Offline with Jon Favreau - Trump's Memeification of War

Episode Date: March 14, 2026

Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum joins Offline to discuss America’s slide towards autocracy, as illustrated through Trump's war of choice in Iran. Anne is a staff writer at The Atlantic, an authoritarianism expert, and the host of the "Autocracy in America" podcast. She and Jon discuss how Trump and the White House are using propaganda to minimize the seriousness of this war, what our president has learned from other autocrats, and why Anne is still hopeful that American democracy can still prevail.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

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It's this performance online culture designed for, I don't know, teenage boys and their grown-up equivalents. But it also has a purpose. I mean, it makes people say, you know, this war is unsurious. The images of violence are frightening. The various different stories that are told are confusing and contradicting. Who knows what's really true? All of this will make people feel disengaged.

And it may work. I mean, how can you focus on a serious war when you're being told the story of it through comic strips and videos? I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from this week's guest, Anne Applebaum. Anne is a journalist and historian who focuses on the rise of authoritarianism. You may have caught her work in the Atlantic or read her many books on the subject or listened to her podcast, Autocracy in America. I've wanted to have her on for a while now to talk about America's slide toward autocracy. and I figured that with the very autocratic way that Trump is both waging and talking about the war in Iran, this week was a good opportunity.

We talked about how Trump and the White House are using propaganda to minimize the seriousness of this war, what Trump has learned from other autocrats, why the war in Iran has been good for Putin, and why she's hopeful that American democracy can still prevail. It's a great conversation you'll hear in a few, but before that, I just want to share a few of my thoughts on Iran. You might be wondering how we ended up right back where this century began. Fighting a dumb war in the Middle East because of politicians who lied about why they started it, don't have a plan to finish it, and can't stop spending our money on it. You might be wondering why after the trillion dollars spent in Iraq

in the hundreds of thousands of lives that were lost there, or in places like Libya or Syria or Gaza, these politicians still think we can bomb our way to a more peaceful Middle East. Why they still think we can destroy people's homes and kill their families without any repercussions. Why they think we can play God just because our army is bigger. More importantly, you might be wondering, why do the rest of us just accept it? The Washington Post interviewed this 41-year-old father who had just gone to pick up his two kids from school. He was waiting for them outside when the explosion sent him flying into the air.

By the time he got up, head covered in blood, and made his way back to the school, it was gone. He helped other parents pull children out of the rubble, but none of them were alive. Neither were his two little boys. There were seven and eight years old. The mistaken U.S. missile attack on the Iranian school that was carried out in our name and paid for with our tax dollars killed at least 100,000. 175 human beings, most of them children. Many of the more than 2,000 civilians we've killed are also children,

as are the hundreds of thousands who've been forced out of their homes in just the first three weeks of this war. It's a war that's also left dozens of Americans injured, some seriously, many with brain injuries. Thirteen have now died. one of them was a 39-year-old soldier from Minnesota who had served in the military for 20 years and was just a few days away from returning home to her husband and kids for good so she could garden with her high school son and ride bikes with her fourth grade daughter. The day after she and six other soldiers were killed by a retaliatory drone strike that Iran launched at their makeshift operation center in Kuwait,

the president said that he expected casualties, but, quote, that's the way it is. And, quote, in the end, it's going to be a great deal for the world. Pete Hegseth accused the press of reporting the deaths as front page news only because they want to, quote, make the president look bad. The next day, at a Medal of Honor ceremony, Trump read a few prepared words about the fallen service members before going off on a much longer tangent, about how he'd saved money on gold drapes for his new ballroom. Neither Trump nor Hegeseth said anything about the schoolchildren their missile strike had killed.

Though the very next day, the defense secretary bragged about, quote, unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history, while avoiding, quote, stupid rules of engagement and politically correct wars. By the end of that first week, as that father was grieving for his two, boys and those kids were grieving for their mother and hundreds of families in the U.S. and across the Middle East were mourning their losses. The White House had begun posting snuff videos. Footage of actual U.S. missile strikes hitting their targets in Iran are spliced together with scenes from Braveheart and Gladiator and Call of Duty and Mortal Kombat.

Explosions that have killed innocent civilians are timed to the crack of a baseball bat or an NFL tackle. The soundtrack is usually a song with the word boom in the title in case the stupid joke wasn't obvious enough. Governments have used propaganda to sell war for as long as there's been war. But Trump and Hegsef and the White House aren't really trying to sell this war. And if they are, they're certainly not succeeding. Few conflicts in the last several decades have started off this unpopular. And polling shows that the videos specifically haven't moved the needle even with Trump's base, let alone anyone else. I think that's because instead of using propaganda to sell the war, this White House sees the war as just another chance to generate more propaganda, to sell people

on the idea that war, like politics, is just part of the show. There are good guys and bad guys, heroes and enemies, suspenseful plot twists and thrilling victories and comic relief and hopefully not too many sad moments because the ultimate goal here is entertainment. Because an audience that's too bummed out might not come back for more. It's why way back in 2019

when a combat veteran who had lost a leg and suffered brain damage was chosen to sing God bless America at an event where Trump spoke, the president said loud enough for people to hear why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded. Because if we think too much about that veteran, or the kids in that school,

or the soldiers in Kuwait, or the boats full of people who were murdered in the Caribbean, or the citizens killed on the streets in Minnesota, and the immigrants who are dying in detention camps, if we linger too long on the lives they led or the loved ones they left behind, then more of us might stop scrolling past the war porn and the memes and the shitposts

and refuse to accept that this is who we are now. More of us might decide that people who don't value the inherent dignity and worth of every life should never be trusted with the power to end it. War is not a game. War is not just another content opportunity. War, even a just and necessary war, is born of the ultimate human failure

