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On Trump's "Spectacle of Power" - A New Interview With Anne Applebaum

Few have taught me more about our current moment than Anne Applebaum - excited to bring her insights into the Hopium community

Simon Rosenberg

Jun 25

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Afternoon all. Sending along a comprehensive new interview we just completed with Pulitzer Prize winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum. Anne has been one of my most important teachers in this new Trump era, and I am really excited to be able to bring her and her insights into the Hopium community.

I asked Anne to join us after reading her two most recent articles:

This Is What Trump Does When The Revolution Sputters - The Atlantic
Trump Has No Strategy - From her Substack

I found her two big arguments in these articles persuasive and very relevant to our work at Hopium. They are:

1) that Trump really has no strategy, and just focuses each day on “winning”

2) that as his regime falters and he grows more unpopular, he is ratcheting up what she calls the “spectacle of power.”

We discuss these arguments in the interview, and also touch on Trump’s NATO trip and his abandonment of Europe; her early thinking about what is happening now in Iran; and the Trump team’s tragic evisceration of the ways Americans have promoted democracy and freedom around the world for generations. Or as we call it here at Hopium “making Russia and China great again.”

At the end we discuss what Americans can do now to counter Trump, and I was pleased to be able to share with her the news about the passage of our two resolutions in New Mexico yesterday.

Get to this interview when you can. Few have taught me more about how to understand this moment we find ourselves in today than Anne. It was a great thrill for me that she was able to join us today from Warsaw. I promise our discussion will be worth your time…..

Keep fighting everyone - Simon

Anne’s Bio

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is also a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the School of Advanced International Studies. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Her most recent books include the New York Times best sellers Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. She was a Washington Post columnist for 15 years and a member of the editorial board. She has also been the deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.