Is Russia Winning the Impeachment Hearings?

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Good morning, everyone.

This is the seventh in a series of public hearings the committee will be holding as part of the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry.

Without objection, the chair.

The House impeachment inquiry has now had public hearings for two weeks.

Witness after witness has sharpened the picture of what the evidence already seemed to show.

President Trump tried to trade official acts of American foreign policy in exchange for Ukrainian investigations in order to benefit himself politically.

But as this picture has become clear, Republicans have held the party line.

They've responded to detailed testimony by arguing that President Trump had a legitimate reason to be suspicious of Ukraine.

Amid attacking the credibility of the witnesses, they kept coming back to a debunk conspiracy theory, Republicans arguing that it was Ukraine and not Russia that meddled in the 2016 election.

Throughout the hearings, no witness challenged them on this line.

That is, until Thursday, when Dr.

Fiona Hill, President Trump's former top advisor on Russia, gave her opening statement.

Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did.

This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.

I'm Isaac Dover, and today on Radio Atlantic, we're going to talk about impeachment.

But instead of a conversation about how the inquiry is playing in domestic politics, we're going to zoom out and try to understand what the rest of the world is seeing.

What does this unique moment mean outside the U.S.?

For Ukraine, for Russia, and for all the countries that look to America as an example of democracy.

With me in the studio is Anne Applebaum.

Anne is a journalist and historian who's covered Russian and Eastern European affairs for decades.

In 2004, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the Soviet Gulag system.

She currently runs a project on propaganda and disinformation at the London School of Economics.

And in January, she'll officially join the Atlantic as a staff writer.

Anne, welcome to The Atlantic and welcome back to the show.

Thank you.

So let's start with this.

At the heart of this whole impeachment inquiry is the question of Ukrainian aid.

And when we did an episode a few weeks back with Alyssa Slotkin, the congresswoman who had been a Defense Department official, is now a congresswoman from Michigan and had just come out for the impeachment inquiry in support of it, I asked her

so

the aid didn't go.

Did people die because of that?

And she said, no, that's not the kind of aid that we're talking about here.

The aid matters not because of the particular sum of money.

In fact, Ukraine gets more money, more economic support from other countries, from Europe, from the European Union, from the IMF, and so on.

But the aid from the U.S., in particular military aid from the U.S., matters because Ukraine is still very much at war with Russia.

This is a live war.

People die every week.

There is constant skirmishing along the border.

At any moment, the Russian military, which now occupies

a couple of provinces in eastern Ukraine, could push farther.

And there are sometimes indications that they might be going to do that.

They sometimes test,

you know,

make gestures that make people think that they will.

What is stopping them from doing that?

One of them is Ukraine itself.

Ukrainian army has revitalized.

Ukraine has a much greater national sense of purpose right now.

They know the Ukrainians would fight back.

The other thing that is stopping them is fear of the United States.

The U.S.

and NATO are the big strategic players in Europe, and they could decide that it's,

you know, in the name of defending European borders to fight back.

And so what the Ukrainians want from the United States is a sign that they are taken seriously, that they're considered a strategic ally.

I mean, they're not a member of NATO, but they're an important partner of the United States.

And that's what this aid was a symbolic of, and this is why the delay of the aid

was taken so badly and considered to be so serious, not only by the Ukrainians, but actually you can hear it in the U.S.

officials who are testifying.

The reason why they all became alarmed was because of the symbolic message that they knew this would send.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Because Russia is watching to see whether

we essentially are putting our money where our mouth is when we talk about diplomacy.

Yes.

Russia is watching to see, watching the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship, trying to understand whether the U.S.

would defend Ukraine,

and for all we know, maybe making military decisions on that basis.

Aaron Powell, there was a line that Adam Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said as he closed the second week of the impeachment hearings, he said that other countries look to us and increasingly don't recognize what they see.

I think that's right.

Much of what the U.S.

was thought to have stood for, not only in that region but around the world, has been kind of dramatically undermined by this story.

Not least, you know, what is it that we've been arguing in Ukraine for 20 years?

What is the basis of our policy?

We have been arguing that we want Ukraine to be more prosperous.

