Jul 11, 2025 · 31 min · 10 segments
Since The Atlantic first released the podcast Autocracy in America last fall, Donald Trump was elected president again. Staff writer Anne Applebaum describes how Trump’s return to the White House fits…
Garry KasparovHost
Anne ApplebaumHost
Frank LuntzGuest
I mean, it's funny, round about 2014, 2015, that was when I started following the rise of Russian propaganda and influence campaigns, mostly in Europe.
I mean, I- I saw them in Poland, I saw them in the Czech Republic, I saw them in Hungary.
And I remember talking to people about it in Washington and people said, "Well, this is all very terrible, you know, for Slovenia and we feel really bad." But it, again, it felt like a very distant problem and really just a year or two later in 2016, we saw the Russian influence campaign being conducted in the United States.
And, uh, since then, the gradual accumulation of, as I said, these authoritarian practices and behavior in American politics.
I mean, it's really been, uh, one in which the United States has gone from one polar opposite, from a, from a- a symbol of...
It's about Americans believing in freedom and Americans having allies and being part of this network of other rule of law countries in the world.
And we've gone from that to being a really rogue power, which seeks to break up all of our alliances and maybe instead do deals with dictatorships.
As I s- as I said at the beginning, you were an early observer of the changes in Russia that created the system that we saw today.
Tell me, when you look at the first months of the second Trump administration, do you see something similar? What's setting off alarm bells in your head?
It's a creation of classical oligarchy and I think that's these many Americans, they got confused because they believe that any rich person who is buying influence is an oligarch.
But by my classification, when you look at Putin's Russia, you should disregard as the- the simple spread of this word for any rich man.
Rockefeller, Carnegie in the past, JP Morgan or now we just have Bezos, uh, Zuckerberg, uh, I still wouldn't call them oligarchs because while they're buying influence clearly, so that's- that's what happens in- in any representative democracy, they are not involved in decision-making process.
I mean, it's funny, round about 2014, 2015, that was when I started following the rise of Russian propaganda and influence campaigns, mostly in Europe.
I mean, I- I saw them in Poland, I saw them in the Czech Republic, I saw them in Hungary.
And I remember talking to people about it in Washington and people said, "Well, this is all very terrible, you know, for Slovenia and we feel really bad." But it, again, it felt like a very distant problem and really just a year or two later in 2016, we saw the Russian influence campaign being conducted in the United States.
And, uh, since then, the gradual accumulation of, as I said, these authoritarian practices and behavior in American politics.
I mean, it's really been, uh, one in which the United States has gone from one polar opposite, from a, from a- a symbol of...
It's about Americans believing in freedom and Americans having allies and being part of this network of other rule of law countries in the world.
And we've gone from that to being a really rogue power, which seeks to break up all of our alliances and maybe instead do deals with dictatorships.
As I s- as I said at the beginning, you were an early observer of the changes in Russia that created the system that we saw today.
Tell me, when you look at the first months of the second Trump administration, do you see something similar? What's setting off alarm bells in your head?
It's a creation of classical oligarchy and I think that's these many Americans, they got confused because they believe that any rich person who is buying influence is an oligarch.
But by my classification, when you look at Putin's Russia, you should disregard as the- the simple spread of this word for any rich man.
Rockefeller, Carnegie in the past, JP Morgan or now we just have Bezos, uh, Zuckerberg, uh, I still wouldn't call them oligarchs because while they're buying influence clearly, so that's- that's what happens in- in any representative democracy, they are not involved in decision-making process.
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