iraqi civilians vs. Trump’s disregard
• [15:34] — Applebaum on propaganda focus: “more real to them than reality”
• [18:03] — Social media’s dominance in shaping political reality
• [20:00] — UK violence, Elon Musk, and distortion of real events online
• [25:36] — Ukrainian technological war advances and casualty rates
• [30:15] — Ukraine’s decentralized innovation as a case for democracy
• [31:51] — Open vs. closed societies: “how a more open society can…stand up”
• [35:52] — Venezuela op-ed: rule of law, dangers, and investment risk
• [40:05] — US deports Iranian asylum seekers; FIFA and immigration hypocrisy
• [41:51] — Applebaum on performative cruelty in immigration and sports
• [43:29] — Palate cleanser: discussion of Carrie Lake’s failed career and improbable appointment
• [47:38] — Book recommendations: The Time of Cherry (Montserrat Roig) and My Tender Matador

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Closing: Book Club & Reflections

• Anne Applebaum closes with a novel recommendation:
  • The Time of Cherry by Montserrat Roig — A novella about the end of Franco-era Spain, showing how big political events shape ordinary lives ([47:38]).
• Tim Miller recommends My Tender Matador — a gay coming-of-age love story set in Pinochet’s Chile.

Final Reflection:
The episode highlights the numbing, corrosive effects of the Trump administration’s propaganda tactics, drawing clear lines from America’s internal struggles with truth to global implications in conflict zones and allied democracies. Applebaum’s analysis pairs an urgent defense of liberal truth-telling with real-world stories, and the closing book club offers a small reprieve and a way forward for thoughtful political engagement.

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For More:
Listen to the episode or follow Anne Applebaum’s writing in The Atlantic for continuing coverage on democracy, information warfare, and authoritarian threats.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[B]

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Congrats to all the Knicks fans that are listening and all my friends, the long suffering Knicks fans. You know, Justin and Jackson and Ben and the others. I hope that none of you like me Turn the game off when the Knicks were losing by 29 and turned on Pod Save the World to prep for today's podcast, I would say that the Pod Save the World episode was far less invigorating than the basketball game that I missed, but the highlights looked exciting. Kudos to the Knicks fans and this podcast is going to be invigorating. I'm excited to welcome back one of our friends, staff writer at the Atlantic. Her most recent books include Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy Inc. It's Ann Applebaum. Hey Anne, how are you doing?

[A]

Fine. How are you?

[B]

Thunderstorm in Poland, you were telling me in the green room. I'm hoping that does not augur poorly for the podcast, but we'll see how it goes.

[A]

I can hear it right now and it would be amazing if you couldn't hear it because it's very loud. But it won't last that long, I hope.

[B]

Okay, well, our podcasts are kind of a rainstorm usually for listeners anyway, so it's appropriate. I want to start with Iran. We're just going to kind of hop around the world as usual this morning. Well, I guess last night we should say the US Carried out a fresh round of strikes on Iran with Trump claiming it was an effort to force the regime into a deal. He was on Fox and Friends this morning where he said we dropped $250 million of bombs on Iran. Who knows what is true and what is false coming out of the administration, but it's pretty interesting since nobody in Congress has appropriated anything. Susan Collins is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. You think she might care about the quarter billion we spent in Iran last night? And then this morning Trump bleats that we are looking in the not too distant future into taking Carg island. So he's back to discussing a Ground trip, invasion of Iran. So I'm wondering what you make of the state of play this morning in Iran.

[A]

Almost every day something happens. Trump makes a statement, there's another use of weaponry, there's another piece of information, and yet nothing happens. You know, he keeps changing the narrative. He keeps trying one version of events after the other. He says, we're going to invade one day, we're not going to invade the next day. Maybe at one point he'll be telling the truth or he'll be saying something that will actually happen, but I'm not sure how we will know when that is. In other words, you know, it's not just the Boy Cried Wolf. We're really beyond that now. I mean, he's almost doing the, you know, the Russian style firehood of falsehoods. You know, if you just keep saying lots of stuff all the time, people begin to eventually blank out. It's very hard to know what's true and what's not true. And so you kind of throw up your hands and say, I just don't know what's going on. And maybe that's the purpose. Maybe that's exactly what he's, what he's, what he's trying to do.

[B]

I definitely think there's some of that. And you can feel, you can feel kind of the acute pushback to the war a month ago and like, less so now. Like, whether that be the markets or whether that just be conversation, I do think that there's kind of a sense of, I got, you know, we're in Groundhog Day, we don't know what's happening. Like, there haven't been the acute crises that like, there were some were warning about with energy. I mean, this stuff takes a long time to go through. But like, people saw like an initial spike in gas prices and then since then it's been kind of steady. Up a little bit, down a little bit. I do think it's noteworthy, the threat this morning, though, because about going into Carg island and seizing the oil, whether he's actually going to do that again, who knows? Like you said, we're well beyond Boy who Cried Wolf. It's noteworthy because to me it feels like it's like, hey, I'm trying a new tactic for forcing Iran to the negotiating table. And like, that's the key point here, is that Iran has seemed to not be susceptible to his various, like, madman attempts to get them to deal with. And he basically taken ground troops kind of off the table for a while. And now it's noteworthy at Least that he feels that he wants to put it back on, I guess, would be the only minor change this morning.

