Anne Applebaum has been writing about government, from democracies to autocracies, for more than 30 years. Yet former President Donald Trump, she emphasized on this week’s episode of Mediaite’s Press Club, is changing U.S. politics in ways she’s never seen before.
“American politicians have been racist before, we’ve called one another traitors and unpatriotic. We haven’t talked about one another as being insects or vermin or parasites,” she told Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin about Trump’s recent uptick in dehumanizing language.
Last week, she published a piece in The Atlantic that compared Trump’s rhetoric to infamous dictators Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin. The piece came days before former Trump chief of staff John Kelly went on the record to say that Trump had openly spoke of his admiration for Hitler during his first term.
Applebaum warned that while her piece focused strictly on Trump’s rhetoric, his actions in office could be far worse. “Democracies nowadays fall through because legitimately elected people who have respect for the institutions of the system take them apart. And would Trump do that if he can? Yes, I think he would,” she said.
Applebaum is also out with a new book, Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want To Run The World, in which she details the extensive and complex networks autocrats use to stay in power. Elon Musk, a powerful booster of Trump, has acted this election cycle in a way that mirrors this phenomenon. He was recently accused of breaking the law through his attempt to influence the election through his vast fortune. “Offering $1 million to random people isn’t something that we’ve ever had before in an American election campaign. This is a dangerous precedent,” Applebaum said.
She also spoke about the similarities between Trump’s rhetoric and what she found in her research from the Stasi archives of East Germany’s secret police, what she fears most about the election in November, and a 2002 story she wrote about the Israel-Palestine conflict that has sparked fresh controversy.
Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Aidan McLaughlin: I want to start with your recent piece in The Atlantic, which sparked a lot of buzz. You could say it’s something of a warning. The headline is “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.” What compelled you to write this piece?
Anne Applebaum: The funny thing is this piece, to me, seemed almost banal because Trump has been using this language, which is a very specific language that comes from the 1930s, for a while, but it somehow became more prominent and noticeable recently. And this is the language where he talks about the “enemies within,” the “enemies of the people.” And specifically, he talks about his political opponents and migrants also as vermin. He talks about migrants poisoning the blood of Americans.
And this is language that not only comes from Hitler, it also comes from Stalin. And I wrote several books about Stalin and Stalinism. And just to jog my memory, I have a whole file of notes that I once took in the East German archives or the Stasi archives, which is the archives of the East German secret police. And I typed the word “vermin” into the search line and discovered dozens and dozens of examples of the Stasi using it, too.
And it’s not been part of American politics before. American politicians have been racist before and we’ve called one another traitors and unpatriotic and so on. We haven’t talked about one another as being insects or vermin or parasites. And this comes from the language of regimes who saw their enemies as not citizens, as not necessarily human, as people who could be treated or destroyed any way that they liked. And my piece wasn’t a very long piece. It just listed some of the things that Trump said, and showed how that language had been used in the 1930s and ’40s by others. But you’re right, it caused some controversy because to people who are going to vote for Trump, this seems very offensive. And they alternatively wanted to dismiss it or deny it or say Biden and Harris are just as bad, even though there’s no evidence of that.
The most prominent person to object to the piece was Elon Musk, who obviously is a big Trump supporter these days. He mocked it as being sensationalist. What did you make of his response?
So my piece is literally a list, it’s just citations. And mocking it is one way to dismiss something that bothers you. I’m just quoting people. I didn’t say Trump is Hitler. I didn’t say Trump will cause a new Holocaust. And actually, what I think the danger of Trumpism is, it’s not Nazi stormtroopers or the kind of scenes that you would recognize from movies about the Third Reich. I think the threat of Trumpism is something different. It’s the threat of Trump assaulting and undermining institutions, which is how most democracies fail nowadays. They do so by slowly undermining judges, courts, bureaucrats and so on.
So the piece wasn’t saying he will be Hitler. The piece was just saying he’s talking like Hitler. And it was also saying that he does so knowingly and there’s some evidence for that. He once said at one of his rallies, I haven’t read Mein Kampf. Who randomly says, I haven’t read Mein Kampf? This is Hitler’s famous anti-Semitic rant. You don’t say that unless it’s in the front of your brain.
