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Thank you very much for your support. This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host Greg Sergeant.

On Thursday, Donald Trump sent out a truly repulsive tweet about Evan Gershovic, the Wall Street Journal reporter who has been tained in Russia for over a year.

Trump promised that Vladimir Putin will release Gershovic, quote, or me, after the election, meaning for Trump, but not for anyone else.

In other words, elect Trump president and Putin will release him.

If not, he won't. We think this saga gets it a larger

story. This is yet another way Trump is wrecking the guardrails of democracy, this time by openly

sabotaging current U. policy expressly to help himself

politically while aligning himself with the world's autocrats and dictators, in this case Putin.

Today we're discussing this with Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois who writes regularly about Trump's Putinist inclinations.

Grossman has a new piece at Arc Digital about about how our institutions are now hanging by a thread in the face of Trump

and his movement. Welcome Nicholas. Hi thanks for having me.

...