The Bulwark Podcast - Anne Applebaum: Trump's Firehose of Lies

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Trump shifts his position on the Iran war so often that it sure looks like he is using the same propaganda technique that Putin uses with abandon: Flood people with contradictory stories to confuse and exhaust them so they'll just tune out. That could be helpful for a commander–in-chief running a failed military campaign. At the same time, the only engagement the administration seems to want is from the online world—which they use to create an alternate reality. Plus, Russia is not winning the war in Ukraine and does not know how to, much of Trump's immigration policy is about performative cruelty, political oppression still continues in Venezuela, Kari Lake has a new gig, and new selections for the Anne Applebaum book club. Anne Applebaum joins Tim Miller.show notes: Anne's latest reporting from Ukraine Phillips O'Brien piece on Iran, "War Crimes Seem To Be Official US Policy Now" A Venezuela opposition leader on the continuing political oppression there Anne's reporting on Kari Lake running Voice of America Anne on Lake being nominated as ambassador to Jamaica Summer novel rec from Anne, "The Time of Cherries" Tim's summer novel rec, "My Tender Matador"

Welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Congratulations to all the Knicks fans that are listening and all my friends, the long-suffering Knicks fans, you know, Justin and Jackson and Ben and the others. I hope that none of you, like me, turn the game off when the Knicks were losing by 29 and turned on Pod Save the World to prep for today's podcast. I would say that the Pod Save the World episode was far less invigorating than the basketball game that I missed. But the highlights looked exciting. Kudos to the Knicks. fans and this podcast is going to be invigorating. I'm excited to welcome back one of our friends, staff writer at the Atlantic. Our most recent books include Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc. It's Ann Applebaum. Hey, Ann, how you doing? Fine. How are you? Dunderstorm in Poland, you were telling me in the green room. I'm hoping that does not augur poorly for the podcast, but we'll see how it goes. I can hear it right now, and it would be amazing if you couldn't hear it because it's very loud. But it won't last that long, I hope. Okay. Well, our podcasts are kind of a rainstorm, usually for listeners anyway. So it's appropriate. I want to start with Iran.

We're just going to kind of hop around the world as usual. This morning, well, I guess last night, we should say the U.S. carried out a fresh round of strikes on Iran with Trump claiming it was an effort to force the regime into a deal. He was on Fox and Friends this morning where he said we dropped $250 million of bombs on Iran. Who knows what is true and what is false coming out of the administration, but it's pretty interesting since, you know, nobody in Congress has appropriated anything. Susan Collins is the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. You think she might care about the quarter billion we spent in Iran last night. And then this morning, Trump bleats that we are looking in the not too distant future into taking Carg Island.

So he's back to discussing a ground trip invasion of Iran. So I'm wondering what you make of the state apply this morning. In Iran, almost every day something happens. makes a statement, there's another use of weaponry, there's another piece of information, and yet nothing happens. You know, he keeps changing the narrative. He keeps trying one version of events after the other. He says we're going to invade one day. We're not going to invade the next day. Maybe at one point he'll be telling the truth or he'll be saying something that will actually happen, but I'm not sure how we will know when that is. In other words, you know, it's not just a

The boy cried wolf. We're really beyond that now. I mean, he's almost doing the, you know, the Russian-style firehood of falsehoods. You know, if you just keep saying lots of stuff all the time, people begin to eventually blank out. It's very hard to know what's true and what's not true. And so you kind of throw up your hands and say, I just don't know what's going on. And maybe that's the purpose. Maybe that's exactly what he's what he's trying to do. I definitely think there's some of that. And you can feel kind of the acute pushback to the war a month ago. and like less so now, like whether that be the markets or whether that just be, you know, conversation. I do think that there's kind of a sense of, I got, you know, we're in Groundhog Day. We don't know what's happening. Like there haven't been the acute crises that like there were some were warning about with energy. I mean, this stuff takes a long time to go through. But like people saw like an initial spike in gas prices.

And then since then it's been, you know, kind of steady up a little bit down a little bit. I do think it's noteworthy the threat this morning, though, because about going into Carg Island and seizing the oil, whether he's actually going to do that, again, who knows, like you said, or well beyond Boy, who cried wolf. It's noteworthy because, to me, it feels like, it's like, hey, I'm trying a new tactic for forcing Iran to the negotiating table. And, like, that's the key point here is that Iran has seemed to not be susceptible

to his various, like, madman attempts to get them to deal. And he had, like, basically taking ground troops kind of off the table for a while. And now it's noteworthy at least that he feels that he wants to put it back on, I guess, would be the only minor change this morning. It seems pretty clear to me that the Iranians are calculating that he doesn't want to use ground troops. In other words, that he doesn't want to continue the war, that he's also bored of the war, that he doesn't want to keep fighting, that he's looking for a way out. And it seems to me that they're using that. I mean, there are various things that they want from the United States, right? They want sanctions lifted.

