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SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk onstage at the Roxain Theater on October 20, 2024, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. | Michael Swensen/Getty Images Elon Musk spent Election Day on X praising men, amplifying anti-immigrant conspiracies, and accusing Democrats of voter fraud. It was all pretty on-brand for the billionaire, who has become one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters and a one-man misinformation machine. When it was clear early Wednesday morning that Trump would win, Musk told his followers: “You are the media now.” A statement like that would have been laughable even a month ago, when estimates showed that X, formerly Twitter, had dropped nearly 80 percent in value since Musk purchased the platform for $44 billion in 2022. Until its transformation into X, the platform was regarded by some as a once-vibrant place on the internet that Musk utterly destroyed. But after Musk spent at least $119 million to get Trump elected and turned his platform into a MAGA megaphone — and then Trump won — the social media site’s real value is starting to take new shape. From the day his Twitter purchase went through, Musk vowed to make free speech central to the platform’s future. He purged the company’s trust and safety staff, setting a precedent that other social media companies followed. Since then, however, Musk has been willing to let authoritarian regimes dictate how X will work in their countries. In the United States, more free speech on X meant more misinformation and an embrace of right-wing politics.  X is certainly not the biggest social media platform, but as other major platforms continue to shy away from policing content and Trump heads back to the White House, X certainly looks more influential than it did last week. You might not like this. Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year.  Gone are the warning labels that Twitter once used to flag false or misleading information. Musk replaced that system with a crowd-sourced fact-checking program called Community Notes. He called it “the best source of truth on the internet.” Unfortunately, the new system doesn’t work very well. So if your feed feels as though it’s especially full of right-wing voices and conspiracy theories, that’s because it probably is. It’s not exactly a coordinated effort by Musk’s lieutenants to push your views to the right. It’s just how X is designed these days.  It’s way too soon to tell just how big a role X played in Trump’s reelection. We also don’t know what, if anything, Musk will do differently with the platform as he eyes some sort of role in the new administration. You can count on continuing to question everything you see on social media, though. “The problem will get worse because there are no guardrails in place right now,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “All the trends are moving in the wrong direction.” Indeed, thanks to the apathy of social media platforms and the rise of AI, lying on the internet has never been easier. And if you’re on X, it’s part of the appeal. The right will continue to rule X Leading up to the election, opinions on the fate of X were grim. There were plenty of reports on the dangers of election misinformation on the platform or Musk’s broken promises about what X would do by now. Bloomberg columnist Dave Lee argued that the platform was simply failing, losing users and relevance. That seems less likely now.  Despite rumors of its demise, X is still quite big. X told advertisers as recently as September that it has over 570 million monthly active users, dwarfing right-wing platforms like Truth Social and Rumble, whose users are in the hundreds of thousands. It is also much bigger than platforms like Mastodon and Blue Sky, which progressives fled to after Musk bought Twitter.  Meanwhile, Meta recently said that its Twitter-replacement platform, Threads, has 275 million monthly active users. A big difference between the two platforms? Meta limits the amount of political content you see on Threads. It looks like people are either staying on X or flocking to it for unfiltered politics news. Political news on Twitter used to be marginal, where celebrities were the main draw. The celebrities have left, and now X is the most popular major social media platform for keeping up with politics, according to a Pew survey published in June. There has also been a major partisan shift. Democrats historically dominated political discussion on the platform, but X has become dominated by right-wing voices in just the last couple of years. Posts from Republicans are far more likely to go viral on X, and once-popular Democrat accounts have seen their audiences disintegrate, according to a recent Washington Post investigation. Republicans have also changed their minds about the platform’s impact on democracy. While Twitter was once framed as the platform that censored conservative voices, X has become the right’s favorite place for freedom. Only 17 percent of Republicans thought Twitter was good for democracy in 2021, but 53 percent said X was good for democracy in 2024, according to the Pew study.  “Democratic users are much more likely to think people getting harassed is a major problem on the platform, and on the flip side, Republicans who post about politics are especially likely to do so because their views feel welcome there,” Colleen McClain, one of the authors of the Pew study, told me this week. McClain added that “in recent years, we haven’t seen any mass exodus or flocking to or from X in our data, either overall or by party.” None of this should come as a huge surprise if you’ve spent any time on X. But the partisan split took on new dimensions leading up to this year’s election, if only because the Republicans who felt like their voices were heard on X also felt heard at the ballot box.  Their guy won, and maybe the weird, violent memes on X helped. Elon Musk is just getting started We don’t know if X will grow or change — or just stay its same problematic self — as Trump prepares to take office again. We do know that Elon Musk isn’t done with politics. Musk was at Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago as the results rolled in on election night, and there’s good reason to believe we’ll see the SpaceX owner in DC soon enough. As far as politics go, Musk says he’s not done funding political races. In a livestream on X, the billionaire said his America PAC would “keep going after this election, and prepare for the midterms and any intermediate elections.” Trump, meanwhile, said in his victory speech, “We have a new star,” Trump said. “A star is born — Elon!” In September, Trump promised Musk a role heading up a task force to review federal expenditures, one that would make “drastic reforms” to the federal government. This makes sense because Musk had been the one who pitched the idea for such a task force to the president-elect. Trump even suggested a new job title, “Secretary of Cost Cutting,” while Musk suggested he’d be head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which