Anne Applebaum: Hungary's Surreal, Post-Reality Campaign

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The dictators who want to run the world increasingly relevant by the minutes. And now it's out in paperback. It's Ann Applebaum. How are you doing, Ann?

I'm fine. How are you?

“Yeah, no. I'm going to Coachella this weekend. I'm going on vacation. So I'm pretty good. And if I have a little bit of senioritis on today's podcast, that's why.”

So I hope you might have to carry me, but I'm going to do my best. I'll do my best too. You are recently in Hungary covering the campaign. You wrote about that for the Atlantic. Before you get into your story, but give us the basics, people have not been following closely. Like, when is the election? Talk to us about Peter Maggar. I can try to describe his politics earlier this week, but I think it'd be better for people just to give a full briefing from you. So the election is soon. It's this Sunday. It's on the 12th of April.

“I suppose the most important thing to know is that this is the first election in 16 years, where it feels like there's a really serious challenger to Victor Orban and the challenger, at least in the opinion polls that we've seen as way ahead.”

Victor Orban is in the grand scheme of things not important at all. He's the leader of a very small country, less than 10 million people.

But he has taken on an outsized importance to the American and European far-right, because he has deliberately set himself up as a model. So he's somebody who just for those who want a little bit even deeper history, who was an anti-communist back in the days when I was also an anti-communist. He spoke at an event in 1989, attracted a lot of attention, founded a youth party, was considered a leading liberal in central and eastern Europe was friendly with all the other leading liberals had a scholarship to Oxford paid for by George Soros.

And over the years he discarded that persona and he decided that his political career would be better served by him moving to the right and you moved first to the center right and then to the far right. I actually wrote about him in a previous book called Twilight and Democracy where I talked about this process of radicalization in Europe and elsewhere. The main thing to know about him is that when he took power 16 years ago, having he was in power once before and they lost, he took power 16 years ago and he used to determine he was never going to lose another election.

And so he set out changing the Hungarian political system, he played around with the constitution, he changed the way voting works, and he slowly took over all the institutions of the Hungarian state. So the judiciary, the bureaucracy, with the help of these oligarchic companies that he helped to create, took over the media, that television stations, radio stations, also those companies control between depending on who you ask, between about 20% and 30% of the Hungarian economy. And he built a kind of nepotistic corrupt system that keeps his party in power and keeps him wealthy, he owns a kind of neo-broke palace somewhere on the country side with zebras in the garden and that kind of thing.

I mean, it's all just like in novels about dictator. Because zebras, that's a new data point for me. We don't know what happened to the zebras. He became a kind of role model for other far-right parties and leaders, including most notably JD Vance and the manga world who literally imported his ideas.

The Trump administration's assault on universities, D.E.I., a lot of that comes from Orban as well, they saw him do it and they're copying it.

“And so he has taken this outsize importance on the, as I said, American and European far-right.”

He is now being finally challenged by a leader who is from his party, who came out of his movement, fetish the name of his political party, but who is younger, more energetic and his focus on the corruption of the regime. So the corruption of the party, the corruption of Orban, as well as the failures, because one of the things that happens when you take over the state is you, and you, especially when you take over the judiciary, the legal system is, you make your system on transparent, which is what they all want to do, it becomes much easier to steal.

And so the system has become very corrupt, the economy is stagnant, the healthcare system is terrible.

You know, the lack of normal conversation and normal politics has begun to bug people, and Peter Maggar has been hammering all those things home. And Maggar himself is a little bit of a, he's a little bit of a wild card, he's a, he's very energetic, he's very emotional. He's been running this very emotional campaign lots of Hungarian flags and patriotism. I know some of the people around him, and they are genuinely committed to making Hungary into a different country. I mean, I should say another thing that's important about Hungary is that in the recent years, Orban has also played the role of Russian puppet in Europe, which I know is very strange and hard to get your mind around.

If you think of Hungary as fighting the Russians in 1956, and you think of Orban as an anti-communist in 1989, but Orban's decided to link his fortunes to Moscow. He has gas deals with Moscow, probably some that benefit his party as well as his, you know, less so his country. And he plays the role of blocking you money for Ukraine, blocking you sanctions on Russia. And Maggar is, has said he will, he will change all that and he will change Hungary's geopolitical direction as well as its economics.

“And just on this time, Maggar, I think this is important for people to understand, because it's important as we'll get to the JDV outside of this and how crazy it is, what side we're on of this fight.”

Basically, like, if you're going to make an American analogy, like somewhere in a, like, a list of slotkin to the list. Yeah, Liz Cheney type figure, right? Like he's, you know, this is not.

Liz Cheney, I mean, he comes from the ruling party, you know, he left the ruling party because he was there were series of outrageous incidents and evidence of corruption and so he left the ruling party. And that's not a socialist, not somebody that's playing. It's not a socialist, you know, the orders to bring in all the refugees from the Iran War to Hungary, right? I just, it's important as we get to like how this thing is being framed. When you were there, you talk, I think this is also kind of relevant to what could be coming for us here.

