This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Think back two months. Imagine it’s September. You’re reading the Substack of some resistance-era liberal. They’re ranting about the dangers of the Orange Man coming back. “Imagine what a second term is going to be like,” they write. “You’re going to have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary. Tulsi Gabbard is going to lead the intelligence services. Matt Gaetz is going to be the attorney general. Maybe Donald Trump is going to make a ‘Fox & Friends’ host secretary of defense.”
I think most people reading that would have said: Oh, come on! Donald Trump might be a menace. He is a menace. But that’s a parody of what a Trump-hating liberal imagines a Trump administration is going to be. Let’s be real about this.
But here we are in the real, and that is not what a Trump-hating liberal imagines a Trump administration is going to be. This is what Donald Trump imagines a Trump administration is going to be. It is what he is trying to make it be.
One of the challenging things about covering Donald Trump is that it is hard to talk about him without sounding unhinged — and that is because he acts in ways that are by any reasonable standard unhinged.
It is this remarkable transference Trump is able to effectuate. He makes his opponents look like rabid antagonists by making them respond to a reality that leaves no room for neutrality, no room for a wait-and-see open-mindedness. He creates a wild reality — and then you sound wild simply describing it.
For me, the Rubicon here was Gaetz. I’ve been watching to see what timeline we’re in. I don’t think I’ve been anything but cleareyed about the dangers of Donald Trump. I did a whole pre-election piece arguing that Trump’s primary trait as a person is disinhibition — but that in his first term, he was inhibited by a Republican Party, by a White House staff, by a civil service that effectively inhibited him. That kept the worst things he wanted to do from happening.
And the thing that I warned about — the thing that I worried about — is that in the second term that wouldn’t be there. And so I’ve been watching to see: Well, what does the second term look like? What kind of people are in it? What is Donald Trump trying to do?
And this looks like the bad timeline. What we’re seeing here is that in the areas of government where Trump cares most about full control — the military, the intelligence services, the Department of Justice — he is trying to do what he could not do last time: He is trying to put true lackeys and loyalists in charge. People who have no loyalty aside from their loyalty to him. No patron aside from him. No viable path in politics or public service aside from him. And these are the parts of the government that can be weaponized most dangerously. And even if Matt Gaetz is rejected or withdrawn, as he very well may be, the intention is there.
Trump’s other lackeys and loyalists can certainly find him a hatchet man who isn’t known around Washington for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old and for burning every bridge he had in the traditional Republican Party.
I’ve heard some people say that the saving grace of these appointments is that these people, at least in the agencies they are trying to run, they’re inexperienced. They’re ridiculous. They’re incompetent. They won’t get anything done. They might even fail to win confirmation.
That is not a saving grace. That is a signal. In other countries, and at other times, when would-be authoritarians try to consolidate power, they do so by placing fools and jesters into positions of extraordinary power.
The absurdity is a cloak. The fact that they are underestimated is a feature. The loyalty they have to the strongman is the thing. And no one is more loyal than someone that the rest of society looks down on. No one is more loyal than someone who would never get this kind of chance, this opportunity, this power under any other person.
Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author who is also a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is an expert on authoritarianism, both in its past and present forms, and the author of a new book, “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.”
EZRA KLEIN: Somebody was saying to me the other day that when I’m back on Twitter, they know things are really bad. And that’s how I feel about having you on this show — that when you’re back on the show, things are really quite bad. I’m sorry to have put you into a Horseman of the Apocalypse bucket, but here you are.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: [Laughs] Thanks for that. Is it a backhanded compliment? I’m not sure.
It’s a condemnation of the space we find ourselves in.
So a lot of people I know — I think myself, too — have been on a bit of an emotional roller coaster in the past few weeks. I think Trump’s winning was greeted with a surprising amount of resignation, probably compared to 2016.
Then the first appointments from him that we began to hear about were kind of straightforward ones: Marco Rubio for secretary of state, Elise Stefanik for the United Nations, Susie Wiles for chief of staff, a government efficiency commission with Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk.
And then you started to get this turn: Pete Hegseth, “Fox & Friends” host, for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.
And the one that really felt like the gut punch was Matt Gaetz for Department of Justice. And all of a sudden these people have been feeling kind of resigned, tipped back into that total overwhelming alarm — that resistance feeling they remembered from 2016. I’m curious what your pathway through this has been.
So, for me, Trump’s campaign was one of the most extreme campaigns we’ve ever had in American history. And the last set of appointments was an indication that if he can, this is what he will do. The point of appointing Matt Gaetz is so that Matt Gaetz will break the rules of the Department of Justice.
Instead of using it to look for people who are breaking the law in accordance with the Constitution, he will use it to prosecute or persecute or harass Trump’s enemies and “the enemies of the people.” And so when I saw that, that’s what I thought. I thought: Right. This is the explanation. He was using that language for a reason — because it represents what he really thinks.
There was a tendency, even among people who weren’t going to vote for him, but among a lot of people who did vote for him, including some that I know, to say: This is just the way Trump talks. He’s crazy. He just talks like this. It doesn’t have any meaning.
And I think what we’ve learned in the last 48 hours or 72 hours — I’m losing track of how many hours it is — is: No, he does mean it. He wants to break the intelligence agencies by appointing Gabbard. He wants to break other kinds of government agencies — which would explain the appointment of Kennedy.
He is interested in going after generals who he feels dissed him or didn’t respect him or didn’t obey him the first time he was president — and that was why you would appoint somebody like a Fox News host to be secretary of defense. So I think he’s now doing what he said he was going do.
This reminded me of when Trump forced Sean Spicer to go out in 2017 and say Trump had the largest inaugural crowd ever — which we could see was not true from photos.
A point people made was that this kind of thing is a loyalty test — making people do something that they know is going to humiliate them, that they know is going to go against both their values and the way they have traditionally seen themselves and acted in the world.
