Putin’s American Asset

Putin’s Russia has been working to undermine democracies in the West for a long time, and is having more success at that mission than a lot of Americans think.

Putin’s conventional war against Ukraine has diverted attention from Russia’s far more effective–and ongoing– digital efforts to damage and degrade the West. Indeed, its digital efforts have been far more successful than its “boots on the ground” assault against Ukraine.

Russian interference in America’s 2016 election has been amply documented by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, among others. Both the Select Committee and the Mueller investigation confirmed that Russia worked to harm Hillary Clinton, boost Donald Trump, and to increase social discord generally. Russia employed three major tactics: cyber intrusions into party, campaign and state election systems; theft and timed release of documents; and a major social media campaign using fake accounts, pages and bots.

Lest we feel special, The Guardian reports that the Prime Minister of England recently announced that he’d seen “clear evidence” that Russia had interfered in the Brexit campaign. A recent academic analysis identified about 6,500 Russian-language bots posting pro-Corbyn and anti-Conservative messages before the vote. Other studies have pointed to Russian interference in Moldova in 2025 and in Armenia this year.

But America does remain the main target. During the current U.S. midterms, researchers have attributed a surge of celebrity deep-fakes and fake news videos to Russian-linked operations.

Rather obviously, it’s hard to measure the impact of these efforts. It is much easier to connect the dots between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

The evidence of a connection between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is too strong to discount. Whether that connection is explained by Trump’s obvious idolatry of autocrats, by his longstanding business dealings with Russian plutocrats close to Putin, or whether he really is–as rumors have long suggested–a “bought and paid for” Russian asset, is at this point irrelevant. The results are the same.

Trump has consistently carried Putin’s water–undermining NATO and betraying Ukraine.

Paul Krugman has deconstructed Trump’s most recent effort to help Putin by purchasing 300,000 tons of Russian diesel. That purchase is blatantly illegal under existing sanctions laws, but as we all know, for Trump, laws are suggestions at best. The purchase may or may not go through, but as Krugman accurately notes, it’s a signal. “Trump isn’t even hiding the fact that he is supporting Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”

Krugman also notes that 300,000 tons is a bit over 2 million barrels.

America consumes approximately 4 million barrels of distillates — diesel (mostly) and heating oil — every day. So Trump is betraying an embattled democracy, demonstrating our faithlessness to the whole world, seriously damaging whatever is left of America’s leadership in the world, for the sake of maybe 12 hours’ worth of diesel.”

The Telegraph’s summary of the Trump-Putin diesel deal is similar. “The Don backstabs Ukraine for five minutes of midterm relief.”

Never-Trumper Charlie Sykes–no liberal–has called Trump’s pro-Russian activities A Betrayal That Will Live In Infamy. “Faced with Trump comprehensive betrayal of Ukraine, it’s also tempting to say things like, “The mask is off.” But that mask has been off for a very long time, hasn’t it? This is who Donald Trump has always been.” He quotes Phillips O’Brian’s reaction that “the USA is run by a Russian useful idiot or agent of influence (depending on the nomenclature you prefer).”

For once, even some Republicans have rebelled. PBS has reported that four Republican senators and two Democratic senators signed onto a statement protesting the deal. Not only had the administration (once again) failed to consult with Congress, it had not submitted an explanation that would justify such a decision–an explanation required by statute. The bipartisan group wrote that “The United States should not provide Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians. The Administration must immediately reverse course.”
The anger of the American public and its widespread disapproval of Trump and his administration has largely centered on the immense damage being done domestically. Typically, voters are less likely to base their political decisions on foreign policy issues. But typically, Americans have not had a President who is waging simultaneous wars on our Constitution and our global allies. To the best of my knowledge, we have never before had an outright traitor in the Oval Office.
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The Enormity Of The Damage…

As the midterm battles heat up, defensive Republicans are trotting out the arguments that have helped them win past elections while degrading the culture. Depending upon the state, they are aiming their attacks on whatever “others” they think are useful targets. In some places, that’s the miniscule number of transgender Americans; in places like Michigan, where the Democratic candidate is Muslim, accusations of terrorist affiliations. And almost everywhere, appeals to White supremacy and Christian nationalism.

In early August, Simon Rosenberg reminded readers of his Hopium Chronicles of the obvious reason for this desperate strategy; GOP candidates have nothing positive to run on. Not only are they running in an election that will be a referendum on a monumentally unpopular and obviously insane President, they’re unable to point to any action they’ve taken to rein him in, to impose even a modicum of accountability.