And I think important to look at it through that lens, you talk about this kind of post reality politics that they're living in. So, Orban is now trying to run for this reelection, finally has legitimate opponent. Economy is shaky there, right? Like there a lot, you know, a lot of things in Hungary are, you know, not, you know, he's not living up to the promises, maybe I'm trying to think of the parallels to something that the Republicans might be going through soon, right? And so the campaign they're running is just a full kind of earth to disinformation campaign to try to muddy the waters and denigrate magga.

Yeah, so the campaign is not even about Hungary. The campaign is seeking to create an evil enemy that the Hungarian should be very, very afraid of.

“And believe it or not, that enemy is Ukraine. And all over Budapest, when I was there, there were big posters of Zelensky, so not Orban, Zelensky with the, with the slowering him and honoring his freedom fighter?”

No, big posters, Zelensky saying, don't let him get the last laugh because the implication being that Zelensky and the Ukrainians are a threat to Hungary, like they might invade or they might do sabotage or they might create some violence inside Hungary. And, you know, if you step back for 30 seconds or not even that, like five seconds, you realize how insane that is. The Ukrainians are fighting the Russians, like why would they invade Hungary? But Orban has now run out of enemies because the migrant thing that he used for so many years, which by the way had a, had a seriously fake aspect to it as well.

Just isn't working anymore. There aren't any migrants in Hungary, and there aren't any who want to go there. You know, the LGBT threat, you know, that isn't really working either. You know, people just aren't that scared of, of gay people. And so he's creating a new threat. And he has to create it literally from scratch. And so there are these AI videos of Zelensky snorting cocaine on a golden toilet or Hungarian soldiers being shot in the head by presumably, I don't know, Ukrainian snipers.

A magiarist trying to run a campaign that's about housing economy, you know, health care, but you know, in a, of course, corruption and trying to focus it on.

Hungarian and magiar is running this very grassroots campaign as well. The opposition doesn't have access to any mainstream media, any media, actually, or even billboard space. They can't control because that's somehow owned by the government or owned by, by the ruling party. And so they're running this intense grassroots campaign.

“Magiar is doing like six public meetings every day. I got a list of them actually for the last few days. The campaign is very intense.”

And Orban is running this campaign that's like, based, as you say, in Earth, too. Among the things that you mentioned in the article, I guess there was a protest of people had signs probe Orban signs that said, we won't be a Ukrainian colony. It was on the sign. And what did they even talking about? Then in order to advance this imaginary world Orban and the regime sees a Ukrainian truck, I guess, with bank cash and arrested people. And maybe injected one of them with something. With truth serum, something. Yeah. What's the deal with that? There was a regular bank run from a Ukrainian bank to I think to a bank in Vienna. I may mix up the details, but they're in my article. And the Hungarian stopped them made this whole fake story about how it was some kind of terrorist or money laundering incident.

It was more than one truck. And that was a group of people injected one of them with truth serum or something. And he had some kind of bad reaction and passed out. You know, it was a crazy again, an attempt to create a fake incident that would convince people that there were some bad Ukrainian thing happening in Hungary. And actually since then, there's been another incident where the Hungarians claim to have found explosives on a pipeline between Hungary and Serbia. And the bizarre thing about this was I heard that that exact scenario was flagged like three weeks in advance before it happened. And people in Budapest were already talking, oh, this is what Orban is going to do.

And it was already being publicized and discussed. Is there will be this false flag operation? And then they did it anyway, as if no one knew what it would be. And I'm told it had very little impact. You know, they keep trying to create incidents and create stories and use use the police or use the army in order to create some image of thread and danger so that people will say, well, we better unite behind the lear.

“One other tactic that they're going to use that we might see back here is just good old fashioned cheating cheating through like quasi legal means, which I think is what the Republicans are trying to do with the safe act.”

In 2021, they passed a law allowing Hungarians to vote wherever they had a registered address, not just where they live creating like this voter tourism, you know, where many, many people can register at the same house. It's kind of funny because it's what the mega folks say is happening. But they're actually doing it in Hungary. And so I mean, that's basically the plan, right? Like that they can put the thumb on the scale, the system having people from maybe Serbia across the border voting in Hungary combined that with this decision.

Yeah, combined that with the disinformation campaign and like that's what they've got left. And so it's in some ways it's ominous, but it's also maybe encouraging that they're back into this corner that that's, you know, that's what they'll have to do strategically.

“Yeah, because as you said, the question is does this, this high scale of intense fake propaganda work, you know, can people really be transported into an alternate and different reality and can enough corners be cut around the edges.”

There's a way of cheating by a way of paying people to vote that they may try, as you say, they're these houses in eastern Hungary where there's sort of 20 people registered to vote suddenly. There's already built into the system, the way the electoral system works and the constituencies worked, you know, the the opposition party would already have to have something like 55% of the vote in order to have a majority, because it's already tilted in the direction of feeders. So there are a lot of things that are already, you know, as I said, built into the system.

