Applebaum, Anne
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merri ok
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an 9 26
President Donald Trump and his high-ranking officials are engaged in a simultaneous project of spreading far right ideologies worldwide — and raking in billions while doing so.
In an article by The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum on Monday, Americans learned the full extent of Trump's mixing of exporting paranoid politics and turning a profit from Brazil and the United Arab Emirates to threatening longtime democratic allies like Canada and Denmark. She added that the major industries helping Trump do this include oil and gas, rare earth minerals and cryptocurrency.
"American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more," Applebaum wrote. "Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can."
She also added that "the clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government is no different. Wrongly described as 'isolationists,' many of its true believers don’t think of themselves as ordinary Republicans who won an election and will temporarily hold power until the next election. Nor are they mere appendages of Trump. They believe they represent something much greater: the vanguard of a movement that will alter not just America, but the world."
Applebaum contrasted the attitude of Trump supporters with that of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who famously said during the 2008 election that his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), was a decent man with whom he happened to disagree.
"Their enemies are existential, and they are international: super-spreaders of a 'wokeness' plague, or proponents of a fictitious 'censorship-industrial complex,' or advocates of 'regulation' that will hamper American business, or self-hating promoters of “mass migration” who want to drown Western civilization in a sea of brown-faced aliens," Applebaum explained. "To maintain their power and defeat these enemies, the predators, like their Bolshevik counterparts, cannot rely on traditional diplomacy, because they don’t trust its practitioners."
She concluded, "Nor do they trust many of the leaders of the democratic states that have long shared the same political and economic values as America. Although the U.S. military and intelligence services continue to cooperate closely with allied governments, the ideologues in and out of the administration are actively seeking to replace them with people and parties who share their disdain for liberal democracy and for what were once considered, at least aspirationally, to be American values. To do so, they need to expand their global influence, manipulate elections in former partner nations, and alter the flows of money and power, especially inside other democracies. Much of the world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical, and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering that it no longer exists."
Trump himself has raked in billions since assuming office in his second term, while his sons have netted millions using their foreign policy connections to get involved in matters like investing in tungsten mines. Earlier this month, a Gallup poll found a historically high number of Americans are upset with government corruption, writing that "Americans’ perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. are at their highest level in 20 years, with 89 [percent] of U.S. adults saying it is widespread. That figure is up 10 percentage points from last year and well above readings in the 72 [percent] to 79 [percent] range between 2010 and 2025."
The poll added, "Democrats’ perceptions of government corruption have risen the most sharply since 2024 compared with other party groups. In former President Joe Biden’s final year in office, 57 [percent] of Democrats said corruption was widespread in government; that rose to 76 [percent] in 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, and reached 91 [percent] this year. The figure among political independents (90 [percent]) aligns more closely with Democrats’ than with Republicans’ (83 [percent]) and is up 12 points since 2024."
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PC vouch 8 25
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/376-how-democracies-fail 1:07 is not full?
mayfair london uberrich shell corps own houses
putin dep mayor stole $ smuggled abroad w help of banksters in west;
jordan weaponization performative 53 min diresta sio
maricopa az election guy had to quit bc threat?
Feb 19, 2024For Clint Hickman, an official who helped lead Arizona's largest country through some of the most difficult moments of the pandemic and the 2020 election, the current moment in American life feels like the right one to quit.
Alternet.org
https://www.alternet.org › top-arizona-election-official-resign
Top Arizona election official forced to resign as threats get 'worse ...
