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Trump Confesses that the United States Is a Client of Russia

There’s a great deal of normalcy bias in the reporting on Trump’s capitulation. NYT reports (based on watching the Sunday shows) that Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff “hint” that Putin will make concessions to reach a plea deal with Ukraine, without questioning whether those are anything but personal inducements to Trump (like a Trump Tower) and without noting that Wikoff is incompetent to understand what would be a real concession in any case. WaPo describes that Putin was willing to offer security guarantees, without noting that guarantees without NATO are useless (and one of the tools Putin has used to lull his imperial victims in the past).

Curiously, one place that is not suffering from normalcy bias is WSJ’s editorial page, which notes what is being shared with “friendly media” (seemingly excluding WSJ from that moniker) are “worse than worthless.”

The President went into the summit promising “severe consequences” if there was no agreement on a cease-fire. He left the summit having dropped the cease-fire with no consequences in favor of Vladimir Putin’s wish for a long-term peace deal as the war continues. Mr. Trump took new sanctions on buyers of Russian oil off the table.

Mr. Trump also said the burden is now on Ukraine to close the deal. European leaders told the press that, in his conversations with them, Mr. Trump said Mr. Putin demanded that he get all of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which would mean that Ukraine give up its main line of defense in the east.

White House leaks to friendly media suggest Mr. Putin promised that, in return for Donetsk, he’ll stop his assault and won’t invade other countries. No wonder Russian commentators and Putin allies were celebrating the summit’s results. Their President ended his isolation in the West, made no public concessions, and can continue killing Ukrainians without further sanction.

Mr. Putin’s promises are worse than worthless. He has broken promise after promise to Ukraine and the West. This includes the 1994 Budapest Memorandum promising to defend Ukraine against outside attack, and multiple Minsk agreements. He wants Donetsk because he would gain at the negotiating table what he hasn’t been able to conquer on the battlefield. It would also make it easier to take more territory when he or his successor think the time is right to strike again.

The silver lining is that European leaders say Mr. Trump told them Mr. Putin had agreed to accept “security guarantees” for Ukraine. The suggestion is that the U.S. might even be one of those guarantors, albeit outside NATO. But Mr. Trump provided no details.

For guarantees to have real deterrent effect, they would have to include foreign troops in Ukraine. Kyiv would need the ability to build up its military and arms industry.

All this is distracting from the question not asked at the Sunday shows yesterday: Why Trump’s team walked out of their meeting with Putin looking like they had seen death.

Let’s recap what got us here:

  • Some weeks ago, Trump gave Putin the 50 days the Russian president wanted before he would come to the table. Then, as Putin kept bombing, making Trump look weak, Trump shortened the timeline to ten days. But instead of imposing the sanctions that Lindsey Graham had spent months crafting, Trump instead sent Steve Witkoff to Moscow. Witkoff, by design (because this is what happens when you choose to put someone with no relevant expertise or temperament in charge of negotiating deals), came back promising deals he couldn’t describe, it’s just not clear for whom.
  • On an impossibly short notice, Trump arranged to host Putin on former Russian land. Going in, Trump promised that if Russia didn’t deal on a cease fire, there would be tough consequences. Europeans and Volodymyr Zelenskyy smelled a rat, but didn’t succeed in convincing Trump how badly he would be manhandled.
  • And manhandled he was. Sergei Lavrov showed up wearing a CCCP jersey, Putin displayed undisguised contempt for everyone. And Trump walked out looking ashen. Putin treated Trump like a menial client.
  • Trump told Sean Hannity that he shouldn’t have done his interview right afterwards, and I wonder if he had not — if Trump had not felt it necessary to immediately declare a success, ten of ten — then Trump’s team might have tried to find a way out. But whatever Trump then said to Zelenskyy and European leaders made them realize things were worse than they anticipated.
  • Trump sent out Rubio and Witkoff on the Sunday shows to basically defer, making transparently bullshit claims of concessions from Russia. But today, Trump is making it clear that he will made demands Zelenskyy cannot accept — the Crimea recognition Trump floated to get elected in 2016, and no hopes of NATO membership — even while suggesting that Zelenskyy will have to make all the concessions.

Effectively, Putin ordered Trump to make Ukraine capitulate. Hell, maybe he even gave Trump a deadline.

And I would be unsurprised if Trump does what happened in February, after he bullied Zelenskyy, but for which Trump later blamed Pete Hegseth’s incompetence. I would be unsurprised Trump withdrew US intelligence sharing, without which Ukraine cannot defend itself, possibly even halting the sale of weapons to Ukraine.

