Anne Applebaum

The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.

I'm Anne Applebaum.

Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals?

Well, maybe they are afraid.

And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.

reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next.

The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.

This episode of the podcast, the point of the podcast is to pull together some things that we've seen covered sporadically or unevenly or in different places and to make an argument that these are the combination of the transformation of ice, changes in culture and education and health.

deregulation of crypto, all these things are designed to unlevel the playing field for the midterms later this year.

That's the bigger argument.

This particular first episode, which was not planned to come out the day after a really horrific and shocking American tragedy, the theme of the episode was ICE and to a lesser extent, the National Guard.

And

which has been covered as a story about immigration.

And my argument is that it's not just about immigration.

It's about intimidation.

It's about creating a paramilitary that feels itself to be above the law.

People who wear masks have only rudimentary training, drive unmarked cars, and as we saw in Minneapolis, use guns.

freely and willingly as if they were fighting terrorists on the streets of America, when in fact what they're fighting is 37-year-old women driving Hondas.

But the point is that this was designed from the beginning as that.

So it was about immigrants, but it was also about having a force that was loyal to Donald Trump,