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- [00:00]
Ann Applebaum
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Charlie Sykes
Welcome to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We have so much to talk about, as usual, and we are very fortunate to have as our guest Ann Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize winning author of the book gulag from 2004 and a staff writer for the Atlantic. First of all, thanks for joining me and I appreciate it very much.
- [00:33]
Ann Applebaum
Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. Okay.
- [00:35]
Charlie Sykes
All right, let's just jump right into this because I've been doing this for a very long time, and this story about the signal gate broken by your magazine is one of the most amazing stories. We had the original story, then we had all of the national security aides troop down to Capitol Hill, up to Capitol Hill, testify under oath, nothing there, no war plans, nothing classified. And then on Wednesday, the second shoe drops and the Atlantic publishes real detailed information about all of the weapons packages and everything. So I'm just going to just toss this to you. What is this story about? What have we learned in the last 24, 48 hours? What is the heart of this story, Ann?
- [01:21]
Ann Applebaum
So I think there's two or three issues at the heart. One is the unbelievable sloppiness of this cabinet and of this administration. And the sloppiness is not only in accidentally adding Jeffrey Goldberg to their Signal chat, but also in the fact that they were using Signal at all. Signal is a commercial messaging app. It's more encrypted than some other apps. But it's not government communications. And the only reason to use it that I can see is in order to, you know, government communications have to all be recorded and kept for the record and put in the archives. And the only reason I can see for using it is to avoid having to do that. So it looks like they're trying to get around the government system. They're trying to have a private chat. They may well have been using their private telephones. We don't know that for certain yet, although Steve Witkoff, who I think was on the chat, this is Trump's negotiator in the Middle east and in Ukraine, has made a big fuss about the fact that he didn't see it and he wasn't on. He was in Moscow at the time. But that seems to be because he left his personal phone at home. But that means he's on this, he's on this on his personal phone. So, you know, this is, this is, this is, this is information on people's personal phones. There are all kinds of schemes and ways of getting into people's phones, of, of photographing and following what they're doing. It's profoundly unsecure. And the fact that you would be having a chat on there is in and of itself dangerous. So that's kind of the first level of, oh, my God.
- [03:00]
Charlie Sykes
And the Pentagon has actually put out a warning, right, telling people not to use Signal because it is so insecure, so easy for whether it's the Kremlin or China or Iran or North Korea to tap into, who knows, who can be listening.
- [03:14]
Ann Applebaum
And I know in previous administrations, I know that you were not allowed to have signal, certainly on your government phone, and if you want, and people, people working in the US Government couldn't use it. So it was considered, you know, not, not usable. And so that, and they, and there has been, as you say, there's been a, there's been a request from, from the Pentagon and maybe others not to use it. So this is already, this is a defiance of, of security rules. I mean, you know, the, you know, the adding of Jeff Goldberg being a particularly bizarre twist, I mean, to what's already unfortunate. I mean, I think the second level was the nature of the conversation. Yeah, there are a lot of oddities about it. So if you've, if you've, if you've read the Signal chat, you'll know, and if you haven't read it, I recommend you do it. One of the oddities is that while they're talking about bombing Yemen, their primary ire and anger is focused on Europe and Europeans, whom somehow they think they're doing this for. I have had at least one European tell me, I don't care about the Houthis, and I don't know if they were doing it for me, then, thank you very much, I didn't need it. But leaving that aside, I mean, they express this kind of anger and hatred of Europe, and we're going to have to tally up how much this costs, and we're going to have to charge the Europeans. So this is for an American security decision to do with freedom of shipping, you know, for whatever reasons they wanted to do it, Trump wanted to do it, but they want someone else to pay for it. So, you know, you see already the motivations are different. I mean, thirdly, I would say the way in which the information was transmitted. So Hexith, the Secretary of Defense, on this insecure apple, puts out a kind of timed description of what's going to happen. You know, this is going to happen at. I don't remember the exact times. You know, 3:15. This is going to happen at 4:17 and then this is going to happen after that. And then afterwards, they discuss things that they've seen on satellite data and so on. On this. On this app. I mean, there's also a kind of weird bravado, like they send each other emojis and emojis.
- [05:22]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah.
- [05:23]
Ann Applebaum
And, you know, little prayer emojis, which is a little odd. I mean, one almost has the feeling, I don't know if you remember the case of the Massachusetts, you know, very junior. He was an airman, you know, a year or two ago, who was arrested for leaking information. And what he was doing was showing off to his friends how much information he had access to this film. To me, like that, you know, Hexith wants to show, you know, his friends in the Cabinet that he knows what's going on and he's cool and he can. And he can tell them what's going to happen. And that.