To help feedish win, and those have worked for them so far, I mean, they work for them for the last several elections.

And we'll see, I mean, Magger is getting these huge crowds. And as I said, it's this very, very grassroots campaign. And people said to me, look, we know we can't reach people through media, we know that, you know, people are live in alternate worlds online and so we're trying to reach them in real life. And it's a small enough country that maybe they can do it. Well, knocking on wood, you have this phrase in the article about how reality may be reasserting itself. And essentially when I read that, it's something I've been saying when I'm speaking to like democratic groups and activists, groups of speaking to one yesterday at up before I had a radical fully and I was making that point basically, which is that you have to have faith that that is going to happen and you have to work to help reality reassert itself.

But eventually there's like a level of suffering or a level of betrayal among the electorate where there may be a backlash. And hopefully we'll see that this weekend in Hungary.

Do you have something on that? I do want to play the J.D. Vance clips as well. Does that make sense pretty important? No, no, the J.D. Vance thing is really extraordinary actually given, given everything that we know about Orban, given his affinities with Russia and China, given even his foreign minister apparently held out a helping hand to Iran after the Israelis attacked Hezbollah, after the pageants that didn't last year, you know, this is a this is urging that is firmly aligned with the autocratic world.

And yet the American vice president went there to promote it. I'm gonna cite people. I need a speech. I put one of the clips from his speech yesterday with David French and he's talking about how if you're for Western civilization, you're for Orban. And it's like words are even have meaning. What is Western? I guess Western civilization just literally means white people now, but it's like, okay, we're on the side of Russia and this battle against a party that is pushing for a rule of law and reunification with the Arab.

“What is Western civilization if not that? No, no, I'm Western civilization as far as I'm concerned is, you know, the whole history and you can go back to ancient Rome to the Roman Republic, if you want to do classical civilization.”

It's the history of democracy, it's the history of more inclusive politics, it's the history of communication.

There's a lot in Western civilization that Russia and China and Iran are trying to destroy and the countries who are defending Western civilization are the democracies, democratic civilization is Western civilization. And the fact that Orban is aligned with forces who want to destroy democratic civilization, I would think would be an obvious reason for an American not to support it, but you're right, I mean they twist words and they twist language. Bands described, youth language describing, sounded like he was describing Orban's opponents as a small band of radicals, you know, as if there were some small Marxist groups that were trying to, I don't know, destroy marriage or something or, you know,

the rape children, you know, but my girl's movement is, you know, at the very least it's half of Hungary and probably more and they're all Hungarians and they're all participating in public life and they're waving Hungarian flags and they're singing the Hungarian National Anthem.

“You know, to mischaracterize it as a small band of radicals is also, as you say, gaslighting.”

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So in addition to framing or bond is being on the side of God and Western civilization and all this other nonsense, JDVans actively participated in this disinformation campaign and this alternate reality campaign that you're talking about with regards to the Ukrainians. I want to play a clip of his conversation when he's over there. He did the campaign speech, but he also did an interview at Matthias College there. Let's take a listen.

Almost couldn't believe it's true, but it's true. It's completely scandalous.

“You should never have a foreign head of government or a foreign head of state threatening the foreign and the threatening the head of government of an allied nation. It's preposterous, it's unacceptable.”

The head of a foreign state should never threaten foreign ally. That's interesting. That's something he should talk to his boss about. I love how he's also. I'm just learning about these things.

I'm just talking to Victor and he's like Zelenski's coming in. I know the whole thing is insane. No, since Zelenski did make an unfortunate half-joking comment about something like that, but to make it into a real threat is nuts and it's even more nuts given that Trump literally was going to invade an ally. And has repeatedly threatened leaders of other countries. Repeatedly insults, threatens, tariffs, punishes, shouts at leaders of foreign countries. And advancing self is sitting in a foreign country, playing a role in their campaign while saying it's very bad to play roles and to be involved in other people's campaigns.

There's this level of sureality that's very hard to cope with. He's a little worse at it than Trump and Orban, because he's trying so hard to be clever. And it just comes off as so so phony. In some ways, it's like revealing of the lie because he's being just too clever by half with his little patronizing tone about that. I want to play one other clip and kind of move us over to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. And the same interview, Vans gave his take on the status of Ukraine war. Let's listen to that too.

What I would say, the both the Russians and the Ukrainians is, you know, we're talking about haggling at this point over a few square kilometers of territory and one direction or another.

“Is that worth losing hundreds of thousands of additional Russian and Ukrainian young men?”

Is that worth an additional months or even years of higher energy prices and economic devastation?

We think the answer is clearly no, but it takes, you know, two to tango.

