This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. There is a term for what Musk and Trump are doing.

That's the headline of the latest Atlantic magazine article by my guest Anne Applebaum.

The term, she says, is regime change. She writes,

No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him

have long desired. She points out, during his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump spoke of election day

as liberation day, a moment when people he described as vermin and radical left lunatics would be

eliminated from public life. Before Applebaum started

writing about America moving to the right and Trump moving toward authoritarianism, she was

writing about how some European countries were becoming authoritarian. Last weekend, she was at the

Munich Security Conference where Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary

of State Pete Hegesath were dismissive of NATO and its importance for American as well as European

security, marking a turning point in the post-World War II alliance. It left European leaders

shocked and worried. Applebaum is a staff writer for the Atlantic.

She is also a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the School of Advanced International Studies.

Her latest book is Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Her other books include Twilight of Democracy, Red

Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine, and Gulag, a history, which won the Pulitzer Prize for

General Nonfiction. She's a former Washington Post columnist and member of the editorial board.

We recorded our interview yesterday morning. And Applebaum, welcome back to

fresh air. Thanks for having me. You're calling what's happening in the U.S. under the Trump regime,

regime change. Can you expand on why you're using that language? In the past, you've used words like

illiberal democracy or authoritarianism. the description keeps getting more extreme.

...