The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine appealed to the Trump administration on Wednesday to respect the truth and avoid disinformation in discussing the war that began with a Russian invasion of his country, in his first response to President Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine had started the war.

“I would like to have more truth with the Trump team,” Mr. Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv during a broader discussion about the administration, which this week opened peace talks with Russia that excluded Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky said that the U.S. president was “living in a disinformation space” and in a “circle of disinformation.”

The remarks, delivered from his presidential office in Kyiv, a building still fortified with sandbags to avoid blasts from Russian missiles, were some of the most pointed yet about Mr. Trump and his views on the war.

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That would be an idea.

The Russian government’s top investment manager, who has Harvard and McKinsey credentials and fluent English, brought a simple printout to Tuesday’s talks with the Trump administration in Saudi Arabia.

Its message: By pulling out of Russia in outrage over the invasion of Ukraine, American companies had walked away from piles of cold, hard cash.

“Losses of U.S. companies by industry,” read the document, which Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, showed to a New York Times reporter. “Total losses,” one of the columns said. The sum at the bottom: $324 billion.

In appealing to President Trump, the Kremlin has zeroed in on his desire to make a profit. President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday praised the U.S. delegation in Riyadh for not criticizing Russia as previous administrations did — there was no “condemnation of what was done in the past,” he said. He added that beyond geopolitics, the two countries were now moving toward deeper engagement on space, the economy and “our joint work on global energy markets.”

Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said after Tuesday’s meeting that “there was great interest” in the room “in removing artificial barriers to the development of mutually beneficial economic cooperation” — an apparent reference to lifting American sanctions.

Remarkably, the Trump administration appears to be engaging with Russia’s message without demanding payment up front. After Ukraine suggested the possibility of natural resource deals to Mr. Trump, his treasury secretary pushed to have the country sign away half its mineral wealth. And Mr. Trump continues to portray American allies as freeloaders, threatening more tariffs and demanding they pay more for their own defense.

With Russia, by contrast, the administration seems to be signaling that the one thing Mr. Putin has to do to pave the way for a full reset in Moscow’s relationship with Washington is end the war in Ukraine. Many Europeans and Ukrainians fear Mr. Trump will seek a peace deal on Russia’s terms, especially after the American president suggested on Tuesday that Ukraine was to blame for the Russian invasion.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that an end to the war would be “the key that unlocks the door” for “potentially historic economic partnerships.” He echoed Mr. Lavrov in hinting that the United States could drop sanctions against Russia as part of such a deal.

“There are sanctions that were imposed as a result of this conflict,” Mr. Rubio said. “I would say to you that in order to bring an end to any conflict there has to be concessions made by all sides.”

For the Kremlin, a key emissary to Mr. Trump’s pecuniary mind-set has been Mr. Dmitriev, a youthful Putin ally and former banker who has specialized in developing Russian business ventures around the world. He has close ties to Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and he pushed the development and global distribution of Russia’s Covid-19 vaccine, Sputnik V.

In 2016, Mr. Dmitriev tried to use business contacts to build a back channel to Mr. Trump in the name of “reconciliation” between the United States and Russia, according to the report into Russian interference in that year’s election by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, that reconciliation never came. This time around, Mr. Dmitriev has already had better luck.

Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, praised Mr. Dmitriev and Prince Mohammed for their role in helping secure Russia’s release last week of Marc Vogel, an American schoolteacher imprisoned in Moscow. In Tuesday’s talks, Mr. Dmitriev was part of Russia’s delegation, using interviews with Western media outlets to promote business opportunities in Russia’s oil sector and in the Arctic.

“The economic track allows diplomacy, allows communication, allows joint wins, allows joint success,” Mr. Dmitriev said. “And we saw that President Trump is focused on having success.”

He said that U.S. oil companies had “really benefited from the Russian oil sector,” adding, “we believe at some point they will be coming back.” The document that he brought into Tuesday’s meeting with the United States showed that the industries with the greatest purported losses among American companies that left Russia were “I.T. and Media,” at $123 billion, and “Consumer and Healthcare,” at $94 billion.

While American trade with Russia before Ukraine-related sanctions began in 2014 was tiny compared with trade with China or the European Union, big energy companies made huge investments, and American consumer goods and tech companies saw Russia as a significant market.

