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This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

On Thursday, Donald Trump sent out a truly repulsive tweet about Evan Gershkovich, the Wall

Street Journal reporter who has been tained in Russia for over a year.

Trump promised that Vladimir Putin will release Gershkovich, quote, for 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 at a larger story.

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

sabotaging current U.S. foreign 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 how our institutions are now hanging by a thread

...