Yeah, we had a lot of what is termed "soft power" in that it's the ability to negotiate and have market strength to make it worth it. This entire regime doesn't realize that and squandered decades of it in a single year when he thought he had full control.

Trump seems to be acting in a degrowth manner. I don’t think it is because he is a genius but because he is an idiot.

You're not wrong, but even that's too generous, IMO. Every time I ask myself, "If Putin could install a puppet American president, what would he have that president do?" I am reminded of how neatly everything Trump has done on the world stage supports exactly that.

We may never know the whole truth about President Krasnov, but we know enough: it's not all just idiocy. It's overwhelming venality and corruption, pee tapes, and a daddy who didn't love him enough turned into authoritarian worship too.

‘The most uneducated buffoon in history stands at a podium, bloated with self-importance, lips pursed like a carnival barker ready to sell turd milk to the unsuspecting. He grins a grotesque smirk stretched across his face as he scrawls his name onto a hollow decree, a sham celebration of the dismantling of knowledge itself. The Department of Education falls, not with a bang, but with wheezing verbs, suffocated under the weight of his own staggering ignorance. Surrounding him are the usual suspects: cowards in expensive suits, servile sycophants clapping like trained seals, and racist opportunistic ghouls picking clean the bones of democracy. Liars, fools, and thieves all parasites fattening themselves on the hardships of the many. They stand in rigid formation, dead-eyed and soulless, their allegiance sworn not to country, not to principle, but to power, and the dark, festering rot that clings to it. And there he is the convicted wrong, the living embodiment of septic tank spew, his voice a noxious fog of grift and grievance. He lectures the world on right and wrong, irony clawing at the walls, desperate to escape the grotesque theatre of his moral void. The stomach turns, the air curdles, and for a moment, history itself recoils watching, in horror, as the great American experiment teeters on the precipice, led by a man who couldn't spell "precipice" if his life depended on it.’