Host: This was Trump's net worth when he went into office, $2.3 billion. And this is his net worth now, just two years later. $6.5 billion.

Anne Applebaum: So, we've never had a president running businesses while in office. And so, decisions are being made not based on what's good for Americans, but what's good for his company. For example, why did the Saudi government invest $2 billion in Jared Kushner's fund? It wasn't because they just like Jared Kushner. It was because Kushner is Trump's son-in-law.

And so my biggest concern is the deterioration of American democracy. I mean, it's already happening. Most people think democracies end with tanks in the street or somebody shooting up the presidential palace, but actually in the modern world, they mostly end because someone who is legitimately elected begins to take apart the system. Trump, he has never cared much one way or the other for American democracy. He admires foreign leaders who have no constraints. And I have a goal that is to remind people of why democracy is important and to pay attention to the ways in which it's declining so that we can fight back. So we're just at the beginning of what could be quite a big change.

Host: So there's five core tactics that autocratic leaders use to dismantle a democracy. Could you walk me through the five tactics?

Anne Applebaum: I started out as somebody who was fascinated by the Soviet Union. I went there when it still existed as a student. I was lucky enough to watch it fall apart. I was a journalist based in Warsaw at the time the Warsaw pack came to an end. Then I spent some years writing history books trying to explain how control was maintained over such a large space by so few people. But all that time, I thought that what I was doing was writing stories about the distant past. I was analyzing a system that didn't exist anymore.

What's happened to me in the last decade is that I've discovered that a lot of what I thought was over and done and belonged to some other era has come back. Most people think democracies end with a coup d'etat or, you know, tanks in the street or somebody shooting up the presidential palace. That actually in the modern world they mostly end because someone who is legitimately elected begins to take apart the system and take away the things that ensure free elections can continue and I started watching that happen in multiple countries at the same time and I saw this authoritarian instinct started to come back and that's what I write about now.

Anne Applebaum: Well, corruption, we've done that one already. Corruption you have in any political system, and you often have it in democracies, too. But in an autocratic society, you have more corruption because the legal system is controlled. And so what you have for example in the United States the fact that Donald Trump has taken over our department of justice and has installed loyalists who are looking among other things for example to prosecute his enemies just because they're his enemies. That means you have a check and balance. Normally if there was high level corruption in the White House or in the administration you would have people inside the Department of Justice and the FBI who would investigate it. But now we don't have that happening.

We didn't have anybody try to use the White House to make money in this way before. So, hard for me to say what would have happened in like, I don't know, the Clinton administration, but we didn't have a completely politicized civil service, completely politicized FBI who would avoid, you know, any kind of investigation. And so corruption is a particular symptom of authoritarianism, and it's also a tool. You know, it's something that the president can offer people. You get along with me, you don't criticize me, your business will prosper. You know, you will get government contracts.

Host: Is that what we're seeing with all these big tech CEOs that seem to be going frequently to the White House and saying wonderful things about him and his support and having dinner with him and none of them speaking out? But if you look at their Twitter feeds a couple years ago, they were all saying the most horrific things about Trump.

Anne Applebaum: Yes. I mean they've understood that, you know, if this is going to be an American administration that you have to genuflect to the president, you have to be sycophantic to the president in order to get business deals, then they'll do it. If you have to donate to his White House reconstruction fund, which many of them have done, then you'll do it. If you have to donate to his inauguration, you'll do it. It's a question of who is supposed to be the beneficiary of government regulation. It's supposed to be Americans. The beneficiary is not supposed to be, as I said, the president and his family and his entourage. And that is a big shift in American politics.

Host: When I look back at someone like the CEO of OpenAI's statements on Trump, if you go back to 2016, he said he was an unprecedented threat to America and called him a potential disaster for the American economy. He said he was irresponsible in the way dictators are and compared his rhetoric to the big lie tactics used by historical authoritarians like Hitler. And then I see him side by side at the White House saying nice things about him and saying nothing critical at all.

I think that being rich for these people is actually just a proxy of status. And it's quite clear to me that if someone like Sam Altman was to say anything negative about Trump, it would of course hurt his business, but actually it would hurt something more, which is his status. He would lose to Anthropic and xAI and Gemini. To lose in your category of peers, which all these sort of tech oligarchs are in, would hurt more than anything. I think it would hurt more than losing a gazillion dollars is just like losing the game.

Anne Applebaum: Yeah. There are two things about it. One is it's very shortsighted because ultimately who will suffer if there is a decline in the American political system in the American legal system? I mean it's them. They have gotten used to paying to play in a way, but it's a mug's game. I mean it's fine as long as you're one of the people who are winning, but what if the rules change?

