Is it Rubio? Is it Rodriguez? It certainly isn't Machado.

Honestly, it's not clear to Venezuelans.

Huh.

I mean, Rodriguez is technically running the country.

She has a complex, that's the best way I could put it, relationship with the Trump administration.

Trump himself likes her.

There are other people inside the administration who also have interests in Venezuela, economic interests, I should say.

And do you think the move is to just get the United States out of there or to fix this relationship that the United States currently has with Venezuela so that, what, the billions of oil can benefit maybe American corporations, but also maybe the Venezuelan people?

Could you maybe tell us what did you establish about who is benefiting from the oil money and what still remains unclear about the situation?

So the photographs are of Lake Maracaibo, where I went, and which Lindsay also went.

And the lake is the most, what was the country's original big oil reserves are underneath the lake.

And it now looks like a scene from after the apocalypse, kind of shattered oil drills and abandoned drilling platforms and oil on the lake and coloring the shoreline and sort of bubbles in the water where broken gas flows.

pipelines are underneath.

You know, it's really it's a huge mess.

And you can immediately see how these years of neglect and underinvestment need to be turned around.

What do you think it tells us about the way in which Trump has changed American foreign policy more generally?

So do you think that changes are standing in the world? And again, we're still going to be a divided government for the next two years.

I think people are, they're cautious.

They understand that Trump is still in charge, that he still has, you know, levers of foreign policy still mostly belong to him.

Our system has become so skewed to the executive that he has enormous powers over the army and the security services and intelligence and so on.

So I don't think anybody's in any illusions that something's going to change overnight.

But this does change the calculus.

So First of all, the MAGA movement, which has an international face, so it has deep connections to the European far right, to the Russians.

How are the Ukrainians and how can they survive these next two years and, I mean, and just the Russian influence of it all?

What have you learned?

So there are two ways in which there's an ugly relationship developing.

One is that Venezuelan oil, the profits from Venezuelan oil currently go into a bank account in the United States.

There is no open audit of the account.

We don't know how much money goes into it.

We don't know how much money, if it comes out, goes back to Venezuela.

We don't know what happens to the rest of the money.

What was in it for the United States?

So the question to you is, can Ukraine survive now with the United States fully now where President Trump specifically throwing his lot in with Putin and saying we're done with Ukraine?

So remember that this war is over when the Russians decide to stop fighting.

And this is why U.S. pressure has been so important, because the Russians need to know that they will continue to pay a price.

They need to continue making these calculations.

What the Trump administration has done throughout, I should say, for the last year and a half is give the Russians the feeling that it's worth fighting.

In other words, the Kushner and Witkoff negotiations have prolonged the war.

The war might have been over by now if the Russians had calculated that we can't win.

The reality on the ground hasn't matched the version we're hearing from President Trump and his team.

They shouldn't indict Kash Patel three times?

You know, they should look for actual crimes, and they should look for incompetence.

I mean, so if they're going to look at—I mean, this is not about the leadership, but if they're going to look at what's happened to the Department of Justice, and here I'm sure you know more than me— But they're going to need to look at who was hired in these years.

Are they people who are qualified? What happened to qualified people? Why have so many people resigned? What happened to them? I mean, they need to look at the institution as a whole and how to fix the institution.

It's not just about...

You know, it's singling out a couple of people.

But this is a this is a job for the next few years.

Are there certain things that you worry are beyond bringing back, whether they're particular? So for example, USAID, is that something that can be brought back or not? The prior strength of NATO as a group of partners who relied on each other and trusted each other, can that come back? And to the extent any of these things, you can pick anything, either optimistic or pessimistic, how much effort and work and time will it take

Talk about Trump and Putin and and Russia and Ukraine and where we are and where that goes.

I think the surprise is the openness and the harshness of Trump's turn against Ukraine.

You know, we know he didn't like President Zelensky.

We know he was, you know, he's inclined towards Russia.

He favors Russia.

He has done so for 40 years.

He's said it many times.