Mr. Dmitriev said the calculation took into account not only fire sales and write-downs, but also “forgone profits.” Western companies that left Russia have officially declared more than $100 billion in losses since the start of the war, with many of their prized assets sold under onerous terms dictated by the Russian state.

Many world leaders have shifted to a business-focused message to cater to an American president whose foreign policy has little in common with his predecessors’ emphasis on democracy, human rights and the trans-Atlantic alliance. But among the governments scrambling to influence Mr. Trump’s view of the war in Ukraine, Moscow stands alone in its success in getting him to bite.

Ukrainian officials made the possibility of lucrative U.S. energy and mineral deals after the war’s end a centerpiece of a charm offensive with Mr. Trump that began last fall. Rather than take the invitation to cooperate, Mr. Trump appeared to decide that Ukraine’s natural resources should serve as payback for past American support.

In Kyiv last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine rejected a proposal from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent under which the United States would take a 50 percent interest in all of Ukraine’s mineral resources.

Europeans have also tried to use talk of deals to get Mr. Trump’s attention. During the World Economic Forum in Davos in late January, NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, said Europe would be willing to foot the bill for the United States to continue supplying arms to Ukraine using its defense industrial base.

Such entreaties did little to shift Mr. Trump’s view of Europe as taking advantage of American security assistance, nor did they stop him from excluding the Europeans from his administration’s talks with Russia.

Russia, on the other hand, has gotten the Trump administration’s attention — both with the prospect of business deals and with the prospect of Mr. Trump being seen as a peacemaker by ending the war in Ukraine.

“Trump doesn’t care much about long-term strategic goals,” said Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who resigned over the war in Ukraine. “Putin is trying to play on this feeling and get him interested in very quick material gains that are immediately clear to Trump.”

The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.

A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.

Hegseth said that Trump wanted to negotiate peace with Russia, and he promptly threw on the table three key Russian demands. He said that it was “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine would get back all its land—essentially suggesting that Russia could keep Crimea, at least—and that the U.S. would not back Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the mutual security agreement that has kept Russian incursions into Europe at bay since 1949.

Hegseth’s biggest concession to Russia, though, was his warning that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump spoke to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

In a press conference on Thursday, the day after his speech in Brussels, Hegseth suggested again that the U.S. military did not have the resources to operate in more than one arena and was choosing to prioritize China rather than Europe, a suggestion that observers of the world’s most powerful military found ludicrous.

Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by “the threat from within,” by which he meant the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.

While the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration on Saturday announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators were not invited either. When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. The day before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

Talks began yesterday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In a four-and-a half-hour meeting, led by Rubio and Lavrov, and including national security advisor Mike Waltz, the U.S. and Russia agreed to restaff the embassies in each other’s countries, a key Russian goal as part of its plan to end its isolation. Lavrov blamed the Biden administration for previous “obstacles” to diplomatic efforts and told reporters that now that Trump is in power, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.”

Yesterday evening, from his Florida residence, Trump parroted Russian propaganda when he blamed Ukraine for the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine’s sovereign territory. When reporters asked about the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks, Trump answered: “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” He also said that Zelensky holds only a 4% approval rating, when in fact it is about 57%.

Today, Trump posted that Zelensky is a dictator and should hold elections, a demand Russia has made in hopes of installing a more pro-Russia government. As Laura Rozen pointed out in Diplomatic, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed out loud.”

“Be clear about what’s happening,” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark posted. “Trump and his administration, and thus America, is siding with Putin and Russia against a United States ally.”

To be even clearer: under Trump, the United States is abandoning the post–World War II world it helped to build and then guaranteed for the past 80 years.

The struggle for Ukraine to maintain its sovereignty, independence, and territory has become a fight for the principles established by the United Nations, organized in the wake of World War II by the allied countries in that war, to establish international rules that would, as the U.N. charter said, prevent “the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Central to those principles and rules was that members would not attack the “territorial integrity or political independence” of any other country. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came together to hold back growing Soviet aggression under a pact that an attack on any of the member states would be considered an attack on all.

The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia.

In 2004 it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.

To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.

Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”

Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.

Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Trump swung U.S. policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Petro Poroshenko, to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.

But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia.

When Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016. But rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who offered to evacuate him, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the postwar rules-based international order and spreading war further into Europe.

When he left office just a month ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a “strong hand to play” in foreign policy, leaving it “an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure,” than when he took office.

