Trump has struck more countries with more fire power in a week than Putin often does in a year. Where Putin's unpredictable persona is a carefully cu… - M. Gessen

No powerful political actor had set out to destroy the American political system itself — until, that is, Trump won the Republican nomination. He was probably the first major party nominee who ran not for president but for autocrat. And he won.

In the United States, when we talk about mass violence and we are not talking about ideology, we usually talk about the easy availability of guns. Of course, access to guns matters. The easier it is, technically, to kill people, the more people will be killed.

Gessen is American, too. They (Gessen is transgender and non-binary and prefers the pronouns "they/them") were born in Russia, grew up in the US, and then lived in Russia again as a journalist, before returning to the US. This allows for a deep comparison between Trump and Vladimir Putin, on whom they have written a well-known book The Man Without a Face. The parallels are evident: Trump admires Putin. Indeed, he would like to be America's Putin.