Are We Living in a Different America
00:45:
(Hannah Rosen)
This is Radio Atlantic.
00:51:
(Hannah Rosen)
I'm Hunter Rosen.
00:52:
(Hannah Rosen)
So Donald Trump won.
00:55:
(Hannah Rosen)
It's looking like he won every swing state.
00:57:
(Hannah Rosen)
And also, like, there was a rightward shift even in the states he lost.
01:01:
(Hannah Rosen)
He won even though in the last months of his campaign he was at his darkest and most crude.
01:07:
(Hannah Rosen)
None of that mattered, apparently.
01:09:
(Hannah Rosen)
So here to help us understand what happened are two Atlantic staff writers, Anne Applebaum, who covers threats to democracy.
01:16:
(Hannah Rosen)
Hi, Anne.
01:17:
(Hannah Rosen)
Hello.
01:17:
(Hannah Rosen)
And political reporter McKay Cobbins.
01:19:
(Hannah Rosen)
Hi, McKay.
01:20:
(McKay Coppins)
Hey.
01:21:
(Hannah Rosen)
So, McKay, what do we know about how he won?
01:25:
(Hannah Rosen)
The particular coalition, the demographics, what do we know so far?
01:29:
(McKay Coppins)
Well, you just got at it.
01:31:
(McKay Coppins)
I mean, I think that the most surprising thing is not that he won because the polls were so tight and everyone was warning us to kind of be prepared for either candidate coming out victorious.
01:42:
(McKay Coppins)
But the fact that he won so decisively, making gains in almost every state and almost every demographic group.
01:50:
(McKay Coppins)
is something that I think most people were not prepared for.
01:53:
(McKay Coppins)
Just to run through a few of the highlights, he made major gains with Latino voters, according to exit polls.
02:02:
(McKay Coppins)
It depends on which exit poll you're looking at, but Harris won Latinos by between 8 and 15 points.
02:08:
(McKay Coppins)
That is a lot less than Biden's roughly 30-point win among Latino voters four years ago.
02:14:
(McKay Coppins)
He made some more modest gains with Black voters, especially young Black men.
02:19:
(McKay Coppins)
A lot of Trump's gains were concentrated with men.
02:23:
(McKay Coppins)
One exit poll showed him narrowly winning Latino men.
02:26:
(McKay Coppins)
The other one showed him narrowly losing them.
02:28:
(McKay Coppins)
But in either case, that is dramatically outperforming his performance in 2020.
02:35:
(McKay Coppins)
And so, you know, you take all this together and what you see is that there is a rightward shift at almost every section of the electorate.
02:47:
(McKay Coppins)
And, you know, that includes parts of the Democratic coalition that Kamala Harris and her campaign thought they could take for granted coming into this race.
02:57:
(Hannah Rosen)
And is it just men?
02:59:
(Hannah Rosen)
Like everyone you mentioned were men.
03:00:
(Hannah Rosen)
It's like Latino men, young black men.
03:03:
(McKay Coppins)
It definitely was.
03:05:
(McKay Coppins)
He definitely did better.
03:07:
(McKay Coppins)
Not to speak for my entire gender here, but he did seem to do much better among men, though.
03:14:
(McKay Coppins)
I will note that coming into the campaign, a lot of Democrats had pinned their hopes on the idea that Dobbs would motivate a surge of women to support Harris.
03:24:
(McKay Coppins)
And, you know, we're so early now that it's still hard to tell from the exit poll data how much that happened.
03:32:
(McKay Coppins)
But it is worth noting that Trump won white women in this election and he won them narrowly.
03:39:
(McKay Coppins)
But there was some hope among Democrats that Dobbs would push independent and even former Republican white women to the Harris camp.
03:48:
(McKay Coppins)
That does not seem to have happened in the numbers that they were planning for.
03:51:
(Hannah Rosen)
Right.
03:51:
(Hannah Rosen)
So all of that is somewhat surprising and things we have to reckon with over the next many months and years.
03:58:
(Hannah Rosen)
And you have been helping us understand over many years what it looks like when a country or democracy drifts towards autocracy.
04:06:
(Hannah Rosen)
How do you read this moment?
04:10:
(Ann Applebaum)
So I read this moment not so much as something new, but as a continuation of things that we've seen in the past.
04:18:
(Ann Applebaum)
I felt that during the campaign, it would be useful for me to record some of the things the president was saying, to say how they echoed in history, to comment on how those things compared to what has happened in other countries.
04:32:
(Ann Applebaum)
I did a podcast about this with The Atlantic.
04:35:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's called Autocracy in America.
04:37:
(Ann Applebaum)
So...
04:38:
(Ann Applebaum)
When he was last in the White House, Trump ignored ethics and security guidelines.
04:42:
(Ann Applebaum)
He fired inspectors general and other watchdogs.
04:45:
(Ann Applebaum)
He leaked classified information.
