Since 2019, the Institute for Human Sciences and the Erste Foundation have sponsored an annual Speech for Europe. The speech is always timed to coincide with the opening of the Wiener Festwochen, Vienna’s annual cultural festival, and is on or near Europe Day, which is also the anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The speech is held outdoors, on Judenplatz, the center of the Viennese Jewish community during the Middle Ages and the site of an important Holocaust memorial today. Entry is free and the audience stands to listen. Hopefully it doesn’t rain.

This year I gave the speech. You can read all of it or watch it here, together with introductions from Boris Marte, until recently the CEO of the Erste Foundation, and Milo Rau, the artistic director of the Vienna Festival (both speak German). American readers might note that I speak here as a European, and that I offer advice to Europeans. This is because I have a Polish passport (acquired in 2013) but also because I consider myself to be a patriotic citizen of the transatlantic alliance that America built together with Europe more than eighty years ago. I also believe that the ideas and values that lie behind the American, Polish and British constitutions are the same.

Here is a very lightly edited version, cut in a few places to make for smoother reading.

I began with a question for the audience

Why are you here? Why did you take time out on a Wednesday night to come here, to the Judenplatz, to hear a »Speech for Europe«? Why did you want to join this annual tradition?

Let me take a guess at two of your motives. First, many of you are here because you remember the catastrophe that engulfed this city, this country, and this continent during the Second World War, more than 80 years ago. You knew that this lecture, in this place, would recall that history—of the war, of the Holocaust, of the hatred and the hunger—and that it would honor the memory of the victims.

Secondly, I am guessing that many of you fear that some version of that catastrophe might return. If that is the case, then you are in good company, and indeed you are part of a very long tradition. Since 1945, several generations of Europeans have been working very hard to prevent another disaster like the Second World War. They wrote history books and put up monuments. They organized events like this one. As you can see, they still do.

They also reorganized their societies. As Austrians were reconstructing Vienna, as other Europeans were rebuilding Paris and Berlin, they were not just putting things back to the way they were before. Surrounded by rubble, they decided to build something brand-new: a set of institutions designed to promote liberal democracy, the rule of law, cooperation between states, economic integration and, eventually, a single market for trade.

These institutions were intended both to promote prosperity and to prevent the return of the imperial and genocidal ambitions that had done such damage to this city, and to so many other cities. Instead of returning to the old system of rivalries, protectionism, and warring armies, Europeans created the European Union and a host of other organizations that connected them to one another and to the world through ties of commerce, trade, travel, and diplomacy.

The Europe that emerged from this process represents an enormous achievement—an unprecedented achievement, in fact; one with no real parallel anywhere else in the world. Thanks to the efforts of that postwar generation, Europe is safer, richer, and more peaceful than ever before in its history. European countries are also more sovereign. Thanks to eight decades of collective deterrence, Europeans have been able to develop their own national cultures within a framework of peace, instead of perpetual war. Thanks to the European Union, Europeans can preserve their art, literature, and architecture, including the buildings that surround us here.

This success does have a downside. Because these institutions worked so well, people began to imagine that they were not the result of hard work and difficult compromises but rather something natural, just some »bureaucracies« that emerged by themselves. Because we had those 80 years of peace, people started taking the laws and norms that ensure peace for granted.

If you came tonight because you fear that these institutions are once again in danger, you are correct. For right now, at this moment, they are indeed under attack.

The revival of old ideas

The challenge comes, first and foremost, from within our own societies. All across Europe and North America, discarded texts, forgotten concepts, and dimly remembered theories are being revived by people who don’t remember why they were discredited three generations ago.

