Dec. 20: The Democrats' Anti-Billionaire Rebrand
Kara Swisher's quest to buy WaPo; Terrorist attack in Germany; Voters agree with Bobby Kennedy
The Big Story
The Democrats are rebranding, or at least trying to, this time using the budget crisis as a platform to launch their message. The potential government shutdown (which might have resolved itself by the time you read this) is a convoluted story, but the Democratic message about it is simple: This is all the fault of billionaire Elon Musk, who led the charge against an earlier, Democrat-approved version of a spending bill.
To quote CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, “U.S. House Democrats have found a phrase to invoke many times today: ‘President Musk.’” It’s not just House Democrats, either. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tweeted:
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is threatening to unseat elected officials if they do not follow his orders to shut down the government during the holidays. Are we still a democracy or have we already moved to oligarchy and authoritarianism?
Earlier this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent a letter to Trump demanding answers about Musk’s role in the government, referring to Musk as the “unofficial co-president.”
Right now, Democrats are levying two related attacks against President-elect Trump (never mind that Joe Biden is still technically president): first, that Elon Musk is the “real” president, and second, that this implies the United States is descending into a terrifying oligarchy. The potential issue with the first attack line is its goal isn’t all too subtle. Everyone can plainly see that the Democrats are attempting to divide Trump and Musk by appealing to the former’s ego. Musk himself tweeted as much on Friday morning:
That is exactly the goal. The political & legacy media puppets all got their new instructions yesterday and are now parroting the same message to drive a wedge between @realDonaldTrump and me.
Putting aside the hypocrisy—as we explained yesterday, the current Democratic president is not the “real” president—it’s clear that Musk has outsize influence within the administration, that he has money to burn on down-ballot elections, and that his X platform remains a bully pulpit. The sane read is that Trump and Musk are both powerful actors, with different sources of power and some overlapping concerns—not that Musk is secretly in charge. More to the point, Trump ran his campaign on the idea of empowering Musk to help make the government more efficient. Teaming up with Elon isn’t some last-minute reversal on a promise. It is the promise. For many voters, appointing a historically successful businessman to trim the size of the federal government is a feature, not a bug.
The Democrats’ rhetoric, however, appears to be part of a conscious effort to rebrand themselves as the “authentic” populists in the wake of the election. Former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes advocated as much in his recent Foreign Affairs article, and his former administration colleagues at podcast “Pod Save America” have embraced the leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker as part of their effort to capture the energy of the online left, as we noted earlier this week. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy has been sounding similar notes on social media and in the left-wing press, arguing that the party needs to embrace “economic populism” and end its support for Israel. In the wake of the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, for instance, the senator urged politicians to listen to the “visceral anger” of alleged shooter Luigi Mangione’s supporters (who account for less than 20% of the U.S. population, according to one recent poll), and in a recent interview with The New Republic he echoed the Sanders/Warren/Rhodes line about Trump and Musk’s false oligarchic populism.
The issue is that there are, indeed, issues. You can’t simply recapture the working class by adopting a more pugilistic economic language. Strong opponents, channeling popular sentiments, can’t easily be memed away as a “billionaire” or “oligarchy.” Recasting “populism” and talking about Gaza does not do the hard work of moderating on base topics like trans rights, DEI, and immigration.
Ruy Teixeira’s post-election treatment in The Free Press gets at the core problem for a party struggling to find itself. He references how working-class voters still retain attitudes on “culture war” topics that Democratic leadership remains in denial about:
These issues reflect deeply held beliefs and values and are vitally important to ordinary voters, especially working-class voters. They are not distractions, or fake issues, or nonfactors in the election. So far, even the screamingly obvious implications of this last election have not been enough to shock the party out of its denialist torpor. Until they wake up, Democrats are doomed to repeat the mistakes of 2024.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Does Donald Trump have a Nobel Prize waiting for him in Kyiv? Vladislav Davidzon and Mark Galeotti investigate
The Rest
→Axios reported Friday that tech journalist Kara Swisher is getting together a group of rich people to attempt to buy The Washington Post from Jeff Bezos, believing the paper can “do better.” One tiny catch, apparently: Bezos, who likely isn’t lacking for cash, has expressed no interest in selling. If he does sell, Swisher told Axios, there would potentially be other suitors. “Hopefully not Elon,” she said, apparently reading from the same talking points distributed to the rest of her party, “though he seems pretty busy these days being President (Not) Elect.”
