Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on How a Good History Book ‘Defeats Expectations’)

"As a historian, you're often at war with clichés, which are something similar to expectations. People have stereotyped images of the past; I seek to make them more complicated. In that sense, any good history book defeats expectations because it offers a richer tapestry, a more complicated version of what most people think happened. History can also alter how we think about the future. Although history does not provide a road map of what to expect in the future, it does tell you what kinds of situations should cause concern.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum quoted in “Soapbox: The Columnists; WSJ. Asks Six Luminaries To Weigh in on Single Topic; This Month: Expectations,” WSJ. Magazine, Nov. 27, 2017

The image of Anne Applebaum that accompanies this post was taken on Oct. 15, 2024, by Mateusz Skwarczek.

Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on American Culture, ‘No Longer Synonymous With the Aspiration to Freedom’)

“American culture is no longer synonymous with the aspiration to freedom, but with transactionalism and secrecy: the algorithms that mysteriously determine what you see, the money collected by anonymous billionaires, the deals that the American president is making with world leaders that benefit himself and maybe others whose names we don’t know. America was always associated with capitalism, business, and markets, but nowadays there’s no pretense that anyone else will be invited to share the wealth. USAID is gone; American humanitarianism is depleted; America’s international medical infrastructure was dismantled so quickly that people died in the process. The image of the ugly American always competed with the image of the generous American. Now that the latter has disappeared, the only Americans anyone can see are the ones trying to rip you off.”— Pulitzer-prize winning American historian Anne Applebaum, “The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark,” The Atlantic, November 2025

By all means, as you’re watching Ken Burns’ multi-part documentary on the American Revolution this week, please read as many articles as you can from The Atlantic’s November issue, which is entirely devoted to “The Unfinished Revolution.”

In this year of PBS budget cuts, Burns has been enormously careful in interviews not to sound like he’s taking an ideological, let alone party, side. That won’t stop those inclined from thinking he is indeed “woke.”

For those like me who fear that he might pull his punches, The Atlantic will provide some much-needed perspective, especially the pieces by Applebaum, Fintan O’Toole (“What the Founders Would Say Now”), and David Brooks (“The Rising”). They remind us that the commitment to equality and against despotism was a near-run thing 250 years ago, and perhaps even more so today.

Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on How Kleptocracies Spread From Russia)

“Since the 1990s, the kleptocratic model created in Russia has spread much further. From Angola to Zimbabwe, dictators with access to hidden sources of wealth are better able to resist demands for political change. They can hide their families and their property abroad. They can finance bribery and influence operations. The aura of secrecy they build is also part of what keeps them in power. Ordinary Russians, ordinary Chinese or ordinary Venezuelans are not allowed to know why their rulers, and their rulers’ friends and their families, are billionaires, because they’re not meant to have any influence or understanding or knowledge of politics at all. That lack of knowledge creates a sense of helplessness, apathy, even despair.”— Pulitzer-prize winning American historian Anne Applebaum, “Follow the Money,” The Financial Times, Aug. 31-Sept. 1, 2024

With Donald Trump’s election to a second term, the United States has officially joined—or, I should say, rejoined—the ranks of the dubious global fraternity of kleptocracies—i.e., governments with leaders who seek personal gain and status at the expense of those they govern.

In an interview last month with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitutional Center, Applebaum not only discussed how the kleptocratic model exemplified by Vladimir Putin (pictured) operates in autocracies across the world, but also how it figures in the case of Trump, whose “primary concern at all times is himself and his own finances and his own power.”

Even while President, Applebaum notes, the autocrat-curious politico maintained the practice he’d begun in his days as a New York real estate mogul of selling condos in Trump-branded or Trump-owned buildings to anonymous people, whose intentions—including whether they were out to bribe or influence White House officials—were unknown.

The potential for conflicts of interest was clear, a situation only worsened by how Trump flouted prior Presidential procedures for blind trusts. Though ostensibly turning over management of the Trump Organization to his two eldest sons after becoming President in 2017, he still received updates on the family-owned trust and remained its chief beneficiary.

Just as the Former and Future Guy made a farce of the notion of a “blind trust,” the Supreme Court did so with the belief that justice is blind. 

In a preview of its extraordinary deference in this past session in granting Trump broad immunity from prosecution for “official acts,” the Roberts Court dismissed in 2021 two cases involving his violations of the Constitution’s “emoluments clauses” for preventing Presidential corruption. (See Ciara Torres-Spelliscy’s excellent summary from that time for the Brennan Center for Justice.)

I have taken particular interest in Trump’s use of the U.S. government as a virtual slot machine for the Trump Organization because one instance of it occurred not far from my family’s ancestral homeland in County Clare, Ireland.

In September 2019, taxpayers footed a $15,000 bill for Secret Service lodging for Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to Ireland. The lucky beneficiary of this largesse? Trump’s Doonbeg resort, which he had already spent $41 million to buy, renovate and operate without returning a profit to that point. 

It was all part of a pattern in which Trump made $82 million from his three properties in Ireland and Scotland through often convoluted and unnecessary travel itineraries and exorbitant tacked-on charges, according to Rebecca Jacobs’ June 2023 report for the ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Even while in office, the Trump Organizations maintained ethically and legally questionable investments involving Trump International Hotel, New York’s Trump World Tower, Dubai’s Trump International Golf Club, trademarks in China, and royalties from The Apprentice and its spinoffs in multiple countries.

