TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. "There's A Term For What Musk And Trump Are Doing" (ph). That's the headline of the latest Atlantic magazine article by my guest, Anne Applebaum. The term, she says, is regime change. She writes, "no one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired." She points out during his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump spoke of Election Day as Liberation Day, a moment when people he described as vermin and radical left lunatics would be eliminated from public life.
Before Applebaum started writing about America moving to the right and Trump moving toward authoritarianism, she was writing about how some European countries were becoming authoritarian. Last weekend, she was at the Munich Security Conference where Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth were dismissive of NATO and its importance for American as well as European security, marking a turning point in the post-World War II alliance. It left European leaders shocked and worried.
Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic. She's also a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the School of Advanced International Studies. Her latest book is "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World." Her other books include "Twilight Of Democracy," "Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine" and "Gulag: A History," which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. She's a former Washington Post columnist and member of the editorial board. We recorded our interview yesterday morning.
Anne Applebaum, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: Thanks for having me.
GROSS: You're calling what's happening in the U.S. under the Trump regime, regime change. Can you expand on why you're using that language? In the past, you've used words like illiberal democracy or authoritarianism. The description keeps getting more extreme.
APPLEBAUM: I think it's very important to understand that DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is not primarily interested in efficiency. If it were, it wouldn't have encouraged mass resignations in the civil service, nor is it primarily interested in transparency or accountability or better government. If it were interested in those things, it wouldn't be firing random people. It wouldn't be searching to get control of data for unclear purposes. It wouldn't be dissolving whole departments.
What DOGE is interested in is something that I've seen happen in other countries. What it's doing is altering the nature and values of the American federal civil service. What Trump and people around him have been calling for for a long time is a new kind of politics in America and a new kind of government. And now what we see is them carrying out that desire.
GROSS: I want to talk about that more in-depth. But first, I want to talk about what happened over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference, which you attended to report on. So let's talk about how shocked European leaders were by what JD Vance and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth had to say about NATO and about Europe's far right, and how shocked they were at how the U.S. has sidelined Europe and even Ukraine from the initial negotiations with Russia about ending the war in Ukraine. Hegseth said that European allies should increase military spending and decrease their reliance on Washington and that Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.
Vance said, if NATO wants us to continue supporting them, and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance, why don't you respect American values and respect free speech? You have a lot of contacts in Europe. I mean, your husband is the foreign minister of Poland. You live part-time in Poland and part-time in the U.S. in Washington. What did you hear behind the scenes about the reaction of European leaders to what American leaders said about NATO?
APPLEBAUM: Funny enough, what was important about Vance's speech was actually that he did not speak about NATO. So it's very important to understand the context. He was talking to a large room filled with defense ministers, four-star generals, ex-security analysts, people who care about things like the fiberoptic cables that lie under the Baltic Sea that Russian ships have recently been cutting. These are people who have real world serious concerns. They think about war and peace. They think about the possibility of Russia invading their countries.
Vance got up in that room in front of those people who were expecting him to talk to address those concerns and instead changed the subject to culture wars. And he gave a whole speech, which was almost something that, you know, a Russian propagandist could have given, sort of describing incidents and situations, many of which - some of which I know and I know were mischaracterized or exaggerated, designed to show that European democracies aren't really democratic.
And speaking as a representative of the movement that brought us January 6 and an attempt to overthrow U.S. election, implying that he was more democratic, and his movement was more democratic. And two aspects of this were offensive. One was the fact that he didn't address any of the real security issues. And of course, the second that he implied that the people he was speaking to were not democrats. The import of his speech was to support the alliance for Germany. This is a political party called the AfD, which - Germany is in the middle of very intense elections. Actually, the election's on February 23, so very soon.
The AfD is a far-right party, some of whose members have expressed nostalgia or nuanced admiration for aspects of Nazi Germany. It's also a party that has been notably pro-Russian and anti-American in the past. And that he was expressing support for them was perceived by many of the Germans in the room as an insult.