04:46:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, he used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state kind of deploying troops in American cities.
04:57:
(Ann Applebaum)
Obviously, he encouraged the insurrection at the Capitol in January the 6th.
05:02:
(Ann Applebaum)
When he left the White House, he took classified documents with him and then he hid them from the FBI.
05:06:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, all those things are indicative of somebody who is in defiance of the rule of law, who thinks he's above the rule of law, who's seeking to avoid normal rules of transparency and accountability, you know, who wants to help his staff get around, as I said, things like security clearance guidelines and so on.
05:27:
(Ann Applebaum)
And those things do represent a break from
05:31:
(Ann Applebaum)
with all previous presidents in modern history, Republican, Democrat, left-wing, right-wing, all of them.
05:38:
(Ann Applebaum)
We didn't have a president before who defied those kinds of rules and norms and laws and respect for some basic principles of the Constitution before.
05:49:
(Ann Applebaum)
The fact is that people either
05:53:
(Ann Applebaum)
liked it that he was doing that.
05:55:
(Ann Applebaum)
They found the transgressiveness attractive, along with the language that he used about his enemies, you know, calling them vermin and the enemy within and so on.
06:04:
(Ann Applebaum)
Either that was appealing, and of course that kind of language historically has been appealing, it does appeal to people, you know, or they didn't care.
06:12:
(Ann Applebaum)
But that means that there has been
06:14:
(Ann Applebaum)
a shift in how Americans see their government, what they understand the Constitution is for.
06:19:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that shift clearly precedes Trump.
06:22:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, probably he helped shape it during his first term.
06:25:
(Ann Applebaum)
He helped shape it during the four years he was out of power.
06:28:
(Ann Applebaum)
But we now have a country that is prepared to accept things from their leader that would have tanked the career of anybody else eight years ago.
06:38:
(Hannah Rosen)
Right.
06:39:
(Hannah Rosen)
So did you wake up on Wednesday morning and think, I live in a different country than I thought I did?
06:47:
(Hannah Rosen)
No.
06:48:
(Ann Applebaum)
No.
06:49:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, I thought from the beginning of this election campaign, I thought it was possible that he would win.
06:54:
(Ann Applebaum)
So, I mean, I suppose the particularly the last couple of weeks of his campaign when he became darker and darker and more and more vitriolic, you know, I wondered whether some of that would bother people.
07:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
Right.
07:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, imagining guns trained at Liz Cheney, you know, talking about his enemies as, again, the enemy within, talking about using the expression vermin or poison blood.
07:16:
(Ann Applebaum)
These are terms that are directly taken from the 1930s and haven't been used in American politics before.
07:21:
(Ann Applebaum)
So I wondered whether people would be bothered by that.
07:24:
(Ann Applebaum)
But am I entirely surprised that they weren't?
07:27:
(Ann Applebaum)
No, I'm not.
07:28:
(Ann Applebaum)
I think the population is now immune to that kind of language or maybe they like it.
07:33:
(McKay Coppins)
Yeah.
07:33:
(McKay Coppins)
I would just say I think that is one of the legacies of the Trump era is how much he has successfully desensitized the country to this kind of rhetoric and behavior that in an era not that long ago, voters would have deemed dangerous.
07:49:
(McKay Coppins)
disqualifying, right?
07:51:
(McKay Coppins)
He has kind of managed to convince enough Americans that this kind of behavior, this kind of rhetoric is okay, or at least that it doesn't matter that much.
08:01:
(McKay Coppins)
And looking forward, I do think that's going to be something we live with in our politics long after Trump is gone.
08:07:
(Hannah Rosen)
I mean, there's one way of looking at what you both are saying, which is, we woke up today, we have confirmation that we live in a failing democracy, but we actually don't.
08:16:
(Hannah Rosen)
Like, all we have confirmation of is that people either don't care that he talks like an autocratic ruler, they don't notice, they like it, or they don't put it in a broader historical context, which is, okay, these are actual signs of actual autocracies, which happen all the time in history and across the world.
08:37:
(Hannah Rosen)
Right?
08:38:
(Hannah Rosen)
That's all we know so far.
08:39:
(Ann Applebaum)
Yeah, no, that's all we know.
08:40:
(Ann Applebaum)
That's all we know.
08:41:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, we also don't know whether Trump will do some of the things that he said he would do.
08:46:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, he talked about mass firings of civil servants.
08:50:
(Ann Applebaum)
He talked about having people around him who were loyalists.
08:54:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that's what political scientists would describe as capturing the state.
08:58:
(Ann Applebaum)
So taking over...
08:59:
(Ann Applebaum)
government departments, government institutions, putting them not in the service of the nation and of everybody, but making them part of your political machine, using them for your political purposes.
09:10:
(Ann Applebaum)
He talked about doing that.
09:12:
(Ann Applebaum)
Will he try it again?