The Gaetz pick, in particular, felt like that on a larger scale, felt like Trump forcing this on Senate Republicans who do not like Matt Gaetz, who view him with complete contempt, and forcing him on the Republican Party more broadly. Trump could have picked a hatchet man whose name nobody knew. He picked the one who would outrage not just Democrats but actually Republicans — and in doing that force them to really choose a side.
Yeah, I think that’s right. Very often this is what — if you look at other autocratic regimes in other places — very often it’s the forcing of people to adhere to a conspiracy theory or say things, as you say, that are patently untrue. That’s the loyalty test. And hitherto in the Republican Party, the loyalty test was: Are you willing to say that the 2020 election was stolen?
That has functioned as the loyalty test up until now. But you’re right: I think that the appointment of Matt Gaetz is another, maybe more severe one, because Gaetz is somebody who can break all boundaries. He breaks the definition of what an attorney general is supposed to be, what kind of person it is, and also that he would be — because he has no other allies, he has no friends in the Republican Party — he would be loyal only to Trump.
He would not have any other loyalties: not to the party, not to the Congress, not to the Constitution. He would be loyal to Trump. And so I think that’s another piece of the story, too.
You’ve mentioned Trump has been very clear in his intention to go after his enemies to seek vengeance. In a world where you have Matt Gaetz or someone who is not as well known but is similarly loyal to Matt Gaetz running the Department of Justice: What might that look like? On what grounds would he go after his enemies? How would he run that through an American court system? To what degree is that something that is actually in his power?
So some of it might not go through the court system. There could be an Internal Revenue Service investigation.
That’s happened in American history before, by the way, so it’s not like it’s unheard of. There could be a set of congressional hearings that were designed to harass somebody or to make them uncomfortable. There could be an attempt to take away a television license. There could be libel suits or other kinds of lawsuits.
This is the playbook that was run against people who were doing research into disinformation and content moderation: That was a combination of lawsuits plus a congressional committee plus a certain amount of just plain online harassment. You could imagine Trump using some arm of the government to investigate or attack someone or put them on the front page.
And then you could imagine a kind of MAGA online army harassing them, as well. For example, what happens in Mexico: The previous president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, used to have these huge press conferences where he would have enemies of the day and he would attack somebody and put their picture up and quotations from them on a screen.
And then what would happen the following day is that person would be overwhelmed and deluged by the president’s online bot army, some of which may have been controlled by the president. Some might have just been volunteers — people who admired and liked him.
There could also be an F.B.I. investigation. There could be a Department of Justice prosecution. And remember, the F.B.I. has huge powers: It could tap your phone. It can look at your email. It can talk to all your friends. It could recruit informers.
But some of it could just be harassment. If they wanted to, the government can waste your time. It can make it difficult for you to do your job. It can create chaos in your life. But if somebody were doing it in a deliberate and systematic way and focusing it on Trump’s enemies, then you could disable people. You could make it impossible for them to live their lives and do their jobs.
I’ve been thinking about something Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” — another one of these books that when you begin quoting it, you know things are not going great — which is: “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
Talk to me a bit about that quote historically, and then how and whether you see it applying in the moment.
So, of course, the quote comes from a book in which she talks about history. She talks about the history of both of the Nazi regime and also of the Soviet regime. And those were both one-party states where there were loyalty tests and where people were given jobs and promoted into power, not for being good at something — for being an excellent manager or a superb policymaker. But were given jobs because of their level of their loyalty to the leader. And that is one of the things that characterizes an authoritarian regime.
If you look around the world now and you look at both authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes, you see that’s how it works. I lived in Poland between 2015 and last year, when we had an autocratic populist government that didn’t develop into full-blown authoritarianism, but it did replace people according to whether or not they were loyal. And they succeeded in degrading the quality of the civil service and of the state.
And I think this gets to a deeper problem, which I think will also begin to play itself out, which is: What is the purpose of government? Why do we have a civil service? What do all these people in Washington do? Are they there to solve problems? To improve the lives of Americans? That’s why we send them there. That’s what we’re paying them to do.
Or could they be used in a different way? Could they be used to do the bidding of the president? In some countries, it’s to make the president rich, or in other countries, it’s to make the president popular. Or it’s to carry out policies that are one way or another in the interest of the president.
So one could talk about using the Food and Drug Administration to approve and disapprove drugs in a way that benefited friends of the president or which benefited the president’s policy interests. If the point of the Department of Justice is not justice and is something completely different, then Matt Gaetz is the perfect person for it.
If the point of the Federal Communications Commission is not to regulate communications but to punish the president’s enemies in the media, then it, too, begins to have a different purpose. And that’s why all of these questions about personnel — and again: What’s the purpose of all these institutions that we have, all these three-letter agencies in Washington?
What are they for? Are they for Trump? Are they for Americans?
One read I had of the procession of appointments — the sort of divergence from the normal Republicans, the people who looked like a hypothetical Ron DeSantis administration, and then the swerve — was that Trump was happy to do normal appointments, to listen to the advice of the people around him for the things he didn’t care about all that much: state and United Nations and agriculture and so on.
But when it came to what he did care about — whether he controlled the military, whether he controlled the Justice Department, whether he controlled the intelligence services: He wanted people who would be absolutely sure those agencies and bureaucracies would do what he wants. And clearly, people around Donald Trump would have said: You know, this Matt Gaetz thing is not a good idea. This is going to look bad. You might not even get him confirmed.
Probably a very similar thing with Pete Hagseth. You can like him on “Fox & Friends” just fine, but it would be very weird if Joe Biden had elevated a cast member of “Morning Joe” to run the Defense Department.
