Hey, Donald: The Red Carpet Didn’t Work
Putin’s latest provocation is his most serious yet. Big surprise: He wasn’t won over in Anchorage.
Lots of Epstein news yesterday—the White House’s ridiculous denials that Trump wrote Epstein a birthday letter, and the media’s bizarre failure to hold their feet to the fire about those denials—but Andrew got it all out of his system already in videos with Sarah and JVL. Other stuff today! Happy Wednesday.
Putin Attacks, Trump Retreats
by William Kristol
Less than a month ago, Donald Trump had U.S. soldiers roll out a red carpet for Vladimir Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. The nervous American host and the confident Russian visitor met for less than three hours. Afterwards, Trump hailed the get-together with the Russian dictator as “productive,” praised Putin’s observations as “profound,” asserted that “there were many, many points” they agreed on, and said that the two had “made some headway.”
Developments since then suggest that the headway seems to have been all in Putin’s direction.
On the U.S. side, it’s been all carrots and no sticks. Trump has successfully pressured Congress not to follow through with long-threatened sanctions against Russia. Last week, his administration announced that the United States would end a longstanding program of military support, known as Section 333, for European allies near the border of Russia.
Meanwhile, Putin has traveled to Beijing for a more extended lovefest with his fellow dictators, at which actual deals for further cooperation were concluded. And Russia has been carrying out repeated and much expanded missile and drone attacks on Ukraine, including on civilian targets. This past Sunday saw Russia’s largest drone assault so far in the war.
Then, in a striking escalation yesterday, what Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called “a huge number” of Russian drones violated Polish airspace. Some were shot down by Polish and NATO air defenses.
Tusk has now invoked NATO’s Article 4, under which NATO allies are called into consultation when a member state believes its “territorial integrity, political independence or security” is threatened. The alliance will be holding an emergency meeting today.
European leaders have uniformly denounced Russia’s actions—including the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, the former prime minister of Estonia, who said: “Last night in Poland we saw the most serious European airspace violation by Russia since the war began, and indications suggest it was intentional, not accidental.” Kallas added that “Russia’s war is escalating, not ending.”
As of this morning, Donald Trump has said . . . nothing.
So Putin is attacking and Trump is retreating. That red carpet in Anchorage seems not to have made much of an impression. Or perhaps Putin understood the gesture for what it was: The red carpet was a kind of white flag, a signal of submission and supplication.
The United States, under Donald Trump, is now weaker than it has been in a very long time. And the world is more dangerous than it has been in a very long time.
Payola Nation
by Andrew Egger
Back in 2017, four Arab nations launched a diplomatic and economic blockade against the tiny, wealthy nation of Qatar, sparking a regional mini-crisis that would last the next four years. At the time, Trump emphatically praised the action: “We had a decision to make. Do we take the easy road, or do we finally take a hard but necessary action?” he said in the Rose Garden. “We have to stop the funding of terrorism. The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.”
Since then, Qatar has gone to great lengths to ingratiate itself with Trump world. And yesterday, after Israel carried out an unexpected military strike targeting Hamas leaders in the country’s capital city of Doha, Trump shared a very different assessment of the nation. Qatar, he said, was a “strong ally and friend of the U.S.” He warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against further strikes there. “I assured [Qatar],” he wrote, “that such a thing will not happen again on their soil.”
Among the Arab petro-states, Qatar has a complicated relationship to the United States. The country has long maintained military ties with America: Al Udeid Air Base, located south of Doha, is the largest U.S. installation in the Middle East. In 2022, President Joe Biden designated Qatar a major non-NATO ally. But Qatar has also long been accused of spending its largesse in less savory ways: funding terror groups like Hamas and spending enormous sums on political influence efforts in the United States. Most infamously, this year, they gifted Donald Trump a plane.