GROSS: I'm going to stop you there because I just want to play a clip that illustrates the point that you're making. You know, he was talking about Europeans being afraid of free speech and that they were using words like misinformation and disinformation, which he described as ugly Soviet-era words. And so he was talking about that and about how there should be room for, like, all parties because, like, the other parties in Germany won't form an alliance with the far-right party that you've been describing.
APPLEBAUM: Yes. But to be clear, the far-right party has access to television. Its leader has been on television debates. It's on the ballot.
GROSS: Isn't it No. 2 in the polls?
APPLEBAUM: It's No. 2 in the polls. It's - I mean, stipulate there are a number of parties in Germany, so it's - it looks at the moment around 20%, but it is absolutely accessible. You can vote for it. The idea that it's somehow repressed was a - is a figment of JD Vance's imagination.
GROSS: So here's JD Vance, speaking over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference.
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VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: And I believe deeply that there is no security if you're afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.
GROSS: What's your interpretation of what he said there?
APPLEBAUM: It was an insult. He was telling Europeans that he doesn't respect their voting systems, but also he was playing with language. Again, he represents the political movement that sought to overturn an election. So this is a political movement that cares about the people and the voters only when they win. Nevertheless, he was accusing Europeans of somehow not caring about their own voters when their political systems are, in many cases, more democratic and more grassroots-based than ours.
These are - most European countries have multiple political parties. People have more choice in elections. You know, they are smaller countries. People have more direct impact on their national governments when they vote. So the idea that JD Vance was somehow implying that America's more democratic was insulting, and it was understood that way. And as I said, it was also in a speech where he was expected to talk about European security, armies and the war in Ukraine, none of which he mentioned or, if so, only glancingly.
GROSS: When he says, there's nothing America can do for you, is that meant to be some kind of threat or just a kind of, like, moral condescension?
APPLEBAUM: I think in the context, it could be interpreted as a threat. And remembering that a few days earlier, the American secretary of defense had said that Europe will need to begin looking elsewhere for security, had implied that there might not be ongoing security guarantees for Europe, and had implied that the United States might be withdrawing troops from Europe. So, yes, in that context, it felt to many people in the room like a threat.
GROSS: So tell me what you heard from European leaders and your contacts in Europe.
APPLEBAUM: Let me describe to you a conversation I had with a German member of parliament who I've known for some time. I met him at Munich. I had actually seen him at Munich the year before. And he reminded me that a year ago, he said to me, I'm really worried that Europe will now be confronting three autocracies - China, Russia and the United States. And this year, he said to me, I said that last year, and this year, I can see it coming true.
Obviously, the United States is not an autocracy. It's not Russia. It's not China. But the United States is now an adversarial power. It's a country that is not interested in using the alliances that it has built over the last 70 years, 80 years. It is not interested in creating relationships of mutual benefit. It thinks much more like a colonial or an imperial power. It speaks about annexing land and territory. It's a power that Europeans now understand - and I think this weekend really brought that home - is not a friend. And I think that's a really big shift.
But this weekend was a - was really an earthquake. Everybody understood this is a different kind of America. It's a different kind of American administration. It's not one that we've seen or dealt with before, and we need new attitudes.
GROSS: And what are Europe's primary security concerns right now, especially if America either totally distances itself or pulls out of NATO?
APPLEBAUM: I don't think anyone expects the U.S. to pull out of NATO because that would create a kind of drama that I don't think President Trump wants. But I think it's important that people understand that NATO is psychological as much as it is an alliance. NATO is a system of deterrence. It's an agreement that - based on the famous Article 5 of the NATO treaty, it's an agreement that if one country is attacked, then all the other countries in the alliance are obliged to consider coming to its defense.
Once nobody believes anymore in that promise, then even if NATO still exists as an institution and even if it still has troops on the ground, its value as a deterrent does become more limited. So I think the fear is that the United States will begin to say and do things that convince Russia that the deterrent is no longer valid. And that simply means they're vulnerable.
