Here we are, roughly a year and a half into Donald Trump’s presidency. I agree with what so many columnists have said: There is definitely a sense of outrage fatigue. Any one of the hundreds of major scandals that have rocked the Trump presidency would have taken anybody else down. Anybody. Else. I said this to my cousin and his son, who are temporarily living here before going back home to the Netherlands: Nobody else could have done what Trump has done. After I said that, I was thinking that I was a bit presumptuous in saying such a thing. But no more. There is nobody on God’s green earth that could do what Trump has done: Completed a hostile takeover of one of the major two political parties in America. Trump has the precise mix, and it is precise, of shamelessness, narcissism, showmanship, and a gut instinct, a visceral knowledge, of what the real fears and resentments of white America are. You could say that he knows many of us better than we know ourselves. He isn’t stupid, he just has a very specialized form of brilliance. The man is functionally illiterate. He lies brazenly, even though his lies are easily disprovable in this age of video. And he knows he can get away with it. But I have a feeling that he is even smarter than that. I think that Trump is working for the Russians, specifically Vladimir Putin. I think that Trump is a Manchurian president who has allegiance to one of our international enemies, and he is successfully implementing Russian President Putin’s agenda.

On the domestic side, President Trump has done since he began his campaign for the presidency has been in service of his master, Putin. He has divided our country into red and blue. Not that he started it; the division was well underway before Trump came on the scene. But he took the division and turned it into opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. He has been a virulent racist right from the start, with his well-known lie, which he didn’t invent but was the chief promoter of, that former President Obama was born in a foreign country. And Trump knows his rubes. He knows that there are many people in America who are either overt or covert racists who want to believe the worst of our first black president. Trump took the African-American football players’ quiet, Constitutionally-protected right of free speech, that of taking a knee silently instead of standing for the National Anthem, and ginned it up to the point where the NFL found it necessary to send a letter to NFL team owners asking them to come to a consensus about how to defuse the controversy, which resulted in a policy change requiring all players to stand during the anthem. Trump really couldn’t care less about this issue. He just has a way of knowing which buttons to push that will rile up his base and alienate virtually everyone else. So it really doesn’t matter what he does as long as it serves his purpose: to divide America along racial, class, education, and geographic lines. So now we are the United States in name only. In truth, we are now the Divided States of America. Thanks largely to President Putin and President Trump.

And isn’t it more than a little strange that Trump never, ever says a bad thing about Putin or Russia? Every time it is pointed out to him what Putin has done, Trump comes up with some false equivalence, like when he told a Fox interviewer, when the interviewer suggested that Putin had killed journalists, that “America isn’t so innocent”.

There is an article in the New York magazine by Jonathan Chait that makes the case much better than I can. When you have the time, read it.