and it leads to the ultimate human tragedy. The more we see that and hear that and remember that, especially when Donald Trump and Pete Hegeseth don't want us to, the more likely we are to demand that it's stop. And with that, here's my conversation with Ann Applebaum. Anne, welcome to offline. Thanks for having me. I've been wanting to have you on ever since the world has become overrun,

with autocracies. So I have several things I want to talk to you about, but let's start with the Iran War, which is now entering its third week. Reactions, how are you feeling about where things are right now? I'm really disappointed and disappointed and yet not entirely surprised that there appears to have been no planning for what would happen after American Israel started dropping bombs. There was no planning for the reaction and the collateral. damage in the Middle East. And there was no planning for Iran. You know, we, over the last year, we dismantled many of the tools that we've had in the past to speak to Iranians, the radio stations, the broadcasters. And we also stopped funding or broke our ties with some of the Iranian

Democratic opposition who we might be speaking to. And it doesn't seem like anybody, they reached out to anybody or spoke to anybody in the planning for what would happen to Iranian people after. after this started. And I think now we're seeing the result. I can't recall another time, maybe not even Iraq, where an administration has delivered so many conflicting justifications for war that they can't seem to settle on, you know, imminent threat to U.S. troops, then to Israel, then nuclear capabilities or nuclear aspirations, then, you know, regime change. What do you make of the fact that they haven't been able to settle on a single reason? It seems like now they have narrowed the objectives to, you know, degrading ballistic missiles and destroying the Navy

and then, you know, all under the umbrella of, I guess, degrading their ability to develop nuclear weapons. I mean, I think the difficulty that everybody's having, not just in the U.S. but everywhere, I'm in Europe right now, is that all of us are seeking to put a rational frame on the actions of the U.S. president because it's so unbelievable and impossible to process the idea that he acts out of impulse and whim and that he doesn't have a bigger strategy. And he doesn't think about what happened in Iran up until before he became president or what will happen in Iran after he's president. He doesn't see Iran as connected to other places. He thinks of it as a kind of one, you know, he's going to go in and go out like he did successfully do.

where he thinks he successfully did in Venezuela. Of course, that story is not over yet either. But all of us want to make this into a story. And that's why people keep asking for reasons and rationales. And it seems to me, especially in these conversations he's had in the first few days of the war with journalists, that what he's doing is kind of message testing. You know, he tries out one explanation for why he did it and sees what that sounds like. And then he tries out another explanation for what did it. And you can even see his administration kind of running to catch up with him. You know, he says, one thing and they try to echo that, and then he says something different, and they have to change their story as well. And I think we're dealing with something that was fundamentally

irrational. I mean, he felt like it that day, you know, we'll learn eventually whether it was ultimately Netanyahu, who convinced him, or whether it was Jared Kushner who convinced him, or whether, you know, he just looked at the map and thought he'd like to do something dramatic this week to distract from other things. You know, we'll eventually find that out. But Trying to see it as a rational strategy makes no sense. And you're right, the comparison to Iraq is interesting. I mean, actually, the Bush administration made a case for Iraq. They made it to the American people. They made it to the U.N. They made it to the U.N. They made it. They made it. It was about weapons of mass destruction. And you can say, you know, the case was wrong and it was based on bad evidence. But they built the case. They made it. They presented it. They argued for it. They got what they thought was a kind of UN approval. They had congressional approval. They had support from Americans. This is totally different. This is a completely different kind of war. It's being fought because the president had a psychological need,

as he put it when he was talking about Greenland, to have a war. I mean, it seems like the lesson, if you could call it a lesson, the lesson that Trump has taken from Iraq is the bombing and the regime change is fine, just don't send in a large, just don't have ground forces there for an extended period of time because he knows that looks messy. I mean, you know, Trump and and Netanyahu have made this decision to attack Iran, but, you know, Republicans and even some Democrats have supported some kind of military action for years to remove what is objectively a violent and dangerous regime in Tehran. What I'm still trying to figure out is, like, why does it seem that no lessons have been learned from what has happened in Iraq or any of the other, you know,

misadventures in the Middle East over the last several decades? So in order to learn lessons, you have to be interested in reading some history. And you have to read at the very least a short version presented by one of your advisors. You know, you have to think about what happened in the past and you have to seek not to repeat it in the future. And it just doesn't look to me like this is something that Trump does. Maybe there are people around him who do it, but it's not clear that their advice gets to him or who it's filtered through or whether he listens. And so once again, as I say, you know, asking about lesson learned, again, you're assuming that the president has a rational reason for wanting to go to war and that he would have a plan to make it work. Just isn't clear that he does.

I mean, I suppose they learned the lesson not to send troops, but if you don't send troops, then you don't really have any impact. You know, you can drop bombs, but you don't have any ability to shape what happens on the ground for better or for worse. And much of what they say is certainly in the first few days implied that they would have an impact on the ground, but it seems that they hadn't thought that through. You referenced a piece you recently wrote for the Atlantic called Trump has no plan for the Iranian people. You know, Iranian people have been sort of fighting for their own freedom for years now. If the goal really is to free them from this regime, what would that actually look like versus what we're doing? Like, what role do you think the U.S. and the world could play in helping to free free freedom? the Iranian people from this regime that isn't what is happening right now.

