excellent interview; also:

Video games. You were a reviewer in the ’90s and also helped make the documentary How Video Games Changed the World. If you could only play one video game for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?
It would probably be Doom, but it would have to be in 1993. I think it came out that year. Doom was such a black-swan event. It was so beyond anything I’d seen that I thought, That’s it. This is the best that games are ever going to get. It can’t get better than this. So if you could freeze time in that moment, I’d be satisfied.

As with his predecessors, Trump’s power over the life and death of entire nations would be practically unbounded. Today, the nuclear deluge he could command would consist of thousands of weapons, each 10 or 20 times more deadly than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nearly 2,000 U.S. strategic nuclear weapons aimed primarily at Russia and China (at a ratio of roughly 2 to 1), with additional dozens aimed at each of several other nations—North Korea, Iran and Syria—would be at a President Trump’s disposal from his first minutes in office. The city of Moscow alone lies in the bore sights of more than 100 U.S. nuclear warheads.

There are no restraints that can prevent a willful president from unleashing this hell.

The Kremlin sees “no reason to expect anything positive from a Clinton Presidency,” Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs and an influential thinker in Moscow on foreign policy, told me this week. As Putin and his allies understand it, Clinton is the standard-bearer of American liberal internationalism, a world view the Russians see as hubristic folly—the same school of thought that sought to remake Russia in its image in the nineteen-nineties, and that later, after those attempts failed, sought alternatively to punish Russia or to ostracize it from the international community. It doesn’t help Clinton’s image inside the Kremlin that she voiced support, however quietly, for anti-Putin protesters in late 2011, when she was serving as Secretary of State. For the country’s ruling élite, Lukyanov said, the prospect of a Clinton Presidency carries the “spectre of unfinished business, this idea that Russia has to change somehow.”

Given all this, Lukyanov told me, it is only logical that Trump generates more enthusiasm in Moscow’s political circles. He is everything that Clinton is not: he speaks admirably of Putin, hints at lifting sanctions and recognizing Russia’s claims in Crimea, and appears largely uninterested in defending Ukraine or the Baltic states from Russian interference or outright aggression. “The essence of his foreign policy is isolationism, a notion that the United States shouldn’t always be getting involved in other people’s business—let them decide,” Lukyanov said. “It’s what Russia has been saying all these years.” When I spoke to Igor Korotchenko, the editor of National Defense magazine and a frequent bombastic guest on Russian state television, he put it even more bluntly. “Trump is appealing because he is not anti-Russian, not a Russophobe, not set on spiteful relations toward Russia,” Korotchenko said.

Tyranny, says Socrates in The Republic, is actually “an outgrowth of democracy.” And would-be tyrants always in every instance claim to be shielding regular people from terrible danger: “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.”

Trump said that he is going to “protect” Americans or some aspect of American life 13 times tonight.

[…]

As The Republic explains, leaders like this inevitably end up “standing up in the chariot of State with the reins in his hand, no longer protector, but tyrant absolute.” This is how liberty “passes into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery.”

The good news is that if you turn off cable news — apparently the only source of Donald Trump’s knowledge about the world — and go outside, you’ll find that the U.S. is probably safer today than it’s ever been.

Despite the misleading statistics Trump used again tonight, the rate of murder and crime overall remains far, far lower than in the past. You also don’t need to worry about ISIS: even after the massacre of 49 people in Orlando, it’s likely more Americans will be killed by bee stings in 2016 than by terrorism.

I am arguing that Trump’s understanding of America’s role in the world aligns with Russia’s geostrategic interests; that his critique of American democracy is in accord with the Kremlin’s critique of American democracy; and that he shares numerous ideological and dispositional proclivities with Putin—for one thing, an obsession with the sort of “strength” often associated with dictators. Trump is making it clear that, as president, he would allow Russia to advance its hegemonic interests across Europe and the Middle East. 

[…]

Now, in an interview with Maggie Haberman and David Sanger of The New York Times, Trump has gone much further, suggesting that he and Putin share a disdain for NATO. Fulfilling what might be Putin’s dearest wish, Trump, in this interview, openly questioned whether the U.S., under his leadership, would keep its commitments to the alliance. According to Haberman and Sanger, Trump “even called into question, whether, as president, he would automatically extend the security guarantees that give the 28 members of NATO the assurance that the full force of the United States military has their back.” Trump told the Times that, should Russia attack a NATO ally, he would first assess whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.”