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- [00:00]
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- [00:47]
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- [01:21]
Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. The war in Iran continues, although you wouldn't notice it because the President seems to want to talk about pretty much everything else. Kash Patel may actually be on the way out the door, and I don't think his performance on Saturday night is particularly going to be enhancing his standing with the White House. And speaking of Saturday night, we continue to have the fallout from the White House Correspondent's Dinner that didn't happen. That ended in chaos and tragedy. It could have been worse, but it gave Donald Trump an excuse to talk about his favorite subject, building a new ballroom. And joining us to start off the week is our good friend Anne Applebaum from the Atlantic. First of all, thanks for coming on the podcast again, Ann, thank you for having me. It seems unavoidable that we have to talk about what happened on Saturday night at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Now, I think a lot of people thought that it was going to be kind of a farce, this sort of media political maga canoodling. It didn't actually happen. We had the gunman. But let's talk about this and the fallout from it. I want to get your take on the way Trump reacted and didn't react to what may or may not have been an assassination attempt on him. Your thoughts?
- [02:43]
Anne Applebaum
I agree with your original point. It was very striking that he immediately started talking not about his enemies on the left, which is what Trump, some around him, did, and what he would have done six months or a year ago. But he immediately started talking about the ballroom and needing to build the ballroom, which was peculiar, on a number of grounds. Number one, this was the White House correspondence dinner. It would never be held in the White House. It's hosted by the journalists, not by the president. And historically, it's the journalists inviting the president. And actually, I'll say a word for it. I've been to it a couple of times, and there is a nice theory behind it that it's, you know, it shows that there's a mutual respect for the press and for what it does, and that the press has some respect for politicians and believes that they're legitimate interlocutors and is thanking them for answering questions and so on. I mean, in a different era, you could see how this was a nice event, maybe small, maybe not for television to do once a year, but in the current context, it was pretty grotesque, the idea that the President was going to come and he was meant to make a speech attacking the press, and the press was going to somehow sit there and listen anyway. None of that happened. But I think the interesting point, as you say one, is that Trump immediately turned to describe himself as a martyr, himself as a great president. And now we need to build the ballroom. And the second thing I thought was interesting and this, I'm speaking to you from Poland, which is where I am at the moment. What I thought was interesting is how quickly the conspiracy theories started. And so this was online conspiracy theories that the. The shooter was a plant, that he was put there by Trump or by the Trump campaign in order to increase the president's popularity. And I'm only saying this because I had dinner with a friend of mine last night who's a kind of Polish intellectual, nothing to do with US Politics, doesn't have any. Anything to do with the White House or White House correspondents. And he immediately asked me whether I thought it was possible that this could be somehow fake. And I think that give a sense of how people around the world, not just in the United States, now read the news from Washington. Everybody takes a step back. Everybody asks whether this is real or not real. Nobody's sure of what's true and what isn't true.
- [05:06]
Charlie Sykes
Why do you think that's happening? It is extraordinary. I mean, it was immediate on both the right and the left. It seemed like one of the leading memes on X. What used to be known as Twitter was that it was staged in some way. And it. My first reaction was, you know, our brains have been broken. That, you know, in the last 10 years, a lot of people have just lost the ability to filter out what is real from what is fake. What do you believe? What do you not, you know, the fact that so many people immediately went to conspiracy theories. And again, no, Donald Trump didn't create this, but he has certainly nurtured this world of post reality.
- [05:48]
Anne Applebaum
Donald Trump has repeated conspiracy theories. Remember that he emerged into Pope public consciousness as a political figure when he started talking about Obama's birth certificate? Yeah, he encourages them. He encourages them as a, I think deliberately as a way to undermine faith in media, undermine faith in traditional sources of information, because it's useful to him to operate in a world where he gets to decide what's true and what's not. And that's classic authoritarian tactic, I should say. I think also the nature of modern media, the fact that we see so many different images so fast that we switch quickly from one source to another, that there isn't, there aren't sources, or many people anyway don't have sources that they're sure are seeking to report the truth. I think that's also helped. I mean, that's not anybody's fault. That's the nature of what modern information is, how we see it. We consume it on our telephones, we look at it very quickly. We get it from many, many different directions all at once. And I think that creates a sense of loss of reality. If you're a guy sitting in Poland watching the news or reading it on your phone, how do you know what really happened at the Washington Correspondent's Dinner? Or if you're in Washington 100 yards away, do you really know what happened? I mean, there were people in the room who weren't sure what had happened until after it was over. And I think the fact that nobody. The combination of the nature of information, plus the number of people seeking to undermine faith in those news organizations that do try to report what really happened, I think that's had its impact.
