Anne Applebaum: Globalized MAGA Kleptocracy
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What is Anne Applebaum’s “Empire of Grift” and why does she call it a globalized MAGA kleptocracy?
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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show. I'm delighted. We'll see how my husband and other listeners feel by the end of the podcast. Her recent books include The Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic, where her latest piece, Empire of Grift, is the October cover story for the magazine. It's Anne Applebaum. Welcome back, Anne.
Thanks for having me again.
It's always a joy for me, even though I'm looking at my outline here and... We'll see how we all feel by the end. I can't be any darker than the AI Apocalypse episode. So we'll see how we land. I want to start here. We'll get to your article next. But first, we have a more important thing. Ann Applebaum, radical revolutionary. I saw a tweet you sent this week. And there was an overhead video of the ballroom. And so you could see the size and scale of the ballroom and how much bigger it is than the White House. And you quote tweeted it with these five words. It will have to go. And I'm like, okay, because I've been kind of squishy on this. I'm like, if Ann Applebaum is out there saying we got to bulldoze the ballroom, that piqued my interest.
So I want to hear more.
So I grew up in Washington and a lot of the institutions that we're talking about, the Kennedy Center, the monuments around D.C., the reflecting pool. These are places I've known all my life and I know how important they are to people who live in the city and to people who visit the city. And I've been taking people to see them. for years and years. And I took kind of generations of children to the Nutcracker Suite. And I was taken to the Nutcracker Suite at the Kennedy Center at Christmas time. And watching the president systematically destroy one after the next has, yeah, has probably radicalized me. You know, the White House was built in a certain style for a certain reason. It was meant to evoke Republican, small r, Republican virtues.
It was supposed to be modest. It wasn't a palace like the palaces in England that the American Revolution had broken away from. It was classical in design. It was supposed to evoke Palladian virtues, you know, this sort of architecture of balance and symmetry. And by destroying it, by building a monstrosity next door to it, Donald Trump has changed its meaning and changed the way it looks and changed the original intentions of the architect. And the intentions are related to very deep American values. And he's imposing a new set of values on them. And I object.
It impacted me to see that you were there because it made me feel like, well, maybe I'm not radicalized enough, you know, and if Ann Applebaum is ready to get out there with the sledgehammer, I, cause you know, I don't know. Part of me is just like, well, okay, well, why don't we just name it the Barack Hussein Obama ballroom and move on to bigger and better things.
If it were in proportion, if it were done with an eye to history, if it were not a grotesque statement of Trump's personality imposed on Washington, D.C., then we could talk about having a ballroom. But that's not what this is. This is a very, very strange project. It's something that Trump is obsessed with. He talks about it all the time, apparently. according to people who have reported on what goes on.
Yeah, Ben Terrace reported on this for the
New York Magazine. Yeah, and so this is not a normal construction project. It's not a bit of improvement to the White House. It's not an upgrade. It's an imposition, and it's doing a lot of damage. And architecture is important because it reflects who we are. As I said, it reflects a set of values. It was built that way originally for a reason. And Trump is destroying those seeking to change the values and undermine the way the city looks.
Hell yeah. To the barricades. I'm with you. You've won me over.
How does the Trump‑era “ballroom” project illustrate the erosion of American architectural values?
I'm with you on it. OK. And it relates to your cover story, which covers kind of the the globalized MAGA grift. You know, I think that there's, of course, been a bunch of reporting and, you know, Jonathan Swan earlier this week.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is Anne Applebaum’s “Empire of Grift” and why does she call it a globalized MAGA kleptocracy?
0:00–4:52
2
How does the Trump‑era “ballroom” project illustrate the erosion of American architectural values?
4:52–16:20
3
Why does Applebaum argue that the new MAGA program is a globalist, not isolationist, agenda?
16:20–26:06
4
What is the secret U.S. influence operation in Greenland and who are the private‑sector players behind it?
26:06–36:29
5
How is the Trump administration using economic levers to try to reinstall the Bolsonaro family in Brazil?
36:29–48:52
6
What role do Russian gangsters and Jared Kushner play in the hidden deals surrounding Ukraine’s war?
48:52–54:35
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Bulwark Daily
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Sarah Longwell and Pedro Gonzalez: Meet the Young MAGA Edgelords—and the One Who Got Away