M. Gessen

Are you shocked by the lack of courage amongst America's elites at the moment?

I remember when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, one of the world's richest men, and the conventional wisdom at the time was, excuse the vulgarity of this language, was that it was going to be a good thing he took over the Washington Post because he had, quote, ''fuck you'' money.

Talking to someone who actually has a fair bit of money about this some time ago, they said, there's no such thing as fucking money.

No one ever has enough money.

For all this talk of cowardice amongst the elites, then there's the people of Minneapolis, where ICE agents have been plucking people out of their beds and off the streets and shooting people dead while they're in their cars.

Can you just explain what people in Minneapolis were doing at a ground level at the moment?

Donald Trump's not a young man.

Despite what his doctors say about him living to 200, he's not likely to do that.

Once he's gone...

How do you think societies are able to pull themselves out of that kind of debauching of their democratic institutions?

How do they recover morally as societies from this?

The US, regardless, will continue to be a global superpower for the foreseeable future.

Or not.

Well, down the track, but for the foreseeable future, I think we can say it will continue to do so.

But long-standing friends and allies like Australia, Canada, Western Europe, Japan will never see it the same way, never see it the same way ever again.

Only a fool would confidently expect America to honour its defence alliances now.

This was the subject of Mark Carney's speech to the Prime Minister of Canada at Davos.

This is a rupture.

Something has profoundly changed.

I have to ask, I don't even know if it's even important, but do people in the United States know this?