GROSS: Yeah. Ukraine's President Zelenskyy has suggested that Europe create its own military force independent of NATO.
APPLEBAUM: So to be clear, Europeans do have armies. Europeans have contributed half of all the aid that has gone to Ukraine since the war has begun. Many Europeans have invested heavily in their armies and in their militaries over the last three years since the war started. It's not as if they have nothing. But the way NATO is constructed, the way many European military systems are constructed - it is with the idea that the U.S. leads. And that's, of course, been a tremendous advantage to the U.S. It means that Europeans buy American military equipment.
It means they defer to the United States on all kinds of decisions, and the United States is the main decider in all kinds of security and economic and other contexts. If the United States pulls out rapidly or the American deterrent disappears rapidly, then it's not clear that Europe is immediately prepared to defend itself. But there was a meeting in Paris on Monday. That was the beginning of what I think will be a conversation about how Europe is going to respond in this new situation.
GROSS: So during the first Trump administration, President Zelenskyy of Ukraine seemed to try to flatter Trump as a way of courting support. Did he shift away from that while speaking in Munich? Do you see that as a change?
APPLEBAUM: I think up until now, President Zelenskyy has been seeking to flatter Trump. I mean, actually, the idea that Ukraine would sell some rare earth minerals to the United States was his idea. He came up with it last autumn. I think this weekend was a kind of break in which he is beginning to feel that the tactics that worked in the first Trump administration don't work now, and he's beginning to speak more to Europeans.
He's also made it clear that any kind of ceasefire in Ukraine requires two sides. I mean, you need both sides to declare peace. It can't be one way. I think he's also - wants to make it clear that a situation in which Ukraine stops fighting but has no guarantee that the Russians won't invade again next week or next month or next year, isn't really a peace. And he's been making that very clear over the last few days.
GROSS: My guest is Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her latest book is called "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World." We recorded our interview yesterday morning. Later, President Trump was asked about Ukrainian objections to being shut out of the initial talks to end the war. Trump responded by falsely blaming Ukraine for starting the war with Russia. Trump said, quote, "you should have never started it. You could have made a deal."
This morning, we reached out to Anne Applebaum for her reaction. She emailed us this. Quote, "Trump is now repeating Russian propaganda. Ukraine did not start the war. Ukraine has not refused to negotiate. When they tried in 2022, Russia offered only one option - surrender. Russian goals are the same now as at the beginning of the war - remove Ukrainian sovereignty. Make Ukraine into a vassal state. Ukrainians know that Russian occupation would mean death, destruction and the loss of identity. If the U.S. sides with Russia against Ukraine, we will boost Russian allies all over the world - in China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela. Many people in the administration and Congress understand what a disaster this would be for the American economy and American power," unquote. We'll hear more of my interview with Anne Applebaum after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JEFF BABKO'S "NOSTALGIA IS FOR SUCKAS")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with journalist Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she's been writing about Trump's move toward authoritarianism. She was at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend.
You have referred to Musk using X to try to influence the election in Germany in favor of the far-right party. You know, American elections are always being threatened by foreign interference nowadays - from China, from Russia, from their bots, from false information, conspiracy theories. But now Europe is worrying about foreign interference from the U.S. through social media. You wrote a whole article about this - about how it's really, like, threatening European elections. What are some of the biggest concerns now about American threats to European elections?
APPLEBAUM: Most countries don't have elections that run as we run ours in the United States. So we have a kind of Las Vegas. You can - anybody can put as much money as they want into the campaign. Anonymously, you can pay political action committees to use your money in various ways. You can do internet advertising that's not tracked. Anything goes. Other countries have rules. They have rules on campaign finance. They're allowed to have rules on how much money you can spend. My husband ran an election campaign to the European Parliament and his spending limit was 30,000 euros, which is about $30,000. And if you put that in the context of the billion-dollar U.S. campaigns, you can see that there's a big difference.
