FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH with Blake Melnick
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH with Blake Melnick
Making Sense of it All with Anne Applebaum (in absentia)
What drives individuals to align with or resist oppressive regimes? #AnneApplebaum's compelling essay originally published in the #Atlantic in 2020 #HistoryWillJudgetheComplicit, digs into the complex motivations that underpin political behaviours, through the telling of stories from real people and real experiences.
Through her writing we can begin to understand #DonaldTrump and untangle the enigma of Republican responses to his presidency. Applebaum's essay delves into the contrasting political paths of #MittRomney and #LindseyGraham, whose decisions during Trump's era raise thought-provoking questions about loyalty, ideology, and personal conviction. How do their stories reflect broader patterns of complicity and resistance in the face of authoritarianism? We take a critical look at the Trump administration's impact on American politics, drawing connections to historical instances of political resistance and the enduring struggle between personal values and public pressure and the darker side of human nature.
Finally, Applebaum's helps us reflect on the themes of collaboration and complicity within the Republican Party, as we ponder the upcoming Canadian election, and think deeply about who will best serve our collective interests during this critical time in our history. Tune in again on Friday February 7th for Part 2 of #MakingSenseofitAll. And please share this episode with anyone concerned about the state of democracy in the U.S. , Canada and around the world ...for what it's worth
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The music for this episode, We Rise We Fall, is performed by our current artist in residence, #TracyJones from his album #LuckyTime
You can find out more about Tracy by visiting the Blog Post for his episode
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Well, welcome to this week's episode of For what it's Worth called Making Sense of it All. I'm your host, blake Melnick, and this is the next installment in our series in the company of readers and writers. Well, talk about change. I was away in New Zealand for a month over the holidays, during which time I untethered myself from news and my social media feeds in order to spend time with the three people I love most in the world my wife and two daughters. This was really a gift to myself. New Zealand was a beautiful and uncomplicated place, ideal for spending quality time with family. I had the opportunity to listen to all their collective concerns, opinions, aspirations and fears. We discuss deeply and debate it often, as is common in our family, and something we collectively value. Just prior to leaving on our trip, I was invited to speak at the Growing your Workforce conference in Windsor, ontario. My presentation was focused on addressing concerns I've had for the past 20 years about Canada's declining capacity and capability for innovation the subject of a soon-to-be-released episode of the show, by the way and it was while I was at this conference, looking out over the Detroit River, that the soon-to-be president, donald Trump, began talking about imposing tariffs on Canada.
Blake Melnick:When I returned from New Zealand and plugged back in just prior to Trump's inauguration, so much had changed. Justin Trudeau announced his resignation and made the decision to prorogue Parliament until a new Liberal Party leader could be found. Much to the chagrin of Pierre Bollievre, mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland had thrown their hats in the ring to run for the Liberal Party and replace Trudeau as Prime Minister prior to the next federal election, and Donald Trump repeated his desire to annex Canada and have us become the 51st state, and that he would use tariffs as a means of economic coercion. In addition, trump wanted to buy Greenland, take back control of the Panama Canal, and so on. While this was going on, mysteriously, an article from the Atlantic actually a really long essay titled History Will Judge the Complicit, by Ann Applebaum, popped up at the top of my news feed and, being somewhat of a history buff, I began to read the essay. It had a profound impact. There's an old proverb there are three truths my truth, your truth and the truth. In this social media-influenced world in which we live, we are bombarded with conflicting opinions my truth and your truth and with all of this noise, the truth is often obscured. The reason Applebaum's essay resonated with me was because I instinctively knew it was true. Instinctively knew it was true. Why? Well, not just because it presented irrefutable historical evidence, but also because it presented human emotions, reactions and justifications that I recognized immediately in myself, in others and in the context of my lived experience in others and in the context of my lived experience. But perhaps the main reason I recognize the ring of truth in this essay that mysteriously appeared in my feed was it was written in 2020. So we can judge its veracity because we've witnessed it unfold.
