Are We Living in a Different America?

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Speaker 3 This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hunter Rosen.
So Donald Trump won. It's looking like he won every swing state, and also like there was a rightward shift even in the states he lost.

Speaker 3 He won, even though in the last months of his campaign, he was at his darkest and most crude. None of that mattered, apparently.

Speaker 3 So here to help us understand what happened are two Atlantic staff writers, Ann Applebaum, who covers threats to democracy. Hi, Ann.

Speaker 4 Hello. And political reporter McKay Coppins.
Hi, McKay. Hey.

Speaker 3 So, McKay,

Speaker 3 what do we know about how he won? The particular coalition, the demographics? What do we know so far?

Speaker 2 Well, you just got at it.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think that the most surprising thing is not that he won, because the polls were so tight and everyone was warning us to kind of be prepared for either candidate coming out victorious, but the fact that he won so decisively, making gains in almost every state and almost every demographic group is something that I think most people were not prepared for.

Speaker 2 Just to run through a few of the highlights.

Speaker 2 He made major gains with Latino voters, according to exit polls.

Speaker 2 It depends on which exit poll you're looking at, but Harris won Latinos by between 8 and 15 points. That is a lot less than Biden's roughly 30-point win among Latino voters four years ago.

Speaker 2 He made some more modest gains with black voters, especially young black men. A lot of Trump's gains were concentrated with men.

Speaker 2 One exit poll showed him narrowly winning Latino men. The other one showed him narrowly losing them.
But in either case, that is dramatically outperforming his performance in 2020.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, you take all this together and what you see is that there is a rightward shift at almost every section of the electorate.

Speaker 2 And, you know, that includes parts of the Democratic coalition that Kamala Harris and her campaign thought they could take for granted coming into this race.

Speaker 3 And is it just men? Like everyone you mentioned were men. It's like Latino men, young black men.

Speaker 2 It definitely was. He definitely did very much.
No, no, not to speak for my entire gender here, but he did seem to do much better among men.

Speaker 2 Though I will note that coming into the campaign, a lot of Democrats had pinned their hopes on the idea that Dobbs would motivate a surge of women to support Harris. And, you know,

Speaker 2 we're so early now that it's still hard to tell from the Exipoll poll data how much that happened. But it is worth noting that Trump won white women in this election.
And he won them narrowly.

Speaker 2 But there was some hope among Democrats that Dobbs would push independent and even former Republican white women to the Harris camp.

Speaker 2 That does not seem to have happened in the numbers that they were planning for.

Speaker 3 Right. So all of that is somewhat surprising and things we have to reckon with over the next many months and years.

Speaker 3 And you have been helping us understand over many years what it looks like when a country or democracy drifts towards autocracy. How do you read this moment?

Speaker 5 So I read this moment not so much as something new, but as a continuation of things that we've seen in the past.

Speaker 5 I felt that during the campaign it would be useful for me to record some of the things the president was saying, to say how they echoed in history, to comment on how those things compared to what has happened in other countries.

Speaker 5 I did a podcast about this with The Atlantic. It's called Autocracy in America.
So when he was last in the White House, Trump ignored ethics and security guidelines.

Speaker 5 He fired inspectors general and other watchdogs. He leaked classified information.

Speaker 5 You know, he used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state kind of deploying troops in American cities.

Speaker 5 Obviously, he encouraged the insurrection at the Capitol in January the 6th. When he left the White House, he took classified documents with him and then he hid them from the FEI.

Speaker 5 I mean, all those things are indicative of somebody who is in defiance of the rule of law, who thinks he's above the rule of law, who's seeking to avoid normal rules of transparency and accountability.

Speaker 5 you know, who wants to help his staff get around, as I said, things like security clearance guidelines and so on.

Speaker 5 And those things do represent a break with all previous presidents in modern history, Republican, Democrat, left-wing, right-wing, all of them.

Speaker 5 We didn't have a president before who defied those kinds of rules and norms and laws and respect for some basic principles of the Constitution before.

