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THE IRON-CLAD PIÑATA Seymour Hersh
President Biden’s foreign policy problems in the Middle East and Ukraine are daunting, especially in an election year, but the war between Russia and Ukraine could be nearing a military endgame, and not via negotiations. Vladimir Putin’s military is more entrenched inside Ukraine than ever, and the undermanned and under-equipped Ukraine military is facing a stalemate at best and the permanent loss of four oblasts. In essence, it is a defeat.
The Russian president’s unchallenged re-election over the weekend was a farce by democratic standards, especially coming after the death last month of the imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny. The 77 percent turnout was the largest since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Putin won 87 percent of the vote. “It was the same process” as in earlier Russian elections, a knowledgeable American official caustically told me. “The Russians voted that way because it was in their interest to do so. The people had to vote.”
Even amid a difficult and costly war that he initiated, Putin remains firmly in control of Russia, despite a series of Western sanctions and wishful thinking in Washington that its military expertise, weapons, and enthusiasm for the war would loosen his grip on power. Blindfolded by ideology, Biden wants the candy of regime change, but Putin has proven to be an iron-clad piñata.
The American president keeps taking his swings. It was not surprising that Biden chose to turn to Putin and the Ukraine war at the start of his State of the Union speech on March 7. He and his foreign policy staff have put Putin’s diminishment at the top of their to-do list since taking office. He told the Congress that Russia “is on the march” and Putin’s intent is “to sow chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not. . . . History is watching . . . Europe is at risk.”
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Meet Your New MAGA Overlords River Page
In under three months, Donald Trump will be in the White House again. We’ve compiled a list of people who helped him pull off his extraordinary comeback—and will help him govern once he is in the Oval Office again. Think of it as a Who’s Who of Trump World in 2024. Some may join him as official White House staffers, cabinet members, or diplomats. Others may simply have the president’s ear, either as members of the media or trusted confidants. Either way, these are the people who will shape the country for the next four years. Bookmark this page; you’re going to need it later.
Here’s a brief guide to the Masters of MAGA.
The Inner Circle
Elon Musk: The billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX bet big on Trump, staking his own reputation on endorsing him and donating around $132 million toward Trump’s reelection efforts. Musk also revamped the campaign’s voter outreach operation, compensating for the implosion of the Michigan and Arizona Republican parties, two crucial swing states that Trump won. Trump has promised to make Musk his government efficiency czar. One Trump transition team source says Musk does not want the hassle of the background checks or ethics requirements that come with being a full-time government employee. “He will be in charge of a blue ribbon commission, but it will be a part-time job,” this source says. Given Tesla’s presence in China, where it builds cars for the European and Asian markets, as well as its reliance on Chinese-made lithium batteries, he might also have Trump’s ear when it comes to the administration’s policy toward that country. The early signs certainly point to Musk having serious influence. He joined a call between the president-elect and Ukrainian leader Volodomyr Zelensky last week and is set to join Trump when he meets Argentina’s Javier Milei next week.
Don Jr.: The president’s most political and public-facing son, Don Jr., proved himself to be a powerful fundraiser and effective surrogate in the 2024 campaign. He has also served as a key adviser for his father, and was reportedly instrumental in convincing him to pick J.D. Vance as his running mate. Don Jr. may not be given an official role in the next Trump White House; Trump is reportedly reluctant to hire his children this time around, saying last year that it was “too painful for the family.” His daughter Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, were given roles in his first administration, a move frequently criticized as improper by his critics. But whatever his job title, Don Jr. will undoubtedly be influential.
Tucker Carlson: After being fired from his popular Fox News program, the commentator relaunched his show on X and has been one of Trump’s most high-profile allies in media. A populist tastemaker, he has helped shatter Republican orthodoxies on issues like free trade and foreign intervention. He speaks directly to Trump’s base—and also speaks directly to Trump, even though text messages revealed through a lawsuit against Fox News showed Carlson had lost patience with Trump during the president-elect’s doomed campaign to reverse the results of the 2020 election. “He’s a demonic force, a destroyer,” Carlson wrote in one text message four years ago. Today he is in the catbird seat when it comes to staffing the new administration, according to three sources. “It’s the Tucker administration. He is exercising a veto, he’s making the decisions. Don Jr.’s lips may be moving, but those are Tucker’s words coming out,” according to one Republican insider clued up on the transition plans for the incoming administration.