does not exist and whose acronym is a reference to a dog-themed cryptocurrency. Musk later said at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally that he wanted to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, which would be very difficult. It’s easy, however, to see how Musk’s many companies stand to benefit immensely from a close relationship with the Trump administration. SpaceX is already one of NASA’s primary contractors, pulling in hundreds of millions if not several billions of dollars with every contract. Musk’s contact with Vladimir Putin reportedly put these contracts in jeopardy, although knowing what we know about Trump’s affinity for the Russian autocrat, the president-elect might not mind this. Tesla also stands to benefit, which explains why the company’s stock soared after Trump’s victory was secured. The EV company wants to roll out a massive fleet of robotaxis, a tall order that comes with significant regulatory challenges. Tesla’s self-driving car program in general has faced pushback from federal authorities, including a recently announced investigation into the system. Regulatory approval and investigations can be easier, of course, if you bankrolled the president’s final push to reelection.  Musk’s bet on developing artificial general intelligence, xAI, can also look forward to more cooperation from the federal government. The second Trump administration could pave the way for xAI to get access to cheap energy, especially as it faces heat for running gas generators without permits to power its data center in Memphis.  On top of these lucrative potential deals, the idea that X might win new relevance and influence must feel like a bonus to Musk.  For its right-wing users, though, X is finally the digital town square they were promised so many months ago. It seems like just yesterday, Elon Musk was carrying a sink into Twitter’s headquarters on his first day as the company’s owner. (“Let that sink in” is supposed to be the joke there.)  Musk paid tribute to that post on X just after midnight on election night. Except this time, in a doctored photo, he was carrying a sink into the Oval Office. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsHow do you know when a democracy slips into autocracy or fascism or some other less-free and less-savory form of society? Do they hang out a sign? Post it on X? Announce it on the newly state-controlled news channel? In the run-up to Donald Trump’s election, and even all the way back to his first administration, people who study autocracies in other countries have shown us how to spot the clues. One reliable teacher has been Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc. and co-host of the podcast series Autocracy in America. Over the years, Applebaum has situated Trump’s musings in a broader historical context. She’s pointed out, for example, that when Trump fired government watchdogs in his last administration or talked about deploying troops against protesters, those are actions that other dictators have taken.In the last few months of his campaign, Trump was free and open with his dictatorial impulses as he talked about punishing “enemies from within.” Now that he’s won, have we crossed the line into a different kind of country? In this episode of Radio Atlantic,Applebaum joins political writer McKay Coppins to help us know how to find the line. Does this resounding win mean the electorate gave Trump a mandate to act on all his impulses? Does he mean what he says? And how will we know?The following is a transcript of the episode:Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. So Donald Trump won. It’s looking like he won every swing state and, also, like there was a rightward shift even in the states he lost. He won even though, in the last months of his campaign, he was at his darkest and most crude. None of that mattered, apparently.So here to help us understand what happened are two Atlantic staff writers: Anne Applebaum, who covers threats to democracy—hi, Anne—Anne Applebaum: Hello.Rosin: —and political reporter McKay Coppins. Hi, McKay.McKay Coppins: Hey.Rosin: So, McKay, what do we know about how he won? The particular coalition, the demographics—what do we know so far?Coppins: Well, you just got at it. I think that the most surprising thing is not that he won—because the polls were so tight, and everyone was warning us to be prepared for either candidate coming out victorious—but the fact that he won so decisively, making gains in almost every state and almost every demographic group is something that I think most people were not prepared for.Just to run through a few of the highlights: He made major gains with Latino voters, according to exit polls. It depends on which exit poll you’re looking at, but Harris won Latinos by between eight and 15 points. That is a lot less than Biden’s roughly 30-point win among Latino voters four years ago.He made some more modest gains with Black voters, especially young Black men. A lot of Trump’s gains were concentrated with men. One exit poll showed him narrowly winning Latino men; the other one showed him narrowly losing them. But in either case, that is dramatically outperforming his performance in 2020.And so, you know, you take all this together, and what you see is that there is a rightward shift at almost every section of the electorate. And, you know, that includes parts of the Democratic coalition that Kamala Harris and her campaign thought they could take for granted coming into this race.Rosin: And is it just men? Like, everyone you mentioned were men. It’s like, Latino men, young Black men—Coppins: It definitely was. He definitely did better—Rosin: (Laughs.) Sorry, McKay.Coppins: (Laughs.) Not to speak for my entire gender here, but he did seem to do much better among men. Though, I will note that, coming into the campaign, a lot of Democrats had pinned their hopes on the idea that Dobbs would motivate a surge of women to support Harris.And we’re so early now that it’s still hard to tell from the exit-poll data how much that happened, but it is worth noting that Trump won white women in this election. He won them narrowly, but there was some hope among Democrats that Dobbs would push independent and even former Republican white women to the Harris camp. That does not seem to have happened in the numbers that they were planning for.Rosin: So all of that is somewhat surprising and things we have to reckon with over the next many months and years.Anne, you have been helping us understand, over many years, what it looks like when a country or democracy drifts towards autocracy. How do you read this moment?Applebaum: So I read this moment not so much as something new but as a continuation of things that we’ve seen in the past. I felt that, during the campaign, it would be useful for me to record some of the things the president was saying, to say how they echoed in history, to comment on how those things compared to what has happened in other countries.I did a podcast about this with The Atlantic. It’s called Autocracy in America. When he was last in the White House, Trump ignored ethics