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Yesterday marked four months since Election Day, but North Carolinians somehow still don’t know who will fill a key seat on the state supreme court.

The problem is not that no one knows who won. Justice Allison Riggs, an incumbent Democrat, won by a tiny margin—just 734 votes out of 5,723,987. That tally has been confirmed by two recounts. But certification is paused while Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin, a judge on the state court of appeals, asks courts to throw out roughly 60,000 votes and put him on the state’s highest court.

The votes that Griffin has challenged fall into three groups. Most are from North Carolina residents whose voter registrations don’t include driver’s license or Social Security numbers. Although this is now required by law, these voters registered using old forms that did not require either; the state never asked these voters to reregister. The second set belongs to overseas residents who have never lived in the state, such as the adult children of North Carolinians who live abroad; state law entitles them to vote in-state. A third consists of overseas voters, including some members of the military, who didn’t submit photo identification with their ballot, again because it was not required.

Griffin doesn’t allege that these voters did anything wrong; in fact, as ProPublica’s Doug Bock Clark reported, Griffin himself twice voted under the overseas-voting law while deployed in the National Guard. But now he argues that their votes should be junked for administrative and clerical discrepancies that were not their fault, and he did not express any concerns about these votes until after he appeared to have lost the race.

“What Judge Griffin is asking is for the courts to change the rules of the election after the election has already happened, and for the courts to allow him to hand-select the votes that shouldn’t count, so that he can be declared the winner,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel who works on voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “That is absolutely unprecedented.”

I wrote about the legal wrangling over the election early this year. At the time, the delay seemed long, but I assumed it would be resolved shortly. Instead, it’s now March, and no end is in sight. Griffin petitioned the state supreme court to hear the case directly, skipping over lower courts, but its justices declined. The North Carolina State Board of Elections, the defendant in the case, attempted to move the case to federal court; a federal judge bounced it back to state courts. A trial court then heard the matter and quickly ruled against Griffin. After he appealed, the state board requested that the supreme court bypass the state appeals court and hear the case quickly, but was rebuffed. So now it’s before the appeals court, with no schedule yet set. The federal court could still reclaim the case later, too. (Yes, this is all incredibly confusing. The News & Observer is maintaining a helpful timeline.)

For North Carolina voters, justice delayed is a justice denied. Sweren-Becker told me that Brennan filed an amicus brief on behalf of voters at risk of disenfranchisement, because these people don’t otherwise have a voice in the case as either plaintiff or defendant.

The decision is now essentially up to Republican jurists. The appeals court has a 12–3 GOP majority, though Griffin is recused from the case. Riggs has also asked that Judge Tom Murry be recused, because Murry contributed $5,000 to Griffin’s legal fund in this case, but Griffin has indicated that he’ll oppose the request. Once the appeals court rules, the case may go to the supreme court, where the GOP has a 5–2 majority (and a recent history of intense partisan acrimony); Riggs, too, is recused from this case. Griffin appears to be asking his own party members to hand him a seat—an impression not helped if Murry stays on the case. (Griffin has declined to comment while the case is in court.)

All of this may be an affront to North Carolinians, but voting experts told me that the outcome matters for America as a whole as well. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA who has contributed to The Atlantic, told me it could end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. “Many of us were worried about subverted election outcomes at the presidential level starting in 2020,” he wrote in an email. “But this is the first serious risk at a lower level. Raising these kinds of issues after the election to disenfranchise voters and flip election outcomes risks actual stolen elections potentially blessed by a state supreme court.”

North Carolina has historically been an early indicator for future national voting battles. It has long seen some of the more preposterous congressional maps in the United States. When the Supreme Court struck part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, North Carolina Republicans moved within hours to change laws. An effort by Republican Governor Pat McCrory to challenge his 2016 election loss presaged Donald Trump’s 2020 “Stop the Steal” push. North Carolina also sent important cases about partisan gerrymandering and the controversial “independent state legislature” theory to the Supreme Court. If Griffin prevails, his playbook could go national as well.

In some ways, the effect of this protracted litigation on the workings of the state is contained. The state supreme court has seven members, and Riggs remains on the court for other cases while hers is resolved. But imagining a case with a more direct impact—say, a governor’s race—isn’t hard. A world in which losing candidates can indefinitely delay the certification of elections with ex post facto challenges is one that could paralyze democratic government. Given the contempt for voters on display here, maybe that’s the point.

Related:

Stop the (North Carolina) steal. Election officials are under siege. (From October 2024)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

American allies don’t trust Trump with their secrets. The advice Elissa Slotkin didn’t take This is what happens when reality TV comes for democracy.

Today’s News

Donald Trump said that a range of goods coming from Mexico and Canada will be exempt from his administration’s latest 25 percent tariff until April 2. Trump is expected to sign an executive order that would start the process of dismantling the Department of Education. Ten Democrats voted with House Republicans to censure Representative Al Green, who spoke out in protest during Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Generations of Americans have questioned the role of the wealthy few who govern the many, Russell Berman writes.

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Evening Read

Nina Westervelt / Redux

Cling to Your Disgust

By Spencer Kornhaber

A few weeks before he started selling swastika T-shirts on the internet, I considered letting Ye back into my life.

It was inauguration weekend, and I’d been sitting in a restaurant where the bartender was blasting a playlist of songs by the rapper once known as Kanye West. The music sounded, frankly, awesome. Most of the songs were from when I considered myself a fan of his, long before he rebranded as the world’s most famous Hitler admirer. I hadn’t heard this much Ye music played in public in years; privately, I’d mostly avoided it. But as I nodded along, I thought it might be time to redownload Yeezus.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Yesterday, I had some harsh words about directionless Democrats. Today, several members of Congress picked a perplexing direction. The group collaborated on a TikTok video playing on a viral trend based on the video games Mortal Kombat and Super Smash Bros Melee. (No, the Trump administration still has not followed through on a law forcing the app’s sale.) “Choose your fighter,” the clip says, before the participants—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minority Whip Katherine Clark—stream through, posing as fighters to be selected in the game. Some are less awkward than others, but the whole thing is pretty cringe. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone some harmless fun, but I’m perplexed by the message. While Democrats are asking people to choose their fighter, voters just want Democrats to pick some fights. It doesn’t look like the party is anywhere close to a flawless victory.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Few White House events have earned the kind of instant infamy that greeted Friday’s disastrous meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And few lines have been as revealing as the one Trump uttered as a benediction, of sorts, to the spectacle: “This is going to be great television.”