These influence efforts have paid off handsomely. Three of Trump’s cabinet members—Attorney General Pam Bondi, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, and FBI Director Kash Patel—were all previously paid consultants or lobbyists on Qatar’s behalf. One of the actions Bondi took during her first day in office was to announce the Justice Department would deprioritize criminal enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It was an act that, coincidentally or not, directly benefited her old client, which would now be able to operate more freely in the U.S. without the demand for public disclosure.
Trump’s about-face on Qatar has been awkward for many congressional Republicans who formerly viewed exposing the nation’s influence operations as a national-security priority.
Take just one example. Late in Trump’s first term, the Justice Department ordered AJ+, a digital media network in the U.S. owned by the Qatar state-funded media network Al Jazeera, to register as a foreign agent under FARA. “Journalism designed to influence American perceptions of a domestic policy issue or a foreign nation’s activities or its leadership qualifies as ‘political activities’ under the statutory definition,” the DoJ letter read, “even if it views itself as ‘balanced.’”
AJ+ refused to comply with the order. And during Joe Biden’s presidency, House and Senate Republicans repeatedly asked the Justice Department why they were not taking enforcement actions against the outlet more aggressively. “With AJ+’s refusal to register under FARA,” several GOP senators wrote in 2021, “agents of the Qatari government continue to operate in the United States in violation of the law.” (The letter was spearheaded by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley. Another notable signatory: then-Sen. Marco Rubio, who is now secretary of state.) Last year, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer went even further, announcing an oversight investigation into the DoJ’s apparent refusal to enforce FARA requirements against AJ+.
With Biden out and Trump back in, the DoJ still hasn’t moved forward with enforcement action—criminal or civil—against AJ+. But Republicans have seemingly lost some of their appetite on the subject. I reached out this week to the White House, the Justice Department, Comer, Grassley, and the rest of the Senate letter’s signatories. The White House referred me to DoJ, and a spokesperson for one signatory, Indiana Sen. Todd Young, referred me to Grassley’s office. I received no other replies.
Qatar’s change in fortunes under Trump 2.0 isn’t just a matter of Trump and people close to him having received Qatari largesse. It’s a philosophical difference in how the U.S. government views foreign largesse writ large. Previously, many Republicans were incensed by the concept of foreign governments spending huge sums to try to surreptitiously buy the good opinion of Americans. But for Trump, those huge sums are just evidence that nations like Qatar want to be in America’s good books. In a world like Trump’s—a world that runs on raw power alone—what’s the harm in it? The best allies are the ones that pay the best.
NYC and D.C. friends don’t delay! Grab your seats today for our Bulwark Live shows in October. Go to TheBulwark.com/events for details and to purchase tickets.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Epstein Scandal Reveals MAGA’s True Face… They all knew Trump was a louse and a liar. Now they’re desperate to deny the obvious, writes MONA CHAREN.
No, Zohran Mamdani Isn’t a Communist… It’s Trump himself who uses Communist tactics, observes WILL SALETAN.
Here’s Why the Supreme Court Keeps Writing Trump Blank Checks…They’re doing so instead of keeping an eye on checks and balances, explains PHILIP ALLEN LACOVARA.
If the Government Shuts Down, Obamacare Will Be Why… The clock is ticking to avert a big rise in health care costs, reports JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.
GOP Senators Run From the Sight of Trump’s Epstein Card… JOE PERTICONE has an insane Press Pass from Capitol Hill.
Quick Hits
MEET THE NEW BOSS: It was only weeks ago that Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, was elevated to the role of interim director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention amid RFK Jr.’s chaotic shakeup of that agency. O’Neill faced some skepticism, not just because his ascension came on the heels of multiple top CDC officials resigning in protest of RFK Jr.’s management style and anti-vaccine quackery, but because he didn’t really have a background in actual medicine. Yes, he’d served at HHS in the Bush administration, but in a policy advisory role. His more recent resume included a stint running Peter Thiel’s investment fund and other projects such as “a nonprofit working to develop manmade islands that would float outside U.S. territory.”
