The Age of the Strongman: Understanding Trump, with Anne Applebaum (Part Two)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorenti. For this episode, we're rejoining for part two of our recent live event with Pulitzer prize-winning historian and political commentator Anne Applebahn. Applebaum joined Gideon Rackman recently at the Royal Geographical Society in London for the final installment of our Age of the Strongman series. understanding Trump.

If you haven't heard part one, do just jump back an episode and get up to speed. But now let's rejoin the conversation live at the Royal Geographical Society. I think that one thing that has shocked people, probably on both sides of the Atlantic, though, is you describe all these acts which uh are manifestly illegal, you know, whether it's bulldozing bits of the White House or corruption. And America is meant to be a country of laws. It's full of lawyers, it's full of checks and balances, and yet nothing's happening.

So so it's not nothing. Some things have been stopped. I have a friend who works for Radio for Europe, which is one of the US foreign broadcasters that the administration has tried to shut down and They fought back in the courts, they've, you know, they're still open and so on. So it's there, there are pieces of uh, you know, and and the the one thing that is working is there are some lawsuits that work, and so far, with some exceptions, they've been sticking the administration, I don't think, hasn't yet wanted to defy the law in a grotesque or obvious way, because that would also be, I think, unpopular.

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