Speaker 5 The fact is that people

Speaker 5 either liked it that he was doing that, They found the transgressiveness attractive,

Speaker 5 along with the language that he used about his enemies, you know, calling them vermin and the enemy within and so on.

Speaker 5 Either that was appealing, and of course that kind of language historically has been appealing. It does appeal to people, you know, or they didn't care.

Speaker 5 But that means that there has been a shift in how Americans see their government, what they understand the Constitution is for, and that shift clearly precedes Trump.

Speaker 5 I mean, probably he helped shape it during his first term. He helped shape it during the four years he was out of power.

Speaker 5 But we now have a country that is prepared to accept things from their leader that would have tanked the career of anybody else eight years ago.

Speaker 4 Trevor Burrus Right.

Speaker 3 So did you wake up on Wednesday morning and think, I live in a different country than I thought I did?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 5 No. I mean, I thought

Speaker 5 from the beginning of this election campaign, I thought it was possible that he would win. So I mean, I suppose

Speaker 5 particularly the last couple of weeks of his campaign when he became darker and darker and more and more vitriolic,

Speaker 5 I wondered whether some of that would bother people.

Speaker 5 Imagining guns trained at Liz Cheney,

Speaker 5 talking about his enemies as, again, the enemy within, talking about using the expression vermin or poison blood.

Speaker 5 These are terms that are directly taken from the 1930s and haven't been used in American politics before. So I wondered whether people would be bothered by that.

Speaker 5 But am I entirely surprised that they weren't? No, I'm not. I think the population is now immune to that kind of language, or maybe they like it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I would just say I think that is one of the legacies of the Trump era, is how much he has successfully desensitized the country to this kind of rhetoric and behavior that in an era not that long ago, voters would have deemed disqualifying, right?

Speaker 2 He has kind of managed to convince enough Americans that this kind of behavior, this kind of rhetoric is okay, or at least that it doesn't matter that much.

Speaker 2 And looking forward, I do think that's going to be something we live with in our politics long after Trump is gone.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, I mean, there's one way of looking at what you both are saying, which is we woke up today. We have confirmation that we live in a failing democracy, but we actually don't.

Speaker 3 Like, all we have confirmation of is that people either don't care that he talks like an autocratic ruler, they don't notice, they like it, or they don't put it in a broader historical context, which is, okay,

Speaker 3 these are actual signs of actual autocracies, which happen all the time in history and across the world. Right? That's all we know so far.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, that's all we know. That's all we know.
I mean, we also don't know whether Trump will do some of the things that he said he would do. I mean, he talked about mass firings of civil servants.

Speaker 5 He talked about having people around him who were loyalists. And that's what political scientists would describe as capturing the state.

Speaker 5 So taking over government government departments, government institutions, putting them not in the service of the nation and of everybody, but making them part of your political machine, using them for your political purposes.

Speaker 5 He talked about doing that. Will he try it again?

Speaker 5 Maybe, you know, I mean, if he has a House and a Senate that will support him, I don't think as we're speaking, we don't know about the House, so we'll see.

Speaker 5 They might make it easy. Will the judiciary support him? Some of it will.

Speaker 5 So, you know, will he do it? I don't know.

Speaker 5 General John Kelly, who was his former chief of staff, staff, has said that last time Trump was president, he talked about we should investigate or get the IRS on.

Speaker 5 You know, at that time, he was talking about the former FBI director, James Comey, or his deputy, Andrew McCabe.

Speaker 5 Maybe now he's talked about punishing Adam Schiff, who's a congressman, now a senator who he doesn't like, or Nancy Pelosi. Will he do it? I mean, will he use the IRS to go after people?

Speaker 5 I mean, that's another thing that happens in failing democracies. And it's also something that has happened in U.S.
history before, so it's not unimaginable.

Speaker 5 So I don't know whether he'll do these things, but it's now on the record that he has said he would or he said he wants to.

Speaker 5 In some of the documents written by people around him, there have been plans to do that. That's what Project 2025 was in part.
And none of it bothered people.

