Two Dictators Walk Into a Bar...
On yesterday’s sickening Oval Office summit.
No time to give it its due, what with the constitutional crisis, but we can’t fully pass over Trump’s wild assertion yesterday that Ukraine started the war with Russia: “You don’t start a war against someone twenty times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”
Okay, now on to the worse stuff. Happy Tuesday.
A Degrading Spectacle
by William Kristol
For some godforsaken reason, I made myself watch some clips yesterday of President Donald Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador (“the world’s coolest dictator,” as he calls himself) yukking it up in the Oval Office.
After all these years in and around politics, I’d like to think I have a pretty strong stomach, but yesterday was sickening. Trump and Bukele were having a great time. They were relishing the fact that innocent men had been snatched from their homes in the United States and sent by our government, lawlessly and with neither evidence nor due process, to an open-ended sentence in a ghastly prison in El Salvador. They were enjoying the prospect that even more people would be sent there, including some “homegrowns” who, Trump assured Bukele, will be the next to go.
This was not newsreel footage of two dictators meeting somewhere far away and long ago. This was yesterday. Here in Washington, D.C. In the Oval Office.
Almost a decade after Trump’s entry onto the political center stage, almost three months into his second term, the spectacle wasn’t surprising. Still, it was a new low.
And it reminded me of the young Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, where he spoke on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”:
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
I’ve studied Lincoln’s speech a bit. But I must acknowledge that I didn’t really take this seriously as a concrete possibility. I was well aware that democracies can fail, and that others have. But I hadn’t really envisioned the prospect of the suicide of freemen here.
Now one has to.
How does that suicide happen? Trump would certainly be its primary author. But looking at the video from the Oval Office, one is reminded of how many enablers he has, starting with the senior officials sitting on the couch in the Oval Office and standing behind it. There are other associates who weren’t there, such as Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who recently met with President Putin and said of the murderer and war criminal, “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.”
But of course there are also so many others working for Trump, arranging all the events and drafting all the documents, to say nothing of those who are in fact seizing innocent people and sending them into captivity.
There are many, many enablers.
And of course one should not neglect Trump’s supporters among the people. They too make all this possible.
I’d add that one of the things we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better is that Trump’s supporters fall into only two camps: There are the Trumpist elites, dedicated authoritarians out for money and power. And there are ignorant followers, true believers, brainwashed by social media.
Both camps exist. But there is a third class that for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about yesterday: His sophisticated apologists. Those who, we are told, really know better. Those who often express some qualms in private, but in public accelerate the degradation of American democracy.
These apologists presumably were among the college graduates who voted for Trump in 2024. Some Trump opponents like to tell themselves that Trump does better among the less educated. That’s true: 56 percent of non-college graduates voted for Trump. But 42 percent of college graduates did as well. And 42 percent isn’t that much smaller a figure than 56 percent.
And one should add that those tens of millions of educated Trump supporters are disproportionately important. Trump and Trumpism couldn’t be sustained by only authoritarian elites and brainwashed masses. Trumpism depends on these educated apologists.
And I will say that I have no confidence that these educated Trump enablers will break from Trump any more quickly than his less educated supporters. Indeed, these sophisticated rationalizers have spent a good deal of time rationalizing and are proud of their ability to rationalize. They could be harder to dislodge than some true believers who might simply lose their faith, or some low-information voters who may simply wake up to what’s happening around them.
Lincoln was familiar with this phenomenon too. As he said in his first debate with Stephen Douglas, there is “a class of men,” many of them of “vast influence,” who should be held particularly responsible for being willing to “blow out the moral lights around us” and “eradicate the love of liberty” in the broader political community.
The modern counterparts of these men have played their part in laying the groundwork for the degrading spectacle we saw yesterday in the Oval Office. But let’s not end on a hopeless note. Today is the 160th anniversary of Lincoln’s death. Perhaps the inspiration one can find in his example can outweigh the demoralization one feels from yesterday’s spectacle of Trump and his sidekick Bukele in the Oval Office.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
by Andrew Egger
Yesterday JVL and I took to YouTube after Trump’s and Bukele’s Oval Office meeting to break down the whole disaster. Trump was all but openly defying the Supreme Court’s order that he work to give a wrongfully deported man due process. How was the Court likely to respond?
