Transcript: ABC News’ Sudden Surrender to Trump’s Fury Alarms Experts

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 16 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Over the weekend, ABC News shocked the political world by reaching a $15 million settlement with Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit he’d brought against the network. Some experts have said ABC could have potentially won the suit. This comes after Trump raged at ABC News throughout the campaign, and many observers are seeing the settlement as a potential sign of capitulation to him. Notably, this comes even as Trump just openly declared that he thinks he’s “tamed” the media; and if not, it’s his full intention to do so in a second term. Today, we’re talking about all this with Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, the author of Autocracy, Inc., who wrote a good piece before the election arguing that Trump is trying to condition voters to accept authoritarian rule. That’s unfortunately even more relevant right now. Thanks for coming on, Anne.

Anne Applebaum: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: ABC News has now agreed to pay $15 million to support the future Trump Presidential Foundation and Museum. There will be something like that apparently. Trump had sued because George Stephanopoulos had said in a question that Trump was found liable for rape in the E. Carroll lawsuit. The details are a bit complicated, but it’s not at all clear ABC would have lost if it had kept fighting. Your thoughts on this outcome, Anne?

Applebaum: Trump issues libel suits and other kinds of suits the way other people buy cups of coffee. He’s been doing it for years. It was one of his business tactics. He does it as a form of intimidation, just to make people think twice and make them spend money and make them waste time. Really the best thing for news organizations to do would be to resist it. Because if you resist it, if you make him spend the money on lawyers and him waste time, then you win. I don’t know the legal details but what’s really disturbing about this one is it sounds as if ABC certainly had a chance of winning. They could have kept going, and they’ve decided not to and given really quite a large settlement to a so far nonexistent Trump charity, supposedly in order to make the suit go away.

That looks less like prudence on the part of a news organization and more like, Let’s not be in any fight with a president who we know might have used other tools against us. And that’s ugly. That’s not the way we’re used to seeing brave news organizations behaving.

Sargent: Right. The critical point you raised there is that news organizations in these situations tend to take on this fight on principle.

Applebaum: Or they have done for many decades. News organizations will resist frivolous libel suits because they know that once they’ve conceded to one of them, others will do the same.

Sargent: In your piece, you write that Trump is adopting a standard authoritarian tactic in a more general sense, which is to prepare the public to accept an authoritarian role for the state. It seems like we’re seeing something similar right here. Can you talk about that broader tactic?

Applebaum: Trump, during the election campaign, used all kinds of language, from calling his opponents “enemies of the people” or “enemies of the state,” calling immigrants “vermin,” language that hasn’t really been part of American politics before. He issued endless threats toward individual journalists, toward the media more broadly, toward particular judges, toward various enemies. And of course he kept doing that, and has been doing it even more loudly since the election.

Some of the purpose of this is not just letting off steam. What he’s doing is making other people afraid to criticize him or afraid to hold him to account. He’s creating around himself this atmosphere of anger and menace. And it looks like, in a number of cases, it’s succeeding. ABC is one example. There are a number of other examples, from Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post to the head of the LA Times, of other news organizations or news owners saying, Right, let’s back away or let’s not pick a fight or let’s concede something in advance, because they don’t want to involved in some open fight with the president.

It’s particularly notable that this is happening in the case of news organizations whose owners have other businesses. So that would be true of the LA Times, The Washington Post, and also ABC, which is owned by Disney. They have other businesses; they have lots of interests with the federal government; they have regulatory issues. And it looks like they’re making concessions in advance so that they don’t run into trouble down the line.

I can anticipate what your next question would be, which is: Is this a pattern and is it something that we’ve seen before in other declining democracies? Of course, the answer is yes, it is. It’s not so much censorship—media control and intimidation works in a place like Hungary or Turkey is not just government censorship. The government doesn’t tell people what to write. Instead, the government finds ways of putting pressure on the owners of media, sometimes on journalists, in order to make them think twice before they say anything critical.

Sargent: In fact, the larger story here with ABC News really underscores what you’re saying there, the story you’re telling there. Remember, during the campaign, Trump viciously attacked ABC News in particular for fact-checking him during the one debate. At the time, Trump threatened to retaliate against ABC by revoking broadcasting rights.

By the way, I should note that The New York Times reports that ABC executives have met with Trump transition team officials at Mar-a-Lago. God knows what was discussed, but here’s what we have. Trump attacks ABC for telling the truth about him, threatens direct retaliation if he wins. Trump sues for defamation. Now ABC decides not to fight even though news orgs do this generally, and instead will donate $15 million to something that lionizes Trump?

Applebaum: We’ll see how other news organizations react. And it’s going to be particularly interesting, those that are smaller, have fewer conflicts of interest, whether they’ll be able to hold out. But many people assumed in the past that the news media in the United States was too big, too diverse, and too complex to be intimidated the the Hungarian news media is. The Hungarian news media, by comparison, is tiny and weak. This is a moment when, for other reasons, the business model of much of the media is in trouble. A lot of both broadcasting and newspapers are either unprofitable or not as profitable as they were. It’s not true of everybody, but it’s true of many. You have an enormous amount of churn and uncertainty. And at this particular moment in history, it means that owners are more likely to be wary.