And so Trump has clearly stopped listening to advice here. And I suspect it’s because he really cares about this set of things. Which to me, when I looked at it, as somebody who tries to be honest with myself about what timeline we’re living in: Trump really trying to consolidate authority over the military, the Justice Department and the intelligence services is the darker timeline, is the more authoritarian timeline.
Yeah. It’s important to say here, I think, that most democracies nowadays in the world — there’s some exceptions — but most of them don’t fail because of a coup d’état or a military coup or colonels and rushing into the presidential palace and shooting up the chandelier. That’s not usually what happens.
What usually happens is that an elected, legitimate leader enters office with a goal of taking over the state, of changing the nature of its institutions and using them to benefit him so that he doesn’t lose the election next time.
If we were talking about Russia, we would be talking about the power agencies: this group of intelligence, security, military and justice. These are the agencies that control both surveillance as well as control use of violence. These are the agencies that have the tools to investigate and prosecute people. They’re the agencies that — yes, I think if you’re truly bent on retribution, which he repeatedly, repeatedly, said that he was — repeatedly — these are exactly the agencies you would care about.
“Retribution” is a useful word here. Because the thing that you will hear from people around Donald Trump is: Oh, you liberals are fine with neutrality when it’s us in power, but this is what you did to him.
And to play out their narrative for a minute: Trump came in. There was this long-running investigation of his ties to Russia, complete with many leaks from within the intelligence services. There was a sense that the Defense Department and the military were in some cases not really following Donald Trump’s orders, were fooling him about troop deployments.
And in the D.O.J.: Trump feels he left office and was prosecuted in a way no previous president had been: a classified documents prosecution from within the D.O.J. right from the federal government — but also a prosecution in New York on a fairly novel legal theory, or an unusual legal theory, to sort of bump up his hiding of payments to Stormy Daniels into a campaign-finance felony.
So to them this is turnabout: that the neutrality that you and I are discussing here wasn’t there. It was more bureaucratically hidden. Everything went through more of a process, but these exact agencies were turned on him and his presidency.
And this is simply the opposite of that.
The difficulty is — and here I will not convince probably any supporters of the president-elect who are listening — but the difficulty is that Trump was violating rules and did appear during the campaign to be a national security risk. And there was Russian intervention in the campaign in the sense that there was a Russian propaganda campaign that was using American social media.
And that was fully proven. It was in Robert S. Mueller’s report. It was in the Senate intelligence report afterward. And on Jan. 6, Trump did break the law in an unusual and violent and startling and unconstitutional way. And one of the criticisms that we’re going to hear of the Biden administration well into the future — maybe it will be in history books — is that Biden’s Department of Justice was too meticulous and was too slow and failed to convict Trump for what was a breach of the law and a breach of the Constitution that we all saw.
The documents were removed from the White House and kept at Mar a Lago — again, there is no precedent in American history for that scale of removal of secrets and then lying to the F.B.I. about it. And so it’s very hard to know how it would have been possible for the F.B.I. not to investigate it. And so we’re going to have to draw a line between what were legitimate investigations, which were launched after dubious or criminal behavior, and investigations that are going to be based on completely false evidence.
But I concede, I agree with you, that this may not satisfy the president-elect’s supporters.
A dynamic that seems intrinsic to Trump — and I’m curious how common it is in your international historical research — is that by acting in extraordinary ways, criminal ways at times, but also just outrageous ways — ways to break norms, rules, procedures — he forces institutions that want to be neutral and want to have nothing to do with turning on a current or former president to make choices that either allow him to get away with extraordinary behavior or make the institution, itself, seem partisan, polarized, a tool being wielded against Donald Trump.
You can look at this with the prosecutions against him. You can look at it with the social media companies that had to make this choice after the 2020 election of whether you ban Donald Trump — which is a wild act — or you allow him to potentially incite mob violence and insurrection on your platforms.
This goes for the intelligence agencies that have to think about what is happening — if there appears to be organized foreign interference in American elections. And then I think this is true for the press in a way. It’s a bit of an impossible bind.
I agree with that. And remember that all of that was accompanied by a drumbeat of attacks on those institutions.
This expression “the deep state” that has been repeatedly used by Trump and by everybody around him: What is the deep state? The deep state is civil servants and ordinary Americans who get paid a lot less than people in Silicon Valley and go to work every day because they think they’re doing something good for their country. But they’ve been characterized and demonized as somehow enemies. Again, they’re “the enemies within” or “the enemies of the people.”
And you can make the same argument about the media. If the leader of one of our political parties — and when, of course, he was the president for a term, as well — repeatedly tells people the media is lying, the media is lying: The purpose of that rhetoric, along with that behavior that you’ve just described, is to reduce trust and to make people feel less affinity for — and not to see — the value of those institutions. Unfortunately, I think it’s been very successful.
You mentioned Silicon Valley. And something you’ve said before, is that you found the role that Elon Musk has played in the election and now seems to be playing in the nascent second Trump administration particularly striking and telling. Why?
First of all, if you’ve spent as much time both in Russia and writing about Russia as I have, you immediately see Musk as a new kind of oligarch — a kind of Russian oligarch.
Some of these things are matters of degree. There have always been business people who are close to power or who are friends with the president or who are insiders in the White House. But I don’t think we’ve seen someone with the kinds of conflicts of interest that Musk has being a direct adviser to the president and leading some kind of commission.
Actually, we don’t know what the commission is yet — what it will do or the kind of powers it will have — but leading some kind of commission whose decisions could presumably have direct impact on Musk’s companies. So he would be there directly making government policy that affects the way his companies work and maybe how much money he makes.
And just to note something interesting on that: This commission is being built as an outside government agency. Because typically, if Elon Musk wanted to become Treasury secretary, he would have to divest —
Of course.
There are all kinds of rules about what you can be doing and not doing while working for the government. And so they’re building this special space for him, where it doesn’t seem to be that the committee will be very powerful in a statutory way, but it can be very powerful in terms of an advisory way.
