Applebaum: Trump Administration Is Revolutionary, Seeks To "Smash And Destroy" The "Administrative State"
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/09/26/applebaum_trump_administration_is_revolutionary_seeks_to_smash_and_destroy_the_administrative_state.html

In an interview on "Firing Line," Anne Applebaum of "The Atlantic" argues the Trump administration is full of "revolutionaries" who don't "see the United States as the natural leader of an alliance of democracies around the world."

"They don't want the United States to promote democracy or be seen as a kind of beacon of liberal democracy itself," Applebaum told host Margaret Hoover.

MARGARET HOOVER: What makes the people in the Trump administration now revolutionaries rather than simply a group of opportunists who happen to temporarily hold power?

ANNE APPLEBAUM, THE ATLANTIC: So it's clear that the, you can see this in both domestic and international policy, that these are people who, exactly as you say, they don't think of themselves as people who are temporarily in charge, who will lose an election next time, who are maintaining and carrying on an American tradition that goes back many decades. They're people who see their job as smashing or breaking what they call the administrative state in which the rest of us call the American government. They want to smash and destroy America's relations.

They don't see the United States as the natural leader of an alliance of democracies around the world. They don't want the United States to promote democracy or be seen as a kind of beacon of liberal democracy itself. They have an idea of America as an ethnic nation, kind of white Christian nationalist civilization.

And they would like to promote that civilization all over the world, but especially they're interested in Europe because they see Europeans as their ethnic kin. And this is really hard even to explain how radically different this is from the way most American administrations have thought before. The United States has acted in the world, at least since in the 20th century, as a force for, as I said, democracy and especially the rule of law and international trade and recognizable rules and so on.

HOOVER: And cultural and religious pluralism. In your reporting, you observe that American foreign policy is no longer represented overseas by trained diplomats, by reliable officials, but instead, quote, by informal envoys, privileged companies, online grifters and hardened ideologues promoting their own business and ideological goals. Who are the ideologues and what do they believe?

APPLEBAUM: So the ideologues are people who believe in the America as a white nationalist Christian nation, as a nation which is derived from a founding group of people and their descendants, and that's its essence. And the civilization of those people is the thing that the United States should promote. And we should also seek to acquire allies who believe in that same version of the world.

I should say a corollary of this, in addition to this, is that they also believe that this civilization should be dominant, especially in its hemisphere. And they promoted a number of colonial or imperial projects towards that end. So whether it's in Canada, whether it's in Greenland, and whether really most spectacularly in Venezuela.