- [05:57]
Charlie Sykes
That the emojis for bombing, though, that's got to be a first. You think this.
- [06:02]
Ann Applebaum
This. The tone of the conversation is very strange. It's unserious. It's kind of, you know, resentful of Europe. They're making us do this. But now that we're doing it, we're going to go ahead and screw him. You know, let's go, boys. You know, and there's a. There's something ugly about that as well. So the whole package is odd. I mean, and then when you add to that the fourth element, and maybe I'll. You know, and I'll. I'll finish here. The fourth element is then the administration's reaction to it. So the normal reaction in any other administration was this is an egregious breach of security and somebody is fired. Mike Wolf is fired, Pete Hexith is fired. And instead, what they've done is first, they tried to deny that there was no classified information, which, if you read it, I mean, I didn't know whether it's technically classified or unclassified. It's clearly secret information that shouldn't be given to a journalist or anyone, you know, two hours before. Before a military attack. And then secondly, there has been an attempt to smear Jeff Goldberg, which I can. I'm. You know, this is a. This is a classic standard piece of authoritarian tactics. This is how you get rid of bad information as you smear the messenger.
- [07:13]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, I want to circle back to that. So, I mean, there's. There's so many different elements, including, you know, at first, Hexith denied that it even took place. That obviously was not true. The administration had already acknowledged it. Then you had the sworn testimony yesterday where they said it was not classified information, which certainly was, you know, blown out of the water by the publication of the details. You know, on Earth 2.0, heads would roll, right? You would have the Secretary of Defense or the National Security advisor or perhaps Tulsi Gabbard for clearly lying under oath about what was in those. So who will be, what will be the consequences? Will heads roll or will they feel the need, in true Trumpian fashion, to keep circling the wagons? What do you think happens here?
- [08:01]
Ann Applebaum
So I don't know, obviously, and you know, there could be further events that change the outcome and I'm not going to make any predictions, but I will say so. I wrote a book called Autocracy Inc. That was pub about nine months ago. And there's a chapter in the book about how modern autocracies and the book is about sort of Russia, China, Iran, Zimbabwe, Venezuela. It's about how they use common tactics. They don't have, they're not all the same. They don't have the same ideology, but they do some things in a similar way. And one of the things that they've learned to do is to avert criticism and avert, pull off, you know, and block, you know, human rights movements or democracy movements by conducting individual smear campaigns where they try to take down the leaders. They could accuse them of corruption or some kind of sexual impropriety or, you know, we may still get to that in this case. We'll see. And in which, instead of, instead of dealing with the substance of criticism, they try to smear and destroy the messenger. And they now have multiple ways to do that. Right? I mean, they can do it online. They can do it through running campaigns in a dictatorship. You can do it by arresting people, obviously, of course, and you can torment them or you can arrest their friends or you can harass them in other ways. And we may get to that in America too. We're not quite there yet. But the idea that they would not acknowledge this, not acknowledge this huge security breach, you know, and instead attack Jeffrey Goldberg, who was bizarrely, through their own error, added their own signal, you know, illegitimate signal, group chat is, is really telling. I mean, it means they aren't serious about national security. And it means that they're, you know, their, their motto is never admit any mistakes. You know, just try to power on and try and, you know, use their, you know, use their, you know, their, their, their, their supporters to, to buoy them forward. Whether it works, I don't know I mean, we'll see. I mean, the question is how. Just how brainwashed are their supporters? And, you know, the, you know, there is a huge community of people in this country who were in the military or in this, you know.
- [10:16]
Charlie Sykes
Right.
- [10:16]
Ann Applebaum
Worked in security. There are veterans, there are people who know that this stuff is important, who've been trained in it. It's not hundreds of people, it's millions of people. And the question is whether that community reacts to this in the way that they should by saying this is outrageous. I mean, a lower level, a colonel or a major who did something like this would be immediately sacked and probably court martialed.
