Anne Applebaum: Trump's Firehose of Lies

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Bulwark — Anne Applebaum: Trump's Firehose of Lies
Date: June 11, 2026
Host: Tim Miller
Guest: Anne Applebaum (Staff Writer, The Atlantic; Author of "Twilight of Democracy" and "Autocracy, Inc.")

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Overview

In this episode, Tim Miller welcomes journalist and historian Anne Applebaum for an expansive discussion on the chaotic state of U.S. foreign policy under Trump, focusing on the administration’s disinformation tactics—what Applebaum describes as the "firehose of falsehoods." The conversation traverses the ongoing conflict with Iran, media manipulation, the information war, developments in Ukraine, propaganda’s corrosive effect on democracies, and reflections on the U.S. approach to global autocracy. The pair also touch on recent incidents in the UK, Venezuela, and immigration, and close with recommendations for summer reading.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The U.S. & Iran: Chaos, Bombings, and Disinformation

• Current Situation: The U.S. carried out new strikes on Iran, with Trump announcing aggressive intentions and inconsistent messaging regarding potential "ground invasions" and seizure of oil resources (03:27).
• Narrative Instability: Trump’s explanations for military actions change daily, making it nearly impossible for the public to discern what’s "real" (03:27–04:24).
  • Quote — Anne Applebaum:
    “He keeps trying one version of events after the other… 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.’ …People begin to eventually blank out. …Maybe that's exactly what he's trying to do.” (03:27–04:24)
• Strategy and Intent: The constant change in narrative, Applebaum argues, is itself a propaganda technique to erode the public’s ability (and will) to seek the truth.
• Lack of Clear Justification: Miller and Applebaum both underscore the absence of a coherent rationale for U.S. action in Iran.
  • Quote — Tim Miller:
    “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.” (06:56)
• Propaganda Tactics: Applebaum references both Russian and Steve Bannon approaches to information warfare: flooding the field with so many contradictory stories that people tune out entirely (07:22–08:31).
• Disconnected Reality: The administration, per Applebaum, is almost exclusively focused on online narratives and engagement, not real-world consequences (16:22–17:28).

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2. Manipulation, Misinformation, and the Post-Truth Era

• Online Propaganda:
  • Applebaum draws parallels between Russia's and the Trump administration’s information strategies—"consciously seeking to shape information … in a way that has almost nothing to do with reality" (18:11).
  • The administration measures success by online engagement, not by actual impact or policy outcomes (16:22).
• X (formerly Twitter) and Elon Musk:
  • The platform’s algorithmic biases and Musk’s personal sway in shaping narratives, particularly around immigration and violent incidents in the UK (19:36–22:56).
  • Memorable moment discussing how isolated incidents are transformed online into broad, often false, narratives to incite real-world anger or unrest.
    • Quote — Anne Applebaum:
      “You can take one incident and you can tell a story about a whole country that isn’t necessarily true. …You can pluck these stories out of real life, turn them into something else on the Internet, and then use the anger...to create riots and people burning down houses somewhere else is pretty scary.” (20:48–22:56)
• Impact on Public Trust:
  • The cumulative effect is public confusion and disengagement—a level of fatigue and numbness that saps civic energy.

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3. Ukraine: A Technological and Information Turning Point

(24:58–34:26)

• Latest Developments: Applebaum provides a fresh on-the-ground report:
  • Ukrainian technological superiority, especially in drone warfare, is eroding Russia’s capacity to sustain the conflict. Daily Russian casualties can reach up to 1,000, and refining targets within Russia are being hit (26:24–27:40).
  • Despite a “stalemate” on the map, the war is dynamic and favoring Ukraine’s decentralized approach.
• Russian Domestic Reality:
  • Growing disconnect between Putin’s propaganda (inevitable victory) and the grim reality visible to ordinary Russians. This gap is widening and being discussed even by Russian influencers (29:15–29:18).
  • Quote — Anne Applebaum:
    “The gap between Russian propaganda and reality is now becoming clear. What that means is hard to say.” (29:18)
• Potential for Escalation: Miller queries whether Putin may open a new theater or provoke a NATO country. Applebaum notes the risk, but cautions it would be "foolhardy" (30:22–31:03).
• The Power of Openness:
  • Ukraine’s decentralized innovation demonstrates the power of a messy, creative democracy in contrast to Russia’s rigid, top-down system (33:03).