Now, on the anniversary of the day the Ukrainian people ousted Victor Yanukovych in 2014—Putin is famous for launching attacks on anniversaries—the United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” a European diplomat said. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”

This shift appears to reflect the interests of Trump, rather than the American people. Trump’s vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, posted: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.” Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed." Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials and congressional officials told them that Putin feels “empowered” by Trump’s recent support and is not interested in negotiations; he is interested in controlling Ukraine.

A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we shouldn’t. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast enough against Europe and Ukraine.

In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who served as the Commanding General of the United States Army Europe, commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany, and the Multinational Division-North in Iraq, underlined the dramatic shift in American alignment. In an article titled “We’re Negotiating with War Criminals,” he listed the crimes: nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia; the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and energy facilities; the execution of prisoners of war; torture of detainees; sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians and detainees; starvation; forcing Ukrainians to join pro-Russian militias.

“And we are negotiating with them,” Hertling wrote. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that the talks appear to be focused on new concessions for American companies in the Russian oil industry, including a deal for American companies to participate in Russian oil exploration in the Arctic.

For years, Putin has apparently believed that driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe would make NATO collapse and permit Russian expansion. But it’s not clear that’s the only possible outcome. Ukraine’s Zelensky and the Ukrainians are not participating in the destruction of either their country or European alliances, of course. And European leaders are coming together to strengthen European defenses. Emergency meetings with 18 European countries and Canada have netted a promise to stand by Ukraine and protect Europe. “Russia poses an existential threat to Europeans,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said today. Also today, rather than dropping sanctions against Russia, European Union ambassadors approved new ones.

For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”

The British tabloid The Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the president of the United States.

JD Vance marked the Trump administration’s one month since its return to power on Thursday by again claiming uncontrolled immigration was “the greatest threat” to both Europe and the United States.

The vice-president took the stage at the country’s largest conservative voters conference in National Harbor, Maryland, to double down on his criticism that stunned European leaders last week when he accused them of suppressing free speech and “running in fear” from voters’ true beliefs.

“The greatest threat in Europe, and I’d say the greatest threat in the US until about 30 days ago, is that you’ve had the leaders of the west decide that they should send millions and millions of unvetted foreign migrants into their countries,” Vance said.

His rhetoric represents the administration’s dramatic U-turn in long-standing American domestic and foreign policy priorities, making clear the aim is to bolster border security with more agents and be more cautious about European military commitments.

Hours before his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Vance had posted a lengthy critique of traditional US and European foreign policy writ-large on X, dismissing concerns about the administration’s stance on Ukraine as “moralistic garbage” and defending its push for peace negotiations.

“President [Donald] Trump and I have made two simple arguments: first, the war wouldn’t have started if President Trump was in office; second, that neither Europe, nor the Biden administration, nor the Ukrainians had any pathway to victory,” Vance wrote.

Vance got more specific on the CPAC stage, suggesting that the US’s military commitment to European allies could be contingent on their domestic policies, particularly targeting Germany.

“There are thousands upon thousands of American troops in Germany today,” he said. “Do you think the American taxpayer is going to stand for that if you get thrown in jail for posting a mean tweet?”

A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we shouldn’t

On Monday, James Marriott of The Times, published in London, noted that the very stability and comfort of the post–World War II liberal order has permitted the seeds of its own destruction to flourish. A society with firm scientific and political guardrails that protect health and freedom, can sustain “an underbelly of madmen and extremists—medical sceptics, conspiracy types and anti-democratic fantasists.”

“Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable,” Marriott writes. “Americans who parade around in amateur militia groups and brandish Nazi symbols do so partly because they are unable to conceive of what life would actually be like in a fascist state.” Those who attack modern medicine cannot really comprehend a society without it. And, Marriott adds, those who are cheering the rise of autocracy in the United States “have no serious understanding of what it means to live under an autocratic government.”

Marriott notes that five Texas counties that make up one of the least vaccinated areas in the U.S. are gripped by a measles outbreak that has infected at least 58 people and hospitalized 13. It may be, Marriot writes, that “[t]he paradise of fools is coming to an end.”

The stability of the U.S.-backed international rules-based order apparently meant that few politicians could imagine that order ending. When President Trump threatened to take the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a key guarantor of global security, Congress responded by passing a law in December 2023 that prohibits a president from withdrawing the U.S. from NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate or separate legislation passed by Congress. Then-senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) was a co-sponsor of the bill.

