Inside Trump’s Putin Lust

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In tonight’s email, I’m sharing my conversation with my longtime friends, Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, the authors of the forthcoming The Divider, about their experience covering authoritarians, from Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump. But first, an update on the dizzying set of new developments in the war in Ukraine over the last few days…

On Thursday, Vladimir Putin traveled to Uzbekistan for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, where he was to meet two of his most important allies: Narendra Modi, of India, and Xi Jinping, of China. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, after all, the two giants refrained from condemning Russia and even began snapping up the Russian oil that...

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Trump’s Putin Lust & the Final Frontier of Democracy

A candid and searing look at Trump’s most astounding provocations, from Barr and Putin to Xi and Playboy, in conversation with Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, the authors of The Divider.

JULIA IOFFE

Julia Ioffe: We’re all old Russia hands here, and you start the book with the joke about the health of Russian democracy from the old liberal Grigory Yavlinsky, the one about the ambulance picking up a patient and heading to the morgue. The patient says, “Why are we going to the morgue? I’m not dead yet!” The ambulance driver responds, “We’re not there yet.”

This book reminded me a lot of your first book together, Kremlin Rising, in the sense that you chart very methodically how nobody believes that this guy is going to do what he says he’s going to do, and then he does all the things he said he was going to do.

Susan Glasser: If 20 years ago, you told us that we would have acquired useful skills for observing an American president through four years of observing Vladimir Putin, we just wouldn’t have believed it. But in fact, some of those skills...

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