Anne Applebaum on The Rise of the Brutal American:

Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterward, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.”

That’s putting it mildly. Even “rude” and “cruel” and “ugly” fall short of describing the grotesque nightmare of that performance.

Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. This is not new. Back in 2016, at the height of the election campaign, Trump frequently repeated false stories launched by Russia’s Sputnik news agency, declaring that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “founded ISIS,” or that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.” At the time, Trump also imitated Russian talk about Clinton starting World War III, another Russian meme. He produced a new version of that in the Oval Office on Friday. “You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III,” he shouted at Zelensky.

And Putin is…?

In reality, the Russians have said nothing publicly about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the past decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but that millions of people can see.

But seeing it is all we can do. Stopping it is way out of reach.

H/t Tim Harris