Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Anne Applebaum:

Trump has passed this bill. Millions of people are going to lose their healthcare. That’s a real thing that’s happening in real life. Is that real life experience more or less powerful than your online experience?

Preet Bharara:

That’s Anne Applebaum. She’s a staff writer at The Atlantic where she covers democracy, authoritarianism and how political systems can shift from one to the other. In our conversation, Applebaum and I step back to examine the broader political landscape from the passage of what the Republicans have called the Big Beautiful Bill to the administration’s controversial immigration enforcement. We explore what is straining our democratic institutions and what could help restore them. Does hope resonate better than fear and outrage? Has social media created a new global political environment? And do people’s daily experiences still influence how they vote? Then I’ll answer your questions about federalizing the National Guard and revoking citizenship. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

If Trumpism is a reaction to an earlier era of politics, what will be the reaction to the reaction? Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum joins me to zoom out on this fraught moment. Anne Applebaum, welcome back to the show.

Anne Applebaum:

Oh, thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know why it’s been so long. I treasured your visit last time and I was reminded you were here more than four years ago to talk about your then new book, Twilight of Democracy. So if we were in the Twilight of Democracy four years ago, are we now … Is it morning? Is it a bright, sunny morning for democracy, Anne? Give us an update.

Anne Applebaum:

I think it’s kind of late evening, actually.

Preet Bharara:

Late evening?

Anne Applebaum:

Moving rapidly towards midnight.

Preet Bharara:

Explain.

Anne Applebaum:

Well-

Preet Bharara:

That’s a big question. I could break it down if you want.

Anne Applebaum:

Let’s break it down. Let’s just do it in parts.

Preet Bharara:

So when you were last here, if I’m doing my math correctly, Donald Trump had, according to most people, lost the election and Joe Biden had been sworn in, and here you are four years later and Trump is back. Lots of people have talked about this, but I want to set the table with respect to a lot of things in both the United States and in Russia and in all sorts of other places, including Poland where you’re speaking from. Are you surprised that four years on we have Trump back? Would you have been surprised if I had told you that in 2021?

Anne Applebaum:

I don’t know that I would’ve been surprised, but I would’ve been disappointed. I don’t know if your listeners want, once again, the litany of mistakes, but to have not-

Preet Bharara:

Why not?

Anne Applebaum:

To have not understood that Donald Trump’s assault on the capitol and the assault on the Constitution and on the democratic process was a dire threat to American democracy that had to be dealt with immediately and severely was a huge mistake. And it’s a long story and maybe we can talk about it a little bit later, but there’s maybe a similar kind of mistake being made in Poland. I mean it’s a different circumstance. But one of the things that we have learned over the last many several years is that these authoritarian movements are not defeated by a single election. They have real strength and roots. They are aided and abetted by the nature of modern media and social media, which encourages them. They have a lot of money behind them and they have a lot of power. And to imagine that you can win against them by being nice and by not putting their leaders in jail when they break the law is to make a large mistake.

And so that was the mistake that Joe Biden made. One of the other things that happened after Trump lost the first time and then assaulted the system and then remained a candidate or remained in the running is that he began to attract to himself all of the most extreme people in American politics. So people who saw that assault, who understood it for what it is, who also had deeply revolutionary, even kind of Bolshevik ideas about how to transform the American political system, all of them were attracted to Donald Trump in a way that they had not been even in 2016. And so the second election of Donald Trump was always going to be very, very different from the first election. It was very hard to get people to understand this or to see why that was the case, but it’s something that’s been the case in other places. I mean, Hugo Chavez after being released from jail and coming back to become president of Venezuela was much more dangerous that time. Victor Orban after losing and coming back was much more dangerous the second time. And so that really singular failure of the Biden administration not to understand this, I think is … That’s a part of explanation for where we are.

Preet Bharara:

So I want to unpack or let you unpack a little bit more of what you just said. Is yours a critique of the voting public? Is yours a critique of the features of democracy as they exist in the United States? It sounded like from your last remark that it’s a critique of the Biden administration, part of which critique sounds like a failure to jail his political adversary. Some might say, well, the 2024 election pretty much was a fair and square election, putting aside arguments about Trump’s eligibility given his high crimes and misdemeanors, which went his way. It’s not just democracy at work. If people choose to ignore foibles or flaws or despotic tendencies and they vote in an election for someone, and generally speaking, the features of the election were upstanding, who’s at fault?

Anne Applebaum:

I mean, it sounds that the point that you’re making is that voters are at fault. And that of course is partly true. I mean, to-

Preet Bharara:

They voted for the guy.

Anne Applebaum:

To have not recognized what he was and what he was saying was a mistake. Mind you, a certain number of them, and I don’t know what the percentage is, clearly did see it and approved of it. So we have to take that into account as well. Actually, the subject of that book that we were talking about four years ago was … The subject was why are people attracted to autocracy and why do people like it and admire it and want it. Even people who’ve grown up in democratic cultures. And so a part of the election is explained by that. But then again, it’s the responsibility of people whose values are closely tied to the political system to make sure that everyone in the system is obeying the law and Trump did not obey the law. He broke the law and in a very profound way, and yet he escaped any responsibility for it.

