Anne Applebaum: Trump's Firehose of Lies

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Congrats to all the Knicks fans that are listening, and all my friends, the long-suffering Knicks fans, Justin and Jackson and Ben and the others. I hope that none of you, like me, turned the game off when the Knicks were losing by 29 and turned on Pod Save the World to prep for today's podcast. I would say that the Pod Save the World episode was far less invigorating than the basketball game that I missed. But the highlights looked exciting. Kudos to the Knicks fans and this podcast is going to be invigorating. I'm excited to welcome back one of our friends, staff writer at The Atlantic. Our most recent books include Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc. It's Anne Applebaum. Hey Anne, how are you doing?
Fine.

**Anne Applebaum** (0:55)
How are you?

**Tim Miller** (0:56)
Thunderstorm in Poland, you were telling me in the green room. I'm hoping that does not augur poorly for the podcast, but we'll see how it goes.

**Anne Applebaum** (1:03)
I can hear it right now and it would be amazing if you couldn't hear it, but because it's very loud, but it won't last that long, I hope.

**Tim Miller** (1:11)
Well, our podcasts are a rainstorm, usually for listeners anyway, so it's appropriate.
I want to start with Iran. We're just going to hop around the world as usual. This morning, well, I guess last night, we should say the US carried out a fresh round of strikes on Iran with Trump claiming it was an effort to force the regime into a deal. He was on Fox and Friends this morning where he said we dropped $250 million of bombs on Iran. Who knows what is true and what is coming out of this administration but it's pretty interesting since nobody in Congress has appropriated anything. Susan Collins is the Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. You think she might care about the quarter billion we spent in Iran last night. Then this morning, Trump bleats that we are looking in the not too distant future into taking Karg Island.
He's back to discussing a ground trip invasion of Iran. I'm wondering what you make of the state of play this morning.

**Anne Applebaum** (2:07)
In Iran, almost every day, something happens. Trump makes a statement. There's another use of weaponry.
There's another piece of information. And yet nothing happens.
He keeps changing the narrative. He keeps trying one version of events after the other. He says we're going to invade one day. We're not going to invade the next day. Maybe at one point, he'll be telling the truth, or he'll be saying something that will actually happen. But I'm not sure how we will know when that is. In other words, it's not just the boy cried wolf. We're really beyond that now. I mean, he's almost doing the Russian style firehood of falsehoods. If you just keep saying lots of stuff all the time, people begin to eventually blank out. It's very hard to know what's true and what's not true. And so you kind of throw up your hands and say, I just don't know what's going on. And maybe that's the purpose. Maybe that's exactly what he's trying to do.

**Tim Miller** (3:05)
I definitely think there's some of that. And you can feel the acute pushback to the war a month ago, and less so now, whether that be the markets or whether that just be conversation. I do think that there's kind of a sense of we're in Groundhog Day, we don't know what's happening. There haven't been the acute crises that there were some we're warning about with with energy. I mean, this stuff takes a long time to go through. But people saw an initial spike in gas prices. And then since then, it's been kind of steady up a little bit, down a little bit.
I do think it's noteworthy the threat this morning, though, because about going into Karg Island and seizing the oil, whether he's actually going to do that again, who knows? Like you said, we're well beyond Boy Who Cried Wolf. It's noteworthy because to me, it feels like it's like, hey, I'm trying a new tactic for forcing Iran to the negotiating table. That's the key point here, is that Iran has seemed to not be susceptible to his various like madman attempts to get them to deal, and he had basically taken ground troops kind of off the table for a while, and now it's noteworthy at least that he feels that he wants to put it back on, I guess, would be the only minor change this morning.