Many have, for example, adopted old attitudes to parliamentary democracy, and are now channeling the same scorn for elections that the autocrats of the 20th century once expressed. Lenin dismissed parliaments as nothing more than »bourgeois democracy.« Hitler called parliamentary democracy »one of the gravest symptoms of human decline.« When you hear European politicians talking about the »degeneracy« of democracy, or the »weakness« of liberalism, remember that these same words were also used in the 1930s, by groups describing themselves as both Left and Right

Some are also rediscovering old political tactics, for example the idea that politics should focus not on creating consensus but on building an existential, potentially violent distinction between »friends« and »enemies.« They may not even know that this idea comes from the German philosopher Carl Schmitt, popular in the Third Reich, who dismissed liberal politics as a sham.

Nor are these the only ideas that have returned. Ethnic nationalism, for example, the belief that nations are better if they are somehow purer, however purity is defined, is also back. So is theocracy, or dominionism. This is the belief that the only good societies are those run by the church. So is an older idea of sovereignty, a vision of the state that gives all power to a ruler or ruling party that is, by definition, immune from criticism, even when these leaders violate the rights of their subjects.

Indeed, the downgrading of human rights as something sentimental and weak is a very old idea. The replacement of news-gathering and fact-checking with propaganda—we have lived through that before too, along with attempts to control and manipulate access to information. And we don’t have to look far back in history to discover that the creation of scapegoats, minority groups whose presence can be blamed for economic losses or social distress, is a political tactic that has been tried many times before.

The threat from Russia

These are European ideas, and they come from European history. But they are also being reinforced from outside of Europe. We hear them, for example, from the Russians, in the propaganda that they use to justify a whole range of military, cyber, and hybrid attacks on Europe. Russia’s war on Ukraine is sometimes described, including recently by the American vice president, as if it were nothing more than a territorial dispute, a scuffle over lines on a map. But when Russia denies that Ukraine is a real nation; when Russia builds concentration camps on occupied Ukrainian territory; when Russia bans the Ukrainian language and systematically arrests mayors, teachers, journalists, and priests, then Russia is also attacking the Europe that was built after 1945, the Europe whose borders are not supposed to be changed by force. Russia invaded Ukraine not only to destroy Ukraine, but also to prove that treaties are meaningless, alliances are weak, and that brute force still decides the fate of nations. By waging an imperialist war of conquest, Russia seeks to undermine Europe’s post-imperial order.

In this sense, the Russian attack on Ukraine is also an attack on the European Union. Europeans may imagine that the EU is a mere bureaucratic inconvenience. But the Russians have never believed that. On the contrary, the Russian president has long understood that when unified, Europe can resist Russian influence and Russian corruption. When divided, Europeans find it far more difficult to turn down Russian offers of special treatment, or lucrative secret deals.

That is why, for two decades now, Russian propagandists have belittled the Union, mocked its institutions and, echoing some Europeans, portrayed it as decadent, divided, overregulated, or doomed. Nor is their policy limited simply to words or memes. They also seek actively to create chaos and division. A few months ago, agents paid by Russia placed explosives on a Polish railway line, in an attempt to create mass casualties. Russian drones have been used to hamper traffic at airports all over Europe. Russian assassins have killed people in Britain, Germany, and Spain.

Russian money backs European political parties and leaders whose victories would limit Europe’s ability to defend European territory. That is why the Russians fund or amplify anti-European political parties as well as separatist movements. Russia wants to replace the Europe of law with a Europe tolerant of kleptocracy: a Europe in which every country can be separately pressured, separately threatened, separately bought.

The challenge from the United States

In another, earlier version of this speech, one that I might have given two or three years ago, I would now speak about how European and American leaders need to work together to push back against Russia’s military and ideological threat, to protect and defend liberal democracy and the rule of law together. But here is where I think we need to acknowledge what is happening in Washington now, because the United States under this administration is no longer interested in leading democratic coalitions, against Russia or anyone else. Democracy is no longer at the center of US foreign policy, or of America’s identity. Instead, Donald Trump has begun to align US foreign and domestic policies with the values and practices of the autocratic world.

