Get used to it. At the United Nations, Washington and Moscow can now speak with one voice. For now, on Ukraine. Later, perhaps, to defend the same vision of the world. The United States and Russia agreed on February 24 to vote for a resolution on the Ukrainian conflict that does not name an aggressor. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin use the same language when they claim "divine missions," restoring their respective countries to greatness, entrusted to them by an almighty who can scarcely contradict them.
The US president didn't fail to boast that his counterpart had picked up on his "common sense" position during their February 12 telephone conversation, a testament to the Russian president's inexhaustible ability to play on the Republican's incurable narcissism. Make no mistake: Trump speaks Putin's language, not the other way around. It's the language of power that no longer knows the checks and balances that hitherto defined the US's political system; that targets the news media; that replaces progressive wokeism, accusing it of all evils, with a conservative wokeism asserted via censorship and semantic diktats, while claiming the banner of freedom of expression for itself.
The great realignment underway, both inside and outside US borders, is less the product of an electoral tidal wave linked to Trump's victory than that of a perfect storm. It is the junction of one man's revanchism, the American right's long-term effort against the Democratic legacy of Roosevelt's 1930s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s, and the even more radical questioning of the social contract carried out by some oligarchs gravitating in the orbit of the new president.
Out of conviction or opportunism
This revanchism is evident in the federal government's subjugation, and particularly evident in the personalities of the men chosen to head the FBI, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. Both were better known in recent years for entertaining Trumpist conspiracy theories than for their institutional rigor.
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