Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Anne Applebaum:

It’s really important to understand that this is a radical administration. It is not a conservative administration, and that’s why it feels like it has nothing to do with conservatives in the past.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Anne Applebaum. She’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, staff writer at The Atlantic, and host of the podcast, Autocracy in America, now in its third season. She’s also the author of several books, including most recently, Autocracy, Inc., which examines how modern autocracies cooperate to maintain power. In recent weeks, Anne has focused on what’s happening in Minneapolis, where ICE operations have led to the killing of two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. She argues that what we’re seeing isn’t just about immigration enforcement, but a broader shift in the exercise of state power. We talk about why Minneapolis has galvanized people in a way few events have in the Trump era. What it means when our closest allies say the word for this moment is rupture and why Anne says the better comparison for the second Trump administration isn’t conservatism, it’s bolshevism. Then I’ll answer your questions about the FBI’s seizure of election ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, and the risks of refusing to pay taxes as a political protest. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Pulitzer Prize winner and Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum discusses ICE, Minneapolis, and the erosion of the rule of law.

Anne Applebaum, welcome back to the show.

Anne Applebaum:

Oh, thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

We haven’t defeated autocracy yet. That’s why we have to keep having you back. How are we doing? How are we trending?

Anne Applebaum:

I think the thing that worries me the most is this administration’s profound disregard for the rule of law. And whether that’s in allowing federal agents working for or with ICE to have impunity, to be able to attack people and kill people with apparently no responsibility, no possibility of investigating them, at least so far. Trump and his family’s willingness to accept all kinds of conflicts of interest and even direct payments into Trump companies and things that would’ve been unthinkable in any other administration and actually are still unthinkable in most democracies. Allowing the, whether it’s DOGE or whether it’s individual cabinet secretaries, to change the rules of their organizations or destroy their programs without asking Congress or without having a legal basis for doing so, all of that is profoundly disturbing. And of course, we could go on from there. I mean, undermining science, undermining health and so on.

Preet Bharara:

This guy who you and I both agree gives short shrift to the rule of law and commits all sorts of other bad acts and is subversive to democracy and all of that stuff was returned to office via democracy. Is it time to lay the blame at the feet of the American people?

Anne Applebaum:

I mean, clearly there is a percentage of the population that either didn’t care that Donald Trump had attacked Congress and the Capitol on January the 6th in 2021. Either they didn’t care or they thought it was good. I think right now, the greater concern is the Republican politicians and Congress who are not willing to hold him to account or even to stand up for what are traditional rights of Congress. Congress has, according to the Constitution, certain abilities and influences, and they won’t use them. And it’s now at a stage of genuine concern that they won’t do so. And then, not all, but some Republican appointed judges who won’t also take the responsibility that they have for stopping illegal actions on the part of the president, which is also their constitutional role. So I’m happy to blame some voters or I’m happy to blame some Republican politicians, and I’m happy to blame Democrats who failed to convince people or to explain to people that this was going to be the result of their choices.

Preet Bharara:

Your colleague at the Atlantic wrote something, and I wonder what you think of it in the last week. Ashley Parker wrote, “Among the greatest tricks Donald Trump ever pulled is convincing significant portions of the population that the slow erosion of their rights is not actually that big of a deal.” Do you agree with that?

Anne Applebaum:

She’s right. I mean, there’s something to that. That’s a traditional means by which people elected to leadership have undermined democracy. And if you look at Hungary or if you look at Turkey or if you look at Venezuela, actually, any one of those countries where you had somebody who was elected to office legitimately then taking power and seeking to undermine the state, it almost always happened through a process of slow chipping away, of saying to people that they weren’t really losing anything or convincing their voters that it was only other people who were losing something. In other words, their voters would be fine, but their political enemies or the ethnic groups or minority groups that they don’t like would be the ones to suffer. That’s always been the way that it’s done. I mean, Trump has done it much faster than any of those previous leaders, which leads me to believe that some part of the population was primed already to accept it, that they already weren’t interested in protecting their rights or didn’t see the value of institutions or themselves agreed with the assessment of American democracy that it wasn’t worth saving.

Preet Bharara:

Now, Democrats, many of whom have been on the show, will still come on this program and go on television and say the path to electoral victory, notwithstanding this critique that we have articulated about Trump or this claim that he has tricked people into believing that the diminution and erosion of their rights is not that big a deal, but they will say, “Nevermind all that. You got to talk about the kitchen table. You got to talk about economic issues.” And I completely understand that pragmatically and strategically, but I wonder how you think about that and how you react to that when talented politicians are saying, “Yeah, that’s too esoteric for people to understand. Democracy is too esoteric. It’s too amorphous.”

Anne Applebaum:

I think it is very possible to connect the democracy issues, or however you want to describe them, the issues of rule of law, the issues of rights. It is perfectly possible to connect those to things that ordinary people understand. It’s a site issue. We had an election here in Poland in 2023 where there were also democracy issues at stake. One of the reasons that a coalition of, I’d say pro rule of law parties finally won was because they were able to connect. Here, it was a question of an illegal undermining of the courts, and they were able to connect that issue to things that ordinary people understood or to incidents that had recently happened. So I think it’s very possible to do both. I’m not sure why there has to be a choice.