Then, while Trump planned his return to power, son-in-law Jared Kushner, while publicly withdrawing from campaign appearances, secured a $2 billion investment from a Saudi Arabian fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as well as $157.5 million in management fees from foreign investors for work expected to be completed in 2024.

Let’s stop for a second on that last item. Mohammed bin Salman—you may remember him as “MBS,” the shadowy potentate credibly charged with ordering the October 2018 assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Is it necessary to spell out the obvious implications of the Kushner deal for diplomacy and influence peddling?

The naturalist writer Frank Norris titled his 1901 novel of corruption by a massive railroad conglomerate The Octopus. With the resounding victory of MAGA forces this week, American voters have given carte blanche to the Trump Octopus.

Presidents' financial misdeeds are not as easy to understand as their infidelities, but they are more important to know if we hope to grasp how the long-term interests of the American people can be subverted. 

Despite Trump’s war against the group he calls “the enemy of the people,” the press owes it to the republic to continue and even amplify its reporting on the President-elect’s festering corruption—and Americans in turn owe it to themselves to pay attention and act accordingly.

Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on the Business Links Among Dictators)

"Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another—and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America….

“Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.”—American journalist Anne Applebaum, “The Autocrats Are Winning,” The Atlantic, December 2021

Russia’s Vladimir Putin—featured prominently in Ms. Applebaum’s informative and disturbing cover story of last month’s issue of The Atlantic, as well as in the photo accompanying this post—might not lead a sprawling international bloc dedicated to one ideology, the way Soviet dictators for most of the 20^th century did.

But he is certainly a charter member of and inspiration for what Ms. Applebaum calls “Autocracy Inc.” Combining the black arts of disinformation and dissent-crushing he learned while in the KGB with the realization that capitalism provides rich new opportunities for corruption that can sustain him in power, he has pioneered the most disturbing form of top-down control seen so far in the 21^st century.

In judging the value of American politicians and pundits, it’s not a bad yardstick to see which ones have continued to hail Putin for his strength (as discussed in Jonathan Chait’s March 2021 piece for New York Magazine), even as his methods of corruption, harassment and murder have become all too brazen.

Essay: The Parallel Transatlantic Crises

“I’ve so far resisted these comparisons, but now Britain’s political crisis [i.e., Boris Johnson 'proroguing' Parliament for more than a month, in an unprecedented move to short-circuit discussion of his 'no-deal' Brexit] really does resemble the parallel crisis in the United States. A ruthless executive is pushing the outer bounds of what is constitutionally possible in order to achieve unpopular outcomes. A ruling party that is afraid for its own electoral future is shamefacedly supporting him. A divided opposition seeks to block him but doesn’t have a popular leader itself. A conservative party is using populist slogans that undermine national institutions. Old precedents and customs are being abandoned at great speed, leaving only a vacuum in their wake.”—Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2019

There are even more parallels not mentioned by Ms. Applebaum between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump: 

*Both are tonsorially challenged clowns with neither executive ability nor respect for truth, perpetrating breakdowns in their country’s essential legislative function.

*Both Trump and Johnson lead a base worried by deteriorating order and challenges to traditional values, despite these "populists" own extremely untidy personal lives.

*Both came to power by emerging from the socioeconomic flotsam of the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis, exploiting the fears of foreigners left in its wake.

*Both found their causes aided by trolls and bots associated with Russia (yes, the British are investigating how Putin propaganda aided the Brexit campaign, according to this NPR interview with Jane Mayer; as for Trump, not one of the President’s most raucous defenders can explain the extraordinary coincidence of Russia releasing the Wikileaks files on Hillary Clinton less than 24 hours after The Donald urged it to do so).

*Both are calling for stronger trade ties between their countries, as a seeming counter-move against the Economic Union (EU)--a strategy that plays into Putin's hopes of undermining economic and military alliances. 

*Both the Trump and Brexit campaigns used Steve Bannon as their scurvy strategist.

*Both leaders have created a ruckus over border security: Trump, by squawking about a wall with Mexico (and even transferring Defense Dept. money for other projects to try to speed its construction); Johnson, by ignoring concerns that lack of a EU “backstop” would doom the fragile tranquility prevailing in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement two decades ago.

*Both have crashed through unwritten rules of law and conduct that restrained predecessors in their countries’ highest office.

*Both have a penchant for insult: Johnson derided opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn as “you great big girl's blouse," while Trump has insulted someone on Twitter pretty close to every day.

*Both now pose a fundamental threat not just to the economy and governance of their countries, but to the faith that other nations place in the U.K. and U.S. as birthplaces of liberty.

So far, only one major difference exists in the ascent to power of Trump and Johnson: In the latter’s first week in office, a coalition of 21 Conservative Party Members of Parliament—including former Cabinet ministers—allied with the opposition to force him to make a Brexit deal or request another extension till early 2020. No such public, principled cohort has emerged to restrain Trump. 

Over the years, I have been critical of much British governmental policy (including its misbegotten colonial legacy), but this week, I have to tip my hat to a legislature that, unlike ours, has enough members who refuse to be bullied into meekly abdicating their time-honored responsibilities.

(Photo of Boris Johnson taken as an MP, July 27, 2016.)