Anne Applebaum: Globalized MAGA Kleptocracy

Tim Miller (0:12)

Hello and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome back to the show. I'm delighted. We'll see how my husband and other listeners feel by the end of the podcast. Her recent books include The Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic, where her latest piece, Empire of Grift, is the October cover story for the magazine. It's Anne Applebaum. Welcome back, Anne.

Anne Applebaum (0:34)

Thanks for having me again.

Tim Miller (0:36)

It's always a joy for me, even though I'm looking at my outline here, and we'll see how we all feel by the end. I can't be any darker than the apocalypse episode, so we'll see how we land. I want to start here. We'll get to your article next. But first, we have a more important thing. Anne Applebaum, Radical Revolutionary.

I saw a tweet you sent this week, and there was an overhead video of the ballroom. So you could see the size and scale of the ballroom and how much bigger it is than the White House. You quote tweeted it with these five words, it will have to go.

I'm like, okay, because I've been kind of squishy on this. I'm like, if Anne Applebaum is out there saying we got to bulldoze the ballroom, that piqued my interest, so I want to hear more.

Anne Applebaum (1:24)

So I grew up in Washington, and a lot of the institutions that we're talking about, the Kennedy Center, the monuments around DC, the reflecting pool, these are places I've known all my life, and I know how important they are to people who live in the city and to people who visit the city, and I've been taking people to see them for years and years, and I took generations of children to the Nutcracker Suite, and I was taken to the Nutcracker Suite at the Kennedy Center at Christmas time, and watching the president systematically destroy one after the next has probably radicalized me. The White House was built in a certain style for a certain reason. It was meant to evoke Republican, small-r Republican virtues. It was supposed to be modest. It wasn't a palace like the palaces in England that we had, the American Revolution had broken away from. It was classical in design. It was supposed to evoke Palladian virtues, this architecture of balance and symmetry.

By destroying it, by building a monstrosity next door to it, Donald Trump has changed its meaning and changed the way it looks, and changed the original intentions of the architect. The intentions are related to very deep American values, and he's imposing a new set of values on them.

And I object.

Tim Miller (2:54)

It impacted me to see that you were there, because it made me feel like, well, maybe I'm not radicalized enough, you know? And if Anne Applebaum is ready to get out there with the sledgehammer, because, you know, I don't know. Part of me is just like, well, okay. Well, why don't we just name it the Barack Hussein Obama ballroom and move on to bigger and better things?

Anne Applebaum (3:13)

I mean, if it were in proportion, if it were done with an eye to history, if it were not a grotesque statement of Trump's personality imposed on Washington, DC., then we could talk about having a ballroom. But that's not what this is. This is a very, very strange project. It's something that Trump is obsessed with. He talks about it all the time, apparently, according to people who have reported on what goes on.

Tim Miller (3:44)

Yeah, Ben Terrace reported on this for the New York Magazine.

Anne Applebaum (3:47)

Yeah, and so this is not a normal construction project. It's not a bit of improvement to the White House.

It's not an upgrade. It's an imposition, and it's doing a lot of damage. And architecture is important because it reflects who we are. As I said, it reflects a set of values. It was built that way originally for a reason. And Trump is destroying those, seeking to change the values and undermine the way the city looks.

Tim Miller (4:14)

Hell yeah, to the barricades. I'm with you. You've won me over. I'm with you on it. Okay. And it relates to your cover story, which covers kind of the globalized MAGA grift.

You know, I think that there's, of course, been a bunch of reporting, and, you know, Jonathan Swan underwent this week. And if you hear him tell it, it's just, I mean, we've barely scratched the surface of the amount of corruption and double-dealing that these guys have done. And, you know, we all know some of the individual stories. We bring this all together, I think, and frame it up in an interesting way about how their program is not at all isolationist. It is a very globalist program, just in a different way of thinking about it. So why don't you explain that concept?