Nice Little Putin Romance Keir takes us back in time to 2016, reminding us the #TrumpWon hashtag on Twitter originated in St Petersburg, Russia, and recites a litany of data points as a refresher on how Trump worked towards Moscow’s “preferred outcomes on every available issue.” He writes: “While there have been persistent allegations by former Soviet intelligence officers that Trump was a long-standing agent for the KGB, with the code name Krasnov, most of these claims do not specify whether Trump was a conscious and active recruit or merely a person whom the KGB sought to exploit. Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has stated plainly that Trump is ‘objectively, a Soviet or Russian asset.’” While it may be difficult within the US to grasp the totality of Trump’s destruction in his first year in office, a poll from the EU that Keir cites shows that Europeans are increasingly aware. “Before 2025, when international polls asked people globally where they could move to if they could, the consistent top answer by a long margin would always be the United States. America’s appeal derived not only from its prosperity, but also from its freedom and democratic values. Today, that image of the United States has collapsed. The change is particularly dramatic in the European Union. A Politico poll in April 2026 found that three times more EU citizens see the US as a threat than as an ally, with Washington regarded as a greater threat than Beijing in Spain, Italy, Belgium and Germany.” By April 2026, almost two-thirds of the countries around the world had no US ambassador, and assignments that had been made since 2025 were to Trump loyalists, giving China an open field, he writes. Same for US media cuts globally and cuts to USAID, all opportunities for China and Russia to step in to vacated American soft power. It’s hard to overstate the damage done to US institutions by the propagandists Trump assigned in each position. “Targeted purges and indiscriminate sackings” eliminated expertise throughout government. US governmental agencies are under sustained attack from Trump and his loyalists, who then turned their federal might on US cities, something very familiar from history and authoritarian regimes. 20/