The End of the Affair
Revisiting my Marci Shore interview on Trump’s public surrender to Putin and what it means for Europe; plus my new Beginner’s Guide to Russian influence interview in Byline Radio with Adrian Goldberg
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A Beginner’s Guide to Russian Influence — Trump and the US
It is always an honor to join reporter Adrian Goldberg (BBC/Byline Times) for Byline Podcast and our latest interview is particularly important. Together, we offer A Beginner’s Guide to Russian Influence: Trump and the US.
It’s never too late to understand that Trump-Russia is very real. Please have a listen to our interview in the link above.
The End of the Affair
I had an overnight read of the National Security Betrayal Strategy — fascist clickbait — and I heard Marci Shore’s words in my mind: It’s the end of the affair.
Here is my Q&A with her from March in my Hot Type column for Byline Supplement on Trump’s ongoing surrender to Putin and what that means for Europe.
And here is an excerpt from that report, where she predicted more “moral depravity to come.”
Hot Type: The End of the Affair
A Q&A with Marci Shore by Heidi Siegmund Cuda
Originally published in Byline Supplement, March 8, 2025
America thought it won the Cold War in 1989 but didn’t read the battlefield. It ended on February 28, 2025, when the United States surrendered to Russia in full view of the world.
Among the Americans watching Oval Office theatre craft in shame and horror was Dr Marci Shore, a Yale professor of intellectual history who wrote The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.
She taught me about the Polish aphorism ‘knocking from below’ – just when you think things can’t get any worse, you hear knocking from below.
“That was precisely the phrase that came into my mind when I was watching,” Shore said. “I thought, there is no bottom. You think you are prepared for everything, and then there is still more depravity to come.”
She told me she didn’t think she could be shocked anymore.
“But I was. I was shocked when I watched that video and filled with a kind of shame and disgust that I still don’t quite have words for,” she said. “It was so appalling that I thought how, as an American, am I ever even going to apologize to the rest of the world for this?”
What follows is a Q & A with Shore, pieced together from an interview for my podcast RADICALIZED Truth Survives and a separate follow up interview exclusive to Byline Supplement, edited for brevity and clarity. Shore and her husband Dr Timothy Snyder, also a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny and On Freedom, are two of America’s most important contemporary thought leaders on Eastern Europe.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: I am touring Europe right now, and I received so many messages from home from broken-hearted people (last Friday) telling me that they were so sorry, filled with despair and shame. I know that is the intention when you get these sort of theatre craft moments. But to you, who wrote The Ukrainian Night, who understands history, what did that event signify? Who was Trump representing and please give us your take on how Zelenskyy responded, because we’re all still trying to figure it out from a place of a broken heart.
Dr. Marci Shore: Let me start perhaps with the broken hearts. There are a couple pieces to that question. The only positive thing I saw about what happened yesterday was that it was such a decisive moment of the end of the affair. I felt like Europeans in particular, perhaps finally, belatedly, and this, of course, started with Munich, were shaken into realizing they absolutely cannot trust Washington.
This idea of America – despite all our problems and our hypocrisy and our racism and our violence – that it was still somehow the world’s deepest liberal democracy and the land of the free and the home of the brave, and everything that Soviet communism was not – will, in the end, be the rescuer and guarantor of freedom. I feel like the last vestiges of that are finally dissolving.
And the responses of all of these European leaders were so unequivocal, and many of them are often equivocal, but even the ones who are often equivocal were responding in an unequivocal way. There was such disgust and such a sense of betrayal. One of the things I’ve been telling my Ukrainian friends and colleagues, and not just Ukrainians, but other Europeans as well, since the election, is, you cannot trust us.
There’s this kind of Freudian denial that, ‘Okay, but it couldn’t really be that bad. In the end, it’s the United States, they couldn’t actually go that far, we couldn’t really switch sides. Your President couldn’t really be working for Putin’. I said, ‘No, you absolutely cannot trust us. It has to be over. You have to take that in, that these are not people you can work with, either rationally or cynically. They are volatile, they are narcissistic, they are moral nihilists. They cannot be trusted’.
It’s not, of course, that there are no good people in Washington. There are good people. In fact, there are people I would trust personally, but they have been deprived of power in the present situation.
So that’s the first thing I would say now. The question as to who Trump and Vance were representing, I would say that these are two people who, in every situation, first and foremost, represent themselves. There are no higher values, there are no first principles. There’s just narcissism. They represent themselves.
Now it’s also very possible that in representing himself and doing what is in his best interest, that Trump belongs to Putin in some way. I don’t think we know the background reasons for that. We can speculate, but in some sense, it doesn’t matter. They clearly were not representing American interests in a broader sense, in terms of the American people. We are now going to be isolated from the rest of the world. They’re representing their own interests. And [last Friday], they were representing Russia’s interest. It looks very clearly like it was all some kind of a setup.
HSC: We have decades of unequivocal evidence that Trump is a Russian asset, and yet we suffer from collaborators that have been so willing to parrot his ‘Russian hoax’ propaganda.