09:13:
(Ann Applebaum)
Maybe, you know, I mean, if he has a House and a Senate that will support him.
09:17:
(Ann Applebaum)
I don't think as we're speaking, we don't know about the House, so we'll see.
09:21:
(Ann Applebaum)
They might make it easy.
09:22:
(Ann Applebaum)
Will the judiciary support him?
09:23:
(Ann Applebaum)
Some of it will.
09:25:
(Ann Applebaum)
So, you know, will he do it?
09:26:
(Ann Applebaum)
I don't know.
09:27:
(Ann Applebaum)
General John Kelly, who was his former chief of staff,
09:30:
(Ann Applebaum)
has said that last time Trump was president, he talked about we should investigate or get the IRS on.
09:36:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, at that time, he was talking about the former FBI director, James Comey, or his deputy, Andrew McCabe.
09:42:
(Ann Applebaum)
Maybe now he's talked about punishing...
09:45:
(Ann Applebaum)
Adam Schiff, who's a congressman, now a senator who he doesn't like, or Nancy Pelosi, will he do it?
09:51:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, will he use the IRS to go after people?
09:54:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, that's another thing that happens in failing democracies.
09:58:
(Ann Applebaum)
And it's also something that has happened in U.S. history before, so it's not unimaginable.
10:03:
(Ann Applebaum)
So I don't know whether he'll do these things, but it's now on the record that he has said he would or he said he wants to.
10:09:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, in some of the documents written by people around him, there have been plans to do that.
10:14:
(Ann Applebaum)
That's what Project 2025 was in part.
10:17:
(Ann Applebaum)
And none of it bothered people.
10:18:
(Ann Applebaum)
And so we have to assume that it's a possibility.
10:21:
(McKay Coppins)
I do think, to answer your earlier question, that it's worth noting that while a lot of voters went into the ballot box thinking about democracy, and in fact, according to one exit poll, around a third of voters said democracy was their top issue—
10:38:
(McKay Coppins)
A lot of voters were not thinking about these things and they were not voting based on hoping that Donald Trump would weaponize the IRS against his political enemies.
10:48:
(McKay Coppins)
You know, for example, a third of voters said the economy was their top concern.
10:51:
(McKay Coppins)
And I think when we talk about the shifts among those demographic groups, we have to acknowledge that a lot of it was a very simple response to
11:00:
(McKay Coppins)
groceries costing more, inflation being up, feeling like the economy was on the wrong track, and responding to a deeply unpopular incumbent president.
11:10:
(McKay Coppins)
And while we, you know, can sit back and kind of look at the broad scope of history, it is clear that not all voters who went in to vote in these last few weeks were thinking about democracy.
11:24:
(McKay Coppins)
But I think it's also good to point that out because the
11:27:
(McKay Coppins)
Donald Trump is going to claim a mandate coming out of this election and say, look, I swept the swing states.
11:35:
(McKay Coppins)
The voters want me to have all this power.
11:38:
(McKay Coppins)
He'll implicitly say they want me to abuse my power.
11:41:
(McKay Coppins)
They've given me permission to do whatever I want.
11:44:
(McKay Coppins)
And I think that it's worth noting that for a whole lot of people who voted for him, they just wanted him to make groceries cost less.
11:51:
(Ann Applebaum)
Yeah, but that's not really an excuse.
11:56:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, you are, as a voter, obligated to know what the person you're voting for stands for.
12:01:
(Ann Applebaum)
And the responsibility of the president of the United States is not merely to control inflation.
12:07:
(Ann Applebaum)
The president also has a lot of power over the U.S. government, over U.S. institutions, over American foreign policy.
12:14:
(Ann Applebaum)
And by deciding you don't care about those things, you know, you do give him that mandate.
12:20:
(McKay Coppins)
My concern is that there's a risk of kind of democratic fatalism coming out of this election where we will decide that, look, Americans voted for this aspiring autocrat.
12:32:
(McKay Coppins)
Therefore, he will be an autocrat and democracy has failed.
12:37:
(McKay Coppins)
And I think that it's worth parsing this electoral data a little bit and acknowledging that
12:43:
(McKay Coppins)
A majority of Americans did not necessarily give him an autocratic mandate, whether they were thinking about the things that they should have been thinking about, weighing the priorities the way that we think they should have been.
12:53:
(McKay Coppins)
I don't think we should let it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy if we let Trump and his allies claim that because he said and done all these things and he won the election, he now has permission to do whatever he wants.
13:06:
(Hannah Rosen)
Yeah.
13:07:
(Hannah Rosen)
I mean, one way of seeing the vote is that it wasn't at all a referendum on Trump.
13:11:
(Hannah Rosen)
It was people saying my life was better in 2019, so I'm going with Trump.
13:15:
(Hannah Rosen)
And I think why what you're saying is important, McKay, is because people who didn't vote for Trump can get discouraged and overwhelmed and tell themselves, you know, people who voted for him voted for everything he stands for.
