My book, Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World was published a year ago. Since then, the world has changed. The paperback edition, published this week, reflects that change, appearing with a new preface.

For me substack readers, here it is!

The New Preface

AUTOCRACY INC was first published in July 2024. In the months that followed, its central subject, the network of dictators who share common interests, not a common ideology, changed very little. Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator, continued his illegal assault on the sovereign nation of Ukraine. Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator, stayed in power even after Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly to remove him. The Syrian regime fell, but its prime allies, Iran and Russia, continued to try to influence its successors. Dictators from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, all members of the network I am calling Autocracy Inc, continued to promote authoritarian narratives and opaque financial schemes, inside their own countries and around the world.

But during those same few months, the democratic world changed profoundly. In November 2024, the United States of America, for eighty years the leader of a powerful set of democratic alliances and an important promoter of democratic ideas around the world elected a president who was no longer interested in democracy, or democracies, at all. Instead, Donald Trump began to align American foreign and domestic policies with the values and practices of the autocratic world described in this book.

This dramatic shift was most visible in the new administration’s relationships with America’s historic allies. From his first days in office, President Trump attacked and berated Ukraine, Canada and the European Union, placing inexplicably high tariffs on goods coming from those countries, as well as from Japan and South Korea. He shouted at the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office, discussed the annexation of Greenland and Canada, and said that the EU had been created to “screw” the U.S. At the same time, he had few words of criticism for Russia, China, Iran or any of the other countries that have long colluded to undermine American political and economic power, as this book describes, and who have continued to do so during his presidency. His top aides agreed. “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” American Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth texted other cabinet members in a leaked message: “It’s PATHETIC.”

This realignment away from the democratic world was accompanied by an equally revolutionary shift in official American attitudes to both domestic corruption and foreign kleptocracy. Perhaps no one should have been surprised: From the beginning of his career, well before he expressed much interest in politics, Donald Trump participated enthusiastically in the opaque, offshore world of shell companies and anonymous bank accounts, a milieu where the autocratic world thrives. From the 1980s onwards, anonymous investors were an important source of funding for Trump’s real estate business. In that era, money from the former Soviet Union was pouring into opaque property investments, as Trump’s son acknowledged in 2008: “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” One out of every five condos in Trump-owned or Trump-branded buildings were purchased by a shell company whose true owner is unknown. Anonymous owners continued to buy into his businesses even during his first term as president.

During that first term, Trump dodged or evaded conflict-of-interest rules designed to stop politicians from using political power to enrich themselves. During his second term he began to defy them with what can only be described as insouciance, immediately making clear that he and his family would both expand lucrative business relationships with the autocratic world and use their political influence for financial gain at home. In the weeks after the election, the Trump Organization announced construction of a Trump Tower in Saudi Arabia, an investment that created a clear conflict of interest for the president. Trump’s family also created a cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial, that could, in practice, serve as a vehicle for anyone to pay him indirect bribes. Ominously, his administration did indeed quickly drop a criminal investigation into Justin Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur and adviser to World Liberty Financial, who had also invested at least $75 million into the company.

In keeping with the new atmosphere, the inauguration itself became an ostentatious display of the new administration’s kleptocratic values. American tech company CEOs were the most prominent guests, but several foreign business partners of the Trump Organization also attended inauguration-related events, posed for photos with Trump, and referenced their connections to his presidency in promotional materials. Several lesser-known companies involved in ongoing regulatory and other negotiations with the US government quietly donated millions to Trump’s inauguration too. Soon afterwards, in a late-night purge, Trump fired seventeen inspectors-general, all people who are responsible for monitoring corruption and ethical violations inside the government.

Wealthy people have, it is true, always played an outsized role in American politics, as they do almost everywhere. But from the beginning of the second Trump term, one wealthy person was given a role that seems to have no precedent in American history. Elon Musk, who had no mandate other than the personal blessing of the president, was given enormous influence over the very same government institutions that had long subsidized and regulated his companies. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency slashed jobs at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency that oversees auto safety and crash investigations, including those involving his own company, Tesla. The mass firings Musk oversaw at other regulatory agencies stalled over 30 investigations into his companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink as well. At the same time, Musk was pushing for Starlink, a product of SpaceX, to provide communications for major US government agencies, including the General Services Administration and the Federal Aviation Authority, and for the State Department to buy armored Teslas.