The boast was, as the line goes, shocking but not surprising. Trump’s deference to television—and the celebrity he has gained from it—are core elements of his brand, his biography, his mythology; his connection to the medium is so widely recognized that commentators were calling him the “First True Reality TV President” before his first term had begun. And he earned the epithet. Trump “cast” key roles in his administration based on candidates’ ability to “look the part.” He announced his choices to fill Supreme Court vacancies as if he were the Bachelor, offering a lifetime appointment as his final rose. He churned out ever more dramatic episodes of The Real White House of Donald Trump, and each was a ratings bonanza: Few things make for appointment viewing like a show whose arcs bend the lives of its audience.

“The reality-TV presidency,” in that way, was accurate. But the characterization was also woefully premature. Reality TV, at its core, is a genre of total immunity. Its many contradictions (it is at once fact and fiction, anthropology and escapism, “unscripted” and highly produced) free it from the standards that might constrain other shows. Is it real? is a foolish thing to ask about a genre premised on a shrug, in which the foolishness is part of the appeal. Reality shows wink. They tease. They make everything delightfully suspect. Plausible deniability, in the hands of skilled producers, can be spun into TV gold.

But the ambiguities that make reality so engrossing as a mode of entertainment make it hazardous as a mode of politics. Trump, in his meeting with Zelensky, was not merely performing “reality” as a show. He was wielding it as a weapon, planting a new flag as he burned another.

The spectacle that resulted was a striking exception (to history, to world stability, to decency). Trump was abandoning an ally and bullying him in the process; he was rejecting frameworks that distinguished America’s friends from its enemies. The meeting declared the president’s—and thus everyone else’s—new reality: Trump’s earlier show was mere prologue. This is Trump’s reality-TV presidency. The new season will be darker, grimmer, and filled with ever more dizzying plot twists. It demands to be watched not as entertainment but as an omen.

Trump’s 2016 campaign, the rumor went, was a bid to control the news by becoming the news: He had hoped to convert his growing political following into an audience for a cable-TV empire. When he won the election, he adjusted course. Like an insult comic who had wandered onto the wrong set, the new president ad-libbed his way through the political drama. The improv explains, in part, why Trump focused so much on appearances while “casting” his Cabinet, and why he bragged about the “ratings” his COVID-related press conferences earned him: TV was the language he knew. Even The Apprentice, the series that had bolstered his image by claiming to show him as he was, had helped him hone his skills as a performer: The Donald Trump of the show was a character acted out by Donald Trump.

He treated the presidency, similarly, as a part to be played. And he prepared for the role with the help of TV—in particular, the channel that had served him so well. The “reality-TV presidency” was also, by conventional wisdom and in practice, the Fox News presidency. The Fox star Sean Hannity effectively operated as Trump’s “shadow press secretary” in his first term; Tucker Carlson, texts would later reveal, functioned as Trump’s mouthpiece. Many days, the president spent hours watching TV news, his staffers said, and Fox in particular. He was so influenced by the viewing that many claims he made in the afternoons could be traced directly—and verbatim—to claims the network had made in the mornings.

Through all of that, though, a fundamental distinction remained: The president was here; Fox was there. Yes, a revolving door spun between Fox’s green room and Trump’s White House. But revolving doors are necessary only when walls stand between the inner space and the outside world. Those walls, in Trump’s first term, remained largely intact. Trump watched the news and tried to influence it; he did not try to stage-manage and wholly subsume it.

Performance itself, in retrospect, served as one more democratic guardrail: Trump winged some lines and ignored many others, but he operated mostly according to an old set of scripts that worked as a check on executive power. He demeaned the role, yes—he twisted and tested it—but he performed the presidency and, in that most basic of ways, preserved it. He paid the role the smallest bit of courtesy by acknowledging it as a role in the first place, scripted and edited and honed over time—a single part meant to be interpreted by many actors.

[Read: The scare quote was 2016 in a punctuation mark]

Trump proved his acceptance of the performance, in fact, by chafing against its scripts. The lawyers who constrained him, the generals who restrained him, the reporters who questioned him, the understudy who threatened him—the assorted producers and directors and designers and actors who had their own roles to play in the show—each, Trump fumed, dimmed his limelight. That first term, as a consequence, found him working as both the government’s headliner and its fiercest critic. He panned the whole thing for its complicated plots and its sprawling cast and, most of all, its failure to be a one-man show.

This was another reason Trump’s first season got the ratings it did. Each of his outbursts was also a cliffhanger, with democracy in the balance. But each, too, was a reminder that the imperiled government, for all its backsliding, had not yet succumbed to the abyss. Even as Trump railed against his castmates, he grudgingly accepted their right to share the stage. Even when he went off-book—even when he missed his marks and ignored his cues—he acknowledged that he was part of a broader production.

Only at the end of his first term did Trump try to torch the stage and shred the scripts. And only at the start of his second has he embraced the full license that comes when “reality” collides with democracy.

As Trump berated Zelensky under the guise of good TV, he also embraced the political force of reality TV. He was converting the genre’s core features—the refusal to distinguish between truth and lies, the ambiguities that verge into nihilism—into an exercise of unchecked power. Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance used the occasion to repeat misinformation so egregiously wrong that it mocked the very notion of “information.” Vance accused Zelensky of being “disrespectful,” of coming into the Oval Office and trying “to litigate this in front of the American media.” (It was the White House, of course, that had turned a meeting that would typically be conducted in a closed-door session into a media event.)

Reality affords total immunity in part because it creates environments that cannot be penetrated by the standards of the outer world. The Apprentice—a spin on Survivor, essentially, set in the kill-or-be-killed world of the corporate jungle—made no sense in practical terms; it reflected the executive-hiring process about as well as Survivor reflected bushcraft. But Does it make sense? is roughly as relevant to a reality show as Is it real? In the worlds established by reality TV, nothing makes sense, and everything does. Reality shows establish, and then are beholden to, their own rules. They are stridently insular. They are thoroughly self-rationalizing. That is the fun—and the danger. They will do whatever they want, because they can.

Trump brought that logic to his meeting with Zelensky—and the permissions of The Apprentice to the White House. Here was the Oval Office, remade as his “boardroom”; here were the confrontations that brought climactic closure to each episode, reconfigured as diplomacy. Here was Trump, the all-powerful executive, bringing his signature glare to the world stage and his signature phrase to a nation: You’re fired, he basically told Ukraine, as he posed and vamped.