you know, they want a better relationship with the U.S. with the world. They've been playing on that, you know, the assumption that Trump doesn't want to fight farther. And so maybe now he's decided to at least rhetorically try to call their bluff and say he will send in troops as a way of getting them to concede more. You know, again, we're back to where we started. Is it real? Is it not real? It's hard to know. I mean, I think it's interesting that Trump keeps returning to this thing about we're going to take their oil. You know, we're going to make money out of this war. You know, that in the end, it wasn't about regime change. Obviously, it was never about democracy. It's not really about peace in the Middle East. It's not about creating something good for Iran or Iranians, rather, you know, so that they get out of the disastrous economic and political situation they're in. It's about making money or making something for me or for my clique. And so that's always the line that he returns to when he's looking for a kind of baseline explanation for what it is that he want. I mean, it was the same in Venezuela. It's the same and almost everywhere.

That's the craziest part to me and why I keep telling the Democrats they need to be going full code pink on this war. It's like he doesn't even know what the war is for anymore. Nobody does. Like what is what is the possible justification if you took him at his word for spending $250 million to bomb Iran last night? Like we have no purpose. At least at the beginning of the war there were there were pretences for why we're going to do it. Like there isn't even that anymore. And the whole thing's crazy. You mentioned how we're kind of at the, you know, what was the Russian phrase you called it? The fire hose of falsehood. Actually, I think that might have been a Benin phrase, but it was really a description of what the Russians do. They put out not just one lie, but millions of lies, you know, or not just one explanation, but one after another after the next.

And there's so many, and there's so much of it all the time that people eventually just tune out. And they say, I don't know what's true. I don't know what's not true. I don't believe anything. I'm just going to stay home. I'm not going to engage in this issue. I'm not going to get angry about it. I just don't want to know anything at all. And it's an actual propaganda technique. You know, you just flood people with massive contradictory stories, and sooner or later they won't pay any attention to anything at all. And whether Trump is doing that on purpose in Iran or whether it's just the result of how his brain works, it's hard for me to say. But it's certainly having that effect.

I mean, it's very hard to focus on a war when, you don't know what's happening is the president telling the truth? Is there a negotiation really happening? is it not happening? You know, what are the Iranians really thinking? It makes it a confusing story to follow. I think Bannon's version of that was a little more crass. But yeah, I'm with you. To that end, do you know, Aaron Blake over at CNN went and counted how many times Trump has claimed an Iran deal is right around the corner or imminent. Do you want to guess how many times? Have you seen that story? It's like 27 or something. 38. 38. And here we are. Who knows this week? Maybe the taking Carg Island is right around the corner. I do want to mention our secretary of war who did a press conference

yesterday. And I don't know what the deal is with the Dr. Seuss stuff from him, but I want to play for you his rationale for us reengaging and bombing Iran. As President Trump said, they've been tap, tap, tap, tap, tapping. You can see when someone's trying to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap on a deal. Instead, they're going to have tap, tap, tap, tap, bombs dropping on key facilities in Iran from the United States of America. That's the real person in charge of the war right there. You're right. I can see it's like one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, you know, tap, tap, tap, tap.

I'm not even sure what it means. Yeah, nobody is. You know, he likes little sayings. Like, he's very oriented, I think, towards, you know, TikTok. You know, he wants little clips of himself doing cheeky things. Maybe he thinks that's what he can add, since he doesn't have any, you know, experience managing a war since he's a television. host. Maybe it's more just a branding thing for him. Maybe that would be, it would be hard for me to

read into his brain and know what he's doing. But, you know, just to go back to where we started, I mean, this is one of the reasons people are having trouble understanding what's going on, because the explanation of the war shifts constantly, and it's always being shaped for consumption. You know, it's Trump saying something grandiose, we're going to steal your oil, you know, or we'll only take complete surrender. And so when they say these things, things that are designed to create internet engagement, it's very hard to know how they relate to reality on the ground. And, you know, there is some reporting for reality on the ground. Actually, there was a great piece in the Atlantic today about how Iranians are suffering and how

bad the economy is and how people are cut off and don't have access to food and all kinds of other goods. There's also a story about the U.S. may have possibly having hit a water. Yeah, this is Phillips O'Brien. I'll put the link in the show notes. I was about to bring this up. is that war crimes seem to be the official U.S. policy now on Tuesday, the USA attack to reservoirs in a water treatment facility in southern Iran, almost immediately afterwards a water was cut off to about 20,000 Iranians who live around the town of Zurich. And, you know, he kind of goes into whether this was a deliberate attack that it seems like it was. Those are real stories. I mean, I actually, when I read about what's happening to Iranians