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4. Sanctions, Economy, and European Contradictions

• Russia’s Economy: While Russia has found ways around sanctions (with help from China and gaps in Western enforcement), its economy remains shaky, with high inflation and huge defense expenditures. The loss of refining capacity from Ukrainian drone attacks prevents full benefit from higher oil prices (34:26–35:41).

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5. Venezuela, Authoritarianism, and Foreign Policy Cynicism

• Venezuela’s Slide:
  • Anne and Tim discuss a Wall Street Journal piece by opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez highlighting ongoing political oppression and lack of rule of law.
  • The superficial shift of personnel does not equal real change; persistent danger and arbitrariness remain (36:43–39:08).
• Tech Oligarchs & Truth: Noteworthy that U.S. business leaders—particularly in tech—often repeat or facilitate propaganda, in contrast to oil/gas CEOs who can sometimes offer blunt honesty.
  • Quote — Tim Miller:
    “Why can’t everybody just be like that? That is a normal society where a CEO can, can just, you know, offer bluntly that something that the president’s doing is bad.” (40:12)

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6. Immigration, World Cup Controversies, and Performative Cruelty

• Immigration Policy: Miller highlights U.S. deportations to dangerous countries, including Iranian women seeking asylum, reflecting a disconnect between policy rhetoric (supporting dissidents) and practice (sending them to possible harm). Applebaum labels this "performative cruelty" (41:27–41:53).
• World Cup/FIFA Issues:
  • U.S. bans participation from a Somali referee while admitting the Iranian team; lack of FIFA protest is noted (42:42–43:39).
  • FIFA's rental of Trump Tower office space seen as a possible effort to curry favor with the administration.

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7. Autocracy, Propaganda, and the Erosion of Care

• Summary Reflection:
  • Applebaum observes a "lack of interest in humans" from the administration—whether for Americans struggling with inflation, Iranians suffering under conflict, or Epstein’s victims (16:22).
  • The regime’s self-enclosed online focus has bred an environment where truth is secondary to performative, viral engagement.
  • Quote — Anne Applebaum:
    “They're inside the world that they created. …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…” (16:22–17:28)

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8. Palate Cleanser: The Lighter (but Not Too Light) Side

• Carrie Lake’s Jamaican Banishment (45:47–48:54): Once a potential national figure, Carrie Lake is now ambassador to Jamaica, an anti-climactic end to her political saga.
  • Quote — Anne Applebaum:
    “What did Jamaica do to deserve this? …Somebody who failed at running for office and who then failed at running an important agency. And now she gets sent there.” (47:35)
• Applebaum Book Club Recommendations:
  • Anne: The Time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig—a short novel about the end of Franco’s Spain, exploring how political upheaval shapes ordinary lives (49:56–51:06).
  • Tim: My Tender Matador—a gay coming-of-age novel set during Pinochet’s Chile.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the "firehose of falsehoods":
  • 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. …People begin to eventually blank out.” (03:27–04:24)
• Applebaum defines the technique:
  "They put out not just one lie, but millions of lies, or not just one explanation, but one after another after the next. …Sooner or later, they won't pay any attention to anything at all." (07:22–08:31)
• On the administration’s empty performativity:
  “All administrations exaggerate, all administrations spin. But there is an emptiness to this that puts them in this space where it really is all just propaganda and service of their corruption and authoritarian powers.” (15:45)
• On Ukraine’s decentralized innovation:
  “There are these pockets of creativity... 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.” (33:03)
• On the psychological result of constant scandal and cruelty:
  • Anne Applebaum:
    “One thing after next, you know, 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.” (44:32)

