Mick Hartley

Yale history professor Dr Marci Shore, interviewed by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, on Trump, and why we should expect more depravity to come:

America thought it won the Cold War in 1989 but didn’t read the battlefield. It ended on 28 February 2025, when the United States surrendered to Russia in full view of the world.

Among the Americans watching Oval Office theater craft in shame and horror was Dr Marci Shore, a Yale professor of intellectual history who wrote The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.

She taught me about the Polish aphorism ‘knocking from below’ – just when you think things can’t get any worse, you hear knocking from below.

“That was precisely the phrase that came into my mind when I was watching,” Shore said. “I thought, there is no bottom. You think you are prepared for everything, and then there is still more depravity to come.”…

Dr. Marci Shore: Let me start perhaps with the broken hearts. There are a couple of pieces to that question. The only positive thing I saw about what happened yesterday was that it was such a decisive moment of the end of the affair. I felt like Europeans in particular, perhaps finally, belatedly, and this, of course, started with Munich, were shaken into realizing they absolutely cannot trust Washington.

This idea of America – despite all our problems and our hypocrisy and our racism and our violence – that it was still somehow the world's deepest liberal democracy and the land of the free and the home of the brave, and everything that Soviet communism was not – will, in the end, be the rescuer and guarantor of freedom. I feel like the last vestiges of that are finally dissolving….

Now it's also very possible that in representing himself and doing what is in his best interest, that Trump belongs to Putin in some way. I don't think we know the background reasons for that. We can speculate, but in some sense, it doesn't matter. They clearly were not representing American interests in a broader sense, in terms of the American people. We are now going to be isolated from the rest of the world. They're representing their own interests. And [last Friday], they were representing Russia's interest. It looks very clearly like it was all some kind of a setup….

I have a kind of psychological fascination with the different ways in which people go over to the dark side. Trump is clearly a pathological narcissist, perhaps that and a psychopath. That's his own category. Let's call that a marginal demographic. But what about people like Lindsey Graham, who say that Trump gave us a master class in representing the interest of America.

No. Trump gave us a master class in moral nihilism, and Lindsey Graham gave us a master class in selling one’s soul to the devil….

Worth reading in full. 

I don't think it's of very much use to speculate what hold Putin may or may not have on Trump. It's more that, at bottom, they share the same understanding of the world, where people – little people – don't matter, and the powerful and strong get to decide, just because they're powerful and strong.