- [07:29]
Charlie Sykes
So the other thing was this, this weird non sequitur of talking about the ballroom as if, like Trump should never be expected to go to an event outside of the. This, the fortress of the White House. So no rallies, no speeches, no cozy dinners with CBS executives, no UFC fights or anything. I was. One of the things that puzzled me was, who does he think he's persuading with this? And also, why do you think that MAGA decided that this was going to be their talking point that somehow this event at the D.C. hilton was the now the pretext for the $400 million ballroom.
- [08:09]
Anne Applebaum
You know, I don't have an answer to that. I don't. I can't read their minds. It did look from the number of copycat posts in the last couple days that there was not an order given out, maybe, but there was some. Somebody was telling people this is the moment to push the ballroom. Maybe Trump is afraid the ballroom won't be built. And it's pretty clear, it's been clear for some months now that the ballroom is one of his major concerns. He's said to hold regular meetings about it. He interrupts other events on other subjects in order to talk about the ballroom. The most famous one was when he had billions of dollars worth of oil executives in the room. People who. People who control a lot of the world's energy resources, and they were all supposedly there to talk about Venezuela. And he interrupted the conversation, stood up, pointed out the window, and started talking about the ballroom. So it's something that he seems to care about more than other things. And so that's. I think we can now expect him to regularly pivot to the ballroom. And, of course, maybe he's afraid now the ballroom won't be built because there are some preservation and conservation rules in D.C. about what can and can't be built on the White House grounds. And maybe he's lost faith and maybe he's worried about the project, and that's in the back of his mind now all the time. I don't have a better guess.
- [09:29]
Charlie Sykes
So it was striking that that was the immediate pivot after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Of course, there were these calls for vengeance and repression. You know, J.D. vance was saying that we need to, you know, search out everybody engaged in wrong. Think about Charlie Kirk's murder. This didn't happen. But also, I guess let's take, like, a very small step back. Donald Trump is. Seems much more interested in the trappings of, like, the ballroom and the arch than he is in the fact that we are still at war with Iran. And over the weekend, there were rather dramatic developments where it looked like there was going to be peace talks. He was going to, you know, send his. His emissaries there. Then he canceled all of that. So give me your sense of where we're at on the war in Iran and why Donald Trump, the President of the United States, the man who launched that war, seems so uninterested in talking about it, even though it's not resolved.
- [10:25]
Anne Applebaum
Look, it's pretty clear that he didn't expect the war to last this long. He was informed by someone or imagined that he was being told that this was something that was going to be very easy. If there were people in the room telling him that it wasn't going to be easy, he ignored them. He himself knows very little about Iran. He seems not to have known about the Strait of Hormuz issue. He seemed to have been surprised when the Iranians attacked US Bases and other objects in the Gulf states. He didn't think they would do that. I assume that US Military has been planning for that for many decades, but somehow that didn't get through to Donald Trump. And so it's a war he doesn't want to think about. He doesn't want to think about the consequences. He keeps looking for somebody to blame for it. He's decided at one point to bully, blame the Europeans for it, who didn't start the war, weren't consulted about the war, you know, are indeed affected by the war, but have very little ability to control the relationship between Iran and the United States in any case. So it's not clear exactly how they could end the war, even if they were, even if they wanted to. So he, so he's faced with a frustrating problem that he can't solve. And so instead of solving it, he'll, he'll talk about almost anything else. I mean, I almost thought he looked happy and relieved after the White House Correspondence Center. You know, it was a change of subject. It got him out of probably what was going to be an ugly speech that would have created more tension and anger. You know, it meant that he could pivot again to his favorite subject, which is himself and his ballroom. And he didn't have to, he didn't have to focus on anything difficult. This is not somebody who wants to deal with or think about problems that have difficult solutions. The most interesting thing about Iran is, as I said, is that he didn't. He seemed to have imagined that it was a one issue problem. It's something the US can resolve by itself against Iran, and that there would be second and third and fourth order consequences, that it would affect the world's jet fuel supply and cause airline prices to rise or air ticket prices to rise, or that it would create fuel shortages in Vietnam, or that it would change the market in international fertilizers. None of these things are within his ability to think. He doesn't think strategically. He doesn't think in terms of longer
- [12:47]
Charlie Sykes
term
- [12:49]
Anne Applebaum