Feb 18, 2024Top Arizona election official forced to resign as threats get 'worse and worse': report Maricopa County Supervisor Clint Hickman, Image via AZ Family/Arizona News.
excerpt scholarship offered
https://samharris.substack.com/p/making-sense-429-the-new-world-order
sam Harris speaks with Anne Applebaum about the erosion of democracy at home and abroad. They discuss the Sudanese civil war and the outside forces involved, America’s retreat from global leadership, the impacts of USAID cuts, gerrymandering, the integrity of U.S. elections, the capitulation of Republican representatives to Trump, tariffs, what a post-T…
July 19, 2024
Sam Harris and Anne Applebaum discuss the nature of modern autocracies and how democracies fail. They discuss the power of ideas, why autocracies seek to undermine democracies, cooperation among dictators, how Western financial experts and investors have enabled autocracies, how Putin came to power, the failure of engagement and investment to create political change, what’s at stake in the war in Ukraine, Trump’s charisma, the current symptoms of American democratic decline, the ideologues around Trump, the hollowing out of institutions, how things might unravel in America, anti-liberal tendencies in American politics, the role of social media, the different pathologies on the Left and Right, analogies to Vichy France, the weakness of the Democrats, the political effects of the assassination attempt on former President Trump, and other topics.
Anne Applebaum is a historian, journalist, and staff writer at The Atlantic. She was a columnist for The Washington Post for 17 years. She is the author of five critically acclaimed books: Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between Poland, where her husband is foreign minister, and Washington D.C. Her newest book is Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
Website: anneapplebaum.com
Twitter: @anneapplebaum
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Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
From the Pulitzer-prize winning, New York Times bestselling author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them.
We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.
International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don’t stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren’t linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan’s essay calling for “containment” of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.
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NO LNX
Only one thing is going to stand in Trump's way — and he knows it
Thom Hartmann April 28, 2025
It didn’t happen in some shadowy back alley or under the cover of night.
It happened in broad daylight — in the heart of an American courthouse.
Federal agents, acting without even the decency of a signed warrant, stormed into Judge Hannah Dugan’s courtroom on Friday morning and dragged her away like a common criminal. No warning. No legal process. No respect for the law she had spent a lifetime upholding.
But they made sure the cameras were there, so America could see what they were doing. Because this was not about justice. This was about terror.
This was a warning shot aimed directly at the beating heart of America’s judiciary:
“Fall in line — or you’re next.”
In that moment, the world’s oldest democracy lurched closer to the edge of authoritarian rule. In that moment, America became a little less free — and a lot more like the nightmare Vladimir Putin always hoped we’d become.
The FBI arrested Judge Hannah Dugan last Friday without even having a legal arrest warrant; this is as outrageous and police-state illegal as an administration can get.
And Pam Bondi’s performance Friday — after her federal agents swarm-raided this county judge — wasn’t staged for the general public.
The real audience was a very small, select group: America’s judges.
Their message is very simple: “P--- us off, judges, and you could end up in prison, too.”
Trump has already pacified the Article I branch of government — Congress — and now he’s in the process of pacifying the Article III branch, the Judiciary.
There are only 3 branches to our government: cowing both Congress and the nation’s Judiciary will leave only the president in charge of the entire country under all circumstances in all ways.
Nothing and nobody else will be able to stop him, short of a military coup (and he’s already decapitated the senior leadership of the military) or unending demonstrations in the streets (demonstrators who may soon face live ammunition).
That is called dictatorship. Real dictatorship. Vladimir Putin-style dictatorship where you are punished for the smallest deviation from orthodoxy and can find yourself in prison or sued into bankruptcy if you dare speak out in public.
It appears more and more every day that Putin is Trump’s mentor, if not his handler. Trump is doing everything he can, with help from a South African billionaire, to destroy the historic American infrastructure (which has been an example for the world for 250 years) and turn us into the newest member of the dictators club, joining Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Hungary, North Korea, and the rest of the fascist and authoritarian world.
To get there, now that they’ve pacified every single Republican member of Congress (most recently, Don Bacon criticized Trump’s schizophrenic tariffs; a day later he started talking about retiring), they only have to seize control of the Judiciary, and then nothing except We The People will stand in their way.
Nothing. Will. Stand. In. Trump’s. Way. Except We The People. And he knows it.