Blake Melnick:There has been a barrage of news reports and articles with countless opinions as to why Donald Trump is behaving the way he is during his very short term in office, opinions attempting to both understand and, in many cases, rationalize Trump's motivation and his end goals. Why would he attack Canada with punishing tariffs, our closest ally and friend? Doesn't he realize that mass deportation of immigrants, both legal and illegal, will cause a decline in America's GDP and potentially, a brain drain? Doesn't he understand the cost of tariffs will ultimately be borne by the average American citizen, stoking inflation and making it harder for middle-class Americans to make ends meet? Why is he dismantling the public service? He is creating countless job losses and economic insecurity amongst the people he stated he was trying to help. These are the wrong questions. What's more interesting and the more important questions are why are people supporting and enabling Trump? Why are they remaining silent in the face of these apparent contradictions and in the face of actions that are seemingly inconsistent with their long-held values and democratic principles, as defined in the American Constitution and supported by the rule of law? Applebaum's thought-provoking essay helps make sense of it all for what it's worth.
Blake Melnick:On a cold March afternoon in 1949, wolfgang Lillard slipped out of the East German Communist Party secretariat, hurried home, packed what few warm clothes he could fit into a small briefcase, and then walked to a telephone box to call his mother my article will be finished this evening, he told her. That was the code they had agreed on in advance. It meant that he was escaping the country at great risk to his life. Though only 28 years old at the time, leonhard stood at the pinnacle of the New East German elite. The son of German communists, he had been educated in the Soviet Union, trained in special schools during the war, and brought back to Berlin from Moscow in May 1945 on the same airplane that carried Walter Albrecht, the leader of what would soon become the East German Communist Party. Leonhard was put on a team charged with recreating Berlin's city government. He had one central task to ensure that any local leaders who emerged from the post-war chaos were assigned deputies loyal to the party. It's got to look democratic, ulbricht told him. But we must have everything in our control.
Blake Melnick:Leonhard had lived through a great deal by that time. While he was a teenager in Moscow, his mother had been arrested as an enemy of the people and sent to Vorkuta, a labor camp in the far north. He had witnessed the terrible poverty and inequality of the Soviet Union. He had despaired of the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941, and he knew about the Red Army's mass rapes of women following the occupation. Yet he and his ideologically committed friends instinctively recalled from the thought that any of these events were in diametrical opposition to our socialist ideals. Steadfastly he clung to the belief system he had grown up with.
Blake Melnick:The turning point when it came was trivial. While walking down the hall of the Central Committee building, he was stopped by a pleasant-looking middle-aged man a comrade recently arrived from the West, who asked where to find the dining room. Leonard told him the answer depended on what sort of meal ticket he had. Different ranks of officials had access to different dining rooms. The comrade was astonished. But aren't they all members of the party? Vyadat walked away and entered his own top category dining room, where white cloths covered the tables and high-ranking functionaries received three-course meals. He felt ashamed, curious. I thought that this had never struck me before. That was when he began to have the doubts that eventually led him to plot his escape. At exactly the same moment, in exactly the same city, another high ranking East German was coming to precisely the opposite set of conclusions.
Blake Melnick:Marcus Wolff was also the son of a prominent German communist family. He also spent his childhood in the Soviet Union, attending the same elite schools for children of foreign communists as Leonhard did, as well as the same wartime training camp. The two had shared a bedroom there, solemnly calling each other by their aliases. These were the rules of deconspiracy, although they knew each other's names perfectly well. Wolf also witnessed the mass arrests, the purges and the poverty of the Soviet Union, and he also kept faith with the cause of the Soviet Union. And he also kept faith with the cause. He arrived in Berlin just a few days after Lerat on another plane, full of trusted comrades and immediately began hosting a program on the new Soviet-backed radio station. For many months he ran the popular you Ask, we Answer. He gave online answers to listeners' letters, often concluding with some form of these difficulties are being overcome with the help of the Red Army.
