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- [00:00]
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- [01:47]
Charlie Sykes
Welcome back to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. I am Charlie Sykes and we are joined by Pulitzer Prize winning author Anne Applebaum, staff writer for the Atlantic, who is talking to us from Warsaw, Poland. Thanks for joining me and I appreciate it very much.
- [02:01]
Anne Applebaum
No, I'm delighted to be with you.
- [02:04]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you know, I was making some notes about for our conversation today and looking back over the things that you've written in the past. You won the Pulitzer Prize for a book called Gulag. You had a cover story in the Atlantic called the Bad Guys Are Winning. You've written books titled the Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy Incorporated. And it occurs to me that the last couple of years, a lot of what you've been writing feels like a prequel and a warning to the moment we're in right now. So I just wanted to get your take. As you're watching what's happening in this country and the accumulation of power by the Trump administration, are you thinking, yeah, that's what I thought would happen. Or is it worse?
- [02:50]
Anne Applebaum
It is what I feared would happen. Nothing is ever determined and no outcomes are ever guaranteed in advance. Some aspects of it look different from what I expected. I'll say that the role that Doge played at the beginning of the administration, the teams of tech guys going into departments of the American government and taking over the computer systems and using that to fire people and steal data, that wasn't something I foresaw, and I'm not sure that's been done anywhere else. So the structure of what's happening does look familiar. I mean, you could compare it to what happened when Hugo Chavez took over Venezuela, or you could compare it to Erdogan in Turkey or Orban in Hungary. This is a democratically elected government with a popular mandate which is seeking to change the nature of the state from within. And we've seen that happen before. But, yeah, there are some, there are elements of it that seem pretty new. The speed is new. Orban took a decade. The speed, the speed of change. And the, and as I say, the, the, you know, that, that, that first effort to capture institutions physically, I mean, to, to send people in and, and take them over. But the elements, you know, the destruction of the civil service, the creation of a new kind of police force that didn't exist before, you know, the undermining of institutions, of Congress, of the media, the attacks on private business and lawyers, and those are things that are familiar from other times and other places.
- [04:43]
Charlie Sykes
You know, it is the blizzard of events. And you mentioned something that I wanted to talk about. So, I mean, you know, as we're talking, there are active military troops on the streets of Los Angeles conducting sweeps through parks. At the same time, the administration is gleefully touting its own gulag in the swamp. The alligator Alcatraz. The alligator Alcatraz. They're even selling T shirts. And, you know, buried in that big, beautiful bill, and I think you just made reference to it, is this vast expansion of ice. Could you talk to me about that? Because there have been a number of people raising alarms that we are now creating this vast new police force with a very, very different mission and culture than, say, the FBI. What concerns you about the Iceman Cometh from the new Trump budget bill?
- [05:38]
Anne Applebaum
I think what really concerns me is one of the things that always reassured me about the United States, as opposed to, say, Hungary, is that it's not a centralized state. So whereas Hungary, a little tiny central European country, it's pretty easy to take over the police force and to send it out to do things or to centralize decision making in the United States. It's very hard because states have real power, and we never had a national police force that had that kind of budget or that kind of mandate to act anywhere in the country against the will of governors or of local leaders or of cities. Not at that scale. I guess you can probably find individual instances of it, but nothing like this. And one of the things that reassured me about America was that I thought that was impossible because we had these guardrails in the form of states and different legal systems in different states. And what really worries me about ICE and this new, I mean, are we going to call it ice? I'm not sure what we're going to call it, but this new militarized customs police which is in effect the first federal police police force we've ever had with, with broad and undefined powers. And as you say, a different culture. The FBI culture was one of this kind of straight arrow gman. That was how it was originally created. And you can argue about whether it ever really was that or not. But the, but the ideal of the FBI was these were kind of, you know, people loyal to the Constitution who were just searching out crime and who would even hold powerful people to account. The, the ideology of that or, or the, the culture of this new thing is something different. I mean this, the culture seems to be you can do whatever you want and if you break a law.
- [07:28]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah.