The global viewership assured by the cameras in the room was complemented by a studio audience: members of the media who had been selected to join the show. Their presence was the fruit of a claim Trump had made earlier in the week, when his White House announced that it would be determining the makeup of the press pool that covers the president. The announcement, one of many recent White House attacks on press freedom, wrested power from the independent organization of journalists that had overseen presidential reporting for more than a century. In the process, it destroyed a standard meant to ensure that the White House receives independent press coverage—and, with it, one more democratic guardrail. (“We’re going to be now calling the shots,” Trump said of the move.) The change also helped explain why, after witnessing a meeting that truly deserved to be called “historic”—one that concerned the future of Ukraine, the future of NATO, the ambitions of Russia, and the possibility of World War III—one member of the press gaggle chose to meet the moment by asking about Zelensky’s outfit.

[Read: Intimidating Americans will not work]

In a coup, you first go for the media: You take over the radio stations, the TV channels, the papers. From there, you can do nearly everything else. You can steadily replace the journalists who would question you with ones who will do your will. You can replace the officials who might question you with ones who will serve you. You can create a world in which the president of Ukraine is to be blamed for the invasion of his own country; in which Zelensky, not Vladimir Putin, is the dictator; in which Ukraine, not Russia, is the villain; in which you are a president who operates like a king. You can air the new “realities” so relentlessly that, before long, they can seem like the only reality there is.

Power grabs, when made by those who already have power, can be harder to detect. They can occur gradually, bureaucratically, cut by cut and claim by claim—and they can look, from the outside, innocent, ordinary, and unscripted. The meager distance that once remained between Fox News and the White House has been, in Trump’s second term, obviated; the president has now brought the full weight of “reality” to bear on his relationship with the network. Why watch Fox as a viewer, painstakingly translating the televised content to reality, when you can cut out the middleman and simply integrate TV into the daily operations of your administration? Why allow a division between the Fourth Estate and the First when you can simply incorporate the one into the other?

By one recent count, Trump has appointed 21 Fox News personalities to his staff—many, like Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, at the highest levels of his administration. The president announced the latest addition to his cast last week (around the time he announced that “White House correspondent” would effectively mean, for his presidency, “White House loyalist”): He appointed Dan Bongino—Fox contributor, radio host, purveyor of conspiracy theories, partisan in good standing—to serve not in a media role in the White House but as the deputy director of the FBI.

Bongino, like many of his fellow appointees, is qualified for his new role mostly to the extent that “personality” is a job description. But in a politics governed by “reality,” qualification will be whatever the producers claim it to be. Loyalty can be its own line in the résumé. And Bongino quickly proved his worthiness within the standards of the show: On the same day that Zelensky visited the Oval Office, the White House announced that the FBI, with Bongino installed in its top ranks, was in the process of returning a cache of documents that the Justice Department had previously held as evidence while it investigated Trump’s potential mishandling of classified information.

This was “justice,” in the insular world of Trump’s show. It corrected a “hoax,” as Trump’s lawyer called the investigation, that had put the president in legal jeopardy. In the reality that has no scare quotes, though, the reclamation of evidence might also look like impunity. It might look like the power afforded to Trump when the Supreme Court—three of the nine justices owing their spots on the bench to one Bachelor and his final rose—made his broad immunity a matter of law and judicial precedent. In the context of history, this is an emergency. In the context of the show, however, it is simply one more twist in the story. Government by “reality,” like the TV genre, has no obligation to be factual. It has no obligation to be moral. It has no obligation to be anything at all. Wisdom, cruelty, accountability, democracy—in the bleak politics of “reality,” these things no longer exist. They can’t exist. Only one thing matters, as the show goes on: Is it great television?

In 2018, Dan Bongino, then a right-wing podcaster who had dedicated his professional life to owning the libs, shared with his audience his latest triumph. Bongino had recently participated in a panel discussion about the “deep state,” one of his areas of expertise. The panel, Bongino explained, had turned out to be a setup. The moderator, the military historian Vince Houghton, was a closet lib, “some complete zero,” who, unable to keep up with Bongino’s formidable intellect, resorted to sputtering profanity.

But Bongino flipped the script. “I get up; I rip the microphone off; I storm off the stage; I’m like, ‘Screw this guy,’” he explained. “But here’s the funny thing, folks. The whole crowd at the panel—there had to be 200-plus people—storms out of the room with me!”

Bongino’s inspiring tale of persecution turned triumph, like other narratives he has repeated, bears some surface relation to the facts. But Bongino omitted certain key events. One was the moderator’s response to Bongino’s put-down, which a reporter recorded at the time: “You’re an idiot, you’re a moron, and you’re deranged!” Another is that, contrary to Bongino’s claim that the entire crowd stormed out with him, only half did so. The other half stayed and cheered his departure. The third is what Bongino did right before storming off, according to two people present: He chucked a bottle of water at the moderator’s head. Not exactly the picture of a man who has just overawed his opponents with the force of sheer reason.

[Read: A new kind of state media]

Like many confident but unreliable narrators of the MAGA movement, Bongino has since moved on to bigger and better things. Last month, Donald Trump appointed him to serve as deputy director of the FBI. (A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment about the panel episode.) Even to those benumbed by the second Trump administration, this came as something of a shock. The bureau’s new director, Kash Patel—whose primary job qualification, like Bongino’s, is fanatical loyalty to Trump—initially placated concerned staff by promising to elevate career FBI officials as his deputies. But after the rank and file resisted demands by the Justice Department to turn over names of agents who had investigated the January 6 insurrection, the president decided that the FBI needed more political discipline, according to CNN, and compounded the effect of Patel’s appointment with the addition of Bongino.

In an email to FBI staff, Patel wrote that he felt “confident Dan will bring his vigor and enthusiasm to the Deputy Director role, driving the operations of this organization in the right direction.” This is, strictly speaking, correct, depending on how one defines right.

Bongino rose to fame as a former Secret Service agent who quit in disgust in 2011. (Given the agency’s shaky performance during the most recent presidential campaign, he may have been onto something.) He ran for Senate in Maryland the next year, lost massively, then ran for a House seat in Maryland two years later, lost narrowly, and then moved to Florida to run for the House yet again, finishing a distant third in the Republican primary. At that point, perhaps wisely, he transitioned from electoral politics to a successful career as a right-wing media personality and podcaster.

Bongino has written or co-written eight books, which is less impressive than it sounds, because he tends to regurgitate the same ideas over and over. Three of Bongino’s books cover the Secret Service, and another three cover the Trump-Russia scandal. To get a sense of how his mind works, I decided to read several of them, but after a few pages, taking mercy upon myself, I lowered the target to one.

Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump is the first volume in Bongino’s trilogy about the Trump-Russia scandal. Or, as Bongino would put it, the Clinton-Russia scandal. Bongino’s argument, familiar to anybody who follows right-wing media, is that the mistaken belief that Russia cooperated with the Trump campaign is the product of a vast conspiracy involving the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, and the FBI. Like a defense lawyer, he walks through the evidence selectively, presenting parts of it in the most sympathetic possible light (for example, when Russians proposed to help the campaign in 2016, Donald Trump Jr. had no choice but to listen) while ignoring facts he can’t spin. Bongino disputes not only that the Russians carried out the hack of Democratic emails in 2016, despite U.S. intelligence determining that they did, but also that Russia favored Trump at all—a preference that Russian propaganda was broadcasting openly.

[From the October 2024 issue: The man who will do anything for Trump]

Bongino argues that Vladimir Putin would never support Trump, “a successful capitalist committed to spreading economic freedom throughout the world.” Instead, he argues, Russia likely preferred Clinton because “her leftist ideology mirrors her mentor’s, Saul Alinksy, the radical Marxist organizer who believed, just as Putin does, that ‘conflict is the route to power.’” The entire explanation hinges on a tenuous three-way ideological link, which in turn rests on a failure to absorb the demise of the U.S.S.R.

Like other Trump defenders, Bongino fails to explain the central flaw in the theory that the Trump-Russia scandal was manufactured to tip the 2016 election: If the FBI’s probe was intended to hurt the Trump campaign, why did it publicly deny his links to Russia until after the election?

In Spygate, Bongino wrote that the FBI was guilty of “false accusations, illegal spying, and entrapment”; taken together, this was “the greatest scandal in American political history.” Or, at least, it used to be. In January, Bongino suggested that the FBI was covering up the identity of whoever planted pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees on the eve of January 6, 2021. “Folks, this guy was an insider,” he said on his podcast. “This was an inside job. And it is the biggest scandal in FBI history.” Presumably, this would demote the previous greatest scandal in American political history, which also heavily involved the FBI, to the second spot. With Bongino now poised to operationalize his theories from a position of power, one suspects that more scandals are due to follow.

For all the norms Donald Trump flouted in his first term, his approach to filling out his administration was familiar. He rooted around the same sets of professions as his predecessors, hiring lawyers, CEOs, academics, and military leaders, among others. Liberals may not have liked his picks—Jeff Sessions for attorney general, say, or Michael Flynn for national security adviser—but regardless of ideology, most of his top advisers had recognizable credentials. In his second term, Trump has found a new talent pool to draw from: podcasters.

In the past week, Trump has tapped two podcasters, Dan Bongino and Graham Allen, for high-ranking jobs in his administration. Bongino, who hosts one of the most popular right-wing podcasts in the country, will become the deputy director of the FBI. Allen, of the Dear America Podcast, will serve as a top communications official at the Defense Department. Even accounting for their unconventional backgrounds, their appointments are surprising. Each has used his platform to trade in extreme conspiracist beliefs. On his show, Bongino has claimed that the pipe bombs found near the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were actually an “inside job,” that the results of the 2020 presidential election were false, and that checks and balances in the government matter less than “power.” (Though a former Secret Service agent, Bongino has no previous experience at the FBI—a departure from those who have held the role in past administrations.) Allen has reportedly claimed that climate change is part of a liberal plot to control people and has called Taylor Swift “a witch and a devil.”

Bongino and Allen, neither of whom responded to requests for comment, are part of a cohort of right-wing media figures who have been assigned top roles within the administration. That includes Darren Beattie, the founder of the conspiracist website Revolver News, who joined the State Department, and Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who is now secretary of defense. Many, if not most, of these figures earned Trump’s loyalty by using their platforms to be obsequious stewards of MAGA—in effect, creating a quasi–state media. But as these figures make the move to government, the Trump administration is also now becoming a media-run state.

[Read: The white nationalist now in charge of Trump’s public diplomacy]

It’s hardly unprecedented for media journalists to make the jump into politics—especially in communication roles. In his first term, Trump picked Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, as his chief strategist, and then–CNBC host Larry Kudlow as the head of the National Economic Council. In 2008, Jay Carney left Time to join Barack Obama’s administration, eventually becoming the president’s press secretary. But something odder is going on now within the Trump administration: a breakdown of the barriers between media and government.

Trump’s recent appointments are only part of the melding. Consider the likes of Charlie Kirk, who doesn’t have an official government position but still seems to hold influence. In November, Politico reported that Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder and right-wing media figure, advised Trump on whom he should select for significant roles in his then-forthcoming administration. Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer who rose to prominence by pushing conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, was invited by Pentagon officials to travel on Hegseth’s first trip overseas. He then claimed to have joined Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on a trip to Ukraine, meeting with the country’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky.

The right-wing media’s formal and informal roles in the administration mark a new kind of singularity. The podcasters now do policy and dabble in politics. And some right-wing politicians, including Ted Cruz and Dan Crenshaw, have their own podcasts. So do some politicians on the left, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, who announced a new show this week. But on the right, politicians and media figures more explicitly mingle and work toward the same goals.

That is especially the case now that the Trump administration has barred media outlets including the Associated Press from covering many White House events, while welcoming in right-wing media figures such as Lara Logan. Although Fox News and Newsmax have cut ties with Logan for her extremist views, she was recently included in a State Department listening session. Similarly, yesterday, the Department of Justice chose to first give documents regarding the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein to right-wing influencers—including Posobiec and Chaya Raichik, who runs Libs of TikTok, a high-profile right-wing account on X—instead of actual journalists. (The documents reportedly contain little new information.)

This blurring is indicative of a substantive shift in how the contemporary right operates. The conservative media ecosystem has long functioned as the id of the right wing. But in the media-state singularity, there is not even the pretense of space between the two worlds. President George H. W. Bush hosted Rush Limbaugh overnight in the White House, in a likely attempt to ingratiate himself with the radio host. Trump doesn’t need to do such a thing, because the modern equivalents of Limbaugh are inside his administration as high-ranking staff members. (After Limbaugh’s death, in 2021, Bongino took over his slot on many radio stations.)

