[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Are Donald Trump and the MAGA movement making America Hungary again? Not hungry as in not enough food, though that may come too, depending on how the terrorist policies work out. Hungary as in the country. Sunday's All Things Considered, maybe you heard it, looked at what's happening in Viktor Orbán's Christian right authoritarian utopia, some see it as, and related it to what has been happening this year. Here's a clip from that report of Csaba Lukács, hope I'm saying that right, Managing Director of Magyar Hang, translation Hungarian Voice, a newspaper for by journalists at what used to be prominent newspapers that have now been forced to shut down by Viktor Orbán's government. The journalist Lukács is talking here about how far democracy, including freedom of the press, have fallen and not--

Csaba Lukács: Are not yet in Turkey because the journalists will not be jailed yet. We are not in Russia because nobody was falling out from the windows yet, but day by day we are getting closer.

Brian Lehrer: By many measures, so are we. Here's Péter Krekó, a Hungarian political scientist, in that All Things Considered report.

Péter Krekó: I think Trump went further in two months than Orbán could in 15 years. The United States, it reminds me of a constitutional coup where everything happens very rapidly.

Brian Lehrer: Who better to talk about what that source described as a constitutional coup than Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic magazine staff writer and author of Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Her latest articles are precisely on the US becoming more like Hungary, one on why dictatorships fail. Little hope there, and her most recent one called Kleptocracy, Inc, as recent events seem to be coming right out of the Autocracy, Inc. scenario she wrote about in her book.

Though she was booked to be on today before this, maybe even yesterday's stock market rebound and Trump's latest climb down on tariffs and the independence of the Federal Reserve is part of this story. Anne, I appreciate your work and we always appreciate when you come on with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Anne Applebaum: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Your article America's Future is Hungary, it begins with the lines, "MAGA conservatives love Victor Orbán, but he's left his country corrupt, stagnant and impoverished." Anne, would you start at the beginning? Why do MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán?

Anne Applebaum: They love Viktor Orbán because he did something that they want to do. He, very slowly, took over the institutions of the Hungarian state, so the civil service, the courts, but also the universities, all kinds of cultural institutions, and he politicized them. Instead of having them be run by independent people or by neutral people, instead of having civil servants who work on behalf of all the Hungarian nation, he repopulated all those institutions with people who are loyal to him. That meant that he got to dictate things.

For example, he got to dictate curriculums at Hungarian universities, and he got to even shut down one Hungarian university that was too independent. It was actually originally founded by George Soros a couple of decades ago, called the Central European University. It was one of the best universities in that part of the world, and he expelled it from the country.

They admire this because of its decisiveness, because of the politicization, because of what that brought him, which is, it essentially made him almost impossible to dislodge as a political leader. What they don't say is, what did this do to the country? The answer that very few people write about, lots of people write about what happened in Hungary and Orbán's rhetoric and how he described what he was doing and so on, but not that many people write about what happened to the Hungarian economy.

What happened is that it became very, very profoundly corrupt and it began to sink downwards in all kinds of league tables, in measures of wealth, in measures of governance, in measures of productivity. Hungary is now at or near the bottom of the European Union. In the article that you quote, I make an argument as to why.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Hold that thought on the economy there and what the lessons are for here under Trump, for a minute. We'll do that in detail. I want to linger for a minute on your description of why the MAGA right likes Orbán and some of the things that you just listed that he's done.

They seem so similar to the things we've all been talking about here recently, what Trump is trying to do to Harvard and other colleges, to the AP and other news organizations, to medical research, the disappearances of legal immigrants, to detention cells in Louisiana and other people, to Salvadoran torture prisons with no charges or due process, the firing of independent inspectors general to hold themselves accountable, the erasure of non binary people from existence under the law. Much of those kinds of things already happened under Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

Do you know enough about the universities piece to discuss it in more detail? I think that's one of the things that's so striking to a lot of people here, the amount of control that Trump is trying to take over college educations, university curricula, even here. Do you know how that went in Hungary? Any detail?

Anne Applebaum: I do know some pieces of it. As I said, they expelled one university which they were unable to control. They essentially banned gender studies programs, different kinds of academic programs that they didn't like, by threatening universities with losing their state funding if they maintain these programs. That, of course, is something we might see happen in the United States. It was one of the things that seemed to be what the Trump administration was threatening Harvard with, that they wanted to dictate curriculum.

