← The Bulwark Podcast
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- [00:00]
Tim Miller
Foreign hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to be here with staff writer at the Atlantic. Her books include Autocracy Inc. Twilight of Democracy and the Pulitzer Prize winning Gulag A History. It's Anne Applebaum. Let's do it. Anne, how you doing?
- [00:24]
Anne Applebaum
I'm well. I'm well. How are you? Well enough anyway.
- [00:27]
Tim Miller
Yeah, well enough. I'm doing well enough. You know, here in my personal life, given all the gulag news out there, I thought I was talking to Katie and I was like, we better get an Applebaum on who better to have than the author of Gulag A History. And we had a minor maybe, maybe positive green shoot late Thursday night when Chris Van Hollen got to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, possibly the first person, first known person to actually get out of Sukkot, the El Salvadoran prison that people have been discussing as a gulag. So I was wondering what you thought about that news, the fact that Chris Allen was successful in that advocacy and then we can kind of get into the details.
- [01:10]
Anne Applebaum
So I worried a little bit about why they let out Abrego Garcia to meet Chris Van Hollen. I mean, clearly. Well, one of the reasons was to show he wasn't dead, which people were beginning to wonder. But it also, the way it was staged, you know, it was meant to say, look, this guy is absolutely fine. There's nothing wrong with him. He was wearing clean clothes. He was in some kind of restaurant looking setting. It was clearly designed to show that nothing all that bad is happening. So I worried about that aspect of it. Obviously, the fact, you know, a US Senator is willing to go there and put his reputation on the line and, you know, make an effort to save an innocent person from a horrific and pointless fate is fantastic. And it's, you know, I think it's gestures like these that will remind people that Congress has agency and senators can do things. You know, I'm pleased that he did it. I mean, of course, what matters now is what happens next. I mean, does the administration listen to the Supreme Court, which has demanded that this prisoner be sent home? Is there movement on the other people who were unfairly and without due process sent to El Salvador? I mean, the thing that worries me the most about the situation, I mean, since we're talking about gulag, is that sisot, if that's how we're pronouncing it, which curiously, the word gulag is an abbreviation. It means main camp administration. It's an acronym.
- [02:30]
Tim Miller
Wait, it's an acronym for what?
- [02:31]
Anne Applebaum
Main Camp Administration in Russian Camp Administration.
- [02:35]
Tim Miller
Oh, that's interesting. I did not know that.
- [02:38]
Anne Applebaum
It means Main Camp Administration. And SISOD is also an acronym. And, you know, these are names given to institutions that have unclear powers and exist outside of the rule of law. And sosot, from our point of view, is doubly outside the rule of law because it's outside of our country. So it's outside of our legal jurisdiction. It exists according to the unclear laws of some other country. The fact that we're taking people out of our country and moving them to this lawless place. It's perhaps easier to sympathize with Abrego Garcia, because he's innocent and he's the father of an autistic child, and he's never broken the law, and he's married to a US Citizen and so on. But really, even the ugliest and most unpleasant people who were sent into this lawless zone, that was a grave violation of the spirit of our Constitution. What a rule of law society is designed to be is one where there aren't exceptions, there aren't emergencies. You know, there aren't. There aren't gray areas and gray zones, and we have some already in our system. But this is an expansion of that, and it really is profoundly disturbing. And, you know, for that reason alone, it's really right that Senator Van Hollen went there to make that point.
- [03:55]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Do you worry at all about the propaganda side of it with the taking him out? I guess that's the thing that I don't. It's hard for me to process, like, so why did they do it? There's the positive way to look at that, which is that he responded to pressure. Van Halen is there. I've pointed out at a press conference that El Salvador is a party to this International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. And as part of being that covenant, it's required of them that they give these prisoners access to an attorney or to outside access. So on the one hand, that's good. On the other hand, they do this weird thing where they put these pretend margaritas up in the picture, and then Bukele is like retweeting people who are talking about how it was all part of a troll, and they're going to reveal that Grego Garcia is a bad Ms. 13 guy, and the Democrats are going to look like they're sucking up to MS.13. I guess I just don't think about how this works in other countries. It's hard for me to wrap my Head around whether we think that Bukele did this from a position of weakness in response to pressure or whether it was like a propaganda tool.
- [05:03]
Anne Applebaum
Oh, I mean, it was certainly a propaganda tool. And, you know, everything is about how it's packaged and how it's sold. Probably it matters as much inside El Salvador as it does in the U.S. you know, this will be an effort to, you know, to portray the prisons as nice places and the regime is fair. And maybe, as you say, also to somehow smear this particular man. You know, that doesn't mean that we are. We, meaning the broader American community of people who still care about due process and the rule of law. We Democrats and Republicans and members of the legal establishment can't also use this incident as a way of making our points. And so I hope we find a way to do it. But, yeah, I mean, you know, when you're dealing with a regime like that, like, everything is a game and everything is a trick and everything will be somehow used to attack you. It's important maybe that Americans start to learn that propaganda is not just words, you know, or images. You know, propaganda is also actions. You know, you can. You can seek to make a political point through doing things, through staging events, through executive orders, or through singling people out. Regimes like that of Bukele are adept at creating situations that are designed to. To have a particular effect. And so paying attention to that and understanding it, you know, is part of what has to be the response.