The practical effect of this union is an ongoing rightward lurch. That the conservative media has infiltrated the White House explains some of the current administration’s policies—proposed mass deportations, vindictive tariffs, attempts to gut entire federal agencies. The new direction of the executive branch is a far-right podcaster’s fever dream. As Bongino posted in November: “We are the media now.” Since the election, the phrase has become popular among an online right distrustful of legacy news outlets. It’s only partially correct. Right-wing influencers such as Bongino are the media to swaths of America. They are also now the government itself.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

This week President Emmanuel Macron of France visited Washington and called Donald Trump “Dear Donald” four times. A photo of their meeting shows them smiling and clasping hands. We, of course, don’t know Macron’s true degree of affection for Dear Donald. But we do know that European leaders have noticed that the rules of diplomacy have changed and they are quickly adjusting.

First, European leaders sat through a speech from Vice President J. D. Vance at a security conference in Munich in which he criticized them and made clear that they could not rely on the United States in the same way they had before. Then Trump repeated Russian talking points, claiming that Ukraine started the ongoing war. And now there are reports that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is flying to Washington to discuss a deal with Trump in which Zelensky would give up national resources in exchange for security protections from the United States, an offer that staff writer Anne Applebaum describes this way:

You know, it’s as if you went to your neighbor with whom you’d had cordial relations with a long time, who’d helped you fix your car and with whom you had good relations and said, Actually, in exchange for all that, you know, in exchange for the salt I lent you and the cookies I baked you, I’m demanding half of your wealth right now.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Applebaum about what she calls the “end of the post–World War II order.” We also talk with staff writer Shane Harris, who covers national security, about how intelligence agencies are responding to this new posture from the Trump administration, and what this means for a group of allies that have long routinely shared intel with the U.S.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: When Donald Trump was running for his second term as president, last year, he gave plenty of hints that he didn’t care all that much about staying chummy with our European allies. For example, he once said if NATO countries didn’t pay their fair share, he would encourage Russia to, quote, “do whatever the hell they want.”

So maybe no one should be surprised a year later that he and members of his administration are spending their first few weeks in office offending their allies and shaking up the world order. But it is kind of surprising—at least, the speed of it and the dismissive tone: For example, Vice President J. D. Vance telling the EU leadership, some of whom he referred to as “commissars,” that their countries were suppressing free speech, or Donald Trump repeating Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine.

Donald Trump: You should’ve never started it. You could’ve made a deal. I could’ve made a deal for Ukraine.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today, we talk about what this shift in the world order might mean. In the second half of the show, we’ll be talking to staff writer Shane Harris, who covers national security, about how intelligence agencies are reacting to the changes.

But first, we talk to Anne Applebaum, author of the book Autocracy Inc. and host of the podcast Autocracy in America. Anne started her career tracking autocracy around the globe, and, with the rise of Trump, she started noticing it creeping up in her own country.

Anne Applebaum: I went around Germany, like, five years ago and did Cassandra-like lamentations, and nobody believed me, you know. And now, like, every German newspaper wants me to say, How do you feel about being right? And I’m like, I feel like shit, you know. What do you mean, How do I feel about being right? I feel terrible. I don’t want to be right.

[Music]

Rosin: Anne, this new administration’s shift in tone has been so sudden and so stark that I want to understand it better and figure out what its implications might be.

Applebaum: So No. 1: The language and body language that have been coming out—not just from the White House but from the defense secretary, from many people affiliated with Trump over the last few days, last couple of weeks—has been strikingly negative. The vice president went to a security conference in Munich, where generals and secretaries of defense and security analysts were gathered to hear the administration’s view of what it felt about the Russian military threats to Europe, and to the United States and to the rest of the world. And instead, he made a supercilious speech mocking them. That was No. 1.

No 2: Donald Trump announced a restart of conversation with Russia that wasn’t an attempt to find a solution to the war that would keep Ukraine safe and sovereign. It seemed to be an attempt to create a U.S.-Russian relationship of a new kind that seemed very sinister. And then, finally, I think it was the real turning point—and this, for many people, was a stunner, I think—was a UN vote. Ukraine and its allies around the world proposed a motion condemning Russian aggression.

The U.S. not only did not back the motion; the U.S. voted against it, together with Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, the Central African Republic, and a handful of other Russian allies around the world. And that package of things, put together, is an indication that the U.S. appears to be switching sides.

Rosin: Yeah. I guess that’s the way to put it: “The U.S. appears to be switching sides.” I mean, I’m trying to think of the right way to characterize this. You immediately said the end of the post–World War II order—you declared that right after these things happened. You feel strongly—you feel definitively about that?

Applebaum: I feel definitive about it. That doesn’t mean other things aren’t going to happen. It doesn’t mean it’s not reversible. It doesn’t mean that Trump won’t get pulled in other directions. The Russians are famous for lying about what their plans are and for promising things they don’t deliver. He may find himself disappointed with the relationship he’s trying to build with Putin.

I’m not saying that there’s a straight line from here in a predictable direction. But I think I can safely say that no American administration—Democrat or Republican, since the 1940s—has talked the way the Trump administration talks. In other words, not just doubting its allies or criticizing its allies—I mean, that’s happened lots of times—but actually criticizing the fundamental premise of the alliance.

The impression Europeans have now is that that’s not true anymore. And because they were still pretty sure it was true three weeks ago, this is a very sudden and rapid change.

Rosin: Right. And this is not a good thing. I hear the alarm in your voice. Why is the post–World War II order important?

Applebaum: The post–World War II order—and, I mean, even calling it an order is too highfalutin. I mean, it’s really just a set of alliances that the U.S. built in Europe, and I should keep saying in Asia, as well, and Japan, South Korea, Australia are also part of the same world. It was a world the U.S. built in which a group of the world’s wealthiest countries agreed to work together to share their security, to develop similar and compatible economies.

The U.S., together with the Europeans and their Asian allies, created these real zones of prosperity and peace. And the U.S. was a beneficiary of that same prosperity. The U.S. was the major investor in these countries. The U.S. was allowed to lead in all kinds of ways. U.S. ideas about trade or about economics were genuflected to. I mean, although maybe that sounds too subservient. But, I mean, the people wanted U.S. leadership, the U.S. benefited from leadership, and the U. S. had those allies when it wanted to do other things.

When the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, American allies also went. When the U.S. wanted to fight terrorism in the Middle East or around the world, U.S. allies cooperated. They cooperated with intelligence. They sometimes cooperated militarily. They sent soldiers when they were asked to send them. So the U.S. had an unusual kind of power in the world.