But the implications of all this are much larger. These demands, particularly the demand that Ukraine turn over the part of Donetsk that Moscow has never conquered, would leave Ukraine defenseless. Conceding these demands would make Zelenskyy vulnerable (indeed, one of Russia’s puppets in Ukraine is already challenging his leadership). Ukraine really is the front line of Europe — of Moldova (with elections scheduled in September), of Czechia (with elections scheduled in October), of the Baltics, where Putin has been staging for some time.

And remember: one of the promises Trump floated during the election, one of the promises that — Nicolay Patrushev said — is why Russia helped reinstall Trump is that Trump limit intelligence sharing with Europe, all of it. Europe relies on that intelligence to combat Russia’s influence operations within Europe. Without that intelligence, one after another country would fall to a pro-Russian party.

Since returning to office, Trump has dismantled every tool the US created to win the Cold War. It doesn’t need to be the case that Trump has stashed his Administration with actual Russian agents — narcissism and venality explain much of what we’re seeing — but there are somewhere between two and twenty Trump advisors who I have good reason to suspect are Russian agents. Over the past three years, right wingers have forced the tech platforms to eliminate the moderation that had provided visibility on Russia’s influence operations. As I laid out, Trump dismantled US Russian expertise and the investigative tools created to hunt and prevent Russian influence operations in the US. Meanwhile, he is willfully bankrupting the country based on plans largely adopted in joint venture with Putin client Viktor Orbán.

Trump has made the United States powerless against Russia, and I expect he will be instructed to make Europe powerless against Russia as well.

This is the point I’m trying to convey: All of Trump’s power depends on his continued reinforcement of the disinformation that Russia used to get him elected the first time. Without Russia’s continued indulgence, the foundational myths to Trump’s power would crumble. Particularly amid the willful destruction of US power, it would provide cause — and maybe even the will, among right wingers — to expel and prosecute him.

The hold Putin has over Trump is existential for Trump. And unless we can expose that, the US will increasingly become a mere satellite of Russia.

Trump is not making America great. He is gutting America.

This is not just about forcing Ukraine to surrender.

Trump has surrendered. And going forward, it is only going to get worse.

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Donald Trump, Alone in the Room with His KGB Handler, Getting His Ass Served on a Picnic Platter

I was the fake news yesterday.

I taunted Kash Patel that he had yet to declassify the Crossfire Hurricane binder Trump purportedly declassified on January 19, 2021. But then I learned that Trump had declassified it.

Sort of.

Trump ordered it released in April, whereupon John Solomon posted it. And after Judicial Watch mentioned it in their FOIA lawsuit, FBI released a copy here. Which I’ve made available here.

I say sort of because, if you compare the released files with the two-part release to Judicial Watch as part of their 2022 FOIA (one, two), there are still a few of the things that were pending for DOJ release that have not been released. Plus, neither re-release includes two Carter Page FISA applications that have been substantially released.

That said, the famed Crossfire Hurricane binder is, as I wrote up in this post, one Dumbass Binder. It is really not all that interesting. It actually doesn’t tell the story of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, not even as completely as Jeffrey Jensen did in his efforts to unravel the Mike Flynn prosecution (but then, that effort involved a great deal of deception and cherry pick).

Almost half of the released pages consist of the Confidential Human Source management files of Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper. Those describe how much the men were paid and when they met with their handlers, including on topics totally unrelated to Crossfire Hurricane. That is, they’re very useful for Russian spies to reconstruct past disclosures. They’re very useful for making anyone who might inform on Trump or Russian sources think twice before cooperating with the FBI.

They’re useless for telling us what really happened with the investigation.

The release of the binder is yet another item in a very long list, seemingly done as part of Trump’s grievance that he needed Russian help to get elected, that has instead served to damage US intelligence, particularly Russian experts, a process I argued was built into Russia’s 2016 operation from the start:

Entail complicity in destroying the Deep State: I’m largely alone in this, but I believe that at least one of those quid pro quos raised the stakes of the inducements. If it is true — as I laid out here — that the Shadow Brokers operation dumping NSA exploits used the same infrastructure as the Guccifer 2.0 operation, it would mean the acceptance of the latter involved tacit participation in the former. More concretely, by the time Roger Stone started pursuing a Julian Assange pardon in October 2016, WikiLeaks was already sitting on the CIA hacking tools stolen by Joshua Schulte, tools that Schulte himself recognized would make it easy for Russia to identify CIA’s operations and assets; by the time Stone started intervening at the “highest levels of Government” for Assange, Trump’s own CIA Director had dubbed WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service. In other words, well before he was elected, Trump unwittingly entered a deal that would make him a participant in the willful destruction of the US security establishment to deliver on his side of the bargain.

