Without a sense of what should be, we cannot be clear about how what is could ever change. - Timothy Snyder

Personally about Mr. Trump, it tells me that his desire to protect himself, his ego, his appearance, his sense of being right, is bottomless, because if there's anything that you should hold back from doing, it's from punishing someone like Lt. Colonel Vindman. ...[I]t calls up to me... a memory of what s are like, because that... is what is happening. People who refuse to tow the line, a line of fiction. A line which said that Ukraine plotted against the United States, and not Russia. A line that said a server was in Ukraine, which has never been the case. A line which said that Ukraine was corrupting us, when were trying to corrupt Ukraine, in fact, in the Trump administration. A line which was false. A set of statements which were clearly false and which Republican senators also know to be false. That you don't follow a line like that, and then get purged. That's what happens in... totalitarian systems.

By 2015, Russia had extended an extraordinary campaign of cyberwarfare beyond Ukraine to Europe and the United States, with the assistance of numerous Europeans and Americans. In 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union, as Moscow had long advocated, and Americans elected Donald Trump... an outcome the Russians had worked to achieve. Among other shortcomings, the new U.S. president could not reflect upon history: he was unable to commemorate ... nor condemn Nazis in his own country.

Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.