→George Mason University continues to have issues with violent extremism. CNN reports that student and Egyptian national Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan is facing federal charges “tied to distributing information related to explosives, destructive devices and weapons of mass destruction and the intent to murder internationally protected persons.” According to the report, Hassan is alleged to have sent an FBI informant bomb-making instructions and the address of the Consulate General of Israel in New York. He is now the third GMU student in recent days to get arrested for a connection with terrorism.
→If Robert Kennedy Jr. sails through the nomination process for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, it could be thanks to one valuable ally: the public. Mike Warren at The Dispatch has polling data that reflects a lot of American support for RFK’s positions on the nation’s health issues. Warren cites a poll conducted by Philip Morris International, which finds that 51% of Americans who voted in the last election believe public health in the United States is “getting worse,” and 62% of voters agree that reforming the Food and Drug Administration should be a “top priority” for the incoming Trump administration.
→A man, identified as a 50-year-old Saudi national who has been living in Germany since 2006, drove a car through a crowded Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday evening, killing at least 11 and injuring more than 60. The Associated Press framing of what looks like another horrific terrorist attack on a Christmas market? “A car has driven into a group of people at a Christmas market in Germany.” We didn’t think self-driving technology had come quite that far…
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Is Trump’s Nobel Prize Waiting in Kyiv?
History loves irony, especially in Eastern Europe
by Vladislav Davidzon and Mark Galeotti
President-elect Donald Trump took the occasion of the restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral to call for a cease-fire in Ukraine. The photographs of the American leader shaking hands with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the French Presidential Palace intimated that he might be ready to forgive conflicts with the wartime president and his publicly recorded resentments with Ukraine, even after Kyiv found itself bizarrely enmeshed in the middle of an American presidential election for a third election cycle in a row. “Zelenskyy and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness,” Trump thundered on Truth Social.
Ending the war between Russia and Ukraine will constitute a major foreign policy challenge to the incoming administration, the war’s quick resolution having been one of Trump’s core campaign promises. As a result, both Moscow and Kyiv view Trump’s victory as a viable opportunity to conclude the war on their own terms.
A month before his inauguration, Donald Trump is behaving like he is the American president in all but name, while lame duck President Joe Biden seems to have gratefully checked out of running the country after having issued a wide-ranging pardon for the criminal activities of his son Hunter. In doing so, the outgoing president offered a sordid coda to the ignoble saga of “Trump-Biden-Ukraine-gate.” For many Americans, the younger Biden increasingly seemed to epitomize the oligarchic corruption of an arrogant, entrenched and self-serving elite, especially as it turned out that the emails on his laptop were all real, rather than the products of a Russian information operation, as 51 former high U.S. intelligence and security officials had suggested a month before the 2020 election, in an effort to prevent voters from considering the material, and the larger question of Biden family corruption.
In Kyiv, Hunter Biden had accepted a lucrative position on the board of Burisma, an energy company belonging to a former minister in the outcast Yanukovych administration. In the process, Hunter blatantly negated all norms governing conflicts of interests—his father was in fact the Obama administration official directly entrusted with the Ukrainian anticorruption portfolio. Biden later boasted of forcing the Ukrainians to fire the chief prosecutor in charge of investigating Burisma on pains of the country not receiving a badly needed loan. For his part, Trump’s attempts to prod the Zelenskyy administration into opening a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s conduct led directly to Trump’s first impeachment trial (further contributing to Trump’s previously formed dislike for the Ukrainians).
