Anne Applebaum | The Atlantic

Illiberalism Is Not Inevitable

2026-04-12T20:24:27-04:00

In the end, the defeat of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, required not just an ordinary election campaign or new messaging but rather the construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement. And by building exactly that, Hungary’s opposition changed politics around the world.

Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief—also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric—that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the “real” people. As it turns out, history doesn’t work like that. “Real” people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy. Illiberalism leads to corruption. And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.

Péter Magyar, the opposition leader and likely next Hungarian prime minister, has now won by a substantial margin, giving him and his party, Tisza, a constitutional majority. To do so, they had to overcome obstacles not usually present in European democracies. After 16 years of what Orbán himself described as an illiberal regime, the Hungarian leader’s political party, Fidesz, had come to control much of the judiciary, bureaucracy, and universities, as well as a group of oligarchic companies that in turn controlled a good chunk of the economy.

Orbán used his control of the state to build an extraordinary web of international illiberal and far-right supporters, and funding mechanisms to support some of them. In the last weeks of the campaign, these friends and beneficiaries rallied round. Orbán received visits or verbal support from Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Benjamin Netanyahu, Marine Le Pen (the leader of the French far right), Alice Weidel (the leader of the German far right), and other illiberal leaders from Argentina, Poland, Slovakia, Brazil, and more. Both Hungarian and American news organizations reported that a Russian intelligence team had set up in Budapest to amplify Orbán’s social-media campaign, and perhaps to stage provocations.

By contrast, Magyar had very little access to Hungarian media, the overwhelming majority of which is owned either by the state or by Fidesz oligarchs. He and his party had limited access even to billboard space, both because they had less money than the ruling party and because many advertising spaces are controlled by the government. Tisza leaders and supporters faced personal obstacles as well. A year ago, I met a Tisza politician who told me that his wife had lost her job and his friends began to stay away after he announced his support for Magyar. Tisza’s database was at one point hacked and posted online, apparently to encourage harassment of party members. Even three weeks ago, many Tisza leaders in Budapest would speak only off the record.

Magyar and his team fought back on the ground. Knowing he could not win if he stuck to Budapest and other large cities, Magyar has been traveling the country since 2024, visiting small towns and villages, many more than once. In the last few days of the campaign, he was holding five or six election meetings every day. He avoided the themes that Orbán chose to promote—global politics, the war in Ukraine, the conspiracy that Ukraine was somehow colluding against or might even invade Hungary—and focused his campaign speeches and social media on the economy, health care, and schools. As a former member of Fidesz himself, he was able to speak with extra conviction about Fidesz’s corruption. He portrayed himself as a part of the European, democratic, law-abiding center-right. He waved a lot of Hungarian flags, as did his supporters.

Despite enormous restrictions and both financial and political pressure, the tiny number of journalists who were still able to report in Hungary also made a difference. In the past few weeks, the investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi, along with his colleagues at the website Direkt26, one of the few independent outlets in the country, patiently debunked Orbán’s anti-Ukrainian propaganda, producing leaked transcripts and audio that revealed Orbán and his foreign minister colluding with Putin and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. These tapes exposed what Panyi described to me as the “big lie that Orbán was a sovereigntist prime minister.” Indeed: Orbán boasted and talked a big game about Hungarian traditions and Hungarian nationalism, but when he spoke on the phone with the Russian leader, he described himself as a mouse and Putin as a lion. For years Orbán has claimed to be fighting shadowy foreign forces—George Soros, the European Union, migrants—but in fact he was himself dependent on foreigners all along.

Those stories resonated, especially with younger Hungarians. At a rock concert in Heroes’ Square in central Budapest on Friday, tens of thousands of them started chanting “Russians, go home”—the same chant that their grandparents used when Soviet soldiers invaded their country in 1956.

Although results are not final, Tisza appears to have won more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. That would give Magyar a constitutional majority that should allow him to pick apart some of the damage that Orbán has done to the Hungarian constitution and to public life. In his victory speech, he called for the resignation of the president, the prosecutor general, the president of the constitutional court, and other institutions. He said he would rejoin the European legal system. In response, according to one witness, Hungarians at his rally chanted, “Europe, Europe, Europe.”

Nobody is pretending this will be easy. Fidesz still dominates many Hungarian institutions and businesses, and the party’s friends and supporters will do their best to undermine a Tisza government. Orbán also leaves behind a fiscal mess, which the analyst Dalibor Rohac suggests Orbán might be happy to abandon while plotting his comeback. “Letting the opposition deal with the economic fallout of the last 16 years might well facilitate Orbán’s return to power in the future,” Rohac wrote earlier this week. Some in the opposition are still expecting dirty tricks in the next days and weeks, before Orbán formally hands over power.

But whatever happens next, this election represents a real turning point. For most European governments, this result is a relief: We can’t know yet what kind of government Tisza will create, but it won’t be one that functions as Russia’s puppet in Europe, blocking EU funding for Ukraine or European sanctions on Russia. Nor will it be a regime that serves as a model for Americans or Europeans who want to capture their own states, or take apart their own checks and balances, or impose their own illiberal ideologies on people who don’t accept them.

The First Post-Reality Political Campaign

2026-03-27T10:31:32-04:00

Flick through pro-government Hungarian accounts on TikTok, and you might see an AI-generated version of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, sitting on a golden toilet, counting his money, snorting cocaine, and barking orders at a Hungarian soldier. You might also find an AI-generated Péter Magyar, the leader of the Hungarian opposition, appearing to say he’s fine with handing Hungarian factories over to foreigners, as long as he’s the one in charge of the country. Keep going, and you will find images of war, violence, and a SpongeBob look-alike declaring that Magyar “wipes up cocaine with me after he accidentally sneezed and it all fell to the floor.”

You won’t find much about Hungary itself, which is not an accident. In recent years political parties around the world have produced surrealist campaigns, comic campaigns, conspiratorial campaigns, even beer-drinking campaigns. But on any list of strange elections, the 2026 parliamentary election in Hungary will stand out—this may be the world’s first post-reality campaign.

In actual reality, the news for Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, is not good. After 16 years in office, plus an earlier three-year term, Orbán has made his country the most corrupt in the European Union, one of the poorest, and certainly the least free. His political party, Fidesz, now controls most universities, the civil service, the high courts, and, through a network of oligarchs, almost all newspapers and broadcasters, as well as about a fifth of the econom y, according to independent economists. General paranoia about Fidesz spies means that Budapest, once again, has become a city where people lower their voices when talking about politics in public.

With that kind of influence, Fidesz, which is well behind in most polls, cannot evade responsibility for Hungarian stagnation, and so neither the party nor its leader is talking much about Hungary, its falling industrial production, or its shrinking population. Instead—backed by Russian propagandists, the European far right, and now the Trump administration (about which more in a minute)—the party is directing a small fortune’s worth of posters and social-media videos toward a different goal: convincing Hungarians to fear sabotage, thievery, or even a military attack from … Ukraine.

This is an entirely false, even ludicrous threat. The Ukrainians have enough to do without starting a second war in Hungary. But Orbán, his government, his party, and many outsiders are now focused on making this threat seem true. Pay attention, because this may be the future of electoral politics: Multiple politicians from several countries are shoveling propaganda at an electorate in order to build terror of an enemy that doesn’t exist at all.

The campaign is not subtle. In Budapest last week, Orbán’s face was almost nowhere to be seen. But posters featuring Zelensky were ubiquitous. Sometimes the Ukrainian president is seen glowering alongside the slogan “Don’t let Zelensky have the last laugh.” Sometimes Zelensky appears with Magyar and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European commission, along with the slogan “They are the risk. Fidesz is the safe choice.” Peter Kreko, who runs a Budapest think tank, told me that this is unprecedented. In 2022, Orbán campaigned on keeping Hungary out of the war. Now he’s telling Hungarians that, as Kreko put it, “we are under imminent threat of attack.”

The same threats reach Hungarians on their phones. On TikTok, where new pro-Fidesz accounts appear every day, AI-created videos of Magyar seem to show him slandering his country—“I stay silent because my masters in Brussels have forbidden me from defending the homeland”—or else singing the Ukrainian national anthem. Another genre of video shows war violence: a Hungarian girl crying as her blindfolded father, wearing a Hungarian uniform, is executed, apparently in Ukraine. Multiple videos also smear Magyar, making personal, sexual, and financial allegations against him, but the fear-Ukrainian-invasion narrative dominates. During a Fidesz march on March 15, a group in the front of the crowd carried a banner declaring We won’t be a Ukrainian colony!

This language and these images have been backed up by the actions of the Hungarian state, each one designed to reinforce Fidesz propaganda. In February, Orbán sent Hungarian soldiers to guard the country’s oil and gas infrastructure, allegedly to prevent a Ukrainian attack, for which there was no evidence. In March, Hungarian counterterrorism authorities seized two trucks, owned by a Ukrainian bank, that were passing through the country on a routine cash-transport run from Vienna. They arrested seven bank employees, one of whom lost consciousness after they injected him with what may have been truth serum. Later they were all released because, again, there was no evidence against them.

[András Pethő: Trump’s attempts to muzzle the press look familiar]

The Hungarian government nevertheless confiscated $82 million in gold and cash, which it has not returned. The online publication Direkt36, one of a tiny number of outlets still doing investigative reporting in Hungary, wrote that Fidesz reckons this ham-handed operation a success: It provoked Zelensky to half-jokingly threaten Orbán, which gave the Hungarian leader another few days’ worth of material.

Hungarian state institutions are not the only government bodies seeking to shape Hungarian perceptions of reality. Although Orbán likes to use the word sovereignty, he now functions, in practice, as the most important Russian puppet in Europe. According to a Washington Post investigation published last week, Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, regularly calls his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to keep the Russians informed following European Union meetings, and sometimes to ask for favors. During a 2020 call between the two men, according to a transcript published by a Hungarian journalist, Szijjártó asked Lavrov to arrange a meeting in Moscow for a pro-Russian Slovak politician, to help him win an election. The meeting did later take place. Other European leaders long ago stopped discussing any security issues in the presence of Orbán himself, who has repeatedly used his veto to block European sanctions on Russia and European aid for Ukraine.

Concerned that a key asset might lose power, the Russians have sent a team of propagandists to Budapest to ensure that Orbán wins. The Financial Times has identified the influence group as the Social Design Agency, a Kremlin-backed IT company whose activities are well known. In 2023, back when the American government was still interested in unmasking Russian propaganda, the State Department’s now-dismantled Global Engagement Center exposed the agency’s role in creating a series of seemingly native pro-Russian websites in Latin America. In Budapest, they were tasked with creating AI videos and using their existing network of trolls and bots to pass them on. One Russian network has circulated doctored screenshots of the English-language website Euronews, with fake quotes attributed to Magyar. The Washington Post investigation revealed that the Russians even proposed to stage a fake assassination of Orbán, in order to build more sympathy for him. They called this strategy “Gamechanger.”

[Anne Applebaum: The longest suicide note in American history]

Tisza, Magyar’s opposition party, is expecting more. Several people close to Tisza told me that they feared a false-flag operation, perhaps an explosion at a Hungarian pipeline or another energy site. I was also told that Tisza has been preparing for a major hack of their internal communications infrastructure, and has built an analog backup system, just in case. Last week, that seemed prudent, since the party’s membership database had already been hacked, with names and private information of members dumped online. Now it seems prescient: This week, Direkt36 published an article, based partly on material from a whistleblower, claiming that this was indeed the Hungarian government’s plan. In response, the Hungarian government said some of the individuals involved were linked to Ukrainian intelligence, and separately accused a Direkt36 journalist of espionage. The story continues to twist and turn.

Not long ago, the U.S. government would have vocally defended the democratic process in Hungary, and might have sought to downplay wild claims about fictional Ukrainian invasions. Instead, the Trump administration is doing its best to amplify them. Strange though it sounds, Hungary, although a tiny country in Central Europe, plays an outsize role in the imagination of the American and European far right: MAGA and its international wing understand that the Hungarian election, the most important in Europe this year, could mark a turning point in the war of ideas that has convulsed the democratic world for the past decade.

Orbán has been actively engaged in this battle, fighting against liberal democracy and the rule of law, advocating for authoritarian populism and one-party rule. He became a beacon for other leaders who seek to alter their own democratic political systems, who also want to twist the rules in order to ensure that they never lose. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, once said Orbán’s Hungary was not just “a model for modern statecraft, but the model.” Orbán pioneered a form of campaigning too, spending years convincing Hungarians that existential threats—from migrants, from so-called decadence, from the European Union—required the radical institutional changes that have kept his party in power. Americans will be familiar with these tactics, which have been adopted, and adapted, by Trump and Vance.

Now the political leaders who have long admired Orbán’s methods are gathering to help him. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Budapest in February to endorse Orbán, even seeming to offer financial support “if you face things that threaten the stability of your country.” Vice President J. D. Vance is set to visit Budapest, probably after Easter. President Trump himself appeared on video at the Budapest meeting last Saturday of CPAC, the formerly mainstream-conservative organization that now organizes pop-up rallies on behalf of the international radical right. In his message, Trump offered his “complete and total endorsement” for Orbán, Russia’s closest European ally.

Other members of the European far right showed up in person. Alice Weidel, head of the far-right Alternative for Germany, made a speech attacking the European Union for allegedly sending billions of euros to Ukraine, “the most corrupt regime on Earth,” as if she were not speaking on a podium inside the most corrupt state in the EU, and were not echoing the rhetoric of Russia, which might authentically be the most corrupt regime on Earth. She was followed by Santiago Abascal, the leader of the Spanish far right, who said that Orbán’s Hungary—repressed and impoverished after years of ersatz populism—is a “shining beam of light in the darkness.” Marine Le Pen of France, Karol Nawrocki of Poland, and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands have also made appearances. Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed Orbán by video. Even the libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, came all the way from South America to laud Orbán, a man who has built one of Europe’s most centralized and repressive societies.

All of them have their own motives. Maybe Weidel is trying to help out the Russians, who fund some of her party members and amplify her own online campaigns. Milei may reckon it prudent to back an ally of Trump, who gave him $20 billion to shore up his country’s currency just before his own recent election. Perhaps Abascal or LePen hope for a boost in their campaigns too. But mostly they were there because the return of a different government in Hungary would invalidate the claim that the far right represents Europe’s future.

[Read: Is the end of NATO near?]

In Budapest, Orban’s language and tactics already feel like they belong to the past. His old threats aren’t working anymore, perhaps because reality is reasserting itself. There is, in fact, no wave of migration challenging the survival of the Hungarian nation. Brussels doesn’t pose an actual threat to Hungarian health and happiness, but the poor state of the nation’s hospitals very well might. And, of course, Ukraine is not going to invade, but Russia might. Hungary was actually invaded, after all, in living memory—by tanks sent in by Moscow, not Kyiv: In 1956, the Soviet army came to Budapest to crush the anti-Communist Hungarian revolution.

To counter Orbán’s post-reality campaign, Tisza has focused on building a grassroots campaign that reaches actual people in the three-dimensional world. Magyar gives no interviews but instead makes campaign speeches in several different towns and villages every day, mostly on topics people understand: the economy, health, corruption. Usually he stays away from the geopolitical themes Orbán much prefers. But at a large rally in Budapest earlier this month, Magyar did start chanting “Russians go home.”

That chant, and the historical memory behind it, also helps explain why Budapest feels so feverish, and why Orbán’s post-reality campaign is so fraught. To win, Orbán has to corrupt that searing national memory, and to substitute fear of Ukraine. That means waging cognitive warfare on a scale no one else has tried before. Emotions are high because the stakes are high. If he succeeds, he will once again blaze a path that others will follow. And if he loses, an era comes to an end.

Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done

2026-03-17T15:35:05-04:00

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Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.

He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.

For the past 14 months, few foreign leaders have been able to acknowledge that someone without any strategy can actually be president of the United States. Surely, the foreign-policy analysts murmured, Trump thinks beyond the current moment. Surely, foreign statesmen whispered, he adheres to some ideology, some pattern, some plan. Words were thrown around—isolationism, imperialism—in an attempt to place Trump’s actions into a historical context. Solemn articles were written about the supposed significance of Greenland, for example, as if Trump’s interest in the Arctic island were not entirely derived from the fact that it looks very large on a Mercator projection.

This week, something broke. Maybe Trump does not understand the link between the past and the present, but other people do. They can see that, as a result of decisions that Trump made but cannot explain, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked by Iranian mines and drones. They can see oil prices rising around the world and they understand that it is difficult and dangerous for the U.S. Navy to solve this problem. They can also hear the president lashing out, as he has done so many times before, trying to get other people to take responsibility, threatening them if they don’t.

[From the March 2026 issue: America vs. the world]

NATO faces a “very bad” future if it doesn’t help clear the strait, Trump told the Financial Times, apparently forgetting that the United States founded the organization and has led it since its creation in 1949. He has also said he is not asking but ordering seven countries to help. He did not specify which ones. “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way from Florida to Washington. “It’s the place from which they get their energy.” Actually it isn’t their territory, and it’s his fault that their energy is blocked.

But in Trump’s mind, these threats are justified: He has a problem right now, so he wants other countries to solve it. He doesn’t seem to remember or care what he said to their leaders last month or last year, nor does he know how his previous decisions shaped public opinion in their countries or harmed their interests. But they remember, they care, and they know.

Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European officials that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In February 2025, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had no right to expect support either, because “you don’t have any cards.” Trump ridiculed Canada as the “51st state” and referred to both the present and previous Canadian prime ministers as “governor.” He claimed, incorrectly, that allied troops in Afghanistan “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines,” causing huge offense to the families of soldiers who died fighting after NATO invoked Article 5 of the organization’s treaty, on behalf of the United States, the only time it has done so. He called the British “our once-great ally,” after they refused to participate in the initial assault on Iran; when they discussed sending some aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf conflict earlier this month, he ridiculed the idea on social media: “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!"

At times, the ugly talk changed into something worse. Before his second inauguration, Trump began hinting that he wouldn’t rule out using force to annex Greenland, a territory of Denmark, a close NATO ally. At first this seemed like a troll or a joke; by January 2026, his public and private comments persuaded the Danes to prepare for an American invasion. Danish leaders had to think about whether their military would shoot down American planes, kill American soldiers, and be killed by them, an exercise so wrenching that some still haven’t recovered. In Copenhagen a few weeks ago, I was shown a Danish app that tells users which products are American, so that they know not to buy them. At the time it was the most popular app in the country.

The economic damage is no troll either. Over the course of 2025, Trump placed tariffs on Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea, often randomly—or again, whimsically—and with no thought to the impact. He raised tariffs on Switzerland because he didn’t like the Swiss president, then lowered them after a Swiss business delegation brought him presents, including a gold bar and a Rolex watch. He threatened to place 100 percent tariffs on Canada should Canada dare to make a trading agreement with China. Unbothered by possible conflicts of interest, he conducted trade negotiations with Vietnam, even as his son Eric Trump was breaking ground on a $1.5 billion golf-course deal in that country.

[From the April 2025 issue: The Trump world order]

Europeans might have tolerated the invective and even the trade damage had it not been for the real threat that Trump now poses to their security. Over the course of 14 months, he has, despite talking of peace, encouraged Russian aggression. He stopped sending military and financial aid to Ukraine, thereby giving Vladimir Putin renewed hope of victory. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, began openly negotiating business deals between the United States and Russia, although the war has not ended and the Russians have never agreed to a cease-fire. Witkoff presents himself to European leaders as a neutral figure, somewhere between NATO and Russia—as if, again, the United States were not the founder and leader of NATO, and as if European security were of no special concern to Americans. Trump himself continues to lash out at Zelensky and to lie about American support for Ukraine, which he repeatedly describes as worth $300 billion or more. The real number is closer to $50 billion, over three years. At current rates, Trump will spend that much in three months in the Middle East, in the course of starting a war rather than trying to stop one.

The result: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared that Canada will not participate in the “offensive operations of Israel and the U.S., and it never will.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius says, “This is not our war, and we didn’t start it.” The Spanish prime minister refused to let the United States use bases for the beginning of the war. The U.K. and France might send some ships to protect their own bases or allies in the Gulf, but neither will send their soldiers or sailors into offensive operations started without their assent.

This isn’t cowardice. It’s a calculation: If allied leaders thought that their sacrifice might count for something in Washington, they might choose differently. But most of them have stopped trying to find the hidden logic behind Trump’s actions, and they understand that any contribution they make will count for nothing. A few days or weeks later, Trump will not even remember that it happened.

Trump Has No Plan for the Iranian People

2026-02-28T13:00:00-05:00

The American bombardment of Iran has been launched without explanation, without Congress, without even an attempt to build public support. Above all, it has been launched without a coherent strategy for the Iranian people, and without a plan to let them decide how to build a legitimate Iranian state.

This lack of coherence has plagued the Trump administration’s policy for many weeks. On at least eight occasions during Iran’s nationwide uprising in early January, President Trump encouraged Iranians to “take over their institutions” and promised that American help was “on its way.” But just last month, days after the Iranian regime massacred thousands of its own citizens, Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, sent out the opposite message. He described Iran as “a deal that ought to happen” and said that the country could be welcomed into “the league of nations.” Vice President Vance has also said that America’s interests in Iran are limited. “If the Iranian people want to overthrow the regime, that’s up to the Iranian people,” Vance recently told reporters. “What we’re focused on right now is the fact that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.”

The absence of a broader strategy fits a pattern. For decades, American presidents from both parties have oscillated between coercion and engagement with Iran, sometimes offering diplomacy, sometimes sanctions. Doves and hawks both sought to manage the tactics of the Islamic Republic—its nuclear ambitions, its ballistic missiles, its network of proxy militias throughout the Middle East—without ever coming up with a meaningful strategy to combat the root problem: the ideology of the regime itself.

The Islamic Republic is a theocracy founded explicitly to oppose the deepest principles of liberal democracy and the rule of law. During its 47-year reign, this theocratic state underwent no meaningful political reform, made no improvement to its human-rights record, and never stopped trying to export its radicalism abroad. To maintain control, the regime has used mass violence, intimidation, and surveillance. In recent years, the regime has also sought, successfully, to use online smear campaigns to divide and denigrate the Iranian opposition. Nevertheless, as the scholar and activist Ladan Boroumand has written, Western liberal democracies have long preferred to engage the Islamic Republic “almost solely through the paradigm of Realpolitik,” to engage in negotiations that never seem to work.

There were plenty of opportunities to try something different. In 2009, at the time of mass protests in Iran, the Obama administration could have put a human-rights campaign at the heart of its Iran policy, promoting the people, ideas, education, and media that might have helped change Iran from within. In 2019, after the cancellation of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the first Trump administration could have done the same. But it did not.

The second Trump administration has gone much further in the opposite direction, actually dismantling tools that could have helped promote civic engagement and build a united opposition in Iran. The administration has taken money away from Iranian-human-rights-monitoring groups and defunded media projects. Under the leadership of the former Arizona political candidate Kari Lake, the U.S. Agency for Global Media has prevented Radio Farda, the Farsi-language channel of the U.S. broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, from using American transmission equipment.

Voice of America, the U.S. government’s other Persian-language channel, cut back coverage and lost credibility by producing partisan broadcasts. The channel’s leadership has actually banned any mention of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran, who commands a substantial following both inside and outside the country. As a result, VOA lost ground to the Saudi-funded channel Iran International. Lake also cut funding for another agency, the Open Technology Fund, dedicated to providing virtual private networks and satellite access to Iranians, among others. That decision might also help keep Iranians inside the country isolated from the large dissident movement in the diaspora.

The administration’s apparent lack of interest in the Iranian opposition adds a layer of surreality to the video that Trump posted early this morning. He called on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Iranian Armed Forces, and the police to “lay down your weapons.” But to whom should they surrender? He almost taunted the Iranian people to take charge. “Let’s see how you respond,” he said. “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.”

But who is “you”? The civil-society and women’s-rights activists who want to build a rule-of-law society, with transparency, accountability, and independent courts? The ethnic minorities—Kurdish, Baluchi, Azerbaijani, and others—who want a decentralized state and more autonomy? The sometimes-fanatical supporters of a new monarchy, who have tried in recent months to push others to the sidelines? Breakaway groups inside the IRGC who might be interested in creating a military dictatorship?

The answer matters. As one opposition insider told me at the time of the previous American attack, the mere act of bombing Iran will not by itself create a stable regime. “If there was ever a fantasy that a leader would fly in under the wings of foreign aviators,” he told me, “that is definitely not going to happen.” Another Iranian activist texted me this morning: “This is one of the best days of my life, Anne; also I am very worried about what comes next.” (Both the opposition insider and the activist requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.)

The point is not that the U.S. should promote democracy for its own sake. The goal, rather, must be to help Iranians achieve normalcy. For the region to be at peace, Tehran must transform itself from the headquarters of an insurgency back into the capital of a country seeking to build peace and prosperity for its own citizens. A stable, law-abiding Iran will help build a stable, law-abiding Middle East. But in order to achieve that, Iran needs not a new dictatorship but self-determination and a pluralist government that respects basic rights. Right now, the Trump administration is not trying to build one.

No, It’s Not Back to Business as Usual

2026-02-17T06:27:47-05:00

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Just like last year, I watched the most important American speech at the Munich Security Conference in the overflow room, sitting on the floor, underneath the speakers. This is the best place both to hear the speech (otherwise the room is too noisy) and to watch the faces of people gathered around the screens. The prime ministers and presidents sit in the main hall, but plenty of other people attend the conference: security analysts, lieutenant colonels, drone engineers, deputy defense ministers, legislators, and hundreds of other people whose professional lives are dedicated to ending the war in Ukraine, bringing peace to Europe, and projecting security in the world.

Just like last year, this group was hoping to hear how the U.S. administration is planning to contribute to these projects. And, just like last year, audience members were disappointed.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Saturday’s key speaker, was more civil than Vice President J. D. Vance, who in 2025 attacked and insulted many of the European governments represented in the room. But Rubio’s speech had many of the same goals. He did not mention the war, or imply that America would help Europe win it. He did not express the belief that Russia can be defeated. He did not refer to the democratic values and the shared belief in freedom that once motivated the NATO alliance, and that still motivate its European members. Instead, he offered a vision of unity based on a misty idea of inherited “Western civilization”—Dante, Shakespeare, the Sistine Chapel, the Beatles—which would fight against the real enemies: not Russia, not China, but rather migration, the “climate cult,” and other forms of modern degeneracy.

[Read: Marco Rubio doesn’t get it]

The speech worked like a Rorschach test. If you wanted to hear some positive news, you might have been satisfied by the emotive expressions of unity. But one of my German friends clearly heard a “dog whistle” to the German far right. I spoke with a couple of Poles who noticed that the list of great men and great artworks failed to include anyone or anything from their half of the European continent. An Indian colleague was alarmed by the praise for colonialism. In Rubio’s repeated references to Christianity, a lot of Americans heard a shout-out to Christian nationalists. And many, many people noticed the oddity of the attack on migration, coming from a son of migrants.

In the hours and days afterward, I did not meet a single person of any nationality who thinks that the American-European relationship is returning to business as usual. Rubio did not say that, and obviously did not want anyone to believe it. Neither did Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, who also appeared in Munich. Colby, speaking at a public event, instead promoted the emergence of a “Europeanized NATO” that can defend itself, by itself, with America perhaps offering a theoretical nuclear umbrella. He dismissed the “cloud-castle abstraction of the rules-based international order.” He said that no one should “base alliances on sentiment alone.” This is the message that the Trump administration has been sending all year, and it has not changed.

That message comes with some profound contradictions. Just after Munich, Rubio flew to Bratislava and Budapest, where he heaped praise upon Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister. President Trump, he told Orbán, is “deeply committed to your success,” a clear reference to upcoming Hungarian elections that Orbán is on course to lose, if the vote is conducted fairly. Many have noted that Orbán has a record of corruption and electoral manipulation, that he puts pressure on judges and independent journalists (hardly any of the latter are left in Hungary), and that Rubio himself signed a letter denouncing the Hungarian prime minister for “democratic erosion” back in 2019.

But in the light of the American message delivered in Munich, the visit was also inconsistent. Orbán, like the far-right leaders in Germany and France who have close ties to Vance and the MAGA establishment, opposes European rearmament. Orbán is not merely seeking to block the emergence of a “Europeanized NATO”; he operates as a de facto spokesperson for Russia inside the European Union.

[Robert Kagan: America vs. the world]

In practice, Orbán’s Hungary creates a major security headache for everybody else. Russians are waging a horrific, damaging, costly war on Ukraine. They have sent drones into Europe, staged regular cyberattacks, and cut undersea cables in the Baltic Sea. Does the United States really want Europe to unite and fight these threats together? If so, why is the Trump administration supporting someone who opposes this project? Europeans can’t help but wonder if the American goal is rather to encourage a divided Europe that can’t defend itself against anyone.

Plenty of people heard the open messages and the subtle ones, with some unexpected results. Yesterday morning, Politico’s Brussels Playbook newsletter reported that finance ministers from six European states were meeting in Brussels to discuss the integration of the continent’s financial systems into a capital-markets union. The goal is to jump-start the economy. But as a German friend of mine likes to say, nobody likes capital, nobody likes markets, and nobody likes unions, which is one of the reasons why this long-discussed idea has never created much popular enthusiasm. Some smaller financial institutions might lose out, and they have never been shy about saying so, either.

The Trump administration has changed the nature of this discussion. If Europe is to emancipate itself from the United States, and if Europe is to be prepared to defeat Russia, then European defense and technology companies need to grow much faster and raise much more money than they can right now. Instead of investing in America, Europeans will have to keep more of their money at home. In Munich I heard a lot of determination to pursue this goal. None of that is business as usual either.

What Is Kari Lake Trying to Achieve?

2026-02-11T09:40:00-05:00

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She wanted to be governor of Arizona. She wanted to be a senator from Arizona. She wanted to run Voice of America, to be MAGA’s broadcaster to the world. Then she wanted to shut down Voice of America, after Donald Trump and Elon Musk turned against it. She wanted to play a big role in the MAGA movement, to live up to the phrase she’s used to describe herself: “Trump in heels.” But Kari Lake has achieved none of those things.

Instead, during her 11 months as the de facto leader of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Lake has done profound damage to America’s foreign broadcasters, and to America’s ability to communicate with the world. USAGM runs Voice of America and gives grants to, among others, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Open Technology Fund, which helps people access information in places including Russia and Iran. During her tenure, Lake has ceded influence to Chinese and Russian state media all over the world, as their broadcasters have taken over slots from canceled U.S. programs. She has hampered the U.S. government’s ability to inform foreign audiences in times of crisis. She bl ocked RFE/RL from using USAGM’s transmission equipment, which meant that during mass street protests and an internet blackout in Iran recently, the broadcasters’ Persian-language service, Radio Farda, had to rent from commercial contractors. Voice of America’s Spanish-language service, which once reached tens of millions of people in Latin America, was unavailable during the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela because it had been shut down months earlier.