So other countries, of course, have military power and economic influence, but the U.S. had a form of economic and military influence that persuaded other countries to join it. This has been true over many years, in many different ways. It means that when European countries are considering big investments, big power plants, they will sometimes choose U.S. companies over their own or over those of their neighbors because they want to maintain those good relations with America.

Rosin: I mean, I guess what’s rattling about this moment is: There isn’t a precipitating event. There isn’t a ratcheting up of hostilities, the way there has been, historically. It’s just Trump. It’s just, you know—he changed his mind, so there’s really no warning. However, he did signal during his campaign, you know, Russia should be able to do whatever the hell it wanted. Is what’s rattling, especially about this moment, the speed? Like, it all unraveled in a few weeks?

Applebaum: So I would go farther. I mean, Trump has been talking about his disdain for allies and alliances since the 1980s. In 1987, notoriously, he took out these huge newspaper ads, after a trip to Moscow, I should say, saying that alliances were a waste of money, and we shouldn’t, you know—at that time, Japan, people were particularly worried about. During his first term, he repeatedly looked uncomfortable with allies, attacked them, disparaged them, famously wanted to leave NATO. He told John Bolton that he wanted to leave NATO, on the way to a NATO summit. And he was talked down by Bolton and by Jim Mattis and by others. So in that sense, it’s nothing new.

Nevertheless, since the election, Trump mostly was talking in a normal way to allies. He had phone conversations with European leaders and Asian leaders. Just a few weeks ago, he was saying, Putin’s a loser. We need to put pressure on him, you know, to end the war. And then, suddenly, as you say, it was the speed—about 10 days ago, about two weeks ago, maybe. Suddenly, the tone shifted and switched.

Rosin: The whole thing brings up the forever question about Trump: Is he chaotic or intentional? Which I think is important here because intentional would imply that he is actively remaking the world order. Like, actively aligning the U.S. with Russia. Do you sense that’s the case?

Applebaum: I think it’s a possibility, yeah.

Rosin: You do?

Applebaum: I do.

Rosin: And why? What are the best guesses about why? To what end?

Applebaum: The best guesses include: He’s been convinced of wealth and riches to be had for the United States or, perhaps, for people in his entourage by a better relationship with Russia. He’s been convinced that putting pressure on Ukraine, rather than on Russia, will end the war quickly. He’s bored of the war; he doesn’t really know how to end it, and he’s looking for a shortcut. Those are the guesses that we have. I mean, whether there’s been a specific conversation or a specific offer, I don’t know.

I should have included this in my list: I mean, the fact that he has been repeating Russian propaganda—so saying things that aren’t true but that are the kind of thing that you hear from the Russian media and from the pro-Russian media in the United States—means that he’s hearing that from somebody. And so the best guess is that he’s been speaking to someone who has changed his mind or has convinced him that Russia is a better and more predictable ally than France or Britain or Germany or Japan.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, that’s the moment where I sat up and took notice, is the way he was talking about Ukraine, repeating such obvious lies about the origins of that war, and then, also, that document that the treasury secretary offered Ukraine. Can you describe that document? That one, for me, was a shocker.

Applebaum: Okay, so this is a document of a kind that I can’t think of a precedent for. It was given to President Zelensky of Ukraine, first by the treasury secretary, who went to Kyiv to do this. And, essentially, the document says Ukraine is supposed to sign away 50 percent of its natural resources, both rare earth minerals and other minerals and other resources and income from ports and infrastructure, to the United States indefinitely.

So the Ukrainians are meant to hand over half of their national wealth for the foreseeable future to Americans, and in an unclear way. It’s not clear to whom they would give this wealth and how the wealth would be extracted and how it would be measured and who would decide what 50 percent was—none of that is clear at all. And they would do that out of some kind of gratitude to Americans, or some kind of fealty to Donald Trump, perhaps. And they would not receive any clear security guarantees or anything else in exchange.

Rosin: And what’s unprecedented about that? That it’s unfolding like a real-estate negotiation? Or what is, you know, unusual about it?

Applebaum: An open-ended demand from a sovereign country that it hand over its wealth to another country—I mean, this is a kind of 18th-century, colonial way of dealing with a country. And this is, of course, a country that’s been an ally to the United States, that’s worked closely with U.S. intelligence, that’s been a part of an American security structure. You know, it’s as if you went to your neighbor, with whom you’d had cordial relations a long time, who’d helped you fix your car, and with whom you had good relations and said, Actually, in exchange for all that—you know, in exchange for the salt I lent you and the cookies I baked you—I’m demanding half of your wealth right now.

Rosin: By the way, a few hours after recording this, there were reports that the proposed deal was updated. The new version apparently now includes a vague mention of security guarantees for Ukraine. And Zelensky is supposedly flying to Washington later this week to meet with Trump about it. We don’t have many more details, but Anne’s neighbor analogy still holds.

Okay. Back to the conversation.

So the obvious thing to read into this betrayal of Ukraine is: There is no sanction for autocrats who want to invade other countries. Do you think that is the intended message?

Applebaum: I don’t know whether Trump understands that as the message and also, because I still don’t understand what the endgame is, how exactly he thinks the war will end. I don’t want to say something terrible has happened before it’s happened, right? But yes, if the war ends in such a way that Ukraine loses its sovereignty or is forced into some kind of humiliating situation or is unable to defend itself in the future against a rebuilt Russian army two years from now, then yes—the conclusion will be that might makes right.

Big countries are allowed to invade small ones and get away with it. And not only will the U.S. not help you if you’re a democracy being invaded by your dictatorial neighbor; the U.S. might side with the invader. That would be the lesson. And that, too, I mean—there are cascading consequences.

Rosin: Yeah. And, you know, during the Ukraine war, you’ve talked about the importance of us standing up for Ukraine, because there are consequences for Estonia. I mean, there are consequences for lots of countries.

Applebaum: There are consequences for Germany. There are consequences for Britain. You know, maybe there are even consequences for the United States. I mean, if we won’t, you know—what are we prepared to defend?

Rosin: Yeah. As things are realigning quickly, I mean, French President Emmanuel Macron seemed to indicate in his visit to Washington this week that, in fact, Europe should be less dependent on the U.S. and more in charge of its own defense. That’s what Trump says he wants. Could that be a neutral shift? Like, is that necessarily a terrible shift? How should we think of that kind of shift, where Europe is more in charge of contributing to security for its own region?

Applebaum: I think it’s a fine shift and one that I’ve been arguing for, for a long time. But it’s not a shift that you can do in two weeks, and so there is a very dangerous moment coming.

Rosin: What do you mean?

