'If You Can Keep It': ‘Empire of Grift’

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0:21Two words defined President Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. From this day forward, it's going to be only America first. America first. And here's some more words that define the campaign. We are making America great again. Very simple. We are making America great again. America has been at the center of President Trump's rhetoric, but his administration's approach to foreign policy tells a different story. The president heads to New York today for the United Nations General Assembly, where American diplomacy will be on display. But what does that look like in the second Trump term? Writer Ann Applebaum says the administration has done everything from leveraging tariffs, canceling visas, wielding sanctions as punishment for foreign leaders to try to influence elections abroad for personal gain.

1:16In her new piece, Empire of Grift in the Atlantic, Applebaum outlines in painstaking detail the way Trump and his allies are talking America first while lining their pockets in practice. I'm Jen White. And I'm Todd Zwilling. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. For today's installment of our weekly democracy series, If You Can Keep It, we look at how the Trump administration is using the tools of U.S. diplomacy to make the world safer for corruption and authoritarianism. That's right after this.

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2:06Anne Applebaum:This week on Up First, we talk about the economy. Trucks, trains, and tractors run on diesel, which is now priced at record highs. with less than 50 days until the midterm elections. So the next six weeks are going to be intense. Let Up First get you through it one morning at a time with three stories you need to know each day. Listen to Up First on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Hernan Diaz about how he's used the same fountain pen for the last 30 years. What would happen if you lost it? Do you guys know those big pens with four colors?

2:44Oh, yeah. I grew up with that. Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's meet our guests. Anne Applebaum is a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She's also the author of Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Anne, it's great to have you back. Thanks for having me. Also with us is Casey Michel. He's the director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program with the Human Rights Foundation. His new book is called United States of Oligarchy, How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators Weak in the U.S.

3:22and Destroy Democracy. Casey, welcome back. Thanks so much. We also reached out to the White House and State Department to respond to the argument and allegations made in Ann Applebaum's piece, but we did not hear back. Now, Ann, you examine dozens of examples where the Trump administration has used foreign policy for personal gain. But let's start with one that isn't in your piece. Last week, a ProPublica report revealed that a part of Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding earlier this year was paid for by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev. He's a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now, Kremlev was also in attendance.

3:56President Trump was not. But the Trumps have confirmed this report saying that it was an, quote, extraordinarily generous wedding gift. How do you think that latest story fits into a bigger one about corruption and how Trump, his family and allies are really upending U.S. foreign policy for their financial benefit? So first of all, it's very interesting to note that the person described as a Russian oligarch is actually, I mean, closer to a gangster. He was a criminal. He changed his name. And he has not just friends with Putin. He has been enriched by Putin. So he's somebody whose money comes from his relationship to Putin.

4:36He has control over the sports betting industry in Russia and a car dealership. He's influenced in the International Boxing League. But he's somebody who is – he's not a normal businessman who earned money through working hard and pulling himself up by his bootstraps. He's a sort of representative of the Russian security state. He's very close to Putin's bodyguards, for example. And so having someone like that be that close to the president's son, offering money to the president's son, a party, a rented island, fireworks. I mean, this story has the advantage of being one that I think everybody can understand.

5:15He's not someone who could reasonably have known Trump Jr. for many years. He's not an old friend. He's someone who is buying his way into the president's entourage, like so many other people have been trying to buy their way into the president's entourage over the last year and a half. and they do it, I mean, this is a particularly egregious and, as I said, clear example of it, but there are also people who pay money into the president's cryptocurrency company without necessarily any expectation of earning anything from it. They're doing it as a gesture of support. There are people who pay money into his inauguration or the ballroom fund, and some of those are foreign companies or foreign actors.

5:58There are people who have, I mean, You have the example of the Saudis who have invested$2 billion in Jared Kushner's investment fund. So you can see all over the world people who are able to, and not all countries are able to do this, who are able to try to influence the president making these kinds of investments. And we're going to get to a lot of those examples, Anne, that you just mentioned, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, other places that you report on. Back on Kremlev, though, and Don Jr.'s wedding, Casey, lots of national security experts and former officials have sort of been clanging the bells here about the national security concerns of a Russian oligarch or gangster, as Anne says, who's so close to Vladimir Putin, bankrolling part of the wedding of the president's son that it would have set off major alarm bells at any other point.