There's an Irish joke about you asked somebody the way to Dublin and they say, well, I don't know, but I wouldn't start from here. So it's a little bit like that. I mean, the starting point should go back farther. There has been a democratic opposition in Iran. It's been very brave. It's full of thoughtful and, you know, resourceful people. And, you know, each time it emerges, it has been systematically.

wiped out and people have been arrested and sent abroad and into exile. And over the years, we've half-heartedly supported it. We've given it some money. Some Iranians, U.S. officials have met them. Macron met with a group of Iranian activists some months ago. The president of France, president of the United States, has stayed somewhat away from them. I mean, there's that group. There's a group of people around the son of the former Shah. There are plausible groups of people in the exile world and inside Iran with whom we could work and who we could advise and who we could help with money and with examples and so on. But we never did that. And so starting from right now, it's much harder. I mean, I talked to somebody who is an Iranian human rights activist a few

days ago. And I asked her, you know, this is right after the war had started. And I asked her, you know, has anyone got in touch with you from the administration? And she sort of laughed and said, no, of course not. And so, you know, we aren't even, as far as I know, you know, I don't see it and I don't hear it. We don't seem to be talking to people inside the country who would be in a position to help the regime change. I mean, you know, you would have to have some people from inside the system, not probably the leadership, but you'd have to have some people who are willing to resign or walk away. You would have to have some people from the outside who had some kind of credibility, and there are such people. You would have to help them. I mean,

We were able in the 1980s, for example, to help the then Polish opposition. I say here, because I'm in Poland right now, who were fighting communism. There was a much less violent system, and we weren't bombing Poland. But we were able to help them work together, offer them. I mean, at that time, it was about Xerox machines, you know, and books and contacts and small amounts of money. And we were able to help the opposition. We didn't make them win. We didn't help them come to power.

You know, we didn't decide their future for them, but we had a, you know, kind of non-permanent set of contacts with people who might be the future leaders of Poland. And we should have had that with Iran for the last decade, more probably. And we don't seem to have it now. So, I mean, if it were me, I would have started with that. I would have been speaking to people inside the country and outside the country who had ideas about how to reshape the landscaping, the idea that the U.S. from the U.S. from the the air is going to do that has always seemed ridiculous. It is possible that the regime is weakened,

that people won't want to fight for it. There are things that could happen as a result of the bombing that could end up well for the Iranian people, which is what I truly hope happens. But that would be more by accident rather than by design. I'm curious what you think about how Trump and his administration have been talking about this war, early declarations of victory, minimizing the dangers and the casualties, bragging about all the bombs they've dropped and the bad guys they've killed, Trump has threatened to make it, quote, virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back as a nation again? Which is horrible.

Horrible. Hegeseth said, quote, the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they're going to live. What do you make of the rhetoric they're using? It's very cartoonish. And I think it's a little bit like the rhetoric they were using around ice. Yeah. It shows how online this administration is and how shaped they are by the performative nature of online communication.

You know, it's all about memes and, you know, loud language and vulgarities and how do you shock people and how do you stun people and how do you scare people with language as a nation conducting war where people are dying, including Iranian children and innocent civilians. Leave aside the bad guys. But there are other people dying, and there are some Americans have died. That's a really serious matter, and it should be treated by, you want to see your head of state, treating this as something that's important and grave and somber and not, you know, a Marvel comic dialogue, you know, or maybe a Marvel comic movie dialogue. I don't know if they even read the comics. But it's something about the way they've learned to read and communicate.

They don't. Once again, it's more evidence. They don't read history books. They don't think about the weight of what they're doing, you know, the consequences over time, you know, the way it will be seen. You know, American presidents have always thought about history and their role in it and their predecessors and what will come after. And this is really an administration that has no sense of time at all, time or seriousness or gravity or the value of life. And so they've reduced this very serious war, which is going to have serious consequences for people. over the world, actually, because of the economic impact and so on, as well as for Iranians, not all of whom are bad guys. And they're unable to talk about it even in a way that accords what they're doing with, you know, appropriate seriousness. I mean, I think also about these White House daily propaganda videos that splice real airstrike footage with clips from movies and sports and video games. And, you know, I think it's horrific. With Trump and Hegset, they're both unsurious people. They spout off all the time,

but does seem like a concerted strategy on the part of the government and the administration to put out these videos that not only minimize the seriousness of war, but sort of promote this nihilism, this sort of dehumanization, this like, don't worry about what's going on,

everything's a game. I know that you've thought a lot about the way autocracies use propaganda and information warfare. are like, what do you think they're trying to achieve with these videos, or what do you think the effect of these videos is? Because who knows what their intentions are? You know, so nihilism is the right word. So what autocratic regimes learned to do over the last couple of decades in their attempts to control the internet. Some of them literally control it.

The Chinese have tried to control what it is that people see and so on. The Russians and others came up with a different tactic. And their tactic was flood the information space. with junk. Offer contradictory explanations for things, sometimes inside the same television program. You know, offer people very violent images or very frightening images. And the point of that was to make ordinary people say, you know, politics is horrible. I don't know what's true and what's not true. I can't be idealistic. I can't believe in anything because everybody's lying. You know, everyone seems to lie. And of course, they also smear their enemies in doing this as well. Everyone's lying, everyone's bad, I'm just going to stay home and I'm not going to be involved.

And that's what they want. That's what an autocracy wants. It wants disengaged citizens who are maybe disgusted or horrified by the propaganda, don't understand it, and want to stay away from it. And I think, you know, you're right that the point of these videos, again, it's this performance online culture designed for, I don't know, teenage boys and their grown-up equivalence. but it also has a purpose. It makes people say, you know, this war is unsurious. It's also the images of violence are frightening. The various different stories that are told are confusing and contradicting. Who knows what's really true? I mean, actually, even the thing you mentioned before, you know, Trump giving multiple reasons why he's fighting, all of this will make people feel

disengaged. And it may work. I mean, how can you focus on a serious war when you're being hold the story of it through comic strips and videos. Yeah, I mean, I just, you know, I served in the Obama White House. I remember how the Bush White House even dealt with this, which is like, you know, the loss of life is just the most serious consequence you can have. And presidents forever have treated the loss of life in war with like the utmost seriousness and sobriety and spend a lot of times honoring the dead and talking about the fallen soldiers and honoring their sacrifice. And I just noticed in this war that not only does Trump seem not to care, but he does seem like he's trying to minimize the casualties and minimize with some of these videos, sort of minimize how we feel about people dying and about the loss of life. And, you know, it does remind me of what he's done domestically with ICE, what they did with Alex Prattie and Renee Good.