If we were at a moment when the media was making lots of money, as it once did in the past, or when it was expanding and everybody was hiring, things might feel different. Right now, it feels like things are shutting and closing down and staff are being let go. That adds another layer to the current circumstances. It has nothing to do with Trump, but Trump is able to take advantage of it, clearly.

Sargent: On Friday, Trump had this to say about the media during an appearance on Wall Street. And I think it goes directly to what you’re saying. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): We did a good job. We had a great first term despite a lot of turmoil caused unnecessarily. But the media has tamed down a little bit. They’re liking us much better now, I think. If they don’t, we’ll have to just take them on again, and we don’t want to do that.

Sargent: This looks to me like Trump knows that the media is in a vulnerable and precarious spot, and he’s really putting them on notice to a greater degree that more of this is coming. Let’s put this in your framework. Is this the sort of conditioning of Americans you’re talking about, in addition to sending a message to the media? What is he conditioning Americans to accept here?

Applebaum: He—and not just him, there’s been a coordinated campaign—he and others have been seeking to attack and undermine journalism and the basis of journalism for a long time. I know perfectly well that there’s good and bad journalism out there. Lots of TV journalism was pretty weak and click-baity, and lots of newspapers have made mistakes. I wouldn’t deny that. But they’re also attacking the very idea that there can be journalism—in other words, that there is such a thing as people going off into the real world, observing something, talking to people, writing about it, fact-checking it, and then publishing it with the possibility that if they have made a mistake, they’ll print a correction the next day. That idea—that that’s possible and that there’s something good about that, and that that form of communication or description of the world has a value—is itself under attack.

We know that a lot of Americans don’t read that kind of journalism anymore—that kind of information and are instead turning to podcasts or Instagram or other forms of media or entertainment where they get information and they get ideas—but they haven’t gone through anything like that process. That’s the result of a lot of things. Some of it’s commercial. Some of it’s behavioral. And some of it is the result of people like Trump or Musk or others in the right and far-right world, and some far-left world too, I should say, attacking anything that looks like journalism, criticizing it, speaking disparagingly about something called “mainstream media” as if there were still such a thing and acting as if it has some agenda that is anti-American or something else.

We have actually a decade of this now, more than a decade actually. You could take it back 20 years if you wanted, but the attack has grown more concerted and louder and more effective in the last several years. And as I said, it’s been accompanied by this corresponding decline in journalism and, to some cases, in the quality of journalism. That gets us where we are. So it’s true that a lot of Americans would hear Trump saying, I’m in control of the media now, and either not care or not be very shocked or say, Well, that’s good. Media was terrible and now Trump will take charge of it.

Sargent: Just to pick up on a point you made there: What’s under attack here is the very idea of journalism. It’s the fact that this is journalism that’s subjecting it to attack. It’s lost on a lot of people, a lot of observers, that what Trump is doing and what MAGA is doing. It’s a whole movement attacking the very act of telling the truth about him and them.

Applebaum: Of course, that’s the effect, the reason to do it. Trump has said this—I’m now not remembering the interview, I think it was with Lesley Stahl—before in public, Of course I attack you because I don’t want you to criticize me.

He wants to undermine any criticism of him or any reporting of him in advance so that when people are told about a corruption scandal, and there are some that have already begun, or when they’re informed about what his administration is doing, or when they’re described the background of the various nominees or appointees to his administration, people would say, I don’t trust any of that. I don’t believe any of that. I’m going to let the president decide, or I’m going to listen to Tucker Carlson, or I’m going to go and read up on wellness on Instagram and YouTube because I feel safer in that space.

That’s the purpose of it. When you undermine journalism ... And by the way, this goes for judges and the legal system and the prosecutors, meaning the attorney general as well and the Department of Justice. When you undermine those things, that can have two effects. One is it makes it easier for you to go after enemies, but it also makes it easier for you to protect yourself. If there’s a biased or partisan system in place, then it’s much easier for you to commit crimes or to be corrupt; or not even to commit crimes but to be corrupt in a broader way. Really, you see this: Any declining democracy—look at Hungary, look at Turkey, look at Venezuela—sooner or later becomes pretty profoundly corrupt because the effect of tearing down those institutions, anything that creates transparency and accountability, whether it be media, courts, law enforcement, inspectors generals of various different kinds. When you tear that down, then you make it much easier to get away with things in secret.

Sargent: You make this point in your piece artfully, that once the public accepts these types of tactics, it just paves the way for the next step. Using your framework here, Trump is essentially getting the public to accept the idea of using the state to suppress independent truth telling about the leader and his followers. What do you expect to unfold here given the international context?

Applebaum: Again, we’re a large country. There’s a lot of different kinds of media. There’s The New Republic, there’s The Atlantic, there’s Substack (although that’s a mixed bag, I think, even speaking as somebody who’s on it). There’s a range of other media and other sources of information. There are a number of nonprofit forms of media now that are gaining some traction. We’re not looking at a wipeout of all information anytime soon. They’re not looking at the elimination of all news or all information. Actually now it’s more incumbent than ever upon Americans to make sure that they know what it is that they’re reading, to make sure that they’re paying for some outlets or for some sources of information that still do fact-checking and still do reporting.