Trump’s invented grievance about the 2016 election has led him to do the following:

And more recent disclosures — notably the HPSCI Report that served as a time machine to make Trump’s contacts with Russia go away — will make it far less likely that allies (like the Dutch) will share intelligence.

You could attribute all this to Trump’s grievances about the Deep State. At some point, though, that excuse begins to ring hollow.

But the effect of it is that Trump will walk into a meeting with Vladimir Putin today having rid himself of almost any competent advisors on Russia. He has, since he started clinging to the grievance Russia built into their 2016 election operation, aggressively eliminated all the people he would need to negotiate with Russia competently.

When Trump met with Putin in 2018, he was still advised by Fiona Hill, a genuine expert.

Hill was asked about her experiences at the summit in Helsinki, when Trump caused huge controversy by meeting Putin alone then appearing deferential in public, saying he took the Russian president at his word that he did not interfere in the US election in 2016 – a conclusion not supported by US intelligence and law enforcement.

Hill has previously said she was so appalled that she considered faking a sudden illness to stop the press conference.

“I also thought about pulling the fire alarm, but I didn’t know what Finnish was for ‘fire alarm’,” Hill said, to laughter.

More seriously, Hill said, the Putin press conference “was one of the most humiliating episodes of all time.

[snip]

“The issue was really the press conference itself. We knew that it was going to be difficult. I’d actually recommended against a press conference. My word didn’t have much coinage in that environment but one of the reasons was because Trump admires Putin so much, he never wants to be humiliated. And it was all about a personal sense of humiliation.

“The instance in which he was asked the question about whether he felt that the Russians interfered in the election, he wanted to push back very quickly against it. He wanted to diminish any kind of idea of that because if … he wanted to get the message across that nobody had interfered on his behalf.”

He got his ass handed to him. It was an utter humiliation for Trump and for the United States.

But this time, having soiled himself in Helsinki, Trump will go into a solo meeting with Putin having been advised by sycophants at best, including those who proudly spout Russian Useful Idioms.

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What Price Would Trump Demand to Sell Out Ukraine?

If I hadn’t already concluded that the coverage of Trump’s sell-out to Putin on Ukraine adopts the wrong framework, I’d be pissed that Lawrence Freedman stole my intended title, “Baked Alaska,” for this column. Freedman’s is the best analysis of Trump’s “deal” using a traditional diplomatic framework. Freedman argues that Trump has accepted this deal out of wishful thinking.

Donald Trump continues to pursue a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine despite the accumulating evidence that there is no deal to be had. He has acknowledged, after many fruitless phone calls, that Putin has been stringing him along, even accusing him of peddling ‘bullshit’. In an interview with the BBC, he acknowledged

‘We’ll have a great conversation. I’ll say: “That’s good, I’ll think we’re close to getting it done,” and then he’ll knock down a building in Kyiv.’

He observed of Putin that ‘I’m disappointed in him, but I’m not done with him.’

And so like Charlie Brown, shocked each time Lucy pulls the ball away as he is about to kick it, Trump allows wishful thinking to triumph over experience. He clings to the belief that a direct conversation with the Russian leader is the key to unlocking the whole process. As he insisted two months ago, ’Look, nothing is going to happen until Putin and I get together.’

Freedman links to but doesn’t dwell on the implications of this BILD report: as the clock was ticking down on Trump’s imaginary deadline for Putin to stop fighting, Trump offered up sanctions relief and territorial concessions, but Putin refused.

“Vladimir Putin still wants full control over the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. He only offered a partial ceasefire – a refusal to attack energy facilities and large cities in the rear. But not a comprehensive ceasefire,” a BILD source stated.

The publication emphasizes that the US, on the contrary, proposed freezing the war along the current front line in exchange for a broad lifting of sanctions and new economic agreements with Russia. According to BILD, the Kremlin was unwilling to accept this proposal.

Even after offering Russia most of what it needs to keep fighting and getting rejected, Trump claimed he might still get concessions out of Putin.

And while that does confirm Freedman’s conclusion — that Trump will be embarrassed — I think imposing a diplomatic lens on this negotiation is as ridiculous, at this point, as it would be to impose an economic lens on Trump’s tariff deals. These deals are not about outcomes — improving the economy or saving Ukrainians’ (much less Palestinians’) lives.

They’re about about Trump’s need to feel powerful, his need to coerce tribute. And he’s willing to destroy America in that pursuit.

Coverage since Freedman’s column has begun to inch closer to that, such as this tidbit in ¶6 of a WSJ article describing that a Trump Tower deal for Trump is back on the table.

Alexander Yakovenko, a former ambassador who headed Russia’s foreign-service academy until last year, wrote in an op-ed for the state RIA news agency that “settling the war in Ukraine, which has been lost by the West a long time ago, has become a secondary issue in relations between the United States and Russia—nothing more than an obstacle to normalization that we must overcome together.”

