Anne Applebaum: Outside the Rule of Law
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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Unfortunately, we have to bring back an expert on autocracy because that is our world right now. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her books include Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Twilight of Democracy, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulaga History. It's Anne Applebaum. How are you doing, Anne?
I'm okay. I mean, personally, I'm fine.
Yeah. Yeah, that's how I'm answering it, too. Things are doing great inside this home. Once we get outside the home, it gets dicier and dicier. Your most recent piece for The Atlantic is called Europe's Elon Musk Problem. If you'd indulge my Yankee myopia, I'd like to begin by discussing America's Elon Musk problem, and then we can back into the Europe side of things. Because there's a New York Times story out this morning inside Musk's aggressive incursion into the federal government. They write, there's no precedent for a government official to have Mr. Musk's scale of conflicts of interest, which includes domestic holdings and foreign connections. And there's no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal workforce. One agency official said before Congress and the courts can respond, Elon Musk will have rolled up the whole government. I'm curious your thoughts on that and parallels to what we've seen elsewhere.
So I'm not sure there is an exact parallel that we've seen anywhere else. What Musk has just done, as you've said, is he's a private citizen. They've given him some kind of quasi-government status. He's a government advisor, but he doesn't have a confirmed position. He's not part of any congressionally confirmed office or department. He himself is obviously not confirmed by anybody. And what he seems to have done is taken a group of some apparently even very young engineers into government offices and started demanding and downloading data. Let's put it this way. If, you know, the Chinese government were to be doing this by hacking, this would be considered a major cyber warfare attack. There is no precedent for giving that kind of information or that kind of access to a private citizen, even if the president says it's okay. And so we're already in a realm where we're in an extra legal situation. You can talk about Russian oligarchs and their ability to shape policy. In Russia, you had this phenomenon of
wealthy people who were both members of the government and the owners of significant companies. So they were making the government decisions that affected their companies. And that's clearly the case with Musk as well. So he is a very important government contractor. His companies get subsidies. He also does work on behalf of the Pentagon. So clearly he's now able to make policy concerning his own his own companies. He can look at the contracts given to his competitors. He can find out information about that. So there is a kind of Russian precedent for that kind of influence. But the broader idea that there's a single person with no status who's been given access to the whole U.S. government payment system and the personnel management system and maybe the property ownership system as well, I can't think of anything. So we're in a world of extra legality. So we are beyond the law. He is operating in a completely lawless realm. He is not under control or under control is the wrong word. He's outside of the rule of law.
And then to look at precedence for that, I mean, you know, I don't want to go there because it always, you know, it's always the end of the conversation. But then you have to look at Nazi Germany or you have to look at. dictatorships where single people took the law into their hands. And of course, it doesn't feel like that to most people, because it's just something happening inside some Washington buildings, you know, and it's not yet affecting ordinary Americans, but it could. And we can, I'm happy to spin it out a little bit about what else, what other damage could be.
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