The other thing they did, and this is probably not exactly relevant to the United States because we have a different system, but Hungary had a lot of state universities that were privatized, supposedly. What that meant was that the leadership of the university was put in the hands of a foundation, and the foundations were controlled by business people close to Viktor Orbán.

What had been a quasi independent system, state universities had their own academic system, their own ways of running themselves. They were then taken over, in essence, by people close to the prime minister. It looked like they were becoming more independent, but in practice, not. He also changed the leadership of a lot of other cultural institutions, the Hungarian art schools and so on, with a similar goal that they would be run by people loyal to him.

Not all of this will be exactly relevant to what happens here, because as I say, we have a [inaudible 00:07:49] university system. It's mixed some. When we say state universities in US we mean state level, California or Texas. We don't mean they're not run by the federal government. That's a little different. The intentions, you can see. The intention is to have the ruling party or people close to the ruling party, people close to the prime minister, have some say in what's being taught and therefore in who determines who hires and fires academics, who determines what curricula look like.

That's something where you can see clearly that there are people in or close to the Trump administration who are following that playbook and, in some ways, maybe even making it a little bit stronger. I think what the Trump administration threatened Harvard with is even a little bit farther than what the Orbán government had threatened Hungarian universities with.

Brian Lehrer: Now, let's get to the economic piece where you describe Hungary as having fallen really far under Orbán's leadership from the Central European country that foreign investors like the most, as you put it, to one of the poorest countries in the EU today, and maybe the poorest, also rated the most corrupt country in Europe the last three years in a row. Is the autocratic project in that country a cause of its economic decline or something separate from it?

Anne Applebaum: It's absolutely a cause. If you think about it, when you take away checks and balances, when you remove transparency, when you intimidate ethics bodies and government inspection agencies, when you hobble the media, when you make it difficult for there to be any openness or any investigation of what the government is doing, when you make government opaque and hard to understand and closed, then, inevitably, in almost any country, you invite corruption, because when people are pretty sure that no one's going to find out what they're doing, then they begin to manipulate the system.

It happened pretty fast in Hungary. It was clearly part of the project from the beginning. Orbán wanted his ruling party to have access to some funds. He began to enrich people around him. Some of it was done in fairly primitive ways. There would be government contracts and they would go to people close to Orbán, or in many cases, they went to his son-in-law, who's somebody who's become very rich.

There are more sophisticated versions of it as well. Essentially, there's something-- between 20% and 30% of the companies in the country are companies that are known to be somehow close to the prime minister or to the ruling party or to his family. They have a special relationship to the state. They get special deals, sometimes they get kickbacks. Foreign investors understand that they play a special role, but they've also been a huge burden for the economy because they're not run like normal companies. They're companies that exist by the largesse of the government.

That's almost the definition of oligarchic companies. You have the same phenomenon in Russia where there are companies whose business plan is to be close to the government and to benefit from government decisions. That was one of the things that Orbán created.

Brian Lehrer: That's why Autocracy, Inc. and Kleptocracy, Inc., in your headlines, because it relates to the corporate world as well as the political. Is the [inaudible 00:11:34] Christian right project, if that's the right term for it, with everything you've been describing culturally as well as economically, how popular or unpopular is Orbán among the Hungarian people at this point?

Anne Applebaum: Orbán was popular for a long time. It's very hard to measure because we don't know how good opinion polls are. As Hungary became more autocratic, you have to ask how honest people were when pollsters called them up and asked them things over the phone. It's true that because he manipulated the constitution, his representation in parliament made him seem he had a larger parliamentary majority than he had popularity, but he was very effective at using the rhetoric of Hungarians against the world, "I'm defending Hungary against the scourge of immigration. I'm defending Hungary against outsiders who want to steal things from us."

That worked for a long time. It hasn't been working recently in. Again, in opinion polls that you have to be careful of, in more recent opinion polls, he's lost out to a competitor and now there are many questions in Hungary about whether that competitor will actually be allowed to contest the next election. They're still a couple of years away.