Ever since the summit was announced, Russian media has been replete with stories about special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Dmitriev sharing fried dumplings at a restaurant in the Russian capital, and about the site of a future Moscow hotel, described as a possible Trump Tower Moscow, that the two men visited last week.

A decade ago, this impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal was going to be worth $300 million. Since then, of course, Trump has turned Trump Tower deals — in Oman, Dubai, Hanoi, Jeddah — into an expanding currency. Back in office now with a pliant Attorney General and immunity for official acts, every deal Trump makes has a side hustle: “free” flying bribery palaces that will cost taxpayers $1 billion, golden shares to destroy a healthy union, 15% to deal critical technology to China. And that’s before you consider the crypto, including the two separate hundred million dollar investments from Chinese linked businessmen, one of whom got a fraud case dismissed. (Er … perhaps the Nvidia approval, to say nothing of the neverending delays in slapping tariffs on China, are not so separate.) His $4.5 billion crypto profit since returning to office may depend on another corrupt pardon.

You cannot assess Trump’s tariff deals in terms of the economic logic because there is none. They are destroying entire US industries by giving foreign companies a competitive advantage.

Similarly, you cannot assess Trump’s upcoming capitulation to Putin in diplomatic terms, because there is none.

This is about Trump.

And I don’t think you can assess how Friday will go without reviewing where we are.

Vladimir Putin helped Trump get elected in 2016 because, according to a piece of intelligence released by Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe, he was “counting on” a Trump win. During the election, Russia floated that impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal. Shortly thereafter, the Agalarovs dangled dirt on Hillary for sanctions relief from Don Jr. And then, just over nine years ago, they had a meeting with Trump’s campaign manager (he had come from a meeting with Trump and Rudy Giuliani) where they discussed how Manafort planned to win the swing states, how to get Manafort paid millions …

And a plan to carve up Ukraine.

A plan not all that different from this plan to carve up Ukraine. Trump seemed all in and even was discussing business deals with the same guy that his latest flunkie, Steve Witkoff, is shopping Trump Tower sites with now.

Trump was gung ho to deliver that deal until his National Security Adviser, on a phone that Russians undoubtedly knew was tapped, assured Sergey Kislyak that “boss is aware” of Flynn’s own efforts to undercut sanctions punishing Russia for helping Trump get elected. And that resulted in a criminal investigation that disrupted those plans.

Trump has complained for nine years that Democrats ruined his presidential term because of that investigation, but really, it was his National Security Adviser’s shitty OpSec, even worse than Mike Waltz’ all these years later.

And as a result, Trump and the Russians have spent nine years trying to bury that past in false stories. In one of the first meetings between Trump and Putin, they crafted a cover story for the Aras Agalarov dangle together, outside the hearing of an American translator. At their Helsinki meeting, Trump famously sided with Putin’s spies over his own.

My people came to me, Dan Coates, came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia.

I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be. But I really do want to see the server but I have, I have confidence in both parties.

[snip]

I have great confidence in my intelligence people but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer.

He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer. Ok? Thank you.

Putin joked that, “I’d like to add something to this. After all, I was an intelligence officer myself and I do know how dossiers are made up.” It was about that time when right wingers averted their gaze from Oleg Deripaska’s likely role in the dossier, which enabled Trump to keep claiming that the dossier — which appears to be the result of Russians fucking Hillary over for her poor choice in a subcontractor her team barely interacted with — was the source of his woes and not his own actions.

Around that same time, we now know, Trump started chasing more Russian disinformation, the attempt to frame Hillary that Russian spies invented the day after the investigation into the Russian hack was publicly announced. Trump started adopting that Russian disinformation as the founding myth of his MAGAt tribe. That’s what Bill Barr used, successfully, to bury the damning results of the Mueller investigation. And Trump’s hunt for disinformation is what elicited his attempt to corrupt the newly elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in 2019. “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it, ” Trump started his extortion attempt, before turning, less than 30 words later, to his claim that Ukraine, not the FBI, had the server Russia hacked: “The server, they say Ukraine has it.” And Trump kept chasing that disinformation, pushing Rudy to team up with Andrii Derkach and others in search of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

At this point, every single claim on which Trump builds his own legitimacy, according to the terms he himself measures it, is built on Russian disinformation. And that means every single claim is built on degrading rule of law in the United States. Every single claim is built on ever deeper swamps of corruption.

And after he won again — with some overt Russian disinformation and who knows what kind of help from bomb threats originating in Russia — Russia made clear they plan to collect. One of Putin’s closest allies, Nikolay Patrushev stated, truthfully, that Trump had relied on certain forces to get elected, to claim legitimacy.