JVL raised the speculative possibility that Chief Justice John Roberts might be the one to blink in this showdown—not necessarily out of sheer cowardice, but as a way of postponing the ultimate standoff between his Court and a lawless administration until he’s confident he’s fighting on the stablest possible ground. He expanded on this possibility in his newsletter a bit later:
If he is forced to fight a series of tactical retreats, then [Roberts] is willing to do so, trading ground for time. Along the way he hopes that he can use the path of his retreat to bring Kavanaugh and Gorsuch around and convince them of the seriousness of the moment. Perhaps he can use the legal structure of his retreats to isolate Thomas and Alito. . . .
He also understands that this struggle will ultimately be decided by the People. Either they will tolerate authoritarianism or they will not. And so he hopes to preserve the position of the Court in the public eye so that, when the forces of liberalism have some ground on which to stand, he can maximize the Court’s leverage with the People on behalf of the liberal order.
Building out this sort of theoretical scaffolding in advance is much more JVL’s bag than mine. But if Roberts is thinking this way, it seems to me that he is making a grave mistake.
What does it mean to lurch into authoritarianism at a moment when we who would resist it are so stripped of real political power? It means we are both imaginatively blinkered and strategically limited. Our possible courses are few: Fight now, fight later, or fight never. Possibly we will be fucked no matter what. Meanwhile, the chaos surrounds us; we are off our own map. We should have the humility to acknowledge that we simply don’t know the likely outcomes of any course we might take.
What this means is that everybody from Roberts on down who hasn’t totally beaten their consciences into submission on the question of Trump is wasting their time if they’re trying to triangulate the best possible outcomes of actions. Even if these things were knowable, how could you possibly trust your own analysis in assessing it? We’re not playing with Monopoly money here; everyone knows Trump is going to drop the hammer sooner or later on those who cross him. You’re going to put a subconscious thumb on the scale in the favor of your own safety if you give yourself a chance. At a moment like this, convincing yourself that prudence demands you fight later is tantamount to giving yourself permission to fight never.
What the moment demands from Roberts and from the rest of us is an option that, blessedly, never fully leaves the table: To speak the truth, to act with courage, and to let the chips fall where they may. That’s hard enough for anyone to do without indulging the part of the brain that whispers that temporary submission is wisdom. Here’s hoping the chief justice—the only man equipped right now, it seems, to deal justice—feels the same.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Checking Facts in a Post-Truth World… Austin Kelley’s new novel is a philosophical detective story in which the objective, verifiable world is a hypothesis, not a given, writes NICK RIPATRAZONE.
Big Law’s Attempts to Appease Trump Won’t Work… Signals of weakness only invite more bullying, argues GREGORY L. POE.
Are Any of Us Safe Now? The Trump administration claims the power to punish “offenders” with no due process, observes MONA CHAREN.
JD Vance Fumbles—Literally… On Bulwark+ Takes, PABLO TORRE joins TIM MILLER to talk about JD Vance’s embarrassing moment with the Ohio State football team at the White House.
Quick Hits
HARVARD DIGS IN: Harvard University yesterday joined the meager ranks of the American institutions publicly willing to stand up to Trump’s bullying, rejecting a suite of changes to college policy from discipline to admissions that the White House had demanded.
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” attorneys for Harvard wrote in a letter addressed to a suite of administration lawyers. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
The administration responded swiftly, announcing it would block Harvard from billions in federal grants until further notice. “It is time for elite universities to take the problem seriously and commit to meaningful change if they wish to continue receiving taxpayer support,” the so-called “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” said in a statement.