I don’t know percentages. I’m not a pollster. Perhaps it’s the case that many people feel surprised by what Trump is doing. Maybe they are surprised to learn that he’s passed a piece of legislation that will, as I understand it, one of the largest shifts from the poor to the rich in American history. Maybe they’re surprised by the fact that he’s created a federal police force or he is in the process of creating it. This new bill will create a federal … Police force is the wrong word. A federal enforcement agency which has as much funding as the armies of some other countries and will have the ability to go in anywhere in the country and override the law and arrest people. And maybe people are surprised that that will happen. Maybe they’ve been surprised by the animus that he shows to his enemies and the displays of cruelty. I mean the creation of a kind of concentration camp in Florida that they make jokes about. They call it Alligator Alcatraz. The celebration of a prison in El Salvador where people are being sent from the United States.

All that kind of celebration, that sort of Instagram cruelty. Again, I’m not that surprised by it, but I think maybe some people are shocked. But as you say, the clues were there. The clues were there in the language that he used during the campaign, in the way he talked about his opponents as vermin, the way he talked about immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation. I mean that’s literally a phrase lifted from Hitler, I assume by somebody who works for him, who must have known what they were doing. The clues were there, but a lot of people didn’t want to see them. So here we are. I don’t know if it’s interesting at this point to play a blame game, but there are a lot of people responsible and the Democratic Party is responsible for not withdrawing Biden when it became clear that he couldn’t win and wasn’t qualified to be running for president anymore. The voters are responsible for not listening to what Trump was saying. The Republican Party is now responsible even much more so than I could ever have imagined for tolerating and facilitating this move in the direction of dictatorship. Of autocracy rather. Plenty of people are at fault. I suppose the more interesting question is what happens now.

Preet Bharara:

I want to stick with this less interesting question for another minute just because I want to understand. It’s not a matter of only historical significance because we’re in the present with this person still in office, having come back from a very resounding and demoralizing and debilitating defeat. And whether the fault lies in any sort of structure or system or set of rules or does the fault lie in human frailty and human lack of understanding and human political lack of fervor and talent. You mentioned Biden not stepping down when he should have. All of those things are sort of fair game. And as we think about the state of American democracy such as it is, and I know you have a particular view on it, one that I probably largely share, but I’m trying to get to the bottom of why we’re where we are and how we can get out of it. Is there something different that our democracy should have set up in terms of the practice and the structure, or did a lot of people just let the American public down and let the founders down? Is it a problem of the people or the problem of the structure and system or both?

Anne Applebaum:

I mean I think we’ve actually lived through over the last 20 years a really profound cultural change. I mean it’s a little bit deeper even than democracy. The way in which people now get and process political information, the speed of change, which I think it’s about to even accelerate further in terms of the economy being altered by technology, by AI, originally by social media. The way in which we relate to each other. What we understand even to be politics is so different now than from what it was even a decade ago. We’re now at a point where politics isn’t even really about policies anymore. So the most important arguments that we’re having aren’t about should we build more roads or less roads or should we have this kind of healthcare system or that kind of healthcare system. You think about the wonkish policy debates that there used to be in the Clinton era or even actually when Obama was president or George W. Bush about what we should do about this problem or that problem.

We’re not even confronting real problems anymore. Now politics is all about demonstrating your identity. Are you this tribe or are you that tribe? And that change, which as I said has been facilitated by the nature of our public conversation, the rules of which are set by the social media companies and regular media as well. I mean all of that has meant that people aren’t even participating in politics in the same way as they used to. I mean American democracy, this is something I happened to have been thinking about for something I’m working on, was always very … It had a very important grassroots element. So there were local politics, political groups, there were Lions Clubs, there were League of Women Voters, there were organizations and associations, also apolitical ones that played a big role in public life in shaping how conversations and debates went and how candidates were chosen.

A lot of those organizations have died or disappeared. And to a big extent, the parties also don’t have in many places the same grassroots role that they used to. Politics became … As it moved online, as I said, it became much more not about stuff that you really did or roles that you played in real life, but about boxes that you clicked. You liked this or you liked that, or you joined this Facebook group or that Facebook group. You weren’t actually engaging in a real activity with other people on the ground. And by the way, this is a problem that is endemic to all democracies. So a lot of European democracies used to essentially have … There were two basic political groupings. On the one hand, there were the social Democrats whose roots were in trade unions and trade unions were real things and people were really in them and they had real meetings and real factories and they were a real force in people’s lives.