I also think there is a space open for someone to begin to articulate a liberal patriotism. Here’s what we stand for. Here’s why our country is great. Here’s why the things that we’ve built in the past need… Some elements from the past need to be taken into the future, and here’s why that will be beneficial for you and your family. Here’s how American prosperity was built, and if you still believe in those things, we can go on building it and making it better. And so I think there’s… I reject the idea that you have to choose. I think you can talk about both.

Preet Bharara:

I join you in your rejection. Who’s doing that? Is it the case, as is often true, that nobody’s doing it or that it’s not gaining traction?

Anne Applebaum:

I think people are doing it. I mean, it’s funny, I’m in Europe and a lot of Europeans have said this to me. In European politics, there’s always a leader of the opposition because there’s a parliamentary system and there’s an opposition party and that as a leader. And there’s somebody who’s the spokesman for the opposition. We don’t have that system. That means that there are perhaps a dozen different people, people whom people… We have various feelings. I mean, there’s Gavin Newsom in California. There’s Governor Pritzker. There’s a handful of people in Congress. I don’t know. There are people like James Talarico who’s running for the Senate in Texas, who’s very articulate about how Christianity is being abused. I mean, there are maybe 20, 25 senior people in politics who are trying some version of this. I don’t know that any one of them has broken through, maybe Governor Newsom the most because he’s very talented at using social media, but it could be that the cumulative effect over time begins to make sense.

I mean, one of the one piece of polling that drifted by me… I mean, I almost had to hesitate to mention it because I’m not sure I can tell you right now off the top of my head where it’s from, but I did see a statistic that said that one argument that moved a lot of people was the argument that this abusive use of ICE, this huge amount of money that’s going to creating President Trump’s private military, that that money was money that should’ve gone to your healthcare or to your educational system or to repair the roads in your congressional district. And that kind of argumentation, that here’s what you’re paying for, here’s what your taxes are going for, this kind of brutality and this clear abuse of power, actually you’re paying for it and it’s costing you money. I think I’ve seen Elizabeth Warren say that. I’ve seen AOC say that. I’ve seen several other people say that.

That’s a way to connect the dots for people. And I think it’s logical. Actually, this is what the Russian opposition, the most successful Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, did, was he talked about corruption, but their corruption, their palaces, their gold taps in the bathrooms, that’s your money, that’s why you have bad hospitals. And that made sense to people. And I think that’s an argument that’s there for the taking, not least because it’s true.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Let’s talk about Minnesota a little bit more. Lots of things have happened and lots of things that you have documented and written about very articulately we try to cover on the program have happened since January 20th of 2017. This seems to have struck a chord, to use that cliche, unlike any I’ve seen.

Anne Applebaum:

Clearly, the site of masked militarily armed men on the streets of a pretty ordinary city like Minneapolis. Minneapolis doesn’t figure in the popular imagination like New York or LA as a big place of crime. I mean, I know the administration tried to build that up in advance of sending ICE there, but it just doesn’t have that resonance. I mean, all the pictures look like suburban neighborhoods that we see. And to have guys dressed for Fallujah or Gosney province closing in on ordinary schools and daycare centers and threatening ordinary people who are committing the crime, crime that’s not a crime of holding up their phones, which is something any American can identify with, I think that’s a pretty shocking contrast.

I mean, there may be other side elements, the fact that the man who was most recently killed, Alex Pretti was carrying a gun and there are a lot of gun owners out there, or he owned a gun. He wasn’t carrying it at the time he was killed. There are gun owners out there who sympathize with that. Obviously he’s white, so he’s a more sympathetic figure for at least a part of Trump’s electoral base, the white nationalist part. He worked for the Veterans Administration hospitals. I mean, he’s clearly not somebody who is a crazy radical, although there’ve been some subsequent attempts to portray him as that.

I think all of that, this vision of an armed paramilitary attacking normal Americans, I think that, for a lot of people, that pushed the wrong button, and it’s very interesting because this was… I think the Trump administration’s original idea was to use ICE as a performative display of cruelty that would appeal to people or scare them.

And so you had, for example, in Chicago, I think it was last summer, you had this ICE attack on an apartment building where they used Blackhawk helicopters and they filmed everything and later they did a video game style video of this attack on an apartment building. And later on, it turned out that half the people in the apartment building were US citizens and nobody in the apartment building was a criminal, but it’s almost like they wanted to create these elaborate pictures that would feed their social media base and appeal to them and would frighten others. I think it’s backfired in that it doesn’t look like a video game. It looks like thugs on an ordinary American street, and it’s not scaring people, at least not in Minnesota, because they’re still coming out to protest.

I think there’s an important conversation to be had about what the Minnesota protestors have done right. I mean, they’ve been extraordinarily brave, but also very well organized. It’s not a leader. This is also a thing I recognize from other countries, a movement that doesn’t have a leader, but has been very flexible in what it does, has focused on recording and documenting, has for the most part, stayed away from violence or tried to. That’s also played a really important role in showing up the contrast between what the administration is doing and what most Americans would recognize as something normal.

Preet Bharara:

This is an odd question to ask, I think, and it’s a hypothetical, but if one were advising historically regimes that are autocratic or sought to be autocratic, what does history teach about the mistakes that they make that we hope that Trump makes, even though it causes harm and damage? But what are the mistakes that they make that cause people to finally recoil from them? Is it a violent overreach or is it something else?