[A]

It seems pretty clear to me that the Iranians are calculating that he doesn't want to use ground troops. In other words, that he doesn't want to continue the war, that he's also bored of the war, that he doesn't want to keep fighting, that he's looking for a way out. And it seems to me that they're using that. I mean, there are various things that they want from the United States, right? They want sanctions lifted. You know, they want a better relationship with the US with the world. They've been playing on that, you know, the assumption that Trump doesn't want to fight farther. And so maybe now he's decided to at least rhetorically try to call their bluff and say he will send in troops as a way of getting them to concede more. You know, again, we're back to where we started. Is it real? Is it not real? It's hard to know. I mean, I think it's interesting that Trump keeps returning to this thing about, we're going to take their oil, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna make money out of this war, you know, that. That in the end, it wasn't about regime change, obviously. It was never about democracy. It's not really about peace in the Middle East. It's not about creating something good for Iran or Iranians, rather, you know, so that they get out of the disastrous economic and political situation they're in. It's about making money or making something for me or for my clique. And so that's always the line that he returns to when he's looking for a kind of baseline explanation for what it is that he want. I mean, it was the same in Venezuela. It's the same in almost everywhere.

[B]

That's the craziest part to me, and why I keep telling the Democrats they need to be going full code pink on this war. It's like he doesn't even know what the war is for anymore. Nobody does. What is the possible justification, if you took him at his word, for spending $250 million to bomb Iran last night? We have no purpose. At least at the beginning of the war, there were pretenses for why we are going to do it. There isn't even that anymore. And the whole thing's crazy. You mentioned how we're at the. What was the Russian phrase you called it?

[A]

The fire hose of falsehoods. Actually, I think that might have been a Steve Bannon phrase. But it was really a description of what the Russians do. They put out not just one lie, but millions of lies, you know, or not just one explanation, but one after another after the next. And there's so many, and there's so much of it all the time that people eventually just tune out and they say, I don't know what's true. I don't know what's not true. I don't believe anything. I'm just going to stay home. I'm not going to engage in this issue. I'm not going to get angry about it. I just don't want to know anything at all. And it's an actual propaganda technique. You just flood people with massive contradictory stories, and sooner or later, they won't pay any attention to anything at all. And whether Trump is doing that on purpose in Iran or whether it's just the result of how his brain works, it's hard for me to say, but it's certainly having that effect. I mean, it's very hard to focus on a war when you don't know what's happening. Is the President telling the truth? Is there a negotiation really happening? Is it not happening? What are the Iranians really thinking? It makes it a confusing story to follow.

[B]

I think Bannon's version of that was a little more crass. But, yeah, I'm with you to that end. Do you know Aaron Blake over at CNN went and counted how many times Trump has claimed an Iran deal is right around the corner. Error, imminent. Do you want to guess how many times have you seen that storm?

[A]

It's like 27 or something.

[B]

38.

[A]

38.

[B]

Yeah, that's right, 38. And here we are. Who knows? This week, maybe. Maybe the taking Carg island is right around the corner. I do want to mention our Secretary of War who did a press conference yesterday, and I don't know what the deal is with the Dr. Seuss stuff from him, but I want to play for you his rationale for us re engaging and bombing Iran.

[A]

As President Trump said, they've been tap, tap, tapping. You can see when someone's trying to tap, tap, tap on a deal. Instead they're going to have tap, tap, tap bombs dropping on key facilities in Iran from the United States of America.

[B]

That's the real person in charge of the war right there.

[A]

You're right. I can see it's like one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, tap, tap, tap, tap. I'm not even sure what it means.

[B]

Yeah, nobody is. He likes little sayings. He's very oriented, I think, towards TikTok. He wants little clips of himself doing cheeky things. Maybe he thinks that's what he can add since he doesn't have any, you know, experience managing a war since he's a television host. You know, maybe it's more just a branding thing for him.

[A]

Maybe that would be, it would be hard for me to read into his brain and know what he's doing. But, you know, just to go back to where we started, I mean, this is one of the reasons people are having trouble understanding what's going on, because the explanation of the war shifts constantly and it's always being shaped for consumption. You know, it's Trump saying something, something grandiose, we're going to steal your oil, you know, or we'll only take complete surrender. And so when they say these things that are designed to create Internet engagement, it's very hard to know how they relate to reality on the ground. And, you know, there is some reporting for reality on the ground. Actually, there was a great piece in the Atlantic today about how Iranians are suffering and how bad the economy is and how people are cut off and don't have access to food and all kinds of other goods. There's also a story about the US May have possibly having hidden a water.