And they’re building it so he doesn’t have to make the decisions another rich guy would make going into government. Gary Cohn had to make a bunch of decisions about leaving Goldman Sachs in order to be the National Economic Council director. And Musk is operating now in this ambiguous role where he gets to play both sides of the field.
Right. Well, that’s the kind of role that you would expect a billionaire to play in Russia. They would be, on the one hand, owners of a private company, on the other hand, a government insider making policy — and you can’t distinguish between them. And we have inside the U. S. government this whole set of rules and norms and even institutions, inspectors general and rules about conflicts of interest that are specifically designed to prevent that — specifically — as a way of avoiding corruption and keeping the state relatively clean.
I haven’t done a thorough look. I’m going to sometime in the next few weeks look back into U.S. history and see if I can find some more distant precedent. I don’t think since World War II, at least, there’s been anybody with that kind of role.
There’s another thing that also has made Musk unique and that is going to have big international significance: He has changed the definition of what a social media platform is, as well.
Hitherto, social media platforms have been arguing that they are not publishers — they are platforms. Anybody can put their stuff on them, and their job is simply to distribute that material, and they aren’t actors with an ideology. That’s what they claimed. Musk has now very, very openly and clearly transformed Twitter into a political tool.
He used his algorithm and decisions about who was boosted and who got blue checks, and so on, on his platform in order to elect someone president. So he has proved that you can do that. And now one of the questions is also going to be — and a conversation has already started, I’ve heard it from around the world — is: Will he now begin to do that in other countries?
Will he be an actor in the French elections? Will he be an actor in the German elections? That’s now going to become an issue that Europeans — really anywhere where Twitter is legal — and it’s not legal in a number of places, including Russia and China. But having done that, he’s also given himself another kind of power.
So he’s not merely Rupert Murdoch publishing news the way he likes to see it on The Wall Street Journal. He has an algorithm that is distributing news so that it determines what people see in a way designed to influence them and change the way that they perceive the world. If the election had a different outcome, we might have had a national conversation about whether that’s what we want social media platforms to be — but, of course, now that conversation won’t happen.
I’ve been trying to think about Twitter after the election and what analogy it fits into. Because it’s very common part of a society descending into some kind of more authoritarian or competitive authoritarian system — that you will have the party trying to consolidate power building or taking control of media operations.
And Musk has always been very clear that he bought Twitter in order to take control of a very, very influential media platform for the right. And he used it in that way in the election. And on the other hand, Twitter is not something that he exactly controls in that fashion. He certainly boosts himself very, very high on it.
And some right-wing influencers seem to be getting a bump from him. And it’s also a very chaotic place. And it’s hard for me to look at the election and see a huge Twitter effect. When you look at the swings in the election, it doesn’t seem to me primarily about where people are using Twitter.
And there’s also this other, I think, dynamic of: It remains a contested space. So how do you think about that? And then also as somebody who is on Twitter, how do you think about being there?
I’ll answer that one first. I’m now very ambivalent. I really thought up until almost a few days ago that it was worth staying there. And that the things in the arguments that I care about, it’s worth publishing my journalism or boosting other people’s journalism, which is mostly what I do on Twitter. I thought it was worth it.
And now I’m wondering. It’s not that it will affect Musk’s bottom line if I leave or don’t leave. Those arguments are a bit silly. But if the primary purpose of it, as I believe, is now to try to shape narratives, to try to shape the way people perceive and read journalism, then I have to ask whether, first of all, what I’m going to learn from it. Am I going to see what I want to see? Am I going to find, read the people I want to read?
And second, if every time I post something, I receive in response a kind of torrent of invective and insults — is that really worth it? Have I achieved anything by doing that? I don’t know the answer yet. I will see.
I think you’re right, though — your broader point about authoritarians seeking control of the information space. I think Twitter is only one piece of that.
Remember that when Musk bought Twitter, it was part of a kind of campaign that had different aspects. There was a congressional piece of it: U.S. Representative Jim Jordan’s so-called weaponization of government committee. There were campaigns in other places against the so-called censorship industrial complex.
There was a campaign against social media moderation, against the idea that there was such a thing as extreme speech, against the idea that platforms could have a policy about disinformation and stick to it and carry it out. And so in a way what we saw in 2024: Everybody I know who does research on disinformation and online propaganda — everybody said that the 2024 election, in all forms, was much, much worse than the 2020 election.
As a result of this long campaign — and Musk was a pretty central figure to that: If you remember the Twitter files, he allowed so-called researchers to cherry-pick Twitter’s documents and to try to prove that Twitter had been censoring people. They didn’t actually ever prove anything, and it wasn’t remotely professional.
Nevertheless, it was part of that argument. So in a way, he won that argument.
I’m not saying hypocrisy is the worst political sin, but it is always a telling one. It is such canon on the right that the media treated the Hunter Biden laptop story — and that Twitter specifically in choosing to throttle what they thought at that time might be some kind of foreign government hack — that Twitter, in choosing to throttle it, had really shown itself as weighing in on one side, had shown these institutions were deeply biased during this election.
There was a hack that many people believed was from the Iranians that was able to pull out some of the JD Vance vetting documents. And the media and also Twitter under Elon Musk and virtually all these groups didn’t run with the story.
This was getting passed around. It was getting pitched to different media groups, and they decided to go nowhere with it, and there was none of that outrage. There was no fury that this wasn’t being dumped on the internet immediately.
That’s just one piece of hypocrisy. But no, no, the whole argument, the whole idea that there is a censorship industrial complex that doesn’t exist is an enormous piece of hypocrisy.
The people who have been censored and whose lives have been made more difficult by this campaign are academics, researchers, people who write about this subject. I can recommend to everybody who’s listening Renée DiResta’s excellent book, which is called “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality,” and which is about exactly this.