This dramatic shift is most visible, of course, in the domestic policies of the president, and in his administration’s attempt to strip funding from USAID or Radio Free Europe, American institutions that once promoted democracy around the world. But it is also apparent in the president’s relationships with Washington’s historic allies. From his first days in office, President Trump verbally attacked Canada, the European Union, and America’s Asian partners, placing inexplicably high tariffs on their goods. He has shouted at the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office, threatened to annex Greenland by force, claimed that the EU was created to »screw« the US, and, more recently, echoed Putin in calling NATO a »paper tiger.« In a break with all previous postwar administrations, Trump has negotiated with Russia not only to bring a just peace to Ukraine or security to Europe, but in order to help US businesses profit from the lifting of Russian sanctions.

Like the Russians, and like European critics of democracy, some members of the Trump administration have also entered the war of ideas. At a speech in Munich last February, the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, declared that America and Europe are bound together not by values, not by a commitment to democracy, but by »Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry«—by blood, soil, DNA and the distant past, in other words, not the present or future. Although the speech praised Dante, Shakespeare, Mozart, and the »vaulted ceilings of the Sistine chapel,« Rubio, like Putin, condemned modern Europe as a continent overwhelmed by migrants, crime, and decay.

More recently, Vice President JD Vance, speaking in Budapest, also praised European architecture, but condemned the »faceless bureaucrats« of the EU for allegedly intervening in Hungary’s elections. He did so while speaking at a campaign event, while he was himself intervening in Hungary’s elections on behalf of the now deposed Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

These two speeches were not outliers. They represent the Trump administration’s policy, as presented in the National Security Strategy that it published at the end of last year. That document made it clear that, although the United States will no longer intervene to promote democracy in the world, it is now American policy to »help Europe correct its current trajectory,« language that implies the US will intervene directly in European politics. The point, the authors claimed, was to prevent European »civilizational erasure.«

According to reports published at the time, an earlier version of the document was more specific. It specifically called upon US diplomatic and security institutions to support illiberal forces in four European countries—Hungary, Poland, Italy, and, please note, Austria—with the explicit goal of persuading them to leave the European Union. For all four, this would be an economic catastrophe, just as Brexit was for Britain. For the rest of Europe, the prospects wouldn’t be much better. A damaged EU would certainly struggle to counter Russian hybrid warfare, let alone a Russian military attack. A badly weakened Europe would quickly lose its sovereignty and find it impossible to compete in a world dominated by the United States and China. Europe would become poorer and weaker, just as Hungary became poorer and weaker under Orbán’s rule.

But, as we can see, this policy is already in practice. Breaking with longstanding precedent, Rubio, Vance, and Trump himself all vocally supported Orbán, the politician who has done more to destroy European unity, to support Russian interests, and at the same time to impoverish his country, than any other. Even his election campaign explicitly sought to demonize both the EU and the Ukrainians, scapegoating them as existential enemies of the Hungarian nation in order to distract Hungarians from his own corruption, using tactics lifted directly from those dusty old history books. A few weeks before the vote, I saw posters in Budapest featuring three dark, menacing faces: Volodymyr Zelensky, Péter Magyar, and Ursula Von der Leyen. The slogan read: »They Are the Risk. Fidesz Is the Safe Choice.« As we know, this proved too ridiculous, too conspiratorial for the Hungarian people, and they voted the other way.

But the Trump administration stuck by Orbán to the bitter end. Partly, its goal was domestic: Vance campaigns for Orbán on behalf of his domestic audience, which long ago accepted the same false stereotypes of Europe and of Ukraine that we hear from Russian propagandists. There is a hard commercial agenda here too. Like his colleagues in the tech community, Vance openly supports political leaders with an explicit anti-EU agenda precisely because, like the Russians, they want to weaken or destroy the European Union.

To be fair, Russian and American motives are different. But both ultimately care not just about ideology, but about their own commercial interests. Vance, like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, knows that the European Commission is the only body on the planet large enough to regulate digital platforms, to demand transparency from them, and to insist that private power be subject to public rules. In a January 2025 interview, for example, Zuckerberg said he felt »optimistic« that President Donald Trump would intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”

Where does that leave us, here in Europe?

