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Politics:
“The White House has become an arm of the Kremlin. Every single day you hear from the National Security Advisor, from the President of the United States, from his entire national security team, Kremlin talking points.” — Chris Murphy
The Real Reason Trump Berated Zelensky
In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown.
But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied about it, giving Putin leverage over him…. The pattern of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, but it was extraordinarily damning…
Zelensky had no good options at the White House. He walked into an ambush with a president who empathizes with the dictator who wants to seize Ukraine’s territory. Everyone who spent years warning about Trump’s unseemly affinity for Putin had exactly this kind of disastrous outcome in mind.
If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky.
Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy.
America is ruled by gangsters now
America’s abrupt turn from moral beacon and defender of the free world is unsurprising, given the fundamental immorality of the Trump administration. If you have the morality of a gangster, you will behave like a gangster.
The Path to American Authoritarianism
The country’s vaunted constitutional checks are failing. Trump violated the cardinal rule of democracy when he attempted to overturn the results of an election and block a peaceful transfer of power. Yet neither Congress nor the judiciary held him accountable, and the Republican Party—coup attempt notwithstanding—renominated him for president. Trump ran an openly authoritarian campaign in 2024, pledging to prosecute his rivals, punish critical media, and deploy the army to repress protest. He won, and thanks to an extraordinary Supreme Court decision, he will enjoy broad presidential immunity during his second term.
Democracy survived Trump’s first term because he had no experience, plan, or team. He did not control the Republican Party when he took office in 2017, and most Republican leaders were still committed to democratic rules of the game. Trump governed with establishment Republicans and technocrats, and they largely constrained him. None of those things are true anymore. This time, Trump has made it clear that he intends to govern with loyalists. He now dominates the Republican Party, which, purged of its anti-Trump forces, now acquiesces to his authoritarian behavior.
U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.
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GOP Piles on Trump’s Zelensky Hostility
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and others in the GOP chided Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday following a heated Oval Office meeting with President Trump and Vice President Vance on Friday…
Johnson said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that Zelensky needs to "come to his senses" and return to the negotiating table "in gratitude, or someone else needs to lead the country to do that."
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We see that there are real consequences to Trump’s admiration of and fascination with the world’s dictators, autocrats, and strongmen; that it’s not just a rhetorical preference. It’s become an actual foreign-policy direction for the country, which represents a radical shift in America’s postwar view of the world…
What is anybody going to do about it? Where is the opposition to this shocking turn of events? I just kept thinking: the person cheering this change more than anyone is Vladimir Putin.
A Grand Bargain With Russia Would Be a Disaster
Throughout the 1980s, and into the early 1990s, the New York real estate developer Donald Trump exchanged fan letters with disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon. In 1982, not quite eight years after Nixon’s resignation, Trump described him as “one of this country’s great men.”
Why was Trump such a fan? It might have had something to do with Nixon’s vengeful approach to politics, or their mutual closeness to McCarthyite prosecutor Roy Cohn. But the famously deal-seeking Trump was also an admirer of Nixon’s most famous diplomatic coup: the 1972 visit to China.
Today, the ghost of Nixon is haunting American foreign policy as well, thanks to the administration’s declared intention to strike a grand bargain with Russian President Vladimir Putin that would reorder global politics by sidelining the Europeans and leaving Kyiv in the cold.
One Nation, Under Podcast Bros
Donald Trump has created a new kind of state media.
“The same people who think English should be the official language of the United States think an apostrophe is someone who followed Jesus.” — John Hartzell
Putin Ally Seeks Restart of Gas Pipeline with U.S. Backing
A former spy and close friend of Vladimir Putin has been engineering a restart of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe with the backing of US investors, a once unthinkable move that shows the breadth of Donald Trump’s rapprochement with Moscow.
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