Welcome everybody to the Jim Acosta show. It is Thursday, February 20th. I believe this is now one month

since Donald Trump was sworn in as president for his second term, as you can see on

screen with me is Ruth Ben Guiat, the celebrated author, an expert on authoritarianism and dictatorship.

I'm coming to you live from Boston today,

and I've got an event at the Edward Kennedy Institute here in Boston tomorrow with Senator Ron Wyden. I'll talk about more as far as all that is concerned at the end of the program,

but I want to just jump right into this because I have Ruth here,

and I got to let her go here in just a few minutes from now.

But I wanted to start off with, and Ruth, let's talk about this, King Trump.

I'm sure you saw how he put out this post on social media.

The White House did as well portraying him as a king.

Well, guess what?

Not to the Kremlin. It's more like court jester, it sounds like. The Russians aren't buying it. The Russians are laughing at the U.S.

after Donald Trump adopted Kremlin talking points and savaging Ukrainian president,

Volodymyr Zelensky, of course Trump called Zelensky a dictator in response to the Ukrainian

president taking issue with the man in the White House blaming Ukraine for the Russian invasion of

their country. And Ruth, I don't know if you saw this piece in the New York Times. It was basically

how the Russians couldn't be more pleased. They couldn't be more pleasantly surprised by what they're

hearing from Donald Trump. And they got one quote in particular from Dmitri Medvedev, the former

Russian president. I covered him back in the day when he was serving. And he said this to the New

York Times quote, if you actually said this on on social media, if you had told me just

three months ago that these were the words of the U.S. president, I would have laughed out loud.

And so, Ruth, there it is right there. The Russians, they're not buying this King Trump stuff.

...