Applebaum: Well, when, you know—if the U.S. is serious about withdrawing from Europe, or if that’s the way that Trump wants to go, then there will be a moment when Europe is not yet prepared for that scenario.

Rosin: I see. So it just can’t happen this quickly. Like, the same as DOGE—it’s just sort of “come and burn everything down,” but it’s not, like, an intelligent or useful way—

Applebaum: No, it’s not an intelligent solution.

Rosin: Yeah.

Applebaum: As I said, I don’t know whether Trump or people around him have thought this through. I mean, the U.S. gains a lot of advantages by being the leading security power in Europe. And will European countries still want to buy U.S. weapons? Will they want to buy U.S. security products? There would be consequences for the U.S. too. I mean, it’s not like the U.S. just withdraws, and Europe takes over, and everything’s fine. No. There would be, as I said, this kind of cascading series of economic and political consequences that might turn out to be quite dramatic.

Rosin: Yeah. Last thing: I know you were in Munich with defense and security officials, people who help with Ukrainian defense. I’m curious what the mood is of people who have to think on the ground about strategy and defense, and how quickly they’ve been able to adjust.

Applebaum: People are adjusting very fast. The new chancellor of Germany, who was elected on Sunday—Friedrich Merz—one of the first things that he said: We have to prepare for a new world in which we are independent of the United States. And I can’t tell you how dramatic that is. He’s been pro-America. He’s been an advocate for close relations between Germany and America, and Europe and America. And to have him say that means that people are thinking fast.

So it will take a long time, of course, for military production cycles and strategic planning to change, but the beginning of the mental change has already started.

Rosin: Well, Anne, thank you so much for joining us and for naming everything that’s happening so clearly. It’s so helpful.

Applebaum: Thanks.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: spies. We talk to Atlantic staff writer Shane Harris about how these shifting alliances are affecting the intelligence community, and what that might mean for American security down the road.

[Break]

Rosin: So in the first half of the show, we talked about the shifting world order and the political issues it causes. And now I kind of want to talk to you about operational issues, like sharing of intelligence, spycraft, you know—the things that happen between nations that make the world run. So from your reporting, are you finding that any agencies, governments are wondering how much they can trust the U.S.?

Shane Harris: I think that has been a question that has been simmering for a lot of the country’s allies since even before the election, when they looked to the possibility that Donald Trump might come back to office. How much could they trust the United States to be a reliable partner in protecting secrets, protecting intelligence that they might share? I should say it wasn’t, like, a “five-alarm fire” kind of worry. But people are really starting to ask this because Donald Trump had a history of disclosing other countries’ information, disclosing the United States’ own secrets, in some cases, and notably was criminally charged for mishandling classified information.

So I think with his election, those anxieties rose, and now what we’re seeing is kind of compounding that is this even more, I might even say, kind of existential question of not just, Can we count on the United States to protect our information and be a good security partner at the kind of tactical level? but, Can we count on them to be a good partner strategically at all anymore?

And I think all of these questions are kind of colliding right now and really undermining what had been decades of confidence that European allies, in particular, had had in the United States, regardless of whether a Republican or a Democrat was sitting in the Oval Office.

Rosin: Right. Can you actually explain how intelligence sharing works? Like, who are our critical partners? Who provides intelligence? Who provides the most intelligence? Just so that we understand what could change.

Harris: Yes. So the most important intelligence-sharing arrangement that the United States has is something that is referred to as the “Five Eyes.” And that refers to five countries—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand—that have this long-standing kind of pact, where they share highly sensitive intelligence and information on a routine basis with one another that’s of interest to their mutual security.

And really, sort of the big, big, big players in this often are the United States and the United Kingdom. I’m just going to give you an example of how closely we share information with the U.K. When it comes to signals intelligence—which is like electronic eavesdropping, intercepting emails and other digital communication—the physical infrastructure, you know, literally the technology, the kit that these two countries rely on, is intertwined in some locations. It is that closely enmeshed.

On the level of human intelligence, so information that an agency gets from spies in the field or from assets that it has, the U.S. and the U.K. routinely share the fruits of that kind of intelligence with each other as well. And all the other partners do that on a pretty regular basis too.

And then the United States does share, maybe on a less exclusive, maybe a bit more restricted basis, but certainly shares with other NATO allies—you know, France, Germany. The United States, you know, for decades has depended extensively on German intelligence to tell us information about terrorist organizations and particular threats that are brewing in Europe that might be of interest or a threat to the United States.

So this is the kind of on-the-ground, if you like, level of sharing that goes on just routinely. And it happens, importantly, via channels and via career employees that are in place, regardless of who the heads of government, the heads of state are in the various member countries.

Rosin: By the way, the term Five Eyes. It’s so good. Like, it’s a little on the nose, but it’s so good. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a movie, or no one’s written a novel called The Five Eyes, in which one of them betrays each other or something like that happens.

Harris: I’ve always loved it because, you know, it’s: They’re all watching. And importantly, I should say, and interesting to follow on that: In the Five Eyes, in that agreement, what’s important, too, is they do not spy on each other, right? That is something that’s also very special to the relationship in those five countries.

Rosin: I mean, I’m reading in the lines of what you’re saying. So we don’t know the degree of mistrust yet. It’s probably brewing, but it sounds like, from what you’re saying, it makes everybody less safe. Like, it makes us less safe, too, because these are how, you know, terrorist threats are detected, and these networks are very intertwined, so it feels a little precarious, dangerous.

Harris: I think that’s right. And you’re right to say that it makes everyone less safe, because if any country is holding back on information, arguably, that is potentially making everybody less informed and less aware, which could have real-world implications. And I should stress that no one has said to me, Well, we’re just going to stop sharing information with the United States, because we don’t trust you.

The real concern now is that (A) the United States might just start cutting off information flows to other countries. We did see, this week, the Financial Times had a very interesting report that Peter Navarro, who is sort of an aide to Donald Trump—who is known for saying some pretty outlandish things, I should say—was raising the idea that Canada should be kicked out of the Five Eyes arrangement. And presumably, this is some kind of coercive measure that would be used to try and get more-favorable trading terms from Canada. Now, Navarro came out and said there was nothing to this; it was a made-up story.

But we have heard rumors of this. I’ve heard chatter about it before, about whether or not Trump was considering doing that. The mere idea that the United States would be using Five Eyes membership and access to national-security intelligence to protect the country’s citizens as a coercive measure to try and get more favorable trading terms, you know, strikes people I’ve talked to as appalling, but totally in keeping with what they would expect Donald Trump to do, which tells you just how far we’ve deviated from the norm.