Those are the people who have had their free speech suppressed. But you don’t hear Elon Musk coming to their defense.
There is another dimension to the Musk-Trump partnership, which is the resources of the richest man in the world being put at the service of the most powerful man in the world for a share of that power. And we’ve talked a bit about Twitter or X, but there is also Musk now building this political action committee, where the explicit idea of the PAC is that it will fund primary challengers against Republicans in the House or the Senate who don’t fall in line with Trump’s agenda.
When you’re talking about the institutions they’re trying to compromise, among them is the Republican Party, which is a pretty compromised institution already. But there is no amount of money that a House or Senate member could raise, no amount of money a political party could raise, that is anything compared to what Elon Musk can spend.
He is the richest person in the world by quite a margin, as best we can tell. And in these races — they’re expensive in terms of themselves: millions or tens of millions of dollars. Kamala Harris amazingly raised a billion dollars. But it’s all nothing to Musk.
I suspect that looks pretty familiar, externally. But that explicitness of cooperation between someone so rich and someone so powerful and the clearly transactional nature of it, which may over time endanger it — we’ll see if everybody feels like they’re getting what they wanted out of the bargain.
But that feels again like a way this has shifted going forward. Musk is really offering himself up as a Praetorian Guard, and Trump seems to have shaken his hand and taken the deal.
In many countries, one can see exactly those kinds of relationships. But again, most of those countries are not democracies. And that we would have that developing here is: It’s not a sign that we’re going to be Nazi Germany. It’s a sign that our democracy has already declined.
That this is now possible is a sign that we are in decline, and a form of more autocratic or illiberal government is already with us.
There’s a question of possible and the question of desirable.
So there’s been this broader swerve of tech titans toward Donald Trump. In 2016, it was really just Peter Thiel in terms of boldfaced names in that industry.
Now it’s obviously Elon Musk. It’s Marc Andreessen. It’s David Sacks. And even the ones who are clearly not totally on board have made a different kind of peace with Trump. Mark Zuckerberg speaks about him much more positively. Jeff Bezos held back The Washington Post endorsement of Harris and very warmly congratulated Trump on his victory.
What do you make of both the actual embrace of Donald Trump? That people have moved to wanting this man to be president who didn’t support him in 2016 — and that people seem to want to be in a much more transactional rather than oppositional space compared to where they were before?
Some of that was people judging that he was probably going to win.
And somebody like Bezos has so many different business interests that intersect with the government in so many different ways. He felt he needed to make some kind of statement in advance that showed that he acknowledged that. And I think —
But he didn’t feel the need to do that in the first term.
He owned The Washington Post then, and was in favor, as I understand it, of the “Democracy dies in darkness” rebranding. He felt able to sort of be in opposition then — and clearly does not want to be there now.
I think people are more afraid of Trump now because, as I said, we started with this language, the extremism of his language, the anger that he expresses, the specific threats that he’s made. I think these are at a very different level from before.
In 2016, he was considered to be — maybe he was a joke or a charlatan. And it wasn’t really clear what he wanted to do. I think people had a pretty good idea from what he was saying what he would or could do. And I think that’s a piece of the story.
You know, I can’t analyze every single one of these men. Some of them may have had political reasons for supporting him. They don’t like woke culture, or they didn’t like mandatory vaccines. I can’t speak for all of them. They may have different arguments. But clearly there was an expectation of a different presidency, of a different kind of presidency, and everybody felt like they needed to accommodate.
Of course, had Harris won, they would have paid no price for it. It wasn’t like Harris was going to take revenge on Jeff Bezos for pulling the endorsement in The Washington Post.
Is there a historical resonance here? And here I’m talking about not the people making accommodation, but the many, many, many people who have moved into full-on embrace.
I think there can be a tendency to say: Well, Trump is in many ways such a regressive and reactionary figure, somebody very much treated as a joke. When Trump discusses things like crypto or A.I., he does not discuss it with a high level of knowledge. And on the other hand, when I look at past movements like this, when I look at fascism, when I look at communism, when I look at Nazism — and I’m not saying these are all the same — but when I look at other forms of extreme nationalistic movements, they’ve often had a pretty strong futurist wing.
There’s a version of that with the Chinese Communist Party now: a frustration with liberal democracy, a frustration with the crowd and all the slowdown and annoyance that comes with having this many voices in a system. When you see this sort of futurist embrace of someone like Trump, are we seeing something new or are we seeing something old?
No, no, that is old. Absolutely. Hitler and Stalin were both obsessed with science and they both had their different wacky theories. Marxism, itself, was meant to be scientific. It was a proven theory that was like a plan by which you could change the world and make it different.
And Mussolini was very explicitly linked to futurism, which was the same kind of idea. So in that sense, it’s not surprising. And we’ve heard Peter Thiel say things like this before, and others in that world, that explicitly democracy — it takes too long for things to happen.
Decisions can’t be made. It gives too much power to people who are poor or people who are uneducated. And that holds back the wealthy or the aristocratic or the successful. Those kinds of arguments have been with us since democracy began. But you hear that very loudly and clearly from Silicon Valley.
Of course, you’re right. It is an oddity that that movement or that set of ideas has attached itself to Donald Trump — who is not himself at all interested in science or able to speak about it in any serious way. And whose understanding of renewable energy is something about windmills not working when the wind stops blowing. But nevertheless, they do appear to have built around him an idea that they can skip things. They can move ahead fast.
Musk’s commission is a commission on efficiency of government. And it’s going to be staffed by high-I.Q. people he was advertising for on Twitter. And by that they’re hoping to give opportunities to bright people to change things.