Now, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio overseeing the dismantling of U.S. support for our allies and a shift toward Russia, Republican senators appear to be discombobulated. As Joe Perticone reported Tuesday in The Bulwark, there appears to be consensus in Congress that “Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, NATO is critical to European and global security, and the United States has led the common defense. But Republicans just backed a presidential candidate and voted to confirm several key cabinet officials who do not accept those realities. Confronted with the consequences of their support for Trump and votes for his nominees, Perticone notes, Republican lawmakers are apparently shocked.

At home, the relative stability of American democracy in the late twentieth century allowed politicians to win office with the narrative that the government was stifling individualism, taking money from hardworking taxpayers to provide benefits to the undeserving.

Although the actual size of the federal workforce has shrunk slightly in the last fifty years even while the U.S. population has grown by about 68%, the Republican Party insisted that the government was wasting tax dollars, usually on racial, religious, or gender minorities. That claim became an article of faith for MAGA voters and reliably turned them out to vote. Now, political scientist Adam Bonica’s research shows that the firings at DOGE are “a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as…left-leaning.”

But the Trump administration’s massive and random cuts to the federal workforce are revealing that the narrative of government waste does not line up with reality. According to Linda F. Hersey of Stars and Stripes, about one third of all federal workers are veterans, while veterans make up only about 5% of the civilian workforce. In fiscal year 2023, about 25% of the federal government’s new hires were veterans, and they have been hit hard by the firings that cut people who were in their first year or two of service. “Let’s call this what it is—it is a middle finger to our heroes and their lives of service,” said Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) who sits on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs and Armed Services committees and is herself a disabled veteran.

Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported today that Republican lawmakers are panicked over this weekend’s firings, concerned about the fired veterans and the firings of USDA and CDC employees who were dealing with the spreading outbreak of bird flu that is threatening the nation’s poultry, cattle, house cats, and humans.

Since Trump took office just a month ago, cuts to government spending have also hit Republican voters hard, and those hits look to be continuing. In June 2024, Ella Nilsen and Renée Rigdon of CNN reported that nearly 78% of the announced investments from the Inflation Reduction Act in initiatives that address climate change went to Republican congressional districts. Today the Financial Times noted that House Republicans are in the position of cutting the law that brought more than $130 billion to their districts.

Now Republicans are talking about cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and supplemental food programs, although Republican-dominated counties rely on those programs more than Democratic-dominated counties do. Yesterday, on the Fox News Channel, Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, praised the Department of Government Efficiency because it was “going to cut a trillion dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse.” Lutnick told personality Jesse Watters, “You know Social Security is wrong, you know Medicare and Medicaid is wrong, so he's going to cut one trillion.”

The administration and the Department of Government Efficiency insist they are getting rid of “massive waste, fraud, and abuse” that they claim has lurked in the government for decades; House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that Congress has not been able to make those cuts in the past because “the deep state has hidden it from us.”

In fact, neither the administration nor DOGE has produced evidence for their claims of cutting waste. Instead, fact-checkers have pointed out so many errors and exaggerations in their claims that observers are questioning what they’re really doing. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who ran the Social Security Administration under Biden, told Jane C. Timm of NBC News: “There’s unelected people that are being given powers to go through and rummage through our personal data for reasons that nobody can quite figure out yet. It’s not for efficiency.”

Indeed, federal government spending since Trump took office is actually higher than it’s been in recent years.

Finally, it appears that the strength and stability of American democracy have also meant that lawmakers somehow cannot really believe that the U.S. is falling into authoritarianism. Today, in a 51–49 vote, all but two Republican senators voted to confirm Kash Patel as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted with all the Democrats and Independents to oppose Patel’s confirmation. In a 2023 book, Patel published a list of more than 50 current or former U.S. officials that he claims are members of the “deep state” and are a “dangerous threat to democracy.” Opponents worry he will use the FBI to target those and other people he thinks are insufficiently loyal to Trump.

The reason Americans created the government that the Trump administration is now dismantling was that in the 1930s, they knew very well the dangers of authoritarianism. On February 20, 1939, in honor of President George Washington’s birthday, Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, which was held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

Just two years later, Americans went to war against fascism.

Over the next century they worked to build a liberal order, one that had strong scientific and political guardrails.

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It may be, Marriot writes, that “[t]he paradise of fools is coming to an end.”