And all these immigrants, like, they just don't want us to see the people who are being hurt. and who are losing their lives as human beings that have equal value to the rest of us. No, that's exactly right. I mean, if you remember, Alex Prattie was within half an hour was being described as a domestic terrorist, as was Renee Good. So you're right. Immediately the idea is to minimize it. They're not real people.

They're radicals. They're enemies. They're terrorists. I mean, all the Iranians are terrorists. But, you know, Trump has been telling us this all along. He's been telling us two things all long. Number one, this kind of dehumanizing language he was using during the 2024 election campaign. You know, he was talking about his enemies and immigrants being vermin.

He used, I mean, literal language from Hitler talking about immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation, you know, as if they were a disease. You know, he talked about Kamala Harris as a radical Marxist leftist and all of his enemies as, you know, he pinned them in extremist political boxes. And that's what dictators do. You know, they pretend that their legitimate political opponents aren't real. They're parasites who can be, you know, wiped out. There are snakes who can be stepped on. I mean, that's the kind of language that Stalin and Hitler and others have used. I mean, you know, it's a known tactic.

And, of course, the other thing Trump has been telling us. And, I mean, you know, the editor of the Atlantic wrote this. And then it was backed up by some of the generals who worked for Trump in the past, is that Trump doesn't respect soldiers. and he doesn't respect fallen soldiers, and he calls them suckers and losers, and he doesn't know why they would fight, and he wouldn't do it. And at the funeral of the six soldiers who came home from Iran, whose bodies came back from Iran, rather, he showed up at the funeral in a blue suit and a red tie and a baseball cap, which is, I don't know of any head of state who would do that anywhere.

And I don't think there's any American president of any political party who would dress like that at a solemn funeral. And I think you're right. I think the point is he doesn't want Americans to take this seriously because he's afraid of the consequences for him. Yeah. Ultimately, again, the consequences of the war and the purpose of the war are for him. And, you know, he doesn't want people to be against the war because that might be a political problem for him. And so the way he thinks about it just isn't the way anyone else has ever thought about it. It's not about the people who've died and the families who need to be comforted.

It's about him. Yeah. and how it will affect his popularity or whatever it is that he cares about. Yeah, I was thinking about that story. It's in maybe the same piece as the Suckers and Losers' Revelation, but there's been two times now, I believe, where Trump has seen wounded veterans, combat veterans at an event. And I think once he turns to John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time,

once it's Mark Millie, former Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he said, well, you shouldn't have them in the front row. why is this guy singing who's a wounded veteran? People don't want to see that. That doesn't look good for me. So the idea that these combat veterans who've been wounded, that somehow their presence is going to, you know, bum the audience out or somehow reflects poorly on Donald Trump

is really all he cares about because the whole thing is a show, which is a very autocratic thing to do. Yeah, it's a show. It's a performance. You know, the consequences aren't for other people. the only consequences that matter are the ones for him. And he does think in terms of, you know, as I said, performance, what does it look like, how are people reading it, not what does the war mean, what's it doing, what's the impact, how's it affecting Americans, how is it affecting other American allies? None of that is important because it just doesn't register on his radar of what he cares about.

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and Canada were like more supportive than I imagined or at least somewhat neutral. And I don't know how they've been thinking about things since then. The silence that you're hearing is the silence of people who are pretty angry. But, you know, the question is what's to be gained by criticizing Trump at this point. I mean, everybody has mixed feelings. Even I have some mixed feelings because the Iranian regime is such a horrible regime. And nobody's sad about the idea that it might fall. And there was a big demonstration in Berlin of Iranians in exile who were, you know, dancing in the streets because they were so happy that Hamina died. And so I think people, certainly at the beginning of the war, wanted to kind of pay homage to those feelings and say, well, you know, it's not a regime that,

you know, that anybody wants to be seen supporting. And I understand that. But I mean, I think certainly as it's gone on and as it's become clear that there's no plan and maybe it's not about regime change, maybe it's about these other seven things, you know, as it's become clear that the costs are going to be borne by Europeans because that's who will pay the higher oil prices and will pay for the disruption in air travel and the rest and maybe eventually costs of refugees and other things. I think people have been getting angrier and angrier. You know, you heard already the Spanish prime minister. say that he absolutely refused to let, I mean, I think he's balanced that a little bit, but he made a very strong statement against the war. And I'm fairly sure he did this because he thought it would be popular. And you will also start to see other European leaders, because as the war goes on, it's less and less popular, who will begin those who have elections coming

or who might begin to, you know, see that the dislike of the war will, you know, it's worth coming out. out because it'll, you know, it'll help them. I mean, it's interesting. I just, by coincidence, I was in Romania in the last week, and the Romanians had a dilemma because they were asked by the Trump administration whether they could use one of their bases. There's a Romanian military, NATO military base in Romania. Could they use it for transport of some equipment to Iran? I don't know exactly what it was, but it was something, could they use the base for Iran? And, you know, in Romania, the war is also unpopular. But the Iranian president,

agreed to let them do it because, you know, and this is how a lot of NATO states will be thinking, because Romania wants the U.S. to stay engaged in Romania. Their main concern is the war in Ukraine. And so you have that set of mixed feelings as well that people don't like the war. They don't want to contribute to the war, but countries whose main focus is still on Russia and Ukraine don't want to alienate the United States completely at this point or Trump at this point. and so they'll let them use bases or they'll remain somehow engaged. But I don't see the war anywhere being popular and people are as horrified in Europe by the constant change of narratives as people are in the United States.

