Inimitable Putin: This president’s crude bossiness reflects a longtime undercurrent of insecurity that has coursed throughout his lifetime. His outrageous business dealings and gold-embossed narcissism with girlfriends and wives made him New York tabloid fodder throughout the ’80s and ’90s. He claimed to hate mass media but instead thrived on the attention because, beneath the bravado, he desperately craved both approval and love. As his political aspirations grew, so did his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, a self-styled macho man who pretended democracy to win friends in the West. Putin was his kind of president, and their affinity, while no longer as demonstrable as it was a decade ago, when he more than once labeled the Russian leader a “genius,” remains solid.

For the outgoing California Governor Gavin Newsome, the occupant of the White House is “a T-Rex. You mate with him or he devours you, one or the other.” But if he is a T-Rex, he is a needy one lacking in emotional self-awareness, which makes him entirely unlike the smoothly articulate Putin, who despite his dictatorial rule, is at all times cool, calm, and collected. He drives Europe mad by using his equanimity to assert dominance. While Putin is ruthless in the extreme, his public side displays none of this same ruthlessness. On the contrary. He does not shout, he does not scream, he does not publicly berate. He does not need to. All have come to recognize his fearsome resolve. The American president, no matter how hard he tries to don a strongman’s mask — and he has been trying very hard as of late — will forever remain a caricature, hardly a blip on Putin’s radar.