Mike Johnson's Ukraine Trap

Plus: The price we're already paying for Trump's renomination.

Another spring Tuesday, another round of pro forma presidential primaries. Contests in Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin last night showed an ongoing burble of primary-voter discontent with both party’s presumptive nominees. Wisconsin progressives irate over Joe Biden’s support for Israel delivered him another symbolic warning with another round of “uninstructed” protest votes; the nearly 48,000 who did (about 8 percent) more than doubled their goal of surpassing Biden’s 2020 margin of victory over Donald Trump in Wisconsin.

But the 89 percent of the Democratic vote Biden took in Wisconsin was better than Trump did anywhere last night: 79 percent in Connecticut, 82 percent in New York, 84 percent in Rhode Island, 79 percent in Wisconsin. These are remarkably soft numbers for a now-unopposed candidate, especially given the fact that—unlike on the Democratic side—there’s zero ongoing organized Republican effort to use the primaries to send Trump a message. A fifth or so of GOP voters are still just showing up to pull the lever for somebody else instead.

Happy Wednesday.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images.)

Picking the Ukraine Lock

Okay, no fooling this time—House Speaker Mike Johnson sure looks like a guy who’s trying to find a path to “yes” on Ukraine aid, if only he could manage it without risking the proverbial guillotine from hardliners in his own caucus. Here’s CNN:

House Speaker Mike Johnson is pledging to act on Ukraine aid when lawmakers return to Washington next week, but behind the scenes the Louisiana Republican is still undecided on the best path forward and keenly aware of his narrow majority and the threat to his speakership that looms.

It’s a confluence of issues that sources say has left Johnson entertaining a series of options as the speaker has continued his outreach to members about how to proceed during the two-week recess.

Johnson is in a remarkable bind. He’s under increasing pressure to pass Ukraine aid from the White House and from many in his own party.

He knows how dire Ukraine’s need is—and he’s old enough to remember the Afghanistan debacle of a few years ago, how a few days of horrific footage of national collapse can scandalize an apathetic populace into remembering that there are worse things than spending a few billion on defense. He knows who’d take the political blame if that collapse were to repeat itself in Ukraine.

And if he dithers too long, he knows pro-Ukraine members in the House may take matters out of his hands via a discharge petition.

But on the other side of the ledger, he also knows how short his leash is among the anti-Ukraine MAGA hardliners. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has already filed a motion to vacate him as speaker, although she hasn’t yet taken steps to force a vote on it. She’s made it clear that she’d pull that trigger if Johnson moves forward on Ukraine. If she does—if anyone does—it’s basically over for Johnson: Any two Republican defections would doom him, assuming Democrats don’t bail him out, and Democrats bailing him out would doom any future he has in GOP politics too.

Getting out of a trap like that calls for remarkable energy and creativity, and it’s remarkable to watch Johnson sweat and brainstorm on it in real time. He’s spending the current House recess in his test kitchen, cooking up a wide range of candy coatings to try to make the Ukraine pill go down more sweetly for the MAGA base. Could he try to fund aid by seizing Russian assets? Could he nominally structure that aid as a (potentially forgivable, interest-free) loan? Could he tie it to some conservative-friendly policy proposal like easing natural gas exports?

Hey, no harm in trying! The loan idea is ridiculous on the merits, but Noah Rothman over at National Review is correct that its only real function would be “to provide Ukraine’s GOP opponents a face-saving way out of the rhetorical corner into which they’ve painted themselves” while having “no impact on the funding or arms Ukraine needs.” The trouble is that Ukraine’s GOP opponents are allowed to notice this too: “It’s absolutely ridiculous and laughable to even try to tell the American people that Ukraine will ever pay us back!” Greene tweeted yesterday.

—Andrew Egger

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How Much Damage Is Done?

In Monday’s edition of The Triad, JVL considered the question: Even if Trump loses in 2024, how much damage will have been done?

His answer: Most likely, a lot.

Maybe the damage he does to the body politic lingers or becomes semi-permanent . . . I am concerned because if there is a quantum effect from Trump—if his pathology did impact not just the electorate but the institutions of civil society—then even defeating him in 2024 won’t be the end.

I think it’s worth elaborating a bit on this important if depressing point.

We’d all like to put our current unfortunate episode in our history in the rear view mirror.

But it won’t be easy.

When he took over from Richard Nixon in 1974, Gerald Ford said, “Our long national nightmare is over.” And he was mostly right. We held some people accountable, we fixed some institutions, and we were able to move on pretty quickly and fairly successfully.