and I read people who are trying to do reporting from Iran and to get information from inside the country, which some people can do, that stuff I believe. It's strange how that piece of the war, you know, what the population is feeling is almost of no interest to the people who are running the war, and which is very strange given that the original justification for the war was regime change. In other words, we're doing this in order to change the government of Iran so that Iranians have a better life and so that the protesters who've periodically trying to shift the government can have some success. I mean, that was. was the first justification. And it's almost as if that just dripped away. We're not even, we don't even

speak about them as real people. I mean, Trump talks about destroying them as a civilization, whereas actually these are mostly pretty ordinary people, I'm guessing, most of them not religious fanatics, most of them probably not supporting the government, except for a small faction, just trying to get through this. And there seems to be no interest in them or no curiosity about them on the part of the Trump administration. Oh, which, by the way, is a big difference from Iraq. Right. Forget about all the justifications pro and con for the Iraq war. There was never a moment when the Bush administration wasn't talking about Iraqis and, you know, trying to shake their... Freedom for Iraqi women and women in Afghanistan, right? I mean, sometimes some of this stuff was obviously a little bit.

Yeah, and they were talking to Iraqis all the time and they were, you know, trying to build a government in Iraq and try to build justification for something new in Iraq and so on. So it was part of what the U.S. seemed to be doing or trying to do. And here there's nothing. There's just no interest in what happens to people on the ground. You know, summer is a tricky one for a middle-aged gay. On the one hand, you are trying to make sure you can look good in a speedo and stay healthy. On the other hand, you know, a lot happening in life, working, traveling, kids home from school. And so, you know, the health habits that you get into during the spring sometimes can dip off a little bit. One thing that's easy to do that takes only 30 seconds and covers your bases no matter what summer throws at you is AG1.

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chief of staff, everybody's like discussing how they manage the, you know, fallout from, you know, the desire for transparency around the Epstein documents. And we read the story and it's just like a clown show of absurdity. Chy Vance is like, maybe we should have Tucker interview Galane Maxwell. I mean, like all of these ideas are just preposterous. But the whole conversation, as it's framed in the story, is about the propaganda. You know, and that is a parallel I do see here with the Epstein story. and with the Iranians, with many other stories with this administration, right?

It's like there was no conversation about, oh, hey, maybe we should try to find accountability for the victims, and maybe that will help us with our PR, right? Like, that topic never seems to come up, right? They don't care at all about that. And, you know, all administrations exaggerate. All administrations spin, you know, but there is an emptiness to this, you know, that puts them in this space where it really is all just propaganda and service of their corruption and authoritarian powers that I think is a meaningful difference from what we've seen in the past.

It's also just the lack of interest in humans. They're not interested in the prosperity and well-being of Americans. Trump keeps saying he doesn't care about inflation. He doesn't, he's not interested in the financial situation of Americans. And I think that's true. I think he isn't interested. They're not interested in what happens to Iran or to Iranians. They're not interested in the Epstein victims. You know, they are entirely focused on the online world. You know, what can they say or do that creates engagement? What creates a good clip? It's not even really about headlines anymore because they don't care about newspapers.

They care about, you know, the visuals, the engagement, what the podcasters will say. You know, they're inside the world that they created. That's, you know, that's the stuff they read. That's the stuff they react to. That's what they care about. And I think that is more real to them than reality. I mean, in that sense, they're already living. living in, I don't know, the AI generated world where what's online is the only thing that's

true. And what's offline is irrelevant or doesn't necessarily penetrate what seems real when you look at your screen. And the people can't really know what truth is. Right. Like this is like the approach of host truth strategy, right? Which is people can know what they're experiencing. Right. And this is why I think that the gas price thing was hurting them in particular, right? Because like people all of a sudden saw a tangible difference. But like beyond that, it's like people don't know what's happening in Iran, really, right? People don't have a great macroeconomic sense about how things are going. If you're being told, things are going great and jobs are being created, right? Like, you know, they are taking advantage of that. And I do think the new technologies

kind of allow for it. I mean, China does this quite well, you know, within their country. And obviously, we're not at that level, you know, but, yeah, and Russia. But it seems like it's on that trajectory. Very much so. I mean, and I think that's deliberate. They are, are consciously seeking to shape information and shape propaganda and shape the story in a way that has almost nothing to do with reality. And that, I think, is a difference between pretty much all previous administrations. I mean, you've had people try to spin, right? We used to have spin doctors where something would happen and people would try and make it

look good and explain it in a way that made it look good. Here we're talking about people who aren't even interested in that because a spin doctor was spinning a real event, right? And these are people who are spinning things that may or may not have even happened, you know, or trying to create new realities. Look at the California conversation around the ballot. The California conversation. Exactly that, you know, that their candidate was doing really well online and he was making, you know, TikTok videos or other videos that were doing really well on X. And that to them was the campaign.

