We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s.

Unleashing Elon Musk and his DOGE cadres on the federal government, menacing Canada and European allies, and embracing Vladimir Putin’s wish list for Ukraine and beyond are not unrelated. These moves are all strategic elements of a plan that is familiar to any student of the rise and fall of democracies, especially the “fall” part.

The sequence is painfully familiar to me personally, because I marched in the streets as it played out in Russia at the start of the 21st century. With ruthless consistency, and the tacit approval of Western leaders, Putin and his oligarch supporters used his fair-ishly elected power to make sure that elections in Russia would never matter again.

Of course, American institutions and traditions are far stronger than Russia’s fragile post-Soviet democracy was when Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin, who had already done his share of damage before anointing the former KGB lieutenant colonel to be his successor in 1999. But those who dismissed my warnings that yes, it can happen here at the start of Trump’s first term, in 2017, got quieter after the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and are almost silent now.

Trump’s personal affinity for dictators was apparent early on. His praise for Putin and other elected leaders turned strongmen, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, was tinged with undisguised envy. No feisty parliament to wrangle. The free press turned into a propaganda machine for the administration. The justice system unleashed against the opposition. Elections staged only for show. What’s not to like?

[Read: Behind the American right’s fascination with Viktor Orbán]

Putin and Russia always held a special place in Trump world, however. Russian intelligence and propaganda worked full-time to promote Trump once he won the Republican nomination to face Hillary Clinton in 2016. WikiLeaks, long in the service of Russian intelligence but still nurturing its old whistleblower image, fed hacked documents to a naively cooperative American media. The Mueller Report makes the degree of cooperation between various Russian assets and the Trump campaign clear—damningly so, despite years of MAGA crying “Russia hoax” because Special Counsel Robert Mueller decided not to prosecute.

Trump made Paul Manafort his campaign chair in May 2016, turning the Russia alarm bells into air-raid sirens for anyone paying attention. Manafort was a former fixer for Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich, who attempted to thwart Ukrainians’ desire to join Europe only to be deposed by the Maidan Revolution of Dignity and forced to flee to Moscow in 2014.

Manafort’s recent expertise was mostly in money and reputation laundering. Adding him to the campaign when Trump’s oddly pro-Putin rhetoric (“strong leader,” “loves his country,” “you think our country is so innocent?”) was already drawing attention seemed a little too on the nose: Why double down? From affinity, the campaign tilted into deeply suspicious fealty toward the Kremlin. Manafort’s subsequent plea of guilty for conspiracy to defraud the United States, and Trump’s later pardon, only threw more wood on the raging collusion fire.

Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, during President Barack Obama’s second term. It annexed Crimea and entered eastern Ukraine, offering up feeble pretexts about protecting Russian speakers (whom it bombed indiscriminately), Nazis in Ukraine (also, naturally, the Jews running Ukraine), NATO expansion, and so-called Ukrainian separatists. Russia launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, in the second year of Joe Biden’s presidency, attempting to take Kyiv in what the Kremlin famously planned to be a three-day special military operation. The timing led Trump and his defenders to say that he had been tough on Russia: The invasion would never have occurred on Trump’s watch.

Now that the second Trump administration is racing to tick off every point on Putin’s long wish list, the reason for this has become clear. In Trump’s second term, Putin was expecting him to abandon Ukraine, lift sanctions on Russia, create divisions within NATO, and leave Ukraine relatively defenseless before Europe could get organized to defend it. That is, exactly what is happening today.

But Trump lost to Biden in 2020, and, entering his 23rd year in power, Putin needed a new conflict to distract from the dismal conditions in Russia. Dictators always wind up needing enemies to justify why nothing has improved under their eternal rule, and once the domestic opposition is eliminated, foreign adventures are inevitable. Putin didn’t expect much resistance from Ukraine or from the West, which he had successfully corrupted, bluffed, and bullied for decades. But then an unlikely hero appeared in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and actor who, it turned out, could perform a phenomenal impression of Winston Churchill under enemy fire.

