With the FBI searching John Bolton’s home, the president trying to fire a Fed governor the way his administration fired the heads of the Defence Intelligence Agency and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and National Guard troops patrolling two American cities with perhaps more to come, it is time for Anne Applebaum to resist the urge to say she told us this would happen.
Rather, she says early in this week’s podcast episode, Donald Trump told us it would happen. This or something like it. “He promised revenge and retribution… he talked about his enemies as vermin. …He has been telling us for the last couple of years that this was going to be a really different kind of presidency. And just a lot of people chose not to believe it.”
It was the sort of rollicking start to an interview that caused me to jump straight to a question I had planned to save for later. Does Applebaum expect the 2026 midterm elections to be free and fair?
“I don’t want to be scaremongering or doom-mongering,” Applebaum replies. There’s a substantial structural advantage to U.S. elections, which is that they’re run by the states, which are jealous of their prerogatives and which therefore turn every “national” election into a patchwork of rules and procedures that makes them simply difficult to rig. And yet… “I also fear that Americans have a lack of imagination when it comes to the possibility of stolen elections or assaults on our political system,” Applebaum says.
It’s time, in short, for this podcast to return to its periodic outbursts of alarm at the Trump presidency. I don’t follow U.S. politics with quite the concentration of some colleagues, but I am rarely encouraged by what I see. Lately there has been much to see.
The Trump II presidency seems more built out than the first, more industrious. That they even had time to fire the Kennedy Center’s director of dance is one measure of the change. Trump 2017-2021 would often tweet about what he saw on TV until past noon. This one has exacted tribute and treasure from law firms, universities, TV networks and Japan. Courts that once ruled against him down the line are becoming less predictable. And of course, public figures who hitched their wagon to Trump years ago are not close to losing their allegiance over whatever he did last week or might tomorrow. Just about the only figure who seems unmoved by Trump is Vladimir Putin.
It’s been ten months since Applebaum made her first appearance on The Paul Wells Show. Probably most of my readers are familiar with her work. She’s a Contributing Writer for The Atlantic, an award-winning author, and she writes a popular Substack on politics, human rights and foreign policy. Much has changed since I spoke to her last, and this week’s publication of a paperback edition of her book Autocracy, Inc. was a good moment to take the measure of those changes.
I’m pleased for the chance to catch up with Applebaum, whose books Gulag and Iron Curtain are modern classics of popular history. She spoke to me from Poland, where her husband Radosław Sikorski is deputy prime minister and foreign minister. With luck I’ll have him on sometime too.
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