I think they’re going to discover that making government work and making business work are very different things. But, yeah, I think a desire to have something faster or something more technologically rapid — that’s an autocratic impulse that you’ve seen in a lot of other times and places.
I’ve been reading this Alexander de Grand book on Italy under Mussolini, and there’s a point he makes, which is that fascism operated not in a unified way but in a hyphenated way. You had a Catholic fascism, and that was distinct in its ways from this monarchist fascism, and there was a futurist fascism — and you can keep going down this list.
And the way that the government worked in practice was not that these strains had to merge into anything coherent, but that they each got their own fief. When I see the way Trump is stalking the government — R.F.K. here and Elon Musk there and Marco Rubio there and Tulsi Gabbard there — it feels resonant to me that you have to serve Trump, you have to maybe buy into a particular story about America and its enemies, particularly its internal enemies. But once you do that, anything goes and everybody gets their piece.
Yes, and in addition to that, some of this will also be the politics of performance: Policy is not being made in order to fix a problem, but policy is being made to demonstrate that we are fixing the problem or to satisfy one of those constituencies. So that’s another aspect of many authoritarian governments. Viktor Orbán is a kind of master of this.
In 2015, there was a migrant crisis on the borders of Europe, he put up a series of billboards all around the country — very strict instructions to migrants about what they are or are not allowed to do, the rules of the Hungarian state and so on. All the billboards were in Hungarian.
In other words, nobody who was not Hungarian would have understood them. So the purpose of putting up the billboards was to make Hungarians who were worried about immigrants feel that the government was doing something. It’s also the case about fascism and communism and many of those regimes: That at the time they seemed very chaotic, and it’s really in retrospect we’ve given them a narrative or we made them consistent.
Or we’ve said that Hitlerism was all about nationalism, and we’ve tried to explain it away that way. Some of what Hitler was doing was popular because he was giving lots of jobs to young people. There will be many reasons many constituents he’s trying to serve — including some he’s tossing a bone rather than doing anything real.
I really struggle with how to talk about this and how to even integrate this history into the way I think about the present. Because I do think there’s this reality that when you use the word “fascism,” people’s thinking shuts down. “Nazis,” even more so. “Communists,” certainly to some degree. That some of these leaders, some of these movements, they really just exist in the American lexicon now, not as complex things that actually happened that people liked when they were happening in many cases, but as slurs.
Yes.
And so these sort of nationalist authoritarian movements that I think have symmetries or echoes or shades of what’s going on with Trump — to talk about them is almost to commit a kind of etiquette violation. And at the very least to get sidetracked onto these other arguments.
So I’ve had a lot of arguments with people about the word “fascist.” I’ve tried to not use it. Just because it makes people think of the Nazis, and it makes people think of movies they’ve seen about the Nazis, and that’s the image that they have in their heads. And as I said already, most modern autocratic or illiberal governments don’t look like that at all. There are no storm troopers; there aren’t mass arrests. Instead what you have is the slow takeover of institutions, the elimination of alternative or independent media.
The takeover of courts is usually a big part of it. And that doesn’t mean, in our case, having conservative courts — but having judges who do what the president wants. Which is something very different from being a conservative judge or an originalist or anything like that. And so I try not to use the word. It’s hard to escape it precisely, because as I wrote, he’s using that language.
He, himself, does it, and former chief of staff John Kelly was using it about him because John Kelly had this conversation with him about Hitler’s general. So it’s Trump himself who brings up those analogies and that makes us fall into them.
But I agree that it can be unhelpful, because it creates the wrong expectation. It makes us think they’re going to be Brownshirts and storm troopers, whereas I don’t think it’s going to look like that at all.
But I also think we flatten them in our own minds when you hear “fascism,” certainly when you hear about Nazis. But let’s stay on the fascists for a minute. What you hear is “totalitarian,” “evil,” “disaster,” “World War II.”
What does that miss? I mean, people like Mussolini. Like, this was —
We miss that they were popular. Hitler was very popular. Mussolini was very popular. There were opponents, as well, but these were regimes that — obviously this changed at a certain point — but who certainly, in the beginning: They weren’t in power and they didn’t stay in power because they were using force and beating up their enemies. Although there was some of that. But they were also — it felt to people at the time like they were responding to some need.
You could certainly say the same of Communists. The people didn’t fight in the Bolshevik Revolution on the side of the Bolsheviks because they were being coerced to do so. They did it voluntarily. They thought they were fighting for something good. And I’ve written pretty extensively about that world.
And I always tried to understand not just the people who were oppressed by the regime but also the people who supported it. What did they think they were doing? Why were they there? And after the Second World War, in Eastern Europe, there was this sense of — somewhere like Poland, for example, or Hungary, there was a sense that the prewar system had collapsed and failed.
So the world of the 1930s was gone. And the war had erased whole institutions, had erased the aristocracy and had erased the whole political and economic system, and therefore we need to start from scratch. And therefore, Communism, to a lot of people, seemed like a brand-new ideology, — that we could build something from scratch at the moment.
And a lot of people adhered to it for that reason, and not merely because they were evil or because they were cowardly. Eventually, many of them were evil and cowardly, and those regimes did a huge amount of damage. So I’m not making an excuse for them.
I’m just saying that, yes, you’re right. They were attractive to people in those countries at that time for reasons that are now hard to understand because we know how it ended. But at that time they didn’t know how it was going to end.
There is this tendency, I think, in certainly more mainstream media, very much in liberal media, to describe everything around Trump as dark.
Very dark tone at the end. And there’s obviously truth to that. And it also misses a lot of excitement and joy at his rallies. When I would tune in to them, they didn’t just feel dark to me. They’re carnivals, right? The darkness is part of the appeal. But only part of it. I wonder about it even in this phase of it.