or longer distance impacts of what he does he's somebody who's very focused on the current moment and as I said, on himself, on his interests. What I'm doing now, am I winning the current moment? Am I succeeding in this encounter, whatever it is that I'm in? And he just doesn't want to think about Iran. I have to hope that there are people inside the administration who do have some knowledge of Iran, who are maintaining some contacts, who are continuing some kind of dialogue, and who have some idea of how, of how the war might be brought to an end. I also have to hope that there are some people inside the administration somewhere or in the US Government somewhere who are thinking about the Iranians. And one of the things that's most striking to me about this war is that after the very first 10 minutes when Trump said something about regime change, it's almost as if the people of Iran have been completely left out of the equation. There's been no attempt to speak to them, to reach out to them, to use the president's ability to communicate to reach them. There have been at least no public meetings with members of the Iranian opposition, either the democratic opposition or the monarchical opposition. There's been no effort to solve the problem in any kind of holistic way. And I hope someone is somewhere in the bowels of the State Department or the Pentagon is doing this.
- [14:16]
Charlie Sykes
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- [15:26]
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- [15:31]
Anne Applebaum
Wait, we're going on tour?
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Boost Mobile Delivery Representative
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Anne Applebaum
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- [15:44]
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- [15:47]
Anne Applebaum
Oh, you're definitely a groupie.
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Anne Applebaum
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- [15:59]
Charlie Sykes
are you hearing from the Europeans? I know you have a lot of context. How do they regard as they're watching this play out, what are they saying? What are they thinking? Because Trump seems to go back and forth saying we don't need you and yet this is your problem to fix. Now he's been railing about NATO. There were reports last week about the possible suspension of Spain from NATO, which apparently can't happen. So last time you and I spoke, you made the point that Americans did not fully understand the level of trauma in Europe after the whole threats to invade Greenland. Where are we at now?
- [16:41]
Anne Applebaum
If anything, it's worse. I mean, I think until recently a lot of Europeans still hoped that there was a way to find some common language with Trump, that you could flatter him or you could offer him things. I mean, actually the king of England is in the United States this week on one of those projects with an attempt to speak to him in some way that will reach him. I think people are losing that hope now and they're beginning to understand that it doesn't work or if it worked in the past, it doesn't work anymore. You know, the war with Iran was also a really important breaking point for a lot of ordinary Europeans. The war is extremely unpopular. It's extremely unpopular in Spain, which is why the Spanish prime minister has been so against it. It's extremely unpopular in Italy. Actually. It's very unpopular everywhere. And what you're also going to see in the next weeks and months is European politicians responding to their own populations. So as Trump sinks in popularity, it's going to become difficult for European leaders to support the United States or work with the United States because that will be seen as a sign of betraying the public opinion of the public mood. I think there's also something about the president's lack of strategy and his constant search for scapegoats that has also disillusioned people. I mean, there were, I'd say a few months ago, there were still people who were hoping there was a, you know, there was a four dimensional chess game going on, that there were people who knew what they were doing, that there was a deeper plan around Iran, that there were some, you know, the United States, after all, is a world power and it had great people and jobs. Maybe we can't see them, but they're there. And I think that is also disappearing as people really worry that the emperor has no clothes and the United States has no idea what it's doing, or at least its current leadership has no idea what it's doing and that they're leading everybody in this direction of global recession without appearing to care about it. And that's, you know, and that makes it hard to even think about how you, how would you even cooperate with this White House. How would you, what, what does, what does NATO, American cooperation in the Gulf even look like? You know, how could you do it without having your public being really angry at you? How could you do it in a way that constructive? How could you do it in a way that didn't immediately create an issue and didn't result in the President attacking you anyway? You know, you didn't fix the problem. Now we're angry at you. I mean, there's almost no good way out for American allies and the other, at the same time, really, extraordinarily, there's plenty of evidence of Russian support for Iran, including with weapons and almost certainly with intelligence. There may well be Chinese support for Iran as well. And yet the President doesn't lash out at Russia and China. He doesn't. He lashes out at China.
