Stay on the Road to Damascus
Plus: What’s a House speaker to do when the president wants to jail his colleagues?
Yesterday, Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen had a record-obliterating day, throwing for 342 yards and three touchdowns while adding 82 yards and another three scores on the ground. Incredibly, it wasn’t enough: The Bills went down to the Los Angeles Rams, 42–44.
Still, we’ve got to say: Maybe the greatest individual performance en route to defeat since Kamala Harris stood on a debate stage with Donald Trump! Happy Monday.
Do Not Get Involved?
by William Kristol
In February 2022, Vladimir Putin’s Russia launched its brutal full-scale war against Ukraine. In October 2023, Hamas unleashed its savage terror attack on Israel. Now, in December 2024, Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Putin and of Hamas—and of Iran which has been in league with Putin and Hamas—has been deposed. Miscalculations by his fellow dictators and terrorists had rendered them unwilling or unable to rally to Assad’s support.
But Putin and Hezbollah weren’t weakened because historical inevitability or geopolitical necessity punished their mistakes. Putin was weakened because the people of Ukraine fought against his invasion, courageously and effectively. Hezbollah was weakened because of the determination and skill with which Israel took on the terror group.
Watching Assad’s fall, one thought that perhaps the arc of the moral universe does sometimes bend toward justice. But it’s the Ukrainians and Israelis who bent that arc over the last couple of years, and who made this weekend’s events in Syria possible.
So all honor to the Syrian people for deposing one of the most brutal and savage dictators of the 21st century. But it is important and fitting to note that they were able to do so thanks to the courage and sacrifices of others fighting on different fronts against brutality and savagery.
Obviously, no one can know what the future holds for Syria. I’m less pessimistic than some about a decent outcome, and less convinced that the unsavory past of several of the groups involved in overthrowing Assad can’t at least partly be left behind. But in any case, the fall of a brutal dictator is rare enough that we should take the opportunity to celebrate it, and pay tribute to those who brought it about.
President-elect Trump isn’t big on celebrating the fall of dictators. But he did say on Saturday,
“Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
It’s hard to argue with the proposition that “Syria is a mess.” But what follows—if I can adopt the president-elect’s penchant for capitalization—IS WRONG.
The fact is that we have national interests at stake in Syria. We already have about 900 troops there as part of a broader effort—which included dozens of air strikes over the weekend—to keep ISIS weak. We have an obvious interest in removing or destroying the chemical weapons stockpiles Assad had accumulated. We have many regional interests that would be furthered by having a peaceful, non-terror-friendly government in Syria. We have an important interest in further weakening Iran and Hezbollah.
How we pursue these interests is matter for real debate, and need not require much in the way of U.S. boots on the ground or direct military action. But it does require understanding that we can’t just say, “This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved.”
We’ve tried not getting involved. But our decision to not respond forcefully when Assad used chemical weapons in 2013, despite President Obama’s previous statement that this would be a red line, had consequences in the region and beyond—including emboldening Putin to invade Ukraine in 2014. Our determination to not get more involved when Putin intervened in 2015 to save Assad had consequences, including triggering a migration crisis whose destabilizing effects were felt far beyond the Middle East. Our insistence on not getting more involved as Iran helped Hezbollah’s massive military buildup next to Israel’s northern border had consequences in Lebanon and Israel this year.
The president-elect’s stark statement of a foreign policy of non-involvement should lead to a vigorous public debate in this country. It might even lead some in his administration who know better to begin real efforts to steer the president away from such foolishness. They can point out that a terror state in Syria, an Iran with nuclear weapons, further wars in the region with more death and destruction, are not only not in our national interest—they won’t be in Trump’s political interest.
As for United States senators, they have a responsibility to judge whether, in this dangerous and uncertain world, the Assad supporter, Tulsi Gabbard, should be director of national intelligence. Or whether the wildly unqualified Pete Hegseth should be secretary of defense, and the recklessly irresponsible Kash Patel should be set free to cripple the counterintelligence capabilities of the FBI.
Could the fall of Assad be a moment when we realize we are in a period of consequences, that we need to come to grips with the real world? Or will we fall once again for the delusion that we can simply sit back and afford to not get involved?
