Shame

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. 

Donald Trump: “Russia fought for that land in Ukraine and lost a lot of soldiers doing it, so Russia should keep it.” @JayinKyiv.
pic.twitter.com/CWpndg7HFu

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) February 19, 2025

  Peter Baker at NYT:

For more than a decade, the West has faced off against the East again in what was widely called a new cold war. But with President Trump back in office, America is giving the impression that it could be switching sides.

Even as American and Russian negotiators sat down together on Tuesday for the first time since Moscow’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago, Mr. Trump has signaled that he is willing to abandon America’s allies to make common cause with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

As far as Mr. Trump is concerned, Russia is not responsible for the war that has devastated its neighbor. Instead, he suggests that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s invasion of it. To listen to Mr. Trump talk with reporters on Tuesday about the conflict was to hear a version of reality that would be unrecognizable on the ground in Ukraine and certainly would never have been heard from any other American president of either party.

In Mr. Trump’s telling, Ukrainian leaders were at fault for the war for not agreeing to surrender territory and therefore, he suggested, they do not deserve a seat at the table for the peace talks that he has just initiated with Mr. Putin. “You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who, in fact, did not start it. “You could have made a deal.”

...

“Some of the most shameful comments uttered by a president in my lifetime,” Ian Bond, deputy director of the Center for European Reform in London, wrote online. “Trump is siding with the aggressor, blaming the victim. In the Kremlin they must be jumping for joy.”

Intimidated Donors

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. 

 Lisa Lerer, Reid J. Epstein and Theodore Schleifer at NYT:

The demoralization and fear gripping blue America in the early weeks of President Trump’s administration have left liberal groups and their allies struggling for cash, hurting their ability to effectively combat the right-wing transformation of the federal government.

The small-dollar online spigot that powered opposition to the first Trump administration has slowed to a trickle as shaken liberal voters withhold their donations.

Charitable foundations that have long supported causes like voting rights, L.G.B.T.Q. equality and immigrants’ rights are pulling back, devoting time to prepare for expected investigations from the Republican-led Congress.

And some of the country’s biggest liberal donors have paused giving, frustrated with what they see as Democrats’ lack of vision and worried about retaliation from a vengeful president. Some Democrats say a few of their reliable donors are now openly supporting Mr. Trump, or at least looking to curry favor with him.

Fund-raising slowdowns are common after a presidential defeat and before marquee midterm races fully begin. But interviews with more than 50 donors, strategists and leaders of activist organizations show that many Democrats believe this year is different.

While Mr. Trump has not taken action against any liberal groups or lawmakers, Democrats worry his frequent threats of retribution during the campaign have led to a chilling effect on the charitable foundations and nonprofit advocacy groups that have long been pillars of the country’s civil society.

...

Some donors are hiring additional legal counsel to address worries about tax audits, congressional investigations and lawsuits. Others are moving assets overseas, or at least their foundations to Democratic-controlled states.

Donors increasingly want to stay anonymous, which could slow the flow of cash to Democratic super PACs because they must eventually disclose their donors.

Donors have reason to be afraid.

Alan Rappeport, Andrew Duehren and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

The Internal Revenue Service is preparing to give a team member working with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive taxpayer data, people familiar with the matter said.

The systems at the I.R.S. contain the private financial data tied to millions of Americans, including their tax returns, Social Security numbers, addresses, banking details and employment information.

“Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said. “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”

 

Napoleonic Code

 Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. 

He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2025

Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan at NYT:

By late afternoon, Mr. Trump had pinned the statement to the top of his Truth Social feed, making it clear it was not a passing thought but one he wanted people to absorb. The official White House account on X posted his message in the evening.

The quote is a variation of one sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, although its origin is unclear.

...

The Trump administration at first did not offer a public legal rationale for blowing through the statutes that provide various kinds of job protections to the officials that Mr. Trump has summarily fired, including members of independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board.

But last week, the administration offered something of an explanation. Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general at the Justice Department, sent a letter to Congress saying the department would not defend the constitutionality of statutes that limit firing members of independent agencies before their terms were up. Such laws say the president cannot remove such an official at will, but only for a specific cause like misconduct.

While not using the phrase “unitary executive theory,” Ms. Harris’s letter echoed its ideological tenet that the Constitution does not allow Congress to enact a law “which prevents the president from adequately supervising principal officers in the executive branch who execute the laws on the president’s behalf,” and said the Trump administration will try to get the Supreme Court to overturn a 1935 precedent to the contrary.

...

But, taken at face value, Mr. Trump’s statement on Saturday went much further, suggesting that even if what he is doing unambiguously breaks an otherwise valid law, that would not matter if he says his motive is to save the country.