Blake Melnick:In August 1947, the two men met at Wolfe's luxurious five-roomed apartment not far from what was then the headquarters of the radio station. They drove to Wolfe's house, a fine villa in the neighborhood of Lake Glenaca. They took a walk around the lake and Wolf warned Leonard that changes were coming. He told him to give up hoping that German communism would be allowed to develop differently from the Soviet version. That idea long ago, the goal of many German party members, was about to be dropped. When Leonard argued that this could not be true, he was personally in charge of ideology and no one had told him anything about a change in direction Wolf laughed at him. There are higher authorities than your central secretariat, he said. Wolf made clear that he had better contacts and more important friends. At the age of 24, he was an insider and Lelad understood finally that he was a functionary in an occupied country where the Soviet Communist Party, not the German Communist Party had the last word.
Blake Melnick:Famously, or perhaps infamously, marcus Wolff's career continued to flourish after that. Not only did he stay in East Germany, he rose through the ranks of its nomenclature to become the country's top spy. He was the second ranked official at the Ministry of State Security, better known as the Stasi. He was often described as the model for the Carla character in John le Carré's spy novels. In the course of his career, his Directorate for Reconnaissance recruited agents in the offices of the West German Chancellor and just about every other department of government, as well as at NATO. Lidhad meanwhile became a prominent critic of the regime. He wrote and lectured in West Berlin, at Oxford, at Columbia, and eventually he wound up at Yale, where his lecture course left an impression on several generations of students. Among them, it was a future US president, george W Bush, who described Leonhard's course as an introduction to the struggle between tyranny and freedom. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, leonhard's course on Soviet history was the most popular course on campus.
Blake Melnick:Separately, each man's story makes sense, but when examined together they require some deeper explanation. Until March 1949, leonard's and Wolf's biographies were strikingly similar. Both grew up inside the Soviet system, both were educated in communist ideology and both had the same values. Both knew that the party was undermining those values. Both knew that the system allegedly built to values, both knew that the system allegedly built to promote equality was deeply unequal, profoundly unfair and very cruel. Like their counterparts in so many other times and places, both men could plainly see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator, while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals.
Blake Melnick:Why In English the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator relevant here is different Someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers At base. The ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason betrayal of one's nation, of one's ideology, of one's morality, of one's values.
Blake Melnick:Since the Second World War, historians and political scientists have tried to explain why some people, in extreme circumstances, become collaborators and others do not. The late Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffman had first-hand knowledge of the subject as a child. He and his mother hid from the Nazis in La Manouelle-et-Bain, a village in the south of France. But he was modest about his own conclusions, noting that a careful historian would have almost to write a huge series of case histories, for there seemed to have been almost as many collaborationalisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration. Still, hoffman made a stab at classification, beginning with a division of collaborators into voluntary and involuntary. Many people in the latter group had no choice, forced into reluctant recognition of necessity that they could not avoid dealing with the Nazi occupiers who were running their country.
Blake Melnick:Hoffman further sorted the more enthusiastic voluntary collaborators into two additional categories. The first were those who worked with the enemy in the name of national interest, rationalizing collaboration as something necessary for the preservation of the French economy or the French culture, though of course many people who made these arguments had other professional or economic motives too. In the second there were the truly active ideological collaborators, people who believed that pre-war Republican France had been weak or corrupt and hoped that the Nazis would straighten it, people who admired fascism and people who admired Hitler. Hoffman observed that many of those who became ideological collaborators were landowners and aristocrats, the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community, people who perceived themselves as part of a natural ruling class that had been unfairly deprived of power under the left-wing governments of France in the 1930s. Equally motivated to collaborate were their polar opposites, the social misfits and political deviants who, in the normal course of events, never would have made successful careers of any kind. What brought these people together was a common conclusion that whatever they had thought about Germany before 1940, their political and personal futures would now be improved by aligning themselves with the occupiers.
Blake Melnick:Unlike Hoffman, czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country's communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime and dissect his experience. In the famous essay the Captive Mind, he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people, all writers and intellectuals, each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party. Many were careerists, but Milos understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation.