His economic policies have slowed economic growth, slowed job growth, caused prices and the deficit to rise. Health care premiums are rising, care is harder to get, millions have lost food assistance. Utility bills all across the country are rising, as are the costs of fertilizer, diesel, and other goods our businesses need to prosper. His illegal tariffs have broken trade agreements and angered our allies. Americans are getting gunned down in our streets by his ICE goons. He continues to desecrate our Capital – ballroom/bunker construction has stopped; the Kennedy Center remains draped; the Reflecting Pool is still closed……

Rosenberg’s list was compiled and published in August, before Trump and Hegseth announced their plan to live-stream the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan–a decision that is not only barbaric, but runs the very obvious risk of turning Hasan into a martyr and sparking additional terrorism. It was before Trump’s treasonist sell-out of Ukraine by lifting sanctions on Russian oil, a move that will not reduce the price of American gasoline, but will give Putin’s struggling economy a lift while allowing him to prolong his war of aggression against Ukraine.

There has long been a theory–initially dismissed as just another of the numerous conspiracy theories that dot our digital landscape– that Trump is a Russian asset. This latest intervention to help Putin may move that theory out of the “conspiracy” category.

As Rosenberg reminds us, Trump’s mess, failures and fanaticism have not been confined to domestic matters.

His foreign policy has been a catastrophe for America and the world. He badly miscalculated in the Ukrainian-Russian war, choosing the wrong side and torching our most important alliances. He bent the knee to Xi in China, and looked like the pathetic coward we all the big blubbery baby man to be. And now we get news this morning that Netanyahu has rejected Trump’s Gaza “peace plan,” flipping the bird to his buddy in the White House.

The utterly unnecessary war against Iran, undertaken without strategy or understanding, has given Iran a previously unthinkable dominance in the region. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz was an obvious probability that “warriors” Trump and Hegseth ignored. Now, Iran is demanding “completely compensation” as a condition for concluding this insane conflict and reopening the Strait, along with the lifting of sanctions and “unconditional” release of frozen assets. According to Rosenberg, “complete compensation” translates to at least $300 billion. That would be in addition to the “extra” $500 billion the administration has requested for the Pentagon this year. And to make matters worse–and even more expensive–the Pentagon has burned through years of munitions, replacement of which will cost many additional billions while increasing American vulnerability.

It’s hard to dispute Rosenberg’s conclusion that Americans are wildly underestimating the true economic and national security costs of Trump’s historic, titanic global failures. The economic costs are staggering, and we are only beginning to recognize the extent of the damage Trump has done to this nation’s security. Rosenberg quotes historian Phillips O’Brien, who argues that “America has not been this exposed and vulnerable since 1861.”

As the linked article concludes:

Much of our current discourse in the pro-democracy movement has been rightly focused on the domestic repair job we must do when back in power – lowering costs, improving health care, restoring rule of law, renewing our democracy, and creating accountability…..But I think the repairing of our standing in the world, rebuilding our alliances, constructing some new global security architecture is going to be of equal import, and is likely to be even more challenging than the hard work ahead of us on the domestic front.

This is what happens when millions of people vote their bigotries and other millions don’t bother to vote at all…

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The Thirty Percent Problem

Most reliable polls tell us that thirty percent of Americans continue to support Donald Trump. While pundits point out that this is an unprecedented low, my own reaction is somewhat different. Thirty percent means that three out of every ten Americans are still in the thrall of a rage-filled madman who undermines this country and the rule of law every single day. 

I recently came across a cartoon that makes the point. A man and woman are at the kitchen table; the man says “Wow. Trump told our enemy to bomb American cities, and it didn’t move the needle!” The woman responds with a litany of other Trump actions that failed to move the needle–mocking a disabled reporter, refusing to release the Epstein files, the “insurrection thing” when he tried to overturn the election, the times he became a convicted felon and an adjudicated rapist, the time he stole government documents and tried to cover it up…at which point, the husband interrupted, saying “Okay, okay. I get it.”

And we all get it.

Whatever that thirty percent finds to admire in this would-be autocrat, it’s shameful. I’ve previously shared my own theory that it’s his permission to hate the “other” that attracts them–bigotry reinforced by their choice of “information” sources. Others have looked at the data and concluded that they are cognitively impaired. Whatever the reason for their continued defense of a man who is very clearly indefensible, that thirty percent constitutes a clear and present danger to the American Idea. As a recent headline in The Bulwark put it (rather inelegantly) “Our politicians suck. But our voters do, too.”

The article quoted an opinion piece from The Financial Times, in which the author noted the current global distaste for incumbent politicians, irrespective of their policies. It doesn’t seem to matter if the rejected leaders are conservative or liberal, young or old, successful or terrible. As he notes, the unpopularity is durable, making every election a change election. He concluded that “either (a) the quality of leaders in Western democracies has declined; or (b) the citizens of Western democracies have become . . . problematic.”