At the same time that Joe Biden was pardoning his son, the center of American power was shifting from Washington, D.C., to Mar-a-Lago. The incoming Trump administration has been hastily cobbling together a new cabinet and signaling its foreign policy priorities. The war, which will enter its fourth year a month after Trump’s inauguration, had played a substantial role in the campaign. Trump had campaigned against continuing to send tens of billions of dollars worth of aid to the Ukrainians, a position that dovetails with the "America First" instincts of large segments of his electorate. The bombastic anti-Ukraine campaign rhetoric spoke for itself (as does that of his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, an earnest ideologue who lacks Trump’s ability to turn on a dime as well as his keen sense of U.S. interests).
Preparing the field, Trump told an interviewer in Paris that Ukraine “should probably prepare to receive less aid from the U.S.” Asserting that “there are people being killed in that war at levels nobody has ever seen [since] the Second World War,” he added that the war is “the stupidest thing I've ever seen and it should have never been allowed to happen.” Coupled with the speed at which his advisers have begun to discuss their peace plan with European elites, the comments indicate that Trump is serious in his commitment to bringing the war to an end—and that he is likely to have the support of European leaders in doing so. As remarkable as it seems, and as much as it might pain the august members of the Peace Prize committee, it is hard to imagine that the successful negotiation of an armistice between Russia and Ukraine wouldn’t merit an appearance by Donald Trump in Oslo, with Putin and Zelenskyy by his side.
So will it happen? Recent news from the front has been focused on escalation. Intended in part no doubt to make Trump’s life in the White House more difficult, it may wind up having the opposite effect, as both sides now have better reasons to back down than they did a month ago.
Immediately upon the conclusion of the American elections, the outgoing Biden administration reversed its long-term policy against providing permission for Kyiv to target Russian territory using the MGM-140 ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System). This quick reversal by the lame duck president proved that the Biden administration had held off out of fear of providing the Trump campaign with ammunition for use against the Democratic Party standard bearer. Two days later the Biden administration also moved to allow the Ukrainians to receive shipments of American antipersonnel mines, which had also previously been kept from Kyiv.
The Russians quickly escalated by firing the Oreshnik, an experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile, at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. The first such deployment in history was intended as a powerful signal, threatening further escalation—namely, the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield. The Kremlin was doubling down on its strategy of deterring Western escalation with nuclear saber-rattling.
Surrogates of the Trump campaign were quick to criticize the outgoing Biden administration for tying the incoming administration to a policy that Trump did not want. Having slow-rolled the Ukrainians for three years, ignoring their pleas out of fear of escalation, the Biden administration was attempting to lock in its preferred policy in its last weeks in power.
A British army officer who has worked alongside U.S. counterparts in supporting Kyiv was scathing about the Biden administration's timing and motivation: “If it made sense to let the Ukrainians hit targets inside Russia in November, why not do so back in August, when they were begging to be able to hit the airbases from which the Russians were hammering them with glide bombs? There is no military rationale, it's all politics.” In part, he conceded, it was likely intended to give Kyiv a stronger hand in any future peace negotiations but, he added with evident frustration, “part of the reason the Ukrainians have such a poor hand now is because Biden was so hesitant in the past.” Indeed, the practical consequence of not allowing the Ukrainians to strike at Russian bases and ammunition dumps in those crucial months was that it had allowed the Russians to counterattack in the Kursk region, with 40% of the territory that the Ukrainians had taken in their daring invasion having already been recaptured by Russian and North Korean forces.
***
Discussion of the Trump-Kyiv relationship has become encrusted with a great amount of misunderstanding, partisanship, wishful thinking, delusion, and often outlandish speculation, largely due to the almost-decade-long information campaign about Trump’s relationship with President Vladimir Putin, which has driven large numbers of American journalists and commentators bonkers. The Ukrainians also played a part, as they had found themselves forced to attempt to ameliorate relations with both American political parties at the risk of making enemies of the other. Unsurprisingly, they have misstepped on more than one occasion.
