Politico had a detail about the Matt Gaetz selection that I’ve seen no one else pick up.

It was Boris Epshteyn’s idea.

How did we get here? That story is still coming out, but here’s what we know. As of Monday, Gaetz was not on the short list to be Trump’s choice for attorney general. But Trump wasn’t satisfied with those options, our Meridith McGraw tells Playbook.

[snip]

The Gaetz-for-AG plan came together yesterday, just hours before it was announced, Meridith tells us. It was hatched aboard Trump’s airplane en route to Washington, on which Gaetz was a passenger. A Trump official revealed more details to Playbook late last night: BORIS EPSHTEYN played a central role in the development, lobbying Trump to choose Gaetz while incoming White House chief of staff SUSIE WILES was in a different, adjacent room on the plane, apparently unaware.

Maggie and Swan have retconned that detail to describe, only, that Boris, Elon, and Susie Wiles were all on the plane, then fluffed it all into bullshit about clarity of what he wants.

Boris’ role in Trump’s apparent plan to destroy the country has gotten little notice amid the parlor games focused on when the two narcissists, Elon and Trump, will tear each other down. But his apparent role in this decision bears more notice.

After all, he’s unindicted co-conspirator 6 in the January 6 indictment. He had a central (though uncharged) role in the documents case, orchestrating parts of the plan to have Evan Corcoran do the search but have Christina Bobb do the certification. And he was or may still be under investigation, with Steve Bannon, for a cryptocurrency scheme that cheated Trump’s rubes.

His communications with now Chief of Staff designate Susie Wiles appear to have been a subject of interest for investigators — a subject tied to what a witness that is likely Eric Herschmann described as an effort to cover his own past legal exposure with a retroactive claim to have been acting as an attorney.

And the potentially belated access to the contents of his phone are what expanded the focus of the immunity brief to incorporate Bannon as an unindicted co-conspirator and Bannon’s prediction that “All Hell will break loose” part of the plot.

Donald Trump was considering actual lawyers for the role of Attorney General, but (per Marc Caputo) didn’t like them because they talked Constitution and all that.

“Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.’”

And then, at least according to Politico, Wiles left the room and Boris convinced Trump to pick Gaetz.

After that, Trump has announced plans to install his defense team — Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, and John Sauer — as Deputy Attorney General, PADAG, and Solicitor General, respectively (note: PADAG is not a confirmed position, so Trump only announced it to make the intent crystal clear).

Now, Bove and Sauer are at least competent to the positions Trump will install them in. All three men know their way around DOJ. Blanche is less horrible than the Gaetz pick — again, if you ignore the symbolism of converting the Department of Justice into the defense firm for the President.

And he’s also Boris’ defense attorney. He was Boris’ defense attorney and then, possibly at Boris’ suggestion, added Trump as a client, creating some challenges regarding discovery.

According to Politico, a key player in Trump’s assault on the Constitution, on the Capitol, is the guy who picked Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General (or who suggested Matt Gaetz be proposed for Attorney General, creating an impossible loyalty test for the Senate).

And the competent people reporting to Gaetz are there to mount a defense.

If you follow me on Bluesky (which has really taken off, thanks to the fascists, so consider signing up if you haven’t already), you’ll know that I have been at the ocean in County Clare.

I am staring at the ocean.

If there’s one thing I recommend to you right now, is to take some time, however long you can, to go stare at the ocean. Or the sky. Or a meadow or mountain or river. Or even a swarming city street.

Go stare at something and just stare.

Oh, and also, breathe. If you need to, do something that will help you breathe: yoga, walking, swimming, singing, playing the tuba.

And after you’ve stared for a while, sit down and think about how you’re going to pick yourself back up again. I’m not asking you to pick yourself back up again.

Yet.

Just asking you to make a plan about how you’ll do so.

As Nicholas Grossman explained, authoritarians want you to quit. Figure out how you’ll defy them.

My plan, for example, includes something several other people’s plans do, too: A change in my media diet. I was always planning to change the way I used Xitter after the election; I was deliberately swimming in the toxicity of the site. I may explain why one of these days. But everything — Musk’s juncture with the government, the change in Terms of Service that go into effect tomorrow, the insanity — demand clearer limits on its use, at least for me. I’m also imposing (attempting to self-impose) a budget on my social media time, just like mothers give their children screen time limits. So far, out here by the ocean, I’ve mostly succeeded, though the post-Matt Gaetz insomnia made it tough.

I’ve got a stack of reading that will fill the time — a stack of reading that will help me think about what we can do to fight this. So far, this week, I’ve finished How to Win an Information War, and started Opus, along with a reading list on Viktor Orbán. I’ve been wondering if folks would like to do a periodical book discussion around here?

Trump succeeds when he hijacks attention and rationality. I know that and yet have also succumbed, even while I was trying to persuade others not to be distracted. Figure out what parts of your media diet make you easy to distract. And purge them, to the extent you’re able.

And while you’re changing your media diet, make sure you invest in the outlets that are providing important content, because they’re likely to face new obstacles and even new opportunities. Such as The Onion, buying InfoWars!

I’m also going to try to change the emotions with which I approach this fight. I’m not sure I’m ready to explain that yet — let me go stare at the ocean some more before I try.

But I need to — I think we all need to — target our outrage. There’s plenty to be angry at top Democrats, at each other, for. With some exceptions (like Gaza), most of those things are less important than the reasons to be angry at the fascists.

Make sure you limit your rage and focus it where it belongs. Or better yet, channel that energy.

Something else to consider: first, make a list of those personal habits or new hobbies you’ve been meaning to adopt and lay out some steps to get there. Make sure you have something else to sustain you, for when you can’t stare at the ocean. Do something so often — this week, for me, it is yoga — that makes you feel noticeably stronger. Replace some of the time you’ve been fighting with self care.

And sustain or build your networks. Not just your political networks, the folks with whom you’ve worked to try to elect Kamala Harris or restore reproductive rights. But your other networks, too. Sometimes, after fascists break political networks, it’s the choirs or the knitting clubs where civic discourse can regrow.

The very first thing authoritarians try to break are the networks of civil society, because isolated people are easier to terrify. So make sure yours are as strong as they can be before the wrecking crew comes.

Go stare at the ocean.

Go take the time. Prepare to pick yourself back up again.

Since Jack Smith conveyed that he was going to shut down, I’ve been pondering how to improve Democratic messaging enough such that when Smith issues his report, it would make clear to Republicans, especially Mitch McConnell (and now John Thune, his chosen successor who was chosen today), they would own Trump’s crimes going forward. Similarly, I’ve been trying to anticipate how to convey the sheer outrage of the pardons Trump will issue when he becomes President.