And on the other hand, you had Christian Democrats in a lot of European countries. Sort of variation of it was the British Tory Party. And the Christian Democrats were based in the church. And I don’t mean they were religious. They were church organizations and groups. And the party emerged in a real way from those real groups. And once both the unions and the church began to die away, the parties became kind of shells that seemed very empty to people. And this is when you began to get this breakdown of politics here too. But I think in the US it’s a little different because we have a two-party system and our parties have different history, but I think there’s something the same that as participation in public life changed, I think it was really detrimental to democracy. And also the rules of conversation on social media were not designed to create better conversation.

They were designed to make money for Facebook or whoever. And that meant that the rules of the algorithms were set to keep people online as long as possible. And keeping them online often meant making them angry or making them feel emotional or making them try to join one group or the other group. The idea that evidence-based debate or conversation was important sort of somehow went out the window. I’m sorry if that sounds … I’m not blaming anybody sufficiently or not answering your question, but I think that’s the underlying change and that more than anything specific about our constitution. I mean our constitution has always been flawed and it’s always had … The Electoral College has never worked the way it was supposed to work from the moment that it was invented. And the Senate was always a distorted body and overrepresented rural states and so on. All those things have always been true and yet they didn’t get us to where we are now. We didn’t have a direct autocratic threat to the nature of the system. And so you have to ask what changed and I don’t think it was the constitution that changed.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So you described a lot of things. I’m going to stick with it another minute. All of these features of social media and culture and the public dynamic and other things that I want to talk to you about, disinformation and everything else, those were not only available to or only relevant to Trump. All those levers, social media and everything else, perfectly available and freely accessible to Democrats and his adversaries as well. So it’s not like he relied on some special privilege or some special access to money or something else.

Anne Applebaum:

No, no. I didn’t mean to say that.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So is the implication then Democrats lost because they played by old rules and they were too nice and virtuous and didn’t take advantage as Trump did of these new features of how we socialize with each other and how we engage with each other and how we form our political opinions? Because unless there’s something inherently autocratic or rightward about these social media features and other things that you mentioned … So I’m trying to understand if that’s what you mean.

Anne Applebaum:

I think that social media inherently encourages extremism and sometimes it’s right-wing extremism and sometimes it’s left-wing extremism. And in the United States it’s mostly right-wing extremism, but you can find other examples in other countries. And the reason I think that is because many of the phenomenon that we saw in the United States are identical in other places. So I’m here in Warsaw, Poland. There is no reason whatsoever why Polish politics should resemble American politics. We have nothing in common historically, geographically, religiously, demographically, any other anything. I can’t think of two countries that are in many ways more different. And yet I have to tell you, the pattern of political life in both places is amazingly similar and the profound polarization is similar. The nature of the Polish far right is similar. The language that’s used is similar.

And the explanation for that is that the structure of debate, which is shaped by … It’s not just social media, it’s social media and the internet more broadly. Has affected them both in similar ways. I mean, so that’s pretty clear. And as I say, I think people who are the more extreme, the more loud, the more polarizing, those are the voices that are now heard more easily than anything else. I mean I notice it in myself. I’m not saying this as an accusatory. The difference between watching a even tempered debate between two relatively similar people who are discussing how to reform American healthcare. How exciting is that? Are you drawn to that or pulled into that?

Preet Bharara:

Well, I might be.

Anne Applebaum:

Actually, it’s the kind of thing I used to find interesting. For a few years, I was on the editorial board of the Washington Post. This is a long time ago. And in that capacity, one of the things I wrote about was healthcare and pension reform and those kinds of issues. And I did find those things interesting and I did watch those kinds of debates and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. But I find as time goes on, those aren’t the things that attract me or draw me or pull me in. And I think I’m as affected by the louder and more dramatic and more, I don’t know, world historical and existential issues that now present themselves to me. Politics is now everywhere. This is everywhere. It’s not just the United States. It’s existential in a way. I mean, if you are in a very polarized society and the people who are your political opponents, if you know that when they take over the country, they’re going to change the nature of the country, then politics is about fear and anger and existence and identity and self-definition. It’s not about which political party will run the healthcare system better, which is what it used to be like or what it felt like it was like 20 years ago.

Preet Bharara:

So this is a totally different example, but one in the news that tests the proposition that all things being equal and political talents being equal, and this is a thing that I’ve always thought about, does a message of fear and division win or lose to a message of hopefulness and inclusiveness? Now, the particular election I’m going to mention is the primary in the city of New York where I am right now. And the presumptive … I guess he is the democratic nominee. Zohran Mamdani. And one could make arguments about whether he’s divisive or not given his views on certain issues. But he did carry a message of hope. I don’t want to over-interpret it for the country or for other places including Poland and elsewhere, but do you have a view that all political talents being equal, does fear and rage compete well or compete poorly with hope? And I would also reference for your consideration, the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama. How do you think about those things and those political movements?

Anne Applebaum:

No. So this is one of the possible solutions. How do you move people emotionally? If we now live in a world where people are mostly moved by emotion and they’re not that interested anymore in the kinds of things we should debate, that we-

Preet Bharara:

It seems to be where we are.