- [07:29]
Anne Applebaum
It'S a, it's much more brutish. There's, there doesn't seem to be legal culture. There are people wearing masks on their face, which is not an American tradition. There are people carrying military grade equipment and military looking vehicles on the streets of ordinary cities. None of that has any real precedent in contemporary American history. I mean, maybe you could go back to the Civil War and you could find something like that, but nothing recent. And that worries me because the more rapidly it's accepted as normal and people get used to it, the more power it can gain. And you know, I know this is going to sound, I don't know, maybe, maybe it'll sound over overexcitable but you know, a police force like that once created has a certain kind of momentum. Right? It has a budget, it has tasks, it's. Right now it's been set to arrest supposedly illegal immigrants, although of course it's sweeping up other people who aren't illegal or, or in some cases who are U.S. citizens.
- [08:39]
Charlie Sykes
Right.
- [08:39]
Anne Applebaum
But the, you know, when it's started to complete that task, it'll just disband itself. And all those people who have jobs and, and, and investments in this new enormous institution with this huge budget I read somewhere larger than the army of Canada, they're just going to go away. Or they're going to find new uses for this kind of force.
- [09:01]
Charlie Sykes
Mission creep.
- [09:02]
Anne Applebaum
Mission creep. You know, enemies of the President or enemies of the country or. And how do we define that? And maybe it's protesters or maybe it's, you know, just people that the President doesn't like. I mean, he's been calling his political enemies vermin. He's been talking about immigrants as poisoning the blood of the nation. This is language actually borrowed from Hitler, which I think somebody must have put into his speech, because I'm not sure he could have made that thought of it himself, although maybe he did. He's known to have read Hitler's table talk, but he's been using this kind of language to describe people that he doesn't like. And that's the kind of language that authoritarian leaders in the past have used before they carry out assaults on their enemies. I'm not saying it will happen. We do have other guardrails, but it can't be dismissed as an idea. We are creating something unprecedented and we need to begin to think in more mold breaking ways. We need to expect precedents to break.
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Charlie Sykes
Well, there have been so many things that have actually happened that if you had predicted them a year ago, you would have been accused of being alarmist. You would have been accused of Trump derangement syndrome. And now it does feel as if we are becoming, they are becoming normalized. Like for example, the use of active military troops on the streets of American cities. Again, if we would have talked about that last August, people would have said, well, of course we have the Posse Comitatus Act. I mean, there's all kinds of norms and limits. And there they are in Los Angeles and it feels like we've kind of become numb to it. You've written about. And again, some people may think that these are excessive. And I'll get your reaction to this. The enthusiasm and the glee with which this administration has embraced these mass prisons in renditioning migrants to El Salvador. And now the alligator Alcatraz, which seems to be celebrated very specifically for its cruelty and its brutality, is. Can you just give me a sense of. It seems as if they're also conditioning Americans to accept and celebrate the fact that there's a certain class of people that we want to, we not only want to get rid of or hold accountable for their crimes, but we, we want to inflict pain on and humiliate them. Humiliate them. Does this sound familiar to you?
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Anne Applebaum
You know, it's familiar and it isn't. I mean, so I worked on a Book about, as you said at the beginning, a book about the Soviet gu. And the Soviet Gulag was of course, kept secret.
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Charlie Sykes
Yes. You know, they didn't have T shirts, right?
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Anne Applebaum
No. The cruelty that was inflicted on people was hidden away from the population. The population was not shown it. And even, you know, you could look at Nazi Germany, and there. There was a much greater festival of cruelty and Kristallnacht and, you know, people saw cruelty in the streets. But actually, even there, the actual death camps were at least partially concealed from some part of the population, which may have guessed they existed. But it was never. It was never shoved in their faces.
- [12:17]
Charlie Sykes
They weren't selling merch.
- [12:19]
Anne Applebaum
They were not selling T shirts. No. And so what we have here is something that looks. Is. Does feel new, as I said, in the way that Doge felt new to me. That in an age of Instagram and when, you know, when perceptions and jokes and the culture of the alt right shape so much of political discourse, this feels like there's a new element to this. The spectacle of cruelty, the. The demonstration of cruelty for its own sake, which of course, both serves to titillate people for whom that is appealing and people who want to see somebody humiliated, maybe people who've been felt humiliated themselves, but also will frighten people. Of course, it's meant to frighten immigrants or their families or their cousins or their friends, but it's also meant to frighten other Americans. Anybody who sees that says, well, anybody who's cruel enough to do that would be also cruel enough to do other kinds of things. And it will become part of a chilling culture as people become afraid to talk about it or afraid to say things or afraid to challenge, you know, to challenge the administration. And, of course, we see some elements of that already, too. I mean, we do the reluctance of university presidents, understandable reluctance, I should say, to speak out in defense of one another, you know, or the we've. The decision of very important wealthy law firms and companies to do deals with the administration or agree to settle lawsuits that didn't have to be settled. I mean, all that is part of the same fear culture.
