What a Weekend for Putin!
It’s been a long time since the Russian dictator had it this good.
It was a hell of a weekend for bad men getting what they paid for out of Donald Trump. And while we’ll focus on Vladimir Putin here, we don’t want to fully ignore venture capitalist David Sacks, Donald Trump’s “crypto czar,” who seemingly stands to make bank following Trump’s weekend announcement of a “strategic cryptocurrency reserve.” Hey, we’re glad someone’s having fun. Happy Monday.
The Oval Fiasco
by William Kristol
Friday’s disgraceful spectacle in the Oval Office was shocking.
It was shocking because we can still remember when U.S. presidents didn’t routinely disgrace their trust. It was shocking because we are not yet used to seeing the Oval Office as a setting in which an American president bullies a democratic leader on behalf of a brutal dictator.
But the sickening spectacle shouldn’t have been surprising. In the last few weeks, with the phone call with Vladimir Putin, the Pete Hegseth and JD Vance speeches in Europe, and the Marco Rubio meeting in Riyadh, it had become altogether clear that in his second term, Trump’s pro-Putin stance would be unencumbered and unapologetic.
And so the Financial Times warned back on February 21 that “those who thought America was a friend or ally” would have to instead deal with a world in which “America is an unabashed predator.”
The FT asked what the events of the preceding week told us about the future:
First, there should be no doubt that Trump’s contempt for allies and admiration for strongmen is real and will endure. . . .
Second, Trump is only getting started. . . .
After three generations of US leadership, it is always tempting to believe that Trump does not mean what he says. . . . But allies and erstwhile friends must banish these self-soothing thoughts. . . . America has turned.
That was ten days ago.
Friday’s Oval Office mugging of Volodymyr Zelensky was simply the next step in the turn. Trump wanted to undercut Zelensky’s support here at home, at least with Republicans who’d heretofore been pro-Ukraine. And so he and Vance set out to create a mini-drama that would allow Trump to say afterwards that Zelensky wasn’t a “partner for peace.” Previously pro-Ukraine Republicans like Lindsey Graham dutifully joined the pile-on.
In Europe, they understood what was happening. The German press on Saturday morning declared: “It is now the law of the jungle.” “The former leading power of the West can no longer be relied upon.”
And the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said later that day, “We can never accept a reversal of perpetrator and victim. Such a reversal would mean the end of . . . the security of most states. And in the long run, it would also be fatal for the future of the United States.”
So our allies are properly alarmed and outraged. The Putin regime, on the other hand, is gleeful and triumphant. They understand how important it is that the Trump administration has joined them in pursuing a world in which perpetrators are rewarded and victims abandoned.
As the Washington Post reports this morning, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov proclaimed that “The new [U.S.] administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.” Peskov continued: “If the political will of the two leaders, President Putin and President Trump, is maintained, this path can be quite quick and successful.”
What can be done by those who believe this path to be both dishonorable and disastrous; by those who believe that the world Putin is trying to create and that Trump welcomes is not a world the United States should want?
Unlike Russia, this is still a representative democracy. There’s another elective branch of the government, Congress. It has 535 elected representatives. They are independent of the executive. They debate. They vote.
It’s true that in foreign policy, presidents have a lot of leeway. But Congress has fought presidents on foreign policy matters in the past, as Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, and others can attest. Congress has the power of the purse. It can appropriate and withhold funds. More broadly, Congress can, on behalf of the American people, remind friends and enemies alike that here the president is not all-powerful, and that his policies can be modified while in office and reversed afterwards.
But Republicans control Congress, you say. It’s hopeless.
Maybe. But there are Republicans who understand what’s at stake. A few spoke out this weekend, such as Don Bacon in the House and Lisa Murkowski in the Senate. The fact is that going forward a small group of Republicans in the Senate and the House, acting in concert among themselves and in cooperation with the Democrats, could make a fundamental difference. With their support, Congress could pass resolutions supporting Ukraine and NATO and condemning Putin. They could insist that aid for Ukraine be added to continuing resolutions and appropriations bills.
They could do this if they remembered Edmund Burke’s admonition that a representative owes his constituents “his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience.” These are “a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable.”
Honoring their trust from Providence or behaving as a rubber stamp for Donald Trump—which legacy is it to be?
The Third Memo
by Sam Stein
On Sunday afternoon, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, was placed on administrative leave for disseminating memos outlining the failure of the Trump administration to follow through on its pledge to allow waivers for life-saving foreign aid.
