Anne is a columnist for the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. She's also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, where she runs a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda, resisting those things rather than producing them.
00:09:15.480And, I mean, you know, the Bernie Sanders candidacy is, of course, another interesting phenomenon of the last year.
00:09:22.700I didn't have any initial sympathy with it at all.
00:09:25.800I mean, as time went on, you know, I began to see – I began – I understand more why people were voting for them
00:09:30.740and why people were excited by them at this particular moment.
00:09:33.840But, no, I mean, I come from – I mean, actually, you mentioned David Frum, who I think he's also been on your program.
00:09:40.520I mean, I – for much of my life, I would have had trouble distinguishing myself from him in terms of political views.
00:09:47.800I mean, we've differed about some things.
00:09:49.220But, you know, sure, I used to write for the Weekly Standard.
00:09:51.980I used to write for the National Review.
00:09:53.240I was – you know, I didn't know how people considered me because I don't – I'm not, you know, probably culturally different from some of the American right.
00:10:02.220But I was very happy in that position 10 years ago.
00:10:07.400Yeah, well, that strikes me as the most useful background to have at the moment because what one can't allege about you and Frum and David Brooks and all the people who are center-right
00:10:21.020and, you know, who have been traditionally Republican or certainly more Republican than Democrat,
00:10:27.140you can't allege rank partisanship in your criticism of Trump, which could be alleged of, you know, anyone on the left.
00:10:35.260I don't think honestly at this point, but certainly that's what would strike the mind of any Trump defender.
00:10:40.440This is really the challenge before us because I want to talk about Trump and Russia and fake news and all of these intersecting concerns.
00:10:47.920But the challenge is to say something that could be conceivably persuasive to someone who doesn't already agree with us.
00:10:54.820And this is the challenge I put to David in my podcast with him.
00:10:59.260It's a very high bar given the style of thinking on the other side.
00:11:05.260This just strikes me as almost an insuperable problem given how the defenders of Trump don't acknowledge seemingly facts that you have to acknowledge to be sane with respect to his behavior and his obvious lying.
00:11:21.160I mean, the most alarming thing about Trump, from my point of view, is, and this is among many alarming things, but it's the degree to which he lies.
00:11:28.860And the most alarming thing about his defenders is their reluctance to admit this.
00:11:34.220They'll say things like, all politicians lie, as though Trump's lying was of the ordinary sort.
00:11:40.320So even in the most extreme case, you have something like the wiretapping allegation against President Obama.
00:11:45.740The most Republicans in Congress will say at this point is that the president is wrong.
00:11:51.560But that entirely misses the moral and political core of what happened here.
00:11:57.040I mean, the president wasn't wrong in the sense that he was mistaken.
00:12:01.240It's not like he has some information that he misinterpreted in good faith, as anyone might have.
00:12:07.160He made up this allegation to cause chaos, obviously to distract people from some other chaos he caused in a previous news cycle.
00:12:16.780And it's kind of the political equivalent of a suicide bombing.
00:12:21.160It's one of these utterly malicious, slanderous, insane lies that you actually stand no chance of being able to get away with.
00:12:29.140And he tells these sorts of lies all the time, lies of a sort that really cannot be believed.
00:12:35.460Where his line is so obvious that the language game he's playing at that point isn't the ordinary attempt at deception.
00:12:43.080He's just trying to bowl you over with his disregard of the norms of political discourse.
00:12:48.840So, you know, as someone who's a student of this style of communication, where you're kind of the strong man or the autocrat or the highly atypical political figure begins to communicate in this way.
00:13:40.420You can look around the world and you can find similar leaders.
00:13:44.740I mean, the period that I worked on, you know, as a historian is a little different in that, you know, I was writing about the communist parties in the 40s and 50s.
00:13:54.360And they combined lying with violence.
00:13:58.080So, in other words, they lied about what they were doing.
00:14:04.320And then they suppressed people who disagreed with them.
00:14:07.180And I don't think we're dealing with anything like that in the United States.
00:14:11.580And I think it's important to be clear about that.
00:14:13.800This isn't nobody's being forced to believe him as they have been in other countries and other times and places.
00:14:20.320Lying has been very central, actually, to a lot of 20th century governments.
00:14:24.660But the correct comparison to him, though, is if you look at Putin and how he uses lies, and if you look at Chavez and how he used lies, you do see that there are leaders who have used them effectively.
