We were all given cause to contemplate the fundamental ricketiness of the modern internet this morning, as a major apparent outage at web-infrastructure provider Cloudflare knocked out access to a bunch of high-traffic sites. It was the second such large infrastructure error in weeks—last month, an Amazon Web Services glitch similarly locked up major chunks of the web for hours.
The Cloudflare glitch is monkeying with Substack and our Bulwark back-end too, although it doesn’t seem to be preventing us from building and sending this newsletter. We guess if you’re reading it, it worked! Happy Tuesday.
Can MTG Survive Our Strange New Respect?
by Andrew Egger
So far, at least, it sure looks like Marjorie Taylor Greene’s winning her breakup with Donald Trump.
The president is running his usual playbook for slapping down internal enemies—the barrage of personal attacks, the accusations of sour grapes, the public brainstorming process for mean nicknames. But none of it seems to be having the usual effect. The shock-and-awe tactics are supposed to cow their target and set them crawling to Mar-a-Lago for forgiveness. But Greene seems unbothered. While Trump’s unsubtle declarations of open war against a Republican are supposed to function as marching orders for the broader MAGA base and Trump infotainment apparatus, Greene appears to be shielded by her own, hard-won MAGA cachet.
It is Trump, not Greene, who is beating a hasty retreat on the matter that sparked their fight in the first place. Despite his bullying, she has persisted in her support for releasing the full Epstein files, while he has been forced to pretend he suddenly supports it too, lest he suffer the embarrassment of seeing a huge swath of the House GOP vote to release them over his objections.
All these developments would have seemed impossible just a month or two ago. And it suggests that we may be witnessing a hinge point for MAGA, a motley coalition of groups that has long been held together only by the personal gravity of Trump. If Trump continues to falter, the power vacuum he will begin to create will be gargantuan. Plainly, Greene senses the opportunity to put herself forward as the leader of a possible successor faction. Well, so far so good for her.
But can it last?
Greene seems unambiguously to have won the early days of the fight. But those early victories may actually prove dangerous to her long-term chances, because she’s starting to get the strange-new-respect treatment from all the wrong people.
It’s a pattern we saw time and again in the first Trump term. Some Republican gets in a fight with Trump. Because Trump is the perpetual main character of our discourse, this fight shoves that Republican into the main-stage spotlight—maybe even into a spot on the January 6th committee. Suddenly they’re all over mainstream media, getting unusually sympathetic write-ups in the discourse and unusually charitable interviews from the establishment talking heads—perhaps about how they stood up to Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 elections.
Compared to the MAGA crowd who’s by now beating that Republican silly online, the mainstream response seems downright warm and loving to the Republican who has “seen the light.” They get correspondingly less prickly in their own rhetoric, more prone to bromides about bipartisanship and so on.
But of course this usually ends up playing right into Trump’s hands. He understands deep in his lizard brain that his base’s central driving concern remains what it has always been: owning the libs. Any non-hostile interaction between an elected Republican and a hated outsider—Democrats, the media, whatever—is inherently, deeply suspicious. And Trump channels that suspicion straight back into his own quarrel with the Republican—look, all our mutual enemies are rallying around THEM! They were a RINO all along!
Greene now presents an interesting test case. She is no establishment politician. She never wore MAGA like a skinsuit. She has lived and breathed it for her entire political career. Will this give her the antibodies she needs to withstand this sort of attack?1
She’d better hope so, because she doesn’t appear to be strategically triangulating away from this playbook in the slightest. The first few major interviews she’s done since her pivot seem like they could have been chosen specifically for their base-alienating properties: A panel on The View, followed shortly by a CNN interview with Dana Bash in which she apologized for her own history of wacky, stuntish behavior—the same behavior that made her a MAGA star in the first place. In that same interview, she spoke about “ending the toxic infighting in politics” and said Trump’s attacks were putting her life in danger.
In many ways, yes, she’s winning the breakup. But let me leave you with the top Breitbart comment on the writeup of Greene’s interview with Bash: “When you go on CNN crying about Trump, you get what you deserve.”