- [10:41]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, there's no question about that. I mean, and everybody that's involved in this knows all that. So I want to circle back to a point that you made that I think is really a crucial point. And Yascha Monk, over Persuasion, wrote about this yesterday in just. In terms of the substance of what we learn, the genuine loathing that J.D. vance has for Europe, and he says. Vance's private comments feel qualitatively different to me, suggests that his goal is not merely to animate Europeans, to take responsibility for their own defense, or even to strengthen the right wing populist forces he clearly sees as Trump's natural allies on the continent. It is to weaken and punish Europe. This should make Europeans very afraid. My fear is no longer the key members of the administration don't see Europe as an ally. It's that they may see it as an outright enemy. If the vice president is. Is unwilling to carry out a comparatively simple airstrike against the Houthis to restore global trade flows, it is hard to imagine that he would advocate coming to the defense of NATO countries like Estonia if they were attacked by Russia. So, I mean, this is a. There's a. There's a substantive aspect to this, which is that the abandonment of Ukraine, the chain, the abandonment of Europe changing sides runs deep in this administration. And it's what they say in, in private as well as public.
- [12:00]
Ann Applebaum
So this is obviously not the first time this emotion has appeared. And actually, I think Europeans already got the message. They got the message from Vance himself at the Munich Security Conference in February, where he appeared before a huge room full of. I was there. Full of generals and defense ministers and people who worry about things like the Russians cutting cables on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, people who really have. Whose everyday security concern, Russia. And Russia is a huge problem for Europe in all kinds of ways, aside from Ukraine. You know, there are sabotage incidents, there are cyber incidents, there Are, you know, military incidents all the time, like every week. And so this is their primary security concern. And in that room where there was a security conference, traditionally the Vice President makes a speech. Vance got up and didn't say a word about security and instead attacked Europeans. And he attacked them for so called undemocratic behavior or violations of free speech. And this, you know, coming from a member of the movement that brought us January 6th was completely outrageous. He kind of cherry picked a few incidents and mischaracterized them and made up and made up this analysis. But I think it really is something quite deep. It's a dislike of, you know, or maybe it's, it's them drawing a line between the kinds of people they imagine run Europe and the kinds of people they don't like at home. You know, people who believe in the rule of law, people who believe in, you know, regulations can be good, people who believe in minority rights and human rights, people who believe in global, you know, international cooperation and collaboration. I mean, what is the European Union except a, you know, an actually extraordinary integrated single market in which countries have, you know, agreed to create common rules and common trade practices in order to create greater prosperity for everybody. And it's in that, in that area, it's been incredibly successful. And so for them, Europe is a big ideological challenge. So for people who want to build up the walls, create an autarky, bring home all the American troops, which actually, I suspect is what Vance wants, end the US's integration with the rest of the world in collaboration with the rest of the world. Europe is a, is a kind of ideological challenge. And so they, they hate and dislike Europe. They want to break it up. They, they see the European liberals, by which they mean the European center right, the European center left, you know, European green parties, they see all those political parties as kind of ideological enemies. And they imagine themselves, you know, in some kind of war with them. And they, you know, it's not just Vance who said this, it's others who said it. You saw Hexith in that same, in that same chat expressing similar views. And, you know, I mean, of course, the irony, or maybe it's not an irony, maybe it's something more horrifying than an irony. I mean, the irony is, of course, that their attitude to Europe and to the European Union exactly matches that of Russia. So Russia is also interested in undermining Europe. Russia also dislikes the European Union. Russia would also prefer to deal with European countries one by one, because of course then they would be weaker. Russia dislikes EU regulation because it prevents Russian corruption from, you know, Russian business malpractice, from dominating the continent. And so you now have this very weird conjunction of the Trump administration or part of it. I'm not saying everybody agrees with this. I don't know that all the State Department agrees with it, for example, but a part of the Trump administration and, and the Russians working in tandem to undermine Europe. And actually Europeans, as I said, they got the message. They've been listening to this. They see it, they heard Vance, they, they saw Vance talking to President Zelensky of Ukraine, a little, a lesser known incident. They saw Vance attack Keir Starmer, actually the prime minister of the UK when he was in the Oval Office. Vance, kind of apropos, nothing, attacked him about some supposed free speech incident in Brit Britain. And Starmer, who's very calm, you know, gave an answer about, you know, we've had free speech for a long time in our country, something like that. But so it went, it went under the radar. But Vance as a, as an opponent has been, it's been clear for a while. So this is, and you're right, this is more than just saying we want you to pay more for your defense. I mean, they're doing, Europe's doing that already. Europe already pays more in Ukraine than we do. And I know that's not a well known or popularly shared statistic and it's something the president never admits. But so there, you know, the defense thing is already happening. That transformation is already happening. What Europeans are grappling with now is whether they need to treat the United States not just as sort of no longer a partner or no longer reliable, but whether the United States is actually an adversary. I mean, to what degree are they, is, does the United States have ill intentions towards them and government? And I'm leaving that as an open question because I said I don't think there's a unified view. But you, you certainly got the message that people on that chat, these two of them already are already acting like that.
