Maybe the author is being ironical with this statement: "The perfect totalitarian subject, Borat is ever ready to believe anything and nothing."

Masha Gessen is an intelligent writer and she maybe using this to show how silly the whole Russia narrative really is, but the BlueWave will take something else away from it entirely.

Like the real-life characters of Robert Mueller’s investigation, Borat and Tutar have no clear political agenda and no great strategic plan, only a deeply provincial sense of wanting to touch power. Borat has little to offer: a monkey that meets an early demise, a bag of cash, and a young woman. He is a hustler who will promise anything. In his quest, he evokes the Moscow lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and her motley crew of entrepreneurs; it was Veselnitskaya who secured the famous 2016 meeting in Trump Tower during which she had been said to be able to offer up dirt on Hillary Clinton—dirt she didn’t appear to be able to provide. He evokes Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the two Soviet-born businessmen who helped Giuliani do whatever he was trying to do in Ukraine, or who were hoping that Giuliani would help them do whatever they were doing in Ukraine, or both, provided that any of them knew what they were doing other than trying to take advantage of the others. Like Parnas and Fruman, Borat and Tutar find Giuliani to be an easy mark.

More than anyone else in the Trump-Russia orbit, Tutar evokes Maria Butina, the Russian who went to prison for insinuating herself into the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast. Butina was never accused of espionage, and doesn’t appear to have been anything but a believer in some of America’s most conservative ideas—but, in the American imagination, she is a spy. Like Butina as we imagine her, Tutar sidles up to older men who find her irresistible in order to make benefit her diminished nation. She appears to gain access to Giuliani by introducing herself as a journalist from a conservative news outlet called “Patriots Report.” She arrives for the interview in the costume and coiffure of a Fox News bot; she flatters Giuliani and touches his knee repeatedly, and he melts.