- [06:32]
Tim Miller
Are there any other lessons or comparisons, you know, that you can think of, you know, as. Just, to me, obviously, this is like a little bit of a testing ground for the Trump administration. Right. Like they're putting the toe in the water to kind of see what they can get away with. I have to imagine, like, this slow walking towards the type of place where you're sending more and more people to prison camps such as this. There have got to be parallels, right? I don't know. I'm just wondering, as you've been watching this play out, has it struck any memories from the research you were doing for the book?
- [07:09]
Anne Applebaum
The Gulag was also something that developed very slowly, and it began with justifications. These were labor camps. People who had committed some minor crime or some offense or were a problem for the state, were going to be made useful to the state. So there was a whole ideology about labor and work and how these people were working off their. Their crimes or their misdemeanors, and they were contributing to the construction of socialism. And that was the slow buildup to It. But of course, as time went on and as it expanded, the faster it expanded. And there were a couple moments when it went very fast. You know, in the 1930s and then again after the war when it went very fast, then all kinds of people were accidentally locked up and random people were denounced by their next door neighbors who wanted their apartments, or, you know, people would denounce their bosses at work so that they would get their job. You know, the ugliest part of human nature was on show as the denunciations got wider and wider. And, you know, we're not at that stage yet, but, but there is a logic like that that once it's okay to send a random person out of the country to a zone of lawlessness, once you can't get them back, or you can't get the Venezuelan hairdresser back, or even that you've sent a bunch of Venezuelans whose, you know, none of whose status we really know anything about. I mean, were they really illegal? Were they, did they really commit crimes? And we have very little knowledge of that.
- [08:37]
Tim Miller
And at least one, at least one not the. And we know, obviously there's no accusation of flawlessness for Andree, the gay makeup artist you referenced. But like, there's at least another one the Miami Herald was reporting that was legal. Like, that went through the legal refugee process, went to the third country, went to Colombia, then came to Florida. Right. So in some of these cases, we know they weren't even illegal.
- [08:56]
Anne Applebaum
Once you've made the established that it's okay to do that under whatever ideology or explanation or justification, then if you can do it for one person, why can't you do it for 10 people or 100 people or a thousand people? And that was the logic. That was how the Soviet Gulag expanded. I mean, of course it was part of a much bigger system of fear and repression that we don't have yet. So I don't want to, you know, make a direct comparison. They aren't exactly the same thing yet. But yeah, there is a, there is a logic to them pushing for this one person to be punished unjustly because then that gives them effective permission to punish anybody unjustly. You know, and that is exactly how it works. I mean, there's also something, there's also something similar in that, you know, a lot of the most notorious camps of the gulag were far away and nobody saw them. And you could live your life in Moscow or in, I don't know, Novosibirsk, and you could go through your day and you wouldn't be aware that there was this great injustice happening somewhere else inside your country. And the El Salvador camps serve that function in a way, too. I mean, they, you know, are we bothered walking down the street in Washington, D.C. or Minneapolis or, you know, Dallas, Texas, thinking about people who've been unjustly shipped to a foreign prison? I mean, we are. We don't see it. It's not, it's not part of our daily life. And that was, that's another way in which you can see how these monstrous prisons function and why they're able to function. And then the third thing I would say, I mean, we haven't really had this national conversation yet, but at some point, it's going to be important to ask, who are these people doing the arresting and putting these people, you know, unjustly away? Are they cops or are they immigration officials who are stopping students who may or may not have student visa problems, you know, on the street and bundling them away into cars? Because no dictatorship is never the work of a single man or even, you know, even a few people. There's always a. There's an apparatus that wants to do it, that's motivated to do it, that has reasons why it thinks those things are just. They're the ones who say some of the justification is for them as well. So it's not just that they're saying Garcia, Abrego Garcia is, you know, is a vicious criminal. It's not just for us. It's also for the people who are doing the arresting. And the corruption of those bodies, of those institutions, the people organizing deportations, is also going to be an important part of the story down the road.
- [11:25]
Tim Miller
Yeah. JBL wrote about the mindset of the kind of ICE agents doing the arresting in his newsletter earlier this week. I'll put a link in the show, Notes for People, because that's a starting point for a conversation that we do need to have. I want to just really quick go to your point about the logic of sending Abreco Garcia and these Venezuelans to Sukkot and what we heard Yesterday on the 4th Circuit from Judge Wilkinson. It was a Reagan appointee, conservative judge, who essentially upbraided the administration for not responding to the court order to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. And he wrote this. It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter, but in this case, it's not hard at the government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process. That is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence, that because it has rid itself of custody, there's nothing that can be done. This should be shocking, not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear. Extremely blunt from a Reagan appointee judge there.