On one side, we are facing a rearmed, radicalized Russian regime that is already using sabotage, propaganda, and military threats to influence European politics.

On the other side, we are facing a radicalized movement inside the US administration that defines our societies as a civilizational enemy.

For different reasons, both favor a Europe that is weaker and more fragmented. Both want a Europe that is less capable of acting independently in the world. The Russians want a Europe than cannot defend itself militarily. The Americans want a Europe that is totally dependent on American technology, and thus susceptible to American political control.

In the face of this challenge, Europeans can, of course, give up. We—and I speak here as a Polish citizen—can let the US negotiators continue to prolong the war in Ukraine, continue to plan business deals with Russia instead of a peace that would help Europe. We can watch from the sidelines as Americans and Russians both amplify anti-European political movements and leaders. We can give in to the various temptations and bribes. We can let Europe once again become a continent of warring nations, easily manipulated by outside powers: Russia, the United States, and of course China as well.

Or we can choose something different.

We can fight back—not by talking, but by building. We can begin, as the French and Taiwanese have started to do, to collaborate on the construction of alternative technologies that would suit not just Europe but the entire democratic world. Instead of getting our information from platforms that are designed to divide and exploit us, we could found, and fund, new companies. We can change the rules that govern them.

Transparency can replace obscurity. Customers of social media platforms could own their own data and determine what happens to it. They could influence, directly, the algorithms that determine what they see. Legislators in democracies could create the technical and legal means to give people more control and more choices, or to hold companies liable if the algorithms they use promote terrorism, racism, or child pornography.

Above all, we need to lean into our achievements. Europe remains an oasis of security, stability, and the rule of law. We have independent courts, who strive not to be mere mouthpieces of whoever is in power. We keep our word. We respect contracts. Our continent respects and admires science, reads history, cares about culture, and is mindful of the lessons of the past. We should use those things to become a magnet for investment, for innovation, for people with new ideas. Our very predictability is an advantage in a world of unpredictable powers.

In order to capitalize on our many advantages, we do need to change some policies and some priorities. We need to put more money into the new European defense tech companies that are being created now, sometimes inspired by the incredible technological progress of the Ukrainians, and sometimes working directly with them. We need to invest in European social media platforms and European AI, with European values built into them. We need our data stored on this side of the Atlantic. We need a capital markets union so that Europe’s full economic potential can be reached. We need to think like the world’s most powerful economic zone, which is what we are, and to act like it.

We should do all of these things to protect our sovereignty, so that decisions about Europe are made in Europe. In an earlier era, sovereignty was measured in armies, borders, and industrial strength. Today it must also be measured in networks, platforms, and engineering talent. If the infrastructure of democratic debate is owned elsewhere, governed elsewhere, and answerable to private interests elsewhere, then formal independence becomes meaningless. Those who use the word »sovereignty« to mean isolationism and protectionism are making an even more foolish mistake. Nowadays, a nation may have its own elections, a separate legal system and carefully controlled borders and yet still find that its public sphere is being shaped by systems it neither understands nor controls.

Finally, we should have an answer to the nostalgic appeals to Western civilization that we are now hearing from US politicians and ideologues, as well as many Europeans. We care about the past—I care deeply about the past—but I want us to remember more of it. Yes, Europeans built beautiful, eternal cathedrals, and city squares like this one. But European civilization is not just a backdrop for Instagram influencers. Let’s also remember the other things that Europe built. After centuries of religious war, dictatorship, and genocide, Europeans invented the ideas that form the basis of liberal democracy.

