(OPINION) Anne Applebaum has been writing about government, from democracies to autocracies, for more than 30 years. Yet former President Donald Trump, she emphasized on this week’s episode of Mediate’s Press Club, is changing U.S. politics in ways she’s never seen before.
“American politicians have been racist before, we’ve called one another traitors and unpatriotic. We haven’t talked about one another as being insects or vermin or parasites,” she told Mediate editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin about Trump’s recent uptick in dehumanizing language.
Last week, she published a piece in The Atlantic that compared Trump’s rhetoric to infamous dictators Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin.
The piece came days before former Trump chief of staff John Kelly went on the record to say that Trump had openly spoke of his admiration for Hitler during his first term.
Applebaum warned that while her piece focused strictly on Trump’s rhetoric, his actions in office could be far worse. “Democracies nowadays fall through because legitimately elected people who have respect for the institutions of the system take them apart. And would Trump do that if he can? Yes, I think he would,” she said.
Applebaum is also out with a new book, Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want To Run The World, in which she details the extensive and complex networks autocrats use to stay in power.
Elon Musk, a powerful booster of Trump, has acted this election cycle in a way that mirrors this phenomenon. He was recently accused of breaking the law through his attempt to influence the election through his vast fortune.
“Offering $1 million to random people isn’t something that we’ve ever had before in an American election campaign. This is a dangerous precedent,” Applebaum said.
She also spoke about the similarities between Trump’s rhetoric and what she found in her research from the Stasi archives of East Germany’s secret police, what she fears most about the election in November, and a 2002 story she wrote about the Israel-Palestine conflict that has sparked fresh controversy.