One of the things that social media - U.S. social media enables is it enables people to get around those rules. European countries are worried that social media algorithms are designed to promote extremes, as they do in the United States - that the algorithms will promote parties of the extreme right or, in some cases, of the extreme left, to the disadvantage of parties in the center, of parties that want consensus, and also of parties that want to stay inside the European Union and that have historically wanted to be aligned with the United States against Russia. So, yes, there is a widespread fear now that social media companies will be used specifically to manipulate and interfere in European conversations in the same way they are seen to have done so in the United States.
GROSS: There is something called the European Union's Digital Services Act, which went into effect last year. What can it do? It's in the middle of an investigation, right?
APPLEBAUM: The Digital Services Act was designed to create greater transparency. So, for example, to force X or to force Facebook to reveal to users how it uses their information, how it uses their data, how it uses their algorithms so that it affects what they see. It's not designed to censor. There wouldn't be a Ministry of Information that decides what can and can't be shown, but there would be more information provided to users. The social media companies in the United States very much resent any kind of European regulation.
And this includes antitrust regulation, which has also affected Microsoft and Google and other companies. And X appears to be particularly worried about the Digital Services Act changing what it's able to do in Europe and changing the political role that Musk seems to want to play inside elections in Europe. One of the things that Europeans believe is that the reason for the intervention is to promote anti-European parties who will work against the EU and who will, therefore, prevent this regulation.
GROSS: Is that an explanation that you think is plausible? 'Cause you wrote that a group of American oligarchs want to undermine EU institutions because these oligarchs don't want to be regulated.
APPLEBAUM: It certainly looks like that's what's happening. There isn't really another plausible explanation for why so many of them have begun to support anti-European political parties. Also, it's true that some of them have said it. Mark Zuckerberg, in a - in some statements he made a month or two ago, said that we need to avoid any kind of regulation. JD Vance said before Christmas in an interview that, you know, Europeans, if they - if they're going to regulate our tech companies, then maybe we shouldn't offer them security through NATO, which - by the way, that quotation has been much repeated and much discussed in Europe over the last couple of months. So comments made by - both from the tech world and from the current administration have led Europeans to believe that this is an important motivation for the Trump administration.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you so we can take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her latest book is called "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World." She's also the author of "Twilight Of Democracy." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MILCHO LEVIEV AND BRUCE STARK'S "NIGHT FIRES")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she's been writing about America's turn to the right and Trump's move toward authoritarianism. She's also written extensively about how some European countries have become or risk becoming authoritarian. Last weekend, she was at the Munich Security Conference, which left many European leaders stunned and worried about Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth's dismissiveness about NATO's importance to America. Her latest books are "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World" and "Twilight Of Democracy."
Do you have any insights into why President Trump wants to distance himself from NATO while he seems to be aligning himself with Putin?
APPLEBAUM: It's not clear to me yet that Trump is aligning himself with Putin. It's clear that he has agreed to many of Putin's explanations of and theories about the war in Ukraine. So he does use some of Putin's language when he talks about the war. He seems to be influenced by Russia's propaganda and by Russia's characterization of the war. He may also be influenced by Vance or by Musk or by others around him who've convinced him that Europe, like other American allies like Canada, are somehow ripping off the United States, that he's - that the U.S. is somehow a victim of Europe. And I would say those are more important than any kind of alignment.
I mean, he - the other thing that's important to understand about President Trump - and I think he wouldn't deny this and nor would anybody else around him - is that he's also capable of changing his mind very quickly. So that's another new characteristic of U.S. foreign policy - that it's unpredictable but unpredictable in a very profound way. I mean, he could be on one side today and on another side tomorrow. And it's very difficult for anybody to plan a strategy around that.
GROSS: And what are the countries that are already leaning toward authoritarianism in Europe now?
APPLEBAUM: The poster child, the country that many people speak about and refer to is Hungary. And Hungary's a very important country for Americans to understand because Hungary is a country that elected democratically a leader, Viktor Orban, who then initially - mostly legally - slowly eliminated many of the checks and balances, many of the institutions of Hungarian democracy, making it impossible for him to lose an election.