- [14:21]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and even the major media companies, like the settlement by Paramount and CBS with Donald Trump, which seems to me to be virtually, I mean, indistinguishable from being a bribe, paying the president millions of dollars for a completely bogus lawsuit, I mean, and Donald Trump's use of power. And again, because you've studied this authoritarian autocratic pattern in the past, what seems really distinctive about some of the ways in which Donald Trump is instilling fear, and using his power is. There's, like, two elements to it. He'll have the private law, a lawsuit, and then the cudgel of government power. I am suing you. Pay me off. Otherwise, I will use state power to block your business interests. So that blending of public and private is really distinctive, a distinctive element of Trump's authoritarianism, isn't it?
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Anne Applebaum
So the blending of public and private. And again, this is out in the open, The. The naked attempt to make money out of it, whether it's Trump himself or his family or his associates or his friends, that, that, you know, also a thing that I don't think we've ever seen in America before. You know, I've still not gotten over World Liberty Financial, which is. This is. I'm sure you've discussed it on your show before, this cryptocurrency company that Trump's family set up, which. In which people are paying money to buy tokens that have no value and can be exchanged for nothing, and the only purpose of buying them is to pay a bribe to the president. Yes. And I don't think we've had. There's no, Nothing on that scale has ever happened in American history before. And I'm not sure I know of a. You know, I'm not sure I know of another country where it's happened in exactly that way. I mean, maybe. Maybe El Salvador is an example. Maybe there's some smaller dictatorships I don't know about. But, I mean, Putin, for example, the Russian dictator, is a. You know, is clearly, you know, we've known about his corruption for a long time, and he's. He owns these various palaces and properties and so on, but it's all a secret. I mean, we're not. We're not told how Putin made his money, and we don't really know how much of it there is, and he's known to keep it through other people. So there are people who are literally called wallets, Putin's wallets. And they're people who are known to hold his property. So he never talks about or displays his wealth, but Trump does, and Trump's family do. And that also seems to me, is a new aspect of this. You know, we have a kind of open cruelty and open corruption and kleptocracy, all in new ways, new things that we haven't had in America at that.
- [17:21]
Charlie Sykes
Scale or at that level before in broad daylight. Here's another aspect that I know you've talked about it. The incredible consolidation of power in the executive, the desire to eliminate any sort of checks and balances, any sort of guardrails is extraordinary because in our constitutional system, there's always been the sense that you don't want to go too far because at some point you will not be in power and you are ceding this power that you've gathered yourself to someone else. And so one of the things that really strikes me is the lack of imagination among Republicans that if Donald Trump can do X, Y and Z, so can President Gavin Newsom or President Aoc. And yet they don't seem to be bothered by that. They are creating and beyond imperial presidency, that under normal circumstances you would say, okay, we don't want, you know, at some point there will be an election and someone else will have these powers, and we have to be careful about giving them that power. That doesn't seem to be a factor. What do you make of that?
- [18:31]
Anne Applebaum
So that's one of the things that worries me the most, because as you say, if you're creating an imperial presidency, then if you're still living in a democracy, you have to assume that somebody you didn't like will have that job next, and then they can use these awesome powers and this new political police against you and your friends and family. And clearly they're not afraid of that. And that makes me worried that they don't think there will be democratic elections or they're so sure of being able to manipulate them that they will win. And, you know, one has to be very careful about saying that because I don't have any right right now. I have no evidence that they're planning to steal any elections. And I, you know, they're, you know, they're, they're the normal arguments about who can vote and so on, that have been going on for a long time. I didn't see anything else happening right now. All I'm saying is that I agree with you. It's very odd. They aren't acting like people who might lose or who, who think they could someday lose and that the, the, the, the, the powers they've created could be turned back on them. And that's, And I didn't have an explanation for it.
