A New Foreign Policy Era Dawns
Plus: Trump can't stop attacking our justice system.
We have a jury. The 12 men and women who will decide whether Donald Trump illegally falsified business records to cover up payments to porn performer Stormy Daniels—payments which in turn were intended to cover up their alleged affair ahead of the 2016 election—were approved in the third day of court proceedings Thursday.
The court hopes to have jury alternates set before the weekend; opening arguments could come as early as Monday. Happy Friday.
A New Foreign Policy Era
All around us, there are indications—I’m tempted, in honor of Passover next week, to call them signs and portents—of a new era.
Last night, Israel responded to Iran’s attack of a few days ago by striking Iran. What for decades has been a proxy war is now a more direct conflict between two Middle East powers. Coming in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, it would seem to be a new moment in the Middle East. One in which the United States is very much involved.
Also last night, all four Democrats joined five Republicans on the House Rules Committee to approve the rule for bringing the foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to the House floor, by a vote of nine to three. This seems to have been the first time in decades when the majority party depended on minority support to approve a rule. And of course Democratic votes will be needed to win today’s vote on the floor to approve the rule, and then to pass the legislation tomorrow.
So—because of the need to deal with new foreign policy challenges—it’s no longer business as usual in Congress.
One of the pieces of legislation moving to the House floor is a slightly modified version of the bill passed last month requiring Chinese divestment of TikTok. And this is expected, along with the rest of the package, to pass the Senate.
This would seem a kind of inflection point in U.S. policy toward our most powerful adversary, the People’s Republic of China. It’s now very possible that TikTok will disappear from the phones of 170 million Americans soon. It’s one thing to toughen China policy in various ways. It’s another actually to impose a cost on our own people in doing so. It’s true that some of us might think losing TikTok isn’t that much of a cost. But in our consumer-driven, pleasure-loving, convenience-seeking society, a decision by Congress to put national security first seems to be a new moment.
Also yesterday—a busy day!—FBI director Chris Wray warned that Chinese hackers are ready to launch a cyber attack on United States infrastructure. Wray said that the Chinese have the “ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing.”
Only a week before, Wray had warned Congress and the nation about possible terror attacks by ISIS-K. Wray said he was “increasingly concerned” about “the potential for a coordinated attack, here in the homeland, akin to the ISIS-K attack we saw on the Russian concert hall” a few weeks ago.
In 2012, President Barack Obama mocked Republican candidate Mitt Romney for warning about the geopolitical threat of Putin’s Russia: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”
It turns out that we’re living in a world far closer to that of the Cold-War 1980s than to the world President Obama chose to imagine we inhabited in 2012.
But the situation that the current moment really resembles, though, isn’t so much the 1980s as 1948—the beginning of the Cold War, the beginning of a new and unanticipated era of foreign policy challenges and confrontations for the United States.
The resemblance to 1948 may even extend to U.S. electoral politics. In 1948, the Democratic incumbent Harry Truman came from behind to win a dramatic victory in an election in which third and fourth parties were expected to take votes from the Democratic ticket. And with good reason: The States’ Rights Democratic Party ticket consisted of two sitting Democratic governors, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Fielding Wright of Mississippi. The Progressive Party ticket fielded FDR’s third-term vice president, Henry Wallace, and the Democratic senator from Idaho, Glen Taylor.
Each of the two parties took about 2.4 percent of the popular vote. And yet President Truman defeated Tom Dewey, the Republican nominee, with 49.5 percent of the vote to Dewey’s 45.1 percent.
Can the electoral history of 1948 repeat itself this year?
Can President Biden, if re-elected, rise to meet the challenges of our new era as well as President Truman met the challenges of his?
Can the Republican party move on to reject the temptations of America First, as it eventually did back then?
Can we as a nation grasp the fact that we are entering, as were entering in 1948, a new world era, and that the shape of the next few decades will depend for better or worse decisively on our actions?
We rose to the challenges of a new era then. Can we do so again?
—William Kristol
Trump vs. the Rule of Law
It’s been a remarkable experience following along from afar as Donald Trump’s Manhattan trial has gotten underway this week. It’s a world-historical event with massive political stakes, but the early wrangling has been all about the routine procedural matters that precede any trial: the patient sifting of a random assortment of citizens into a roster of jurors who can pass judgment dispassionately and impartially.
Routine matters, but not uninteresting ones. It’s not easy, finding people ready to fairly judge the most controversial living American. After those who had scheduling conflicts or believed themselves unable to be impartial (juror, know thyself!) had been dismissed, other prospects were filtered through a 42-item questionnaire—where do they get their news? What podcasts do they listen to? Ever attend a Trump rally? Any association with QAnon, the Proud Boys, or Antifa? Ever read any books by Michael Cohen? By Donald Trump?
When he got up to address the jury pool, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass acknowledged the difficulties: “We don’t expect you to be living under a rock for the past eight years or the past 30 years.” This case, he says, “isn’t about whether you like Donald Trump; it’s about the rule of law.”
The jurors who made the cut seem to take this charge seriously. One juror who was seated Wednesday showed up Thursday to inform the judge that after a night’s soul-searching she’d decided she would struggle to ignore outside influences and be impartial; the judge dismissed her. “What I think about [Trump] outside this room has no bearing,” another juror told Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche. “If we were sitting in a bar, I’d be happy to tell you, but in this room how I feel about Trump is not important.” If there’s reason to doubt a specific juror can embody that sentiment, they’re sent packing. It’s a huge task, but the system is working how it’s supposed to work.