So he culled the Hungarian civil service by changing labor laws, replacing professional civil servants with members of his party. He changed the nature of the Hungarian courts over a period of time. He captured Hungarian media, both through putting pressure - financial pressure on independent media, empowering oligarchs and people around him, businessmen who are close to him to buy or take over Hungarian media and then transform their nature. Of course, Hungarian state media he took over. And slowly over time, he also repeatedly changed the constitution, which enabled him to change the way elections are run. And he continually made small alterations that were designed to make sure he couldn't lose.
And this model, the Orban model, is one that has been admired, spoken of positively by many people around Donald Trump. And of course, it has admirers in Europe as well. Right now we have a Slovak government, which is seeking to go down a similar road. And we had in the past, between 2015 and 2023, a Polish government that also - again, whose leaders openly admired Orban. They talked about building Budapest in Warsaw and sought really to take a similar path.
GROSS: You mentioned that some people on the right in America are very supportive of Orban and admire him. He spoke to one of the CPAC conferences, the Conservative Political Action Conference. And at one of those conferences, he said Hungary is actually an incubator, where experiments are done on the future of conservative politics. Hungary is the place where we didn't just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it. Do you think the Trump administration has taken some actions from the Orban playbook?
APPLEBAUM: The Trump administration has absolutely taken actions from the Orban playbook. We know, for example, Project 2025, which is - was a kind of blueprint written by the think tank The Heritage Foundation for some of what's happening now, for the takeover of institutions of the state - we know that was heavily influenced by Hungarians. We know that Viktor Orban frequently met Trump in the - during the campaign. Some of his advisers and ministers have also met with people in the Trump administration and around it. Tucker Carlson has extensive, long relations with the Hungarian government and has spoken in Budapest, and he's an influential figure in the Trump administration, too. So, yeah, we know that Hungary is a kind of model for many people.
I mean, I would draw your attention to one way in which Hungary is a model. Hungary has also put an enormous amount of pressure on universities, cutting their budgets, forcing them to eliminate certain kinds of programs. I think anything with the word gender in it had to be eliminated. Gender studies or women's studies had to be taken out of Hungarian curriculums if you wanted to have any state money. And right now many U.S. universities are afraid that that same kind of pressure will be applied on them, too. So you can see that many things that were done in Hungary can and will be imitated in the United States.
GROSS: Orban has really advocated on the far-right side of the culture wars, and he said the woke movement and gender ideology are exactly what communism and Marxism used to be. They artificially cut the nation into minorities in order to spark strife among the groups.
APPLEBAUM: One of the strange thing is is there was - I didn't know what he's talking about. I mean, there is no woke movement in Hungary. I mean, he - most of what he...
GROSS: Yeah. I was wondering about that.
APPLEBAUM: No, no. He borrowed the American culture war and used it in Hungary as a way of attacking his enemies. It was one of the things that he did that Hungarians found very strange but seems to have worked. You know, he also ran an anti-immigrant campaign, even though Hungary has very, very few immigrants, so the immigrants were mostly fictitious. I mean, at least in the United States, we have real immigrants. And so there's a real problem, and you can talk about realistically how to solve it. In Hungary, it was mostly fiction.
But he used that language, and one of the reasons he did it, I think, was to create an international coalition around himself. He spent a lot of time and invested a lot of money in bringing foreign conservatives from Britain, from the United States, from other countries to Budapest. He created a special specific think tank called the Danube Institute, which was designed to do exactly that. He spent a lot of time projecting Hungarian ideas into other places, and one of his ideas for how he would stay in power - in other words, although he'd broken many rules, and although he was in violation of EU standards of judicial independence, one of the ways he thought he would stay in power was by finding allies outside of Hungary. And he found many inside the United States but also in some other European countries.
GROSS: And he endorsed Trump in 2016. I don't know if he said anything in 2020 or 2024. But it sounds like not only is the right borrowing from the Orban playbook, but Orban is borrowing from the far-right playbook in America.