He chose problematic voters, and Jonathan V. Last, the author of the Bulwark article, agreed.

It is self-evidently true, at least in America, that voters are not serious adults. (Please don’t make me show my work; we’ve done dozens of newsletters on this topic.) Are they less serious at the innate, human level than they were twenty years ago? Or forty years ago? Possibly.

It’s possible that environmental factors—such as changes in technology and media—have made them more decadent and less serious.

But it is also true that in America the structural processes by which our leaders are chosen have changed in ways that have lowered the quality of the leaders.

Last identifies three major developments that have contributed to the change.

The first is geographical sorting. For the past forty years, as Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort documented, Americans have been gathering geographically  This sorting, where people move to areas they find ideologically compatible, has increased the number of counties in which one political party is utterly dominant. And–as research clearly shows– “the lack of ideological competition lowers the overall quality of the leaders who win power.”

The second is gerrymandering, the artificial partner of voluntary sorting. Gerrymandering not only reduces ideological competition, it functions as a “multiplier for radicalism. When elected officials only have to worry about intraparty primary fights and not general elections, they become more extreme over time.”

The third may seem counter-intuitive, but I agree that what was a seemingly laudable effort to democratize candidate selection via primaries has turned out to be–as Last delicately puts it–“suboptimal.” When elites in our political parties chose the candidates, the process was arguably anti-democratic, but It was also reasonably successful, giving us a lot of quality candidates—especially, as Last points out, at the presidential level.

America’s current disaster–and it is a disaster–is a combination of systemic problems and the moral and/or intellectual deficits of approximately thirty percent of the country’s voters.

We can reform structural problems–pass the John Lewis Act and outlaw gerrymandering, for example, and change the candidate selection process. I don’t see any way to keep people in a free country from moving to places they find compatible, and we have yet to devise efforts to reach the thirty percent that stubbornly rejects logic, science and evidence –it may be impossible.

We can, however, outvote them. And we must.

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They’re Coming For The Libraries

The current effort to take America back to an earlier time requires a broad-based war on information.

Science, evidence and facts of all kinds challenge those committed to narrow “truths.”  That’s why, along with their efforts to stamp out recognition of diversity, politicize the scientific grant process, ignore medical science findings that debunk favored conspiracy theories, and other assaults on knowledge, the Trump administration and its fellow-travelers are constantly attempting to rewrite history, change displays at our national parks and museums to replace “woke” (i.e. accurate) exhibits with whitewashed ones, and dismiss climate change as a “hoax.” 

It isn’t inaccurate to see these attempts to turn back the clock as a war on knowledge. And in a war on knowledge, libraries become major targets.

This year is the 150th birthday of the modern American library–which, as a recent New York Times article notes, has undergone considerable change since that founding, and is now “arguably the most versatile civic center in any community lucky enough to have one.”

In addition to its function as a repository of centuries of human knowledge and belief, today’s library provides–as the article makes clear–a safe place for people to gather around books, ideas and one another. As one librarian was quoted, “Librarians are defenders of democracy. We’re defenders of the freedom to read. We’re protectors of patron privacy.”

Another librarian explained her concerns about the current political assault, warning that what librarians are facing right now are like nothing she’d seen in her previous 27 years of librarianship.  “The attacks on libraries, the censorship, books disappearing from shelves in Texas and Florida. Librarians and democracy are aligned, hand in hand.”

Another librarian reported on her personal experience of being targeted by a Moms for Liberty group. “There were grievances filed; I was doxxed online. I live by myself and I feared for my safety…if you told me 10 years ago that this is what my job would be, I would have said you were nuts.”

Several of the librarians interviewed worried about the rising incidents of book banning and book challenges. Others noted the accelerating introduction and passage of state-level legislation limiting freedom of expression and the freedom to read. 

Those legislative attacks take a number of forms. In addition to straightforward efforts to remove books or restrict access–efforts that tend to generate considerable public opposition–there are more “sophisticated” attacks. Here in Indiana, where our legislature is dominated by MAGA culture warriors, the most recent assault has been fiscal.

As the Capital Chronicle has reported, a measure introduced by Republican Senator Gary Byrne would remove the authority of library boards to impose tax levies for certain enumerated needs, turning that power over to the counties in which they are located. Librarians who testified in opposition to the bill pointed out that board members are appointed by those same counties, in concert with the schools and cities served by the libraries–and that libraries are regularly audited to ensure that monies are being spent properly. 

As the article noted,

The bill comes as libraries continue to be under fire for their catalogs, including efforts to ban books with LGBTQ or anti-racist themes. Notably, Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith was part of the Hamilton East Public Library Board of Trustees and spearheaded a book review policy that included prominent local author John Green.

