During President Trump's first term, journalist Anne Applebaum reported on how he was moving toward authoritarianism. Now she's describing Trump's actions as regime change. "Our imagination of a coup or regime change is that there are tanks and violence and somebody shoots up the chandelier in the presidential palace," she says. "Actually, nowadays, that's not how democracies fail. They fail through attacks on institutions coming from within." Applebaum also talks about the dismantling of America's civil service system and how the Trump administration is distancing itself from NATO, while getting closer with Putin. Applebaum is a staff writer at the Atlantic and author of Autocracy, Inc.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. There is a term for what Musk and Trump are doing. That's the headline of the latest Atlantic Magazine article by my guest Anne Applebaum. The term, she says, is regime change. She writes, no one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired.
She points out during his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump spoke of Election Day as Liberation Day, a moment when people he described as vermin and radical left lunatics would be eliminated from public life. Before Applebaum started writing about America moving to the right and Trump moving toward authoritarianism, she was writing about how some European countries were becoming authoritarian.
Last weekend, she was at the Munich Security Conference, where Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth were dismissive of NATO and its importance for American as well as European security, marking a turning point in the post-World War II alliance. It left European leaders shocked and worried. Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic.
She is also a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the School of Advanced International Studies. Her latest book is Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Her other books include Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine, and Gulag, a History, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
She's a former Washington Post columnist and member of the editorial board. We recorded our interview yesterday morning. Anne Appelbaum, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. You're calling what's happening in the U.S. under the Trump regime, regime change. Can you expand on why you're using that language? In the past, you've used words like illiberal democracy or authoritarianism.
The description keeps getting more extreme.
I think it's very important to understand that DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is not primarily interested in efficiency. If it were, it wouldn't have encouraged mass resignations in the civil service, nor is it primarily interested in transparency or accountability or better government. If it were interested in those things, it wouldn't be firing random people.
It wouldn't be searching for to get control of data for unclear purposes. It wouldn't be dissolving whole departments. What DOGE is interested in is something that I've seen happen in other countries. What it's doing is altering the nature and values of the American federal civil service.
What Trump and people around him have been calling for for a long time is a new kind of politics in America and a new kind of government. And now what we see is them carrying out that desire.
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