Enrich had authored two memos, both dated February 28, 2025. One noted the dramatic staff reductions that had taken place at the Bureau for Global Health, whose workforce had gone from 783 “encumbered” positions to 69 personnel “that received Essential Personnel Designations, of which 15 received RIF letters.” In the other, Enrich identified “72 activities across 31 awards” that had been approved for waivers by Secretary of State Marco Rubio but for which no payments had been released. He said the death toll from this was “not known.”
The Bulwark on Sunday obtained both Enrich memos. This morning, we were passed a third, unfinished one he’d been putting together, this one more alarming than the other two.
The memo, titled “Risks to U.S. National Security and Public Health: Consequences of Pausing Global Health Funding for Lifesaving Humanitarian Assistance,” included a table of startling projections. The permanent halt of $7.7 billion in resources for lifesaving global health programs, Enrich projected, could lead to the following:
12.5–17.9 million cases of malaria with an additional 71,000–166,000 deaths annually;
A 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally;
An additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year;
And, in a worst-case scenario, more than 28,000 cases of Ebola, Marburg, or related diseases.
Enrich continued from there. The memo projected that nearly 17 million pregnant women would not be able to reach life-saving services if USAID programs were permanently halted, and more than 11 million newborns would not get critical postnatal care. An estimated 1 million children would not be treated annually for severe acute malnutrition.
The acting assistant administrator described a geopolitical and economic catastrophe entirely of our own making. In the unfinished memo, he notes that “preventable diseases” would surge, and that the “consequences will extend beyond borders, increasing the risk of infections reaching the U.S.” He noted that the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak cost the U.S. approximately $4.3 billion. He highlighted a February 25, 2025 Center for Global Development study noting that “If TB and multidrug-resistant TB in the US reach current global average rates, the cost of treating TB cases in the US would increase to over $11 billion annually.”
Enrich plainly attempted to craft the memo in language that would speak to Trump. In one section, he noted that there could be global economic disruptions if disease were to break out in “key trade regions.” He noted that USAID food programs provide American farmers and manufacturers “with a stable $2 billion market supporting an estimated 15,000–20,000 jobs.” He made the case that permanently halting these programs represents a national security risk.
“Weakened disease surveillance doesn’t only jeopardize natural outbreak detection—it also creates openings for malicious actors,” Enrich wrote. “Global health monitoring systems serve as the ‘smoke alarm’ for unusual disease patterns that could signal a bioterrorism event. If those alarms are switched off or muted due to lack of funding, a deliberate release of a pathogen could spread for weeks under the guise of a normal outbreak.”
The source who passed along the memo suggested that Enrich wrote it knowing that he was, more or less, digging the grave for his career. It’s not as polished as the other two, reflecting the fact that he was clearly still crafting it before he was put on leave.
Few USAID vets were surprised when Enrich was placed on leave Sunday night. “He knew sending those would result in discipline and the end of his career (at USAID), but also sending those ‘for the record’ ensured that the world had a light on what was really going on,” one person told The Bulwark.
How much good will come of this is the larger question. It’s fair to be skeptical. That said, there is some precedent for people using public pressure to compel DOGE and Trump to reverse their decisions to shutter critical programs. Over the weekend, Elon Musk took to Twitter to try and shame folks for insisting that 400,000 boxes of USAID-branded nutrient-rich, peanut-based paste were languishing in a warehouse because of the aid pause. But he also pledged to look into it. And then he reported back that the payments for those shipments had been restored—which, by late Sunday night, they had been.
Quick Hits
SEE ROGER RUN: How to cope with all the grisly news? One increasingly common strategy: Blowing off some steam by yelling at your Republican lawmaker.
On Saturday, Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall became the latest victim of this hot new trend at an overstuffed town hall in the small town of Oakley (pop. ~2000). Attendees booed his arrival and rolled their eyes at his answers throughout the prickly hour-long event, while Marshall castigated them as “rude.” He suggested they’d fallen victim to “misinformation” about DOGE and ultimately cut the event short.
A possible opportunity for introspection for the senator? Apparently not. In a statement, Marshall’s office suggested the fix was in, the town hall “sabotaged” by “Democrat operatives.” “Real Kansans,” the statement continued, “overwhelmingly support President Trump’s DOGE initiative.”