Oh yeah, like in Russia with the oligarchs. I'm sick of these oligarchs. I want different oligarchs. And that happened in China, too. The second argument is, and I think Anthropic might have figured this out already and some of the law firms have figured it out. There's also a game to be made by saying no I'm independent. We have our own corporate rules. We have our own legal code of ethics and we're going to behave as patriotic Americans and then you attract business.

Anne Applebaum: When you begin to see attempts to corrupt and shape elections, this is when you know your democracy is in trouble. When the rules of the election are challenged. When there begin to be arguments about who can vote and attempts to make some people not be allowed to vote when you try to alter the result in some way. I mean any an attack on elections is a classic way in which democratically elected leaders undermine democracy. So an example of this okay Victor Orban who just lost an election in Hungary after 16 years he had two-thirds control of in Hungary if you have two-thirds of the parliament then you can change the constitution so he continually altered the Hungarian constitution in order to give himself electoral advantages.

Anne Applebaum: Gerrymandering is a great word actually. It comes from a congressman named Gerry in the early 19th century who drew an electoral map which looked like a salamander. And a gerrymandered map in US terms is a electoral map that has been altered to favor one political party. Once you have maps that are designed to favor one party or the other, then you begin to get real democratic decline.

In the US, they want to change the law so that you either have to use a passport or a birth certificate. And most Americans don't have passports. I think 60% don't. Many people have lost or never had their birth certificates. If you passed a law like that, it would make it much more difficult for some people to vote, especially certain kinds of people.

Anne Applebaum: Personnel. This is civil service in a modern democracy. In a 21st century democracy, government does a lot of things. It manages the road system, regulates insurance markets, measures pollution. It's very important that those people be people who know how to do them. You want the person who's measuring air pollution to be an expert in air pollution. You don't want them to be the president's cousin. In corrupt autocracies, that is who gets those jobs.

He doesn't like Jerome Powell in the Fed, right? And so he's tried to undermine Jerome Powell. What Trump wants is to have civil servants who are historically independent, and that includes the chairman of the Fed. In a failing democracy, you have people whose interests are not everybody in the country, but their interests are the president, his family, his party.

Anne Applebaum: Information. All dictatorships seek to control information. In China, the entire internet since the 1990s has been constructed so that the government can control it. But even inside the United States, you can see the Trump administration seeking to shape the information space in new ways. Nowadays that's not how media control works. In Orban's Hungary or Erdogan's Turkey what happens is that the leadership encourages or helps business people or groups close to them to acquire media properties. So they do it through the level of media ownership.

And I agree with you that it is an illiberal instinct to try to control speech. And there's a left-wing version of it and there's a right-wing version of it. And the people who are really in favor of free speech are the people who are willing to call it out on both sides.

Anne Applebaum: Control over power ministries and the use of violence. Most autocracies sooner or later want to create some kind of repressive system that's also physical. So it's not just control of the information space. There's also some element of coercion.

Look at what ICE looks like. They are masked. They are wearing military uniforms. They're not accountable to anybody. They're not accountable to the mayor or to the governor. And that gives them a kind of impunity. When you have a military force that's above the law, then it's really a paramilitary. If you have a police force that can harm ordinary citizens and not pay any price for it and isn't accountable, then you're not serving Americans. You're serving the interests of the ruling party.

Anne Applebaum: What you're watching is everybody all over the world hedging. Everybody is looking for alternatives. I think the breaking point for a lot of people in Europe was Greenland. You had the president of the United States saying he was going to invade Denmark. Trump was kind of hinting it in public. That meant that the Danes said, "Okay, we're preparing for a US invasion." And they had to suddenly imagine a real war with their closest ally. No one has recovered. Everybody remembers that moment and said, "Okay, this is an unstable power. They can't be relied on. We need alternatives."

Anne Applebaum: I don't believe in historical inevitability. And I think is very dangerous. Anytime you think that something is inevitable that takes away your willingness to act. What happens tomorrow and next year is completely dependent on what we do today. Whether the United States survives as a democracy or not depends on choices Americans make, not some historical rule that some very brilliant political scientist invented. I don't believe in inevitable cycles.

Anne Applebaum: We are lucky in that we live in societies where we can vote. When people become nihilistic, when they say, "They're all the same. It's not worth voting," this is what autocrats try to create. A real Democrat respects those institutions precisely so that democracy can remain.

Host: As a 33-year-old that's lived most of my life in the West, it's very easy to take democracy as a subject for granted.

Anne Applebaum: Yes. Well, it's normal. It's the water we swim in. We're the fish, you know, and the idea that there would someday not be water is unimaginable.