Making Sense of it All with Anne Applebaum (in absentia)

I was away in New Zealand for a month over the holidays , during which time I untethered myself from news and my social media feeds in order to spend time with the three people I love most in the world my wife and two daughters . This was really a gift to myself . New Zealand was a beautiful and uncomplicated place , ideal for spending quality time with family .

I had the opportunity to listen to all their collective concerns , opinions , aspirations and fears . We discuss deeply and debate it often , as is common in our family , and something we collectively value . Just prior to leaving on our trip , I was invited to speak at the Growing your Workforce conference in Windsor , ontario .

My presentation was focused on addressing concerns I've had for the past 20 years about Canada's declining capacity and capability for innovation the subject of a soon-to-be-released episode of the show , by the way and it was while I was at this conference , looking out over the Detroit River , that the soon-to-be president , donald Trump , began talking about imposing tariffs

on Canada . When I returned from New Zealand and plugged back in just prior to Trump's inauguration , so much had changed . Justin Trudeau announced his resignation and made the decision to prorogue Parliament until a new Liberal Party leader could be found .

Much to the chagrin of Pierre Bollievre , mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland had thrown their hats in the ring to run for the Liberal Party and replace Trudeau as Prime Minister prior to the next federal election , and Donald Trump repeated his desire to annex Canada and have us become the 51st state , and that he would use tariffs as a means of economic coercion .

In addition , trump wanted to buy Greenland , take back control of the Panama Canal , and so on . While this was going on , mysteriously , an article from the Atlantic actually a really long essay titled History Will Judge the Complicit , by Ann Applebaum , popped up at the top of my news feed and , being somewhat of a history buff , I began to read the essay .

It had a profound impact . There's an old proverb there are three truths my truth , your truth and the truth . In this social media-influenced world in which we live , we are bombarded with conflicting opinions my truth and your truth and with all of this noise , the truth is often obscured .

The reason Applebaum's essay resonated with me was because I instinctively knew it was true . Instinctively knew it was true . Why ?

Well , not just because it presented irrefutable historical evidence , but also because it presented human emotions , reactions and justifications that I recognized immediately in myself , in others and in the context of my lived experience in others and in the context of my lived experience .

But perhaps the main reason I recognize the ring of truth in this essay that mysteriously appeared in my feed was it was written in 2020 . So we can judge its veracity because we've witnessed it unfold .

There has been a barrage of news reports and articles with countless opinions as to why Donald Trump is behaving the way he is during his very short term in office , opinions attempting to both understand and , in many cases , rationalize Trump's motivation and his end goals . Why would he attack Canada with punishing tariffs , our closest ally and friend ?

Doesn't he realize that mass deportation of immigrants , both legal and illegal , will cause a decline in America's GDP and potentially , a brain drain ? Doesn't he understand the cost of tariffs will ultimately be borne by the average American citizen , stoking inflation and making it harder for middle-class Americans to make ends meet ?

Why is he dismantling the public service ? He is creating countless job losses and economic insecurity amongst the people he stated he was trying to help . These are the wrong questions . What's more interesting and the more important questions are why are people supporting and enabling Trump ?

Why are they remaining silent in the face of these apparent contradictions and in the face of actions that are seemingly inconsistent with their long-held values and democratic principles , as defined in the American Constitution and supported by the rule of law ? Applebaum's thought-provoking essay helps make sense of it all for what it's worth .

On a cold March afternoon in 1949 , wolfgang Lillard slipped out of the East German Communist Party secretariat , hurried home , packed what few warm clothes he could fit into a small briefcase , and then walked to a telephone box to call his mother my article will be finished this evening , he told her . That was the code they had agreed on in advance .

It meant that he was escaping the country at great risk to his life . Though only 28 years old at the time , leonhard stood at the pinnacle of the New East German elite .