It's interesting to see how he maintained his popularity. His game has been to do this very, very aggressive promotion of very divisive ideas all the time, constant smearing of his opponents, constant description of his political opponents as traitors or elites or foreigners, or people who suck up to immigrants, or people who wish the Hungarian nation ill, and this constant use of polarization as a way of promoting himself. As I said, I'm not sure that it's still working, but it did work for some time.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your questions and comments welcome for Anne Applebaum at 212-433 WNYC. Call or text on her Atlantic Magazine articles America's Future is Hungary, This is how Autocracies Fail, and Kleptocracy, Inc., or ideas we're discussing as all of these do related to her book Autocracy, Inc., 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text.

A couple of listener comments we already have. One says, "Obama went after every university in the country and made them change the definition of sexual abuse." Another one writes, "All of these accusations are essentially what the left already has done to the United States. What Trump is doing is just trying to move the institutions already under one ideological control to the center." I read those as examples of Trump supporters.

In your Why Autocracies Fail article, you write that just as in the first half of the 20th century would be-- authoritarians have begun arguing that we would be better off without all those institutions. You quote Mussolini who said, "The truth is that men are tired of liberty." It's really a two-part question. What do you think about those comments from listeners who saw the left as taking control of institutions ideologically and not that different from what Trump is doing. Then you can tell us if you think many Americans, many Trump voters in particular, are tired of liberty.

Anne Applebaum: There is no previous instance of an American administration writing a letter of the kind that Harvard got, that demanded control of hiring and firing, as well as curriculum, as well as admissions, and when the university protested, responding by saying that they would deprive them of tax exempt status and many billions of dollars of federal, mostly scientific research funding.

I don't think Obama ever threatened any university by saying, "We will take away the money that you use to carry out biomedical research or other scientific research because you aren't conforming to our ideology." We can have an argument about which trends or which fashions had success in different university departments. I think one should be very careful about generalizing because different universities had made different decisions. I'm sure there are university departments where the people who called in don't like what's being taught or how.

The use of federal power in that kind of crude way is not something I'm aware of happening before in modern history. It's a very different style. It's a very different way for the White House to treat what have, historically, been independent educational institutions. That's what I would say about that.

Brian Lehrer: Just to further that one step, we also hear from many Republicans in the conservative media that the left was responsible for tyranny in this country. That's part of what they were voting against when they voted for Trump or considered Trump, tyranny during the pandemic, other kinds of regulations that became tyrannical in what they see as an ideological pursuit of the fight against climate change, as well as, gender and LGBTQ related things. This accusation, at least, of tyranny has been going both ways in this country, right?

Anne Applebaum: The accusation has been going both ways, but the reality doesn't hold it up. On the one hand, you had a culture war between people who had different sets of ideas. There was a legitimate argument to be had back and forth about what should be taught at a university that was being had between different sets of academics or different sets of scholars or different sets of thinkers.

It's very different for the federal government to intervene and, as I said, use the IRS or use the National Institute of Health funding, to resolve the question. These are open questions. The debate about what should be taught at a university has historically, in our country, happened inside universities or around universities or the media. It hasn't been decided by fiat from Washington. I would say that that's different.

Brian Lehrer: The Mussolini quote, "The truth is that men are tired of liberty," why did you include that?

Anne Applebaum: I included it because there is a fashion now, and this is coming a little bit less from culture warriors and more from Silicon Valley. There's an idea that democracy is inefficient, that it takes too long to solve things, that what we need is not this endless debate about things, but we need someone to intervene and just answer the question and solve the problem, end all the cacophony, end the noise and simply intervene and end the conversation.

That's an instinct you've heard-- there's a techno authoritarian group in Silicon Valley who talk like that. You hear it a little bit from some of the culture warriors on the right. Historically, it's something you've also heard on the left. This doesn't have to be a left wing or a right wing instinct. The Soviet Union was a left wing dictatorship that also sought to end public debate and end conversation.

It's something that happened in the 1930s, that it was an era of a lot of economic turmoil, there was a lot of doubt about democracy. As I said, you had people like Mussolini, others in Lenin, who kept saying, "We don't need this democracy. It's a waste of time, it's a facade, it's time consuming. Let's end the conversation." I feel there's a whiff of that now, both in the United States and also in Europe, a sense that democracy isn't providing answers and we need something else, something different.

The argument of the article you're quoting is that, that's all very well, but once you go down that road, then you'll find you've created other problems. For example, you've created an executive who is uncheckable and uncontrollable and whose whims can create an economic crisis from one day to the next.