APPLEBAUM: It's - sure. It's a two-way project. I mean, I think it's also important maybe at this point to stress that the project of destroying your democracy as an elected leader is something that you don't have to be right wing in order to do. So this is more or less the same kind of playbook that Hugo Chavez used in Venezuela. You know, he also famously sacked civil servants. There was a moment when he sacked 19,000 employees of the Venezuelan state oil company and replaced them with loyalists, who wound up destroying the company. He also attacked judges, media and so on.
There's actually a - the playbook is neither right wing nor left wing. It's a playbook about undermining democracy, and it's one that has - is most often carried out by democratically elected leaders. But these are democratically elected leaders who characterize themselves or describe themselves as deserving of no opposition. So I am the true Hungarian, or I am the only real American. Or I speak for the people, and you only speak for elites and foreigners. Or I speak for real people, real Americans, and my opponents are radical-left lunatics or vermin. But it's a known playbook. It's unfolded in many other countries. You know, I could name Turkey. I could name India. You can point around the world and find a large number of them.
Nowadays, most democracies fail through these kinds of tactics and not through a coup d'etat. You know, we have - our imagination of a coup or a regime change is that there are tanks and violence, and, you know, somebody shoots up the chandelier in the presidential palace. Actually, nowadays, that's not how democracies fail. They fail through attacks on institutions coming from within.
GROSS: My guest is journalist Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she's been writing about America's turn toward the right and Trump's move toward authoritarianism. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JULIAN LAGE GROUP'S "IOWA TAKEN")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with journalist Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she's been writing about Trump's move toward authoritarianism. Her latest book is called "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World."
Let's look at Poland. Your husband is the foreign minister of Poland, and you're very familiar with Polish politics. You live part time in Poland and part time in Washington, D.C. Poland had moved from a hard-won democracy to approaching authoritarianism, and then it moved back to democracy. How did it return to democracy? Was it through resistance to authoritarianism, through just a vote? Like, what happened to return it?
APPLEBAUM: So in Poland, we had exactly this kind of attempted illiberal takeover of the state, and it was partly successful. The destruction of the civil service happened. The politicization of a part of the judiciary happened. The ruling party was never able to completely undermine or destroy the opposition. And also, one of the effects of it being in power for eight years was that it became very corrupt.
So one of the things that happens when you eliminate journalists and, you know, corrupt the judges and make it hard for people to understand what the government is doing is that people naturally start trying to steal. And that happened in Poland on a large scale, and people began to see it. And that offered an opening, if you will, for the political opposition, which had been in a kind of disarray after the initial victory of this - it's called the Law and Justice party. And they took advantage of anger about corruption and anger about economic failure and began to build a new coalition.
I think maybe it's - couple things worth saying about Poland. One is that the autocratic ruling party was defeated at an election because of a broad coalition. There were three parties - center left, center right and liberal. And it also won because of a huge effort to mobilize. They mobilized enormous numbers of young people to vote, women. I mean, there's another aspect, which is that Poland had a - the previous party passed an unusually harsh abortion law, abortion being - having been illegal in Poland for a long time, but one that meant that even women who had medical issues with birth were forced to give birth, and some of them began to die. So that became a major political issue as well. But they were able to mobilize people.
Poland had not destroyed its electoral system. In other words, the election was fair in the sense that the people counting the votes were counting them fairly. I mean, it was unfair in other ways. But there was enough mobilization, there was enough anger, and there was a clear enough narrative that allowed pretty disparate parties to come together and defeat at the polls the Law and Justice party.
GROSS: So we're seeing in America right now a lot of people in civil service - and now I'm talking about ones who aren't being fired - they're having to decide whether they should stay in their jobs and carry out orders, thus sacrificing their own principles of ethics and good government, or resign. But then they risk having their position either not filled or filled by somebody who will be pressured to just conform to orders that are not good government kind of orders. Did that happen in Poland, where people had to make really tough decisions about what to do?