[B]

Yeah, this is Phillips o'. Brien. I'll put the link in the show notes as I was about to bring this up. He says that war crimes seem to be the official US Policy now. On Tuesday, the USA attacked two reservoirs in a water treatment facility in southern Iran. Almost immediately afterwards, the water was cut off to about 20,000 Iranians who live around the town of Zurich. And he kind of goes into whether this was a deliberate attack, but it seems like it was.

[A]

Those are real stories. I mean, I actually, when I read about what's happening to Iranians and I read people who are trying to do reporting from Iran and to get, get information from inside the country, which some people can do that stuff. I believe it's strange how that piece of the war, you know, what the population is feeling is almost of no interest to the people who are running the war. And which is very strange given that the original justification for the war was regime change. In other words, we're doing this in order to change the government of Iran so that Iranians have a better life and so that the, the protesters who've periodically trying to shift the government can have some success. I mean, that was the, that was the first justification. And it's almost as if that just dripped away. We're not even, we don't even speak about them as real people. I mean, Trump talks about destroying them as a civilization, whereas actually these are mostly pretty ordinary people, I'm guessing, most of them not religious fanatics, most of them probably not supporting the government, except for a small faction just trying to get through this. And there seems to be no interest in them or no curiosity about them on the part of the, the Trump administration at all, which by the way, is a big difference from Iraq.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Forget about all the justifications, pro and con, for the Iraq war. There was never a moment when the Bush administration wasn't talking about Iraqis and, you know, trying to shame freedom for

[B]

Iraqi women and women in Afghanistan. Right. I mean, sometimes some of this stuff was obviously a little bit.

[A]

Yeah. And they, and they were talking to Iraqis all the time and they were, you know, trying to build a government in Iraq and try to build justification for something new in Iraq and so on. So it was part of what the US seemed to be doing or trying to do. And here there's nothing, there's just no interest in what happens to people on the ground.

[B]

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[A]

It's also just the lack of interest in humans. You know, they're not interested in the prosperity and well being of Americans. Trump keeps saying he doesn't care about inflation. He doesn't. He's not interested in the financial situation of Americans. And I think that's true. I think he isn't interested. They're not interested in what happens to Iran or to Iranians. They're not interested in the Epstein victims. You know, they are entirely focused on the online world. You Know, what can they say or do that creates engagement, what creates a good clip? It's not even really about headlines anymore because they don't care about newspapers. They care about, you know, the visuals, the engagement, the what the podcasters will say. You know, they're, they're inside the world that they created. That's, you know, that's the stuff they read, that's the stuff they react to. That's what they care about. And I think that is more real to them than reality. I mean, in that sense, they're already living in, I don't know, the AI generated world where what's online is the only thing that's true and what's offline is irrelevant or doesn't necessarily penetrate what seems real when you look at your screen.

[B]

And the people can't really know what truth is, right? Like this is like the approach of post truth strategy, right? Which is people can know what they're experiencing, right. And this is why I think that the gas price thing was hurting them in particular, right? Because like people all of a sudden saw a tangible difference. But like, beyond that, it's like people don't know what's happening in Iran really. Right. People don't have a great macroeconomic sense about how things are going. If you're being told things are going great and jobs are being created, they are taking advantage of that. And I do think the new technologies kind of allow for it. I mean, China does this quite well within their country, and obviously we're not at that level. And Russia, but it seems like it's on that trajectory.

[A]

Very much so. I mean, and I think that's deliberate. They are consciously seeking to shape information and shape propaganda and shape the story in a way that has almost nothing to do with reality. And that, I think, is a difference between pretty much all previous administrations. I mean, you've had people try to spin, right. We used to have spin doctors where something would happen and people would try and make it look good and explain it in a way that made it look good. Here we're talking about people who aren't even interested in that because a spin doctor was spinning a real event, right? And these are people who are, who are spinning things that may or may not have even happened, you know, or trying to create new realities.

[B]

Look at the California conversation around the battlefield.

[A]

California conversation, exactly. That, you know, that their candidate was doing really well online and he was making, you know, TikTok videos or other videos that were doing really well on X. And that to them was the campaign. And the fact that this was a, this was an election campaign in Los Angeles, which is a blue city in a blue state, and that their candidate in the end did no better than Trump had done in the last election, seemed somehow jarring to them because for them, the real reality is what they see on X in particular. And that. And X is, of all the forms of social media, X is the one that's the most skewed. And depending on which part of the algorithm you're in, is most shaped by Musk himself, you know, by what he says and, and his enormous numbers of followers.