The changes the administration had demanded were shockingly far-reaching, amounting to a wholesale federal takeover of huge swaths of Harvard’s institutional decision-making. To take just one example: The task force had demanded the university to commission a government-approved audit of “those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture”:
The programs, schools, and centers of concern include but are not limited to the Divinity School, Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, Medical School, Religion and Public Life Program, FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.
The White House’s term for private institutions holding to viewpoints the government dislikes is “ideological capture.” Remember back when we called it “freedom”?
JOINT TASK FORCE TO DO WHAT NOW?: If you hadn’t heard of the Joint Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, you’re not the only one. The Wall Street Journal published a feature yesterday on the “little-known” group currently “tearing through American universities”:
The group’s stated goal is to “root out antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” a mission that emerged from pro-Palestinian protests that disrupted campuses last year. But along the way, the task force is taking on university culture more broadly in ways that echo the MAGA dreams for remaking higher education—including ending racial preferences in admissions and hiring.
The task-force leaders have unprecedented leverage, thanks to a financial assault on higher education by the Trump administration that has no equal since the federal government began pumping money into research at universities during World War II. The Trump administration has pulled or frozen more than $11 billion in funding from at least seven universities. The tactics and agencies have varied but the top-line intent, Trump said on the campaign trail, is to wrest control of universities from the far left.
WHISTLING PAST THE GLOBAL-TRADE GRAVEYARD: These days, we get our kicks where we can find them. One reliable place to find a fun five minutes is in the writings of Marc Thiessen, the conservative Washington Post columnist. A neoconservative, pro-trade Reaganite, Thiessen’s recurring shtick is panning the river of Trump’s utterances and behavior to find scanty nuggets suggesting that Trump himself, deep, deep down, is a neoconservative pro-trade Reaganite too. Thiessen’s column this week, “How Trump could end up the greatest free-trade president in history,” is destined to become a seminal work in the field.
Tariffs may be Trump’s one true policy love: He’s been calling for huge expansions of them in public since the ’80s. But Thiessen isn’t so sure: “Does Trump really love tariffs? Or does he profess his affection for them because, if other countries believe he is willing to impose them, it gives him leverage?”
“This much is certain,” Thiessen continues hopefully. “If Trump manages to negotiate the reduction or elimination of trade barriers to U.S. exports in as many as 75 countries, our tariff-loving commander in chief could end up the greatest free-trade president in history.”
Hey, you know what? Keep having fun out there, Marc. We’ll even put our thumb on the scale for you. President Trump, if you’re reading, you know what would really show up your critics at The Bulwark? Your dramatic eleventh-hour revelation that this has all been a ruse after all, and you’re ready to assume your mantle as the greatest free-trade president in history! Boy, would we have gotten you wrong! We would be so owned! Think about it, will you? Are you sure you wouldn’t rather prove Marc right than us?
Cheap Shots
Yesterday was the single worst Oval Office meeting I’ve seen since JD Vance screamed at Zelensky for not wearing a suit.
The United States of America crossed the rubicon yesterday. We should all be in the streets right now, honestly.
I’m not holding my breath for SCOTUS to act, and it sickens me to my core when I think about the fact that in MY country we are openly kidnapping people off the street.
My God.
The excesses of believing it was acceptable to become grotesquely wealthy while shirking any sense of social responsibility are now reaching their final act. This wasn’t always the American way—there was a time, especially before World War II, when frugality and social obligation were understood as necessary virtues, born from generational struggle. That ethic helped shape the New Deal, a shift grounded not in utopia but in survival.
But in the decades since deregulation and the culture of selfish wealth-building became gospel, we’ve hollowed out those safeguards. What we’re witnessing now—the lawless detentions, the elite apologists, the moral decay—is the logical endpoint of a society that placed capital above conscience.
This is why dismissing AOC as “far left” is a relic of an outdated frame. She’s not extreme—the political landscape has simply moved too far to the right. She represents a recalibration, not a revolution. The Democratic Party would do well to understand that its survival doesn’t lie in cautious centrism or Elissa Slotkin-style triangulation. It lies in a bold, moral, unapologetically justice-driven vision. That’s not radicalism. That’s course correction.