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.

“He will be obligated to fulfill them.”

The mistake, in analyzing the Alaska meeting is not just about Ukraine.

It’s about the United States.

It’s not just that Putin can bide his time in Ukraine.

It’s that the longer he holds out, the greater his true objective — turning Trump into his puppet and the United States into a dying kleptocracy that is child’s play to manipulate — comes into grasp.

Putin may still be fighting in Ukraine. But he has achieved far more than he probably hoped for in the US. He has all but defeated every nuisance the Main Enemy once stood for: rule of law, free trade, freedom of speech, science, human rights, reason.

It’s not just that Trump is welcoming a dictator on US soil. It’s that the dictator is coming to reclaim what Russia owns.

Update: This paywalled Telegraph piece says Trump is discussing cooperation on mineral resources in both Eastern Ukraine and Alaska, with an end to sanctions on parts and planes.

Update: OFAC has just cleared a sanction license for the meeting, meaning sanctioned people — like Oleg Deripaska — could attend.

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How Chuck Grassley’s Politicized Redactions Gave Putin Leverage over Trump

After making Canada, Japan, Vietnam, and Switzerland go to the US and making the EU go to Trump’s golf course in Scotland to negotiate tariffs, Trump sent his real estate developer buddy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow to negotiate tariffs with Vladimir Putin.

I would have low expectations that Witkoff, who has gotten his ass handed to him at every turn, would negotiate a reasonable deal with Russia in any case.

All the more so given the politicized release of old documents on Russia that Tulsi Gabbard has orchestrated in recent weeks.

Consider just this redaction in the classified Durham appendix that Chuck Grassley released last week.

As I laid out here, the redaction is designed to fool readers in several ways.

First, it helps to sustain a fiction that the draft SVR memo purporting to report Hillary Clinton approving a plan to smear Donald Trump is the first document in a series, and not the last. That, in turn, serves to suggest that what I call the Deep State memo, laying out a plan by SVR to frame Hillary came after the draft memo, rather than laid out a plan to fabricate the memo, complete with fabricated emails including Russian idioms attributed to Leonard Benardo.

But that’s not right. The Deep State email was, Durham described, sent on July 26. The draft SVR email incorporates an email fabricated on July 27.

Indeed, after this Deep State email, Russian spies talked about “mak[ing] [something]” — that is, fabricating emails — to “illuminate” how Clinton wanted to “vilif[y]” Trump and Putin, proposing an initial fabricated July 25 email promising to, “put more oil into the fire,” but not yet adding reference to the doping scandal that was contemporaneously a very sore subject for Russia. The email with the reference to the Olympics, dated July 25 but almost certainly fabricated on July 27, is the one that was incorporated into the draft SVR memo.

In response, those Russian spies said … we don’t know what, but we do know that they attached the fabricated July 27 email purporting to reflect Hillary approving that plan on July 26.

I’d love to know what that email says; it may make it more clear that this was all a great plan to frame Hillary Clinton, or it may reveal other parts of the plan, possibly pertaining to Guccifer 2.0. But I don’t need to know what it says to know that the email gives Putin great leverage over Donald Trump at the moment that Trump finally tries to assert a strong hand with the Russian dictator.

By hiding that email in an attempt to hide that what Trump has claimed for eight years was an effort by Hillary to frame Trump was — is, still — a wildly successful attempt by SVR to frame Hillary, Trump’s top spies — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director and Useful Idiom John Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Kash Patel — have all sustained a secret with Russia’s spies, a secret Kash has been chasing all that time, a secret that could legally implicate at least Ratcliffe and Kash (not least because they sustained this campaign during the time they were private citizens) in a crime.

Trump’s top spies are keeping a secret: the secret that for the last eight years Trump has carried out precisely the plan to frame Hillary Clinton that those SVR spies first ginned up on July 26, 2016.

And here’s the thing. Putin’s spies know much of what is behind that redaction. They can reverse engineer it because the footnote to it shows that the email in question is the one to which those Russian spies attached that fake July 27 email, nine years ago. They still have that email. Hell, it’s probably hanging in a gilt-edged frame somewhere, Putin’s trophy from a wildly successful attempt to compromise the Main Enemy.

So that redaction is not, as a classification redaction should, keeping any secrets from our adversaries. The Russian spies know what is too embarrassing for Grassley and Tulsi and Kash and Ratcliffe to release.

But we don’t.

And that’s why this entire frenzy to release more secrets just in advance of this meeting with Putin has made Trump far, far weaker.

Donald Trump cares more about his claims of grievance, a fake grievance that has always gotten him out of jams, than he does about America, to say nothing of Ukraine.