MS: I have a kind of psychological fascination with the different ways in which people go over to the dark side. Trump is clearly a pathological narcissist, perhaps that and a psychopath. That’s his own category. Let’s call that a marginal demographic. But what about people like Lindsey Graham, who say that Trump gave us a master class in representing the interest of America.
No. Trump gave us a master class in moral nihilism, and Lindsey Graham gave us a master class in selling one’s soul to the devil. Why did Marco Rubio sell his soul to the devil? Like, these are not people who just started out deranged with no concept of what is right or what is wrong. They have made a decision to get in line. So this problem of collaboration and why people are induced to collaborate is something that’s fascinated me for a long time. I have no decisive answers, but I’ve seriously been thinking in the past several days about putting together either an undergraduate or graduate seminar on the topic of fictional and non-fictional versions of Faust. Under what circumstances do people sell their souls to the devil? Because not only were Trump and Vance ganging up in this grotesque, obscene performance to humiliate Zelenskyy, but all of these other people like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio are getting in line. These men who were supposed to be representing the United States of America were acting like adolescent bullies on the playground who have some kind of momentary advantage, and they take pleasure in beating up somebody, who happened to show up alone or wasn’t wearing his sneakers that day so he couldn’t run that fast.
It was just grotesque. This whole trope of ‘you have to say thank you. You have to express your gratitude’. This is a classic trope from domestic violence abuse. We might also recall that Vance is on record as saying, ‘I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.’ Vance has done nothing at all for Ukraine. And Trump’s relationship to Zelensky began with blackmail in 2019 and has graduated to extortion with this rare mineral deal.
With apologies for the many victims of child abuse who have emerged from that and not passed on that behavior and self reflected on it and were resilient, but Vance is behaving like a victim of child abuse, which he very possibly was, who has simply no other coping mechanism as an adult, other than to turn around and bully and humiliate people just because he can. It was absolutely obscene. I don’t know that I will ever lose that feeling of nausea I had watching that scene.
Zelensky learned English relatively recently as an adult. Three years ago, he wasn’t speaking English in public at all. He’s done a phenomenal job, but it’s difficult for him. It’s imperfect, and he struggles to express himself. And so he was at a huge disadvantage. And yet he still maintained his dignity, which I think was extraordinary.
As do other leaders. Lech Wałęsa, together with 38 other Solidarity activists and former political prisoners, signed an open letter to Trump saying that the atmosphere in the Oval Office was reminiscent of their interrogations by the secret police during the communist period. They wrote: ‘The prosecutors and judges on orders of the all-powerful communist secret police also explained to us that they were the ones holding all the cards, while we held none. They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that because of us thousands of innocent people were suffering. They deprived us of freedom and civil rights, because we did not agree to collaborate with those in power and we failed to show them gratitude. We are shocked that President Volodymyr Zelensky was treated similarly.’
HSC: I’ve studied Russian disinformation, hybrid warfare, theater craft and for Trump, this is all theater. But can you elaborate on how in reality, this is not a game?
MS: That for me was a really important moment in the exchange, when Trump was yelling in his stereotypical ‘I’m a casino guy and I had a reality show’ way, ‘You’re not holding any cards’. And Zelensky said something very profound. He said, ‘We’re not playing cards’. And that exchange captured in some sense the essence of the relationship between those two men. And moreover, what kind of politics they represent. And I’m not saying Zelensky is a perfect person or a perfect leader. There are no such perfect people or perfect leaders. But Zelensky is living in a real world for which there are real, concrete human lives at stake. He does feel a very real responsibility for those real lives.
And Trump is living in a world where nothing is real and everything is a casino game, and that clash of living in the world of reality and living in the world of not reality is philosophically, politically, ideologically, the most profound contrasts between those men. That exchange captured it quite brilliantly.
HSC: I’m going to give you a Zelensky quote that I think is really important. He said, ‘During the war, everybody has problems, even you, but you have a nice ocean and don’t feel it’. I’m summarizing it now, but he said, ‘You will feel it in the future’. To me, obviously Russia is a fascist regime that you cannot trust, that doesn’t follow through on any promises or treaties or anything. And I would just love your thoughts on what Zelensky was relaying in that moment.
MS: Zelensky was saying simply something that is obvious to anyone who is living in the real world, which is that reality will come back to bite you. In the end, there are consequences for one’s actions. In the end, getting into bed with a neo-totalitarian dictator is going to have a cost, the consequences of which cannot be foreseen.
Trump lives in a world in which he takes no responsibility for anything. He has set in place a regime in which the first things he’s doing are firing federal aviation workers. There’s a whole string of plane crashes. You have the richest guy in the world come in and shut down USAID and take food away, literally, from starving children. USAID was feeding some 800,000 people in soup kitchens in the capital of Sudan. And you have Elon Musk come in and shut it all down. You are burning everything to the ground. You’re taking no responsibility for the measles outbreak, for the starving children, for the plane crashes, for anything else. And Zelensky is saying, ‘at some point that will catch up with you’. And that’s not counterintuitive. That’s just life in any kind of dealing with Putin.