Ukraine’s brave resistance to the supposedly overwhelming might of the Russian military lasted long enough to force the United States and Europe to join its defense, albeit reluctantly and slowly. Three long years have passed. Iranian drones crash nightly into Ukrainian civilian centers; Russian artillery and missiles reduce entire cities to rubble; China supports Russia’s attempt at conquest while hungrily eyeing Taiwan. Three years of documented reports of Russian torture, rape, and the mass kidnapping of children. North Korean soldiers have arrived to fight and die in Russia’s invasion, while NATO nations stand by, letting Ukrainians die in the war NATO was created to fight. Yet somehow Ukraine holds the line while Russia’s military losses grow and its economy wobbles.

Once more unto the breach arrives Donald Trump, back in office with more help from the Kremlin—and the inept Democrats—ready to throw his old pal Putin a lifeline. At his side is someone new: the richest private citizen in the world, Elon Musk. (Putin controls far more money than Musk or Trump—do not underestimate how that affects their perceptions of him as the big boss.) With Musk arrives an overused and misunderstood word in the American vernacular: oligarch.

[Read: The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine]

Although it’s not a Russian word, post-Soviet Russia popularized its use and attempted to perfect the system it described. In the 1990s, those most capable of manipulating the newly privatized markets became the richest people in Russia. They quickly seized the levers of political power to expand their resources and fortunes, persecute their rivals, and blur the lines between public and private power until they were erased.

Putin, a nondescript technocrat, was a useful front for billionaires such as Boris Berezovsky: Putin appeared to be the hard veteran of the KGB, cleaning up corruption—while what he was really doing was bringing it inside, legitimizing it, and creating a mafia state. Oligarchs could bend the knee and profit, or resist and end up in jail or in exile, their assets ripped away.

Russian democracy had no institutional memory, no immune system to fight off these attacks. It was like a baby deer hit by a locomotive. The Russian Duma, purged of real opposition, became a Putin cheer squad under the new United Russia party. Judges and the security services fell in line or were removed in purges. Oversight was twisted into enforcement of the presidential will. Economic policy aimed to nationalize expenses and privatize profits, looting the country to line the pockets of a few dozen well-connected oligarchs. Foreign policy also moved out of public view, conducted by billionaires in resorts and on yachts. A flood of Russian money washed over European politicians and institutions. Kremlin troll farms and bots made social media into a national and then global weapon.

If all of this is starting to sound a little familiar, welcome to the Putinization of America, comrade! Trump’s deference to the Russian autocrat has become full-blown imitation. Musk’s promotion of Kremlin-friendly candidates in Germany and Romania and his attacks on Ukraine are bizarre but not random. Berezovsky, who elevated Putin to power from behind the scenes, was soon exiled and replaced with more compliant oligarchs. He also met a grisly end—found hanged at his Berkshire mansion at 67—a precedent that might give pause to anyone thinking of risking his business empire to play that gray-cardinal role for the likes of Trump and J. D. Vance.

Trump didn’t campaign on cutting cancer research and foreign aid any more than he did on threatening to annex Greenland and Canada or lifting sanctions on Putin’s dictatorship and extorting Ukraine. What these things have in common is that they provoke conflicts with allies, which then allow him to distinguish the truly loyal.

Imitation and servility aren’t the same thing. Trump and Musk could attempt to undermine American democracy and create a Russian-style power vertical without kowtowing to Putin or abandoning Ukraine. But they haven’t. And while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, affinity and envy aren’t enough to explain the abruptness and totality of the Trump administration’s adoption of every Russian position. On Monday, the anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion, the United States even joined Russia in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Ronald Reagan gave a famous speech supporting Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 in which he said, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size … A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” As a “Reagan Communist” myself back in the U.S.S.R., I sympathize with those who want to shrink and limit government power. But replacing it with a junta of unaccountable elites—the Putin model—is not an improvement.

Cutting bureaucracy isn’t usually associated with despotism and power grabs. We tend to think of wannabe dictators packing the courts and increasing the size and power of the state. But that isn’t what you do when you want to make the government impotent against private power—your private power. The Putin model was to weaken any state institution that might defy him and to build state power back up only when he had total control.

