“The United States has changed teams” Russian dissident Gary Kasparov spoke at the Principles First conference in Washington last weekend, writes Michael Tomasky. Kasparov “uttered a very simple line that chilled the thousand or so people in the room: ‘The United States has changed teams.’ ” The hell it has. I resent being told the United States of America switched sides because the White House is in the grip of a band of lawless sociopaths. Donald Trump’s country-wreckers have changed teams, certainly. Most of the Republican upper echelons has. Many MAGA foot soldiers have as well. How many have aligned with Vladimir Putin’s “might makes right” geopolitics simply because Trump has is unclear. How many would snap out of it after he’s gone is even less clear. The lean toward Russia on the Christian right comes from the ludicrous proposition that there people live under biblical law because the nation is heavily white and Putin is hostile to LGBT people. One conservative Christian couple from Canada moved to Russia to be free from “LGBT ideology” and quickly found themselves free from being free. What is clear after yesterday’s world-shaking, Oval Office shouting match is that Trump and J.D. Vance are all in on Vladimir Putin’s brand of autocracy. “[W]elcome to the Putinization of America, comrade!” Kasparov wrote in The Atlantic Friday morning before the fireworks: Imitation and servility aren’t the same thing. Trump and Musk could attempt to undermine American democracy and create a Russian-style power vertical without kowtowing to…