- [19:42]
Charlie Sykes
He seems to rationalize it.
- [19:44]
Anne Applebaum
He rationalizes it. He understands why Russia would support Iran, but he's angry at the Spanish and to a lot of Europeans, that just sounds more and more like he's in league with the autocratic world. He no longer is interested in the fate of the democratic world. And people are beginning to draw their own conclusions and they're beginning to talk about either a few, a little bit in public, but many behind the scenes are talking about what does Europe look like without this deep connection to the United States.
- [20:14]
Charlie Sykes
So speaking of the future of democracies, I'm catching up a little bit here, but we haven't spoken since the Hungarian election, the overwhelming landslide defeat of Viktor Orban. And I know you've talked and you've written about this, but I want to go back to this question because we've talked about this Very extensively. Viktor Orban had 16 years to entrench his power. He rigged the elections, he rigged the judiciary, he insidified the media, exerted his power over the universities. And I think there was that very. He was very much a role model for what Donald Trump has been envisioning in this country. And yet with all of that rigging, he was blown out of office and has apparently decided to leave voluntarily resigning from parliament, you know, reportedly maybe even coming here. So you wrote about goulash authoritarianism, and specifically, I want to talk about the people who are saying, well, obviously he couldn't be that much of an authoritarian if he was willing to give up power. What's wrong with that argument?
- [21:19]
Anne Applebaum
So, first of all, lots of authoritarians have given up power peacefully. It actually it happened in Hungary in 1989, so there's a tradition of that there. And it happened in Chile, it happened in Spain. Actually, it happened in Communist Poland as well. It's not so unusual. There are authoritarian leaders who decide that it's enough and they're not willing to exert the violence. It would need to stay in control or they don't think it will work, which I think is the case with Orban. Also, I think it's important to take a step back and look what it took to defeat Orban. So, 16 years, so almost a generation he was in power. There are young Hungarians who can't remember anybody else leading their country. In order to defeat him, it required someone who had been in his party to leave the party and campaign for a year and a half, to endure being bugged by the security services, to have his girlfriend turn out to be a spy for the ruling party, and to make tapes of them having sex, which were leaked, presumably to the Hungarian security services. He had to endure being smeared and attacked and having his life explored and destroyed. This is Peter Magyar, the leader. One rumor about him said that he had roasted and eaten the family dog in front of his children, which is almost as grotesque a smear as you can imagine. That smear was actually repeated by Rod Dreher, who is one of the Americans who was paid by the Hungarian government and who lived in Budapest and supported that regime. So he had to go through what really no democratic leader should ever go through. He had to create a grassroots movement from scratch. There had to be Tisa, this is the name of his party cells all over the country. He had to run a year, as I said, an 18 month grassroots campaign in which he constantly, every day, did several public meetings. He drove around the country on a flatbed truck that had nothing, but it carried these speakers. And he would stop in small towns and villages and make speeches and blare them through the loudspeakers. And that's how he campaigned for many months. And, and to need that and to need the kind of tension and panic that I saw in Budapest a couple of weeks before the election, where almost everybody was speculating about what Orban might do in order to stay in power. Would he organize a coup? Would he pretend there had been violence? It wasn't a normal democratic campaign of any kind. And I don't think that's the way, that's a useful way to have politics be conducted in any democracy. And of course, Hungary wasn't really a democracy. And so that's why you had to have what felt like a 1989 movement of people power in order to dislodge him. So I mean, of course he was an authoritarian leader. Of course he wanted to build an authoritarian state. He didn't, I will say this for him, he didn't want to use violence to stay in charge. And his Venezuelan equivalent did. So. Actually, I had a phone call a few days after the election, after the Hungarian election, with a Venezuelan colleague who, who was, who pointed out to me that Maria Corita Machado ran a campaign like that in Venezuela. It was grassroots campaign. She came from the center, right. She was, you know, seeking to involve a lot of people and so on. But she didn't win because the regime just refused to give up and was willing to use violence to stay in charge. Orban was not in the end willing to use violence, but he was. But, you know, but he has the, the experience of him losing and of somebody else coming to power feels to Hungarians like a moment of regime change. And you have this phenomenon of Orban era oligarchs fleeing the country, taking their money out of the country. You have talk of Orban himself leaving the country. You're right. There is a rumor that he's moving to the United States. His daughter and son in law, his son in law having been one of the people who was most enriched by his government, have already left the country and are already in the US it's actually funny. I was joking with another friend of mine about whether the US maybe Mar a Lago becomes the new Moscow. You know, outside of Moscow you have Assad living the dictator of Syria, and you have somewhere in the country you have Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine. Maybe now Washington becomes home for failed illiberal leaders.