Look at the striking parallels between Putin’s strategies and Trump’s actions:
From installing Trump’s loyalists in the military and the federal police agencies of the Department of Justice and FBI, to his open threats against freedom of the press, to the GOP’s efforts to rig elections and purge voters, Trump’s subversion of US democracy looks eerily familiar.
He’s taking pages directly from the autocrat’s handbook.
Trump has openly quoted and praised autocrats like Putin and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who has presented his leadership in speeches to the GOP and CPAC as a model of an “illiberal” state.
Trump’s not hiding his admiration for dictators; he’s flaunting it. And now he’s putting the final stages of their script into action.
Trump’s movement toward authoritarianism follows “a known playbook. It’s unfolded in many other countries,” as journalist Anne Applebaum notes. “These are democratically elected leaders who characterize themselves or describe themselves as deserving of no opposition. So I am the true Hungarian, or I am the only real American.”
In a mere matter of weeks into his presidency, Applebaum says, Trump and his allies “have managed to push America into that space somewhere between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy.”
The speed is shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. It only took Hitler 53 days to completely end democracy in Germany. Others, like Lukashenko, Orbán, Putin, Mussolini, Duterte, El-Sisi, and Erdoğan took longer (none longer than two years), but you could argue that Trump has been working at this project for 9 years now.
Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, who studies how democracies slip into authoritarianism, warns that we’re heading toward what experts call “competitive authoritarianism”: regimes that “constitutionally continue to be democracies” with regular elections and legal opposition, but where “systematic abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.”
Make no mistake about what’s happening: Trump and his allies are methodically working through a four-step process to establish complete autocratic control, which will turn America into a one-man dictatorship.
- Terrorize Congress: Trump’s already largely succeeded here. Republican lawmakers now march in lockstep with his agenda, afraid to oppose him even when their consciences scream otherwise. The V-Dem Institute already warns that Trump’s actions are “extremely worrying” for American democracy.
- Terrorize the Media: Trump has, as The Washington Post writes, “relentlessly attacked the free press, another pillar that allows democracies to stand above authoritarian regimes,” as political scientists have noted. “He has echoed the worst dictators in history, calling journalists the ‘enemy of the people.’” With help from Elon Musk and other billionaires, he’s creating a media and social media environment where truth itself is under assault. And last week his administration threatened to arrest journalists and charge them with treason, an offense for which they could be executed.
- Terrorize Judges and Lawyers: What we witnessed Friday with the raid on a county judge and the arrest of a retired judge earlier in the week is just the beginning. The final step in this process will be intimidating the Supreme Court, and if Trump’s minions can first terrorize the entire federal judiciary, it will be much easier to terrorize members of the Court itself, just like Putin and Orbán have done. This follows dangerous cracks in democracy’s pillars that experts have been warning about.
- Terrorize Citizens: Once the above institutions are captured and there’s no more Constitutional opposition to Trump, the final phase begins: crushing individual dissent through fear, persecution, and potentially violence. This is the playbook Malcolm Nance detailed in his work analyzing Putin’s strategies to undermine American democracy and has already started against immigrants and student visa holders. If history tells us anything, American citizens will be next.
Most of this is already in place; time is running out fast.
Trump and his fellow fascists know their time is running out because elections are coming in a handful of months and their popularity is already crashing. They are at maximum power right now, and it is already beginning to decline.
This is another reason why they are pushing so hard to frighten judges, so they can implement the final destruction of any Constitutionally-based opposition to Trump’s one-man rule.
If Trump can consolidate authoritarian rule as quickly as some other historical dictators did, the complete (albeit hopefully temporary) end of American democracy could happen very rapidly, possibly even in the next few weeks or months. The window for action is closing fast.
But there’s still hope, because we’re still We The People. As long as our protest movement continues to grow and demand a stop to the damage Trump and Musk are doing to our democratic republic, we may be able to slow or even stop this anti-American cabal and reclaim our republic.