And the fact that this was a this was an election campaign in Los Angeles, which is a blue city and a blue state. and that their candidate in the end did no better than Trump had done in the last election seemed somehow jarring to them because for them the real reality is what they see on X in particular. And X is of all the forms of social media, X is the one that's the most skewed. And depending on which part of the algorithm you're in is most shaped by Musk himself, by what he says and his enormous numbers of followers. This extends also, so you're pushing about Elon's commentary on what is happening in the UK. with protests and with the backlash to some of the, you know, migrant violence issues.

One thing I wanted to correct, it was earlier in the week, I think it was with Bill on Monday. I had said that, and this shows that, you know, we all can be victims of the misinformation online. I'd said that the person that was charged with killing Henry Noak in Southampton was an immigrant. He actually was a British Sikh, and he was Sikh, but he was a native of the UK. And then we also now have outburst in Belfast. There's a Sudanese asylum seeker who's charged with attempted murder over a knife attack and massive protests there. A building on fire, you know, where there are a lot of immigrant residents, violence. Tommy Robinson, like the racist street thug in the UK, sparking a lot of this.

Elon posting on all of this, right? And that is, you know, in part impacting what's happening in the real world, right? It's getting people out into the streets to do these protests. but it also is creating this distorted view of what's happening, you know, in Britain broadly, you know, based on kind of isolated, horrible, but like isolated incidents. I don't want to minimize these incidents because they're horrible. No, no, I mean, either. They're horrible, I mean, but it's true. You can take one incident and you can tell a story about a whole country that isn't necessarily true.

I mean, just as you said, if the perpetrator is not, in fact, an immigrant or not an illegal immigrant or not a migrant at all. all. And yet he's being used to whip up hatred of migrants. You know, that's an illustration of how you can take a fact and twisted and distorted and make it into, make a story that isn't necessarily political. As I understand that story, it was a, it was a police screw up and there was a, there was a deliberate misinformation. The perpetrator called the police to report the crime and so the cop, that's right, you know, assumed that they were the victim, not the perpetrator. Right, which is not the first time and that kind of thing has ever happened. I mean, they're kinds of domestic violence stories where, you know, men accuse women of doing various things.

And anyway, it's not completely unique. But if, you know, once you go down to the story, it doesn't have anything to do with the police being anti-white, which is the language that Elon Musk and his pals on X are using. I mean, it's a horrible story. It's a terrible story. It's a police mistake and disaster. And it's a tragedy. But it isn't, it isn't a political story in the way that it's being made to be. And so, So that you can pluck these stories out of real life, turn them into something else on the internet, and then use the anger that they generate to create riots and people burning down houses somewhere else is pretty scary.

And what you're watching is the state and the police, the authorities in Belfast and elsewhere, being really unable to deal with this. I mean, they, you know, when there's a wave of information, you know, anger and emotion, They can't pinpoint on anything. It's very hard for them to know how to react and what to do. It's another side effect of the fact that we've given up the information space to algorithms that are being written, you know, outside of the places where they're being used. The other night when I was watching game three of the finals with my buddies out on the back porch and joined the delicious booing of Donald Trump knowing that I'd wake up in podcasts the next day. we had ourselves little soul out of office beverage. It was nice. It made the booze wash over me

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Go to getsole.com and use the code the bulwark. That's getsole.com promo code the bulwark for 30% off. I want to move on to what's happening in Ukraine. In some ways, for different reasons, don't we're talking about it, but in Iran, But I feel like now I go weeks without talking about it even just because we've had a long relative stalemate.

There have been few developments positive for Ukraine recently. We've brought up from time to time. But it was your last piece was just kind of on the state of play there. So I thought maybe you could just cook for a little bit and give us an update on how things are going. So I consider it my role to keep you continually informed about Ukraine even though you don't. I want to be informed. So it's an important role. You have a captive audience, at least with me.

I can't speak to all the listeners. But for me, I'm interested. Thank you. Fire away. Well, I live in Poland part of the time. So it's not that far for me to get there. I try and get there periodically. Anyway, I was there, I guess, about 10 days ago, two weeks ago.

And the story in Ukraine is actually really interesting now because we have hit another one of these turning points where the technological advantage is now, once again, on the Ukrainian side. And I think what's important, this, I think most people, don't really understand this yet, that there are different dimensions of the war. One of them is the front line itself. And the front line is now this 20 or 25 mile wide zone, which is totally transparent. So everything that happens inside that zone can be seen by Ukrainian and other reconnaissance drones. And every time the Russians enter that zone with a soldier or a tank or a truck

or anything else, it is immediately identified and the Ukrainians can hit it. When you're You talk about a stalemate, the stalemate doesn't mean that nothing is happening. What's happening is that there are these waves of Russian attacks and the Ukrainians keep hitting them. And you have this very, very high Russian casualty rates now, sometimes as many as a thousand people a day that's killed and wounded. Wow, really? A thousand a day?