13:27:
(Hannah Rosen)
And what follows from that is a sense of alienation.
13:30:
(Hannah Rosen)
Like, this is not my country and I don't understand what's going on.
13:35:
(Hannah Rosen)
Anyway, Anne, you mentioned that Trump ran an explicitly vengeful campaign, that he would come after enemies from within, whether they were immigrants or Democrats or us, the journalists.
13:46:
(Hannah Rosen)
And you have taught us to take leaders' words seriously.
13:50:
(Hannah Rosen)
And yet a lot of people, not just voters, have said, oh, this is hyperbole.
13:56:
(Hannah Rosen)
Stop taking it so seriously.
13:57:
(Hannah Rosen)
So how do we know the difference?
13:59:
(Hannah Rosen)
Yeah.
13:59:
(Ann Applebaum)
We'll know by his actions.
14:02:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, you know, maybe he, you know, it's true that by saying those things and by acting out vengeance that he, you know, maybe that was appealing to people who want some kind of vengeance, who are angry at whatever.
14:14:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, they're angry at the economy or the system or the establishment or the media or Hollywood or the culture or whatever it is that they're angry at or feel deprived by, that he acted that out for them.
14:25:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that was appealing to them.
14:27:
(Ann Applebaum)
So we have to, you know, I'm sure that's a piece of the explanation.
14:30:
(Ann Applebaum)
And then another piece of the explanation is that there were people like the Wall Street Journal editorial board, you know, or the writer Neil Ferguson, who said, oh, these things are just doesn't matter.
14:39:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's just hyperbole.
14:40:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, that's just how he talks.
14:43:
(Ann Applebaum)
So and we'll see.
14:44:
(Ann Applebaum)
We wait for it.
14:45:
(Hannah Rosen)
McKay, Project 2025, which came up a lot in the campaign and has been described as a blueprint for the next administration, includes transformative ideas about everything from abortion to tax policy.
14:58:
(Hannah Rosen)
How much do you think that's a realistic roadmap for what the administration might do?
15:04:
(McKay Coppins)
I would take it seriously.
15:06:
(McKay Coppins)
I mean, I think that there is a risk that because Donald Trump, realizing it was a political albatross around his neck, decided to distance himself in the final months of the campaign, that we collectively take him at his word.
15:22:
(McKay Coppins)
And I don't think we should.
15:23:
(McKay Coppins)
I think that what he ends up doing in his next term will
15:28:
(McKay Coppins)
rely a lot upon who he appoints to his administration, right?
15:34:
(McKay Coppins)
I reported back in December that talking to people in Trump world about future appointees, the watchword was obedience.
15:41:
(McKay Coppins)
They talked about how Trump...
15:44:
(McKay Coppins)
felt burned in his first term by appointees, people in his cabinet who saw themselves as adults in the room, who believed that their role was to constrain him to kind of keep the train on the tracks.
15:59:
(McKay Coppins)
And he doesn't want people like that in his next administration.
16:02:
(McKay Coppins)
He doesn't want adults in the room.
16:04:
(McKay Coppins)
He doesn't want James Mattis's
16:05:
(McKay Coppins)
Mark Milley's or John Kelly's.
16:08:
(McKay Coppins)
He wants absolute loyalists, either people who share his ideological worldview or out of a sense of ambition or cravenness are willing to do exactly what he says without questioning it.
16:20:
(McKay Coppins)
And so when you look at Project 2025 and
16:24:
(McKay Coppins)
and the part of the plan, for example, that has to do with politicizing the civil service, taking 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy and making them political appointees subject to the whims of the president, it will matter a lot whether he follows through on that and who those people are.
16:42:
(McKay Coppins)
A big part of Project 2025 was identifying loyalists, partisans, conservatives who could fill those roles.
16:50:
(McKay Coppins)
And so I think when we talk through...
16:53:
(McKay Coppins)
what his next administration, what his agenda will look like, a lot of it comes down to this kind of truism of Washington that personnel is policy.
17:02:
(McKay Coppins)
So does Stephen Miller return to his administration in some kind of role where he gets to oversee immigration enforcement?
17:10:
(McKay Coppins)
It's entirely possible, but that will make a big difference in terms of how much he follows through on his threats of mass deportation.
17:18:
(McKay Coppins)
Who does he appoint as attorney general?
17:20:
(McKay Coppins)
That was one role that everybody I talked to in Trump world told me he was very committed to getting right because he felt the two men who served in that role in his first term betrayed him.
17:32:
(McKay Coppins)
So is it somebody like Josh Hawley or Mike Lee or Ted Cruz?
17:37:
(McKay Coppins)
These are the questions that we're going to have to be answering and we'll get a lot more clarity in the coming weeks and months as we see those appointees and those short lists emerge.
17:48:
(Hannah Rosen)
After the break, we're going to get into what mass deportations under Trump could look like.