And Chuck Grassley’s willful protection of this secret between Putin’s spies and Trump’s has only served to give Putin leverage over Trump and over the United States.

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Mr. Art of the Deal Struggles to Spin Three Failed Negotiations

Trump is in the process of spectacularly failing at least three high profile negotiations, all while insisting he’s making imaginary deals left and right.

No, there’s many deals.

When are they going to be announced?

You have to understand, I’m dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I’ve made all the deals.

Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?

I’ve made 200 deals.

You’ve made 200 deals?

100%.

I’ll explain what those three are, but the larger point I want to raise is that these failures, all coming at roughly the same moment, will create a psychological and political need for Trump to seek some other way to look strong, even as these failures prove he’s not.

Harvard

Start with Harvard. That Trump failed what he intended to be a negotiation is evident by the timeline.

At first, Harvard hired Bill Burck, along with Robert Hur. Burck is a formidable lawyer, but quasi-adversaries of Trump (think Eric Adams, who also hired him) hire him because of his relationship with Trump, because he’ll be able to make a deal. When they hired Burck, it is clear, that’s what Harvard expected to do: to deal.

But in response to Trump’s White House overplaying their hand — who overplayed their hand is an open question — with a letter basically demanding to reorganize the most prestigious university in the US and a freeze of $2 billion in funding, Harvard prepared for war, both suing (adding a different set of lawyers) and launching a PR campaign that has not only explained the value Harvard (and higher education generally) brings to the US, but also set an example for and given cover to other universities, giving them the space to fight back, now more unified in opposing Trump’s power grab. While not directly a response to Trump’s attack, Harvard also has the ability and is taking steps to weather this fight financially, but doing so in ways that could influence an already volatile market.

The solidarity formed in response to Harvard’s created a problem. A WSJ piece on how elite universities came together after Harvard took a stand reports, “the Trump administration has been worried schools would team up in resistance, because it is harder to negotiate with a united front.”

After Harvard said they sue, Trump seeded the transparently bullshit story with NYT claiming that the letter — on purpose-made letterhead and signed by three officials — had been sent in error.

Then, almost immediately, came a frantic call from a Trump official.

The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.

The letter was sent by the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, according to three other people, who were briefed on the matter. Mr. Keveney is a member of the antisemitism task force.

It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.

In a ridiculous attempt to reset the negotiations, White House senior policy “strategist” May Mailman blamed Harvard (whence she got her JD) for taking a signed letter seriously, but then invited them to resume negotiations with an offer of “a potential pathway to resume discussions” even while accusing Harvard of playing the victim. [!!!]

A senior White House official said the administration stood by the letter, calling the university’s decision to publicly rebuff the administration overblown and blaming Harvard for not continuing discussions.

“It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” said May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist. “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”

Still, Ms. Mailman said, there is a potential pathway to resume discussions if the university, among other measures, follows through on what Mr. Trump wants and apologizes to its students for fostering a campus where there was antisemitism.

Having now filed the lawsuit, Harvard plans to skip the steps many other adversaries (including the law firms) have taken, forgoing a request for a Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction.

Harvard does not at present request a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunctive relief. Because this case concerns agency action subject to review of the administrative record under the Administrative Procedure Act, Harvard’s claims can be resolved expeditiously through cross-motions practice.

To move towards that, Harvard issued a demand for records that will show the claimed basis for Trump’s interference in Harvard is bullshit, and will also show who was involved (including at the White House, up to and including Trump himself) in manufacturing that pretense.

  • Proof that the government had found a Title VI violation: “the materials considered to conclude there was a Title VI violation, and materials considered in concluding that the government action taken—a funding “freeze”—was the appropriate, legally-justified action in response”
  • Basis to claim that Harvard had been ideologically captured, whatever that is: “the materials considered in concluding there was such ‘capture,’ and materials considered in determining, again, that a “freeze” was the appropriate and lawful response
  • Proof that Trump retaliated by withdrawing funding: “the materials considered in presenting the demands and conditions the government did, and in proceeding with the freeze when Harvard declined the conditions, are part of the record”
  • Basis for freezing specific grants (which Harvard has noted affect legal entities unrelated to Harvard itself): “All materials considered in arriving at those notices are also part of the record”
  • The communications within the government about this, including from the White House, up to and including Trump: “all materials directly or indirectly considered by agency decisionmakers in freezing funding, even if those materials include directions by White House officials”

Given that antisemitism is a transparent pretense to interfere with the university and to predicate funding on a mandated ideology, this documentation will be rather damning. As Harvard’s complaint lays out:

[T]he Government wielded the threat of withholding federal funds in an attempt to coerce Harvard to conform with the Government’s preferred mix of viewpoints and ideologies. Defendants sent Harvard the April 11 Letter and, when Harvard refused the demands, ordered the freeze of billions of dollars in federal funding.