and security guidelines. He fired inspectors general and other watchdogs. He leaked classified information. You know, he used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, kind of deploying troops in American cities.Obviously, he encouraged the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. When he left the White House, he took classified documents with him, and then he hid them from the FBI. I mean, all those things are indicative of somebody who is in defiance of the rule of law, who thinks he’s above the rule of law, who’s seeking to avoid normal rules of transparency and accountability, who wants to help his staff get around, as I said, things like security, clearance, guidelines, and so on.And those things do represent a break with all previous presidents in modern history: Republican, Democrat, left wing, right wing—all of them. We didn’t have a president before who defied those kinds of rules and norms and laws and respect for some basic principles of the Constitution before.The fact is that people either liked it that he was doing that—they found the transgressiveness attractive, along with the language that he used about his enemies, you know, calling them “vermin” and the “enemy within” and so on. Either that was appealing—and, of course, that kind of language historically has been appealing; it does appeal to people—or they didn’t care.But that means that there has been a shift in how Americans see their government, what they understand the Constitution is for. And that shift clearly precedes Trump. I mean, probably he helped shape it during his first term. He helped shape it during the four years he was out of power. But we now have a country that is prepared to accept things from their leader that would have tanked the career of anybody else eight years ago.Rosin: So did you wake up on Wednesday morning and think, I live in a different country than I thought I did?Applebaum: No. I mean, I thought from the beginning of this election campaign—I thought it was possible that he would win. I mean, I suppose, particularly the last couple weeks of his campaign, when he became darker and darker and more and more vitriolic, you know, I wondered whether some of that would bother people.You know, the imagining guns trained at Liz Cheney, you know, talking about his enemies as the enemy within, talking about using the expression vermin or poison blood—these are terms that are directly taken from the 1930s and haven’t been used in American politics before. So I wondered whether people would be bothered by that.But am I entirely surprised that they weren’t? No, I’m not. I think the population is now immune to that kind of language, or maybe they like it.Coppins: Yeah, I would just say: I think that is one of the legacies of the Trump era, is how much he has successfully desensitized the country to this kind of rhetoric and behavior that, in an era not that long ago, voters would have deemed disqualifying.He has managed to convince enough Americans that this kind of behavior, this kind of rhetoric is okay or, at least, that it doesn’t matter that much. And looking forward, I do think that’s going to be something we live with in our politics long after Trump is gone.Rosin: I mean, there’s one way of looking at what you both are saying, which is: We woke up today; we have confirmation that we live in a failing democracy. But we actually don’t. All we have confirmation of is that people either don’t care that he talks like an autocratic ruler, they don’t notice, they like it, or they don’t put it in a broader historical context, which is that these are actual signs of actual autocracies, which happen all the time in history and across the world. Right? That’s all we know so far.Applebaum: Yeah, that’s all we know. That’s all we know. We also don’t know whether Trump will do some of the things that he said he would do. I mean, he talked about mass firings of civil servants. He talked about having people around him who were loyalists. That’s what political scientists would describe as “capturing the state”—so taking over government departments, government institutions, putting them not in the service of the nation and of everybody but making part of your political machine, using them for your political purposes.He talked about doing that. Will he try it again? Maybe, if he has a House and a Senate that will support him. As we’re speaking, we don’t know about the House, so we’ll see. They might make it easy. Will the judiciary support him? Some of it will. So will he do it? I don’t know.General John Kelly, who was his former chief of staff, has said that last time Trump was president, he talked about: We should investigate or get the IRS on—at that time he was talking about the former FBI director, James Comey, or his deputy, Andrew McCabe. Maybe now he’s talked about punishing Adam Schiff—who’s a congressman, now a senator, who he doesn’t like—or Nancy Pelosi.Will he do it? Will he use the IRS to go after people? I mean, that’s another thing that happens in failing democracies. And it’s also something that has happened in U.S. history before, so it’s not unimaginable.So I don’t know whether he’ll do these things, but it’s now on the record that he has said he would, or he said he wants to. In some of the documents written by people around him, there have been plans to do that. That’s what Project 2025 was, in part. And none of it bothered people, and so we have to assume that it’s a possibility.Coppins: I do think, to answer your earlier question, that it’s worth noting that, while a lot of voters went into the ballot box thinking about democracy—and in fact, according to one exit poll, around a third of voters said democracy was their top issue—a lot of voters were not thinking about these things, and they were not voting based on hoping that Donald Trump would weaponize the IRS against his political enemies. For example, a third of voters said the economy was their top concern. And I think when we talk about the shifts among those demographic groups, we have to acknowledge that a lot of it was a very simple response to groceries costing more, inflation being up, feeling like the economy was on the wrong track, and responding to a deeply unpopular incumbent president.And while we can sit back and look at the broad scope of history, it is clear that not all voters who went in to vote in these last few weeks were thinking about democracy. But I think it’s also good to point that out because Donald Trump is going to claim a mandate, coming out of this election, and say: I swept the swing states. The voters want me to have all this power. He’ll implicitly say, They want me to abuse my power. They’ve given me permission to do whatever I want. And I think that it’s worth noting that for a whole lot of people who voted for him, they just wanted him to make groceries cost less.Applebaum: Yeah, but that’s not really an excuse. I mean, you are, as a voter, obligated to know what the person you’re voting for stands for. And the responsibility of the president of the United States is not merely to control inflation. The president also has a lot