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Timestamps for Significant Segments

• U.S. Strikes & Disinformation in Iran: 03:27–09:56
• Propaganda “Firehose” Explained: 04:24–08:31
• Contrast with Iraq War, Loss of Human Focus: 12:20–13:36
• The Online Reality, Elon Musk, and Social Media Distortions: 16:22–22:56
• Update on Ukraine War, Drone Warfare, Russian Propaganda: 24:58–34:26
• Venezuela: Ongoing Oppression and International Cynicism: 36:43–40:12
• Immigration, World Cup, and “Performative Cruelty”: 41:27–43:39
• Carrie Lake, Political Fates, and Book Recommendations: 45:47–51:56

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a deeply informed, at times bleak, but also insight-rich conversation about the current state of American—and global—politics under Trump: the dominance of performative propaganda, the loss of earnest policy intent, the power of decentralized resistance (in Ukraine), and the psychological toll on populations subject to a nonstop torrent of misinformation. Applebaum’s and Miller’s rapport brings both clarity and a darkly humorous edge, closing with literary recommendations for those seeking both escape and greater understanding.

Transcript

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[Anne Applebaum]

All?

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[Tim Miller]

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, Justin and Jackson and Ben and the others. I hope that none of you, like me, turned 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 gonna 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 you doing?

[Anne Applebaum]

Fine, how are you?

[Tim Miller]

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.

[Anne Applebaum]

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

[Tim Miller]

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, who thinks 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 Kharg 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.

[Anne Applebaum]

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 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 trying to do.

[Tim Miller]

I definitely think there's some of that. And you can feel kind of the acute pushback to the war a month ago and less so now. Whether that be the markets or whether that just be conversation. I do think that there's kind of a sense of, we're in Groundhog Day. We don't know what's happening. There haven't been the acute crises that there were some were warning about with energy. I mean, this stuff takes a long time to go through. But people saw 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 to threat this morning, though, 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. And he, like, 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.

[Anne Applebaum]

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. 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 about, we're going to take their oil, you know, we're going to. We're going to 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.

[Tim Miller]

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?

[Anne Applebaum]

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, 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. 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 he. Is there a negotiation really happening? Is it not happening? You know, what are the Iranians really thinking? It makes it a confusing story to follow.

[Tim Miller]

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?

[Anne Applebaum]

It's like 27 or something.

[Tim Miller]

38.

[Anne Applebaum]

38.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, 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.

[Anne Applebaum]

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

[Ryan Seacrest]

Iran from the United States of America.

[Tim Miller]

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

[Anne Applebaum]

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.

[Tim Miller]

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.

[Anne Applebaum]

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 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 hit a water.

[Tim Miller]

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, you know, he kind of goes into whether this was a deliberate attack, but it seems like it was.

[Anne Applebaum]

Those are real stories. I mean, I actually, when I, when I read about what's happening to Iranians and I read people who are trying to do reporting from Iran and to 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, which by the way, is a big difference from Iraq.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[Anne Applebaum]

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 shape freedom for

[Tim Miller]

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

[Anne Applebaum]

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 that was, 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.

[Tim Miller]

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[Anne Applebaum]

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.

[Tim Miller]

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, because people all of a sudden saw a tangible difference. But beyond that, it's like, 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, but it seems like it's on that trajectory.

[Anne Applebaum]

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.

[Tim Miller]

Look at the California conversation around the battlefield.

[Anne Applebaum]

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 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.

[Tim Miller]

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, right? And that is in part impacting what's happening in the real world, 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.

[Anne Applebaum]

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

[Tim Miller]

No, no, me neither.

[Anne Applebaum]

Obviously they're horrible. I mean, but it's true. You can take, 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 immigrant 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, it was a police screw up and there was a, there was a deliberate misinformation.

