Soon, The Buck Stops With Him
Plus: Devastation and blame game in LA and the original guy to come up with the “Gulf of America.”
Out in southern California, things just keep looking worse. The winds keep blowing, the fires keep spreading, and the death and devastation keeps growing: Five people have been confirmed dead, roads are snarled by people attempting to flee, and there’s no way yet even to assess the amount of property damage across the area. The Santa Ana winds fueling the blaze have eased somewhat, but are forecasted to return in the days ahead.
We’re keeping everyone affected in our prayers today. Happy Thursday.
Eleven More Days
by William Kristol
Donald Trump seems to be enjoying his time as president-elect. Why wouldn’t he? He’s a winner. He’s the center of all attention, and the recipient of all capitulation. He’s the biggest man on the biggest campus—and there are no classes yet, and no exams.
But there is one thing about being president-elect: You become president. And then you’re in charge. You’re responsible. You have to govern.
And there’s no reason to think Trump will be good at governing. He wasn’t the first time, and the second term will be worse. He won’t be constrained this time by some responsible people within the administration, or by elements of the Republican party not yet entirely cowed by him. And he’ll be backed and egged on by an authoritarian movement that is far stronger and more radical than it was at the beginning—or even at the end—of his first term.
Beginning January 20, it will be Trump’s show. From the most trivial things to the most weighty, the power will emanate from and the buck will stop at Trump’s Oval Office.
Does he really think direct U.S. control of Greenland is important to our national security? If so, what’s he going to do about it? If not, why is he antagonizing the NATO ally that controls Greenland and cooperates with us on security matters there?
On more weighty matters, what actual policies will he follow with respect to China and Russia and Iran? Will they work? Will he bring peace to Ukraine? How? Will the economy benefit from his trade and tax measures? Will the country benefit from his immigration policies?
The time in which president-elect Trump just gets to talk ends in eleven days. And the phony political war of the last two months—in which the newly victorious president-elect has been confident and triumphant, with the opposition dispirited and in disarray—ends as well.
As a president facing real challenges at home and abroad, Trump will be judged not by talk but by deeds. And he won’t be able to blame Congress for failures, as Congress is controlled by his party, a party he controls. The last time a president entered a second term with control of Congress was George W. Bush in 2005. He claimed a mandate and he and his party were riding high. It didn’t end well.
No one should relish the prospect of these next four years. There will be serious human costs, at home and abroad, from Trump’s policies. Real damage will be done to our political system, our country, and the world.
That’s why we in the opposition will have a responsibility to oppose and block damaging policies when we can. A checked Trump will be a less destructive Trump—less destructive to the world, to our nation, to our democracy.
So we should try to check him where we can. But it will still be Trump’s moment. He’ll be in charge. It will be a rough four years. But it could also be a clarifying moment. It could be a moment when government by demagoguery and dishonesty, animated by authoritarianism, is discredited. And it could also be a moment when, in opposition and with its back against the wall, a robust and forward-looking liberalism emerges.
Donald to Vlad: ‘I Feel Your Pain’
by Cathy Young
Amid his other eccentric ramblings (putting it charitably) at Tuesday’s press conference, President-elect Donald Trump had things to say about Ukraine, Russia, and the war he once vowed to settle in one day. This time, he conceded that it’s a lot more complicated. He also reprised his theme of blaming Joe Biden, claiming that Biden provoked Vladimir Putin not only by bungling the Afghanistan exit but by urging Ukraine to join NATO: “They had a deal and then Biden broke it.”
Russia—for many, many years, long before Putin—said, “You could never have NATO involved with Ukraine.” . . . That’s been, like, written in stone. And somewhere along the line Biden said, ‘No. They should be able to join NATO.’ Well, then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feelings about that.
As a very different Republican president once said: There you go again.
Putin’s “feelings” or “security concerns” about Ukraine and NATO are a perennial pro-Kremlin talking point. I addressed it in The Bulwark in the war’s early days, but a quick update is in order.
First, documents declassified last year confirm that no “deal” to keep Ukraine out of NATO ever existed. Boris Yeltsin did suggest to Bill Clinton, in 1997, a confidential “gentleman’s agreement” that no former Soviet republics could join the alliance. Yet Clinton not only bluntly told him this was impossible, but argued that it would be bad both for “build[ing] a new NATO” and for “build[ing] a new Russia.” Clinton assured Yeltsin that he wanted a Russia-NATO partnership sensitive to Russia’s security concerns; the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council, formed the same year, provided a framework for such cooperation. (Its successor, the Russia-NATO Council, was suspended in October 2021.) And, of course, it was George W. Bush, not Biden, who first backed Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership.