19:00:
(Hannah Rosen)
Something else I've been thinking about a lot that Trump has threatened is mass deportations.
19:05:
(Hannah Rosen)
They are expensive.
19:08:
(Hannah Rosen)
They're actually quite difficult to carry out.
19:11:
(Hannah Rosen)
They require a lot of manpower, local and national.
19:15:
(Hannah Rosen)
You know, is that bombast?
19:17:
(Hannah Rosen)
Is that a realistic threat?
19:18:
(Hannah Rosen)
How will we know the difference?
19:20:
(McKay Coppins)
Yeah, I mean, again, this is where I think personnel will matter a lot.
19:25:
(McKay Coppins)
Who is head of the Department of Homeland Security, for example.
19:29:
(McKay Coppins)
But just to go through what Trump promised on the campaign trail, he said that he would build massive detention camps and
19:37:
(McKay Coppins)
implement mass deportations at a scale never before seen in this country, hire thousands of additional border agents, use military spending on border security.
19:49:
(McKay Coppins)
He even said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel people who were suspected of being in drug cartels or gangs without a court hearing.
20:00:
(McKay Coppins)
He said he would end catch and release,
20:04:
(McKay Coppins)
reinstate the remain in Mexico policy.
20:08:
(McKay Coppins)
And I think it's notable that he did not directly answer whether he would reinstate family separation, which was the most controversial aspect of his immigration policy in the first term.
20:19:
(McKay Coppins)
Take all these together, you know, I think there are some of these things he could do pretty easily on his own with executive orders.
20:28:
(McKay Coppins)
And there's not a lot of evidence that he could be constrained by the courts or by Congress.
20:34:
(McKay Coppins)
There are some things like building massive detention centers that would require a lot of money.
20:40:
(McKay Coppins)
Hiring thousands of more border agents would require a lot of money.
20:43:
(McKay Coppins)
So this is where control of Congress is going to matter a lot.
20:46:
(Hannah Rosen)
Right.
20:47:
(Hannah Rosen)
Are there others on his list that are top of mind for either of you?
20:52:
(Hannah Rosen)
Like, aid to Ukraine is one that I'm thinking of.
20:55:
(Hannah Rosen)
Like, are there others where you're going to be vigilantly watching, okay, he said X, is he going to do X?
21:04:
(Ann Applebaum)
Aid to Ukraine is in a slightly different category.
21:07:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's not a, you know, it's not about American autocracy and democracy.
21:11:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, it's a question of, you know, our position in the world.
21:14:
(Ann Applebaum)
So are we going to remain the leader of a democratic camp, which is opposing the growing and increasingly networked autocratic camp?
21:25:
(Ann Applebaum)
So will we oppose Russia, which is now in alliance with Iran and North Korea and China, you know, or will we not?
21:32:
(Ann Applebaum)
And this, again...
21:34:
(Ann Applebaum)
From Trump world, I know a lot of people who spend a lot of time in the run-up to the election trying to find out what Trump meant when he said, I'll end the war in one day, which has been his standard response when asked about it.
21:45:
(Ann Applebaum)
And you can literally find almost as many interpretations of that expression as there are.
21:49:
(Ann Applebaum)
people in Trump's orbit.
21:51:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, it ranges from we're just going to cut off all the funding to we're going to give Ukraine to the Russians to something quite different.
21:57:
(Ann Applebaum)
There are people who said, no, we're going to threaten the Russians.
22:00:
(Ann Applebaum)
We're going to tell them we're bringing in a thousand tanks and, you know, a thousand airplanes unless you pull back.
22:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
And so that's another version that I've heard.
22:06:
(Ann Applebaum)
There are versions that suggest offering something to Russia, you know, some deal.
22:12:
(Ann Applebaum)
But honestly, I don't know.
22:13:
(Hannah Rosen)
But those are legitimate foreign policy debates.
22:16:
(Hannah Rosen)
You can be an isolationist democracy.
22:17:
(Hannah Rosen)
Those are not fundamental threats in your mind to the nature of this country and what it should be.
22:23:
(Ann Applebaum)
Although, although there are connections and have always been, we haven't always acknowledged them.
22:29:
(Ann Applebaum)
between America's alliances and America's democracy.
22:34:
(Ann Applebaum)
So the fact that we have been aligned in the past with a camp of other democracies, that we put democracy at the center of our foreign policy for such a long time during the Cold War,
22:45:
(Ann Applebaum)
was one of the reasons why our democracy was strengthened.
22:49:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, this is a, you know, it's well known that during the Cold War, one of the reasons why there was an establishment shift towards favoring civil rights and the civil rights movement was the feeling that, you know, here's this thing we stand for.
23:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
We stand for democracy.
23:06:
(Ann Applebaum)
We stand for the rule of law.
23:07:
(Ann Applebaum)
And yet we don't have it in our own country.