Anne Applebaum:

It seems to be where we are. How do you move people emotionally and is there a positive way to do it? And actually I think the Harris campaign tried to do it. So it’s not as if she wasn’t aware. She used that Beyonce song about freedom. There was a lot of symbolism in her-

Preet Bharara:

But that’s when the issue of political talents being equal arguably comes into play.

Anne Applebaum:

Sure. But it’s not as if no one’s thought of this. So finding a way to reach people emotionally and finding a way to go to where people are, to go to TikTok or to go to the podcast world or to go to social media and find a way to use it in a way that promotes hope and unity and makes people feel emotional in a positive way, in theory that’s possible. In theory that’s possible. I mean I think it’s much harder, and I don’t know of that many successful examples. Maybe the mayor of New York will be one. Would his kind of message and his kind of talent work at a national level? I don’t know. New York is very specific.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know either.

Anne Applebaum:

But I actually appreciate one thing your asking about him is that I do think some of the debate about him is very stupid. Again, focused on this policy or that policy. You’re right to focus on the fact that he ran a very successful campaign at the level of being able to use the tools of social media in a way that none of his opponents did. And showing that you can do it with a different cause or with a different aim. I just don’t know whether over the breadth of the nation it can work.

Preet Bharara:

From my perspective, maybe this is naive or maybe it’s overly optimistic and hopeful and maybe it reflects a particularly sunny view of people, all of whom can be motivated and moved by anger and rage and vindictiveness and all those things. But ultimately, if the message is equally powerful, an uplifting one, a hopeful one wins the day. I used to say when I tweeted a lot on that evil social media that you were referring to, making myself part of the problem, I guess, presumably. If I posted a snarky tweet that was very clever, it would get a lot of engagement. But on the occasion where I had an equally high quality hopeful and benevolent tweet that was not saccharine, it would get even more engagement. So I don’t know if that’s a recipe for anything at all. And it also depends on the messenger. I sometimes wonder if we don’t say that we’re over determining the accomplishments politically of Donald Trump. Obviously there have to be conditions precedent. Obviously there is some merit and worth to the argument that he is a symptom of other things, but he’s also a cause. And I wonder if other people doing exactly what Trump does could make nearly as much headway in the United States, in Poland, in France or wherever. And how much of this is singularly Trump, which would make us feel better about the world? I don’t know. How do you think about that?

Anne Applebaum:

I don’t know how you separate these things out. I mean, in an earlier era, Trump wouldn’t have succeeded. With different kind of media and a different kind of politics. His talents and his particular qualities are particularly well suited to this moment and they might not be-

Preet Bharara:

By definition. Like Reagan-

Anne Applebaum:

By definition.

Preet Bharara:

If he became president, Reagan, Obama, they were the people for their moment, right?

Anne Applebaum:

That’s right. Or what was Ronald Reagan’s great skill? It was television and he emerged out of the world of Hollywood and he was identified as a kind of Hollywood good guy. And so that kind of white hat cowboy. And that was at a moment when Americans wanted a white hat cowboy to be their president. I mean, would we want someone like that now? I don’t know. We don’t watch those kinds of movies anymore. Trump comes out of reality television. He comes out of tabloid culture, online and offline, and he comes out of Twitter. Even the pre-Musk Twitter. And so all of those things, that’s the space that he was good at being in and his talents were good at that. And in an era when people wanted the president to be the good guy in the movie, he would not have won. So our era created him in that sense.

Preet Bharara:

Some people don’t like this point because it’s Pollyannish and it maybe suggests nobody needs to do anything and be active and be engaged, but don’t reactions … And the Trump movement can be seen to be a reaction to establishment politics and a lot of other things on the left and politics as usual. Isn’t there always a reaction to the reaction?

Anne Applebaum:

Of course.

Preet Bharara:

If you look at history. And so can you point to the day and month and year when there will be an overwhelming reaction to the Trump phenomenon?

Anne Applebaum:

I don’t do predictions and I don’t think I can point to the day-

Preet Bharara:

That was a joke. That was a joke.

Anne Applebaum:

I’m not going to give you a day, but I mean of course there will be a reaction.

Preet Bharara:

But does it take years or decades or is this a permanent … Is there any argument this is a permanent feature of American politics or is that silly given how things shift?

Anne Applebaum:

I do worry that, not Trump himself, but that the autocratic movement he’s created, whatever you want to call it … I don’t know if MAGA is the right name for it, but the movement of people who want an America that has a kind of national police who wear masks and carry machine guns down the street. I worry that that movement is going to be with us for a long time. And the reason I worry about it is because it has been with us in the past. I mean it’s appeared at this level of state governments before. We’ve seen it manifest in other ways. There’s plenty of reason to think it’ll be here again. They could be here for a long time. So yeah, I do think it’ll be here for a long time and defeating it or arguing with it, or at least politically neutralizing it is probably the project for the next generation. It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible or it can’t be done, but I don’t think it will disappear when Donald Trump disappears.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Anne Applebaum after this.