But 50 years later, our Trumpian nightmare is not over.

After all: An authoritarian demagogue wins the nomination of one of our two major parties. He then wins the presidency. He governs as an authoritarian demagogue. His party—one of our two major parties, with the support of half the country—first falls in line, then is reshaped by him. He loses his reelection bid but attempts a coup, fails—but then re-emerges, utterly unapologetic and unreformed, as dominant as ever in his own party. He wins his party’s nomination for the third straight time.

This has been going on too long to be a mere nightmare. And the repercussions are too serious for us to simply be able to wake up and shake it off.

This was brought home to me recently in a couple of conversations with friends who’ve served in senior national security positions in the U.S. government. They talk to their former counterparts abroad all the time. And what struck them is that we’re already paying a price for Trump’s renomination.

As one of my friends summarized the private comments of his foreign counterparts:

You had the five-alarm fire of January 6th at home. You had the wake-up call of February 24, 2022, from Trump’s friend Putin, abroad. But still the Republican party does not turn its back on Trump? Instead they rush to embrace him? They renominate him? And now the American people are considering putting back in the presidency in November? How could this happen? How do we know, even if he loses, that it won’t happen again? It would be irresponsible not to take the lessons of the last several years seriously.

This is true abroad and it’s true at home. Even if Trump loses this fall, so much damage will already have been done. Even if Republicans pay far more of a price than now seems likely for embracing and imitating Trump, even if authoritarian conservatism and shameless lying and crazed conspiracism all recede after November 5, 2024, we will have a major project of governmental, political, and civic reconstruction ahead.

But repudiation must precede reconstruction, and so far we have failed—our institutions, our people, our system have failed—to repudiate Trump and Trumpism. The United States recovered from previous demagogic and authoritarian episodes because, after their turns in the spotlight, men like Henry Wallace and Joe McCarthy and George Wallace were no longer respectable even in their own parties.

This is the opposite of the case today. The renomination of Trump is proof of the normalization of Trumpism.

I haven’t re-read Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind’ in quite a while, but in thinking about our situation its sober closing sentence comes to mind: “The gravity of our given task is great, and it is very much in doubt how the future will judge our stewardship.”

—William Kristol

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Catching up . . .

• Ukraine is at great risk of its front lines collapsing: Politico

• Joe Biden says Israel “has not done enough” to protect aid workers and civilians in Gaza: Financial Times

• Taiwan’s strongest quake in 25 years kills 9, injures nearly 1,000: Washington Post

• Trump, RNC raised $65.6 million in March: Politico

• The California businessman financing Trump’s $175 million bond: Washington Post

• Frustrated prosecutors ask Trump documents judge to act on key claim: New York Times

• Trump wants Election Day to be called “Christian visibility day”: Axios

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Quick Hits: Losing Ground Against Disinformation

Bill Lueders has another blast of cheery content up on the site today. If you think online disinformation has been pernicious the last few years, he writes, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Bad actors are more organized and brazen than ever, and their toolkits are getting more powerful:

The even-badder news is that the problem is going to get a whole lot worse, as AI delivers new weapons to those who wish to go to war with the truth. As our collective ability to identify a shared, factually grounded public reality further deteriorates, the tools of mass deception are becoming more powerful. Now it’s possible for almost anyone to create real-looking images of things that never happened, and Google will sometimes spit them out at you in response to search queries without identifying them as fabrications. . .

Efforts to combat disinformation have largely failed, according to reporters Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers in a 4,000-word front-page New York Times article last month. But while attempts, from both the private sector and the government, to counter disinformation have mostly flopped, the efforts by Trump and his allies to push back against anything that would make it harder to lie and get away with it “have unquestionably prevailed.” 

As Rutenberg and Myers put it: “Three years after Mr. Trump’s posts about rigged voting machines and stuffed ballot boxes went viral, he and his allies have achieved a stunning reversal of online fortune. Social media platforms now provide fewer checks against the intentional spread of lies about elections.”

Among the keys to this success has been the Bradley Foundation, a longtime funder of conservative groups that has in recent years turned in an increasingly MAGA direction. The Milwaukee-based foundation has deployed its considerable assets to promote voter suppression, block action to address the threat of climate change, and sow doubts about the integrity of elections. Each of these causes depends on the perpetuation of disinformation . . .

Read the whole thing.

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