Our protesting in the streets and reaching out to legislators may encourage resistance within the media and courts, and might even inspire a handful of Republicans to stand against this wannabe dictator.
When democratic institutions fail, the last line of defense has always been citizens willing to take to the streets. Ukraine provides the most powerful recent example of how a determined populace can rescue democracy from Russian-inspired authoritarianism.
During Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests in 2014, over half a million people joined demonstrations in Kyiv to defend democracy against creeping authoritarianism. Those protests ultimately ended Viktor Yanukovych’s Russia-backed puppet regime (and kicked out its Russian-funded American advisor, Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager) and became known as the Revolution of Dignity.
Ukrainians stood firm in the streets despite violence and intimidation, and their courage changed history.
Ukraine’s later Orange Revolution similarly empowered ordinary citizens to engage in mass protests, with some lasting continously more than two weeks. This peaceful revolution successfully defended Ukraine’s democratic aspirations against Russian influence and showed the world that people power can overcome autocratic manipulation.
Putin fears democracy, particularly at his doorstep like in Ukraine and the Baltic states. He knows that democracy is contagious, and any spread near Russia, he believes, poses an existential threat to his autocratic rule. That’s why he invaded Ukraine, and that’s why he spent millions on social media trolls to support Trump’s election and his assault on our democratic institutions.
As Ukrainian historian Hanna Perekhoda warns, “If we let Russian authoritarians win, it will mean that the authoritarian forces also in our countries, in the U.S., for example, will grow stronger.”
If this assault on the Courts (and the implied intimidation of all judges including those on the Supreme Court) succeeds, and the media continues to bow down, the only thing left will be us in the streets.
The time for half-measures, “very strong letters,” and polite political disagreement has passed. We are watching in real-time as our 250-year experiment in democracy is being dismantled by a would-be dictator taking his cues from — or, at least, modeling his presidency on — Vladimir Putin.
This is not hyperbole. This is not partisan exaggeration. This is the stark reality facing our nation today. Fascism and dictatorship are at our doorstep.
Just last week, it was reported that Trump has now deported three American citizens, including a child taking cancer therapy.
Not content to just pull student visas and ask them to leave the country, Trump’s goons have been imprisoning students for writing OpEd articles for weeks. And now they’re show-arresting judges.
The arrest of Judge Dugan is not an isolated incident; it’s part a broader strategy to intimidate the judiciary and consolidate power.
When judges are arrested for upholding the principles of due process, the very foundation of democracy is at risk. This moment demands vigilance and action from all who value the rule of law.
The preservation of our democratic institutions depends on our collective response to such unprecedented challenges.
Buckle up, America. Democracy itself is on the line, and if the courts fall, we’ll be its last defenders.
NOW READ: Behind the 60-year Republican plot to destroy American democracy
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cadwalladr
One of the voices in the film is Anne Applebaum, a journalist and historian, who’s an essential guides to this present moment. Her latest book, Autocracy Inc, lays out comprehensively but simply how networked autocracies and countries with autocratic features are with one another. These are political and financial technological alliances that link Russia to China to Venezuela to Iran.
Anne’s point is that the bad guys are helping each other out all the time in all sorts of ways. And we’re watching a new US-UK axis being built in real time between Farage and Musk. Wendy Siegelman, a brilliant open-source investigator who had a career in corporate finance before becoming a one-woman kleptocracy exposure machine and who has been a hugely valuable resource and ally helping with my investigations over the years, posted this week about a disturbing new company she’d found.
X.AI London Ltd was incorporated in the UK’s Companies House on December 12. And look who’s the person with significant control:
We don’t know what that company is for but if Musk did want to pour £100m into the next UK election, as it’s been reported, this is how he could do it.
