Anne Applebaum

Trump has destroyed our reputation for good governance.

Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukrainian leaders tell you everything you need to know.

The deadly nuclear plant disaster spiraled thanks to government coverups and disinformation.

Vox blazed across the Internet, dividing its country. Now it’s in parliament.

During the Cold War, we thought ahead about geopolitics. We no longer do.

It’s true: One version of “American greatness” now belongs in the past tense.

She shares similarities with Jacob Golos, who worked for the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

The only deal those who pushed for leaving the EU can genuinely offer - the only one that fits their definition of what Brexit means - is the no-deal deal.

"We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for," Harry Hopkins told his biographer. "We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of peace." Hopkins, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's most important advisers, was not the only one present to have considered the Yalta Conference in February 1945 a great success. In his book on Yalta, the Harvard scholar Serhii Plokhy points out that everybody in the U.S. and British delegations, from gloomy George Kennan to cautious Winston Churchill, was pleased with the result. Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union seemed to have settled their differences, sketched out their spheres of influence and agreed that after the German capitulation, the liberated countries of Europe should all be democracies.

In the old days, these things were done differently. There were KGB couriers, bags of cash, "Moscow gold," secret subsidies for far-left printing presses: The Soviet Communist Party was seeking to undermine Western democracy, covertly. But it was all pretty small-scale. The U.S.S.R. was not rolling in wealth, and it was never in a position to make its supporters wealthy. Being men of ideology, they weren't supposed to want money in any case.

Power seekers in the U.S., Hungary and elsewhere have picked up Moscow’s tricks.

There's a reason despots don't like local news, and a reason why it's so valuable.

Online, it's getting ever harder to maintain our grip on reality.

Let us count the ways.

Congress needs to find a way -- and the will -- to ask the right questions, because Russia's reach into Trump's business is deep.