- [12:32]
Anne Applebaum
And this is the kind of statement that we've been waiting for. I mean, this is what the courts should be doing. They should be making it absolutely as clear as possible why this is a violation of. It's not just the law. It's the essence of our constitutional republic. Rule of law. It's older than American democracy. I mean, preceding the Declaration of Independence and preceding the Constitution, there were courts. In colonial America, there were arguments about independence of judges. One of the reasons for the American Revolution was the fear that judges were being influenced by the king. Colonists wanted independent judges. They wanted also separation of powers. You know, those arguments have been around for, you know, as I said, longer than the United States itself. And the rule of law is a very deep part of how the US became prosperous, how we, you know, remain a, you know, remain a unified republic. How we became one of the leaders in the world, how we came to be widely admired, at least by some people, some of the time. How we came to be so influential, why so many people imitated us. I mean, it wasn't just democracy. I mean, actually the, the flaws of our electoral system are pretty clear to everybody else, especially to people who live in parliamentary democracies and have somewhat more civilized politics than we do. But the advantages of the, you know, the separation of powers and the rule of law is clear, you know, even in countries that aren't democracies. So I think the judge, by drawing everyone's attention to this really basic point, you know, has done us a huge favor. And the more, I would say, the more that the judiciary can speak in plain English and not use complicated legal language, the more they will get through to Americans. I mean, I think Americans have this basic sense. You know, we have this, you know, this is a free country. You know, there are things that we say about ourselves that I think some of this is so much in violation of the basic self definition of who we are that it goes beyond partisanship, I hope, and goes beyond polarization. So I hope that some of these incidents can get people to realize how dangerous this usurpation of power has been.
- [14:40]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Speaking before the Declaration, I was struck by this from the Magna Carta 1215 the other day. No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled, or ruined in any way except by the lawful judgment of his peers and the law of the land. This is, this is pretty old material.
- [14:56]
Anne Applebaum
It's pretty old material. And those ideas, which were English ideas, are the basis of our legal system, too, at some long time ago.
- [15:07]
Tim Miller
I want to go to your most recent article for the Atlantic, Kleptocracy, Inc. You write, american government, American foreign policy, and American trade policy are slowly being transformed not to benefit Americans, but to benefit the president, his family and his friends. Only voters can stop them. Give people kind of just a top line summary of what you wrote about.
- [15:27]
Anne Applebaum
So, in a way, this is the same issue. This is also about the rule of law. More specifically, it's about people who have political power also using that political power to enrich themselves. You know, to be clear, you know, wealthy people have been very influential in America forever. And, you know, probably they always will be like they are in every country. And there have been other examples of corruption in, you know, in the past, but I don't know of another administration where there were so many people who had double interests. You know, the president himself, you know, on the day that the stock market was crashing Friday, April 4, instead of going to Wall street to find out what was going on, he went to his personal golf course and to his club in Florida where a golf tournament was taking place that is sponsored by companies from Saudi Arabia. One of the people in attendance was the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Several other Saudi companies were on the list of sponsors, including Aramco, which is the Saudi oil company. TikTok was one of the sponsors of this golf tournament. You know, these are companies that have a direct interest in U.S. foreign policy and are directly interested in influencing Donald Trump. And in effect, they are. Their sponsorship is a form of payment. They're. They're paying him, they're supporting his course, they're supporting his club. That's unthinkable in any other administration that there would be so much blatant abuse. The genesis of that article, though, was that I started trying to pull together some of these things, you know, both the Trump, Trump's family, Trump himself, but also other people in the administration, you know, and other. Other incidents of people trying to buy influence or get out of court cases or get out of, you know, other, other tangles with the government through influence, through, through financial influence or financial relationships with the Trump family or with Donald Trump, and as well as lists of what the Trump administration is doing to loosen all the laws against fraud. And against corruption that we have in our system. And the list is astonishingly long. You know, there are dozens and dozens of instances already and we're only three months into the administration. I mean, like it starts in December when the Trump family is a big investment in Saudi Arabia. You know, it continues with the Trump family's, you know, cryptocurrency business, which in effect, almost anybody can be an investor in that business. And that's again a way to pay the Trump family. And there's already one instance of somebody who was a major investor having a piece of civil litigation against him lifted or suspended. You know, we don't know whether there was a quid pro quo, but it certainly looks like there, there could have been. So nobody's made any effort to avoid that. Elon Musk's conflicts of interest. I mean, Mus. Musk is responsible for firing people at government agencies who were responsible for regulating his companies. And he has a presence also in government agencies that are able to subsidize his companies or buy things from his companies. You know, whether it's Starlink or whether it's the State Department, I think is buying armored Teslas. That's a grotesque conflict of interest of a kind that we. I also can't think of a contemporary precedent. Again, rich people, influential, they do, they get laws passed, you know, they, they lobby for things and so on. But to actually have the owner of major companies that have major interests have been heavily subsidized by the US Government, personally going into government agencies and firing people and making policy there, and I can't think of anything like that. I mean, that is oligarchy of a kind you see in autocratic states. I mean, that's Russian style oligarchy. Once again, it is a profound challenge to the rule of law, to the assumption that, you know, democracy needs transparency and accountability and that people who are acting in the public interest should be acting in the interest of Americans and not in their personal financial interests. I mean, when Musk has people fired at, you know, the transportation safety regulatory bodies, you know, is that, is that because it's good for Americans or because it's good for Tesla? You know, and if it's just good for Tesla, then, you know, then that's a catastrophe for Americans and sooner or later there will be repercussions and we will be less safe and we will be more badly regulated and our taxpayers money will be wasted on, on Musk's companies. You know, I feel that partly because some of this stuff sounds complicated. I mean, there's a thing called the Corporate Transparency act, which they've announced they're not going to enforce, which requires people to reveal owners of shell companies, to reveal who they really are. These are, these are anonymous companies that are often used to hide stolen money or to escape paying taxes. You know, those sound like those are complicated big words. And they, you know, kleptocracy can be a complicated thing to describe, but to me, this should cause, you know, as in aggregate, I mean, almost more outrage than anything else. And if there's a way that opponents of this administration can explain it to people, you know, your money is being taken and used to enrich people around Trump, and your policy has been stolen and it's being. It's been captured by people who are using it to enrich themselves or pursue their own interests. I mean, this is about as fundamental a violation of what government is for. I mean, forget about democracy as anything that we've seen. I mean, and in a way, combined with the illegal deportations, they both show this scorn for the rule of law and this scorn for any kind of basic responsibility that government officials should have to the people who elected them.