It can be a thousand a day. Much lower on the Ukrainian side because their war is increasingly automated. It's increasingly run by drones, often by people directing them pretty far from. from the front line. When I was there, I was shown some of the robots they now use. They use robots both to rescue people who are in the zone and are wounded and need to be taken out. And they also use them. They've actually, I think for the first time, use them to take a position. They're beginning to experiment with robot guns. And it's very, it's not really 21st century. It's kind of 22nd century stuff. It's stuff you didn't, you didn't imagine, or it looks like it comes

from science fiction or comic books, but it's becoming real. You know, it's, the front line is not moving. At the same time, Ukrainians have got also much better at hitting longer range targets. So they're hitting oil refineries, oil and gas infrastructure inside Russia, creating these spectacular fires and explosions, including one a few days ago, the morning of a economic conference in St. Petersburg, famous one that Putin holds every year is pretty pathetic. This year, Candace Owens was in attendance. So you can see what kind of calibre of Economist is now. Hunter's new friends.

He's now going there. That's right. On the morning, they hit the refinery in St. Petersburg, and they were kind of billowing black smoke over the city while people were walking into the conference also. That's pretty, you know, it's pretty stark illustration of what it is that they can do. They're really beginning to damage the refining capacity and also beginning to cut off a lot of supply lines into Crimea and into southern Ukraine with these longer range, so-called medium-range drones. and they're just making it very hard for the Russians to continue fighting the war.

That doesn't mean that Putin doesn't have things he can do. He can still hit Ukrainian cities with missiles. And Ukrainians have very little missile defense left or relatively little. You know, he can still create, you know, anger and hardship. But the Russians are now very publicly and clearly not winning. And here's where we can connect this part of the conversation to the previous part. Putin has also been seeking to persuade the Russians not to pay attention to the war. It's inevitably a Russian victory.

We're going to win sooner or later. We're much bigger than they are. They're not a real country. Their country's run by Nazis. It's not a real government. And we're going to win. And suddenly it's becoming clear to a lot of people, not just near the front line, but in Moscow and St. Petersburg, that they are not winning. And that's beginning to have echoes.

You know, you can see it in the Russian Internet. You can see some responses even from sort of, believe it or not, Russian influencers. You can see. Were there like critiques of Putin that are starting to bubble up? There are critiques of Putin. There are people commenting that, you know, why aren't we winning? Why aren't we trying harder? Some people talking about nukes again.

That always happens when the Russians are losing. There's a sense of shakiness and instability. And, you know, the Russians had this, they have a every May. they have this enormous victory parade. And this year, it was much shorter, and it went forward without any, usually they have these big weapons, you know, they have tanks and, you know, military hardware. And this year they didn't do that because they were afraid of Ukrainian drones hitting Moscow during the victory parade.

And that's palpable. That's now clear to everybody in the country, that they aren't winning the war. And so the gap between Russian propaganda and reality is now becoming clear. What that means is hard to say. Is there any scuttlebutt about what Putin's move could be on this? And I saw another columnist suggesting that maybe Putin opens up a new theater, you know, goes a little bit into a Baltic state or something to try to distract or, you know, get, you know, attention elsewhere.

It was just speculation. I don't know what you're hearing. They threaten that they'll do that. And they've been sending drones into, you know, across the border into several other countries. And so one of the speculations, you know, one of the speculations. is they might use this moment while Trump is distracted by Iran and Europe is not quite ready. They might use it to create some kind of provocation in one of the Baltic states just to show that NATO doesn't fight back or just to illustrate that there's weakness on our side or just to create some anger and distraction and, you know, and cheer up the Russians. I mean, it's possible. I mean, it seems like that would be a fairly foolhardy thing to do because actually they don't know how it with the reaction.

would be. I would think the more likely reaction is that Europeans who are now more aware than ever before of the physical and cyber and propaganda threat from Russia, certainly much more so than they were a year ago or two years ago, it just might reawaken that understanding. But, you know, I mean, his choices are all bad now. And he can widen the war. He can have mass mobilization, which would also create a backlash. Or, as the Ukrainians have suggested many times, he could, have a ceasefire on the current lines. And for him, that would be a failure because he said he was going to conquer the whole country. He still says he wants to conquer the whole country and he will not have managed to conquer the whole country. But it might be at some point soon something that he or

people around him will want to sell to the Russians on the grounds that, you know, it's not going well. I mean, there's a deeper story here too. And this is maybe the better and more relatable part of the story, which is why has this happened? Like, why is the Ukrainian drone industry so good? What did they do? And the answer is that Ukraine is a very decentralized country. It's very messy, disorganized and chaotic countries some of the time. But it also means that there are these pockets of creativity. So it's not like there's one Ukrainian state drone company that's giving orders for drones. What you have is like literally hundreds of small companies. They work with individual units or with particular commanders. You know, there's this constant feedback. When I was there a few days ago,

I met a CEO of a drone company. I went to see his factory and he was kind of, you know, looking kind of scruffy because he'd just been to the front line for a few days and he just got back because he goes and, you know, meets soldiers and watches how they're using his drones and then they report back to him. And then he makes alterations inside his actually incredibly high-tech, you know, warehouses where he, where he does this work. And so there is this, there's a kind of feedback, There's this lots of different people trying experimentally different things at the same time. They have European money. They don't have U.S. money.

