Anne Applebaum: Globalized MAGA Kleptocracy
The Bulwark Daily
Anne Applebaum discusses the global reach of Trump-aligned influence operations, framing them as a 'globalized MAGA grift' that combines aut
Key takeaways
- Trump's administration is pursuing a globalist agenda under the guise of nationalism, supporting far-right movements abroad to consolidate power.
Main topics
- Globalized MAGA ideology
- Corporate influence on foreign policy
Notable quotes
It will have to go.
Conclusion
Applebaum warns that the current administration's blend of authoritariani
Transcript preview
Speaker 6 (0:12) Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show. I'm delighted. We'll see how my husband and other listeners feel by the end of the podcast. Her recent books include The Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic, where her latest piece, Empire of Grift, is the October cover story for the magazine. It's Anne Applebaum. Welcome back, Anne. Thanks Speaker 1 (0:34) for having me again. Speaker 6 (0:36) It's always a joy for me, even though I'm looking at my outline here and... We'll see how we all feel by the end. I can't be any darker than the AIpocalypse episode. So we'll see how we land. I want to start here. We'll get to your article next. But first, we have a more important thing. Ann Applebaum, radical revolutionary. I saw a tweet you sent this week. And there was an overhead video of the ballroom. And so you could see the size and scale of the ballroom and how much bigger it is than the White House. And you quote tweeted it with these five words. It will have to go. And I'm like, OK, because I've been kind of squishy on this. I'm like, if Ann Applebaum is out there saying we got to bulldoze the ballroom, that piqued my interest. So I want to hear more. Speaker 1 (1:23) So I grew up in Washington and a lot of the institutions that we're talking about, the Kennedy Center, the monuments around D.C., the reflecting pool. These are places I've known all my life. And I know how important they are to people who live in the city and to people who visit the city. And I've been taking people to see them for years and years. And I took kind of generations of children to the Nutcracker Suite. And I was taken to the Nutcracker Suite at the Kennedy Center at Christmastime. And watching the president systematically destroy one after the next has, yeah, has probably radicalized me. You know, the White House. was built in a certain style for a certain reason. It was meant to evoke Republican, small r, Republican virtues. It was supposed to be modest. It wasn't a palace like the palaces in England that we had, the American Revolution had broken away from. It was classical in design. It was supposed to evoke. Palladian virtues, you know, this sort of architecture of balance and symmetry. And by destroying it, by building a monstrosity next door to it, Donald Trump has changed its meaning and changed the way it looks and changed the original intentions of the architect. And the intentions are related to very deep American values, and he's imposing a new set of values on them. And I object. Speaker 6 (2:54) It impacted me to see that you were there because it made me feel like, well, maybe I'm not radicalized enough, you know, and if Ann Applebaum is ready to get out there with the sledgehammer, I, cause you know, I don't know. Part of me is just like, well. OK, well, why don't we just name it the Barack Hussein Obama ballroom and move on to bigger and better things? I Speaker 1 (3:13) mean, if if it were in proportion, if it were done with an eye to history, if it were not a grotesque statement of Trump's personality imposed on Washington, D.C., then we could talk about having a ballroom. But that's that's not what this is. This is a. Very, very strange project. It's something that Trump is obsessed with. He talks about it all the time, apparently, according to people who have reported on what goes on. Yeah, Speaker 6 (3:44) Ben Terrace reported on this for the New York Magazine. Speaker 1 (3:47) Yeah, Speaker 6 (3:47) and Speaker 1 (3:47) so, you know, this is not a normal construction project. It's not a bit of improvement to the White House. It's not an upgrade. It's an imposition, and it's doing a lot of damage. And architecture is important because it reflects who we are. As I said, it reflects a set of values. It was built that way originally for a reason. And Trump is destroying those, seeking to change the values and undermine the way the city looks. Speaker 6 (4:14) Hell yeah, to the barricades. I'm with you. You've won me over. I'm with you on it. Okay. And it relates to your cover story, which covers kind of the globalized MAGA grift. You know, I think that there's, of course, been a bunch of reporting and, you know, Jonathan Swan on earlier this week. If you hear him tell it, it's just, I mean, we've barely scratched the surface of the amount of corruption and double dealing that these guys have done. And, you know, we all know some of the individual stories. You bring this all together, I think, and frame it up in an interesting way about how their program is not at all isolationist. It is a very globalist program, just in a different. way of thinking about it. So why don't you explain that concept? So Speaker 1 (4:59) I think it's important to understand that the people who now occupy important jobs in the U.S. administration, not all of them, but a significant number of them. think of themselves not as ordinary Republicans who won an election and a few years from now will happily hand over to Democrats and are part of a long chain of history. And, you know, as we've been discussing, an inheritance of values going back a long way. They think of themselves as revolutionaries who are enacting a profound change. And in a revolution, always needs an international dimension. So to stay secure at home, to complete their revolution at home, they need to create a world where they have lots of friends and allies who agree with them and it will help them continue to build the revolution. And so they think about how do we help bring to power like-minded political parties in other countries? They're particularly interested in Europe because they have this idea of white Christian civilization that they believe it comes from Europe and they want Europeans to agree with their vision of the world. They're also very interested in Latin America and more broadly the Western Hemisphere because they think the U.S. should be dominant. And I mean dominant as in an imperial kind of dominance in the hemisphere, not just the largest country. And they are willing to go to great lengths to make these things happen. Speaker 6 (6:19) All Speaker 1 (6:20) revolutions... When they break existing systems, when