Why Musk is so obsessed with Britain and Keir Starmer’s government is its own mystery. Anyone? A residue of his roots in South Africa and a desire to decolonise the coloniser? I’m reaching here…
At the end of Autocracy Inc, Anne Applebaum makes a case for why democracies have to take a leaf out of the bad guys’ playbook and find ways of working together with the first line of attack being against the entire offshore financial system that enables kleptocracies to steal, launder and shelter money. One of the small rays of hope and prompts to action,she cites is Alexei Navalny’s crowdfunded YouTube investigations into corruption:...
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ggl 8 25
The frog in boiling water': Nicolle Wallace breaks down Trump's escalating attacks on blue cities
msnbc.com
22h
Trump can now 'be safely ignored' by Putin after running out of 'cards to play': historian
msn.com
10d
biographs.org
https://biographs.org › anne-applebaum
Anne Applebaum biography. American-British journalist and writer.
Learn about the life and career of Anne Applebaum, an American-British journalist and writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book "Gulag: A History". Find out about her education, marriage, awards, and controversies.
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Britannica
https://www.britannica.com › contributor › anne-applebaum › 12461390
Anne Applebaum | Britannica
Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist who writes for The Atlantic and Johns Hopkins University. She has authored books on topics such as the Gulag, the Iron Curtain, the Holodomor, and the rise of authoritarianism.
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SNF Agora Institute
https://snfagora.jhu.edu › directory › anne-applebaum
Anne Applebaum - SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute.
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The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com › people › anne-applebaum
Anne Applebaum - The Washington Post
Anne Applebaum was a Washington Post columnist, covering national politics and foreign policy, with a special focus on Europe and Russia. She is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a ...
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Global Georgetown
https://global.georgetown.edu › people › anne-applebaum
Anne Applebaum - global.georgetown.edu
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Agora Institute.
sobrief.com
https://sobrief.com › authors › anne-applebaum
Anne Applebaum (author of Autocracy, Inc.) - SoBrief
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is a renowned Polish-American journalist and historian known for her extensive work on Marxism-Leninism and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She has contributed to prestigious publications such as The Economist, The Spectator, and The Washington Post. Applebaum's expertise in post-Soviet politics and her analysis of modern autocracies have earned her ...
DW
https://www.dw.com › en › german-peace-prize-winner-anne-applebaum-a-voice-against-autocrats › a-70524941
Peace Prize winner Anne Applebaum: A voice against autocrats
Oct 18, 2024Anne Applebaum's latest book "Autocracy, Inc." comes just in time to illustrate why her work is being honored in Frankfurt, where she is being honored with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade ...
Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and historian known for her writings on the history of Communism and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2004 for her book "Gulag: A History" and has been a prominent political commentator, particularly on issues related to Russia and democracy.
The Atlantic Wikipedia
Overview of Anne Applebaum
Personal Background
Full Name: Anne Elizabeth Applebaum
Date of Birth: July 25, 1964
Place of Birth: Washington, D.C., U.S.
Citizenship: United States and Poland (became a Polish citizen in 2013)
Education
Yale University: B.A. in History and Literature, summa cum laude (1986)
London School of Economics: M.Sc. in International Relations (1987)
St Antony's College, Oxford: Further studies
Career Highlights
Journalism:
Staff writer for The Atlantic
Former member of the editorial board of The Washington Post
Worked for The Economist and The Spectator
Books:
Gulag: A History (2003) - Pulitzer Prize winner
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 (2012)
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017)
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020)
Contributions and Recognition
Applebaum is known for her writings on the history of Communism and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
She has lectured at prestigious universities, including Yale, Harvard, and Stanford.
Recognized for her critical commentary on Russia and its political landscape.
Personal Life
Married to Radosław Sikorski, a prominent Polish politician, since 1992.
The couple has two sons, Aleksander and Tadeusz.
Anne Applebaum's work continues to influence discussions on democracy, authoritarianism, and historical narratives in Eastern Europe.
Wikipedia
The Atlantic
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