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While national security cases rarely get litigated, when they have, the Supreme Court has been skeptical of sweeping theories of presidential power — striking down President Harry S. Truman’s attempted seizure of steel mills as a Korean War measure, for example.

In any case, Mr. Trump’s moves so far have largely not been in the realm of national security. Rather, he has been attempting to stamp out pockets of independence that Congress created within the executive branch in order to centralize greater power in the White House over issues that are largely ones of domestic policy.

Mr. Trump and some of his allies have pushed the political argument that the nation has been under siege from what they characterize as leftist policies and values, and has fallen into a spiral of decline that must be reversed by any means necessary.

Among them, Mr. Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought, wrote an essay in 2022, declaring that the United States was already in a “post-Constitutional moment” and that to push back against liberals, it was necessary to be “radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”

Trump: "He who saves his County does not violent any Law."

Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte in the 1970 film Waterloo asserting his dictatorial power:

"He who saves a nation violates no law."

Waterloo 1970 https://t.co/VeZIwnSunS pic.twitter.com/WIVKMMspxi

— Aaron (@BlueCardPack76) February 15, 2025

I've seen many news reports that Trump's Napoleon quote came from the 1970 Rod Steiger movie "Waterloo," but this isn't exactly true. The line was borrowed from a 1916 translation of Jules Bertaut's book of Napoleon quotes and has appeared in many conservative political texts. pic.twitter.com/c5WzS03tUl

— Jason Colavito (@JasonColavito) February 15, 2025

Trump National Security: Appeasement and Incompetence

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. 

David E. Sanger and Steven Erlanger at NYT:

The top foreign policy official for the European Union had a blunt assessment on Friday of the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to give Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, much of what he wants in Ukraine, even before negotiations to end the three-year war begin.

“It’s appeasement,” the official, Kaja Kallas, declared at the Munich Security Conference. “It has never worked.”

Ms. Kallas, a former prime minister of Estonia, was hardly the only European diplomat uttering the word “appeasement,” with all its historical resonance, though she was one of the few willing to do so on the record.

It was an almost-universal description of the Trump administration’s disorganized and often publicly contradictory approach to the questions seizing the continent: What kind of peace deal does President Trump have in mind? And will it be done with Mr. Putin over the heads of both the Ukrainians and the Europeans, whom Mr. Trump apparently expects to bear the burden of Ukraine’s future security?

Adam Wren at Politico:

Policymakers across the continent are still reeling from VP JD Vance’s blistering speech yesterday, during which he chided Europe and told it to open up to the far right, as NYT’s Jim Tankersley, Steven Erlanger and David Sanger report. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz derided Vance’s comments, citing Germany’s history with Nazis, Bloomberg’s Christoph Rauwald and Stephanie Lai report. (“No one is talking about anything else,” a senior Eastern European official told POLITICO’s Robbie Gramer, Paul McLeary, Jack Detsch and Joe Gould).

Vance’s speech could be remembered as one of the most important speeches a sitting vice president ever delivered. Quick: Recall any speech former VP Mike Pence ever made while in office.

tic:

Day-to-day operations at the Pentagon and other agencies are usually run by a deputy secretary. The previous deputy under Lloyd Austin, Kath Hicks, has a Ph.D. from MIT and years of experience in national defense, including at the Pentagon. Trump’s nominee to succeed her is the billionaire Steve Feinberg, who co-founded Cerberus Capital. He has no military or Pentagon experience. (Likewise, Trump’s pick for secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, is a wealthy businessman and art collector who has never served in the military or any government position.)

Below the secretary, several undersecretaries serve as the senior managers of the institution, and the news here is also worrisome. In 2020, Trump tried to nominate Bradley Hansell, a special assistant to Trump in his first term, as the deputy undersecretary for intelligence (in order to replace someone whose loyalty came into question among Trump’s advisers), a nomination that was returned to Trump without action from the Senate. This time, Trump has nominated Hansell (whose background is in venture capital) for the more senior job of undersecretary, despite his lack of qualifications. Trump has also tapped Emil Michael, a tech investor and executive at Uber and Klout, as undersecretary for research and engineering. Michael is a lawyer; his predecessor in the research and engineering post in the Biden administration, Heidi Shyu, was an actual engineer, with long experience in defense production and acquisition issues.

...

After Hegseth, Trump’s most disturbing DOD nomination—at least so far—is Anthony Tata, the retired one-star general whom Trump has put forward as undersecretary for personnel and readiness. Tata’s views are extreme: He once referred to President Barack Obama as a “terrorist,” claimed that former CIA Director John Brennan was trying to kill Trump, and pushed the conspiracy theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton had murdered several of their political opponents. Trump had to pull Tata’s nomination in 2020 as undersecretary for policy (the position Colby is now slated to get) just 90 minutes before his Senate hearing, after being told that the votes to confirm him were not there. The president is now going to send Tata back and humiliate the Republicans into voting for yet another unacceptable nominee.

