Reality Reshaped

I was actually at a breast cancer retreat and during the coffee break I looked at my emails to see if I had, if there was anything that I had to deal with. And I got this email from the university and it was a real gut punch. My knees basically buckled and I had to sit down. I never imagined that it would be possible that funding for life saving research would be terminated for issues that were totally unrelated to the quality of the work or the progress that we had made in the work.

0:00

From the Atlantic. This is autocracy in America. I'm Ann Applebaum. In this new season, I'm asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of US Politics and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. Today's episode examines the administration's attacks on science, medicine, culture and education. A combination of verbal threats and funding cuts that look very much like an attempt to control knowledge. Maybe there's a broader goal too, to build distrust and ultimately to reshape all Americans perceptions of reality. I know that sounds dramatic, but I spent many years writing about authoritarian regimes and almost all of them try to undermine admired institutions in order to radically alter the way people think. Let's start with the attacks on science. Joan Brugge was stunned when her research became a target.

0:38

I've been doing cancer research for almost 50 years now, not just at Harvard. When I was an undergrad, my sister was diagnosed with a highly aggressive brain tumor. You know, I've been moving forward from that ever since. It's definitely been a compass that's been directing my life's work. The research projects in our lab involve studies of finding better ways to detect and destroy cells that are the earliest precursors of breast cancer and to design treatments that can eliminate them so that we could try to prevent them from progressing to cancer. You know, it's like we're detectives. Like, you go in and there was a bank robbery and you got to figure out who did it. Were trying to figure out what genes are responsible for causing this cancer and how did they do. Was May of 2025 when I found out that both of my research grants were terminated. The few days after we first got the notices, it was like walking through a morgue. All the faculty and staff from the labs were just almost paralyzed by the consequences of this. You know, really is. It's shocking and demoralizing to have to deal with this. One of the impacts of the terminations was that instead of guiding my lab towards the studies to prevent or treat cancer, I've been extremely distracted by efforts to try to raise money to support the lab. Since last May, seven people have left the lab, but I've only had sufficient funding to be able to replace two of them. It's funny, it's like I think it gets emotional here just because this is what we're living with and it's just so difficult. It doesn't feel right that Americans are going to be deprived of the outcome from this research.

1:37

We have a very focused and intense effort across the board to set America back a generation, at least for education, health research, climate policy.

3:48

Ruth Ben Guillot is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen Mussolini to the Present.

3:59

The thing many people don't understand is that autocrats think about governments in a totally different way. Public welfare and accountability are not of interest to autocrats. It's about amassing power, staying in power as long as you can, and enriching yourself.

4:08

Ruth of all the changes made by this administration, it seems to me that the attack on science is the strangest. I can't even think of other places where this has happened in recent memory.

4:24

I've been trying since the start of this administration in January 2025 to figure out where it is following the classic autocratic playbook and what instead is new or novel. There are two things that stand out as new to me. One is the speed of change, really the speed at which institutions have been destroyed, and the second research has been destroyed. Whole areas of knowledge and policy have been set back. It doesn't correspond to any other example I know where the leader came to power via elections. It doesn't correspond to the first 10 months of Putin, Orban, Erdogan, none of them.

4:36

To a lot of Americans, it feels like these attacks are coming out of the blue. How do you explain them? How do you explain their origin? Why are these things the focus of Trump or his acolytes interest?

5:20

Well, they only come out of the blue if you ignored what was going on during Trump 1.0. Many of these fanatic causes and the people involved in them, such as Stephen Miller and others, were active then, and it was simply that they were only able to push these things so far, and now they feel free and empowered to push this through. The speed at which these parallel wars on American institutions and science and knowledge are happening resemble not the aftermath of an election, but when people come to power via coup. And in fact, in some areas, like the universities or science, the Trump administration has acted more swiftly than people did. For example, Pinochet's regime after a coup. They didn't start a lot of their large scale changes to the economy and education for a year or two. So here we have something that's been planned for a long time. And then the other thing I would mention is that they used their power when they were out of office beautifully. And by partnering with the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 when he won the election, they were able to hit the ground running.