Anne Applebaum:

It’s very hard to be general because it depends on the specific country, but it can be violent overreach. I mean, it was the use of violence, for example, in the Ukrainian Maidan in 2014 that brought a lot of ordinary people who weren’t normally protestors onto the street. And actually that’s something similar has happened in Minneapolis. People who wouldn’t normally do that kind of thing have come out because they were so offended by the scale of the violence. Sometimes it’s the contrast between what the regime says and what people know to be true, and there’s an element of that here too as well.

Preet Bharara:

I definitely want to talk more about that.

Anne Applebaum:

Yeah. When they lie and when their lies are very obvious and easily countered, I mean, in the case of these two murders as they were by the tapes of the murders, but also their description of even the Somali community in Minneapolis as being criminal gangs clearly was beyond reality. And so when you have that contrast, that’s another thing. I mean, of course there’s another… We’re not at this stage yet, but it’s also, there’s a point at which when people become very desperate or when they think they have no other choice anymore, then they’ll protest and defy death and do all kinds of things. That’s what’s happening in Iran right now. That doesn’t apply to the United States. But since you asked the hypothetical question, if we were ever to get there, I’ll sum it up. People are inspired by or angered by what they see as injustice and by what they see as lies, and then sometimes by what they feel is desperation.

Preet Bharara:

Why these lies? I mean, you and I and others have been documenting demonstrably false statements by the president and others for a long time, but there’s something about… I keep asking… Maybe there’s no answer to this question, but I welcome what seems like a shift in the vibe as people who are much younger than me say, but the lying about these victims of ICE shootings as domestic terrorists or as gunwielding or gun brandishing or arriving there to massacre law enforcement agents, that has upset people more than other lies, maybe for good reason and maybe it’s just so self-evident.

Anne Applebaum:

Because they died in such an obviously innocent way in both cases. And to lie about someone who died… And they did it so fast. Actually, it even shocked me that within, particularly the first one when Renee Good was murdered. Just within minutes, they were slandering her.

Preet Bharara:

I think before the video had even been observed.

Anne Applebaum:

Yeah. And she was being slandered immediately. And I was kind of taken aback by that. I mean, we didn’t even have time to find out what happened. And before we had time to do that, they immediately began campaigning around her and they put out very aggressive statements and so on, and they repeated it again. I think the normal reaction of normal people is to wait a beat. I mean, someone has died, an innocent person has been murdered by agents of the federal government. I mean, don’t you wait a day to find out before launching into a propaganda invective? I mean, I think that was a… Normally people, we mourn people who die in those circumstances, we don’t insult them. And I think that bothered something even… It wasn’t just that the administration was lying, it was just they were violating some sense of very deep decency or some deep respect that we have when someone dies in that violent way.

Preet Bharara:

Now, I feel like for a lot of years, people thought that there was a fog of cultish attraction to Trump, and it would vanish in a heartbeat if someone just did something like was done to Joseph McCarthy. And again, I don’t know if this is true because I haven’t gone back and done the history, and I wasn’t alive at the time, but popular law tells us that when a gentleman said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” people snapped out of it. Again, that’s probably too simplified. And people thought that was going to happen with Trump. At some point, whether it was childhood separations in the first term or something else, that would happen. That’s not going to happen, right? How is it going to happen? If it is to happen, how is it going to happen?

Anne Applebaum:

I am not sure that this category of decency is felt by everybody anymore.

Preet Bharara:

You think that’s a change? Do you think that’s a change?

Anne Applebaum:

I think it’s a change.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Anne Applebaum:

I mean, certainly from the 1950s. The cultural forces that created this moment are too great for me to pick on one thing. I mean, it’s clearly something to do with the way people now get information on the internet, the hardening of parts of people who see millions of images every day, and you see images of death and murder and violence and tragedy, and you just click and move on. And so we’ve all got used to doing that, and that’s clearly affecting people. I mean, maybe there’s some blame for Hollywood. I don’t know. I mean, maybe there’s some blame for video games. I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot to go around, but there is some profound coarsening of the culture that both made Trump possible, and he in turn has accelerated that coursening. And so people who would have considered him just out of bounds and impossible to imagine as president, even just for his personal life, forget his actions in office, seem ready to accept him in ways that are surprising.

I mean, the Christians and Catholics who support him, the people who think of themselves as moral, upstanding Americans who support him, despite the cruelty, the cruel language, despite the corruption, which is just on an astronomic scale. And yet, I don’t know, people who wear button-down shirts and go to offices every day and are nice to their wives seem able to go along with this. So you have to ask what else has happened in the culture.

Preet Bharara:

How do you go from being way, way, way up politically and poll-wise on the issue of immigration and the border to being underwater on it? I guess the answer is because of the overreach in Minneapolis.

Anne Applebaum:

Yeah. Also, Trump told people, “Oh, we’re arresting these criminals and thieves and rapists who are among us.” And then it turned out that’s not what they were doing. They were rounding up people who worked in daycare centers and children and the guy who mows your lawn. Not only were they doing that, they were also rounding up people who had legal status in the United States. They were arresting people who went to have their immigration papers renewed or their cases examined, and also, they swept up a lot of Americans. The running tab keeps changing, but it’s certainly over 150. I mean, there have been US citizens who’ve been locked up for no reason or brutalized or taken down as part of this too. So it’s way beyond what people thought they were voting for, even the people who wanted an end to illegal immigration. I think they…

I mean, I don’t know. It’s a little bit hard for me to say because this is what I thought it might look like. So I did anticipate that this might happen, but I think not everyone did. So maybe those who didn’t anticipate it are surprised.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. And I guess the reason why they’re lying about this stuff stupidly in an asinine and demonstrably disprovable fashion, to me, and tell me if you agree with this, is because again and again and again, they’ve gotten away with it. I mean, the level of lie is no different. It’s just what the lie is about and the focus of the American people is different. But the Stephen Miller lies and the Kristi Noem lies are of a peace with what’s been going on for nine years, no?