[B]

This extends also. I see you were posting about Elon's kind of commentary on what is happening in the UK with protests and with the backlash to some of the migrant violence issues. One thing I wanted to correct was earlier in the week, I think it was with Bill on Monday, I had said that, and this shows that we all can be victims of the misinformation online. I'd said that the person that was charged with killing Henry Nowak in Southampton was an immigrant. He actually was a British Sikh. And he was Sikh, but he was a native of the uk. And then we also now have outburst in Belfast. There's a Sudanese asylum seeker who's charged with attempted murder over a knife attack and massive protests there, a building on fire where there are a lot of immigrant residents, violence. Tommy Robinson, the racist street thug in the uk, sparking a lot of this, Elon posting on all of this. And that is in part, part impacting what's happening in the real world. Right, because it's getting people out into the streets to do these protests, but it also is creating this distorted view of what's happening in Britain, broadly based on kind of isolated, horrible, but isolated incidents.

[A]

I don't want to minimize these incidents because they're horrible.

[B]

No, no, me neither.

[A]

Obviously they're horrible. But it's true. You can take one incident and you can tell a story about a whole country that isn't necessarily true. I mean, just as you said, if the perpetrator is not in fact an immigran or not an illegal immigrant or not a migrant at all, and yet he's being used to whip up hatred of migrants. You know, that's an illustration of how you can take a fact and twist it and distort it and make it into. Make a story that isn't necessarily political. As I understand that story, it was a police screw up and there was a deliberate misinformation.

[B]

The perpetrator called the police to report the Crime. And so the cop.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

Assumed that they were the victim, not the perpetrator.

[A]

Right. Which is not the first time that kind of thing has ever happened. I mean, there are all kinds of domestic violence stories where, you know, men accuse women of doing various things. And anyway, it's not completely unique. But once you go down to the story, it doesn't have anything to do with the police being anti white, which is the language that Elon Musk and his pals on X are using. I mean, it's a horrible story, it's a terrible story. It's a police mistake and disaster and it's a tragedy. But it isn't a political story in the way that it's being made to be. And so that you can pluck these stories out of real life, turn them into something else on the Internet, and then use the anger that they generate to create riots and people burning down houses somewhere else is pretty scary. And what you're watching is the state and the police, the authorities in Belfast and elsewhere being really unable to deal with this. I mean, when there's a wave of information and anger and emotion that they can't pinpoint on anything, it's very hard for them to know how to react and what to do. It's another side effect of the fact that we've given up the information space to algorithms that are being written outside of the places where they're being used.

[B]

The other night, when I was watching game three of the finals with my buddies out on the back porch enjoying the delicious booing of Donald Trump, knowing that I'd wake up and podcast the next day, we had ourselves a little soul out of office beverage. It was nice. It made the booze wash over me in a way that was even more joyous. It made the goosebumps prick up on my arms just a little bit more intensely than they would have otherwise. You can join me with that if you want. You can get a soul out of office beverage or Soul is offering another new product. Their Mood Gummies. Sol is a wellness brand that makes delicious hemp derived CBD and THC products designed to make feeling good simple. Their Mood Gummies have precise dosing, clean ingredients and formulations designed for predictable effects so you can choose how you want to feel while staying in control. If you're looking for a bright social and energizing buzz with your buddies on the porch, go with the Uplift gummies. If you're trying to wind down, get some rest. At night, the mellow gummies deliver 3 milligrams of indica THC. Ideal for the cozy nights and fully unplugging. Or for that, just write Anytime Vibes. Sole's Balance Gummies blend the hybrid THC and CBD for an easy, versatile feel. Make today a good day and get yourself some Sole gummies. Right now. Sol is offering my audience 30% off your entire order. Go to getsoul.com and use the code. The bulwark. That's getsoul.com promo code thebullwerk for 30% off. I want to move on to what's happening in Ukraine in some ways for different reasons than we were talking about in Iran. But I feel like now I go weeks without talking about it even just because we've had a long relative stalemate. There have been few developments positive for Ukraine recently. We've brought up from time to time, but your last piece was kind of on the state of play there. So I thought maybe you could just cook for a little bit and give us an update on how things are going.

[A]

So I consider it my role to keep you continually informed about Ukraine, even though you don't.

[B]

So thank you. I want to be informed, so it's an important role. You have a captive audience, at least with me. I can't speak to all the listeners, but for me, I'm interested. So go fire away.

[A]

Well, I live in Poland part of the time, so it's not that far for me to get there. I try and get there periodically anyway. I was there, I guess about 10 days ago, two weeks ago. And the story in Ukraine is actually really interesting now because we have hit another one of these turning points where the technological advantage is now once again on the Ukrainian side. And I think what's important, I think most people don't really understand this yet, that there are different dimensions of the war. One of them is the front line itself. And the front line is now this 20 or 25 mile wide zone, which is totally transparent. So everything that happens inside that zone can be seen by Ukrainian and other reconnaissance drones. And every time the Russians enter that zone with a soldier or a, a tank or a truck or anything else, it is immediately identified and the Ukrainians can hit it. When you talk about a stalemate, the stalemate doesn't mean that nothing is happening. What's happening is that there are these waves of Russian attacks and the Ukrainians keep hitting them. And you have this very, very high Russian casualty rates now. Sometimes as many as a thousand people a day that's killed and wounded. Wow.