- [25:52]
Charlie Sykes
Bolsonaro will end up there.
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Anne Applebaum
Bolsonaro's son is already there. Exactly. So maybe you can imagine Florida becoming a kind of refuge, but really it required an incredible campaign. People had to endure unbelievable pressure and damage. The cost to the country was enormous. All of that was so ugly. Is that what you want American politics to become? Is that the direction you want it to go? Because that is what people around Trump want. They want to create a system that locks in their power and locks in the Republican Party the way that Orban was locked in in Hungary for 16 years.
- [26:32]
Charlie Sykes
They thought so. Were you surprised when Orban conceded? Because there were all of that speculation that he was going to try to pull a Trump or that he would try to pull a coup, and yet that night he basically said, yeah, I lost the election. Were you surprised by that?
- [26:48]
Anne Applebaum
I was surprised partly because, as I said, I'd just been there, and everybody I talked to, they were just spinning scenarios about how he might try to retain power if he lost. On the day of the election, some government officials were talking ominously about some kind of violence coming from the opposition. And there had been hints during the campaign that maybe the Ukrainians were going to interfere and stop the election. And people were very prepared for. And I know that the opposition party was prepared for some kind of legal coup. They had lawyers ready to fight that. And so everybody was prepared for that. My guess is that he decided not to do it because the scale of the defeat was so large, and especially because he could see, especially in the early returns coming in, he could see that the countryside hadn't voted for him, and that was where his base was. And the way his. The electoral system worked in Hungary was that the. A little bit like in the U.S. senate, that people who live in rural districts have a greater impact than people who live in urban districts. And he could see that they. And he may have thought that that would save him, that although he was behind in the polls, that the fact that urban votes, rural votes, count more than urban votes would help him, and then he could see that that wasn't going to happen. And I think he may have decided to give up to spend some time in opposition, and then presumably his intention is to use the money that he and others have stolen or taken from the government, hidden in foundations and companies and their ongoing influence inside the Hungarian state, to come back. Whether they can do that, I don't know, but I'm imagining that that's what they decided was a better plan, that a use of violence would backfire.
- [28:33]
Charlie Sykes
So let's talk about what happens next. Because if Orban over the last 16 years was kind of the playbook for authoritarianism, what you're going to see now is a playbook for unraveling authoritarianism. And so it appears, as you know, and again, I am not as versed in this as you are. Magyar. Is that how you pronounce his name? Magyar? Magyar is being very aggressive. He's being very aggressive in unwinding all of this and holding people accountable. And this is one of those questions is how do you respond after something like this? Do you basically try to return to normalcy, let bygones be bygones? Do you hold people accountable? Do you? I mean, so give me your sense of how aggressively they will be unwinding 16 years of Orbanism and whether or not guys like Orban and his cronies will be held accountable and the people will get back some of those ill gotten gains.