I think the way in which he frames up the war just continues to be such enough front of an outrage. It's an affront in an outrage because the war is not about a few kilometers. You know, the war is about whether Ukraine gets to exist as a nation. And the Russians have, and I've said this before, I'm probably on your program. I mean, the Russians have never said they want to cease fire.

They have never given up their main war aim, which remains the conquest of all of Ukraine or the control of all of Ukraine. They've never conceded that Zelensky is the legitimate leader of Ukraine. You know, none of this has ever happened. And Ukrainians have been continually pressured by the Trump administration to give up territory to Russia.

“And the Ukrainians keep saying, what will we get in return?”

How do we know if we give up territory the war will end?

And the answer is they don't, you know, there's nothing.

No one has given them anything. And the territory they're being asked to give up is heavily fortified territory. This is like fortress towns that have, you know, that have been protected and fought over for years and years. Places where Ukrainians live. You know, you're not just giving up territory or giving up, you know, a protective zone.

If you gave it up, you would then enable the Russians to move further. I mean, I suppose it's because they don't want to understand it. You know, what they want to do is they want to quick business deal between the United States and Russia. And they want to move on and the war is in their way. And so they keep talking about it like it's some trivial, you know, trivial problem that, you know,

Zelensky's just blocking it and if you would just step out of the way, we could solve it. It's just a profound kind of arrogance and ignorance and hubris wrapped into one. You know, this, this is a really big war. It's a, it's a war about European civilization, the same civilization. They say they care about it.

It's about whether or not they're favorite words. And something to talk about. They're talking about it. They're talking about it all the time. Yeah. Do the Ukrainians not deserve sovereignty? I mean, so anyway, it's illustrative of their deep shallowness. And the, as I said, their inability to even spend five minutes trying to understand what these conflicts around the world are about.

I mean, you know, we haven't talked about Iran yet. But I mean, they didn't even talk to the Iranian opposition before starting that war. Raise your hand if you've been putting off a dental cleaning and annual check up or out of the enemy. Or, honestly, any kind of doctor's appointment. Yeah. I hand's up to when something feels off.

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Thank you to Zackdok for sponsoring this message in this episode. I went back into the run stuff with just a couple of the other little news items related to how we're engaging with our European friends and allies. As we engage that war, and then we'll get to the ceasefire itself. This is a craziest story. And I just think it's an interesting pairing with what we saw in Hungary with JD Vance.

“You know, talking about how you should not be threatening allies in any way.”

Also, one of your colleagues at the Atlantic wrote a great story about glad and poppin. There's like this American Catholic intergrillist type who's now an orban advisor. Once Melania de Role is queen of America. And they're in JD Vance's new book. He's Catholicism.

It's like all of this, they're trying to tie their Catholicism and the religion into the nationalism in a very real way. simultaneously to that, we had a story that broke yesterday. And this is from my buddy that writes letters from Leo. It's a good sub stack about, about Pope Leo. And January behind closed doors at the Pentagon.

Under Secretary of War for policy, Elbridge Colby summoned the Cardinal Christoph Pierre. Pope Leo's then ambassador to the US and delivered a lecture. America Colby and his colleagues told the Cardinal has the military power to do whatever it wants. The Catholic Church had better take its side. As temper as rose, when US official reached for a 14th century weapon and invoked the avenue on papacy.

The period when the French crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.

“Like we literally brought the ambassador from the Holy sea to the Pentagon and told them,”

"Poblios got to get in line." All right, we're going to do some invasions. And we're going to need Pope Leo on our side. It's an amazing story. Although, that first I wasn't sure if I believed it, but if you look at the timing of it,

it makes sense because it's supposedly happened in January. And you can actually hear in the way the Pope has talked about the war in Iran and the way in which he's talked about migraine issues and immigration issues inside the United States that he senses a threat from America. And the threat turns out to have been a real threat. The ambassador from the Holy sea inviting him to the Pentagon and a Pentagon American military official,

threatening him and saying, "You know, the Pope better shape up and support us," or else he's in trouble. I mean, again, it's this level of sort of arrogance and failure to understand reality. And also the failure to understand what American influence is and can be.

You know, American influence in the past never worked through military threats,

at least not in allied countries. You know, it worked through the power of persuasion and example. And the idea that you can threaten the Pope and that that's, you know, I mean, anyway. Many have observed that what's really impressive about the story is that someone in the Pentagon or in the Trump administration knew what the Avignon Papacy was. I mean, that's kind of...

I disagree with that. So here is why I was with you. I was skeptical it was true as well. And then it was confirmed by Christopher is doing good reporting on the Vatican.

You can't make that up. You can't make that up.

You couldn't invent that, did you?

You couldn't invent that anecdote. Right. And it's important to understand the combination of people that Trump has around. Like he has total losers and clowns who had no hope in politics and he was their tickets. And then there's a handful of like a grieved super dorks.