A truer definition of European or Western civilization includes not just flying buttresses, but the rule of law, the separation of powers, judicial independence, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the idea that governments are accountable to citizens. Those things are no less part of Europe’s inheritance than its literature or architecture. Indeed, they are what make Europe’s cultural inheritance more than a museum collection. They are what allow free people to read Dante differently, to argue about Shakespeare openly, to attend whichever churches or cathedrals they choose, to criticize their rulers without fear, and to change governments without bloodshed.

You cannot celebrate European civilization while simultaneously attacking the legal and political order invented here, or while openly seeking to undermine the institutions that protect pluralism and dissent. Anyone who does so is defending the shell of that civilization, not its substance.

We are living through a moment of great change, as significant and consequential as the end of communism in 1989. But we can make that shift work in our favor. Europeans are indeed tied together by many links, by shared history, both good and bad; by shared art and culture; by shared religions, as well as by shared religious tolerance, an idea invented here, in Europe, in the 18th century, and later exported to the United States.

We did invent divisive and ugly ideas, and we can retrieve them from the past. But all of the texts that led to the birth of classical liberalism were also written here too, if we want to find them, revive them, and reinterpret them for the present. These too are old ideas that can be made new again. We are not condemned to the might-makes-right, brutal world of Carl Schmitt or Lenin. We can choose something different, and I believe we will.

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 and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)

May 8

• After Trump decided to paint the base of the reflecting pool, the administration invoked an exemption reserved for emergency situations to award a $6.9 million no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings—a firm that previously performed work at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.

• Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have contributed to an investment vehicle launched by Dominari Holdings—a Trump Tower-based brokerage firm in which they hold a 12% stake—which has raised $1 billion to invest in US companies in industries championed by the Trump administration.

May 9

• Shares of Dell Technologies jumped after Trump encouraged people to buy the stock in a White House speech posted to YouTube.

• Palm Beach has not only renamed its airport the President Donald J Trump international airport, but has also given the president’s company the right to sell merchandise using that name

May 12

• Trump is using a White House-hosted UFC match to solicit political contributions via sponsorship packages that could cost upward of $1 million each.

May 13

• Eric Trump joined his father at a summit with Xi Jinping in China to explore a deal with a chipmaker that US lawmakers allege has ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

May 14

• Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion IRS lawsuit over the 2019–2020 leak of his tax returns in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies he claims were persecuted by the Justice Department.

• Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York are taking a lenient approach to white-collar crime, offering lawbreaking firms backroom deals that allow them to avoid charges, fines, or full public disclosure of their fraud in exchange for self-reporting.

• After multiple delays and changes to terms of service—which informed preorder customers that their $100 deposits did not guarantee delivery—Trump Mobile announced it would begin shipping its $499 T1 smartphone.

• The Department of Justice is planning to drop its bribery indictment of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani after he hired one of Trump’s personal attorneys to represent him and offered to invest $10 billion in the U.S. economy.

Judenplatz

There are two monuments on Judenplatz. One of them, Rachel Whiteread’s powerful Holocaust memorial, was erected in 2000. The monument is an inside-out library, with all of the books facing outwards. The titles cannot be seen and the content of the books is unknown. The monument is not meant to be beautiful, in contrast to some of the elegant buildings on the square, but rather to make people think.

At the other end of the square stands a statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), the German writer known, among other things, for Nathan the Wise, a play advocating religious tolerance. The Viennese first built a monument to him here in 1935. The Nazis destroyed it a few years later. The current statue was created in 1968 and moved back to its original place in 1981.

Afterwards, I signed a few books

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From my article in the Atlantic:

Last week, the whining noise of unmanned flying objects could be heard in the city of Moscow once again. On the morning of May 7, the mayor of Moscow announced that the Russian air force had shot down hundreds of Ukrainian drones aimed at the city. Two days later, Moscow was due to host Russia’s annual May 9 military parade, a celebration linked very intimately with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who revived this Soviet-era celebration of Stalin’s victory over Nazi Germany and his conquest of Europe.

