The Atlantic ran an article titled “The Putinization of America” by Garry Kasparov, “the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and a vice president of the World Liberty Congress.” Yup, “he was the 13th world chess champion.” The subhead is “Trump’s deference to the Russian dictator has become full-blown imitation.”
It begins: “We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s.
“Unleashing Elon Musk and his DOGE cadres on the federal government, menacing Canada and European allies, and embracing Vladimir Putin’s wish list for Ukraine and beyond are not unrelated. These moves are all strategic elements of a plan that is familiar to any student of the rise and fall of democracies, especially the ‘fall’ part.”
The article hit my email BEFORE Comrade FOTUS and Juvie Vance tagteamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on February 28. As an American, I was embarrassed by the vulgar display of a transactional worldview. VZ has repeatedly thanked the US, so anyone stating otherwise is lying. (Lindsey Graham, as usual, is an embarrassment.)
I Googled Putinization of America and found these, some of which are behind paywalls:
LeMonde, 27 Feb
By Piotr Smolar. Both at home and in international relations, the American president seems to be promoting illiberal ideas and methods that are in line with those of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“He called Volodymyr Zelensky a ‘dictator.’ He accused Ukraine of having prolonged the war for three years, which started, according to him, because of the prospect of NATO membership offered to Kyiv. Is it Vladimir Putin talking? No, it’s Donald Trump. The confusion is understandable given the incredible turnaround in Washington. A slippery slope toward illiberalism, contempt for international law, neo-imperialist aspirations, politicization of the state apparatus, confusion between public and private interests and a cult-like attitude toward his leadership both in his team and in propagandist conservative media: The United States is ‘Putinizing’ at high speed.”
The New Yorker, 20 Feb
By Susan Glaser. “No matter how many times Donald Trump openly parrots the Kremlin line, it’s never not going to sound wrong coming from the President of the United States. In 2018, at a press conference in Helsinki, Trump announced that he accepted Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia did not intervene in American elections, despite our own intelligence agencies’ conclusion to the contrary.
“I watched the scene sitting outside in the glaring Finnish summer sun on a CNN set, with Anderson Cooper, who, after a short, stunned silence, concluded, ‘You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American President.’ Later, Fiona Hill, the National Security Council senior director who had staffed Trump at the summit, would recall what it felt like inside the room when she heard Trump’s words: she thought about faking an illness, pulling a fire alarm, anything to stop him from talking.” I knew FOTUS and Putin had the same agenda after Helsinki.
Katie Couric interviewed Glaser on February 28, after the White House debacle.
Vanity Fair, 21 Feb
By Mikhail Zygar. “The rules-based order? A relic. Trump’s casual claims to Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal—and his cozying up to far-right movements in Germany and Britain—signal that the game has fundamentally changed. As Musk put it recently in a social media post directed at Justin Trudeau, ‘Girl, you’re not the governor of Canada anymore, so doesn’t matter what you say.’ According to many of my contacts in Moscow, the statement was so emblematic of the emerging global order that it might as well be considered its new slogan.
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