Anne Applebaum:

Yeah, no, I mean, they’ve gotten away… I mean, I think the first term was preparation for the second term in this sense. In the first term, they got away with an enormous amount. I mean, Trump was still surrounded by people who were cautious, this is true domestically and in foreign policy as well, who wanted him to keep within some kind of normal boundaries, and everybody around him was dedicated to doing that. But the fact is that he got away with everything he got away with. And then more importantly, he got away with January the 6th. And January the 6th was an open assault on the political system.

I think what happened after January the 6th was that anybody who sympathized with that assault, whether because they dislike democracy and they dislike the way the United States work and they want it to be replaced with some, I don’t know, tech fascism or Christian nationalist government that rules the country on behalf of Christians, or because they feel so much disgust for the country and for the political system they thought that was right, all of those people who agreed with the sympathy behind that then went to work for Donald Trump in the second term. And so the administration is now populated by people who know he got away with it, who agree with what he did, and who are anxious to continue whatever… I mean, I think some of them have different goals. And so I wouldn’t say they’re all the same, but whatever version of destruction or rebellion or transformation they think is happening, they want to continue.

I mean, I think it’s really important to understand that this is a radical administration. It is not a conservative administration. That’s why it feels like it has nothing to do with conservatives in the past because conservatives believe in conserving things and in moving slowly and in taking care not to smash things up because conservatives know that it can be hard to rebuild them institutions again. This is a group of people who don’t care about any of that. This is a mentality much closer to the Bolsheviks, I would say, than to, I don’t know, Burkean conservatism of the past.

Preet Bharara:

Burkean conservatives, they are not. Even I know that.

Anne Applebaum:

They’re not. Even you know that.

Preet Bharara:

What do you make of the role of just everything having to do with Mr. Steven Miller?

Anne Applebaum:

I don’t know him and I haven’t met him, and so I don’t know what his… I can’t analyze him or what’s wrong with him, but he is somebody who knowingly uses the most radical language he can find. Some of it comes from the fascist world, some of it comes almost from the communist world. He’s very willing to say, more or less, we need a foreign-born population that are not citizens, whether that means he wants slavery back or whether he wants some underclass to be created. I mean, he’s willing to… He’s somebody who’s interested in breaking and defying conventions of all kinds, and maybe that’s his personality trait. I can’t say why he wants that or what he thinks he’s going to get, but something about him clearly appeals to Trump. In other words, Trump also likes this idea of smashing things and breaking convention and saying the unsayable, whether it’s…

There’s a group of people around this administration or in its orbit, like Nick Fuentes, who’s openly pro-Nazi, and others who are finding that breaking those taboos is… I don’t know whether it’s psychologically useful for them or whether it’s effective because it moves Trump or whether they move a part of the electorate or group of people on the internet. I don’t know who their audience is, but that seems to be what they’re doing.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be back with Anne Applebaum after this.

There are different forms of government and sometimes pieces of geography fall into one versus another over the course of time and human history. And I think it’s been said by a lot of different people that democracy is the most fragile form of government. I wonder if you agree with that. Is democracy more fragile than autocracy? In other words… And this is maybe a terrible example and it may be an asinine question, but it just occurred to me. At this moment in time on the arc, is American democracy more fragile than Iranian autocracy, for example?

Anne Applebaum:

I mean, look, autocracies are inherently fragile because they don’t have popular support and because… I mean, any regime that needs to use violence to stay in power is already telling you that it doesn’t have legitimacy. And because they’re illegitimate, they can stay stable for a long time and then they can fall very quickly. I mean, that’s what always happens in Russia, right?

Preet Bharara:

So in democracy, we have the benefit of not falling quickly. Is that fair?

Anne Applebaum:

Well, democracy has a succession process. Theoretically, if you have a bad president, you can replace him. I mean, there actually are things built into the democratic system that can keep democracy stable. And actually, ours hasn’t been stable the entire period of its existence, but it’s been around for a long time, I think, for that reason.

I think it’s more the more accurate thing. It’s not about democracy being fragile. Democracies are unusual. I mean, if you look back on human history, there haven’t been very many, and most humanity over thousands of years have lived in what we would describe as an autocracy, a monarchy or a tribal system or some kind of warlordism. That was normal for most people over time. And democracies were made possible by the thinking of the enlightenment, by the existence of popular information, by some kind of basic level of education. I mean, there were a lot of things that made democracy be possible in the 18th and 19th centuries where it wasn’t before.

The question is whether it can survive the new forms of communication and new kinds of technology, whether surveillance technology or AI, or as I said, the superficiality and the speed of information that most of us now receive. Whether it can survive, that remains to be seen. I mean, it was a product of a particular moment and a particular constellation, a particular information system and a particular world. And maybe it was also the product… Actually, if you read the Founding Fathers, this is what they said at the time. It was also the product of a certain expectation of decency. I mean, the founding fathers believed that the person who would be president would be a good person and that nobody would vote for a bad person. Obviously that was wrong.