[Anne Applebaum: The U.S. surrenders in the global information wars]

But even while Lake presided over the destruction of an agency vital to U.S. national-security interests and the squandering of taxpayer dollars—more on this later—she often seemed to be focused on other things. Throughout the past year, she has posted on X constantly, sometimes many times a day, about Arizona politics (“Arizona elections are theater. Everyone knows it”); Somali immigration; Ashli Babbitt; Melania Trump’s movie; even former Ohio Governor John Kasich, whom she called “a pussy.” Although head of an agency whose broadcasters are mandated by law to be nonpartisan and editorially independent, she has four photographs of President Trump at the top of her X feed, where she has also pinned a long, wild screed about unspecified electoral fraud (“Why is NO ONE talking about this during a week when a lot of people are TALKING??? I think I know—because there is BIG money in keeping the corrupt, rigged elections going”).

Yet if Lake’s intention is to win Trump’s favor by broadcasting conspiracy theories, she is failing at that too. In October, she was spotted waiting in a White House lobby, hoping to see Trump, according to two GOP operatives. “Kari has been here for hours,” a White House aide told one of the operatives that day. “She’s going to run, and she’s asking for the endorsement.” Lake, who was rumored to be mulling a run for Congress in Arizona, eventually shared her pitch with a low-level aide who conveyed no enthusiasm for a third Lake candidacy, the same person said. The other Republican operative offered a similar account. When asked for comment on the episode, Lake responded in a statement that “every shred of this question is incorrect” and added, “The President has always been very gracious and generous when I have requested time with him.”

Whatever she does next, Lake will leave behind immense damage, as well as a legal quagmire, not least because the legal basis for her current position is peculiar. Because Trump removed most members of the bipartisan, Senate-confirmed board that oversees USAGM, depriving it of a quorum, Lake could not formally be appointed head of VOA. The head of USAGM has to be confirmed by the Senate, but for whatever reason, Trump didn’t want to go through the process. That’s why Lake arrived at USAGM with the title “special adviser.” She was promoted to “deputy CEO”; later she began calling herself the “acting CEO.” During a sworn deposition in two lawsuits brought by fired employees, she admitted that she had no documentation confirming her appointment to the latter position.

Once in place, several current and former staffers told us, Lake made little effort to understand the agency, its mission, or even the point of journalistic independence. A television-news anchor in Phoenix for more than two decades, she had a very limited background in international journalism, and during congressional testimony revealed that she did not know, for example, what language is spoken in Armenia, although VOA had an Armenian service. During her deposition, she could not think of any countries in Asia, other than China, that might not have adequate sources of free information; apparently North Korea did not come to mind.

Although she had no experience working with any of the institutions before, she did not initially consult with senior officials at the broadcasters. Rohit Mahajan, the chief communications officer for RFA, said that leaders of all of the broadcasters had approached Lake, and continue to do so, but to little effect. Michael Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America, said he tried unsuccessfully to engage Lake both directly and through intermediaries. In the end he met her twice, once by accident in a hallway and once when he came to hand her a briefing book prepared by his staff. She took it and indicated she would read it, but he never heard back. (Lake declined to comment on these specific allegations due to ongoing litigation.)

But that was not unusual; she kept her distance from others as well, multiple current and former staffers said. One VOA staffer reckons that she wasn’t in that building “more than a couple of times” in a six-month period. In the deposition, Lake said she primarily spent time at the State Department, where she was eventually given an office. But she didn’t ask many people to meet her there either. In her statement, Lake defended her commitment to the job, saying, “Frankly, most of your ‘sources’ probably wish I didn’t work so hard.”

The VOA staffer also said that new appointees then working with Lake seemed “distrustful of federal employees, as part of the so-called deep state.” Among these appointees were John Zadrozny, an anti-immigration campaigner and DHS official in the first Trump administration; Mora Namdar, who contributed to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025; and Frank Wuco, a former talk-radio host known for promoting birtherism and several other conspiracy theories.

A former USAGM executive nevertheless said some employees were initially hopeful about Lake, given her television experience. Perhaps, some thought, the outlet could have found an on-air role for her, or even created her own show. Another former employee said they had prepared proposals for institutional reform. But whatever plans Lake had originally made for the broadcasters ended in mid-March, when Trump signed an executive order designed to close the entire agency. Lake admitted under oath that this decision caught her by surprise. Nevertheless, perhaps egged on by criticism from the Trump aide Ric Grenell and from Musk—who described the broadcasters, collectively reaching hundreds of millions of people, as “radical left crazy people talking to themselves”—Lake instantly rushed to demolish the institution, even denigrating VOA as “rotten to the core.”

With the help of DOGE, she immediately began trying to cut grants to RFA, RFE/RL, and other agencies, forcing them to make emergency cuts in staff and programming. USAGM also fired about 500 VOA contractors, many of whom were journalists with unique language skills and contacts in difficult parts of the world. Because they are what Abramowitz described as “the guts of the language services,” people with years of experience and deep knowledge of their countries, their departure meant that many VOA programs became impossible to produce. Eventually most were shut down.

In addition, about 800 full-time employees were placed on paid administrative leave. During the following months, Lake and her team repeatedly tried to fire the agency staff, including journalists, editors, and tech support. But because Lake’s authority to discharge employees was uncertain, and because she and her aides did not comply with strict rules about so-called reductions in force in the federal government, Lake’s team kept running into legal hurdles that they seem not to have anticipated.

Even as Russian and Chinese state media were replacing American news reporting, USAGM was obligated to pay salaries and benefits to hundreds of people placed on leave. A minority report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations estimates that from March 15 through July 18 alone, USAGM paid hundreds of people more than $69 million not to work, and that cost has continued to grow. As of August, more than 500 people were still on administrative leave, still receiving salaries and benefits, and still barred from performing their duties. In September, a judge blocked another attempt to fire them. Since then, the federal government has likely paid them about $50 million more—an estimate based on average salary levels at the agency—while still preventing them from doing their jobs. Lake’s statement did not refute these numbers but instead blamed an “activist judge” for obstructing her plans.

Lake has taken the position that she is required by law to maintain merely a statutory minimum service at VOA, something far smaller than the broadcasts previously produced in 49 languages. Lake initially preserved service in only four languages (Mandarin, Dari, Pashto, and Farsi) but later added a few more, including Korean and Kurdish. Yet even as she continues to pay hundreds of experienced journalists and federal workers to remain on administrative leave, sources at VOA and USAGM told us that she is hiring more and more contractors. This may be because, as she has testified, she truly believes USAGM and its broadcasters are “rotten to the core.”

[Toluse Olorunnipa: Kari Lake’s attempt to deport her own employees]

Regardless, she seems to be replacing some journalists with propagandists. By law, all of the broadcasters are supposed to be nonpartisan, with a firewall between the journalists and the U.S. administration. The State Department puts out the administration’s views; the broadcasters are meant to be reporters, a distinction particularly important in places that don’t have any other independent media. But some of VOA’s newer material doesn’t appear to meet that standard. One recent article, originally published in Chinese, echoed the false claims that Trump likes to make about his own record: “Trump combined his dealmaking ability with diplomacy based on the concept of ‘peace through strength’ to secure agreements halting and restraining eight global conflicts in 2025.” VOA’s Mandarin-language Instagram feed recently began posting heroic, Photoshopped images of Trump with misty American flags and helicopters in the background.

In practice, this is another kind of waste. Trump did not halt or restrain eight global conflicts, and obvious pro-Trump puffery isn’t going to have the same kind of influence among Mandarin-speaking audiences as, say, the extraordinary reporting once done by Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur-language service, which had to be shut down when funding to the broadcaster was cut and only recently reopened with a limited service. In 2017, RFA broke the story of the Chinese government’s mass arrests of Uyghur people in Xinjiang, part of a crackdown that has since forced some 1.8 million people into concentration camps. This story also had an impact on international perceptions of China in a way that fictional tales of Trump’s diplomacy will not.

Lake’s decisions about USAGM property have also taken their toll. Before Trump returned to office, the agency had begun to move into new quarters. Its old building, constructed in 1939 for the Social Security Board, needed expensive renovations; reportedly had ancient, faulty wiring; was far too big; and was generally unsuitable for modern journalism. After an extensive search and a lengthy negotiation, the service contracted to lease a smaller office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Although the total price tag of the 15-year lease was more than $200 million, a number that looks large, the annual cost was reportedly lower than that of the agency’s former quarters. The owner gave USAGM two years’ free rent, as well as an additional nine months without rent to move into the building; the previous leaseholder threw in office furniture as well. According to USAGM’s previous CEO, the savings from the deal would have come to more than $150 million over the course of the lease. Renovations had begun, and some staff had already moved in.

In March, Lake abruptly canceled the lease. The former USAGM executive and another person with knowledge of the transaction say that she and her team did not follow the specified termination procedures. Lake’s team did not want to reimburse the owner’s costs, which the people close to the deal said initially came to about $16 million. The executive believes that this is because any payment undercut their argument that “it’s cheaper to get rid of these things than to keep them.” Theoretically, the building’s owner could add to the list of lawsuits against Lake, and a court could now hold USAGM, and thus U.S. taxpayers, liable for the entire 15-year lease. (In her statement, Lake maintained that canceling the lease reduced the agency’s costs and will save more than $225 million over 10 years.)

Meanwhile, office leases and other contracts around the world have been canceled, sometimes incurring additional costs, by VOA as well as the other broadcasters, staffers said. Further losses are mounting. USAGM also continues to pay to update and maintain its transmission capabilities in multiple countries around the world, even though they are now being used less often, and even though Lake has prevented some of the services from using them. Lake is also engaged in a series of lawsuits, some of which she appears to have made only minimal effort to fight. RFE/RL has won several cases that have allowed it to remain open. Employees of VOA, RFA, and the Middle East Broadcasting Network have also received favorable court rulings. One federal judge, Royce Lamberth, a President Ronald Reagan appointee, has pointed out that when Congress appropriated $260 million to VOA for 2025, it did not intend the money to be used to cut programming and keep employees at home. “The legal term for that is ‘waste,’” he said, “and it is precisely what federal appropriation law aims to avoid.”

No one can say Lake lacks enthusiasm for the cause of shutting down the agency. During the course of the year, she has railed against USAGM, baselessly accused Voice of America of taking instruction from the Chinese Communist Party, and canceled visas for the foreign employees of the broadcasters, forcing them to leave the United States immediately and, in the case of some from repressive countries, scramble to find somewhere safe to live. “There was no caretaking to deal with that issue at all,” said Kathryn Neeper, director of strategy at USAGM, now on administrative leave. Lake did take time to make a slick video about the new VOA building whose lease she canceled, describing it as luxurious and overpriced.

More recently, after congressional appropriators began talking about bringing the agency’s funding back, she switched tack. She visited the Miami headquarters of Radio Martí—which is part of the Office of Cuban Broadcasting, beloved by Cuban American politicians, the broadcaster least affected by her purge—and even met staff last week at the main headquarters of RFE/RL in Prague.

She has lauded the work of the skeleton VOA services in Persian and installed a new leader for them—albeit a controversial, seemingly partisan one—even as she continued to prevent RFE/RL’s Radio Farda from accessing transmission services. Lake asserted in her statement that RFE/RL leaders “were putting out a message that was counter to US policy” and that she was helping them “align their messaging with American foreign policy and national security strategy.” But that assertion again reflects a deep misunderstanding of what RFE/RL is supposed to do. According to long-standing statute, the broadcaster has “professional independence,” providing not American messaging but real journalism in places where there are few alternatives.

Lake herself never pretends not to be partisan, keeping up a constant stream of praise and adulation for Trump, the “Trump Kennedy Center,” Charlie Kirk, and other MAGA heroes. But the Lake era at USAGM might look very different, even to Republicans, once the costs and losses of her year in charge are counted. Not only has she wasted money; she hasn’t won many arguments. In recent weeks, Congress rejected Lake’s requests to cut funding to a bare minimum and allotted USAGM something approaching previous levels of funding. Lake will retain the ability to undermine the broadcasters, but her expensive, monthslong, legally dubious attempt to destroy them has so far failed.

[Tom Nichols: They’re cheering for Trump in Moscow—again]

The uncertain future of her role might explain why Lake was said to be sitting in a White House waiting room in October, trying to get the president’s endorsement for a congressional race. But even if she had his blessing, a return to Arizona politics will be difficult. The Republican consultant and pollster Paul Bentz told us that MAGA voters in Arizona have moved on from Lake: “MAGA’s got other people that they’ve put at the forefront,” Bentz said. “They’ve got better candidates that they like more.” In October, a “war room” account on X affiliated with her past campaigns accused Fox News and Bret Baier of blacklisting her.

In her statement, Lake did not directly answer a question about whether she would seek a congressional seat, saying only, “If and when I decide to run for office, The Atlantic will be the very last to know.” Soon after allegedly being turned away at the White House, Lake also bought a condo in her native Iowa, according to MS Now, perhaps to try her luck in politics there. She can then explain to Iowa voters how much damage she did to American interests and communications around the world, as well as what happened to the hundreds of millions of dollars she squandered on their behalf.

Democracy Under Occupation

2026-02-06T06:01:00-05:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

When heavily armed agents of the federal government arrived in Minneapolis, the people of the Twin Cities responded with surprising strength.

In this episode, residents describe what drove them to act, and host Anne Applebaum speaks with contributing writer Robert Worth about what he learned when he observed the tactics of the federal agents and the response of Minnesotans.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Amanda Bauer: I’ll tell you, I’ve been teaching for 25 years and for 25 years we’ve had lockdowns, teaching kids about, you know, mass shootings in schools. But I think, in my head, I never thought it would be our own government that we had to try to protect ourselves from, or to protect our children from.

[Music]

Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Anne Applebaum. This season, I’ve been examining how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. Today we’re bringing you an extra episode that takes a look at what opposition to this new normal looks like on the ground level. When heavily armed agents of the federal government arrived in Minneapolis, the residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul met those federal forces with surprising strength.

For this episode, I spoke to journalist Robert Worth, a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He’s just been to Minneapolis, where he observed the tactics of the federal agents and the response of Minnesotans. He and I both saw an eerie resemblance to other protest movements that we’ve witnessed in other parts of the world.

First, though, here’s some more from the people of the Twin Cities, explaining how and why they were moved to act.

[Music]

Bauer: My name is Amanda Bauer. I’m an elementary music teacher in a small elementary school, about 500 or so students from places all over the world, primarily Hispanic and Latin American countries, and then a lot of Somali families, too. The very first day back of break, ICE was at our school and circling the blocks and parked across the street. The kids didn’t feel safe, so we kind of started walking kids home to their apartments and places in the neighborhood. And it was Wednesday, exactly right when we dismissed, that ICE hopped out of their vehicles with all of their riot gear on and were heading over to the apartments across the street from our school. So we had to lock down and keep the kids inside. And it happened fast enough that we had a student who was looking out the window and saw them break into his apartment and just sobbed, “That’s my house. That’s my—that’s my home.” And we shut the blinds, but it was too late. He saw it, and he’ll never unsee it. I don’t know from the other perspective or people who think that this is an acceptable form of trauma for a child to have to experience. The count today is we have 40 students who aren’t coming anymore because of not feeling safe.

[Music]

Emilia González Avalos: People here have a civic life. [I’m] Emilia González Avalos, executive director of Unidos. You know people in your caucus, in your neighborhood. People show up to city-council meetings here in Minnesota. Guess what we’re gonna use when they try to come after Minnesotans? We’re going to use civil life. And we’re gonna make more of it. We’re gonna recruit more people. This is just a very Minnesotan thing we do.

Chad Knutson: I don’t know how other people react when they get bullied, but I don’t back down when I get bullied. I fight harder. Everyone I see out here is like, What do you think—we’re gonna quit? We live here. My name is Chad. I am a father of two from St. Paul. Yesterday, [an] ICE agent [was] sitting in a white car idling there on my block, four houses down. I go out and take a picture of his license plate and a picture of him. We’re not protesters. We’re protectors. I don’t wanna be out in my street yesterday blowing a goddamn whistle, because there’s an adopted brown kid down there. They hid her in the basement yesterday. That’s what I don’t think anyone that’s not living here right now understands, is that they wanna make it out to be like this bunch of lunatics in the street. It’s just fucking normal people that don’t want to see their neighbor get beat up. I’m protecting my neighbors.

Ibrahim: My name’s Ibrahim. Born and raised in Minnesota. U.S. citizen. Lived here all my life. I just graduated—I just graduated college. Cybersecurity. I know coming outside there’s a risk, there’s a risk to it, you know, especially me being a Somali male, a Muslim guy, Black skin. But I feel like our community has united a bit more. People come into our mosques on Fridays, you know, white people. And I know that people do show up to support the community. We support one another, and we’re all in this together.

Sara Myron: I was in Egypt during the Arab Spring. You go out, you show up. Dar, dar; zanqa, zanqa; irhal. “Door to door, street to street, leave.” You know? My name’s Sara Myron. I’m a Moroccan American. My great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War for the Wisconsin 11th Infantry to achieve the American dream. We put down the Confederates, we’re gonna put these ICE guys down too. Not with force, but legally with protests and with the will of the people.

Applebaum: Robert, welcome.

Robert Worth: Thank you for having me.

Applebaum: We have both been in authoritarian countries, where demonstrators are protesting in an atmosphere of fear and repression. Minneapolis isn’t exactly Tahrir Square, or the Ukrainian Maidan, or the Hong Kong democracy movement, but it actually has more in common with those demonstrations than most Americans want to acknowledge. In each place, demonstrators faced hostile police who used surveillance technology, who threatened violence. And as a result, they had to create new means of organization, and sometimes new kinds of protests. You were in Minnesota recently. Tell me about what you saw. And tell me how you understand Minnesota within the context of these other moments and movements.

Worth: What I saw was a combination of some of the clashes with protesters and ICE agents, including one stop that got quite violent where a six-car convoy showed up outside a health center. And the agents, they had arrested a couple of people, some protesters as well. Then next thing we know, people are getting sprayed in the face, tear gas. But beyond that, I spent a lot of time talking to people in the Twin Cities about what they had experienced at their local schools, in their neighborhoods. I think, often, it’s easy to caricature this as protesters who believe in sanctuary cities, who believe in open borders versus these agents who were just enforcing the law. I don’t think that’s an accurate picture at all. What you have is a community that feels that whatever their views may be on immigration, there’s a kind of assault on their entire community in a variety of ways, and they wanted to push back on that.

Applebaum: Let’s talk a little bit about the tactics used by federal agents in the United States, some of which are very new in this country, but are more common overseas. So I’m thinking about surveillance, for one. For example, photographing license plates, using facial-recognition software. Did you see those tactics in use, and did you see people reacting to them or finding ways of compensating for them?

Worth: Absolutely. What is striking, many people go to these encounters to monitor them, to take pictures. Everybody’s holding up a cell phone on the assumption that if someone is going to be arrested, they want there to be a record for potential use in legal proceedings. But the agents themselves are also photographing everybody, and we all now know that they have technology, facial-recognition technology. Everybody feels that they are in potential danger just by being anywhere near these things. And what you also see is a lot of organization. They use tear gas very liberally. And there are always medics in the group who are ready and prepared to help people out, not just with the tear gas, but people who’ve been beaten, thrown to the ground, that kind of—

Applebaum: Medics among the protesters, you mean?

Worth: Yes, exactly. So there’s a lot of organization and this does, for me, evoke some of the things I’ve seen overseas. I covered the 2009 Green Movement in Iran, which was, probably the first major insurrection where social media was used to organize, and then on a much, much larger scale in 2011 with the Arab uprisings, when again social media was used to evade that kind of surveillance and to organize the protests.

Applebaum: Let me add other things that are new. One is the dress and arms and attitude of ICE and the other federal agents—people dressed like they were in Fallujah, you know, or in southern Afghanistan. Lawlessness—so people are entering homes and other buildings without a warrant, dragging people off the street based on nothing except for their skin color. These things feel very un-American, but again, they’re common in other places. Let’s walk through some of the ways in which the protesters and some of the victims may be learning to react. I was very struck in your writing and in the writing of other people by the use of pseudonyms, encrypted-messaging platforms. Did you see any of that? And did that remind you of things you’d seen, whether in Iran or elsewhere?

Worth: Very much so. I traveled to the encounter I described earlier with someone who was using Signal. And these are neighborhood groups, Signal groups. Everybody’s using pseudonyms for the reason you mentioned. They all fear that the government could come after them in unaccountable ways. I think the level of violence is shocking—just seeing these heavily armed people—but also the flagrant absence of what we think of as efforts by the police or any other uniformed group in the U.S., government officials, to avoid violence. I mean, the killing of Alex Pretti, I’ve seen people who’ve been in the military look at those videos and say, Those people are not trained properly at all. And I think that kind of information spreads very quickly. And there’s a feeling of not only that you’re vulnerable to state violence, but there’s a complete lack of accountability for it.

Applebaum: One of the features of the Hong Kong democracy movement was that the protesters knew that there were cameras everywhere and they were being recorded, and so they started wearing masks and they started also trying to always act in unpredictable ways. They would show up in different parts of the city at different times, so that there were no patterns, so that they couldn’t be followed. Did you see anything like that in Minnesota?

Worth: Certainly people were wearing masks, although it’s a little bit hard to say because the weather was, you know, 10 below zero sometimes, and people had to—

Applebaum: Scarves.

Worth: Exactly. People had to protect themselves in any way they could. I certainly saw techniques that reminded me of what I saw in, you know, the Arab uprisings. Number one, a deliberate effort, a disciplined effort, to avoid violence, even when the protesters are being attacked. A leaderless structure, organized by cells, so that it would be harder to identify people—that was certainly going on.

Applebaum: Also very like Hong Kong, actually, to make sure that there was nobody who could be identified as a leader and therefore picked up or arrested.

Worth: Exactly. And that goes back to people who have written about this from early on, like the American political scientist Gene Sharp, who wrote a book that advocated all of these methods. His work was influential for protesters in Bosnia, inAsia, as you mentioned, and certainly in Iran and across the Middle East.

Applebaum: He had a belief that there were—if you had people in sufficient numbers protesting in ways that were peaceful, that they could eventually move the authorities through their demonstration of resolve and resilience. Is that what people in Minnesota believe?

Worth: I think they do. I spoke to a number who really felt that they could be a model, in the way that they were confronting the authorities. I heard some woman say, “I’m glad that Minneapolis gets to tame the federal beast.” I think that was maybe a little over-optimistic; the federal beast is not easy to tame. But what she meant was, We hope people see what we’re doing and that they do something similar in their own towns.

Applebaum: I also wanted to talk about the significance of the telephone video recordings. I think it’s the first time I remember, maybe there are a couple earlier smaller instances, but that people in those numbers are using their phones, high-quality videos, to record the behavior of federal agents. And obviously, if there weren’t such high-quality videos, then we wouldn’t know what happened to Alex Pretti or Renee Good.

Worth: It was really striking to see, for instance, the convoy that I mentioned before where ICE stopped and was arresting people—dozens and dozens of people surround it, and they’re pretty much all holding up their cell phones. It at first seemed kind of overkill to me. Maybe each of these people thinks they’re gonna do the video that matters, but after the killing of Alex Pretti, it became clear to me—no, no, that’s essential. And that what we’re seeing is multiple different angles that make it much easier to refute a false narrative that got put out, in this case right away, by the government. I think what’s different now, the proliferation of phones and of media like that and of photography so that while in 2011, say in Egypt, you might be lucky if one protester had gotten a video of someone being attacked, tortured, killed, now you’re going to potentially have that from many different angles. And it’s a much more effective tool.

Applebaum: Although it’s interesting, I mean, the way you talk about it, it’s clear that it’s also a tool against something else that’s new in America, which is the assumption that the state will lie. There will be an act of violence committed, and then there will be lies told about it, and we need to have an answer to that. So people are already mentally preparing for the administration to lie.

Worth: In the Middle East, everybody expects it. It’s part of what they were protesting against. And I think that’s a frightening and new aspect of what’s going on.

Applebaum: You alluded to this a bit earlier, but is this a movement with a set of practices that can move beyond Minnesota, do you think? Or is it specific to this place with its particular traditions?

Worth: Minnesota definitely has an old tradition of mutual aid and of neighborhood organizing, and I think that got more intense after the George Floyd protests. And I’ve made this point before, but just to be clear, it’s not just a question of progressives who wanted to protest at that time in 2020, after the killing of George Floyd. I think at that time there was so much going on. There were right-wing provocateurs coming to town. There were opportunistic criminals. Many of the people I spoke to said, We simply want to keep ourselves safe. We want to protect ourselves. And that was the real inspiration for bolstering those networks. Whether that can be replicated, I don’t know. But I suspect yes is the answer because people are aware now and people are frightened. People don’t want to see this. I mean, people as far away as Italy are saying, We don’t want ICE in our town. And my guess is yes, you’re gonna see that kind of thing being replicated.

[Music]

Applebaum: More on that after the break.

[Break]

Applebaum: Robert, after Pretti was killed, there was initially a rush by the Trump administration, as we said, to defend the federal agents and to blame him. But then there was a blowback. People did see the protesters and people did look at the video, citizens and politicians alike. And the administration did withdraw the figurehead of these raids—the Border Patrol’s “commander at large,” Greg Bovino, who has returned to his previous post. And then just a few hours before we taped this conversation, the administration said it would pull about a quarter of the federal agents out of the state. What do you make of those developments? Did the protesters win?

Worth: I think you can say there is some kind of victory there. It’s still hard to say what it all amounts to, but I think there’s no question that the proliferation of those videos being seen by everybody. And one little thing I wanna mention is that Chris Madel, who was running for governor as a Republican—who, by the way, is a lawyer who represents cops, that’s what he does, and is very much, one assumes, involved in that community—came out, he canceled his run, and he came out and taped a video in which he said, As a Republican, I can’t afford to be associated with this stuff. The way that ICE is carrying out its campaign is not acceptable. And I couldn’t help thinking that that’s gonna ramify across the country. It’s not just about Democrats.

Applebaum: So that also historically was the goal of peaceful protests, starting with Mahatma Gandhi and going through our civil-rights movement and up through the Ukrainian Maidan and others, was to move ordinary people who aren’t involved in politics. So the point is not to, as you say, to get a bunch of progressives to demonstrate their anger, but to carry out actions that are bringing a wider part of the population, even people who aren’t there. So in a way we can see this happening in Minnesota.

Worth: I think so. I spoke to people of various different backgrounds, sort of moderate, suburban, elderly people, not at all activists. I think there’s a widespread sense that whatever one’s political beliefs, the way that ICE is behaving is just unacceptable and un-American.

Applebaum: What do you think these few weeks tell us about the administration’s broader plans? What’s ICE really for beyond the arrest and deportations? Is it performative cruelty? Is the idea to create fear among the population? Is it some other goal? I mean, it seems to me that just focusing on this as an immigration issue misses a large part of what ICE is doing. If you just wanted to identify immigrants, you wouldn’t even, for example, need policemen who are armed. The only reason to arm people looking like they’re ready to take on ISIS is to create fear and terror. And that must have a purpose. What’s your view of that?

Worth: I do think there’s some performative cruelty. I think there’s an effort to intimidate people. There’s that now-famous clip of a video: The agent says something like, and this is just after the killing of Renee Good, Haven’t you learned, haven’t you learned? In other words, We just killed someone. Stay the hell away from people like us, and let us do our work. So I think there’s an effort to spread fear and again, that very much echoes with my experience covering these insurrections in the Middle East.

But what strikes me also is that this is backfiring. If their goal is, as they say, to arrest as many illegal migrants as possible, one can’t help thinking that for a lot of Americans, immigration enforcement writ large is now gonna be associated with the gestapo-like tactics. And this is not the first time, right, that the administration has set out a goal and then proceeded to enforce it in the most club-footed way possible. Their tactics really baffle their strategy.

Applebaum: In each of our episodes this season, we’ve looked ahead to the midterm elections because I—and not I alone, many other people—think that a lot of what we’re seeing is maybe a test run for what could happen in November. And we actually got a data point on that this week in Minnesota because there were precinct caucuses held across the state. Members of the public gathered to discuss platform issues and nominate delegates for future conventions. And we talked with some residents and volunteers who attended one caucus at a high school in South Minneapolis. So let’s listen to that.

Dex Anderson: We have one door to the high school that is unlocked. We have a deescalation group that is here, and we have ICE Watch in the parking lot. We have never had to have stuff like that in past years. My name is Dex Anderson. I am the site lead for the caucuses here, and I am a volunteer. I wish we had been able to pivot to virtual or contactless caucuses, which is what we did under the pandemic. But the state party did not make the decision about that beforehand. So we did everything we could tonight to make sure that our neighbors are safe.

Michael Reif: My name is Michael Reif. I’m a part of the DFL Lawyers Committee. We’re here today just making sure that if we see ICE presence, that we remind them that they’re not welcome without a judicial warrant, and that we’re ready to respond if we need to. And so this is part of the, kind of, brave new world that we’re in right now.

Jennifer Arnold: I’m Jennifer Arnold. I’m gonna be helping convene the caucus for my area. I know that a lot of my neighbors aren’t coming. I know that because last year I supported a bunch of folks to participate in the caucus process who hadn’t participated before, who speak Spanish. I accompanied folks and interpreted. And this year, none of those people are gonna participate. There is added security, but I would say no, there was nothing we could do to make it safe as long as they had to leave their homes to get here. How can you have democracy under occupation?

Applebaum: That’s also pretty reminiscent of things we’ve probably both seen before. When you have armed people on the street, then people are afraid to come out. Even people who have the right to vote, even people who are citizens. The presence or the expectation of violence scares people away from democracy. It sounds like people in Minnesota have been trying to do their best and keep these caucuses safe. But what could this suggest about what democratic participation in the United States might look like in the months ahead? I mean, that’s little-d democrat, not participation in the Democratic Party, but could this kind of military presence on the street scare people from voting?

Worth: I think it could. And one little indicator there: When I was in Minneapolis, and I was all over the city, and I saw very few Black faces, very few brown faces, in a city with a substantial minority population. And I think that’s because so many of them are afraid to come out. They were hiding inside their houses. They were having groceries delivered to them by their neighbors. And as we heard on that tape, many of them would be frightened to come out. And so if this gets replicated, if there’s a spreading of feelings of fear, the most vulnerable people will be frightened to turn out. And on the broader point, you and I have covered referenda in dictatorships and places where people are ostensibly allowed to come out and have their voices heard, but in fact, they know, number one, that they’re surrounded by soldiers. No doubt, that makes them feel terrified. Number two, they don’t trust that their vote is private and they probably feel that if they don’t pull the right lever, someone’s gonna come knocking on their door that night.

I don’t think we’re anywhere near that here, but when I was in Minneapolis, I did speak to people who said that after some kind of confrontation with ICE, the agents would then follow them—drive, follow them back to their houses, not to bang on the doors or anything, but just as an intimidation tactic to let them know, We know where you live. Just the very fact that they were willing to do that was shocking. The very fact that that fear is now entering into the political process, the caucus process, is a troubling one.