And they have now a lot of joint ventures with European companies. And of course, now Zelensky is offering some of their technology to the Gulf states as well, which for which they'll also get money or other weaponry. So it's one of the few good examples at the moment of how a more open society can defeat or can at least stand up to a much larger closed society. And so if you want to feel better about democracy and liberalism, liberalism, then this is your example. All right, I'm for it.

I love that. The one countervailing thing that you just hear out there that I'm just interested in your take on is that there was a little bit of an economic interplay with the war in Iran, like the rising oil prices, kind of helped Russia economically. you know, we let these some sanctions. There's still, it's kind of weirdly, despite the opposition to Russia in Europe, like some pockets of Europe using Russian oil

and other energy resources. My friend Kalen Robertson was on the ground in Ukraine. Usually was back in Ireland talking about this story in Ireland. They have like Russian companies providing electricity. So who was that aluminum? Was that one aluminum? Yeah. And so anyway, I'm just kind of wondering, like,

is there anything to that story about, Russia's economy stabilizing? It's not stable, but it's true that the Russians have found a lot of ways around sanctions. It's true that European and American and other companies, lots of Chinese companies, are still finding ways to supply Russia. It's also true, though, that, you know, enormous amount of their budget is going into making weapons. They have labor shortages. They have very high inflation. You know, and as I said, they have these exploding refineries all over the place. The exploding refineries seems to be preventing them from benefiting from the rising oil prices the way they could. So it's a big country.

It's very hard to know, and all the statistics are fake anyway. So it's hard to know exactly what's going on. But, I mean, it doesn't look from the outside and from the little news we have from the end. It doesn't feel very happy. You know, they know they know they're not winning. Yeah. You know, they know they're not prospering.

They can see they're falling behind in all kinds of other races, you know, the AI race, the technology race, and they're stuck, you know, fighting this ground war that they don't want to be in. I mean, I don't think it changes that. Even the bump up in oil prices, I don't think is helping them the way it could. They've lost something like 20% of their refining capacity, which is a lot. Unroved to Venezuela, there's an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Leopoldo-Lopez, who was in the opposition and was wrong. Former mayor and was the opposition leader in Venezuela, yeah. Yeah, it was wrongly jailed by Maduro by the previous regime.

It's pretty striking up, but it begins like this. My children and I watched a video on a phone screen last week. Venezuelan officials cut a ribbon at what used to be our home in Caracas. They were applauding, announcing a social program for the elderly. I spent seven years of a political prisoner under the absurd charge that had sent subliminal messages of the Venezuelan people. The judge who presided over this travesty are still on the bench. I think he was trying to offer a wake-up call and a reminder to, you know,

what the situation still is, political oppression in Venezuela. You know, there's the change in power to Delci Rodriguez, and you hear Trump bragging about how great it is now, but you don't really hear a lot of reporting about what's actually happening there. And so I just wanted to flag that. It's a really, really important story.

Also, he goes on to make a broader point, which is that there's still no rule of law in Venezuela, and you'd be crazy to invest in Venezuela. You know, you could write a contract tomorrow, and it could be annulled by the law. the government. His house was expropriated. So why wouldn't the government expropriate your oil company's investment should you want to make it? You know, the acting like if we just change the leader to someone who's, you know, less obnoxious to me personally, that that somehow

changes the situation in Venezuela completely when we haven't changed the judges or the regime or anything else is crazy. I mean, one of the reasons there's not a lot of reporting from Venezuela is it's incredibly dangerous for Americans to go to Venezuela. You know, there's still reports of threats to Americans in the street and a lot of caution about sending reporters there. We don't have a very good idea of what's going on deeper inside the country. I mean, it seems like there are a few small kind of wildcat oil companies who have gone in and are trying to make some money, but I'm not hearing of any really big investments or long-term commitments, which is the kind of thing you would need to really get that oil industry moving again. And until there is a real change,

until there's an election, until there's a change of regime, until there's a regime that's committed to the rule of law at the very least, you're not going to have a lot of change in it as well. I thought it was a really moving and well done up-ed, actually. Yeah, and he talked about, I guess there's potentially new Supreme Court coming up, and like that will be an interesting inflection point, right, if they keep the same people. Like, you'll know that nothing has really changed. You also cited, you know, we're at strange times. You know, you're looking for strange heroes these days.

You have to shout the Exxon Mobil CEO as the person injecting truth and reality into the public sphere. But it is like noteworthy that Darren Woods was there. I had a Silicon Valley guy on on Tuesday. It was a frustrating conversation. It was trying to understand why all of these tech oligarchs are just totally submitting to Trump and going along with his lies and participating in them and helping to perpetuate them, frankly. And there's like one good old boy oil and gas CEO that's like, I'm not going into Venezuela. Things aren't good in Venezuela.