Rosin: So what else are people bringing up that makes them nervous? You mentioned, you know, Trump has leaked secrets before. Like, I think he famously tweeted a top-secret image of an Iranian rocket-launch site. I mean, he’s known for being a little lax with other people’s intelligence. So that’s one thing. Is that on people’s minds?

Harris: That’s definitely on people’s minds. You know, there was a famous incident in the first year of his first term where he seemed to disclose a top-secret source of information we were getting from Israeli intelligence during a meeting he had with two Russian officials, which didn’t go over great. So there is that kind of general concern about Trump himself and the people around him being very leaky and using intelligence in a way that is to their own benefit and interest. That’s been a worry.

You know, another, I think, less-appreciated concern has been: This intelligence-sharing relationship, while it is ostensibly a two-way street, really, it’s the other four Five Eyes that are depending on the United States for most of the information. I mean, the British security service, while very capable, is much smaller than the United States, and they really depend on the information they’re getting from the Americans, and it’s less about how much the Brits are giving to us.

And several people I’ve talked to in the Five Eyes community worry that as agencies—particularly, like, the FBI, which routinely shares information with the Five Eyes partners—as they’re going through this sort of chaotic period where they’re being taken over by political loyalists, like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the new deputy director, and Trump has gone through and fired these sort of upper echelons of the career establishment, or is trying to, those are the people, the individuals with whom these different allied countries interact with on a regular basis.

And some of them have said to me, Look. You know, while you guys, basically, can’t get your stuff together, and you’re kind of in chaos, we worry that that’s going to have a downstream negative effect on us, because you’re so distracted by politics and internal witch hunts and, you know, personnel matters that maybe you’re taking the eye off the ball, and we’re not getting the usual high quality of intelligence that we depend on.

Rosin: Right. You know, some leaders in Europe have talked about—like, Emmanuel Macron hinted at this in his meeting with Trump—that actually, being less dependent on the U.S. for their security might be a good thing for Europe. I wonder if there’s a version of that for intelligence. Like, We don’t want to be as dependent on the U.S. There’s some advantage to switching up the way that we’ve been doing things.

Harris: I think that there is. And certainly, intelligence officials I speak to aren’t quite there yet in proposing it, but everyone is aware that the nature of the alliance is shifting—and perhaps not irrevocably, but at least for the foreseeable future.

You know, if you take some intelligence agencies in Europe right now—you know, take the British intelligence service and the security service right now, for instance. They have been very aggressive and far more kind of at the front line of the action in Ukraine than the United States has. They’ve developed certain capabilities and networks and sources of information that are very useful to them.

The European countries, the U.K. included, really do see the threat from Russia, I think, differently than Americans do. They see it as something that is very much kind of in their backyard. And because of that, I think that they have been devoting more resources to beefing up their own intelligence on Russia. And could that push them, you know, in a direction where maybe they say, Look—we’ve got to start being less dependent on the United States and beef up our own capabilities and share with each other? I think that’s quite possible.

What the United States has to offer is, you know, technical reach. I mean, we’re talking about electronic information. We’re talking about just a constellation of satellites that can capture imagery and all kinds of other information. So the United States still has that bulk and has those numbers, but that does not mean that these other countries can’t develop even more specific and tailored ways of collecting information that suit their own interests and make them less dependent on the United States. I think that could happen.

Rosin: Yeah. And that’s, I suppose, value neutral? Like, we don’t know if that’s good or a bad thing.

Harris: Well, look—count me on the side of people who believe that the alliances have been very much in the interest of the various members, and that this information sharing is just a culture that now pervades among these countries. There’s a belief that more sharing, you know, and a kind of mutual—not dependence but, you know—feeling of we’re all in it together is generally good for the collective whole.

I don’t want to overstate this. The United States is the dominant intelligence force in the West. Could it go off on its own and probably be okay? Yeah, it probably could be for the near term. But you never want to be missing that one key piece of information that tells you about, you know, a bigger threat. And I just don’t see any reason, particularly, other than Trump being Trump, why we need to blow up those alliances. But, you know, this is where we are right now, isn’t it?

Rosin: A last thing: I’m thinking about Trump signaling his closeness with Vladimir Putin, you know, how he recently repeated some Russian talking points. I wonder how those kinds of signals get received among the people you talk to—intelligence officials, the people who are guarding these alliances. What’s the result of those kinds of actions?

Harris: I think that they hear that, and, honestly, they think, We’ve heard this before. Everyone talks a lot about J. D. Vance’s speech in Munich, and some of the statements that Donald Trump has made about Zelensky being a dictator, and this affection for Putin. And all of this has been happening in the past month.

My mind goes back to 2018, when Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki—and listeners may remember—the question of Russia’s interference in our elections in 2016 came up. And Trump—in front of the audience, in front of the world—said that he believed Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies when Putin said that Russia didn’t interfere in the election. And I think that was as stunning of a single, jaw-dropping moment as I can remember in my career covering intelligence—that the president of the United States was standing there next to an ex-KGB officer and saying, I believe him and not the U.S. intelligence community.

Our allies heard that. And really, ever since then, when I talk to people, you get a range of opinions, from, Donald Trump is just a businessman, and he likes Putin’s tough-guy attitude, all the way toward people thinking, I can’t prove it, but I’ve always suspected the Russians are either blackmailing him, or somehow, he’s secretly an agent. Like, you get the range of opinions from people.

So I think that they have just always, generally—the security services in these ally countries—have always seen that relationship that he has with Putin as a significant problem. And it’s one that they have to manage. So what they’re hearing from him now, with this affection for Putin, is not new. The difference is that now Trump is actually breaking these alliances with the West. And he is talking about a settlement in Ukraine that does not necessarily appear to be either in the interests of Ukraine or other European countries. And that has intelligence officials in Europe extremely nervous.

Rosin: I see. So this erosion of trust is long and slow. And what’s been shocking to the rest of us, the intelligence community has been monitoring for a while, those who are keeping close tabs.

Harris: I think that’s right.

Rosin: Well, Shane, thank you so much for joining us today. You always teach us so much about worlds that we don’t know a lot about.

Harris: It’s great to be with you. Thanks, Hanna.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Bongino's appointment means two staunch allies of the US president will lead the country's principal federal law enforcement agency.

Trump said Bongino was "a man of incredible love and passion for our Country" and would serve under newly confirmed FBI director Kash Patel.