There’s an excitement to chaos, to unpredictability, to things happening faster and in ways you wouldn’t have seen coming: Wait, R.F.K Jr. is going to be Health and Human Services secretary? Like, Matt Gaetz is somehow involved in this. Elon Musk is doing something! It really turns government into a show.
There have been all these characters in recent years, and suddenly the characters are getting bigger roles. And here’s the next season and the next season. Boots up and people are doing different things. And what’s going to happen?
And I’m curious about that dimension of its appeal in other countries, historically, in your work — just the sense of all of a sudden government gets really interesting. As a turnover from the sort of aged Biden administration at the end there. Just sort of people doing the government, and it’s not working quite the way you wish it were. But people are doing something, I guess.
And then, all of a sudden, the show starts. The curtain is pulled, and all these famous political entertainment figures and media entertainment figures, “Fox & Friends” host, are now doing things.
That’s certainly the feeling now.
I also think people often miss the fact that the MAGA movement is a movement. Like, it has its own symbols. It has its own language. It’s a thing people are part of. They feel connected to one another. People are actively part of it. They aren’t just passively part of it. And they have their own worldview and their own things that they read that other people don’t read. In a sense of being an insider, that’s very important.
But what’s also going to be interesting to watch is the moment when — and I don’t know when it will come — in a month or a year or three years, I don’t know — when people get tired of this season. They get tired of this moment. Or when there’s some kind of failure — when there’s a foreign policy failure or a domestic failure, whatever it is.
And the inner circle needs to change the story. And I’m certain this will happen. And then maybe they’ll begin a campaign. So then that’s when the campaign against migrants will begin or the campaign against universities, if they want to kick up rather than kick down.
So they will also be thinking in these terms, I’m sure: How do we keep the entertainment? How do we change the story? How do we keep people involved and on side. How do we keep America polarized? Because that’s going be important to them. Staying in power, too. How do we keep finding enemies that will fit into the next storyline? So they will be dependent on that need going well into the future.
The amount of thinking surrounding Trump feels like a material and substantive difference to me in 2024 than in 2016: Trump was such a surprise. MAGA was not at that time a movement. He was a renegade candidate who took over the Republican Party and then won unexpectedly. They were totally unprepared.
And now there’s been years of a movement — which actually does have ideologists. JD Vance is one of them. It has many journals. It has all these groups ranging from Heritage and Project 2025 to the America First Institute that have been trying to vet people — but have also been thinking about how to take over institutions, how to then use those institutions to take over other institutions.
You mentioned universities. Media is another of them. There is so much more ideology now than there was before, and so many more people who have joined to try to do something they’ve actually been thinking about. How does the maturation of the ideologizing and planning and strategizing and sort of movement thinking around Trump change either what you think is going to happen or what you think could possibly happen?
Well, certainly the existence of cadres, which weren’t there before, and of people who claim to be able to speak for Trump is already different. There was nobody to call up last time to find out what he was going to do, because there wasn’t anybody who knew. And now there’s almost too many people.
I know lots of people who’ve been trying to find out what they think about Ukraine, and there are several different, sometimes even radically different, schools of thought and different people claiming to speak for him who have contradictory views.
I don’t think Trump had an ideology in 2016. He had a set of instincts. I’m not sure he has an ideology now, actually.
But he has a set of things that he believes. He likes tariffs. He doesn’t like Europeans. He thinks our allies are ripping us off. Yes, now there are competing groups around him who want him to mean different things. There’s the Heritage version, and there’s a Mike Pompeo version, and there’s another version. And choices will be made, and sooner or later one of them will emerge victorious.
But I suspect the one that emerges victorious is not going to be the one that sounds most rational or coherent to some academic scholar. But it’s going to be the one that serves Trump and does what he wants it to do. It brings him retribution or it destroys his enemies or it changes the institution that he wants changed.
How about the other side of this? Something that feels notably different to me right now is: When Trump won in 2016, there was this immediate counterresponse. What gets called the resistance. You had the Women’s March, and very early on in the administration, people actually are out in the streets around the Muslim ban.
And you can feel the absence of that. Now Matt Gaetz getting named for attorney general was the first time I felt even any of that vibration in the media. But the resistance feels quite exhausted, defeated, broken. The Democratic Party doesn’t feel like it lost in a fluke. It feels like it lost.
It is, in a way that I think is healthy, doing a lot of re-evaluation. But there is an exhaustion among Trump’s enemies that there is not among his friends right now. I’m curious, one, if you agree with that, and two, how you think that will play out?
Yeah, I agree with it. I do think it’s mostly to do with the nature of the election.
In fact, it was a close election if you break down the numbers and you look at how close it was in the three blue-wall states. But it certainly felt on the night like it wasn’t close. It was over much earlier than anybody thought. There were a lot of groups and people who were ready to go to fight an attempt to falsify the election, but who weren’t ready for that rapid, or that clear, a victory.
I think there’s another thing that happens — and this is another phenomenon in authoritarian states — that people are sometimes angrier at the opposition movement that loses than they are at the regime. And this is not quite the case with America — I’m telling you about what it feels like in other places. That the loss — when you have a movement, and it conducts a mass demonstration, and then they lose at the last minute, and a lot of people go to jail, there’s a lot of bitterness and recrimination against the leaders of the movement — rather than against the dictator who crushed it. And another thing that often happens is that, particularly when you have an autocratic political party in power, the opponents very quickly become easily divided.
They disagree on strategy. In order to defeat the autocratic movement, you need a pretty wide range of people, from the center left to the center right. And a lot of people who were previously enemies have to find a way to work together. And that’s sometimes uncomfortable. And so you can be fragmented for a long time.
For example, that’s what happened to the Hungarian opposition for years. It may be changing now, but instead of figuring out a way to fight as a united front and become a majoritarian political movement, they wound up squabbling with each other.
And the regime has ways of encouraging that. It can offer people money. It’s the ruling party, so much wealthier than the other parties. It can buy people off and play games and so on.