they change the rules, they bring with them other people who want to take advantage of that change. And this revolution is taking place in conjunction with and with the help of a number of large companies. And they are the tech companies. They are cryptocurrency industry. some oil and gas companies, some minerals companies who see these changes beginning to happen and are seeking to take advantage of them. And so, you know, you have to kind of look at it as two faces of the same project. And it's not a coincidence that a lot of... of the far right movements and people and groups who are supported by the Trump administration also have deep, very often deep cryptocurrency connections. And they use this language of libertarianism and deregulation, which is what the cryptocurrency companies want, or sometimes the tech companies as well. And they have a group of companies who are using the power of the U.S. government and the power of U.S. diplomacy and maybe even other things to make money. And that is a, it's a very, very different way of doing foreign policy than we've known from the past. Speaker 6 (7:33) It's this globalist nationalism, which is like a contradiction in terms at some level. But it leads to these kind of strange quotes going from the administration. You had a lighted one that caught my eye from Sarah Rogers, who is the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. And she's been caught up also in this like online MAGA controversy back and forth with some of the the influencers that they're paying online have now been revealed publicly. And, and, and she's, she's embroiled in that. But this is a quote you highlighted. We are going to be fully utilizing all the tools at our disposal, exchange programs, cultural heritage initiatives, micro grants, and more to advance the president's America first agenda. Okay. I mean, it's weird, but it is, it's what they're doing in a strange way. Speaker 1 (8:23) It's what they're doing. So they are using the tools of American diplomacy to fund or aid or help people with whom they agree. And very often, again, in Europe, these are far right political parties and groups and movements. Sometimes they're, as I said, they use libertarian language. I'm not sure they're... true libertarians, whatever that means, but they're people who are allied with companies that want deregulation. A great example of that is in the UK, where they're very close to Nigel Farage. He's the leader of the Reform Party, which is the British far right, and has recently been involved in a series of scandals to do with him being funded basically by cryptocurrency moguls, some of whom live outside the country. But the U.S. is using tools that in the past were used to promote democracy, to promote human rights, to encourage future leaders of potentially democratic governments around the world to come and visit the United States, to study at American universities, Fulbright scholarships, for example. And all these tools that have been part of the U.S. kind of soft power arsenal for decades are being reverted. I mean, I'm not sure it's... happened yet entirely. These things take time and there are some restrictions on how much can be done. But the idea is to revert them and to make them tools of this kind of MAGA nationalist international. And I think that's the deep goal of some of the ideologues at the State Department. You Speaker 6 (9:55) mentioned their increasing focus or like their main focus is on Europe because the whiteness element. So why don't we start there? You're going to go through some examples. And I think it's interesting to revisit what is happening in Greenland in particular, because I do think that there was a lot of focus on, rightly, on, you know, kind of the military element of this and how, you know, the European countries scrambled their military to protect the diplomatic side of it. But there is this, you know, the corruption. And the integration of the administration with the private sector and other efforts to be corrupt in Greenland is pretty striking. A former president of Estonia, Thomas Hendrick, flagged this for me, which was the story of this Greenlandic politician, Jorgen Waver, who his wife was representing Greenland in negotiations with the U.S. And now he's received a house in Greenland's capital, paid for by American investors, including Ron Lauder. father-in-law of the new Fed chair and friend of Trump, the guy whose, I think, idea it was for us to do this Greenland deal. In your piece, you talk about a bunch of other examples of Trump donors, Ken Griffin, trying to meddle in Greenland and, I think, advance those imperialist goals and economic goals all in one. Talk about that. Speaker 1 (11:14) Greenland is really interesting because in Greenland, you see how You know, it's not U.S. diplomats necessarily doing American foreign policy. It's this world of business people close to Trump who are now de facto carrying out Trump's wishes or someone's wishes inside the administration. And in Greenland, I mean, you did have this dramatic moment in January when the Danes really did expect a possible invasion and they got ready to defend Greenland. And there were, you know, they sent. blood banks up to Nook, and they prepared to blow up airports. And this is now public information. And they were ready to fight back. And then it didn't happen, and it sort of, you know, faded away. But since then, as I said, there have been a number of U.S. companies who have stayed in Greenland, sometimes offering really extraordinary investments. There's a guy who wants to build a data center in Greenland, even though it would probably melt the permafrost and you would have to import all the workers and all the material. Greenland, remember, is frozen, you know, all year round. It's not an easy place to do anything. Speaker 6 (12:23) Elon's talking about data centers on Mars. So why not Greenland? Speaker 1 (12:26) Why not do Greenland first? Although actually, that's not a joke because there are people who have said, let's do a, you know, a kind of one of these sovereign states run by CEOs. Let's create a new civilization in Greenland as an experiment. for when we get to Mars. So they're not unrelated, those two ideas. But the point is that, you know, we think nothing's really happening in Greenland, but actually there's this huge U.S. influence operation being funded by private companies, trying to reach Greenlandic politicians, trying to influence the way people think, offering people huge amounts of money in a place where people don't have it. all with the aim of subverting the existing social system in Greenland and imposing something else. And this is being carried out without really any oversight, without most Americans really knowing about it.