It is virtually impossible to keep track of every outrageous, ignorant, or hateful remark that Donald Trump makes. He claims that as president he should have “full and total immunity” to do anything—even acts that “cross the line.” Speaking about Nikki Haley, he confuses her with Nancy Pelosi. He routinely hurls racist comments. The front pages of newspapers could be full of stories about individual pronouncements that raise fundamental questions about his fitness for office and his threat to the United States’ constitutional order. Yet with this flood of alarming statements, particular comments can get lost in a blur of Trump white noise that numbs and overwhelms.

I’d like to pull out one remark from the recent tsunami for special attention. A few days ago, during a campaign speech in Concord, New Hampshire, Trump slammed Haley, saying, “I know her very well. She’s not tough enough. She’s not smart enough…She cannot do this job.” Of course, this was ludicrous. Given that Trump had hired her to be UN ambassador, was he confessing to his supporters that he put a dunce in this position? Not at all. For Trump, cognitive dissonance is his dearest friend. But it’s not this misogynistic utterance I want to highlight. Trump continued his rant: “She’s not going to be able to deal with [Chinese] President Xi. She’s not going to be able to deal with Putin and Kim Jong Un. And all the people—they’re very fine people.”

Very fine people.

Trump’s affection and admiration for tyrannical and murderous dictators has long been evident. So much so that few eyes are batted when he now speaks positively of these leaders. Trump has praised Xi as “an exceptionally brilliant individual who governs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” (As president, Trump encouraged Xi to use concentration camps to detain the Uighurs.) From the Oval Office, Trump exchanged love letters with Kim (which did little to stop North Korea from further developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles). And then there’s Putin. For over a decade, Trump has gushed over the Russian despot. What was once a mystery that prompted commentators and analysts to wonder about the source of Trump’s admiration for Putin has become ho-hum—even as Trump maintains his infatuation with the Russian leader while Putin wreaks death and destruction on Ukraine and its civilians.

It is now accepted as just another Trump thing that he idolizes autocratic tyrants—even when Trump also says that he if he returns to the White House he should have absolute power. None of this is a secret. This fanboy of dictators aspires to be an above-the-law strongman. Yet this is not a dealbreaker for tens of millions of Americans. Nor has it led to top GOP officials denouncing Trump (though Haley took a poke at him for his “bromance” with Putin and the others). It’s hard to imagine a more important issue for a presidential election.

But Trump’s latest wet kiss for Putin—and the less-than-thunderous reaction from the political press—was a reminder of how he escaped accountability for a profound act of betrayal: aiding and abetting Putin’s attack on the 2016 election. I know that for many this seems like ancient news, and Trump and his fellow disinformers on the right have strived mightily over the past seven years to deny and deflect, relentlessly claiming the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax and cooking up assorted conspiracy theories to distract from the basic facts: Russia mounted a covert operation to assist Trump’s campaign, and Trump and his crew helped Putin by falsely asserting there was no Russian assault. Trump accepted Russia’s assistance and covered for Moscow.

I’m not going to belabor this point. When this matter comes up these days—which it rarely does—Trump and his henchmen throw up the usual BS, insisting there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow and that the Steele dossier has been discredited. The 966-page bipartisan Senate intelligence report on the Trump-Russia scandal released in 2020 blows apart Trump’s phony narrative and shows that his campaign signaled to Moscow it welcomed its secret intervention and that it amplified Putin’s false denials. The report even concluded there was a “direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.” But these findings have been drowned out by the endless screams of “hoax” from the Trump mob.

So here we are. Trump escaped accountability for siding with a foreign adversary that waged information warfare against the United States. Just as he has tried to avoid responsibility for attempting a coup to overturn the 2020 election and inciting the insurrectionist riot of January 6. Trump’s attempt to subvert American democracy three years ago remains a campaign issue this cycle. Yet his complicity in Putin’s war on the United States has fallen down the memory hole.