The Trump administration is stripping away support for scientific research in the US and overseas that contains a word it finds particularly inconvenient: “climate.”

The US government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon environmental regulations and clean-energy development.

Trump, who has said that the climate crisis is a “giant hoax”, has already stripped mentions of climate change and global heating from government websites and ordered a halt to programs that reference diversity, equity and inclusion. A widespread funding freeze for federally backed scientific work also has been imposed, throwing the US scientific community into chaos.

Researchers said work mentioning climate is being particularly targeted. One environmental scientist working in the western US who did not want to be named said their previously awarded grant from the Department of Transportation for climate-adaption research had been withdrawn, until they retitled it to remove the word “climate”.

“I still have the grant because I changed the title,” the scientist said. “I was told that I needed to do so before the title of the grant was published on the US DoT [Department of Transportation] website in order to keep it. The explanation was that the priorities of the current administration don’t include climate change and other topics considered ‘woke’.”

The researcher said they were “shocked because the grant was already awarded and I would have risked losing it. I’m very concerned about science being politically influenced. If researchers can’t use certain words, it’s likely that some science will be biased.”

References to climate are being scrubbed elsewhere, too. Course materials at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center at the University of Hawaii will delete mentions of “climate change”, leaked emails seen by the Guardian show. The alterations, at the behest of the Trump administration, affect about a dozen different course materials.

“Specifically, references to ‘climate change’ and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) have been removed or revised to align with the new priorities,” an administrator at the center wrote. “Please exercise caution when referencing these topics during instruction.”

The administration’s animus towards climate research has even extended overseas via the US’s Fulbright exchange program, which offers about 8,000 grants a year to American and foreign teachers and scholars.

Kaarle Hämeri, chancellor of the University of Helsinki in Finland, said the descriptions for Fulbright grants had been changed to remove or alter the words “climate change”, as well as “equitable society”, “inclusive societies” and “women in society”.

Hämeri said that one grant to his university had already been withdrawn as a result of changes he said were also being imposed across other countries involved in the Fulbright program. Fulbright and the US state department were asked about the extent of the wording bans.

“I understand that these actions are due to changed priorities in US government,” said Hämeri. “It will harm research in several important fields, especially as in many cases the US researchers are among the best in their field.”

At the National Science Foundation (NSF), a $9bn federal agency that supports research in science and engineering, teams have been combing through active projects looking for dozens of words, including “women”, “biased” and “equality” that may violate Trump’s ban on certain grants.

The NSF, which has just fired about 10% of its workforce, did not respond to questions over whether climate is also on the banned list. Regardless, grants supporting an array of scientific work have been frozen amid this zealous mission to install a newspeak among scientists, despite a court order demanding the freeze be reversed.

“[The] NSF is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders,” a foundation spokesperson said.

The freeze on grants has upended scientific work across federal agencies, hospitals and universities, placing the future of hundreds of millions of dollars’ of research into question.

“The people most vulnerable in our society in terms of health and public safety are now even further at risk,” said Jennifer Jones, director of the center for science and democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“This administration doesn’t have a plan to advance science, they have a plan to remove obstacles for the oil and gas industry. They want to return to an era where kids have polio, rivers are on fire and cities are blanketed by pollution.”

Jones said that the US government may be moving in the direction of Florida, where Republicans banned mention of climate change in state laws. “I live in a state where we are under threat more than ever from climate change but state employees can’t mention it,” she said. “This administration wants scientists to feel threatened. We’ve seen this before but Trump is doing it at an unprecedented scale now.”

The attack upon science “feels very personal right now” and may deter a new generation of young scientists from entering their areas of research, according to Joanne Carney, chief government affairs officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“We could see a reduction in whole fields of scientific research that will slow down our ability to understand the natural world and craft policies to protect society and national security,” Carney said.

“We’re concerned about the signal this is sending out to any young student interest in Stem [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] who might not think they can see a future in the US,” she said. “We need greater investment in science and technology to be a global leader at this moment. Our adversaries will be very happy with this.”

The Trump administration is stripping away support for scientific research in the US and overseas that contains a word it finds particularly inconvenient: “climate.”

The US government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon environmental regulations and clean-energy development.

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas.4 Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

With many billions invested in organization and in propaganda strategies they have managed to wrest control of the GOP to a point far beyond what Eisenhower imagined.

... seems to have turned the tide.