- [17:17]
Charlie Sykes
So none of nothing occurs in a vacuum. And of course, the larger context of this is all the things that are happening domestically with the Trump administration moving it at ramming speed to establish its control not just over the federal government, but over civil society. And you, your most recent book is Autocracy Incorporated. You've been thinking about and writing about the rise of authoritarianism. You've watched the authoritarian regimes in Hungary and Poland and other places. So what is it like for you and Applebaum to be watching this play out in this country in real time. Because a couple of years ago people could say, well, yes, this happened there, but this is the United States and we have the guardrails, we have the bulwarks, we have all sorts of, of protections that would make that, that wouldn't happen here. And yet it is happening here. So just give me some sense of what's going through your mind and how it is to, to watch what you've seen elsewhere happening right now, right here.
- [18:23]
Ann Applebaum
I mean, it's devastating, you know, and it's all the more devastating because I, I did think it was going to happen. I did think that people were too, you know, people were too complacent. I still think they're too complacent. I, you know, you, maybe not, but I've been in rooms with Washington lawyers and with others who keep telling me things will be fine. And, you know, I, you know, I just feel that people aren't understanding the scale of what's happening. I mean, the other thing that is true about what's happening right now in the United States is that we all expected some version of this. You know, I expected some version of what Erdogan did in Turkey or what Orban did in Hungary or what Chavez did in Venezuela. This doesn't have to be a right wing or left wing process, you know, capturing institutions. You know, they call it boiling the frog, right? You know, you make little changes and little changes and nobody notices. And nobody notices. And then the frog is boiled, right? And then you're not a democracy anymore, but this is happening at, you know, at the speed of light.
- [19:34]
Charlie Sykes
Right?
- [19:35]
Ann Applebaum
You know, I don't think anybody imagined, including me, I didn't imagine that. I knew that you could use, you know, you know, you could manipulate Congress and you could play games and you could, you know, eliminate institutions, but I did not know that you could take a team of 19 year olds and walk into the Department of the treasury and change the codes on the treasury computer and cut payments to programs that Elon Musk dislikes. Regardless of what the President says, by the way, or regardless of what Congress has said. You know, and there have been things, I mean, not all of them have had the, you know, gotten attention, but I mean, things that Musk just personally doesn't like or doesn't want, he can cut. And I didn't think that, I didn't think of that. You know, I didn't think of that being possible. And so what we're watching is, you know, it's not the frog being slowly boiled. I Mean, the water's boiling right now. You know, it's, it's, you know, the lid is on the pot. And, and still I'm not sure that everybody sees it, you know, you know, as rule after rule after rule. And it's not just norms, you know, it's laws are being broken. I mean, to take one example, the US Institute for Peace, which is a small, nice institution actually, by Ronald Reagan, which is technically speaking an independent corporation, it's not part of the US Government. It has US funding, tried to prevent DOGE from coming into its offices and there wound up being, you know, Doge wound up calling the D.C. police and the D.C. police, like allowed them to break into the offices. And even though this is, there is nothing legal about it, I mean, you know, USAIP is created by Congress and it has congressional funding. And you can't just eliminate it by sending a bunch of guys there to kick everybody out. But that's what happened.
- [21:22]
Charlie Sykes
They did.
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Ann Applebaum
And maybe there will be a lawsuit and maybe they'll get their building back and so on. But in the meantime, Musk's team is in there going through the computers and who knows what they're deleting, you know, taking stuff off the walls, you know, rearranging the furniture. Whatever it is that they're doing, I mean, it's not, whatever it is, it's not going to be there when they, if they ever get it back. It won't be the same institution. And it turns out that that's possible. And there is.
- [21:51]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and you wrote about this last month. You said there's a term for what Trump and Musk are doing, how regime change happens in America. So. And by the way, and you point out that, you know, despite the name of doge, they don't seem that interested in actual efficiency. They seem more interested in control and destruction. But what do you mean when you say regime change?