- [19:47]
Charlie Sykes
No. Well, it is alarming. So something else that you have written about and talked about for years, but seems to be accelerating. And again, it's, it's not breaking news that we have a president who has a, shall we say, a limited association with the truth, the stream of lies, the amount of disinformation out there, the incredible pattern of distraction. And I Think this is something that we're all living through, is that things are happening so fast you don't know what to pay attention to. There's so much stuff being thrown up at the screen. And this has been described in the past as the annihilation of truth. The sense that who do you know, who can you believe? What should I believe? So talk to me about that because that does fit patterns that we've seen before in authoritarian regimes. To numb people and to. Is the goal to make them just drop out, disengage from politics? Just simply say, I can't any longer think about this, what is it?
- [20:52]
Anne Applebaum
I mean, that is very close to how it's been used in the past. So, you know, you can point to regimes that have deliberately sought to poison the political sphere, to poison, you know, destroy the public square so that people don't know what's true and what's doesn't. The famous example of this, actually there are several examples from Putin's Russia. There's a moment when do, if you remember the Malaysian plane that crashed in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and it was shot down by, as it turned out, Russian soldiers, which was pretty clear from the beginning that that's who it was. But after that plane went down, the Russian state put out rapid, conflicting descriptions of what had happened. Some plausible, some implausible, some insane. You know, there was one version where, oh, the plane was put up in the air and filled with dead bodies and then exploded over Eastern Ukraine in order to embarrass Russia or something. And so the, you know, really crazy stuff. And I remember seeing a few days later, this is when Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, was still active in Moscow. This is the American backed Russian language media in Russia that the Trump administration is trying to destroy, but it was still active. And I remember a series of interviews they did on the street with people and they were asking people, what do you think happened to the Malaysian plane? And one after the other people would say things like, I don't know and we will never know or I don't know and the truth is unknowable. You know, we can't possibly know who did it because we have all these conflicting explanations. And that was a, you know, and, and that was Putin's innovation was rather than to just deny it, you know, which is what his predecessors and Soviet predecessors might have done or just cover it up. Instead he put out a million different messages about it, you know, each one. And sometimes I remember a Russian saying to me, you know, they came in the same News program. You know, you get one version at the beginning of the program and another one at the end, and then another one an hour later. And that was a. That was a policy. And the policy was to confuse people so that they wouldn't have any sense of, you know, how to tell truth from falsehood. And that has a further consequence, because if you can't know what's true and the whole public sphere is contaminated, then why should you participate in politics at all? You know, what's their. What should you fight for and who should you believe? And is there an idealistic dissident who you should back? I mean, why should you do that if you don't know what that person is saying is true or not? The effect, the desired effect is to make people passive and apathetic and cynical and nihilistic and to make them stay home. The idea is people shouldn't be engaged. We don't want people in politics, we want them out of politics. And that, as I said, was a deliberate Russian tactic. That was a strategy. In the case of Trump, I think it's partly. Also was a strategy certainly at the beginning. I mean, actually going back before he was in politics, he just lies all the time, and that's a way of confusing people about what's true and not true. And then as a politician, I think he understood immediately that if he pollutes the public sphere, if he lies constantly, which he still does many times a day about many things, then after a while, people stop correcting him. They stop trying to find out what's true and what's not true. They, you know, they, they treat things like the, the cryptocurrency company we were just talking about as sort of just another story that might have some reality or not. You know, the Alligator Alcatraz. Well, maybe that's real, or maybe it's just some kind of alt right joke, you know, who knows?
- [24:32]
Charlie Sykes
Right.
- [24:33]
Anne Applebaum
And so it. It enables him to get away with things. And I think he's achieved that. And I think. Yeah, and I think it may also. It may also induce a kind of, you know, disgust or nihilism. I have actually a younger relative who was never involved in politics before who I saw posting something very nihilistic on the 4th of July. Okay. And I realized that she was somebody who was probably very affected by this. I mean, she doesn't. She's not very, you know, she just sees all this lies and nonsense, and her feeling is just stay out and stay away from. And I can imagine that being true of a lot of people.