Okay. Like Roosevelt who got swirlied in high school and went to Harvard and Yale. And now this is their moment for revenge. And those are the guys that are dropping the Avignon Papacy. Historical threats to the Ambassador from the Holy See.

Similarly, on threats to NATO over Iran, just two bleeds from the President over the past 24 hours. All caps, NATO wasn't there when we needed them.

And they won't be there if we need them again.

Remember Greenland, that big poorly run piece of ice. And then posted this morning. None of these people, including our own very disappointing NATO, understood anything unless they have pressure placed upon them.

“I think he's trying to say that they don't understand anything unless they have pressure placed upon them.”

So that's it. I mean, he's like threatening the Greenland, obliquely threatening NATO again upset that they did not join us. And they wore a choice in Iran that we did not ask them to be a part of or brief them on or include them in any way. Right. So, you know, we put tariffs on Europe. We insulted Europeans.

We sneered about Europe's own security needs which involve mostly revolver on Ukraine and winning the war there. And, you know, we've already talked about advances, you know, dismissive attitude to that war. We didn't tell them we were going to invade Iran or whatever we did to Iran, bomb Iran. We didn't involve them in it.

And if you look at the kind of the timeline of Trump's comments about Europe, you know, he first says,

"We don't need you, then we do need you, and then we don't need you." And then the British say they're going to send some ships. I think to defend some interests in the Gulf, or in Cyprus. It's too late to send ships. We've already won the war. You know, this kind of stream of insults and

“Invective, which I think comes from the fact that Trump, I think he's now at the point”

I don't know whether it's psychological or physical deterioration. I just, I'm not able to explain it, but he does, he no longer seems to connect the events of one day with the next day. You know, and what he says, he doesn't, he acts like it won't have any impact. You know, when you insult the leader of a country, that is heard in that country. And that affects how you are perceived by that country.

These are democracies. Trump is unbelievably unbelievably unpopular all across Europe. You know, in Denmark, it's like 90% unpopularity. This war in Iran is unbelievably unpopular in most of Europe. And they're not going to leap to the defense of an unpopular president fighting in unpopular war, especially when they know that if they did, that would be forgotten the next day too.

I mean, what, you know, you help Trump and then so what? You know, he doesn't remember. I mean, he's insulted the countries who sent troops to Afghanistan and the people who died there. You know, events said something about a Afghanistan that was a long time ago. We don't care about that anymore.

“You know, the only time that article five of NATO, this is the thing in the treaty that says,”

you know, an attack on one is more or less an attack on all. The only time it's ever been invoked was after 9/11. And the only countries who've ever fought on behalf of another country or Europeans fighting for the United States. The other thing is, you know, it's, it's also just not true. I mean, the US has been using European bases all the way through this conflict.

That plane that went down in Iran took off from a British base. You know, the German bases are in constant use. You know, the US would have no ability to fight in the Middle East if it wasn't for the European bases. It's unreal. It's detached from reality.

I mean, the only other thing I can think is that it's his, you know, the war isn't going the way he thought it would. He needs somebody to blame, you know, he doesn't want to blame the Russians, you know, because they're his friends. And so he's looking for some kind of target, you know, it's NATO's fault. But we should have mentioned, I should have mentioned during the, when we're discussing Hungary, like that's another crazy part about all of this.

Like he's blaming NATO and they're campaigning for our bond in Hungary, there's on the Russia side of that election. Meanwhile, the Russians are providing aid to Iran and helping them shoot down our planes and helping them, and helping them go after our soldiers. We're not in a hot war with Russia, but like through proxies, like we are kind of at war with Russia right now, too.

And yet, we're on their side everywhere else. And have been for a long time. I mean, the Russian cyber attacks, Russian sabotage. Those are the main security issues in Europe and their issues for us as well. You know, for our bases around the world and probably inside the United States as well.

And yet Trump, you know, is fixated on the idea that his enemy is, you know, France.

It's, it's a, it's a very, very weird inability to shift some ancient prejudice he has, I don't know, from the 1980s. Yeah, the lack of object permanence, the Trump has is really important, important observation. Because I think he wants the other guys to have that, too. We're like, Macron wakes up one day and it's just like every morning as a clean slate. And like I need to say, doesn't matter what happened. And for Trump, it's reminiscent a little bit for me.

This is something that has worked for Trump politically, but like we're seeing the weakness of this trait. But like back in 2016 on the debate stage, I Trump would be on stage and like talk about how Jeb's wife is an illegal immigrant.

“And that's why Jeb likes illegal immigrant drug trafficking killers or whatever.”

And then the leave stage and on the way back, you'd be like, what's going on this weekend, you want to go golfing? You want to come by the club, right? Like it was all just fake. It was all, you know, it's all performance, right? Trump perceives all of this, like he perceives the apprentice, right, or WWE. And so for him, it's like, yeah, I can whatever threatened Greenland one day. And then the next day say, hey, we need you guys to send us some troops and put them at risk.