APPLEBAUM: It did happen in Poland. I think, actually, the change in the United States is more dramatic from a civil service that's loyal to the Constitution and to the country and to the rule of law into a civil service that's loyal to a single person or political party. You know, in Poland, we didn't have those kinds of civil service traditions that went back a hundred years, so it wasn't as dramatic. But, yes, there were people who had to make decisions about whether to stay, whether to protest. Many people were fired. They lost their jobs. One of the long-term effects is that there are a lot of weaknesses in Polish government. But, yeah - no, when you have a change like that, from one kind of system to another, that will leave people loyal to the old system with pretty dramatic choices.
GROSS: You trace the modern civil service system back to Teddy Roosevelt, who reformed it. What was it like before?
APPLEBAUM: So before Teddy Roosevelt, we had something called the spoils system, or patronage. And by the way, it's something that most countries have, I would guess, on the planet. And that meant that all civil servants were hired and fired according to who was the president. It meant that the civil service was often, you know, people's cousins or people's sister-in-law, or, you know, party loyalists who needed jobs and who could be given them, at least for the time being. The point of working for the government was not to prevent Americans from being poisoned by air pollution or to make sure that children got vaccines. The point of working for the government was to get a salary and be loyal to whichever president or whichever political movement had put you there.
Patronage systems are famously corrupt because, again, the people who are in those jobs are only in them because they're being paid. And they're also famously inefficient because the point is that people are hired not for their expertise or their skills, but they're hired for their political loyalties.
Teddy Roosevelt was one of many - although he was a leading voice - in the 19th century of arguing that this system was bad for America and that it should end. And so the idea that the civil service should be a meritocracy - that, in some cases, there should be exams or standards that determine who gets hired and who gets promoted - this all dates from that era, this - kind of the civil service reform movement. And we're so used to it in America that we don't even notice it. We just assume that's what civil servants are, and that's what they do. But, of course, you can end this system just as you began it. And you could end the legal protections that civil servants enjoy, and you could undermine or destroy their ethos, this - as I said, this ethos of neutrality and patriotism and loyalty to the rule of law.
GROSS: You wrote that if the Trump administration succeeds in destroying the civil service system, the universities are next. What leads you to say that?
APPLEBAUM: Some of the tactics that have already been used against the civil service, so these abrupt, very harsh cuts in federal funding, we've - that's already happened. So the National Institutes for Health, NIH, already made very big cuts in funding of biomedical research, which a handful of big research universities noticed immediately. Orders to alter or remove so-called DEI programs - or anything that mentions gender or diversity or minorities - from campuses are already beginning to filter down. I believe it was the National Science Foundation that has produced a list of suspect words to look for in grant applications and project applications, you know, that would cause red flags. And the words included are words like diversity and women. So anybody who's studying something that could be construed as anything to do with diversity or minorities, that this - these kinds of projects could be stopped.
And, of course, university presidents and administrators, including some that I've spoken to, are afraid that this could go farther - in other words, that federal funding could be used as a tool to alter the shape of university departments or tell universities what they can and can't teach. And as I said a little bit earlier, this is something that has been done in other places. This is what happened in Hungary, and it could happen in the United States.
GROSS: Trump pardoned leaders of far-right groups that organized January 6 and were convicted of sedition, seditious conspiracy. One of those groups, the Proud Boys - here's what the Anti-Defamation League has to say about them. The group serves as a tent for misogynistic, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies and other forms of hate. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the Proud Boys as a hate group. So the leaders of that group were pardoned by Trump. Can you talk about the contrast between pardoning hate groups and being against diversity, equity and inclusion?