I didn’t and don’t have great expectations that Democrats will be up to the task.

But then, after appointing a Fox TV pundit to run the largest military in the world, Trump picked Tulsi Gabbard to run the biggest intelligence operation, and then picked Matt Gaetz to run DOJ.

Thus far I’ve heard just a few Republicans (Lindsey Graham, Tommy Tuberville, Anna Paulina Luna), in either chamber, suggest Gaetz should be confirmed. Everyone else, especially Senators, are saying, welp, let’s have a thorough confirmation process. Some are nodding towards the clearance process they still imagine Trump would adhere to. Elsewhere, Ed Whelan is spreading rumors that Trump simply intends to recess Congress and appoint his cabinet that way.

It’s a frenzy. And it’s a frenzy led by Republicans — though Democrats are definitely joining the fun. A frenzy that has already led to a flood of new details about Gaetz’ debauchery.

If Gaetz gets this job via some means, it’ll be horrible. But it would probably be less horrible than if Mark Paoletta got the job, because Paoletta is highly competent, bureaucratically and legally, and personally close to Clarence Thomas and Sammy Alito. If you’re going to have a guy trying to thoroughly weaponize DOJ, I’d much rather have the guy who’ll piss off judges and natural Trump allies in the process.

Now, maybe this will burn through quickly and Trump will replace Gaetz with Paoletta. But if not, Gaetz serves as a ready symbol whom most Republicans loathe of all the same fitness problems that Trump has, of the same reasons why rule of law matters.

Trump is sprinting to bring the US down — and his nominations, and the means he might take to install his nominees, make that more clear.

Yes. It’s horrible. Everything is horrible. But this Gaetz nomination (along with the other two) may finally convince people that Trump really is the menace to America that Democrats and never-Trumpers have been warning he was. There may be no better person than Gaetz to convince the Republicans who hate him how poor Trump’s judgment is.

Update: After reporting that the Ethics Committee was going to vote on Friday to release their report on Gaetz (which is one of two reasons he quit), Dick Durbin called on the committee to preserve and share the report. John Cornyn also said he’d like to review it.

In this post, I posited a way of understanding the election. Where Kamala Harris and down ballot Democrats engaged in traditional politics, it worked (as exhibited by Harris’ better performance in swing states and the retention of at least four of the swing state Senate seats, among other things). But propaganda worked far better across the board (exhibited, in part, by the large numbers of disaffected voters who supported Trump because they believed false claims about his policies or were mobilized by propaganda campaigns stoking fear).

Since I wrote the post, the election results have actually gotten a lot closer. Trump won by a lower percentage of the popular vote than Joe Biden did (and only just cracked 50% of the vote), and like Biden, won by narrow margins in the states that mattered.

If I’m right about that dynamic — that politics worked but propaganda worked far better — then it means much of the post-election soul-searching is misplaced (and, indeed, a dangerous misallocation of focus). That’s because Harris lost, in part, because of media disfunction, because electoral choice became dissociated from political persuasion more than any recent US election, largely due to an assault on the press and rational thought.

All this builds on Fox News and other institutions of right wing propaganda — though, partly because of the Dominion judgment and partly because Pete Buttigieg had started to crack through that facade, that’s an area where Dems did important work.

It builds on the hollowing out of the traditional press that has been happened for years, as corporate raiders turn news into a profit center. Several things made that worse, this year. As WSJ reported the other day, social media referrals to legacy newspapers cratered last year.

This was a deliberate choice by gatekeepers to dramatically alter their function, from a referral service to a disinformation swamp. But it had an immediate affect on the readership of those legacy outlets and other services relying on them, effectively neutering their power. (One reason I recommend Bluesky over other Xitter alternatives is because Bluesky encourages outlinks.)

At the same time, the oligarchs who own those papers shifted their priorities in ways that would have more subtle impact on the coverage. WSJ, which has flourished in spite of the media environment, nevertheless fired a bunch of journalists in spring, targeting local news and, anecdotally, a certain profile of journalist. Jeff Bezos taunted WaPo’s reporters with their declining influence when he brought in Will Lewis, a Murdoch retread with a history of protecting the boss, and Will Lewis reveled in the kind of ethically problematic both sides journalism that chases manufactured scandals as much as GOP crime. Bezos taunted his journalists again when he declined to endorse Kamala Harris, only to issue a simpering congratulations once Trump won.

There’s still a lot to unpack about the turn of the oligarchs (I’ve left out their embrace of AI because I hope even they will soon have to concede that AI hasn’t replaced human workers but it has enshittified their product). But when a number of these things all happened in spring, I remember wondering whether all the oligarch owners had gotten together in a room and decided to make their product worse in an election year, all in the name of chasing different kinds of influence.

Partly, they’re trying to compete with podcasts. And while there’s a lot to be said for the authenticity of podcasts, it’s another industry driven by algorithms, and some of the key platforms cater to far right politics.

Before we turn to Musk, consider that Trump used manufactured grievances — including the goddamned Hunter Biden hard drive!! — from 2020 to bully Mark Zuckerberg in advance of the election. It’s unclear to what degree Zuckerberg’s efforts to depoliticize Meta stem from fear, from a desire for another tax cut, or from a genuine solidarity with his oligarch brothers. Whatever the motive, Threads was built not to replicate what Twitter used to be, yet it continues to be the destination for journalists exercising no critical thinking of what they need from a new social media platform. And Meta sold at least a million dollars in ad spending that violated Meta guidelines. Something led Zuckerberg to reverse his prior support for democracy, and it had a significant effect on the election.

Ah, Elon Musk. Perhaps his original motivation for buying Xitter was simply the imagined moral injury his ego suffered when Grimes ditched him to (briefly) date Chelsea Manning and his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, transitioned (since the election, Wilson has announced she’s leaving the US for a country more welcoming to trans people). But the plan definitely took shape in the aftermath of January 6. It appears to have taken shape with the kibbitzing of Stephen Miller.

Musk — aided by David Sacks — played a key role in the kind of operation we see in the Viktor Orbán regime, but which happened in order to install Trump for a second term. By giving Substackers who were willing to misrepresent primary documents access to Xitter’s documents, Musk created a false narrative about moderation, pitching voluntary efforts to protect democracy as instead efforts to censor far right speech. That, in turn, gave demagogues in Congress the opportunity to create the appearance of substantiating that narrative with an investigation into the people who formerly moderated social media. This investigation resulted in legal costs and death threats to those involved — but only easily debunked propaganda reports that melt under the least scrutiny.

Nevertheless, those investigations have an enormous chilling effect. Paired with lawsuits against entities like the Stanford Internet Observatory, they disrupted most of the infrastructure attempting to limit disinformation on social media.

