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Offline with Jon Favreau

Trump's Memeification of War

Offline with Jon Favreau

Crooked Media

News, Society & Culture

4.72.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2026

⏱️ 67 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum joins Offline to discuss America’s slide towards autocracy, as illustrated through Trump's war of choice in Iran. Anne is a staff writer at The Atlantic, an authoritarianism expert, and the host of the "Autocracy in America" podcast. She and Jon discuss how Trump and the White House are using propaganda to minimize the seriousness of this war, what our president has learned from other autocrats, and why Anne is still hopeful that American democracy can still prevail.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

Transcript

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0:00.0

The country feels like it's falling apart right before our eyes and the people inside it are being silenced.

0:08.3

So we're going to East 26th Street and Nicolet Avenue, which is where Alex Pready was executed by ICE and Border Patrol.

0:19.6

That is not a headline.

0:21.1

That is a human life.

0:22.4

And it is all happening right now.

0:24.9

Do you worry about your own safety being involved in all this?

0:28.2

Yes.

0:29.4

But it doesn't really feel like there's another option, you know?

0:34.6

And of course they use a five-year-old child as bait. And of course they're doing

0:39.9

all these horrible, bad things because they don't know what they're doing. They've been told

0:44.4

that they're going to get rid of the worst of the worst, then they have absolute immunity.

0:50.7

And they've been told that nothing they, will they ever be held accountable for?

0:55.9

On my show, Runaway Country, we go where the headlines hit home,

0:59.4

from communities under threat to the people fighting to be heard.

1:03.1

New episodes of Runaway Country drop every Thursday,

1:05.9

subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.

1:12.6

It's this performance online culture designed for, I don't know, teenage boys and their

1:19.3

grown-up equivalence. But it also has a purpose. It makes people say, you know, this war is

1:25.0

unsurious. The images of violence are frightening, the various

1:28.8

different stories that are told are confusing and contradicting, who knows what's really true.

1:33.9

All of this will make people feel disengaged, and it may work.

1:37.7

I mean, how can you focus on a serious war when you're being told the story of it through

...

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