We want it to be more integrated in the global economy.

We want it to be more democratic, more just.

And the main thing we've been arguing is that Ukraine needs rule of law.

It needs a reliable, independent judiciary.

It needs prosecutors who investigate people based on

the idea that they've carried out actual crimes and not used as political tools, which has been the case in Ukraine and also many other post-Soviet states up until now.

This is what Joe Biden was doing in Ukraine.

This is why he was talking to them about their prosecutors.

This has been you, but not just Joe Biden.

I mean, the EU, the IMF, the Germans, the British, everybody has been pushing Ukraine to have a more,

you know, a fairer, less politicized judicial system.

What has Donald Trump just done?

He's gone in and said, I want the Ukrainians to corrupt their judicial system.

I want them to conduct investigations that they know are rubbish.

I mean,

they're based on conspiracy theories, which actually apparently they had to look up after that July 25th 25th phone call.

They had to Google CrowdStrike,

which was this

company that Trump referred to.

Which is the idea

that it was not Russia that attacked the U.S.

elections, but that it was a company that was associated with Ukraine that was essentially trying to blame Russia for it or made it look like it was Russia.

Right.

In fact, the company has nothing to do with Ukraine, and this is why the Ukrainians didn't know what it was.

So what Trump is asking them to do is something they know is not true.

There's no justification or basis for either that investigation or the one into the Joe Biden's company, Hunter Biden's company.

So the Ukrainians know that they are being asked to do something that's against the rule of law.

And therefore, and that the U.S.

is therefore going against everything that it's said that it stood for in this region.

for two decades.

And that is going to have an effect on not just on Ukrainians, but on others.

Oh, I see the U.S.

is a corrupt state just like ours.

Oh, I see

justice can be politicized by the U.S.

President just like it can be politicized by, I don't know, the Moldovan president.

And

this is a message.

You know, the U.S.

does not behave anymore like a rule of law-based liberal democratic country.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: One of the things that I

am always surprised by when I travel overseas or when I talk to people who live overseas, you live a lot of your time overseas, so it's not as surprising to you as how

much people outside of America pay attention to American politics and to things like this impeachment inquiry.

In the context of everything that we're talking about here and

how the United States and Russia are feeling each other out or trying to maybe recalibrate what their relationship is on the world stage and other countries figuring out their parts of it.

I wonder,

when this is playing out, the impeachment inquiry like this, are are we just

to use the old Soviet term, useful idiots here?

That we're sort of playing into the hands of what the Russians want?

I mean, yes, there's a sense in which

since the 2016 election,

Trump has very much

played a role that the Russians want him to play.

I mean, in some ways, he's been less bad than some people thought he might be because he hasn't yet broken up NATO, right?

He hasn't yet said, we're pulling our troops out of Germany, which at some points people expected that he might do.

Nevertheless,

he has deepened and broadened the polarization of the United States and polarization

and deepened and broadened

the political conflict.

And yes, that you know, the

dysfunctional democracy, a Congress that is unable to do anything,

a State Department that's completely paralyzed paralyzed by

conflicting orders from different people.

Yes, this is exactly what the Russians hoped to see in the United States.

And yes, we are advertising our dysfunction.

But I mean,

there's no way of avoiding that because we are dysfunctional.

I mean, the Trump administration has rendered the bureaucracy dysfunctional.

Congress is dysfunctional.

The conflict between the two parties is so deep as to make any kind of bipartisan legislation or policy possible.

You know, it is dysfunctional and

it has an impact on how the U.S.

is perceived and also how democracy is perceived all over the world.

Aaron Powell, this feels, I think, weird to a lot of Americans that this is what we're living through every day.

Is this as weird for other people in other countries to see as it feels for Americans to be living through this?

I think Trump is, yes.

I mean, you know, they don't,

I mean, yes, people do pay attention to it.

I don't think they follow it necessarily day to day the way way we do.

But yes, people do find it very weird.

I mean, certainly

people who deal with the U.S.

as diplomats,

you know, foreign militaries,

you know,

people who have, you know,

foreign businessmen, actually, people who trade and think about relationships with the U.S.,

are very often flabbergasted.

