Europe fears ‘American autocracy’ if Trump wins – Anne Applebaum

Democracy is under attack across the western world – from external powers like Russia, China and Iran, and from inside: the rise of populism, disinformation and organised crime.

That’s the alarming warning from the Pulitzer prize winning author Anne Applebaum, whose latest book Autocracy. Inc, The Dictators who want to run the world, reveals a network of repressive regimes across the world who are working to keep one another in power.

We spoke to her earlier and asked first about what she thought of the proposed ‘Project 2025’ by the Republicans if they win in November, led by Donald Trump.

Anne Applebaum: So nowadays, most democracies don’t fall because there’s a coup d’état, with tanks in the streets and the lieutenant colonel shooting up the presidential palace. They fall because a legitimately elected politician attacks and undermines democratic institutions. It’s what happened originally in Putin’s Russia. It happened in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. It happened in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. It doesn’t have to be a right-wing or a left-wing leader.

And it’s what Project 2025 describes in the United States. It describes a means of replacing or changing many American institutions, many long time American civil servants, and replacing them with people who are loyal not to the political system and not necessarily even to the Constitution, but who are loyal to Trump or to the Republican Party under Trump’s guidance.

Matt Frei: And of course, this has a lot of publicity, some very negative publicity, in this election campaign. Is that the reason why you think Trump has been trying to distance himself, at least rhetorically, from this project?

Anne Applebaum: Yeah, he’s begun to understood, or at least his campaign managers have begun to understood that as people read these plans, they ask, ‘is this going to be the same United States that we’ve known?’ Or ‘are we going to be the leader of the democratic world as we have been?’ Are we going to push back against the network of autocracies that I describe in my book, or are we going to become really quite a different country? And I think the possibilities are really alarming to people. And that’s why the Trump campaign belatedly realised that they better try and keep quiet about it.

Matt Frei: But beyond Project 2025, before that ever kicks in, if it will, you’ve got the Supreme Court of the United States that virtually handed any president, whether they’re called Trump or Harris, the powers of impunity with their recent decisions. How alarming is that for the future of American democracy?

Anne Applebaum: That is also very worrying. I mean, so the idea that you have a captured judiciary, that judges act not in the interest, again, of the Constitution, but in the interest of the president or of the leader. This is a principle of autocratic states that we’ve tried to fight back against in the United States for more than two centuries. But you’re right. It does give theoretically, it could give an aggressive, law breaking president a lot more power and a lot more of a sense of impunity and possibility.

Matt Frei: One of the things that really strikes me about this country is that you’ve got two sides in this election. Both believe that if the other side wins, their world is imperilled, their version of this republic is imperilled. And of course, the decision will be made, probably again by a pretty small sliver of voters in a small number of swing states. Given the stakes in this election, given the bitterness of the campaign, how dangerous will this moment be for America?

Anne Applebaum: Existential politics are always dangerous when you think that your political opponents are a mortal danger to you or to your country, or when you think that they represent some antithesis of life as you know it. Then yes, of course, you’re much more likely to be violent. It seems to me, the way to change it, and if Harris wants to change it, she’s really the one who’s in the position to do it, would be to try to change the debate so that it’s about real things. Schools and roads and hospitals and things that affect people’s lives, and I hope that’s the kind of campaign she’ll run.

Matt Frei: You spend much of your time in Poland, which has had its own experience of the struggle between autocracy and democracy. You also go to Kyiv a lot. You’ve interviewed President Zelensky. How nervous are they in Kyiv, in other European capitals, in Warsaw, about this election campaign and about the possibility of Trump coming back in?

Anne Applebaum: They’re nervous, and the way it was put to me, just to return to the topic of my book, the way it was put to me recently by a German member of the Bundestag was, ‘we Europeans are afraid that we will soon be facing three autocracies: China, Russia and the United States.’ And the idea that the United States would become not just sometimes a rival, or a difficult partner, or a sometimes very irritating ally, but that it would actually become anti-European. That it would seek to undermine democratic alliances, that it might pick apart Nato.

This is something that people are really just beginning to grapple with and contemplate. And of course, all across Europe, and nobody talks about it in public, but their preparations are being made and conversations about the future of defence are being had. And yes, what can I say? People are anxious that a second Trump presidency would be markedly different and more radical than the first.