The Zelenskyy administration had inherited a very bad hand from its predecessors and was certainly not responsible for what had happened before it came to power in 2019. Yet the bad blood between Ukraine and Trump was already a serious factor for the new Ukrainian president to contend with. Trump viewed the machinations of some Ukrainians, in their attempt to gain favor with the Clinton campaign during the 2016 elections, as being an expression of state policy. The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, D.C., had played a bad hand against the Republican Party standard-bearer rather carelessly, and secret Ukrainian intelligence (SBU) files on Paul Manafort had been leaked to American and British newspapers during the week of the 2016 Republican convention—which had led to his sacking as Trump’s campaign chairman. A Kyiv insider previously speculated to us that Trump’s relationship with Zelenskyy was “likely beyond repair,” though as Zelenskyy has shown in his postelection commentary and in his meetings with Trump, that may not be the case.
Trump has always seen Ukraine as part of the “Russiagate” narrative. While hardly a “Russian asset,” or controllable in any way by anyone apparently, Trump is also deeply skeptical of the international alliances that constrain the freedom for the blunt application—or withdrawal—of American power in global trouble spots. In the process he appears willing to weaken and destabilize the multilateral institutions and security alliances that constrain Russia’s own influence. In that sense, Trump always seemed like a natural partner for Putin, even if the Russiagate narrative was always something between a political slander and a mass hallucination by people who didn’t know much about Eastern Europe and turned out not to be very bright.
Despite Putin’s public statements, such as his smirking claim to support Kamala Harris because of her “infectious laugh,” the Kremlin was almost certainly rooting for Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. That is even more so than during previous election cycles: In 2016, Moscow had incorrectly assumed that he had no chance of winning against an establishment candidate and supported Trump essentially as a spoiler. That assumption essentially reflected the Kremlin’s continuing inability to understand the American system and national character: Assuming that all democracies were as “managed” as Russia’s, Moscow could not believe a disruptive outsider would be “allowed” to win.
This time, however, the Kremlin viewed the American horse race as something closer to a win-win. A Trump victory was the preferred outcome, but a narrow and contested Harris victory would have served their purposes almost as well. A polarized and paralyzed America, engaged in months of recounts, recriminations and intense civil disobedience, would have certainly satisfied the Kremlin.
The Russians understand full well that Trump is a uniquely self-centered and transactional individual who has zero allegiance to them. He is seen with good reason as an unpredictable character, and they are well aware that although he poses a challenge to the Western concert of nations, he is equally capable of doing just as much damage to Russian interests. Indeed, it is noteworthy how far the state-controlled media have gone in trying to play down to the Russian people any overoptimistic expectations as to what a Trump presidency may mean. The tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets ran a commentary headlined “Uncle Trump’s Tales: Promises of ‘Swift Peace in Ukraine’ Are Worth Less Than Nothing,” while Nikolai Patrushev, one of Putin’s most hawkish advisers, even hinted that if Trump challenged the agenda of the U.S. deep state too severely, he faced the risk of assassination.
Patrushev is often something of a nationalist outlier in his circle, but later Putin himself picked up the idea, warning during a summit in Kazakhstan that “he is not safe now” considering the “absolutely uncivilized methods used to battle against Trump, up to and including an assassination attempt.” Of course, Putin in part is playing to Trump’s vanity, presenting him as an embattled champion fighting a ruthless elite, but he is also counseling against overenthusiasm at home.
The fact that Trump’s decisions are unpredictable to himself no less than to America’s elites and international partners makes him a totally unreliable partner for the Kremlin, and in some ways makes him much more dangerous than a conventional opponent. Russia’s armies, spooks, and saboteurs have always factored in some degree of U.S. restraint. So long as the Americans were determined to be the adults in the room, the Russians could play the role of the risk-taking adventurers. No such assumptions of responsible behavior or clear and stable “red lines” will be made under the next Trump administration. That lack of predictability is something that will make the Russians much more cautious in their decision-making, with the aggressive and opportunistic Trump liable to pocket those gains.