Speaker 5 And so we have to assume that it's a possibility. Aaron Powell,

Speaker 2 I do think, to answer your earlier question, that it's worth noting that while a lot of voters went into the ballot box thinking about democracy, and in fact, according to one exit poll, around a third of voters said democracy was their top issue.

Speaker 2 A lot of voters were not thinking about these things. And they were not voting based on hoping that Donald Trump would weaponize the IRS against his political enemies.

Speaker 2 You know, for example, a third of voters said the economy was their top concern.

Speaker 2 And I think when we talk about the shifts among those demographic groups, we have to acknowledge that a lot of it was a very simple response to groceries costing more, inflation being up, feeling like the economy was on the wrong track, and responding to a deeply unpopular incumbent president.

Speaker 2 And while we

Speaker 2 can sit back and kind of look at the broad scope of history, it is clear that not all voters who went in to vote in these last few weeks were thinking about democracy.

Speaker 2 But I think it's also good to point that out because

Speaker 2 Donald Trump is going to claim a mandate coming in out of this election and say, look at, I swept the swing states. The voters want me to have all this power.

Speaker 2 He'll implicitly say they want me to abuse my power. They've given me permission to do whatever I want.

Speaker 2 And I think that it's worth noting that for a whole lot of people who voted for him, they just wanted him to make groceries cost less. Right.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but that's not really...

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 that's not really an excuse. I mean, you are, as a voter, obligated to know what the person you're voting voting for stands for.

Speaker 5 And the responsibility of the President of the United States is not merely to control inflation. The president also has a lot of power over the U.S.
government, over U.S.

Speaker 5 institutions, over American foreign policy. And by deciding you don't care about those things, you know, you do give him that mandate.

Speaker 2 I mean, so.

Speaker 2 See, but my concern is that there's a risk of kind of democratic fatalism coming out of this election where we will decide that, look, Americans voted for this aspiring autocrat, therefore he will be an autocrat and democracy has failed.

Speaker 2 And I think that it's worth, you know, parsing this electoral data a little bit and acknowledging that a majority of Americans did not necessarily give him an autocratic mandate.

Speaker 2 Whether they were thinking about the things that they should have been thinking about, weighing the priorities the way that we think they should have been, I don't think we should let, it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy if we let Trump and his allies claim that because he's said and done all these things and he won the election, he now has permission to do whatever he wants.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, one way of seeing the vote is that it wasn't at all a referendum on Trump.
It was people saying, my life was better in 2019, so I'm going with Trump.

Speaker 3 And I think why what you're saying is important, McKay, is because people who didn't vote for Trump can get discouraged and overwhelmed and tell themselves, you know, people who voted for him voted for everything he stands for.

Speaker 3 And what follows from that is a sense of alienation. Like, this is not my country, and I don't understand what's going on.

Speaker 3 Anyway, and you mentioned that Trump ran an explicitly vengeful campaign, that he would come after enemies from within, whether they were immigrants or Democrats or us, the journalists, and you have taught us to take leaders' words seriously.

Speaker 3 And yet a lot of people, not just voters, have said, oh, this is hyperbole. Stop taking it so seriously.
So how do we know the difference?

Speaker 5 we'll know by his actions.

Speaker 5 I mean, you know, maybe he, you know, it's true that by saying those things and by acting out vengeance, that he, you know, maybe that was appealing to people who want some kind of vengeance, who are angry at whatever.

Speaker 5 I mean, they're angry at the economy or the system or the establishment or the media or Hollywood or the culture, whatever it is that they're angry at or feel deprived by, that he acted that out for them and that was appealing to them.

Speaker 5 So we have to, you know, I'm sure that's a piece of the explanation.

Speaker 5 And then another piece of the explanation is that there were people like the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, you know, or the writer Neil Ferguson who said, oh, these things just doesn't matter.

Speaker 5 It's just hyperbole. You know, that's just how he talks.

Speaker 5 So, and we'll see. We wait for it.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, McKay, Project 2025, which came up a lot in the campaign and has been described as a blueprint for the next administration.

Speaker 3 It includes transformative ideas about everything from abortion to tax policy.

Speaker 3 How much do you think that's a realistic roadmap for what the administration might do?

