“History Will Judge the Complicit”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Just sum up, if you can, some of what you have written about and how it applies to today because you bring it all way to support and enabling of Donald Trump.

ANNE APPLEBAUM, HISTORIAN AND STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: So, what I tried to do in the article was show Americans that some of the behavior that they’re seeing in their own country has echoes from the past. In other words, that the kind of language that’s being used, the excuses that people are making, the strategies they’re adopting, these are familiar from other times and other places. Americans always have this idea of themselves and is understandable why, they’ve been so lucky, we have been so lucky in our history. We have this idea that we’re exceptional, that our history has no relationship to other histories. I mean, actually, from the beginning of the United States we have always thought of ourselves as very different from Europe, very, you know — with our own ethos and our own kind of politics, nothing like that. And yet, in Washington, over the last three years, I’m not there all the time but I come in and out, I’m — I live partly in Europe and partly — but visit frequently in the United States. I began hearing people say things to me that sounded like stories that I’d written about. I have written books about the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. I’ve read a lot about the history of occupied France and other parts of Europe, and they sounded to me like people living in an occupied country. And by that, I don’t mean that Trump is Hitler or Trump or Stalin or anything like that. I mean, that people who were working in the Trump administration and in the high levels and the high levels of the Republican Party, including in Congress, had the feeling that they had been taken over by an alien ideology. And many people at the beginning thought that it was America first, it was about as kind of super patriotism, it was about maybe even a kind of populism, we’re going to do more for working people and so on. But actually, what happened in Washington was nothing like that. What we saw was really Trump first. We saw a president focused on himself and his personal needs, his psychological needs, his political needs and a president who tried to subordinate all the instruments of the state to himself and his order. In other words, not someone who’s acting in the interests of the American people or in the interests of the Republican Party but himself.