When Congressmen like Jordan and James Comer investigate, they aren’t bound by mere facts. They invent wildly. But with the help of process-oriented Congressional beat journalists, they still manage to tell their tales anyway. Such journalists report what Jordan and Comer said and who they’ve subpoenaed with almost no scrutiny of whether any of it makes sense. Those beat journalists are getting played.

This is precisely the kind of persecution of civil society at which Viktor Orbán has excelled. Many people are just beginning to think of what will come, but (as Renee DiResta, one of the targets of Jim Jordan’s wrath, keeps noting on Bluesky), what will come already started, years ago, and accelerated two years ago in earnest.

The election result significantly built on these prior Orbanization efforts. Certainly, Xitter became the cesspool of disinformation that researchers formerly combatted. Musk favored pro-Trump speech and seems to have throttled others (though some of Musk’s Terms of Service and API changes make it far harder to quantify). That favored speech includes his own, from the day he endorsed Trump.

And it wasn’t just the assault on moderation. Congress also targeted state and local prosecutors, the professionalization of the FBI, FTC Commissioner Lina Khan, any pushback on Elon Musk, and even government efforts to protect against Russian influence operations. The lawsuits against media outlets — even the embarrassingly frivolous ones launched by Devin Nunes, and the efforts to co-opt oligarch owners, also played a role. The Hunter Biden witch hunt, with its mythical foundation in the laptop that is not a laptop, its projections of corruption, the constant narrative it fed right wing propaganda (drowning out even Ron DeSantis’ bid to challenge Trump), was undoubtedly a big part of Joe Biden’s terrible approval ratings, and it is precisely what we’ll see all the time going forward.

We can’t assess the election without assessing the degree to which such efforts impacted the race. We sure as hell can’t discuss how to win the next election without thinking of how Republicans will work to further neuter liberal and nonpartisan civil society that protects democracy. Some of the biggest supporters for Kamala Harris will spend the next four years fighting to protect their professional lives and, in some cases, even their freedom.

The same disinformation researchers who’ve been evicted from safe university posts did their job in at least documenting what happened and in real time the press tracked what they were seeing (and what dedicated journalists found themselves). Next time, however, both the disinformation researchers and the press will be under more sustained assault (or, via their oligarch owners, cooptation), both via targeting their funding and creating more scapegoats to chill such work.

So if you want to think about the next election — if you’re optimistic enough to assume there will be a next election — you have to factor in the assault on civil society that has already started and will ratchet up in the next few years.

Yesterday, Donald Trump picked a Fox News pundit, Pete Hegseth, to lead the largest military in the world.

Before I discuss that, note that Kaitlan Collins described that Trump has yet to pick an Attorney General nominee, candidates for which include people like Matt Whittaker, Senator Mike Lee, and Mark Paoletta. According to Collins, that’s because none of the candidates checks all the boxes for Trump. Paoletta already issued a manifesto about forcing the career employees to bend to Trump’s will, and yet he apparently is missing something for which Trump is looking.

That may be how Trump skipped over people like former Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, longtime Trump national security aide Keith Kellogg, and Representative Mike Rogers, who were considered candidates. And tellingly, we know that Miller was willing to check the litmus test in place when he was picked in 2020: a willingness to invoke the Insurrection Act.

There’s something else that Hegseth is happy to do that the others are not. The possible choices are gutting the military of women, people of color, LGBTQ soldiers, launching nuclear first strikes, committing war crimes, and treating leftists as terrorists — all are things he has espoused before.

Today, Senate Republicans will vote for Majority Leader. I expect John Thune and John Cornyn will split the non-crazy vote and give the race to Rick Scott. But the race will presume Trump’s demand to allow Trump to install these candidates via recess appointment.

A Hegseth appointment is precisely the kind of pick that would test the Senate’s willingness to provide some kind of pushback to Trump. But if all three aspiring Majority Leaders have already given away advice and consent, that won’t happen.

Russia has been engaged in a good deal of dick-wagging with Trump since the election.

After Trump won, Russia did not call to congratulate — at least as far as we know (though Viktor Orbán seems to be Trump’s handler and he did).

Putin did, on Thursday, butter up Trump, calling his response to being shot courageous and claiming interest in a deal.  Putin did what he always does with Trump: he played to his narcissism.

On Friday, though, one of the most popular TV shows in Russia used a different approach (as made available by Julia Davis’ Russian Media Monitor) — airing Melania’s nude photos in the guise of noting that she was years ago photographed with a US seal, as if someone knew she would be First Lady.

Monday morning, WaPo published an exclusive claiming that in his first call with Putin, Trump warned Putin not to escalate in Ukraine.

During the call, which Trump took from his resort in Florida, he advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe, said a person familiar with the call, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

The two men discussed the goal of peace on the European continent and Trump expressed an interest in follow-up conversations to discuss “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon,” one of the people said.

In the aftermath of the claimed call, Russia escalated strikes.

Russia has also deployed 50,000 troops, including some from North Korea, to attempt to expel Ukraine from Kursk.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday Russia has deployed nearly 50,000 troops to Kursk, the southern Russian region where Kyiv launched its surprise counteroffensive in the summer.

Ukrainian troops “continue to hold back” the “nearly 50,000-strong enemy group” in Kursk, Zelensky said in a post on Telegram after receiving a briefing from General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

Kyiv launched its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August, taking by surprise not just Moscow, but also its allies. It said at the time, that the operation was necessary, because Russia had been planning to launch a new attack on Ukraine from the region. It said it was aiming to create a “buffer zone” to prevent future cross-border attacks.

The Kursk offensive, the first ground invasion of Russia by a foreign power since World War II, caught Moscow completely unprepared.

Meanwhile, Russia denied WaPo’s report. There was no call, Putin’s spox said. Putin has no plan to call.

“It is completely untrue. It is pure fiction; it is simply false information,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said when asked about the call. “There was no conversation.

“This is the most obvious example of the quality of the information that is being published now, sometimes even in fairly reputable publications.”

Peskov added that Putin had no specific plans to speak to Trump.

Peskov is probably lying. But the US can’t debunk him because (according to WaPo) Trump is, once again, going it alone.

Trump’s initial calls with world leaders are not being conducted with the support of the State Department and U.S. government interpreters. The Trump transition team has yet to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration, a standard procedure for presidential transitions. Trump and his aides are distrustful of career government officials following the leaked transcripts of presidential calls during his first term. “They are just calling [Trump] directly,” one of the people familiar with the calls said.

Later in the day, Nicholay Patrushev implied that Trump had made commitments to get elected — commitments he was obliged to keep.

In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “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.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.

