Anne Applebaum

And I don't right now see how we get to that.

And the scenarios that would lead us to that aren't good, and so I don't wish for them.

I mean, one would really have to have a...

The only other alternative I can think of is that there needs to be just a lot more awareness among ordinary people of how, you know, how bad it's gotten.

You know, I know that a lot of, for a lot of Americans, this doesn't feel like something new.

A lot of Americans, partly because of the way they've been reading and thinking and learning about politics in the last decade,

several years, think that Washington is corrupt anyway, and everything has always been corrupt, and this is just an extension of past corruption, and explaining to them that this is something qualitatively different, that this is a different kind of behavior, that American foreign policy has never been for sale at this level with these kinds of stakes before.

I think the best I can do is write about it and talk about it

I know you're doing that, too, in order to convince enough people, you know, to to to take this moment seriously and to have it change their their behavior, make them vote, make them get involved in politics, make them make them participate, because it's really without that.

It's hard to see.

It's really hard to see how you change.

I mean, interesting comparison.

I haven't written this yet, although I hope to do it in the next year.

I talked this morning to a senior figure who's involved in a corruption investigation inside Ukraine.

Maybe you've heard that the Ukrainian state is investigating itself, which is actually at this point in history hard to imagine in the United States.

There's an anti-corruption bureau inside the government, and they are investigating people, some of whom are very close to the president, for a kind of kickback scheme to do with the energy industry.

The details aren't that important.

What matters is that it's the Ukrainian state that's doing it.

It's as if our FBI was investigating our president, which right now is hard to imagine.

You can't imagine that happening.