Regardless of how often Donald Trump repeats the Kremlin’s narrative, it will always seem inappropriate coming from the President of the United States. In 2018, during a press conference in Helsinki, Trump declared that he accepted Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Russia had not interfered in American elections, contradicting the conclusions of our own intelligence agencies. I witnessed this moment while sitting under the intense Finnish summer sun at a UJ set with Anderson Cooper, who, after a brief, shocked silence, remarked, “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 was present with Trump at the summit, would reflect on her thoughts at that moment: contemplating feigning an illness or pulling a fire alarm—anything to stop him from speaking.
On Tuesday afternoon, just hours after his foreign-policy team engaged in discussions with Russian officials in Riyadh regarding the war in Ukraine, the President had what can only be characterized as another Helsinki moment. While speaking at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago about why he chose not to include the Ukrainians in the Saudi meeting, Trump claimed there was no need to, asserting that Ukraine was to blame for Russia’s invasion, which occurred three years ago this week. “You should never have started it,” he said, addressing Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky. “You could have made a deal.” According to Trump, it seemed as though Ukraine was indiscriminately bombing its own cities and harming its own people. He stated that the United States had contributed three hundred and fifty billion dollars to assist Ukraine, while claiming Zelensky’s approval ratings had plummeted to just four percent in recent polls—both claims so detached from reality that even Putin might not have dared utter them.
By Wednesday, Zelensky responded to Trump’s absurd claims, asserting that Trump was operating in a Russian-manufactured “disinformation space.” In retaliation, Trump labeled the Ukrainian leader a “Dictator without Elections” in a lengthy social-media post filled with inaccuracies. His officials have made it clear over the past week that Trump’s pro-Kremlin sentiment goes beyond mere rhetoric; he appears prepared to concede to Russia on numerous significant demands for a peace agreement, including committing to preventing Ukraine from joining NATO, disallowing U.S. troop involvement in Ukrainian security post-ceasefire, pressing Ukraine to relinquish illegally occupied territories to Russia, and lifting sanctions imposed on Russia. Trump’s swift embrace of America’s adversary and dismissal of its ally has astonished even senior Kremlin figures. “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev shared on X.
The timing of all this—just one month into his second term—seems fitting for a President who has long displayed an inexplicable eagerness to ingratiate himself with Putin. However, one notable change from Trump’s initial four years in office is that he has not only adopted a pro-Putin stance on the Ukraine conflict but also embraced a foreign policy approach mirroring Putin’s outdated vision of the world, viewing it as a playground for dominant powers to exert nearly absolute control over smaller nations within their sphere. What other explanation can there be for Trump’s recent posturing on the global stage since returning to office, including threats to seize territories within the Western Hemisphere, from Canada to Greenland and Panama? It seems he has been emboldened by Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, and Trump is now pressing Ukraine to recognize that this territory has been permanently lost to Russia. Trump’s second Inaugural Address, in sharp contrast to his first, even resurrected the antiquated term “manifest destiny,” invoking the concept of American expansionism as a divine right that should extend not only to designating Canada as the “fifty-first state,” as Trump has come to refer to it, but even to Mars.
Trump’s explicit endorsement of a pro-Putin foreign policy has, understandably, sent shockwaves around the globe in recent days. Equally disturbing, in my opinion, is Trump’s adoption of Putin-like tactics domestically, a hallmark of his return to power that has unfolded with unprecedented speed and intensity compared to his first term. We might call it the Putinization of America.
A quarter-century ago, I was a young foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, based in Moscow, reporting on Putin’s consolidation over Russia, a process that crushed the country’s fledgling, albeit flawed, democracy. The targets included any rival power centers not beholden to Putin—from independent media and wealthy oligarchs to elected governors. Within a few years, the Kremlin had dismantled or neutered them all. Simultaneously, Putin empowered former K.G.B. colleagues in the security services, who established a modern-day dictatorship rooted in what Russians term the “power ministries.”
This playbook is precisely what Trump appears to be following now. It’s crucial to maintain a clear-eyed perspective regarding this development. I can’t predict where it will end or how far Trump will push it. Thankfully, America remains a vastly different nation from Russia, with a long-standing tradition of democratic freedoms, decentralized authority in the states, and constitutional governance. However, tallying the damage of just one month reveals it to be substantial. And no, I’m not merely referring to alarming acts such as Trump openly contemplating staying in office for an unconstitutional third term or, just one day ago, declaring himself a “king” on social media while having his White House circulate a doctored cover image of him wearing a crown on a Time-like magazine.
Today, Washington reverberates with disquieting echoes of that transitional phase in Moscow—the sudden, alarming silence of critics who previously spoke out, business magnates rushing to pay homage to the President, and the lies and distortions of reality designed to conform to the official narrative. Trump’s consolidation of power during this term has proceeded at a swift and significant pace. Through a series of executive orders, he has claimed the authority to unilaterally revoke the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, cancel billions in federal funding, and seize executive control over independent federal agencies. He has empowered the wealthiest individual in the world to dismiss tens of thousands of government employees and dismantle long-established, statutorily sanctioned programs, from America’s renowned Epidemic Intelligence Service to the entire foreign-aid program. Although some of these cutbacks are being challenged in court, Congress, controlled by the G.O.P., has permitted this unprecedented encroachment on its authority with little more than a few sporadic murmurs of concern. In the Senate, Republicans have willingly capitulated to many of his most contentious, unqualified nominees, including a notably alarming vote on Thursday to confirm Kash Patel as the director of the F.B.I., despite (or perhaps because of) the implication that Patel will use the agency to target Trump’s adversaries—a list that Patel conveniently itemized in a book published last year.
In many respects, Trump seems to operate under the belief that he is already a dictator with unchecked authority. That was certainly the insinuation in his weekend social-media post, channeling his inner Napoleon with a quote often misattributed to the nineteenth-century French emperor: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Just this week, Trump has instructed New York to cease charging extra fees for vehicles entering Manhattan, mused about federal oversight of the District of Columbia, and disclosed that he has banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool for refusing to acquiesce to his personal whim—formalized in yet another executive order—to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. In a federal courtroom on Wednesday, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, personally advocated for dropping the corruption prosecution of New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, to further Trump’s anti-immigration policy agenda—an exchange so glaringly corrupt that it resulted in multiple prosecutors resigning in protest. According to multiple news reports on Thursday, a loyalty purge of top generals at the Pentagon, possibly including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is on the horizon. This time, Trump seems intent on ensuring that the power ministries are entirely under his dominion.
Back in 2019, Putin boasted in an interview with the Financial Times about the conclusion of the “obsolete” liberal world order, which he claimed had long since “outlived its purpose.” At that time, the President of the European Council, Poland’s Donald Tusk, countered, arguing that what was “really obsolete” was Putin’s own heavy-handed method of governance, marked by “authoritarianism, personality cults, and the rule of oligarchs.” A few years later, that statement resonates with a sense of sorrow: it’s not only Putin’s Russia that jeopardizes the foundations of Western liberal democracy but also Trump’s Washington. ♦