Second, since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO has gained two new members, Finland and Sweden. Finland’s entry more than doubled the length of the Russia-NATO border to 1,584 miles. The Russian-Ukrainian land border is 1,126 miles (with another 199 miles of nautical border). The difference hardly justifies a claim of existential threat, especially when Russia’s total land border is nearly 14,000 miles. Unsurprisingly, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, in 2014 and especially in 2022, has also led to a much more militarized and active NATO presence “on their doorstep.”
It’s almost as if the Kremlin’s concerns and feelings had nothing to do with military security—which is what Russia’s former pretend president and current Security Council deputy chair Dmitry Medvedev basically admitted in a July 2023 article. The issue, Medvedev wrote, wasn’t NATO expansion in general; it was Russia’s demand “not to invite former parts of our country to join NATO” (italics in the original). “Our country” here is clearly not Russia, of which Ukraine was never a part, but the Russian or Soviet empire. The menace is to Russia’s, or Putin’s, imperial ego and sense of entitlement to a “sphere of influence.”
Of course, those are things Trump understands quite well, as his recent declarations of territorial ambition suggest.
It’s hard to see how Trump’s willingness to channel the Kremlin narrative on the war is anything but bad news. It throws a juicy chunk of red meat to Putin’s propagandists. It also signals a willingness, at the very least, to force Ukraine into ruinous and humiliating concessions for “peace.” Optimistically, one could hope that it’s an attempt to sweet-talk Putin into a Ukraine-friendly deal. But let’s face it, nothing about Trump’s post-election conduct inspires optimism.
Quick-Ish Hits
IN GOOD HANDS: No single person can be blamed for the wildfires still blazing out of control across the Los Angeles area, a drought-dried tinderbox currently being pummeled by sustained winds that whip up new fires as quickly as firefighters can douse them. Still, you sure wouldn’t want to be LA Mayor Karen Bass right now. At a moment of deep crisis, she can’t seem to stop stepping on rakes.
Bass has faced heavy criticism both for seemingly approving millions of dollars in cuts to the city’s firefighting budget last year—though Politico reports that the overall funding for the department actually increased in a later, separate bill—and for an ill-timed trip to Ghana this week. She took that trip even as warnings came in that a dangerous fire could break out in and around the city. Once gone, she was left to coordinate the initial response from thousands of miles away.
Things only got worse after she touched back down in town Wednesday. A Sky News reporter who happened to be on Bass’s flight approached her on the jetway as they waited to deplane. The reporter peppered her with questions. All he got was some deeply awkward video footage of Bass staring stone-faced into space for more than a minute. Later, giving her first on-the-ground public remarks, Bass couldn’t even manage to get through a written statement without sparking still more criticism: “Right now, if you need help, emergency information, resources, and shelter is available,” Bass read. “All of this can be found at URL.”
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: It won’t shock you to learn that Donald Trump is responding to the devastating fires with his customary grace and restraint, railing against “Gavin Newscum,” bizarrely casting himself as the blaze’s primary victim (“THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME”), and incoherently insisting that the reason the LA metro area is ablaze is because Newsom has been reluctant to pump more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farmers in the state’s Central Valley.
It’s largely bluster and wrong. But there is a small part of the crisis that is undeniably the fault of California’s state government. Many of the burned-out homeowners may be facing genuine financial hardship because California state law has made it impossible for them to adequately insure their homes.
As fire risk has soared throughout southern California in recent years, the actuarial risk of insuring homes has skyrocketed as well. But California state law places price controls on home insurance, with an annual rate hike above 7 percent requiring approval from the state’s elected insurance commissioner. Predictably, the state has dragged its feet on approving rate hikes commensurate with rising risk, and insurance companies have spent the last few years inching out of the market. Last year, State Farm, the biggest home insurance provider in the state, canceled tens of thousands of property policies in places like Pacific Palisades, arguing that, at the rates they were permitted to charge, a large-scale disaster could cook the whole company.
Here’s the LA Times, reporting on the insurance crunch last year:
Left with no other choice, a number of Californians have turned to the FAIR Plan as a last resort. Funded by the insurers doing business in California, the Fair Access to Insurance Requirement plan provides more limited coverage as a fallback for property owners unable to find conventional policies they can afford.
