“He’s Talking Like Hitler”: Anne Applebaum Warns Trump Wants “Absolute Power” in Second Term

[Rough transcript]

The way democracies fall nowadays is usually not through couet or some kind of military you know event they fall through because elected legitimately elected people who don’t have respect for the institutions of the system take them apart and would Trump do that if he can I mean yes I think he would an applebomb is a poitz or prizewinning author and staff writer at the Atlantic her new book is autocracy Inc dictators who want to run the world she joins us now thanks for coming on the show an thanks for having me so I want to start with your recent piece in the Atlantic which uh sparked a lot of Buzz and you could say it’s something of a warning the piece the headline is Trump is speaking like Hitler Stalin and musolini just to start what compelled you to write this piece so so the funny thing is this piece to me seemed almost benal um because Trump has been using this language which is a very specific language that comes from the 1930s he’s been doing it for a while but it somehow the it it became more more prominent and noticeable recently and this is the language where he talks about his you know the enemies within the enemies of the people … um he and specifically he talks about his his political opponents and migrants also as Vermin um he talks about migrants poisoning the blood of Americans and this is language that was it’s not only comes from Hitler it also comes from Stalin and I I wrote several books about Stalin and stalinism um and just out of just to jog my memory I have a whole file of notes that I once took in the East German archives of The stazzy Archives this is the archives of the East German secret police and I typed the word vermin into the search line and discovered dozens of dozens of examples of the stazi using it too and it’s … it’s a … it’s a … it’s a particular … it’s not part of American politics before I mean American politics have been racist before and we’ve called one another traitors and unpatriotic and so on we haven’t talked about one another as being … um … insects or Vermin or parasites um and this comes from the language of um uh regimes who saw their enemies as not citizens as not Criticism of Trump’s Rhetoric necessarily human um as people who could be treated or destroyed any way that they liked and all my piece was it wasn’t a very long piece it just it just listed some of the things that Trump said and showed how that language had been used in the 1930s and 40s um by others but it’s you’re right it caused some controversy because to to people who are going to vote for Trump um this seems very offensive and they alternatively wanted to dismiss it or deny it or say but Biden and Harris are just as bad you know even though you know there’s no evidence of that yeah so one of the the probably the most prominent person who objected to the piece was Elon Musk who obviously big Trump supporter these days and he sort of mocked it as being I guess sensationalist would be his his argument what did you make of his response to it and and this response more broadly so my piece is literally it’s almost a list it’s just citations yeah um and mocking it is one way to um to dismiss something that bothers you I mean the I’m just say I’m just you know I’m just quoting people um I didn’t say Trump is Hitler I didn’t say Trump will cause a new Holocaust um and actually what I think the danger of trumpism is is not some kind of Nazi um um you know Stormtrooper some kind of scenes that you would recognize from movies about the Third Reich I mean I think the threat of trumpism is something different it’s the threat of trump assaulting and undermining institutions which is how most democracies fail nowadays they do so by um by by by by slowly undermining judges courts bureaucrats uh and so on so I you know so so the peace wasn’t saying he will be Hitler the piece was just saying he’s talking like Hitler and it was also saying that he does so knowingly and there’s some evidence for that he um he he once said at one of his rallies I haven’t read mine comp I mean you know who who Who’s who who who randomly says I haven’t read mine comp I mean um this is Hitler’s famous um so kind of anti-Semitic rant which you don’t say that unless it’s you know in the front of your brain and so my you know the explanation for it is that he’s using this language because he thinks it will work I mean he thinks that it will appeal to some Americans that it will create anger and division which is what it did in Nazi Germany and in stalins Russia by the way and in uh communist East Germany um and it will it will give people the feeling that they’re they’re threatened by um people or enemies who represent who are something like illness or disease and as I said musk’s you know um musk’s attitude is mock it laugh at it don’t take it seriously um and that’s one way of of of trying to ignore it or marginalize this this that you know these these quotations which you you know which you come they I mean they come from videos and tapes and and and rallies that we’ve all seen on television so you know I was I didn’t have to make anything up it ended up being very very timely the piece this week because we had some new reporting from uh Jeffrey Goldberg your your editor at the Atlantic who uh had comments from General John Kelly who served as Trump’s uh DHS secretary his chief of staff decorated fourstar General and he claimed that Trump said among other things I need the kind of generals that Hitler had and made the point that Trump uh who you know previously had served as as CEO of a of an organization in America was upset that the generals and and their you know pesky attit udes about respecting the law were getting in the way of what he wanted done and the New York Times also reported that Trump had repeatedly praised Hitler in private and even said at one point that he did some good things I should note the Trump campaign denied that he ever said this but uh you know John Kelly is uh a man who is is quite well regarded served in uh Trump’s Administration and it’s unclear why he would make any of this up what did you make of that reporting so first of all John Kelly’s been saying some of this author record for a long time so some of it I’d heard before so it didn’t it didn’t it didn’t surprise me also I think you know it it it does reflect something about Trump’s inclinations Admiration for Autocratic Leaders again it’s not that he’s going to create a new