Preet Bharara:

Can we talk about America’s relationship to other countries? Do you agree with everyone I’ve spoken to that Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, gave a speech for the ages at Davos?

Anne Applebaum:

He did because he articulated what a lot of other people were saying. So in other words, it wasn’t the originality of the speech, it was-

Preet Bharara:

He said it.

Anne Applebaum:

… the fact that he said it in that forum in that moment. And maybe somebody pointed out to me. As the former chairman of the Bank of England and The Bank of Canada, he was somebody who was very used to Davos. He knew what the audience was. He was somebody who was particularly prepared to do it. But the important thing was him saying that what we are living through now is not a transition, but a rupture. In other words-

Preet Bharara:

Yes, I was going to ask you about that word. Talk about that word.

Anne Applebaum:

That was the main word, and that reflected what everyone in the room thought. It’s what Europeans now think and many others, not just Europeans, Asians, Australians I’ve spoken to recently. Everybody believes we’re now living through a moment of radical change. And this is, as I say, not surprising because the administration is a radical administration, really radical change and that it’s going to require some radical reactions.

Preet Bharara:

What does rupture mean? Does rupture mean it can be repaired but not in the same way or it can never be repaired?

Anne Applebaum:

Look, I mean, after Julius Caesar, Rome never went back to having a republic. I think some things have changed that will not be repaired.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s pretty intense, Anne.

Anne Applebaum:

Or maybe they will be rethought or maybe we’ll be in a different way. I mean, it doesn’t mean that-

Preet Bharara:

So what’s an example? Is NATO ruptured?

Anne Applebaum:

Yeah, NATO is ruptured.

Preet Bharara:

It will never be the same?

Anne Applebaum:

It will never be the same. It may be that it can be reinvented. It may be that a future American president can find ways to heal or fix some of the problems. It may be that Europeans are going to find new answers. I mean, this week, there’s a meeting… Actually, there have been multiple meetings of new configurations of NATO. There’s a security group that’s emerging in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea. There are lots and lots of conversations about what Europe should do and how it should change moving forward. So things are going to change and are changing already. Then the question is, how will that affect America over time?

I mean, the concern I have is that a rupture between the United States and its allies, whether it’s European allies or its Asian allies, or even its friends in Latin America and elsewhere, won’t have an immediate effect for most Americans. So you won’t immediately feel it in your pocketbook or you won’t see it in an immediate way, but over time, it will be quite profound. I mean, this is what we discovered after the Brexit vote in the UK. There wasn’t an immediate moment where, I don’t know, everybody lost all their money because of Brexit, but over time, after a decade, we can see that the country has changed not for the better. We can see that a lot of businesses lost out. We can see that the UK lost momentum to Europe and all kinds of fields, and we can see that there’s a sense of malaise in the country. That’s the kind of thing that I would foresee happening to the United States.

The world that we created after the Second World War and that brought us prosperity and made us, for better and for worse, the richest and most powerful country in the world was a world where we had allies and we had trading partners. And we built the laws of the sea and the laws of international aviation, and we made travel and transport possible. And we also created a world in which we were the recipient of all kinds of largest that we never acknowledged. I mean, why did people buy our airplanes or our infrastructure? They did it not just because it was really good, but also because we were the protector country, and so people wanted a special relationship with the United States, and all that will fall away and the United States won’t be automatically able to count on friends, whether it’s in financial markets, or in business, or in trade, or in politics. We will feel it. It just might take time.

I mean, it’s not all irreparable. One of the strange things I also say, and I hear traveling around Europe, is that at another level, three levels down from the presidency, American-European relations are the same as they ever were. So if you met an American general or an admiral, they would say, “All of our plans still depend on allies and there are military exercises and intelligence operations going on all the time that are still shared by allies.” And so there’s a weird disconnect where at the top. The president is insulting Europeans. He’s talking about invading Denmark. And at another level, everybody’s preparing to do joint operations. So it’s a strange time. I don’t think we can go back ever to what we were, but there are things certainly to be rescued.

Preet Bharara:

Economic interdependence has never been so tightly locked in as now. Is that going anywhere? Maybe because of tariffs.

Anne Applebaum:

Tariffs… I think people have said this to me too. People who would have invested in the United States until recently are now afraid because of tariffs, because of instability, maybe they want … So again, this was true of Brexit as well. It’s not so much that you’ll see this dramatic shift, at least I don’t think so, where suddenly everything breaks, but you’ll see millions of decisions being made where people decide not to invest or they don’t want a US partner, or they’re worried about sending staff to the United States because people are freaked out about visas. People are very freaked out about US visas and customs and borders and so on. And you’ll see a slow shift and people will look for other options and they’ll say, “Well, maybe we don’t want to open an office in Chicago because maybe we don’t want to send somebody from our country there because he might have a hard time.” So you’ll see a slowdown that will be inevitably the result of this. And again, I say that because it’s what happened in the UK.

Preet Bharara:

Can I play a small note of devil’s advocate on Trump’s behalf for a moment?