So it wasn’t too big a surprise to those on the receiving end that O’Neill’s first all-hands email to staff in his new role had nothing to do with medicine, disease, or even internal strife at the agency. Instead, it was about incorporating AI into HHS operations.
“In many offices around the world, the growing administrative burden of extensive emails and meetings can distract even highly motivated people from getting things done. We should all be vigilant against barriers that could slow our progress toward making America healthy again,” read the Tuesday-morning email, which was passed along to The Bulwark. “I’m excited to move us forward by making ChatGPT available to everyone in the Department effective immediately.” He proposed that the tool would help people “refine” their “thinking on a subject.”
Rest assured, O’Neill went on to note that HHS’s chief information officer had “taken precautions to ensure that your work with AI is carried out in a high-security environment.” But he also advised those who will be incorporating ChatGPT into their work to bring a skeptical eye with them. “Watch for potential bias, and treat answers as suggestions,” he wrote. “Before making a significant decision, make sure you have considered original sources and counterarguments.”
DOGE may be dead. But the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
– Sam Stein
NOT ‘FOR CAUSE’ ENOUGH: Donald Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook is on ice—at least for now. On Tuesday, a D.C. district judge granted Cook a preliminary injunction against her firing, ruling that Trump was unlikely to prevail in his argument that he had fired her “for cause” as required by law because he had not accused her of misconduct while on the job.
“The best reading of the ‘for cause’ provision is that the bases for removal of a member of the Board of Governors are limited to grounds concerning a Governor’s behavior in office and whether they have been faithfully and effectively executing their statutory duties,” Judge Jia Cobb, a Biden appointee, wrote in her opinion. “‘For cause’ thus does not contemplate removing an individual purely for conduct that occurred before they began in office.”
Trump has accused Cook—and a number of other political opponents—of committing mortgage fraud by listing multiple homes as primary residences on mortgage applications. He has been aided in this by Federal Housing Finance Agency head Bill Pulte, who has parlayed his regulatory role into MAGA e-stardom by raking through the data of Trump’s enemies to find anything to exploit.1 How long Pulte will be able to keep doing that remains to be seen, however. His penchant for badmouthing colleagues has made him some enemies in the administration, most notably Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who threatened to punch him in the face at a dinner last week. Yesterday, a few House Republicans privately cheered Bessent on in interviews with Politico: “I think [Pulte’s] a nut,” one said.
USA! USA!: Last week, we dwelt with distaste on the blood-and-soil polemic Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) delivered at the National Conservatism Conference, the central thesis of which was that Americanism was an explicit ethnic heritage, not a creed or an ideal. Coming from a sitting U.S. senator, it was shocking stuff.
It also remains, as Noah Smith pointed out in a blog post yesterday, a deeply unpopular set of suppositions. Two months ago, YouGov ran a national poll on this very question: What makes someone American? Having many generations of American ancestors, being white, being Christian, even being born in the U.S. and growing up here were all ranked by respondents near the bottom of the list. Overwhelmingly, both Democratic and Republican respondents agreed that specific behaviors and beliefs—the sort of thing Schmitt was scoffing off—make a real American: Obeying U.S. laws, supporting the U.S. Constitution, believing in the Declaration of Independence. (Being a U.S. citizen, arguably the truest technical answer, came fourth to all of these.)
It’s worth bearing in mind: The ethno-NatCons speak for far fewer people than they’d like us to believe.
Cheap Shots
Judge Cobb better hope her papers are in order.
Bill: "So Putin is attacking, and Trump is retreating."
No, Trump is not retreating. He's on Putin's side. Trump's cabinet is on Putin's side.
And for the gazillionith time, **this is what the great and good American people voted for**.
On a purely factual basis, can we still refer to it as the Rose Garden, now that it looks like the outdoor seating area of a fast food joint? Do you think we need to say- the area formerly known as the Rose Garden.