The son of German communists , he had been educated in the Soviet Union , trained in special schools during the war , and brought back to Berlin from Moscow in May 1945 on the same airplane that carried Walter Albrecht , the leader of what would soon become the East German Communist Party . Leonhard was put on a team charged with recreating Berlin's city government .

He had one central task to ensure that any local leaders who emerged from the post-war chaos were assigned deputies loyal to the party . It's got to look democratic , ulbricht told him . But we must have everything in our control . Leonhard had lived through a great deal by that time .

While he was a teenager in Moscow , his mother had been arrested as an enemy of the people and sent to Vorkuta , a labor camp in the far north . He had witnessed the terrible poverty and inequality of the Soviet Union .

He had despaired of the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941 , and he knew about the Red Army's mass rapes of women following the occupation . Yet he and his ideologically committed friends instinctively recalled from the thought that any of these events were in diametrical opposition to our socialist ideals .

Steadfastly he clung to the belief system he had grown up with . The turning point when it came was trivial . While walking down the hall of the Central Committee building , he was stopped by a pleasant-looking middle-aged man a comrade recently arrived from the West , who asked where to find the dining room .

Leonard told him the answer depended on what sort of meal ticket he had . Different ranks of officials had access to different dining rooms . The comrade was astonished . But aren't they all members of the party ? Vyadat walked away and entered his own top category dining room , where white cloths covered the tables and high-ranking functionaries received three-course meals .

He felt ashamed , curious . I thought that this had never struck me before . That was when he began to have the doubts that eventually led him to plot his escape . At exactly the same moment , in exactly the same city , another high ranking East German was coming to precisely the opposite set of conclusions .

Marcus Wolff was also the son of a prominent German communist family . He also spent his childhood in the Soviet Union , attending the same elite schools for children of foreign communists as Leonhard did , as well as the same wartime training camp . The two had shared a bedroom there , solemnly calling each other by their aliases .

These were the rules of deconspiracy , although they knew each other's names perfectly well . Wolf also witnessed the mass arrests , the purges and the poverty of the Soviet Union , and he also kept faith with the cause of the Soviet Union . And he also kept faith with the cause .

He arrived in Berlin just a few days after Lerat on another plane , full of trusted comrades and immediately began hosting a program on the new Soviet-backed radio station . For many months he ran the popular you Ask , we Answer .

He gave online answers to listeners' letters , often concluding with some form of these difficulties are being overcome with the help of the Red Army . In August 1947 , the two men met at Wolfe's luxurious five-roomed apartment not far from what was then the headquarters of the radio station .

They drove to Wolfe's house , a fine villa in the neighborhood of Lake Glenaca . They took a walk around the lake and Wolf warned Leonard that changes were coming . He told him to give up hoping that German communism would be allowed to develop differently from the Soviet version . That idea long ago , the goal of many German party members , was about to be dropped .

When Leonard argued that this could not be true , he was personally in charge of ideology and no one had told him anything about a change in direction Wolf laughed at him . There are higher authorities than your central secretariat , he said . Wolf made clear that he had better contacts and more important friends .

At the age of 24 , he was an insider and Lelad understood finally that he was a functionary in an occupied country where the Soviet Communist Party , not the German Communist Party had the last word . Famously , or perhaps infamously , marcus Wolff's career continued to flourish after that .

Not only did he stay in East Germany , he rose through the ranks of its nomenclature to become the country's top spy . He was the second ranked official at the Ministry of State Security , better known as the Stasi . He was often described as the model for the Carla character in John le Carré's spy novels .

In the course of his career , his Directorate for Reconnaissance recruited agents in the offices of the West German Chancellor and just about every other department of government , as well as at NATO . Lidhad meanwhile became a prominent critic of the regime .

He wrote and lectured in West Berlin , at Oxford , at Columbia , and eventually he wound up at Yale , where his lecture course left an impression on several generations of students . Among them , it was a future US president , george W Bush , who described Leonhard's course as an introduction to the struggle between tyranny and freedom .