And so the explanation for it is that he’s using this language because he thinks it will work, he thinks that it will appeal to some Americans, that it will create anger and division, which is what it did in Nazi Germany and in Stalin’s Russia, and in communist East Germany. And it will give people the feeling that they’re threatened by people or enemies who are something like illness or disease.
And as I said, Musk’s attitude is mock it, laugh at it, don’t take it seriously. And that’s one way of trying to ignore it or marginalize these quotations which come from videos and tapes and rallies that we’ve all seen on television. So I didn’t have to make anything up.
We had some new reporting this week from Jeffrey Goldberg, your editor at The Atlantic, on John Kelly, who served as Trump’s DHS secretary, his chief of staff, and is a decorated four-star general. Kelly claimed that Trump said, among other things, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” and made the point that Trump, who previously had served as a CEO of an organization, was upset that his generals and their pesky attitudes about respecting the law were getting in the way of what he wanted done. The New York Times also reported that Trump had repeatedly praised Hitler in private and even said at one point that he did some good things. The Trump campaign denied that he ever said this. What did you make of that reporting?
First of all, John Kelly’s been saying some of this off the record for a long time. So some of it I’d heard before, it didn’t surprise me. Also, I think it does reflect something about Trump’s inclinations. It’s not that he’s going to create a new Holocaust, but he does admire not just Hitler, but President Xi and President Putin. He admires people who rule without checks and balances, without the rule of law, without real legal opposition, people who have an absolutely unfettered ability to do whatever they want, which is, of course, the definition of an autocracy or a dictatorship.
And that he would admire someone from history who’s done that seems completely unsurprising to me because he says versions of this all the time. In his first term in office, he was saying the same kinds of things, but at that time, he was hemmed in by people like John Kelly and others who understood how the American political system works, namely that in the American system, soldiers and generals in the army swear an oath to the Constitution, not of personal loyalty to the president. Employees of the federal government also work on behalf of the Constitution and not as sidekicks of the president in most positions.
And Trump was never able to get used to that. He found it difficult to understand. And if you look back at the history of that administration, the constant clashes with people he was working with, with people in the military was always over that. So I’m not surprised at all.
He also seems to know almost no history. Actually, Hitler’s generals famously organized a plot to try and kill him. So wishing for Hitler’s generals, if you think that means you’re wishing for a super loyal military, you’re amazingly mistaken. But it seems to be a piece of his fix, the idea of absolute power and absolute control. That seems to be what he wants. And so whether he’s talking about his enemies as viruses who don’t get to have any rights or any consideration, or whether he’s talking about admiring Hitler, they seem to be part of the same aspect of his personality.
There’s a distinction between what you’re arguing in this piece, which is that he’s not going to behave necessarily like Hitler would or Mussolini would or Stalin would.
Because he won’t be able to, at least not immediately.
His defenders, like Elon Musk, look at these kinds of arguments and dismiss them as ridiculous and absurd. We already had Trump in power once. He didn’t commit a Holocaust. So why is everyone pretending that he’s like Hitler? What you’re saying is your argument is more nuanced than that, which is that Trump is using this kind of rhetoric because it excites people in the same way that Hitler used that kind of rhetoric because it excites people.
The way democracies fall nowadays is usually not through a coup d’etat or some kind of military event. They fall through because legitimately elected people who don’t have respect for the institutions of the system take them apart. And would Trump do that if he can? Yes, I think he would. And will he be surrounded in his second term by people who want to do that and will help him do that?
Yes, I think it’s very possible. Vance has openly said things that sound very similar. Project 2025, produced by the Heritage Foundation, which has lots of people who either served with him or are close to him who contributed to it, is exactly that project. So I’m adding an element of nuance, but that doesn’t mean that you can dismiss it all or say it’s a joke, or say, “but Joe Biden told people to get vaccinated” — which is what somebody said to me — “and that’s equally bad.” There is something that he’s saying to us. He’s warning us and he’s hoping it will help him win. And we should take it seriously.
What do you think we have in store if Trump does win in two weeks?
Trump is very hard to predict because his only real interest is himself. So he doesn’t have an ideology of power in the way that some people do. He has one or two policy issues that he cares about. One of them is he wants high tariffs and the other is he wants to leave NATO. And those are two things he’s been saying for 30 years. Beyond that, he doesn’t know much, he doesn’t care much.
