Masha Gessen

The absence of Congress in so much of it, I think in part because Congress is like anti-spectacle.

It's slow.

You get bogged down.

It's details.

But it also is itself a kind of – to the degree it is a spectacle, it is a spectacle of constraint.

So you have a line where we say that it is institutions and norms and laws that make a democracy.

And I think the spectacle here, the way the Trump administration does it, is actually about the contempt for those institutions and norms and laws, such that the message is, we are not that kind of system.

We are this kind of system run by this one man.

You have a line in one of your pieces where you say that

Trump and autocrats like him are opposed to deliberation as such.

And I've been thinking about this line because the idea that the U.S.

just entered into, as Trump himself has now said repeatedly, a multi-year open-ended commitment to in some form or another running Venezuela with the

Zero domestic debate about it.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is not debating this.

What it means for America has not been described by anybody.

So tell me, in your view, both about the relationship between leaders like Trump and deliberation and what it means that there was so little deliberation for such a profound assumption of responsibility and violence here.

I was very struck by Stephen Miller, who I think is functionally the prime minister of the U.S.

right now, talking to Jake Tapper about the possibility of America taking Greenland, which, again, under the structure of international law, is unthinkable.

Let me start here.

What do you think when you hear that comment?