23:09:
(Ann Applebaum)
And there were a lot of people who felt that very strongly.
23:12:
(Ann Applebaum)
And it's not a bad reason why that happened, but it's part of the explanation.
23:18:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, who are your allies?
23:19:
(Ann Applebaum)
Who are your friends?
23:21:
(Ann Applebaum)
This affects also what kind of country you are and your own behavior.
23:25:
(Ann Applebaum)
Who are your relationships?
23:26:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, if our primary political and diplomatic and economic relationship is with Russia...
23:32:
(Ann Applebaum)
and North Korea, then we're a different kind of country than if our primary relationship is with Britain and France.
23:39:
(McKay Coppins)
The only other kind of policy area that I'll be keeping an eye on is tariffs.
23:46:
(McKay Coppins)
He has said that he would impose between 10 and 20 percent across the board tariffs on all U.S. imports and a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods.
23:57:
(McKay Coppins)
You know, a lot of economic experts pointed out that this would very likely cause massive inflation and, you
24:04:
(McKay Coppins)
given that he was just elected in large part on voter frustration with inflation.
24:11:
(McKay Coppins)
It's an open question whether he'll follow through on this.
24:14:
(McKay Coppins)
He clearly does not believe, and this is one of the few issues that he's been pretty consistent on his entire life, he does not believe it would cause inflation.
24:23:
(McKay Coppins)
Almost every economics expert disagrees with him.
24:25:
(McKay Coppins)
And in his first term, there were people in the White House who believed
24:31:
(McKay Coppins)
blocked him from imposing more tariffs than he actually did.
24:35:
(McKay Coppins)
In fact, to the point where we saw reporting from Bob Woodward that his staff secretary was literally taking executive orders off his desk before he could sign them and kind of losing them in the bureaucracy of paperwork.
24:48:
(McKay Coppins)
Will there be somebody like that this time?
24:50:
(McKay Coppins)
Will there be somebody who can get his ear and convince him not to go through with this?
24:54:
(McKay Coppins)
That is something that I think a lot of people will be looking at because the economic implications for this country and globally could be pretty profound.
25:02:
(Hannah Rosen)
And what are the bigger implications of tariffs?
25:05:
(Hannah Rosen)
Like that could just be a legitimate economic debate.
25:08:
(Hannah Rosen)
Some people believe in tariffs.
25:09:
(Hannah Rosen)
Some people don't believe in tariffs.
25:11:
(Hannah Rosen)
And it's an experiment in, you know, economic protectionism.
25:16:
(McKay Coppins)
I would not say that this is one of those kind of core democratic issues that certainly to various degrees there have been protectionist policies.
25:26:
(McKay Coppins)
policymakers and politicians in both parties over the last several decades.
25:31:
(McKay Coppins)
It could cause a trade war.
25:32:
(McKay Coppins)
It could, you know, interfere with our diplomatic relations with the countries that we're imposing tariffs on.
25:41:
(McKay Coppins)
There are a lot of trickle down implications.
25:42:
(McKay Coppins)
But yes, I do think it's important.
25:45:
(McKay Coppins)
And I like that what you're doing here is that separating the issues that are
25:49:
(McKay Coppins)
kind of more typical policy disagreements from those things that Anne has been talking about, which are fundamental to American democracy.
25:58:
(McKay Coppins)
I don't think tariffs are, but they could have an effect on a lot of Americans.
26:03:
(McKay Coppins)
And so that's why I think it's worth keeping an eye on.
26:05:
(Hannah Rosen)
OK, so there's obviously going to be some resistance to Trump.
26:09:
(Hannah Rosen)
So let's start simple.
26:11:
(Hannah Rosen)
McKay, who is going to be the leader of the Democratic Party?
26:14:
(McKay Coppins)
So obviously, if Democrats take control of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, the next speaker, would, I think, by default, become the kind of leader of the Democratic opposition to Trump, at least for a while.
26:27:
(McKay Coppins)
If Democrats don't take control of the House, I think it's a very open question.
26:32:
(McKay Coppins)
And frankly, it's one that Democrats probably should have been trying to answer two years ago.
26:37:
(McKay Coppins)
Joe Biden deciding to stay in the race after the 2022 midterms will probably go down as one of the most consequential political decisions in this era.
26:49:
(McKay Coppins)
The fact that he stayed in for so long only to drop out in the final months of the election meant that Democrats didn't really have time to have the big intraparty debate about what they should stand for, who their standard bearer should be.
27:03:
(McKay Coppins)
That debate will be happening now.
27:05:
(McKay Coppins)
And it's going to be contentious and noisy and unsettling to a lot of left-leaning voters.
27:12:
(McKay Coppins)
I also think it's healthy to have these conversations.
27:15:
(McKay Coppins)
And I
27:16:
(McKay Coppins)
I think Democrats in some ways are kind of innately averse to that kind of contention.