I mean, they find it very hard to understand.

A lot of elements of U.S.

policies that they relied on, that they thought of as bipartisan.

I mean, for example, our policy towards, you know, rule of law in Central Europe and Eastern Europe.

Seeing all those things thrown up in the air is disorganizing and surprising.

And this is why

in the last couple months, there are people, for example, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has recently said, we need to begin to think about a post-NATO Europe.

It's time to take, we need to take the dysfunction of the U.S.

seriously.

We need to assume it's going to go beyond this administration.

We need to begin planning for the future.

And of course, not everybody wants to do that because

all kinds of people have stakes in the current system.

But there are people beginning to say, what is the world going to look like without the U.S.

as a leader, without the U.S.

as the center of a kind of Western security system?

Aaron Powell, I had this conversation, I remember, with people in 2016, before Trump won, when it came to the issue of trade, and

people who were more in favor of international trade than obviously Donald Trump was or Bernie Sanders was, saying,

look, we assume that Trump will lose, but other countries are starting to look at America and say, well, that's part of America one way or the other now, and we have to

calibrate ourselves that way.

It seems like, obviously, Trump did win.

These things have been even more part of it.

Even if Trump loses in 2020, this is now part of what America needs.

Yeah, no, I've written this.

I mean, it would be a great mistake for people to think otherwise.

I mean, look, there is a strain of isolationism and a strain of protectionism that have been part of U.S.

politics since before the Second World War.

They were pretty decisively killed off by the Second World War,

but they're back.

It strikes me, in thinking about the work that you did for years before Donald Trump was elected, you wrote about Soviet gulags.

You were thinking about all these issues.

Is it odd that it is so relevant to the news?

It's extremely odd.

I mean, I'm not sure the gulag is the same.

Not the gulags, but thinking about Soviets and the old world order.

Well, it's true.

I mean, there was a point in 2011 when I had this idea that maybe it's now, because I speak Russian and Polish, but I had this idea, maybe now it's time to learn Farsi.

You know, let's learn a, no one's going to care anymore about Russia, you know, and it sort of went away

as a big political issue.

But

you were the only one, right?

Remember

very famously when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are debating in 2012 and Romney says that Russia's the number one enemy for America and Obama says the 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back.

And it turns out that the future was what was calling.

That's right.

No, no, no.

It's funny.

I think Mitt Romney was right, but possibly for the wrong reasons.

But

I thought for a long time that Russia posed a greater threat than was acknowledged precisely because the kind of threat that it poses is not

is not a traditional one.

In other words, no, it's not the world's most important economy.

Yes, it's in demographic decline.

Its military is probably only fit for purpose locally.

I mean, I don't see them projecting forces all over the world and so on.

Oh, and yes, China is bigger and more important and more dangerous in lots of ways.

But Russia is the one foreign power that is very closely focused on us and is very interested in us and studies us and cares about us and in particular cares about our politics.

and is interested in figuring out how to manipulate our politics.

And partly

that's a hangover from the Cold War.

They've always had departments full of people who think about America.

It's also because to Putin, and this is his personal concern,

this is not about Russian national interest, it's his concern.

Putin himself is very conscious of the threat that could be posed to his power by a kind of democracy narrative.

And he understands the appeal of the West and of American democracy, and he wants to quash it.

So what is the best way, if that's what your main concern is, your main political fear, what is the best way to give it ⁇ well, dismantle the country that is the symbol,

you know, that is the symbol of democracy and freedom.

You know, undo it, make it dysfunctional,

try and corrupt it, try and get money to people who can undermine it.

I mean, this has been their policy for a decade.

There are different ways that people interpret how Donald Trump leads his life and what motivates him.

Some say he's just like a New York businessman.

That's what this is.

And he was always, always, when it comes to this phone call that he had with Zelensky, it's the way he operated in real estate.

Oh, you give me this, I'll give you that.

And that he doesn't think that there's anything wrong with it because that's the way he's always operated.

There are people who look at him and say, this is a guy who's like playing mob boss.

There are people who look at him and say

he's an authoritarian or at least an authoritarian wannabe.

