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 sequence is painfully familiar to me personally, because I marched in the streets as it played out in Russia at the start of the 21st century. With ruthless consistency, and the tacit approval of Western leaders, Putin and his oligarch supporters used his fair-ishly elected power to make sure that elections in Russia would never matter again.
Of course, American institutions and traditions are far stronger than Russia’s fragile post-Soviet democracy was when Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin…