Federal policy also made a sudden shift, in favor of opaque business practices and against ordinary Americans. The Treasury Department announced it would no longer penalize U.S. businesses that fail to disclose ownership information under the Corporate Transparency Act, hampering anti-money laundering efforts. Trump ordered a full work stoppage at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been created to protect consumers from manipulation by banks and other financial institutions. He also fired top officials overseeing ethics, whistleblower protections, and labor rights, including the heads of the Office of Government Ethics, Office of Special Counsel, and the Merit Systems Protection Board.

A toxic combination of transactionalism and imperialism began to shape American foreign policy in ways that also have no precedent in contemporary history. During negotiations with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Trump’s representatives handed Zelensky’s team a memorandum of understanding, proposing that Ukraine hand over half of its future wealth, indefinitely. Trump’s negotiations with Russia, meanwhile, were from the start dominated not by a desire to create a just and lasting peace in Ukraine, but by a desire to help American businesses profit from the lifting of Russian sanctions. Trump imposed tariffs seemingly at random, on a whim, sometimes just for the sake of inflicting economic hardship, sometimes to extract concessions.

Trump’s domestic policies reflected the same reorientation: Away from the rule of law, away from institutions created by Congress, and towards the personalization of power. Under the false flag of “cost-saving,” Musk’s DOGE carried out mass firings and program cuts, making no attempt to audit or even understand many of the institutions affected. Among them were America’s foreign broadcasters, including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and other media which have for decades practiced independent journalism in parts of the world that don’t have it. Musk slashed funding for organizations who campaign for democracy and voting rights. He destroyed USAID, the aid organization whose humanitarian programs provided food and medicine to the poorest people on the planet. All of these programs had long provided a counterweight to the Russian, Chinese, Iranian and other influence campaigns which the Trump administration, clearly, was no longer interested in fighting.

Musk claimed he cut these programs because he wanted to save money. But that explanation, given that they represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget, was insuffi cient. Instead, their destruction, alongside the damage done to domestic departments and agencies overseeing education, scientific research, health and social security, seemed deliberately designed to alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Since the late nineteenth century, federal workers in America had been trained to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations. They were supposed to measure objective reality—evidence of pollution, for example—and respond accordingly. The non-partisan values of this system had long been accepted by everyone, from Republican-voting FBI agents to Democratic-voting environmental officers.

During their early weeks in office, Trump’s cabinet began plotting to replace these civil servants with loyalists chosen not by merit tests, but by purity tests. Already in the first weeks of the administration, at least two candidates for higher positions at the FBI were told to state who the “real patriots” were on January 6, 2021. They were asked, in other words, not just to demonstrate their fealty to Trump, but also to repeat outright falsehoods, violating the old civil-service ethos which required people to make decisions based on objective realities, not myths or fictions.

The impact of this change was rapid, and harsh. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who worked for the American federal government had the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation. In the spring of 2025, I received a letter from a woman who had worked for much of her career at major universities and as a government scientist. She had read an article I had written about the experience of living through regime change, and found it touched a chord. She too, she said, “will soon face a choice about whether to allow myself to get fired, to resign, or to be considered complicit in the current regime.” These are not choices that Americans are used to making. But they would sound very familiar to the inhabitants of the autocratic world described in this book.

So too would Trump’s use of lawsuits to intimidate the media. Or his attempts to browbeat Republican congressmen and Senators, using financial threats to their future campaigns. Or his administration’s selective targeting of foreign students, some of whom were picked up on the street by plain clothes officers. Or his threats to law firms who defend clients he doesn’t like. Or the deportation without due process of immigrants, including immigrants with legal status, to prisons in El Salvador. Put all these changes together, and there is a pattern. A personalized, even patrimonial foreign policy, one designed not to benefit America’s allies, or even America itself, but rather to benefi t the American president, his friends and his family. A political system designed to reward people for loyalty, not for merit. A drumbeat of propaganda directed against judges, journalists, whistleblowers, anyone who stands in the way of the regime. These are the features of the states that comprise Autocracy Inc, and they now describe the political system that the Trump administration is trying to build in the United States.