Speaker 2 I would take it seriously. I mean, I think that there is a risk that because Donald Trump,

Speaker 2 realizing it was a political albatross around his neck, decided to distance himself in the final months of the campaign, that we

Speaker 2 collectively take him at his word. And I don't think we should.
I think that what he ends up doing in his next term will

Speaker 2 rely a lot upon who he appoints to his administration, right?

Speaker 2 I reported back in December that talking to people in Trump World about future appointees, the watchword was obedience. They talked about how Trump

Speaker 2 felt burned in his first term by appointees, people in his cabinet who saw themselves as adults in the room, who believed that their role was to constrain him to kind of keep the train on the tracks.

Speaker 2 And he doesn't doesn't want people like that in his next administration. He doesn't want adults in the room.
He doesn't want James Mattis's or Mark Milley's or John Kelly's.

Speaker 2 He wants absolute loyalists, either people who share his ideological worldview or out of a sense of ambition or cravenness are willing to do exactly what he says without questioning it.

Speaker 2 And so when you look at Project 2025 and the part of the plan, for example, that has to do with politicizing the civil service, taking 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy and making them political appointees subject to the whims of the president,

Speaker 2 it will matter a lot whether he follows through on that and who those people are. A big part of Project 2025 was identifying loyalists, partisans, conservatives who could fill those roles.

Speaker 2 And so I think when we talk through

Speaker 2 what his next administration, what his agenda will look like, a lot of it comes down to this kind of truism of Washington that personnel is policy.

Speaker 2 So does Stephen Miller return to his administration in some kind of role where he gets to oversee immigration enforcement?

Speaker 2 It's entirely possible, but that will make a big difference in terms of how much he follows through on his threats of mass deportation. Who does he appoint as attorney general?

Speaker 2 That was one role that everybody I talked to in Trump World told me he was very committed to getting right because he felt the two men who served in that role in his first term

Speaker 2 betrayed him. So, is it somebody like Josh Hawley or Mike Lee or Ted Cruz?

Speaker 2 These are the questions that we're going to have to be answering, and we'll get a lot more clarity in the coming weeks and months as we see those appointees and those shortlists emerge.

Speaker 3 After the break, we're going to get into what mass deportations under Trump could look like.

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Speaker 3 Something else I've been thinking about a lot that Trump has threatened is mass deportations. They are expensive.
They're actually quite difficult to carry out.

Speaker 3 They require a lot of manpower, local and national.

Speaker 3 You know, is that bombast? Is that a realistic threat? How will we know the difference?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, again, this is where I think personnel will matter a lot.

Speaker 2 Who is head of the Department of Homeland Security, for example.

Speaker 2 But just to go through what Trump promised on the campaign trail, he said that he would build massive detention camps, implement mass deportations at a scale never before seen in this country, hire thousands of additional border agents, use military spending on border security.

Speaker 2 He even said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel people who are suspected of being in drug cartels or gangs without a court hearing.

Speaker 2 He was going to, said he would end catch and release,

Speaker 2 reinstate the Remain in Mexico policy.

Speaker 2 And I think it's notable that he did not directly answer whether he would reinstate family separation, which was the most controversial aspect of his immigration policy in the first term.

Speaker 2 Take all these together, you know, I think there are some of these things he could do pretty easily on his own with executive orders.

Speaker 2 And there's not a lot of evidence that he could be constrained by the courts or by Congress. There are some things like building massive detention centers that would require a lot of money.

Speaker 2 Hiring thousands of more border agents would require a lot of money. So this is where control of Congress is going to matter a lot.

Speaker 3 Right. Are there others on his list that are top of mind for either of you? Like, Aid to Ukraine is one that I'm thinking of.
Like, are there others

Speaker 3 where you're going to be vigilantly watching? Okay, he said X, is he going to do X?

Speaker 5 Aid to Ukraine is in a slightly different category.

Speaker 5 It's not about American autocracy and democracy. I mean, it's a question of our position in the world.

Speaker 5 So, are we going to remain the leader of a democratic camp which is opposing the growing and increasingly networked autocratic camp?