When I was at Yale in the 1980s , leonhard's course on Soviet history was the most popular course on campus

. Separately , each man's story makes sense , but when examined together they require some deeper explanation . Until March 1949 , leonard's and Wolf's biographies were strikingly similar . Both grew up inside the Soviet system , both were educated in communist ideology and both had the same values . Both knew that the party was undermining those values .

Both knew that the system allegedly built to values , both knew that the system allegedly built to promote equality was deeply unequal , profoundly unfair and very cruel . Like their counterparts in so many other times and places , both men could plainly see the gap between propaganda and reality .

Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator , while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals . Why In English the word collaborator has a double meaning . A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense .

But the other definition of collaborator relevant here is different Someone who works with the enemy , with the occupying power , with the dictatorial regime . In this negative sense , collaborator is closely related to another set of words collusion , complicity , connivance .

This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War , when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers At base . The ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason betrayal of one's nation , of one's ideology , of one's morality , of one's values .

Since the Second World War , historians and political scientists have tried to explain why some people , in extreme circumstances , become collaborators and others do not . The late Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffman had first-hand knowledge of the subject as a child . He and his mother hid from the Nazis in La Manouelle-et-Bain , a village in the south of France .

But he was modest about his own conclusions , noting that a careful historian would have almost to write a huge series of case histories , for there seemed to have been almost as many collaborationalisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration .

Still , hoffman made a stab at classification , beginning with a division of collaborators into voluntary and involuntary . Many people in the latter group had no choice , forced into reluctant recognition of necessity that they could not avoid dealing with the Nazi occupiers who were running their country .

Hoffman further sorted the more enthusiastic voluntary collaborators into two additional categories .

The first were those who worked with the enemy in the name of national interest , rationalizing collaboration as something necessary for the preservation of the French economy or the French culture , though of course many people who made these arguments had other professional or economic motives too .

In the second there were the truly active ideological collaborators , people who believed that pre-war Republican France had been weak or corrupt and hoped that the Nazis would straighten it , people who admired fascism and people who admired Hitler .

Hoffman observed that many of those who became ideological collaborators were landowners and aristocrats , the cream of the top of the civil service , of the armed forces , of the business community , people who perceived themselves as part of a natural ruling class that had been unfairly deprived of power under the left-wing governments of France in the 1930s .

Equally motivated to collaborate were their polar opposites , the social misfits and political deviants who , in the normal course of events , never would have made successful careers of any kind .

What brought these people together was a common conclusion that whatever they had thought about Germany before 1940 , their political and personal futures would now be improved by aligning themselves with the occupiers . Unlike Hoffman , czeslaw Milosz , a Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet , wrote about collaboration from personal experience .

An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war , he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington , serving his country's communist government . Only in 1951 did he defect , denounce the regime and dissect his experience .

In the famous essay the Captive Mind , he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people , all writers and intellectuals , each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party . Many were careerists , but Milos understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation .

To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation , to feel close to the masses , to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers . For tormented intellectuals , collaboration was also a kind of relief , almost a sense of peace . It meant that they were no longer consistently at war with the state , no longer in turmoil .

Once the intellectual had accepted that there is no other way , milos wrote . He eats with relish , his movements take on vigor , his color returns , he sits down and writes a positive article , marveling at the ease with which he writes it .

And Milos is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity , the lightness of heart that it grants , the way it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas . We all feel the urge to conform . It is the most normal of human desires to conform . It is the most normal of human desires .

And I was reminded of this recently when I visited Miriam Berthler in her light-filled apartment in Berlin During the 1980s . Berthler was one of a very small number of active dissidents in East Germany . Later , in reunified Germany , she spent more than a decade running the Stasi archive , the collection of former East German secret police files .

I asked her whether she could identify among her cohort a set of circumstances that had inclined some people to collaborate with the Stasi . She was put off by the question . Collaboration wasn't interesting , bertha told me . Almost everyone was a collaborator . 99% of East Germans collaborated .

