'Cancer inside the system': Expert sounds alarm at threat that will outlast Trump

A prominent voice on democracy and authoritarianism used a stark medical image Friday to describe the health of American elections, and the warning was aimed squarely at anyone who assumes the threat begins and ends with one man.

Appearing on MS NOW's "The Moment with Katy Tur," Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic, pushed back when Tur asked whether the president's fixation on the 2020 result was more backward-looking than forward-looking. Applebaum said he stays preoccupied with proving he really won, but she urged viewers not to file it away as a personal obsession.

Around the president, Applebaum said, sits a group of people across the administration, federal agencies, right-wing media and the online right who are convinced their work is revolutionary, and who view their opponents not as ordinary patriotic citizens with different views but as an existential threat to the country. That constituency, she argued, is driving state-level legislation and a year of gerrymandering fights that a single person couldn't orchestrate alone.

She flagged that election deniers from 2020 who have since won office in states and now oversee how the next elections are run.

"It's really important that Americans start paying attention to this now, because this is a kind of cancer that's inside the system. And unless we face up to it now and block it now, I think we're going to be dealing with it for a very long time," she warned.

The problem would outlast any single election, Applebaum added, and would not vanish even if the president left office.