There will be something, but there is a danger that large media, especially when owned by someone who has other conflicts of interests, could become intimidated and could begin to tell its reporters to be careful what they say. So again, the real danger isn’t censorship. It’s not like there’s going to be a censor who’s going to come on TV and say, You can’t say that. The danger is that people start to self-censor. People start being careful about what they say. They think about the consequences, about the frivolous lawsuits that might come if they say something that could conceivably offend the president. That’s the world we’re entering. Not for all media, not for every journalist. I’m sure it will still be possible to find good information, but it could happen at some outlet.

Sargent: It sounds to me like you think that generally speaking, the free press in the U.S. is still a very robust institution. It’s very large. It’s comprised of a lot of different interests. And there’s a very strong tradition, journalistic tradition among the reporters and editors that could make it very hard for an owner or an executive in the type of position you’re talking about to try and manipulate coverage or bring about self-censorship, at least relative to some of these other deteriorating democracies. Is that right?

Applebaum: I’m simply trying to look at the bright side. I didn’t think we’re facing some kind of wipeout. At least that’s not what I see right now in December, 2024. I still see a pretty broad range of sources of information available, but in some of the key mass media, in some of the television news programs and some newspapers, you might begin to see that. You might begin to see self-censorship and nervous executives telling journalists to be careful what they say. That’s probably already happening, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

So I’m saying something a little nuanced. I want to say that there is still information to be had, that we’re not talking about the threat of becoming North Korea. We’re talking about losing some of our larger media. We’re talking about people becoming worried and afraid and scared about what they can say, and to a degree that we aren’t used to. I don’t know how to say this the right way, but it’s normal to think twice about what you say when you’re going on television. That’s fine. You should seek to be careful. What we’re talking about is the coming of a moment when people are specifically afraid to say something that would affect Trump because he might then launch a frivolous lawsuit, or because he might use his power over broadcasting regulation to take your organization off the air, or because he might intimidate your CEO who has some other interest with him. That’s the aspect of it that’s new.

Sargent: Just to wrap this up, what recourse do news consumers and the broader public have here? Recently, when The Washington Post shelved its editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, as you know, there was an enormous outcry. Enormous numbers of people canceled their subscriptions. There was a debate about whether that was the right thing or whether it would further weaken the press as an institution. In some way, you’ve got do that in order to exert pressure on institutions not to fold. What is your experience in the international context telling you about the prospects for that type of thing to work?

Applebaum: I don’t know that there’s an equivalent in the international context because the numbers of readers that U.S. papers have is so much larger than so many other places. Not everywhere, but in most places. Of course, everybody’s within their rights. If people don’t want to subscribe to The Washington Post anymore because of Jet Bezos, then I understand it. I’ve kept my subscription. I still think The Washington Post does great reporting. They have columnists that I like to read. I used to work there, I admire a lot of people there, and I’m going to keep reading it. But if people would rather not pay Bezos or pay for that, then I understand.

I would only ask that people find something else, find another organization, find another news organization that you can read and support because any time and attention that you spend on actual journalism—material that someone’s got out into the world to procure and has sought to package for you to read and has tried to fact-check it and will correct it again if it’s mistaken—as opposed to reading social media posts or flipping through Instagram is time well-spent. Whatever investment of your time and your money you can make in that is useful, both for you and for the rest of us.

Sargent: It’s a brutal dilemma, isn’t it, Anne? On the one hand, objecting to or canceling subscriptions and so forth does weaken independent truth-telling institutions. On the other, readers and news consumers don’t have a lot of recourse other than that. You do want to let your institutions that you’re loyal to and that you learn from daily know that capitulating in these situations is unacceptable, and there’s not any good way to do that other than this. So what do you think? It’s a tough dilemma, isn’t it?

Applebaum: It’s a tough dilemma, and everyone’s going to resolve it the way that’s best for them. I fully understand why people would cancel subscriptions to The Washington Post.

Sargent: Do you think that in the end Trump wins against the press, or not? Or somewhere in between? How bad could it get?

Applebaum: I don’t think it’s going to be win and lose. It’s going to be an ongoing struggle and dilemma for everybody who works in the media and for everybody who reads media over the next four years. There isn’t going to be some moment where we say, Right, the American press has ceased to exist, or where we say, Right, the American press has won and has maintained its independence. It’s going to be a process of two steps forward and one step back, or three steps back and four steps forward. This is going to be one of the themes of the next four years.

Again, if you care about it, if you keep track of it, make sure that you reading something that you trust and that you trust for good reasons, and make sure that if it’s something that you can subscribe to that you’ve paid for it.

Sargent: Or alternatively, it could be a one step forward and two steps back. Folks, please make sure to check out Anne Applebaum’s book, Autocracy, Inc. Anne, thanks so much for coming on with us today.

Applebaum: Thanks so much.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.