of power over the U.S. government, over U.S. institutions, over American foreign policy, and by deciding you don’t care about those things, you do give him that mandate.Coppins: But my concern is that there’s a risk of a kind of democratic fatalism coming out of this election, where we will decide that: Look—Americans voted for this aspiring autocrat, therefore he will be an autocrat, and democracy has failed. And I think that it’s worth parsing this electoral data a little bit and acknowledging that a majority of Americans did not necessarily give him an autocratic mandate. Whether they were thinking about the things that they should have been thinking about, weighing the priorities the way that we think they should have been, I don’t think we should let—it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy if we let Trump and his allies claim that, because he’s said and done all these things and he won the election, he now has permission to do whatever he wants.Rosin: Yeah. One way of seeing the vote is that it wasn’t at all a referendum on Trump. It was people saying: My life was better in 2019, so I’m going with Trump. And I think why what you’re saying is important, McKay, is because people who didn’t vote for Trump can get discouraged and overwhelmed and tell themselves, People who voted for him voted for everything he stands for. And what follows from that is a sense of alienation. Like, This is not my country, and I don’t understand what’s going on.Anyway, Anne, you mentioned that Trump ran an explicitly vengeful campaign, that he would come after “enemies from within,” whether they were immigrants, Democrats, or us, the journalists. And you have taught us to take leaders’ words seriously. And yet a lot of people, not just voters, have said, Oh, this is hyperbole. Stop taking it so seriously. So how do we know the difference?Applebaum: We’ll know by his actions. Maybe it’s true that by saying those things and by acting out vengeance, maybe that was appealing to people who want some kind of vengeance, who are angry at whatever—the economy or the system or the establishment or the media or Hollywood or the culture—whatever it is that they’re angry at or feel deprived by, that he acted that out for them, and that was appealing to them. I’m sure that’s a piece of the explanation.And then another piece of the explanation is that there were people, like The Wall Street Journal editorial board or the writer Niall Ferguson, who said, Oh, these things just don’t matter. It’s just hyperbole. You know, That’s just how he talks. So we’ll see, and we’ll wait for it.Rosin: McKay, Project 2025, which came up a lot in the campaign and has been described as a blueprint for the next administration, includes transformative ideas about everything from abortion to tax policy. How much do you think that’s a realistic roadmap for what the administration might do?Coppins: I would take it seriously. I think that there is a risk that—because Donald Trump, realizing it was a political albatross around his neck, decided to distance himself in the final months of the campaign—that we collectively take him at his word, and I don’t think we should.I think that what he ends up doing in his next term will rely a lot upon who he appoints to his administration. I reported, back in December, that, in talking to people in Trump world about future appointees, the watchword was obedience. They talked about how Trump felt burned in his first term by appointees, people in his cabinet who saw themselves as adults in the room, who believed that their role was to constrain him, to keep the train on the tracks. And he doesn’t want people like that in his next administration. He doesn’t want adults in the room. He doesn’t want James Mattises or Mark Milleys or John Kellys. He wants absolute loyalists, either people who share his ideological worldview or, out of a sense of ambition or cravenness, are willing to do exactly what he says without questioning it.And so when you look at Project 2025 and the part of the plan, for example, that has to do with politicizing the civil service, taking 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy and making them political appointees subject to the whims of the president, it will matter a lot whether he follows through on that and who those people are.A big part of Project 2025 was identifying loyalists, partisans, conservatives who could fill those roles. And so I think, when we talk through his next administration, what his agenda will look like, a lot of it comes down to this kind of truism of Washington that personnel is policy. So does Stephen Miller return to his administration in some kind of role where he gets to oversee immigration enforcement? It’s entirely possible, but that will make a big difference in terms of how much he follows through on his threats of mass deportation.Who does he appoint as attorney general? That was one role that everybody I talked to in Trump world told me he was very committed to getting right because he felt the two men who served in that role in his first term betrayed him. So is it somebody like Josh Hawley or Mike Lee or Ted Cruz? These are the questions that we’re going to have to be answering, and we’ll get a lot more clarity in the coming weeks and months as we see those appointees and those short lists emerge.[Music]Rosin: After the break, we’re going to get into what mass deportations under Trump could look like.[Break]Rosin: Something else I’ve been thinking about a lot that Trump has threatened is mass deportations. They are expensive. They’re actually quite difficult to carry out. They require a lot of manpower, local and national. Is that bombast? Is that a realistic threat? How will we know the difference?Coppins: Yeah. Again, this is where I think personnel will matter a lot, who is head of the Department of Homeland Security, for example. But just to go through what Trump promised on the campaign trail: He said that he would build massive detention camps, implement mass deportations at a scale never before seen in this country, hire thousands of additional border agents, use military spending on border security.He even said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel people who were suspected of being in drug cartels or gangs, without a court hearing.He said he would end “catch and release,” reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy. And I think it’s notable that he did not directly answer whether he would reinstate family separation, which was the most controversial aspect of his immigration policy in the first term.Take all these together—I think there are some of these things he could do pretty easily on his own with executive orders, and there’s not a lot of evidence that he could be constrained by the courts or by Congress. There are some things, like building massive detention centers, that would require a lot of money. Hiring thousands of more border agents would require a lot of money. So this is where control of Congress is going to matter a lot.Rosin: Are there others on his list that are top of mind for either of you? Aid to Ukraine is one