The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 16 episode of theDaily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Over the weekend, ABC News shocked the political world by reaching a $15 million settlement with Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit he’d brought against the network. Some experts have said ABC could have potentially won the suit. This comes after Trump raged at ABC News throughout the campaign, and many observers are seeing the settlement as a potential sign of capitulation to him. Notably, this comes even as Trump just openly declared that he thinks he’s “tamed” the media; and if not, it’s his full intention to do so in a second term. Today, we’re talking about all this with Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, the author of Autocracy, Inc., who wrote a good piece before the election arguing that Trump is trying to condition voters to accept authoritarian rule. That’s unfortunately even more relevant right now. Thanks for coming on, Anne.
Anne Applebaum: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: ABC News has now agreed to pay $15 million to support the future Trump Presidential Foundation and Museum. There will be something like that apparently. Trump had sued because George Stephanopoulos had said in a question that Trump was found liable for rape in the E. Carroll lawsuit. The details are a bit complicated, but it’s not at all clear ABC would have lost if it had kept fighting. Your thoughts on this outcome, Anne?
Applebaum: Trump issues libel suits and other kinds of suits the way other people buy cups of coffee. He’s been doing it for years. It was one of his business tactics. He does it as a form of intimidation, just to make people think twice and make them spend money and make them waste time. Really the best thing for news organizations to do would be to resist it. Because if you resist it, if you make him spend the money on lawyers and him waste time, then you win. I don’t know the legal details but what’s really disturbing about this one is it sounds as if ABC certainly had a chance of winning. They could have kept going, and they’ve decided not to and given really quite a large settlement to a so far nonexistent Trump charity, supposedly in order to make the suit go away.
That looks less like prudence on the part of a news organization and more like, Let’s not be in any fight with a president who we know might have used other tools against us. And that’s ugly. That’s not the way we’re used to seeing brave news organizations behaving.
Sargent: Right. The critical point you raised there is that news organizations in these situations tend to take on this fight on principle.
Applebaum: Or they have done for many decades. News organizations will resist frivolous libel suits because they know that once they’ve conceded to one of them, others will do the same.
Sargent: In your piece, you write that Trump is adopting a standard authoritarian tactic in a more general sense, which is to prepare the public to accept an authoritarian role for the state. It seems like we’re seeing something similar right here. Can you talk about that broader tactic?
Applebaum: Trump, during the election campaign, used all kinds of language, from calling his opponents “enemies of the people” or “enemies of the state,” calling immigrants “vermin,” language that hasn’t really been part of American politics before. He issued endless threats toward individual journalists, toward the media more broadly, toward particular judges, toward various enemies. And of course he kept doing that, and has been doing it even more loudly since the election.
Some of the purpose of this is not just letting off steam. What he’s doing is making other people afraid to criticize him or afraid to hold him to account. He’s creating around himself this atmosphere of anger and menace. And it looks like, in a number of cases, it’s succeeding. ABC is one example. There are a number of other examples, from Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post to the head of the LA Times, of other news organizations or news owners saying, Right, let’s back away or let’s not pick a fight or let’s concede something in advance, because they don’t want to involved in some open fight with the president.
It’s particularly notable that this is happening in the case of news organizations whose owners have other businesses. So that would be true of the LA Times, The Washington Post, and also ABC, which is owned by Disney. They have other businesses; they have lots of interests with the federal government; they have regulatory issues. And it looks like they’re making concessions in advance so that they don’t run into trouble down the line.
I can anticipate what your next question would be, which is: Is this a pattern and is it something that we’ve seen before in other declining democracies? Of course, the answer is yes, it is. It’s not so much censorship—media control and intimidation works in a place like Hungary or Turkey is not just government censorship. The government doesn’t tell people what to write. Instead, the government finds ways of putting pressure on the owners of media, sometimes on journalists, in order to make them think twice before they say anything critical.
Sargent: In fact, the larger story here with ABC News really underscores what you’re saying there, the story you’re telling there. Remember, during the campaign, Trump viciously attacked ABC News in particular for fact-checking him during the one debate. At the time, Trump threatened to retaliate against ABC by revoking broadcasting rights.
By the way, I should note that The New York Times reports that ABC executives have met with Trump transition team officials at Mar-a-Lago. God knows what was discussed, but here’s what we have. Trump attacks ABC for telling the truth about him, threatens direct retaliation if he wins. Trump sues for defamation. Now ABC decides not to fight even though news orgs do this generally, and instead will donate $15 million to something that lionizes Trump?
Applebaum: We’ll see how other news organizations react. And it’s going to be particularly interesting, those that are smaller, have fewer conflicts of interest, whether they’ll be able to hold out. But many people assumed in the past that the news media in the United States was too big, too diverse, and too complex to be intimidated the the Hungarian news media is. The Hungarian news media, by comparison, is tiny and weak. This is a moment when, for other reasons, the business model of much media is in trouble. A lot of both broadcasting and newspapers are either unprofitable or not as profitable as they were. It’s not true of everybody, but it’s true of many. You have an enormous amount of churn and uncertainty. And at this particular moment in history, it means that owners are more likely to be wary.
If we were at a moment when the media was making lots of money, as it once did in the past, or when it was expanding and everybody was hiring, things might feel different. Right now, it feels like things are shutting and closing down and staff are being let go. That adds another layer to the current circumstances. It has nothing to do with Trump, but Trump is able to take advantage of it clearly.
Sargent: On Friday, Trump had this to say about the media during an appearance on Wall Street. And I think it goes directly to what you’re saying. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): We did a good job. We had a great first term despite a lot of turmoil caused unnecessarily. But the media has tamed down a little bit. They’re liking us much better now, I think. If they don’t, we’ll have to just take them on again, and we don’t want to do that.
Sargent: This looks to me like Trump knows that the media is in a vulnerable and precarious spot, and he’s really putting them on notice to a greater degree that more of this is coming. Let’s put this in your framework. Is this the conditioning of Americans you’re talking about, in addition to sending a message to the media? What is he conditioning Americans to accept here?
Applebaum: He—and not just him, there’s been a coordinated campaign—has been seeking to attack and undermine journalism and the basis of journalism for a long time. I know perfectly well that there’s good and bad journalism out there. Lots of TV journalism was pretty weak and click-baity, and lots of newspapers have made mistakes. I wouldn’t deny that. But they’re also attacking the very idea that there can be journalism—in other words, that there is such a thing as people going off into the real world, observing something, talking to people, writing about it, fact-checking it, and then publishing it with the possibility that if they have made a mistake, they’ll print a correction the next day. That idea that that’s possible and that there’s something good about that, and that that form of communication or description of the world has a value is itself under attack.
We know that a lot of Americans don’t read that kind of journalism anymore—that kind of information and are instead turning to podcasts or Instagram or other forms of media or entertainment where they get information and they get ideas—but they haven’t gone through anything like that process. That’s the result of a lot of things. Some of it’s commercial. Some of it’s behavioral. And some of it is the result of people like Trump or Musk or others in the right and far-right world, and some far-left world too, I should say, attacking anything that looks like journalism, criticizing it, speaking disparagingly about something called mainstream media as if there were still such a thing and acting as if it has some agenda that is anti-American or something else.
We have actually a decade of this now, more than a decade actually. You could take it back 20 years if you wanted, but the attack has grown more concerted and louder and more effective in the last several years. And as I said, it’s been ...
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