The Thursday Afternoon Massacre

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  Just a few weeks in, it is not only unethical, it is waging war on ethics.

William K. Rashbaum,Benjamin Weiser., Jonah E. Bromwich and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

Manhattan’s U.S. attorney on Thursday resigned rather than obey an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Then, when Justice Department officials transferred the case to the public integrity section in Washington, which oversees corruption prosecutions, the two men who led that unit also resigned, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.

Several hours later, three other lawyers in the unit also resigned, according to people familiar with the developments.

The serial resignations represent the most high-profile public opposition so far to President Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department. They were a stunning repudiation of the administration’s attempt to force the dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.

The departures of the U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, and the officials who oversaw the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, came in rapid succession on Thursday. Days earlier, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department, Emil Bove III, had ordered Manhattan prosecutors to drop the case against Mr. Adams.

The agency’s justification for dropping the case was explicitly political; Mr. Bove had argued that the investigation would prevent Mr. Adams from fully cooperating with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. Mr. Bove made a point of saying that Washington officials had not evaluated the strength of the evidence or the legal theory behind the case.

Ms. Sassoon, in a remarkable letter addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi, said that Mr. Bove’s order to dismiss the case was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts.”

 

A Good Day for Putin

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  

Brett Samuels at The Hill:

President Trump on Wednesday would not say whether he considers Ukraine to be an “equal member” of efforts to end the war between Moscow and Kyiv, as his administration pushes for negotiations between Russia and the neighboring country it invaded in 2022.

“It’s an interesting question,” Trump said in the Oval Office when asked if he viewed Ukraine as an equal member of the process.

“I think they have to make peace. Their people are being killed, and I think they have to make peace. I said that was not a good war to go into, and I think they have to make peace. That’s what I think.”

Trump said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would “have to do what he has to do” when asked about the prospect of ceding territory as part of negotiations to end the war.

Trump claimed Zelensky’s poll numbers were sinking, and he reiterated his belief that Europe should be doing more to support Ukraine because of its proximity to the conflict.

Trump also called it “unlikely” that Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, before Russia seized Crimea, as part of a negotiated ceasefire.

“They took a lot of land, and they fought for that land and they lost a lot of soldiers,” Trump said. “I’m not making an opinion on it, but I’ve read a lot on it, and a lot of people think that’s unlikely. Some of it will come back. I think some of it will come back, yeah.”

 Anton Troianovski at NYT:

The call came on the same day that Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, declared that the United States would not support Ukraine’s desire for NATO membership. It also came as the Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard, widely seen as sympathetic to Mr. Putin, as the next director of national intelligence.

...

In Moscow, news of the long-awaited call ushered in a wave of barely contained glee. Commentators claimed that the American-led three-year effort to isolate Russia had emphatically ended. They celebrated Mr. Trump’s glowing social media post after the call about “the Great History of Our Nations” and noted that the American president had spoken to Mr. Putin before he had called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

One Russian lawmaker said that Mr. Putin’s call with Mr. Trump “broke the West’s blockade.” Another said that Europeans were surely reading Mr. Trump’s post about it “with horror and cannot believe their eyes.” A third said it was a “day of good news.”

In a sign of the burst of optimism, Russia’s main stock market index jumped 5 percent on Thursday morning to its highest point since last summer, and its battered currency, the ruble, gained against the dollar to its strongest level since September.

The Left Believes in the Green Lantern Theory of Minority Party Leadership

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Hans Nichols at Axios:

A closed-door meeting for House Democrats this week included a gripe-fest directed at liberal grassroots organizations, sources tell Axios.

Why it matters: Members of the Steering and Policy Committee — with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) in the room — on Monday complained activist groups like MoveOn and Indivisible have facilitated thousands of phone calls to members' offices."People are pissed," a senior House Democrat who was at the meeting said of lawmakers' reaction to the calls.

The Democrat said Jeffries himself is "very frustrated" at the groups, who are trying to stir up a more confrontational opposition to Trump.

A Jeffries spokesperson disputed that characterization and noted to Axios that their office regularly engages with dozens of stakeholder groups, including MoveOn and Indivisible, including as recently as Monday

Zoom in: "There were a lot of people who were like, 'We've got to stop the groups from doing this.' ... People are concerned that they're saying we're not doing enough, but we're not in the majority," said one member.Some Democrats see the callers as barking up the wrong tree given their limited power as the minority party in Congress: "It's been a constant theme of us saying, 'Please call the Republicans,'" said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).

I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively," said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.).