Where do you fall on that?

I mean, all those things could be true at once in a way.

I mean, there's no question that the behavior towards Ukraine was one of a mob boss, you know.

And also, it was one of somebody who either knows and doesn't care or doesn't understand what the difference is between his personal interest and America's national interest, which, by the way, is an extremely post-Soviet way of thinking.

So

using money that had been allocated by Congress, which is, by the way, a co-creator of American foreign policy.

He is not the only one in charge of American foreign policy.

So using money that had been allocated by Congress as a kind of, you know, in order to extort from the Ukrainians an illegal investigation.

I mean, this is a, yeah, you could say that's a business deal, but it's a corrupt business deal.

So in that sense, it's a mob boss deal.

And is it authoritarian?

Yes, it also is in the sense that he's clearly somebody who, as I said, doesn't think of his interest and the interests of America to be different.

You know, so he, you know, whether it's using, trying to put in a, you know, a G7 meeting at one of his hotels, or whether it's making sure that this, this is a story that's come out today, making sure that the Secret Service pay enormous amounts of money to his businesses in Florida and around the world.

He sees the presidency as an opportunity for him to make money.

He sees U.S.

foreign policy as an opportunity for him to get dirt on his political phones or create fake dirt, as the case would be.

He doesn't draw any lines between his personal interests or his family interests and the interests of the state.

And that is an authoritarian way of thinking as well as being a kind of mob boss way of thinking.

Aaron Powell,

I'm curious also for your sense of where the line is between partisan media and propaganda.

Do you think that what we're seeing, particularly in the way that Fox News has covered the impeachment and what's led up to the impeachment, have we tilted into propaganda there?

Oh, yeah.

I mean,

the difference between Fox News and

the way state media operates in Russia is minimal at at this point.

I mean,

I don't want to be too unfair.

I mean, there are some legitimate parts of Fox News, and there are some perfectly decent people there.

But if you look at

the big opinion programs, which actually I have been watching over the last few days.

You mean like Hannity and Tucker Carlson or the.

And Laura Ingram.

Yeah, if you watch them, the way they ⁇ you know, I watched a program that Laura Ingram did a couple ⁇ it was either yesterday, the day before, in which she described the impeachment process, but entirely through the lens of mocking and making fun of the various witnesses.

Little tics they had, drinking water, you know.

But I mean, it went on for some time, and it ended with her howling with laughter with her co-host.

There was no discussion of the substance of the impeachment.

There was no mention of any issues that we've just discussed, nothing about Ukraine, nothing.

It was all demeaning, undermining, mocking, making fun of.

And

this is a famous tactic.

That could be the Soviet Union, that could be RT.

That's how you get rid of a political opponent.

You don't deal with them.

You don't take on their arguments.

You don't have a rational debate.

You just demean them and pour sarcasm all over them.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: We're talking about Russia and its propaganda, but how far does this go back?

So the creation of an enemy,

building up the image of the enemy,

adding horns and teeth to the enemy, describing the kind of threat that the enemy poses.

This is a very, very, very old, you know, we tend to associate it with the Nazis, but actually it was the Soviet Union that was the best at creating this image of the enemy that was designed to scare people and persuade them that they needed to follow the authoritarian system.

When you watch Fox, I mean, there are a couple of enemies now, right?

One of them, sometimes it's immigrants.

writ large.

You know, you get either specific attacks on Central Americans at the border.

There have been some elements even in these hearings, commentary about Lieutenant Colonel Windeman.

Maybe

he's not really American.

Fiona Hill with a British accent.

He's going to be a spy.

Fiona Hill has a British accent.

Maybe she's a spy.

So the creation of hatred around foreigners because it's kind of encouraging xenophobia.

You also hear them doing it when they talk dismissively about the left.

And you can sometimes find kind of clips of particularly egregious campus demonstrations or outrageous things that people do or said.

And then that's described the Democrats, the left, look how odd and weird they are.

They're trying to destroy our country.

The America that we know and love will not exist anymore

if you let these people take over.

And this kind of creation of enemies and creation, and the inspiring people, this need to fight back against a foreign or even a kind of internal domestic threat.