The other feature that we have at the moment that you are an expert on and have written about and have talked about and have thought about very deeply is disinformation and misinformation. That’s a game-changer and whether you think that that’s propagated on social media or in group chats or Signal or wherever it is propagated, sort of changes everything and it changes everything it seems for every side. And you have this phenomenon that I’d like you to talk about for a second. On the one hand, it is not a terrible thing if you are a follower of Donald Trump or any politician that you begin to be skeptical of legacy media or mainstream media or whatever institution has long existed and you may believe has been unquestioningly respected for a long time. That’s a good thing. But the odd dynamic that we’re in is that there is only questioning and deep, deep, deep skepticism if not wholesale rejection of certain legacy media institutions or the Democrats. And on the other side of the coin, zero skepticism and utterly incomplete credulousness of every claim, ridiculous, false, documented false in many cases, from Trump and his team. How do those things coexist and what do you make of that and is that something that fades or is that something that’s a bell that can’t be unrung?

Anne Applebaum:

Well, I mean that’s connected to the admiration for autocracy that I was talking about. We live in a time of immense cacophony and noise and there’s the screeching sound of debate and conflict and disagreement all the time. And for some people, the way to deal with that is to go into a space where you never hear any counter-arguments and where you ignore everything else as false and untrue and you live in the world of, as you say, complete credulity. And that is an autocratic impulse. It’s an impulse to want to accept the word of the leader as absolute and never to question it. I mean, having said that, there is also something a little odder about Trump and the people who follow Trump was maybe some people believe everything he says and are completely credulous, but there’s another thing that he’s done, and this actually he also has in common with dictators, especially Putin. He has now so polluted the discourse by constant lying. I mean, remember he lies like 10 times a day every day about everything. He lies-

Preet Bharara:

At least.

Anne Applebaum:

He lies about how many people came to his inauguration. He lies about what is in his bill. He lies about how much money we spend on weapons for Ukraine. I mean just like every day, all day long he lies. And I think one of the effects of that is that after a while people distance themselves from politics and they say, “I have no idea what’s true and what’s not. It’s impossible to know. We can’t really ever know. It’s better to just have faith, pick your side and just tune out and don’t participate too much in politics. Don’t pay attention. Just stay out because you’ll never know. You can’t really know what’s true and what isn’t.” And the other thing that kind of behavior does is it also makes the kind of thing that you were just talking about, the emergence of hope or of something new or some kind of different vision for the future, it makes it much more difficult.

Because once you have accepted this fundamentally cynical and nihilistic view of politics that they all lie, Trump’s lying, everyone’s lying, they’re all lying, once you’ve accepted that, then it’s much harder to hear anybody idealistic. The idealists are just lumped into the same category as everybody else. And of course, this is what dictators do is they … Nowadays the modern autocrat … And this is in my more recent book, Autocracy Inc. The modern autocrat doesn’t necessarily kill his enemies. Sometimes they do, but not necessarily. What’s much better than killing someone because when you kill them, you create a martyr and so on and possible blowback violence, better killing somebody, what you do is you mock them, you make fun of them, you create false corruption charges against them, you tell fake embarrassing stories about them and you make it hard for anyone to put any hope into them. And that’s another thing that Trump is very good at.

Preet Bharara:

It’s like a sucker ideology.

Anne Applebaum:

The idea is to create apathy and to make people not care and to make everyone say, “Okay. Trump is lying but everyone else is lying too.” Or, “They’re all the same.” Or, “Everybody’s bad and politics is useless and I’d be better off staying home and reading a novel or making money or whatever.” Again, these are known tactics. This is what autocrats do in countries like Russia or indeed Zimbabwe. And it’s a way of undermining your opponents through sneering, cynicism and mockery.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. And the situation is even more dire than that because not all of the blame can be placed at the feet of particular allegations and lies and conspiracy theories. And the fact that I used to make this point, which is a pretty dispiriting point, is at some point during the Biden administration there’s a poll and a very substantial percentage of Trump MAGA voters when asked is the stock market up or down when it was really up said the stock market is down. That is a readily ascertainable fact, objectively verifiable and it was just freaking wrong. And I don’t know if in that particular day or in that instant that Trump was running false ads. He probably wasn’t. Or making false statements about the crappy stock market under Joe Biden. But that’s what people believed. There was this moment when the stock market was going down during Trump two. Do you remember this? I don’t know if you follow this from Poland. And Fox News literally reportedly got rid of the stock ticker at the bottom of the screen. So the job of that kind of propaganda is made much, much easier to succeed in a universe in which people think that up is down and down is up and don’t bother to check otherwise, isn’t it?