Holocaust but he does admire not just Hitler but uh president XI and President Putin he admires people who rule without checks and balances without the rule of law without real legal opposition you know people who have an absolutely unfettered ability to do whatever they want which is of course the definition of an autocracy or or or a dictatorship and he’s and you know that he would admire someone from history who’s who’s done that at well seems completely unsurprising to me because he he says versions of this all the time um and this of course in his first term in office you know he he was saying the same kinds of things but at that time he was hemmed in by people like John Kelly uh and others who understood how the American political system work Works namely that in the American system um soldiers in the Army and Generals swear an oath to the Constitution not of personal loyalty to the president and um employees of the of the federal government also work on behalf of the Constitution and not as personal you know um you know they’re not they’re not Sidekicks of the president in um in most positions and Trump was never able to get used to that he he found it difficult to understand um you know he and he repeated if you look back at the history of that Administration the constant clashes with people he was working with with people in the military it was always over over that so I’m not surprised at all he also seems to know almost no history um you know actually Hitler’s generals famously organized a plot to try and kill him so so I mean wishing for Hitler’s generals if you think that means you’re wishing for a super loyal um you know a super loyal military is also amazingly mistaken but it seems to be a you know piece of he he’s his eeday fix is the idea of absolute power and absolute control and that seems to be what he wants and so you know that whether he’s talking about whether he’s talking about his enemies as viruses who don’t have to be who don’t have to have any rights or any consideration or whether he’s talking about admiring Hitler I mean Trump’s Defense Tactics they seem to be part of the same the same aspect of his personality so just to talk about Trump’s defense for a brief second you’re getting at this a little bit there’s a disconnect between what you’re arguing which is that in in this piece that you wrote for the Atlantic and in in Trump’s late that he’s not actually going to behave necessarily like Hitler or melini would or Stalin would he won’t be able to at least not immediately right and so where whereas his his Defenders like Elon Musk let’s say will look at these kinds of arguments and look at what John Kelly says and and dismiss it as ridiculous and absurd we already had Trump in power once he didn’t you know commit a holocaust so why is everyone pretending that he’s like Hitler whereas your argument is a little bit more nuanced or a lot more nuanced than that which is that he is using this kind of rhetoric because it excites people in the same way that Hitler used that kind of rhetoric because it excites people and but then that then that he also would operate as president in ways that mimics strong men and because he has an appreciation for dictators it doesn’t necessarily mean that he would act like a dictator to get to the Al I should say I mean the the way the way democracies fall nowadays is usually not through a coup d’a or some kind of military you know event and they fall through because elected legitimately elected people who don’t have respect for the institutions of the system take them apart and would Trump do that if he can I mean yes I think he would and will he be surrounded in his second term by people who want to do that and will help him do that yes I think it’s very possible I mean JD Vance has said openly um things that sound very similar project 2025 produced by the Heritage Foundation which has lots of people who either were served with him or or or close to him contributed to it is exactly that project yeah um so you know so so I’m I’m adding an element of nuance but that doesn’t mean that you know that you can dismiss it all or say you know oh it’s a joke or say um oh you know but you know but Joe ven told people to get vaccinated which is what Potential Implications of a Trump Second Term somebody said to me you know and that’s equally bad I mean there’s a there’s a there is something that saying to us and he’s warning us and he’s hoping it will help him win and it’s a and we should take it seriously what do you think we would have in store if Trump does win in two weeks so you know Trump is very hard to predict because his his real only interest is himself so he’s he doesn’t have a you know an um an ideology or of power in the way that some some people do um he has one or two policy issues that he cares about one of them is he wants High tariff and the others he wants to leave NATO and those are two things he’s been saying for 30 years beyond that he doesn’t know much you know he doesn’t care much um but as I said what he wants is this feeling of absolute power and control and so the danger of trump in his second term is that he would employ people who who who who would seek to achieve that agenda um who would for example fire civil servants who are competent and have and have you know meritocratic um Quality or or reasons to be doing their jobs and replace them with absolute loyalists who will just do whatever is said there’s a there’s a real threat of corruption I mean his first term was very corrupt you know many of the these were stories that weren’t often reported you know the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of energy was stuffed full of former lobbyists who were using their jobs in the government um as ways of making money and that you know that would that would be on steroids that kind of practice so the the F the the further Corruption of the federal government um the cre of loyalists um possibly the use of the Department of Justice to go after people to go after his you know the enemies within I mean the political enemies who he thinks doesn’t have don’t have rights um possibly the use of other Federal institutions he’s actually talked about the FCC the Federal Communications Commission um you know he’s talked about using it against uh television stations so that’s a possibility um it’s happened in the past in the in in American history that presidents have tried to use the IRS to harass people and that’s a that’s a tactic used in other autocratic countries it’s was