5:37

And is the purpose of this attack to diminish academic institutions themselves, or is it to do with the people who work for them?

6:58

It's both. If we take the example of education institutions, of course, you want to go after individuals, and so every autocrat ends up purging any kind of critic. Certain fields of knowledge must go and others are actually replaced. So you have a reform of institutions at the curricular level, such as Italy and Germany under the fascist period, made huge investments in demographics and eugenics, racial engineering and other subjects, and people who taught them had to go. But you also, at a structural level, you want to change the tenor of the institution. You want to make educational institutions into places where you don't have free thinking, critical thinking and curiosity as you would in democracies. Instead, the education institution itself becomes a place that breeds the values of authoritarianism, suspicion, hostility. And so every regime invests in having student informers. And when I start my classes now at New York University, the first day, if they're about authoritarianism or fascism, I look out at the the students and they say, if this were an authoritarian state, one of you or two of you would be informing on each other and another would be assigned to inform on me as the instructor. So it's curriculum, it's personnel, but the very conception of the institution must change, and it must become realigned and recast to fit in with the larger goals of that state.

7:07

And in this case, what do you mean by larger goals?

8:54

Well, we have here, this is what I call and others call personalist rule under the Trump administration. Under personalist rule, you have obviously a very strong leader and everyone has to pay tribute to him. Some people call this patrimonialism. I use personalism. And so educational institutions have to be compliant to him.

8:57

Ruth Several academics have told me that they believe cuts in funding for university scientific research are really not about science, but about the humanities. They fear that the administration thinks it can use federal funding to influence the kinds of courses universities teach, the students they enroll, the people they hire, ultimately the thoughts that they generate. But still, this doesn't quite explain why? Why an American president would want to destroy the most powerful engine of innovation in our economy and maybe the world, which is our universities and their research departments. Why would they want to stifle life saving cancer research? Also, why would any government want its people not to be vaccinated? I'm not sure there are any other examples in the modern world or even in recent history.

9:23

I agree. I can't find any examples either. Although we have examples of people such as Bolsonaro when he was president, trying to dissuade people during COVID that he said it was just a little flu. So this is a way to attack science. Most obviously a way to spread conspiracy theories. We've seen attempts to smear and discredit scientists, librarians, teachers, judges, journalists, anybody who works with empirical research protocols, fact based methods, scientific methods, investigations, all of them must go. And a very terrifying void opens up that is filled by fear, by conspiracy theories, or by nothing where people don't have any recourse against disease creating conditions. So that with the CDC and NIH and all the other infrastructure of science, if there is an outbreak of mass disease, will be completely undefended. So it's really almost a totalitarian. I don't use that word lightly. A totalitarian effort to change the mindset of people away from science and fact based research across the board.

10:13

Of course, totalitarian leaders in the past did try to use schools and universities to create an alternative reality. Stalin wanted to build a world in which everything he said was automatically accepted as true. Hitler manipulated science to prove his theories about race. But still both of them were very interested in engineering and nuclear technology and energy technology. They weren't cutting funding across the board. Ruth, as we heard from Joan Bruge at the top of this episode, freezes in federal support have already been impacting research labs across the United States. Can you think of an example prior to this administration of a very advanced society with very advanced scientific institutes simply threatening to cut off funding?

11:32

The only example I can think of is China during Mao.

12:18

I was just going to ask about that.

12:24

During Mao's long tenured cultural revolution, et cetera, science was put back by generations. Scientists were among the intellectuals and researchers who were killed and imprisoned and purged. And so you had some of this winnowing out because of loyalty. You had ideological obedience to the party and to the revolution over fact based knowledge. And fact based research became the enemy. Universities were destroyed, experts were sent to the countryside for reeducation. So really, people who have studied this, talk about an entire lost generation. Of scientists, engineers as well. And instead you had institutions, including scientific ones, populated with guards and people who were inexperienced, fanatics, reckless. And so even people who were heroes of the nation, they were beaten, tortured, taken for reeducation. It didn't matter who they were and what kind of contribution they could make. The entire enterprise of science had to be wrecked. That's the only example I can think of where you have an intention, an intensity, and of course, the scope was bigger. But this is just beginning in the United States, and it's really, really frightening.

