He is. And SOME of those who voted for him will come to see that. The worst thing we can do is to dismiss them all as unreachable & so not bother trying, b/c that can only be a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to play smart, tho: contempt & abuse will only push them further in the wrong direction.

But not everyone who voted for Trump is part of a cult. People had all sorts of reasons for voting for him/not voting against him, not all of them wholly unreasonable. It will be counterproductive to tar them all with the same disparaging brush.

Freedland is rather assuming that Putin's aims and Trump's aims are not one and the same thing.
I don't think that's a safe assumption.

Deluded

My money's on him *cough* falling out of a window at some point ...

Exactly. And the tragedy is: they're not wrong. It's just that the only radical change on offer is of the worst possible kind.