This is really Stalinist.

We're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with more with Ann Applebaum in a moment.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie Sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

And we're back talking Russia and the impeachment inquiry with Anne Applebaum.

And we were talking earlier about whether we're useful idiots, and I want to come back to that.

You talked about how

the goal for Russia is to see American democracy seem dysfunctional and not working, that it undermines the idea of democracy.

And so I wonder, just by

going through this, how much of Russia's work are we doing for it?

And I guess I would ask it in both the larger way of

tearing each other apart and going at each other, and then in the more immediate way when you see, and this is something that Fiona Hill called out in her testimony, that

some of the Republican response to the witnesses has been to focus on conspiracy theories, some of which seem to have their roots in Russian intelligence.

This crowd strike idea that it was not actually Russia, it was Ukraine, seems to have originated with Russian intelligence.

And it is now part of

what the President of the United States talks about, and it's part of what Republican members of Congress are talking about in official inquiries of Congress.

Aaron Powell, so I would start by saying, of course, the polarization is not, you know, and it's very important to not imagine that that's all Russia's fault.

I mean, this isn't the nature of our system.

It's been getting worse for some years.

And the solution to it will not be just to kick out Russia.

I mean, that we would have a problem even if there were no Russians.

So

we don't want to begin thinking that we can blame them as an explanation for all of our problems.

That's an important point that

I don't want to lose.

Having said that, you are absolutely right that the bizarre conspiracy theories about Ukraine,

the idea that it was Ukraine and not Russia that hacked the election,

the idea that this company CrowdStrike, which was the company that investigated the hack of the DNC, is somehow Ukrainian,

this weird idea that somehow Hillary Clinton's server is inside Ukraine.

These are exactly conspiracy theories that originate with Russia.

How Trump acquired them, I don't know.

I think there are two possibilities.

One is that Putin told him, and we know that he's had several conversations with Putin, which we have no record of, including one where

he took the translator's notes away, and he and the translator were the only other Americans in the room.

That may be one source.

Another possible source is that many of the conspiracy sites in the U.S., you know, InfoWars and Alex Jones and so on, they get their material from Russian sources, from Sputnik and from RT.

And it may be that he's getting it via them because they then can feed this kind of conservative echo chamber.

Maybe both.

And same for the Republicans in Congress.

But this is a victory for Russian intelligence, right?

A huge victory.

There were Russian intelligence agents who came up with a story.

It's not true.

The crowd strike, it's a conspiracy theory.

And they started pushing it out there.

It's the ultimate victory, right?

You've got the President of the United States talking about something that Russian intelligence officers came up with.

Aaron Powell, yes.

And

this was the argument as to why Trump should not be elected, because he was so clearly vulnerable to foreign disinformation and foreign influence.

He has no ability to distinguish lies from truth.

He has no ability to he doesn't trust normal sources of information, verified sources.

He'd rather get information from

Putin than he would from the CIA.

This is exactly why he's such a dangerous president.

I wonder ⁇ we have ⁇ it's like a joke on Twitter that the 2016 election never ends, right?

And that we're still living through 2016.

It's a three-year election, maybe a four-year election.

When Bob Mueller finished his work before he testified in front of Congress, he made a statement.

And in addition to saying the report is coming out, there it is,

he said

We should

be thinking about the fact that Russia is looking to attack us again in 2020, that some of those efforts are already underway, and we as a country are not prepared for it.

Fiona Hill, in her testimony, said something very similar.

So all the stuff we're sort of thinking about 2016, looking back and the things that are still running out of 2016, how unprepared are we for what comes next?

I mean, we're so unprepared that the operation is already on.

You know, the idea that disinformation is something that only happens in the six weeks just before an election is genuinely wrong.

Also, the idea that disinformation is about fake stories is also wrong.

This is about campaigns.

So the Russians conduct,

and not just the Russians, but

many now do it, will conduct

campaigns designed to shape how people think in the year or two up to the election.

One of those campaigns was the campaign to convince people that it was Ukraine and not Russia that hacked the election.

And with that campaign, they've already been very successful.

So it's something that is already going on.

It already exists.