27:22:
(McKay Coppins)
And I think that they might need to kind of get comfortable with it because one way to look at the two elections that Donald Trump has won is that he really benefited from the fact that Democrats cleared the field for the two nominees he ended up beating, Hillary Clinton in 2016, Kamala Harris in 2024.
27:42:
(McKay Coppins)
One takeaway that I think a lot of Democrats will have is that, you know, Democrats need to decide that they're OK with a little messiness and letting their voters decide who their nominee will be.
27:55:
(Hannah Rosen)
And when other countries have faced a moment like this, like a moment when you have to be vigilant, things are in the balance, the opposition feels alienated, it's unclear who the opposition leaders are at the moment.
28:09:
(Hannah Rosen)
How do you move through a moment like that?
28:13:
(Hannah Rosen)
Like how have other countries successfully moved to a healthier place?
28:20:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, it almost entirely involves building broad coalitions.
28:28:
(Ann Applebaum)
So the only real example I can give, so I live part of the time in Poland.
28:32:
(Ann Applebaum)
We had an autocratic populist government take over in 2015.
28:36:
(Ann Applebaum)
They did try to capture the state.
28:38:
(Ann Applebaum)
They did it pretty successfully.
28:39:
(Ann Applebaum)
They took over state media, which is a big deal in Poland, and they made it into a kind of propaganda tube.
28:44:
(Ann Applebaum)
Poland has some state companies and they took over the companies and began using the money to fund themselves and their party and so on.
28:50:
(Ann Applebaum)
So they enriched themselves and they tried to create a system whereby they would never lose again.
28:56:
(Ann Applebaum)
Remember that another sign of autocracy and a very, very important thing to watch for is corruption.
29:02:
(Ann Applebaum)
When you remove guardrails and when you remove inspectors, generals, and when you weaken the media, then it becomes much easier for people to be corrupt.
29:10:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that, you know, we've already got that problem in our system and it's going to get a lot worse.
29:15:
(Ann Applebaum)
Essentially, what happened was...
29:17:
(Ann Applebaum)
The building of a coalition that went, in their case, from the center-left to the center-right, kind of center-left, liberal center-right, of people who wanted something.
29:27:
(Ann Applebaum)
It was partly, in part, an anti-corruption coalition, so it wasn't so much built around fighting for democracy, although that was a piece of it.
29:34:
(Ann Applebaum)
The coalition was also seeking to fight against corruption and for good government, but it took eight years.
29:41:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, it was a long process, and along the way, you know, a lot of money was stolen.
29:47:
(Ann Applebaum)
And, you know, the institutions declined and the country is worse governed.
29:52:
(Ann Applebaum)
And, you know, there are a lot of problems that are not going to be easy to solve.
29:56:
(Ann Applebaum)
But a lot of – there's a look for coalitions.
29:59:
(Ann Applebaum)
There was some internal soul-searching about what it was we did that – why did we lose?
30:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
But I'm not sure even how useful all of that was.
30:08:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, what mattered in the end was the reconstruction of an opposition that had a clear message, that had a clear critique, and offered a vision of a different kind of future that was led by somebody who was charismatic.
30:21:
(Hannah Rosen)
Yeah, I mean, that is actually really useful, even to know that the coalitions don't have to be for the restoration of democracy.
30:28:
(Hannah Rosen)
You know, they can be against mass deportation, against tariffs.
30:32:
(Hannah Rosen)
Like you can form coalitions around if you if you tell yourself, no, the voters did not give a mandate to Donald Trump to do whatever he wants and carry out all of his policies.
30:42:
(Hannah Rosen)
That is not what happened in the last election.
30:45:
(Hannah Rosen)
So coalitions can form popular coalitions around all kinds of issues.
30:49:
(Hannah Rosen)
Yeah.
30:49:
(Ann Applebaum)
No, no.
30:51:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, you could have a coalition that really cares about women's issues and women's rights.
30:55:
(Ann Applebaum)
Right.
30:55:
(Ann Applebaum)
And abortion rights.
30:56:
(Ann Applebaum)
And you can have another one that really cares about the environment.
30:58:
(Ann Applebaum)
And you can have another one that really cares about corruption.
31:01:
(Ann Applebaum)
And you link them together.
31:03:
(Ann Applebaum)
And then you have a movement.
31:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
Right.
31:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
Right.
31:05:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that's sometimes more effective.
31:07:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, democracy is an abstract word.
31:10:
(Ann Applebaum)
That doesn't necessarily mean things to people.
31:13:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, it has to be made real through something that people experience.
31:18:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that, you know, maybe that that's how we have to look at it too.
31:21:
(Hannah Rosen)
Yeah.
31:22:
(Hannah Rosen)
I think the thing that catches me in this election, which we haven't quite touched on yet,
31:28:
(Hannah Rosen)
is the truth and lies problem.