12:26

Why do you think Harvard has been such a focus? What is it about that institution that has attracted the attention, not really just of Trump, but of, of the Project 2025 crowd?

13:56

Well, here we get into the logic of authoritarian bullying. The more powerful an entity is, the more they must be made an example of. And the higher, more prestigious your target, the more bringing them down or trying to sets it sends a message to everybody else. And so that's how authoritarian shifts in culture, and I'm talking about cultures in terms of behavior, values. That's how they can be jump started. Because then universities with far smaller endowments and power and clout would say, oh, if Harvard's capitulating, well, what can we do?

14:08

Yeah, When I saw the attack on Harvard, I also thought, they're doing this to show that they can do anything. If they can destroy Harvard, they can destroy anyone.

14:54

That's right.

15:04

And there are quite a lot of people out there who like some of what Trump is doing, and maybe they're worried by some pieces of it, but they wouldn't see this as some kind of deliberate destruction. What would you say to them to convince them of your point of view?

15:05

I think that it's a question of time. When you take away pandemic planning, when you take away scientific research, when you take away accessibility for vaccines, the results aren't seen immediately. It takes time for these things to develop. And so, unfortunately, I believe we're going to have a reckoning that eyes will open as things fall apart in America. And then people who did not want to believe who Trump was will see the light.

15:22

The erosion of these institutions, the attempt to undermine our faith in the scientific method, these things could be part of a larger autocratic effort to maintain power.

15:58

Why is he militarizing everyday life? He wants to build fear in people about going to vote. There's both a work of discrediting elections and a work of intimidation that's going to intensify as the midterms grow closer.

16:09

That's after the break, Let's talk a little bit about cultural institutions. Why would an American president be interested in dictating the content of exhibitions at the the Smithsonian, a beloved American institution, It belongs to all of us. Its governing board has all kinds of worthy people on it. The chief justice of the Supreme Court, it's usually had the vice president, many other important figures in public life, bipartisan, I should say. What is it about the Smithsonian that's attracting his interest? Or again, the interest of the people around him?

16:28

Autocrats engage in a mix of utopia and nostalgia. So the Smithsonian is a perfect target if you truly are aiming big. And authoritarians like Trump, they think big, they think long term. They're very obsessed with their legacy. You purge the content of histories that you no longer want or people you no longer want featured, and instead you promote your own sanitized, mythological version of history. It's not enough to just fire people you are smearing who are radical left even though they're not. You have to go after the whole thing.

17:12

For people listening, for whom this is a new idea. Why would a leader be trying to reshape or rewrite history? How does it serve the president to erase black history or to eliminate stories of immigrants who've come here from all over the world? What does that do for him?

17:55

So every leader, especially authoritarians, want to situate themselves within the flow of the nation, and they need to show that they are on the right side of history. History itself has to be rewritten. And in this case, we have white Christian nationalist history, which in a totalitarian framework does not permit the coexistence with other histories. You can't read the history of institutionalized racism or slavery. And so the entire history, and this translates down to banning what's being banned first in Florida and Oklahoma and other states, all of this has to go. And cultural and political icons, people who might be enshrined in the Smithsonian, have to go. So the entire at stake is rewriting the entire history of America as a multiracial, multi faith democracy.

18:12

The administration has also halted some federal government cultural spending, for example, on small museums or monuments, and indeed scholars, and redirected it instead to the upcoming 250th anniversary celebrations of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Why do you think the Trump administration cares about that anniversary? And what distinguishes that from teaching civics or the history of the American Revolution?

19:15

Well, Trump in particular is a man of spectacle. He knows how to stage a spectacle. And ideally, of course, he is at the center of this. This is a classic appropriation of what would be a national, very important national milestone. It will become an excuse to intensify a kind of rewriting of American history, but also remapping of the way that Washington, D.C. looks as the power center. And he's already done this with the White House. That's leaving his mark. So it's never just a superficial transformation. When you have authoritarians, they can change countries so that even in the space of just a decade, so that it can take generations for that country to recover.