Suddenly, and very publicly, Russian officials appeared nervous, afraid that their parade would be spoiled. The Russian foreign minister issued a threat, promising “no mercy,” whatever that means, if Ukrainians struck the parade. The Kremlin’s spokesman reassured Muscovites that security was tight because the “threat from the Kyiv regime” had already been taken into account. The Russian president even persuaded the American president to ask the Ukrainian president for a one-day ceasefire. Volodymyr Zelensky granted Putin’s wish, after Trump offered to broker an exchange of 1,000 prisoners of war. Zelensky then issued a magnanimous, droll decree, formally granting Putin permission to hold the parade.

This is the decree:

All of this comes on top of weeks, even months, of disruption:

Three years after the first drones exploded over the Kremlin, and more than four years into a conflict that was supposed to be nothing more than a brief “special military operation,” Muscovites have no choice but to think about the war. Alleged security measures—some think they are a form of censorship—had already rendered cellphone coverage in Moscow and across Russia unreliable, at times non-existent. Although Russians already lost access to most forms of Western social media, in April the state cut access even to the Russian-built app Telegram, as well as many VPNs. Without public internet many physical systems, including ATMs, also stopped working. Ride apps don’t function either. These inconveniences come on top of high inflation and high interest rates that have weighed even on Russia’s wealthiest businesses and consumers for months.

The parade itself was shorter than previous years, with fewer foreign leaders and no tanks, missiles or heavy military equipment. Presumably no one wanted any large objects to be struck by a Ukrainian drone on Red Square. But I think this public display of anxiety reflects something deeper.

The carefully promoted cult of the Second World War started in Soviet times, but Putin has deepened and expanded it. The loss of the Soviet empire in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 created enormous nostalgia for 1945, and Putin has been promoting that nostalgia for more than two decades. During that time, he also built that nostalgia into the fabric of the city of Moscow and other cities across Russia, adding and expanding the monumental sculptures and brutalist memorials that glorify the heroic war dead.

Now, at last, the cult of the war has caught up with him. Putin knows he can’t live up to the mythology he created, and everyone else can see that too. His unnecessary, illegal, brutal war in Ukraine has already lasted longer than the Russian war against the Nazis, killing hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and producing neither military nor political nor any other kind of success. On the contrary: He can’t even hold a parade in Moscow without fearing that the Ukrainians will disrupt it.

Plesae read the whole thing here (gift link):

Read the whole Atlantic article

“Something rather unusual is happening in Russia”

I can’t go to Moscow anymore, as I am a list of banned people. But a few foreign journalists still operate there. Remarkably, Steve Rosenberg of the BBC is one of them. On Saturday he published a short video which gives you a good feel for the Victory Parade:

He also recorded an episode of From Our Own Correspondent, a beloved BBC Radio program. In this short dispatch, he lists many of the unusual things he has noticed lately in Russia, including soldiers poking around manholes in the street, presumably looking for bombs. He’s very good on the growing paranoia and discontent, some of which I’ve heard about third hand but of course have not seen myself.

Listen here:

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 and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)

May 4

• Trump asked longtime GOP fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke to solicit donations for his project to develop a new golf course and sculpture garden along the Potomac in Washington—opening a new avenue for donors to curry favor with the president.

• Elon Musk settled an SEC lawsuit for $1.5 million, resolving accusations that he waited too long to disclose his initial Twitter share purchases in 2022. This represents a significant shift under the Trump administration. When the suit was originally filed during the Biden administration, the SEC sought full remuneration of the $150 million Musk gained from the delay.

May 5

• Palm Beach County commissioners voted to rename Palm Beach International Airport after Trump at a cost of $5.5 million, which includes a trademark deal with the president’s companies to license his name and image.

May 6

• Traders opened nearly $1 billion in crude oil short positions about an hour before an Axios report that the US and Iran were nearing a nuclear deal sent prices tumbling—the latest example of insiders profiting from advance knowledge of the news.