- [22:13]
Ann Applebaum
I mean they're changing the nature of the American government. I mean, that piece which I wrote a month ago was very specifically about the civil service. Okay, so we have in America a civil service that is, that was created at the sort of end of the 19th, early 20th century, with a big input, by the way, from Teddy Roosevelt. So prior to that, we had something in the US that you have in lots of other countries called the spoil system, meaning that people who are appointed to work for the government work for one particular politician, the president perhaps, and maybe the state level governor who can hire them and fire them at will. And, you know, when you change the president, everyone gets fired into the Postmaster General and they hire some friends of the President. And this is a classic kind of corrupt civil service where everybody's loyal not to the system and not to the Constitution, but to the person who appointed them. And that means they're corruptible. Right, because they're going to turn a blind eye when that person wants to steal or they're going to, you know, hire that person's friends. Not, not on merit base and so on. So we haven't had that in our country for more than a century. We have a civil service that is merit based. That is where people are loyal to the Constitution and not to a particular president or political party. If you work for the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, you serve Republican and Democratic administrations. And that's just like the military. And that's been the case for a very long time. And of course, you know, that doesn't mean that everybody in the civil service was great or clever or good at their job or uncorrupt, but it meant that there were rules designed to prevent that. So if you did have a corrupt civil servant, it was possible to investigate them and fire them and so on, you know, or if you had a, you know, lazy civil service. Same, same thing. What they seem to want to do is they're, they're intimidating those people. They're randomly firing. This is, by the way, nothing to do with efficiency. I mean, I would go farther than to say they're not interested in efficiency. I'd say it's actually anti efficiency. Because if you want to efficiently reform the civil service, you don't randomly fire 10% of people. You figure out who to fire. Right? I mean, you have a plan like you want the department to do X, Y and Z. And so you meet the people who do X, Y and Z. You don't just randomly.
- [24:24]
Charlie Sykes
They're not making. Yeah, they're not making Social Security more efficient, are they, at the moment? And that doesn't seem to be their goal.
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Ann Applebaum
No, no. Or anything more efficient, you know, or, or education better run or, or, you know, the destruction of usaid, which is a whole other thing, you know, that's good, that's going to cause financial scams, you know, for, for, for years to come. I mean, they literally cut people off from the money they were supposed to be supervising. You know, nobody knows where their budgets are anymore. I mean, they literally just destroyed, you know, the institution. People don't have email contact. I've talked to people who are in the, in usaid and so I know that's true. So this has nothing to do with efficiency. This was about intimidating the civil service and replacing the civil service instead with loyalists. And they're already loyalist tests. So they're in some to get promotions and to be hired in some US Government departments. Already they're asking people, what did you think happened on January 6th? Who won the 2020 election? They're trying to get people to go along with the alternate reality that Donald Trump created, rather than living in the real reality of what actually happened. And they're trying to create a completely different kind of government that is completely loyal to them and which they can then direct, either for political purposes, or maybe we're going to see for financial purposes. And this is something that really puts them in line with the autocratic world. This is how politics works in modern kleptocracies, that the. The government is there to serve the financial interests of the people who run it. And if we're heading in that direction, then we're heading into something that's really, really dark. And also, by the way, regime change is the word that they use. I mean, they talked about replacing the radical left Marxists who ran the country. And Trump spoke about the vermin who opposed him. And they've talked, Steve Bannon has talked about destroying the administrative state. This is it. This is what they mean. They mean wrecking the government as we know it and as it exists and replacing it with something completely different. And it will not be recognizable. It will not be the kind of democracy that we've lived in for the last, at least for the last century.
- [26:36]
Charlie Sykes
Well, the other extraordinary thing, though, and you've written about this as well, has been the surrender of so many institutions preemptively. You know, and again, in the history of authoritarian regimes, they have targeted the media, they have targeted universities. And we're seeing that as well. We're seeing. And, you know, they went after Columbia University. Columbia has caved in, which I think will probably mean that you will have rolling threats against universities. The one thing that I didn't see, that I think I had a pretty good imagination, I knew there would be an attack on the media. I knew there'd be an attack to undermine the federal judiciary. I didn't see the assault on the law firms taking place, and I didn't see big law caving in. I mean, to see these giant, you know, white shoe law firms with billions of dollars in revenue, you know, take a knee to Donald Trump, to see him threatening, threatening that, that any law firm that makes a motion that they regard as frivolous might be in their crosshairs. That's, that's amazing to me. Is that part of a pattern? Have you seen that elsewhere? Did that surprise you?