Blake Melnick:To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the masses, to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration was also a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace. It meant that they were no longer consistently at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual had accepted that there is no other way, milos wrote. He eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns, he sits down and writes a positive article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.
Blake Melnick:And Milos is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas. We all feel the urge to conform. It is the most normal of human desires to conform. It is the most normal of human desires. And I was reminded of this recently when I visited Miriam Berthler in her light-filled apartment in Berlin During the 1980s.
Blake Melnick:Berthler was one of a very small number of active dissidents in East Germany. Later, in reunified Germany, she spent more than a decade running the Stasi archive, the collection of former East German secret police files. I asked her whether she could identify among her cohort a set of circumstances that had inclined some people to collaborate with the Stasi. She was put off by the question. Collaboration wasn't interesting, bertha told me. Almost everyone was a collaborator. 99% of East Germans collaborated. If they weren't working with the Stasi, then they were working with the party or with the system more generally. Much more interesting and far harder to explain Much more interesting and far harder to explain, was the genuinely mysterious question of why people went against the regime. The puzzle is not why Markus Wolf remained in East Germany, in other words, but why Wolfgang Leonhard did not.
Blake Melnick:Here is another pair of stories, one that will be more familiar to American readers. Let's begin this one in the 1980s, when a young Lindsey Graham first served with the Judge Advocate General's Corps, the military legal service in the US Air Force. During some of that time, graham was based in what was then East Germany, on the cutting edge of America's Cold War efforts. Graham, born and raised in a small town in South Carolina, was devoted to the military After both his parents died when he was in his 20s. He got himself and his younger sister through college with the help of an ROTC stipend and then an Air Force salary. He stayed in the reserves for two decades, even while in the Senate, sometimes journeying to Iraq or Afghanistan to serve as a short-term reserve officer. The Air Force has been one of the best things that's ever happened to me, he said in 2025. It gave me purpose bigger than myself. It put me in the company of patriots. Through most of his years in the Senate, graham, alongside his close friend John McCain, was a spokesperson for a strong military and for a vision of America as a democratic leader. Abroad, he also supported a vigorous notion of democracy at home. Abroad, he also supported a vigorous notion of democracy at home. In his 2014 re-election campaign, he ran as a maverick and a centrist, telling the Atlantic that jousting with the Tea Party was more fun than any time I've been in politics.
Blake Melnick:When Graham was doing his tour in West Germany, mitt Romney became a co-founder and then president of Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm. Born in Michigan, romney worked in Massachusetts during his years at Bain, but he also kept, thanks to his Mormon faith, close ties to Utah. While Graham was a military lawyer drawing military pay, romney was acquiring companies, restructuring them and then selling them. In 1990, he was asked to run the parent company, bain Company, and, in the course of doing so, he became very rich. Still, romney dreamed of a political career and in 1994, he ran for the Senate in Massachusetts, after changing his political affiliation from independent to Republican. He lost, but in 2002, he ran for the governor of Massachusetts as a nonpartisan moderate and won. In 2007, after a gubernational term during which he successfully brought in a form of near-univers universal health care that became a model for Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, he staged his first run for president After losing the 2008 Republican primary. He won the party's nomination in 2012 and then lost the general election.
Blake Melnick:Both Graham and Romney had presidential ambitions. Graham staged his own short-lived presidential campaign in 2015, justified on the grounds that the world is falling apart. Both men were loyal members of the Republican Party, skeptical of the party's radical and spiritual fringe. Both men reacted to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump with real anger, and no wonder. In different ways, trump's values undermined their own. Graham had dedicated his career to an idea of US leadership around the world, whereas Trump was offering an American first doctrine that would turn out to mean me and my friends. Romney was an excellent businessman with a strong record as a public servant, whereas Trump inherited wealth, went bankrupt more than once, created nothing of value and had no governing record at all.