Trump is going to be a tool of Russia. In one of his first personnel moves, he humiliatingly killed Mike Pompeo’s bid to be Defense Secretary; Pompeo, like Nikki Haley, supports Ukraine. Reportedly Trump made that decision with the counsel of Don Jr — Trump’s soft-underbelly — and Tucker Carlson.

My guess is their primary concern is when he will do that.

He promised to deliver peace on Day One. Seven days later, he hasn’t delivered, nor said he would. The shape of the capitulation Trump is discussing — basically a freeze of the status quo and a withdrawal of funding for Ukraine — is far less ambitious than what Russia intends, which is to conquer all of Ukraine.

While Trump has appointed white nationalists — Tom Homan and Stephen Miller — to run his mass deportation program, his national security appointments, thus far, were once normal people before they capitulated to Trump: Elise Stefanik at UN Ambassador, Mike Waltz at National Security Adviser, Marco Rubio at Secretary of State, and Kristi Noem at Homeland Security (it’s unclear who thinks will manage the House as it awaits special elections to replace two newly elected members; the GOP will win the majority but with a thinner margin than they had).

But Patrushev is correct: Russia did, overtly, help Trump win, and there may have been far more useful covert assistance we don’t know. Early in the year, they set up yet another attack on Hunter Biden as a way to attack his father. They released a series of videos targeting Harris and manufacturing claims about migrants voting. Those videos likely involved John Mark Dougan, a former Palm Beach sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016. While it’s not yet clear whether bomb threats to Springfield, OH and on voting locations were from Russia, they were routed via a Russian email domain.

A far bigger question is whether the decision by a bunch of tech oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk, to support Trump came with the involvement of someone either formally working for or just actin as an epic useful idiot of Russia. Did Trump install JD Vance as part of a deal for support from Elon? And what should we take from all the Russophile nutjobs that Trump plans to install in his administration?

To a great degree, Trump will be opening up his Administration to Russia, and doing so via wildly ignorant or crazy people. Russia will get what it wants under a Trump Administration. It just might take awhile.

So why the dick-wagging?

Probably, Russia is engaging in this game for two reasons. First, while the infusion of North Korean soldiers has helped its cause and it is making advances in Ukraine, it is doing so at great cost. And Ukraine still manages some attacks deeper in Russia.

An average of around 1,500 Russian soldiers were killed or injured per day in October — Russia’s worst month for casualties since the beginning of the invasion, according to Britain’s Chief of the Defense Staff Tony Radakin.

“Russia is about to suffer 700,000 people killed or wounded — the enormous pain and suffering that the Russian nation is having to bear because of [President Vladimir] Putin’s ambition,” Radakin told the BBC on November 10.

Moscow does not reveal the number of its war casualties.

Radakin claimed Moscow was spending more than 40 percent of public expenditure on defense and security, putting “an enormous strain” on the country.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed on November 10 that its forces had captured the town of Voltchenka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, where Russian forces have been making advances in recent weeks.

Ukraine launched dozens of drones targeting Moscow, forcing the temporary closure of three of the capital’s airports, Russian officials said on November 10.

With Trump’s victory, Russia is in a strong position, but it faces immediate challenges. So it would prefer, I’m sure, immediate action.

More importantly, Russia has a history with Trump, where he deferred action until he was inaugurated, and then failed to deliver.

Robert Mueller never charged Trump with entering into a quid pro quo in 2016. It may have happened, but would have required the cooperation of people Trump later pardoned to prove it. But Russia had every reason to expect that Trump might end sanctions and recognize Crimea after he was elected with their help the first time. During that transition, Russia did reach out to Trump, first with a congratulatory Putin call, and then with discussions via Mike Flynn.

On December 29, 2016, Flynn reached out to Sergey Kislyak and asked Russia to do no more than match Barack Obama’s sanction, so as not to set off an escalation. At that point, Russia undoubtedly had every expectation they’d see sanctions removed. Instead, over the course of the Administration, more were imposed, with Biden adding an entire new sanctions regime in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.

That is, Trump has a history of making commitments to Russia he didn’t deliver, couldn’t deliver after installing grown-ups in his Administration.

So Russia appears to be doing what every other entity that helped Trump get elected is doing, as they try to collect on their support: exerting what levers of pressure they have to get their objectives.

It turns out they likely have more levers of pressure — some of which are more powerful now, before Trump’s win is certified — and larger demands than most of the people who helped Trump get elected.

Trump proved unreliable in 2016. Russia has good reason to want to demand better this time around.

There’s a telling quote from Greg Sargent in his description of Kamala Harris’ difficulties in convincing voters that Trump was a bad president.

Some Democrats believe that the leading pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, failed to spend enough of its enormous budget on advertising early on that might have reminded voters of the horrors of the Trump presidency. That perhaps allowed him to slowly rehabilitate himself and edge up his favorable numbers while Democrats weren’t looking.

“There was a calculation among Democrats after 2020 that Trump was disqualified and wouldn’t be back,” Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier told me. “That evolved into a calculation that he would be disqualified by his legal troubles and could end up in jail. Democrats undeniably failed to disqualify him. The result was that by the time the Harris campaign started, it was too late.”

“Was disqualified … would be disqualified … failed to disqualify.”

Bonier is just one person. But the passivity he describes on the part of Democrats expecting and hoping that some magic unicorn would just make the problem of Donald Trump go away is telling. As described, Democrats as a party apparently abdicated all agency for making that case themselves until it was far too late.

It is precisely the reason I’m so impatient with the Merrick Garland whinger industry, which has flourished again since Trump’s win: because they replicate precisely the impotence that got us here. They always asked that Garland do the work, singlehandedly, of making Trump go away, without considering the political groundwork that was necessary to any successful legal case.

Take Ankush Khardori’s description of Trump’s legal impunity. After laying out that, with his election, Trump’s legal troubles will now go away, with which I mostly agree, Khardori then lays out his three culprits: Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnell, SCOTUS.

His culprits are not in temporal order; if McConnell — who had an immediate way to disqualify Trump from further office — had engaged in an impeachment effort, DOJ would have had more time to prosecute.

They’re not in order of culpability. He addresses SCOTUS’ actions in four paragraphs close to the end of his rant. He ignores how their interventions on the Colorado case and Fischer also affected DOJ’s options, and never mentions precisely how long they stalled the case: eight months, with a guarantee of more on the back end. Once you address SCOTUS’ delays and rewriting of the Constitution, it’s not clear a case could ever have been brought before an election, even ignoring how COVID stalled everything for a year, to say nothing of bringing an insurrection charge that would be (per the Colorado decision) the only thing that could disqualify Trump from office. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t matter whether Garland or a gun-toting Adam Schiff, as prosecutor, were in charge. SCOTUS’ intervention, assuming it would have been the same whether it happened in 2021 or 2022 or 2023, was decisive. Trump’s judges made a prosecution of him before the election impossible and further ruled that the only thing that could disqualify him was an insurrection charge.

