Forget “it’s morning in America.” Right now it feels like the US in the middle of a long, dark night.
Like many of you I imagine, I’ve been fixated by Los Angeles this week. The armed troops. The aggressive immigration raids. The eerie sense that the whole thing is a set piece for TV, produced by the ultimate show runner, Donald J. Trump.
The numbers defy logic. There are now more troops in LA than in Iraq and Syria combined.
And consider this: the last time a US president overrode a state to deploy the National Guard was in 1965 - when Lyndon Johnson sent troops into Alabama to protect civil rights marchers.
So what exactly is happening in Los Angeles? What is Trump trying to achieve?
To help answer that, I was joined today by Anne Applebaum—a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, Atlantic staff writer, and one of the world’s leading experts on how authoritarian leaders dismantle institutions and turn democracies into autocracies.
Our conversation began with LA and Anne’s most recent Atlantic article, which sees this moment not as a show of strength, but as evidence that Trump’s revolution is facing resistance—from the courts, from citizens, and from what remains of America’s institutional guardrails.
In response, Trump and key allies like Stephen Miller appear to be following a familiar authoritarian script: “to provoke, to divide, and then to allow the revolutionaries to suspend the law, create an emergency, and rule by decree.”
In an ominous speech at Fort Bragg yesterday, Trump reverted to the dehumanizing rhetoric he used during the election campaign, calling protesters “animals” and “a foreign enemy,” language that seems to give permission to the Marines to kill people. Even if this confrontation ends without violence, the presence of the military in Los Angeles breaks another set of norms and prepares the way for another escalation, another set of emergency decrees, another opportunity to discard the rule of law later on.
Trump sent in the National Guard under the pretense of quelling unrest—unrest that his own administration helped incite. It’s a textbook authoritarian move. As Anne noted during our half-hour discussion: “Nobody in LA asked for this.”
We talked about the coalition driving Trump’s movement: a mix of techno-authoritarians, Christian nationalists, and old-school MAGA loyalists, united by a common contempt for the modern American state—and for the very concept of institutional checks and balances.
As well as Trump’s revolutionary ambitions - and whether he really could suspend future elections - we also discussed the two driving motives of his White House: expanding his power, and looting the state.
Bloomberg suggests Trump has doubled his net worth to about $5.4 billion since the early days of his re-election campaign. As Anne put it, “this is already the most corrupt administration we have had in American history.”
Anne was speaking to us from Poland - which has just elected its own populist president (after some not so subtle pressure from Trump’s acolytes). Has MAGA become its own ideological export? (Tariff-free, of course.)
We ended our conversation with what I think is the most urgent question of all: What can we, as citizens, actually do to resist the rise of authoritarianism?
Anne offered thoughtful, grounded insights—on the power of peaceful protest, the importance of civic institutions, and the critical need for sustained engagement.
It’s a vital conversation for this moment. I hope you find it as illuminating as I did.
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I also wanted to tell you about another exciting live discussion on Democracy for Sale this week.
Tomorrow (Friday June 13) at 13.00 BST I’ll be speaking with author and journalist James Bloodworth about his compelling new book, Lost Boys. We’ll be diving into the manosphere, social media and why, and how, a generation of young men is being targeted and recruited online by the far right. Click here to join!
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