6:51Can you describe what some of those national security concerns might actually be? Yeah, well, this is a security concern 101 because this has been, of course, not only the financial elements of this relationship and the kind of leverage that that may present for a figure like Kremlev and, of course, figures in the Kremlin who see Kremlev as a proxy for their efforts to cultivate the Trump family, in this case, Trump Jr. But to say nothing about what actually happened at the wedding itself, there are all kinds of questions about if there was any kind of bugging, any kind of clandestine photography or video recording or what kind of conversations or potentially compromising material may have been gained by this one action, by this one figure out of one regime targeting one family member of the Trump administration.

7:37And look, as Anne described, this is just one example of many that we know about. Of course, Trump Jr. himself has been intimately involved in the Trump family's crypto investments and crypto businesses, which we know foreign regimes have been all too happy to take full advantage of as well, not least places like the United Arab Emirates, which just so happened to also be receiving high-end chips that were all kinds of national security concerns themselves, paralleling their investments in the Trump family business. So again, these are only the examples that we know about. They have all kinds of knock-on national security effects and concerns.

8:14And as Anne just laid out there, one more piece of evidence about how American foreign policy and even American national security are now for sale to the highest bidder. Now, we should note that at least two Republican senators, John Curtis of Utah and Tom Tillis of North Carolina, criticized these payments. And we reached out to both senators to join us but didn't hear back. The invitation stands. And this idea that the Trump administration is using foreign policy for personal and financial gain, is it new? You examined the administration's involvement in dozens of countries, including Brazil, as Todd mentioned, Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, Russia, and others in great detail.

8:50Some of these places you even visited. What patterns did you find about how the administration is wielding U.S. diplomacy to promote its interests? I think the most important thing to understand is that the administration isn't using diplomacy as we traditionally understand it or only selectively. So many of the most important conversations that happen between the White House and foreign leaders are brokered by businessmen. And they're very often businessmen who are somehow close to Trump or who have donated to Trump. And actually Brazil is an example of that where it's a long story. There was a kind of breakdown in relations between the U.S.

9:32and Brazil. The American president was favoring the Brazilian opposition. There was very little communication between the two sides. And finally, a meeting between Trump and the Brazilian president was brokered by a Brazilian businessman, a meatpacking business, which has some business in the U.S. and some in Brazil, and who is also one of the major donors to the inauguration. So – and this is a pattern we see everywhere where it's not diplomats. It's not experts. It's not people who have knowledge of Russia or of Iran who are negotiating with Russia and Iran. It's business people. It's the president's son-in-law.

10:10It's people who have their own interests in the issue. And this, as I said, repeated everywhere. You know, the fact that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are negotiating in Ukraine instead of people who understand the situation in Ukraine and understand what it means to move the border to one place or the other, or the fact that they were negotiating in Iran when they had no expertise in Iranian nuclear development. This is a sea change. I mean there are many things you can point to that have echoes in the past. There have been U.S. power has been used to help U.S. companies in the past, especially in Central America and other places.

10:47But the transfer of diplomacy from the realm of experts and diplomats and people with training to people who have their own interests in the region or in the outcome is, I think, unprecedented, at least in modern America. And you have to get your passport stamped when you read this piece because you hopscotch all around the world to all of the different places where this dynamic is at play. One, of course, is Greenland. Americans have been hearing so much about it. You describe in close detail Donald Trump's intimidation of Greenland, his promotion of the idea that he's going to take it over, social media posts of him glowering over Greenland while the American flag sort of rises on the horizon.

11:33But there's news on this front. On Friday, the president said that the United States had officially struck a security agreement with Greenland and with Denmark that would give the United States greater military access and presence in the country. And that agreement still needs approval from Denmark and from the parliament in Greenland. But what would this do in practice and how does it fit into the bigger story here? So I have to tell you, as far as we know from what's been published, this agreement alters very little. So the United States has a security treaty with Greenland and Denmark going back to 1951 in which the U.S.

12:11is allowed to put bases on Greenland. And actually during the Cold War, we had many bases on Greenland and we at one point may even have stored nuclear weapons on Greenland. And over the years, this was reduced. So this – there's a clause in the treaty that says that, well, now the Russian-China can't put bases there. But when was – Denmark was never going to let that happen anyway. There's a clause that says there can't be big Chinese or Russian investments there. Also, it was never going to happen anyway. So it looks to me like a kind of face-saving gesture rather than something real. Again, as I said, we haven't seen the full document yet.