31:31:
(Hannah Rosen)
And I find that so overwhelming, like the idea that people believe an untrue thing about what happened on January 6th and an untrue thing about what happened at Springfield, Ohio.
31:42:
(Hannah Rosen)
And as a journalist, I always find that like an impossible barrier to cross, but maybe you're suggesting ways to cross that barrier is, well, people believe smaller truths, you know.
31:53:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's one of the ways.
31:54:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, we now have an information system that enables the creation of alternate realities.
32:02:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, for me, one of the really striking things about the election campaign wasn't so much Trump.
32:06:
(Ann Applebaum)
It was Musk.
32:08:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, Elon Musk, who owns a big and important social media platform, was saying things that he must have known not to be true.
32:18:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, falsehoods.
32:19:
(Ann Applebaum)
about immigration, about the election.
32:21:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, he was allowing the platform to deliberately promote them.
32:25:
(Ann Applebaum)
And he seemed to be doing that as a way of demonstrating his power.
32:30:
(Ann Applebaum)
You know, he was showing us that he can decide what people think.
32:34:
(Ann Applebaum)
And he was working hard to create this alternate world in which things that aren't true seem true.
32:39:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that, I'm afraid it was really successful.
32:43:
(Ann Applebaum)
Right.
32:44:
(Ann Applebaum)
Yes.
32:44:
(McKay Coppins)
And the other thing that I think we've seen is that a big purpose of propaganda and disinformation is not even just to convince people that a certain thing is true, but to almost exhaust their ability to tell the difference between what's true and what's not.
33:02:
(McKay Coppins)
Right.
33:02:
(McKay Coppins)
kind of make them cynical and fatigued and disinclined to even try, right?
33:09:
(McKay Coppins)
I remember in 2020, I spent a lot of time covering kind of disinformation in the campaign.
33:13:
(McKay Coppins)
And that was the thing that I would encounter when I talked to Trump voters.
33:18:
(McKay Coppins)
It wasn't so much that they believed everything he said.
33:20:
(McKay Coppins)
Someone would even acknowledge that he would lie or exaggerate, but they would kind of throw their hands up and say, yeah, they all lie, right?
33:28:
(McKay Coppins)
Who even knows what's true?
33:29:
(McKay Coppins)
And
33:29:
(McKay Coppins)
That, I think, is the thing that we need to guard against over these next few years.
33:35:
(Ann Applebaum)
So that is the essence of Putinist propaganda.
33:38:
(Ann Applebaum)
It's not so much that you're expected to believe everything he says about whatever, the greatness of Russia or –
33:45:
(Ann Applebaum)
Or the horror of Western civilization.
33:48:
(Ann Applebaum)
But you're expected to become so confused by the multitude and number of lies that you've been told that you throw your hands up in the air and you go home and you say, I don't know anything.
34:00:
(Ann Applebaum)
I can't be involved in this.
34:01:
(Ann Applebaum)
I don't want anything to do with politics.
34:03:
(Ann Applebaum)
I'm just going to live my life.
34:04:
(Ann Applebaum)
And that has been a really – turns out to be a really, really successful form of propaganda.
34:09:
(Ann Applebaum)
Probably more successful than the old-fashioned Soviet thing of telling everybody that everything is great.
34:14:
(Ann Applebaum)
Yeah.
34:14:
(Ann Applebaum)
Which you can disprove pretty easily.
34:17:
(Hannah Rosen)
Well, Anne and McKay, with your idea of coalitions, I had almost succeeded in finding us a practical path of thinking about a future.
34:26:
(Hannah Rosen)
But now we're back at this big veil of disinformation, which is not the place I want to end.
34:30:
(Hannah Rosen)
Is there some way to turn that ship?
34:32:
(Hannah Rosen)
I'll ask you again, Anne.
34:34:
(Hannah Rosen)
How have people turned that ship when you find a culture, a populace that's just become cynical and overwhelmed by lies?
34:42:
(Hannah Rosen)
How have other countries successfully crawled out of that ship?
34:46:
(Ann Applebaum)
You build relationships of trust around other things.
34:50:
(Ann Applebaum)
I mean, almost as we were just talking about.
34:52:
(Ann Applebaum)
You find alternative forms of communication, all different ways of reaching people.
34:58:
(Ann Applebaum)
That's the only way.
35:00:
(Hannah Rosen)
All right.
35:00:
(Hannah Rosen)
Well, Anne McKay, we will have many more such conversations, but thank you for helping us be more discerning.
35:07:
(Hannah Rosen)
Thank you.
35:08:
(Hannah Rosen)
Thanks.
35:11:
(Hannah Rosen)
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Janae West and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudina Bade.
35:17:
(Hannah Rosen)
It was engineered by Raps Merciak.
35:20:
(Hannah Rosen)
Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
35:26:
(Hannah Rosen)
I'm Hannah Rosen.
35:27:
(Hannah Rosen)
Thank you for listening.