Trump and Putin: Not a hoax

Trump’s America is becoming 'a gangster’s paradise.'

(Image credit: Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images)

“Welcome to the Putinization of America, comrade!” said Garry Kasparov in The Atlantic. Just a month into his presidency, Donald Trump began “openly embracing Vladimir Putin’s wish list for Ukraine and beyond,” and upending 80 years of foreign policy by aligning the U.S. with Russia and against NATO. Trump’s “personal affinity” for the Russian president has been long apparent, particularly since Putin’s intelligence services “worked full-time to promote Trump” in the 2016 election, with the grateful cooperation of Trump and his campaign. Now Trump’s admiration for Putin has escalated into “full-blown imitation”: threatening to annex Canada and Greenland; punishing disfavored news outlets; and unleashing his own oligarch, Elon Musk, to undertake a Stalinist purge of the federal government so MAGA loyalists have free rein. This all evokes chilling memories of how Putin seized dictatorial authority in early-2000s Russia, which I personally witnessed. Beware, America. Your democracy is in danger.

“Putin’s investment in Trump sure is paying off,” said David Corn in Mother Jones. As the world can now see, their partnership is anything but a “hoax.” Special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee — then chaired by Sen. Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state — documented extensive evidence of communication and cooperation in 2016 between Trump’s circle and the Kremlin. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort — who’d worked for Putin puppets in Ukraine — shared campaign polling data with a Russian intelligence officer. Putin, investigators found, ordered the hack into Democratic Party servers, which fed damaging information to WikiLeaks that Trump gleefully exploited. Russia also launched “a host of disinformation projects” to help Trump in 2024. “Putin wanted Trump in the White House,” and now we see why.

Like Putin’s Russia, Trump’s America is becoming “a gangster’s paradise,” said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. Trump is conducting mob-like shake-downs of corporations and media companies, which feel a need to make whopping campaign contributions and lawsuit settlements. He’s instilling such a “culture of fear” that Republicans won’t vote against his nominees or proposals lest they face death threats or prosecutions. The U.S. still isn’t Russia, said Ed Kilgore in New York magazine, but “Trump will take his power grabs exactly as far as he is allowed to.” That includes making “future elections as meaningless as possible.”