It was true that some attendees had schlepped to the event from the Kansas City area to give Marshall a piece of their mind. But some of their concerns were plainly shared by locals. The last crowd comment came, according to local media, from local resident Chuck Nunn, who politely and sorrowfully mourned DOGE’s reckless slashing of veteran jobs. Identifying himself as “a dying breed, a conservative Democrat,” Nunn said he supported the mission of identifying waste in government—but that “the way that we are going about it is so wrong, because there are unintended consequences.”
“What the government is doing right now, as far as cutting out those jobs, a huge percentage of those people—and I know you care about the veterans—are veterans,” Nunn went on. “And that’s a damn shame. A damn shame.”
Acting like this sentiment is nothing but scurrilous left-wing astroturf may be comforting to Republicans. But it’s also remarkably short-sighted. There’s a reason “do right by our veterans” has long been a more or less universal tenet of our politics. Scoffing off that extremely normie critique of the DOGEbros is something Republicans do at their peril.
START YOUR ENGINES: Speaker Mike Johnson has managed to shepherd a budget plan through the House of Representatives, which ultimately passed it by a single vote last week. But reconciling it with whatever version of the budget the Senate comes up with will be another matter, given how little room Johnson will have to maneuver. As Politico notes today:
Among those he now needs to placate are tax writers who want a costly permanent extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, hard-liners who want even deeper spending cuts if the tax provisions expand, swing-district members who want assurances on safety-net programs and even billionaire Elon Musk, who has raised public concerns about Johnson’s plan.
That’s to say nothing of Trump himself, who has sided at times with all of those competing factions.
Already the tensions are playing out in public. The hard-liners, for instance, are calling on Johnson to stand strong against Senate attempts to water down the deep cuts they secured. . . . But others are counting on changes to soften the potential backlash vulnerable Republicans face—especially easing the eye-popping $880 billion of savings demanded from the House panel that oversees Medicaid, among other areas.
MORE EMAILS: Elon Musk’s “What did you do last week?” emails are back. This time, most agencies appear fine telling their staff to respond (deadline at midnight tonight), though it doesn’t appear that failure to do so will be treated as resignation.
We were tickled by how the Department of Health and Human Services relayed instructions to its employees. In an email viewed by The Bulwark, HHS personnel were told that they “are expected” to respond. But they were also told to keep the responses “at a high level of generality” so that they protect sensitive data. They were told not to identify “any other HHS employees with whom you have been working” or “matters you are working on” or “any specific grants or contracts.” They were told not to mention by name “any drugs, devices, biologics, therapeutics, or similar items.” They were also told to “assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors.” In short, include the most banal, pointless summary of your work; assume that this could be used by China; but spend a chunk of the workday responding anyway.
Cheap Shots
Convicted Felon Trump’s latest Oval Office debacle wasn’t just another stain on his presidency. This was another instance of America, under Trump’s small and trembling hands, methodically dismantling its own leadership role and placing the crown in Beijing’s outstretched fingers.
Never before has a nation so willingly, so eagerly, so idiotically paved the way for its own irrelevance. Trump is not simply appeasing Putin—he is performing a geopolitical euthanasia on the United States itself. He is ensuring that when the dust settles, America may still be feared, but it will no longer be respected or needed on the global stage. The power vacuum left in our wake is already being filled.
While Trump stumbles from one foreign policy disaster to the next, China is moving with precision. Every time Trump snubs NATO, China secures another military outpost in the South China Sea. Every time he humiliates Ukraine, China deepens its trade and infrastructure deals across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Every time he signals that America no longer honors its word, China offers itself as the new pillar of global stability. Beijing isn’t just waiting for the U.S. to crumble; it is actively ensuring that when we do, the world has already shifted to a new center of gravity.
This is not just a shift. This is succession. This is the end of American leadership—not because we were defeated, but because we chose to abdicate. As Trump dismantles America’s alliances, China is forging new ones, binding the world to its economic and political influence with the kind of long-term strategy that the U.S. once excelled at. The result? A future where Washington no longer dictates the terms of global trade, security, or diplomacy—Beijing does.
Superpowers die from the rot from within, their influence draining away like blood from an open wound. Trump is not just accelerating that process—he is gleefully watching as America’s global standing hemorrhages, oblivious to the fact that history will remember him not as a leader, but as the incompetent fool who let it all slip away. China is not conquering the world through war. It doesn’t need to. It is simply stepping into the throne that Trump is too foolish to realize he has already vacated.
I've told my sons and more than one friend: I've never witnessed a first-world country systematically attempt to commit political, cultural, and economic suicide before. We're certainly giving it a good shot, though.