- [25:15]
Charlie Sykes
And also it immunizes people like Donald Trump from any sort of scandal. I mean, a post truth society is also post scandal. I'm trying to imagine any negative story, any investigative story that now would damage him because he can call it fake news or he can say that it's made up. Even if there were, if there were pictures of him and Jeffrey Epstein with young underage girls, even if they were documented. Well, I understand, but he has now conditioned half the country to simply say, I won't even believe the evidence of my own eyes. And really, when you think about really of all of the guardrails, of all the things that he's destroyed, the fact that he's essentially immunized himself from any sort of scandal or investigative reporting that he cannot discredit, I mean, this is one of the great legacies of our age here.
- [26:18]
Anne Applebaum
So there are two other aspects to this. I mean, it's not just him, obviously. So he is very much a product of our time in this moment and he is the product of media world that has now created the possibility of fakery. And not just AI, false, not just AI, but the, I mean, this, this business about repetitive falsehoods. I mean, people, you know, you see them every day in your Twitter feed. You know, you don't only need Donald Trump to tell them to you. I mean, so we created a world in which there are all kinds of sources of information that don't have any backing behind them and don't have networks of connections or fact checkers. And some of them appear to be credible or more authentic. They seem more realistic than other sources of news. And so it's almost as if he's evolved along with that. He's a product of that media and he's been the beneficiary of it and then has of course accelerated and AI has added another and probably is going to, even in the next year or two, is going to add new layers to that as well. And you know, that's inevitable. I'm often asked how we get out of that. And it is hard.
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Charlie Sykes
Yes.
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Anne Applebaum
I mean, it is hard. It requires people to think really seriously about what are alternative ways to use the Internet, how to build, you know, trustworthy media spaces. I know of people who are trying them in small ways, but it's difficult. There's no immediately obvious solution.
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Charlie Sykes
No, there isn't. And the question, it's not only hard, it is hard to imagine how you would scale it up to actually affect the large scale populations, especially as AI becomes more powerful, as learning all the time. And the impact that it could have on politics is almost incalculable. Which brings me to this. Just your thoughts on. You mentioned Doge before. One of the strangest elements, as people look back on 2025, will that an episode with Doge, the bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the world's most powerful man, the world's richest man, all broken up. Elon Musk now talking about a third party. Any, any thoughts about where that goes? Do you think he's serious? Is it a real threat? Elon, Does Elon Musk have a political future? No one does.
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Anne Applebaum
This is, I mean, the only. So my way of understanding what Musk is doing is to compare him. Do you remember Prigozhin? Do you remember this Russian general, the head of the Wagner group, who became dissatisfied with. With what Putin was doing and he staged a weird march on Moscow that was then he changed his mind halfway and turned back and he wound up dying on an airplane, in an airplane crash. I mean, Elon Musk looks to me like that. I mean, he's a kind of. He's a kind of Prigozhin figure. You know, he's, he's inside that world whether he wants to be or not. You know, he is now identified with it forever. You know, he is, he's the one who did the Nazi salute and he's the one who has written a form of AI that seems to now spit out, you know, Nazi memes and.
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Charlie Sykes
Yes, what is that?
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Anne Applebaum
Wow, Conversations of white genocide. You know, so it's not, it's not like he's gonna suddenly switch sides and attract a different, you know, public to him. And America's progressives are going to line up behind Elon Musk. I mean, that doesn't seem like it's going to happen. Instead, it seems more like he's going to be a troublemaker within that camp. And actually, I mean, if I had to bet, I don't want to say he's going to end like Prigozhin, because I don't mean literally.
- [30:05]
Charlie Sykes
Right.
- [30:05]
Anne Applebaum
But I mean, if I had to bet, I think Donald Trump wins. I mean, if the oligarch versus the man with real political power, then the men with political power usually win because they have, they have this power of the state. And in the case of Musk, Trump has the power to cut off his subsidies and destroy his companies and of course, put him in jail or whatever. But it looks to me like this Musk will lose. But it's true. I mean, along the way, he could create a lot of trouble. I mean, Prigozhin really scared Putin. Putin came out that morning and gave a weird speech about the Russian revolution. So it's a. You know, he could do damage, but, but I. Hard for me to see how he wins.