Applebaum: It’s true, and this may be something that a lot of Americans don’t know, just the act of voting doesn’t make democracy. So the vote itself alone isn’t enough. It’s about the preparation for the vote, the atmosphere in which it takes place, the way in which candidates are chosen. Of course, it’s the way the votes are counted, which is another issue. But I think a lot of people have a very simple idea of what it means to be a democracy, but actually you need a level playing field. You need people to have a sense that the vote was fair and that the process is fair. And what worries me is that this use of armed people on the streets is one of several ways in which we could lose that.

[Music]

Worth: It’s a frightening thought. Elections become charades in a lot of autocratic countries. They are a way for the regime to maintain some kind of facade of legitimacy. But very few people actually feel that they’re exercising their right to vote when they go out on these referenda.

Applebaum: Robert Worth, thank you.

Worth: It’s a pleasure.

Applebaum: This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Natalie Brennan and Jocelyn Frank. With additional reporting from Minneapolis from Jocelyn Frank. Editing by Dave Shaw. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado and Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Anne Applebaum.

How Autocrats Meddle With Elections

2026-02-06T06:00:00-05:00

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The Trump White House is changing the rules of our political system through intimidation, the distortion of information, financial corruption, and the dismantling of government offices. In the final episode of this season, we examine whether the administration is also trying to change the rules of our elections. Dawn Baldwin Gibson, a North Carolina pastor, tells us about how, in 2024, her vote was challenged for reasons that still aren’t clear to her. Host Anne Applebaum interviews Stacey Abrams, who has spent years fighting voter-suppression tactics. Abrams argues that Gibson’s story is one of many attempts to change how people vote and how their votes are counted.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Dawn Baldwin Gibson: For more than 35 years, I have been a registered voter and I have been casting my vote. To this day, months later, I still don’t know why my vote was being challenged.

[Music]

Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Anne Applebaum. This season, we’ve been talking about the Trump administration’s unprecedented accumulation of power. But we’re still missing one piece of the story: the elections themselves. We’ve heard people talk about how they fear soldiers on the streets could intimidate voters, or how crypto barons could try to manipulate campaigns. But the [Donald] Trump White House is also very interested in elections: how voters are registered, how they vote, how those votes are counted.

Across the country, state governors and legislators, sometimes inspired by Trump’s false claims about the 2020 elections, are enacting new voter-ID rules; they’re changing registration requirements and crafting lists of voters to purge from the rolls.

Dawn Baldwin Gibson is a pastor in New Bern, North Carolina. She’s one of more than 60,000 North Carolina voters who had the legitimacy of their vote challenged in 2024.

Gibson: One of the races on the ballot was for the North Carolina Supreme Court. The election was between Allison Riggs and Jefferson Griffin. I actually went to vote as an early voter, and this is something that for many years I have done with my family. Showed my ID, went in, cast my vote, and really thought nothing else about it until a couple of weeks went by. I started hearing about this Jefferson Griffin list.

ABC11 newscaster: Republican candidate Griffin is challenging more than 65,000 ballots in the North Carolina Supreme Court race, arguing—

Gibson: The authority in North Carolina is the State Board of Elections. They were not challenging my vote. They were showing that I had done everything that I was supposed to have done for my vote to count. But Jefferson Griffin’s team, they were the ones challenging my vote. And that seemed like changing the rules after the results are not what you want.

I just thought, Do something! What can I do? So we got a local church. We wrote letters. We talked to the local media.

CBS 17 newscaster 1: After months of back-and-forth legal rulings, the challenge to November’s supreme court election ruling is over.

CBS 17 newscaster 2: Republican Judge Griffin is conceding the race. His decision ends the only election—

Gibson: So yes, in the end we did get our votes to count, but it put a lot of stress. It put a lot of worry. I come from a rural community, and the word we would use is: It was a lot of worry-ation. They felt like—every time I go to vote, Is this what I’m gonna have to put up with? Go vote, and then there’s a challenge.

[Music]

Gibson: My maternal grandfather, Frederick Douglas Fisher—both of his parents were slaves. He believed in being a part of the American democracy process, and that process was voting, and that we, as his children and grandchildren, had a responsibility to show up and vote, and so there was a great pride in that. And to know that we are now in a time where we are seeing our votes being challenged, it is our responsibility. The breaking down of democracy is not going to happen on our watch. This is our time, where history will look back and say, In 2025, there were people that stood and said: “I will be seen. I will be heard, and my vote will count.”

[Music]

Stacey Abrams: Voter suppression is one of the core tools of authoritarianism. It is how you shift from democracy to autocracy. And for millions of Americans, it’s about to become the norm.

Applebaum: Stacey Abrams is one of the leading experts on the topic of voter registration and voter suppression. Her work has helped me understand that voter suppression isn’t a single thing or a law, but rather a thousand little cuts and changes, maybe designed to discourage just a few voters but which can make a big difference when elections are as close as ours. She’s the founder of Fair Fight, the voting-rights organization, and she twice ran for governor of Georgia. She’s also the lead organizer of a campaign to fight authoritarianism called the 10 Steps Campaign. Stacey, what do you make of Dawn’s story?

Abrams: There are three components to voter suppression: Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does that ballot get counted? And what she is describing is that third barrier. What we have seen happen over the last decade and a half, since the erosion of the Voting Rights Act, is this wholesale attack on all three of those points of entry to democracy.

Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? She covered both of those hurdles, but she got tripped up by: Does your ballot count? And in Georgia, in Texas, across this country, in Florida, North Carolina, we are watching this dramatic acceleration of voter suppression and, sadly, it is going to be the most effective tool used by authoritarians to thwart the will of the people in the next few years.

Applebaum: Okay. Let’s start with gerrymandering, the redrawing of voter-district boundaries. It’s a topic that is not remotely new in America. The word itself comes from Eldridge Gerry, who, while governor of Massachusetts in 1812, designed a voting district that supposedly looked like a salamander, hence gerrymander. So it’s very old practice, but this year, I think for the first time, we have an American president who has asked state governors to create new voter districts and even put quite heavy pressure on some of them in order to give his party an advantage in the midterm. This is now a national project, as opposed to something that happens locally, and it’s also out of season and out of order, because usually voter boundary changes are made after a census.

Now Governor [Greg] Abbott of Texas has already agreed to change boundaries in Texas, even without a census. Am I right that this is new? That the federal government’s involvement in this is different and maybe more dangerous?

Abrams: There have been maps that have been redrawn in between census years, in between redistricting, but those had been exclusively court-ordered. When lines were drawn that did not conform, the court would take some time to look at these maps. Georgia, almost every single cycle after the Voting Rights Act, had to have its maps adjudicated by a court, and that was true for a lot of southern states.

And so it is not the case that there had never been redrawn districts. It had usually been that those districts were redrawn because the court said, You didn’t do it right the first time. But what we are seeing now, and what you’ve just described, is unprecedented. We have never had a president of the United States explicitly state that the line should be redrawn, not based on population, but based on voter outcome. And when you do that, when you decide that the districts are not designed to allow voters to elect their leaders, it is designed to allow leaders to elect their voters—that is a shift of power, and it is exactly what redistricting is designed to preclude.

Applebaum: What do you make of the response of Governor [Gavin] Newsom to the Texas redistricting? You know, he responded that if this was gonna be a federal-government project, that he was going to also make it a project in California. He held a referendum that has allowed California to also redistrict. I mean, is this just perpetuating the unfairness, or is this a legitimate response?

Abrams: It is a legitimate response because we are in illegitimate times. What is unique in this moment is how aggressively one political party is leveraging this and the ends to which it is being used, which is to overthrow democracy and to install an authoritarian regime. So that is a distinction that is incredibly important if we’re gonna understand what Newsom did. When Trump said that he wanted to redraw those districts, when Abbott complied, when Missouri complied, when North Carolina complied, what they were doing was explicitly trying to strip power away from certain voters. And what Gavin Newsom understands is that performative pragmatism is not the response. This is an open battle for the kind of government we’re going to have. And what he did was not advance the cause of Democrats. He nullified the advance of authoritarianism.

We are going to either win or lose democracy in the next few years. It’s important for us not to think about this in the normative terms of political debate that we tend to have: one party versus the other. You and I both know that autocracies and authoritarian regimes have elections. Venezuela has elections. You know, Russia has elections. But they game before the election begins what the outcome is. The urgency of this moment is that if this holds, there will never again be the opportunity for competition, because if we have a single-party system that does not countenance democracy as the end goal, meaning that people actually get to participate, they will go through the motions, but it won’t really matter, because they’ll change the rules again. Because they will control the means of decision making, meaning they’ll control the presidency and they’ll control both chambers of Congress. And they have a pretty strong lock on the judiciary, which means that we won’t have the debate anymore, because changing the lines won’t matter, because the elections won’t matter.

Applebaum: Stacey, there’s another form of federal-government interference that the Republicans are also promoting, which is a federal law: the SAVE Act, or the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would require in-person voter registration and the presentation of physical documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in federal elections. So they’re asking people for not just a drivers’ license or ID, most of which, I should say, already requires U.S. citizenship to obtain, but for a passport or a birth certificate in addition. And this creates an extra hurdle that people might not think about, or they might not remember to do before the election. Is that the right way to characterize how this law is supposed to work?

Abrams: The SAVE Act has disproportionate effect on very targeted communities: the 69 million women who may have changed their names after marriage, transgender people who may have had name changes. They’re going to say that you don’t have proof of your right to vote, because your name does not match your birth certificate and your Social Security card. That means that millions of people would be disenfranchised and would have to go through multiple hurdles to get back on the rolls. You knock out a group who also are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican.

I wanna be really clear. There are two conditions that are embedded in this argument that are important to understand. One is that you prove your citizenship, and the second is that you prove your identity. In the United States, both proofs are already required. This is not new. And, more importantly, there has been no discernible harm done to elections because people have not met these conditions. So it’s really, really important that we understand that this is a solution that has no problem. Republicans and Democrats both acknowledge—in fact, there was a report that came out after the 2020 election—we don’t have voter fraud in this country. It’s hard enough getting people to vote. People don’t really engage in trying to vote more than once, and people who do not have the right to vote, it is an extraordinary rarity that they will try.

Applebaum: Right so there was no problem of noncitizens voting.

Abrams: There’s no problem with noncitizens voting. There’s no problem with non-ID voting. You have always had to prove who you are to cast a ballot. The issue was not Did you have to prove it? It was How did you prove it?

Applebaum: Does this requirement affect other groups? What about Black voters?

Abrams: Well, if you were born in the United States during Jim Crow and you were Black, you were legally not permitted to be born in a hospital, which meant that the birth certificate that you got was filed with the county, but it was not the original birth certificate from the hospital. So Black people, thousands and thousands of Black people, do not have an original birth certificate; 146 million Americans do not have a passport. Working-class and low-income Americans tend not to have that paperwork, and if they do, it’s not easily accessible. And so that is why in the U.S. we’ve created systems to allow you to prove your citizenship in other ways. And by changing those rules, you are lining up communities that will not be able to participate in elections.

Applebaum: Would the lack of participation not also hurt Republicans? Again, there are a lot of Republicans who presumably don’t have passports and don’t have birth certificates.

Abrams: It does. And that’s one of the reasons I think this should be a bipartisan fight. Because when you try to break democracy by targeting one community, the problem is: You break it for everyone. And so they are willing to risk it because they think it will help them more than it will hurt them.

And the reason it matters is that when you tell the average person, You’re not allowed to vote, they’re gonna get mad. But it’s unlikely that they’re going to go to court to force the issue. And in a year, and in a nation, where margins of thousands of voters, not millions of voters, decide the outcome, if the federal government controls that data, if they can manipulate that information, they can then start to attack thousands and thousands of voters and win on the margins—not by actually winning the election, but by forcing voter suppression to lead people to simply not bother trying. And that has the same effect as not voting.

Applebaum: I also want to talk about your own experience with this. So, after you ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, you raised a lot of questions about whether voter-suppression tactics by your opponent had influenced the race. You sued. And, of course, you acknowledged the outcome of the race in the end, that he would be governor, and you wouldn’t. But there was a nuance to your position that opened you up for criticism. I wonder if you could explain the nuance.

Abrams: The tradition in politics is that once an election is over, you use the word concede. And as someone who is not only a lawyer but also a writer, words matter to me. They have meaning; they have heft. But I’m also the daughter of two civil-rights activists. My father was arrested when he was 14, registering Black people to vote in Mississippi. And so I take very seriously, and it has been my life’s work, since I was 17, to focus on the access to democracy that is contained within the right to vote.

And so when I gave my speech on the night that we realized, despite the very clear and unambiguous voter-suppression tactics leveraged by my opponent, I said, He won. I was very clear about that. I said he was going to be governor. I was not, but I refused to use the word concede, because concession in that statement meant to say that the system that he leveraged was true or correct or proper, and I could not in good conscience say that. I never once questioned whether or not he became the governor. I questioned the system that allowed him and his cohorts to block access to the right to vote for thousands and thousands of Georgians. And because I refused to use the word concede, it became weaponized. But I never once filed a suit to make myself governor. I never once filed a personal suit. Trying to dislodge him. Every lawsuit that was filed was about the system itself. It was never going to solve the problem of me not winning. It was always in service of: How do we ensure that voters have their rights protected?

Applebaum: Right. Right. So that’s very different from the 2020 campaign, when Donald Trump tried to overthrow the results of an election.

Abrams: Absolutely. And it’s a distinction that anyone with good faith or with good hearing can discern. Running for office does not guarantee you victory, but being a citizen in this country should guarantee you access to the right to vote.

[Music]

Applebaum: After the break:

Abrams: I fundamentally believe, based on what I’ve watched this country do, what we have watched other nations do, that we can indeed fight back. But you cannot fight if you do not understand the opposition.

Applebaum: We’ll be right back.

[Break]

Applebaum: Stacey, it’s illogical to think that illegal immigrants are eagerly voting in American elections, and there is no evidence that they do. Why would they want to attract that kind of attention from the government? Nevertheless, the administration, the Republican Party, MAGA media have been talking for years and years and years, actually, about illegal immigrants voting, even, as you say, proposing legislation to prevent it. Is this because they genuinely fear illegal voters? Or does it have a different purpose? Maybe the point is to create hysteria about an unfair election in advance, just in case the Republicans lose. That would give them an excuse to refuse to swear in new members of Congress. Or maybe they want to intimidate legal voters.

Abrams: Lies work. (Laughs.) Lies are a very effective deterrent for voter participation. But there’s also the micro issue. When people think that they might be arrested if they show up, then they won’t vote. If people believe that there is some harm they will face, they won’t show up. When people think that it is going to be too hard, when they think that it is going to be dangerous, they don’t vote.

So let’s look at New Jersey in 1981. New Jersey had a tendency to have armed folks standing in the polling places where Black people were voting. And based on that behavior, they were actually denied, the Republicans were denied, the right to do election observation for 30 years. The reason it became so important was that people would say, I’m not going to vote, because I could be arrested. Not that they had done something wrong, but they were afraid of being arrested because you had law enforcement patrolling voting places.

Applebaum: I mean, look. The establishment of ICE as a kind of paramilitary, a federal police that’s not just used to enforce the law but to intimidate people, as well as the decision to send the National Guard into American cities has already got one governor, Governor [J. B.] Pritzker of Illinois, to say that these decisions are not just about fighting crime or public safety, but about creating a pretext to send armed military troops into communities now or during the 2026 election. So it sounds like you think that’s a possibility.

Abrams: I think it’s a likelihood, because we’ve seen it happen. In Georgia, Hancock County, deputy sheriffs followed Black men home. And that behavior was so egregious that Black men started calling the county, saying, Please take my name off of the voting rolls, because I don’t want the sheriff coming back to my house. That was a decade ago.

We know that when people are afraid, they will do what they can to protect themselves and their families. And just in case the fear isn’t real enough, this administration, suborned by Republicans at every level of government, are willing to threaten the possibility of harm in order to game winning an election. And the reason they are doing this so aggressively is because they believe that if they can do it, they will control every level of government and every lever of power. Authoritarianism isn’t about winning a single election. It is about dismantling a democratic system and installing a system that lacks accountability and has unchecked power. That’s what they’re after, and we cannot be so naive as to think that this is just about who wins a race. This is about who wins America.

Applebaum: I thought that it was illegal for armed troops, certainly military, to be anywhere near polling booths on Election Day. Is that not the case?

Abrams: I will say it this way: It’s illegal if you note them. But let’s be clear, there are only a few places ICE is not permitted to go. And because they are masked, because they’re unidentified, it is not just the actual harm—it’s the specter of harm. That’s what we have to be thinking about. It’s not just the explicit violation of the law; it’s the implicit threat that the law permits them to exercise. And when the U.S. Supreme Court said that you could detain people based on their race, their accent, or the language they spoke, when you said that ICE could do that, there is nothing to preclude ICE from doing that while you’re standing in line getting ready to cast a ballot. So you may not have the National Guard there, but ICE is not actually military.

Applebaum: I want to move way upstream in this discussion of elections, from the actual voting to the culture of election information and voter engagement. Here’s an example: TikTok may be about to change from Chinese ownership to U.S. ownership, and the new owners could be U.S. billionaires who are friendly to Trump. We know that TikTok is one of the main sources of political information for young people. Do you think that this change in ownership could be deliberately designed to alter perceptions of the coming campaign, to change how people feel about the candidates? Is that something that counts as election interference? And if so, how do we think about it?

Abrams: Not only is it possible—it is highly likely. Half of young people get their news right now from TikTok and YouTube. Voting is as much a cultural event as it is a practical one. I vote in part because my parents used to take us with them to vote. I watched my parents vote in every election. It was part of our culture. We knew that voting was an important thing to do. There’s a young woman, Esosa Osa, who started a company, an organization called Onyx Impact, and she has done extraordinary research into how disinformation intentionally targeted Black people. It works as a voter-suppression tool.

Applebaum: To convince them not to vote?

Abrams: To convince them not to vote or that their votes don’t matter or that the vote that they have taken is somehow being manipulated. And it works. If you have conversations with those in the Latino population, they will tell you about the very subtle language that got inserted into conversations that they were listening to on the radio, that reminded them that their participation would be akin to supporting a regime that their families escaped from a decade before. And so, yes, culture is absolutely upstream, but when it floods the zone, it changes outcomes.

Applebaum: Stacey, this is the last episode in a season that’s been exploring the administration’s power grab from several angles. We have noted: This is not just arming ICE and sending the National Guard to cities. It’s not just the construction of a biased civil service. It’s not just the reshaping of culture and science. It’s not just the direction of cryptocurrency profits to congressional campaigns. It’s all of these things put together. How should listeners think about the defense of democracy? Is it a state-by-state effort? Is it issue by issue? Should we have a unified national approach?

Abrams: So the Constitution gives oversight of elections to state government. We don’t have a single democracy. We have 50-plus different democracies operating at any given moment. And so, yes, part of the solution is going to be a state and local solution because the ripple effects of this will reach every level of government. We may be having conversations about Congress, but we’ve gotta understand that this will affect city councils and school boards and county commissioners and state legislatures. It will affect everything that government is responsible for delivering or not delivering. And so we have to have a localized response. That means more people have to volunteer to be poll watchers. More people have to organize to ensure that their communities understand what the votes actually count towards.

The young woman at the top of this conversation from North Carolina, she got it—that it wasn’t just about whether or not a supreme-court justice in North Carolina got seated. It was whether or not kids in that school were going to get lunch, because the elections that are happening decide: How do we respond to SNAP benefits being cut? How do we respond to the ACA subsidies being diminished? How do we respond to disabled veterans being fired from their jobs because of the anti-DEI executive orders? Those are all of a piece, and so we have to have a multilayered, multipronged response to what is a multilayered, multipronged attack.

But I fundamentally believe, based on what I’ve watched this country do, what we have watched other nations do, that we can indeed fight back. But you cannot fight if you do not understand the opposition. We could win. But we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. This is not about whether this Democrat wins or that Republican wins. This is about whether democracy wins or authoritarianism wins.

[Music]

Applebaum: Thank you so much, Stacey Abrams.

Abrams: Thank you for having me.

Applebaum: And thank you all for listening. I hope that you’ve also concluded that this is not business as usual. The Trump administration is making deep changes to our political system and to the nature of our government. They are doing so with an eye towards tilting the playing field, shaping the elections in November, and, of course, the next presidential election, in 2028. If we want to keep our elections free and fair, not just this time but into the future, all of us will have to pay attention, take part, join campaigns, learn about local candidates, communicate with others, and vote. We don’t want this to be the last chance.

Autocracy in America is produced by Arlene Arevalo, Natalie Brennan, and Jocelyn Frank. Editing by Dave Shaw. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Fact-checking by Enna Alvarado and Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Anne Applebaum.

Rise of the Trump Loyalist

2026-01-30T06:00:00-05:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Kathleen Walters was only 23 days away from qualifying for early retirement at the IRS when she decided to quit, rather than acquiesce to a Trump-administration request that she break the law and compromise millions of people’s privacy. She’s one of hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have left or been fired from their federal-government jobs in the past year. In this episode, host Anne Applebaum speaks with Don Moynihan, an expert in the history of public policy from the University of Michigan. He explains how the destruction of America’s civil service is part of the administration’s greater effort to create a government that derives its power through unprecedented means and fundamentally disrupts democracy as we know it.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Kathleen Walters: I thought I would be at the IRS for six months when I joined, and those six months turned into almost two decades. My name is Kathleen Walters, and I was an executive at the IRS for nearly 20 years, most recently serving as the agency’s chief privacy officer. I’ve kind of worked with every administration all the way back to the early ’90s. No other administration has personally ever asked me to do anything that was illegal, no. No.

Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Anne Applebaum. In this new season, I’m asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. Today’s episode examines the destruction of the civil service: the removal of professionals, and their replacement with loyalists. I’ve seen this kind of transformation before, in other failing democracies. Everyone suffers from the degradation of public services. Government institutions run by lackeys are also more easily manipulated by autocratic leaders, and no longer serve the public interest. Kathleen Walters found herself in the center of this story in 2025.

Walters: So on day one of the second Trump administration, it was clear things were going to be different because of the flurry of executive orders that were issued. I got word that some of our leaders might be negotiating with DHS over a memorandum of understanding—an agreement to share tax data. I was contacted by our acting commissioner, and they wanted to have an agreement signed with DHS to share data on immigrants. Certainly name, address, contact information was high on their list and, really, whatever we could give them. And they wanted to compile it and mix it with the data they received from all the other agencies, and—they didn’t use this term, but it was very clear—create the most updated profile on each of the immigrants. I asked DHS for a sense of volume, and the individual representing DHS stated that he believed it would be about up to 7 million immigrants’ data that they were requesting.

That is very, very sensitive data, and we have one of the most complex privacy laws in the federal government. The lawyers determined that we could not give it to them legally. I had decided that I was not going to be able to facilitate something that, based on our attorney’s input, was not lawful. So that weekend, I sent a resignation email to the acting commissioner.

The decision to leave the IRS was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and yet the easiest decision. We all have boundaries in life. I had a clear one, and I was committed to it. So that made it easy. On the other hand, I also am the mom to a 9-year-old, who I’m responsible for caring for and paying for. I was 23 days shy of qualifying for early retirement, which would’ve given us some payments monthly and health insurance for life. So I had to tell my daughter what was going on, and I said, you know, We are gonna have to not spend as much money. We’re probably not gonna go out to eat much. But this is what I did and this is why. And it still chokes me up. She said to me, Mom, even if we have to live in a tent in someone’s yard, you made the right decision.

Integrity, to me, it’s the most important thing to maintain, because if you lose a job, you can get another job. But if you lose your integrity, it is very hard to get it back.

[Music]

Don Moynihan: I don’t think this is an anomaly, and I think what it tells us is about the way in which Trump is managing the civil service in his second term in a fashion that’s quite different from how he did in the first term.

Applebaum: Professor Don Moynihan is an expert in the history of public policy, and teaches at the University of Michigan.

Moynihan: And a lot of these disagreements really boil down to whether the president can order people to break the law. It’s a red flag when you see so many people saying, My god. This is so illegal that we cannot, in good conscience, stick around any longer.

Applebaum: Don, there are now many, many civil servants who have left or been fired, so tell us more about how this term may be different from President Trump’s first term.

Moynihan: I spent a few years at the end of Trump’s first term trying to think about how bad could it get in his second term. I did not anticipate just how bad it would become, partly because I didn’t anticipate that so many laws, civil-service laws and other laws, would be broken with seeming impunity. One of his big lessons from his first term was that there are a lot of lawyers in government who are telling me, No, I can’t do things. I need lawyers who will tell me, Yes you can. And so he’s systematically pushing the envelope on policy and, in many cases, breaking the law. And then also replacing those lawyers with more amenable actors. And so we see again and again, principled public officials saying, We think this crosses the boundaries, effectively being put on administrative leave, being told to resign, or, in some cases, being fired.

Applebaum: I want to ask you about the implications of all that, but first I think it would be helpful to give a little background here, because the United States hasn’t always had a professional, nonpartisan civil service. Until the Pendleton Act of the 1880s, we had something called the “spoils system,” which meant that only loyal party members could get jobs in government. And that system created corruption. It encouraged bribery. It was inefficient. How did that change?

Moynihan: The first major civil-service reform bill is introduced during the Civil War by Charles Sumner. And it’s a response to the perception that a lot of money is being wasted, the war effort is less efficient than it should be, partly because of the corruption that’s embedded in the use of public funds. We see stories of, basically, large contracts going to people aligned with the party. And so it became clearer to the public that you couldn’t really trust that the politicians were acting in the public interest when there was so much money sloshing around the public sector.

Applebaum: And so instead of that, we created a system that requires people to be hired and fired based on merit. And the Civil Service Reform Act, which comes later in the 20th century, also says you can’t hire or fire people because of their political affiliations. Correct?

Moynihan: That’s exactly right. The Civil Service Reform Act is the first act to actually write down what those merit principles are, and it specifies, very clearly, that employees cannot be treated differently because of their political affiliations.

Applebaum: And is the current administration adhering to this act?

Moynihan: Neither in spirit or in the letter of the law is the current administration adhering to this act, in my view. I think we’re at the most dramatic attack on the civil-service system since its creation in the 1880s. It feels that there is an element of the spoils system that is returning, but also, there is this much more direct attack on democracy that is part of the mechanization and the weaponization of the civil-service system right now.

Applebaum: And is this an effective strategy for improving government efficiency?

Moynihan: We know that research tells us that more politicization leads to generally worse outcomes. And this is for a variety of reasons. One is that you get less competent people who work for government under more politicized regimes. The more talented people tend to leave. You also have officials who don’t want to share bad news with their political principals. And so the presidents or the agency leaders are simply making worse decisions because they don’t have good access to information.

I’ll give you two examples of pieces of research here. One is that after the Pendleton Act, and the post office was no longer driven by patronage, you saw the accuracy and speed of mail delivery improve. So in a very specific way, you could see how performance got better. Another example is: The Bush administration used to rate agency programs on a one-to-five scale from “not performing” to “excellent.” And one analysis found that programs that were run by career civil servants tended to perform better than programs that were run by political appointees, all else being equal. Once you add politicization, things tend to get worse; once you give autonomy to capable professionals, things tend to get better when it comes to performance.

Applebaum: I mean, is there a precedent of other countries that had meritocratic civil service sliding backwards? The only example that comes into my head, since my background is in writing Soviet history, is the Bolsheviks, in the Soviet Union. The Soviet state created a civil service in which you could only advance if you were a party member, and not only that, you had to publicly state your allegiance to the party and its constantly changing principles, whenever you were asked to do it. Is there another country, another example, that you think of?

Moynihan: In Hungary, they put party cronies in charge of major parts of the system through a privatization scheme. In Turkey, we saw mass purges of people who were perceived as not being aligned with the administration. And so there is a common pattern there that I think serves as a warning sign.

Applebaum: And where do you see those warning signs now, in America?

Moynihan: So I think we’re seeing a multipronged attack on civil-service capabilities. Partly it’s through hiring. They want to put more loyalists into civil-servant positions. Partly it’s through firing. People who won’t go along with breaking the law are being shown the door. And partly it’s also through just instilling a culture of fear within our government.

Applebaum: Let’s break those down. What is unprecedented about the way the Trump administration is hiring civil servants?

Moynihan: The Trump administration announced a new hiring process, which it claimed would bring in better candidates for public-sector jobs. There were a couple of really unusual aspects to that. One is that people would submit essays where they would be asked to name their favorite Trump executive order and how they would help serve President Trump. And so that is new—the idea that job candidates will be asked, How are you gonna serve this particular president? Even though the job is, you’re supposed to serve every president, not just this individual president. The second part of the hiring process that’s changing now is that political appointees are directly involved in choosing these civil servants, and so it eliminates any barrier between the political appointees—those who are directly loyal to the president—and the people who are hired, which makes it much more likely that the people who are hired are also going to share those same political loyalties to President Trump.

Applebaum: Of course, political appointees have always had some involvement with the civil service, but there still seems to be something different now. There’s a culture of fear around these appointments that didn’t exist before, and we know that that culture of fear is being created deliberately. And we know that because the architect of a lot of these changes, Russell Vought, at the Office of Management and Budget, has said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want to put them in trauma.” How are we seeing that play out?

Moynihan: I certainly think that was his goal. He has been upfront about viewing the government as an enemy, wanting a much smaller bureaucracy. And I think he has succeeded. One thing that’s important to understand is that this culture of fear that we’re seeing is not just driven by Trump officials. It’s also driven by Trump-aligned actors in broader society. And so, for example, Elon Musk might tweet about an individual government employee. They then get doxxed; they have to leave their home. You see private actors who are sort of conservative commentators identify individual civil servants. These could be FBI agents. And you read the next week: Those people have been fired.

And you also see a very organized effort, and some funded by organizations like the Heritage Foundation, to FOIA individual civil servants, to basically go through their emails, see if they can find any damaging language that would allow them to be fired, and to create, effectively, enemies lists, where individual civil servants are put on a website somewhere. There are lists of alleged crimes, which are often things like, Served on a DEI panel once, are listed. And then, again, you predictably see sometimes formal retaliation for that—a person might be put on leave or fired—but also informal attacks, where people get nasty phone calls, emails; sometimes people will turn up at their home and threaten them. And so the fear is not irrational. It is not just in the workplace; it’s in the broader society that these civil servants are now working in.

Applebaum: The third warning sign you listed is the mass firings. Since the Trump administration has taken office, hundreds of thousands of civil servants have been fired or have quit. Are these mass firings legal? I had always assumed, prior to this administration, that it wasn’t that easy to fire civil servants. In fact, this was one of the complaints that was sometimes made about them, is that they can’t be fired. How is it possible that this administration can just tell thousands of people to leave their jobs?