No thanks to Trump, who—in open defiance of a gag order forbidding him from publicly denigrating jurors, witnesses, counsel, or the court—has continued his usual barrage of posts about how the whole thing is one big witch hunt. The most notable of these posts came Wednesday, when Trump shared a quote from Fox News host Jesse Waters to his social media: “They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury.” Prosecutors urged the judge to find a way to get a handle on his defendant: “It’s ridiculous and it has to stop.” He’s continued to kick up absurd process objections, too, complaining, for example, that it’s unfair his team couldn’t strike an unlimited number of potential jurors. At one point, Trump’s apparent loud courtroom muttering in the direction of a juror drew a stern rebuke from the judge: “I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom. I want to make that crystal clear.”
Reasonable people can disagree about the strength of the prosecution’s case against Trump, although it’s safe to say it’s the weakest of the various charges he’s facing. The underlying conduct is skin-crawling, but prosecutors are relying on a somewhat rickety legal theory to charge it as a felony. And the jury may be turned off by the obvious sleaze of the central witness against Trump, his former fixer Michael Cohen.
But whatever the jury finds, the New York trial has already put Trump’s ongoing danger to the American soul on full display. The split-screen is unmissable: On the one hand, men and women coming together to painstakingly do the work of the people, taking their charge seriously as stewards of a messy but ultimately noble justice system. On the other hand, the demagogue who that justice system currently threatens, spewing a constant stream of pollution into the minds of his supporters, insisting that everyone from the judge to the prosecutors to the last alternate juror are nothing but craven witch hunters. That’s the core of the Trump pitch: There’s no justice, there’s only power, so give it to me.
This isn’t new, of course; Trump and his cronies have been raging against institutions like the justice system for years. But the contrast has rarely been more striking.
—Andrew Egger
Catching up . . .
Trump campaign says it will deploy thousands of election workers to monitor poll sites: Politico
Jury selection continues for alternates in Trump’s historic trial: CNN
U.S. not involved in any offensive operations, Blinken says of Israel’s strike on Iran: NBC News
In unusual vote, Democrats rescue measure to allow vote on Ukraine bill: New York Times
Behind the IMF’s warning to Biden and Congress on deficit spending: Axios
Quick Hits
Trump’s Secretary of Defense: ‘Take Him at His Word’
The latest episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol is, if we may say so, an all-timer: Bill was joined by Mark Esper, who served as secretary of defense under Trump from 2019 to 2020 before being fired by him days after the 2020 election. The wide-ranging conversation covered the war in Ukraine, his concerns in 2020 about Trump’s potential use of the military, the lead-up to January 6th, and the what a second Trump term could look like, among other things:
I think you have to take President Trump, and any leader for that matter, at their word. And Trump has been explicit with regard to what he would do [in a second term]. With Ukraine, he said he’d cut off funding, cut off support, and he would negotiate an agreement within 24 hours. Which is fanciful. The only person who could stop this war in 24 hours is Vladimir Putin. But he’s also attacked NATO, said it’s not a good deal for the United States and has made attempts during his first term to undermine the alliance. So, I take him at face value for his view on those. He said similar things about our allies in Asia, so I think he would pursue those things in a second term because he’s unbound by the need to play to a reelection, because there will not be another term after that. And so the other big question becomes, who does he put in his cabinet? Myself and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton would talk him out of these things or, at times when it came to funding Ukraine, try to talk him into providing funding for Ukraine. So a key part here is on him, but the opposite side of the coin is, who are the people he brings around him at both the Departments of State, Defense and elsewhere, but also in the White House because the people there have a big influence on him as well. So those are unknowns that we should be concerned about as this election unfolds.
Watch it here, or wherever you get your podcasts:
Cheap Shots
"FBI director Chris Wray warned that Chinese hackers are ready to launch a cyber attack on United States infrastructure. Wray said that the Chinese have the 'ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing'.”
I'm always stunned that we Americans collectively do not give more emphasis and attention to this issue, opting instead to kick the topic down the road for another time and for someone else to deal with while we go about our day working our jobs, playing with social media, and generally assuming that because all is seemingly well, it will remain so. Until it isn't.
I have an uncomfortable feeling that we are living our lives as if it were September 10, and that the 11th will be just another sunny, carefree day. Maybe our experts have an inkling as to what sort of cyberattack might come, on what and where. Maybe not. But the lack of overt attention to the possibilities and public planning for them strikes me as very negligent, and potentially criminally so, if/when the day comes that our electrical grids are taken down. Or our telecommunications system. Or our online capabilities, including banking and commerce. Or control over our water supply. Or our ability to track and monitor aircraft (or anything destructive incoming from abroad).
It's nice to go through life believing that all is well and will continue to be so. Until it isn't. Then watch how quickly people ask why something wasn't done about it sooner and why we were so unprepared. And it won't be just the politicians who come under scrutiny for largely ignoring the huge elephant in the room. Or what will happen if/when our leaders opt to retaliate, and what can come after that, especially if they are less than competent in comparison to our adversaries. Given Wray's informed warning, shouldn't this all be more of a public discussion and a media topic of attention than, say, a new Taylor Swift album?
Hats off to Democrats who once again put aside the anger and vitriol they have been swamped with in the House and used Committee votes to advance these foreign policy bills. What wonderful leadership from Jeffries.