Sunday Reflection

“Lying is the message. Its not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power of the truth itself... Both Trump and Putin use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it’s not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when. This makes it impossible to negotiate with them and very difficult for journalists to cover them." -- the always prescient Masha Gessen, in "The Putin Paradigm," New York Review of Books, December 2016.