- [29:28]
Anne Applebaum
The only comparison I can make that's nearly parallel is what happened in Poland after elections in 2023. So there had also been an authoritarian populist government in Poland. It wasn't in power as long as Orban and it didn't achieve the levels of control that Orban did, but it did undermine the judicial system. It did take over the equivalent of the Supreme Court and it had captured state media. And the only thing I can say is that after a new government took over, and this was a center, left, center right coalition, so a pretty broad political coalition, the things that it did fast and quickly have been the most successful. So one of the things it did very quickly was take back state media and impose a, you know, try to create some kind of neutral public broadcaster in the place of what had been a very hard, right, very conspiratorial public broadcaster. And they did, I mean, they actually took it off the air for a few days. They chucked everybody out of the building. It was a very, it was a very dramatic thing to do. They didn't do that with the courts. They, they took a slower route which they hoped would be more, you know, more democratic or more in tune with the rule of law. And as a result, the courts remain a huge mess a few years later. So really one of the lessons is that there's actually a pretty narrow window to do things quickly. Maybe Magyar understands this. He's already spoken about again changing the state broadcaster and he's called on the president to resign. Hungary has a president who's elected by the parliament, so he's not popularly elected. It's more like a German president or an Italian president. And he called on him to resign. And he sounds like he will make a big effort to get money back to sue people who were given government funding in ways that are perceived to be illegal and so on. I mean, he may have a tough time. One of Orban's trademarks is that he tried to do everything legally. He had the ability because of this, because at one, because he had 2/3 control of the parliament and that gave him control of the constitution, so he could continually change the legal system in a way that made it possible for him to do stuff that.
- [31:45]
Charlie Sykes
This is what's known as state capture.
- [31:47]
Anne Applebaum
State capture, State capture. So technically it wasn't illegal. So unwinding all of that is going to be really difficult and it may take a long time. And of course, Magyar will have the problem of the public becoming frustrated, of economic change not happening fast enough, of criminals and oligarchs fleeing to Dubai or Mar a Lago and people being angry about that. So that will be a. You know, his first problem is gonna be can he move fast enough and can he do things in a way that satisfies public anger quickly enough? Because as time goes on, those things often get harder.
- [32:24]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. And the 2/3 majority, the ability to amend the constitution is something we do not have in this country. And, you know, it will be interesting to see how aggressively he's able to move. And now this is speculative, but what do you think that Donald Trump. What do you think that Donald Trump took from Orban's defeat? Do you think that he thought. Well, what do you think he thought?
- [32:47]
Anne Applebaum
So I suspect Donald Trump didn't take very much from it and wasn't very interested in it, that would be my guess. But Vance. Yes, Vance, and people around Vance, who had taken Orban as a ruling model and who understood what he was doing and understood what he meant by liberal democracy, and who understood the kind of propaganda he used in which he created existential threats and then justified everything he was doing on the grounds that there was an existential threat to the Hungarian nation from migrants or from gay people as independent or from Ukraine as during this campaign? I think they understood that politics, and I think his loss will damage them because it looks like that's a less certain way to achieve electoral victory than they expected. And there's a. There's also another piece that is. We don't really know the extent of which is that Orban was also a very important funder of the far right. Again, we don't know the levels. I actually heard somebody from Budapest told me a couple of days ago, gave me some numbers which were pretty high of how much people were being paid and how much money was in one of these big foundations that was funding other far right groups in other countries. But they're not official yet. And, you know, I think we'll have to wait for Magyar to take over and for there to be a new government before we, before we know. But it was certainly a significant funder of. It was. Orban was always very interested in American and British conservatives. He invited them to Budapest, he sponsored speeches, he created fellowships, cpac, cpac. He funded CPAC visits to Hungary maybe, and maybe elsewhere. I mean, CPAC has been a for rent organization for a long time. Like you can pay to have CPAC in your country. In Poland, a cryptocurrency that has just gone bust actually paid for a CPAC conference in Poland just before the Polish presidential election. But, but Orban, I think, started that idea. So he, and, and he, he may also have been funding or helping with their propaganda other political parties in Europe. We know he helped the Slovaks, current leader. We know he was involved in other Balkan elections. He may even had a role in the Polish presidential elections. So all of that huge secret infrastructure, I think we'll find out what the extent of it really was. But a lot of that will fall apart. And that may also affect the prospects of both the American far right, but also the European far right parties with whom they were cooperating.
