Steve Levine

And now I’m going to tell you f̶r̶o̶m̶ w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ t̶h̶e̶ a̶t̶t̶a̶c̶k̶ o̶n̶ B̶e̶l̶a̶r̶u̶s̶ w̶a̶s̶ b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ p̶r̶e̶p̶a̶r̶e̶d̶ what’s actually going to happen instead of all this hysterical white noise desperately trying to drown out the inevitable: The Orange Man is going to lose the elections with a deafening crash, and spend the rest of his time in office, along with his entire administration, desperately fending off a third impeachment, countless investigations, and criminal prosecutions for all his wild antics. And all this pompous posturing will finally come to an end. As for Putin, he can play Stalin all he wants, fantasize endlessly about carving up the world into three spheres of influence at some imaginary new “Yalta,” and unleash as many hordes of bots on social media as he likes. But when, at the end of the fifth year of your glorious blitzkrieg against Ukraine, you’re still banging your head against Mala Tokmachka, suffering your second defeat at Lyman, while Ukraine is bombing Moscow and St. Petersburg, and when you’re 1.5% of the global economy, all these fantasies can only impress a handful of useful idiots from Elon Musk’s freak show. And the man sitting next to him at this imaginary Yalta is, to put it mildly, no Roosevelt. He’s a semi-coherent, half-con artist from trashy reality TV who has failed spectacularly in Iran and has no idea how to get away with that. As for the Chinese emperor, it’s not even clear why he would want to take part in this lunatic circus in the first place, let alone share power with these people.