***
Trump’s instincts are also filtered through the policy recommendations of his team, and many of the proposed security and cabinet officials whom Trump has nominated are more hawkish on Ukraine than had been anticipated. Even as some of his team would strongly prefer that the Americans hand over the Ukrainian burden to Europe, most understand the stakes of the conflict—as well as its capacity to disrupt their other foreign and domestic policy priorities. Trump’s penchant for theatrical negotiation means that he is just as likely to pressure the Russians to make concessions as he is willing to do so with the Ukrainians.
The Russians had been horrified in April 2017 by the experience of watching Trump impulsively order a cruise missile strike into Syria when he was angered by dictator Bashar Assad’s brutal chemical attack on civilians. An American president with an impulsive temperament, mercurial and opaque decision-making processes, radical pride, a deeply egoistic sense of self, no appetite for following conventional wisdom, a low threshold for the use of force, and no interest in consulting with allies is the definition of a Russian strategic nightmare. By the end of the first Trump administration, U.S. policy toward Russia was the toughest it had been at any time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. “Look at what he is doing, and not what he is saying on TV,” conservatives would reply to complaints from Ukraine hands at that time. Admittedly, this was above all because Congress arrogated Russia policy to itself, but many within the Kremlin, mirror-imaging their own autocratic politics, presumed Trump was somehow behind this. Even the more sophisticated America-watchers were disappointed as it became clear that he was not willing to invest any of his own political capital to intervene and moderate Congress’ hawkish actions toward Russia.
Putin’s congratulatory remarks to Trump included boilerplate about negotiations with Ukraine—but not under “Kyiv’s demands.” Putin’s best chance for a quick and positive end to the war, or at least a cease-fire on his terms, is to have the Americans force concessions on Kyiv. It is, of course, unclear whether Trump would be able to impose a cease-fire on Kyiv, let alone a lasting end to the conflict. He can surely threaten to limit or block further military aid, which would be disastrous for Ukraine, but this would have severe potential political repercussions, especially as a cease-fire would almost certainly favor Putin, allowing him a space in which to rearm and reconstitute his forces, but also leaving him with the initiative, able to resume hostilities whenever he thinks is best to his advantage.
The Ukrainians understand this dynamic perfectly well, and will therefore resist any such concessions unless they are accompanied by reliable security guarantees. Such guarantees will be even more crucial for any lasting agreement, which would likely be framed as “land for peace,” with Ukraine accepting some or all of Russia’s territorial conquests—currently accounting for perhaps 19% of all Ukraine—in exchange for an end to the war. Having been badly burned by the lack of response to Moscow’s breach of its commitments under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which saw Ukraine surrender its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal in return for promises that the other signatories would never attack it, Kyiv will need those security guarantees legally codified in treaty form. Ideally in their eyes, this would take the form of full NATO membership—indeed, Zelenskyy explicitly floated the idea that he would waive any hopes of militarily regaining the occupied territories (which in practice means abandoning them, at least for the foreseeable future) in return for quick entry of the rest of Ukraine into the NATO alliance, so that it would be under its Article 5 guarantee of mutual protection.
Getting Washington to lean on Kyiv and impose a cease-fire or peace process will require Putin to try to woo Trump. Putin may well have trouble accepting that in the process he will implicitly be acknowledging that Trump and the United States will be the ultimate guarantors of the negotiation process. All of which carries serious potential risks for Moscow. Trump is easily offended, and if the Russians signal a lack of flexibility in negotiations, or appear to be acting in bad faith or drag their feet, or in any way seem to be the ones denying him a quick and satisfying political triumph, they will deeply anger Trump and thus risk losing an opportunity to end the conflict on terms acceptable to them.