00:14:39.100So, Putin uses them in a very specific way.
00:14:41.340He lies, well, he and the media that he controls.
00:14:46.120And he, again, is in a different position because he controls all the media, which is, again, not the case with Trump.
00:15:04.200Look at what happened after that Malaysian plane crashed in Ukraine a couple of years ago.
00:15:11.100It was shot down by—we now know it was shot down by Russian anti-aircraft weapons, and it crashed in Ukraine, and many people died, including many Dutch people.
00:15:22.840What did the Russian media do after that?
00:15:33.780It was the Ukrainians shot them down because they were aiming at Putin's plane.
00:15:37.260There was another explanation that said there were lots of dead people put on the plane on purpose, and it was crashed on purpose, you know, to discredit Russia.
00:15:44.940There was another—you know, many of them were absurd, the explanations.
00:15:49.620But the proliferation of them was such that it created this massive confusion around that event.
00:15:55.260And Radio Free Europe did a very good series of interviews in Moscow at that time right afterwards, and they asked people on the street, you know, who—why did that plane crash?
00:16:06.080And overwhelmingly, people said things like, oh, we have no idea and we'll never know.
00:16:29.460You know, Putin doesn't want people—he doesn't want people to believe anything because, you know, maybe somebody will eventually print, for example, how much money he really has.
00:16:38.640Or—and actually, you know, many things about his, you know, his colleagues and associates have been printed.
00:16:44.980There has been information about money stolen.
00:16:47.240There's a big piece, actually, in the last few days reported by several newspapers about much of the extent of Russian money laundering in Europe and how much, you know, billions of dollars stolen from the Russian budget and so on.
00:16:58.680So what Putin wants is for all those stories to be undermined.
00:17:02.340You know, so if you tell lots and lots of lies, then people don't really know what to believe and they don't—and I don't want to make a direct analogy to what Trump is doing, but Trump clearly is trying to undermine the, you know, the so-called mainstream media or even, you know, just the media.
00:17:19.640He wants people to doubt what they read.
00:17:21.740He wants his followers not to believe, I don't know, the New York Times or the Washington Post.
00:17:27.660And so, you know, by lying, he obfuscates the whole space in a way.
00:17:32.640You know, the whole media space and the media conversation is thrown into chaos.
00:17:37.140I mean, I think it's really interesting how difficult it is for sort of mainstream reporters—I mean, really, whether they have kind of center-right or center-left views—even to describe what he's doing.
00:17:50.420I mean, for example, you know, as soon as he made that wiretapping claim, Obama denied it almost immediately.
00:17:56.460It was pretty clear to me right away that it wasn't true, you know, that he'd made it up, as you say, to distract from something else.
00:18:03.280But it's very difficult for, you know, in our media environment, it was very hard for people to cope with that.
00:18:09.260And, you know, people kept reporting on it, and they kept asking him questions about it.
00:18:13.640And it was very difficult for us to come to terms with it.
00:18:16.120And I think what it helped to do was undermine the whole idea that the press can report on things that are true and find truth and falsehood and that there's anything that can be true or false at all.
00:18:26.820And, you know, he prefers to exist in a kind of fantasy world where he can make up reality so he can say, I don't know, you know, I won the popular vote in the election where there were millions of people at my inauguration.
00:18:41.200And he wants people to believe that because he wants to create reality and not be, you know, be beholden to reality.
00:18:48.220And lying is one of the ways in which political leaders do that.
00:19:10.500And what's, you know, the interesting thing will be to watch what happens both to the American press and to the American political debate over the next several years.
00:19:18.780And I actually don't I don't have a prediction exactly as I can tell you what happened in, you know, in totalitarian countries where people were forced to believe in lies or were forbidden from contradicting them.
00:19:29.160But how it will work in in in in the United States, I don't know yet.
00:19:34.220You know, in other countries, you get a phenomenon where people separate public life from private life.
00:19:41.220In other words, there's one set of values that apply in the public sphere.
00:19:45.400You know, in the public sphere, you lie.
00:19:47.060And then in the private sphere, you behave differently around your family and your children and so on.
00:19:51.200And maybe something like that will happen in America where people begin to say, right, the public sphere is different.
00:19:57.180And, you know, we behave differently there and we did and we behave differently at home.
00:20:01.340Maybe you will begin to get people cutting themselves off from public life.