[B]

Really? A thousand a Day, it can be

[A]

a thousand a day. Much lower on the Ukrainian side because their war is increasingly autom, increasingly run by drones, often by people directing them pretty far from the front line. When I was there, I was shown some of the robots they now use. They use robots both to rescue people who are in the zone and are wounded and need to be taken out. And they also use them. They've actually, I think for the first time used them to take a position. They're beginning to experiment with robot guns. And it's very. It's not really 21st century, it's kind of 22nd century stuff. It's stuff you didn't, you didn't imagine. Or it looks like it comes from science fiction or comic books, but it's becoming real. The front line is not moving. At the same time, the Ukrainians have got also much better at hitting longer range targets. So they're hitting oil refineries, oil and gas infrastructure inside Russia, creating these spectacular fires and explosions. Including one a few days ago. The morning of a economic conference in St. Petersburg, famous one that Putin holds every year, is pretty pathetic. This year Candace Owens was in attendance. So you can see what kind of caliber of economist is now.

[B]

Hunter's new friends now going there.

[A]

That's right. That's right. On the morning they hit the refinery in St. Petersburg and they were kind of billowing black smoke over the city while people were walking into the conference hall. So that's pretty, you know, it's pretty stark illustration of what it is that they can do. They're really beginning to damage the refining capacity and also beginning to cut off a lot of supply lines into Crimea and into southern Ukraine with these longer range, so called medium range drones. And they're just making it very hard for the Russians to continue fighting the war. That doesn't mean that Putin doesn't have things he can do. He can still hit Ukrainian cities with missiles and Ukrainians have very little missile defense left or relatively little. He can still create anger and hardship. But the Russians are now very publicly and clearly not winning. And here's where we can connect this part of the conversation to the previous part. Putin. Putin has also been seeking to persuade the Russians not to pay attention to the war. It's inevitably a Russian victory. We're going to win sooner or later. We're much bigger than they are. They're not a real country. You know, their country's run by Nazis. They aren't. It's not a real government and we're going to win. And suddenly it's becoming clear to a lot of people, not just near the front line, but in Moscow and St. Petersburg, that they are not winning. And that's beginning to have echoes. You know, you can see it in the Russian Internet. You can see some responses even from sort of, believe it or not, Russian influencers. You can see, were there, like, critiques

[B]

of Putin that are starting to bubble up or sort of.

[A]

There are critiques of Putin. There are people commenting, you know, why aren't we winning? Why aren't we trying harder? Some people talking about nukes again, that always happens when the Russians are losing. There's a sense of shakiness and instability. And, you know, the Russians had this. This. They have a. Every May, they have this enormous victory parade. And this year it was much shorter, and it. It went forward without any. Usually they had these big weapons. You know, they have tanks and, you know, military hardware. And this year they didn't do that because they were afraid of Ukrainian drones hitting Moscow during the victory parade. And that's. That's palpable. That's now clear to everybody in the country that they aren't winning the war. And so the. The gap between Russian propaganda and reality is now becoming clear. What that means is hard to say.

[B]

Is there any scuttlebutt about what Putin's move could be on this? And I saw another columnist suggesting that maybe Putin opens up a new theater, goes a little bit into a Baltic state or something to try to distract or get attention elsewhere. It was just speculation. I don't know what you're hearing.

[A]

They threaten that they'll do that, and they've been sending drones across the border into several other countries. And so one of the speculations is they might use this moment, while Trump is distracted by Iran and Europe is not quite ready, they might use it to create some kind of provocation in one of the Baltic states just to show that NATO doesn't fight back or just to illustrate that there's weakness on our side, or just to create some anger and distraction and cheer up the Russians. I mean, it's possible. I mean, it seems like that would be a fairly foolhardy thing to do, because actually, they don't know how, what the reaction would be.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I would think the more likely reaction is that Europeans, who are now more aware than ever before of the physical and cyber and propaganda threat from Russia, certainly much more so than they were a year ago or two years ago, it just might reawaken that, that understanding. But, you know, I mean, his choices are all bad. Now, and he can widen the war. He can have mass mobilization, which would, could also create a backlash. Or as the Ukrainians have suggested many times, he could have a ceasefire on the current lines. And for him, that would be a failure because he said he was going to conquer the whole country. He still says he wants to conquer the whole country. And he will not have managed to conquer the whole country, but it might be at some point soon something that he or people around him will want to sell to the Russians on the grounds that, that, you know, it's, it's not going well. I mean, there's a deeper story here too. And this is, this is maybe the better and more relatable part of the story, which is, why has this happened? Like, why is the Ukrainian drone industry so good? What did they do? And the, and the answer is that Ukraine is a very decentralized country. It's very messy, disorganized and chaotic countries some of the time. But it also means that there are these pockets of creativity. So it's not like there's one Ukrainian state drone company that's giving orders for drones. What you have is like literally hundreds of small companies. They work with individual units or with particular commanders. There's this constant feedback. When I was there a few days ago, I met a CEO of a drone company. I went to see his factory and he was kind of looking kind of scruffy because he'd just been to the front line for a few days and he just got back because he goes and, and meets soldiers and watches how they're using his drones. And then they report back to him and then he makes alterations inside his actually incredibly high tech warehouses where he does this work. And so there's a kind of feedback loop. There's this lots of different people trying experimentally different things at the same time. They have European money, they don't have US Money, and they have now a lot of joint ventures with European companies. And of course, now Zelensky is, is offering some of their technology to the Gulf states as well, which, for which they'll also get money or other weaponry. So it's one of the few good examples at the moment of how a more open society can defeat or can at least stand up to a much larger closed society. And so if you want to feel better about democracy and liberalism, liberalism, then this is your example.