Congress’s Next Backbone
by William Kristol
Today the House of Representatives will pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, something President Trump bitterly opposed for months. This will be taken, correctly, as a suggestion that Trump may be beginning to lose his iron grip on the Republican party.
Could the president also be losing his iron grip on Congress?
That grip has been made possible by the fact that in the Trump era, partisan loyalty has swamped institutional responsibility. Could today’s vote be a sign that members of Congress are re-awakening to the fact that they were elected to serve as our representatives in a co-equal branch of the government, not as mere rubber stamps for the executive?
It’s possible. Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) announced yesterday that a bill to repeal Trump’s executive order stripping union rights from federal workers now has enough signatures on its own discharge petition to bring it before the House. The discharge petition had previously languished two votes short of the necessary 218, but yesterday Republican representatives Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler of New York signed on. So that piece of legislation, opposed by the administration, should also soon come to the floor for a vote.
These are only modest steps on the path back to Congress retaking its proper place in our constitutional structure. But a major and necessary stride in the right direction is available for the taking: Congress should insist on having a say before Trump leads us into war with Venezuela.
Over the past two-and-a-half months, the Trump administration has attacked almost two dozen alleged drug boats in international waters, killing over 80 foreign nationals, with no serious legal justification for (or detailed explanation of) its actions, and without congressional authorization or oversight. Indeed, after notifying Congress pursuant to the War Powers Act, the administration has exceeded the time frame for executive action laid out in that legislation. Congress has so far failed to enforce that law.
Trump has, over this period, repeatedly raised the prospect for far wider military action, including the possibility of bombing targets within Venezuela. Then, on Sunday night, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced that the U.S. was designating Cartel de los Soles—a group he claimed is headed by Venezuela’s president—as a foreign terrorist organization.
Let’s leave aside that it’s very doubtful this amorphous group is an actual terrorist organization. “They’re designating a non-thing that is not a terror organization as a terrorist organization,” said Brian Finucane, a former government war powers lawyer. And let’s leave aside that such a designation does not provide any legal justification for military action. What seems evident is that the administration considers this designation a useful rhetorical predicate to military action.
That certainly appears to be the direction this is heading. On Sunday night, the Pentagon announced that its most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, had crossed into the Caribbean Sea. And then, yesterday, in response to a question, President Trump wouldn’t rule out the use of military force against Venezuela, even including ground troops. “We just have to take care of Venezuela,” he said.
But you know who is supposed to be a crucial part of the “We” in that sentence? The United States Congress.
In Article 1, Section Eight, the Constitution prescribes that, “The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War,” and “To Make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.”
Donald Trump wants to lead us into war without authorization from or even consultation with Congress. And he will use the precedent of unconstrained presidential control of the military to lay the predicate not just for action in Venezuela but for threats to our own liberties here.
Congress should vote to release the Epstein files. It should prepare to vote on union rights for federal workers. But if it fails to assume its responsibility on the fundamental question of war and peace, those promising steps will, I fear, prove to be mere footprints on the sand, soon covered over and forgotten as the Trump administration proceeds apace on its authoritarian project.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Arrested for Following the Rules… There is a danger to ICE’s strategy of targeting immigrants who are simply fulfilling their legal responsibilities, warns ANSLEY SKIPPER.
The Leopard Is Eating Trump’s Face… And it’s still hungry, reports WILL SOMMER in False Flag.
The Internet’s Attack on Reality… FRANCIS FUKUYAMA joins MONA CHAREN on the Mona Charen Show to share his theory that the internet—and not economic distress, the Democratic party’s problems, or other things—has given rise to populism.
Quick Hits
FEMA HEAD OUT: Acting FEMA head and work/life balance icon David Richardson resigned Monday, bringing a close to a short tenure in which America’s chief disaster-response agency endured criticism for sometimes-sluggish response to, well, disasters. Not all of this was Richardson’s fault, but he did acquire a reputation as being weirdly hard to reach. As the Washington Post noted in September:
Historically, FEMA administrators carry a bag with multiple devices with them, including top security clearance phones from the White House that give a select group of people access to high levels of classified information, such as intelligence about a particular threat.
But Richardson rarely uses government communication and top security phones, according to several current and former officials.