that I’m thinking of. Are there others where you’re going to be vigilantly watching: Okay, he said X. Is he going to do X? Applebaum: Aid to Ukraine is in a slightly different category. It’s not about American autocracy and democracy. It’s a question of our position in the world. Are we going to remain the leader of a democratic camp, which is opposing the growing and increasingly networked autocratic camp? Will we oppose Russia, which is now in alliance with Iran and North Korea and China? Or will we not?And this, again, from Trump world, I know a lot of people who spent a lot of time in the run-up to the election trying to find out what Trump meant when he said, I’ll end the war in one day, which has been his standard response when asked about it. And you can literally find almost as many interpretations of that expression as there are people in Trump’s orbit.I mean, it ranges from, We’re just going to cut off all the funding, to, We’re going to give Ukraine to the Russians, to something quite different. There are people who said: No. We’re going to threaten the Russians. We’re going to tell them we’re bringing in a thousand tanks and a thousand airplanes unless you pull back. And so that’s another version that I’ve heard. There are versions that suggest offering something to Russia—you know, some deal. But honestly, I don’t know.Rosin: But those are legitimate foreign-policy debates. You can be an isolationist democracy. Those are not fundamental threats in your mind to the nature of this country and what it should be?Applebaum: No, although there are connections and have always been—we haven’t always acknowledged them—between America’s alliances and America’s democracy. So the fact that we have been aligned in the past with a camp of other democracies, that we put democracy at the center of our foreign policy for such a long time during the Cold War, was one of the reasons why our democracy was strengthened.It’s well known that during the Cold War, one of the reasons why there was an establishment shift towards favoring civil rights and the civil-rights movement was the feeling that: Here’s this thing we stand for. We stand for democracy. We stand for the rule of law, and yet we don’t have it in our own country. And there were a lot of people who felt that very strongly. And it’s not a bad reason why that happened, but it’s part of the explanation.You know, Who are your allies? Who are your friends? This affects, also, what kind of country you are and your own behavior. Who are your relationships? You know, if our primary political and diplomatic and economic relationship is with Russia and North Korea, then we’re a different kind of country than if our primary relationship is with Britain and France.Coppins: The only other kind of policy area that I’ll be keeping an eye on is tariffs. He has said that he would impose between 10 and 20 percent across-the-board tariffs on all U.S. imports and a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods.A lot of economic experts pointed out that this would very likely cause massive inflation. And given that he was just elected, in large part, on voter frustration with inflation, it’s an open question whether he’ll follow through on this. He clearly does not believe—and this is one of the few issues that he’s been pretty consistent on his entire life—he does not believe it would cause inflation. Almost every economics expert disagrees with him.And in his first term, there were people in the White House who blocked him from imposing more tariffs than he actually did, in fact to the point where we saw reporting from Bob Woodward that his staff secretary was literally taking executive orders off his desk before he could sign them and kind of losing them in the bureaucracy of paperwork. Will there be somebody like that this time? Will there be somebody who can get his ear and convince him not to go through with this? That is something that I think a lot of people will be looking at because the economic implications for this country and globally could be pretty profound.Rosin: And what are the bigger implications of tariffs? Like, that could just be a legitimate economic debate. Some people believe in tariffs. Some people don’t believe in tariffs. And it’s an experiment and, you know, economic protectionism.Coppins: I would not say that this is one of those kind of core democratic issues, that certainly, to various degrees, there have been protectionist policy makers and politicians in both parties over the last several decades. It could cause a trade war. It could interfere with our diplomatic relations with the countries that we’re imposing tariffs on. There are a lot of trickle-down implications.But yes, I do think it’s important. And I like that what you’re doing here is separating the issues that are kind of more typical policy disagreements from those things that Anne has been talking about, which are fundamental to American democracy. I don’t think tariffs are, but they could have an effect on a lot of Americans, and so that’s why I think it’s worth keeping an eye on.Rosin: Okay. There’s obviously going to be some resistance to Trump. Let’s start simple: McKay, who is going to be the leader of the Democratic Party?Coppins: So, obviously, if Democrats take control of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, the next speaker, would, I think by default, become the kind of leader of the Democratic opposition to Trump, at least for a while.If Democrats don’t take control of the House, I think it’s a very open question and, frankly, it’s one that Democrats probably should have been trying to answer two years ago. Joe Biden deciding to stay in the race after the 2022 midterms will probably go down as one of the most consequential political decisions in this era. The fact that he stayed in for so long, only to drop out in the final months of the election, meant that Democrats didn’t really have time to have the big intraparty debate about what they should stand for, who their standard-bearer should be.That debate will be happening now. And it’s going to be contentious and noisy and unsettling to a lot of left-leaning voters. I also think it’s healthy to have these conversations. And I think Democrats, in some ways, are kind of innately averse to that kind of contention. And I think that they might need to kind of get comfortable with it, because one way to look at the two elections that Donald Trump has won is that he really benefited from the fact that Democrats cleared the field for the two nominees he ended up beating: Hillary Clinton in 2016, Kamala Harris in 2024.One takeaway that I think a lot of Democrats will have is that Democrats need to decide that they’re okay with a little messiness in letting their voters decide who their nominee will be.Rosin: Anne, when other countries have faced a moment like this—a moment when you have to be vigilant, things are in the balance, the opposition feels alienated, it’s unclear who the opposition leaders are at the moment—how do you move through a moment like that? Like, how have other countries successfully moved to a healthier place?Applebaum: I mean, it almost entirely involves building broad coalitions. The only real example I can give: I live part of the time in Poland. We had an autocratic, populist government takeover in 2015. They did try to capture the state.They did it pretty successfully. They took over state media, which is a big deal in Poland, and they made it into a kind of propaganda tube. Poland has some state companies, and they took over the companies and began using the money to fund themselves and their party and so on. They enriched themselves, and they tried to create a system whereby they would never lose again.Remember that another sign of autocracy and a very, very important thing to watch for is corruption. Because when you remove guardrails and when you remove inspectors general and when you weaken the media, then it becomes much easier for people to be corrupt. And we’ve already got that problem in our system, and it’s going to get a lot worse.Essentially, what happened was the building of a coalition that went, in their case, from the center-left to the center-right—kind of center-left liberal, center-right—of people who wanted something. It was, in part, an anti-corruption coalition, so it wasn’t so much built around fighting for democracy, although that was a piece of it.The coalition was also seeking to fight against corruption and for good government. But it took eight years. It was a long process. And along the way, a lot of money was stolen. And the institutions declined, and the country is worse governed, and there are a lot of problems that are not going to be easy to solve.But there’s a look for coalitions. There was some internal soul-searching about what it was we did that—Why did we lose? But I’m not sure even how useful all of that was. I mean, what mattered, in the end, was the reconstruction of an opposition that had a clear message, that had a clear critique, and offered a vision of a different kind of future that was led by somebody who was charismatic.Rosin: Yeah. That is actually really useful, even to know that the coalitions don’t have to be for the restoration of democracy. They can be against mass deportation, against tariffs. Like, you can form coalitions, if you tell yourself, No, the voters did not give a mandate to Donald Trump to do whatever he wants and carry out all of his policies. That is not what happened in the last election, coalitions can form—popular coalitions—around all kinds of issues.Applebaum: Yeah. I mean, you could have a coalition that really cares about women’s issues and women’s rights and abortion rights. And you can have another one that really cares about the environment. And you can have another one that really cares about corruption. And you link them together, and then you have a movement.Rosin: Right.Applebaum: And that’s sometimes more effective. I mean, democracy is an abstract word that doesn’t necessarily mean things to people. It has to be made real through something that people experience. And maybe that’s how we have to look at it too.Rosin: Yeah. I think the thing that catches me in this election, which we haven’t quite touched on, is the truth-and-lies problem. I find that so overwhelming, like, the idea that people believe an untrue thing about what happened on January 6 and an untrue thing about what happened at Springfield, Ohio. And, as a journalist, I always find that an impossible barrier to cross. But maybe you’re suggesting ways to cross that barrier is: Well, people believe smaller truths.Applebaum: It’s one of the ways. We now have an information system that enables the creation of alternate realities. For me, one of the really striking things about the election campaign wasn’t so much Trump. It was Musk. Elon Musk, who owns a big and important social-media platform, was saying things that he must have known not to be true: falsehoods about immigration, about the election.He was allowing the platform to deliberately promote them. And he seemed to be doing that as a way of demonstrating his power. He was showing us that he can decide what people think. And he was working hard to create this alternate world in which things that aren’t true seem true. And that—I’m afraid it was really successful.Rosin: Right.Coppins: And the other thing that I think we’ve seen is that a big purpose of propaganda and disinformation is not even just to convince people that a certain thing is true but to almost exhaust their ability to tell the difference between what’s true and what’s not, and make them cynical and fatigued and disinclined to even try.I remember in 2020, I spent a lot of time covering disinformation in the campaign. And that was the thing that I would encounter when I talked to Trump voters. It wasn’t so much that they believed everything he said. Some would even acknowledge that he would lie or exaggerate. But they would throw their hands up and say: Yeah, they all lie, right? Who even knows what’s true? And that, I think, is the thing that we need to guard against over these next few years.Applebaum: That is the essence of Putinist propaganda. It’s not so much that you’re expected to believe everything he says about whatever, the greatness of Russia or the horror of Western civilization. But you’re expected to become so confused by the multitude and number of lies that you’ve been told that you throw your hands up in the air, and you go home, and you say, I don’t know anything. I can’t be involved in this. I don’t want anything to do with politics. I’m just going to live my life.And that turns out to be a really, really successful form of propaganda, probably more successful than the old-fashioned Soviet thing of telling everybody that everything is great, which you can disprove pretty easily.Rosin: Well, Anne and McKay, with your idea of coalitions, I had almost succeeded in finding us a practical path of thinking about a future. But now we’re back at this big veil of disinformation, which is not the place I want to end. Is there some way to turn that ship?I’ll ask you again, Anne: How have people turned that ship when you find a culture, a populace that’s just become cynical and overwhelmed by lies? How have other countries successfully crawled out of that disinformation?Applebaum: You build relationships of trust around other things. I mean, almost as we were just talking about, you find alternative forms of communication, all different ways of reaching people. That’s the only way.Rosin: All right. Well, Anne, McKay, we will have many more such conversations, but thank you for helping us be more discerning.Coppins: Thank you.Applebaum: Thanks.[Music]Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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Influencers Adin Ross and FaZe Rain in 2022. | Cassidy Sparrow/Getty Images for FaZe Clan Among the many questions that will be sure to plague Democrats in the months following Kamala Harris’s defeat in the 2024 presidential election: What is happening with Gen Z men? Could it be that growing up in a fundamentally different media environment than generations before them, one populated by individual influencers who often preach the values of entrepreneurship, self-improvement, and, ultimately, self-interest over everything else, galvanized the youngest voters to vote for a man who shared that same spirit? Or could it be that young men have helped make this content popular because they like what it says? What’s clear is that Donald Trump catered to the bro vote and won.  