12:48But, you know, from related to what we were talking about before, the important thing to understand about Greenland is whatever it is that we achieve or whatever minor nuance to the treaty we improve, that doesn't justify, you know, a year and a half of real intimidation in Greenland. And so just to be clear, there are U.S. companies now and U.S. businessmen who periodically show up in Nook, in the capital, who make sometimes grandiose offers of funding or money, who seem to be trying to buy or influence Greenland politicians. Carrying guns sometimes, you write. Well, no, it's the Greenlanders who carry guns.

13:29Okay. All right. Straighten that up. No, no. So you now have the – and of course nothing is secret in Greenland. It's a very, very small society. And so when an American person styling himself as a business person who has some links to the Trump administration appears and begins making generous sweeping offers, everybody immediately understands that this is political. And this has been – this is now the pattern and there have been multiple examples of it. There was actually – there's a company linked to a big Trump donor that over the summer was announced that it was going to be drilling in Greenland even though it didn't have permission to drill.

14:06It's actually a strange story because they say they're interested in drilling and minerals and so on. I mean Greenland is actually a very, very difficult place to work and there's a reason why no U.S. companies were there in the past because it's very hard to – you would have to import workers and infrastructure and you have to work in, you know, Arctic temperatures and conditions. and it's not the easiest place to function. And so what it looks like to the Greenlanders is that all these people are coming there now as part of a political campaign. It doesn't look to them like genuine economic interest.

14:39Look, Casey, we spend our Mondays talking about the health of democracy in this country. To your mind, what does the Trump administration's approach to foreign policy mean for both American democracy but also our national security more broadly? Well, Jen, of course, it's a disaster for both American democracy and American national security. As Anne was just describing, and as she describes in her piece, this has been a complete erasure of any dividing line between private interests from those in and around the administration and American national interests writ large. Donald Trump himself has talked about this in the past, that he does not have any conflicts of interest.

15:17And, of course, his family and inner circle, by all appearances, seem to be thinking the same thing and, of course, saying the same thing as well, whether it's out of Greenland, whether it's out of Canada, maybe most spectacularly. We talked about him earlier in the conversation, a figure like Jared Kushner, who claims that he is still not a public official and therefore not actually subject to any kind of public disclosure requirements and is yet now here in the 2020s, by all appearances, the single most diplomat that the United States of America has produced, all while taking in billions of dollars from foreign patrons and foreign benefactors around the world and still being at the center of everything from Gaza and Israel policy to, yes, Russia and Ukraine policy, to most spectacularly the Iran war and the failed negotiations that led up to that.

16:01I think that's one of the clearest examples you could see of Kushner on the one hand taking, of course, billions of dollars from Iran's geopolitical foes, failing to disclose most, if not all, of that, and especially what's happening with that money, while nonetheless leading these failed negotiations, and as we now know, claiming, being one of the few people who claimed that Iran was weeks, if not days, away from developing a nuclear bomb, and therefore the Americans had to step in and take this action, this military action that has now been ongoing for, I've lost track of how many months, and certainly what it has cost all of us.

16:34You know, Anne was just talking about Greenland a moment ago, and yes, there is this new deal, or at least supposed deal, which seems to just revert to where things were in the status quo ante, but it's worth remembering this is, if not shattered outright, then at least done significant damage to America's transatlantic alliance and American-Canadian relations as well. The North American security architecture is suddenly in question in a way it hasn't been in decades, if not centuries, all because of, or largely because of, the private financial interests and financial gains that are at the heart of the Trump administration's policies.

17:07And we have just about a minute before we have to take a break, but Casey zeroes in on Jared Kushner. What role do you think unofficial actors like Kushner, like Steve Witkoff play, And how does this make corruption easier? So these are people who have conflicts of interest. They are not diplomats. They are not abiding by a code of ethics that they have to swear to. They are not civil servants who work on behalf of America. They're people who are essentially freelancing. I mean they work for Donald Trump, of course. But they're working in places where they have private interests or where their friends could or where people they know could benefit.

17:48And that's, again, as I said, unprecedented. It just leaves open the possibility that they could be swayed or persuaded by money in a way that a previous generation of diplomats would not have been. Pat writes, It appears that many countries have determined that America can no longer be counted on with our change in administrations every four years. Therefore, it's in their best interest to move forward together without the U.S. We'll get to that after the break.

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18:57Ideas about how to make sense of the incomprehensible. Most of science in general is actually intuitable. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. Ten years ago, Colin Kaepernick took the knee during the national anthem, and it cost him his NFL career. He's rarely talked about it since. Now he tells the story of that decision and why he still trains every day to play. But I am not at the point of accepting I will never step on a field again. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get fresh air. Now, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney didn't mince words when it came to how he thought countries like his should respond to the Trump administration's foreign policy.