It's already happening, and we're completely vulnerable to it.

Aaron Powell, we've seen a lot of attention to Facebook at the last couple of weeks, even in just this week.

That's something you've thought about over the last couple of years.

What do you think

the role of Facebook as a company is going to be, and how does it play into what happens over the course of the next 11 months of this election and sort of beyond that?

Aaron Powell,

I wouldn't single out Facebook.

I would talk about Facebook.

I would talk about Twitter.

I would actually talk about Google.

One of the other companies that everybody's always trying to game is Google and Google search engines.

So it's also very important.

If we were in a different political place, if we had a different kind of president, maybe even a different Congress,

what we would be talking about right now is how to regulate social media and the Internet.

What are the the rules?

And we would be, and by the way, we would be talking about this with Europeans.

We now live in a world where there's going to be a Chinese Internet.

There already is a Chinese Internet.

And the Chinese state has decided to use the Internet in a particular way.

It's going to keep track of people.

It's going to use it to end crime.

It's going to combine not just social media, but also facial recognition technology, many other things, in order to keep total control of society.

That's what the Chinese Internet is going to look like.

What is the liberal democratic internet going to look like?

Right now, the liberal democratic internet doesn't really exist.

In other words, our internet is patchily run by private companies who are using these extraordinarily powerful technologies to make money for themselves.

We really should be thinking as a society,

if this is going to be the main method of communication, the main method of commerce,

if this is how our interactions are going to begin to happen via the internet, we should be talking about

what are the basic rules?

How do we want this technology to work for us as a society and not just for Facebook or just for Google?

Do you think it's within our capability to do that?

Yeah.

I mean, I think back of when Zuckerberg has testified in front of Congress, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook,

how

completely

ignorant of what Facebook is.

Some of them were.

Yes.

Yes.

No, no, no.

Just like the basics of Facebook.

There was a huge embarrassment.

I agree with you.

I agree with you.

And so we would look to those

people to regulate what's going on online.

I mean, you could set up a commission.

You could make it an international commission.

By the way, this is a big issue in Europe as well.

The French, the British are all, French are actually quite far ahead in thinking about how to make

you know, how to make, for example, the algorithms more transparent so that we can understand better why we see things that we do.

So,

you know, maybe we need, for example, an ombudsman,

just like we have

a regulator

who's in charge of giving out broadband.

A very good

kind of early historical example is the creation of the BBC.

We never had anything like that in this country.

But the BBC was created directly because the British understood, because the first people to take real advantage of radio were Hitler and Stalin.

And the BBC was created with the idea that we need some kind of national broadcaster who will reach obscure parts of the country, you know, Cornwall and the Scottish Islands and

Wales, and will bring the nation into a single conversation.

And that was literally the idea of the BBC.

I mean, you can now argue about whether it worked or didn't and how good it is.

It doesn't matter.

And the thinking was always,

you know,

we need to create a platform where there can be different views, where people people can have different opinions, but we want a single conversation or at least one, you know, and that we need this for the purposes of democracy.

Something like that thinking, I'm not saying something exactly like that, but that

as a kind of prototype, you know, if we could begin to think about the internet as, you know, because right now

it's created these deep cleavages, right?

So people live in their own echo chambers.

We all know that now, and people only see what they want to see, and they only see what their friends send them, and so on.

We may need some to do some thinking about how do we make sure that the Internet is reinforcing democracy in the sense that it continues to make possible national conversations.

If we can't have a national conversation, we're almost at the stage where we can't.

If there isn't some common agreed upon sources of information, if there isn't some common agreed upon topics,

then we will not be able to have democracy.

Aaron Powell, in March of 2016, you wrote that we were maybe two or three elections away from the end of NATO

and a change of the liberal world order.

Since you wrote that, there was the Brexit vote and there was the 2016 election in America.

Does that count?

Is that two for your two or three elections?

I think I said there would have because the third would have been the presidency of France.

I mean if you had a French president who wanted, you know,

if Le Pen had won.

If Le Pen had won.

Yeah, if Le Pen had beaten Macron, then that would have probably been the beginning of the end of NATO.

So where are we in that continuum now?