Trump’s never-ending love affair with Putin has long been a problem. With the ongoing war in Ukraine, this relationship would be especially dangerous. It seems highly probable that Trump, should he claw his way back into the White House, will betray Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That would be a twofer for Trump, helping Putin and seeking vengeance against upon the fellow tied to Trump’s first impeachment and the government Trump baselessly claimed was the real culprit in the Russia scandal.

Moreover, it's a good bet that Putin this year will try once again to mess in an American election. After succeeding in 2016, he again took a shot in 2020—another chapter in the Trump saga that’s received insufficient attention. In February 2020, the US intelligence community briefed Congress that Russia was interfering and attempting to get Trump reelected. Trump reacted by shit-canning acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire and replacing him with Richard Grenell, a combative Trump toady. Still, months later, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center publicly stated Russia was covertly scheming to “denigrate” Joe Biden. This was obviously a reference to the endeavor led by Rudy Giuliani to concoct and spread false allegations about Biden, his son Hunter, and Ukraine. Trump’s own Treasury Department noted that Ukrainians collaborating with Giuliani were Russian operatives. This time, the Russian plot failed.

Putin is one for two. This year, as he continues to commit horrendous war crimes in Ukraine, he has even more reason to clandestinely boost Trump and win the rubber match. Trump’s comment about him, Xi, and Kim is not just another one of his dumb and outrageous throwaway lines. It serves as a warning about the threat to American democracy coming from inside the country and potentially from outside.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

If Ron DeSantis read Our Land, he could’ve saved himself a lot of trouble—and saved his donors $100 million or so. A year ago, I wrote a piece explaining why the mean-spirited Florida governor would be a fool to try to depose Trump in the GOP primaries. He didn’t listen. This past weekend, he quit the race and bent the knee to Trump, endorsing the man he had denigrated and who had denigrated him. DeSantis illustrated the debasement of the GOP. Within a week he went from decrying Republicans who kiss Trump’s ring to…kissing Trump’s ring. It was a fitting farewell for a phony who wrote a book with the word “courage” in the title and whose super-PAC was named Never Back Down.

We will be holding another Our Land Zoom get-together on January 24 at 8 p.m. Eastern. As most of you know, this event is only open to premium subscribers—those Our Landers who send us a few dollars each month and who make this venture possible. On the day of the Zoom shindig, these subscribers will receive a mailing with a Zoom link. And this is a good time to remind non-premium subscribers that we do need your support to keep this newsletter up and running and that it is easy as pie to upgrade to top status so you can participate in this conversation with fellow readers and me. Just click here. See you soon.

Origin. With Origin, acclaimed moviemaker Ava DuVernay set up an immense challenge for herself: creating a feature film that’s more about an idea than a story. There is plot here. But the star of this flick is the notion that caste—the stratification of society into a rigid and violently enforced artificial hierarchy of groups—better explains the oppression of Black people in America than racism. That idea was explored by Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson in her 2020 bestseller, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. In this work, Wilkerson explores the “connective tissue” between American racism (slavery and segregation), Nazi Germany, and the Dalit of India (the persecuted “untouchables” at the bottom of that country’s caste system). Her book—which "inspired"  Origin, according to the film's credits—was a triumph of history, reporting, and analysis, and yielded an elegant thesis that deepens our understanding of race-based prejudice beyond a conventional black-and-white view.

But how do you make a multiplex-friendly movie out of this? DuVernay, who wrote and directed the film, came up with a simple answer. Origin tells the story of how Wilkerson (Aunjanue L. Ellis-Taylor) developed this idea and wrote the book. There are not too many films about the construction of nonfiction works. All the President’s Men was conceived as a real-life thriller, and it depicted Woodward and Bernstein as on-the-beat reporters chasing scoops for the next edition, not authors with a years-down-the-road deadline. Origin doesn’t have that kind of driving drama, though Wilkerson experiences personal tragedy while working on Caste. It’s more of a road trip film that follows her on a global journey aimed at capturing a big idea.

