Excerpt from an email sent to my “pen pal” in Ukraine on the occasion of her 18th birthday. 

It’s an interesting time we’re having here in the U.S. because we have a president who is a thug and would like to run our country the way Putin runs Russia. Moreover, the U.S. vice-president, the secretary of state (our foreign minister) and the attorney general (our minister of justice) are in league with him, and nearly all the members of his party in Congress (roughly equivalent to parliament in most countries) are supporting him, so it’s unlikely that he can be removed from office for violating the Constitution and not at all certain that he can be removed as a result of the election scheduled for November 3, 2020. The fate of American democracy hangs in the balance.