He's just very blunt about it. And I was like, why can't everybody just be like that? Like, that is a normal society where a CEO can just, you know, offer bluntly that's something that the president's doing is bad or wrong or not accurate. Exactly. The story from the Times this morning with the next wave of deportations is going to the Central African Republic, a country that, we have a travel advisory for and those deportations include a couple of Iranian women

trying to find freedom and asylum in America while this war is ongoing. There had been a story that I covered God, many months ago now, probably in 2025 of the Iranian woman that had been sent I'm going from memory now, I believe, to Panama

and she was like, she had a sign in the window where they were holding her in Panama that was like, don't send me back to Iran. And like to your point earlier about how there's no actual care for the Iranian people, like on the one hand, it's like we're invading this regime, talking about how they're a terrible regime. On the other hand, we're sending their dissidents either back there or to some other dangerous country. Simultaneously, the world cup happening. It is interesting that the Iranian soccer team has been let in. They were wearing the pins representing the girls who are killed in the girls' school, which that was interesting. But we banned a referee from Somalia who was denied entry. The government hasn't really said why. They said vaguely that there was ties to terrorists or something. It's ridiculous.

Yeah, you went back to Somalia, refs a game there. I saw this video that was quite moving from a local Somali and soccer game where everybody's cheering the referee. You don't see that very much at sporting events. So anyway, I just kind of wanted to get your take on that story, which is kind of continuing to happen, but it's not, has not been, the immigration story has not been as acute in the public eye, you know, sense the transfer from now.

It's kind of performative cruelty, isn't it? It's, you know, we're going to take these Iranian women who've obviously left the country because they would be persecuted for political or religious reasons. You know, we can't send them back to Iran. And so we're going to send them to an equally dangerous country where they have no means of making a living and where, who knows, they might be kidnapped or taken by Iranians who do do that sort of thing and taken home. And we would bar from our country, you know, a World Cup referee who's qualified to be refereeing matches.

And here's the strange part for me was that I didn't see FIFA, you know, the organization that runs the World Cup. You see barely any objections. I mean, there was no real commentary, no condemnation. Oh, the United States has the right to do it at one. Do you see the other FIFA story? They have a floor at Trump Tower. I think it's the 17th floor at Trump Tower, New York, that they got. odds that it's empty. Like they like opened up a quote unquote office in Trump's building in New York.

Which is just a form of bribery, right? I mean, it's just a form of bribery and sucking up. Maybe it's about avoiding corruption charges, notoriously corrupt organization. Maybe it's about maybe they have other reasons for it. Maybe they want to get through the World Cup without something terrible happening. Yeah, it's a CYA maybe. It's like why they gave them the Peace Prize, they gave them that PFA Priz Prize orders. It's like if we pay them, if we give them awards, you know, then if someone, if someone, controversy comes up, we can use some of that access, whatever, to try to help manage, you know, the dictator. And I guess they don't think that, you know, defending the honor of their referee that arose to the level of using, I mean, of that capital that they gained from buying off the Trump family. Or why didn't they have the referee do the games in Canada and Mexico? Why didn't, I just don't,

I was mystified by that story, actually. I didn't fully understand it. I thought it was really profoundly offensive, you know, a qualified person who's come to take part in an international event, who's excluded for some, you know, they have a thing about Somalians, you know, because they're racist against Somalians or they don't like Somalia or they've put Somalia on some list. I mean, that's just not an excuse. And as I said, the only, the explanation is it's a, it's a display of cruelty. It appeals to Americans who also want to, you know, demonstrate their strength and cruelty and and desire for to exclude others. And it's, again, I think it's part of the same, the same propaganda that makes everybody else feel numb. You know, there's kind of one thing

after next, you know, one horrible story after next. And after a while, people say, I don't want anything to do with politics. I don't want to know about it. Anything else on the autocracy ink watch before we go to a pallet cleanser to close the show? I mean, you know, let's go to the pallet cleanser. Okay. I mean, everything. Our existence is the autocracy and quatch, I guess. Talk on this is your second to last article, which is about my old friend, Carrie Lake. I wasn't tweeted at me in a while. I kind of miss her. She hasn't drunkenly accosted me at a bar recently. And I don't have any plans to go to Jamaica. So she might not have a chance. You write, what did Jamaica do to deserve Carrie Lake? I did get a kick out of this. There are a couple little anecdotes in there that I wasn't aware of that she was, not even the first choice for Jamaica. ambassador. Apparently not. Yeah, and so it was all that was thinking about running for Congress, but couldn't get Trump's full support for that. And so, I don't know, there she is with her kind of Matt filter down in Jamaica. Yeah, well, she, I wrote about her earlier in the year, because I wrote about her, what she has been doing for the last month, so she was running