Watching someone doing research at an archive may not be gripping, but DuVernay brings excitement to each discovery Wilkerson makes that supports her premise. Additionally, she intertwines Wilkerson’s search with dramatic episodes that will appear in her book: two Black anthropologists who move to the Deep South in the 1930s and go undercover to observe the social structure of segregation; Nazi officials studying the Jim Crow practices of the United States as they concoct the early laws of the Holocaust; and the inspiring story of B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit leader who becomes the chief architect of India’s constitution (whose statues are defaced to this day due to his caste ancestry).

DuVernay’s intention was wildly ambitious. Yet as Wilkerson succeeded in demonstrating there are fundamental links between various systems of repression—in 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. visited India and had his views shaped by the similarities between the untouchables and American Blacks—DuVernay pulls off her attempt to weave these different plot lines into a fully integrated tale. Origin is quite the triumph. There’s an especially stunning scene toward the end of the film that occurs at a segregated swimming pool in the 1950s. I won’t say more about it, other than to note that these few minutes alone show how a master storyteller like DuVernay can show us so much with a single moment.

The Returner, Allison Russell. In 2021, Canadian singer-songwriter Allison Russell released her first album, Outside Child. It was one of the best records (if we still call them that) of the year, nominated for three Grammy awards in the Americana and American Roots categories. But she was—and remains—a hard musician to categorize. Writing about her in this newsletter, I observed, “Soul, country, blues, rhythm and blues, rock, roots—you can hear it all on Allison Russell’s impressive debut solo album. You will also discern in her mesmerizing vocals traces of Lauryn Hill, Rosanne Cash, Nina Simone, and Regina Spektor.” A few years later, not much has changed—except perhaps now she can best be identified as sounding like Allison Russell. Her second album, The Returner, which came out a few months ago, has drawn four Grammy nominations, again in Americana and American Roots run-offs. But her sound on The Returner is even more eclectic and genre-defying. To the above list you can add elements of funk and luscious string arrangements.

The Returner opens with the jaunty “Springtime,” in which Russell sings of her trek from a time when “I was doomed / To die young, to be consumed / All lullabies were violent / Thosе winters of my discontent” to the “springtime of my present tense.” It conveys a well-deserved sense of triumph. (Her first album recounted her personal tale of abuse and homelessness, which included a stretch living in a cemetery.) The title track also focuses on overcoming obstacles: “Goodbye, so long, farewell, all I've been / Ooh, oblivion / Throw me in the ocean / Ooh, see if I can swim.” Yet this is no feel-good/I’ve-made-it collection of songs. On “Eve Was Black,” Russell explores the specific racism that confronts Black women. (“Why do you try to touch my hair? / Do you hope to find a blessing there? / Why do you try to keep me down? / Do you hope to sow this barren ground.”) The final track, “Requiem,” is a solemn and moving prayer for dead children, presumably those who perish due to gun violence. (“Oh, I know your way / Is hard to see today /Bullets, they fly faster than mother's lullabies / And the sparrows cannot sing / For it is theirs to bring / The souls of those lost babies back to the sky.”)

Russell recorded this album only with women, including Brandi Carlile, at the Los Angeles studio where Joni Mitchell made Blue and Carole King produced Tapestry. That certainly sets a high bar, and, with The Returner, Russell once again demonstrates she has the talent and vision to be that ambitious.

January 20, 2024: The absurdity of No Labels; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Ron DeSantis); the Mailbag: MoxieCam™; and more.

 January 17, 2024: Hugh Hewitt’s constitutional con; the truth of American Fiction; George Saunders’ Liberation Day; and more.

January 13, 2024: Is Trump extremism getting more extreme?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (everyone!); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

January 9, 2024: Two historic Dutch girls and today’s world; the creepy chaos of Leave the World Behind; the awesome creativity of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; and more.

January 3, 2024: A story of Mother Jones (the labor organizer) and a populist senator; Mark Levin, Joe Scarborough, and me; and more.

December 23, 2023: To disqualify or not disqualify Trump?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Michele Bachmann); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

December 19, 2023: A (cracked) Christmas playlist; the chances of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley; the return of Brad Parscale; and more.

December 16, 2023: Donald Trump, rubber, and glue; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Brenden Dilley); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.