Wake Up, Mitt

Romney should realize he can’t reorient the GOP without fully demonstrating the consequences of its lurch toward Trumpism.

Donald Trump’s campaign responded in typical fashion yesterday to Bob Woodward’s revelations that the ex-president has maintained a tight relationship with Vladimir Putin and even shipped him a COVID test kit during the height of the pandemic.

“Woodward is an angry, little man,” Trump communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement. “President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue.”

This morning, the Kremlin denied that Putin and Trump have spoken several times since Trump left office. But it did confirm that Trump sent Putin scarce COVID tests! Happy Wednesday.

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“Read my lips: I’m not not not not voting for Kamala Harris.” (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images.)

Romney Winks

by Andrew Egger

Mitt Romney is getting a little tired of you asking him whether he’s going to endorse Kamala Harris. He wonders: Can’t you people read between the lines?

“I’ve made it very clear that I don’t want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States,” Romney said at an event in Utah yesterday. “And you’re going to have to do the very difficult calculation of what that would mean.”

The Utah senator has never before implied so strongly that he’s actively rooting for Harris. What remains fascinating is that he still won’t say it out loud.

He says his reticence is deliberate. “There’s a good shot that the Republican party is going to need to be rebuilt and reoriented, either after this election, or if Donald Trump is reelected, after he’s the president,” Romney went on, as is his habit. “I believe I will have more influence in the party by virtue of saying it as I’ve said it. I’m not planning on changing the way I’ve described it.”

But this explanation falls flat. Heavily implying you back Harris but not actually saying it publicly is prima facie pointless. You’ve reduced your influence by letting everyone know how you’re gonna vote—but you’ve minimized your impact by not formally announcing your vote. Well done!

Last week, Tim noted the biggest issue with Mitt’s decision to stand on the sidelines: It’s remarkably Pollyannaish for Romney to assume there’ll be anything left for him to influence. Why he thinks the GOP will be headed for reorientation if Trump wins again, rather than for four more years of lockstep devotion to the least of Dear Leader’s whims, we couldn’t begin to tell you.

But the biggest thing that’s needed right now isn’t personal courage from Romney. It’s a reorientation of the way the Romneyite mind thinks about today’s intra-right wing politics.

The pose Romney is striking here is a common one for many anti-Trump Republicans, ex-Republicans, and conservatives—even ones whose primary political goal is somehow finding a way to move the Republican party past Trump. These people are open, ideologically, to the premise that Harris would be a far better, safer president than a re-elected Trump. But they’re also still trying to maintain their credibility and moral authority in a coalition whose current sole bedrock principle is the Democrats are always worse.

Ultimately, the gravest outcome they can imagine isn’t anything Trump might do to the country—it’s that in a post-Trump world, the Republican party will blunder even further without their sagacious guidance. Romney sees himself as a savior of the GOP. But there is no indication that anyone else in the GOP is looking for his salvation.

What’s odd is that Romney has no illusions about the size and strength of his coalition within the party right now. “My wing of the party is like a chicken wing, all right?” Romney told MSNBC earlier this year. “It’s a little, tiny thing that doesn’t take the bird off the ground. So we’re going to have to change that, in my view.”

MAGA lunatics have hijacked the party and driven it into a ditch. They only reason they have any national political viability is because they’ve convinced a critical mass of longtime Republican normies to keep their heads down and keep being good team players. And the main way they’ve done that is by enforcing a simple cultural shibboleth: What else are you going to, vote for a Democrat?

If Romney’s really interested in beefing up that chicken wing, he should consider the possibility that tearing that shibboleth down is a good place to start.

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Are You There, Vlad? It’s Me, Donald.

by Benjamin Parker

As noted above, Bob Woodward’s book excerpts were released yesterday, in which he reported that since leaving office, Donald Trump has had at least seven private phone conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Both the Kremlin and Trump campaign are denying it. But Woodward’s track record is hard to argue with. And, tellingly, he writes that Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines “carefully hedged” when asked about the calls.

The Bulwark spoke to Lawrence Pfeiffer, director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and National Security at George Mason University, about whether the United States intelligence community might have a record of those calls, and under what conditions those records could become public. Pfeiffer is a former senior intelligence official. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Bulwark: What are the odds that somewhere in the intelligence community, there’s a record of what was said on these phone calls between Trump and Putin? And to the degree you can answer, how and why do you think the IC would have collected that information?

Larry Pfeiffer: I have no idea if anybody has collected anything, nor if they’ve got the capability to target Vladimir Putin’s private cell phone. If it were to have been collected, it would likely be because the Russian side of the phone call would have been targeted as a legitimate foreign intelligence target—either Putin’s phone, his office phone, his aide’s phone, something along those lines. There’s always a possibility that it could be encrypted, which means maybe all we have is the fact of the call and not the content of the call.

If the call was intercepted, it would likely have been intercepted by NSA. The only way anyone in the domestic side of things like the FBI would have the call is if there was some active criminal investigation against the U.S. end of that phone call, and I'm not sure there's an active U.S. investigation into Trump right now.

Let’s say they did intercept the call and they’ve got the content. If the content doesn’t meet any kind of priority requirements set by the president and the National Security Council for foreign intelligence—for example, if it was a phone call about their respective golf games—then as soon as it was determined that this call was not of foreign intelligence value, they would stop listening to it and delete it.