May 7

• The US Air Force is planning to have the Qatari-gifted jumbo jet ready for Trump to use as Air Force One by July 4, in celebration of America’s 250th birthday, though there are also efforts to have the aircraft ready by the president’s birthday on June 14.

  ---

  From a Viennese Bus

  A friend of mine saw this in a bus in Vienna, advertising a speech I am making later this week. I will post it here, in due course.

  

  Enjoy the good weather, if you are lucky enough to have it

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For just over a year now, starting last April, I’ve published regular editions of my Kleptocracy Tracker. Most weeks, this list contains examples of the president’s conflicts of interest (at least those that have been uncovered by the media) as well as those of his cabinet and associates. I have also listed policy changes that weaken enforcement of existing laws on corruption (an example here). I have had a particular focus on potential violations of the emoluments clauses of the US constitution, which explicitly prevent the president and other federal officials from accepting gifts from national and foreign leaders: “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

You can see the content of the Tracker on this SNF Agora Institute chart. Or you can find all of the editions in my past Substacks. But from time to time I will also take stock of the broader impact. For although the US is not a full-blown kleptocracy - a state whose primary purpose is to enrich its rulers - we are heading in that direction.

Of course, there have been conflicts of interest in Washington before. But eighteen months after Trump’s second election, it’s clear that we are now living in a completely different world. The amount of money involved is in the billions of dollars. The impact on US foreign policy, and on domestic regulatory decisions, is far-reaching and perhaps irreversible. Also, some of the patterns are new. Here are a few:

The presidential family. No previous presidential family has actively done business with foreign leaders who have significant stakes in US foreign policy. In the past, relatives of the president have indeed traded on their proximity to the president. But now, the president’s son-in-law is both a business partner of the Saudi government and one of the two main Middle East negotiators. The president’s sons also deal directly with companies whose owners have deep security and military relationships with the US government, and a clear interest in influencing American decisions. There are domestic examples too: after Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm invested in an American rare earth mining company—then valued at $200 million—the Trump administration took a $50 million stake in the firm, helping raise its valuation to $2 billion.

The use of cryptocurrency. The New Yorker had an excellent account last January of how foreign people and governments - Emirati, Pakistani, Chinese-Canadian - have enriched Trump and his family through their crypto company, World Liberty Financial. In many cases, these investors were simultaneously looking for favors or otherwise interested in decisions made by the US government. Some of the investments don’t look like real investments, and it’s not clear they could ever be profitable, or whether they were even meant to be profitable.

The scale of pardons. There has long been a whiff of impropriety around presidential pardons, which have in the past been given in exchange for what appear to be favors. But the Trump administration is simply issuing them in greater numbers, and to people who have committed more serious crimes, than ever before. Some have been issued following major donations to MAGA candidates or Trump’s own campaign funds.

The dismantling of enforcement. In any previous presidency, these kinds of conflicts of interest would have triggered Department of Justice or FBI investigations. But professionals have been fired or stymied at those organizations. Instead, the president has hired sycophants and loyalists, who are unlikely to investigate him, or his family, or the foreign and domestic actors who are buying into their companies. That’s why this continues: there is no one to stop it.

Taken together, the potential impact of these changes is dramatic. All around the world, and all across America too, anyone with an interest in any US government decision has just one question: who do I pay.

So far, the political impact is muted. The scale and nature of this change doesn’t seem to be broadly understood. Congressional investigations are hampered by the Republican majority. Although some Democratic politicians do talk about oligarchy and kleptocracy, nobody has yet followed Alexei Navalny or Péter Magyar in creating a major campaign linking high-level corruption with falling middle class living standards. In Hungary, this was one of the arguments that finally defeated Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Indeed, Hungarian businessmen with links to Orbán’s government are reportedly now leaving the country, or else sending their money abroad. Magyar, who hasn’t taken office yet, has alleged that “Orbán-linked oligarchs are transferring tens of billions of forints to the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Uruguay and other distant countries,” and has promised to use his office to stop them.

