297 - Anne Applebaum: Trump Is Building an Autocracy | On Putin, Kushner, and America’s Future

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Anne Applebaum (1:00)

Everybody knows there are ways you can pay someone to see Trump. That's how it works now. They don't just talk about the war. They talk about business deals. And that is really unprecedented. You can't imagine in the 1930s, Chamberlain negotiating with Hitler, if you're being investigated by the Department of Justice, your life is hell. The danger is that the decline will happen slowly and we will suddenly wake up and realize it's not fixable.

Robinson Erhardt (1:35)

I just read your book, Autocracy, Inc., which goes really well, of course, with your latest essay in the Atlantic, where you argue that American foreign policy doesn't really serve Americans anymore, so much as it just serves private interests. I wanted to start out by asking, what your strongest evidence is for that claim, and what makes it different from earlier conflicts of interests in American government?

Anne Applebaum (2:02)

I mean, you can find incidences of American power being abused on behalf of American companies in the past. The most famous example is United Fruit, which was a company that used US power to try to control governments in Central America in the mid-20th century.

But what we're seeing now is something different in scale and in the all of government approach. What we're watching is, for example, the tools of American, what we used to call democracy promotion, so state department, cultural funding, visits by the Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Assistant Deputy Secretary of State, are being aimed at promoting not democracy, not ideas, but far-right political parties around, especially in Europe, but also elsewhere, who are compatible with their kind of civilizational idea. They have an idea about the collapse of Western civilization, and they believe those are the parties that will fix it, but which also happen to be parties that oppose all kinds of regulation. Many of them have links to the cryptocurrency industry.

So they're also political parties who happen to work very well together with a number of the Trump administration's business allies. I mean, that's one example. But if you look at the way foreign policy is being done as well, you see business envoys actually doing policy. So you see the disappearance of diplomats. An example of this, for example, is in the article, I describe how American policy towards Brazil has gone in the last year and a half. And what happened when Trump first came to power was that he, when he won his second election, right soon after his inauguration, he put 50% tariffs on Brazil. And this was because he was promoting, again, civilizational allies. So this is Bolsonaro, who was the far right leader of Brazil who had led an insurrection against an election, very much like Trump himself and was under investigation. And Trump wanted to favor that political grouping over the sitting president who's a left-wing president, Lula da Silva. So you had tariffs being imposed, and then you had a strange situation that Brazilians described to you when I was there of suddenly nobody being able to speak to Washington. I mean, the Secretary of State kind of disappeared, and an appointment that was made between Brazil's Minister of Finance and the American Treasury Secretary was abruptly canceled, and instead the American Treasury Secretary met with Eduardo Bolsonaro, who's one of the former leader's sons. And the upshot of this, though, is that in the end, the only person who was able to do diplomacy between Brazil and the United States was a Brazilian businessman who has big businesses in the United States, who gave a lot of money to Trump's inauguration, and was the person who became the contact between the Brazilian government and the Trump administration. And that's kind of typical. I mean, I hear examples of this all the time, that they don't talk to diplomats, they don't talk to foreign ministers. What they do is they look for business contacts, whether it's in Pakistan, whether it's in the Gulf States, whether it's in Europe. It's harder in Europe because Europeans aren't used to operating that way and it's difficult for them to do it. But in some parts of the world, like the Gulf, it's very easy. In the Gulf States have instantly understood, okay, we need to do business with America, then we need to invest in Jared Kushner's company. The Saudis invested $2 billion in it or we need to, you know, the Qataris gave a plane to Trump, a luxury airliner worth, I think it was $400 million. And so everybody suddenly understands that, oh, it's a transactional administration in order to get things done. We need to pay someone. We need to find a big businessmen.