The wife of Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has warned that the US is starting to resemble a fascist state.
US-Polish historian and commentator Anne Applebaum claimed a government that “glorifies violence” and disregards the rule of law constitutes evidence of a drift towards fascism; that US President Donald Trump has employed language used by Hitler and said dialogue with him will not work.
Applebaum made her claim in an interview with Italian daily La Repubblica, published yesterday.
“I don’t use the word ‘fascism’ lightly, but I fear this time it’s appropriate,” said Applebaum.
She went onto argue that the US administration led by Trump not only glorifies violence but, presumably referring to law enforcement agency ICE, “has created a paramilitary group acting with impunity believing that it can ignore laws and the Constitution”.
She accepted that the US remains a functioning democracy with freedom of speech, the right to protest and an independent judiciary but said that the events in Minnesota, where ICE agents shot two locals earlier this month, showed a dangerous direction of travel.
She claimed Trump lacks an ideology of his own and that this void is filled by groups with an authoritarian agenda.
“There are Christian nationalists seeking a Bible-based state, white nationalists who want segregation, and a tech-world faction often called the techno-right,” she claimed, adding: “All of these lead toward autocracy — power concentrated in the hands of a few.”
Applebaum predicted that Trump’s current second term would be much more radical than his first because, from the outset, he had used language she claimed had never been heard in US politics before, such as “calling immigrants ‘parasites’”.
Applebaum, despite being a historian, apparently was ignorant of the language used in America during the 1840s and 1850s by a major political party called the Native American Party, sometimes known as the No Nothing Party, who used derogatory slurs against German and Irish immigrants, terming them immoral Papists and drunkards who needed to be barred from migration to the US.
She also accused Trump of using the sort of language last used by Hitler.
“He even used a phrase taken directly from Hitler’s speech, speaking about immigrants who poison the blood of the American nation, exactly as the Fuehrer wrote in Mein Kampf about German blood poisoned by the Jews,” said Applebaum.
Sikorski’s wife said she felt Trump may not have written such text himself and that it may have been his speechwriters who deliberately used dehumanising language to appeal to the President’s hardcore supporters.
Asked about what should be done to “save democracy”, Applebaum urged people to be active against injustice and to seek to engage in bipartisan efforts to protect institutions.
She flatly rejected any attempts to placate Trump on the part of European governments.
“Flattering Trump in hopes of swaying him doesn’t work,” she said. “What democratic governments must do is find ways to co-operate and act together.”
Applebaum is a Pulitzer prize winner who has written extensively on Communism and Central Europe. She was until 2025 a board member of the US government funded National Endowment for Democracy. She currently writes for the The Atlantic magazine.
Asked about his wife’s views when she first compared Trump’s words to those of Hitler and Mussolini in 2024, Sikorski told reporters: “A wife is not an extension of her husband,” but added: “My wife is an outstanding commentator on US matters who has in the past voted Republican.”
Sikorski has been scathing about Trump in the past, too. When he lost the US presidential election in 2020, Sikorski said he expected him to “get political asylum in Russia and to live next door to president Yanukovych” [Ukrainian president deposed during the Maidan revolution who left the country for Moscow].
In 2020, in one of his many posts on X, Sikorski said: “Trump is not a Republican, he is a charlatan.”
The Polish centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, of which Sikorski is a key member, has sought to avoid conflict with the Trump administration. That is despite the fact that Poland’s head of government has in the past been highly critical of the US president, at one stage calling him a “Russian asset”.
The opposition Conservatives (PiS)-aligned President Karol Nawrocki is an ally of Trump’s and has, like the party that supports him, enjoyed good relations with the current occupant of the White House.
