M. Gessen

A country where money has captured politics to an extraordinary degree as well.

I thought it was based on the kind of votes you got in the primaries, but it's based on money that's raised for your campaign?

Donald Trump told us what he wanted to do and now he's doing it.

In a recent essay in the New York Times, you started ringing the fire bell and your headline was, State Terror is Here in the United States.

We've seen the shooting of two protesters by masked ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis.

What else is going on in the United States that hasn't been quite so loudly proclaimed on international headlines?

You grew up in the Soviet Union.

Tell me the story of what happened to your grandfather during the 1930s, the period when Stalin was purging the Communist Party and having the NKVD, the secret police, just pick up probably millions of people, I think it's true to say.

Why did he lose his mind?

There was a newspaper report recently about a couple of British grandparents who were having a holiday in the United States.

They had a valid visa.

They were making preparations to cross the border to go and visit family in Canada.

Their visa for Canada wasn't quite right, so they were sent back to the United States, were immediately arrested by ICE agents.

This grandmother was thrown into a cell where she slept on the floor of the cell for two weeks.

And when she was asking, why am I here?

My US visa is actually still valid.

She said that the guards there told her they had a quota to fill.

So is the randomness the point then?

In looking at the Trump administration, I want to talk about the leader, his lieutenants and his followers, beginning with Trump himself.

When Ronald Reagan was president, he was often quite detached from events and was an old movie actor and was often like a man playing the part of a president in a Frank Capra film or something like that.