Vladimir Putin

I just finished Evan Moscovich's memoir.

He was the American journalist who was falsely imprisoned in Russia, essentially to provide currency for prisoner exchanges with Putin wanting to get back people who had been doing his dirty work for him in the West.

So I read that, which is about the sort of creeping autocracy in Russia.

So that was fascinating.

He said that if the US and Canada couldn't reach a mutually advantageous trade deal, he was ready to walk away.

He said he would not be talking with Putin at this month's APEC summit in China, but if he ran into him, he'd tell him to get out of Ukraine.

So it was a pretty strong interview, I thought.

Yeah.

He turned to Tulsi Gabbard in around 2019, 2020.

And then, you know, Putin invades Ukraine in 2022, and for some reason this really just triggers him, I guess.

He winds down his construction company.

He goes to Poland.

He tries to cross the border and volunteer to be a fighter to help Ukraine against Putin in the invasion.

Is he Ukrainian? No, he's kind of a hillbilly from Greensboro, North Carolina.

He's got a self-published book that's still available on Amazon, and he just talks about this is a threat to global democracy and freedom and human rights, and he just couldn't abide that, and so he needs to fight Putin.

That's kind of his rationale.

I don't know what Trump does about Ukraine.

If the Democrats take the House and the Senate, it's imperative for him to please Putin, but do it too strongly in Ukraine.

And Democrats and the aforementioned 2028 Republican Senate candidates will impeach and remove him.

They would be liberated to come out in favor of Ukraine.

The cleanup effort by the GOP to distance

themselves from idiotic comments made by Donald Trump and other MAGA figures praising Vladimir Putin in the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has begun in

earnest.

But when you see a member of Congress say things like this, the one thing I want you to know, they're outliers in the largest sense possible on our side.

And there's some on the left that are outliers.

So let's end with this thought that America believes that Zelensky and the Ukrainians are the good guys.

and Putin's the bad guys, and we'd like to be helping the good guys more.

In the annals of political pronouncement that have aged poorly and quickly, relatively few rank up there with Trump's hailing Vladimir Putin's savvy and genius comments two weeks ago, even as the Russian president ramped up an invasion of Ukraine.

We went to Kharkiv.

We heard stories of systematic kidnap and relocation of children, rape of women and daughters in the presence of their husband before they were executed, an illegal war that was initiated by the despot that we know as Vladimir Putin.

If President Trump wants to end the strain of energy supplies, number one, get things right in Iran, and number two, recognize that it was Vladimir Putin, not Zelensky, that started this war.

And it's Vladimir Putin who owns the responsibility for energy prices to the extent that they come from that part of the world.

It's also Vladimir Putin who disrupted food supplies that are causing people to starve in Africa.

So please, Please spare me any blame on the Ukrainian people and President Zelensky.

They're fighting for their lives, and Vladimir Putin wants to literally freeze them to death in the coming months.

The president needs to move forward with the sanctions bill that we sent him.

You're

talking about Putin.

Are you talking about Putin?

I'm talking

about Putin.

I'm talking about Putin and Musk and

Trump.

75% of his wealth is dependent on taxpayers.

A hegemon would have the ability to assert its control over the minor nations in its orbit, much as the United States is now seeking to do in the Western Hemisphere.

The conviction that hegemons ought to get their way in relations with smaller nations in their orbit helps to explain why Trump has regarded Ukraine with such annoyance and has been consistently eager to end the Russia-Ukraine war on terms favorable to Putin.

Putin, Trump believes, ought to be able to control a country in his backyard, Ukraine included in a manner similar to the way in which Trump has wanted to impose the will of the United States on Venezuela, Panama, Cuba, Canada, and Greenland.

Trump has had to pay lip service to the importance of keeping Taiwan independent of China, given the island nation's role as a premier chip manufacturing center for the entire world.

Yet if Trump gets his way and his world-making hardens across the next 10 years into a new world order, the United States will almost certainly look the other way when China decides to take over Taiwan.

Hence the third pillar of Trumpian world-making, undertaking a crusade to restore the Bible as a guide to life, to restore pride in peoplehood and nationhood, to restore the patriarchal family and children to their place at the center of social life, to restore Europe to its earlier greatness.

This crusade to restore traditional morality of this sort is equally prominent in the politics of other strong men.

One can discern this desire in the politics of Putin, in the politics of Viktor Orban in Hungary, in the politics of Modi, in the politics of Erdogan, in the politics of Netanyahu, in the politics of MBS in Saudi Arabia.

I think if you read between the lines, there's actually quite a lot going on because it does seem to be rowing back on quite a lot of a fairly aggressive approach to decarbonizing.

Obviously, in the long term, the hope is that decarbonizing will reduce energy bills if electricity prices aren't dictated to us by the price of gas and therefore by whatever mood Putin is in.

then that's basically brilliant for everyone.

If we can decouple energy pricing from fossil fuels, fantastic.