Speaker 5 So, will we oppose Russia, which is now in alliance with Iran and North Korea and China,

Speaker 5 or will we not? And this, again,

Speaker 5 from Trump world, I know a lot of people who spend a lot of time in the run-up to the election trying to find out what Trump meant when he said, I'll end the war in one day, which has been his standard response when asked about it.

Speaker 5 And you can literally find almost as many interpretations of that expression as there are people in Trump's orbit.

Speaker 5 I mean, it ranges from we're just going to cut off all the funding to we're going to give Ukraine to the Russians to something quite different.

Speaker 5 There are people who said, no, we're going to threaten the Russians. We're going to tell them we're bringing in a thousand tanks and

Speaker 5 a thousand airplanes unless you pull back. And so that's another version that I've heard.
There are versions that suggest offering something to Russia, some deal.

Speaker 5 But honestly, I don't know.

Speaker 3 But those are legitimate foreign policy debates. You can be an isolationist democracy.
Those are not fundamental threats in your mind to the nature of this country and what it should be.

Speaker 5 Although, although

Speaker 5 there are connections and have always been, we haven't always acknowledged them between America's alliances and America's democracy so the fact that we have been aligned in the past with a camp of other democracies that we put democracy at the center of our foreign policy for such a long time during the Cold War was one of the reasons why our democracy was strengthened I mean this is a You know, it's well known that during the Cold War, one of the reasons why there was an establishment shift towards favoring civil rights and the civil rights movement was the feeling that, you know, here's this thing we stand for.

Speaker 5 We stand for democracy, we stand for the rule of law, and yet we don't have it in our own country. And there were a lot of people who felt that very strongly.
And that was a,

Speaker 5 and it's not a bad reason why that happened, but

Speaker 5 it's part of the explanation. You know, who are your allies? Who are your friends? This affects also what kind of country you are and your own behavior.
Who are your relationships?

Speaker 5 You know, if our primary political and diplomatic and economic relationship is with Russia and North Korea, then we're a different kind of country than if our primary relationship is with Britain and France.

Speaker 5 Aaron Ross Powell,

Speaker 2 the only other kind of policy area that I'll be keeping an eye on is tariffs.

Speaker 2 He has said that he would impose between 10 and 20 percent across the board tariffs on all U.S. imports and a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods.

Speaker 2 You know, a lot of economic experts pointed out that this would very likely cause massive inflation.

Speaker 2 And given that he was just elected in large part on voter frustration with inflation, it's an open question whether he'll follow through on this.

Speaker 2 He clearly does not believe, and this is one of the few issues that he's been pretty consistent on his entire life. He does not believe it would cause inflation.

Speaker 2 Almost every economics expert disagrees with him. And in his first term, there were people in the White House who blocked him from imposing more tariffs than he actually did.

Speaker 2 In fact, to the point where we saw reporting from Bob Woodward that his staff secretary was literally taking executive orders off his desk before he could sign them and kind of losing them in the bureaucracy of paperwork.

Speaker 2 Will there be somebody like that this time? Will there be somebody who can get his ear and convince him not to go through with this?

Speaker 2 That is something that I think a lot of people will be looking at because the economic implications for this country and globally could be pretty profound.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, and what are the bigger implications of tariffs? Like, that could just be a legitimate economic debate.

Speaker 3 Some people believe in tariffs, some people don't believe in tariffs, and it's an experiment and

Speaker 3 economic protectionism. Aaron Powell,

Speaker 2 I would not say that this is one of those kind of core democratic issues that certainly

Speaker 2 to various degrees. There have been protectionist

Speaker 2 policymakers and politicians in both parties over the last several decades. It could cause a trade war.

Speaker 2 It could, you know, interfere with our diplomatic relations with the countries that we're imposing tariffs on. There are a lot of trickle-down implications.

Speaker 2 But yes, I do think it's important, and I like that what you're doing here is that separating the issues that are kind of more typical policy disagreements from those things that Anne has been talking about, which are fundamental to American democracy.