Blake Melnick:Both Graham and Romney were devoted to America's democratic traditions and to the ideals of honesty, accountability and transparency in public life, all of which Trump scorned. Both were vocal in their disapproval of Trump Before the election. Graham called him a jackass, a nutjob and a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He seemed unhappy, even depressed, by the election. Romney went further. Let me put this very plainly. He said in March 2016 in a speech criticizing Trump if we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished. Romney spoke of the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, third-grade theatrics. He called Trump a conman and a fraud. Even after Trump won the nomination, romney refused to endorse him On his presidential ballot. Romney said he wrote in his wife and Graham said he voted for the independent candidate, evan McMullin.
Blake Melnick:Trump did become president, and so the two men's convictions were put to the test. A glance at their biographies would not have led many to predict what happened next. On paper, graham would have seemed in 2016, like the man with the deeper ties to the military, to the rule of law and to an old, established idea of American patriotism and American responsibility in the world. Romney, by contrast, with his shifts between center and the right, with his multiple careers in business and politics, would have seemed less deeply attached to those same old-fashioned patriotic ideals. Most of us register soldiers as loyal patriots and management consultants as self-interested. We assume people from small towns in South Carolina are more likely to resist political pressure than people who have lived in many places. Intuitively, we think that loyalty to a particular place implies loyalty to a set of values, but in this case the cliches were wrong.
Blake Melnick:It was Graham who made excuses for Trump's abuse of power. It was Graham, a JAG Corps lawyer, who downplayed the evidence that the president had attempted to manipulate foreign courts and blackmail a foreign leader into launching a phony investigation into a political rival. It was Graham who abandoned his own stated support for bipartisanship and instead pushed for a hyper-partisan Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden's son. It was Graham who played golf with Trump, who made excuses for him on television, who supported the president even as he slowly destroyed the American alliances with the Europeans, with the Kurds, that Graham had defended all his life. By contrast, it was Romney who, in February, became the only Republican senator to break rank with his colleagues voting to impeach the president. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office, he said, is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine. One man had proved willing to betray his ideas and ideals that he had once stood for, the other refused why.
Blake Melnick:To the American reader, references to Vichy, france, each Germany, fascists and communists may seem over the top, even ludicrous, but dig a little deeper and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin. The point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work closely with the White House, to the experience of Frenchmen in 1940, or East Germans in 1945, or Czeslaw Miosz in 1947. These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or set of values that are in sharp contrast with their own. Not even Trump's supporters can contest this analogy, because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along.
Blake Melnick:Trump's first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values. Remember, he described America's capital city, america's government, america's congressmen and senators, all democratically elected and chosen by Americans according to America's 227-year-old constitution. No-transcript. Their victories have not been your victories, he said. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. Trump was stating as clearly as he possibly could that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though, of course, the nature of those new values was not yet clear.
Blake Melnick:Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality, a long undervalued component of the American political system. America is not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules. Trump's insistence, against the evidence of the photographs, television footage and the lived experience of thousands of people that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than that at Barack Obama's first inauguration represented a sharp break with that American political tradition. Like the authoritarian leaders of other times and places, trump effectively ordered not just his supporters but also apolitical members of the government bureaucracy to adhere to a blatantly false, manipulated reality. American politicians, like politicians everywhere, have always covered up mistakes, held back information and made promises they could not keep. But until Trump was president. None of them induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs, or compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd, or encouraged him to do so in front of the press corps that knew he was lying.
Blake Melnick:The lie was petty, even ridiculous, and that is part of why it was so dangerous. In the 1950s, when an insect known as the Colorado potato beetle appeared in eastern European potato fields, soviet-backed governments in the region triumphantly claimed that it had been dropped from the sky by American pilots as a deliberate form of biological sabotage. Posters featuring vicious red, white and blue beetles went up all across Poland, east Germany and Czechoslovakia. No one really believed the charge, including the people making it, as archives have subsequently shown. But that didn't matter. The point of the posters was not to convince people of a falsehood. The point was to demonstrate the party's power to proclaim and promulgate a falsehood. Sometimes the point isn't to make people believe a lie, it's to make people fear the lie.