If they weren't working with the Stasi , then they were working with the party or with the system more generally . Much more interesting and far harder to explain Much more interesting and far harder to explain , was the genuinely mysterious question of why people went against the regime .

The puzzle is not why Markus Wolf remained in East Germany , in other words , but why Wolfgang Leonhard did not . Here is another pair of stories , one that will be more familiar to American readers . Let's begin this one in the 1980s , when a young Lindsey Graham first served with the Judge Advocate General's Corps , the military legal service in the US Air Force .

During some of that time , graham was based in what was then East Germany , on the cutting edge of America's Cold War efforts . Graham , born and raised in a small town in South Carolina , was devoted to the military After both his parents died when he was in his 20s .

He got himself and his younger sister through college with the help of an ROTC stipend and then an Air Force salary . He stayed in the reserves for two decades , even while in the Senate , sometimes journeying to Iraq or Afghanistan to serve as a short-term reserve officer .

The Air Force has been one of the best things that's ever happened to me , he said in 2025 . It gave me purpose bigger than myself . It put me in the company of patriots . Through most of his years in the Senate , graham , alongside his close friend John McCain , was a spokesperson for a strong military and for a vision of America as a democratic leader .

Abroad , he also supported a vigorous notion of democracy at home . Abroad , he also supported a vigorous notion of democracy at home . In his 2014 re-election campaign , he ran as a maverick and a centrist , telling the Atlantic that jousting with the Tea Party was more fun than any time I've been in politics .

When Graham was doing his tour in West Germany , mitt Romney became a co-founder and then president of Bain Capital , a private equity investment firm . Born in Michigan , romney worked in Massachusetts during his years at Bain , but he also kept , thanks to his Mormon faith , close ties to Utah .

While Graham was a military lawyer drawing military pay , romney was acquiring companies , restructuring them and then selling them . In 1990 , he was asked to run the parent company , bain Company , and , in the course of doing so , he became very rich .

Still , romney dreamed of a political career and in 1994 , he ran for the Senate in Massachusetts , after changing his political affiliation from independent to Republican . He lost , but in 2002 , he ran for the governor of Massachusetts as a nonpartisan moderate and won .

In 2007 , after a gubernational term during which he successfully brought in a form of near-univers universal health care that became a model for Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act , he staged his first run for president After losing the 2008 Republican primary . He won the party's nomination in 2012 and then lost the general election .

Both Graham and Romney had presidential ambitions . Graham staged his own short-lived presidential campaign in 2015 , justified on the grounds that the world is falling apart . Both men were loyal members of the Republican Party , skeptical of the party's radical and spiritual fringe .

Both men reacted to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump with real anger , and no wonder . In different ways , trump's values undermined their own . Graham had dedicated his career to an idea of US leadership around the world , whereas Trump was offering an American first doctrine that would turn out to mean me and my friends .

Romney was an excellent businessman with a strong record as a public servant , whereas Trump inherited wealth , went bankrupt more than once , created nothing of value and had no governing record at all .

Both Graham and Romney were devoted to America's democratic traditions and to the ideals of honesty , accountability and transparency in public life , all of which Trump scorned . Both were vocal in their disapproval of Trump Before the election . Graham called him a jackass , a nutjob and a race-baiting , xenophobic , religious bigot .

He seemed unhappy , even depressed , by the election . Romney went further . Let me put this very plainly . He said in March 2016 in a speech criticizing Trump if we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee , the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished .

Romney spoke of the bullying , the greed , the showing off , the misogyny , third-grade theatrics . He called Trump a conman and a fraud . Even after Trump won the nomination , romney refused to endorse him On his presidential ballot . Romney said he wrote in his wife and Graham said he voted for the independent candidate , evan McMullin .

Trump did become president , and so the two men's convictions were put to the test . A glance at their biographies would not have led many to predict what happened next .

On paper , graham would have seemed in 2016 , like the man with the deeper ties to the military , to the rule of law and to an old , established idea of American patriotism and American responsibility in the world .