But why has Trump made Putin’s agenda his top priority? The GOP has been compliant with every Trump move so far, but a few members still take issue with Trump calling Zelensky a dictator while cozying up to Putin. So why pick fights with his narrow congressional majorities over Russia so early, with such urgency? The same could be asked of Musk’s reckless slash-and-burn tactics with DOGE, which are beginning to provoke backlash as popular programs are cut and job losses pile up, along with lawsuits.

We may never know why Trump is so perversely loyal to Putin. We don’t know exactly why Musk went all in for Trump and Russia or what his deep conflicts of interest in the U.S. and China portend. But the urgency of their actions I do understand, and it’s a dire warning.

[Read: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power any time soon, or ever. They are racing to the point where they will not be able to afford to lose control of the mechanisms they are ripping up and remaking in their image. What such people will do when they believe that mounting a coup is the lesser risk to their fortunes and power cannot be predicted.

There may be a Pulitzer Prize awaiting the person who discovers the answer to the question “Why?” But stopping Putinization—the looting by cronies, the centralization of authority, the moving of decisions into unaccountable private hands—is the vital matter of the moment. Trump admiring Putin is far less dangerous than Trump becoming him.

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Nothing could have prepared Americans for what the first 50-ish days of the second Trump administration have been like. Even some Cabinet members and Republican members of Congress seem caught off guard. But if you took time to look closely at Project 2025, the effort from the conservative Heritage Foundation to prepare for a new Republican administration, you’re probably a little less shocked than other people.

I’m not the first to point out that many of the actions the White House and other departments have taken since the inauguration are pulled directly from Project 2025. Even though Donald Trump vociferously denied any connection to the work during the campaign, that was always transparent bunk. For example, Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, led the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump White House, was the policy director for the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform, and is now leading OMB again.

There are some useful resources online that seek to track which Project 2025 goals have already been achieved, but for all that Trump has done so far, some of Project 2025’s most radical ideas for transforming the power of the president have yet to unfold. What is still in store?

The authors of Project 2025 believe that far too much of the executive branch is not functionally under the control of the president. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Vought told The New York Times in 2023. One example is what are called “independent regulatory agencies”—entitites such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The laws that authorize these agencies give the president the power to appoint leaders, but not generally to remove them or direct policy. That’s different from, for example, a Cabinet department such as State and Treasury, whose secretaries can be fired at will.

“The Trump team came in determined to expand the scope of presidential power,” Don Kettl, the former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, told me in an email. “Their goal is to stretch the limits of Article II of the Constitution, by using the beginning of the article—that executive power is located in the president of the U.S.—and the take-care clause, to assert that the president has power over all things executive. Congress might pass a law, but once the law is passed, they believe the president ought to have complete control over how it’s implemented.”

Many of the moves that Trump has taken so far appear to be of dubious legality. This week, Vought’s OMB issued a memo laying out plans for mass layoffs of federal employees subject to civil-service protections. Such a reduction in force almost certainly violates civil-service protections and bargaining agreements. Similarly, last week, the administration issued a little-noticed but potentially very important executive order asserting unprecedented power over independent regulatory agencies, cutting against decades of precedent and understanding of existing laws.

These are only the latest examples of the Trump administration’s apparent defiance of Congress’s intent. As Jonathan Rauch noted this week, Trump has fired inspectors general without giving the legally required 30-day notice, even though he could have easily just followed the law. The president also tried to fire Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which protects whistleblowers; Dellinger promptly sued, and his firing is currently temporarily blocked by courts. Last week, the administration asserted a right to fire administrative-law judges, who oversee hearings inside executive-branch agencies, even though the law says they can be removed only for cause.

The statutes that govern these matters are not especially ambiguous: Congress intended for these bodies to have some independence. Trump’s aides don’t disagree; they just think that the laws are an unconstitutional infringement on the powers of the executive branch. “There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such—SEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup—but that is not something that the Constitution understands,” Vought told Tucker Carlson in November. Unfortunately for Trump, the Supreme Court has disagreed. In a 1935 case called Humphrey’s Executor, the justices unanimously slapped down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission.