What Will Mike Johnson Do?
by Andrew Egger
Listening to Donald Trump discuss his wish for his congressional opponents to be jailed this weekend, the most infuriating thing was how little he felt the need to hide it.
“Everybody on that committee . . . for what they did, yeah, honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump told Kristen Welker of NBC News.
Trump followed that with a fig leaf, saying that he would not direct his new FBI director to do this jailing for him. But why would he need to? He’s out there, in the open, expressing his desire for it. And in Kash Patel, he’s chosen a human attack dog who spent years auditioning for the post of FBI director by rattling off—to anybody who’d listen—the Trump enemies he’d prosecute given the chance. Patel doesn’t need the president-elect to give him the green light on national TV—but here Trump is, doing that anyway.
It’s one thing for Trump to make such declarations as a candidate for president running on the politics of grievance. It’s another for him to do so as president-elect. The question now is what other Republicans will do about it. That question is most acute for House Speaker Mike Johnson: What do you do when the leader of one of the other branches of government is calling for the jailing of six members of your branch?
As speaker of the House, Johnson could bristle at these sorts of open threats against members of his institution, which are plainly calibrated to intimidate his lawmakers out of participating in the legitimate investigative work of Congress in the future. Instead, he’s keeping his head down and focusing on buttering up Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in the hopes of getting Trump on board with his budgetary priorities. The Bulwark asked Johnson’s office about Trump’s call for members of the January 6th Committee to be in jail; a spokesperson did not comment.
Senate Republicans sure aren’t standing up to Trump either. As wielders of the constitution’s advice-and-consent prerogative, they could decide that the combination of Patel’s open promises of political retribution against Trump’s enemies with Trump’s open encouragement of that retribution would be too large a pill to swallow. But right now, signs are that Patel will sail through the Senate without too much trouble: Sen. John Cornyn said as much in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt last Thursday. “People I know and who I trust speak well of him and I’m looking forward to meeting with him,” Cornyn said.
And of course, conservative media isn’t standing up. Trump’s more militant supporters are cheering him on, while the more polite crowd simply looks the other way.
Trump’s always had an animal instinct for how much he could get away with. And after being reelected president, there’s little reason to think he’s misjudged how far to push the boundaries.
Quick Hits
GOING OUT ON TOP: Lara Trump, it appears, has learned all she can in her current role as Republican National Committee co-chair. The president-elect’s daughter-in-law announced Sunday she was stepping away from the RNC, proclaiming that “the job I came to do is complete.” Meanwhile, her charm campaign to have Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appoint her to the Senate seat likely to be vacated by secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio continues: “It is something I would seriously consider,” she told the Associated Press in an interview published Sunday. “If I’m being completely transparent, I don’t know exactly what that would look like. And I certainly want to get all of the information possible if that is something that’s real for me. But yeah, I would 100 percent consider it.”
TARIFF MAN: Between the pledges to pardon January 6th convicts and the wishes for lawmakers who served on the January 6th Committee to land in jail, Trump took some time during his Meet the Press interview to deny outright that tariffs come with any economic costs—although he balked from guaranteeing that they wouldn’t raise prices:
WELKER: You are now proposing tariffs against the United States’s three biggest trading partners. Economists of all stripes say that ultimately consumers pay the price of tariffs.
TRUMP: I don’t believe that.
WELKER: Can you guarantee American families won’t pay more?
TRUMP: I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. . . .
WELKER: Sir, your previous tariffs during your first administration cost Americans some $80 billion, and now you have major companies from Walmart, Black & Decker, AutoZone, saying that any tariffs are going to force them to drive up prices for their consumers. How do you make sure that these CEOs, that these companies don’t in fact pass on the cost of tariffs to their consumers?
TRUMP: They cost Americans nothing. They made a great economy for us . . . It didn’t cost this country anything. It made this country money.
Frankly, we don’t know what all these economists and CEOs are so anxious about. Trump’s got it all under control.
Cheap Shots
It’s never fun to face politicized prosecution. But to be prosecuted politically by a guy with such remarkably good taste . . .
Trump’s determination to stay neutral internationally is because he will be too busy taking down his fellow Americans. Retribution starts at home.
I always thought ignoring Assad's breach of the red line was Obama's biggest failure.