Moynihan: There are so many things I thought were illegal that now appear to be legal. It’s hard to keep a full list. If you asked me a year ago, Can the president eliminate an agency? or Can the president impound funds? I would’ve said, No, those are illegal things because that takes up congressional prerogatives too great an extent. They’re clearly unconstitutional. And now we have seen the president do both of those things. When it comes to firing individual employees, it is onerous to fire an individual employee. You can fire them for cause. That is to say: If they’re poor performers, you can fire them. They can appeal that decision. It can take a while to do that, but if you document the basis for the firing, it is possible to get rid of them. Ironically, it’s somewhat easier to fire lots of employees, because there is a legal “reduction in force” process—RIFs—where agencies can say: Because we need to save money, or because of some reorganization, we are going to eliminate a lot of positions.

Whether the Trump administration is using those reduction-in-force authorities legally, I think, is a very open question. RIFs are very technical documents and there’s a lot of procedures. It looks to me that the Trump administration has not followed in implementing those RIFs. Also, a huge number of people left through the deferred-resignation program, the so-called “fork in the road” voluntary-resignation program that Elon Musk introduced. It feels fairly clear to me that that was not following statutes, but a lot of people simply did leave, and it doesn’t seem like the Supreme Court is gonna do anything about it. The ways in which there was mass firings of probationary employees—a judge has ruled those to be illegal, but he’s also said: Well, it’s too late to fix it now. And so there is this sort of disturbing trend where things that really do appear to be illegal in terms of how federal employees are treated are allowed to move forward. And then maybe, down the line, the court will say, Well, that wasn’t right. But at that point, the remedy has pretty much walked out the door. Too much time has passed. So, for example, USAID doesn’t exist as an agency anymore. And so even if the courts were to say, That was illegal, there’s no workable solution for the employees who were laid off or for the programs that they were trying to implement.

Applebaum: Coming up after the break: The attack on the civil service may be part of a bigger project: Trump’s entourage wants to change our system so that they can stay in power.

Moynihan: He’s issued executive orders claiming authority over elections that constitutionally he doesn’t seem to have, but that doesn’t mean that a weaponized Department of Justice couldn’t sue or investigate or harass states or individual election officials for what they regard as improper behavior, which could be behavior that’s actually trying to maintain a free and fair election.

Applebaum: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Applebaum: Don, talk about the practical impact of these firings. Of course they are felt by the people themselves, who’ve lost their jobs, but how will this affect the public at large?

Moynihan: I think there are two ways to answer that question. And so the first way is to think about the federal workforce as a group of employees who work for you. Do you want a group of employees that are knowledgeable, committed to their job, really dedicated to the goals that they’re trying to implement? And I think, historically, in America, we’ve mostly said yes. We get to hire some very smart people in government, partly because they care a lot about the mission, partly because they like the stability of government work. And so we probably get people who are coming not just for the paycheck—because they could earn more in the private sector—but because they’re really committed to the statutory goals of protecting the environment or emergency management. If you think of yourself as a mini-CEO overseeing this workforce, what we’re seeing is a bunch of structural changes that is gonna make it less easy for you to attract and retain good employees. They don’t appreciate the lack of stability. They don’t appreciate the toxic work environment, or being demonized. And so a lot of those people will exit, or they will never join the public sector in the first place. The stock of human capital in the workforce just gets worse.

Then we get to specific public services. And here, it’s harder to say, Planes are going to drop out of the sky tomorrow because there’s a 5 percent cut of FAA employees. And this is something about public services that is sometimes maybe a little different from private services, which is that the erosion of quality can be slower and harder to observe. I do think there are places we are starting to see this. Social Security has been struggling to serve its customers. I think the IRS—the fact that they’re hiring back people now is an admission that they simply don’t have enough people to manage the inflow of tax forms that will come at tax season. I think emergency management, to me, is a huge red flag, where FEMA did not have an especially bad summer in terms of natural disasters, but with flooding in Texas, it clearly was not as able to respond, partly because of the cuts and services, partly because of the extra layers of red tape that the DHS leadership imposed upon it. And so I think there will be more stories like that, where failures occur in a visible way. And then if you look at those failures honestly, you can say, Well, partly, this is because the Trump administration chose to reduce the capacity of these agencies.

Applebaum: So if things do begin to erode and government services begin to decline and more accidents happen with pollution or food safety, do you think people will make the connection between those accidents, and that erosion, and the attacks on the civil service?

Moynihan: What I do think is true is that there is a moment here of opportunity for civic education between the citizens of America and the government that serves them, where we can explain to them: Here it is; here’s what your government does. Here’s how your taxpayer dollars are spent. And when you sort of pull out these capacities, here’s how things start to collapse. We mostly don’t have those moments of opportunities, because they’re mostly moments of really bad outcomes. I think about Hurricane Katrina. That was an opportunity where we understood that putting unqualified people in charge of FEMA contributed to some very bad outcomes for the residents of New Orleans. So I think the work to be done there is to connect these failures that we see with choices made by the administration to undermine state capacity.

Applebaum: Earlier, you directly linked the civil-service firings with a decline in democracy, and you’ve also written elsewhere that President Trump is trying to build a more authoritarian political system. Let’s talk more specifically about what that means. For example, direct control of some state institutions could give a ruling party or leader advantages. So if the president can use the IRS to steal data or information, and use it in campaigns, or to initiate investigations against his enemies for political reasons, then the next time we go to vote, the playing field isn’t level. And that’s why neutral institutions that are meant to serve all of us shouldn’t be politicized.

Moynihan: Yeah. You need nonpartisan institutions to, I think, also create trust in government. And if we look at independent agencies, or, let’s say, take the Merit Systems Protection Board. This was created with the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. These were the actors put in place, where if some employee is saying, I’ve been fired because of my political affiliation, or I’ve been fired because I wouldn’t do something illegal, they have the final sort of judgment on whether discrimination on political basis took place. But President Trump has basically taken control of that entity, removed any Democrats and put only Republicans on it. And so it’s no longer a credible check on government abuses at this point.

Applebaum: All of us have begun to focus on the midterms, and, clearly, the administration is nervous about them. How does the absence of thousands of federal civil servants, or the politicization of the civil service—how could it affect the elections? Do mass firings create an atmosphere of fear that impacts voting? What’s the connection between these two things?

Moynihan: One part of the authoritarian checklist that Trump has struggled most with is elections, and that’s partly because the constitutional system delegates the actual running of elections to state governments. And historically, the federal government has had minimal involvement over these processes. And, you know, right now that seems like a very good thing. But that doesn’t mean that a weaponized Department of Justice couldn’t sue or investigate or harass states or individual election officials for what they regard as improper behavior, which could be behavior that’s actually trying to maintain a free and fair election. It doesn’t mean that the president might not deploy the National Guard to election sites, or put ICE around election sites, on the claim that mass fraud is taking place. It is, I think, the area where Trump has made the least progress. But he’s clearly interested in this as a topic, and he’s issued executive orders claiming authority over elections that, constitutionally, he doesn’t seem to have—as he has done in other areas.

Applebaum: This seems, to me, to be the central point: the possibility of elections being shaped or manipulated by the executive. It’s not necessarily going to happen, but it’s also important that we take the possibility seriously. How do you think we should be thinking this? Should we be behaving differently; should we be acting differently?

Moynihan: We’re currently operating under an administration where you probably can’t retain a significant job if you don’t go along with the idea that somehow the 2020 elections were crooked. It does mean that the leadership of these agencies, like the Department of Justice, are going to be very much driven by people with this conspiratorial worldview, who are perhaps less dedicated to constitutional principles.

So I think in the blue states, you will have attorney generals who will be anticipating these efforts and will be, in some cases, responding to Department of Justice investigations. In red states, you’re gonna have this partisan alignment between the president and the actors in charge of individual states. And so I think, in both cases, public support for elections, public support for maintaining the integrity of elections, will become very important. Visible demonstrations by members of the public, if they can start to realize that there are real threats here, will become, I think, useful in reminding society as a whole that these elections do not run themselves.

[Music]

Applebaum: Don, thank you so much.

Moynihan: It was my pleasure. Thank you, Anne.

Applebaum: Autocracy in America is produced by Arlene Arevalo, Natalie Brennan, and Jocelyn Frank. Editing by Dave Shaw. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado and Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Anne Applebaum.

Next time on Autocracy in America:

Stacey Abrams: We cannot be so naive as to think that this is just about who wins a race. This is about who wins America. We could win. But we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.

Applebaum: That’s next time, on our final episode of the season.

Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education

2026-01-23T06:00:00-05:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Joan Brugge has worked for nearly 50 years as a cancer scientist, studying the earliest signs that someone might become sick. Then the Trump administration canceled her lab’s funding. The administration’s attacks on medicine, culture, and education—which include verbal threats and funding cuts—are about more than just budgeting and bravado. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. She argues that this effort is part of a larger autocratic project to maintain power.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Joan Brugge: I was actually at a breast-cancer retreat. And during the coffee break, I looked at my emails to see, you know, if there’s anything that I had to deal with. And I got this email from the university, and it was a real gut punch. My knees basically buckled, and I had to sit down.

[Music]

Brugge: I never imagined that it would be possible that funding for lifesaving research would be terminated for issues that were totally unrelated to the quality of the work or the progress that we had made in the work.

Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Anne Applebaum. In this new season, I am asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result.

Today’s episode examines the administration’s attacks on science, medicine, culture, and education—a combination of verbal threats and funding cuts that look very much like an attempt to control knowledge. Maybe there’s a broader goal, too: to build distrust, and, ultimately, to reshape all Americans’ perceptions of reality. I know that sounds dramatic, but I spent many years writing about authoritarian regimes, and almost all of them try to undermine admired institutions, in order to radically alter the way people think.

Let’s start with the attacks on science. Joan Brugge was stunned when her research became a target:

Brugge: I’ve been doing cancer research for almost 50 years now, not just at Harvard. When I was at undergrad, my sister was diagnosed with a highly aggressive brain tumor. I’ve been moving forward from that ever since. It’s definitely been a compass that’s been directing my life’s work.

The research projects in our lab involve studies of finding better ways to detect and destroy cells that are the earliest precursors of breast cancer, and to design treatments that can eliminate them so that we could try to prevent them from progressing to cancer. It’s like we’re detectives, like, you go in and there was a bank robbery, and you gotta figure out who did it. We’re trying to figure out what genes are responsible for causing this cancer, and how do they do it?

It was May of 2025 when I found out that both of my research grants were terminated. A few days after we first got the notices, it was like walking through a morgue, because all the faculty and staff from the labs were, just, almost paralyzed by the consequences of this.

It’s shocking and demoralizing to have to deal with this.

One of the impacts of the terminations was that instead of guiding my lab towards the studies to prevent or treat cancer, I’ve been extremely distracted by efforts to try to raise money to support the lab. Since last May, seven people have left the lab, but I only have sufficient funding to be able to replace two of them.

It’s funny; I think it gets emotional here, just ’cause this is what we’re living with and it’s just so difficult. It doesn’t feel right that Americans are going to be deprived of the outcome from this research.

[Music]

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: We have a very focused and intense effort across the board to set America back a generation, at least, for education, health, research, climate policy.

Applebaum: Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.

Ben-Ghiat: The thing many people don’t understand is that autocrats think about governments in a totally different way. Public welfare and accountability are not of interest to autocrats. It’s about amassing power, staying in power as long as you can, and enriching yourself.

Applebaum: Ruth, of all the changes made by this administration, it seems to me that the attack on science is the strangest. I can’t even think of other places where this has happened in recent memory.

Ben-Ghiat: I’ve been trying, since the start of this administration in January 2025, to figure out where it is following the classic autocratic playbook and what, instead, is new or novel. There are two things that stand out as new to me. One is the speed of change, really the speed at which institutions have been destroyed.

Applebaum: And the second?

Ben-Ghiat: Research has been destroyed. Whole areas of knowledge and policy have been set back. It doesn’t correspond to any other example I know where the leader came to power via elections.

It doesn’t correspond to the first 10 months of Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan—none of them.

Applebaum: To a lot of Americans, it feels like these attacks are coming out of the blue. How do you explain them? How do you explain their origin? Why are these things the focus of Trump or his acolytes’ interest?

Ben-Ghiat: Well, they only come out of the blue if you ignored what was going on during Trump 1.0. Many of these fanatic causes and the people involved in them, such as Stephen Miller and others, were active then. And it was simply that they were only able to push these things so far, and now they feel free and empowered to push this through. The speed at which these parallel wars on American institutions and science and knowledge are happening resemble not the aftermath of an election, but when people come to power via coup. And, in fact, in some areas, like the universities or science, the Trump administration has acted more swiftly than people did, for example, Pinochet’s regime after a coup. They didn’t start a lot of their large-scale changes to the economy and education for a year or two. So here we have something that’s been planned for a long time.

And then the other thing I would mention is that they used their power when they were out of office beautifully. And by partnering with the Heritage Foundation—Project 2025—when he won the election, they were able to hit the ground running.

Applebaum: And is the purpose of this attack to diminish academic institutions themselves, or is it to do with the people who work for them?

Ben-Ghiat: It’s both. If we take the example of education institutions, of course you wanna go after individuals. And so every autocrat ends up purging any kind of critic. Certain fields of knowledge must go, and others are actually replaced. So you have a reform of institutions at the curricular level, such as Italy and Germany under the fascist period, made huge investments in demographics, in eugenics, racial engineering, and other subjects—and people who taught them had to go. But also, at a structural level, you want to change the tenor of the institution. You want to make educational institutions into places where you don’t have free thinking, critical thinking, and curiosity, as you would in democracies. Instead, the education institution itself becomes a place that breeds the values of authoritarianism: suspicion, hostility. And so every regime invests in having student informers.

And when I start my classes now at New York University, the first day, if they’re about authoritarianism or fascism, I look out at the students and I say, If this were an authoritarian state, one of you or two of you would be informing on each other. And another would be assigned to inform on me, as the instructor.

So it’s curriculum; it’s personnel. But the very conception of the institution must change, and it must become realigned and recast to fit in with the larger goals of that state.

Applebaum: And in this case, what do you mean by “larger goals”?

Ben-Ghiat: Well, this is what I call, and others call, personalist rule, under the Trump administration. Under personalist rule, you have, obviously, a very strong leader, and everyone has to pay tribute to him. Some people call this patrimonialism. I use personalism. And so educational institutions have to be compliant to him.

Applebaum: Ruth, several academics have told me that they believe cuts in funding for university-scientific research are really not about science but about the humanities. They fear that the administration thinks it can use federal funding to influence the kinds of courses universities teach, the students they enroll, the people they hire, ultimately the thoughts that they generate. But still, this doesn’t quite explain why an American president would want to destroy the most powerful engine of innovation in our economy, and maybe the world, which is our universities and their research departments. Why would they want to stifle lifesaving cancer research? Also, why would any government want its people not to be vaccinated? I’m not sure there are any other examples in the modern world, or even in recent history.

Ben-Ghiat: I agree. I can’t find any examples either, although we have examples of people such as [Jair] Bolsonaro, when he was president [of Brazil], trying to dissuade people during COVID that—he said, it was just “a little flu.” So this is a way to attack science, most obviously; a way to spread conspiracy theories.

We’ve seen attempts to smear and discredit scientists, librarians, teachers, judges, journalists. Anybody who works with empirical-research protocols, fact-based methods, scientific methods, investigations—all of them must go. And a very terrifying void opens up that is filled by fear, by conspiracy theories, or by nothing, where people don’t have any recourse against disease—creating conditions so that with the CDC and NIH and all the other infrastructure of science, if there is an outbreak of mass disease, we’ll be completely undefended. So it’s really, almost, a totalitarian—I don’t use that word lightly—effort to change the mindset of people away from science and fact-based research, across the board.

Applebaum: Of course, totalitarian leaders in the past did try to use schools and universities and research institutions to create an alternative reality. Stalin wanted to build a world in which everything he said was automatically accepted as true and nobody ever questioned him. Hitler manipulated science to prove his theories about race. But still, both of them were interested in engineering, in nuclear technology, in energy technology. They weren’t cutting research funding across the board.

Ruth, as we heard from Joan Brugge at the top of this episode, huge cuts in federal support have already been impacting research labs across the United States, including labs that don’t have anything to do with politics. Can you think of an example, prior to this administration, of a very advanced society with very advanced scientific institutes, simply threatening to cut off funding?

Ben-Ghiat: The only example I can think of is China, during Mao.

Applebaum: I was just gonna ask about that.

Ben-Ghiat: During Mao’s long-tenured Cultural Revolution, et cetera, science was put back by generations. Scientists were among the intellectuals and researchers who were killed and imprisoned and purged.

And so you had some of this winnowing-out because of loyalty. You had ideological obedience to the party and to the revolution over fact-based knowledge, and fact-based research became the enemy. Universities were destroyed. Experts were sent to the countryside for reeducation.

So really, people who have studied this talk about an entire lost generation of scientists, and engineers as well. And instead, you had institutions, including scientific ones populated with guards and people who were inexperienced, fanatics, reckless. And so even people who were heroes of the nation, they were beaten, tortured, taken for reeducation. It didn’t matter who they were and what kind of contribution they could make. The entire enterprise of science had to be wrecked. That’s the only example I can think of where you have an intention, an intensity. And, of course, the scope was bigger, but this is just beginning in the United States, and it’s really, really frightening.

Applebaum: Why do you think Harvard has been such a focus? What is it about that institution that has attracted the attention not really just of Trump but of the Project 2025 crowd.

Ben-Ghiat: Well here we get into the logic of authoritarian bullying. The more powerful an entity is, the more they must be made an example of. And the higher, more prestigious your target, the more bringing them down, or trying to, sends a message to everybody else.

And so that’s how authoritarian shifts in culture—and I’m talking about culture as turns of behavior, values—that’s how they can be jump-started, because then universities with far smaller endowments and power and clout would say, Oh, if Harvard’s capitulating, well, what can we do?

Applebaum: Yeah, when I saw the attack on Harvard, I also thought: They’re doing this to show that they can do anything. If they can destroy Harvard, they can destroy anyone.

Ben-Ghiat: That’s right.

Applebaum: There are quite a lot of people out there who like some of what Trump is doing, and maybe they’re worried by some pieces of it, but they wouldn’t see this as some kind of deliberate destruction. What would you say to them, to convince them of your point of view?

Ben-Ghiat: I think that it’s a question of time. When you take away pandemic planning, when you take away scientific research, when you take away accessibility for vaccines, the results aren’t seen immediately.

It takes time for these things to develop. And so, unfortunately, I believe we’re going to have a reckoning, that eyes will open as things fall apart in America. And then people who did not want to believe who Trump was will see the light.

[Music]

Applebaum: The erosion of these institutions, the attempt to undermine our faith in the scientific method—these things could be part of a larger autocratic effort to maintain power.

Ben-Ghiat: Why is he militarizing everyday life? He wants to build fear in people about going to vote. There’s both a work of discrediting elections and a work of intimidation that’s going to intensify as the midterms grow closer.

Applebaum: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Applebaum: Let’s talk a little bit about cultural institutions. Why would an American president be interested in dictating the content of exhibitions at the Smithsonian, a beloved American institution. It belongs to all of us. Its governing board has all kinds of worthy people on it: the chief justice of the Supreme Court; it’s usually had the vice president; many other important figures in public life—bipartisan, I should say. What is it about the Smithsonian that’s attracting his interest or, again, the interest of the people around him?

Ben-Ghiat: Autocrats engage in a mix of utopia and nostalgia, so the Smithsonian is a perfect target if you truly are aiming big. And authoritarians like Trump, they think big; they think long-term. They’re very obsessed with their legacy.

You purge the content of histories that you no longer want, or people you no longer want featured—and instead, you promote your own sanitized, mythological version of history. It’s not enough to just fire people you are smearing who are “radical left,” even though they’re not. You have to go after the whole thing.

Applebaum: For people listening for whom this is a new idea: Why would a leader be trying to reshape or rewrite history? How does it serve the president to erase Black history, or to eliminate stories of the immigrants who have come from all over the world? What does that do for him?

Ben-Ghiat: So every leader, especially authoritarians, want to situate themselves within the flow of the nation. And they need to show that they are on the right side of history. History itself has to be rewritten. And in this case, we have white-Christian-nationalist history, which in a totalitarian framework does not permit the coexistence with other histories. You can’t read the history of institutionalized racism or slavery. And so the entire history, and this translates down to what’s been banned first in Florida and Oklahoma and other states. All of this has to go. And cultural and political icons—people who might be enshrined in the Smithsonian—have to go. At stake is rewriting the entire history of America as a multiracial, multifaith democracy.

Applebaum: The administration has also halted some federal-government cultural spending—for example, on small museums or monuments, and indeed scholars—and redirected it instead to the upcoming 250th-anniversary celebrations of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Why do you think the Trump administration cares about that anniversary, and what distinguishes that from teaching civics or the history of the American Revolution?

Ben-Ghiat: Well, Trump in particular is a man of spectacle. He knows how to stage a spectacle, and ideally, of course, he is at the center of this.

This is a classic appropriation of what would be a very important national milestone. It will become an excuse to intensify a kind of rewriting of American history, but also remapping of the way that Washington, D.C., looks as the power center. And he’s already done this with the White House. That’s leaving his mark. So it’s never just a superficial transformation when you have authoritarians. They can change countries so that even in the space of just a decade, it can take generations for that country to recover.

Applebaum: Ruth, we know how this worked in the past. Dictators have built monumental palaces, or reconstructed their capital cities, as a way of proving they can defeat death, make their power last forever. Famously, Stalin built skyscrapers in Moscow, as well as in Riga and Warsaw, after he occupied those cities, too.

Ben-Ghiat: Yeah, I agree. What autocrats really want is to feel safe, because they of all people know how hated they are. They know who their enemies are, and the depth of hatred that they foster with their violence and their corruption. And so they build these safe spaces for themselves, both at the level of governance where they have these, they’re called inner sanctums, with sycophants and family members.

And they also put their mark on the capital. I think, in America, because we haven’t had a national dictatorship, it’s hard to envision that autocrats truly don’t care about public welfare. They have totally different priorities.

Applebaum: How does that make sense even from the point of view of the authoritarian? I mean, if they continue to strive to damage America, how long can their destruction continue before it reflects the failure of the leader himself?

Ben-Ghiat: That’s a risk they take. But one thing about authoritarians is—although, as I’ve just described, they’re very fearful—they also come to believe in their own omnipotence. In part, because, all day long, if they’ve done their job and gotten enough sycophants around them—we’ve seen this daily in America—all day long,they’re having praise from people. Without you, we wouldn’t be anything, Mr. President. And after a while of this, and we’ve seen this, they start to believe their own propaganda. And then they take risks, and they exceed; they overreach. And that often is their downfall.

Applebaum: Ruth, finally, how does this change the conversation about the midterms in 2026? Is the rewriting of history or attacks on universities—are these part of an attempt to persuade Americans to think differently about elections? Do you connect these attacks on science, on medicine, on culture to the midterms?

Ben-Ghiat: There’s been a concerted and very relentless attempt to change the way that Americans feel about authorities, to change the way that they feel about American institutions. And elections are the most important of those institutions because it is the way that we express our voice and have our agency in the world.

And so, already, as we well know, with his election denial in 2020, he had managed—he actually pulled off a historic feat—he managed to convince tens of millions of people of a very easily verifiable fact that he lost the election. Instead, he convinced tens of millions that he was the rightful winner. And he kept up the distrust in elections all these years. The churches allied with him; the manosphere; all of his enablers and allies. They’ve done a beautiful job from the autocratic point of view of discrediting not only elections but the whole way you think about democracy. So that’s part of it.

The other is: Why is he militarizing everyday life? He wants to build fear in people about going to vote. There’s both a work of discrediting elections and a work of intimidation that’s going to intensify as the midterms grow closer.

Applebaum: So part of the point of attacking institutions that collect and promote knowledge, whether scientific or cultural, is just to reduce Americans’ trust in everything. If we don’t know what’s true and what’s not true, then when Trump argues that the results of the 2020 election are fake, we believe him. There isn’t any evidence, but we don’t care about evidence. And they might also persuade Americans not to accept the results of elections this year either, if they aren’t favorable to the Republicans.

Ben-Ghiat: Yes.And it’s so nice to speak with you because you’ve studied these things too. That’s a big point. It’s destroying trust, which is really trust in each other, too, because what is an election? It’s everybody casting their vote, their preference, and then based on that collective will, you can change a leadership.

And so by convincing people that, Oh, it’s just all gonna be rigged, you’re really giving up on each other. And when you don’t vote, you’re also kind of giving up on your own voice.

[Music]

Ben-Ghiat: Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats, and it’s one of the saddest things. And we know, when autocracies finally fall, rebuilding that trust is one of the most difficult things to do.

Applebaum: Thank you very much, Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Ben-Ghiat: Thank you, Anne.

Next time on Autocracy in America:

Kathleen Walters: The decision to leave the IRS was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. We all have boundaries in life. I also am the mom to a 9-year-old, who I’m responsible for caring for and paying for.

Applebaum: The dismantling of the civil service. That’s next time.

Trump’s Letter to Norway Should Be the Last Straw

2026-01-19T09:11:42-05:00

Let me begin by quoting, in full, a letter that the president of the United States of America sent yesterday to the prime minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre. The text was forwarded by the White House National Security Council to ambassadors in Washington, and was clearly intended to be widely shared. Here it is:

Dear Jonas:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations (“Complete and Total Control”). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many “written documents” establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia.

[Eliot A. Cohen: How to understand Trump’s obsession with Greenland]

Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.

Think about where this is leading. One possibility, anticipated this morning by financial markets, is a damaging trade war. Another is an American military occupation of Greenland. Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it? This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.

For the past year, American allies around the world have tried very hard to find a theory that explains Trump’s behavior. Isolationism, neo-imperialism, and patrimonialism are all words that have been thrown around. But in the end, the president himself defeats all attempts to describe a “Trump doctrine.” He is locked into a world of his own, determined to “win” every encounter, whether in an imaginary competition for the Nobel Peace Prize or a protest from the mother of small children objecting to his masked, armed paramilitary in Minneapolis. These contests matter more to him than any long-term strategy. And of course, the need to appear victorious matters much more than Americans’ prosperity and well-being.

[Read: Denmark’s army chief says he’s ready to defend Greenland]

The people around Trump could find ways to stop him, as some did in his first term, but they seem too corrupt or too power-hungry to try. That leaves Republicans in Congress as the last barrier. They owe it to the American people, and to the world, to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests. He is at risk of alienating friends in not only Europe but also India, whose leader he also snubbed for failing to nominate him for a Nobel Prize, as well as South Korea, Japan, Australia. Years of careful diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, are now at risk because senators and representatives who know better have refused to use the powers they have to block him. Now is the time.

How Crypto Is Used for Political Corruption

2026-01-16T06:00:00-05:00

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Brandon LaRoque kept his life savings in a cryptocurrency account. One morning, as he went to check his balance, he discovered that it was all missing. LaRoque is one of many victims of the unregulated crypto industry, and soon there may be more. President Donald Trump has rolled back regulation of the industry. At the same time, he and his family have earned untold billions of dollars from new crypto ventures. Molly White, a writer focused on the intersections of tech and finance, describes the crypto industry, and explains how this new financial industry is shaping our politics and facilitating corruption within our government.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Brandon LaRoque: Things tend to happen to me first ’cause I’m usually the one willing to try something new first. And I hope I’m not the canary in the coal mine.

[Music]

Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Anne Applebaum. In this new season, I am asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result.

Today’s episode: cryptocurrency, and the crypto oligarchs whose campaign to prevent any regulation of their industry is corrupting the American economy as well as American politics.

Donald Trump was once skeptical of the crypto industry; bitcoin, he once said, “seems like a scam.” But since his inauguration, Donald Trump and his family have turned 180 degrees and made hundreds of millions of dollars from their own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. At the same time, Trump has deregulated the crypto industry, making life easier for the oligarchs who run it, and potentially allowing them to harm thousands of ordinary consumers.

Brandon LaRoque is one those people, a victim of what he says was a hack involving a crypto coin called XRP.

LaRoque: My name is Brandon Laroque. I’m from Raleigh, North Carolina. I’m an Eagle Scout. I’m a veteran, and for the past 21 years, I ran a bar. We, my wife and I, ran it together. It’s called the Goat Bar, in Raleigh. The bar was our baby.

[Music]

Every day when I used to leave my bar, if I had any extra cash with me, I would go to the ATM machine and I would buy XRP, and send it to my wallet. That was my savings. I just kind of wanted to stay out of the banks as much as possible.

Each month what I would do is, since we had retired from our bar, I would sell off a little bit of XRP. So if we needed, you know, $5,000 to pay the mortgage or pay our car payment, or whatever it was, I would actually just sell off whatever I needed. And that’s what we’ve been living off for the past year.

On October 15, which was a Wednesday, I, being in the bar business, I’m a night owl. I’m up all night long. I’m usually going to bed when most people are getting up, going to work.

And I just happened to click on my wallet. I don’t check it every day. I clicked on the app, and I noticed that my XRP had all been just disappeared. It was 4 o’clock in the morning. I woke my wife up, literally in tears. Somehow I was hacked. I don’t know. And I still don’t even know how to this day.

1,210,000 XRP. It was worth approximately $3 million. It was our life savings.

The first week was a haze. I was so lost. I lost 12 pounds in seven days. It’s just so crazy that I’ve gone this long and now I’m right here at the finish line, and it’s gone.

I mean, I hate to say that money caused me the worst day of my life, but it caused me the worst day of my life, unfortunately, to be honest. ’Cause it wasn’t about the money as it was about, you know, I could just see all our dreams kind of disappearing when that happened.

We didn’t know what we were gonna do. I contacted my local sheriff. They did not have a cybercrimes unit. I contacted my local police department. They don’t have a cybercrimes unit. I also contacted the FBI. With the FBI, it was like, Just fill out a report. And I think there’s, like, less than a 1 percent chance of getting any of our crypto back. I mean, I hope there’s more, but I just really doubt it.

[Music]

I think a lot of people are making a lot of money off the backs of a lot of people.

And, I mean, I’ll say, I am a Trump supporter, but I don’t agree with the Trump coin. I don’t agree with these meme coins. I don’t agree with the whole thing going on. I think it’s called World Liberty or World Finance, whatever it is. I think they’re all terrible.

If I had President Trump’s ear, I would ask him to please work with Congress and make crypto safer and easier for everyone. Even though I don’t like the banks, at least I can walk into a branch and speak to a human being, and they will sit down there and help me with my bank account. Why can’t you do the same thing with crypto?

I think that they all need to get off their butts and pass legislation to make it safer for everybody. Let’s get something done.

[Music]

Molly White: I think there’s a lot of damage that can potentially happen to everyday people through crypto.

Applebaum: Molly White is a software engineer and researcher. She writes the newsletter Citation Needed, which focuses on the crypto industry and the intersections between finance and tech.

Molly, for listeners who aren’t steeped in finance or who are just unfamiliar, how do you describe what crypto is, and how do you explain how it’s different from traditional banking?

White: Well, crypto is really a form of a digital asset, so there’s no paper currency. Broadly speaking, people are not using crypto for buying their groceries or paying their rent or those types of things. Most people buy and sell them for speculative purposes.