As Trump takes so many steps, some observers have expressed concern that Trump intends to just ignore courts. This isn’t a crazy fear. Trump has shown that he has no personal respect for the rule of law, and many of his aides—including Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance—have floated the idea of defying judicial rulings. But I think the more likely interpretation (at least for now) is that many of these law-defying, or at least law-bending, actions are ways of getting cases before the Supreme Court in the hopes of eliciting favorable decisions.

“The Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey’s Executor upholding agency independence seems ripe for revisiting—and perhaps sooner than later,” the law professor Adam Candeub writes in “Mandate for Leadership,” the main document produced by Project 2025. (He’s since been appointed general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission.) Elsewhere in “Mandate,” Gene Hamilton, who helped design the family-separation policy in Trump’s first term, writes that a conservative administration should seek “the overruling of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States … The next conservative Administration should formally take the position that Humphrey’s Executor violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

How the Court would handle such a case is anyone’s guess. Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have already said they’d overturn Humphrey’s Executor; Republicans have long pushed for the “unitary executive theory,” which seeks an expansion of the president’s power over the executive branch; and the justices have shown a willingness to bend precedents to help Trump in the past.

The impact of striking down Humphrey’s Executor would be enormous. Agency independence is designed to provide regulatory predictability and consistency and to avoid political interference, but Project 2025 proposes systematically politicizing independent agencies, seeking to use federal power to attack climate-focused investing, compel private corporations’ business decisions, and more. This is especially dangerous with a president who has already begun following through on his campaign promises to use the government to punish his critics, but it would be destabilizing under other circumstances. Any future Democratic president would at least try to return things to the status quo ante, which would mean a wild seesaw in regulation every four or eight years.

Alternatively, the Supreme Court might blanch before such a shift of power from Congress to the executive branch. In 2024’s Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision, it struck down Chevron deference, which accorded executive-branch agencies broad discretion in interpreting laws, saying that Congress needed to make those decisions. If Trump’s test cases fail, what comes next?

“I always abide by the courts, always abide by them,” Trump said earlier this month. Yesterday, his nominees for top Justice Department roles told senators that they believed the administration could at times ignore judicial orders. We may soon find out which of them is telling the truth.

Related:

What will happen if the Trump administration defies a court order? There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Inside the collapse at the NIH Grad school is in trouble. What Trump is really after in the Middle East Radio Atlantic: The Five Eyes have noticed.

Today’s News

Donald Trump hosted U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House to discuss issues including trade and Ukraine’s future. The Trump administration notified most USAID staffers this week that they have been placed on leave or fired and announced that 90 percent of the agency’s foreign-aid contracts worldwide will be canceled. Trump announced that 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico will go into effect on March 4, and that China will face an additional 10 percent tariff.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Who counts as a hillbilly—and who gets to decide? Andrew Aoyama examines the complicated history of Appalachia and J. D. Vance’s ties.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

My Mom’s Guide to the Art of Living

By Arthur C. Brooks

My late mother was an artist of some renown in the Pacific Northwest. Over her many-decades career, her paintings evolved from highly representational watercolors into mixed-media abstracts. One constant in her work, however, was excellent technique: If she decided to paint a naked guy holding a guitar, much to the mortification of her adolescent son, that’s exactly what it looked like.

Growing up, I could draw a little myself and enjoyed doing so, but I never had her talent. Once, I asked her how I could improve. I suppose I expected her to say something like “Practice 10,000 hours.” Instead, she told me to look at what I wanted to draw.

Read the full article.

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Gene Hackman redefined the leading man. Jeff Bezos’s hypocritical assertion of power It’s weird that eggs were ever cheap. The public-health brain drain is here. The problem with optimism in a crisis

Culture Break

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: CSA-Printstock / Getty.

Read (or skip). The columnist Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe, argues for religion from a rational perspective. “It won’t make a believer out of me,” George Packer writes.

Debate. Here’s who will win at the 2025 Oscars—and who should win, according to David Sims.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you understandably haven’t read all 922 pages of “Mandate for Leadership,” then allow me to recommend a book—specifically, my own. The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America is out from Random House on April 22. I wrote it as a layperson’s guide to both what Project 2025 wants to do, broken down by subject area, and how the authors propose achieving it. The book is available for preorder now.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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