19:41

Ruth, we know how this worked in the past. Dictators have built monumental palaces or reconstructed their capital cities as a way of proving they can defeat death, make their power last forever. Famously, Stalin built skyscrapers in Moscow as well as in Riga and Warsaw after he occupied those cities, too.

20:34

Yeah, I agree. What autocrats really want is to feel safe because they, of all people, know how hated they are. They know where the enemies, who their enemies are, and the depth of hatred that they foster with their violence and their corruption. And so they build these safe spaces for themselves, both at the level of governance, where they have these, they're called inner sanctums, with sycophants and family members. And they also put their mark on the Capitol. I think, in America, because we haven't had a national dictatorship, it's hard to envision that autocrats, they truly don't care about public welfare. They have totally different priorities.

20:55

How does that make sense, even from the point of view of the authoritarian? I mean, if they continue to strive to damage America, how long can their destruction continue before it reflects the failure of the leader himself?

21:40

That's a risk they take. But one thing about authoritarians is, although as I've just described, they're very fearful, they also come to believe in their own omnipotence, in part because all day long, if they've done their job and gotten enough sycophants around them, we're seeing this daily in America. All day long they're having praise from people. Without you, we wouldn't be anything, Mr. President. And after a while of this, they. And this, we've seen this, they start to believe their own propaganda, and then they take risks and they exceed. They overreach, and that often is their downfall.

21:54

Ruth, finally, how does this change the conversation about the midterms in 2026? Is the rewriting of history or attacks on universities? Are these part of an attempt persuade Americans to think differently about elections? Do you connect these attacks on science, on medicine, on culture, to the midterms?

22:36

There's been A concerted and very relentless attempt to change the way that Americans feel about authorities, to change the way that they feel about American institutions. And elections are the most important of those institutions because it is the way that we express our voice and have our agency in the world. And so already, as we well know, with his election denial in 2020, he had managed, he actually pulled off a historic feat. He managed to convince tens of millions of people of a very easily verifiable fact that he lost the election. Instead, he convinced tens of millions that he was the rightful winner. And he kept up the distrust in election. All these years, the church has allied with him, the manosphere, all of his enablers and allies. They've done a beautiful job from the autocratic point of view, of discrediting not only elections, but the whole way you think about democracy. So that's part of it. The other is, why is he militarizing everyday life? He wants to build fear in people about going to vote. There's both a work of discrediting elections and a work of intimidation that's going to intensify as the midterms grow closer.

22:55

So part of the point of attacking institutions that collect and promote knowledge, whether scientific or cultural, is just to reduce Americans trust in everything. If we don't know what's true and what's not true, then when Trump argues that the results of the 2020 elections are fake, we believe him. There isn't any evidence, but we don't care about evidence. And they might also persuade Americans not to accept the results of elections this year either, if they aren't favorable to the Republicans.

24:28

Yes, and I'm glad to speak with you because you've studied these things too. That's a big point. It's destroying trust, and which is really trust in each other too, because what is an election? It's everybody casting their vote, their preference, and then based on that collective will, you can change a leadership. And so by convincing people that, oh, it's just all going to be rigged or you're really giving up on each other, and when you don't vote, you're also kind of giving up on your own voice. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. And it's one of the saddest things. And we know when autocracies finally fall, rebuilding that trust is one of the most difficult things to do.

24:57

Thank you very much, Ruth Ben Giet.

25:51

Thank you, Ann.

25:53

Autocracy in America is produced by Arlene Arevalo, Natalie Brennan and Jocelyn Frank Editing by Dave Shaw, Rob Smirciak engineered and provided original music. Fact checking by Enna Alvarado and Sam Fentress Claudine Abade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our Managing Editor. I'm Ann Applebaum. Next time on Autocracy in America.

25:59

The decision to leave the IRS was the hardest thing I've ever done. We all have boundaries in life. I also am the mom to a nine year old who I'm responsible for.

26:26

Caring for and paying for the dismantling of the civil service. That's next time. If you want to listen to the whole series, all five episodes are available to Atlantic subscribers on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to the Atlantic to hear the full third season of Autocracy in America. Now.

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