Anne Applebaum:

Well, when I say our reality has been changed and the way that we live has changed, this is also part of what I mean. I don’t know the answer to this by the way. So I don’t know whether real events affect people as much as their perception of events. In other words, Trump has passed this bill, millions of people are going to lose their healthcare. That’s a real thing that’s happening in real life. Is that real life experience more or less powerful than your online experience? Because in your online world, there’s nothing wrong with your healthcare, the bill was the Big Beautiful Bill, is a genius and the Republican Party is moving forward in saving America from the Marxist left. And the question is question does reality matter? And honestly, I don’t know. I mean we’ll see.

Preet Bharara:

Well, we’ll pick another example. The stock market one is something that you can turn on your TV or go on your phone and you figure out is the market up or down. There’s a very significant fact that we have differing opinion on and that is did the dropping of bombs on Iran’s nuclear facility set back their nuclear program a little bit, a bunch or as Trump puts it basically permanently obliterated the nuclear program. Now, if you poll people … I haven’t seen a poll. I’m guessing that a vast majority of Trump voters will believe and will refute evidence to the contrary, but will completely believe that the Iranian nuclear program was obliterated as Trump says. Fair? How do you compete in that universe?

Anne Applebaum:

It’s very hard and there are going to be other examples. As you dismantle the National Weather Service because you don’t want to know about climate change because you think climate change is a damaging left-wing ideology. How are you going to cope with floods and hurricanes and droughts and other kinds of disasters caused by climate change? The imaginary world is so much more powerful than the real world. Isn’t that going to harm the ability of government or politics really or anything to try and cope with problems and shape them? This, by the way, is … If you want an example from the past, I mean this was actually the Soviet Union’s problem. This is going back ways in history. One of the problems that the Soviet Union had was fake statistics because there was an ideology and people needed to suck up to the party and say, “My factory has produced a hundred thousand widgets a year,” even though they’d only produced 30,000. People were turning in fake statistics all the time.

And so the upshot of it was that the Soviet leadership actually didn’t know how the economy worked and couldn’t understand what was going wrong. And I’m afraid we might get to that in the United States in some version of it. Not exactly the same. But in which we are surprised by can’t cope with weather and climate events, where labor statistics begin to be manipulated by some government department and we don’t really understand what’s happening inside the economy or with employment. Or your Iran example. I mean it’s okay. All right. So a lot of the public thinks the Iranian nuclear program has been obliterated when it may or may not have been. What happens when in order to be promoted in the US Army or or US intelligence have to pretend that the program was obliterated? Because if you don’t say it was obliterated, then somehow you’ve gone against the president.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, like the DNI.

Anne Applebaum:

Then we’re going to have real problems and then what is our policy towards Iran’s nuclear program? Is it based on reality or on this world of propaganda? So the problems that this fake world create down the road and the insistence of the president of people around him that everybody toe the line and say what he says and the effect that that has on ordinary people and voters and civil servants and others could be catastrophic. This is how the Soviet Union failed.

Preet Bharara:

Look, you listed a litany of awful examples. I’ll tell you the one that wasn’t on your list, and I’m sure it would be, that scares me the most perhaps of all the things and that is disease. And so currently you have a situation where reliable sources report, physicians and other medical entities report that we have a resurgence of measles and measles deaths and it’s some order of magnitude larger than the last number of years combined. And at the moment, in this regime of conspiracy theories and lack of truth and all of that, people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others will come up with some explanation that doesn’t lay blame at their feet or lay blame at the anti-vaxxers’ feet. But I don’t know, phase two of that next year, if there’s a thousand measles deaths or 500 measles deaths is simply to say that’s not true. That’s the easiest thing to do. Rather than try to twist yourself in a pretzel and try to allocate blame and cause and effect and health policy or blame it on Biden, which is the other go-to gambit, they can just say those stats are not correct. One person died of measles, not a thousand. And there’s no way to combat that, is there?

How are you going to prove to a non-credulous public, a cultish subsection of the population who might already be anti-vax that yeah, it’s fake news. It’s not a thousand deaths, it’s one death. How are we going to deal with that, Anne?

Anne Applebaum:

I mean, I think we’re already there. Yeah. I’m sure there are already people who would deny that there are measles deaths or deny plenty of other things. So the only way to deal with it is to think seriously about how we reestablish what my friend John Rausch calls the constitution of knowledge. So the systems both in the world of science and in the world of journalism and elsewhere, you need to establish systems of mutual checking that helps people begin to determine what’s true and not true. We haven’t invented anything else yet.

Preet Bharara:

Final maybe unfair question. I’m going to ask you to be a physician of the body politic. And I’m not a doctor, but I know that when you have ailments and damage to organs or bodily functions or limbs, certain things can be fixed over time and you can remove the deficiency and certain things can’t be right. I think that if you lose certain brain functions, they don’t come back. If you gain weight, you can lose weight. And each organ has a different level of recovery. So I imagine you would say, if we’re talking about our alliances and how they have been frayed with Canada or Europe, those are things that can be fixed going forward. What are some of the things that you are most optimistic about if we take a proper course in the future are fixable like our alliances, I presume, and some that if we go too far down this road are not if any?