- [35:24]
Charlie Sykes
So I want to circle back to where we started about things like the ballroom. When we talk about. You've written so extensively about authoritarianism and autocracy, and we tend to focus on the legalities of that, the things that are being done through formal institutions of government. And maybe Donald Trump's fetish for arches and things like that is just simply a personality quirk. But can you talk to me a little bit about the authoritarian mystique? Because it strikes me that Donald Trump has this. I mean, he has this obsession with marking his presence with great monuments, which again, is something not unknown to history. History's authoritarianism, history's strongmen. So is there. The trappings of authoritarianism are also important, Right, the optics. But Viktor Orban never was able to build a, you know, Arc de Orban or vast ballroom. So can we connect the dots between Donald Trump's grandiose view of his own role and the fact that he wants to make it a physical presence in Washington D.C. but otherwise, how do you Explain his absolute obsession with this arch and this ballroom and putting his name on absolutely everything that strikes me as very much outside the normal Democratic Republican continuum, even of people who have overweening pride. Your thoughts?
- [36:59]
Anne Applebaum
I think you're right. If you look at the aesthetics of Stalinism or the aesthetics of really many authoritarian regimes across the ages, you see rulers who want to translate their vision of themselves and of their power into something concrete. If I were Timothy Snyder, I would talk about fear of death. They're afraid they're going to die and they want to leave a mark. They want to shape. He wants to shape the city, shape Washington, shape the country, make sure that his presence is in stone. I think that's why he keeps talking about Mount Rushmore and why others do as well. And so it's something about making his power last forever. It's his fear of not being able to.
- [37:45]
Charlie Sykes
Putting himself on money, putting himself on
- [37:48]
Anne Applebaum
money, putting himself on. On. In. In imagery. And so it's a very, you know, it's. It's you. You can see it in. I mean, this goes back to the Roman Empire. It's. It's nothing new at all. Interestingly, Orban didn't create arches or a ballroom, but he did put historical monuments all over Budapest that were designed to reinforce his form of propaganda. So really, right in the center of the city, there's an enormous Vietnam War memorial like monument, which is kind of underground, which you walk down to, which has the names of all of the Hungarian towns and cities that are no longer in Hungary carved into the side. And there's a kind of eternal flame on the bottom. It's quite creepy. And so these are all cities and places, and mostly in Roman or Slovakia or actually there are a few towns in Poland that at one time or another were Hungarian. And so it's a kind of death memorial for them. And this is part of his idea of reviving the idea of a greater Hungary. So actually, he did do a lot of reconstruction of Budapest, not quite in his name, but in the name of the ideas that he purported to be standing for. So even Orban, who was operating in a European Union context, where he had to be careful about offending his public a bit more than Trump seems to be worried. Even he made these sort of monuments to himself. But no, it's very much about living forever and lasting forever, and I would expect Trump will keep trying to do it as long as he's in office.
- [39:32]
Charlie Sykes
Speaking of which, what do you make of the Trump as Jesus meme and his war with The Pope.
- [39:39]
Anne Applebaum
The war with the Pope is extraordinary on a lot of levels. We would almost need another hour's discussion to pick it apart. I mean, extraordinary because so many Trumpists and so many people around the president are Catholics or recently converted Catholics, in the case of the Vice president, and who say they have joined. They've joined the Catholic Church precisely because of its sense of hierarchy, you know, and it is a hierarchy. It's a. There's a clear authority, and the person at the top of the authority is the Pope. And so the question arises, to whom are they loyal? To the religion they say they belong to, or to the. Or to the person who they work for? And so that creates a very strange dynamic. I mean, my. There's also another thing to say about the Pope, which is all popes have talked about, not they. If you look back, even in recent history, Pope Francis talked. Talked a lot about wars, and he was very upset about the war in Gaza, for example. John Paul II spoke about it, about political issues. He spoke about capitalism and its dangers, as well as, of course, being critical of communism, which he also never did in a very direct way. But he talked about remembering truth and speaking in truth and so on. And so there's. This is absolutely nothing new. I mean, it seems to me that what's new is that the Pope speaks English, and the Pope is a clear, good American.
- [41:06]
Charlie Sykes
Yes. And clearly English. I mean, with a clarity that we have not seen before. So you mentioned Pope John Paul II and the first Polish Pope and the role that he played in the fall of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War. And there are people who draw analogies and say that, is it possible that this American Pope, Pope Leo, can play the kind of global role that we attribute to John Paul ii? Now, whether that was the case or not, I'll leave up to you. But it does strike me is that this Pope has a chance to be more consequential than any Pope since John Paul ii, which is not saying a lot. There haven't been a lot.