widely used in Russia um in the 2000s it’s what the hungarians do it’s what um the the the the Polish government that was in charge for eight years you know used Financial investigations and harassment to to undermine people I mean you would begin to see a lot of stuff like that that that would be um you know might have some precedence in American history but the scale of it would would would feel you know particularly right now at this moment in time would feel very weird and so that’s all very possible I mean this the the the stuff that he says about Mass deportation and um you know creating I don’t know building camps to put migrants in it’s very hard to know how that would work um uh he would need a lot of people enabling him to do that it’s not something that could happen right away but you would be surprised and here I say is somebody who lived I live part of the time in Poland and I watched this happen you’d be surprised how fast some things could change I mean the Department of Justice could change its spots overnight you know the um you know the the FCC or the IRS could change very quickly with the right kinds of people in charge um and maybe then over time he would he would he would you know seek to create these kind of displays of violence and control which is also what some of the people following him admire about him and what he uh you know these are things that he finds satisfying um again he he he likes the idea uh you know just as just as other authoritarians do of demonstrating and showing his power remember he wanted to shoot at demonstrators during the George Floyd protest you know he wants to he wants to show that he’s in control he wants he wants military parades you know this is the kind of um this is what satisfies him and I think there would be a lot of that some of it might be um you know some of it might not matter and some of it might matter terribly and we would we would begin to have a shift to a very different kind of political culture in Washington I think it’s it’s it’s easy to forget that during his Trump’s Potential Exit from NATO first term there was a story in The New York Times The Washington Post almost weekly that Trump had proposed something that we would consider quite extreme and that somebody in his administration stopped him from doing it and he had all these pretty you know strong conservatives in administration Jeff sessions Jim Mattis John Kelly and very often they rejected some of his more outlandish ideas and you’re right that what we know about the incoming Administration should he win the election is that a lot of those figures would not be in power anymore and that a lot of his worst impulses would probably be enabled yeah so um I made a podcast a five-part podcast called autocracy in America that described some of this in in Greater detail exactly these kinds of processes and one of the people we interviewed was John Bolton who was his National Security adviser um and Bolton told us the story um my my colleague and I of being in a car and driving with Trump to a European Summit and Trump turns to Bolton he says today is the day we’re going to make history John we’re going to leave NATO and John you know John and Bolton and and Mattis and all kinds of other people you know started putting pressure on him said don’t do it we can it’ll have a you know they convinced him I think that it would be bad for him politically um uh but will those people be there a second time probably not um you would have you know with Vance and with um you know and with Trump’s with you know Don Jr having positions of power and influence I mean you would see very different kinds of people in the white house so yes you would have to worry a lot more about this stuff than we did previously now your your book autocracy Inc it notes that a lot of these autocrats don’t do it alone you write that autocracies are not run by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures and you you speak about a number of of cases throughout your book but one of the things that I was thinking about especially this week with the way that Elon Musk has inserted himself into this election campaign there seems to be an Elon Musk’s Influence and Ambitions in US Politics effort by on his part that reminded me a lot of what you write in the book to use his wealth to really influence this campaign in a way that may or may not be legal what do you make of his role in this election and his support for Trump so musk clearly has an ambition to be an oligarch and um you know a Russian style oligarch is somebody who’s well and money and power are not um it’s not just that he has a good relationship with the people who run the country they they mesh and they intermingle um and so the the the the oligarch is enriched by the politicians the politicians then sometimes in Russia I mean they’re often the same people I mean the politicians own the the major companies um or or have or have investments in them um and and and musk playing this role um and and playing it in the in the runup to the election is also something that’s pretty unprecedented in US politics I mean there’s a lot of money in US politics and I mean almost there’s almost no other democracy on the planet that runs elections like ours which are as saturated with with money as these are um but using it openly to appear to buy votes um to to offer million-dollar rewards to people who register to vote and this is a this is you know the scale of things matter too you know it’s not just um you know it’s the it’s the offering a million dollars to random people isn’t something that we’ve ever had before in you know in an American election campaign I have to say I’ve just been I’ve just come back from Germany where I was for several days and I have to say Europeans keep asking me how is this legal you know there’s you know they can’t imagine how you could have um you know how you could have somebody playing that kind of role in in the political system um but musk’s musk’s interest appears to be a business interest of financial interest um as well as as his own interest in power and in having um you know being able to operate for example without regulation he has enormous number of businesses that have conflicts with it he has he has deals with the US government um but a lot of them are also in conflict in various The Dangers of Business-Politics Alliances ways you know their environmental issues or their regulatory issues and he’s you know perhaps he thinks that by having a kind of symbiotic relationship