And I think that like he literally either is incapable of making that connection. Or like that type of attitude has worked for him for so long that he just assumes that it will work. And everyone will bend to his will and everyone is kind of like him in a way they just don't admit it. No, he has no sense of history. He doesn't understand that he says something. It has a reaction.

He, it's as if he has no memory and other assumes that others have no memory. You know, Greenland just to just to fixate on that for one second.

This was a huge trauma in Denmark. I've been to Denmark since then. The Danes are still talking about it. So the Danes got ready for a variety of reasons public and private statements made by Trump. They got ready. They were prepared for an American invasion. So that meant they went through the thought process.

“What we do, what we shoot down American planes, you know, will our soldiers shoot American soldiers?”

Will they shoot us? What are going to be the economic consequences of that? And other European countries were involved in that conversation too. Germans and the French and Poles and others. They knew there might be a war in Denmark between Denmark and the United States. And everybody got ready for the catastrophic consequences of that.

And then okay, Trump then went to Davos and he made a speech. And he mixed up Greenland and Iceland a few times and he sort of backed off. And you know, but do you think everybody forgot about that? Do you think the Danish military forgot that they had been through that exercise or the Germans forgot that they were nobody forgot. And so, you know, the fact that Trump forgets it doesn't mean that, you know, that this slate is blank for the rest of Europe.

Everybody remembers everybody knows that there's no value in doing anything for Trump because he doesn't, you know, he doesn't remember or he doesn't or doesn't count.

“When only counts is would he cares about right now in that second?”

In that second is he winning right now that's all he cares about.

And that's not how the rest of the world works. And that's not exactly the same. The legendary check-out of Shopify is just on your website. It's the social media and everything is over. That's the music for your time.

How do you know about the rest of the world? With Shopify, you can help in a real help. And start to learn how to tune in on your own or promote it. To that point, really great news letter from my colleague Andrew Eger this morning on how this negotiation of the ceasefire in Iran is demonstrating the end of Madman theory. Madman theory is this idea that Trump benefits from the fact that he's so crazy that the accounter parties do bend to his will because they're worried that, you know, he might do, you know, this extreme thing that no other democratic leader would have done in the past.

Andrew writes about it like this. Somehow, Trump and his supporters insist that his threats to Iran are supposed to exist in some mythical space where we, on our side, are permitted to discount them as not real. But they on their side are expected to take them deadly seriously. This is so as to unlock for Trump devastating levels of negotiating pressure that only he can access. That's basically what Trump defenders have been saying about him for a long time.

And they're in the ways in which that is true, like ways in which certain leaders have given in things because they're like, it's just not worth dealing with the crazy guy on the corner.

The problem is that this situation has revealed the limits of that.

And we have this morning as we're taping this obviously this is a dynamic situation. The straight is an open. There isn't really an agreement to actually there's something coming over whether Lebanon is part of the deal.

Our great military is loading up and resting looking forward to its next conquest.

I got where we're at right now, where like Trump made this big threat, presuming that the Iranians would buckle and their onions like, you know, pay them some service cut a deal, but like not really. I mean, the straight is still being heavily monitored by them. They're making ships go through like along the Iranian shore and taking bribes from people. So that's the state of play right now.

“That's the state of play and we've still never heard, you know, what's the plan to get out of it?”

You know, it is a bizarre negotiation. I mean, on the one hand, you have this completely unreliable, uninformed, you know, I guess Trump and another sending vans who's, you know, equally unprepared and has equally no, no basis of knowledge in the region. You know, on the other side, you have a the hardened remnants of a theocratic regime whose leader is probably in a coma somewhere deep inside in the country, probably underground somewhere. And, you know, is that a reliable team of people to do business with?

I mean, do they even control all of the, all of their military units?

I mean, the IGRC, the revolutionary guard supposedly had, you know, after the leadership was killed, I think by plan had splintered.

And so there are different groups now who are operating maybe not even in contact with one another. I mean, so it's not even clear like who is negotiating with who and are the right people even speaking to the other right people? And is there a deal even to be done? I mean, we've created this very bizarre situation where, I mean, the regime is still in place and, you know, and so on, but the leadership is, it's unclear who the real leaders are. Yeah, as you talk, it's making me think about it that maybe madman theory is working on a run side this time, maybe the feeling is that they're the madman, right?

“Honestly, because just being blunt about the situation, Trump had to beg Pakistan like a dog to help them get out of this, right?”

Like, any day sent Pakistan, the language for a tweet that was said, hey, we're making progress, you know, hopefully you'll come to the table Mr. Trump, you know, to try to save face. But we wrote the language that we sent to Pakistan to, for them to put out, you know, Pakistan calling on Iran and the U.S. to come to the table for a ceasefire. So we asked them to do that, and now we're trying to get an negotiation to happen in Islamabad while the straightest quasi closed. And we're sending vans, who as as you mentioned, no expertise, but the only advantage he has in this situation in this negotiation is that he doesn't want anything out of it.