Speaking of the war in Ukraine, how's Putin viewing all this? It's a very interesting question because in a lot of ways the war is good for Putin. Oil prices are high again. That's good for him because that's his main source of income. The U.S. is announced it wants to lift sanctions. on some Russian oil exports, which is interesting. I mean, that means that it shows what choice has been made. The U.S. preferred to pursue this war of choice in the Middle East

rather than to defend Europe against Russia and to keep pressure on Russia to force them to end the war. And so that will be good for Putin. There's also the strange, you know, Zelensky said a few days ago, the president of Ukraine said a few days ago that in the first three days of the war in the Middle East, more air defense missiles were let off. I think it's 800.

He said something like 800 air defense missiles were let off. Then Ukraine has had access to since the beginning of the war. And so Trump is demonstrating, as I said, he's made this choice. He's more interested in pursuing this whimsical war that he can't explain in the Middle East than he is in defending Ukraine. Ukraine had a terrible winter. They were short of air defense missiles and their electricity system was destroyed. which was horrible when it was really cold there, especially. And this is, you know, yet another demonstration to Putin that Trump just isn't that

concerned about his war and doesn't want to end it. So it's sending all kinds of signals to Putin as well. And remember, it's really important to remember that, you know, in many ways this war, the war in Ukraine has a very important psychological element. So this is a war that will be over when Putin stops fighting. When he decides he can't win, Ukraine is going to remain an independent. country, he's not going to be able to conquer it, and then the war will be over. And so everything that Trump does to encourage Putin with the idea that the U.S. doesn't really care and the U.S.

is out of it and the U.S. is not going to put pressure on Russia. And the U.S. prefers to fight Iran rather than help Ukraine. I mean, all of those things will build Putin's willingness to continue the war and his desire to pursue it. So in that sense, it's good, I mean, there is one other nuance, which is that Iran is a country that's been connected deeply to Russia for the last decade. You know, the Iranians gave their drones to Russia at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Russians then learned to produce them. It's pretty clear that Russian technology is being used by the Iranians. Russian tactics, I don't know why this surprised the U.S. administration, but it did.

And so Russia has an interest in Iran not being defeated. And so you will see or we may not see it. but it may happen, that there will begin to be more, you know, if the Russians think the Iranian regime in some form is going to survive, they may, you know, they may also begin sharing more. I mean, we know from a lot of reporting, we've been told that the Russians are sharing targeting data and satellite information with the Iranians. We see them sharing drone tactics and electronic warfare tactics that come from the Ukrainian war. We've seen those being used in the Gulf. And so particularly if the war goes on and becomes more embarrassing for the United States, Putin's going to have an interest in pumping

up the Iranian side. And then finally, there's one more aspect, which is interesting, which is, of course, the one country on the planet that really understands how to fight Russian-style drone warfare is Ukraine. Yeah. And Ukrainians have put together teams. They've sent three teams to the Middle East already. I think to the UAE, three of the Gulf states they've sent a teams to, and they're talking to some others. and because their systems aren't just about the physical drone, it's about how you operate them, how you use the software,

how you use drone interceptors, and they're sending some teams to train people in the Gulf, and for which I hope they're going to get some kind of compensation or some weapons sharing in the future, I'm sure they will. But this is a monumental American oversight. You know, why didn't anyone think about talking to the Ukrainians before the war? Why doesn't the U.S. use their style of technology? Why didn't the U.S. suggests that the Gulf countries do it? I mean, why are we doing this now, you know, rather than beforehand? And it's evidence more of what I was saying before that Trump just doesn't see the bigger picture. He's not interested in how Iran relates to Russia or to Ukraine or how the war that's happening in Europe can affect the war that's happening in the Middle East. He doesn't think in terms of that kind of geography or those kind of interconnections. It's sort of every incident is separate. And again, his interest in each one of them is how it relates to me,

you know, to him, to Donald Trump. There's a Times piece when the war started about how Trump's rhetoric around Iran echoes Putin's rhetoric around Ukraine, the dehumanization, the denial that there's a legitimate government to negotiate with on and on and on. What do you think Trump has learned from Putin about how to wage and sell a war? And more broadly, Like, do you think autocrats like Trump and Putin, like, study each other's playbooks consciously, or does this kind of rhetoric and behavior just sort of converge naturally? So certainly autocrats do study each other's behavior and they borrow tactics and they borrow ways in which you suppress demonstrations and so on. I mean, it's really clear that they copy each other and they learn from each other, whether they actually sit down and discuss it. I don't know.

And, you know, again, as I've written, I don't think there's like a secret room where they all. all meet like in a James Bond movie and exchange information and, you know, secret handshakes or anything like that. But they do watch each other. They do speak to one another. And they do pay attention. I mean, in the case of Trump and Putin, there's a weird way in which Trump has always admired Putin. And what he seems to admire is the fact that Putin has no restraints. There's no Congress. There's no courts. There's no opposition. There's nobody who can, you know, he can do whatever he wants. So that seems to be how Trump sees it.