But what's actually happened since we did that in January?

So when we look at these elections, very simple question, will they be conducted fairly? What are you looking out for to judge whether they are?

So one of the great advantages and disadvantages of the American electoral system is that it's really 50 separate systems.

And even within particular states, sometimes voting, there are different voting system inside a single state.

And this makes it, you know, unlike, say, Venezuela, where Maduro was able to just not recognize the vote because he controlled a national electoral commission.

You don't have anything like that in the United States.

You don't have a single button that the president could press.

But there have been, for the past year, multiple attempts to manipulate the results.

What effect might the outcome of these midterms have on these movements?

So when we look at these elections, very simple question, will they be conducted fairly? What are you looking out for to judge whether they are?

So one of the great advantages and disadvantages of the American electoral system is that it's really 50 separate systems.

And even within particular states, sometimes voting, there are different voting system inside a single state.

And this makes it, you know, unlike, say, Venezuela, where Maduro was able to just not recognize the vote because he controlled a national electoral commission.

You don't have anything like that in the United States.

You don't have a single button that the president could press.

But there have been, for the past year, multiple attempts to manipulate the results.

If the Europeans elect basically the far right, which is nationalist, if nothing else, then does the European Union survive?

What does that say about a leader who is at a step with 97% of his citizens?

It means that his interests are not the same as America's.

His interests are himself, whether it's his longstanding business relationship with Russia and Russians, whether it's his admiration for Putin, an autocrat who doesn't have to listen to media or have unpleasant conversations.

legislators asking him what he's doing, whether he's been talked into this by people around him.

And there are all kinds of speculations, and I'm sure that your other guests will have other ideas.

It doesn't really matter anymore.

The point is that this is something that's personal to him.

Take us through it.

I started by asking Anne Applebaum to tell us how Trump and the people around him are using his office for their own financial gain.

I think it's important to understand that this is a system.

There are these stories every other day, as you say, and they seem to come from all different directions, but I think it represents a very systematic way of thinking.

So the people around Trump have both an ideological and a business interest in using the power of the American state, of the American government, to make money for themselves and to attempt to push others in the directions that they want as well.

So on the one hand, they are pushing, for example, for victories for the far right in Europe, for also self-identified right-wing leaders in Latin America.

And this is because those leaders in Europe are anti-regulation or they think would weaken the European Union, which would then not be able to regulate American companies.

And in Latin America, they're looking for deals.

So is it working from Trump or Trump's administration perspective that they are not only boosting ideological allies or like-minded politicians at the same time as enriching themselves? Yeah.

This Venezuelan oil that we're extracting, where do we believe the money is going?

So there are two separate things.

One is that the oil that's coming out of Venezuela, the companies who are the royalties and taxes that they earn from it are going into a U.S. bank account.

Previously, it was in Qatar, the bank account.

Now it's been moved to New York.

Very little, if not almost nothing, actually, is known about how much money goes into the account or how much comes out again.

So some money does come back to Venezuela.

is doing?

I wanted to start out by asking what your strongest evidence is for that claim, and what makes it different from earlier conflicts of interest in American government?

I mean, you can find incidences of American power being abused on behalf of y- for American companies in the past.

You know, the most famous example is United Fruit, which was a company that used US power to try to control governments in Central America in the sort of mid-20th century.

Um, but what we're seeing now is something different in scale and in the, and in the sort of all-of-government approach.

So what we're watching is, um, for example, the tools of American, what we used to call democracy promotion.

So, um, you know, State Department, um, uh, you know, cultural funding, um, you know, visits by the, the Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Assistant Deputy Secretary of State, are being aimed at promoting not democracy, not ideas, but far-right political parties around, especially in Europe, but also elsewhere, um, who have a-- who are, who, who are compatible with their kind of civilizational idea.

They have an idea about the collapse of Western civilization, and they believe those are the parties that will fix it, but which also happen to be parties that oppose all kinds of regulation.