Anne Applebaum:

So I want to be very careful about alliances because of course we-

Preet Bharara:

I was overly optimistic about alliances?

Anne Applebaum:

Well, no. I worry that there’s a deep thing that’s changed, which is that a lot of automatic assumptions about America, that America was just a reliable partner and that America shared our values even if only about trade, that a lot of those things might be very hard to fix. Even if we have, I don’t know, the most marvelous president three years from now who speaks French and wants to spend a lot of time in Europe and admires the Japanese and thinks South Korea’s great.

Preet Bharara:

That person’s not getting elected.

Anne Applebaum:

Even if that kind of person becomes president again, I think it’s going to be a long time before American allies treat America with the absolute deference that they did before. And the absolute assumption America’s reliable, America’s our leader. We defer to America in many big and small ways and we will do it automatically. I think that might be gone, actually. That may be one of the things that’s gone and hard to recover. I mean, US military can recover. The programs I just talked about cutting, some of those can be put back.

But this kind of undefinable thing, the assumptions that people made about America, I think are going to be hard to recover. And I don’t think actually most Americans understand how deep the shock is in Europe and in the Asian allies too. People are still bowled over by the degree to which … Remember it’s not just Ukraine, it’s Ukraine, it’s the tariffs, it’s the language, it’s the way their leaders are treated in the Oval Office. It’s the JD Vance speech in Munich. It’s the arrival of Americans like Musk and others to intervene in their elections on the side of the far right. It’s a whole package of things that they’ve seen happening over the last few months that I think might erase forever a kind of image of America that many people still had. As I said, a lot of things could be rebuilt, but I think that might be one of the things that won’t.

Preet Bharara:

So the thing that I was most optimistic about, I was totally wrong about. You convinced me utterly. And so I am not going to get myself into a deeper hole of dismay on this program. You’ve been very generous with your time, Anne. Thank you for this conversation all the way from Poland. Be well and come back soon.

Anne Applebaum:

Thanks so much for having me.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Anne Applebaum continues for members of the Cafe Insider community.

Anne Applebaum:

Trump has still been much nastier about Zelensky than he’s ever been about Putin.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about federalizing the National Guard and revoking citizenship.

Q&A

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes from Lindsay via the Stay Tuned substack. Lindsay asks, “By what authority did President Eisenhower federalize the National Guard in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957? How did it differ from what Trump did?” Well, Lindsay, that’s an interesting and legally complex question, so I love that question. As you noted, President Eisenhower and many, many decades later, President Trump, both federalized state National Guard units, but they relied on very different laws to do so. So let’s go back in time and talk first about Ike. Famously, as everyone knows, in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools for white and black students were unconstitutional and inherently unequal.

But as you also may remember, that wasn’t the end of the story. That decision Brown v. Board set in motion, the very slow process of actually desegregating schools across the country, including famously in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three years after the decision in 1957, when nine black students, known as The Little Rock Nine, tried to enter the previously white only Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to block their entry. So in other words, to block the execution of the laws. President Eisenhower initially tried persuading the governor to allow the students to come in, but Faubus did something else. He withdrew the National Guard entirely, leaving the nine students unprotected and exposed to a violent mob, protesting integration. Unsurprisingly, the students just couldn’t safely enter the school amidst all that chaos and threat of violence. This was the moment that Eisenhower decided to intervene under his powers.

He issued an executive order to federalize the Arkansas National Guard, invoking the Insurrection Act, something we’ve talked about on the podcast from time to time. The Insurrection Act authorizes the president to deploy federal troops domestically to quell violence, suppress rebellions against federal authority, and to deal with unlawful obstructions. With Eisenhower in command, federalized troops secured the school and protected the nine black students, ensuring they could safely enter and attend classes. Now, all that was a far cry from what Donald Trump just did. On June 7th of this year, in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and arrests in Los Angeles, President Trump federalized the California National Guard, but he used a different law than President Eisenhower did. A statute that you can find in Title 10 of the United States Code at section 12406. This law enacted a while back, 1903, allows the president to call up the National Guard under specific conditions, notably when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”. And that’s what he claimed he needed to do given the protests in California.

Notwithstanding ample evidence, as I’ve said before, that they were largely peaceful and certainly more peaceful than what happened on January 6th before President Trump left office, for which he didn’t think the National Guard needed to be called up. So a lot of legal scholars were surprised that Trump chose Section 12406 instead of the Insurrection Act as this statute has never been previously used this way. Some speculated that Trump picked it because the threshold for invoking the statute is significantly lower. Essentially requiring only that regular forces are insufficient to execute federal laws. You may recall that in recent weeks, the governor of the state of California, Gavin Newsom, sued the Trump administration over the federalization of his state’s National Guard among other reasons, saying that it required the blessing of the governor. Initially, a federal district court judge sided with Newsom and issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s action. But as we’ve also discussed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay, allowing the federal deployment to continue while the case was reviewed. We’ll see what happens. Stay tuned.

