Masha Gessen

The enemy needs to be dealt with, you know, at least as the internal logic of this looks, by force.

And when that happens, they're not going to investigate or say, this is a great tragedy, we need to see what happened.

They're going to say, you were the enemy and we were right to kill you.

How does all this look similar or different to you from what you saw in Russia?

Do you think that the rate and the speed of it also reflects a fragility within it?

And one way I mean that is very famously Putin has, or at least had, but still has, I believe, very, very high approval ratings.

Trump does not.

In the 2025 elections, Republicans got routed everywhere they competed.

Some of the spectacles we're talking about, I think Venezuela might over time turn into this too.

Like they don't have a plan for Venezuela.

If it goes easily and we never think about it again, that'll be fine for them.

But if it ends up in civil strife and other things, and we do need to have American boots on the ground, as Trump has said he is open to, people may not like that.

Liberation Day was constructed very much as a spectacle with Trump, you know, with his big poster board of tariffs on islands full of penguins.

And the tariffs have been politically quite disastrous for the administration.

I often say to people that if anything is going to save American democracy, it's Donald Trump's tariff regime.

There is a lot of speed here.

And sometimes the speed to me feels like it is covering up for a hollowness.

They have to move so fast because they actually have not built the underlying consensus support infrastructure.

But then they're not planning for what happens after.

They're not ready for it.