- [27:52]
Ann Applebaum
Attacking certain. I mean, it's certainly part of a foreign pattern, you know, attacking lawyers, harassing lawyers who defend dissidents, even jailing them. I mean, this is, this is something that happens in, in, in, in dictatorships. But yeah, I mean, the, you know, the use of it in America where lawyers have such an, such a unique status where they're among the most highly educated Americans and the best connected Americans and as you say, the wealthiest Americans, and the fact that people running, you know, big Wolf Wall street law firm like Paul Weiss don't feel that they have the ability to stand up to Trump or to, you know, to work in a, you know, to do their jobs in this atmosphere. I mean, yeah, that, that was also extraordinary. And again, it's, it's the speed of it that's, that's unusual. I mean, this kind of stuff has happened in other places. I just don't know where it's ever happened so fast. I mean, we're, what, this is the third month or something and you already have, you know, the, among the wealthiest and most prominent lawyers in the country saying we're not fighting back.
- [29:04]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and it's not just the lawyers. I mean, you're seeing, you know, ABC News, you know, giving a settlement, all of the billionaire oligarchs that lined up to, you know, to pay the Dane Geld at the inauguration, and you're thinking of one institution after another. You wrote about Columbia University. You know, first they came for Columbia. You know, I guess I'm also surprised by the speed with which academia has caved in. I've been critical of academia in the past, and many of those, I think criticisms are still valid. But to watch the way that Donald Trump has leveraged federal aid to the universities or the research money to force them to change curriculum and hiring practices is really breathtaking. So where is this going? If he is following the playbook, what happens next?
- [29:58]
Ann Applebaum
This is a Hungarian playbook. And by the way, they haven't done this yet. I mean, I think Colombia was a kind of test case and they use Colombia because Colombia is unpopular. You know, Columbia had a series of very ugly demonstrations last year. Lots of people were angry at Columbia for different, you know, for those reasons, Columbia had other kinds of campus protests. And ugly stuff happened at Columbia over the last decade. I mean, Columbia is partly, also it's in New York. And there are Lots of journalists in New York. And you can see Columbia, you see what happens in Colombia in a way that you don't see what happens at, I don't know, you know, the University of Alabama, because Tuscaloosa is far away and there aren't a lot of media there. So Columbia became the focus of a lot of bad media. And so it was an easy one to pick on. Yeah, no, it was. He clearly wanted to pick that fight. Yeah. And of course, the dangerous thing is, you know, Columbia being made an example means that it's just a matter of time before they go after other universities. And they haven't done this yet, but I would not be surprised to see down the road them using the threat of cuts in federal funding. And remember, all big universities have federal funding. They have mostly research funding. So if you have a lab, if you have a, you know, if you have, I mean, if you're Johns Hopkins, where I have an affiliation, and you have a huge, you know, biomedical research units, if you have. Actually the University of Alabama. University of Alabama in Birmingham. Sorry, the University of Alabama Medical School in Birmingham is the largest employer in the city of Birmingham, and it's a major medical research institute. I mean, if you're an institution like that, then you have. You may have literally thousands of people on your payroll, scientists as well as lab assistants, as well as, I don't know, janitors and all kinds of people whose jobs are dependent on federal money. And so you aren't really in a position to be able to say, screw you to the federal government because, you know, you have people whose lives are, you know, and futures and careers are dependent on you if you're the president of one of those universities. And so I feel some empathy for them. I mean, they're not, they're not in a position to protest because they have this responsibility to their, to their, to their. To their faculty. But I would not be surprised if down the line we get to something like that. We get to them saying, you know, we won't give you federal funding if you have a women's studies department, or we won't.
- [32:35]
Charlie Sykes
Oh, I could see that.