But that’s another thing to watch out for and be careful of. Of course, there should be introspection, and people should ask why they lost and people should develop theories of how to do it differently next time, and so on. But beware the tendency for opposition to be divided and dividable by the ruling party.
One of the ways I see people disagree about how to read Donald Trump, which I do think comes out of the first term, particularly the period before Jan. 6, is: There’s a lot of rhetoric. He appoints crazy people. But in the end, he doesn’t end up doing all that much. He’s not competent. He’s not focused, etc.
I was saying earlier that it’s important to me to be attuned to what timeline we’re in. So what are the things you are looking for that signal to you the difference between: Donald Trump and his allies run the government now, and they’re going to try to do the kinds of things that somebody who believes what he believes would try to do — and Donald Trump and his allies are trying to break the system and rebuild it into something different, something they control, something that cannot really be taken from them.
Something that is a more fundamental transition for the American political system than just: The party I personally don’t like is in power and is using that power in ways that I personally would prefer they didn’t.
So I would watch government agencies and institutions and, as we’ve been discussing, who runs them and with what purpose.
Are they still being run to benefit the American people? Or are they being run in order to perform some political narrative or in order to achieve revenge or retribution for the president? I would look at judicial appointments, looking not for whether somebody is a liberal or a conservative — that actually in our system is a normal debate.
A liberal judge, a conservative judge — how they interpret the Constitution can be very different. And we are all deeply divided about that. But that’s not the kind of judge that would worry me. The kind of judge that would worry me is someone like Aileen Cannon — someone who seems to be there in order to do favors for the president or for his friends.
You saw a hint of this, by the way, a few days ago when Musk talked about moving all disputes to do with Twitter, with X, to a particular district in Texas. And that was a strange decision. And people were guessing that maybe it’s because there are some judges who he thinks are friendly. I mean, that’s a kind of red flag.
I would also look at foreign policy. Even if you don’t care about foreign policy, the significance of who we’re allied to and who our friends are in the world tells you a lot about us, and it also tells you which way our government is going. An America that remains aligned with Europe and remains a leader of democracies around the world is a different kind of America from one that is allied to Russia.
If we are allied to Russia, and we are now a state that is on the side of kidnapping children and massacring civilians, that makes us different from what we were before. And finally, I would always watch very carefully. Again, we talked a little bit about Musk, but there’s a broader issue about kleptocracy and corruption.
One of the things that happens when you lower guardrails or you remove these rules about conflicts of interest or you remove the rules about security clearances or you get rid of the inspectors general or you muzzle the media or you threaten people and make them afraid to speak out — obviously, one of the effects of that is to make repression possible. If they decide to go that route. And that would be a more obvious thing to do.
But another effect of it is it makes it easier for people to steal things — or to use the government as a way of making money. There’s a lot of issues about how transparent the American government’s relationship is with American business already. And the role of lobbyists is already very huge.
This is an element of American democracy that’s already declined pretty far. But you could push it a step further. And most of the modern authoritarian regimes — and this is one of the other ways in which they’re very different from the regimes of the 1930s — are what we would call kleptocracies.
So those are systems where the leaders are not only very politically powerful, they are also billionaires. So Putin is a billionaire. Xi Jinping is a billionaire. We don’t necessarily know how they’re billionaires or why or how they got there, but they are. That’s part of their power, and that’s part of what keeps them in power. Because they have the money to be able to bribe people or to influence people or to run influence campaigns or to buy people off — in a way that Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini didn’t have.
So those are the kinds of things that I would watch carefully going forward.
If somebody is listening to this, and they’re terrified, what should people do? People not on board with the idea of America sliding down in this direction and who want to do something more than read news stories and follow social media posts about it.
What is effective in the sort of international scenarios that you’ve seen, and what isn’t?
The worst result or the worst consequence of this kind of government, if that’s what we’re going to have, and of course we still don’t know yet, is that people become apathetic. They say: This is all so overwhelming, it’s so huge. I don’t even know what’s true and what’s not true anymore, and I’m just going to stay home.
Try to overcome that. And it almost doesn’t matter what it is that you do. Involve yourself in a local group, a discussion group. Join a political party. Run for local office. Try to be present in your community in some way. Do something that makes you active. And that makes you feel that you’re taking part in the governance of your country.
Democracies were always meant to be political systems that involved ordinary people in all kinds of ways. And I think one of the other reasons our system has declined as far as it has, is that that has atrophied. Along with all kinds of other institutions. There’s the famous thing about Americans not being in bowling clubs anymore and not joining the Rotary Club and not participating in real-life institutions because they’re at home watching TV or playing video games. But there’s also been a decline in civic activity and civic engagement.
And even if it’s just for your mental health, Even if it’s just to make sure that you don’t feel that you are isolated and alone and unable to affect anything, try to join some group or work with some group that is making change in your community, either politically or even apolitically. And that seems to me to be the best antidote.
And then always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
I have picked three books that describe something that most people don’t understand, which is the secret world of money laundering and kleptocracy.
One of them is a book by a British writer, Oliver Bullough, and it’s called “Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World.” And it describes where the offshore world came from: What is its history, where does it come from, how did it spread so far, how it works. And it’s almost a primer. It’s written for somebody who doesn’t know anything. So it explains to you the basic rules.
Another kind of parallel book to read — it’s a very short book — is called “Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism.” It’s by Brooke Harrington, who is a sociologist who, in order to write the book, trained as a financial adviser — and so entered that world and learned how it worked from the inside. She writes very well about the rules, the way the system functions but also the values of the people who are inside of it.
And then as a third book to the trilogy, I would say read “American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History,” which is a book by Casey Michel that talks about, much more specifically American focused, how grand corruption is already visible and already at play in the United States.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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