Newsletter

Receive regular updates about forthcoming events and other news from Intelligence Squared

Thanks

You have been added to our mailing list and will now be among the first to hear about events.

Watch

The Age of the Strongman: Understanding Trump

Politics &
Economics

We were joined by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Anne Applebaum and host Gideon Rachman for the final instalment of our Age of the Strongman event series

This event is part of our Age of the Strongman series. Click here to see the other events in the series.

The morning after Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election, The New York Times front page declared: ‘America Hires a Strongman’. But is Trump really a ‘strongman’ and is it fair to put him in the same category of leaders as Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping?

The Trump administration is already viewed by many commentators as more authoritarian than the first. But will Trump meaningfully crack down on civil liberties? Will he persecute his political opponents? Will he use the state to enrich himself and his inner circle? And will he abandon democratic allies and align America with other authoritarian so-called ‘strongman’ states?

Many critics say the answer to all of those questions is already, demonstrably ‘yes.’ So how far could he go?

We were joined by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Anne Applebaum and host Gideon Rachman for the final instalment of our Age of the Strongman event series.

Speakers for the motion

  • Anne Applebaum

    Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose new book is Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Chair

  • Gideon Rachman

    Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator for the Financial Times

Speakers are subject to change.

Speakers

Speaker

Anne Applebaum

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose new book is Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Historian and political commentator. Her books include Gulag: A History, which won the Pulitzer Prize, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, which won the Cundill Prize and Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine which won the Lionel Gelber and Duff Cooper prizes. She is a columnist at The Atlantic and a senior fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She divides her time between Britain, Poland and the USA. Her latest book is Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends.
Host

Gideon Rachman

Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator for the Financial Times

Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator for the Financial Times. He joined the FT in 2006, after 15 years at The Economist, where he served as a correspondent in Washington D.C., Brussels, and Bangkok. In 2016, Rachman won the Orwell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious prize for political journalism. He has written a number of books including Zero Sum World, Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond, and The Age of Strongmen.