- [21:10]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I'm actually doing a deeper dive later this afternoon just on the crypto element of this. There's this great substack article by Molly White. I'm going to interview Molly so people can get that on YouTube or in our Bulwark Takes feed. But I wanted to ask you about, just looking back about the opposition here, because I do think reflecting back on the first term, this issue is maybe the biggest failure of the institutions and the oppositions. And the opposition. Right. Like, the idea of the emoluments clause became kind of like a joke, honestly, during the first term. People would, like, roll your eyes when you talked about it, but there was a test drive of all this stuff in the first term. Trump was doing things that were totally unprecedented in the first term as far as enriching himself and his family. It was just kind of small ball stuff compared to what you just laid out. And so are there any lessons that can be learned from that? The idea that the Democrats had control of Congress for two years during the Trump first term and didn't really do meaningful investigations on this as compared to what Republicans did against the Hillary Clinton server or Benghazi, to me. Seems like just a huge mistake in retrospect.
- [22:20]
Anne Applebaum
Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, partly because it was stuff like people staying in Trump's hotels. You know, it was, it was some Pretty distant connections. It didn't feel. You know, it's not as grotesque and egregious as it is now. It was underrated. But maybe the lesson here is, once again, to bring back to the illegal deportations. I mean, if you don't begin to react when the law is broken, and when you're referring to the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which says that, you know, American leaders can't take money in any form from foreigners or from foreign governments, which, you know, Trump now blatantly does, you know, when those things aren't enforced, when they're broken, then that makes it much easier for somebody to push. You know, you open the door a crack, and then it can be burst open. You know, it can be burst open at a later point. I mean, this gets to a point that I don't. I don't have an answer to this. Maybe you. Maybe you have thoughts. During Trump's first term, a lot of people complained that, I don't know, that people talking about democracy or people talking about law breaking were hysterical, and they were exaggerating and they were. You know, there was Trump derangement syndrome, and they weren't, you know, they were overreacting to stuff that Trump was doing. You know, I never knew quite whether that was right or not. I mean, it's true that if you speak at a very high pitch the whole time, then people stop listening to you. So there's something. There's something right about that. On the other hand, it certainly looks, in retrospect, like we underreacted. We underreacted to the corruption, we underreacted to the beginnings of oligarchy. We certainly underreacted to January the sixth and a whole series of violations after that. And that people are only beginning to see that now, you know, years later is tragic. I mean, now it's a little late. I mean, now the horse is out of the barn, you know, whatever metaphor you want to use.
- [24:08]
Tim Miller
I mean. No, my only thought that is 100% agree. I don't know how to fix that. The image I always bring up whenever people talk, talk about overreacting is if you went back and showed a front page of the newspaper the day after January 6th to anyone in January of 2015, they would say, that is impossible. That is insane. There's no way that could happen here. Right? And so then how can you convince the people that would have had that view in January 2015 to act that way, how they might have in January 2021 or 2025? And I don't it's like human instinct, human. Like this is more of a psychological than a political question. Humans are adaptable. And I guess maybe there's a lesson here from the other article that you wrote that I wanted to reference, which is this, America's future is hungry. And I don't know if there are ways that we can learn from that to put some limitations in now. I mean, one such example is right on this point. I guess Orban was forcing people to stay at his son in law's hotel as just a direct comparison to what we're seeing here. But you know, what else, you know, since maybe we're a little bit behind on the timeline, you know, happened there, that might be a useful lesson.