The day after Harvard pushed to accelerate this process, Trump issued a whiny tweet partly targeting Burck (but not by name), which Kaitlan Collins reported led Eric Trump to drop him as outside ethics counsel for Trump Organization.

The reason Trump didn’t get what he appears to have wanted from Harvard — quiet capitulation and ongoing corruption — stems in significant part because his negotiators assumed they had more power than they had and they put that in writing, in the April 11 letter.

But according to the NYT, his negotiations also failed because he couldn’t explain what he wants.

The back and forth lacked specifics on what the administration wanted Harvard to do. The Trump administration lawyers said they would send Harvard a letter last Friday that laid out more specifics.

By the end of the workday on Friday, the letter had not arrived. Instead, overnight, the lawyers from Harvard received a letter, sent from Mr. Keveney in an email, that was far different from the one the school had expected.

I’m not sure I buy that. I suspect the letter really was what Trump wanted. He intended the “negotiation” to result in obeisance, not a deal crafted around specifics tied to the alleged antisemitism — something the law firms that capitulated have discovered to their chagrin.

Trump’s missteps with Harvard are far less consequential than the others, but it maps the same pattern: His need for adulation, his overstep, leading to failure.

Ukraine

Yesterday, Sergey Lavrov announced — in English — Russia’s terms for a deal: effectively, complete capitulation. Unless Trump takes an adversarial stance for the first time since he took office, this may well end it, with Russia and their North Korean cannon-fodder moving on to grander plans.

The dynamics around the failed Ukraine negotiation that brought us here are, in my opinion, entirely different from that with Harvard.

Those negotiations being wildly misunderstood by people — both people who should know better and people who’ve been wildly credulous in the past — treating this as a peace deal. In this funny story, for example, CNN continues to express credulity (as they have in the past), repeating Trump’s reported frustrations as if they are true, taking Trump’s public scolding of Putin as something other than performative.

President Donald Trump is frustrated his efforts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine have so far fallen short, and has privately told advisers that mediating a deal has been more difficult than he anticipated, sources familiar with the discussions told CNN.

Behind the scenes, he frequently brings up how much Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hate one another, one of the sources said – an unsurprising fact, but one the president argues further complicates negotiations.

On Thursday, his agitation boiled over as Russia launched its worst assault on Kyiv since last summer, killing at least 12 people. The attack, Trump said, came at an inopportune moment: just as he believes he is on the verge of securing a deal, which he has told aides he wants in place by his 100th-day anniversary.

“I didn’t like last night,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, where he was meeting with Norway’s prime minister. “I wasn’t happy with it, and we’re in the midst of talking peace, and missiles were fired, and I was not happy with it.”

It was a rare moment of criticism directed toward Russia from a president whose ire over the course of his time back in office has mostly been aimed at the Ukrainians.

The exchange shined a light on a rising sense of exasperation among the president and his advisers at his inability to mount a successful pressure campaign against Putin to end the war. Trump bristled at a reporter’s suggestion that he had not applied pressure to the Russian leader.

“You don’t know what pressure I’m putting on Russia,” Trump snapped. “We’re putting a lot of pressure on Russia, and Russia knows that.”

Trump is frustrated that Russia won’t allow his capitulation to look like a peace deal; his pretense to care about Ukrainians just that.

Alex Finley is far more realistic, describing it as the Peace Deal that Never Was.

To be sure, I think someone coached Trump to say he wanted and was uniquely suited to craft a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia during the election. I think he believed all that when he said it! He even did some things during the transition — the beginning of it, anyway — that resembled things that you’d do if you actually expected you could make peace and win a Nobel prize for doing so (again, the kind of conceit you might encourage if you were manipulating Trump to act in a certain way).

But then, after Pam Bondi eliminated all possibility that fulfilling a quid pro quo with Russia would be investigated, this time, and in the wake of Nikolay Patrushev’s oblique warnings about campaign debts after the election, Trump — or the Russians — put Steve Witkoff in charge of “negotiations.”

This is actually consistent with what Russia was prepping to do in the 2016-2017 transition, where they sought someone someone — they tried both Jared Kushner’s buddy Rick Gerson and Erik Prince — to be an instrument whom Kirill Dmitriev could entice with financial goodies and in the process ensure “negotiations” ended as Russia wanted. It’s unclear why Gerson didn’t work out (probably timing). Prince turned out to be venal enough for the job (he was chasing a big deal with UAE), but not stupid enough. As Dmitriev was testing him in Seychelles, Prince remembered that he shouldn’t sell away US interests in Libya. And that was probably the end of things.