with Trump that he would eliminate all of his problems with regulation um but this is a this is not you know this is a this is a really dangerous precedent and it and it would change very much I think the way the relationship between business and politics in in the country I mean it’s it’s not good as it is but this would make it worse I want to talk just quickly about election night uh you wrote in a recent story that we can be absolutely certain that an attempt will be made to steal the 2024 election if kamla Harris wins course what worries you most about election night or election week I should say because this is probably going to take longer than than just the night uh given last time and and what we’re in store for so I mean I think it’s pretty clear that whatever happens um by 11 o’clock that evening Trump will declare Victory I mean that’s what happened last time yep um so unless of course it’s a landslide for Harris um but if it’s if it’s close in any way um he will he will declare Victory and then um he will put into motion you know various projects to make sure that some perhaps to slow down the count as he did before if he thinks he’s behind um and in you know in order to enable various schemes to UNF flowens similar to the to what happened in in 2020 uh except that this time it’ll be on a larger scale um and of course this time we’re better prepared for it as well but but it will be on a larger scale um there are already lawsuits being teed up um challenges to voter registration are already being made in in a number of Swing States um there are already some precedents of of counties particular counties refusing to certify electoral results um you know there are also I should say there are there are lawyers on the other side who are um who are suing those kinds of counties I mean so there’s there already a legal B the legal battle is already unfolding um it’s already started and the the attempt to change the perception The Influence of Betting Markets on Election Perceptions of the election will begin almost as soon as the polls close you know if not before I mean in a way it’s begun now uh you know it’s very interesting um that this betting Market this very strange betting Market statistics that have been shown maybe you’ve seen them or or run across them in your in your reading the last few days um there’s a there’s a betting Market that’s at least partially owned by Peter teal um which has been showing these huge margins of victory for Republicans like 60% to 40% and so on and that that kind of thing is also part of an attempt in advance to show um you know to show that the Republicans are winning and they’re going to win so that as I said in case it’s closer in case Harris wins they will um they will challenge the they will challenge right Trump couldn’t have possibly lost this election because of know given how far he was ahead in this betting Market he couldn’t have possibly lost the election um and the and remember a betting Market is is can be e is easily manipulated by money I mean it’s just whoever puts money on it decides who it’s not a it’s not a poll it’s it’s a market so right so there these you know there’s a lot of what so-called Red Wave polls out there that are um that are also you know see you know seeking to favor Trump as much as possible to give the impression that he’s winning I mean that’s not to say that he won’t win I mean he might win um but but right now they’re doing what they can to prepare in advance just in case he doesn’t win so that they can challenge the result piece of yours that’s been getting a lot of attention in light of your new book and the war in the Middle East back in 2002 you wrote a piece for slate and the headline was Kill the Messenger and in it you argued that official Palestinian radio and TV studios are fair Targets in the war between Israel and Palestine and you wrote that the media these media organizations qualified as combatants and were there legitimate military targets um you’ve been getting some criticism online for that piece recently first of all you know that was 22 years ago second of all I don’t write the headlines okay okay and I I still don’t write the headlines in fact I had a with Debate on Media Outlets as Combatants that this week um second of all you know I don’t have the piece in front of me now but most of it was was speculative it was about you know should we consider them combatants in the war not we should kill them so it wasn’t about you know it wasn’t advocating murder whatever the headline said okay you know also um you know I think you know after 22 years um I’m I’m allowed to not remember what was the context that I was writing it in sure but have your views changed on that on on that idea that that any media Outlets whether or not they’re a member of a state or not should be considered combatants um you know obviously I don’t think media Outlets should be killed no I mean I don’t think journalists should be killed or that media Outlets are are are considered combatants I mean there is a complicated question about what who what propagandists are um the Russian propagandists who support the war in Ukraine um no I don’t think they’re military targets but should they be the targets of sanctions yes they should and apple bomb thanks so much for coming on the show I really appreciate it thank you after our interview a spokesperson for Anne applebomb sent us an amended statement from her about her 2002 slate article the statement from an applebomb reads although I recently saw a screenshot of that article on X which I ignored I hadn’t read it for more than two decades and was not prepared to be asked about it now that I have I can say that it could have been better worded and the headline which I would not have written could have been less provocative but the substance of the article which was mostly about the dehumanizing propaganda being taught to Palestinian children is still consistent with everything else I write 22 years later I’m still against teaching children whether Palestinian or Israeli to hate each other I still think propagandists bear co-responsibility for war and of course I did not believe then and do not believe now that radio stations or television stations are actually legitimate military targets thank you for watching this episode of Press Club please tune in next week we’ve got a special election episode uh in anticipation for the 202 for presidential race we’ll see you next week.

Source: Anne Applebaum, youtu.be/t5cg6y0IUSo?si=Qy4AjG8VlQAnQe8b