[B]

All right, I'm for it. I love that. The one countervailing thing that you just hear out there, that I'm just interested in your take on, is that there was A little bit of an economic interplay with the war in Iran. Like the rising oil prices helped Russia economically. We eased some sanctions. There still is, kind of weirdly, despite the opposition to Russia in Europe, some pockets of Europe using Russian oil and other energy resources. My friend Kalyn Robertson, who's on the ground in Ukraine, usually is back in Ireland talking about this story. In Ireland, they have Russian companies providing electricity. So was that one aluminum? Yeah. And so anyway, I'm just kind of wondering, is there anything to that story about Russia's economy stabilizing?

[A]

It's not stable. But it's true that the Russians have found a lot of ways around sanctions. It's true that, that European and American and other companies, lots of Chinese companies, are still finding ways to supply Russia. It's also true, though, that, you know, enormous amount of their budget is going into making weapons. They have labor shortages. They have very high inflation, you know, and as I said, they have these exploding refineries all over the place. The exploding refinery seems to be preventing them from benefiting from the rising oil prices the way they could. So it's a big country. It's very hard to know. And all the statistics are fake anyway, so it's hard to know exactly what's going on. But I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't look from the outside and, and from the little news we have from the ends, it doesn't feel very happy. You know, they, they, they know they're not winning.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, they, they know they're not prospering. They can see they're falling behind in all kinds of other races, you know, the AI race, the technology race. And they're, they're stuck, stuck, you know, fighting this ground war that they don't want to be in. I mean, I don't think it changes that. Even the bump up in, in oil prices, I don't think is, is helping them the way it could. They've lost something like 20% of their refining capacity, which is a lot,

[B]

en route to Venezuela. There's an interesting op ed in the Wall Street Journal by Leopoldo Lopez, who is in the opposition and was former

[A]

mayor and was the opposition leader in Venezuela.

[B]

Yeah. Was wrongly jailed by Maduro by the previous regime. It's pretty striking op ed. It begins like this. My children and I watched a video on a phone screen last week. Venezuelan officials cut a ribbon at what used to be our home in Caracas. They were applauding, announcing a social program for the elderly. I spent seven years as a political prisoner under the absurd charge that had sent subliminal messages to the Venezuelan people. The judge who presided over this travesty are still on the bench. I think he was trying to offer a wake up call and a reminder to what the situation still is regarding political oppression in Venezuela. There's the change in power to Delsey Rodriguez and you hear Trump bragging about how great it is now, but you don't really hear a lot of reporting about what's actually happening there. And so I just wanted to flag that.

[A]

It's a really, really important story. Also, he goes on to make a broader point. Point which is that there's still no rule of law in Venezuela and you'd be crazy to invest in Venezuela. You know, you could write a contract tomorrow and it could be annulled by the government. His house was expropriated. So why wouldn't the government expropriate your oil company's investment should you want to make it right? You know, the acting like if we just change the leader to someone who's, you know, less obnoxious to me personally, that, that somehow changes the situation in Venezuela completely. When we haven't changed the judges or the regime or anything else else is crazy. I mean, one of the reasons there's not a lot of reporting from Venezuela is it's credibly dangerous for Americans to go to Venezuela. You know, there's, there's still reports of, you know, threats to Americans in the street and, and a lot of caution about sending reporters there. We don't have a very good idea of what's going on deeper inside the country. I mean, it seems like there are a few small kind of wildcat oil companies who are, who have gone in and are trying to make some money. But I'm not hearing of any really big investments or long term commitments, which is the kind of thing you would need to really get that oil industry moving again. Until there is a real change, until there is an election, until there's a change of regime, until there's a regime that's committed to the rule of law at the very least, you're not going to have a lot of change in Venezuela. I thought it was a really moving and well done uphead, actually.