Instead of focusing primarily on the main culprits, Khardori prioritizes what he imagines was Garland’s role over that of McConnell and — astonishingly — SCOTUS.

And as is typical with Garland whingers, his indictment of Garland is riddled with problems (and, as the red typeface I used to mark links to his own past pieces shows, his own bellybutton lint).

It is now clearer than ever that Garland was a highly questionable choice to serve as attorney general from the start. From the outset of the Biden presidency, it was readily apparent that Garland had little desire to investigate and potentially prosecute Trump.

The most comprehensive accounts on the matter, from investigative reporting at The Washington Post and The New York Times, strongly indicate that the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation and public hearings in 2022 effectively forced Garland to investigate Trump and eventually to appoint Smith in November of that year — nearly two years after Trump incited the riot at the Capitol.

There are many people — including many Democratic legal pundits — who have continued to defend this delay and may continue to do so, so let me be very clear: Those people are wrong.

It was clear after Trump’s loss in 2020 — even before Jan. 6 — that his conduct warranted serious legal scrutiny by the Justice Department, particularly in the area of potential financial crimes. But that probe, which could and should have been pursued by Biden’s U.S. Attorney and aspiring attorney general in Manhattan, somehow never materialized.

It was also clear — on Jan. 6 itself — that Trump may have committed criminal misconduct after his loss in 2020 that required immediate and serious attention from the Justice Department.

The formation of the Jan. 6 committee in early 2021 did nothing to change the calculus. There too, it was clear from the start that there would still need to be a criminal investigation to deliver any meaningful legal accountability for Trump.

In fact, the warning signs for where this could all end up — where the country finds itself now — were clear by late 2021, less than a year into Biden’s term. The public reporting at the time indicated (correctly, we now know) that there was no real Justice Department investigation into Trump and his inner circle at that point, even though the outlines of a criminal case against Trump — including some of the charges themselves that were eventually brought nearly two years later — were already apparent.

As a result, the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department were running an extremely obvious risk — namely, that Trump would run for reelection and win, and that any meaningful criminal accountability for his misconduct after 2020 would literally become impossible. That, of course, has now happened. It was all eminently predictable.

Garland’s defenders over the years — including many Democratic lawyers who regularly appear on cable news — claimed that Garland and the department were simply following a standard, “bottom-up” investigative effort. Prosecutors would start with the rioters, on this theory, and then eventually get to Trump.

This never made any sense.

It did not reflect some unwritten playbook for criminal investigations. In fact, in criminal cases involving large and potentially overlapping groups of participants — as well as serious time sensitivity — good prosecutors try to get to the top as quickly as possible.

The Justice Department can — and should — have quickly pursued the rioters and Trump in parallel. The fact that many legal pundits actually defended this gross dereliction of duty — and actually argued that this was the appropriate course — continues to amaze me.

As for Garland, his legacy is now out of his control, and the early returns are not looking good.

Garland is a serious, well-intentioned and complex figure. But given all this, he may go down as one of the worst and most broadly unpopular attorney generals in American history — hated by the anti-Trump part of the country for failing to bring Trump to justice, and hated by the pro-Trump part of the country for pursuing Trump at all. I sincerely hope he provides a first-hand accounting of what happened after he too leaves office next year.

The only sources of information on the investigation Khardori cites (aside from his own posts about what he could see without looking) are a WaPo and a NYT article. From both, only Glenn Thrush, a political journalist rehabilitated to the DOJ beat, covered the Trump case closely; none covered the larger investigation.

The WaPo article, which fairly obviously relies heavily on sources from the January 6 Committee members and people who left DOJ when Garland came in, has a number of problems I’ve laid out before (one, two, three).

• It missed the significance of Brandon Straka, whose “cooperation” I believe was mishandled, but had it not been, might have gotten you into the Willard in March 2021.
• It focused on the Oath Keepers and almost entirely ignores the Proud Boys, and in the process misunderstands the specific role they played, the ways DOJ under Bill Barr had made their prosecution far harder, and their importance to any hypothetical insurrection charge (because they kicked off the insurrection before Trump did, a problem impeachment prosecutors faced).
• It ignored the decisions DOJ made with Rudy Giuliani’s phone — which was seized with a warrant obtained on Lisa Monaco’s first day on the job — which made that content, including content J6C never got, available to DOJ starting in November 2021.
• It ignored the way DOJ, in August 2021, opportunistically used the prior Deferred Prosecution Agreement of Alex Jones sidekick Owen Shroyer to arrest and exploit the phone of someone who otherwise would likely be protected under media guidelines.
• It ignored the overt investigative steps against Sidney Powell taken no later than September 2021.
• It ignored a subpoena that was overt in May 2022, which included people who were not immediately a focus of J6C (and so not derivative of that investigation), as well as warrants dating no later than May 2022 targeting (among others) John Eastman. Since then, thanks to Khardori’s colleagues at Politico who do cover these investigations, we’ve learned the exact date that kicked off over ten months of Executive Privilege fights to get the testimony of 14 of Trump’s closest aides: June 15, 2022, one day before J6C interviewed those same witnesses: Marc Short and Greg Jacob. Which is to say, WaPo’s timeline even of known investigative steps is off in a way that suggests DOJ was entirely derivative of J6C, which it could not have been.
• Perhaps predictably, given the obvious reliance on J6C sources, it didn’t talk about how their decision to delay sharing transcripts from April until December 2022 withheld information both helpful and crucial from criminal investigators.

More importantly, WaPo focused on Steve D’Antuono’s hesitancy to turn to the fake electors, even as DOJ was pushing to do so. Which is to say that D’Antuono — someone no longer at DOJ — was the key cause for delay, not Garland.

So there are a lot of problems with the WaPo story that Khardori, if he had actually tracked the investigation or followed those of us (including Politico’s own reporters) who do, should have known.

But Khardori didn’t even need to do that to understand that the WaPo had blind spots. That’s because the NYT story describes two prongs of the investigation, started in 2021, that don’t make the WaPo. It describes that,

• Garland encouraged investigators to follow the money in his first meeting with them, though that turned out to be largely a dead end (note: Garland publicly implied that investigators were following the money in October 2021).
• By summer of 2021, Lisa Monaco convened a team focusing on John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudy, and Roger Stone.

The NYT story missed a lot of what I included above, too (though not the Proud Boys), but it tells a very different story about efforts to focus on people close to Trump in 2021 than the WaPo did.