Having checks and balances and having debate and having several steps that the executive needs to take in order to make a decision, there's a reason why the founding fathers of the United States or the authors of other constitutions around the world, there's a reason why they put those things in, because a single executive who controls everything, which you could also call a dictator or an autocrat, once he begins to make bad decisions, there's nobody who can stop him.

Brian Lehrer: JP in Park Slope, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. JP, do we have you?

JP: Yes. Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Hi. Go ahead.

JP: Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, go ahead. We got you-

JP: Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we have you now. Go ahead.

JP: I'd like to ask, Ms. Applebaum, how does Orbán's illiberal democracy-- how are they going to prevent the elections from going on in the sense of gerrymandering? I know that gerrymandering is the wrong word, but how, will, let's say, the Republicans here grapple with keeping Trump in office for a third term? How are they going to subvert our democracy in that way? If Orbán has an opponent, it's really easy for him to get rid of him, just like Putin does, but here it's a little bit more difficult. How do we prevent that kind of voter obstruction and keeping a dictator in office? Sorry for the long question.

Brian Lehrer: No, that's okay. Thank you for that question. I actually want to make it even longer, because we don't even have to look at 2028 to, at least, ask the question. We can look at 2026. You've probably heard a version of what I'm about to play. It's Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who's been a leading voice warning of how close we are to the edge of the collapse of democracy. He's been saying we have months, not even a year, because democracy is maybe before democracy is maybe permanently destroyed. On The New Yorker Radio Hour a few weeks ago, he said this.

Senator Chris Murphy: Is this a normal moment where you can just keep on punching Donald Trump and pushing down his approval ratings and eventually win the 2026 election and set up a potential win in 2028, or is there a pretty good chance that we're not going to have a free election in 2026?

David Remnick: You believe that's a possibility?

Senator Chris Murphy: 100%. Oh, every single day, I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.

Brian Lehrer: Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, with David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Anne, are you worried for the 2026 elections? To the caller's point, it would normally be a midterm check on an administration that goes too far. You heard what Chris Murphy said.

Anne Applebaum: What you have had in Hungary, as you had previously in Turkey and for a period in Poland, although no longer, was elections that were not-- they weren't rigged, but they were unfair in that there were hobbles on the media, or there was so much state control over the media and so much state money that went into promoting one party or the other that the result wasn't fair.

In Hungary, the prime minister had the ability to change the constitution and change the way percentages of votes were counted. He kept giving himself a constitutional majority in the parliament, even though he didn't even have more than 50% of the votes. That's not going to happen here because we don't have that kind of political system. What I would look for here are changes to voting laws.

There's laws, for example, that make it difficult to register to vote, that require birth certificates, that are difficult for people to obtain. I would look at repression or assaults on big media that make media afraid or nervous of reporting exactly what's happening so that you begin to get more state control over what's said and what debates people are having. I'm less worried about that in the United States States than in other places, just because our media is so diverse. We're not a small Central European country with state television, but it's something to look out for.

I would especially look at voting laws. It could be that Chris Murphy is worried about some kind of emergency situation where there are protests, there are interventions, there's a suspension of the vote. It's something like that. We're still pretty far away from that. I would say to everybody listening to this that you should work on the assumption that there will be elections, there will be midterm elections and you should participate in them.

Brian Lehrer: Let me keep pushing on how far this can go. Here's one more clip from the All Things Considered story about Hungary on Sunday that's truly frightening. This is a Hungarian Pride Parade spokesperson in Budapest on pride parades being banned or cancelled over there.

Johanna Majercsik: if the government succeeds in banning such a peaceful protest, that means that in the future they will be able to ban or restrict any other peaceful event, any other peaceful demonstration organized by another social group.

Brian Lehrer: That's Hungarian Pride Parade spokesperson Johanna Majercsik in Budapest. Anne, listening to that and knowing that pro-Palestinian protesters here are being detained and deported based on foreign policy grounds, not criminal grounds, and I'll add that I know people who think Trump wants mass protests that begin to turn violent so he can declare martial law and really suspend democracy. How far can all this go in your view?

Anne Applebaum: Again, I don't want to frighten people because I want people to participate in the political process and I want people to work for candidates and to vote because that's the most important thing that we can do to bring back some control over an over-powerful autocratic executive, is to restore some balance by having a Democratic majority in Congress. At the same time, yes, it's important to imagine what could happen because we need to think about how to prevent it in advance. These things have happened in other countries. There have been votes that have been suspended, there has been martial law declared.