- [25:20]
Anne Applebaum
So actually what happened in Hungary is a little different from what's happening here. What happened in Hungary was a very slow attack on institutions. I mean, it went, it was over a long period of time. And it's this, it's more the boiling the frog theory, you know, that you keep turning up the heat a little bit and the frog doesn't notice and doesn't notice until finally it's did. So it was hard to pinpoint the moment when Hungary stopped being a democracy. You know, it was, it was a small, lots and lots of small changes over a long period of time. Orban was able to change the constitution. He kept manipulating it. He undermined the judiciary. There was a slow process of taking over the media, which he mostly did through business groups who were close to him. I mean, it's not like there was censorship. Instead there were the media. You know, companies would begin to have a lot of financial trouble and then somebody would take them over and shut them down. That was the, it was rather that system. And until we got to a point where it was suddenly almost impossible to unseat him. He controlled all the media in the country. He controlled 95% of the public conversation. You know, he took over the universities, he took over all the cultural institutions. And all that stuff happened one by one. I mean, actually what's happening here in the United States is much faster. It's going much faster. The Doge group of the engineers going into the Treasury Department and cutting off the payment system and deciding what they will and won't fund. I mean, I think it's just Musk's personal decision or maybe some of these kids personal decision about what they're going to fund and what they're not going to fund. I mean, I don't even know if Trump is, is fully aware of all these Things. I mean, that kind of thing didn't happen in Hungary. So this is much faster, much more violent, metaphorically violent, but much rapid. But of course it's going in the same direction. The point I wanted to make in that article was that it's true that the decline of democracy in Hungary has got a lot of attention and people have written about it. And the right has often pointed to Orban as a kind of model. There's a lot of admiration in particular for what he did to universities. He. He did something that we're going to. About to find very familiar, which was saying for, you know, if you have a gender studies program or some other program that we don't, the government doesn't like, then we're going to cut off your funding. I think that's where that idea came from. So quite a lot of stuff they did is widely admired in the. In sort of maga world by. By different parts of advance. I think it's a particular admirer of. Of some of these tactics. Not that many people look at what happened in the meantime to the Hungarian economy or Hungarian people. And the answer is that Hungary is, depending on which measure you use, is either the poorest country in the European Union or maybe the second poorest. You know, sometimes it's the third poorest. It's gone way down the charts. It has, you know, very poor productivity, large numbers of people leave the country, hospital system and medical system in very poor shape, educational system in very bad shape. You know, by one measure after the next, I mean, if you look at. Just look at charts, you find that Hungary is now at or near the bottom of almost everything in Europe. There's even one that someone pointed me out, I was in Budapest a couple months ago, which is the Heritage foundation has a measure of. It's a measure of governance, and it puts Hungary at the bottom of the measure of governance and government accountability because Hungary is so corrupt.
- [28:35]
Tim Miller
That must be somebody in the back of the Heritage building. They don't even realize the guy's still back there. He's been there since 1983. It's like, we got to fire this guy that's coming up with the. Coming up with a bad metric here.
- [28:46]
Anne Applebaum
It's some kind of index they do. And Hungary ranks near the bottom in Europe. And the point is that all these measures, these kind of flamboyant transformation of the state into being the arm of the ruling party and the end of free media and the suppression of statistics. The government uses fake statistics, and there's always a fake Report beginning of the year about how great the economy is. And they don't tell you that, they don't tell people the truth, you know, all that kind of stuff. It's had an enormous effect, you know, on people's lives. And Hungarians are poorer than their neighbors by some measures. They're poorer than Romanians, which is their, one of their historic rivals, which annoys them in particular. But it's also a really profoundly corrupt country. Something like, depending how you count, like 20 to 30% of Hungarian companies who are in effect part of this group of companies who are reliant on, who have special arrangements with the government. They prosper because they get access to lucrative government contracts. And so the hotel that you read about where Orban's son in law owns, he owns a bunch of stuff actually. But you know, the hotel that they were trying to get dignitaries to stay in, you know, that's just one tiny piece of it. I mean, the son in law has had lucrative procurement, you know, contracts, all kinds of special relationships with the state. But he's not the only one. And those companies are this huge weight on the Hungarian economy. They're a big chunk of it. They drag it down, you know, they aren't productive. They exist and they're managed in order to, in order to please the ruling, you know, the ruling party. In that sense, they're kind of like Soviet companies used to be. And it's been a disaster for the economy. And that, you know, the point is, is that authoritarianism makes you poor.
- [30:32]
Tim Miller
This is a problem with the link. There's like, and I don't know how to do this is another political challenge where the remaining Wall Street Journal Republican types that are out there, they haven't accepted the reality of how far down the path we are towards the authoritarianism element of it. And they think that is, as you were mentioning earlier, like TDS or hyperbolic. And since they don't accept the premise, I don't feel like they have pushed back as hard as maybe they would have against the economic punishment that is coming as part of that. And this is why I was kind of on the side of hoping that he does as big of tariffs as possible, because the more pain that happens, the more maybe that will shake some of these money guys from their slumber. But I don't know they're related in that sense.
