Anne Applebaum

or foreign companies, a lot of that is just being taken away.

You know, they're just not enforcing it.

They don't care anymore.

And of course, the bad actors know that.

And so when they see the legal system being taken apart and they know it's a free-for-all, they can just remove money from people's cryptocurrency wallets, which happens more often than you think.

You know, or, you know, or they can violate the law or they can, you know, they can do as they please because they know that nobody's watching them.

And I think that's and that doesn't get a lot of attention because it's not, you know, it's not very exciting news to say that the Trump administration has decided it won't enforce X or Y law.

But that's going to create the long term problems.

You know, if we create this atmosphere of lawlessness where, you know, you can buy a pardon from the president if you've broken the law.

You can assume that nobody will enforce regulation if you decide to break it.

You can rip people off and you won't pay any price.

You can do all these things with impunity.

I mean, that begins to create a kind of business culture

that is ultimately bad for everyone.

I mean, I guess, you know, bad guys will benefit from it, but if you've ever lived or worked in a really corrupt country, and I have, you know, I spent a lot of time in Russia in the 1990s.

I spent a lot of time in Ukraine, actually, in the era before it began to reform itself.

And, you know, I remember that it's even for, I mean, maybe particularly for ordinary people,

You know, daily life is different in a really, really corrupt country.

You know, you don't make business investments in a normal way.

You can't make judgments about how to work or where to work unless you know, you know, who's really in charge or who's the person behind each one of these companies.