Tar mig friheten att citera ett stycke ur Masha Gessens bok Surviving Autocracy:
”…physical distance makes villains seem bigger than they are in real life. Just as the full absurdity of Trump was sinking in, crushing any hope that he would turn ”presidential”, Putin, in the American imagination, was turning into a brilliant strategist, a skilled secret agent who was plotting the end of the Western world. In fact, Putin was and remains a poorly educated, underinformed, incurious man whose ambition is vastly out of proportion to his understanding of the world.”
För att på något sätt försöka summera denna pamflett, detta hårda angrepp mot Trump, i efterskriften daterat April 2020, måste jag ännu citera författarens avslutning:
”Now that the pandemic, aided by Trump, has stripped our polities and our society to the bare basics, the question facing Americans is; What do we want the future to look like? Will we, as we did after 9/11, sacrifice civil liberties and human rights? Will we, as we did n response to the financial crisis of 2008, create even greater wealth inequality? Will we, in other words, chose solutions that exacerbate the root problems? In 2020, that would mean forfeiting more freedoms, accepting ever greater inequality, and reelecting Trump. Or will we commit ourselves to reinvention?
Obviously blev svaret det sista alternativet.