I want to say that we're still far away from that. I understand why Chris Murphy is worried. It is true that Trump keeps talking about having a third term, which is illegal and unconstitutional. Your point about new levels of repression against people who are, in effect, political dissidents is also very worrying, but I would still say that the vote is-- it's something that Americans know is supposed to happen and I have to believe that Americans will make sure that it happens.

Brian Lehrer: How would you compare this moment to others in the United States' own history? Listener writes that, "Ezra Klein had the historian Stephen Hahn from NYU on his show this week, his New York Times podcast. Hahn wrote Illiberal America: A History. He argued that we don't actually need to look abroad as so many people are doing, to find a model for illiberalism because it has happened here many times during the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Jim Crow, the Red Scare, Japanese internment-" this person writes, "-and on and on." I'm just curious your reaction to that if that listener got The Ezra Klein Show gist correctly.

Anne Applebaum: I didn't hear that [unintelligible 00:30:14] The Ezra Klein Show, but certainly, the listener is right that you can find incidences in American history of autocratic behavior as well. I made a podcast last summer called Autocracy in America and it was before the election. One of the thesis of the podcast was to look at ways in which the United States is already autocratic and to look at some of the autocratic traditions in America.

It's true that there's a part of the American political system that has always been skeptical of the federal government, that has disliked it, that has used the word "freedom" to mean freedom from the federal government, rather than freedom as in the freedom to participate in public life or the freedom that belongs to everybody to vote. There are different interpretations of the word "freedom" that.

That group has had power in the South in the past, even after Jim Crow, but it hasn't had federal power before. The idea that the federal government needs to be dismantled, which is a piece of the story we haven't talked about yet, which is also a little bit different from Hungary, there's a very long, very old tradition of that in America, defiance of federal government rules about-- actually going back to Native Americans, but also about how Black people were treated after the Civil War and even into pretty recent times, they haven't had control of the whole system in the past.

The other incidents that you can point to have been in wartime, the arrest of Japanese Americans, or in a past when there were different rules about who was a citizen and who's not. What's happening now does feel a little bit different in that we're not at war, there is no emergency. There is no COVID pandemic.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Although, isn't one of the things Trump doing declaring states of emergency on things that are really normal policy disagreements?

Anne Applebaum: Yes. This is what is new, is the declaration of a state of emergency when there is no emergency, so the power that he's using to, for example, lay tariffs is a fake emergency, the power that he's trying to use to deport immigrants is a wartime power from the 18th century. Anytime you see an executive or a government really of any kind talking about an emergency, saying, "What we need to do is suspend the rules, suspend the laws, suspend the Constitution," this is the moment when you should be worried.

In a time of civil war, you can understand martial law. In a time of great natural disaster or a pandemic, then there's an argument for why we need to behave differently, but we're not in a time like that now. The only reason why Trump is using these emergency powers is to bend the law to get around Congress to change the rules and to break them and to act in a lawless way.

That's the piece of this that's worrying, and in some ways, it's more extreme than what's happening in Hungary because Viktor Orbán actually made a huge effort over many years to act within the law. That was one of the ways that he tried to keep power was always he would change the Constitution, he would alter the law. He was very particular about that, partly because Hungary is part of the European Union, which has rules about rule of law. What Trump is doing is seeking to not have the law apply to him at all, not have any rules apply to him at all.

Brian Lehrer: When we continue with Anne Applebaum, we're going to talk about her two Atlantic articles, This is How Autocracies Fail and Kleptocracy, Inc., and they relate to each other. There is a scenario here about how all of this starts to fall apart for Trump. Stay with us.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Few more minutes left before All Of It with Allison with Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic Magazine staff writer and author of the book Autocracy, Inc. As we talk about a few of her recent Atlantic articles that are related to the book called Kleptocracy, Inc., and Why Dictatorships Fail, as well as the one on the US becoming more like Hungary.

Anne, to your article, This is How Autocracies Fail, you wrote it a day after Trump blinked on some of his tariffs policies. That was on April 10th. It happened again yesterday, as I'm sure you saw. Your article then argued that the checks and balances in our Constitution are why autocracies fail, but Trump seems to only be reacting to the stock market. I'm curious if you tie those two things together, checks and balances and the backlash to the tariffs, maybe democratic institutions aren't mattering to him and only the backlash from the investor class is.