And he seems to aspire to that himself. You know, this idea, you know, that you had since the beginning of this administration that the, you know, the president can do whatever he wants. He can break the law and then let the courts catch up with him afterwards, as he did with so many institutions. Or, you know, the president can, you know, break all kinds of norms from one day to the next and not have to apologize for it. I mean, that all seems to me that it's coming from his observation.

and some of the people around him observing Putin, observing Victor Orban, who's operating in a different context. He's a democratically elected leader who then decide to undermine institutions around him. I mean, in the case of Orban, we know they were learning from him, and we know that lessons were being transmitted because it was done via the Heritage Foundation. But Trump seems to admire that kind of absolute power. And it does seem that in the case of this war, why should he bother explaining it to the American people, why should he ask Congress. You know, he's picked up this idea that a real leader can break the law, can do what he wants, can act without legitimacy, and he sees Putin doing that, and he wants to do it too.

And so I don't know, again, whether he studied Putin's language. It doesn't seem to me he... It's as much of a stodier, no. He studies very much, but the attitude, I mean, I just don't think it's an accident that the language is the same, because the attitude is the same. Yeah. You know, the attitude is, I can do what I want. My enemies aren't real people.

All I need to do is perform for the public. I don't want anyone involved. I don't want any debate. And that's an autocratic way of thinking. And that's how he behaves. That's how Putin behaves. And it's not that surprising that they have, you know, they come up with similar, you know, similar ways of speaking. Well, I've been thinking about this because, you know, when you zoom out on sort of Trump's foreign policy, he shows deference to Putin.

respect to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-un, Orban. And he probably shows the most deference, I think, to, like, powerful autocrats, who many with nuclear weapons, while, you know, showing outright hostility to liberal democracies. And I'm sure part of that is his style. You know, he admires what they've done in their countries, how they're strong, all the things you were just saying. But also I sort of wonder where, like, he doesn't want to mess with Russia. He doesn't want to mess with China. He doesn't want to mess with people who he thinks are strong and could sort of unleash, you know,

whether nuclear weapons or other kinds of warfare on the world. And I wonder about this like sphere of influence theory that I've heard, you know, floated around where maybe Trump thinks and some people around them think, well, you know, China, Russia, United States, we can sort of divvy up the world. And then maybe there'll be peace among nations. and we can all oppress our own people and everyone can just live their own lives and that's the way it is.

I wonder if they think that at all. This is a theory floating around that I had heard at the beginning of the administration from some Trump people. And I think it's actually originally Russian. And the idea is that the world should be divided into spheres of influence, the Chinese should have Asia

and the U.S. should have Western Hemisphere. And somehow Putin should have Europe, I guess, although the European economy is five times larger than Putin's economy. And even the European armies, when you put them together, are larger than Putin's army. And Putin is actually unable to defeat the Ukrainians, let alone all the Europeans. It's, you know, leaving that aside. I mean, it's a, it was a theory that always flattered Putin because it put him in this higher group that he shouldn't be in. And I do think there are people

around Trump who wanted him to pursue this. And all that language about the Western Hemisphere and Greenland and, you know, dominate. our neighborhood, and he's used this very aggressive language about Latin America in various contexts, both in documents, but also in, you know, in public, almost colonialist language. You know, I think that was the intent of many of people near him. I mean, Hexeth has talked about a little bit like this. Vance has talked a little bit like this. There's some ideologues at the State Department who talk like this. I mean, the one thing I would say is that if, you know, if your ideas, everybody should have their own sphere of influence, then the war in Iran is somewhat

out of line with that. And again, I think this is just further proof that Trump doesn't stick to strategies. I mean, there are sometimes he's, he's interested in this sphere of influence strategy, and sometimes he's interested in, you know, fighting Muslims, and sometimes he's interested in something else. And so the attempt of people around him to get him to stick to one thing and to bring, I mean, there are people in the administration who want to bring American troops home from everywhere, from Asia, from Europe, and, you know, just leave the whole thing. But he is now somehow enamored of the idea of using American military power. And so he's somehow busted that up. But no, I mean, the idea that, you know, large, big countries should be able to bully smaller

countries, which is fundamentally what's beneath the sphere of influence idea. I mean, I think he's absolutely fine with that. Yeah. And this, by the way, is another thing the Europeans have heard. And you, I mean, you heard Mark Carney say it, but you now hear it everywhere you in Europe. Everybody gets it. Okay, we're middle-sized powers. We need to stick together. We need our own defense industry. We need our own tech industries. We need to pull away from the United States because, you know, if they're going to be bullying smaller powers, then that's going to be us, unless we're one thing. And I hear that over and over. I hear it from Germans. I hear it from East Europeans. You know, I hear it from everybody. I mean, every time I hear about,

talk about China and whether they're going to invade Taiwan, I always think to myself, like, there is no chance in hell, Donald Trump is going to have the United States come to Taiwan's defense in a situation like that. Because that to me is a classic example of somewhere where Trump's like, well, that's China. They're big. Taiwan's not. Why would we get involved in that? No, it's true. He's afraid of big countries. You know, he's afraid of China. Yeah. And he's he's not willing to stand up to China or even to create a kind of strategy to resist China or or even to galvanize his Asian allies, you know, to pull Japan and South Korea and Taiwan together, which is what the previous administration was trying to do. So, no, he's afraid of big countries,

and he would rather bully smaller ones. There's no question that that's true. And I don't think China wants to invade Taiwan. I mean, I could be wrong, and I hear lots of different theories about it. And so they may still hope that they can somehow get Taiwan differently through pressure. But it's true that if they were going to do it, I would expect this administration would be the time they would try. So just to talk about the U.S. for a second, like, where do you think we are, from your perspective, in our slide toward autocracy? Are there ways we are actually worse off than some countries you've studied? Are there ways we've been more resilient? What would you say? I have to say that the progress of dismantling institutions and changing the rules