In spite of the NYT description of two prongs of the investigation that started in March and summer 2021 that attempted to get directly to those in Trump’s orbit, Khardori spent four paragraphs of his complaint claiming that DOJ had exclusively tried to work their way up from rioters. That’s not what the public record shows, it’s not what NYT says happened, it’s not what public reports on the Powell subpoenas say, it’s not what Garland said in October 2021 testimony. And yet that is the basis Khardori uses to condemn Garland. Further, the NYT describes that, in his first meeting with investigators, Garland, “said he would place no restrictions on their work, even if the ‘evidence leads to Trump,'” That statement is inconsistent with most of Khardori’s first two paragraphs on Garland. The Attorney General told investigators from the start he had no problem investigating Trump. Yet Khardori still links his own past work and claims vindication, rather than confessing that, if the NYT piece he relies on is accurate, he was wrong.

Which is to say, Khardori doesn’t claim to (and shows no signs of) having reviewed how the investigation actually happened.  That’s not his job, I guess, as a legal journalist. Instead, he relies on two sources, one of which partly debunks the other, as well as countering his own claim about Garland’s unwillingness to investigate and his four-paragraph argument that Garland should have pursued multiple routes to Trump but did not.

There are facts. And Khardori chooses to ignore them, clinging instead to past assertions that he falsely claims have been vindicated.

It’s the most irresponsible kind of laziness. Without having learned what really happened, Khardori concocts out of his uncertainty and frustration broad judgements that support his priors but are inconsistent with the public record. Via that invented theory to explain the scary unknown, Merrick Garland remains his primary villain, not John Roberts, not Mitch McConnell.

Poof! Thousands of clicks, each time misleading another despondent reader, encouraging helplessness.

Having made Garland his villain, he proclaims defeat.

I am, if anything, more furious than Khardori that Trump will not face legal accountability for his alleged crimes, because I know the kind of insurrectionists whose likely pardons will effectively flip patriotism on its head, valorizing Trump over country. This is a potentially irreparable blow to rule of law in the US.

But I’m not ready, as Khardori seems to be, to concede defeat. That’s because legal accountability is not the only recourse; indeed, we were never going to get legal accountability without first demanding political accountability. That’s the mistake many made: by looking passively at Merrick Garland and begging for a sparkle unicorn to make Trump go away, many failed to take steps, themselves, to hold Republicans to account for abandoning rule of law.

Consider how Khardori disempowers himself elsewhere in his column. Here’s how he describes Jack Smith’s closure of the case.

Already there is reporting suggesting that special counsel Jack Smith will leave his post and dismiss the pending cases, which is not that surprising considering that Trump pledged to fire him once back in office anyway.

He describes this as driven by Trump’s threat to fire Jack Smith, not DOJ regulations that prohibit further prosecution. He doesn’t link or consider any of the reports that lay out the obvious: by stepping down rather than waiting to get fired, Smith obliges himself to write a report. He chooses how he will go out. Admittedly, Khardori published his piece before last week’s filing that suggests we’ll have, at least, clarity by early December which, if it were the actual report, would (among other things) be early enough to hold a hearing.

That’s not going to change Trump’s win. But it provides an opportunity to lay a marker in the sand: This is what Republicans have chosen to enable going forward. This is what Republicans have chosen as a party to become.

It lays a marker for the two other villains in Khardori’s column: McConnell and the other Senate Republicans who refused to convict Trump, and John Roberts and his colleagues who vastly expanded his power without even knowing what Jack Smith had discovered.

Fresh off a big electoral victory, I doubt any will much care. But when the obvious repercussions come — when a guy who stored nuclear documents in a coat closet further compromises US security — the report and the hearing provide a marker that those who failed to stop Trump were warned and chose to do nothing (or worse, on the part of SCOTUS, chose to give him more power).

One of the only remaining possible checks on Trump’s power are the people in the Senate and SCOTUS who failed to check him on these alleged crimes before (though SCOTUS did check some of his other initiatives the first time around). We won’t soon persuade any of them to change their minds. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying — or at least laying a record of their complicity. In that path lies capitulation.

All the more so given that Roberts and his colleagues will be the villains in many more stories that have direct impact on people’s lives going forward.

Donald Trump is about to do a great deal of outrageous things at the start of his term to reverse the treatment of January 6 as a crime. The response cannot be to say, ho hum, if only that awful Merrick Garland would have yelled louder, and give up, especially not when no amount of yelling was going to change what SCOTUS did.

The response is to stop hoping for a sparkle unicorn to do this work for us. The response is to take some agency for making the case about Donald Trump. And a first step in that process is to stop blaming Garland for things — the public record shows — he didn’t do, and especially to stop blaming Garland for things that more important villains, like John Roberts, did do.

The first step to effective accountability is to identify the actual villain.

Update: Ty Cobb, when asked what he thinks about Trump’s promise to pardon the Jan6 defendants, stated, I don’t think anybody in our history has more tarnished the rule of law than Donald Trump.”

I want to elaborate on something I said on Nicole Sandler’s show on Friday. There were really two elections last Tuesday.

In one, politics worked.

In the other, propaganda worked far better. Trump didn’t even hide that he was running on propaganda. JD Vance said it plainly during his debate: their campaign wasn’t willing to participate in any venue that would fact check. They did not contest this election on true claims about policy. Indeed, hours after Trump’s win became clear, one after another influencer announced that, yes, Donald Trump really does plan on implementing Project 2025, even though he falsely disavowed it as a core tenet of his campaign over and over.

Trump won with about the same number of votes he got in 2020. Trump will get millions more votes than he did in 2020 (though possibly not more than Biden did in 2020.) [Thanks to Nate Silver for the correction.] But they were different votes: more Hispanics, fewer white people. He will win the popular vote, too, but it’s not yet clear by how much.

Harris lost. But she lost differently in contested states and uncontested states. In uncontested states, the country moved upwards of 6% towards Trump. In contested states, Harris halved that movement by 3%. That is, where she followed the old rules of campaigning, persuasion, and GOTV, it worked, some, to counter the larger propaganda wave.

Meanwhile, a lot of people only voted for Trump. That’s why Democratic Senators are on pace to win four swing states that Trump won.

And Democrats had resilience down ballot in other places, too. A number of democrats in districts Trump won by double digits kept their seats. In several states, less conservative judges were kept. In Montana, the legislature moved left. In addition to most of the abortion referenda, right wingers lost referenda on school vouchers in ruby red states.

There is no getting around the devastation of Trump’s win. But the down ballot resilience will end up being very important — and also suggests some areas of vulnerability for Republicans.

Democrats are already at each others’ throat over whether politics could have worked better — who is to blame. Some idiots are arguing that Democrats lost because they’re too “woke,” as if they don’t know that “wokeness” was a propaganda creation the entire time, propaganda created by men waging cultural war on behalf of aggrieved men. We can come back to the two issues — Harris’ silence on Gaza and her cultivation of Republicans — that might plausibly have led Democrats to stay home.