Trump’s personal antipathy toward the Ukrainians, whom he rightly or wrongly views as having been on his opponent’s side for the past three electoral cycles, will no doubt be balanced out by his desire to deliver a big and flashy deal. Trump will also be keen to avoid a debacle like the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. This may help protect the Ukrainians from being totally abandoned to Moscow. Although Trump very much desires to rebalance the burden of the war and force the Europeans to shoulder a greater share—especially by buying more American weapons and ammunition on behalf of Ukraine—he will not want to look weak or a “loser” by capitulating to Putin. Proffering the unsentimental and transactional businessman the understanding that he is forcing European freeloaders to pay their own way—and even better to pay Americans for defending them—would be one way of keeping him on board.
There is also a belief in some quarters in Ukraine that Trump could potentially be their savior, forcing a deal—whether good or bad—before the country bleeds to death through attrition. Trump’s election has therefore been met with a surprising amount of positivity within Ukrainian political circles, which have grown frustrated with the way in which the Biden administration had been slow-rolling assistance, much as it attempted to limit Israel’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon. As a result, many in Kyiv—including figures within the presidential administration—are entirely ready to give Trump the chance to break the current stalemate.
That said, it is also important to avoid assuming that Trump’s election will necessarily bring dramatic changes to the war front. Negotiating the temporary cease-fire that Putin wants without offering Ukraine security guarantees would not be accepted by Kyiv, even as Moscow will not accept Ukraine’s integration into Western military alliances (with or without NATO membership). Trump’s high profile and theatrical attempts at procuring a deal with North Korea fell through because America fundamentally had no leverage to make the North Koreans dismantle their nuclear program. Likewise, it is entirely possible that, faced with a similarly intransigent situation between Kyiv and Moscow, Trump would shrug and move on to the next thing while directing the Europeans to take matters into their own hands, leaving the Russians without a resolution to the war and the Ukrainians in more dire shape than before.
A former Ukrainian diplomat who used to be close to the administration in Kyiv admitted that "Trump is no more a friend of ours than he is of the Russians, he just wants to prove he is the master dealmaker, get that Nobel Peace Prize, prove he can accomplish what Biden failed to do. But let's be clear, if something else more appealing comes along, or if it looks too hard, he'll just drop this.” Neither Moscow nor Kyiv want to be seen as the intransigent party, and both have recently restated their maximalist negotiating positions precisely to indicate that they are willing to see what they can get.
However, while the Russians have enough arms to fight until the end of 2025, the Ukrainians are running critically low on manpower. What they may face is not a sudden collapse of their lines, but a continued, slow and bloody Russian advance. To some, the unpalatable choice seems to be between a bad deal sooner or an even worse one later. As the Russians grind away at Ukraine’s forces and now seem to be winning, many in Kyiv see Trump’s intervention as their only option, even if this may not be Kyiv’s optimal time for negotiations in terms of battlefield dynamics.
After all, what happens if there is no cease-fire, let alone an actual peace deal? Trump is not going to be able to pull Russia away from its revisionist authoritarian alliance with China, Iran, and North Korea, as it needs them too much. Likewise, Ukrainian dreams that a popular uprising, economic collapse, palace coup, army mutiny, or heart attack would rid them of Putin and end the war have not panned out. At the same time, while a growing proportion of Ukrainians supports some kind of negotiations, most still oppose any long-term land-for-peace deal, let alone capitulation to Moscow. If NATO is not willing to let Ukraine join, perhaps a multinational alliance of more combative European states such as Britain, Poland, and the Baltic states could provide some meaningful security guarantees that could permit a genuine peace deal. However, it could just as easily be that the war continues for several more years before concluding with an Iraq-Iran 1980s style stalemate—only with even a higher number of dead Russians and Ukrainians.
It is tempting to view Trump’s efforts as nothing more than a vanity project, but it may also be that they offer the best, or only, hope of silencing the guns, and preventing even worse outcomes.
If that happens, he may well deserve a Nobel Prize.
Musk does not have influence because he is a billionaire, of which there are many in America, but because he is one of the smartest people on earth.
Just like Kamala Harris would not elect a Jew as her running mate, the Nobel price committee would never elect Donald Trump for any prize no matter how much he deserves it.