Anne Applebaum:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Look, Trump says things that you shouldn’t say. And a lot of those things that we’ve discussed, and as has been well documented, are abject complete lies, but then there’s some things he says that have a kernel of truth that you’re not supposed to say. Is there any kernel of truth as obnoxious and as uncivil and as unstrategic as it may be when Donald Trump says, “You know what? These European countries, including Denmark and others that are in NATO, they didn’t do a whole hell of a lot. Yeah, they lost a few lives…” Again, I’m channeling Trump. “They provide a couple of ships here and there, but really it’s America all the way. We’re the star, but for us, there’s no world order, there’s no peaceful liberal world order. And the least these guys can do is pay their fair share and they’ve gotten too much credit.” Would you address that?

Anne Applebaum:

No, none of that’s true. First of all, the idea that they aren’t paying their fair share, that’s not how NATO works. This has been said so many times. It’s incredible that we have to continue to repeat it, but-

Preet Bharara:

Well, not paying the aspirational percentage of GDP-

Anne Applebaum:

Well, the US’s percentage of GDP was, first of all, for US operations around the world. It’s true. NATO doesn’t have operations in the Pacific and the British have an aircraft carrier, one or two others have some assets in the Pacific, but no, they don’t have that. It was the US that has bases in the Middle East and in Africa and around the world, and no, Europeans don’t have that. They didn’t feel that they needed that. And so that was the US’ decision. But if you look at the percentage of spending in Europe as opposed to all over the world, then I believe Europeans are well ahead of the United States. So it depends on how you count these things.

Second of all, a lot of these decisions about American leadership were… I mean, Americans wanted to do these things. They wanted to be the leaders. They wanted to create the systems of the satellite intelligence systems and so on. And they got advantages from doing so. As I’ve just said, the United States got benefits and it got concessions and it got good economic treatment and it was allowed to do things that Europeans wouldn’t have let any other country do. And they were given all this as a… Everybody understood there was a quid pro quo in exchange for protection. And the Europeans, at the one moment when the US was attacked and they were asked to do something, absolutely stood up.

After 9/11, Article five was declared and European countries sometimes at great political costs to themselves, as well as the lives of their soldiers sent soldiers to Iraq and to Afghanistan, wars that were not especially popular or necessary in Europe, but the United States had asked NATO to contribute. And so they did. And to have that now treated as some kind of unimportant… I mean, actually, Trump has lied about that too because he says, “Oh, they didn’t fight close to the front line.” It’s not true. And to have him dismiss it that way has been really profoundly shocking. I mean, especially in the UK, in Poland, in Denmark, and in the countries that sent proportionally to their populations, a lot of troops. So no, I don’t think it’s useful. I mean, I do think-

Preet Bharara:

But do you think some people think that though?

Anne Applebaum:

There is some use to him saying it out loud, if that’s what he thinks, because then you’re now getting this really hyper new European defense projects, including some tech projects and including intelligence projects that are now designed to replace the United States. And so that’s beginning to happen probably faster than it would’ve done if he hadn’t said those things, but that doesn’t make them true, and it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be good for America that he’s said that. And if people believe it, I mean, they’re welcome to believe it, but it’s not true.

Preet Bharara:

You have said other things about modern autocracy, which I think is important to understand because not all autocracy is the same and everything evolves. Democracy evolves. Autocracy evolves. And one thing you said in Autocracy, Inc. is, “Once upon a time, the leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the 20th century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system and the objective when it was criticized, go on and on. Today, the members of Autocracy, Inc. no longer care if they or their countries are criticized or by whom.” Why is that and what’s the consequence of that?

Anne Applebaum:

So why is hard to say. I mean, it’s to do with decline of the UN system. It’s to do with perceptions, especially in Russia and China, that the language of international human rights and rule of law wasn’t good for them, for Putin and Xi personally. And so they decided to retreat from those four or to try to change the way people talk in them. But yes, there is a phenomenon whereby the use of brutality is no longer considered embarrassing. The Chinese bragged about destroying the Hong Kong democracy movement.

Actually, I believe that one of the reasons why the Russians launched their full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was precisely to show, especially Europeans, but also the world, that they don’t care about the rules. They don’t care about borders, about the UN charter, which recognizes borders. They don’t care about other country sovereignty. They don’t care about laws on genocide. They don’t care about laws on the protection of children. They don’t care about Geneva conventions on warfare. They’re going to do whatever they want. And that was important for Putin politically at home to show that he had no boundaries. It’s part of what keeps him in power, is that people are afraid of that. And also, it was something he wanted to do abroad, to show that he’s… To demonstrate his… To break all these rules and regulations in Europe.

I think as a group of autocrats evolved who saw the language of international law and rights and transparency as a threat to them, they began to see that they needed to break all those things everywhere. And I think we’re seeing the impact of that. And I think Trump is very much in that tradition. Trump also sees that breaking laws and breaking regulations is somehow… I mean, he feels that it empowers him. It frightens people. As I said, it doesn’t create prosperity or a better world for anybody, but it might be good for him personally. Actually, I think to understand Trump’s foreign policy, you really have to understand that this is all about him, in each circumstance. It’s about him being perceived as the winner, about him being perceived as the victor or as the dominant person.