Like they can give around whatever they want, like we have no goals, we have no objectives, like basically all we want out of it is like letting the letting global trade get back to some quasi normal place where maybe we can take some money. Yeah, the only thing we want out of it is to go back to where we were before. Yeah, man, maybe get some cash, maybe get a half the toll money on the straight. Who knows, I mean, but yeah, right, but like so then it's easy to negotiate kind of because it's like we're not really asking about for anything because we didn't have a.

We don't have any goals anyway. No. Another colleague of mine, Nancy use of word a very good piece published yesterday that I before, you know, saying that basically none of the goals that have been just were described by the administration, you know, by Trump. Over the weeks of the war, you know, they gave different goals at different times none of them have been reached.

I mean, certainly not regime change, which they never even really attempted.

They didn't ever talk to the Iranian opposition, they didn't ever involve them anyone else in the conversation. They don't seem to have destroyed the Iranian military, which at some points was the goal. They don't seem to have destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, which was sometimes also the goal. What did we achieve? I mean, I guess we destroyed a lot of Iranian military assets. But now the world is in a worse situation because the Iranians have first of all demonstrated that the Gulf States, all of which depend on this illusion of safety and freedom and desalination plants in order to exist.

It's shown that they're more vulnerable than anybody thought, so he fits destabilized the region. And also Iran is now taking control of that straight and has said they're going to, you know, make people pay to go through it. So I don't understand what's been gained to this point.

“I mean, I think I guess I have to, I don't have my podcast guest list in front of me, but I think pretty much everybody I've had on this podcast.”

Low the Iranian regime and if they could snap their fingers, you know, would have had a peaceful transition to a different regime that offers more freedom for their people. Right. So I of course. Yeah. So everybody wants that. And so like the point of this, like the conversation is all around the question of like, how can you go about that in a way that is effective, you know, that could be helpful with minimizing potential costs and risks.

This has become a unilateral ceasefire with Washington alone abiding by its top line terms.

The consequences of letting this status quo persist are grave. The US would effectively see that's role as guarantor of global maritime navigation rights. The world would make its own separate arrangements, years of influence would arise. The evidence that the modest or even theoretical application of force to a contested waterway can close it will tempt Beijing to test the premise, all but ensuring a soft or hard blockade of Taiwan. That's from somebody you thought this was good. And then like we're risking a permanent end to peaceful global maritime navigation.

We're so just zeldonally starting with this in the board this morning. So the stakes and risks are just so high and like the geopolitical, you know, potential for things unraveling so great. And it's like, for what this is the other thing Trump is incapable of doing. The word geopolitics and the word strategy, they mean nothing to him. So the idea that something happens in Iran and that has implications for Taiwan or implications on another part of the planet or that people see what happens in one place and they draw conclusions in another place.

“He can't think like that at all. He can only think in terms of what's happening this minute and how do I solve this problem?”

And Iran is now this problem for him. He just wants it to go away. Like he wants the Ukrainian more to just go away.

You know, if we just want to mag Aberkendabra disappear. He even said something like that. You know, he tweeted something a few days ago saying, "Oh, the straight of one day, the straight of one move will just open. It will just magically open." You know, just like COVID would one day, it would just magically disappear. You know, he has these fantasies about problems just disappearing. And that's literally how he thinks.

I can't tell you how many people I've had this argument with his Europeans and foreigners. You know, they, you know, there must be something else going. It's impossible that the American president doesn't have a strategy and doesn't understand that, you know, if he breaks up with NATO,

that will have an effect on Russia or if he does something in Iran, that will affect on China.

It's impossible that he doesn't understand that, but he genuinely doesn't. [MUSIC PLAYING] The legendary check-out from Shopee-Fi is just the shop of your website. It's just social media, and it's everywhere. That's the music for your Iran.

How do you deal with Shopee-Fi with Shopee-Fi? It's possible to get a real help. [MUSIC PLAYING] Okay, I'll move on to a couple really quick final talks. Is there anything else that I didn't ask you about with regards to the conflagration and the Middle East that you want to get off your chest?

“The only thing that continues to upset me and this is the peace I wrote at the beginning of the war.”

It continues to upset me as the administration's failure to talk to any Iranians. You know, there are Iranians to talk to. They're in exile, maybe there are some inside the country. They're Iranian Democrats. They're Iranian monarchists if you want to talk to the son of the Shah.

The failure to include them in any conversation to understand, you know, to listen to people who are actually affected by this conflict that drives me crazy. I don't understand why. I mean, even Iraq, which you could argue was despite all the planning, and was also a disaster, and in Iraq, we did talk to Iraqis, and there was some attempt to understand what Iraqis might want. And here, there's just nothing, and I think that's an important cause of the disaster.

“We always touch such bleak topics when we're together, you know?”