00:20:05.400And I've seen this a little bit among people I know.
00:21:09.600I'm sure I'm not the only person who has said this.
00:21:11.520But if Trump were one tenth as bad, he would seem worse.
00:21:16.760Like you can't even keep up with the crazy thing he said a few hours ago because he's he's saying another crazy thing right now.
00:21:24.940And you see, the media just can't even focus on his various crimes and misdemeanors against basic human sanity to say nothing of civility because they come at just so rapidly and they're so enormous.
00:21:40.800But this is we know this in other countries.
00:21:44.460I mean, it's it's a it's a and as I said, people people develop coping mechanisms.
00:21:49.700They cut themselves off or they create, you know, they make a distinction between public and private morality or they, you know, or in some cases they they realize that to get ahead in their job or in their community, they need to pretend to believe it.
00:22:05.340I mean, that's another phenomenon it's worth paying attention to is that, you know, and I think that a lot of the Republicans who defend him or who aren't anyway, don't criticize him or doing it for this reason, you know, so he's set the tone of public life.
00:22:17.860And in order to succeed in his world, whether it's in his cabinet or in his White House or in his or in the Congress that he's president of, people will need to pretend what he's saying is true.
00:22:28.800And that will create another weird level of alternate reality.
00:22:32.720Where, you know, as you say, people can't contradict him because in order to sort of, you know, in the way that, you know, the Communist Party used to say, you know, we've had this tremendous economic success and people would say, yes, we've had tremendous economic success.
00:23:06.600I don't know who this person would be.
00:23:08.120If you have a smart defender of Trump in mind, please name this person because I would love to know such a person exists.
00:23:15.980But what could someone say to argue that none of what we just said matters at all?
00:23:23.220So I do know some people who've defended Trump.
00:23:26.380I won't mention their names because they might not like it.
00:23:28.560But the main defense that I have heard from intelligent Republicans who, you know, care about their country just as much as you and I do, is that there are things that we need to get done.
00:23:41.020That the Republican Congress, you know, which is now united and dominated by the Republicans and we are about to have a Republican dominant or anyway, four to five, if I mean, never quite works out like that.
00:23:52.180But a Supreme Court that will have a conservative majority or might have a conservative majority because you never know how people really vote.
00:23:58.080But, you know, there are now important changes that we can make and we just need to somehow live with Trump and his madness and get around him.
00:24:08.740And the Republican Congress is going to do so many great and important things that we can ignore this.
00:24:19.300Does it go so far as to say that not only is Trump the lesser evil here, it's just not that Clinton was going to be so terrible and make our, you know, our being the rights policy concerns unattainable, but that there's something actually more optimal about Trump than that.
00:24:39.360That what the system needs is this level of chaos or something like it.
00:24:43.840There's that's there's the Steve Bannon anarchy argument or the Peter Thiel anarchy argument, you know, that we need total chaos and revolution and we need to burn everything down.
00:24:53.540And then in the ashes of our country, we will rebuild something better.
00:24:57.200I mean, that but that's, by the way, Bolshevik argument.
00:24:59.660That was the you know, that was the motivating idea of the Russian Revolution, which ended in total disaster.
00:25:05.100I mean, there's no there's no evidence that revolutionary destruction creates anything good ever.
00:25:11.020I mean, there's no historical example you can point to.
00:25:13.360But there are people who believe I mean, there are people who believe that stated that way.
00:25:20.200Did you think Bannon and Thiel and people who subscribe to the wrecking ball theory are imagining that level of real world chaos?
00:25:31.260Or are they just imagining that it can be contained to the bureaucracy of government and that it will kind of clean out that mess of bad incentives and career bureaucrats who staff the administrative state, but that nothing that we really care about will be destroyed?
00:25:52.160So I only know, you know, I'm now repeating what people have said about Bannon or heard him say or, you know, interpreted that, you know, but I'm told that he does believe in a in something quite a lot more than that.
00:26:06.500For example, he would like to have a war with China, you know, because he feels that, you know, we need to bring this crisis to, you know, this competition between our two countries to, you know, to to a head and we need to resolve it.
00:26:18.820And so we need, you know, we need a war and just, you know, desiring a war like that.
00:26:23.700That's another, that's also very Bolshevik.
00:26:25.780I can't, you know, I don't know whether that's true or not, but if it is, then it is a case that they do believe in something quite a bit more than just less bureaucracy.