- [31:22]
Anne Applebaum
It's also true that in some ways an economic crisis or a recession, that's one of the best things that could happen by comparison to the other things that could happen because of Our destruction of state institutions. I mean, what about a cyber attack that takes out the electricity grid or something? I'm just making this up. I don't know whether that's possible or not. But you know, when you eliminate regulators and when you eliminate, when you attack, you know, pieces of the security state, you know, then you're, you're, you're putting yourself at risk. And so a recession might be, might be the wake up call. I mean, I think part of the problem also is that people are misled by China. And so China is an authoritarian state that did very well economically over many years. But the reasons for that, when you look at it, I mean, essentially it was because the Chinese adopted some practices of free markets, because they let entrepreneurs function, because they sought to maintain elements of a fair bureaucracy. I think Francis Fukuyama used to write about this, about how, you know, the Chinese had a functional state which was part of why they were able to grow so fast. If you look around the world at just about almost any other dictatorship. If you look at Venezuela, which was the richest country in South America and is now the poorest thanks to dictatorship, if you look at Hungary, which was one of the most promising countries in Central Europe and is now one of either the poorest or the second poorest, if you look at a country like, I don't know, I mean, when you think about Turkey, Turkey, Zimbabwe, most autocratic states have been, are poor and sometimes even desperate. And even the ones that are successful, you have to ask how much more successful they would be if they had real rule of law, you know, if they had freer markets or freer speech and, you know, better exchange of ideas. Authoritarianism is a huge cost on the economy. You know, it costs money, it drags you down, it creates uncertainty. I mean, who wants to invest in the United States in a situation in which the tariffs might be one thing one day and one thing another day. And maybe, you know, if you're a, I don't know, your European company wants to build something in America, you want to bring over your German manager. Well, what, he's going to have visa problems because now we're attacking foreigners and we take away their cell phones at the border. Once you disturb, you create the idea that the US is an unstable and unpredictable place that's a disaster for long term economic growth and for investment and for planning and for everything else that you need to make people prosperous. I mean, it's. And we've seen that you can look around the world, I mean, over and over and over and over again, in authoritarian countries, you know, they destroy their citizens futures by leaving aside the rule of law.
- [34:06]
Tim Miller
You mentioned China yesterday. We were on Nicole Wallace together and you kind of alluded to the fact that there's some similarities with what's happening with the universities to, or some maybe echoes of the Cultural Revolution in China. Afternoon cable news isn't really the best place to explore those kind of metaphors at length. So I was like, I was listening to you and I was like, I want to hear more about that. So luckily we're together today, so I would like to hear more about that comparison.
- [34:33]
Anne Applebaum
Again, I don't want to push it too far. I mean, we're not using mass violence, sure, we're not sending intellectual to concentration camps or not yet. But what was the Cultural Revolution? The Cultural Revolution was an attempt to get rid of a layer of, you know, what the, what the Chinese, you know, radical part of the Chinese Communist Party thought were, you know, backward looking elites. And those were professors, they were, you know, civil servants, they were older people who had some kind of status and they were hauled before, you know, student groups who shouted at them and you know, and demanded there that they resign and in some cases could arrange for them to be sent to, you know, I don't know, cut trees in, in Outer Mongolia. But the point was, is that it was a revolution against the existing culture, against the cultural institutions, universities, museums, you know, every, everybody who had some kind of educational rank or status. And this attack on American universities and on science more broadly has a whiff of that. You know, what they were asking Harvard to do was something Harvard could never have accepted. You know, it was, we want control over your admissions process, over what courses you teach, over who you hire, you know, over, over decisions the faculty makes. I mean, no university can accept that. And you know, Columbia tried to accept some of it and they still didn't get their federal money or they, and you know, even accepting some of it meant there was a further demand for more. And it becomes pretty clear when you look at this stuff that the point is not, you know, it's certainly not about anti Semitism or whatever fake story they give. And the point is they want to destroy all these institutions and they are cutting funding. And by the way, most federal funding for universities doesn't go to like gender studies or even like history or whatever you think it goes to. It goes to scientific research, it goes to biochemical research, it goes to medical research, it goes to, you know, the physics departments. I mean, the vast bulk of federal research funding Goes to things that we all care about that make our lives better, that create the products that America then sells around the world. And the fact that they're going for that, you know, they're destroying those people and that layer of society means they really want to destroy, you know, the essence of what makes America work now. And they want to replace it with something else. And I genuinely don't know what they think will replace it, because it isn't like there's some other group of, you know, MAGA scientists who can replace the Harvard scientists and do the same thing.
- [37:06]
Tim Miller
And colleges are, though. And they did this a little bit in Florida. Not again. We're restraining the metaphor a little bit to talk about what Ron DeSantis did as like, a cultural revolution. But they had the new college in Florida. They put Christopher Ruffo, who is this, you know, was at a conservative think tank, is like a social media gadfly, like, ends up. I forget what his job is, but, like a top job, like running a university in. In Florida and, you know, instituting, you know, more. Whatever conservative, traditionalist values. So, like, that. That's. That would be one prime example. There's probably. No, there's not really an NIH version of that, but there certainly is for the universities.
- [37:42]
Anne Applebaum
Yeah. I mean, as I recall, and I read about this, you know, a year or two ago, so I don't know whether it's still true. One of the only ways they could change the nature of that college was to bring in a lot of athletes.