But as I said, what he wants is this feeling of absolute power and control. And so the danger of Trump in his second term is that he would employ people who would seek to achieve that agenda, who would, for example, fire civil servants who are competent and have meritocratic reasons to be doing their jobs, and replace them with absolute loyalists who will just do whatever.
There’s a real threat of corruption. His first term was very corrupt. Many of these were stories that weren’t often reported. The Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Energy was stuffed full of former lobbyists who are using their jobs in the government as ways of making money. And that would be on steroids, that kind of practice. So the further corruption of the federal government, the creation of loyalists, possibly the use of the Department of Justice to go after the enemies within, the political enemies who he thinks don’t have rights, possibly the use of other federal institutions.
He’s actually talked about the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, about using it against television stations. So that’s a possibility. It’s happened in the past in American history where presidents have tried to use the IRS to harass people. And that’s a tactic used in other autocratic countries. It was widely used in Russia in the 2000s. That’s what the Hungarians do. It’s what the Polish government that was in charge for eight years did, they used financial investigations and harassment to to undermine people.
You would begin to see a lot of stuff like that, that might have some precedence in American history, but the scale of it, particularly right now at this moment in time, would feel very weird. And so that’s all very possible. The stuff that he says about mass deportation and rebuilding camps to put migrants in, it’s very hard to know how that would work. He would need a lot of people enabling him to do that. It’s not something that could happen right away. But you would be surprised.
As somebody who lives, I live part of the time in Poland and I watch this happen. You’d be surprised how fast some things can change. The Department of Justice could change its spots overnight. The FCC or the IRS could change very quickly with the right kinds of people in charge.
And maybe that over time, he would seek to create these displays of violence and control, which is also what some of the people following Trump admire about him, these are things that he finds satisfying. He likes the idea, just as other authoritarians do, of demonstrating and showing his power. Remember, he wanted to shoot at demonstrators during the George Floyd protests. He wants to show that he’s in control. He wants military parades. This is what satisfies him. And I think there would be a lot of that. Some of it might not matter and some of it might matter terribly. And we would begin to have a shift to a very different political culture in Washington.
It’s easy to forget that during his first term, there was a story in The New York Times or The Washington Post almost weekly that Trump had proposed something quite extreme and somebody in his administration stopped him from doing it. He had conservatives in the administration, Jeff Sessions, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and very often they rejected his more outlandish ideas. What we know about the incoming administration, should he win the election, is that a lot of those figures would not be in power anymore, and a lot of his worst impulses would probably be enabled.
I made a podcast, a five-part podcast called Autocracy in America, that describes some of this in greater detail, exactly these kinds of processes. And one of the people we interviewed was John Bolton, who was his National Security Adviser. And Bolton told us the story, my colleague and I, of being in a car and driving with Trump to a European summit. And Trump turns to Bolton and says, today is the day we’re going to make history, John. We’re going to leave NATO.
And John Bolton and Mattis and all kinds of other people started putting pressure on him. They convinced him, I think, that it would be bad for him politically. But will those people be there a second time? Probably not. You would have, with Vance and with Don Jr. having positions of power and influence, you would see very different kinds of people in the White House. So, yes, you would have to worry a lot more about this stuff than we did previously.
What do you make of Elon Musk’s role in this election and his support for Trump?
So Musk clearly has an ambition to be an oligarch. And a Russian-style oligarch is somebody whose wealth and money and power, they mesh and they intermingle. It’s not just that he has a good relationship with the people who run the country. And so the oligarch is enriched by the politicians, in Russia they’re often the same people, politicians own the major companies or have investments in them, and Musk playing this role, playing it in the run-up to the election is something that’s pretty unprecedented in U.S. politics.
There’s a lot of money in U.S. politics, there’s almost no other democracy on the planet that runs elections like ours, as saturated with money as these are. But using it openly to appear to buy votes, to offer $1 million rewards to people who register to vote, the scale of things matter too. Offering $1 million to random people isn’t something that we’ve ever had before in an American election campaign.
I’ve just come back from Germany where I was for several days. And Europeans keep asking me, how is this legal? They can’t imagine how you could have somebody playing that kind of role in the political system. But Musk’s interest appears to be a business interest, a financial interest, as well as his own interest in power and being able to operate without regulation.