This question comes in an email from Lisa who writes, “I read in The Guardian that a recent Justice Department memo directs attorneys to prioritize civil denaturalization proceedings against naturalized citizens who obtained citizenship unlawfully or concealed important facts, and that these proceedings offer fewer protections such as no right to a government-paid attorney and a lower standard of proof compared to criminal cases. Is it legal for citizenship to be revoked through civil proceedings based solely on a memo from the Justice Department?” Well, Lisa, that’s a great question and of some personal importance to me since I’m a citizen and I would like to stay in the country as has been my expectation for a very, very long time. So the memo you’re referring to was written on June 11th by the head of the DOJ Civil Division, person by the name of Brett Shumate, and it addressed all civil division employees.

It lays out a number of the enforcement priorities of the division, and it directs the civil division among other things, to use its enforcement authorities to advance the administration’s policy objectives. In that memo, the issue of denaturalization comes up a bit later in the document. On that point, the memo says, “The Department of Justice may institute civil proceedings to revoke a person’s United States citizenship if an individual either illegally procured naturalization or procured naturalization by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” In other words, if a person lied about their eligibility or provided false or fraudulent information. That seems to make sense. That doesn’t seem to be a terrible thing if used judicially. That’s my comment on the memo. Now, to answer your broad questions, as I just said, this is in theory legal. The legal authority for denaturalization doesn’t come from the memo as you asked, but is established by a federal law. That can be found at Title VIII of the United States Code at section 1451A.

The statute outlines the standard for revocation of naturalization, but it has been used pretty sparingly since its enactment as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. As my friend, former colleague and podcast co-host Joyce Vance pointed out in her newsletter, Civil Discourse, “Denaturalization was used against alleged communists during the McCarthy era in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But from 1990 to 2017, DOJ filed only about 11 denaturalization cases per year.” Pretty small number as the Washington Post has pointed out, the most prominent cases of denaturalization were people who concealed their connection to the Nazis when they applied for US citizenship. So it goes right to the heart of that language I read. If you become a citizen by fraud, that citizenship can be undone, and that makes fairly decent sense. So it is legal for citizenship to be revoked through civil proceedings, and that process has been well-established.

Now, while the DOJ memo may direct attorneys in the Civil Division to prioritize or aggressively pursue these types of cases, which as Joyce pointed out, has not been the status quo, the memo itself doesn’t create any new legal powers. The government still has to go to court, present evidence, obtain an order, etc, etc, etc. Now, just because it may be lawful, it doesn’t mean that it is always right. Discretion, as I have said a million times and I’ve written about extensively, is an important part of a government lawyer’s job, whether you’re a criminal prosecutor or a member of the civil division of the Department of Justice. And there are suggestions and indications that the administration may pursue a much wider umbrella of denaturalization cases alongside its massive deportation effort. Let’s take a look at what those indications are. While the memo says the government will pursue egregious cases like those against individuals who engaged in torture, war crimes or other human rights violations, or cases against individuals who committed felonies that were not disclosed during the naturalization process, it also says … This is important.

It also says they will pursue cases against those who “pose a potential danger to national security” and also “cases against individuals who engage in fraud against private individuals, funds or corporations”. Now, knowing this administration, I see no reason why they wouldn’t apply potential danger to national security extremely hyper broadly. These are the folks, remember, who said with respect to deportations, they would first focus on serious criminals. They’re doing a lot more than that. These are the people who have not acknowledged the right to due process with respect to folks like Mahmoud Khalil and Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Moreover, these are the folks who have taken any leeway in a statute to argue for very, very broad executive power. So there’s no reason to think that they would be limited in the way presidents previously viewed their denaturalization power. In fact, Mr. Shumate writes that they shall pursue “any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue. Further, the civil division retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate.”

Now, that doesn’t enlarge the statute, but it quite seriously enlarges the discretion that they’re bestowing upon individual lawyers in the Justice Department and basically says you can initiate an investigation for purposes of denaturalization pretty much anytime you want. At least that’s a reasonable concern. I’ll end with a quote from Joyce who said it best in her piece. “The provision is so vague that it would permit the division to denaturalize for just about anything. Given the other priorities discussed in the memo, it could be exercising First Amendment rights or encouraging diversity in hiring now recast as fraud against the United States. Troublesome journalists who are naturalized citizens, students, university professors, infectious disease doctors who try to reveal the truth about epidemics. Lawyers. That includes me, I guess. All are now vulnerable to the vagaries of an administration that has shown a preference for deporting people without due process and dealing with questions that come up after the fact and with a dismissive tone.” So I will tell you, frankly, while this particular issue is not the thing that’s keeping me up at night as a naturalized citizen lawyer, critic of the president of the United States at this moment, I’ll be watching this very closely.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Anne Applebaum. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag, #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Bluesky, or you can call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.