Early exit poll data from swing states shows that 18- to 29-year-old men favored Trump 49 percent to 47 percent, while 18- to 29-year-old women favored Harris by 24 points — the largest gender gap within any age group, and one that defies conventional wisdom that once painted young people as broadly progressive.  It’s worth noting that exit poll data can be unreliable and it will take weeks for a clearer picture to emerge. But even as we wait for a more comprehensive demographic breakdown of the election, it’s fair to say that Trump’s campaign was uniquely attuned to Gen Z bros. He appeared on a succession of extremely online streams and podcasts targeting young men, an unusual media strategy that some second-guessed but ended up being vindicated.  That Trump would attempt such an outreach shouldn’t come as a shock. Gen Z is leaning more right than its predecessors. This fall, a Harvard Youth Poll showed 18- to 24-year-old men saying they were more likely to identify as conservative than liberal, while men and women of the same age group said they were more conservative than 25- to 29-year-olds.  A Gallup and Walton Family Foundation study showed that Gen Z teens are twice as likely to identify as more conservative than their parents in comparison to millennials and their parents 20 years before. This was especially true for male Republican teenagers. Younger people are also more skeptical of major American institutions, including political parties, the government, and the media.  Trump’s campaign directly spoke to this demographic: He echoed that same mistrust in institutions, and did so while stopping at seemingly every podcast, Twitch stream, YouTube channel, and TikTok page whose viewership is dominated by Gen Z men and boys. He joined Adin Ross, a now 24-year-old streamer who once famously looked up and struggled to read the definition of “fascism” on camera, for an interview during which Ross presented him with a Rolex and a Cybertruck.  He went on the mulleted comedian Theo Von’s podcast, where they discussed cocaine, golf, and UFC.  He palled around with YouTube millionaires like the Paul brothers and the Nelk Boys, known for their distasteful pranks and crypto scams.  And, of course, he talked to Joe Rogan, the most famous podcaster in the world; the two men rambled to each other for three hours. For this, he received Rogan’s much-coveted endorsement.  Where the Gen Z bro media diet came from A source of endless recent debate has been young men’s rightward turn, despite the fact that the answer may be in plain sight. Young men are seeing the strides women have made in the last several generations — out-earning men in college degrees and nearly tripling the share of women who earn as much or more than their husbands since the mid-70s — and feeling left behind and demonized by the left.  Nearly half of men between 18 and 29 say there is “some or a lot” of discrimination against men in America, up from a third in 2019, according to the Survey Center on American Life, which is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. They believe the Me Too movement was an overreach and that many women are simply lying about being abused. It’s not exactly surprising they’re drawn to media that speaks to these grievances — and more often than not, that media comes in the form of individual influencers who are unaffiliated with existing media institutions. Like Rush Limbaugh in the ’90s, these creators have tapped into an enormous swath of men who want to be told they can still aspire to be the head of household, even if they can’t afford rent or find a girlfriend.  @adinrossvod #adinross #adin #kaicenat #kai #speed #ssbontop ♬ Monkeys Spinning Monkeys – Kevin MacLeod & Kevin The Monkey Social media platforms, of course, incentivize this kind of content. Though it fits into a specific niche, it’s provocative and engaging, and therefore users will continue to see more if they watch or share it. That’s also why the bro influencer world remains such a mystery to older people, women, or anyone outside of that particular algorithm: The social media landscape is atomized and personalized to each user, yet a lot of men are getting funneled into the same one.  Part of the issue for Democrats is that the most popular content on the internet is either entirely nonpolitical (consider Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, which only briefly stepped into politics for its Kamala Harris interview) or is right-leaning and geared toward men. While plenty of podcasters and influencers espouse leftist and liberal views, they don’t command nearly as much influence as those on the right.  Hasan Piker, perhaps the left’s sole answer to this brand of charismatic, attractive, and explicitly political young male influencer, explained it like so: “If you’re a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever, whether it’s playing video games, whether it’s working out, whether it’s listening to a history podcast or whatever, every single facet of that is just completely dominated by … the center-right to Trumpian right.”  One branch of this network is what writer Max Read dubbed “the Zynternet,” which he covered this summer when Haliey Welch went massively viral for her “Hawk Tuah” joke. It’s fratty and reactionary, and it’s held together by a love of college sports and the gambling industry.  It’s also worth noting that the rightward shift among young people isn’t limited to men, nor is it exclusively the domain of male influencers. Digital researcher Jess Rauchberg pointed out on X that the influx of tradwife content may be shifting “the way young white women are imagining their roles in political participation” (though I’d argue this extends beyond just white women). Creators like Ballerina Farm and reality shows like the The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, she argues, “are endorsing a form of political engagement that reinforces separate (economic, political) spheres for women and men.” The seeds of this media landscape sprouted a decade ago, when the social justice movements abetted by the rise of social media were met with a swift backlash in the form of harassment campaigns like Gamergate. Those tactics were then mobilized in ways that mystified the non-extremely online back then to help elect Trump the first time around. Ten years later, men are even lonelier, more likely to be single, more skeptical, and more afraid than ever. They find solace and community online, in places that older folks still don’t understand, where they see idealized versions of masculinity winning. They cheer on UFC fights and boxing matches, use “edgy” slurs, trade in risky crypto investments, bootlick Silicon Valley billionaires, listen to toxic dating advice, and denigrate women.  They vote for a man who has done everything you’re not supposed to do — steal, lie, rape, idolize Hitler — because his election fulfills their fantasy that men really can get away with whatever they want.  For now, it seems they’re right.