And I feel bad about that because you're a happy person. And so we're going to try to end with an actual happy thing today. But I have to laugh about the fact that I went to look at the outline of our last discussion, trying to see what we had talked about, kind of refresh my memory, see if there's anything on this, to want to get back to you today.

And in my outline, the final topic for happy talk was maybe some good news for Iran, question mark. Because it was in January, and this is a, it's pretty macabre laughter. But it was in January right when those protests were starting, and the regime seemed weak. And like this is the thing, this is one of the things that frustrates me so much about this whole thing. It's like they all, they all just keep lying about why we did this, too.

And they keep lying when they're creating post-talk new rationale for like the real purpose of this was degrading their Navy or whatever. It's like fuck you, like we know what happened. Like the real purpose of this was they seemed weak in January, and Israel saw an opportunity, and BS saw an opportunity.

And like that was the initial point of doing this, and we're farther away from that than ever.

“Yeah, I know it's the thing I'm most upset about actually.”

I'm most upset about what is what this does to Iran and Iran's.

Final topic, let's make fun of Kerry like for a second.

You wrote a couple months ago, now, about what's been happening with the US agency for global media, which she's allegedly running. I've had a few run-ins with old Kerry, but I haven't really followed that that closely, so what's getting us up to speed, what's what's happening there. She managing an efficient ship. No.

No, Kerry Lake has run the really a disastrous ship.

You essentially have a global media runs voice of America, but it also runs some other things. A radio for your radio liberty, which are the radio stations that run in Russian, Belarus, and other places. That's part of radio for Europe, radio for Asia, which broadcasts in Mandarin and Korean in North Korea, and actually was famously broke the story of the oppression of the weaker people in China. There are some very legit, very good journalists who've been part of, you know, not all of it is excellent or wonderful, but a lot of it's very good, and in some places it's really important.

“She took over, I think initially thinking maybe she was going to become a TV star by doing so, and then, I don't know, inspired by Musk and some crazy people on on X.”

She decided actually her job was to destroy the whole thing, and so she literally set out to fire everybody and break up everything and the whole thing.

She was a very good journalist and the system fought back, people sued her, and what's happened most recently is she started losing lawsuits. And one judge has already said she needs to reinstate everybody that she fired at V.O.A. And there's also a bizarre legal question as to whether she's even legally in charge of USADM, whether she's even able to do it because she was appointed in a strange way, and according to the law, she's not she would need Senate confirmation, which she doesn't have. And on top of all this, like actually what she spends most of her day doing all the time is tweeting, you know, non-stop stuff about Trump and Rick Renell and the Trump Kennedy Center and, you know, so mostly what she does is promote herself all day long.

And meanwhile, seek to destroy this agency, which used to do good things, and I should say another piece of the story is has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in doing this hundreds of millions, you know, she fired a lot of people illegally, and that meant their salaries were still being paid. She's shut offices in such a way that she will have to pay fines for having shut them, you know, she broke contracts.

“I mean, almost everything she has literally trail of destruction behind her, and now it's not even clear she was even legally able to do that, which I think that's the good news courts fought back.”

Yeah, so to sum up, Carrie Lake is a loser who's pretending to be in a job she doesn't really have. That's familiar. That seems like a trend for her. Alright, we'll close with this Jeff Goldberg got mad at me a couple of weeks ago because he was trying to suggest to me some World War II military strategy book that I should read and I'm like, I'm sorry. I only have time for one Atlantic book club in its Ann Apple Bombs, and it's an informal one. You've previously suggested the captive mind, the operaman's, the director, a poem, a poem.

That's nice, the choice of comrades, what we can know by Ian McEwen was the most recent suggestion. Anything else? If you're reading watching a TV a streaming show, do you have anything, anything bringing you joy that you'd like to add to the list of Ann Apple Bombs recommendations? I don't know about joy, but I really enjoyed furious minds by Laura Field. Have you read that yet? Oh, you know, I'm talking about it. I'm going to get in trouble that I haven't read it because I love Laura and she wrote, as she's doing the research for the book, she wrote for the bulwark, some really great pieces that I enjoyed, and so for that reason I kind of felt like, I kind of get it. So I haven't read the whole book yet, but I should read the whole book. It is on my list as well.

What's really useful about it for those who don't know, it's a, it's a kind of academic history of the far right, and it places them in, you know, the universities and academic spaces they came from. And she observed them as they were developing, and so there's some good character portrayals and a lot of stuff made more sense to me after I read it, and it's very well done. It's good book. I needed this kick in the ass. I apologize, Laura, that I haven't read it. You know, there's, I've do it. There's a lot of content creation happening out here, furious minds. That is a great suggestion. We'll put a link in the show notes.

That is an apple bomb. I will be here tomorrow taping from California. So it might come out a little bit late, and then a Monday, Sarah, and Bill Crystal be sitting in for me, and then I'll be back on Tuesday.

The board podcast is brought to you. Thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, an audio engineering in editing by Jason Brown. for more information about the e-flesh record.