Applebaum: Speculative purposes, meaning they invest in it, and they hope the price will go up.

White: Correct.

Applebaum: And how can unregulated crypto hurt ordinary consumers?

White: So there is the risk when it comes to the asset itself in the sense that these assets are highly volatile. Many of them, you don’t know who has created the asset. You don’t know who is running the business. You don’t know their credibility or their background. They aren’t required to disclose it under the current regulatory regime. There have been many, many cryptocurrencies that are known as “rug pulls,” where, essentially, the creators of these assets inflate the price artificially and then sell all their tokens, profiting immensely themselves but at the expense of everyone they convinced to purchase the tokens.

You know, there’s very little regulation preventing that type of activity, whereas you would expect that activity to be quickly shut down in more regulated ends of the financial system. So there’s the sort of asset-level risk, but then there’s also the broader risk, which is that if you buy a stock today through your brokerage account, the price of the stock might go up and down, but you know, fairly confidently, that that stock is still gonna belong to you when you open up your brokerage in a month.

When it comes to the cryptocurrency industry, we’ve seen repeated examples of crypto firms that have gone bankrupt, that have run off with all the money, that have just vanished into thin air practically. We saw the collapse of FTX, in 2022—

Applebaum: Right, Sam Bankman-Fried’s company—

White: Correct, where it turned out that people were trusting this company that was actually taking their money and then using them to trade or to make investments in other companies or to purchase real estate for the executives of that company. And people ended up losing a lot of money when FTX went bankrupt. And now its CEO is spending a long time in jail.

And I think a lot of people don’t understand that there is very little protection against that type of activity. Especially in the United States, I think we’ve all become very comfortable with banks or regulated financial institutions, where there is some degree of oversight, where you expect that a company is not gonna just run off with all your money without any recourse. Or, you know, if your bank fails, you expect that you don’t have to worry about your deposits, because they are insured up to a fairly large amount. And I think a lot of people who are being sucked in by the marketing and the promises of getting rich overnight, frankly, don’t understand that there is that amount of risk that they’re getting into.

Applebaum: So it’s a little bit like the banking industry before deposit insurance, before banks were regulated. It’s as if you could have had your money in a bank, and then the bank could go bankrupt or disappear overnight, and then you would just lose everything.

White: Right, exactly. I mean, that is, when we saw crypto collapses throughout the past handful of years, there were many instances where people lost their funds and they said, I thought I had the same protections as a bank. I thought the FDIC would step in and reimburse me. And now we are actually seeing the regulators being pulled back and told to step away from the crypto industry. And we’re seeing legislation being passed that would essentially enable the crypto industry to expand its business activities without any additional consumer protections.

Applebaum: You keep a running tally of money that’s been lost in schemes and scams since 2021. Where are we now approximately?

White: Let me take a quick look. So the running total on my website for the money that’s been lost is almost $80 billion, and that’s actually a very conservative estimate. So that’s really the lower bound, I would say.

Applebaum: So to be clear, this is $80 billion lost by ordinary consumers.

White: Yeah, it’s a mix of everyday people and institutions.

Applebaum: Let me shift now to the current administration. Maybe we could start with World Liberty Financial. Can you explain what it is and how it works and how it could be used, in effect, to bribe the president?

White: So World Liberty Financial is a cryptocurrency platform that was created by Trump, some of his sons, and a handful of external partners in August 2024.

Applebaum: And one of those external partners is Zach Witkoff, who is the son of Trump’s Middle East and Russia envoy, Steve Witkoff.

White: Right, and this has been a very lucrative project for the Trump family. They’ve earned hundreds of millions of dollars just from selling WLFI tokens that currently don’t really do much, but allow people to buy favor with the president, essentially.

Applebaum: Can we just focus on that for a second? So people are buying tokens, but then there’s nothing they can use those tokens for, right? I mean, they can’t be used to buy anything else, and they can’t be traded easily, and they can’t be sold easily. So the only reason to buy them is to be able to show the president that you spent money on his company.

White: I agree that it really is just a way to buy favor with the president. And we’ve seen that being done through people like Justin Sun, for example, who is a foreign national, is not permitted to contribute to Trump’s campaign, but was making a $75 million purchase of these WLFI tokens. And Trump and his family take a 75 percent cut of that.

Applebaum: So Justin Sun invested in World Liberty Financial, and what did he get in exchange?

White: He ended up being rewarded with an advisory position at the World Liberty project, which gives him close access to the Trump family.

Applebaum: And at the time, he was under an investigation as well, no?

White: Correct. Justin Sun was actively fighting a civil lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission that alleged fraud in addition to the usual unregistered sales of securities.

Applebaum: And since then, those charges have been removed? Or we’re not investigating him anymore?

White: The Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit has been paused, pending resolution. So essentially dropped. And so, yes, I mean he essentially has nothing to worry about anymore in terms of both criminal and civil litigation.

Applebaum: I mean, obviously, we can’t prove the connection, but there is a series of strange events. So, Justin Sun made an investment in World Liberty Financial. Subsequent to that, the investigation into him was lifted, although his investment was locked and frozen, later on, by World Liberty Financial. So obviously, there is more to this story. [Sun has denied any wrongdoing.]

White: Correct. You know, we’ve seen other examples where companies have partnered with Trump’s companies in ways that are very lucrative for the Trump family, and then they’ve seemed to suddenly enjoy relief from legal concerns. We’ve seen, for example, Coinbase spending millions of dollars on political contributions, whether it was to crypto-focused super PACs that were supporting pro-crypto congressional candidates, or if it was sponsorship of the Trump military parade or a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund. And then shortly after Trump took office, the SEC enforcement case against them was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled. I mean, the list really goes on.

Applebaum: Some of this doesn’t sound that new; it just sounds like classic lobbying. The difference, it seems to me, though, is both in the scale, in the amounts of money being thrown around, in the fact that people seem to be paying to get rid of their legal problems. And of course, the huge difference is the personal involvement of the president and his family.

White: They are involved in almost every aspect of the crypto industry at this point. The Trump family is profiting from cryptocurrency businesses and crypto investments, and President Trump is essentially directing the regulation and legislation around the crypto industry.

Applebaum: Can you estimate how much money the president and his family have made through this line of business?

White: We’re talking billions of dollars at this point.

Applebaum: This seems to me the genuinely unusual and new piece of this, actually, which is that you have an industry that is directly benefiting the president. So he is directly, personally, and immediately benefiting from his own regulatory decisions. I mean, what stopped that before? Was it just our norms—presidents just didn’t do that.

White: It’s probably fair to say that some presidents have profited to some extent from the office, but this is certainly a dramatic escalation of directly profiting, and in quite enormous amounts. I think some of it comes down to norms. I think some of it comes down to an unwillingness or inability to investigate and prosecute corruption.

There have been multiple lawmakers calling for investigations into these clear conflicts of interest, and those have largely not gone anywhere, due to the unwillingness of the rest of Congress to step up and look into this type of activity.

Applebaum: Yeah. It seems to me the other big difference is: Other presidents profited after leaving the presidency. They made money from speeches, but I can’t think of, in modern times at least, of a president who has earned this kind of money, this fast, while in office.

White: That’s absolutely correct.

[Music]

Applebaum: We’ve been talking about the tangled web of the crypto world and how Trump and his family have personally benefited. But it feels like hardly anyone is talking about how this new source of money—billions of dollars—is also giving the presidency new levels of autonomy and power.

White: It’s sort of a chicken-and-an-egg question. To what extent has the authoritarianism enabled the policies that have allowed him to acquire so much cryptocurrency? And then the other way around.

Applebaum: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Applebaum: Molly, there is one country that has made crypto a central part of its financial system, and that is El Salvador. It’s led by Nayib Bukele, a democratically elected president who has, like Trump, also sought to centralize power and eliminate checks and balances. We know the Trump family admires him. Donald Trump Jr., together with Tucker Carlson, went to Bukele’s inauguration in 2024. How has El Salvador’s experiment with crypto worked out?

White: Yeah, so El Salvador took a very similar approach, frankly, to bitcoin a number of years ago, where the president essentially unilaterally determined that they were going to create this national fund of bitcoin. They were gonna take money belonging to the country and put it into purchasing bitcoin.

This was not something that was particularly popular among the populace, but it was sort of a unilateral decision by Bukele to sort of foist bitcoin upon the everyday people in El Salvador, who were told to download crypto wallets. Businesses were instructed to begin accepting bitcoin in their day-to-day operations.

And it was ultimately not very beneficial to Salvadoran people. This was government money that could have been used in much more socially beneficial ways that was instead being stockpiled away in crypto investments. There were technical problems with the bitcoin wallet, and the [government] rollout that resulted in people’s assets being stolen from them. It was, frankly, fairly disastrous. And so it was a very challenging time for El Salvador.

Applebaum: So it’s not as if El Salvador has created this beautiful model that we can just follow.

White: Well, I mean, it sort of seems like Trump and his family have been emulating El Salvador in many ways. But El Salvador is not a great example of, I think, where this country should be going. But it, unfortunately, has strong parallels to Trump, where the president has consolidated power in very alarming ways. He runs the government in a fairly authoritarian way. And he has gone all in on crypto.

Applebaum: Moving back to the United States, how would you describe the Trump administration’s regulatory approach in this second term?

White: Well, the strategy so far has been to completely defang financial regulators. You know, there have been executive orders instructing the SEC and [the Commodity Futures Trading Commission] to essentially back off from the cryptocurrency industry, and the Department of Justice as well. And the people that the Trump administration has been installing at regulators and in these other agencies have largely been coming from the cryptocurrency industry. I mean, we’ve seen, essentially, this revolving door happening, where many of the people now in charge of regulating the cryptocurrency industry have very direct ties to that industry.

Applebaum: Let me shift now to ask you about the idea of a cryptocurrency reserve, a “Bitcoin Strategic Reserve", or having crypto be part of the deeper bones of the U.S. financial system. Walk us through what that proposal is and how it would work, and then I’ll ask you about how it could go wrong.

White: So the “Bitcoin Strategic Reserve” and the “Digital Asset Stockpile” were created with sort of an executive order that takes a pile of crypto assets that were already being held by the U.S. government and pledges to continue to hold them rather than sell them. And so the U.S. government actually holds a fairly substantial amount of cryptocurrencies, largely that were seized as a result of law-enforcement activity.

So, for example, if there’s, you know, a criminal case against an online drug marketplace or something like that, and they shut that down, they seize the crypto assets, once that case is finished in court, those assets are forfeited to the government. That means that the government essentially has them in their government crypto wallet, and historically they have sold them off. But now the idea is that the government will actually hold those assets in kind and essentially hope to profit from increases in, for example, bitcoin price.

Applebaum: And how could this be damaging? What’s wrong with doing that?

White: Well, it’s essentially the U.S. government engaging in crypto speculation. These are assets that historically would’ve gone towards funding various treasury activities. Now they’re being held in reserve, and it’s unclear under what circumstances that those assets will be used for normal government purposes. It also, you know, we’re seeing various members of the government, including people who are very active in defining crypto policy, talking about trying to find ways to add to those holdings by purchasing crypto assets.

You know, we saw this sort of mad scramble when Trump was talking about creating this executive order from various crypto companies that wanted their crypto assets included in this stockpile as well, because they understood that this would be both an endorsement of their crypto assets and would drive demand.

Applebaum: And would this also not give the president access to funds or to money that he could spend as he wants? Money that hasn’t been allocated by Congress?

White: I think that’s a very serious question. You know, there is not the type of congressional oversight when it comes to spending these types of alternative funds, and it seems to me that this is a way for Trump to essentially create this stockpile of funds that he could then use without much oversight.

Applebaum: So he would have sort of his own slush fund.

White: That’s how it seems to me. Yes.

Applebaum: Can you describe the involvement of the crypto industry in the 2024 elections? Was that different from the industry’s previous involvement, and what exactly were they trying to achieve?

White: Yeah. So the crypto industry became very heavily involved in the 2024 elections in ways that they had really not been previously. We saw the involvement of these massive, single-issue pro-cryptocurrency super PACs that were getting heavily involved in congressional elections. The industry contributed over $150 million to those super PACs. They spent around $130 million influencing congressional races, where they were hoping to either install pro-crypto candidates or remove people who were viewed to be enemies of the crypto industry. At one point it was almost half of all corporate spending was coming out of the cryptocurrency industry.

Applebaum: Wow. So that’s even beyond the scale of spending of the oil-and-gas industry, for example.

White: Yeah, I mean, you look at the size of the crypto industry, which is very small comparatively, and they were spending like the pharma industry, like the oil industry.

And it was very, very overt around the messaging. Basically, the industry saying, If you don’t support us, we are going to crush you with millions and millions of dollars in these elections where—these are often states where these crypto companies don’t have any real presence, but they are funneling money to control these elections in ways that the actual residents of those states often have very little say in as a result. And so you end up with these corporations contributing huge amounts of money to essentially raise their interests above those of everyday constituents.

Applebaum: So crypto companies are making enormous contributions to state, Senate, and House campaigns, even where they don’t even have a physical presence, just to be able to have influence in Congress later on. Tell me about the possibility of using crypto for illegal campaign funding. Money is moved around anonymously so easily in that world. For example, if a foreign national wanted to influence a campaign, could they do it via the crypto industry?

White: Potentially. I mean, we’re already seeing these various sort of indirect ways in which foreign nationals and U.S. people are directing funds towards the Trump family, for example. And those are not campaign contributions, but they certainly appear to be influencing policy. You know, essentially, crypto could be a conduit for bribery that is challenging to trace. I mean, one of the goals of crypto is to be fairly anonymous, to make it challenging for people to know where funds are coming from.

Applebaum: Do you expect the industry to be involved in the midterms? Do you expect big investments in campaigns once again?

White: Absolutely. We’ve already seen these same crypto PACs from 2024 raising money for the 2026 elections. We’re actually seeing new super PACs being established. One of them has already committed to spending $100 million in the midterms. And we’re seeing politicians and candidates speaking very frankly about wanting to install pro-crypto candidates. I mean, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Tim Scott, recently said the No. 1 thing that the crypto industry can do is fire the legislators that are in your way. So we’re seeing very aggressive incitement for these crypto PACs to get very involved in the midterms.

Applebaum: So legislators who support consumer protection, who care about ordinary people not being ripped off—they’re the ones who will be the target of the crypto funding in the 2026 elections?

White: Absolutely. I mean, we saw Sherrod Brown, for example, in Ohio. The crypto industry spent $40 million to support his competitor to get him out of office. And Sherrod Brown is going to be running again. And we’re already hearing people talking about opposing him because he is such a strong advocate for consumer protections or for actions against big banks, Big Finance. We’ve seen calls for the industry to come out in force against him.

[Music]

White: And I think we’ll see very similar strategies against other proconsumer protection candidates that run in 2026.

Applebaum: Molly White, thank you.

White: Thank you for having me.

Next time on Autocracy in America:

Joan Brugge: In the 50 years I’ve been doing research, I’ve never heard of the government cutting off research funding across the board. It’s shocking and demoralizing to have to deal with this.

Applebaum: In 2025, unexpected freezes to federal funding created chaos for thousands of labs, research projects, and experimental teams. What does this assault on science have to do with the health of our democracy?

That’s next time.

Federal Agents Are Violating the Rights of Americans

2026-01-09T06:00:00-05:00

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The transformation of ICE into a type of national police force, backed, in some cases, by soldiers from the National Guard, has been covered as immigration story—but these forces are reshaping democracy for all of us. This shift was evident even before the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland this week. In this episode, George Retes, a U.S. citizen and an Army veteran, recounts how he was detained by ICE and held for three days without explanation. The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum returns as host of Autocracy in America and talks with Margy O’Herron and Liza Goitein from the Liberty & National Security Program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice about the potential impact of these forces on elections in November.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Anne Applebaum.

[Music]

Applebaum: In this new season, I am going to ask how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of US politics, and introduce you to some of the Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. The president and his entourage are accumulating power in ways that seem familiar to me: this is exactly how elected leaders in other countries have distorted their democracies. I want to understand how these kinds of changes work here, and what they bode for the future.

George Retes: My name is George Retes Jr. I’m 25 years old. I was born and raised here in Ventura, California. I’m a father of two, and yeah, I’m a U.S. citizen. The day I was arrested by ICE agents was July 10.

Applebaum: This first episode will focus on an issue you’ve probably heard about: the transformation of America’s immigration and customs officers into a masked and heavily armed paramilitary, and the deployment of the National Guard to American cities, supposedly to defend them. Americans may think of this as a change that mostly affects illegal immigrants, but this new federal police force is also establishing standards of lawlessness, and they are operating with an assumption of impunity that is changing the lives of U.S. citizens as well.

George Retes has already felt the impact.

Retes: I was driving to my workplace, where I work as a contracted security guard. When I pulled up, there’s just cars on that entire road, bumper-to-bumper—people getting out, just cars driving around each other. And I was like, All right, well, I just need to make it to work. So I make my way through, and it’s just this roadblock of ICE agents just standing across the road.

[Music]

Retes: There’s people banging on trash cans and just yelling and stuff. I got out and I stood right by my car. I’m basically yelling at them, like, I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m a veteran. I’m just trying to get to work. I’m not protesting. I’m just trying to get to work. I thought everything was gonna be okay, and they just were hostile from the get-go.

Like, You’re not going to work today. Get back in your car. Leave. So I end up getting back in my car, and they just all start walking in a line towards me, and they just surround my car. I have the agents on the side trying to pull on my door handles, trying to open my car door, yelling at me to get out, and the agents in the front of my car are telling me to reverse, contradicting what these other agents are telling me to do.

They end up throwing tear gas. And I’m in there choking, trying to plead with them, like, I can’t see; my car’s engulfed in smoke, and eventually they hit my window again, and it just shatters. Immediately, the moment it shatters, another agent sticks his arm through and sprays me in the face with pepper spray.

They just dragged me out of the car, threw me on the ground. They just immediately kneeled on my neck and back. There’s maybe four or five other agents just standing around us, just watching as they do this. And the entire time, they’re just questioning, like, Why was he arrested? basically. Like, they were confused themselves.

Eventually, they put me back in this unmarked SUV, and then they end up driving me to the detention facility in downtown L.A. They strip-search us, they do our fingerprints, take our pictures. My hands are burning. My face is burning from tear gas still, and the entire time I was in there, no phone call, no lawyer, no shower. No nothing.

I was detained for three nights and three days. That Saturday was my daughter’s third birthday party, and that was probably the worst feeling ever. She’s my princess. It was just terrible.

So Sunday, a guard ends up coming up and is just like, You’re off, like, He’s getting released, and that’s all he says. That was it. They’re like, You’re free to go. All the charges had been dropped; you’re free to go. And I just asked them, “So I basically was locked up and missed my daughter’s birthday for no fucking reason?” And they just were silent. They just stayed silent. I was given no explanation, no apology, just: That’s it.

[Music]

Retes: When I was locked up, just that entire time, I knew If I get out of here, I’m definitely gonna take legal action. I was gonna make my voice heard because that’s the only way to hold them accountable for what they did. Someone has to be held accountable. Treating people a certain way without dignity or respect or humanity is so fucking wrong. To not have any fucking rights, especially here in America, when that’s what we’re supposed to be all about—it’s wrong. It goes against everything we stand for. And so I hope that the justice system, even though I don’t believe it works all the time, I hope that in this case it works.

Applebaum: By one count from ProPublica, over 170 American citizens, like George Retes, have already been detained by ICE.

The unnecessary deployment of armed agents onto peaceful streets has also led to tragedy.

This week a woman was shot dead in her car by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.

Last September a man was shot and killed by ICE outside Chicago.

And last November, an Afghan refugee shot two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., and has been charged with the murder one of them, a 20-year-old woman from West Virginia. She had been deployed, frankly, for symbolic reasons, to demonstrate Trump’s control over the military, and over the nation’s capital, and she was murdered, it seems, because she served as a symbol of that American military power. The assailant has pled not guilty.

ICE, and the use of the National Guard to protect ICE, has been covered as immigration story, but America’s immigration and customs agents aren’t only being used for that purpose.

The Trump administration is also using ICE and the National Guard to project power, to demonstrate that it can operate without restraint, and in defiance of the law.

How is the deployment of these agents and soldiers legal? Has anything like this ever happened before? It seems any American can now be detained or harassed, or even killed. The American National Guard can be used as puppets in a presidential game—is that legal too?

I asked two experts from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU what we should be doing to secure our own safety, and to preserve our democracy. (We spoke before the killing in Minneapolis this week.)

Our first guest, Margy O’Herron, has documented the transformation of ICE. I started by asking her about the George Retes story and what ICE is supposed to do when it picks up a citizen. (And we should add here that ICE did not respond to questions from The Atlantic about the Retes case.)

Margy O’Herron: When ICE discovers that somebody is a citizen, they are supposed to release them right away. I think what you’re seeing, too, is just a bigger phenomenon of unchecked, chaotic deportation and arrest that is dangerous, and it risks all of our rights.

Applebaum: Okay, so citizens who are detained are supposed to have a certain set of rights, though even those now seem to be at risk. What about noncitizens?

O’Herron: There’s one key fact that I think is different, that I think is really important for folks to understand. And that is that the immigration system is considered a civil system. So this is not law enforcement in the sense of going after criminals. The great majority of immigrants in the system are actually only being charged with a civil offense, if anything, and that is: You are in the country without permission, and there is a civil process to remove you. Because of that, many of the rules that do apply in the criminal context, like right to counsel, do not apply in the civil context. But they’re operating much as if these folks are criminals. They’re arresting them. They’re detaining them. And the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment do still apply to immigrants. They apply to immigrants in the same way that they apply to citizens. There’s no distinction in the law. So without those things, ICE is arresting people and taking people out of the country without any kind of process, without alerting them that they’re going, without allowing them to talk to a lawyer—that is not lawful; it’s unconstitutional. Those rights exist, and they should be protected.

Applebaum: Trump’s big spending bill, which he called the One Big Beautiful [Bill] Act, will allocate over $170 billion to border and immigration enforcement, with a significant amount going to ICE. Can you give us some idea of the scale of the spending? What does it allow ICE to do that’s different from what Immigration [and Customs Enforcement] was allowed to do in the past?

O’Herron: Just to put it in context, it’s $170 billion over four years, but across the country, all states and local law enforcement, in a year, spent about $135 billion [in 2021]. And the money going to ICE is triple what they were authorized before. And what it means is that the types of raids that we’ve seen and the scale of detention that we’ve seen are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s going to increase significantly as they start spending all of those funds.

Applebaum: Also, of course, all this funding is going to law enforcement, and very little is going to the judges or the immigration courts that for a long time have been the places where people targeted for deportation were allowed to state their case or make their arguments.

O’Herron: Exactly right. So you see a 400 percent increase in detention and a 14 percent increase for the number of judges. We’ve also seen attacks on the immigration courts and immigration judges. The administration has fired more than 80 immigration judges, mostly for no cause. They’re claiming this is the right of the president to decide who’s an immigration judge. One assumes that they’re being fired because their positions or history or background is something that this current administration does not like. And they’re proposing now to replace those fired immigration judges with military lawyers. And although there are excellent lawyers in the military, they are not trained as immigration judges. And without that training, without that background, it suggests that there’s something else at work. And the fear will be that those judges are there to rubber-stamp the administration’s broader deportation agenda.

Applebaum: As the money starts to get spent, what are some changes that all of us will see, that people not directly involved in immigration, immigration enforcement, or who aren’t immigrants themselves—what will we see? How will we be affected?

O’Herron: I think we’ll see increased raids and surveillance the way that we’ve seen things happening in Chicago and Los Angeles—roving patrols of ICE agents and also other law enforcement that’s been assigned to support ICE, right? So we now have: Customs and Border Protection, which is used to operating at the border, is supporting ICE. We also have more than 2,000 other federal law-enforcement agents—I think The Washington Post reported that 25 percent of FBI agents are now detailed over to do law enforcement of civilians in the immigration system. And that’s a huge shift from having law enforcement go after who we’d consider to be bad guys, to instead go after immigrants who have done nothing except enter the country unlawfully. And even the number of people that have entered the country unlawfully is lower than the number of people that they’re arresting. Of the folks that are being arrested, 70 percent have absolutely no criminal background, and of the folks that do, there is a very slim number that have any kind of violent criminal background. Most have property crimes or—

Applebaum: Parking tickets, I read in one case.

O’Herron: Parking tickets, even. Correct. And so you’ve taken your FBI agent who’s well trained to go after a drug trafficker or child predator, and instead you have them going after a landscaper or a guy who works at the car wash—to go after civilians.

Applebaum: If this is illegal, if it breaks existing laws, why can’t courts seem to stop this kind of behavior?

O’Herron: I think the courts have been stopping this behavior, or at least they’re trying. There have been some really important rulings out of both Chicago and Los Angeles, which is where we’ve seen a lot of violence against immigrants in the last few months. A district court in Los Angeles, for example, ruled that ICE could not arrest immigrants without reasonable suspicion and couldn’t rely on certain factors, like race and speech, to support that reasonable-suspicion determination. That order was stayed by the Supreme Court, unfortunately. But in the intervening period, while the court’s order was in effect, those orders were followed.

Applebaum: But it’s not stopping them from continuing to arrest people.

O’Herron: Well, I think there is a sense from the top that the agents who are taking these actions are not gonna have any consequences for those actions. For example, there was a video that circulated quite broadly of a woman who was pushed by an ICE agent outside the New York immigration office. She was shoved across a hallway, and she fell. She ended up being hospitalized. Initially, ICE came out with a statement that said that type of action was unacceptable, but a few days later, it was reported that that ICE agent was back on the job.

The administration also has cut many of the oversight offices that are supposed to be places that compile and check that kind of abuse. These are really important offices that field thousands of complaints every year on exactly this kind of behavior. And instead, now we have to rely on the courts exclusively to take these actions.

Applebaum: Taking a step back, it seems that what you are saying is that we are granting a heavily armed federal police force permission to break the law with impunity. They are not punished for either illegal or unethical actions, and no one is keeping track.

O’Herron: You can still file a complaint with ICE. And even though that may seem like a futile exercise, it is really important for tracking what is happening. Those records are then available by [the Freedom of Information Act]. They’re available to Congress. They will be available to some future administration to be able to identify what has happened and provide redress.

Applebaum: It looks to me like the nature of immigration enforcement is changing, that it’s beginning to look something a lot more like the War on Terror.

O’Herron: Yeah, I think that’s right. What we now see is a very heavy, militarized law-enforcement presence with very little oversight. You’ve got ICE agents and their law-enforcement partners using—they’re dressed like military soldiers. They are using military weapons. They are rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters. They’re using flash-bang grenades to clear out buildings. They’re zip-tying the elderly, children as a way of evacuating a building. These are tools that are used by armed soldiers against enemies—not that we use against civilians.

So I do think there is an effort to terrorize, to intimidate, and probably to get people to self-deport or to not come in the first place. And I think it also is an effort to enforce this narrative that we’re going after the worst of the worst. That has been the line that the administration has been using, but that’s not what they’re actually doing. By making it look like they need all of this backup, they need this heavy-duty equipment, it suggests that that is in fact what they’re doing. But the data does not support that claim.

Applebaum: So they’re trying to convince people that this is a real military operation against real terrorists. They even made a recruiting video out of the raid that deployed Black Hawk helicopters, making it seem something like the Marines in Iraq. But even that raid, it was allegedly meant to target a Venezuelan gang, and yet no one who was detained appears to be a member of a gang, or even a criminal. So it seems that it’s ordinary people.

O’Herron: Correct. Being pulled out of, you know, in the middle of the night to sit in the cold and wait for a chance to say that they’re a citizen.

[Music]

Applebaum: We’ve been talking about ICE, but that is only one aspect of the new military presence on America’s streets. The other is the National Guard.

Liza Goitein: To me, a police state is a place where the presence of, whether it’s the federal military or law enforcement, is so heavy that people are really kind of living in fear, and they’re changing the way they behave.

Applebaum: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Applebaum: In addition to ICE, President Donald Trump has also deployed the National Guard in several big cities. I’ve seen them hanging around Metro stops in Washington, D.C., fully armed, which I find very jarring. I asked my second guest, Liza Goitein, also of the Brennan Center, whether there are any precedents for this.

Goitein: No president has used the military domestically in the way that President Trump is using the military.

Applebaum: Never?

Goitein: Never. For street crime? In our nation’s history, presidents have deployed troops to quell civil unrest or to enforce the law a total of 30 times. And the last time was in 1992, so over 30 years ago.

So what we’re seeing now, not only has Trump deployed the military into American cities three times in just over eight months in office, compared to 30 times in the nation’s entire history before this, but he’s also doing it in circumstances where it just hasn’t been done this way before.

Applebaum: Right, so neither is the state asking for help, nor is the state acting in violation of federal law. So there’s no—none of the excuses that have ever been used before are being used.

Goitein: Exactly. I mean, the only time I think the military has been used for street crime was in Hawaii during World War II when Congress authorized martial law. And Hawaii wasn’t a state at the time. Having said that, the law is—it’s 10 USC § 12406. I wish it had a catchy name.

Applebaum: (Laughs.)

Goitein: It doesn’t. Okay, so I’m just gonna call it Section 12406. And that’s a law that allows the president to federalize National Guard forces. Now, this law has never been used to deploy troops to quell civil unrest, at least not on its own. He’s using it in an unprecedented way.

Applebaum: And he’s doing so on the grounds that there’s an emergency, right? He’s claiming he’s claiming emergency powers. There’s a very bad tradition of leaders using emergencies to do things that are illegal. I mean, it goes back to the 1930s and earlier.

Goitein: Well, yeah, and it’s a hallmark of authoritarian regimes around the world, because emergency powers free leaders from legal constraints that they would otherwise face. And so there’s obviously a temptation to either exploit real crises or to manufacture crises in order to act without these legal limits.

Applebaum:

Right. Of course the president has already used exaggerated claims about “unrest,” and therefore “emergency,” in Portland to try to justify the use of troops there, possibly after being shown outdated video. Historically, wars have also given leaders an excuse to crack down on protest or to claim emergency powers. You know in the run up to the U.S. incursion into Venezuela, I did wonder whether the purpose was to create a reason for the president to declare an emergency. Which leads me to the next question, which is whether the military is now at risk of becoming a political tool, used by the White House, not to defend Americans from their enemies, but to promote the President’s power or status and to punish his enemies.

Goitein: When soldiers are dragged into what is widely perceived to be a domestic political fight, that this—first of all, it’s really bad for the morale of the soldiers. That’s not why they enlisted. They don’t like being dragged into politics. But also, it undermines public trust in the military. When you do that, that really weakens our military, when it cannot appeal to and draw from all sectors of the U.S. population, when it loses the public confidence.

