To Russia, With Love, Donald
Moscow can’t even believe its luck.
Here at The Bulwark, you might have noticed, we tend to take a pretty cynical view of the current occupant in the Oval Office. And yet, we confess that not even we had this one on our Week Four bingo cards:
The president of the United States made an unprecedented declaration on Wednesday while applauding his administration’s decision to terminate federal approval of New York’s congestion pricing program.
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” Trump wrote on his social platform Truth Social. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
The official White House social media accounts on X, Instagram and Facebook soon quoted his post, all sharing a fake magazine cover depicting an illustration of Trump smiling in a suit — and wearing a bejeweled golden crown. In the corner of the magazine cover appears the text: “LONG LIVE THE KING.”
Epic troll, sir! Very cool! Happy Thursday.
Trump’s All-In for Putin
by William Kristol
In for a kopek, in for a ruble. That seems to be Donald Trump’s modus operandi. Only a week after his phone call with Russia’s leader, Trump’s gone all-in on a pro–Vladimir Putin foreign policy.
He’s now mocking Ukraine for not having fought valiantly to defend itself for three years, and he’s attacking its elected leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a dictator. His vice president and national security adviser are portraying Zelensky as the obstacle to peace. His administration is embracing Putin’s demand that Ukraine, contrary to what its constitution envisions in a time of martial law, hold elections before direct Russia-Ukrainian negotiations can begin—a transparent negotiating ploy that allows Russia to stall for time to see if Ukrainian demoralization might set in on the battlefield.
All of this is a prelude to blaming Zelensky for the failure to attain a negotiated peace, and to abandoning Ukraine.
Trump is also preparing to throw our European allies, many of whom want to stand with Ukraine, under the bus. Thus his administration has expressed a willingness to entertain the longstanding Russian demand that the United States remove troops from the frontline NATO countries most threatened by Russia. Such a move would effectively mark the end of NATO, which Trump, once again following Putin’s lead, would presumably welcome.
And yesterday Trump ordered Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to prepare massive cuts in the defense budget, cuts that will damage us across the board but also—as I’m told by someone familiar with the proposal—that are particularly targeted on weakening our commitment to Europe. There are also reports that Hegseth is about to embark on a purge of top military officers in order to install Trump loyalists in key posts at the Pentagon, so there will be no pushback to our new, pro-Putin foreign policy.
Unsurprisingly, Putin and his allies are happy.
“If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed out loud,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev gloated in response to Trump’s attack on Zelensky. “Trump is 200 percent right.”
Two-hundred percent? Putin expressed his pleasure in more measured tones: “Trump started receiving real information, and it changed his approach.”
One shouldn’t be surprised, at this point, to see Trump bend over backwards for Putin. But surely all those hawkish Republicans on the Hill, many of whom criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough to help Ukraine, would be moved to speak out in protest?
Surely you jest.
The New York Times headline summarized the situation well: “As Trump Turns Toward Russia and Against Ukraine, Republicans Are Mum.” The subhead read: “Congressional Republicans have mostly tempered their criticism or deferred to the president as he topples what were once their party’s core foreign policy principles.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), defended the silence of his fellow Republican lambs: “Right now, you have got to give him some space.”
In other words: Don’t look to us to speak up. And, presumably, don’t look to us to support further aid to Ukraine in a new government funding bill in March. Of course, if a new funding bill passes without such aid, that would further weaken Ukraine on the battlefield, which would give Trump more space to effectuate Putin’s wishes.
You have to go abroad to find a conservative politician willing to tell the truth about what Trump is up to. Chris Patten, former chairman of the British Conservative Party, said the following to the Times’s Nick Kristof:
We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values—largely put in place by America since the Second World War—which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity. . . . I love America and was once happy to regard its president as leader of the free world. Not any longer. Where are the American values that I used to admire?
“Where are the American values that I used to admire?”
A fair question.
Quick Hits
THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM: One day, we may be lucky enough to look back on this as the week DOGE went from “dark and alarming” to “still dark and alarming, but also sort of bleakly hilarious?” As Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger crew continues to slash and burn its way across the government, its heap of clanging political missteps, amateurish clerical errors, and outright fabrications has grown nearly tall enough to be seen from space.
Every department newly DOGEd leaves a rubble of radicalized political enemies for Trump in its wake. Disabled vets at the Department of Veterans Affairs? Thank you for your service, there’s the door. Cancer researchers? Who needs ’em? Programs to help special-needs students transition to adulthood? A decadent luxury we can do without!
Other cuts have been most notable for their sloppiness and counterproductive spite. Federal employees have found their subscriptions to enterprise media outlets terminated—apparently, you work more efficiently when you’re not allowed to read the Bloomberg terminal. (Employees are invited to find the up-to-the-minute technical news they need to do their jobs on X, the everything app. Our country will run on community notes going forward.)
Even this relatively straightforward no-money-for-the-fake-news cut was applied with all the subtlety of an ice pick to the cranium: DOGE canceled the Security and Exchange Commission’s access to the legal database Westlaw because it is administered by the conglomerate Thompson Reuters, and was therefore seemingly swept up in their purge of accounts for the Reuters wire service.
Meanwhile, DOGE finally beefed up its website this week, trumpeting its “savings” with lists of purported cuts. Canny perusers of the site, however, quickly found it riddled with major errors: double- or triple-counting contracts, completely misunderstanding the nature of “contracts” being counted, or just getting raw numbers wrong. The site’s single biggest purported cut, a DHS contract for a supposed $8 billion, turned out to be exactly 1,000 times smaller: an IT support contract for $8 million at the agency. (According to DOGE, they never actually included the larger, incorrect number in their own savings calculations, despite the incorrect number having been displayed for a few days on their website.)
Meanwhile, DOGE has settled into an apparent strategy for dealing with people pointing out other errors: correcting them on an ad-hoc basis while leaving the remainder unfixed and continuing to trumpet baloney estimates of total money saved.
How many rakes can one group step on without starting to hemorrhage serious political support? Odds are we’ll get to find out.
HE’S PROMISED TO BE BASED, YOUR HONOR: We’re old enough to remember when the Justice Department was primarily concerned with whether the people it was prosecuting had committed any crimes. Not so much now, per the New York Times:
A senior Justice Department official suggested Wednesday that President Trump’s administration is justified in putting aside allegations of corruption against a public official if the official cooperates with the president’s political agenda.
The Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, raised the idea during a hearing on Wednesday at which a judge asked him to explain his rationale for abandoning a corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.
In response to questions from the Manhattan judge, Mr. Bove renewed his assertion that the prosecution should be dismissed because it was hindering Mr. Adams’s cooperation with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Mayor Adams’s open quid pro quo with the Trump administration—which could refile his corruption charges at any time—isn’t quite a done deal: On Wednesday, the judge did not rule on whether he would permit the government to drop the charges. And Adams may not have the opportunity to ride out his full term in any event. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has the (honestly bizarre) authority under state law to remove him, although it would be an unprecedented step.
Cheap Shots
"Moscow can’t even believe its luck."
Except it's not luck. Russia has been nurturing a relationship with Trump since the 80's. Russian intelligence always plays the long game, and with Trump, it cost them very little to cultivate this relationship. And it's worked out for them. The ROI is huge. So Moscow isn't lucky. They did their research into a venal, amoral real estate developer, kept up a relationship with him for 40 years, and now it's paying off.
I love Patten's phrase "oligarchy of ignorant shoe-shiners." It sounds like something the French knights in Monty Python's Holy Grail would say. "We fart in your general direction, you ignorant shoe-shiners!"