Speaker 2 I don't think tariffs are, but they could have an effect on a lot of Americans.

Speaker 2 And so that's why I think it's worth keeping an eye on.

Speaker 3 Okay. So there's obviously going to be some resistance to Trump.
So let's start simple. McKay,

Speaker 3 who is going to be the leader of the Democratic Party?

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, so obviously, if Democrats take control of the House, Hakeem Jeffries,

Speaker 2 the next speaker, would, I think, by default become the kind of leader of the Democratic opposition to Trump, at least for a while.

Speaker 2 If Democrats don't take control of the House, I think it's a very open question. And frankly, it's one that Democrats probably should have been trying to answer two years ago.

Speaker 2 Joe Biden deciding to stay in the race after the 2022 midterms will probably go down as one of the most consequential political decisions in this era.

Speaker 2 The fact that he stayed in for so long, only to drop out in the final months of the election, meant that Democrats didn't really have time to have the big intra-party debate about what they should stand for, who their standard bearer should be.

Speaker 2 That debate will be happening now. And it's going to be contentious and noisy and unsettling to a lot of left-leaning voters.
I also think it's healthy to have these conversations.

Speaker 2 And I think Democrats in some ways are kind of innately averse to that kind of contention.

Speaker 2 And I think that they might need to kind of get comfortable with it because one way to look at the two elections that Donald Trump has won is that he really benefited from the fact that Democrats cleared the field for the two nominees he ended up beating, Hillary Clinton in 2016, Kamala Harris in 2024.

Speaker 2 One takeaway that I think a lot of Democrats will have is that, you know, Democrats need to decide that they're okay with a little messiness in letting their voters decide who their nominee will be.

Speaker 3 Trevor Burrus And when other countries have faced a moment like this, like a moment when you have to be vigilant, things are in the balance, the opposition feels alienated, it's unclear who the opposition leaders are at the moment, how do you move through a moment like that?

Speaker 3 Like, how have other countries successfully

Speaker 3 moved to a healthier place?

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 5 it almost entirely involves building broad coalitions.

Speaker 5 So the only real example I can give, so I live part of the time in Poland. We had an autocratic populist government take over in 2015.
They did try to capture the state.

Speaker 5 They did it pretty successfully. They took over state media, which is a big deal in Poland, and they made it into a kind of propaganda tube.

Speaker 5 Poland has some state companies, and they took over the companies and began using the money to fund themselves and their party and so on.

Speaker 5 So they enriched themselves and they tried to create a system whereby they would never lose again. Remember that

Speaker 5 another sign of autocracy, you know, a very, very important thing to watch for, is corruption.

Speaker 5 Because when you remove guardrails and when you remove inspectors' generals and when you weaken the media, then it becomes much easier for people to be corrupt.

Speaker 5 And that, you know, we've already got that problem in our system and it's it's going to get a lot worse.

Speaker 5 Essentially what happened was the building of a coalition that went, in their case, from the center left to the center right, kind of center left, liberal, center-right, of people who wanted something different.

Speaker 5 It became, it was partly, in part an anti-corruption coalition, so it wasn't so much built around fighting for democracy, although that was a piece of it.

Speaker 5 The coalition was also seeking to fight against corruption and for good government, but it took eight years.

Speaker 5 I mean, it was a long, it was a long process, and along the way, you know, a lot of money was stolen.

Speaker 5 And, you know, the institutions declined and the country is worse governed. And, you know, there are a lot of problems that are not going to be easy to solve.

Speaker 5 But a lot of it, there's a look for coalitions.

Speaker 5 There was some internal soul searching about what it was we did, why did we lose.

Speaker 5 But I'm not sure even how useful all of that was.

Speaker 5 I mean, what mattered in the end was the reconstruction of an opposition that had a clear message, that had a clear critique, and offered a vision of a different kind of future that was led by somebody who was charismatic.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, that is actually really useful, even to know that the coalitions don't have to be for the restoration of democracy. You know, they can be against mass deportation, against tariffs.