But more generally, what are the signs you look for that signal, 'cause all, all governments have corruption, but that signal corruption has stopped being merely misconduct within a democracy but become the way of governing, and how far along that pathway is the United States?

What is that?

So their argument, they don't all have an argument, but those who do believe they are, and for all I know, it's a sincere belief, believe that they are engaged in a global struggle against some kind of international wokeness, some kind of left-wing movement.

I mean, this is misleading on a number of grounds.

One, the politics of the U.S. don't translate exactly to other countries.

The reasons why...

Europe has – its immigration policy are different from ours.

The reason why conversations about race and about history in Europe are very different from America.

It sounds as if that some of that coming together is what we are seeing in terms of our own country.

years ago.

One of the ways that some activists in autocratic countries have tried to fight this is through using personal or idealistic messages that can bring people together, you know, around symbols or around ideas.

And one of the examples that I write about in the book… On social media.

On social media, right, exactly.

And one of the examples I wrote in the book was a Zimbabwean youth pastor called Evan Mawariri who… who made a video, I think, out of just personal frustration.

He's somebody who had been abroad.

He came back to the country.

I mean, so

What, what do most people, do you think, not understand about the level of corruption we're seeing in the second Trump term?

So first of all, I think people don't understand the degree to which, as you say, this is a revolutionary project.

That means that there is a team of people.

It's not Trump himself.

Trump has his own agenda, his own narcissistic agenda, his desire to win at all costs and so on, but there's a group of people around him who are very happy to destroy existing institutions and bureaucracies and customs and to replace them with themselves, essentially.

And in the, in the case of foreign policy, what this looks like is clearing away diplomacy, removing experts, removing, um, ways of doing business that Americans have stuck to for the last seventy, eighty, ninety, maybe a hundred years, and instead substituting businesspeople, friends of friends of the president, in some cases ideologues, and letting them be the voice and the face of America.

And the reason I compare it to a revolution is that when you have a revolution, there's always an ideological component, right? There's a big idea, and the...

Hmm.

H- how do you, when asked, explain to people who maybe aren't, um, marinating in this subject all day, every day, why the country should invest so much in this war, and maybe why even we should be doing more, uh, or perhaps, uh, getting more directly involved in the, in the, in the conflict ourselves?

Right.

So well, so right now we're not investing much.

There isn't much, m- you know, US money or, or, or weapons going to Ukraine.

Um, but why is Ukraine significant? Ukraine is significant because the Russians understand, and many of their allies, which includes China and Iran, also understand that in their minds, this is a war against the world that America built.

You know, when they invaded Ukraine, they were also saying, "We don't care about your idea that there will never be a war in Europe again.

You know, we don't care about international law.

Yeah

It's calmed down a little bit now, but what the hell was that about?

So first of all, yes, there was a moment when the Danes were preparing for a military invasion.

That doesn't mean that it would have happened, but they prepared.

They sent troops to Greenland.

There were other European countries along with some, sometimes symbolically, but in a few cases there were a number of soldiers there.

They were prepared to blow up airports because there's no way to land in Greenland because of snow and ice, except on an airport.

So you can prevent a landing even, apparently, even of helicopters by blowing up the runways.

What did you hear from them?

Can you explain what that order is and how it works?

So I think the most important thing to understand is that for the first time since at least the Second World War, you have a U.S. administration which is retreating from the idea that America is the leader of the world's democracies and that America is at the center of a powerful alliance in Europe and Asia and Latin America and elsewhere designed to fight against dictatorship and to promote the rule of law and to promote democracy.

trade and to promote integration of the world in a peaceful way.

This administration doesn't believe in any of that.

And they've made clear, they say that actually in the documents that they produce, but also in their actions.

And instead, they're driven by, as you say, this revolutionary sensibility, this idea that we need to fight against our existential enemies and that we need to change systems permanently.

We need to change permanently the way the United States government works, which they don't call it the government, they call it the administrative state, which makes it sound a lot worse.

Can you explain what the pressure America is putting on Brazil now?

