Darkness Over D.C.

A difficult night for our nation and our nation’s capital. A challenging day ahead.

It’s Thursday. Late last night, a tragedy on the Potomac (more below); today, confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill for Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel. We’ll be covering them live this morning at 9:30 a.m.

The only way through is together.

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Of Course They’re a Doormat

by Bill Kristol

Yesterday’s newsletter went out under the headline “Congressional Republicans Prefer Being a Doormat.” An old friend emailed just a few minutes after it arrived in his inbox, gently mocking me: “Dog Bites Man. Details at 11:00.”

Fair enough. This is supposed to be a NEWSletter. Congressional Republicans rolling over for Trump isn’t news.

After all, the sad saga of the GOP’s capitulation to Trump has had a long run. It’s been a key story in American politics for almost a decade. This year’s college graduates would have had to have been following politics at a very young age to remember anything else. The regularity of Republicans surrendering to Trump even antedates the regularity of Andy Reid, Patrick Mahomes, and the Chiefs making the Super Bowl.

So I suppose there was no reason to expect a stiffening of the Republican spine in 2025 after all these years of bending the knee. To the contrary: If Republicans wouldn’t stand up to Trump in 2016 when he was a mere candidate; if Republicans wouldn’t stand up to him when he was a first-term president; if Republicans stayed with him after January 6th; if Republicans even renominated him in 2024 then why, after he won re-election in 2024, would they have second thoughts now?

The problem—and it is a real problem for the nation, not just for the Republican party—is that the need for some Republican-led checks and balances is more necessary than ever. Trump and Trumpism have progressed over their decade in the spotlight to embrace and advance a more thoroughgoing extremist and authoritarian agenda than ever before. And many of the guardrails that previously kept him in check him are far weaker now than they were before.

So with Trump riding high, and with (narrow) Republican majorities in Congress, it’s more important than ever before that some Republicans in Congress stand up to him. But the fact that he’s riding so high makes it more unlikely.

This paradox is on vivid display today. The Senate will hold confirmation hearings on three cabinet nominees who are wildly unqualified and/or ill-suited for their posts, and a committee vote on a fourth. These cranks and conspiracists and extremists provide an occasion when some—okay, a few—Republicans could show courage and independence.

They could say, as they said when they opposed Matt Gaetz, that they are saving Donald Trump from some bad advice or some impetuous decisions. They could say that the farcical back-and-forth on the defunding, then refunding, then defunding again of government programs, shows that he needs experienced cabinet secretaries to execute his plans. If they were honest with themselves, they could look at Pete Hegseth’s first days as secretary of defense, removing portraits of predecessors from the Pentagon in a Stalinist way and jumping into culture wars in a juvenile way, and acknowledge that one more of them should have stepped forward to try to get someone at least remotely up to that rather important job.

Perhaps some will rise to the occasion during the hearings for Kash Patel for FBI director and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, as well as the second day of hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for HHS secretary and the committee vote on reporting to the floor Russ Vought’s nomination for OMB director.

I’m not holding my breath. Dog bites man, after all.

But it's also true that these votes matter only to a point. Even if all these nominees were—mirabile dictu!—to be defeated, the problem wouldn’t be solved. Trump is the problem, not his individual appointees. And Trumpism is the problem, not the individual instances of idiocy and demagoguery and extremism and conspiracism.

Still, some checking would be better than no checking. Some demonstration of independence and responsibility—even if by only a handful of Republican senators—would be better than none. Weak guardrails are better than none. And while all those who care about constitutional government and liberal democracy and a free and humane society will do the best we can regardless of what a few Republican senators do, the next two years would be more difficult with no help from any Republicans on the Hill.

In any case, though, we need to do our best, as Trump and his allies do their worst.

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Tragedy on the Potomac

by Jim Swift

Last night, a passenger jet, American Airlines Flight 5342, crashed into a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter next to Reagan National Airport over the Potomac. The flight, a commuter plane from Wichita, Kansas, carried sixty passengers and four crew members. The Army helicopter, out of nearby Fort Belvoir, carried three soldiers. It was on a training mission.

As of this morning, there were no known survivors, and Washington, D.C.’s fire chief said he didn’t believe there would be. A first responder told The Bulwark the scene was “horrific.”

The airport remains closed until 11 a.m. today, when partial operations will resume.

The U.S. Figure Skating governing body confirmed to the BBC that “several members of our skating community were sadly aboard American Airlines Flight 5342.” Some Russian citizens were also on board.

Kansas Senator Jerry Moran attended a 1 a.m. press conference with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and newly sworn-in Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Moran noted that the direct flight route, which he personally had sought to secure from American Airlines, was “personal” to him: “I know that flight. I’ve flown it many times myself. I lobbied American Airlines to begin having a direct, nonstop flight service to DCA. . . . And it is certainly true that in Kansas and in Wichita, in particular, we’re going to know people who are on this flight, know their family members, know somebody.”

For the unfamiliar, DCA is the central airline hub for the nation’s capital. It’s nestled on the Virginia side of the Potomac River but is a short drive or Metro ride to downtown D.C. as well as Capitol Hill. Over the years, it has added more and more flights, undergone major additions, and become increasingly critical for those coming to and from the city.

The airport recently observed a solemn anniversary, that of Air Florida Flight 90, which crashed into the Potomac on January 13, 1982. There were only five survivors of that flight.

Vice President JD Vance called for prayers for those impacted. President Trump handled the accident with somewhat less grace. Our thoughts and prayers are with those who are affected.

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Quick Hits

THAT’S THE INCOMPETENCE WE KNOW AND LOVE: Yesterday, the Office of Management and Budget promulgated a two-sentence memo rescinding the earlier memo that paused all federal grants and financial assistance. The president’s executive order, which the original memo was implementing, still remains valid, but OMB is directing all questions about it to “your agency General Counsel.”

That seemed like a walkback because it was a walkback. But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was insistent that nothing was being walked back at all:

A couple lessons here. Mainly, it’s important to distinguish between three kinds of statements—statements the president or members of the administration make, statements of law, and true facts about the real world. The former two cannot change the latter, and whether Trump’s statements can actually change the law is still open to debate.

Just because Trump says the body of water from Texas to Florida is the Gulf of America doesn’t mean we have to call it that. Just because someone says government employees can take a buyout or be forced back to the office doesn’t make it automatically true. The default response to every pronouncement from Trump about his intentions or about facts should be, “We’ll see.”

The fact that OMB rescinded the funding freeze memo after it caused major problems in the real world should be at least a little reassuring. Leavitt seems to think that Trump can make policy in pectore. Again, we’ll see.

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IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU’RE LUCKY: Even as we navigate the peaks and valleys of our short-term problems, we can’t ignore the creeping doom of our long-term problems. The New York Times has the story on one of them:

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history—33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.

There was progress in math, but not enough to offset the losses of the pandemic.

This isn’t the time or place to get into a whole disquisition on literacy and civic engagement and news and politics, or whether the American primary education system’s long slide into mediocrity so eroded our society that Trumpism became viable. But think of it this way: It probably didn’t help.

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THESE BARS WON’T BE GOLD: Former New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez was sentenced yesterday to eleven years in prison for bribery, fraud, and acting as a foreign agent while chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This is a good thing. The law should apply equally to everyone—and the punishment for abusing the government for personal benefit and the benefit of other countries should be enough to deter people from doing it.

But Menendez’s conviction does raise one interesting question: Why didn’t he just announce his candidacy for president and run out the clock? It works!

You know what else works: getting on Trump’s good side and securing a pardon. And, wouldn’t you know it, Menendez is trying to do just that.

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