Romney , by contrast , with his shifts between center and the right , with his multiple careers in business and politics , would have seemed less deeply attached to those same old-fashioned patriotic ideals . Most of us register soldiers as loyal patriots and management consultants as self-interested .

We assume people from small towns in South Carolina are more likely to resist political pressure than people who have lived in many places . Intuitively , we think that loyalty to a particular place implies loyalty to a set of values , but in this case the cliches were wrong . It was Graham who made excuses for Trump's abuse of power .

It was Graham , a JAG Corps lawyer , who downplayed the evidence that the president had attempted to manipulate foreign courts and blackmail a foreign leader into launching a phony investigation into a political rival .

It was Graham who abandoned his own stated support for bipartisanship and instead pushed for a hyper-partisan Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden's son .

It was Graham who played golf with Trump , who made excuses for him on television , who supported the president even as he slowly destroyed the American alliances with the Europeans , with the Kurds , that Graham had defended all his life .

By contrast , it was Romney who , in February , became the only Republican senator to break rank with his colleagues voting to impeach the president . Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office , he said , is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine .

One man had proved willing to betray his ideas and ideals that he had once stood for , the other refused why . To the American reader , references to Vichy , france , each Germany , fascists and communists may seem over the top , even ludicrous , but dig a little deeper and the analogy makes sense . The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin .

The point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party , especially those who work closely with the White House , to the experience of Frenchmen in 1940 , or East Germans in 1945 , or Czeslaw Miosz in 1947 .

These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or set of values that are in sharp contrast with their own . Not even Trump's supporters can contest this analogy , because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along .

Trump's first statement as president , his inaugural address , was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values . Remember , he described America's capital city , america's government , america's congressmen and senators , all democratically elected and chosen by Americans according to America's 227-year-old constitution . No-transcript .

Their victories have not been your victories , he said . Their triumphs have not been your triumphs . Trump was stating as clearly as he possibly could that a new set of values was now replacing the old , though , of course , the nature of those new values was not yet clear .

Almost as soon as he stopped speaking , trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality , a long undervalued component of the American political system . America is not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law .

We are a democracy that debates facts , seeks to understand problems and then legislates solutions , all in accordance with a set of rules .

Trump's insistence , against the evidence of the photographs , television footage and the lived experience of thousands of people that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than that at Barack Obama's first inauguration represented a sharp break with that American political tradition .

Like the authoritarian leaders of other times and places , trump effectively ordered not just his supporters but also apolitical members of the government bureaucracy to adhere to a blatantly false , manipulated reality . American politicians , like politicians everywhere , have always covered up mistakes , held back information and made promises they could not keep .

But until Trump was president . None of them induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs , or compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd , or encouraged him to do so in front of the press corps that knew he was lying . The lie was petty , even ridiculous , and that is part of why it was so dangerous .

In the 1950s , when an insect known as the Colorado potato beetle appeared in eastern European potato fields , soviet-backed governments in the region triumphantly claimed that it had been dropped from the sky by American pilots as a deliberate form of biological sabotage .

Posters featuring vicious red , white and blue beetles went up all across Poland , east Germany and Czechoslovakia . No one really believed the charge , including the people making it , as archives have subsequently shown . But that didn't matter . The point of the posters was not to convince people of a falsehood .

The point was to demonstrate the party's power to proclaim and promulgate a falsehood . Sometimes the point isn't to make people believe a lie , it's to make people fear the lie . These kinds of lies also have a way of building on one another . It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing values .

The process usually begins slowly , with small changes , no-transcript Social Psychology . This happens in part because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest , and that self-image is resistant to change . Once certain behaviors become normal , then people stop seeing them as wrong . This process happens in politics too .

In 1947 , the Soviet military administrators in East Germany passed a regulation governing the activity of publishing houses and printers . The decree did not nationalize the printing presses . It merely demanded that their owners apply for licenses and that they confine their work to books and pamphlets ordered by central planners .