He “is not a big fan of cellphones” and tries to limit his sons’ exposure to them, said a person who has worked closely with him. He usually puts his phone in a box when he gets home and rarely answers it after hours, according to two former officials who worked with him.
So, yeah, maybe not the best guy to run emergency disaster response operations for the whole federal government. But we can’t help but feel like the administration is losing a real one here.
OPERATION ‘GET COMEY’ ON THE ROCKS: Lindsey Halligan may have come into the job of acting U.S. attorney for Eastern Virginia as an insurance lawyer with zero prosecutorial experience. But what she lacked in polish she was supposed to make up for with total loyalty to the president and steely devotion to the project of punishing his enemies with criminal charges.
There’s just one problem: It turns out total loyalty and steely devotion may not be enough to get the charges to stick. Politico reports that “a cascade of apparent errors” in Halligan’s prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey has led to a remarkable rebuke from the federal judge overseeing the case:
The magistrate judge, William Fitzpatrick, ordered prosecutors Monday to quickly turn over records of secret grand jury proceedings to defense attorneys as they seek to dismiss the false-statement and obstruction-of-Congress charges pending against Comey in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.
“The Court recognizes this is an extraordinary remedy,” Fitzpatrick wrote in a 24-page opinion, “but given the factually based challenges the defense has raised to the government’s conduct and the prospect that government misconduct may have tainted the grand jury proceedings, disclosure of grand jury materials under these unique circumstances is necessary.”
It’s amazing how many rakes Halligan has managed to step on already in her short time on the job. On the sliding scale of embarrassing Trump hires, she’s speedrunning straight into the Anthony Scaramucci/Rudy Giuliani zone.
COME FOR THE CHUCK, YOU BEST NOT MISS: Fed-up progressives want Chuck Schumer gone. But Axios reports that, base energy or no base energy, it’s far from clear that anybody’s got a viable strategy to actually replace the minority leader:
Progressive critics are united in their fury at Schumer (D-N.Y.), who’s led Senate Democrats since 2017. But they’re missing two critical ingredients: A clear path to his ouster, and a Democratic senator who’d want the job.
National progressive groups floated Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) as a possible Schumer replacement late last week.
Van Hollen isn’t pursuing Schumer’s job, a source familiar told Axios, but he does want a “serious discussion on how to more effectively fight back” against President Trump.
This is all a familiar story to anyone who’s ever spent time following the internal politicking of Senate Republicans. As conservative anti-establishment fury surged through the 2010s, then-GOP Leader Mitch McConnell became the single Republican in America most hated by Republicans. It was a situation that nevertheless never seriously jeopardized his perch atop the party: McConnell sailed to the end of his career as the longest-serving Senate leader in history, squashing would-be challengers like bugs along the way. Whether Schumer has the same cachet within his caucus remains to be seen. But throwing out a Senate leader is no easy feat.
Cheap Shots
With Cloudflare acting up we can’t actually get you a screenshot of Rep. Thomas Massie tweeting that he’s looking forward to attending Trump’s signing of his Epstein-files bill, which Trump fought for months but now suddenly supports. But he did!
Vaxxed?
"But let me leave you with the top Breitbart comment . . . . ."
Well, this puts the pressure on us commentors. What we write might be picked up by the punditocracy as representative of all Never Trumpers. So let me be perfectly clear: I thought Donald Trump a steaming pile of shit the day he came down the escalator and I've had the same thought every single day since.
As I have suggested before, Trump’s MAGA is a cult, with all of the psychological brainwashing that it includes. That MTG publically acknowledged and apologized for some of her wacky statements in the past and realized how dangerous the cult leader was, she began her journey toward sanity. There is no good accomplished by lambasting her for past poor choices under the influence of Trumpism. Instead, she, and those Republicans should be, cautiously, accepted back into normalcy. It doesn’t matter how it happened, just provide them a way to stop being Trump’s lemmings and turn away from the cliff.
As for Halligan, ethical lawyers don’t accept cases when they are far beyond their area of expertise. Many of the lawyers who serve Trump will likely be facing discipline, if not disbarment and possibly prison when Trump’s power fails—Bondi, Patel and Blanche being at the top of the list.