[B]

Yeah. And he talked about, I guess there's potentially a new Supreme Court coming up and that will be an interesting inflection point. If they keep the same people, you'll know that nothing has really changed. He also cited we're in strange times. You're looking for strange heroes these days. We have to shout the ExxonMobil CEO as the person injecting truth and reality into the public sphere. But it is noteworthy that Darren woods was there. I had a Silicon Valley guy on on Tuesday. It was a frustrating conversation, but was trying to understand why all of these tech oligarchs are just totally submitting to Trump and going along with his lies and participating in them and helping to perpetuate them, frankly. And there's one good old boy oil and gas CEO that's like, I'm not going into Venezuela. Things aren't good in Venezuela. He's just very blunt about it. And I was like, why can't everybody just be like that? That is a normal society where a CEO can just offer bluntly that something that the president's doing is bad.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Wrong or not accurate.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

The story from the Times this morning with the next wave of deportations is going to the Central African Republic, a country that we have a travel advisory for. And those deportations include a couple of Iranian women trying to find freedom and asylum in America while this war is ongoing. There had been a story that I covered, God, many months ago now, probably the. Probably in 2025, of the Iranian woman that had been sent, I'm going from memory now, I believe, to Panama. And she was like, she had a sign in the window where they were holding her in Panama that was like, don't send me back to Iran. And to your point earlier about how there's no actual care for the Iranian people, on the one hand, it's like we're invading this regime, talking about how they're a terrible regime. On the other hand, we're sending their dissidents either back there or to some other dangerous country. Simultaneously, that we have the World cup happening. It is interesting that the Iranian soccer team has been let in. They were wearing the pins representing the girls who were killed in the girls school, which I thought was interesting. But we banned a referee from Somalia who was denied entry. The government hasn't really said why. They said vaguely that there was ties to terrorists or something.

[A]

Ridiculous.

[B]

Yeah, he went back to Somalia, refed a game there. I saw this video that was quite moving from a local Somalian soccer game where everybody's cheering the referee. You don't see that very much at sporting events. So anyway, I just kind of wanted to get your take on that story, which is kind of continuing to happen, but has not been. The immigration story has not been as acute in the public eye since the transfer from Nome.

[A]

It's kind of performative cruelty, isn't it, it's. We're going to take these Iranian women who've obviously left the country because they would be persecuted for political religious reasons. We can't send them back to Iran. And so we're going to send them to an equally dangerous country where they have no means of, of making a living and where, who knows, they might be kidnapped or taken by Iranians who do do that sort of thing and taken home. And we would borrow from our country a World cup referee who's qualified to be refereeing matches. And here's the strange part for me was that I didn't see FIFA, the organization that runs the World Cup. You see barely any objection. I mean, there was no real commentary, no condemnation. Oh, the United States has the right to do it all.

[B]

See the other FIFA story, they have a floor at Trump tower. It's the 17th floor at Trump Tower in New York that they got that it's empty. Like they opened up a quote unquote office in Trump's building in New York in the lead up to this.

[A]

I mean, it's just a form of bribery and sucking up. Maybe it's about avoiding corruption charges. Notoriously corrupt organization. Maybe it's about. Maybe they have other reasons for it. Maybe they want to get through the World cup without something terrible happening.

[B]

Yeah, it's a cya. Maybe it's like, why they gave him the Peace Prize. They gave him that FIFA peace Prize. Or it's like if we pay him, if we give them awards, then if some controversy comes up, we can use some of that access, whatever, to try to help manage the dictator. And I guess they don't think that defending the honor of their referee and arose to the level of using any of that capital that they gained from buying off the Trump family.

[A]

Or why didn't they have the referee do the games in Canada and Mexico? Why didn't I just. I was mystified by that story, actually. I didn't fully understand it. I thought it was really profoundly offensive. You know, qualified person who's come to take part in an international event, who's excluded. For some, you know, they have a thing about Somalians, you know, because they're racist against Somalians or they don't like Somalia or they, they've put Somalia on some list. I mean, that's just not an excuse. And as I said, the only the explanation is it's a display of cruelty. It appeals to Americans who also want to demonstrate their strength and cruelty and desire to exclude others. And again, I think it's part of the same propaganda that makes everybody else feel numb. There's kind of one thing after next, one horrible story after next. And after a while, people say, I don't want anything to do with politics. I don't want to know about it.

[B]

Anything else on the Autocracy Ink Watch before we go to a pallet cleanser to close the show?

[A]

I mean, you know, let's go to the pallet cleanser.

[B]

Okay. I mean, everything, our existence is the Autocracy Ink Watch, I guess Talk cleanser last. Your second to last article, which is about my old friend, friend Carrie Lake, who hasn't tweeted at me in a while. I kind of miss her. She hasn't drunkenly accosted me at a bar recently, and I don't have any plans to go to Jamaica. So she might not have a chance. You write, what did Jamaica do to deserve Carrie Lake? I did get a kick out of this. There are a couple little anecdotes in there that I wasn't aware of that she was not even the first choice for Jamaica ambassador.

[A]

Apparently not.

[B]

Yeah. And so as all, I was thinking about running for Congress but couldn't get Trump's full support for that. And so I don't know. There she is with her kind of matte filter down in Jamaica.