Americans who believe in the rule of law, European and Asian allies who have long argued in favor of American leadership, democratic activists around the world who admired what America stood for – all of them, all of us, need to rethink how we approach the world in light of these dramatic changes. Yet the advice I give at the end of this book still holds. Broad, powerful, carefully focused coalitions are still the only way that the democratic world can resist the influence of autocratic propaganda, and autocratic corruption. Now we will simply have to form them, at least temporarily, without the leadership of the United States.

Anne Applebaum, April 2025

Buy the paperback of Autocracy Inc

The Kleptocracy Tracker

Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc.)

August 15

• Trump officials have halted or dismissed 47 government investigations into technology firms—including probes into Meta’s misuse of financial data and Binance’s unlicensed securities operations.
• Republicans who voted for the Big Beautiful Bill—which provides billions of dollars in giveaways to oil and gas companies—have received $105 million in campaign donations from those same firms.
• Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been living for free in a water-front home usually reserved for the head of the Coast Card.

August 18

• Corporate allies of the Trump administration have been receiving preferential treatment from the Department of Justice’s antitrust division in matters concerning mergers and acquisitions.

August 19

• The PGA Tour announced plans to return to Trump National Doral in Miami to host a golf tournament next year, which will benefit the president directly.

August 20

• Since the beginning of his second term, Trump has purchased more than $100 million in corporate, municipal, and state bonds—while overseeing a policy agenda that directly influences their value.

August 21

• Shortly after Michael Boulos—now Tiffany Trump’s husband—proposed to her in January 2021, his family and their associates began benefiting financially from their proximity to the Trump family.

August 26

• Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1798, has invested in Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market where users can bet on political and policy outcomes.
• Trump Media & Technology Group announced a partnership with the cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com to form a company that holds CRO—a token created by Crypto.com—reflecting a broader trend in which companies make buying and holding digital currency a central part of their business strategy.

August 27

• Although term-limited from campaigning for the presidency in 2028, Trump claimed to have raised $1.5 billion since the 2024 election.

August 28

• Trump dismissed one of the two Democratic members of the US Surface Transportation Board, breaking a 2–2 tie ahead of the board’s consideration of the Union Pacific–Norfolk Southern merger.
• A bitcoin mining company backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, American Bitcoin, secured funding for a merger that will allow it to trade on the NASDAQ.

A Russian fighting for Ukraine

Peter Ruzhavin is a Russian journalist who experienced the invasion of Ukraine as a personal blow. Ruzhavin lives in Kyiv, and is married to a Ukrainain journalist, Nataliya Gumenyuk. Nataliya is a founder of the Reckoning Project, a group of investigative journalists who are both documenting Russian crimes and working with lawyers and officials to prepare for war crimes trials in the future. I co-wrote an article with Nataliya in 2023, describing the repressive conditions in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. (‘They Didn’t Understand Anything, but Just Spoiled People’s Lives’: How Russian invaders unleashed violence on small-town residents)

Peter, meanwhile, had begun training as drone operator. This week Masha Gessen has written an excellent profile of him, explaining his decision to join the Ukrainian army. Her insight here really struck me:

Ruzavin first got the idea to enlist in the summer of 2023, when he was hiking in the Carpathian Mountains with his wife, Nataliya Gumenyuk, who is one of Ukraine’s best-known journalists. He told me about it a few weeks later. He presented it as a decision, but it was clear that he was still just getting used to the idea himself.

“What’s the point of writing another story about the war?” he asked.

Having written several myself, I knew what he meant. A lot of other journalists do, too. No matter how hard you try, the stories become repetitive. People start ignoring them, or reading them, as Susan Sontag once wrote, only to reassure themselves that they “are not accomplices to what caused the suffering.”

I think everyone who writes has that feeling at the moment. It’s one of the reasons I’ve contributed to a Polish charity that buys four-wheel-drive cars and pickup trucks and delivers them directly to the frontline, including to Ruzhavin’s unit.

Do read Gessen’s article if you’ve got the time.

End of August

That’s it — summer’s over, here in western Poland. Hope everyone got a chance to savor the last few days