Blake Melnick:These kinds of lies also have a way of building on one another. It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing values. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes, no-transcript Social Psychology. This happens in part because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change. Once certain behaviors become normal, then people stop seeing them as wrong. This process happens in politics too.
Blake Melnick:In 1947, the Soviet military administrators in East Germany passed a regulation governing the activity of publishing houses and printers. The decree did not nationalize the printing presses. It merely demanded that their owners apply for licenses and that they confine their work to books and pamphlets ordered by central planners. Imagine how a law like this, which did not speak of arrests, let alone torture or the gulag, affected the owner of a printing press in Dresden, a responsible family man with two teenage children and a sickly wife. Resident a responsible family man with two teenage children and a sickly wife. Following its passage, he had to make a series of seemingly insignificant choices. Would he apply for a license? Of course he needed it to earn money for his family. Would he agree to confine his business to material ordered by the central planners? Yes to that too. What else was there to print After that? Other compromises follow. Though he dislikes the communist, he just wants to stay out of politics he agrees to print the collected works of Stalin because if he doesn't, others will. When he is asked by some disaffected friends to print a pamphlet critical of the regime, however, he refuses, though he wouldn't go to jail for printing it. His children might not be admitted to university and his wife might not get her medication. He has to think about their welfare. Meanwhile, all across East Germany, other owners of other printing presses are making similar decisions, and after a while, without anyone being shot or arrested, without anyone feeling any particular pangs of conscience, the only books left to read are the ones approved by the regime.
Blake Melnick:The built-in vision of themselves as American patriots or as competent administrators or as loyal party members also created a cognitive distortion that blinded many Republicans and Trump administration officials to the precise nature of the president's alternative value system. After all, the early incidents were so trivial. They overlooked the lie about the inauguration, because it was silly. They ignored Trump's appointment of the wealthiest cabinet in history and his decision to stuff his administration with former lobbyists because that was business as usual. They made excuses for Ivanka Trump's use of a private email account and for Jared Kushner's conflicts of interest, because that's just family stuff.
Blake Melnick:One step at a time, trumpism fooled many of its most enthusiastic adherents. Recall that some of the original intellectual supporters of Trump, people like Steve Bannon, michael Anton and the advocates of national conservatism an ideology invented post-Hawke to rationalize the president's behavior advertised their movement as a recognizable form of populism, an anti-Wall Street, anti-foreign wars, anti-immigration alternative to the small government libertarianism of the establishment Republican Party, to the small government libertarianism of the establishment Republican Party. Their drain-the-swamp slogan implied that Trump would clean up the rotten world of lobbyists and campaign finance that distorts American politics, that he would make public debate more honest and legislation more fair. Had this actually been Trump's ruling philosophy, it might well have posed difficulties for the Republican Party leadership in 2016, given that most of them had quite different values, but it would not necessarily have damaged the Constitution and it would not necessarily have posed fundamental moral challenges to people in public life to people in public life.
Blake Melnick:In practice, trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters, although some of his speeches have continued to use the populist language. He has built a cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters, but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy, not the working class. His shallow economic boom, engineered to ensure his re-election, was made possible by a vast budget deficit on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor an enormous burden for future generations. He worked to dismantle the existing health care system without offering anything better, as he'd promised to do, so that the number of uninsured people rose, and all the while while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism, both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview. More important, he has governed in defiance and in ignorance of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had total authority over the states.
Blake Melnick:His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks and balances and the rule of law. He built a proto-authoritarian personal cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence, with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. With tragic consequences for public health and the economy, he threatened to fire a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, nancy Messonnier, in late February after her two blunt warnings about the coronavirus. Rick Wright, a top health and human service official, says he was demoted after refusing to direct money to promote the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine. Trump has attacked Americans' military, calling his generals a bunch of dopes and babies, and America's intelligence services and law enforcement officers, with whom he has denigrated as the deep state and whose advice he has ignored. He has appointed weak and inexperienced acting officials to run America's most important security institution. He has systematically wrecked American alliances. His foreign policy has never served any US interests of any kind.