But the enrollment surge is putting a financial strain on the state insurer as it faces a potential loss of $311 billion, up from $50 billion in 2018. State officials said the FAIR Plan had a surplus of $200 million and was at risk of insolvency should a catastrophic event occur.
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN: We were all a little surprised to hear Donald Trump announce out of the blue this week that he intended to “rename” the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” But nobody was more surprised than Steve Holland, a former longtime Democratic state lawmaker in Mississippi who made the very same proposal at the state level more than a decade ago.
“I’ve gotten about 60 texts today about it,” Holland, a professional undertaker who served in the House of Delegates for 25 years before losing reelection in 2020, told The Bulwark this week. “Saying, ‘Hell, have you and Trump gotten chummy?’”
Holland’s 2012 bill, which would have redesignated the Gulf in all official Mississippi government materials, differed from Trump’s suggestion in one key respect: Holland was 100 percent kidding. In fact, as he said at the time, his proposal was intended to poke fun at his Republican colleagues’ increasingly anti-immigrant policies. “It was just truly a spoof,” he said, hatched while grumping with some friends at the bar about “some of this anti-immigration stuff that was going around.”
What does Holland make of the fact that what seemed like parody material a decade ago is now resurfacing as a sincere policy proposal from the incoming president, not to mention legislation from a Trump-allied member of the House? He was reluctant to say, pleading that he doesn’t want to prejudge Trump before he even takes office: “He’s the president—I’d better bite my tongue and hope like everything that he does good things, but I have my doubts.”
“The [Trump] campaign was despicable to me,” he added. “And his first presidency was pretty despicable to me.”
Cheap Shots
Welp, this feels like something we’ll be hearing more about.
How do you check someone who doesn’t just ignore the rules but incinerates them in full view of the crowd, laughing as the ashes settle? How do you discredit someone who thrives on discredit, whose every lie is a rung on the ladder of their ascent, whose every scandal is just another spotlight in the unrelenting circus of their existence? You don’t shame a man without shame. You don’t corner someone who sees boundaries as dares. You don’t outmaneuver someone whose only strategy is chaos itself.
Donald Trump isn’t a leader—he’s a black hole in the shape of a man, devouring norms, reason, and decency with the gravitational pull of his own ego. He’s not bound by the constraints of governance or morality because his power doesn’t derive from them—it feeds on their destruction. He’s the ultimate postmodern creation: a man whose currency is spectacle, whose weapon is outrage, and whose greatest skill is turning every defeat into fuel for his next act.
The idea that we can “check” him assumes he’s playing the same game, but he’s not. Trump doesn’t lose when he’s proven wrong; he wins by being the loudest voice in the room. He doesn’t need credit to succeed—he thrives in its absence. In fact, the very idea of discrediting him is absurd. He was never a figure of credibility to begin with, only a character, a projection of power and defiance that his followers cling to with cult-like fervor.
Our systems of accountability—laws, norms, even truth itself—are like cobwebs trying to restrain a wrecking ball. They rely on mutual consent, on the understanding that some lines won’t be crossed, some games won’t be rigged. But Trump’s entire ethos is that there are no lines. No rules. Just endless opportunities to exploit the chaos and claim victory through sheer audacity.
So how do you fight that? With facts? With decency? With carefully worded op-eds and well-intentioned condemnations? You might as well throw paper airplanes at a hurricane. Trump isn’t constrained by the systems we expect him to follow, and that’s exactly why his base loves him. Every outrage is proof of his strength. Every scandal is a badge of honor. To his followers, his very defiance of the rules is the point.
The real question isn’t about him. It’s about us. Are we prepared to acknowledge that our institutions—the courts, Congress, the media—aren’t designed to handle someone like Trump? That they crumble under the weight of a man who wields chaos as both shield and sword? Or will we keep pretending that the same playbook that worked against ordinary politicians will somehow tame the beast?
Because let’s be clear: this isn’t about governance. It never was. It’s about performance. Trump doesn’t want to run the country; he wants to run the show, and if we don’t recognize that for what it is, we’re not just playing into his hands—we’re the ones setting the stage.
The buck will never “stop at Trump’s Oval Office”. He blames others reflexively; as natural as drawing breath. Even blaming them for serious misfortune as he’s blaming Gavin Newsom for the LA fires. I recall a quote regarding Covid deaths: “I take no responsibility at all”.