- [30:50]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, no, that, that little episode, which I have not spent a lot of time when, where, where Grok basically started giving Nazi speeches was, was. I. I'm tempted to think that it was very revealing that, that, that, that what happens is that AI is listening to what he's saying and then translating it and, you know, without any of the guilt and everything, you know, the gilted edges. And here we're getting kind of the id. But speaking of Vladimir Putin, let's switch gears to all of that. You had a piece in the Atlantic the other day, you know, that America was switching sides, which again, has been the story of the last six months. In the last 48 hours or so, Donald Trump has said some, some sort of unwantedly critical things of Vladimir Putin, suggesting he was giving him a lot of bullshit and then reversing the decision not to give Ukraine defensive weapons. So what do you make of all of this? So when you wrote that piece, it certainly looked like we were doing everything possible to abandon Ukraine, providing Putin with more incentives to kill Ukraine. Now Trump is basically saying he doesn't know what Peter Hegseth was doing. He had nothing to do with the cutoff of aid. Maybe we will give them. So where are we at? What do you, what do you make of all that?
- [32:11]
Anne Applebaum
So we've been actually through a few of these cycles before. Yes, you know, Trump did appear to have some belief that he would be elected. And then he would call his friend Vladimir, and Vladimir would say, okay, you're right. Let's stop the war. Yeah, I mean, I think that was the extent of his. That was the extent of his imagination, which was another one of those things that was very clear before the election that he had no plan. There wasn't one. But anyway, people seemed excited to repeat this idea that he would, that he would, that he would have a plan. And so, you know, he's been disappointed, but, you know, but then he gives him another chance, and then there's another phone call. And presumably Putin, who's a, Who's a. Has trained KGB recruiter, you know, knows what flattering things to say and which buttons to push, and Trump has put off for another while. What actually worries me more about this administration is not. Not at that level. What worries me more is the layers of other things that they're doing. So the, the, the, in practice, in effect, we're lifting sanctions on Russia. So, yes, sanctions are, sanctions are something, aren't just a thing you put down once. It's a dynamic process because you sanction one set of companies and then a different set of companies are used to get around barriers. And so you need to sanction that set of companies. And the Biden administration, I talked to some of its members while this was during this process over the last few years, and they were, you know, they had every month, you know, they were looking at sanctioning new companies or new groups or looking for new, new ways to put pressure on the Russian economy. As far as we can tell, the Trump administration has stopped. They're not doing that anymore. And that means, in effect, that Russia is suddenly finding it easy again to get components for its, for its defense industry. You know, at the same time, the US has dismantled, with unbelievable speed all kinds of programs that were designed to aid the Russian opposition, aid Russian independent media, track and reveal Russian propaganda around the world. In Africa and Latin America, there was a whole program that did that at the State Department called the Global Engagement center, which then became the focus of a lot of conservative conspiracy theories. And so that was shut down very dramatically. So we're not doing that anymore. We're not. You know, we're not. There are all kinds of ways in which USAID was helping Ukraine in, you know, in rebuilding its energy sector. And so, you know, we're not doing that anymore. So there's a whole series of programs that we had in place that were designed to counter Russian propaganda to, you know, to help the war effort in other ways in Ukraine that have, that have stopped. And Putin sees all of that. So he's unlike Trump. He's not just paying attention to the news clips from the last five minutes. He can see that the Russian opposition is unfunded. He knows that Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, is about to be taken off the air or might be if it doesn't win its lawsuit. He knows that. He knows that there have been this start, stop attitude to funding Ukraine. He knows there's no new money for Ukraine. So he knows all of that. And all of that gives him this belief that he can continue the war and that he can eventually win the war because he will just wear down the United States and wear down Europe. And he sees that the Trump administration is floundering. And that's, you know, I genuinely believe that a different, you know, had we had a President Harris or a president, anybody else right now who had renewed instead the aid to Ukraine that we would be looking at coming to the end of the war, you know, because this is a war that will end when the Russians stop fighting. And I think I've been saying that like a broken record, you know, for more than three years. But that is the key thing. The Russians have to stop fighting. This is a colonial war. It's an imperial war. It is the Russians who are invading Ukraine. They have to stop the invasion. And right now they have no incentive to stop it. And all these, like, think tank articles about some deal we might do and maybe we'll swap Crimea and we'll move the border. And they don't care about that. This was not a war about Crimea or about some Donetsk province. This is a war about destroying Ukraine, destroying its sovereignty, reabsorbing it one way or the other into Russia, and