| Hi Anne – could you start by defining for readers what you mean by “Autocracy Inc”? My book describes a group of autocracies that are not connected ideologically. We are talking about communist China, nationalist Russia, theocratic Iran or Bolivarian socialist Venezuela. Some are one-party states, some are run by individual leaders or oligarchies. And yet, all of them have begun, over the last decade, to work together. They have economic, information and military and geostrategic interests in common. And what links them is an understanding that the language and practices of liberal democracy are a threat to them. The rule of law, human rights, transparency, accountability – that’s the language of their opposition movements – and they came to understand that fighting against those things required them to fight not only inside their own countries but around the world. How does the re-election of Donald Trump fit into this story of growing autocratic networks? To be very careful and nuanced, my book and my most recent writing has been about genuine autocracies. These are political systems in which there are no checks and balances, political opposition, independent press and independent courts. I have also written about democratic decline, which refers to democracies where there are democratically elected leaders pushing their countries in that direction. I think it’s fair to say – and this isn’t my interpretation, that this is based on things that Trump himself said – that Trump fits into that latter mould. The US is not going to become a dictatorship overnight but Trump is someone who has talked about, even since being elected, undermining some rules and institutions and changing the way that the American political system works. The danger is not that America becomes a totalitarian state, the danger is that Trump pushes an already existing problem of democratic decline and growing autocratic trends and practices and makes them worse. What are the democratic guardrails at risk in the US? Guardrails are just people – people who act in the way they are institutionally supposed to act. The last time Trump was president, he was surrounded by a lot of people who were very concerned that he not break the rules. He has a different set of advisers now. Trump has dropped hints about wanting to change the leadership of the military, talking about replacing “woke” generals. There aren’t really woke generals, but this could be a way to change generals so that he has people in charge of the army who would act as he wanted them to act: according to his personal will or political desire, not necessarily according to the constitution. Earlier this year you wrote about how some autocracies use propaganda to discredit democracy. What are the main levers that these nations use? In my book, I wrote a bit about the ways in which the autocratic world collaborate and cooperate on creating an autocratic narrative – an argument that autocracy is stable and safe and democracy is weak, divided and degenerate. Some of the ways in which the autocratic world influences the democratic world are pretty direct. We had a case last summer where a group of YouTubers, a media company of sorts based in Tennessee, were already putting out a lot of different kinds of materials promoting far-right conspiratorial narratives when Russia Today, a Russian state media company, took it upon themselves to begin funding them via a series of shell companies and a fake businessman. That’s just one example. There’s a whole world of information laundering that they engage in. In the last US election, we also saw something else. Elon Musk, owner of one of the largest social media platforms, began to use X to algorithmically boost pro-Trump and autocratic narratives. And that is, of course, not a Russian or a Chinese plot – this was done inside the United States. But it is something that other democracies should be aware of, because Musk has specifically talked about using his platform in order to do what he has done in the US in other countries. Whether he can do that, I don’t know. ‘There’s always something you can do in your community’ | 