But given the larger dynamic of the race — that politics worked where it was done, but propaganda worked far better — Democrats would be far better to use the two months they’ve got to inventory their tools (one of which is that down ballot resilience), breathe, and think about how to counter the propaganda, because Trump will be in a position to keep doing what he just did unless Democrats find a way to counter the propaganda.

I’m not the only one making that observation. Michael Tomasky noted that Trump won on inaccurate perceptions about the economy. Amanda Marcotte wrote about this dissonance at Salon, pointing to a bunch of studies showing that people who get information from non-news sites prefer Harris’ policies but nevertheless voted for Trump.

The problem wasn’t Democratic policy or messaging. It’s ignorance. As Heather “Digby” Parton wrote at Salon Wednesday, people backed Trump’s “aesthetics and attitudes” but knew nothing about his policies. Before the election, Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou at the Washington Post polled voters about policies without revealing which candidate proposed them. Harris’ were far more popular — even Trump voters generally liked her ideas more, as long as they knew they weren’t hers.

When voters have factual information about the candidates, they prefer Democrats. Polls from earlier this year show that people who consume news from journalistic outlets — newspapers, network news programs, and news websites — overwhelmingly planned to vote for the Democratic candidate. Newspaper readers clocked in at 70% Democratic support, and network news viewers were 55% Democratic. News website readers were only less so because the survey didn’t distinguish between legitimate sites like Salon and bunk outlets like Breitbart, but still: merely being a person who reads stuff makes you more liberal. In states where heavy ad spending helped educate voters a little more on Harris’ plans, she lost less ground than in places where that money wasn’t spent.

The problem is most people simply do not absorb quality information. Instead, increasing numbers of Americans have a media diet that is mostly a bunch of lies, conspiracy theories, irrelevant diatribes and other such bunkum that right-wing propagandists use to deceive people. A study released by Pew Research in September showed people were exponentially more likely to get “news” from social media detritus than legitimate news outlets. And those results almost certainly downplay the ratio of nonsense-to-real news, since most people taking the poll won’t want to admit that they mostly scroll TikTok all day and haven’t read an actual article in eons. Looking at newspaper sales and news site traffic, we can see that the consumption of reality-based news is plummeting.

WSJ has a piece describing the collapse of both legacy media and cable news. Of particular note: the referrals to legacy media started collapsing in 2023; but we know that was an intentional choice made by some of the richest men in the world to change their algorithms.

There’s one other aspect of this dynamic for which I’d like to offer a hypothesis.

Propaganda didn’t just win the election. It created the malaise that Trump promised he would solve.

A number of people are blaming this exclusively on an anti-incumbent wave that has taken out ruling parties since COVID (there are exceptions to this, likely to include Ireland when we vote later this month). But that anti-incumbent wave includes legislative elections. And in 2022, Democrats did far better than expected, even though Biden’s approval ratings were as bad as they currently are during the summer of 2022 (his approvals narrowed somewhat by the election).

There are three differences.

First, Trump was on the ballot. A great many people — often disaffected and less educated — are buying the con that Trump is selling, and they’re buying it because Trump and his allies first made them more disaffected and then offered to provide an antidote. He plans to do more of the same in his second term.

Second, as the WSJ points out, legacy media has cratered in the last two years. But importantly, as I’ll show, Republicans have already started putting a lot of the fascist crackdown we fear in place, both in individual states like Florida, but also in the way the GOP used their majority in the House starting in 2023. Republicans took out social media moderation in advance, and that played a significant part in the success of GOP propaganda efforts. They started laying the foundation to win on propaganda when they got a majority in the House.

Finally, a word about Biden’s unpopularity, which is what the wave was against. We’re looking at the election and no doubt the propaganda made the difference there. It didn’t help that legacy media misrepresented Biden’s economic successes.

But one reason Biden is so unpopular is the same reason Hillary was in 2016: Republicans had led a sustained garbage investigation designed to do nothing but raise her negatives. Republicans tried to impeach Biden for, literally, nothing, and it captured the attention of both real and fake media for two years. And the effort to smear Biden was, as these campaigns always are, about projection. Republicans in Congress spent taxpayer dollars to create the illusion that Biden was the corrupt one, not Trump. (Trump’s unprecedented corruption, which will be one of several organizing principles of his Administration, got almost no attention during the campaign.)

Which is to say, it’s not just the election. It’s broader than that. It’s that a permanent propaganda campaign has been supercharged in the last two years, in ways that weren’t even true when Fox News relentlessly tried to take down Hillary and her spouse in the 1990s. And that propaganda campaign has played a key role in leading people to distrust and eschew “reality,” including the reality that Joe Biden was better for the economy and Trump is unashamedly corrupt.

Update: Another piece on the correlation between media use and Trump vote.

And Timothy Snyder ends a piece on Trump and fascism this way:

He bears responsibility for what comes next, as do his allies and supporters.

Yet some, and probably more, of the blame rests with our actions and analysis. Again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side.

h/t rocksunderwater (public domain)

In Germany, November 9th is a day of very mixed emotions.

In 1923, this was the date on which the “Beer Hall Putsch” took place, a failed violent coup led by Hitler and the Nazis to overthrown the Weimar government. The following April, Hitler was convicted of high treason and sentenced to five years in prison (the bare minimum sentence). While in prison, Hitler was given various privileges, and he wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf. By the end of the year, Hitler was released, and he pivoted the Nazi party to seek power via legitimate means. Ten years later, Hitler had become the Chancellor of Germany.

Fifteen years to the day after the Beer Hall Putsch, in 1938, came Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. On that night, the German authorities stood by as Hitler’s Storm Troopers and members of the Hitler Youth stormed Jewish businesses and buildings, synagogues and schools, hospitals and homes, breaking their windows and ransacking the property. While the Nazis claimed the violence was a spontaneous reaction to the murder of a Nazi official, it was instead a well-planned attack, thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, and the Nazis demanded the Jewish community pay a huge “Atonement Tax” of 1 billion Reichsmarks, and any insurance payouts to Jews were seized by the government.

As bad as those memories are for Germany, an entirely different memory of November 9th was created in 1989, when after a tumultuous summer, the Berlin Wall came down. JD Bindenagel was the career State Department officer serving as the deputy chief of mission at the US mission in East Germany’s capital of Berlin, and he described it like this in 2019:

On Nov. 9, 1989, there was no sign of revolution. Sure, change was coming—but slowly, we thought. After all, the Solidarity movement in Poland began in the early 1980s. I spent the afternoon at an Aspen Institute reception hosted by David Anderson for his new deputy director, Hildegard Boucsein, with leaders from East and West Berlin, absorbed in our day-to-day business. In the early evening, I attended a reception along with the mayors and many political leaders of East and West Berlin, Allied military commanders and East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. Not one of us had any inkling of the events that were about to turn the world upside down.