He has enormous number of businesses that have conflicts with the U.S. government. He has deals with the US government, but a lot of them are also in conflict in various ways, with their environmental issues or their regulatory issues. Perhaps he thinks that by having a symbiotic relationship with Trump that he would eliminate all of his problems with regulation. But this is a really dangerous precedent. It would change very much the relationship between business and politics in the country, it’s not good as it is, but this would make it worse.
You wrote in a recent piece that “we can be absolutely certain that an attempt will be made to steal the 2024 election if Kamala Harris wins.” What worries you most about election night?
I think it’s pretty clear that whatever happens, by 11 pm that evening, Trump will declare victory. That’s what happened last time. So unless, of course, it’s a landslide for Harris, if it’s close in any way, he will declare victory and then he will put into motion various projects to slow down the count as he did before, if he thinks he’s behind. I think it’ll be in that sense similar to what happened in 2020, except that this time it’ll be on a larger scale.
And of course this time we’re better prepared for it as well. But it will be on a larger scale. There are already lawsuits being teed up. Challenges to voter registration are already being made in a number of swing states. There are already some precedents of counties refusing to certify electoral results. And there are lawyers on the other side who are suing those kinds of counties. So the legal battle is already unfolding. It’s already started. And the attempt to change the perception of the election will begin almost as soon as the polls close, if not before.
In a way, it’s begun now. It’s very interesting that this betting market, these very strange betting market statistics that have been shown, it’s at least partially owned by Peter Thiel, and has been showing these huge margins of victory for Republicans, like 60% to 40% and so on. That is also part of an attempt in advance to show to that the Republicans are winning and they’re going to win.
So as I said, if it’s the case that it’s closer, that Harris wins, they will challenge. And then people will say, given how far he was ahead in this betting market, he couldn’t have lost the election. And remember, a betting market can be easily manipulated by money. Just whoever puts money on it decides it. It’s not a poll. It’s a market.
So there’s a lot of so-called red wave polls out there that are seeking to favor Trump as much as possible to give the impression that he’s winning. That’s not to say that he won’t win. He might win, but right now, they’re doing what they can to prepare in advance, just in case he doesn’t win so that they can challenge the result.
I want to ask you about a piece of yours that’s been getting a lot of attention in light of your new book and the war in the Middle East. Back in 2002, you wrote a piece for Slate and the headline was “Kill the Messenger.” And in it, you argued that official Palestinian radio and TV studios are fair targets in the war between Israel and Palestine. And you wrote that the media, these media organizations, qualified as combatants and were therefore legitimate military targets. You’ve been getting some criticism online for that piece recently.
First of all, that was 22 years ago. Second of all, I don’t write the headlines. And I still don’t read the headlines. In fact, I had a problem with that this week. I don’t have the piece in front of me now, but most of it was speculative. It was about, should we consider them combatants in the war, not, we should kill them. So it wasn’t advocating murder or whatever the headline said. Although, I think after 22 years, I’m allowed to not remember what was the context that I was writing it in.
Sure. But have your views changed on that idea that any media outlets, whether or not they’re part of a state, should be considered combatants?
Obviously, I don’t think media outlets should be killed. I don’t think journalists should be killed or media outlets who are considered combatants. There is a complicated question about what propagandists are. The Russian propagandists who support the war in Ukraine, no, I don’t think they’re military targets, but should they be the targets of sanctions? Yes, they should.
Editor’s note: After our interview concluded, a spokesperson sent an additional statement from Anne Applebaum regarding her 2002 piece in Slate:
“Although I recently saw a screenshot of that article on X (which I ignored) I hadn’t read it for more than two decades and was not prepared to be asked about it. Now that I have, I can say that it could have been better worded (and the headline, which I would not have written, could have been less provocative). But the substance of the article, which was mostly about the dehumanizing propaganda being taught to Palestinian children, is still consistent with everything else I write. Twenty-two years later I’m still against teaching children, whether Palestinian or Israeli, to hate each other. I still think propagandists bear co-responsibility for war. And of course I did not believe then, and do not believe now, that radio stations or television stations are actually legitimate military targets.” — Anne Applebaum.
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