something called the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which is America's foreign broadcasters, You know, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and really essentially running them into the ground and wasting, I need tens of millions of dollars while doing it. I mean, it's a long story. I can recommend you to the Atlantic article where she was, you know, she tried to fire people. She did it illegally. They wound up being on administrative leave. They were all getting their salaries while not working. She ended some contracts in a way that was damaging. So the U.S. government will have to pay compensations. or, I mean, literally like one catastrophic mistake after the next, you know, undermining our foreign broadcasting, you know, including, for example, in Iran at a time when speaking to the Iranian people might even be a useful thing. And having achieved really nothing and having undermined and destroyed this agency, now the Trump administration is running around looking for something else for her to do and they had this great idea. Let's send her to Jamaica. But, you know, Jamaica is a parliamentary democracy, probably at this point more stable than America.

It's a friendly nation. You know, it has lots of American tourists. There's lots of, you know, consular activity between the United States and Jamaica. Important Jamaican population in the United States. Rich kids on spring break, you know, get a little too high, lose their passport, you know. Right, we need someone serious. But what did Jamaica do to deserve this kind of third rate, you know, for? choice retread, you know, somebody who failed at running for office and who then failed at running an

important agency. And now she gets sent there. I mean, it's, you know, I think Jamaica deserves better. I do as well. But we've kind of got better. This is why it's a Palac cleanser. You can see how this could be a sad story or an angry story, because it does suck for the Jamaican people. And it is sad, which she did, dismantling, you know, our communications tools and overseas. But on the other hand, if she had gotten like 20,000 more votes in that first election, like she was so close to beating Katie Hobbs. Had she beaten Katie Hobbs and become governor of Arizona, she might be the vice president right now.

You think that we're in the worst timeline? But like we're only like two degrees away from her being like really, the most likely non-JD. Vance choice, so it would have been some appeal of her being a woman. She sucks up like JD. She would have won a swing state governor's race versus JD who was in a come over a red state. There was a path to carry Lake being vice president. We don't have that path.

Instead, she was the backup choice for Jamaica ambassador. And that makes me happy. I get some joy. You're right. You're right. That's a good news story. That's a happy ending. Okay.

We'll close with the unofficial Ann Applebaum Book Club. I have to admit I was on it. Like, because you know, you come on every couple of months, which we appreciate about a quarterly visit. And I can read a serious book a quarter these days, despite my content calendar. But I've gotten behind. I've been instead reading gay fiction. I was reading some Justin Torres fiction. And I loved both of his books.

So I was doing that instead. But I'm going on vacation coming up here in a couple of five weeks. In five weeks, you people are going to miss me. I can have good guests, guest hosts. So I'm going to catch up on my Ann Applebaum Book Club list. But for people who are more up to speed than me who want to catch up, We had originally had the captive mind, the opermans, the director, the choice of comrades, what we can know by Ian McEwen.

The last time you're on, we shouted out Furious Minds by Laura Fields. It's about Claremont and how, you know, the bastardization of the conservative movement in America. Do you have a new edition for people this summer? So I've picked a novel for you. Great. I love novels. It's not even a long novel. It's a short novel.

It's called The Time of Cherries. and it's a novel that's set at the very end of Franco's Spain. And so it's about the end of a dictatorship, not the beginning of one. And the author is called Montserrat Roig. She was a Spanish kind of part of the Spanish opposition to Franco family. And the book has a really great description of what it's like to be in a demonstration and then what it's like to be arrested and go to jail. But it's also other things.

It's how people adjust to the, their lives to the system. I think it was published a year or two after he died. And so when people were reading it, it was already history. But you can see how people's lives have been shaped by politics, just ordinary people, average people. That's one of the themes that I always find really interesting. You know, the big things happen in the world and how do those relate to ordinary people and how do they adjust and how do they think about it? And they're sort of different versions of it in the book. And as I said, it's an easy read, not too long. Well-read. written. I love that. A lot of Franco fans on the MAGA, right? So also a little relevance there.

I'll throw one at you then. I've got a bonus. I've read this a couple years ago now. It's one of my favorite, because it hits all of my interests. It is a gay novel. It's a gay coming of age novel, but also that overlaps is kind of a historical autocracy. It's a gay love story in Pinochet's Chili. It's called My Tender Matador. So people want that. Yeah, so if people want that, the time of cherries and my tender matador, people can have two short novels for the summer where you get a little, you know, like a little autocracy. So, you know, you can kind of feel like you're, you know, in touch with something that is relevant in the news, but you're also separate from the world. You're also doing, doing fiction. So there you go. And Applebaum, I appreciate you very much.

Hope the wildflowers bloom soon in Poland. And we'll be talking to you a couple months. Thanks so much. All right. Everybody else will be back here tomorrow for a weekend edition of the pod. See you all then. Peace. is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Ansela Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.