There isn’t a broader strategy. I don’t think there is one in Europe either. I mean, as we saw, he made all these threats to Greenland. He made the Danes get ready for a US invasion, and then he changed his mind because he saw that he wasn’t winning that argument or because the stock market crashed. I don’t know. There isn’t a consistent strategy. Instead, the foreign policy is about him, his power, his psychology, his money. We haven’t talked about that yet. And that’s very similar to Putin and Xi. Their foreign policy is about preserving their own power and spreading it.

Preet Bharara:

You’ve also suggested that another thing that has changed is the view that engaging in trade with autocratic regimes-

Anne Applebaum:

It always fail, but it doesn’t create democracy.

Preet Bharara:

No, no. Right. From my civilian seats, it seems, and I think that’s a reasonable observation, that economic engagement fails. Other people suggest that sanctions fail. So what is one to do?

Anne Applebaum:

Economic engagement, the idea starting in the 90s… And I have a lot of sympathy with the people of the 1990s, because at that time they had the experience of the reintegration of Europe after World War II, and they had experiences that led them to believe that economic ties would lead to better political ties. And they thought that if you connected the world economically, then you would have a peaceful world because nobody would want to go to war with their trading partners. That was the dominant theory of the 1990s. Of course, there were also people who were just greedy and they wanted to make money or they were good businessmen and wanted to make money. I didn’t mean to be disparaging. And so there were a lot of other reasons why people went into Russia, for example, to do business, or China.

What happened, though, was that as this progressed, people understood that… People believed that globalization would go one way. In other words, that we would spread democracy or we would spread our ideas of rule of law to the countries that we were trading with. And instead, what happened was that those ideas began to threaten our trading partners and they began seeking to spread different ideas back to us. So this is where you’ve got the Russians seeking to build up the far right or sometimes the far left in all over Europe and elsewhere. You see both Russia and China using bribery in some cases in different countries to try to affect politics.

I don’t think it means that all trade needs to stop. On the contrary, I just think we need a level of realism and understanding how it works and what it does. And also, some caution about what it is. By the way, this conversation was happening before Trump was elected. There was a conversation in Europe about derisking. So when trading with China, should you sell them your most valuable chips, remembering that they could be turned against you at a time of conflict. That was the kind of conversation that we were having.

Now, unfortunately, the conversation about derisking is also about the United States. Do you want to have these dependencies on the United States? This is also what Mark Carney said, that the United States was weaponizing economic engagement and interdependence. And so now people are asking, “Do we want to be too dependent on America?” And so the question is moving the other way.

I didn’t want to make sweeping statements about stopping trade. It was more that we understand that trade doesn’t bring democracy and trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace, and the people we’re trading with might use that trade to their advantage. That, I think, is now pretty widely understood, except that now, of course, it’s affecting how people see America.

Preet Bharara:

Anne Applebaum, good luck. Come back soon.

Anne Applebaum:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Anne Applebaum continues for members of the Cafe Insider community. In the bonus for insiders, Anne and I discuss whether the war in Ukraine is effectively over, what Trump’s Greenland obsession is really about, and the uncertain future of Venezuela after Maduro.

Anne Applebaum:

If Trump wanted the war to end quickly, what he could do would be put pressure on Russia, which he has refused to do from the moment of coming to office.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about the FBI’s seizure of election ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, and the risks of refusing to pay taxes as a political protest.

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Edward who asks, “What type of affidavit is required for a federal magistrate to issue a search warrant for the Georgia election records? Does the magistrate independently review the FBI’s claims or simply accept the agent’s assertions? In what legal standard applies? Reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or something else?” Thanks for the question, Edward.

Let’s start with the basics. In federal court, a search warrant is governed by the Fourth Amendment, and also the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, namely Rule 41. To get a warrant, the government cannot act on its own, or the executive branch at least cannot act on its own. So what it does, it submits a written application supported by sworn affidavit, usually, almost always, from a law enforcement agent. It lays out facts that in the government’s view, establish probable cause, that’s the standard, probable cause to believe that evidence of a specific crime will be found at the place to be searched.

So to your question about the judge’s role, the magistrate judge is not supposed to rubber stamp the agent’s say so. The whole point is some independent judicial review. The judge evaluates whether the affidavit supplies a sufficient factual basis for probable cause and can require the affiant to appear and answer questions under oath, and I’ve seen that happen. As I mentioned, the legal standard is probable cause, not reasonable suspicion, which is a lower standard. Reasonable suspicion is what you’ll hear about in stop and frisk or traffic stop context. Search warrant has a higher bar.

Now, as for the specific situation you asked about in Georgia, on January 28th, FBI agents executed a search at Fulton County’s election records facility from the 2020 presidential election. News reports say the warrant authorized agents to seize physical ballots, ballot tabulator tapes, electronic ballot images, and voter rolls. It’s a lot of stuff. The search warrant was signed and authorized by US Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas. Because the affidavit in this matter remains sealed and that’s typical, the public does not yet know what specific evidence or allegations persuaded the judge that the probable cause standard was met, and therefore, a warrant justified. That uncertainty helps explain why this has drawn so much scrutiny. It’s not every day. UC federal agencies election materials that have already been counted, recounted, audited, and litigated for years. And many potential federal offenses, depending on what’s being alleged, are subject to a five-year statute of limitations, though there are exceptions.