- [37:53]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [37:53]
Anne Applebaum
You know, again, it wasn't like there was this other group of great intellectuals who'd been repressed by this, the fake censorship complex that they imagine exists. Instead, what they had to do was fill the university with people who play baseball.
- [38:07]
Tim Miller
That's a cultural revolution of a sort.
- [38:09]
Anne Applebaum
That's a cultural revolution. I mean, but you're right. I mean, it's the replacement of people who think with, you know, with. They're looking to find people who think differently. But what they'll end up doing, which is, by the way, exactly what happened in China is just destroying everything and then realizing a few years later that they need to bring everybody back again.
- [38:27]
Tim Miller
I want to talk a little bit about Africa. I've given a short shrift on the pod just because there's so much happening. But there's Atlantic article yesterday or maybe Wednesday that said the headline, ominous headline, in three months, half of them will be dead. That's about how the Trump administration has quietly doubled down on its plan to stop sending emergency food to millions of children who are starving in Somalia and other countries. There was also an NPR article I saw earlier this week about Zambia and how it was 12 Zambians sharing their stories about how HIV drugs are running out. It's a horrifying image from like a church in Zambia where half of the congregants didn't show up because they were sick, because their HIV medicine was running out. Really horrible story. So just I saw you shared the Atlantic story on Blue Sky. I wondered if you have any kind of thoughts about the ramifications, the global ramifications.
- [39:17]
Anne Applebaum
So, as it happens, I have just been to Africa. I was in Sudan. I haven't written about it yet, so, so won't talk about it extensively. But I have to say one of the most kind of moving moments for me. I was at a hospital in Khartoum, outside of Khartoum, rather, and it was a children's pediatric hospital. And there was a very young, attractive doctor there. And he was talking about there's a feeding supplement, a nutritional supplement called Plumpy Nut, which is made in the US it's made in two factories in Georgia and in Rhode Island. And it's one of the things that USAID has been buying from these factories and shipping to, to Africa, you know, and not just Africa, you know, all over the world, wherever there are malnourished children and there are, there are malnourished children. In Sudan because of the civil war, he'd heard that, you know, USAID was being cut because of wastefulness. And he said to me, you know, I just want to assure Americans that, you know, we're not wasting any of it. You know, I keep track of exactly how much of it there is. All of it makes its way to these children, you know, who are, who are on the brink of starvation. And it was, you know, the idea that a doctor in a hospital like that, in a war zone was having to justify, you know, to an American that he was using their, you know, we're talking about probably a few dollars worth of stuff that he was justifying that was, to me, so tragic and so moving, the way in which USAID was destroyed. It's a catastrophe all over the planet. And it's not even just the food being cut off. It's also, you know, the logistics, so the delivery of the food. So the United States was supplying something like 40% of all humanitarian aid in the world, which is a high number, but the US Was also doing a lot of the logistics. So physical delivery, trucking, but management, monitoring, surveying, you know, I mean, how many people are starving in this part of the world or that part of the world? There's somebody has to know that before you, before you can deliver the aid. And a lot of those programs which were USAID funded programs have been cut. And the ramifications and the echoes, you know, I think, are going to be with us for years and years and years. I mean, it just. People will absolutely begin to die because of these decisions that Elon Musk made. You know, he says he's feeding USAID into the wood chipper. And isn't that great? You know, well, the effect is going to be children dying, people being sick, lifelines and systems that worked for people falling apart. It's one of the most tragic and catastrophic things that we've done so far.
- [41:44]
Tim Miller
Just horrifying. And it's like, for what? We're also harming the people at the Plumpy Nut factory in Georgia. Like, the whole thing is just so maddening. Since we've been on, Marco Rubio been talking about the Russia Ukraine war. And I want to kind of end, I want to end with a fun thing, but. So we'll end with a fun thing. The penultimate topic, Marco, speaking about the Russia Ukraine war. Let's listen.
- [42:07]
Marco Rubio
So we came here yesterday to sort of begin to talk about more specific outlines of what it might take to end the war, to try to figure out very soon. And I'm talking about a matter of days, not a matter of weeks, whether or not this is the war that can be ended. If it can, we're prepared to do whatever we can to facilitate that and make sure that it happens, that it ends in a durable and just way. If it's not possible, if we're so far apart that this is not going to happen, then I think the president is probably at a point where he's going to say, well, we're done. You know, we'll do what we can on the margins. We'll be ready to help whenever you're ready to, to have peace. But we're not going to continue with this endeavor for weeks and months on end.
- [42:48]
Tim Miller
Pretty shocking. Marco Rubio setting the stage for abandoning Ukraine there in a matter of days, maybe even. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. I know I'm dropping it on. You live here?