also, by the way, proving that NATO doesn't exist and doesn't matter and proving that the United States is weak. Those are the big goals of this war. And for Putin, those are really big and important goals. And he's not given them up. And he will only give them up if he's pressured to give them up. And the Trump administration is not doing anything right now that shows he would do it. I mean, there is this bill that Lindsey Graham and I think some 80, 70, 80 senators have signed up to that would increase, you know, would increase sanctions on Ukraine. And that would be a very useful, you know, if, were that to pass and were that to become law, that would be useful in helping to persuade the Russians that maybe it's not going to be as easy as they think think. But, you know, but there, but, you know, there's, there's a kind of full court press that needs to happen. And we don't have an information strategy in Russia. We don't have a counter propaganda strategy for Russia. You know, we are, you know, our military strategy has been narrowed greatly. Our, our thinking about Ukraine, you know, even our diplomacy towards Ukraine is weird. I mean, the ambassador resigned and we don't, it's not clear how, how policy is even being made in Ukraine and all that needs to change. And I didn't see it changing immediately. I mean, actually, I had, just before talking to you, I saw a Ukrainian friend of mine who's in Warsaw. I had coffee with him and he said he was betting that Trump would eventually conclude the same thing as Biden, that the only way to end the war is to arm Ukraine and make sure Ukraine Wins, but he was just worried it would take a long time to get to that conclusion. So maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I. I just don't see them understanding that there has to be a deeper and longer strategy. And from a president that doesn't think strategically, that's obviously very difficult.
- [38:24]
Charlie Sykes
Right. He doesn't think strategically and he doesn't have a strategy. But this also goes back to this very, very strange relationship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Donald Trump has one view of what the relationship is. What does Vladimir Putin think of Donald Trump? Because I am struck by his willingness to overtly humiliate Trump. Trump thinks they are the best friends. He has kissed up to him, he has sucked up to him. He's appeased him in almost every possible way. And Vladimir Putin is not throwing him even the smallest bones. And it does seem as if, while so many other world leaders and national leaders here are afraid of Donald Trump, that Vladimir Putin actually sort of understands something fundamental about Donald Trump. What do you think?
- [39:13]
Anne Applebaum
So there are a couple things. I mean, one is that there are so many rumors, and even more than rumors, evidence of business deals, I mean, both in the past and in the present. You know, Steve Witkoff is, every time he goes to Moscow, he comes back talking about deals, and they're, you know, the Ukrainians have, say they have information that's much more specific about specific people who've been offered specific, specific things by the Russians. And I, I can't prove it. So I, I won't, I won't repeat it. But, but it's a, you know, so there, so that may be a part of the explanation. I mean, there's just a lot of money being sloshed around by different people inside Russia, you know, aimed at different people inside the United States. And that, that, that could be part of the story. I mean, there's also this long history of business contacts between the Trump company and the Trump family and Russian money. You know, the real estate business in the, in the 90s and 2000s was in, especially the kind of real estate business Trump was in. You know, this selling luxury condos was very. I mean, it was very Russian. And both of Trump's sons said that at different times. And Russian banks were important in keeping their business alive. So they have some deep business ties. I mean, I've now heard kind of 15 different versions of some other thing, you know, some other personal thing that ties, you know, or some compromise or some, you know, that people have. People have theories that I don't even Want to speculate because I don't know.
- [40:48]
Charlie Sykes
Okay.
- [40:49]
Anne Applebaum
But it's clear, it's clear that psychologically Trump feels some kind, he owes something to Putin. He's grateful to him for something. You know, he talks about him in a way that's peculiar, that he doesn't talk about around people. And, you know, maybe one of my ideas was maybe he believes that the 20 that Putin helped really did help him win the 2016 election one way or the other. You know, and we know that Putin did help him. I mean, Putin, you know, arrange the theft of email from the Democratic National Committee and did a huge campaign as Trump requested. We weren't aware yet of how these campaigns worked and so on. So we. Maybe he feels grateful for that, maybe he feels grateful for him being kept afloat financially, who knows? But he feels some kind of gratitude and even fear of Putin. You know, there's something, there's strange body language between them. And you're right also about Putin humiliating Trump. So within a few days of Trump's election last November, Russian state television, their reaction to the election was to post nude photographs of Melania Trump. So they, the sort of porn pictures she took, took years ago and put them on, on the evening news. And they repeatedly, I mean, night after night after night, they make fun of Trump on Russian television. I mean, that's kind of, you know, they mock him or they say he's our guy, or they, you know, they make fun of things he does. You know, there's, there's a, there's almost a kind of non stop patter about him that goes on and on.