Imagine how a law like this , which did not speak of arrests , let alone torture or the gulag , affected the owner of a printing press in Dresden , a responsible family man with two teenage children and a sickly wife . Resident a responsible family man with two teenage children and a sickly wife .

Following its passage , he had to make a series of seemingly insignificant choices . Would he apply for a license ? Of course he needed it to earn money for his family . Would he agree to confine his business to material ordered by the central planners ? Yes to that too . What else was there to print After that ? Other compromises follow .

Though he dislikes the communist , he just wants to stay out of politics he agrees to print the collected works of Stalin because if he doesn't , others will . When he is asked by some disaffected friends to print a pamphlet critical of the regime , however , he refuses , though he wouldn't go to jail for printing it .

His children might not be admitted to university and his wife might not get her medication . He has to think about their welfare .

Meanwhile , all across East Germany , other owners of other printing presses are making similar decisions , and after a while , without anyone being shot or arrested , without anyone feeling any particular pangs of conscience , the only books left to read are the ones approved by the regime .

The built-in vision of themselves as American patriots or as competent administrators or as loyal party members also created a cognitive distortion that blinded many Republicans and Trump administration officials to the precise nature of the president's alternative value system . After all , the early incidents were so trivial .

They overlooked the lie about the inauguration , because it was silly . They ignored Trump's appointment of the wealthiest cabinet in history and his decision to stuff his administration with former lobbyists because that was business as usual .

They made excuses for Ivanka Trump's use of a private email account and for Jared Kushner's conflicts of interest , because that's just family stuff . One step at a time , trumpism fooled many of its most enthusiastic adherents .

Recall that some of the original intellectual supporters of Trump , people like Steve Bannon , michael Anton and the advocates of national conservatism an ideology invented post-Hawke to rationalize the president's behavior advertised their movement as a recognizable form of populism , an anti-Wall Street , anti-foreign wars , anti-immigration alternative to the small government libertarianism

of the establishment Republican Party , to the small government libertarianism of the establishment Republican Party . Their drain-the-swamp slogan implied that Trump would clean up the rotten world of lobbyists and campaign finance that distorts American politics , that he would make public debate more honest and legislation more fair .

Had this actually been Trump's ruling philosophy , it might well have posed difficulties for the Republican Party leadership in 2016 , given that most of them had quite different values , but it would not necessarily have damaged the Constitution and it would not necessarily have posed fundamental moral challenges to people in public life to people in public life .

In practice , trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters , although some of his speeches have continued to use the populist language .

He has built a cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters , but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and , of course , his own family . His tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy , not the working class .

His shallow economic boom , engineered to ensure his re-election , was made possible by a vast budget deficit on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor an enormous burden for future generations .

He worked to dismantle the existing health care system without offering anything better , as he'd promised to do , so that the number of uninsured people rose , and all the while while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism , both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview .

More important , he has governed in defiance and in ignorance of the American Constitution , notably declaring , well into his third year in office , that he had total authority over the states .

His administration is not merely corrupt , it is also hostile to checks and balances and the rule of law . He built a proto-authoritarian personal cult , firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence , with tragic consequences for public health and the economy .

With tragic consequences for public health and the economy , he threatened to fire a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official , nancy Messonnier , in late February after her two blunt warnings about the coronavirus .

Rick Wright , a top health and human service official , says he was demoted after refusing to direct money to promote the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine .

Trump has attacked Americans' military , calling his generals a bunch of dopes and babies , and America's intelligence services and law enforcement officers , with whom he has denigrated as the deep state and whose advice he has ignored . He has appointed weak and inexperienced acting officials to run America's most important security institution .

He has systematically wrecked American alliances . His foreign policy has never served any US interests of any kind .

Although some of Trump's cabinet ministers and media followers have tried to betray him as an anti-Chinese nationalist , and although foreign policy commentators from all points on the political spectrum have accepted this fiction without questioning it , trump's true instinct always has been to side with foreign dictators , including Chinese President Xi Jinping .