- [32:36]
Ann Applebaum
This kind of course or that kind of course, or you hire this professor or that professor, your federal funding will be in jeopardy. I mean, we haven't gotten to that. That level of intervention yet. But I wouldn't be shocked. It feels like that's the direction that it's going. I mean, they're going to want to, you know, and again, these are, you know, if you look at, if you look at Vance and the people who've inspired him, you know, or Stephen Miller and the people who've inspired him. I mean, these are people who believe they are. Just as they're engaged in a kind of big culture war with Europe and Europeans, they also think they're engaged in a big culture war against universities. I mean, how. J.D. vance, who is a. Whose career was made by Yale Law School, life at Yale Law School, and, you know, his mentor was a Yale Law School professor who convinced him to write Hillbilly Elegy. You know, the fact that he feels this animus towards universities is almost bizarre. I mean, it's, I don't have the background in psychiatry to be able to explain it, but, but he clearly does feel it. And he said he's talked about universities as the enemy. And they think they're engaged in a, in a culture war and a cultural revolution. And I would not. And they think they're winning and they're going to use the influence of the federal government in a way that it hasn't been used, at least in recent years. I mean, I'm sure we can go back in the history and find examples, but nothing at this scale and nothing at this level, you know, has been enacted before. And again, this is the kind of, you know, this is a. More like a bookmark. Like, I, you know, I don't know that this is going to happen, but it's mo. I can tell you that I'm. I am aware of several universities where they fear that it will. And also I'm. I know that, you know, there, there are universities who, like some law firms, by the way, who are trying to create a kind of solidarity and who are trying to work together and find ways of having a common program. I also know from some things that people have told me that there's. There, there are going to be problems getting blue state universities and red state universities to cooperate because red state universities are under special kinds of pressure. You know, they need permission of their attorney general, state attorney general to join lawsuits, for example, they try to use their influence in their senators or, I don't know, their, their Congress people to get exceptions made for them. But you're gonna see some political divides in universities based on their geography, which is also, if you think about it, just unbelievably ugly.
- [35:20]
Charlie Sykes
So let's turn the lens around just for a moment from what Donald Trump and J.D. vance are doing in Washington to the culture, because compare the mood right now and the way, and the, and the state of resistance to what it was in 2017. In 2017, a lot of these institutions were prepared to fight back. They were engaged. They were prepared to make common cause. There was a sense that, you know, this was wrong and that we were going to stop it. What has changed? And I want you to put this in the international context. What has changed in the. Called the economic political culture of this country that right now it looks at Donald Trump and thinks somehow that he's irresistible, that we have to bend the knee, because it feels like there was a shock of the acquiescence that certainly did not occur in 2017 and 2018. So what's changed among us in the country, in the culture?
- [36:25]
Ann Applebaum
I think what happened is January 6th, I think the fact that Donald Trump assaulted the Capitol and that he did so with, you know, he incited violence, you know, against. And he organized a massive propaganda campaign designed to convince people, you know, to ignore the results of an election. And he got away with it. You know, he didn't go to prison. He was not locked up. He was not, you know, he was never satisfactorily even examined. I mean, There was a January 6th committee in Congress. But Trump was never himself put on trial for this. You know, he was put on trial for something else, which wasn't the thing that people felt he was guilty of. And I think he having got away with that, I think people were, you know, that means he can get away with anything. I mean, he assaulted our constitution, he assaulted our democratic system. He physically, his people physically assaulted our capital, and yet they were allowed to get away. I mean, it's the equivalent of, you know, Chavez carrying out a coup d'etat and failing and then somehow coming back to power. You know, it's the equivalent of, you know, it's very, very often in these stories, it's true of Orban as well. It's the second time that one of these people comes to power, that they. That they're. The nature of what they do is different, and their determination not to lose power again is greater. And so I think that is a big part of what's different. I also think that because of having done that, Trump has attracted around himself different kinds of people than were there in his first term. So people who were attracted to the lawlessness and who are attracted to the insurrection and who admired his attempt to destroy American institutions, they're now working for him and with him. So wherever they were in society before, they're now affiliated with Trump. Whereas in his first term, he was surrounded by, you know, I mean, you can, like, them or not like them, but they were people who were still loyal to the Constitution and who still believed in it. And I don't know.
- [38:40]
Charlie Sykes
And of course, then you've also had now a Supreme Court which has immunized him. So I, I sense that people look around and go, well, who's going to stop him? You know, why should I stand up against him? Because I can't count. Congress is not going to check him. The independent agencies aren't going to be independent anymore, and the courts are an unreliable ally in terms of upholding constitutional values. So I guess the question is, Ann, what does it take to turn that around? How do authoritarian regimes, I mean, what is the, what is the wall they run up against? What has to happen here?