And you have to worry about the long-term effects on the military in terms of who is going to join up and who’s going to stay in the military. And increasingly, are we going to see that the people who enlist, the people who stay in the military, are people who either agree with the president’s political agenda, agree that the military should be used to police fellow Americans, or at least are okay with the military being used in that way? And that would very fundamentally and dangerously change what our military is.

Applebaum: Yeah. One of the sources of legitimacy of the U.S. military is that it is perceived as bipartisan, and it is perceived as an institution that protects all of us. And so, presumably, if it loses that, then it loses some of its legitimacy in the eyes of Americans.

Goitein: Absolutely. And that’s really one of the main dangers of what’s happening now that I think not enough people are focused on.

Applebaum: Let me ask you a different question about the future: Do you think, as some governors have warned, that the deployment of armed forces on our streets—National Guard, ICE, and others—will be used to shape public opinion in the run-up to midterm elections this year and maybe during the elections themselves?

Goitein: Yeah, there’s certainly a risk that the president would attempt to deploy troops around the time of an election on the theory that people are less likely to come out and vote if they think that the streets are gonna be full of, you know, heavily armed, federal law enforcement or military troops. That’s going to dissuade some people from getting out and exercising the right to vote.

You really have to worry that not only that this is happening so often—we’re seeing a routinization of the use of the military domestically—but also that we’re seeing a real creep in terms of what it’s being used for. So first it started with protests against ICE raids that were supposedly interfering with ICE’s ability to conduct those raids. Then it was general crime control in Washington, D.C., and you have to wonder what the next reason is going to be. Now, it might continue for a while to be crime control or, you know, protests. But the next reason could be claims of voter fraud, which is a phenomenon that is statistically almost nonexistent.

Applebaum: So you could imagine ICE or the military being used to police polling stations?

Goitein: Well, no, they can’t be used to police polling stations. No. The law very explicitly says that U.S. military and federal armed agents cannot be present at polling stations unless force is necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States. We do have these very strong laws in place that prohibit interference with elections generally and specifically by the military. So that’s off the table. Or at least if they were to do it, it would be flagrantly and obviously illegal.

Applebaum: So technically, we have laws on the books that should prevent troops from being used inside a polling booth. But this administration has already demonstrated that it’s willing to break laws. And maybe, one of the purposes of troop deployment in cities is just to create a general climate of fear, to make people afraid to participate in public life?

Goitein: I mean, it’s certainly the predictable effect of deploying the military on the streets on a sort of routinized basis—to change people’s behavior so that they are afraid to exercise their rights, so that they do behave differently.

So my concern is that we’re moving towards a status quo in which the cities of this country really feel like police states. And to me, a police state is a place where the presence of—whether it’s the federal military or law enforcement—is so heavy and the chill on people’s exercise of their rights is so acute that people are really kind of living in fear, and they’re changing the way they behave.

I personally know several people who are U.S. citizens or immigrants who are lawfully in this country, who have told me that they are staying inside as much as they can, and not going out unless they have to.

[Music]

Goitein: To me that kind of chill and that kind of change in behavior is what really marks life in a police state.

Applebaum: Thank you, Liza.

Goitein: Thanks for having me.

Next time on Autocracy in America:

Brandon LaRoque: Somehow I was hacked. I don’t know. And I still don’t even know how to this day. It was 1,210,000 XRP. It was our life savings. If I had President Trump’s ear, I would ask him to please work with Congress and make crypto safer and easier for everyone.

Applebaum: How the crypto industry is making billions for President Trump and his family, how ordinary consumers are losing money, and what that means for our democracy.

That’s next time.

Trump’s ‘American Dominance’ May Leave Us With Nothing

2026-01-05T09:37:39-05:00

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the world is divided into three spheres of influence: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, all perpetually at war. Sometimes two of the states form an alliance against the third. Sometimes they abruptly switch sides. No reasons are given. Instead, the Party tells the proles, “We have always been at war with Eastasia.” Newspapers and history books are quickly rewritten to make that seem true.

Orwell’s world is fiction, but some want it to become reality. Since well before President Donald Trump’s second term, the idea that the world should have three spheres of influence—an Asia dominated by China, a Europe dominated by Russia, and a Western Hemisphere dominated by the United States—has been kicking around the internet in a desultory way, mostly promoted by Russians who want to control what they call their “near abroad,” or perhaps just want their country, with its weak economy and faltering army, to be mentioned in the same breath as the United States and China.

Back in 2019, Fiona Hill, a National Security Council official in the first Trump administration, testified to a House committee that Russians pushing the creation of spheres of influence had been offering to somehow “swap” Venezuela, their closest ally in Latin America, for Ukraine. Since then, the notion that international relations should promote great-power dominance, not universal values or networks of allies, has spread from Moscow to Washington. The administration’s new National Security Strategy outlines a plan to dominate the Americas, enigmatically describing U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere as “Enlist and Expand,” and downplaying threats from China and Russia. Trump has also issued threats to Denmark, Panama, and Canada, all allies whose sovereignty we now challenge.

[Anne Applebaum: The longest suicide note in American history]

In some ways, the military raid that took the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro into custody does resemble past American actions, especially the ouster of the Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in 1989–90. But the use of this new language to explain and justify the Venezuelan raid makes this story very different. At his press conference on Saturday, Trump did not use the word democracy. He did not refer to international law. Instead, he presented a garbled version of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, a policy originally designed to keep foreign imperial powers out of the Americas, calling it something that sounded like the “Donroe Document”: “Under our new National Security Strategy,” he said, reading from prepared remarks, “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Toward this end, he said the United States would “run” Venezuela, although he didn’t say who would actually be in charge. Viceroy Marco Rubio? Governor-General Pete Hegseth? Asked about María Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, Trump was dismissive. “She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect within the country,” he said.

Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, leads a movement whose presidential candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, received two-thirds of the vote in the 2024 election. Although the state-controlled media backed Maduro, and although Maduro’s police and paramilitaries harassed, arrested, and murdered their supporters, Machado and González not only won; they collected documentation from polling stations proving that they had won. Maduro never produced any such proof. He declared victory anyway.

For the moment, Trump isn’t interested in identifying the legitimate leader of Venezuela. The administration is instead hinting that the U.S. might work with Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who would presumably keep Maduro’s regime intact—not regime change, in other words, just dictator change. But Trump isn’t trying very hard to provide legitimacy for his own actions either. Before kidnapping Maduro, he did not consult with Congress, U.S. allies, or Venezuela’s neighbors, many of whom might have wanted to contribute to a solution. Although his administration has described this action as a criminal arrest, and has justified it with an indictment for drug smuggling, this isn’t part of any consistent policy. Trump just pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was legitimately indicted on drug charges six years ago.

[Read: Making sense of the Venezuela attack]

None of this is logical, but it isn’t meant to be: Like the Party in 1984, the would-be dominators of the Western Hemisphere seem to feel no need for logic. If might makes right, if the U.S. gets to do what it wants using any tools it wants in its own sphere, then there is no need for transparency, democracy, or legitimacy. The concerns of ordinary people who live in smaller nations don’t need to be taken into account, because they will not be granted any agency. Their interests are not the concern of the imperial companies that want their mineral resources, or the imperial leaders who need the propaganda of conquest to keep power at home.

Russia’s and China’s responses to Trump’s actions this weekend have been surprisingly soft, given their billions of dollars of investments in Venezuela. Perhaps this is because the language Trump is using to justify the kidnapping of Maduro echoes some of their own narratives. Ukraine belongs to Russia’s sphere is Vladimir Putin’s main argument, after all. Taiwan is part of China’s sphere will be Xi Jinping’s justification if he decides to invade the island. That doesn’t mean that Moscow is really in a position to control Europe, or China to control Asia: The European Union’s combined GDP is nearly 10 times the size of Russia’s, and there aren’t any countries crying out to become Chinese colonies either.

For all of Trump’s bluster, neither are Americans exactly in control of our sphere of influence. Two days after the capture of Maduro, Trump already risks falling victim to his own propaganda, just like Putin. Venezuela, as one former U.S. ambassador to the country recently wrote, is “a failed state riddled with illegal armed groups and foreign terrorist organizations.” The regime has not been removed. The military and various paramilitaries are all still in place, and although some might cooperate with the Trump administration, others might not. With no U.S. troops in Venezuela, will Americans “run” Venezuela by issuing loud statements and threats? By ordering periodic military interventions? Perhaps the administration has made a deal with some members of the regime—that would explain why the American raid met so little opposition—but there is no guarantee that such a deal will produce the kinds of benefits Trump expects. Oil isn’t something that lies around on the ground to be picked up and taken home. It requires long-term investments, relationships, contracts. If the government of Venezuela is likely to fall or change at any moment, none of those will materialize.

But Trump’s error is even more fundamental. The division of the world into spheres of influence implies that smaller countries cannot influence events, and it’s a grave mistake to imagine Venezuelans won’t try. Many of them wanted an American intervention, are overjoyed that Maduro is gone, and no wonder: He and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, together turned the richest country in South America into the poorest, fortifying their ugly security state with guns and surveillance systems purchased from autocracies around the world.

But now that Maduro is gone, the people who fought for years for justice, freedom, and self-determination aren’t going to want to live in a Trump-backed dictatorship staffed with Maduro’s cronies. One Venezuelan exile, who requested anonymity because of risks to his family, told me that on Saturday, he felt like he was on a roller coaster. First the elation of Maduro’s exit, then the shock of Trump’s press conference, then the angry realization that maybe nothing has changed and he still can’t go home.

I don’t think Americans will be any happier if another authoritarian is installed in Venezuela either. Most Americans still do want their country to stand for something other than greed, and most don’t want their expensive military to fight on behalf of Trump’s oil-industry donors. Trump’s pursuit of an illusory sphere of influence is unlikely to bring us peace or prosperity—any more than the invasion of Ukraine brought peace and prosperity to Russians—and this might become clear sooner than anyone expects.

If America is just a regional bully, after all, then our former allies in Europe and Asia will close their doors and their markets to us. Sooner or later, “our” Western Hemisphere will organize against us and fight back. Far from making us more powerful, the pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all.

Henry James’s Venice Is Still Here

2025-12-17T09:30:00-05:00

Photographs by Matteo de Mayda

In a quiet, almost empty part of Venice stands a Renaissance palazzo with an unusually large garden. The garden is invisible from the outside, blocked by a high brick wall that I recognized when I saw it. In The Aspern Papers, a novella serialized in The Atlantic in 1888, Henry James lets the narrator, a literary scholar whose name we never learn, describe the wall. “It was figured over with the patches that please a painter, repaired breaches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions of brick that had turned pink with time,” he writes. “It suddenly occurred to me that if it did belong to the house I had my pretext.”

The narrator has arrived at the dilapidated palazzo by gondola, together with his friend Mrs. Prest. He is plotting to meet the elderly owner, Juliana, the former mistress of a famous, long-dead poet, Jeffrey Aspern. She owns a collection of reputedly scandalous letters from the poet, and has guarded them from scholars and souvenir hunters for many decades. The narrator wants them. “Hypocrisy, duplicity,” he tells Mrs. Prest, “are my only chance.”

The narrator is greeted by Tita, Juliana’s middle-aged niece. Using a false name, he asks to rent some unused rooms in the crumbling palace, explaining that he adores gardens, that he loves flowers. Then he begins to insinuate himself into the lives of Juliana and Tita.

I arrived in Venice with a similar goal: to get access to that same garden. I wasn’t sure it was possible, not least because I didn’t know whether the garden really existed. But although I hoped not to use hypocrisy and duplicity, I did know that if I found it, I would be looking at Henry James’s Venice. Not Lord Byron’s decadent Venice, that is; not Thomas Mann’s pestilential Venice; and certainly not James Bond’s shootout-in-the-collapsing-palace Venice, but rather the city of intense beauty and deep secrets that James transformed into novels, letters, stories, and essays during the 10 visits he made to the city between 1869 and 1907.

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

The shore of the island of San Pietro di Castello, in Venice

During those four decades, Venice changed. James was the scion of a wealthy American family—his brother was the philosopher William James—but he often scrambled for money, and when he first got there, Venice was cheap. Napoleon had invaded at the end of the 18th century, looting the city and putting an end to the thousand-year Venetian Republic, and even moderately wealthy foreigners could buy grand palazzi with Tiepolo ceilings and Byzantine windows. On one of his early visits, James could afford to rent rooms with one of the best views in the city, overlooking the lagoon and San Giorgio Maggiore.

[Read: A tale of sex and intrigue in imperial Kyoto]

But even during James’s lifetime, Venice transformed itself into the tourist mecca we know today. In The Wings of the Dove, published in 1902, James gives his feelings about the city’s new business model to another deceiver, this one an Englishman named Merton Densher. Densher dislikes his hotel, with its “vulgarized hall,” and longs to get away from “the amiable American families and overfed German porters.” He prefers the residence of Milly Theale, the sickly American heiress whose fortune he seeks. She has rented the Palazzo Leporelli, an abode high above the water, “hung about with pictures and relics” and modeled very precisely on the Palazzo Barbaro, where James often stayed with his friends Daniel and Ariana Curtis.

The Curtises, at the center of the “queer, polyglot, promiscuous society” James frequented in Italy, were part of his Venice too. They surrounded themselves with artists and writers—John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Robert Browning, and Edith Wharton, along with their son Ralph Curtis, also a painter—as well as what remained of Venetian high society. Isabella Stewart Gardner sometimes rented the Palazzo Barbaro, using it as a base to collect the art, furniture, and medieval bric-a-brac that eventually found its way to her eponymous Boston museum.

Instead of the modern city, James preferred this languid Venice, a place of leisurely afternoons, exquisite paintings, and long conversations in shabby Baroque rooms. This Venice was also the perfect backdrop to his favorite kind of story: that of the duplicitous fortune seeker who, like the hero of The Aspern Papers, fools himself in the end, as well as his intended victim; or the independent-minded, idealistic American girl who comes to Europe and is charmed, and then swindled, by corrupt Europeans. That is the plot of his most famous novel, The Portrait of a Lady—completed in Venice, serialized in The Atlantic in 1880–81—as well as, more or less, The Wings of the Dove.

This kind of plot has always interested me. As an independent-minded and idealistic American girl, I also moved, as James did, from America to Europe. I still attempt, as he did, to live in both places. Although I would argue that I escaped the fate of James’s American heroines (as would my European husband, who is annoyed by The Portrait of a Lady), I understand their intense curiosity. So did James. Like them, he wanted not just to visit other places, but to become part of them, to grasp their essence, to know what lies on the other side of the garden wall, to get hold of the letters before they are lost forever.

Before it’s too late—before Venice sinks into the lagoon, before James’s oblique writing falls out of fashion again, and, frankly, before I am so consumed by the current global political crisis that I can’t appreciate Venice anymore—I set out to find the secret city that he loved, and that I love too.

I arrived in Venice with a list: places Henry James described, paintings he admired, churches he visited. Dutifully, I started checking them off. On my first day I visited San Zaccaria to see one of his favorite paintings, Giovanni Bellini’s “mild and serene” Madonna. I contemplated an elegant Saint George, delicately stabbing a dragon, at the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni nearby. I drank a very expensive espresso at Caffè Florian in Piazza San Marco, where James came often for “second breakfast,” otherwise known as brunch.

After a day or two, I slowed down. To see James’s Venice requires not his list but his attitude, especially his attitude toward time. “There is no simpler pleasure,” he once wrote, than “strolling into St. Mark’s—abominable the way one falls into the habit—and resting one’s light-wearied eyes upon the windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola or than hanging over a balcony or than taking one’s coffee at Florian’s. It is of such superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of the matter is in the emotions to which they minister.”

[Read: The Aspern Papers]

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

A statue in the hidden garden of the Palazzo Soranzo Cappello, the scene of several turning points in The Aspern Papers, Henry James's 1888 novella about an American in Venice who seeks access to long-hidden secrets

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

Fruit trees and other greenery abound in the garden, a rarity in crowded Venice.

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

Poveglia Island, where plague victims were once quarantined, at high tide

I am not accustomed to having that kind of time, but having been granted a few days’ worth, I found, despite hearing many warnings to the contrary, that James’s “simple pleasures” are still available. It’s true that the Piazza San Marco is crowded, that the Rialto Bridge is a crush, and that the main Venetian thoroughfares are choked with tour groups in the middle of the day. But it’s also true, as it always was, that if you take an odd turn down a narrow pathway and head away from the main attractions, the crowds thin out, and eventually you can find yourself quite alone. As James wrote to his brother in 1869, “I have spent a good deal of time in poking thro’ the alleys which serve as streets and staring about in the campos—the little squares formed about every church—some of them most sunnily desolate, the most grass-grown, the most cheerfully sad little reliquaries of a splendid past that you can imagine.”

Getting to the empty campos might take some time, but that’s the point. As James wrote, a walk to a far corner of Venice “will show you so much, so many bits and odds and ends, such a revel of Venetian picturesqueness, that I advise your doing it on foot as much as possible.” Walking has other consequences too. At Caffé Florian I started talking with a waiter; he texted the marketing director; she came over to meet me, because that’s how things work in Venice. She told me she’d moved to Venice precisely for this reason: because there are no cars, because every day you are therefore “compelled to see people, talk with people, greet people.” She pointed out some graffiti that I would have missed if I hadn’t slowed down to chat with her. During the violent rebellion of 1848, when Venice first declared independence from Austria, wounded patriots were cared for at Florian’s, and some of them scrawled Viva la Repubblica and Viva San Marco, the name of their short-lived republic, on a nearby wall.

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

Graffiti written outside Caffé Florian during an 1848 rebellion against Austria reads, “Viva San Marco” and “Viva la Repubblica.”

Many of James’s favorite churches, galleries, and scuoli—clubhouses, really, built by Venetian fraternities and guilds—also offer an unexpected bonus: Because they charge a small entry fee, almost everyone stays away. You can walk off a packed Venetian street, pay a few euros, and suddenly find yourself completely alone with a masterpiece. Then you are free to see what James saw, and to experience the same aesthetic shock.

After repeating this experience several times, I started to understand why James admired the calm, luminous paintings of the early Renaissance, a preference he picked up, in turn, from John Ruskin. Ruskin was the eccentric British art critic whose hatred of the late Renaissance inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, a school of British painting. His overwritten book, The Stones of Venice, was a kind of bible for the cultured (or would-be cultured) Anglo-American visitor in the 19th century. During one of my first trips to the city (confession: it was my honeymoon), I walked around, pretentiously, with an abridged version of The Stones of Venice myself.

Ruskin also helped promote an Anglo-American–Venetian love affair that has stretched from Byron through James, Sargent, and Stewart Gardner, and more recently to the great 20th century historian John Julius Norwich. The Victorians, living at the height of the British empire, were endlessly fascinated by the wreckage of Venice’s empire, just as they were drawn to Rome. Gilded Age Americans, with their shiny modern buildings, new fortunes, and puritan work ethic, were equally drawn to a very ancient, very scruffy city full of people who were not especially interested in work at all.

The affair continues into modern times, now powering the work of Save Venice and Venice in Peril, the American and British foundations dedicated to the proposition that the loss of Venice to flooding and decay, both of which have plagued the city since before Ruskin’s day, would be a loss for civilization. I spent a slow afternoon at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, one of the city’s largest churches, with Susan Ruth Steer, a British art historian who works for Venice in Peril. She reminded me of how pleasurable it is to listen to people talk about something they really love. We agreed that Ruskin probably influenced James’s admiration of the golden Bellini triptych in one of the Frari’s side chapels—“nothing in Venice is more perfect than this,” he wrote, adding that “it seems painted with molten gems”—and his dislike of Titian’s dramatic Assumption of the Virgin (he called it “second-rate”), which hangs over the altar.

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

“Nothing in Venice is more perfect,” James wrote, than Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child With Saints, in the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

Work by Tintoretto, whom James called “the greatest of painters,” at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

The interior of the elegant (and expensive) Hotel Danieli

Susan showed me two of Venice in Peril’s projects in the Frari. Its donors paid for the restoration of the tomb of the neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, a marble pyramid with stone figures, after salt water was found to be seeping up from underground and damaging the statuary. They continue to support patching the cracks that could destroy an elaborate Baroque reliquary altar, which we agreed James would not have liked at all.

Afterward, we walked to the nearby Scuola Grande di San Rocco, dedicated to the saint who protected Venetians from the plague. Restrained on the outside, the scuola’s spectacular interior is embellished, floor to ceiling, with gilded stucco and the paintings of Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto. Here restoration has its limits, because Tintoretto, born in 1518 in humble circumstances—he was the son of a tintore, a “cloth dyer” (hence the nickname)—balked at the high cost of ultramarine pigment, which at the time was made from ground lapis lazuli, imported from Afghanistan and priced the same as gold. He sometimes used a cheaper paint made of ground glass, but alas, it deteriorated after a century or so, turning some of Tintoretto’s skies brown or gray.

“Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great collection of Tintorets at San Rocco,” James wrote. “Incurable blackness is settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at you across the sombre splendour of the great chambers like gaunt twilight phantoms of pictures.” Restoration has in fact made the canvases brighter and clearer since James saw them, if not returning the exact original colors. Restoration has also helped secure Tintoretto’s reputation, which has waxed and waned—much like that of James, whose novels went out of fashion during his life before being rediscovered after his death. In his time, Tintoretto was considered seriously ambitious, bordering on greedy. He challenged established artists, built a huge studio, employed his children, and lobbied hard to get all of the best commissions, even donating a painting to the scuola as part of his campaign to paint the rest of it.

[Read: Venice underwater: The highest tide in 50 years]

James liked the way Tintoretto used his art to tell stories. The artist painted his Last Supper from a side angle, with the kitchen visible at the back. In the Adoration of the Shepherds he put the Holy Family on the top floor of a barn whose first floor was occupied by an ox. His Crucifixion contains several separate scenes, each with its own drama. Tintoretto, James wrote, “felt, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human life very much as Shakespeare felt it poetically—with a heart that never ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of his brush.”

Tintoretto is hard to avoid in Venice. His works can be found in the city’s most important museums, where some of them still have ultramarine skies, and on the walls and ceilings of the Doge’s Palace, once the seat of Venetian power. He contributed some smaller paintings to the building too. One of them appears in Travelling Companions, a short, early James novel, also serialized in The Atlantic. The story recounts the fate of Miss Evans, yet another bright American girl visiting Venice, who is admired by another male narrator, Mr. Brooke. The two visit the Doge’s Palace together, and she admires Tintoretto’s Bacchus and Ariadne, with its “broad, bright glory of deep-toned sea and sky.”

Hearing this, Mr. Brooke leaps at the opportunity. “To understand this Bacchus and Ariadne we ought to spend a long day on the lagoon, beyond sight of Venice,” he says. “Will you come tomorrow to Torcello?” She demurs.

They go to Padua instead, and the story unfolds from there. But I took Mr Brooke’s advice.

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

The Hotel Danieli, which appears in James’s novel Travelling Companions, commands a fine view along the Riva degli Schiavoni.

In truth, there are two ways to see Henry James’s Venice: One is to peer into the corners of dark churches. Another is to spend a lot of time floating in the lagoon, looking up at the sky.

Although the former activity is still available for those willing to make the effort, I concede that the latter is much harder to experience than it used to be. When James came to Venice, he sometimes rented a gondola and hired a gondolier (“the gondolier at Venice is your very good friend—if you choose him happily”). So does the narrator of The Aspern Papers; this comes in handy when Juliana dies and Tita tells the narrator that she will give him the letters he covets—but only if he marries her.

Shocked by the offer, he rushes out of the palace and tells his gondolier to take him “anywhere, anywhere; out into the lagoon!” This crisis might have echoed a real one. James’s close friend Constance Fenimore Woolson, an American novelist, committed suicide by throwing herself out of an upper-story window of the Palazzo Semitecolo, a few hundred yards down the Grand Canal from the Palazzo Barbaro. She may have done so because James, whose sexuality was as ambiguous as his writing, did not want to marry her.

Obsessively, the narrator makes excuses to himself:

Did she think I had made love to her, even to get the papers? I hadn’t, I hadn’t; I repeated that over to myself for an hour, for two hours, till I was wearied if not convinced. I don’t know where my gondolier took me; we floated aimlessly about on the lagoon, with slow, rare strokes.

Alas, hardly anyone floats aimlessly about in the lagoon in a gondola anymore, not even when experiencing a spiritual crisis. Gondoliers, members of a tightly controlled caste that passes down licenses within families, can charge up to €100 for half an hour. The tourists they carry always look stiff and awkward, as if they aren’t sure exactly why this short ride in a dressed-up canoe is so expensive.

[Read: Chasing le Carré in Corfu]

Actual Venetians use motorboats. Matteo, the photographer whose excellent pictures accompany this article, has a motorboat. Noisier and less comfortable than a 19th-century gondola, it has no felze (the small black cabin that protected Victorian ladies from the sun), or indeed any passenger seat at all. But after two days, the boat changed the way I saw Venice.

To start with, I was initiated into a whole set of rules. Private boats are allowed in the center of the city only after noon. In the morning, the canals are reserved for delivery boats, such as the one I saw carrying a pile of brown Amazon packages. Parking requires even more specialized knowledge. The paline da casada, the striped poles in front of grand houses, belong to families who have used the same colors for centuries, but even the plain wooden ones are private. Pilots instead tether their boat on metal rings discreetly mounted on some of the canal walls. Matteo always leaves a sign with his phone number on his boat, just in case he has accidentally parked in someone’s space.

Learning the rules is worth the effort because the facades of the palaces can be seen from the water as they were meant to be seen. The vaporetto, the public water bus, also travels along the large waterways, but in a small vessel you can float right up to the Palazzo Barbaro and see the balcony that James loved to lean on, and watch an egret sun itself beside the Palazzo Mocenigo, where Lord Byron once lived with his dogs, his birds, two “charming monkeys,” a fox, a wolf, and his mistress, who was a Venetian baker’s wife. A motorboat can also access the hidden industrial side of Venice: the ugly but practical railway bridge, much deplored by Ruskin; the marine gas stations; the trash-collection barges; the ambulance boats lined up outside a hospital in case of emergency.

Turn a few more corners and drift farther away from the main island, and a completely different Venice appears: a world of muddy islands, clumps of reeds, abandoned forts, and water reflecting the sky. The remains of a church bell tower mark Poveglia, an island where plague victims were once quarantined that is now, following a local campaign, destined to become a park for city residents. Colonies of ibis, the sacred birds of ancient Egypt, have settled in on several abandoned islets. We saw cormorants, seagulls, and, later, a dolphin that had somehow found its way into the waters just off Santa Maria della Salute. One afternoon, the sky was so clear that we could see the distant Dolomite mountains shimmering above the water, a phenomenon the Venetians call stravedamento.

This deserted, evocative Venice had a deep appeal to romantically minded 19th-century travelers—starting, again, with Ruskin, who especially loved the island of Torcello, home to the first important lagoon settlement. “Mother and daughter,” he wrote of Torcello and Venice, “you behold them both in their widowhood.” Founded in 452 C.E. by Roman citizens fleeing the barbarian invasions of the mainland, Torcello was for several centuries the most populated island in the lagoon, before it was abandoned, probably following a bout of malaria or the plague. Depending on your point of view, Torcello is now a jolly day trip, a reminder of the fragility of civilization, or, as in one of Harold Pinter’s plays, a place that sparks memories of a failed romance.

“Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to know Venice or to sympathise with that longing for pure radiance which animated her great colourists,” James wrote; he found not much on the island except “a meagre cluster of huts,” a “ruinous church,” and a “perfect bath of light,” which is exactly what he liked about it. Nowadays, Torcello has a small museum. The church, the seventh-century Byzantine Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, has been restored, thanks to Venice in Peril and Save Venice, among others. On the day I visited, a polite Japanese tour group listened quietly to a guide.

But the seagulls, the reeds, and the light are still there. And the Last Judgement, a golden mosaic covering the basilica’s entire western wall, hasn’t changed much since James saw it, or indeed since it was created nine centuries ago, possibly by artists from Constantinople. Christ still reigns in heaven. The Virgin pays him homage. The righteous are in paradise, standing solemnly beneath palm fronds. The sinners are tortured by demons and suffering in the flames of hell.

The apostles, lined up in a row, seem frozen in time. “Ranged against their dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers presenting arms,” James wrote, they appear “to wait forever vainly for some visible revival of primitive orthodoxy.” They are waiting still.

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

The paline da casada, the striped poles in front of some Venetian houses, are part of an elaborate parking system, helping show captains where they can, or cannot, moor their boats.

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

James often stayed at the Palazzo Barbaro with his friends Daniel and Ariana Curtis. He once called it “the loveliest dwelling-place in the world.”

A Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

Casa Alvisi was owned by another of James’s American friends, Katharine Bronson.

In the end, duplicity was not required. I entered the garden of The Aspern Papers—behind the Palazzo Soranzo Cappello—exactly the same way James did: thanks to friends of friends. In his time, the palazzo was occupied by Julia Constance Fletcher, another American novelist (she wrote under the name George Fleming), and her divorced mother, who had shocked Boston society by running away with a painter. A pair of women, the elder with a scandalous past, might well have inspired the novella, as did stories James had heard in Florence about one of Byron’s mistresses. James had many links to Fletcher. He might have known her through Oscar Wilde (about whom he was ambivalent), through Woolson, or through mutual friends in London.

[Read: An ideal journey through Italy]

My entry into the garden was similarly made possible by my friend Beppe, an Italian journalist, who introduced me to Francesco, who runs a literary festival in Cortina. Francesco talked with Anthony, his former professor, and Anthony told him about Rosella. And Rosella—Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, the author of an indispensable guide, In Venice and in the Veneto With Henry James—spoke with Giuditta, who oversees conservation projects in Venice from her office in the palazzo.

Giuditta escorted us—me, Rosella, Francesco, and Matteo—into the palazzo, which still sits beside what James described as a “clean, melancholy, unfrequented canal.” The central hall, where the narrator was first received, is also still “paved with marble and roofed with dim crossbeams.” The upstairs rooms where the narrator might have stayed are small and mean, but the large downstairs rooms off the central hall (Juliana would have hidden Aspern’s letters in one of them) have high ceilings and doors with stone frames.

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

The author accessed the garden of the Palazzo Soranzo Cappello not through duplicity, like Henry James’s protagonist, but through friends of friends, as James himself had.

The garden, reached through the back doors, was drenched in sunshine on the day we visited. This time the aesthetic shock came not from the elegance—the grass was overgrown, the lawn covered by leaves—but from the luxury of space. Venice is a very crowded, very urban city with hardly any greenery. But here was a large, old mulberry tree; a clutch of fruit trees, pomegranates and persimmons; ornamental shrubs. Gently weathered statues of various Roman Caesars line the first courtyard; a pathway leads through a gateway toward a pavilion at the far end, where more statues, too decayed to be identified, lurk under the roof.

Many generations of Venetians, starting with the Soranzo family, who laid out the garden in the 16th century, must have come here for respite from the city. So did Fletcher, James, and the Italian poet and novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio, who set a story in the garden too. So does the narrator of The Aspern Papers. “I had floated home in my gondola,” he says about halfway through the novella, “listening to the slow splash of the oar in the narrow, dark canals, and now the only thought that solicited me was the vague reflection that it would be pleasant to recline at one’s length in the fragrant darkness, on a garden bench.”