In the US, oligarchs are still accumulating their wealth with impunity. More to the point, nobody is yet trying very hard to stop them.

Before the election, I dedicated an episode of my Autocracy in America podcast to kleptocracy. It holds up quite well (and was accompanied by the great illustration at the top of this substack). Read the transcript here, or listen:

Kleptocracy Tracker

And here is this week’s edition!

(Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)

April 19

• Syrian billionaire Mohamad Al-Khayyat used a proposal for a Trump golf course in Syria and Congressional campaign contributions to successfully lobby both the president and several members of Congress to repeal sanctions imposed on Syria during the Assad presidency.

April 20

• Corporate beneficiaries of government contracts, including a subsidiary of ICE contractor GEO Group, have contributed millions of dollars to Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., helping to raise a record $350 million ahead of November’s midterms.

April 21

• Trump said he would “remember” companies that do not seek tariff refunds from the government after the Supreme Court ruled his use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act illegal, implying that he would continue using executive power to punish companies that displease him.

April 22

• Traders placed a series of bets worth $430 million on a drop in crude oil prices just 15 minutes before Trump said he would extend a ceasefire with Iran—the fourth such well-timed trade since the war began.

• The Trump administration established a legal framework to keep hundreds of millions of dollars donated to fund construction of the White House ballroom anonymous, curtailing federal conflict-of-interest reviews.

April 24

• Despite Trump’s public statements condemning prediction markets, Trump Media Group launched its own such platform last year, and Donald Trump Jr. has extensive ties to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

• Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison hosted a dinner for Trump and top members of his cabinet—including acting attorney general Todd Blanche—as he awaits Department of Justice approval for his firm’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery.

• Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s son William is seeking to raise $100 million for a fund tied to his father’s Make America Healthy Again movement, in an attempt to capitalize on Kennedy’s cabinet position.

• Trump pardoned Republican Las Vegas city councilwoman Michele Fiore of her fraud conviction for using funds she had raised for a statue honoring a slain Las Vegas police officer to pay for cosmetic surgery, rent, and her daughter’s wedding.

April 25

• Clark Construction, the firm building the White House ballroom, received a no-bid contract from the Trump administration last January to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park. The National Park Service subsequently increased the contract’s value several times, ultimately reaching $17.4 million.

• Trump hosted a second dinner—this time at Mar-a-Lago—for the top 297 investors in his memecoin $TRUMP, with a follow-on reception for the top 29 investors.

April 28

• Less than a month after the Trump administration announced criminal charges and sanctions against a transnational crime syndicate it accused of stealing billions of dollars from Americans, World Liberty Financial announced a partnership with a digital currency firm whose leaders had been sanctioned in that same crackdown.

April 29

• After a decade of avoiding Trump venues, the PGA Tour will be held at Trump National Doral in Miami from April 30 to May 3, where a golden statue of the president — sponsored by cryptocurrency group Patriot Token — will preside over the Cadillac Championship.

• An analysis by Popular Information revealed that Trump has promoted his businesses at least 110 times since the beginning of his second term through Truth Social posts, public remarks, and event locations.

• Amazon is considering launching a reboot of The Apprentice, this time with Donald Trump Jr. as host.

April 30

• An analysis by the non-profit advocacy group the Anti-Corruption Data Collective found that half of all longshot bets—defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35% or less—on military or defense actions placed on prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi are successful, suggesting many users are trading on privileged classified information.

• A shell company backed by Eric and Donald Trump Jr. merged with a critical minerals group that received up to $1.6 billion from the US government last year to mine tungsten in Kazakhstan.

• A drone firm also backed by the brothers—Powerus—landed its first US government contract for an undisclosed number of interceptor drones for the US Air Force.

  ---

The Mazovian Museum of Rural Life

pictures taken at Muzeum Wsi Mazowieckiej in Sierpc, on a lovely spring day

Buy my book, Autocracy Inc

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