Speaker 3 Like you can form coalitions around,

Speaker 3 if you tell yourself, no, the voters did not give a mandate to Donald Trump to do whatever he wants and carry out all of his policies. That is not what happened in the last election.

Speaker 3 So coalitions can form popular coalitions around all kinds of issues.

Speaker 4 As a resistance.

Speaker 5 No, no, I mean, you can have a coalition that really cares about women's issues and women's rights

Speaker 5 and abortion rights.

Speaker 5 And you can have another one that really cares about the environment, and you can have another one that really cares about corruption, and you link them together, and then you have a movement.

Speaker 5 And that's sometimes more effective. I mean, democracy is

Speaker 5 an abstract word that doesn't necessarily mean things to people.

Speaker 5 It has to be made real through something that people experience.

Speaker 5 And that, you know, maybe that that's how we have to look at it, too. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I think the thing that catches me in this election, which we haven't quite touched on, is the truth and lies problem.

Speaker 3 And I find that so overwhelming, like the idea that people believe an untrue thing about what happened on January 6th and an untrue thing about what happened at Springfield, Ohio.

Speaker 3 And as a journalist, I always find that like an impossible barrier to cross. But maybe you're suggesting ways to cross that barrier is, well, people believe smaller truths, you know?

Speaker 5 It's one of the ways. I mean, we now have an information system that enables the creation of alternate realities.

Speaker 5 I mean, for me, one of the really striking things about the election campaign wasn't so much Trump, it was Musk.

Speaker 5 You know, Elon Musk, who owns a big and important social media platform, was saying things that

Speaker 5 he must have known not to be true. I mean, falsehoods about immigration, about the election.

Speaker 5 He was allowing the platform to deliberately promote them. And he seemed to be doing that as a way of demonstrating his power.
You know, he was showing us that he can decide what people think.

Speaker 5 And he was working hard to create this alternate world in which things that aren't true seem true. And that, I'm afraid it was really successful.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 2 And, you know, the other thing that I think we've seen is that a big purpose of propaganda and disinformation is not even just to convince people that a certain thing is true, but to almost exhaust their ability ability to tell the difference between what's true and what's not and kind of make them cynical and fatigued and disinclined to even try, right?

Speaker 2 I remember in 2020, I spent a lot of time covering kind of disinformation in the campaign. And that was the thing that I would encounter when I talked to Trump voters.

Speaker 2 It wasn't so much that they believed everything he said. Some would even acknowledge that he would lie or exaggerate, but they would kind of throw their hands up and say, eh, they all lie, right?

Speaker 2 Who even knows what's true? And that, I think, is the thing that we need to guard against over these next years.

Speaker 5 You know, so

Speaker 5 that is the essence of Putinist propaganda. It's not so much that you're expected to believe everything he says about whatever, the greatness of Russia or

Speaker 5 the horror of Western civilization, but you're expected to become so confused by the multitude and number of lies that you've been told that you throw your hands up in the air and you go home and you say, I don't know anything.

Speaker 5 I can't be involved in this. I don't want anything to do with politics.
I'm just going to live my life.

Speaker 5 And that has been a really, turns out to be a really, really successful form of propaganda, probably more successful than the old-fashioned Soviet thing of telling everybody that everything is great, which you can disprove pretty easily.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, Ann and McKay, with your idea of coalitions, I had almost succeeded in finding us a practical path of thinking about a future.

Speaker 3 But now we're back at this big veil veil of disinformation, which is not the place I want to end. Is there some way to turn that chip? I'll ask you again, Anne, how have people turned that chip?

Speaker 3 When you find a culture, a populace that's just become cynical and overwhelmed by lies, how have other countries successfully crawled out of that disinformation?

Speaker 5 You build relationships of trust around other things. I mean, almost as we were just talking about, if you find alternative forms of communication, all different ways of reaching people,

Speaker 5 That's the only way.

Speaker 3 All right. Well, Anne McKay, we will have many more such conversations, but thank you for helping us be more discerning.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Thanks.

Speaker 3 This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Janae West and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudina Bade. It was engineered by Rapis Merciak.

Speaker 3 Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm Hannah Rosen.
Thank you for listening.

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