To his surprise, Tita is sitting in the garden, and for the first time, she speaks frankly with him, as if the open space gives her license to tell secrets. He also speaks frankly with her, or almost frankly. Yes, he tells her, he is a scholar and critic who writes about Jeffrey Aspern. But he feigns ignorance. Might she have any material about the poet? Tita reacts in alarm: “Santo Dio!” she exclaims, and rushes upstairs. Although he doesn’t yet know it, the narrator still has several surprises to come. And so, thanks to my chain of acquaintances, did I.

After several attempts and some misunderstandings, Rosella got hold of Elizabeth. Elizabeth lives in the Palazzo Barbaro, on one of the floors formerly occupied by James’s friends and hosts, Daniel and Ariana Curtis. She rents it from the current owner, who bought it from the Curtis family, who still own the very top floor. Until the day I arrived in Venice, I wasn’t certain whether Elizabeth would be there, or whether she would allow me to visit. But she was, and she did.

We arrived at the back gate and climbed up the same rickety stone staircase that James described as being “held together one scarce knew how.” The walls of the entry hall, covered in green fabric, were reminiscent of James’s “walls of ancient pale-green damask, slightly shredded and patched.” Elizabeth showed us the dining room, with its patterned floor and—unusual for the city—windows on both sides. She explained to us with what care one cleans an ancient apartment in Venice, and how gingerly one must close doors whose frames have shifted with time.

[Read: An innocent abroad in Mark Twain’s Paris]

Finally, she took us to see the ballroom, a salon whose high ceilings were created in the 17th century by knocking together two medieval palaces. In this room, the Barbaro family once listened to concerts. Sargent painted An Interior in Venice here, a portrait of the Curtis family that Mrs. Curtis hated. James wrote voluminous letters. Robert Browning read his poems. Isabella Stewart Gardner held court wearing her long string of pearls. Elizabeth drew our attention to the painting on the back wall, The Rape of the Sabine Women, and told us that Hermann Goering had allegedly seen and coveted it but couldn’t figure out how to get it out of the building.

Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic

The central hall of the Palazzo Soranzo Cappello

We turned toward the windows. The salon was dark and cavernous behind us, the heavy paintings in gold frames dominating Elizabeth’s sparse and modern furniture, the delicate stucco on the walls, the stone floors. Light streamed in from the windows, exactly as light does in a Tintoretto painting. When Elizabeth invited us to step onto the balcony, we gazed down at the Grand Canal. And we saw what James described in 1882:

If you are happy, you will find yourself, after a June day in Venice (about ten o’clock), on a balcony that overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on the broad ledge, a cigarette in your teeth and a little good company beside you. The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and there from their lamps, some of which are colored lanterns that move mysteriously in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there are too many gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of the hotels. The serenading in particular is overdone; but on such a balcony as I speak of you needn’t suffer from it, for in the apartment behind you—an accessible refuge—there is more good company, there are more cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there presently.

It was November, not June, and it was daytime, not evening—but still, I considered myself lucky. In the final scene of The Aspern Papers, Tita tells the narrator that she has destroyed Jeffrey Aspern’s letters. “Yes; what was I to keep them for? I burnt them last night, one by one, in the kitchen.”

The narrator is forever cut off from the past, forever unable to slake his curiosity. But I did, just briefly, touch Henry James’s Venice.

Travel Notes

Riva degli Schiavoni

If you want to wake up in the morning and see the view that James had while he was writing The Portrait of a Lady, spend a night in the same building he did, now the Pensione Wildner—I did and discovered, sadly, that the building has seen better days. The identical view is also available in the more elegant (and more expensive) Hotel Danieli, a few hundred yards down the quay, which is also where Miss Evans stays in Travelling Companions. In either place, ask for a room overlooking the water. Peer out the window, and you will see “the far-shining lagoon, the pink walls of San Giorgio, the downward curve of the Riva, the distant islands, the movement of the quay, the gondolas in profile.”

Hotel Danieli, Riva degli Schiavoni, 4196, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy

Palazzo Soranzo Cappello

You, too, can visit the garden, even without friends of friends to help you, although you will have to plan your trip with care. The garden opens to the public a few days a year, in the autumn and spring. Check the local Superintendence for Cultural Heritage website for updates, use Google Translate if you need to, and be persistent. Presumably, the garden’s caretakers rake the leaves when they know people are coming.

Ramo Quinto Gallion O del Pezzetto, 770, 30100 Venezia VE, Italy

Chioggia by bike

Lord Byron liked to gallop his horses down the beaches of the Lido, the island in the outer part of the lagoon that was the backdrop to Thomas Mann’s novel (and Luchino Visconti’s film) Death in Venice. Nowadays there aren’t too many horses, but you can rent bikes. Ride to the end of the island, hop on a ferry to reach the next island, and keep doing this until you reach Chioggia, the fishing village once painted by John Singer Sargent and remembered by James for its “bright colored hovels.” Lots of small restaurants along the water will serve you a very fresh piece of fish. I did this 25 years ago, and I still remember it as one of the best days of my life.

30015 Chioggia, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy

Isola di San Michele

In late October, in time for All Saints’ Day, the Venetians build a temporary pontoon bridge to the cemetery island, and for a few days you can walk over, which I did. At other times of the year, take the vaporetto. Napoleon, horrified by bad hygiene in Venice, ordered the construction of the cemetery. The tombs date from the 19th century, although the church is older. The Orthodox section contains some notable Russian exiles, including Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev. The poet Joseph Brodsky, who once described the city of Venice as “the greatest masterpiece our species produced,” is buried in the Protestant section (he was Jewish, so the Orthodox wouldn’t take him), as is the American poet Ezra Pound, a virulent anti-Semite.

Isola di San Michele, 30100 Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy

Nevodi

Nevodi means “nephews” in the Venetian dialect, and this is a family-run restaurant in the residential Castello district that feels like one—assuming your nephews make subtle fish sauces, use vegetables from local gardens, bake homemade bread, and serve everything with bespoke olive oil. I had the cuttlefish pasta with black squid ink and didn’t regret it. James doesn’t write about food in Venice, perhaps because Venice is one of the few cities in Italy where you can easily pay a lot of money for a bad meal (I did that a few times too), so find a place you love and keep going back.

Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1533, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy

Arsenale di Venezia

Visit the city during the Biennale, the international art exhibition; I have always found the art lovers as entertaining as the art. Many are dressed, as Isabella Stewart Gardner often was, from head to toe in designer black. Much of the Biennale takes place in or near the medieval arsenale, where in the 16th century, well before the Industrial Revolution, the Venetians mass-produced nearly one ship every day. It was the source of their commercial and political power and was, in its day, every bit as high-tech as a modern data center, which is perhaps why it was not remotely interesting to James.

Campo de la Tana, 2169, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy

Church of Madonna dell’Orto

This is Tintoretto’s parish church, tucked away in the Cannareggio district, well away from the crowds. Built in the mid-14th century, it got its name from a statue of the Virgin found to be working miracles in a nearby orchard. Tintoretto’s house, where he was born and lived all of his life, is around the corner; a plaque commands visitors to remember him. The church courtyard is one of the few in Venice to retain its original brick paving. Inside you can find Tintoretto’s tomb and 10 of his paintings, including Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple, which features Mary as a child, looking small and scared. “You seem not only to look at his pictures, but into them,” James wrote. “I’d give a great deal to be able to fling down a dozen of his pictures into prose of corresponding force and color.”

Cannareggio, 3512, 30121 Venezia VE, Italy

The Longest Suicide Note in American History

2025-12-16T06:00:00-05:00

Last year, a team of American diplomats from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center traveled to two dozen countries and signed a series of memoranda. Along with their counterparts in places as varied as Italy, Australia, and Ivory Coast, they agreed to jointly expose malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran.

This past September, the Trump administration terminated these agreements. The center’s former head, James Rubin, called this decision “a unilateral act of disarmament,” and no wonder: In effect, the United States was declaring that it would no longer oppose Russian influence campaigns, Chinese manipulation of local politics, or Iranian extremist recruitment drives. Nor would the American government use any resources to help anyone else do so either.

The recent publication of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy showed that this decision was no accident. Unilateral disarmament is now official policy. Because—despite its name—this National Security Strategy is not really a strategy document. It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.

Before explaining, I should acknowledge the curious features of this document, which seems, like the Bible, to have several different authors. Some of them use boastful, aggressive language—America must remain “the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful country for decades to come”—and some of them prefer euphemism and allusion. Sometimes these different authors contradict one another, proposing to work with allies on one page and to undermine allies on the next. The views expressed in the document do not represent those of the entire U.S. government, the entire Republican Party, or even the entire Trump administration. The most noteworthy elements seem to come from a particular ideological faction, one that now dominates foreign-policy thinking in this administration and may well dominate others in the future.

The one genuinely new, truly radical element in this faction’s thinking is its absolute refusal to acknowledge the existence of enemies or to name any countries that might wish America ill. This is a major departure from the first Trump administration. The 2017 National Security Strategy spoke of creating an alliance against North Korea; noted that Russia is “using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to Europe, undermine transatlantic unity, and weaken European institutions and governments”; and observed that China is “using economic inducements and penalties, influence operations, and implied military threats” to bully others. The 2017 Trump policy team also observed a “geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order.”

The second Trump administration can no longer identify any specific countries that might wish harm to the United States, or any specific actions they might be taking to do harm. A decade’s worth of Russian cyberwarfare, political intervention, and information war inside the United States goes unmentioned. Russian acts of sabotage across Europe, Russian support for brutal regimes across the Sahel region of Africa, and, of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine aren’t important either. None of these Russian acts of aggression gets a mention except for the war in Ukraine, which is described solely as a concern for Europeans.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: A wider war has already started in Europe]

Even more strangely, China appears not as a geopolitical competitor but largely as a trading rival. It’s as if Chinese hacking and cyberwar did not exist, as if China were not seeking to collect data or infiltrate the software that controls U.S. infrastructure. China’s propaganda campaigns and business deals in Africa and Latin America, which could squeeze out American rivals, don’t seem to matter much either. The new document makes only a vague allusion to a Chinese economic presence in Latin America and to a Chinese threat to Taiwan. When discussing this latter possibility, the authors drop their swaggering language about American power and slip into bureaucratese: “The United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”

Other rivals and other potential sources of conflict get no mention at all. North Korea has disappeared. Iran is described as “greatly weakened.” Islamist terrorism is no longer worth mentioning. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still “thorny,” but thanks to President Donald Trump, “progress toward a more permanent peace has been made.” Hamas will soon fade away. The American troops who are still fighting in Somalia and Syria—and in some cases dying—are ignored, as if they didn’t exist at all.

But if America has no rivals and expects no conflicts, then neither the military nor the State Department nor the CIA nor the counterintelligence division of the FBI needs to make any special preparations to defend Americans from them. The document reflects that assumption and instead directs the U.S. national-security apparatus to think about “control over our borders,” “natural disasters,” “unfair trading practices,” “job destruction and deindustrialization,” and other threats to trade. Fentanyl gets a mention. So, rather strangely, do “propaganda, influence operations, and other forms of cultural subversion”—although there is no indication of who might be using propaganda and cultural subversion against us or how it might be countered, especially because the Trump administration has completely dismantled all of the institutions designed to do so.

But what if this document was not written for the people and institutions that think about national security at all? Maybe it was instead written for a highly ideological domestic audience, including the audience in the Oval Office. The authors have included ludicrous but now-familiar language about Trump having ended many wars, a set of claims as absurd and fanciful as his FIFA Peace Prize. The authors also go out of their way to dismiss all past American foreign-policy strategies, presumably including those pursued by the first Trump administration, as if only this administration, under this near-octogenarian president, can see the world clearly.

Finally, although they do not name any states that might threaten America, the authors do focus on one enemy ideology. It is not Chinese communism, Russian autocracy, or Islamic extremism but rather European liberal democracy. This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law. Not coincidentally, these are the same people whom the MAGA ideologues hate and dislike at home, the same people who are fighting to prevent MAGA from redefining the United States as a white ethnostate, who oppose the corruption of America’s democratic institutions, and who object when Trump’s friends, family, and tech allies redirect U.S. foreign policy to benefit their private interests.

European and American liberal democracy is so dangerous to their project, in fact, that the MAGA ideologues seem to be planning to undermine it. They don’t want to meddle in anyone’s internal politics anywhere else on the planet: “We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change.” The glaring exception to this rule is in Europe. Here, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” language that implies that the U.S. will intervene to do so.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Trump’s security strategy is incoherent babble]

According to reporting by Defense One, an earlier version of the National Security Strategy said that U.S. foreign policy should even seek to support illiberal forces in at least four countries—Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Austria—to persuade them to leave the European Union. For all four, this would be an economic catastrophe; for the rest of the continent, this would be a security catastrophe, because a damaged EU would struggle to counter Russian hybrid warfare and Chinese economic pressure. If the union breaks up, there would also no longer be a European Commission capable of regulating American tech companies, and perhaps that is the point.

At the same time, the document’s authors seem to derive their hatred of Europe from a series of false perceptions—or, perhaps, from a form of projection. The authors fear, for example, that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European” very soon. Because they are presumably not talking about non-European Turkey and Canada, the clear implication is that countries such as France and Germany have so much immigration from outside Europe that they will be majority nonwhite. And yet, it is the United States, not Europe, that is far more likely to become “majority minority” in the coming years.

The security strategy also talks, bizarrely, about Europe being on the verge of “civilizational erasure,” which is not language used by many European politicians, even those in far-right parties. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, has called this sentiment “to the right of the extreme right.” In multiple indices, after all—health, happiness, standard of living—European countries regularly rank higher than the United States. Compared with Americans, Europeans live longer, are less likely to be living on the streets, and are less likely to die in mass shootings.

The only possible conclusion: The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out. Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us. Will our military really stop working with allies with whom we have cooperated for decades? Will the FBI stop looking for Russian and Chinese spies? Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that it was taking action against two Russian state-sponsored cybercriminal groups that, among other things, targeted American industrial infrastructure. But if our real enemy is “civilizational erasure” in Europe, then surely we should redirect resources away from this kind of secondary problem and focus them on the threat posed by the British Labour Party or the German Christian Democrats.

One is tempted to laugh at these kinds of ideas, to express incredulity or turn away. But similar conspiracist thinking has already done real damage to real institutions. Elon Musk believed distorted or completely false stories about USAID that he read on his own X platform. As a result, he destroyed the entire organization so rapidly and so thoughtlessly that tens or even hundreds of thousands of people may die as a result. At the State Department, Darren Beattie, the undersecretary for public diplomacy, has repeatedly and falsely stated that the Global Engagement Center was censoring Americans, a fantasy that he encountered on the internet and that he continues to repeat without proof. As a result, he destroyed that organization and ended its international negotiations. He is now conducting an internal departmental witch hunt, trying to find or perhaps invent post hoc evidence for his conspiracist ideas.

[Charlie Warzel: Everything is the ‘Twitter Files’ now]

Some elements of this story are familiar. Americans have overestimated, underestimated, or misunderstood their rivals before. And when they do, they make terrible mistakes. In 2003, many American analysts sincerely thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. During the Cold War, many analysts believed that the Soviet Union was stronger and less fragile than it proved to be. But I am not sure whether there has ever been a moment like this one, when the American government’s most prominent foreign-policy theorists have transferred their domestic obsessions to the outside world, projecting their own fears onto others. As a result, they are likely to misunderstand who could challenge, threaten, or even damage the United States in the near future. Their fantasy world endangers us all.

Coming Soon: Season 3 of Autocracy in America

2025-12-15T06:00:00-05:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The Trump administration is making radical, unprecedented changes to American institutions. By doing so, it is seeking to transform the American political system as well. To explain Donald Trump’s project, and to talk about where it might be going, The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum is returning to host a new season of Autocracy in America. She’ll introduce listeners to Americans whose lives were changed during the administration’s first year, and will ask historians, analysts, and political scientists how new laws and policies might affect the midterm elections in November.

Coming January 2026.

The following is a transcript of the trailer:

Kathleen Walters: No other administration has personally ever asked me to do anything that was illegal, no.

[Music]

Anne Applebaum: I’m Anne Applebaum, and in this season of Autocracy in America, I’ll explain how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics. I’ll start by introducing you to some of the Americans whose lives have been changed as a result.

George Retes: I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m a veteran. The day I was arrested by ICE agents was July 10.

Joan Brugge: I never imagined that our funding for, you know, lifesaving research would be terminated.

Applebaum: Cuts to research and universities, firings of the civil service, heavily armed troops on our streets—they’re about more than just bravado.

Don Moynihan: There are so many things I thought were illegal that now appear to be legal. It’s hard to keep a full list.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: You have, obviously, a very strong leader, and everyone has to pay tribute to him.

Donald Trump: We will win together, and then we will seek justice together.

Applebaum: The Trump administration is now making radical, unprecedented changes to our institutions and to our political system. I’ve spent a lot of my life studying the ways democracies fracture and then crumble around the world. This is how elected leaders in other countries have assaulted their own political systems in an attempt to rule without challenge.

Stacey Abrams: When people think that it is going to be too hard, when they think that it is going to be dangerous, they don’t vote.

Applebaum: From The Atlantic, Autocracy in America, Season 3.

Abrams: This is about who wins America.

Applebaum: New episodes arrive January 2026.

Trumpian Corruption Is Worse Than Ukrainian Corruption

2025-12-07T07:00:00-05:00

A few days ago I called Oleksandr Abakumov, a senior detective at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. I wanted to ask him about his investigation into a kickback scheme in his country’s energy industry. While we were talking, I got interested in Abakumov himself. As he was explaining his motivations, I was struck by the surprising contrast between people like him—the Ukrainian civil servants and civil-society activists who have been demanding transparency from their leaders for two decades—and the American and Russian negotiators who met this week in Moscow, perhaps to decide Ukraine’s fate.

[Anne Applebaum: Why does Steve Witkoff keep taking Russia’s side?]

Ukraine is fighting for its survival. Drones and missiles hit Ukrainian cities most nights. Many Ukrainians nevertheless want, even now, to have a government that’s accountable to the public. Meanwhile, American and Russian kleptocrats are circling the country, looking for ways to make deals that benefit themselves.

Abakumov’s career was directly shaped by his country’s history. Until 2014, he was a police detective in the city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. At the beginning of that year, a series of mass protests in Kyiv persuaded Ukraine’s corrupt, authoritarian, pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, to flee the country. Furious at the loss of their puppet, the Russians immediately invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine, including Luhansk. Ukrainian elections brought a new president to power. Popular demand for reform led to the creation of new institutions, including the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU, which has from its beginning intended to eliminate high-level state corruption.

Abakumov’s life changed too. He left occupied Luhansk and moved to Kyiv. In 2016, he went to work for NABU, taking a job that he considers to be a great honor. Certainly, NABU is popular: Last summer, after President Volodymyr Zelensky sought to shut the agency down, Ukrainians organized the largest mass protests the country has seen since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. The president changed his mind, and the agency remained open. The job also appeals to Abakumov’s patriotism. He believes that if he can help eliminate high-level corruption, then he can help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty and its democracy. “Corruption equals Russia, and we are not Russia,” he told me.

In their investigation, dubbed “Operation Midas,” Abakumov and his colleagues have accused several people in the government of taking money from contracts involving the state nuclear-power company—a particularly sensitive charge at a moment when many Ukrainians live without electricity, thanks to Russian bombing campaigns.

Foreign coverage of “Operation Midas” often relies on the passive voice, as if the scandal has a will of its own (“Scandal Consumes Top Aide”). But people such as Abakumov, who is a part of the Ukrainian state, worked to make the scandal public. They have interrogated cabinet ministers, published surveillance recordings, searched apartments. The Ukrainian Parliament has dismissed two ministers. Tymur Mindich, a former business partner of Zelensky, has fled the country. Late last month, the president’s closest adviser, Andriy Yermak, resigned following a search of his apartment. All of this means that the political system is healthy, operating according to the law.

I should note that quite a few Ukrainians, and indeed many Europeans, believe that the investigation has somehow been assisted by the Trump administration, as a way of weakening Zelensky to force him to capitulate. Given that the Trump administration has stopped advocating for anti-corruption policies around the world and, following the closure of USAID, has dramatically decreased cooperation with Ukrainian law enforcement, this seems implausible.

[Anne Applebaum: The murky plan that ensures a future war]

Abakumov told me that he believes corruption, not transparency, weakens Ukraine. If Ukraine tolerates corruption, he said, “this is the way we lose, during the war, during negotiations, during rebuilding Ukraine.” Daria Kaleniuk, one of Ukraine’s most prominent anti-corruption activists, told me that with this investigation, “we have the chance to save the country and make it stronger.”

These beliefs are radically different from those held by Ukraine’s opponents. From the beginning of his career, Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, has sought to enrich himself and his entourage at the expense of ordinary Russians. Putin himself was a pioneer in the use of secret offshore accounts and shell companies to transfer state assets into his own pockets. He has also spent years seeking to prevent those ordinary Russians from finding out about his finances.

In January 2021, the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny released a meticulously documented film, Putin’s Palace, that revealed a network of kickbacks and payments to the Russian president far larger, more far-reaching, and more baroque than the scandal under investigation in Ukraine. The result: Navalny, who had just been arrested at the Russian border, was sent to a Siberian prison, where he later died. Putin kept his palace, complete with its private hockey rink and hookah bar, and his money. He blocked all further investigations into his wealth, jailed protesters, drove real journalists out of the country, and launched an invasion of Ukraine.

The Americans taking part in the recent Moscow negotiations are not brutal dictators, but neither are they civil servants acting purely in the interests of transparency, accountability, and patriotism. Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and the owner of an investment company that received $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, are now conducting the main negotiations. Their Russian counterpart is Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund, which has strong ties with its Saudi counterpart. He is believed to have met Kushner while doing business in the Gulf.

[Franklin Foer: Why the Gulf monarchs shower Trump with gifts]

Last month, The Wall Street Journal revealed that these three businessmen met in Miami Beach in October to discuss not just Ukraine but also future Russian-American business deals. Russian businessmen who are known to be close to Putin have been “dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals” in front of American companies, the Journal explained, to “reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.” Some of the companies have connections with Donald Trump’s family.

[Anne Applebaum: The murky plan that ensures a future war]

Witkoff and Kushner are not taking kickbacks on government contracts, as some Ukrainian officials are now accused of doing. The corruption they represent is more profound: They are using the tools of the American state in a manner that happens to benefit their friends and business partners, even while they do terrible damage to American allies, American alliances, and America’s reputation. This is a conflict of interest on a grand scale, with no real precedent in modern American foreign policy.

In Ukraine, the state itself is investigating the government, the cabinet, even the president’s closest advisers. By contrast, it is impossible to imagine Kash Patel’s FBI investigating anyone in Trump’s White House. Any Russian who investigates Putin goes to jail. The word corruption has many nuances, and we aren’t using enough of them when we talk about Ukraine.

Why Does Steve Witkoff Keep Taking Russia’s Side?

2025-11-26T16:28:29-05:00

Pay attention to the dates, because the timing matters. Steve Witkoff spoke with Yuri Ushakov, a Russian official, on October 14. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held a meeting with President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on October 17. Trump had been hinting that he would offer to sell Tomahawks, long-range cruise missiles, to the Ukrainian army. But he did not.

Why not? Perhaps because Ushakov listened to Witkoff’s advice and persuaded Russian President Vladimir Putin to call Trump on October 16. Witkoff, in other words, may have helped block that sale. And that would make Witkoff responsible for prolonging the war.

Let me back up and explain.

Witkoff, a former real-estate developer, is supposed to be negotiating a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine. He is in theory acting on behalf of the United States but also on behalf of millions of people who want peace in Ukraine and security in Europe. Ushakov, a former Russian ambassador to the United States, has different interests: Like his boss, he wants Russia to win the war.

[Read: Trump’s real secretary of state ]

A tape of the October 14 conversation has been leaked to Bloomberg. That’s how we know Witkoff suggested to Ushakov that Putin call Trump. He also offered advice about what Putin should say. The Russian leader should flatter Trump, of course, which is standard advice for speaking to the American president: “Compliment him on his great success in Gaza, congratulate the president on this achievement.” After that, Witkoff said, “It’s going to be a really good call.”

Then, Witkoff advised, Putin should impress upon Trump this idea: “The Russian Federation has always wanted a peace deal. That’s my belief. I told the president I believe that.” Together, the two of them would cook up a peace plan, just like Trump’s recent Gaza peace plan.

Ushakov gave Putin this advice. Putin followed it. How do we know? Because Putin did, in fact, call Trump, on October 16. The call lasted for more than two hours. Trump said the call was productive, and that the two leaders would soon meet, potentially in Budapest (which never happened). During his meeting with Zelensky on the following day, he did not offer Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. Instead, he became emotional and angry.

In keeping with a long-standing Russian demand, Trump tried to persuade the Ukrainians to give up Ukrainian land in Donetsk province that they currently control—land that the Russians have not been able to conquer after more than a decade of fighting. This is what Putin wants: to obtain Ukrainian territory without fighting for it, to weaken Ukraine, and to use any temporary cease-fire as an opportunity to plan the next invasion.

“With a single phone call,” one insider told Politico last month, “Putin appears to have changed President Trump’s mind on Ukraine once again.” This was Witkoff’s achievement. Working with another Kremlin insider, Kirill Dmitriev, he went on last week to propose the 28-point peace plan that could, if carried out, temporarily stop the fighting but position Russia to invade a weakened Ukraine at a later date.

[Anne Applebaum: The murky plan that ensures a future war]

I’ve written this before, but it cannot be repeated often enough: This war will end only when Russia stops fighting. The Russians need to halt the invasion, recognize the sovereignty of Ukraine, and drop their imperial ambitions. Then Ukraine can discuss borders, prisoners, and the fate of thousands of kidnapped Ukrainian children.

But the only way to persuade Russia to stop fighting is to put pressure on Russia. Not Ukraine, Russia. The Ukrainians have already said they will stop fighting and agree to a cease-fire right now, on the current lines of conflict. Yet Witkoff is seeking to persuade Trump not to put pressure on Russia, and we don’t really know why.

Witkoff has no previous diplomatic experience, so perhaps he is naive. He spent many years in New York real estate, at a time when Russians were spending fortunes on property, so perhaps he feels gratitude. Maybe he’s helping Russia win because he has “the deepest respect for President Putin,” as he told Ushakov, and admires his brutality. Maybe he, or others in the White House entourage, have business interests tied to Russia—or hope to. In addition to discussing “peace,” Witkoff has also been, according to the document made public last week, talking with the Russians about American investments “in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centers, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic.”

Whatever the reason, Witkoff is prolonging the conflict. He is not promoting peace. His call to Ushakov was not, as Trump said last night, a normal negotiating tactic. Every time he intervenes, advocating for Putin’s positions, he encourages the Russians to think they can get Trump on their side, pull America away from Europe, break up NATO, and win the war. In other words, every time he intervenes on behalf of the Russians, he contributes to the deaths of Ukrainians, the attacks on infrastructure, the ongoing tragedy that affects millions of people.

If this were a normal American administration, he would be fired immediately. But nothing about this negotiation, or this administration, is normal at all.

The Murky Plan That Ensures a Future War

2025-11-22T06:00:00-05:00

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The 28-point peace plan that the United States and Russia want to impose on Ukraine and Europe is misnamed. It is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else.

The plan was negotiated by Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer with no historical, geographical, or cultural knowledge of Russia or Ukraine, and Kirill Dmitriev, who heads Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and spends most of his time making business deals. The revelation of their plan this week shocked European leaders, who are now paying almost all of the military costs of the war, as well as the Ukrainians, who were not sure whether to take this latest plan seriously until they were told to agree to it by Thanksgiving or lose all further U.S. support. Even if the plan falls apart, this arrogant and confusing ultimatum, coming only days after the State Department authorized the sale of anti-missile technology to Ukraine, will do permanent damage to America’s reputation as a reliable ally, not only in Europe but around the world.

The central points of the plan reflect long-standing Russian demands. The United States would recognize Russian rule over Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk—all of which are part of Ukraine. Russia would, in practice, be allowed to keep territory it has conquered in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. In all of these occupation zones, Russian forces have carried out arrests, torture, and mass repression of Ukrainian citizens, and because Russia would not be held accountable for war crimes, they could continue to do so with impunity. Ukraine would withdraw from the part of Donetsk that it still controls—a heavily reinforced and mined territory whose loss would open up central Ukraine to a future attack.

[Read: A self-defeating reversal on Ukraine]

Not only would this plan cede territory, people, and assets to Russia; it also seems deliberately designed to weaken Ukraine, politically and militarily, so that Russia would find it easier to invade again a year from now, or 10 years from now. According to a version of the text that appeared in the Financial Times yesterday, the plan does state that “Ukraine’s sovereignty would be confirmed.” But it then imposes severe restrictions on Ukrainian sovereignty: Ukraine must “enshrine in its constitution” a promise to never join NATO. Ukraine must shrink the size of its armed forces to 600,000, down from 900,000. Ukraine may not host foreign troops on its soil. Ukraine must hold new elections within 100 days, a demand not made of Russia, a dictatorship that has not held free elections for more than two decades.

In return, the plan states that Ukraine “would receive security guarantees.” But it does not describe what those guarantees would be, and there is no reason to believe that President Donald Trump would ever abide by them. Russia would also “enshrine in law its policy of non-aggression towards Europe and Ukraine,” a bizarre and meaningless statement, given that Russia currently has a policy of permanent aggression not only toward Ukraine but also toward Europe and has, anyway, repeatedly violated promises before. The United States would lift sanctions on Russia, losing any existing leverage over President Vladimir Putin; invite Russia to rejoin the G8; and reintegrate Russia into the world economy. Awkward wording, evident throughout the document, suggests that at least some of it was originally written in Russian.

Why is the Trump White House pushing Ukraine to accept a Russian plan that paves the way for another war? The document offers some hints, declaring that the U.S. would also somehow take charge of the $100 billion in frozen Russian assets, for example, supposedly to invest this money in Ukraine and receive “50% of the profits from this venture.” Europeans, whose banks actually hold most of these assets, would receive nothing. European taxpayers, who currently provide almost all of the military and humanitarian support to Ukraine, are nevertheless expected to contribute $100 billion to Ukraine’s reconstruction.

Meanwhile, the United States and Russia would “enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centers, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities,” according to the plan. This is no surprise: Putin has spoken of “several companies” positioning themselves to resume business ties between his country and the United States.