Anne Applebaum: Well, democratic institutions aren't mattering to him because the democratic institutions aren't doing anything. That piece was mostly about Congress. As I think I said a few minutes ago, Congress would have the power to say, "You can't use an emergency rule to exert tariff." The power to tax and the power of the budget in this country is in the hands of the legislature, the House and the Senate.

The House and the Senate, who are both controlled by Republicans right now, have refused to check Trump on multiple issues, on the tariffs, also on some of the cuts to programs that especially Elon Musk and his DOGE group have made. They're cutting programs that were approved by Congress, that have been funded by Congress, that they have no right to cut. It's not in their gift. It's not in their ability to go in and cut them. There are even some instances of Musk cutting things that Trump doesn't seem to know about, so there's a question of why does Musk get to decide what to cut and what not to cut?

Brian Lehrer: Right, but the Republican majority in Congress doesn't seem interested in protecting its institutional prerogatives?

Anne Applebaum: No, it's a very strange moment. Of course, the people who wrote the Constitution, who designed the system, I don't think would have imagined that there would be a Congress led by people who don't want to use Congress's power. That wasn't part of the idea. The courts may be able to check him, although we may be just about to run into the limits of that. Many of the cuts made by Musk and DOGE, there's beginning to be a pushback from the courts, the courts saying they're not allowed to be cut.

Of course, the courts have also put a brake on some of the illegal deportations. So far, the Trump administration, it looks like, we still don't know, may well defy the court, even the Supreme Court, on this matter, and then we're in a new kind of constitutional crisis.

Brian Lehrer: Your article called Kleptocracy, Inc., your book that came out last year was called Autocracy, Inc. I think part of your premise in the book was that autocratic countries these days aren't one-man dictatorships, but these kleptocratic systems, that includes Iran, Russia, China. Can you explain that a little bit? We're going to run out of time soon. Tell us if you see the US under Trump and the "oligarchs," moving in that direction.

Anne Applebaum: The book was an argument about how these countries relate to one another. They don't share an ideology, they don't have the same kind of language. Some of them are one-party states, some of them are one-man dictatorships, but they do share a lot of common interests. Once you understand that, a lot of their behavior begins to make sense. A lot of them have-- they're run by very, very rich people who have their money in opaque or unclear ways and who hide it in the international financial system also in opaque or unclear ways. That's one of the things that they share with one another.

We do now have an administration in which people have more conflicts of interest. There's more potential for abusing the law and undermining the law than I think we've ever had certainly in recent, modern history, in the last hundred years. Musk himself, Musk is somebody who is involved in reforming and controlling agencies that also regulate his own companies and, in some cases, subsidize his own companies. He's looking to get access to records and data that might help him in business.

This is a kind of abuse of the state that does look a lot like what happens in dictatorships. You have oligarchs who are close to the system who benefit financially from their proximity to power.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more caller in here. Mark in West Orange, we've got about 30 seconds for you with Anne Applebaum. Hi, you're on WNYC.

Mark: Hello there. I think the issue is less of a democratic issue and more of a socioeconomic issue. Trump was able to tap into the frustration and anger of that group of people who lost their so called manufacturing jobs and are angry at the minority, which would be the elite, the universities. The universities are symbols to these individuals, these groups, because they have failed in their own economic success.

Brian Lehrer: Mark, I'm going to leave it there for time so we can get a response from Anne. I think it implies, at least his call does, a larger question of how do you fight back against a kleptocratic, oligarchic autocracy, if that's what's developing, if it got into power based on popular discontent, the way he describes?1

Anne Applebaum: First of all, I think the support for Trump was a lot wider than just former manufacturing, people who worked in manufacturing and don't anymore. If you just look at the numbers, quite a lot of middle class people voted for him, quite a lot of very rich people voted for him. I think the economic reasons for voting for him are a little bit murky, so I would be cautious on that.

Brian Lehrer: We've got 15 seconds.

Anne Applebaum: Fight back by voting and by participating in public life. Autocrats want you to be apathetic. They want you to stay home. Fight back by being active.

Brian Lehrer: Anne Applebaum, Atlantic Magazine staff writer and author of Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Thank you so much for sharing much of your analysis with us.

Anne Applebaum: Thank you.

[music]

 

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.