00:26:35.260Give me the view from across the pond.
00:26:37.420How, what is Trump doing to our standing in the world?
00:26:41.500How did the various European countries view us at the moment?
00:26:46.640I mean, so I live in London, most of the time I live in Warsaw, part of the time I have a kind of foot in different parts of the transatlantic alliance.
00:26:56.580I married to a Pole, you know, who was a, who was in a previous Polish government and who's, you know, was, I watched, you know, Central Europe join NATO, which was very moving at the time.
00:27:08.160And I watched the creation of the expanded transatlantic alliance as it is and the spread of democracy and prosperity across Europe.
00:27:15.220And, you know, the, I mean, first of all, it was clear to me during the campaign that Trump, even by his rhetoric and his behavior, was doing enormous damage to America's reputation.
00:27:25.340But, of course, since he's been in office, it's become much worse.
00:27:29.660You know, he, he, he, you know, the same things that we see at home, of course, are seen abroad.
00:27:35.180I mean, there's no difference anymore.
00:27:36.680And, you know, he, the same tweets that he's tweeting in the United States are read all over the world.
00:27:40.900I mean, I was told there was a department now in the South Korean government that's now devoted to reading Trump's tweets because they need to be, you know, up on them in case, I don't know, in case he accidentally insults South Korea.
00:27:55.240But, I mean, he, he, I mean, first, first of all, the lying, which is perceived as lying abroad just as it is at home.
00:28:01.540But second of all, the open and obvious disregard for America's allies and alliances and traditional friendships, which are not minor and unimportant things and which are not, you know, in which, which have been extremely valuable and important to the United States.
00:28:20.500I mean, one of the bizarre things about Trump, who styles himself as a dealmaker, is that he doesn't seem to understand even, you know, what our alliances are and what they give to us.
00:28:32.080I mean, why does the United States have an outsized footprint all around the world?
00:28:38.840Why, you know, why is the world open to American companies?
00:28:42.380And one of the reasons it and also why are we, why was our strength generally accepted and not fought back against in Europe and other places?
00:28:51.760And part of it is that we are an unusual superpower and that we have created this structure of friends and alliances and like-minded countries who want to cooperate with us in creating international trade agreements and international financial arrangements and ensuring that, you know, the business is, the business is possible for our companies.
00:29:13.800And, you know, the world is open to our diplomats and, you know, the world is open to our diplomats and our tourists and our travelers.
00:29:18.240I mean, there are all kinds of benefits that we have as a nation, both economic and psychological and political, from this enormous web of alliances with other democracies.
00:29:28.960And Trump, by denigrating it, I mean, constantly, actually, all the way through the campaign and right up until really a few days ago, when he once again attacked Germany and Sweden in a strange speech that he gave, you know, at a rally in Florida, he has continually attacked them, you know, over and over again, you know, while appearing to praise dictatorships and particularly Russia.
00:29:52.840And that has alarmed people because, you know, what does it mean?
00:29:56.280Is America not interested in democracy anymore?
00:29:58.460Are we not going to defend our friends anymore?
00:30:00.400Are we not interested in the world that we created?
00:30:04.580I mean, the globalized world, you know, we call it globalization.
00:30:08.900Actually, you know, in a lot of ways, it's been Americanization.
00:30:12.020I mean, it's been people accepting our norms and our ways of behavior and our, you know, our understanding about economics.
00:30:18.360You know, the free trade is an American, really, it's an Anglo-American idea.
00:30:23.000The British championed it in the 19th century, but we championed it now.
00:30:25.920This is our, the world that we wanted and that we've stood behind and we're the, you know, we wrote the rules.
00:30:32.700So are we now going to unwrite all that?
00:30:36.560Are we going to, you know, go backwards?
00:30:38.420And it's been, it's very confusing for our allies.
00:30:40.580And for people who don't like the United States, it's been, I mean, it's a combination of them feeling quite nervous about it, about us and not being sure what we'll do anymore.
00:30:50.260But it's also, you know, a green light.
00:30:52.900Okay, America doesn't care anymore about democracy.
00:30:55.740You know, that makes it easier for us to beat up on our dissidents.
00:30:58.520So I think there's been a, you know, I think that his, his, this, the two months of his presidency have had a profound negative and, you know, maybe irreversible effect on America's impact in the world and America's presence in the world.