happened much faster in the United States than I've ever seen it happen anywhere else. So Victor Ormond took years to do the same stuff. And even Putin took more time. I mean, Russia wasn't really a democracy board of that, so it's a different story. Or Hugo Chavez. This is not always, by the way, a coded right-wing way of taking of the system. You can do it from the left as well. And historic, that's happened lots of times too. And the Chavez takeover also took a number of years before it was complete. But the Trump, administration arrived with a very clear plan and with an attempt to do a kind of, you know, break stuff and then see what happens policy, you know, put Doge in charge, illegally destroy a lot of

institutions, and, you know, make everybody pick up the pieces afterwards. And the number of rules they broke and laws they broke and, you know, even spoken and unspoken rules of American politics, the pressure they put on big media companies, the pressure they put on some lawful firms, all of that was pretty unprecedented and it all happened very fast. The other thing I think that's unusual and different about the Trump administration's assault on the system is the role played by the tech companies. The richest companies in America, or some of them, not everybody, but some of the richest companies and richest people in America aligned with this process from the beginning. I didn't know of a precedent for that. So it wasn't just the government doing

it. It was also the tech company is doing it, and they seem to be doing it because is they see, you know, a financial advantage. I mean, they can get contracts with the government. You know, if they, if they help the Trump administration win, if they, you know, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, we're not right propaganda more often, then they get something in exchange. And the power that they have, I mean, I know, there are no Hungarian companies that had that kind of power and were able to help Orban in that way. I mean, he later created kind of oligarchic companies who helped him, as did Putin, actually. You know, usually it works the other way around.

The authoritarian creates the oligarchs. And in our country, we had the oligarchs already. And it was when they aligned with Trump that he was able to do all these things much faster. Having said all that, the fact that they did it fast, the fact that they broke so much so quickly, the fact that at the very least they've unsettled the economy. And with this war, they've created real anxiety and fear. The fact that they did all that so fast means that there is. is, you know, backlash and there will be, I mean, resilience is the wrong word. I mean, there will be people who will be much more dedicated to being involved in politics to getting

them out because they present a much greater threat than they would have done had they done it smoothly and softly and quietly and without, you know, video game, war videos, you know, that offend people and anger them. So there is a downside to what they're doing. They're creating a lot of enemies, and they're doing it pretty fast. I just hope that our politicians are able to mobilize that anger and mobilize people to vote them out. I mean, the real test, of course, is going to be the midterms. Yeah. And not only will people vote, but how fair will they be? I mean, we know that the administration will cheat because they did last time, and we know they will try and do what they can to manipulate the result. It's harder when you have 50 states and 50 different electoral commissions.

But they will try. This is why they're trying to pass this National Act determining what kind of ID you need to vote. And then there may be an issue with, I don't know, about counting votes or accepting the result. You know, if they lose badly, will they accept the fact that they've lost the House speakership? I mean, Trump didn't accept that he'd lost the presidency in 2020. So all of that is still ahead of us. And that will be a real test. I mean, that's really the test of whether Americans can stay focused, whether they can stay organized, and whether the political system will hold. I mean, I think this year, the midterms are a test, and then, of course, two years from now, it'll be even more dramatic. Offline is brought you by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe

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If you said yes to both, welcome home. I'm Erin Ryan. And I'm Alyssa Master of Monaco. And we're the host of Hysteria, the podcast for women who care about democracy, culture, and not losing their minds in the process. We break down the news, call out the nonsense, and spotlight the women actually fighting back on Capitol Hill, in classrooms, and everywhere the stakes are high. It's sharp, honest analysis featuring women's voices with humor and zero handholding. Listen to Hysteria wherever you get your podcasts and watch. full episodes on YouTube. What do you make of how the opposition has responded to Trump, particularly the Democratic Party, when I've talked to people who live in countries who've gone through the same thing,

and I would say, like, what do you wish you would have done? The most common answer is I wish we would have had a better, stronger opposition party and stronger opposition leaders when this whole thing started. But I don't know what your view of how the Democrats have handled this is. So one of the things that always happens when you have the rise of a regime like this one, like we have in the U.S., what always happens everywhere is that the opposition shatters and splits into factions. This is actually normal. And the reason that happens is because what Trump is doing is changing the rules of politics. The way you do journalism, the way you act in Congress, the way you reach people and talk to people. You know, all of it changed. And so. Some people understand the change and, you know, are able to cope with, and a lot of people can't. And so the reason you're hearing, like, these 95 different strategies, you know, how do we fight back, is because there isn't a right answer and because a lot of people just don't have experience dealing with this kind of politics.

We have a lot of ugly politics in our country's history. I mean, you know, I don't want to deny that. And we have negative campaigning, dirty tricks. This all happened before. But we haven't really had people in power. And it's not everybody, but we haven't had people in power who are actually dedicated to changing the political system and to altering the rules so that they never lose and who are building a, you know, a kind of army of people who also want that and who are seeking not just to say they disagree with their opponents or their opponents are, you know, they don't like their opponents or their opponents have bad opinions about taxes or welfare or something. these are people who say their opponents are illegitimate, you know, or even they're vermin and are trying to eliminate them from politics altogether and saying only we have the right to win. And figuring out how to navigate that and fight back against it, I mean, I do cut some slack to people who haven't seen it before and are surprised by it.