- [42:32]
Charlie Sykes
And, and Trump never reacts to that, though.
- [42:35]
Anne Applebaum
He never, I mean, he may not.
- [42:36]
Charlie Sykes
Know it, I don't know. Well, okay, that's true.
- [42:40]
Anne Applebaum
Some people around him surely know it and they must know that. Then of course, that kind of pattern gets reflected and repeated in other authoritarian media. So it's part of a broader way that the authoritarian, the autocratic world perceives Trump as kind of a bumbling version of themselves. Sorry, no.
- [43:05]
Charlie Sykes
So in the few minutes we have left, though, I want to talk about, and again, we've talked about how he doesn't have any strategy. I wanted to get your view on what happened with Trump, Israel and Iran. We had the big bombing of Iran that looked like it might start a new war. It's gone quiet now. There is a ceasefire. I think it would be. Seems naive to think that that's over. But your sense of where we're at on this and why Donald Trump decided to do something that was, I mean, talk about high risk. And it also appears that despite his claims that he obliterated Iran's nuclear capability, that the mission was not accomplished. So where are we at now?
- [43:51]
Anne Applebaum
Yeah, we have the non truth problem again. I mean, did we destroy the Iranian nuclear program or not? And if we did or didn't, how will we ever know? I mean, and how will policy be made in the future? I mean, there's a, he's created a whole huge, a huge problem going into the future. I mean, my sense is that actually he did it because he thought it wasn't a risk because the Israelis had destroyed Ukraine Iranian air defense. And so it was at that moment relatively safe actually for a US Bomb bombing raid to happen because nobody was going to shoot at the, at the planes, you know, and that he waited until that had happened. And you know, and he, and he did this. How he was talked into it or who talked him into it, I don't know. I mean, I, some, somebody did.
- [44:40]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah.
- [44:41]
Anne Applebaum
And somebody must have, you know, convinced him that this would be a kind of easy win. Remember that what he looks for in public policy is not strategic objectives. You know, it's not about helping Iran change its regime.
- [44:58]
Charlie Sykes
It's not, he's not a, he's not a chess player. He's, he's not thinking three moves down.
- [45:03]
Anne Applebaum
He's trying to win the moment. And somebody convinced him that this was a win. You could have, you could drop these bombs and then that would be over and you would win. You would obliterate the factory or the, the power plant and then you could, and then you could go home. And that, that's what it looks like to me happened. And I don't know whether who. There again, many versions of who it was who convinced him and why. I mean, maybe it was just the Israelis, maybe there were others. But that's my sense of it. And you know, there are a lot of questions that I find puzzling. You know, what is the strategy towards Iran now?
- [45:41]
Charlie Sykes
Now?
- [45:41]
Anne Applebaum
You know, did we just have, we just reinforced the regime? I mean, it looked to me initially after the Israeli raids that we might, we've destabilized it. I mean, I have Iranian and a lot of them were telling me how excited and happy they were that so many Iranian leaders had been killed, especially this irgc, the Revolutionary Guard leaders who had been in charge of arresting women and torturing men. And nobody was sad to see them go. So there was a kind of moment when it looked like something might happen, but there doesn't seem to be a plan or a strategy for that either. I mean, so I'm at a loss. I mean, I don't know what our plan for Iran is now or how we see Iran fitting into the larger Middle East.
- [46:29]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and again, going back to your larger critique, though, there probably is no plan. There is no strategy. He won the moment, or he thought he won the moment. And now I wonder whether or not because he's become so invested in that it was a complete and absolute success that that in some ways he's providing Iran cover. If in fact they still have the nuclear capability. He is in deep denial because if they still are creating a bomb, then obviously what he did failed. And as we know, Donald Trump never, ever, ever admits that he was wrong or that he failed. Ann Applebaum, thank you so much for all your time and your insight. I appreciate it. Anne Applebaum talking to us from Warsaw. Always good to talk with you.
- [47:16]
Anne Applebaum
Thanks so much. Thanks for your time too.
- [47:19]
Charlie Sykes
And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. You know why we do this? We keep doing this because now more than ever, it is important to continually remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. Thank you.
- [47:43]
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