Another unusual detail is the identification of Thomas Albus, the interim US attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri as the “attorney for the government,” rather than the US attorney from Georgia. According to Bloomberg Law, Attorney General Pam Bondi granted Albus a special appointment to investigate alleged election related offenses nationwide. The appointment is reportedly made under a particular statute, 28 USC, section 515, which allows Albus to conduct civil or criminal proceedings, including grand jury proceedings, that US attorneys are authorized to conduct in any district. That’s unusual.

Now, zooming out, part of what’s fueling concern here is the political context. Trump has continued to promote false claims about the 2020 election, over five years on. These claims have repeatedly been debunked by investigators and in courts again and again and again, yet Trump continues to be fixated on what he calls the big lie. Writing on the election law blog, UCLA law professor Rick Hassan suggested that the Fulton County search could be a test run for 2026 when control of Congress is at stake, raising the possibility of future federal efforts to seize election materials or interfere with state and local election administration in competitive districts.

One thing is clear, Donald Trump has never taken defeat well, whether in golf or in politics. In due time, we’ll likely learn more about the government’s evidence and claims that supported a probable cause finding by Judge Salinas. But for now, as Georgia Senator John Ossoff put it, the FBI search of the Fulton County election’s office amounts to a sore loser’s crusade. By the way, there’s a lot more to this story. Apparently, DNI head, Tulsi Gabbard, was present at the search. That’s really unusual. And Trump apparently spoke to FBI agents after the search. Joyce and I spoke a little bit more about this on the Insider Podcast. So if you haven’t, check out that conversation.

This question comes in an email from Andrew. Andrew writes, “Thank you for last week’s Stay Tuned segment on the leaked ICE memo saying agents don’t need warrants to enter homes. So what happens now? Can the courts order ICE not to enter homes without a judicial warrant? Has a case been brought?” Thanks for the follow-up question, Andrew.

At the end of last week’s show, I discussed a legally dubious internal Department of Homeland Security memo, claiming that ICE agents can bypass traditional judicial warrants and forcibly enter people’s homes using so called administrative warrants, which are not signed by a federal judge. That memo wasn’t released publicly by DHS. It came to light through a whistleblower disclosure in which two ICE employees raised concerns about both the policy itself and the extraordinary secrecy surrounding it. The associated press reported on the whistleblower disclosure and the secret memo on January 21.

And while the story is still very recent, it’s already prompted significant responses. To start, Congress has stepped in. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who received the whistleblower report, is demanding answers from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. And he’s calling for hearings in the Senate judiciary and Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committees. Also, the memo has become part of the broader fight over Department of Homeland Security funding. Democrats cited concerns about that particular warrant authority as one reason they opposed funding DHS during the recent government partial shutdown. Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, released a list of proposed guardrails for ICE operations, which included tightening the rules governing when and how warrants may be issued.

On the judicial side, there is now, in fact, a direct legal challenge. Two Boston area immigrant advocacy organizations, the Greater Boston Latino Network and the Brazilian Worker Center have filed a lawsuit in federal court against ICE. The suit challenges the constitutionality of this new policy, arguing that it violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. It appears to be the first lawsuit specifically aimed at the memo’s home entry policy.

So to answer your question, steps are being taken in both Congress and the courts to challenge ICE’s new policy. I think we can expect additional legal challenges to follow, and of course, we’ll be tracking all of them closely. Stay tuned.

This question comes in an email from Susan. “In view of the Trump administration’s numerous violations of the Constitution and refusal to abide by judicial orders, is it legal to withhold federal tax payments this year?” Susan writes, “I resent funding this government’s actions in lining Trump’s pockets.”

Susan, while I empathize with your frustration about contributing your tax dollars to government actions you strongly disagree with, I have some bad news and it should be expected. You got to pay your taxes. It seems that every year, around tax season, I get a handful of listener questions asking this, whether they can skip paying income taxes as a form of political protest. And often I respond by quoting that famous Ben Franklin line, which surely you’ve heard. “In this world, nothing is certain, except death and taxes.” Federal courts have consistently rejected political objections as valid grounds for refusing to pay taxes.

In fact, American history is replete with examples of people who refuse to pay taxes for political reasons and wound up where? That’s right. In jail. One of the most famous examples goes back nearly 180 years. Henry David Thoreau, remember him? He was an American philosopher best known for his book on Walden Pond. He felt that people have a moral duty to resist unjust laws, even when that resistance carries legal consequences. So Thoreau put that belief into practice when he refused to pay a Massachusetts poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American war. Pretty good causes. He was arrested, spent a night in jail, and was released only after someone else reportedly that Nerdoel Ralph Waldo Emerson paid the tax over his objections.

A more modern example is the actor and star of movies like White Men Can’t Jump and Blade. Yes, Wesley Snipes. Snipes embraced a tax protestor theory known as the 861 argument, which claims that income earned inside the United States isn’t actually taxable income under the Internal Revenue Code. Courts have, as you might expect, routinely and emphatically rejected that theory. Wesley Snipes was famously charged with failing to file federal tax returns for multiple years. He was convicted on three misdemeanor counts of willful failure to file tax returns. And in 2010, a federal judge sentenced him to three years in prison. So just bear in mind as you contemplate not paying your taxes, that both Henry David Thoreau and Wesley Snipes both went to jail for not paying their taxes. By the way, it’s probably the rare podcast that juxtaposes Henry David Thoreau and Wesley Snipes, but we’re here for you.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest Anne Applebaum. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or BlueSky @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indig. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Torrey Paquette and Adam Harris. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.