One former administration official who had seen Trump interact with Xi , as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin , told me that it was like watching a lesser celebrity encountering a more famous one . Trump did not speak to them as the representative of the American people .

He simply wanted their aura of absolute power , of cruelty , of fame , to rub off on him and enhance his own image . This , too , has fatal consequences . In January , trump took Xi's word when he said that COVID-19 was under control , just as he had believed North Korea's Jim Jong-un when he signed a deal on nuclear weapons .

Trump's fawning attitude towards dictators is his ideology at its purest . He meets his own psychological needs first . He thinks about the country last . The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not America first , but rather Trump first . Maybe it isn't surprising that the implications of Trump first were not immediately understood .

After all , the communist parties of Eastern Europe or , if you want a more recent example , the Chavistas in Venezuela , all advertised themselves as advocates of equality and prosperity , even though in practice they created inequality and poverty . And prosperity , even though in practice they created inequality and poverty .

But just as the truth about Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian revolution slowly dawned on people , it also became clear eventually that Trump did not have the interests of the American public at heart .

And as they came to realize that the president was not a patriot , republican politicians and senior civil servants began to equivocate , just like people living under an alien regime . In retrospect , this daunting realization explains why the funeral of John McCain in September 2018 looked , and , by all accounts , felt , so strange .

Two previous presidents , one Republican and one Democrat , representatives of the old patriotic political class , made speeches . The sitting president's name was never mentioned . The songs and symbols of the old order were visible too the battle hymn of the Republic , american flags , two of McCain's sons in their officers' uniforms so very different from the sons of Trump .

Writing in the New Yorker , susan Glasser described the funeral as a meeting of the resistance under vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows . In truth , it bore an uncanny resemblance to the 1956 funeral of Laszlo Rak , a Hungarian communist and secret police boss , who had been purged and murdered by his comrades in 1949 .

Rak's wife had become an outspoken critic of the regime , and the funeral turned into a de facto political rally helping to set off Hungary's anti-communist revolution a couple of weeks later . Nothing quite so dramatic happened after McCain's funeral , but it did clarify the situation . A year and a half into the Trump administration .

It marked a turning point , the moment at which many Americans in public life began to adopt the strategies , tactics and self-justifications that the inhabitants of occupied countries have used in the past , doing so even though the personal stakes were , relatively speaking , so low . Poles like Milosz wound up in exile in the 1950s .

Dissidents in East Germany lost the right to work and study . In harsher regimes like that of Stalin's Russia , public protests could lead to many years in a concentration camp . Disobedient Wehrmacht officers were executed by slow strangulation .

By contrast , a Republican senator who dares to question whether Trump is acting in the interests of the country is in danger of what exactly ? Losing his seat and winding up with a seven-figure lobbying job or a fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School .

He might even meet the terrible fate of Jeff Flake , the former Arizona senator , who has been hired as a contributor by CBS News . He might suffer like Romney , who was tragically not invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference , which this year turned out to be a reservoir of COVID-19 .

Nonetheless , 20 months into the Trump administration , senators and other serious-minded Republicans in public life who should have known better began to tell themselves stories that sound very much like those in Miloš's the Captive Mind . Some of these stories overlap with one another .

Some of them are just thin cloaks to cover self-interest , but all of them are familiar justifications of collaboration recognizable from the past , and here are the most popular . This concludes part one of Making Sense of it All in the company of readers and writers .

With my guest in absentia , anne Applebaum , pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of History , will Judge the Complicit . We'll be releasing part two of the episode this coming Friday at 9 am Eastern Daylight Time and I hope you'll hang in for that and take time in the intervening days to reflect on Applebaum's essay . In the context of our country .

At this critical juncture in our history as a nation and with the up-and-coming election , who will best serve the collective needs and interests of all Canadians , or what it's worth ? Best serve the collective needs and interests of all Canadians For what it's worth .