The other thing I would say is that, you know, this is about this year and not 2028. it is true that we have 50 states and even within the states there are different, you know, constituencies. And I am not sure that right now having one leader and one idea and one platform would be the way to win the election. Yeah. You know, I am fine with there being someone very different running in rural Colorado or urban New Jersey or, you know, East Texas or, you know, West Virginia. You know, I think having people who are using different ways of speaking to local

issues and speaking to local concerns, I think that's, you know, that's good. And we'll, and, you know, we've seen it already. I mean, we've have, on the one hand, we had Mamdani win a landslide election. On the other hand, we had Abby Spanberger and Virginia win with a much larger margin than anybody expected, you know, and those are two different places, and it seems right to me that two different kinds of people were able to take advantage and win. And so I don't think there's, you know, there are people out there who are looking for one answer or one message. And I think it's fine that there are different messages. I mean, the main thing is that people recognize the reality, the way in which the right, and these aren't conservatives, these are radicals, you know,

where this kind of radical right has captured a part of the population and find ways to reach them and find ways to go to wherever they are. So that make sure they're using YouTube, they're using Instagram, they're using TikTok. I mean, I don't like all of these forms of social media, but I accept that people are on them. And if that's where they are, and that's where they're getting their information,

then all of our politicians have to be on all of them too. And so figuring out what is the message for your state or your county or your constituency, and then using the tools that people use to reach them, I think that's most important now. Your argument in Autocracy, Inc., the book that you wrote, is that corruption is the glue that holds these regimes together. Do you think corruption is also potentially their Achilles heel, the undoing for these regimes? So it has been in other places, but one really successful political movement in Russia

since Putin came to power, which was Alexei Navalny's movement, was an anti-corruption movement. And I've talked to the people who created that campaign. And one of the reasons they did it, you know, you could pick a lot of issues to organize people around was because it was the one issue that unified people across different classes. So across social classes and across, you know, Russia also has a huge geography and a lot of different kinds of people in it. And it was the one thing that they could find that people identified with all the guys. And they made a very important link.

And this is something that I haven't seen actually yet in the U.S. In that, of course, they talked about Putin's corruption. Navalny famously made these kind of mini-documentaries about Putin's palace and, you know, the ways in which his entourage hid their money and spent their money. And this was important in Russia where there's a lot of secrecy around money. And he showed it. And they were kind of humorous and well-produced and hundreds of millions of people watched them. But they did something else.

which is they connected the story of that corruption to ordinary people. So they said, they have palaces, and that's why you have bad roads or that's why you have bad hospitals. And one of the things that I haven't heard American politicians do yet, and this is partly because I think some of this stuff is so new. I mean, this is the most corrupt administration we've ever had, and there isn't anyone in second place. Yeah. You know, this is a, you know, Trump has his own companies. I mean, you know, we, you know, We've been talking about the Iran War, for all we know, the real reasoning of the Iran war is that, you know, the Saudis are his business partners, and they asked him to do it. And because he's in business with them, he did it.

I mean, I don't know that the explanation was that simple, but it might be. Yeah. And the fact that that's even a possibility already makes Trump totally different from any American president before him. And there's nobody who's profited off being in office whose family has profited off being in office, you know, to the tune of billions of dollars. You know, this isn't, you know, what was it? Billy Carter with some, you know, this little weird relative who tries to make money off his cousin,

the president. I mean, this isn't that. This is, this is huge money. And it's out in the open, most of it. And it's open. And, you know, I mean, we were talking about the negotiation with Ukraine. I mean, we know there's two negotiations. There's one about the future of Ukraine and there's one about America's business deals with Russia. And we know there go, I mean, it's been reported. And also, Wikoff doesn't really hide it. He's said it in front of European leaders, you know, just so that you know I'm doing these, I'm negotiating these deals. And that's also unheard of. And we don't really know what Trump's motives are in Ukraine because they might just be, once again, they might be financial. Anyway, the point is, is that there's a lot of this reporting, you know,

I try and keep track of it and I write about it periodically. But what we need at some point is for politicians to begin to connect the dots for people. Yes. You know, why is your government dysfunctional? Why are you losing your health care? You know, it's connected to the fact that, you know, you have enormous corruption at the highest level. And the corruption isn't somehow systemic and it's not like the deep state. It's actually Trump and his family and the people around him. And the numbers of conflicts of interest in this administration also there's no comparison. The people who have private interests and whatever cabinet position they have or sub-cabinet position they have is also it needs to be presented to people and told as, you know, so that people understand it.

Otherwise, it really is a story that's complicated. It's far away, you know, a bunch of rich people who live in Washington. We don't know about it. And making people understand how it affects them. That's something that I'd like to see American politicians follow the Russian opposition in doing. Yeah. And it also has the benefit of outflanking Trump on sort of the populist rhetoric and policies even that sort of led him into the White House in the first place by actually connecting the corruption to people's everyday lives and what they're angry about. You know, Trump presented this completely false story, you know, of the elite that's hurting you.

But, you know, he is the elite and the people around him are the elite and the richest people in America are on his side. And, you know, they are reshaping the system in ways that we can see to their own advantage. And I don't think it should be that hard to explain it to people. You know, he lied to you. You know, he said he was going to fight the swamp, but he's made it much worse. Yeah, yeah. And Applebaum, thank you so much for joining offline. This is a great conversation.

and I appreciate you, appreciate you coming on. Oh, well, thanks for having me. Hope to talk to you again. You too. Take care. As always, if you have comments, questions, or guest ideas, email us at offline at cricket.com,

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And we're the host of Hysteria, the podcast for women who care about democracy culture and not losing their minds in the process. We break down the news, call out the nonsense, and spotlight the women. actually fighting back on Capitol Hill, in classrooms, and everywhere the stakes are high. It's sharp, honest analysis featuring women's voices with humor and zero handholding. Listen to hysteria wherever you get your podcasts and watch full episodes on YouTube.