Why is it dangerous to redesign American foreign policy around an ideology like this and the personal benefit of those who deploy it?

So American foreign policy should be about benefiting all Americans.

It should be to make America prosperous.

It should be to make it easier and more lucrative for Americans to trade with the world.

To do that means you need some mutual benefit.

I mean, if you do a trade deal, if you do a trade deal that only benefits one side, that's not going to be a lasting trade deal that the other side is going to agree to for very long.

You need to create mutual relationships that will last for a long time, that will benefit U.S. companies for decades, not just for the next year or not just for the next two years, but for 10 years.

So first of

Give us a sense of how you see the state of the war and the pressure on Ukraine right now.

So what we're watching really is an acceleration of military development and technology of a kind we've never seen before or not recently, not in recent memory.

Over the summer, if you'd asked me, I would have said Ukraine was pulling ahead.

So the Ukrainians had a couple of really big advances.

They have built their own long-range strike system, which is not dependent on the U.S. or Ukraine.

or American technology, or as I understand it, even American intelligence.

And with this, they are now able to strike deep into Russia.

But do you think that's just for show? Would Putin actually go? So those are two different questions.

Why was he right?

He was right because US policy towards Canada is to undermine the Canadian economy, to weaken the country, and possibly, if they can, to divide it.

Um, and so we have...

I mean, you know the, the tariff policy is, is public.

Uh, it, it, it's, it's not a, it's not a normal trade policy in the way that we've understood trade policy in the past, which was, uh, you know, create trade arrangements of mutual benefit so that both sides could become prosperous.

You know, this looks much more predatory.

This is an attempt to undermine Canada.

What happens when we realize that we no longer do?" So what happens when you realize that you don't have those?

Does it, does it feel different to land in New York today?

It-- I think your point about how people landing here from different parts of the world hear this story is a really important one because people from dictatorships all over the world arrive in the United States seeing the president ban media, um, reading about the corruption of his sons, his son taking money from a, um, from a foreign oligarch, foreign gangster really.

Um, what they hear is, "Oh, all this stuff that US has been criticizing for so many years, um, it's okay now.

Uh, the, you know, the rules have changed.

Nobody's gonna criticize us." You know, the United States isn't playing the role either of speaking about democracy or of practicing democratic values and, and, and virtues, uh, you know, the rule of law, transparency, accountability.

And they come here and they see that, and they will feel differently about this country.

And on the, on the other hand, our allies come and, uh, you know, see that the United States is no longer their leader.

In what way?

What patterns did you find about how the administration is wielding U.S. diplomacy to promote its interests?

the most important thing to understand is that the administration isn't using diplomacy as we traditionally understand it or only selectively.

So many of the most important conversations that happen between the White House and foreign leaders are brokered by businessmen.

And they're very often businessmen who are Somehow close to Trump or who have donated to Trump and actually Brazil is an example of that where, you know, it's a long story.

There was a kind of breakdown in relations between the U.S. and Brazil.

The American president has been was was favoring the Brazilian opposition movement.

There was very little communication between the two sides.

How is all of this making room for anti-democratic government's in other countries when the United States and the Trump administration approach diplomacy in this way?

I'm like, if Anne Applebaum is out there saying we gotta bulldoze the ballroom, that piqued my interest, so I wanna hear more.

So I grew up in Washington, and a lot of the institutions that we're talking about, the Kennedy Center, the monuments around D.C., the Reflecting Pool, these are places I've known all my life, and I know how important they are to people who live in the city and to people who visit the city, and I've been taking people to see them for years and years, and I took kind of generations of children to The Nutcracker Suite, and I was taken to The Nutcracker Suite at the Kennedy Center at Christmastime.

And watching the president systematically destroy one after the next has, yeah, has probably radicalized me.

You know, the White House was built in a certain style for a certain reason.

It was meant to evoke republican, small R, republican virtues.

You know, it was supposed to be modest.

It wasn't a palace like the palaces in England that we had-- the Re- American Revolution had broken away from.

Yeah.