- [41:49]
Anne Applebaum
It's possible. What to me about him is interesting is what he's saying. So I'm interested in the fact that he's. He's speaking very clearly about the poor, about the homeless, about migrants, about income inequality. He seems to want to play a role in talking about what happens to AI, how artificial intelligence will, how that will affect our sense of who we are, a humanity. In other words, he's. He's taking something from the Bible. I mean, that's obviously there. And putting it at the center of his interests rather than, and forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe even recently he said this quite clearly, that he wants the church not just to talk about sexual conduct and not just to be known for making pronouncements about that, but he wants it to return to the original teaching of Jesus, who did speak about the poor and the homeless and migrants and who was interested in the question of, you know, what it means to be human and what human compassion is. And so it seems to me that he's trying to make a very important shift. I mean, this is irrespective of American politics, but it could have quite a deep impact on our conversations about wealth and poverty and the nature of modern technology. It could have a greater impact than we might have anticipated, given the nature of the pulpit he has. I mean, he is listened to in a way that almost nobody else is, except maybe the U.S. president.
- [43:38]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and that's what makes it so interesting is that you have an American pope versus an American president. What an awkward moment for J.D. vance, who has, you know, been building his identity around his Catholic conversion. He's got the book coming out this fall at the very time when not just the pope, but all of the bishops are saying, you know, J.D. you're getting it wrong. The gospel according to J.D. is not the gospel that we are reading. And this strikes me as, you know, look, JD Has a lot of other. Katie Vance has a lot of other challenges, but this strikes me as a particularly awkward moment for somebody who wanted to inject his version of Christianity into the center of politics and into his own potential campaign in 2028. The last person on earth as a Catholic you want to be debating is the Pope, with all of the bishops lined up in real solidarity behind him saying, listen to this guy. Because, J.D. you're not understanding what your faith really is all about.
- [44:40]
Anne Applebaum
Yes. It seems awkward to me. And I speak here as a. As a non Catholic. I will say another aspect of this quarrel with the Pope is it also has gone down very badly in the Catholic countries of Europe.
- [44:54]
Charlie Sykes
Yes.
- [44:54]
Anne Applebaum
In Poland, people were horrified, including people on the right. In Italy, people were horrified. The Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgio Maloney, who's one of the people who's tried to flatter and stay in touch with Donald Trump, also felt obligated to say something about it. I mean, it's extremely unpopular in countries where the majority of people are Catholic. It's not even the merits of it. It's the ugliness of the US President contesting. The Pope when the Pope is, I mean, a lot of what he's saying is very, you know, I mean, he's condemning war and violence. I mean, he's not. He doesn't talk about Trump himself or even about the United States. He's condemning war and violence in a way that, as I said, most people agree with. And then to have this be somehow contested by American politicians makes the American politicians look arrogant and out of touch.
- [45:56]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and once again, Trump is finding that he has an opponent, an antagonist who is not easily bullied. He's not able to browbeat the Pope. And it is interesting how willing the Pope is to engage with this. So over the weekend, we find out the Department of Justice wants to bring back firing squads for executions, which is another one of Donald Trump's fetishes. And the Pope immediately begins talking about the death penalty and the morality of the death penalty. So if Trump thinks that he was going to bully the Pope, that would be on the level of severe miscalculation. Wouldn't.
- [46:33]
Anne Applebaum
Certainly would. But as I said, it also, it's an unsuccessful way to get your point across. I mean, just to lower the register a little, because it doesn't, you know, people who are Catholic or who are listening to the Pope and sympathizing with what he says. It doesn't make Trump or Vance look either moral or very savvy.
- [47:01]
Charlie Sykes
Anne Applebaum, thank you so much for all of your time. I appreciate it very much. Talking to us from Poland. Thank you, thank you. And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We do this, we will continue to do this because no matter how many times I say it, it is important to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. Thank you.
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Anne Applebaum
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Anne Applebaum
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Charlie Sykes
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Anne Applebaum
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Charlie Sykes
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Xin Yi Pai
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Charlie Sykes
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Anne Applebaum
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