Fortunately, Senator Byrne’s bill did not come up for a vote during the last session, but it is likely to be revived, despite the fact that–as  Senator Fady Qaddoura pointed out– it’s unclear what problem this bill is intended to solve.

 Our public libraries are an absolutely essential element of a free society. They provide access to books, databases, newspapers, and research tools to all citizens, regardless of income. They are fundamental to the creation of an informed citizenry and they encourage and facilitate lifelong learning. 

In our increasingly digital age, libraries also bridge what has been called the “digital divide,” providing reliable access to the internet, computers and printing–and competent help in using those tools. 

Our public libraries often fill educational gaps that schools and other institutions often don’t or can’t. They are an essential part of the knowledge infrastructure–and that’s why they are such tempting targets for the Neanderthals who want to retreat from the modern world.

We must never take them for granted.

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Pariah Country

There is a tendency among pundits–including bloggers like yours truly–to criticize the multiple dangers/idiocies of the Trump administration in general terms. The hollowing out of government capacity. The assault on democracy and democratic norms. The cruelty of ICE. The rejection of science–especially medical science. The destruction of America’s defense establishment.

The economic consequences of incompetence and malevolence.

All of those general criticisms are meritorious. But sometimes, it’s more illuminating to bore down and examine specific economic consequences of Trump’s withdrawal from the global order. A recent article in Lincoln Square did just that –it connected the dots between America’s new “pariah” image–the global scorn for a country that has withdrawn from international pacts, started a ridiculous and unnecessary war, and is increasingly in the thrall of neo-fascist authoritarianism.

People around the world look at what’s happening and stop visiting. And that when lots of people stop visiting, there are economic consequences.

Travel experts had expected that, this year, international tourism would regain much of the ground lost as a result of the pandemic. No such luck. Even the FIFA Men’s World Cup didn’t reverse the downward trend. This year, overseas visitation is “on pace to fall by nearly two million travelers from last year.” One of the steepest drops has been in tourism from Canada, which has long been one of our most important international sources. (Gee, I wonder why…Could it possibly be a combination the idiotic tariffs and childish tantrums of America’s President?)

Reduced tourism is not a worldwide phenomenon.

“We’re the only major country in the world losing visitation,” Geoff Freeman, president and chief executive of the U.S. Travel Association, told Axios. “It’s mind-boggling.”

The economic consequences extend beyond hotels and airlines.

International travelers spend money across hotels, restaurants, attractions, airlines and local transportation businesses. U.S. Travel had projected that foreign visitors would spend about $178 billion in the country this year.

That forecast was already subdued by historical standards. International travel spending fell 2.4 percent in 2025, according to U.S. Travel. Even the rebound projected for this year would have left inflation-adjusted spending roughly 18 percent below its 2019 level.

The decline in travel from Canada has hit especially hard. There was already a 21 percent decline in Canadian visits in 2025, and this year, that decline is roughly 23 percent below levels from two years earlier.

Meanwhile, other major destinations are seeing increases in tourism. The linked article reports that China has expanded visa-free entry policies to attract more international visitors, and that Japan’s weak currency has helped that country draw record numbers of travelers. The obvious question is: why, while these and other competing destinations are attracting more visitors, are so many international travelers choosing to avoid the United States?

As Stephen Beschloss has written, the decline goes beyond tourism and the economic harms associated with declining numbers of visitors.

Last month air travel to the U.S. by foreign tourists was down about 10 percent and road trips by Canadians dropped 32 percent year to year. International student enrollment in American colleges and universities, which exceeded 1.1 million a year ago, is expected to drop this year and cause harm to those schools that count on their tuition dollars. Scientists and other post-graduate researchers working in the U.S. are looking to leave our shores as funding cuts and the overall assault on academic research accelerate.

Declining tourism. Declining student enrollment. Accelerating brain drain. These changes represent rational responses and inevitable consequences to the climate of hatred, uncertainty and danger that Trump and his henchmen have fostered, made worse by revoking visas of students and other academics who speak their mind and aggressively stopping foreign visitors at airports or other border crossings.

America, Beschloss reminds us, was once a magnet and beacon to the world. Thanks to Donald Trump, the country is in danger of becoming a pariah state—”an outcast, increasingly isolated and despised by former democratic allies and everyone who believes in the responsibility of building civilized, respectful societies.”

Is it any wonder that tourists would avoid visiting a “hostile nation that thinks the international rules and norms do not apply to them?”

Citizens of other countries have taken note of our exit from the World Health Organization, our abandonment of USAID, and our withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council–not to mention Trump’s unhinged and damaging attacks on our NATO allies and his consistent defenses of Putin’s Russia.

I wouldn’t want to travel to Putin’s Russia, so I completely understand why people who’ve watched what Trump has done to America won’t be visiting any time soon.

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