00:31:13.240I mean, it's, it's, I mean, this is something I did try to talk about before the election, you know, quite a lot.
00:31:17.540And I don't know that, you know, and one of the things I'm worried about is that I don't know that Americans understand this anymore.
00:31:22.680I don't know how, how, how, if Americans are aware of the degree to which this is their world, you know, that they created with their rules and that we had been the main beneficiaries of it.
00:31:34.900Yeah. So could you just reflect on the, on the, the concept of soft power?
00:31:39.200It seems like that's what you've been describing, but it's not a concept that most people I think are familiar with.
00:31:44.340So soft power is the, is the power that we exert through, through being, for example, the world leader in education, you know, that, that people want to come and study in our country.
00:32:09.580It's power through that we set by example.
00:32:11.840I mean, for example, you know, it's, it's a, it's a side issue, but, but an important one.
00:32:16.780The fact that Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state has stated that he doesn't want to bring reporters with him anymore when he travels.
00:32:23.960Well, you know, one of the things that when the secretary of state brings reporters to, for example, China and has an open dialogue with them, one of the things that does is it shows, look, this is the American system.
00:32:52.660He's a, he's a secretive leader, just like one of ours.
00:32:55.120You know, he becomes less, you know, less interesting to, to people who want to want China to evolve.
00:32:59.640So, you know, the soft powers, the things that we do that, that aren't military, that nevertheless create American influence.
00:33:07.760And this is one of the things that Americans have excelled at and that we've been particularly good at over the last several decades is exporting our model.
00:33:16.620You know, things that values that we believe in all over the world, not through military force, but through, as I say, the power of example, through media, through education and other things.
00:33:26.720And that even leaves aside economic power, which is another source of power.
00:33:30.180The idea that military power is our only, is the only thing we have is absurd.
00:33:35.140I mean, of course it helps and it's very important, particularly in particular circumstances, but, but American power and strength comes from people admiring us and wanting to be like us as much as it comes from anything else.
00:33:49.020I want to get into Russia and that tightly wound, not in a moment, but just to stay on this point of foreign perception of our travails at the moment.
00:34:00.180How does our response to Trump, such as it is, appear to our allies abroad?
00:34:09.700I mean, how does it look like this investigation into Russia ties that's to whatever degree being midwifed by the Republicans in Congress?
00:34:18.360How does our response look to the rest of the world?
00:34:21.560Our system is not collapsing, obviously, but, you know, the fact that we were successfully promoted someone like Trump and are now so tongue tied in addressing, you know, what to me is his obvious unfitness for the role of the presidency.
00:34:39.580It looks like American democracy is precarious in a way that I don't think anyone previously could have imagined.
00:34:49.220Yes, I've had a lot of sort of hysterical Germans wanting to know, you know, is this the Fourth Reich, you know, is, is, is, is totalitarianism rising in America?
00:34:59.460And I think actually I've mostly suggested that that's not the case.
00:35:03.100I mean, a lot depends, I think it's a little early, actually, because a lot depends on how our democracy does react to him.
00:35:10.980You know, how, how do we deal with him?
00:35:13.440You know, what does happen in these hearings?
00:35:15.320You know, are we, you know, is our system able to cope with a liar?
00:35:19.440You know, is it able to cope with somebody with these authoritarian tendencies, you know, and if it, if it, if it turns out that it can, which I think it's too early to say that it can't, I think, I think it may very well might be able to, then I think American proxy will look stronger to people, American democracy will look stronger to people.
00:35:39.740So I think, you know, certainly it's true that the outside world is gripped by the Russian story, partly because particularly in Europe, I can say, you know, there's really no country in Europe that doesn't have a similar story.
00:35:53.860I mean, there is, you know, enormous amount of, you know, attempted Russian influence in really every country in Europe.
00:36:00.900And in some cases I've, it's already shaped elections and it's already shaped political narratives and people are very aware of the problem.
00:36:07.980So watching how that comes out, I think will have an enormous impact on other countries, particularly European countries.
00:36:14.480Well, that's a great background point to make because obviously Trump's defenders will say that the Russian story is just a conspiracy theory, right?
00:36:23.780As though Russia, there's no evidence that Russia ever does anything like this.
00:36:27.680No, no, no. I mean, so the Russian story is, so I saw it last summer when it started.
00:36:31.980I knew exactly what it was as soon as the first week makes just before the Democratic Convention.
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