If the content did have foreign intelligence value, then a report could possibly be written. But the report would be written exclusively about the foreigner and the U.S. person would be protected in the text of the report. They would be identified as ‘U.S. Person No. 1,’ or something along those lines.

If ‘U.S. Person No. 1’ was somebody like a president, former president, or a current congressman or senator, that report would go through a sensitivity check, probably all the way up to the director. And if it were to go out, it would go out to a very limited [number of] people. The parallel would be the calls that occurred between Michael Flynn and [then-Russian ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak] back when Trump was not yet president. That information was reported to a small group of people. [Flynn’s] name was masked in the report.

TB: If there was information collected, if there was a report, how many people in total and what people do you think would have access to that information or have the report?

LP: There would be a handful of people at NSA who would have handled the raw material and produced the report, maybe 10 to 15 people. A report like that would likely have gone to a small handful of the senior most people in government—the attorney general, the president and the vice president, maybe the national security advisor. It would probably be hard copy only, not electronic, and it would be hand-delivered.

TB: Under what circumstances could this information, if it exists, become public? If it goes through the normal process of classification and declassification, how long do you think it might be until we—or historians—find out what was in those calls, if ever?

LP: I would, again, look back to what happened with the Flynn calls. I think it took a press leak before anything happened. Not that I'm encouraging that.

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Quick Hits

TRANS ACROSS AMERICA: You might have thought Republicans’ top issue in this election was the economy or immigration or crime. But in terms of what Trump and the GOP are actually spending money on, you’d be wrong.

The Times reports:

With just four weeks until the election, Donald J. Trump and Republican candidates nationwide are putting transgender issues at the center of their campaigns, tapping into fears about transgender women and girls in sports and about taxpayer-funded gender transitions in prisons.

Since the beginning of August, Republicans have poured more than $65 million into television ads in more than a dozen states on these topics in some of the country’s most competitive races, according to a New York Times analysis of advertising data compiled by AdImpact.

In fact Trump’s most aired negative ad in the last stretch of the campaign is on transgender issues, or fears—a strategy first picked up on by our own Marc Caputo. In the last three weeks, the Trump campaign has spent more than $15.5 million on two ads that feature comments Harris made in 2019 supporting access for transgender prison inmates to gender-affirming surgery. The main pro-Trump SuperPAC has reinforced this message. And it’s not just Trump. The main Senate Republican SuperPAC has poured tens millions into transgender ads against Democratic Senate candidates.

It’s pretty astounding that a presidential campaign, and a political party, are so focused on this niche issue. But is it smart politics—a way of intensifying concerns about Democrats’ capture by the cultural left—or desperation, a sign the big issues Republicans were counting on aren’t working as the GOP had hoped? And even if the ads test well, will people actually vote on trans rights? Democrats, who are avoiding engaging, are betting not. But we really don’t know.

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PAYBACK TIME: President Biden and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu are expected to speak this morning, Axios reports, as Israel prepares to retaliate against Iran for the missile barrage it launched last week. Biden has continued to back Israel in its multi-front conflicts against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, while Kamala Harris said in an interview this week that Iran is America’s “greatest adversary.” But one unnamed official told Axios that Biden intends to use this call “to try and shape the limitations of the Israeli retaliation.”

This strategy—backing Israel while trying to manage it around the margin—remains politically risky for Biden, since there’s something in it for everyone to hate: Progressives remain furious that more hasn’t done more to rein Israel in, while Republican hawks are indignant that Israel is being dictated to at all. On the bright side, Biden’s no longer running for anything.

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WE DIDN’T MEAN IT LIKE THAT: In the wake of Hurricane Helene, the Trump campaign is calling on North Carolina to make various emergency changes to its voting rules to ensure voters can still make it to the polls, including letting voters vote from any precinct in their county, making it easier for displaced voters to vote absentee, and waiving residency requirements for poll workers. No funny business here: The requested changes seem truly intended to ensure, as Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita wrote, that “the people who have already suffered from the storm don’t lose their right to participate in this important election.”

Still, there’s some irony here, given that extraordinary changes to state voting procedures in the wake of another extraordinary disaster—the COVID pandemic—formed the basis of much of the GOP’s sour grapes in the aftermath of the 2020 election. In fact, it continues to be cited by Trump and JD Vance as a major reason not to accept the legitimacy of that contest.

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POLICY POWER HOUR: Your Morning Shots correspondents assume you all routinely check every couple weeks to see the latest guest in Bill’s series of long-form conversations on major issues of the day. But on the inexplicable off chance that you don’t, we recommend the most recent episode, featuring Princeton professor and AEI fellow Aaron Friedberg analyzing America’s foreign policy challenges.

According to Friedberg, the cooperation among Russia, China, Iran, North Korea “has grown more and more sophisticated and complex,” making the challenges in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia more difficult. Friedberg details the alternate Trump and Harris approaches to these problems, stressing that “if Trump comes back, the range of possible policies in each of these areas is just much wider than would have been typically the case in the past.” He points out that a key question with Harris is: “To what extent does she share [Biden’s] gut instinct regarding American leadership?”

We are given to understand that coming up next is a discussion with Harvard economist Jason Furman evaluating the alternate economic policy proposals of the Trump and Harris campaign. Policy hasn’t exactly been central to this campaign. But Bill thinks someone should pay some attention to it!

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