Blake Melnick:Although some of Trump's cabinet ministers and media followers have tried to betray him as an anti-Chinese nationalist, and although foreign policy commentators from all points on the political spectrum have accepted this fiction without questioning it, trump's true instinct always has been to side with foreign dictators, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. One former administration official who had seen Trump interact with Xi, as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin, told me that it was like watching a lesser celebrity encountering a more famous one. Trump did not speak to them as the representative of the American people. He simply wanted their aura of absolute power, of cruelty, of fame, to rub off on him and enhance his own image. This, too, has fatal consequences. In January, trump took Xi's word when he said that COVID-19 was under control, just as he had believed North Korea's Jim Jong-un when he signed a deal on nuclear weapons.
Blake Melnick:Trump's fawning attitude towards dictators is his ideology at its purest. He meets his own psychological needs first. He thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not America first, but rather Trump first. Maybe it isn't surprising that the implications of Trump first were not immediately understood. After all, the communist parties of Eastern Europe or, if you want a more recent example, the Chavistas in Venezuela, all advertised themselves as advocates of equality and prosperity, even though in practice they created inequality and poverty. And prosperity, even though in practice they created inequality and poverty. But just as the truth about Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian revolution slowly dawned on people, it also became clear eventually that Trump did not have the interests of the American public at heart. And as they came to realize that the president was not a patriot, republican politicians and senior civil servants began to equivocate, just like people living under an alien regime. In retrospect, this daunting realization explains why the funeral of John McCain in September 2018 looked, and, by all accounts, felt, so strange. Two previous presidents, one Republican and one Democrat, representatives of the old patriotic political class, made speeches. The sitting president's name was never mentioned. The songs and symbols of the old order were visible too the battle hymn of the Republic, american flags, two of McCain's sons in their officers' uniforms so very different from the sons of Trump. Writing in the New Yorker, susan Glasser described the funeral as a meeting of the resistance under vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows. In truth, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the 1956 funeral of Laszlo Rak, a Hungarian communist and secret police boss, who had been purged and murdered by his comrades in 1949. Rak's wife had become an outspoken critic of the regime, and the funeral turned into a de facto political rally helping to set off Hungary's anti-communist revolution a couple of weeks later. Nothing quite so dramatic happened after McCain's funeral, but it did clarify the situation.
Blake Melnick:A year and a half into the Trump administration. It marked a turning point, the moment at which many Americans in public life began to adopt the strategies, tactics and self-justifications that the inhabitants of occupied countries have used in the past, doing so even though the personal stakes were, relatively speaking, so low. Poles like Milosz wound up in exile in the 1950s. Dissidents in East Germany lost the right to work and study. In harsher regimes like that of Stalin's Russia, public protests could lead to many years in a concentration camp. Disobedient Wehrmacht officers were executed by slow strangulation. By contrast, a Republican senator who dares to question whether Trump is acting in the interests of the country is in danger of what exactly? Losing his seat and winding up with a seven-figure lobbying job or a fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School. He might even meet the terrible fate of Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator, who has been hired as a contributor by CBS News. He might suffer like Romney, who was tragically not invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference, which this year turned out to be a reservoir of COVID-19.
Blake Melnick:Nonetheless, 20 months into the Trump administration, senators and other serious-minded Republicans in public life who should have known better began to tell themselves stories that sound very much like those in Miloš's the Captive Mind. Some of these stories overlap with one another. Some of them are just thin cloaks to cover self-interest, but all of them are familiar justifications of collaboration recognizable from the past, and here are the most popular. This concludes part one of Making Sense of it All in the company of readers and writers. With my guest in absentia, anne Applebaum, pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of History, will Judge the Complicit. We'll be releasing part two of the episode this coming Friday at 9 am Eastern Daylight Time and I hope you'll hang in for that and take time in the intervening days to reflect on Applebaum's essay. In the context of our country. At this critical juncture in our history as a nation and with the up-and-coming election, who will best serve the collective needs and interests of all Canadians, or what it's worth? Best serve the collective needs and interests of all Canadians For what it's worth.