- [39:16]
Ann Applebaum
So, well, so first of all, it's very normal when you have this kind of political change for the opposition to be fragmented. I mean, that's actually the first thing that happens. And I have a long, I have a Venezuelan friend who once described to me how this happened in Venezuela. Like, just everybody shattered and they fought with each other and so on. And there was a version in Russia. There was a version of it in Poland, actually, after we had an autocratic populist party win an election 2015. They event lost. They lost in 2023. But the first thing that happened was everybody split into a million pieces. And that's because the rules of politics have changed, but people don't necessarily know what the new ones are yet and exactly how to fight back and how to react. So there isn't really a. And you can see it happening. I mean, you could see different people pursuing different formula right now. You know, in, in politics, I mean, you know, it's not my job to kind of theorize or strategize on behalf of the opponents of Trump. And so I don't want to do exactly that. But, you know, my guess is that what you'll see is a reformulation eventually of the Democratic Party and a new set of alliances. And they will, you know, what they'll have to do to succeed is to find the new, the themes that can unite a broader coalition. And they'll have to bring together the people who are, and there are a lot of them, people who are shocked and offended by the destruction of the federal government, people who are upset about the pointless tariffs that have created mindless and pointless economic misery, the people who don't like the idea that the United States is allied with Russia against Europe. You know, the people who are going to be bothered by the corruption that emerges if it emerges, and it looks like it will, you know, once you eliminate guardrails and you eliminate transparency, eventually you get people. You'll find people trying to use, I mean, whether it's musk trying to use the agencies that, you know, trying to manipulate the agencies who've subsidized these companies, or trying to, I don't know, bring Starlink and to make it communication for the federal government, whatever it is, you know, you'll begin to create, you'll begin to figure out what are the new issues that, that, that, that unify people. But, I mean, there also has to be a lot of thinking about communication and how to reach people. It's pretty clear that some large percentage of Americans, I don't know the exact number, don't get their news anymore from anything that we would recognizably call journalism. And that means good journalism, bad journalism, journalism, left journalism, CNN or Fox. They don't watch any of it. They get their information. They watch entertainment programs. They watch, I don't know, weightlifting podcasts. They, they read about celebrities or they, I mean, I don't want to, I don't mean to sound. You know, they just don't. They're not, they're not read. They're not reading about politics as such. And I think that the, the right found ways of reaching people through those means. And now everybody else, by which I mean the center right and the center left have to have to also find channels to reach people. I mean, the thing that I don't know the answer to, and I genuinely, I don't have a theory or an explanation, I don't know the answer to whether whether the alternative reality that we now live in online is so compelling and so interesting and exciting that it's stronger than real reality. And so I don't know if the price of eggs goes to $20 an egg and the recession kicks in and people have been pointlessly fired for no reason and Social Security checks stop arriving, like, is that enough to move people? Or will the, the power of online propaganda saying it's not happening or that it doesn't matter, will that be stronger? I mean, you know, it's an interesting.
- [43:35]
Charlie Sykes
These are very interesting questions. No, these are questions that I think of all the time. I think you're right.
- [43:41]
Ann Applebaum
I mean, this, the signal. The signal. I don't want to call it Signal Gate because that's so unoriginal, but the, you know, the, the signal, chat leak. I mean, there it is. You can read it. You know, you can, you know, Jeffrey Goldberg, published it today. You can, you can read it and look at it for yourself and see that it contains information that shouldn't be public and shouldn't be circulated on a commercial messaging camp. It's not hard, you know, pretty obvious. And you have to weigh that against the, you know, president's spokesman and probably the president himself and lots of other people saying this doesn't matter. And I don't know which side people will take. Will they read it themselves onto their own conclusions, or will they listen to, you know, to what the White House press spokesman says? I don't know.
- [44:27]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. How do you break through? This may seem a digression, but this was one of the things I was thinking about after I watched the this new Netflix series, Adolescence, where no spoiler alert. But the grownups realize at a certain point they have no idea what's going on in the rooms, in the communications, in the social media of adolescents. They have just no clue whatsoever. And it's not because they're ignorant or uncaring. It's that things have changed so rapidly. And so, you know, we know that the kids are not all right. We know that the political culture is not all right, but I don't know that we have really grasped what's going on in people's heads and their minds, the way they process information. And so many people seem to operate on the premise that it's vaguely normal or it's same old, same old, when clearly it is not in terms of just not just the medium but also the content.
- [45:28]
Ann Applebaum
Yeah, I don't know either. I mean, and I don't know, as I say, I myself, I don't know the answer. I don't know which is no, which is more powerful. Is it the online world or is it the real world?
- [45:41]
Charlie Sykes
Excellent, excellent question. Ann Applebaum, thank you so much for joining me. Ann Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize winning contributor writer for the Atlantic. Her most recent book, Autocracy Incorporated, was published last year. Incredibly timely guide to the world that we live in now. Ann, thank you so much for joining me again today.
- [46:01]
Ann Applebaum
Thanks for having me.
- [46:03]
Charlie Sykes
And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. We do this because now more than ever, it's important to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. Thanks.