[Tim Miller]

The perpetrator called the police to report the crime and so the cop. That's right, you know, assumed that they were the victim, not the perpetrator.

[Anne Applebaum]

Right. Which is not the first time in the, 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 if, you know, 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 the, on X are using. I mean, it's a horrible story, it's a terrible story. It's a police mistake and disaster and, and it's a tragedy, but it isn't, it isn't a political story in the way that it's being made to be. And so the, that you can pluck these stories out of, you know, out of real life, turn them into something else on the Internet, and then use the anger that they generate to create riots and, 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, they, you know, when there's a wave of information, you know, anger and emotion, 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, of the fact that we've given up the information space to algorithms that are being written, you know, outside of, outside of the places where they're being used.

[Tim Miller]

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[Anne Applebaum]

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

[Tim Miller]

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

[Anne Applebaum]

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 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.

[Tim Miller]

Really? A thousand a day?

[Anne Applebaum]

It can be 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 need to. Or 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 did not, 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, was pretty pathetic. This year Candace Owens was in attendance. So you can see what kind of caliber of economist is now.

[Tim Miller]

Hunter's new friends now going there.

[Anne Applebaum]

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 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

[Tim Miller]

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

[Anne Applebaum]

There are critiques of Putin. There are people comment that, 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, they have a, every May they have this enormous victory parade. And this year it was much shorter and 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 cleared everybody in the country that they aren't winning the war. And so the gap between Russian propaganda and reality is now becoming clear. What that means is hard to say.

[Tim Miller]

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.

[Anne Applebaum]

They threaten that they'll do that and they've been sending drones into 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, or just to create some anger and distraction and, you know, and. And cheer up the Russians. I. 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.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[Anne Applebaum]

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. 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 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. 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, you know, it's not going well. I mean, there's a deeper story here, too, and 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 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 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.

[Tim Miller]

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 Kaylin 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?

[Anne Applebaum]

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. Look from the outside and from the little news we have from the ends, it doesn't feel very happy. They know they're not winning. They know they're not prospering. They can see they're falling behind in all kinds of other races, the AI race, the technology race. And they're 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 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.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and safeway now through June 23rd. Shop for you. Save days and get great savings on all your favorite personal care Essentials and earn 4 times points. Shop in store or online and save on items like head and shoulder shampoo, Pantene shampoo, Tresma Conditioner, l' Oreal hair Dye, Tresemme Hairspray, and Aussie Miracle Curls. And earn four times points to use for future savings on groceries or gas. Offer ends June 23. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.

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[Tim Miller]

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 mayor and was

[Anne Applebaum]

the opposition leader in Venezuela.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, Was wrongly jailed by Maduro by the previous regime. It's pretty striking up, 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.

[Anne Applebaum]

It's a really, really important story. Also, he goes on to make a broader 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 is crazy. I mean, one of the reasons there's not a lot of reporting from Venezuela is it's incredibly 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 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 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. And 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 op ed, actually.

[Tim Miller]

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. You 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. I like, it was a frustrating conversation, but 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 like 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, can just, you know, offer bluntly that something that the president's doing is bad. Or wrong or not accurate.

[Anne Applebaum]

Exactly.

[Tim Miller]

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'd been a story that I covered, God, many months ago now, 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. Like, to your point earlier about how there's no actual care for the Iranian people. Like, 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 were sending their dissidents either back there or to some other dangerous country. Simultaneously to that we have the World cup happening. It is interesting that the Iranian soccer team has been let in. They're 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.

[Anne Applebaum]

It's ridiculous.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, he went back to Somalia, ref to 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 the immigration story has not been as acute in the public eye since the transfer from Nome.

[Anne Applebaum]

It's kind of performative cruelty, isn't it? It's, you know, we're going to take these Iranian women who've obviously left the country because they would be persecuted for political or religious reasons. You know, 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 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 bar 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 objections. I mean, there was no real commentary, no condemnation. Oh, the United States has the right to do it.