In March, the Financial Times reported on one of these negotiations. Mattias Warnig—a German businessman and former Russian spy who has close links to Putin and is under U.S. sanctions—has been seeking a back channel to the Trump administration through U.S. investors who want to reopen the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline, part of which was blown up by Ukrainian saboteurs early in the war. One American familiar with the plan told the Financial Times that the U.S. investors were essentially being offered “money for nothing,” which is, obviously, an attractive prospect.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Trump’s devastating plan for Ukraine]

Other details of the business negotiations carried out by Witkoff and Dmitriev remain secret. Ukrainians and Europeans, who would pay the military and economic price for this plan, deserve to know them. Above all, American citizens should be asking for the details of any business negotiations now under way. This plan has been proposed, in our name, as a part of U.S. foreign policy. But it would not serve our economic or security interests. So whose interests would it serve? Which U.S. companies and which oligarchs would benefit? Are Trump’s family members and political supporters among them? The arrangements on offer should be public knowledge before any kind of deal is signed.

For a decade, Russia has been seeking to divide Europe and America, to undermine NATO and weaken the transatlantic alliance. This peace plan, if accepted, will achieve that goal. There is a long tradition of great powers in Europe making deals over the heads of smaller countries, leading to terrible suffering. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with its secret protocols, brought us World War II. The Yalta agreement gave us the Cold War. The Witkoff-Dmitriev pact, if it holds, will fit right into that tradition.

The Pentagon’s Preferred Propaganda Model

2025-10-27T12:27:03-04:00

When you imagine media in a dictatorship, you probably think of something dull and gray. Maybe a Soviet state-television program, extolling the annual harvest. Perhaps a smudgy newspaper photograph of Chairman Mao or General Pinochet, surrounded by blocks of turgid prose.

But if that is your mental picture, then your imagination is out of date. Nowadays, authoritarian propaganda can be varied, colorful, even mesmerizing. Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator, used to perform on television for hours, singing, chatting, and interviewing celebrities. On one recent day, the website of Komsomolskaya Pravda—formerly the organ of the Soviet youth movement, now a mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin—offered stories ranging from clickbait about “the beautiful women who lure Muscovites into dating scams” to an alarmist account of how Ukraine is “being turned into a training ground for the EU army.”

[Read: The last days of the Pentagon press corps]

The point of these efforts is not merely to misinform but to build distrust. Modern authoritarian regimes often offer not a unified propaganda line but rather contradictory versions of reality, and in many different forms: highbrow and lowbrow, serious and silly, sort of true and largely false. The cumulative effect is to leave citizens with no clear idea of what is actually happening.

For the first time in our history, the Department of Defense has been carefully preparing to offer Americans something similar: not information but entertainment, scandal, sycophancy, and jokes. Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that all news organizations at the Pentagon sign a document agreeing to some new restrictions on reporters’ movement—and, more important, prohibiting journalists from publishing information that contradicts official accounts, a stricture that some believed risked criminalizing ordinary journalism. Several dozen reporters left the building, including from The Atlantic but also representatives of Newsmax and Fox News. Many had years of experience, as well as deep knowledge of military budgets, logistics, and technology. Now their replacements are arriving, and they are indeed different. Although they are widely described as “right wing,” as if they were conservatives, most are conspiracy theorists, domestic and foreign propagandists, and others with little institutional knowledge.

One of the new outlets covering the Pentagon, for example, is LindellTV, the streaming service founded by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, who spent millions of dollars trying, unsuccessfully, to prove that China hacked the 2020 election (and who, as he once explained to me, would accept no evidence to the contrary as true). LindellTV is already invited to press conferences at the White House, where one of the outlet’s “reporters” asked earlier this year whether the president’s staff would consider releasing his fitness plan. Donald Trump looks “healthier than he looked eight years ago,” she said, and asked, “Is he working out with Bobby Kennedy, and is he eating less McDonald’s?”

Another new face is Tim Pool, now the owner of something called Timcast Media. Pool previously worked for Tenet Media, a company that was secretly funded by RT, Russian state media. Pool has insisted that he did not know that the company received Russian money, although there were plenty of clues, including messages time-stamped in a way that indicated they came from Moscow, as well as encouragement to make videos that backed up absurd pro-Moscow narratives (that a terrorist attack at a Moscow shopping mall, for which the Islamic State overtly claimed responsibility, was really carried out by Ukrainians, for example).

[Anne Applebaum: The Americans who yearn for anti-American propaganda]

Pool’s team and LindellTV will be joined by The Epoch Times, which is linked to the Falun Gong religious movement in China. The outlet is perhaps best known for promoting QAnon conspiracy theories as well as false accounts of the 2020 election. Accompanying it will be the Gateway Pundit, a site that unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to thwart a lawsuit by election workers whom it had falsely accused of fraud. One America News Network, The Federalist, and representatives of Frontlines, a publication of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point network, will also be part of the new press corps. None has a reputation for expertise in military affairs.

These outlets might, of course, produce pro-Trump propaganda. But, more important, they will produce confusion. At a time of multiple international crises, at a moment when the United States is about to engage in some kind of military action in Venezuela, as the National Guard is being sent to American cities against the will of American governors, the Pentagon’s official positions will be relayed by Timcast, The Epoch Times, LindellTV and the Gateway Pundit, which means that many people simply won’t believe Pentagon statements at all.

This appears to be the Trump administration’s preferred model, not only in the Pentagon but in the White House and everywhere else: Keep the public off-balance. Tell jokes, lies, and amusing stories or publish sinister AI-made videos, not in order to get Americans to believe government statements but in order to make them distrustful of all statements. If they aren’t sure what the U.S. military is really doing, then they won’t object. If people don’t believe anything they read anywhere, then they won’t be motivated to argue, to discuss, or even to engage in politics. Modern authoritarian propaganda, of the kind we are about to receive from the Pentagon and perhaps other government agencies, isn’t designed to produce true believers or mass movements. It’s designed to produce apathy.

In a world where more and more people get their information from ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek and Gemini, this information fog could grow worse over time, creating permanent misunderstandings or historical vacuums. One study has already shown that these AI chatbots frequently link to Russian state media and produce false information about Russia’s war on Ukraine. But Americans might not have to wait for AI to write false histories before we feel the consequences. If the public, our allies, our adversaries, and eventually the military itself no longer believe what the Pentagon is saying, then the Pentagon might find it faces obstacles to its credibility, and to its operational capability, much greater than those once posed by investigative reporters with access to the building.

Why Trump Turned to the Sewer

2025-10-20T15:40:47-04:00

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Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger was in charge of a Berlin Wall checkpoint on the evening of November 9, 1989, when a garbled televised press conference convinced thousands of East Berliners that they were allowed to cross into West Germany. People ran to the checkpoint. They started shouting at Jäger, telling him to open the barrier, even though no one had told him about any changes.

Still, “when I saw the masses of East German citizens there, I knew they were in the right,” he told an interviewer, many years later. In another interview, he recalled, “At the moment it became so clear to me … the stupidity, the lack of humanity. I finally said to myself: ‘Kiss my arse. Now I will do what I think is right.’” He opened the barrier and people started walking through.

Had these events taken place a few months earlier, Jäger might have kept the barrier shut. But the “masses of East German citizens” who had spent that autumn marching against dictatorship in East Berlin, Leipzig, and other East German cities had shaped his understanding of events. Watching them, he understood that most of his countrymen opposed the regime and hated the Wall. If everyone was against it, he no longer wanted to defend it.

[Quinta Jurecic: Resistance is cringe—but it’s also effective]

The differences between the “No Kings” demonstrations that took place across the United States on Saturday and the East German protests 36 years ago are too numerous to list. I saw no riot police at the protest I watched in Washington, D.C. Nor did the demonstrations in the autumn of 1989 feature animal costumes, cute homemade signs, or people dancing the Macarena. But they shared at least one goal: to remind the government’s supporters and enablers that the public is unhappy. The majority of Americans object to President Donald Trump’s politicization of justice, his militarization of ICE, and his usurpation of congressional power. Eventually some of those presidential supporters and enablers might, like Jäger the border guard, be persuaded to side with the majority and help bring this assault on the rule of law to an end.

The people in the White House know this too, and they reacted accordingly. Trump, the successor to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, posted an AI-created video of himself as a fighter pilot, wearing a crown, flying over an American city, and dumping shit onto American protesters. The point was not subtle: Trump wanted to mock and smear millions of Americans, literally depicting them covered in excrement, precisely so that none of his own supporters would want to join them.

Still image from an AI-generated video that Donald Trump shared on social media Saturday (X.com)

Mockery isn’t Trump’s only tool, nor was it the only one that his team has borrowed from other autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world. Just as the Chinese leadership once described participants in popular, broad-based Hong Kong protests as “thugs” and “radicals,” the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, said before Saturday’s protest that the only people protesting would be “Marxists” or “pro-Hamas.” Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin has called democracy protesters “paid agents of the West”—he once even claimed that Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. secretary of state, had sent “a signal” to “some actors in our country”—Ted Cruz, among others, insinuated that the millions of American protesters were paid by George Soros. A host of Republicans tried to portray the protesters as dangerous or treasonous, or else, paradoxically, as elderly and ineffective.

[View: More ‘No Kings’ protests across the U.S.]

For those using the oldest tools in the authoritarian playbook, the nature of the smear is unimportant. What matters is the intention behind it: Don’t answer your critics. Don’t argue with them. Don’t let them win over anyone else. Describe them as dangerous radicals even when they wear frog costumes. Imply, without evidence, that they were bribed to speak out, because there can’t possibly be any sincere idealists who criticize the Party and its Leader out of a genuine desire to help other Americans. Dump AI-generated sewage on their heads to discourage anyone else from joining them. And if they keep coming out, make the messages even harsher.

We are just at the very beginning of this familiar, predictable cycle, and we know from the experience of other countries that it can lead in many directions. Protests could fizzle out, as often happens, because mocking, angry, and, in this case, scatological propaganda discourages people from joining them. Or the official reaction to them could turn uglier: Anyone who objects to the Party or the Leader will be described as not really American, not eligible for the rights of a citizen, not really entitled to protest at all. In authoritarian countries, state institutions—tax authorities, regulators, political police—would then begin to pursue them. That isn’t supposed to happen in America, but then, this isn’t an ordinary American political cycle.

Alternatively, the people who showed up on Saturday might be inspired to do more. For years, Americans at protests have been chanting, “This is what democracy looks like.” But the No Kings marches are actually what free speech looks like. Democracy looks different. Democracy requires organized politics, support for candidates, the creation of broad coalitions. Protests can only create enthusiasm, spread goodwill, and inspire people to dedicate time and energy to real political change. And the people who created the sewage video knew that too.

The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark

2025-10-14T05:50:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Within weeks of their publication in July 1776, those words spread around the world. In August, a London newspaper reprinted the Declaration of Independence in full. Edinburgh followed. Soon after that, it appeared in Madrid, Leiden, Vienna, and Copenhagen.

Before long, others drew on the text in more substantial ways. Thomas Jefferson himself helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued by French revolutionaries in 1789. The Haitian Declaration of Independence, of 1804, drew on both the American and French precedents, calling for the construction of an “empire of liberty in the country which has given us birth.” In subsequent decades, declarations of independence were issued by Greece, Liberia (the author had been born in Virginia), and a host of new Latin American nations. In 1918, Thomáš Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, signed a Declaration of Common Aims of the Independent Mid-European Nations at Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, using the Founders’ inkwell.

On that occasion, a replica of the Liberty Bell was rung, not because any American president or official had asked for it to ring but because Masaryk had been inspired by the story of the American founding. He evoked the Declaration not because of any pressure applied by U.S. foreign policy, but because of Jefferson’s words and what they signify. Since 1776, Americans have promoted democracy just by existing. Human rights and the rule of law are in our founding documents. The dream of separation from a colonial empire is built into them too. Our aspirations have always inspired others, even when we did not live up to them ourselves.

In the 20th century, we moved from simply modeling democratic ideals to spreading or promoting them as a matter of policy. We did so in part because the language of democracy is in our DNA, and when we are confronted by autocrats and despots, we use it. Woodrow Wilson, when arguing for entry into the First World War, said America should advocate the “principles of peace and justice” in opposition to “selfish and autocratic power.” In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to America as an “arsenal of democracy” determined to aid British allies against the Nazis: “No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination.”

During the Cold War, we connected words such as freedom and rights not just to our military strategy but to our national identity, to our culture. We were advocates of free markets, a free press, abstract expressionism, and jazz, and we exported those things too. Plenty of people wanted them. Willis Conover, the host of Voice of America’s nightly jazz broadcast in the 1960s and ’70s, had an audience of 30 million people, mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950, pulled together anti-Communist intellectuals from all over Europe into a single movement.

Many people found our language hypocritical, and they were right: Americans were perfectly capable of backing dictatorships while talking about democracy. The contradiction between the ideals we said we fought for abroad and their failure at home bothered foreigners as well as Americans. In 1954, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that argued in favor of desegregation because, among other reasons, racist laws prompted “doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”

Democratic faith. Because it was at the center of our foreign policy, we aspired to it, even if we didn’t live up to it. Others did too. Over time, the number of these democratic aspirants increased. After the Second World War, the dream of American freedom and prosperity strengthened what were initially shaky democracies in Western Europe and Asia, including recently defeated West Germany and Japan. Their political and economic success drew others into the fold. Greece and Spain joined the club of democracies in the ’70s; South Korea and Taiwan in the ’80s; Central Europe in the ’90s. Asked in 1989, the year they voted out Communism, what kind of country they wanted to be, most Poles would have said, “We want to be normal.” And by “normal,” they meant a European democracy, a capitalist state with a welfare system, a close ally of the United States.

We Americans were inspired by our own language too. We always think about America’s postwar role in Europe as an act of great generosity, the defense of allies from Soviet aggression. But by putting democracy at the center of our international and national identity, we also helped strengthen our own political system. If nothing else, all Americans, even those on different sides of our deepest cultural divides, had a common cause: Right-wing or left-wing, Christian or atheist, we could all be in favor of freedom.

Considering how deeply we were divided about so many other things, it’s extraordinary how bipartisan our foreign policy was for so long, and how many energetically bipartisan institutions we built to promote it. Radio Free Europe and Voice of America—and later Radio Free Asia and a clutch of other foreign-language broadcasters—always enjoyed support from Democrats and Republicans, as well as every president from Harry Truman onward. From the time of its founding in 1983, so did the National Endowment for Democracy, which was inspired by Ronald Reagan’s call for new institutions to “foster the infrastructure of democracy—the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities—which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.” The National Endowment, run by a bipartisan board, makes small grants to groups that monitor elections, promotes free speech, and fights kleptocracy and authoritarian propaganda.

The dramatic shift we have undergone in just a few months—away from a foreign policy based on democratic faith and toward the promotion of a more cynical, more authoritarian, view of the world—has hit these institutions very hard. The fact that the Trump administration has tried to shut down all of America’s foreign broadcasters is telling. The president appointed Kari Lake, who lost races for both the U.S. Senate and Arizona governor, to eviscerate Voice of America, and she did so with enthusiasm, even ostentatiously revoking the visas of VOA employees, reporters, and translators, in some cases giving them 30 days to leave the country after many years of work on behalf of Americans. Though the National Endowment for Democracy has rallied its many supporters in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, it remains the target of a small group of conspiracy theorists who have influence in this administration because they have large followings on X or have appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. It’s strange to think of Reagan as a naive idealist, but that’s what he looks like now, for having founded an institution that promotes fair elections and the rule of law.

[Anne Applebaum: America surrenders in the global information wars]

The shift against these historically bipartisan institutions, against the belief that Americans should defend and promote democracy around the world, and against the democratic faith itself is part of something broader. We have a president who regularly attacks judges and journalists, who bullies CEOs into handing over stock in their companies and university presidents into paying meritless fines, who sends military forces into American cities, who is building a new form of interior police, and who raucously encourages the deepening divide between red and blue America. Abroad, Donald Trump appears much happier with dictators than with democratic allies. His random, punitive tariffs sent Lesotho, a small African country, into economic decline. His demands to occupy Greenland created a political crisis in Denmark, a longtime U.S. ally.

His vice president’s single notable speech since taking office, made in a room full of people expecting a serious discussion of security, berated Europeans with a list of dishonest or exaggerated attacks on them for alleged assaults on free speech. Trump’s own attacks on “radical-left judges” and “fake-news media” now travel around the world much faster than “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” did. Vladimir Putin has banned media that spread “fake news”—that is, accurate information—about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The autocratic ex-president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, called Rappler, a famous investigative-reporting site, a “fake-news outlet” to discredit its work. In places as varied as Egypt and Myanmar, the fake charge of “fake news” has been used to destroy legitimate journalists.

All of these changes are part of a larger shift, a revolutionary transformation in the way Americans present themselves to the world, and the way they are therefore perceived by others. The most ubiquitous form of American culture nowadays is not jazz programming going out on shortwave radio across Eurasia, but the social-media platforms that pump conspiracy theories, extremism, advertising, pornography, and spam into every corner of the globe. After Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union for political dissent, the U.S. government facilitated his arrival in America. Now we have different heroes: The Trump administration went out of its way to rescue and welcome the Tate brothers, who had been arrested and briefly held in Romania, charged with rape in Great Britain. (The Tates deny the charges.) Instead of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, we now have the Conservative Political Action Conference, a kind of movable rent-a-troll event. Identikit nationalists anywhere—Hungary, Poland, Britain, Mexico, Brazil—can pay the CPAC team to come to their country and produce a MAGA show. Steve Bannon or Kristi Noem will show up, deliver a rowdy speech alongside the local talent, and help them make headlines. A CPAC conference held near Rzeszów a few days before the second round of the Polish presidential election featured Noem and was sponsored by a Polish cryptocurrency company that wants a U.S. license.

American culture is no longer synonymous with the aspiration to freedom, but with transactionalism and secrecy: the algorithms that mysteriously determine what you see, the money collected by anonymous billionaires, the deals that the American president is making with world leaders that benefit himself and maybe others whose names we don’t know. America was always associated with capitalism, business, and markets, but nowadays there’s no pretense that anyone else will be invited to share the wealth. USAID is gone; American humanitarian aid is depleted; America’s international medical infrastructure was dismantled so quickly that people died in the process. The image of the ugly American always competed with the image of the generous American. Now that the latter has disappeared, the only Americans anyone can see are the ones trying to rip you off.

The impact of this change around the world will be profound, far-reaching, and long-lasting. The very existence of American democracy inspired people in every corner of the planet, and the decline of American democracy will have the same effect. Perhaps the mere existence of Trump’s America will boost new autocratic parties that will carry out assaults on their own democratic political systems, as Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters have already done in Brazil. Perhaps the Chinese and Russian propagandists who replace Voice of America and Radio Free Europe will simply win global ideological arguments and undermine American economic influence and trade.

More unpredictable is the impact of the change on Americans. If we are no longer a country that aims to make the world better, but rather a country whose foreign policy is designed to build the wealth of the president or promote the ruling party’s foreign friends, then we have fewer reasons to work together at home. If we promote cynicism abroad, we will become more cynical at home. Perhaps expecting Americans to live up to the extraordinary ideals that they proclaimed in the 18th century was always unreasonable, but that language nevertheless shaped the way we thought about ourselves. Now we live in a world where America is led by people who have abandoned those ideals altogether. That will change all of us, in ways we might not yet be able to see.

This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark.”

Why María Corina Machado Deserved the Nobel Peace Prize

2025-10-10T08:28:24-04:00

María Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela” and “her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” When announcing the award, the committee chair described her as “a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness.”

This metaphor is apt. Machado is in hiding, deep inside a country that is failing. I spoke with her twice late last year, without knowing where she was. A few months before, the country had just held presidential elections. The opposition movement that she leads had won. Even though activists were being picked up off the streets, or simply shot and killed, they had held a primary, run a presidential campaign—Machado herself was barred, so Edmundo González was the candidate—and made sure that votes were counted accurately. Still, even after his definitive loss, Nicolás Maduro, the country’s illegitimate leader, refused to hand over power.

Lately, Americans have been hearing little about Venezuela other than drugs and gangs, but the country has long been the home of one of the world’s most impressive grassroots-democracy movements. At this moment, when citizens in many of the world’s most successful liberal democracies are giving up, even questioning whether popular participation in politics has any value, Venezuelans fight violence with nonviolence, and oppose corruption through bravery. As I wrote in December:

During both of our conversations, Machado sat in front of a blank wall, with no other backdrop. Both times she was also calm, assured, even elegant. She didn’t look tired or stressed, or whatever a person who hadn’t seen her family or friends since July should look like. She wore makeup and simple jewelry. She sounded determined, positive. This is because, Machado told me, she believes that the campaign and its aftermath altered Venezuela forever, bringing about what she describes as “anthropological change.”

By this, she meant that the grassroots political movement she and her colleagues created has transformed attitudes in Venezuela and forged new connections between people. Her organization, in concert with others, carefully organized a primary campaign that brought together old opposition competitors. Volunteer training, she told me, gave hundreds of thousands of people a real experience not just of voting but of building institutions from scratch. Those efforts didn’t end with last summer’s election. “The 28th of July was not just an event,” Machado told me. “It’s a process that has brought our country together. And regardless how many days it takes, Venezuela has changed forever and for the good.” Her team, with its leaders across the country, built not just a movement for one candidate or election, but a movement for permanent change. The scale of their achievement—the number of people involved, and their geographic and socioeconomic range—would be notable in a liberal democracy. In an authoritarian state, this project is remarkable.

What Machado wanted, she told me, was to

“transform completely—completely—the relationship we had between citizens and the state. We’ve only known the state deciding for us. Now it’s going to be the other way around. We’re going to have the society in power and making their own decisions, and the state at its service.”

She added:

“I went around the country saying, ‘I have nothing to offer but work. I have nothing to offer you but [the possibility] that we’re going to get together, and we’re going to put this country back on our feet. So we’re going to do this right.’ And people cried and prayed.”

Machado continues to be a fierce, uncompromising optimist. She founded an election-monitoring group more than two decades ago. Since then, she has continued to argue that engagement matters, and that change is possible. Participation, she argues, can make a difference. Any society can be made better, more just, and more free—even in places where that seems impossible.

Read the original article here.

Ukraine’s Plan to Starve the Russian War Machine

2025-09-24T15:25:32-04:00

Updated at 10:58 ET on September 25, 2025

In one section of a sprawling warehouse in central Ukraine, workers have stacked what appear to be small airplane wings in neat rows. In another section, a group of men is huddled around what looks like the body of an aircraft, adjusting an electronic panel. In makeshift locations elsewhere in Ukraine, workers are producing these electronic panels from scratch: This company wants to use as few imported parts as possible, avoiding anything American, anything Chinese. Jewelers, I was told, have turned out to be well suited for this kind of finicky manufacturing. Ukraine’s justly celebrated manicurists are good at it too.

They are not alone in being new to the job. Everyone in this factory had a different profession three years ago, because this factory did not exist three years ago. Nor did the Ukrainian drone industry, of which it forms part. Whatever their job description before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, everyone at this production site is now part of a major shift in the politics and economics of the war, one that hasn’t been fully understood by all of Ukraine’s allies.

Once almost entirely dependent on imports of weapons from abroad, the Ukrainians are now producing millions of drones, large and small, as well as other kinds of weapons, every year. They are using them most famously on the front line, where they have prevented the Russians from making large-scale gains this year, despite dire headlines, and where they have ensured that any territory occupied by the Russians comes at a terrible price, in equipment and lives. The Ukrainians have also used sea drones to clear their Black Sea coast of Russian ships, an accomplishment that seemed impossible even to imagine at the start of the war.

Finally, they are using drones to hit distant targets, deep inside Russia, and lately they are hitting so many military objects, refineries, and pipelines that some Ukrainians believe they can do enough damage to force the Russians to end the war. On Monday, they once again struck Gazprom’s fuel-processing plant in Astrakhan, for example, one of the largest gas-chemical complexes in the world and an important source of both gasoline and diesel. Yesterday, they hit a key part of an oil pipeline in Bryansk. Presumably President Volodymyr Zelensky transmitted this optimism to President Donald Trump, who again upended his administration’s previous policies yesterday and declared that Ukraine is “in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”

The company that I visited, Fire Point, specializes in weaponry for these long-range attacks, producing large drones that can travel up to 1,400 kilometers and stay in the air for seven hours. Fire Point recently attracted attention for its newest product, the Flamingo cruise missile, which can hit targets at 3,000 kilometers, and the company is testing ballistic missiles, too. These capabilities have put Fire Point at the cutting edge of Ukraine’s most ambitious strategy: the campaign to damage Russian refineries, pipeline stations, and other economic assets, especially oil-related assets. Trump has still never applied any real pressure on Russia, and is slowly lifting the Biden administration’s sanctions by refusing to update them. By targeting Russia’s oil and gas industry, the Ukrainians have been applying “sanctions” on their own.

[Read: Ukraine’s most lethal soldiers]

This campaign is not new. I spoke with a Ukrainian officer responsible for helping coordinate the long-range-bombing campaign, and he told me that “sporadic” attempts to hit targets deep in Russia began immediately after the start of the invasion. After the Ukrainians received some American drones under the aegis of a program called Phoenix Ghost, their efforts became more serious. Made for different kinds of wars, the American drones were susceptible to Russian jamming, and the U.S. imposed restrictions on their use. One former soldier now involved in drone manufacturing told me that the Ukrainians weren’t necessarily prepared to use them either. He and some colleagues found boxes of drones in a warehouse along with some other U.S. equipment in the first year of the war, and figured out how to use them from videos they found on the internet. Only later did they receive real instruction. (I agreed not to identify the officer or the former soldier, who fear for their security.)

Whatever their faults, these American donations did inspire the creation of long-range-drone units. Some are part of the military; others are connected to Ukrainian intelligence. As they grew to understand the technology, the commanders of these units, just like the teams deploying battlefield drones and sea drones, concluded that they needed their own drones, as well as their own drone research and development, with a constant feedback loop between the operators on the front lines and the industrial engineers. As the officer told me, “Everything interesting started a year ago, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine started to receive mass numbers of Ukrainian-made drones.” Once their own production lines were in place, they were not trapped by technology invented somewhere else, and they could continually update it to counter advances in Russian tactics and electronic-warfare technology: “What we had two years ago or a year ago,” the officer said, “it’s dramatically different from what we are operating right now.” A weapon that worked last winter might no longer have been useful over the summer.

As a result of both new technology and expanded capacity, the numbers of attacks inside Russia have increased. The officer told me that Ukraine’s long-range-drone units now launch several dozen strikes on Russia every night.

Until recently, the impact of the long-range-drone campaign was hard to measure. The Ukrainians do not always admit to hitting targets deep inside Russia, and many of the targets are in obscure places, where no one is around to record the strike on a cellphone. Russian authorities also make a major effort to hide these strikes and the damage they do, both from their own population and from the rest of the world. On one occasion, Ukrainians learned from satellite pictures that their drones had successfully struck a military airport. They could see debris, oil spills, and other evidence of a successful attack. Just three hours later, all of that evidence was gone: The Russians had cleared the airfield and cleaned the tarmac.

Sometimes evidence emerges anyway, usually via a home video, posted to Telegram, made by a Russian who happens to be near a burning factory or exploding refinery and is shouting for his wife to come and look. But even so, it can be hard to know whether these dramatic fires are caused by drones or by Ukraine’s even more clandestine sabotage campaign inside Russia, alleged to have both Russian and Ukrainian participants. The vacuum has left the field open for what the officer called “fake experts,” and sometimes false claims from those who want to steal credit.

But the Ukrainian military does keep careful track of the damage being done, and has thought carefully about how to prioritize certain targets. It has disrupted airports and hit weapons factories and depots. The Ukrainian officer told me that, early on in the war, his colleagues realized that the Russians are not deterred by the deaths of their soldiers: “Russia can sustain extremely high levels of casualties and losses in human lives. They don’t care about people’s lives.” However, “it is painful for them to lose money.” They need money to fund their oligarchy, as well as to bribe their soldiers to fight: “So naturally, we need to reduce the amount of money available for them.” Oil and oil products provide the majority of Russia’s state income. This is how the oil industry became the Ukrainians’ most important target.

The campaign against the oil industry has been helped by the degradation of Russian air defenses, which had been moved closer to the border of Ukraine and at the moment aren’t numerous enough to cover every possible economic target across a very large country. Since August, 16 of 38 Russian refineries have been hit, some multiple times. Among them are facilities in Samara, Krasnodar, Volgograd, Novokuibyshevsk, and Ryazan, among others, as well as oil depots in Sochi; an oil terminal at Primorsk, in the Baltic; and pumping stations along another pipeline that supplies crude oil in Ust -Luga, in the northern part of the Baltic. In August, the Ukrainians also hit the Unecha pumping station, a crucial part of the Druzhba pipeline that links Russia and Europe and still supplies oil to Hungary and Slovakia, the two European countries that have sought to block or undermine sanctions (and the only two European NATO states who, alongside Turkey, import Russian oil at all).

[Read: Ukraine’s warning to the world’s other military forces]

The result: Russian overall oil exports are now at their lowest point since the start of the war, and the Russians are running out of oil at home. The commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces has said that more than a fifth of Russian refining capacity has been destroyed. The regime has banned the export of refined oil products, because there isn’t enough for the domestic market. Gas stations are closed or badly supplied in areas across the country, including the suburbs of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Telegram accounts post videos of cars waiting in enormous lines. Earlier this month, Izvestiya, a state-owned newspaper, actually admitted to its readers that severe fuel shortages are spreading across central and eastern Russia, as well as in Crimea, a problem it attributed, laughably, to “the seasonal increase in fuel demand and the growth of tourism activity.”

Quietly, Europeans are backing Ukraine’s strategy. The Germans will invest $10.5 billion in support for Ukraine this year and next, a large chunk of which will be spent building drones. Sweden has pledged $7.4 billion. The European Union’s decision to invest $6 billion in a “Drone Alliance” with Ukraine is mostly designed to build anti-drone defenses along Europe’s eastern border, but that money will also accelerate production and benefit Ukraine as well.

Both the Ukrainians and their European allies are also looking harder at the so-called shadow fleet, the oil tankers now traveling around the world under flags of convenience, fraudulent flags, or no flags at all, carrying illicit Russian oil. Many are old, dangerous boats, with inexperienced crew and little or no insurance. Some have been involved in accidents already, and they could do real environmental damage in the Baltic Sea. Sweden, Germany, and Denmark have all announced that they will check the papers of these shadow tankers and sanction those that aren’t insured, adding them to a growing list of sanctioned ships. The point, for the moment, is not just to protect the environment but to raise the costs of Russian oil exports and thus to reduce the amount of money flowing into Russia and back up Ukraine’s air campaign. More extreme measures, including banning these unmarked, uninsured ships from the Baltic altogether, are under consideration too.

But that will take time, which no one in Ukraine wants to waste. No one wants to wait for Trump to impose new sanctions on Russia either. Drones, which can defend the front line and take the battle deep into Russia, can do more. In an address to the nation on September 14, Zelensky put it very clearly: “The most effective sanctions—the ones that work the fastest—are the fires at Russia’s oil refineries, its terminals, oil depots.” In the absence of an American policy that offers something other than rhetoric, the Ukrainians, backed by Europe, will pursue their own solution.