Most Americans think Potemkin Village is a car dealer. Putin, being Russian, knows Trump's Whitehouse is a Potemkin Village. He might also know "It is what it is" as a Mafia term for a hit.

Vladimir Putin is on a worldwide quest to destroy democracy. Putin knows Trump’s Whitehouse is a Potemkin facade. Putin is using Trump to destroy the very foundation of modern democratic government, the United States Constitution.

"A senior administration official involved in the pandemic response said, “Everyone is busy trying to create a Potemkin village for him every day. You’re not supposed to see this behavior in liberal democracies that are founded on principles of rule of law. Everyone bends over backwards to create this Potemkin village for him and for his inner circle.”

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"When the president claimed in a recent interview for HBO that the virus was “under control,” Axios reporter Jonathan Swan interjected. “How?” Swan asked. “A thousand Americans are dying a day.”“They are dying, that’s true,” Trump said. “It is what it is.” 

FROM: 

WASHINGTON POST

The lost days of summer: How Trump fell short in containing the virus

Robert Costa

“A thousand Americans are dying a day.”“They are dying, that’s true,” Trump said. “It is what it is.” In saying "It is what it is" Trump means Americans will take a hit, die so Trump can be reelected.

"In the last chapter of Putin’s People, Belton documents the activities of the biznesmeny who have circled around Trump for 30 years, bailing him out, buying apartments in his buildings for cash, offering him “deals,” always operating in “the half-light between the Russian security services and the mob, with both sides using the other to their own benefit.” Among them are Shalva Tchigirinsky, a Georgian black marketeer who met Trump in Atlantic City in 1990; Felix Sater, a Russian with mob links whose company served, among other things, as the intermediary for Trump buildings in Manhattan, Fort Lauderdale, and Phoenix; Alex Shnaider, a Russian metals trader who developed the Trump hotel in Toronto; and Dmitry Rybolovlev, an oligarch who purchased Trump’s Palm Beach mansion in 2008 for $95 million, more than double what Trump had paid for it in 2004, just as the financial crisis hit Trump’s companies.

While many of these stories have been written before, Belton puts them in the larger context. The hard truth is that Trump was not exceptional. He was just another amoral Western businessman, one of many whom the ex-KGB elite have promoted and sponsored around the world, with the hope that they might eventually be of some political or commercial use. Many of these bets didn’t pay off, but in 2016, Putin finally hit the jackpot: His operatives helped elect an American president with long-standing Russian links who would not only sow chaos, but systematically undermine America’s alliances, erode American influence, and even, in the spring of 2020, render the American federal government dysfunctional, damaging the reputation of both the U.S. and democracy more broadly."

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The Atlantic

A KGB Man to the End

The origins of Putin’s worldview—and the rise of Russia’s new ruling class

Anne Applebaum September 2020 Issue