As the event was ending, Wolfgang Vogel asked me for a ride. I was happy to oblige and hoped to discuss changes to the GDR travel law, the target of the countrywide demonstrations for freedom. On the way, he told me that the Politburo planned to reform the travel law and that the communist leadership had met that day to adopt new rules to satisfy East Germans’ demand for more freedom of travel. I dropped Vogel off at his golden-colored Mercedes near West Berlin’s shopping boulevard, Ku’Damm. Happy about my scoop on the Politburo deliberations, I headed to the embassy. Vogel’s comments would surely make for an exciting report back to the State Department in Washington.

I arrived at the embassy at 7:30 p.m. and went directly to our political section, where I found an animated team of diplomats. At a televised press conference, government spokesman Guenter Schabowski had just announced the Politburo decision to lift travel restrictions, leaving everyone at the embassy stunned. East Germans could now get visitor visas from their local “People’s Police” station, and the East German government would open a new processing center for emigration cases. When an Italian journalist asked the spokesman when the new rules would go into effect, Schabowski fumbled with his papers, unsure—and then mumbled: “Unverzueglich” (immediately). With that, my Vogel scoop evaporated.

At this point, excitement filled the embassy. None of us had the official text of the statement or knew how East Germans planned to implement the new rules. Although Schabowski’s declaration was astounding, it was open to widely varying interpretations. Still dazed by the announcement, we anticipated the rebroadcast an hour later.

At 8 p.m., Political Counselor Jon Greenwald and I watched as West Germany’s news program “Tagesschau” led with the story. By then, political officer Imre Lipping had picked up the official statement and returned to the embassy to report to Washington. Heather Troutman, another political officer, wrote an on-the-ground report that the guards at Checkpoint Charlie were telling East Germans to get visas. Greenwald cabled the text of Schabowski’s announcement to Washington: East Germans had won the freedom to travel and emigrate.

As the cable arrived in Washington, I called the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center to discuss the report and alert them to the latest developments. I then called Harry Gilmore, the American minister in West Berlin.

“Harry,” I said, “it looks like you’re going to have a lot of visitors soon. We’re just not sure yet what that rush of visitors will look like.”

We assumed that, at best, East Germans would start crossing into West Berlin the next day. In those first moments, the wall remained impassable. After all, these were Germans; they were known for following the rules. Schabowski had announced the visa rules, and we believed there would be an orderly process. East Germans, however, were following West German television coverage, as well. And, as it turned out, they decided to hold their government to its word immediately.

I headed home around 10 p.m. to watch events unfold on West German television. On my way to Pankow, I was surprised by the unusual amount of traffic. The “Trabi,” with its two-cycle engine and a body made of plasticized pressed-wood, spewing gas and oil smoke, was always in short supply. Perhaps one of the most striking symbols of East Germany’s economy, those iconic cars now filled the streets despite the late hour—and they were headed to the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint. Near the checkpoint, drivers were abandoning them left and right.

Ahead of me, the blazing lights of a West German television crew led by Der Spiegel reporter Georg Mascolo illuminated the checkpoint. The TV crew, safely ensconced in the West, was preparing for a live broadcast. Despite the bright lights, all I could make out was a steadily growing number of demonstrators gathering at the checkpoint. From the tumult, I could faintly hear yells of “Tor auf!” (Open the gate!) Anxious East Germans had started confronting the East German border guards. Inside the crossing, armed border police waited for instructions.

Amid a massive movement of people, fed by live TV, the revolution that had started so slowly was rapidly spinning out of control. The question running through my mind was whether the Soviet Army would stay in its barracks. There were 380,000 Soviet soldiers in East Germany. In diplomatic circles, we expected that the Soviet Union, the military superpower, would not give up East Germany without a fight. Our role was to worry—the constant modus operandi of a diplomat. But this time, our concern didn’t last long.

When I arrived home around 10:15 p.m., I turned on the TV, called the State Department with the latest developments, and called Ambassador Richard Barkley and then Harry Gilmore again: “Remember I told you that you’d be seeing lots of visitors?” I said. “Well, that might be tonight.”

Just minutes later, I witnessed on live television as a wave of East Berliners broke through the checkpoint at Bornholmer Strasse, where I had been just minutes earlier. My wife, Jean, joined me, and we watched a stream of people crossing the bridge while TV cameras transmitted their pictures around the world. Lights came on in the neighborhood. I was elated. East Germans had made their point clear. After 40 years of Cold War, East Berliners were determined to have freedom.

Bindenagel was elated, the German people were elated (Bindenagel gave more detail in a video interview here, and Deutsche Welle has a host of anniversary articles and interviews here), and the West (broadly speaking) was elated.

A certain KGB agent stationed in East Germany and assigned to work with the Stasi (the East German Secret Police) was most certainly not elated, and grew increasingly frustrated in the weeks that followed. The BBC described the agent’s reaction like this:

It is 5 December 1989 in Dresden, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall has fallen. East German communism is dying on its feet, people power seems irresistible.

Crowds storm the Dresden headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police, who suddenly seem helpless.

Then a small group of demonstrators decides to head across the road, to a large house that is the local headquarters of the Soviet secret service, the KGB.

“The guard on the gate immediately rushed back into the house,” recalls one of the group, Siegfried Dannath. But shortly afterwards “an officer emerged – quite small, agitated”.

“He said to our group, ‘Don’t try to force your way into this property. My comrades are armed, and they’re authorised to use their weapons in an emergency.'”

That persuaded the group to withdraw.

But the KGB officer knew how dangerous the situation remained. He described later how he rang the headquarters of a Red Army tank unit to ask for protection.

The answer he received was a devastating, life-changing shock.

“We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow,” the voice at the other end replied. “And Moscow is silent.”

That phrase, “Moscow is silent” has haunted this man ever since. Defiant yet helpless as the 1989 revolution swept over him, he has now himself become “Moscow” – the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

For Putin, this was the beginning of the fall of the great Russian empire, and everything Putin has done since was been an effort to restore the greatness of Great Mother Russia, with himself as her leader and savior.

On this November 9th, it is the Germans and West who are worried and Putin who is elated, as Donald Trump prepares to take office. Putin dreams of an end to US military support for Ukraine, a diminished US role in NATO (if not a complete withdrawal from the alliance), and a weakening of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement between the US and the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

On this November 9th, Putin’s dreams are looking closer to becoming a reality.

On this November 9th, Moscow is no longer silent.

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