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November 11, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”
Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power.
The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.
In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles.
Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate.
Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”
Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.
In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces.
Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.
The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.
Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not.
Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.
Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate.
Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.
Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.
All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.
While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.
The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship?
Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.
In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.
One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”
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Notes:
https://www.distractify.com/p/did-the-taliban-congratulate-trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/16/afghanistan-child-brides/
https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/us-right-wing-media-embrace-russias-far-right-ideologue
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/07/russia-putin-reaction-us-election/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/10/trump-putin-phone-call-ukraine/
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/kremlin-was-hoping-division-america-not-victory-one-candidate
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/09/elon-musk-trump-administration
https://www.politico.com/playbook
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/10/trump-rick-scott-senate-cornyn-thune-mcconnell/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/us/politics/russia-north-korea-troops-ukraine.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/22/afghanistan-taliban-restrictions-men-beards/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/11/trump-victory-red-wave/
X:
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ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3laooezh7ie22
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The Five Things President Trump Should Do on Day One Santi Ruiz
In a few short weeks, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president. His transition team will be in charge of a federal government that, in many rudimentary ways, doesn’t work.
Let’s leave aside partisan gridlock in Congress and turmoil in the judicial branch, and just focus on the executive branch: National Public Data, which aggregates personal information for background checks, was hacked this year, meaning your Social Security number is now floating around on the internet. The IRS is built on mainframes from 1965 and relies on code from JFK’s administration that no one’s learning anymore. The pandemic highlighted our broken systems: In January 2020, the Food and Drug Administration effectively banned private companies from rolling out their own Covid tests because the CDC was developing their own. But the CDC tests turned out to be defective, leaving the U.S. flying blind until private companies could rush in and pick up the slack.
For the past year, I’ve run an interview series called Statecraft where I talk with civil servants to understand how the federal sausage actually gets made. These men and women serve in a variety of roles, such as running a CIA base in Afghanistan, investigating Soviet anthrax leaks, and redesigning Department of Labor job centers. The best of them have managed to deliver good outcomes for the American people by working around the worst ingrained practices of the federal bureaucracy, and they have lessons for reformers eager to make the federal government go.
But changing the culture of a machine this size takes time. Despite the fact he will have a Republican House and Senate, and the allyship of Elon Musk, who seems eager to head his own Department of Government Efficiency, Trump faces the same broken federal machinery—and will face many of the same problems, and the shot clock to solve them—that Biden did.
To help make the government more efficient and effective instantly, the Trump team should prioritize the following:
Hire Bureaucrats, Just Make Them the Right Ones
Progressives fear Trump’s vision for civil service reform, Schedule F, which would reclassify many civil servants to make them easier to fire. They worry Schedule F would gut executive branch agencies—which includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Education, State, Justice, et al.—of their talent, and consolidate power in the White House.
But even liberals like Jen Pahlka, former deputy chief technology officer of America under President Obama, have pointed out that “managing out” a poor performer can be a full-time job for political appointees. Firing an executive branch civil servant requires extensive documentation. Additionally, many employees are unionized, and all can appeal their firings internally. Partially as a result, the government cans bad employees about four times less often than the private sector does. It takes a lot more than saying “you’re fired” to get people out the door.
It’s also impossible to hire new, better civil servants. Our systems for sourcing are shattered. Take Jack Cable, 17, who won the Department of Defense’s “Hack the Air Force” contest against 600 other contestants by identifying weaknesses in Pentagon software. But when Cable applied for a DoD role, his résumé was graded “not minimally qualified” because the hiring manager didn’t know anything about the coding languages he listed himself proficient in. Or take the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been screening prospective air traffic controllers for how many sports they played in high school in an effort to meet its racial quotas.
A strategic administration will encourage agencies to find creative ways to bring in top talent. It could try using new tools to assess technically talented applicants in bulk, or it could increase the number of academic rotations through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, which allows academics to contribute part-time to special federal agency projects. The Office of Personnel Management can and should encourage more aggressive use of Direct Hire Authority, allowing agencies to avoid certain procedural steps of the federal hiring process.
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