19:49Anne Applebaum:The middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu. So, Casey, how is the Trump administration's approach to foreign policy reshaping this country's relationship, both with adversaries, but also with longtime allies? Well, it's a great question, Jen. Certainly what we've seen thus far is that it's the adversaries that are the ones benefiting, because all too often it is those adversaries, those autocracies and dictatorships and the Russias and the Chinas and the elsewheres of the world that are able to purchase American policy at will. They don't have any kind of domestic anti-corruption or pro-transparency requirements, whether it's places like the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia, they can ink these deals as much as they want with any of the figures in and around the Trump orbit.

20:38And they are the ones who we have seen thus far benefiting, whereas it is America's democratic allies who do have restrictions and transparency requirements on signing these kinds of business arrangements that we have seen with both American diplomats and private sector actors under the Trump administration that prevents them from creating these kinds of corrupt or crooked or questionable business deals. Now, of course, that is to the benefit of those domestic audiences in the Canadas and the UKs and the Australias of the world. But what that means is that they are driven further and further away from the United States of America and are developing more and more cohesive alliances themselves and structures themselves.

21:16We saw just a few days ago the announcement of some kind of impending conversations, potentially even a deal of some new arrangement between Canada and the European Union. What that structure exactly looks like remains to be determined, but I have no doubt that whether it's the EU, the UK, Canada, or even further afield, the Australians, New Zealands, and Japans of the world, there will be new arrangements that leave the United States of America to the side and will be ultimately to the detriment of American interests. Anne Applebaum, some of this is about money, as you detail, some of it's about ideology.

21:50How How is all of this making room for anti-democratic governments in other countries when the United States and the Trump administration approach diplomacy in this way? So there are different ways in which this works. Let me focus for a minute on Europe because there it's most interesting and probably most controversial. The U.S. has now in the State Department a number of very ideological people who feel themselves to be civilizationally aligned with the European far right. This means parties like the AFD in Germany, Nigel Farage in the U.K., maybe Marine Le Pen's party in France, although that's complicated because France has a long tradition of far right anti-Americanism.

22:36But far right in Poland and Central Europe. and they are actively seeking to promote the fortunes and interests of those parties and they do it through gestures, through statements, but also increasingly I think they're looking to do it through funding. You know, the U.S. has a lot of public diplomacy funding that goes to scholarships and cultural promotion and they want to redirect it towards those kinds of groups and organizations and to think tanks that are close to them. You know, we see this in other ways, too. So just to give you an example, at the last Polish presidential election, a few days before the final round, there was a CPAC event held in Poland.

23:18I think Kristi Noem came, if you still remember her. And the guest of CPAC was the far-right presidential candidate. And, you know, he was obviously clearly being promoted by – it wasn't the administration. It was people around it. There is also among the companies close to the administration an interest as well. And this is a little more nuanced, but the tech companies, for example, have a great interest in not being regulated by Europe. They would like not to have to conform to European laws. They would like to not have to face the EU's very powerful regulatory systems. Far-right parties in Europe are very often anti-European.

24:06So that means they're anti against the European Union, against the organization that is capable of regulation. And so their support, which in some cases is pretty open from Elon Musk, in some cases, you know, it may be done through algorithms or through other means for the far-right and for people who are opposed to the European Union is pretty clear. And so there you see a kind of alliance between some business interests and some ideological interests. And Europeans are beginning to understand this. They understand that the U.S. is now supporting, in some cases, parties that would want to change their political systems or in the case of Germany, a party that would – that is pro-Russian and would stop Germany's aid for Ukraine and maybe even Germany's participation in NATO.

24:56So there's no previous U.S. administration in which you could imagine political parties like that having American support. But now they do. And as I said, it's ideological as well as financial. We got this question from Stephen who says, do we not have laws against people officially representing the United States without being a United States official? And Casey, I think it's important to sort of take a step back here. Talk about some of the policy decisions that have made the Trump administration's actions possible. How did we get here? Well, it's a great question, Jen. We could spend the entire conversation talking about how we got here.

25:36To answer the questioner's question first, yes, technically there are laws, such as things like the Logan Act, that go back years, decades, even centuries that prevent individuals who are not specifically appointed and approved, either by the Senate or the other governmental bodies in the United States, that prevents them from directing American policy and negotiating on behalf of the United States of America. And there are certainly plenty of good governance individuals, civil society, certainly myself included, that feel that Jared Kushner more than falls under the requirements for public transparency and transparency about his finances.