Tag Donald Trump

Fiona Hill and the two presidents

Fiona Hill’s new book, There Is Nothing for You Here, went on sale last week – five and a half years after Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin had been published (co-authored with Clifford Gaddy). Hill served as the national…

From individualism to groupthink

Putin appointed Andrei Illarionov as his senior economic adviser in April 2000. Illarionov remained in that position until late December, 2005. Those were good years for the Russian economy. Simply put, it was growing, and would keep growing until 2007.…

Free speech under Yeltsin: Black October

It’s good to know that Russia’s number one opposition leader supports an expansive understanding of free speech. Navalny may be wrong on Trump versus Twitter but it’s far more important – in the Russian context – that he get the…

Please let it be a farce, please

Shortly after watching a performance of Timofey Kulyabin‘s production of The Broken Pitcher (or The Broken Jug) – a remarkably well thought through interpretation – I learned that Kleist had been thinking of Oedipus Rex while writing his comedy: The…

Quadrillion II

The Quadrillion to the fourth power argument graces an insane, dangerous and all-over anti-American lawsuit. As if it weren’t enough, now the states of New California and New Nevada have filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the Texas…

70 to 30

When Trump visited Moscow in 1987, he did some preliminary probing for a possible real estate deal but came back disappointed: the USSR had no private ownership of land at all and the dispute resolution procedure his Soviet counterparts proposed…

Quadrillion

Three tweets from the same thread related to the insane lawsuit filed by the Texas Attorney General (himself under indictment for securities fraud) against four other states, seeking to have Trump anointed as the winner despite his loss to Biden…

“The final act of what they owe Russia”

The tweet below apparently referred to the lawsuits – mostly frivolous – filed by the Trump campaign. I would extend it to Trump’s attempts to have Republican-dominated legislatures appoint electors contrary to the popular vote in their states: The only…

Childish in the worst sense of the word

Last Friday, I wrote that election fraud isn’t all that easy to pull off even in a polity dominated by a single party. Even in Russia. Now think about a fiercely competitive environment such as a swing state, like Georgia,…

An American dystopia

This is an alarmist article from a left-wing journal. Nonetheless, it provides for useful reading and includes a link to this excellent report by the Transition Integrity Project, Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition. In June 2020 the Transition…