Two-thirds of the way.

TBD.

I mean, how much is riding in that on

Donald Trump's re-election in 2020?

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I feel almost certain that Donald Trump's re-election would be the end of NATO.

I don't see how it stays together.

If you think about what a second-term Donald Trump administration would look like, who would be in it, who would be Defense Secretary, who would be Secretary of State.

You can't imagine people who would be interested in American alliances.

I just don't see how that happens.

I mean, you had in this administration, I mean, we had sort of, we had James Mattis, we had some people who initially thought that they could work with Trump and maintain American influence around the world.

And I don't see how those kinds of people ever go to work for him again.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And it seems to me that you're talking about the cabinet-level people, but even in what we've seen test, the people we've seen testifying in the impeachment inquiry, people like Fiona Hill or Bill Taylor or George Kent, who are the folks that we never hear about, but who decided that they saw a reason to work within the administration.

I don't know that if you are a person who disagrees with Donald Trump, you would want to now put yourself into that situation the way that these people did.

And I also don't know that if you're Donald Trump, you would be willing to trust anyone who was not clearly on your side when he has seen all of these people who were in private conversations in the White House and with him testify in front of Congress and he feels be disloyal to him.

Aaron Powell, right, because he, again, once again, his concept of the state is that the state somehow belongs to him.

This is very, again, very authoritarian, one-party state kind of thinking.

You know, everybody

should be loyal to me.

But your broader point is absolutely correct.

I mean, I actually had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with a college-age woman who had been planning to take the Foreign Service exam after she graduated.

and she told me she doesn't want to do it anymore.

Because, you know, why would you want to be in the Foreign Service, in the U.S.

Foreign Service, you know, in this kind of situation?

I also know somebody who's another university student who does ROTC who told me that if Trump is re-elected, he's dropping out.

Because, you know, you don't want to be someone who's, do you want to go to war to defend Trump towers in Istanbul?

You know, do you want to go to war as a mercenary in Saudi Arabia?

You know, no, you don't.

I mean, the knock-on effect on all kinds of institutions, on not just the State Department, but the Army, you know, the

almost any government institution you can think of may be very, very severe.

So let's end with this.

There is one way to look at what's happened over the last couple months and be very depressed by it, that this is the state of our government and all the dysfunction and infighting that we've been talking about.

There's another way of looking at it that is maybe more optimistic that the system has worked, that there is an impeachment inquiry, that these government officials who were there, who were, it seems pretty clearly, staying away from partisan politics and recoiling from partisan politics were then able to go in front of Congress and testify.

And we'll see how this plays out, of course, over the next couple of weeks and months when the House, it seems likely will impeach Donald Trump and then it will go to a trial in the Senate.

We'll see what happens with that.

Where are you?

Are we ⁇ should people feel good about American democracy right now or should they feel bad about American democracy right now?

I mean, I think it's really too early to say that the system has worked.

I mean, you're right that some elements of it have kicked in.

We've seen these incredibly impressive civil servants.

You know, it's clear that

we have amazing people who work for us and

we have institutions that have worked in the past.

But

I don't know whether American democracy survives Donald Trump not being impeached and being re-elected.

I'm not sure it does.

That's a double if there, right?

Those are two double ifs.

So you think it could survive if he's impeached and not removed from office, but then also loses in 2020?

If he's impeached and loses, then

we have a chance at rebuilding.

If he's impeached and wins, then

I see no further stops on him.

In that case, he will feel completely free of any legal boundaries, of any norms that we can think of, of any responsibility to Congress, of any responsibility to the country.

And I would think that would be the end of American democracy as we know it, actually.

Well, we often try to end on an upbeat note, but I don't know how we wouldn't do it.

Mitt Romney will save us.

I'm not going to try to get us there.

Ann Anne Applebaum, thank you for being here on Radio Atlantic and walking us through all this.

I think that the sense of what's going on, it's just so hard to wrap our heads around.

And it is so much bigger than any of us can think about, whether that's in terms of chronology or

the world,

what we're living through.

Maybe it'll make sense more in 10 or 15 years.

Everything's easier to understand in retrospect.

Right.

Thank you.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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