APPLEBAUM: The Trump administration is seeking to redefine what American basic values are - what we think is good and bad and, you know, whose voices are heard and whose voices are suppressed. And they have decided that the groups who backed January 6 - and this includes some on the far right and white supremacists and so on, and people who would not be offended by you saying that's what they are - are now proud members of the Trump coalition, and people who have promoted diversity are not. And so I think they're seeking to redefine our values and redefine what it means to be, you know, a central part of the American project.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she's been writing about America's turn toward the right and Trump's move toward authoritarianism. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADRIAN YOUNGE & ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD'S "BETTER ENDEAVOR")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with journalist Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she's been writing about Trump's move toward authoritarianism. She was at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend. Her latest book is called "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World."
You're a journalist, and you've been writing critically about Trump since 2016 or 2015. Trump is attacking the press. He's always attacked the press. I mean, in his first term, the press was the enemy of the people. But now it's escalating. What are some of your concerns about the attack on the press and where it might lead to for the press?
APPLEBAUM: My concerns about the press aren't at the moment really personal. My real concern is about big media companies, television companies, whose owners have other interests. And this is one of the ways in which media in other illiberal democracies, you know, or in other declining democracies have been affected. So if you have somebody who owns a large television station but who's also interested in investing in something else that - for which he needs a government license, then you could see him needing to genuflect to the ruling party or to the leader, you know.
And we already have an example of that, which is Jeff Bezos, who's the owner of The Washington Post, who has - seems to be making some decisions or his newspaper is making some decisions that accommodate the Trump administration. Bezos has many other interests in cloud computing and space travel, all kinds of things, for all of which he would need, in some cases, government cooperation or funding. And so his - he may also, in addition to that, have - feel ideologically aligned with the Trump administration. That I don't know and can't speak to. But clearly, he has mixed motives, and there are other media owners who - of whom you could say the same. And that, in a way, is the most dangerous thing because, you know, one journalist can be replaced or can be brave or, you know, there are many - have all kinds of options. But it's when the companies begin to censor themselves or begin to change the way they show the news because of their owner's other interests.
GROSS: The White House blocked the AP, the Associated Press, from the Oval Office and from Air Force One because the wire service used Gulf of Mexico and not Gulf of America in its reporting. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America seems like an odd and maybe not very important thing. But do you see that as part of, like, a loyalty test? Like, who's going to say it my way, the Gulf of America, and who's going to defy me and say Gulf of Mexico?
APPLEBAUM: I do think it's a kind of test, yes. And very often, these tests are trivial. The test is whether you can make a news organization change one of its policies. And if you can make it change that policy, then maybe you can make it change other policies. Also, all the other news organizations will be watching to see what AP does, and they will understand from AP's decision how much freedom they have. So it's about creating a kind of chilling atmosphere, about making journalists think twice and making media owners think twice about decisions that they make and the language that they use. So, yes, it's an attempt to chill the atmosphere.
GROSS: Do you have any role models for continuing to report in a time that can be very chilling for journalists?
APPLEBAUM: Oh, there's so many. You know, the world is so full of brave people, I mean, brave reporters, brave activists, people who try to tell the truth in Russia, people who have been active for women's rights in Iran. You know, the kinds of threats that we face as Americans are pretty trivial compared to the brutality that people have faced in full dictatorships.
You know, I - in my life, I've met so many very, very brave people in so many different kinds of countries. I'm pretty confident that Americans will be just as brave. And so maybe that's the flip side of this story is that, you know, we've been talking about people who'll be cowed or people who'll be scared. I mean, there are going to be a lot of people who are brave and who will want to tell the truth and continue to expose lies and continue to write just freely about the government the way they've written freely about all governments - you know, Joe Biden's government or Barack Obama's government. I'm pretty confident there'll be plenty of Americans who will do that.
GROSS: Anne Applebaum, thank you so much for coming back to FRESH AIR.
APPLEBAUM: Thank you.
GROSS: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her latest book is "Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World."
Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, Rich Benjamin, the grandson of a popular Haitian labor leader who became president of Haiti in 1957 but was overthrown by a military coup after 19 days. Benjamin will talk about getting classified documents showing the U.S. role in the coup, and we'll hear about Benjamin's experiences as a Black gay Haitian American who came out during the AIDS epidemic. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.
FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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