[A]

Yeah, well, I wrote about her earlier in the year because I wrote about her, what she has been doing for the last month. So she was running something called the U.S. agency for Global Media, which is America's foreign broadcasters, Voice of America Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and really, essentially, essentially running them into the ground and wasting tens of millions of dollars while doing it. I mean, it's a long story. I can recommend you to the Atlantic article where she was, you know, she, she tried to fire people. She did it illegally. They wound up being on administrative leave. They were all getting their salaries while not working. She ended some contracts in a way that was damaging. So the US Government will have to pay compensation or I mean, you know, literally like one catastrophic mistake after the next, you know, undermin foreign broadcasting, you know, including, for example, in Iran at a time when speaking to the Iranian people might even be a useful thing. And having achieved really nothing and having undermined and destroyed this agency, now the Trump administration is running around looking for something else for her to do. And they had this great idea, let's send her to Jamaica. But, you know, Jamaica is a, is a parliamentary democracy, probably at this point more stable than America. It's a friendly nation. You know, it has Lots of American tourists. There's lots of, you know, consular activity between the United States and Jamaica. Important Jamaican population, the United States.

[B]

Rich kids on spring break, you know, get a little too high, lose their passport. You know, you need to feel serious.

[A]

But what did Jamaica do to deserve this kind of third rate, you know, fourth choice retread, you know, somebody who failed at running for office and who then failed at running an important agency, and now she gets sent there. I mean, I think Jamaica deserves better.

[B]

I do as well, but we've kind of got better. This is why it's a palate cleanser. You can see how this could be a sad story or an angry story because it does suck for the Jamaican people. And it is sad what she did, dismantling our communications tools and overseas. But on the other hand, if she had gotten 20,000 more votes in that first election, she was so close to beating Katie Hobbs. Had she beaten Katie Hobbs and become governor of Arizona, she might be the vice president right now. You think that we're in the worst timeline, but we're only 2 degrees away from her being the most likely non JD Vance choice. There would have been some appeal of her being a woman. She sucks up like J.D. she would have won a swing state governor's race versus J.D. who was in more of a red state. There was a path to Carrie Lake being vice president. We don't have that path. Instead, she was the backup choice for Jamaica ambassador. And that makes me happy. I get some joy.

[A]

You're right. That's a good news story. That's a happy ending.

[B]

Okay, we'll close with the unofficial Ann Applebaum Book club. I have to admit I was on it because you come on every couple months, which we appreciate about a quarterly visit. And I can read a serious book a quarter these days, despite my content calendar. But I've gotten behind. I've been instead reading gay fiction. I was reading some Justin Torres fiction and I loved both of his books, so I was doing that instead. But I'm going on vacation coming up here in a couple. Five weeks. In five weeks, you people are going to miss me. I can have good guest hosts. So I'm going to catch up on my Ann Apple Von book club list. But for people who are more up to speed than me or who want to catch up, we had originally had the captive mind, the Oppermans, the director, the choice of comrades. What We can know by Ian McKeown. The last time you were on we shouted out Furious Minds by Laura Fields. It's about Clermont and how the bastardization of the conservative movement in America. Do you have a new addition for People this summer?

[A]

So I have picked a novel for you.

[B]

Great. I love novels.

[A]

It's not even a long novel. It's a short novel. It's called the Time of Cherry. And it's a novel that's set at the very end of Franco's Spain. And so it's about the end of a dictatorship, not the beginning of one. And the author is called Montserrat Roig. She was a Spanish, kind of part of the Spanish opposition to Franco family. And the book has a really great description of what it's like to be in a demonstration and then what it's like to be arrested and go to jail. But it's also other things. It's how people adjusted their lives to the system. I think it was published a year or two after he died. And so when people were reading it, it was already history. But you can see how people's lives have been shaped by politics. Just ordinary people, average people.

[B]

Interesting.

[A]

That's one of the themes that I always find really interesting. You know, these big things happen in the world, and how do those relate to ordinary people? And how do they adjust and how do they think about it? And there are sort of different versions of it in the book. And as I said, it's an easy read, not too long, well written.

[B]

I love that. A lot of Franco fans on the Maga. Right. So also a little relevance there. I'll throw one at you then. I've got a bonus. I've read this a couple years ago now. It's one of my favorite because it hits all of my interests. It is a gay novel. It's a gay coming of age novel, but also that overlaps with kind of a historical autocracy. It's a gay love story in Pinochet's Chile. It's called My Tender Matador.

[A]

My Tender Matador, People like that.

[B]

Yeah. So if people want that. The Time of Cherries and My Tender Matador people have two short novels for the summer where you get a little autocracy. So you can kind of feel like you're in touch with something that is relevant in the news. But you're also separate from the world. You're also doing fiction. So there you go. Ann Applebaum, I appreciate you very much. Hope the wildflowers bloom soon in Poland. And we'll be talking to you a couple months.

[A]

Thanks so much.

[B]

All right, everybody else will be back here tomorrow for a weekend edition of the pod. See you all, then peace. The Borg Podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.