'The template and the playbook': Former Russia reporter reveals how Trump will model Putin

12 November 2024

President-elect Donald Trump is about to begin his second term in the White House without many of the guardrails that kept him in check during his first administration. One veteran journalist is now warning that Americans can except a government like Russian President Vladimir Putin's over the next four years.

In a recent interview with the New Republic's Greg Sargent, New Yorker reporter Susan Glasser described how what she saw while covering the Putin regime in Russia could also happen in the U.S. as Trump prepares to be inaugurated for his final term. She warned that the president-elect is "very likely to move very, very rapidly to create new facts on the ground while his opponents are just busy fighting with each other over their ideological priors." She also cautioned that based on her personal experience as a former journalist reporting from Russia, Americans should expect many similarities between the second Trump administration and Putin's government.

"My husband and I were correspondents [in Russia] in the first few years of Putin’s term, and Putin moved with extraordinary speed and focus to dismantle the fledgling institutions of Russian democracy," she said. "That has been the template and the playbook for other would-be authoritarians who are working within a democratic system."

"The speed and rapidity with which Trump can make very big changes in our system has been an under-appreciated aspect that I think is now going to kick in," she added.

In the immediate term, Glasser said she expected the new Trump administration to cave to Putin on Ukraine. She noted that Donald Trump Jr. recently posted a meme mocking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a shower of money raining down on him, which she described as him saying: "Your allowance from America is going to be cut off soon, guy."

"It was not a mistake that one of the very first personnel announcements we’ve seen directly from Trump himself, as opposed to his advisors, was an announcement over the weekend that neither Nikki Haley nor Mike Pompeo will be welcomed back into a second Trump administration," Glasser told Sargent. "What do those two have in common? They both have been strong public proponents of Ukraine."

Trump has also indicated how he will approach the Ukraine-Russia war given who he's surrounded himself with. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has been a vocal opponent of arming Ukraine in its fight against Putin's invasion, and billionaire Elon Musk — who was recently on a call between Trump and Zelenskyy — has also been critical of President Joe Biden's administration in its support of Ukraine.

"Essentially, they’ve publicly endorsed many Russian talking points with regards to the war in Ukraine," Glasser said.

Aside from Ukraine policy, the New Yorker journalist said that Trump's second term is also accompanied by his wholesale takeover of the Republican Party, and his past nine years of public campaigning. She warned that the oligarchy of well-connected billionaires dictating government policy in Russia will likely be Trump's modus operandi in his second term.

"Owners—they pressured owners, they changed owners. They had an oligarchy system in which they basically took over these places in a variety of different ways, forcing people to sell things, forcing them to moderate their criticism in order not to lose business deals," she said. "Well, does that remind you in any way of the pressure on Jeff Bezos, for example, in the run-up to the election where he refused to endorse Donald Trump despite overruling his own editorial board, where he publicly congratulated Donald Trump?"

Click here to read Glasser's full interview in the New Republic.

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