[Tim Miller]

Do you see the other, see the other FIFA story? They have a floor at Trump Tower. I think it's the 17th floor at Trump Tower in New York that they got that it's empty here. Like they opened up a quote unquote office in Trump's building in New York.

[Anne Applebaum]

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.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, it's a cya. Maybe it's like why they gave him the peace prize, given that FIFA peace prize order. It's like if we pay him, if we give him a war, you know, then if some controversy comes up, we can use some of that access, whatever to try to try to help manage the dictator. And I guess they don't think that defending the honor of their referee in a rose to the level of using any of that capital that they gained from buying off the Trump family.

[Anne Applebaum]

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'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, it's a, it's a display of cruelty. It appeals to Americans who also want to, you know, demonstrate their strength and cruelty and desire for, to exclude others. And it's, again, I think it's part of the same, the same propaganda that makes everybody else feel numb. You know, there's kind of one thing after next, you know, 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.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and safeway. Now through June 23rd. Shop for you. Save days and get great savings on all your favorite personal care Essentials and earn 4 times points. Shop in store or online and save on items like head and shoulder shampoo, Pantene shampoo, Tresemme conditioner, l' Oreal hair dye, Tresemme hairspray and Aussie Miracle Curls and earn four times points to use for future savings on groceries or gas. Offer ends June 23rd. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.

[Tim Miller]

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

[Anne Applebaum]

I mean, you know, let's go to the Palate Cleanser.

[Tim Miller]

Okay. I mean, everything, our existence is the Autocracy Ink Watch, I guess. Talk your second to last article, which is about my old 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.

[Anne Applebaum]

Apparently not.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. And she was 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.

[Anne Applebaum]

Yeah. Well, I wrote about her earlier in the year because I wrote about her, which 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, you know, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and really 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, literally like one catastrophic mistake after the next, undermining our foreign broadcasting, 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, 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, United States rich kids

[Tim Miller]

on spring break, you know, get it, get a little too high, lose their passport. You know, you need someone serious.

[Anne Applebaum]

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, it's, you know, I think Jamaica deserves better.

[Tim Miller]

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 like, we were like, we're only like 2 degrees away from her being like really 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 a 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.

[Anne Applebaum]

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

[Tim Miller]

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 of 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'm going to have good guest hosts. So I'm going to catch up on my Ann Applebaum 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 McEwan. The last time you were on, we shouted out Furious Minds by Laura Fields, about Claremont and how the bastardization of the conservative movement in America. Do you have a new edition for People this summer?

[Anne Applebaum]

So I have picked a novel for you.

[Tim Miller]

Great. I love novels.

[Anne Applebaum]

It's not even a long novel. It's a short novel. It's called the Time of Cherries. 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.

[Tim Miller]

Interesting.

[Anne Applebaum]

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.

[Tim Miller]

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 favorites 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.

[Anne Applebaum]

My Tender Matador.

[Tim Miller]

People want that. Yeah. So if people want the Time of Cherries and My Tender Matador, people can have two short novels for the summer where you get a little, you know, a little autocracy. So, you know, 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. Doing fiction. So there you go. Anne Applebaum, I appreciate you very much. Hope the wildflowers bloom soon in Poland. And we'll be talking to you a couple months.

[Anne Applebaum]

Thanks so much.

[Tim Miller]

All right, Everybody else will be back here tomorrow for a weekend edition of the pod. See you all then. Peace.

[Anne Applebaum]

So much.

[Tim Miller]

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.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and safeway now through June 23rd. Shop for you Save days and get great savings on all your favorite personal care Essentials and earn 4 times points. Shop in store or online and save on items like Head and shoulder shampoo, Pantene Shampoo, Tracema Conditioner, l' Oreal Hair Dye, Tracema Hairspray and Aussie Miracle Curls and earn four times points to use for future savings on groceries or gas. Offer ends June 23rd. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.