- [42:57]
Anne Applebaum
Well, no, I did know about it, and I know that the Europeans with whom Rubio met don't know what it means. What does it mean to say we're dropping it, we're just not doing it anymore? It's a mystery. Does it mean they won't give Ukraine access to satellite information? Does it mean they're not speaking to Putin anymore? It's very, very unclear. I mean, the only thing I would say is that the idea that it's not doable and they've tried really hard is. It's laughable. This war continues because the Russians remain on the offensive. By the way, they've started a new offensive in northeast Ukraine. So they are. They are continuing to push forward. They have still never recognized the right of Ukraine to exist as a sovereign state. So they have never agreed to a ceasefire. They have never stopped fighting. You know, they've never acknowledged that Ukraine can come out of this war and remain an independent country, which has to be the fundamental requirement of Ukraine, apart from where the border is going to be and everything else. And this administration has put no pressure on Russia. On the contrary, it has given the Russians the impression that they're about to do lots of deals with them, and there are all kinds of arrangements are going to be made and people are going to start making money. And so until they have put pressure on the Russians, then they haven't done anything. You know, there hasn't been a negotiation. There hasn't been a strategy. There's just been, you know, the president, you know, shouting about how he wants to end the war, shouting at Zelensky, you know, waving his hands in the air, and nothing. I mean, they haven't. They've done nothing. And the idea that they've worked really hard on it and it's, you know, and now they're blaming everybody else for failing to achieve anything. I mean, it's ridiculous.
- [44:35]
Tim Miller
They've never even been able to enunciate what the ask is of Russia, you know, across multiple people. Trump and Rubio Wyckoff. You know, anytime a reporter asks us, well, like, what are you asking? For them to concede? They don't. They have nothing. They say nothing. You know, I think they're just hoping that Trump's friendship with Putin and the supposed great economic deal we're going to do with them would be enough for Russia to just stop their conquest of Ukraine. And it was just gullible in the extreme.
- [45:02]
Anne Applebaum
Trump has an imaginary idea that he has a deep relationship with Putin, but, you know, it exists in his head. It's not in reality.
- [45:10]
Tim Miller
I know guys like this. He doesn't have real friendships. He doesn't have any actual friends. Like, this is. So he thinks Putin is a friend anyway. Okay, we're to end with this last Time we talked, you mentioned the book the Captive Mind of Milosz. It was a Polish book about the totalitarianism coming into Poland. Me and Bill Kristol discussed this a little length a couple weeks ago. How the thing that really struck me from that book was he was talking about how we in the west have a lack of imagination about how bad things could get. Among the things that struck me when I read it this time, my request for you is, you know, we're always. We're so serious. You have to have an escape, right? Ann Applebaugh must have a. And must read, like, trashy romance novels or watch a TV show or there must be some type of escape for you. And I thought maybe you could make a recommendation for the listeners also looking for an escape.
- [45:59]
Anne Applebaum
I mean, lots of my real escapes are to do with walking in pretty places and going outside. You know, I mean, that's, that's good, you know.
- [46:06]
Tim Miller
Do you have a favorite walk, favorite pretty place?
- [46:09]
Anne Applebaum
It depends where I am. I mean, you know, in Washington, there's the Billy Goat Trail. You know, in Warsaw, there's, you know, there's the kind of central park in the middle of town, Wazinke Park. I have a house in Polish countryside and we ride bikes a lot there. I mean, that's really what I do when I want to. When I want to.
- [46:28]
Tim Miller
Is there Polish alcohol at the house, at the countryside? Is there.
- [46:31]
Anne Applebaum
So I am not a big vodka drinker, but there are other kinds of European alcohol. We have no tariffs in Poland that prevent the import of French wine, no.
- [46:41]
Tim Miller
Terrorists preventing the French red wine from making it. The Billy Goat Trail is great. I did the Billy Goat Trail a couple of times, hung over when I was in Washington. It's very manageable for our DMV listeners. And maybe you'll see Ann Applebaum out there. Ann, thank you so much. It's been so educational and helpful, and I hope you'll come back soon. Thanks a lot, everybody else. We'll see you back here on Monday with Bill Kristol. Have a wonderful Easter weekend. We'll talk to you soon.
- [47:03]
Unknown Speaker 1
Peace, should they at any time become a clear and present danger initiated by the radical elements threatening the operation of the government of the United States of America. Members of this radical element shall be transported to detention centers until such time as their threat has been eliminated. Code King Alfred.
- [47:22]
Unknown Speaker 2
Bring Obama back. Tell them bring Obama back. Got the Uzi, Anakin, and where the drama at? Oh, they asking for a favor. Where the commas at?
- [47:32]
Unknown Speaker 1
Uno, dos, tres. Hey, cuato cigo.
- [47:34]
Unknown Speaker 2
Says hey, we shall overcome and if we don't, you better run they come coming with the sticks and the drums the money make the band sound great what's your rate?
- [47:48]
Anne Applebaum
What's your rate?
- [47:49]
Unknown Speaker 2
I rather do the flight than wear cape RP the STP the great smg we got it out the crate SMG here ring a bell and make a late like what it do Bob this a war zone Send them to the gulag they was talking now they talk with Tupac now they JFK with the roof off like we shall overcome and if we don't you better run they coming with the sticks and the drum the money make the band sound great.
- [48:27]
Tim Miller
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.