The idea that you can have some kind of a relationship with a murderous dictator… Vladimir Kara-Murza tweeted to Trump recently. He said, ‘Okay, just know that if you go and shake that man’s hand, you’re shaking a hand that’s covered in blood’.
HSC: In that fictional world where Trump lives, he doesn’t see the blood.
MS: It’s all right there in front of our faces. He tells you who he is every single day, and he’s shouting at Zelensky, like, ‘this guy has this horrible hatred for Putin. I mean, he’s just being completely unreasonable. Like, how are we supposed to negotiate when you have this irrational hatred for Putin’...
Well, imagine that you’re watching someone slit the throats of your children in front of you day after day after day, and you’re saying, ‘Oh, well, why are you holding anything against him? Really, it’s just a kid. It’s just a few 1000 kids’. And they’re walking around without arms and legs, and what about all those people who are being chained to boards and tortured with electric shocks, or the children who have been kidnapped. Or, what about all those kids who are buried under rubble? In Mariupol, my friends in Lviv, their next-door neighbors in September – a woman, a mother and three daughters – were in seconds buried under rubble and killed because Putin the Russians sent a missile to Lviv to a residential apartment building for absolutely no reason.
And the father in this family was just pulled out of the rubble, and he’s watching, covered in blood, as the corpses of his wife and three daughters are pulled out of this rubble. And you say, ‘Oh, this guy has got such a hatred for Putin. Why?’
I mean, you really have to be a psychopath to even have it in you to articulate such a question, and it’s just so revolting that I don’t quite have words for it.
One of the things that’s very similar between Trump and Putin is that these are people for whom other people’s lives mean absolutely nothing. Whether that’s a mental defect or whether something went wrong in their childhoods or whether that’s how they’re hardwired, I can’t answer. But what we do know is that other people’s lives mean absolutely nothing to them. There’s this extraordinary moral nihilism, we’re staring into an abyss, and that gives them a free hand, because they are unconstrained by anything, because nothing means anything. They have no real relationships with anybody.
HSC: And that is how with ease they are always pushing their unreality at all of our own detriment. How do we somehow make people cherish and preserve truth and empathy and decency in their every single waking moment? Because it’s going to be up to us to be able to not allow these vampires to take everything from us.
MS: It’s an excellent question, and the first thing I would say to that is in order for us to be able to make judgments about good and evil and right and wrong, we need to be grounded in truth and falsehood. Empirical reality is the grounding that allows us the possibility of making those moral judgments. So if we lose that epistemological grounding, we have nothing to stand on.
We have to go back to a world in which there is a distinction.
HSC: I don’t think we’ve even had the chance to mourn yet that our alliances have shifted. I’m in Europe, and when I meet people, they’re not comfortable often until they know what side of this I’m on. And I understand that. Is there one last thing you can say to people to help them gain the type of emotional mental distance in order to still be effective at whatever small acts of resistance they can do until we figure out a much bigger play, because I can’t endure the thought that we would just already tap out.
MS: One thing that I tell my students and I tell myself, is that we have to keep speaking out, even if it doesn’t seem effective, we cannot put our heads down and get in line. And this is something I feel as a historian looking back at the 1930s, the fact is that most people, most of the time, will put their heads down and get in line.
Vance tweeted right around the time of the inauguration that my husband, Tim Snyder, was an embarrassment to Yale, where we’ve long been faculty members. And what terrified me was not that Vance tweeted this, but that none of my colleagues, and especially my colleagues in the law school, publicly spoke up to defend him. And not because I suspected they really liked Vance or were on his side, and not because I suspected the University administration, which I know loves Tim and was on his side, but because I feel like there are moments where people become interested in the self preservation of the institution, or as writer Masha Gessen just wrote, it’s rational to put one’s head down and not protest, because in any individual case, you’re taking risk and bearing cost. But those actions that are rational to appease and to obey on an individual level are precisely what makes tyranny possible.
This post-modern creation of a fictitious world, a series of fictitious worlds – an attempt to disassemble any notion that there is such a thing as truth, and therefore, rather than mobilizing a population, you’re demobilizing a population and making that population feel helpless – that comes from Russia.
Spin doctors who call themselves political technologists… in the 1990s, was a historical moment. It’s a chapter in intellectual history that was consciously put together as a new model of power. And it happened first in Russia. And if Tim and I recognized what was going on sooner than other people when Trump appeared on the scene in late 2015 and into 2016, I’m sure it’s not because I was smarter than other Americans, but because I had been watching what was happening in Russia and Ukraine.
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Dr. Marci Shore teaches modern European intellectual history. She received her M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1996 and her Ph.D from Stanford University in 2001; she taught at Indiana University before coming to Yale. Currently, she teaches at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński’s The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, and The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution (paperback edition, 2024). In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current book project, a history of phenomenology in East-Central Europe, tentatively titled “Eyeglasses Floating in Space: Central European Encounters That Came about While Searching for Truth.” She is a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Presently she is co-curating a Public Seminar/Eurozine forum “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life” (title inspired by Nietzsche).
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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Thanks for re-upping this from March. I am bereft at the loss of my country today, truly now unmoored from allies and fully adrift