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Though it’s already been overshadowed in the deluge of post-election analysis of Donald Trump’s victory, Tuesday also marked a serious escalation of Russia’s global campaign of sabotage and intimidation targeting the US and other Western powers.  Polling sites in several states received bomb threats — later determined not to be credible — which the FBI said in a statement “appear to originate from Russian email domains.” The threats forced several polling places to close temporarily in the swing state of Georgia. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told reporters on Tuesday, “We identified the source, and it was from Russia.” Polling sites in the swing states of Michigan and Arizona also received threats, though it’s unclear if these was part of the same campaign.  Other officials have suggested that someone could have been spoofing Russian email addresses, and the Russian government was quick to deny any involvement. The US intelligence community had warned prior to the election that the Russian government was promoting disinformation via social media in the US in order to “undermine the legitimacy of the election, instill fear in voters regarding the election process, and suggest Americans are using violence against each other due to political preferences.” US authorities say the Russian government had been behind smear attacks targeting Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and false allegations of voter fraud, among other examples of disinformation.    As anyone following American politics over the past decade knows, the Russian government has tried to meddle in US campaigns before. As was the case in the past two elections, the Russian government was believed to prefer Trump, who speaks frequently of his good relationship with President Vladimir Putin and has been critical of both NATO and US support for Ukraine.  This time, though, it ultimately may not have mattered that much. Though Russian disinformation was widely spread, including by X owner and Trump backer Elon Musk, nothing the Kremlin allegedly orchestrated in this election cycle appears to have had anywhere near the political impact of the hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, which US intelligence agencies also believe Russia orchestrated.  Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and analyst who has written several books on Russia’s security services, says this year’s campaign targeting the US election differed from past efforts. It was also different from recent alleged campaigns of fraud to help Moscow’s preferred candidates in elections in the former Soviet states of Georgia and Moldova.  “The goal was not actually to change the results of the election,” Soldatov told Vox. “It was about posturing, about reminding Americans what’s at stake, and sending a message about what might happen if America continues its support for Ukraine.” Though the election is over, Russia’s efforts to transmit this message are not, and they ultimately might take forms that are more violent and destructive than empty bomb threats.  Out of the gray zone and into the blue Two days before the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that Western security services believed two incendiary devices seized on board planes in Europe over the summer were a test run for a Russian operation to start fires on US-bound planes. The devices detonated without injuries at logistics hubs in Germany and the UK, but the head of Poland’s intelligence agency said, “I’m not sure the political leaders of Russia are aware of the consequences if one of these packages exploded, causing a mass casualty event.” The Russian government has denied involvement.  This follows a campaign of arson and sabotage across Europe that intelligence officials say demonstrates an increasing recklessness on the part of the Kremlin. As the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6 put it, “Russian intelligence services have gone a bit feral, frankly.” In recent months, Russian agents have been accused of plotting sabotage attacks against US and German military targets, arson attacks in the UK and Lithuania, and the attempted assassination of a major German defense contractor, among other plots.  Notably, Soldatov said this campaign goes beyond anything the KGB has attempted in Europe or the United States during the Cold War and should be seen as an attempt by Moscow to raise the costs of Western support for Ukraine, an effort that is separate from but complementary to Putin’s periodic threats to use nuclear weapons.  “People sometimes think the only way Russia can escalate is with nuclear weapons,” Soldatov said. “But what we’ve seen in 2024 is that there are actually many more ways to escalate.” Disinformation and sabotage are the kinds of tactics often referred to as “gray zone” or “hybrid” warfare: inflicting costs on an adversary while maintaining plausible deniability. The aim here is to cause just enough damage to get the point across without leaving an opening for an all-out military war. But that line is a narrow one, and some officials say Russia’s behavior is pushing the gray zone’s limits.  At the NATO summit in Washington in July, Lithuania’s foreign minister said on a panel, “I’m not sure it can be called hybrid events or gray zone events any longer. It’s quite clear that [these are] terrorist attacks by a hostile neighboring country against NATO countries.”  Moscow gets its man Trump, after all, has promised to immediately end the war in Ukraine, presumably by pressuring Kyiv to accede to at least some of Moscow’s demands. Could the Kremlin dial back the campaign now that its preferred candidate is returning to the White House? It’s possible. Russian leaders reacted with open jubilation to Trump’s victory in 2016 but were largely disappointed with his administration, which, for all his kind words for Putin, also saw a raft of new sanctions against Moscow and the sale of anti-tank weapons to Ukraine.    Moscow is being much more cautious this time around. In a statement Wednesday responding to Trump’s victory, the Russian foreign ministry credited him with countering the “globalist” course of America’s current administration. It also added, “We have no illusions about the president-elect, who is well known in Russia … the US ruling political elite adheres to anti-Russia principles and the policy of ‘containing Moscow.’ This line does not depend on changes in America’s domestic political barometer.”    One of the risks of engaging in gray zone tactics is that you can’t always be sure how your opponent will react, and it’s difficult to know when a red line is finally crossed. Trump, for one, has prided himself on his unpredictability. Like everyone else after what happened on Tuesday, Putin is likely waiting to see what comes next. 

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