But Witkoff was the perfect combination of venal, stupid, and trusted by Trump. Once Russia had him in place, there was never going to be a successful negotiation. Never. There was and is only the question of how much advantage Russia can get and how much chaos in the Western alliance they can cause by letting Trump believe he might be able to claim a deal.

And the “deal” that wishcasters are treating as serious ends up delivering the quid pro quos Trump owed Russia from 2016: sanctions relief and Crimea. As Finley lays out, that was always the end goal, not peace.

This is actually the end point Trump has been trying to get us to all along, in my opinion. He desperately wants to appease Putin and do business with the man he admires. These discussions have already begun, with administration officials beginning to outline business deals (including in energy and in minerals).

My guess is Trump doesn’t care one way or the other if this “deal” gets accepted or not. If Ukraine refuses to accept it (indeed, Zelenskyy has already said the Crimea recognition point is dead on arrival), Trump will blame Ukraine for the lack of a deal and then say the US cannot wait any longer to restart business with Russia. If somehow the deal is accepted, Trump will celebrate and say now it’s time to get back to business with Russia.

I suspect the reason Trump has to pretend he is making a deal (or invent the thin appearance that Ukraine is at fault for his failure to make one) is because, most practically, there are enough Republicans who oppose his capitulation that he needs to at least provide them political cover for their lockstep support. He also needs to make it look like he’s not the big weak plaything of Vladimir Putin that he is.

While Trump’s failure to negotiate a real deal will bother him less than his failures to command obeisance from private universities and foreign countries, some of the reasons he has failed to craft even the appearance of a deal are the same.

As The Atlantic just laid out, for example, Trump’s paranoia about loyalty has made Mike Waltz an appendage at NSC, with the result that there is no policy process, no expertise, no adults.

On the priorities that matter most to the president, Waltz has less influence than Stephen Miller, the homeland-security adviser and deputy White House chief of staff for policy, whose team is part of the NSC. Miller treats the advisory body not as a forum to weigh policy options, current and former officials told me, but as a platform to advance his own hard-line immigration agenda. On the most sensitive geopolitical issues, including Russia’s war in Ukraine and U.S. interests in the Middle East, Trump’s longtime friend and special envoy, Steve Witkoff, sometimes draws on the support of the NSC staff but often operates independently, officials said.

Meanwhile, Waltz’s authority to hire and fire his own staff has been swept out from under him. Vetting by the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office, typically uninvolved in internal NSC matters, has derailed hiring and led to dismissals of career staff for infractions that include donating $50 to a Democratic Senate candidate eight years ago. (Screening for political affiliation is a prohibited employment action under federal law.)

The chaos has marginalized the NSC in the making of Trump’s foreign policy; major decisions have been reached without a traditional NSC process. Some staff with portfolios that include Russia’s war in Ukraine, for instance, first learned from news reports that Trump had decided to pause intelligence sharing with Kyiv. Once that choice was made, they were unable to answer questions that flooded in from agencies about the scope of the decision and how it would be implemented. The chaotic approach to foreign-policy decision making was also reflected in a lax attitude toward operations security, current and former officials told me. “There were always too many cellphones in the Oval Office,” one former official said. (The White House denied that cellphones are present during sensitive discussions.)

That’s how you end up with the quotes to CNN, the purported surprise on Trump’s part that Putin and Zelenskyy hated each other.

As with his other deals, Trump has absolutely no end game for the negotiation (unless it’s the financial  benefits for himself that Russia has been dangling); he doesn’t know what he wants and claims to have wildly inaccurate beliefs about how the war started, though those beliefs may be necessary fictions to justify full capitulation.

Perhaps most importantly, Russia was able to manipulate Trump into capitulating on ever-increasing Russian terms by telling Trump he is strong. Trump can’t negotiate because his belief that he’s stronger than he is makes him vulnerable.

Trade deals

And all that might be enough if he weren’t capitulating to Putin even as he and Scott Bessent search for allies who’ll help Trump undo the damage he has done by starting a trade war.

I’ve already written about how Scott Bessent pitched this idea to Trump — to pause draconian tariffs with the excuse that Trump was using the threat of them to negotiate dozens of new trade agreements — in a rush, as the economy was going to shit because of the tariffs Peter Navarro rolled out. I’ve also written how foolish Bessent — Trump’s most grown-up advisor — looks when he claims we have a bunch of friends rushing to make a deal to isolate China, even as Trump pisses off all our friends by capitulating to Putin.

Since Bessent staved off immediate collapse by convincing Trump to adopt this “strategy,” he has settled into a rhythm. Someone like Charles Gasparino describes an imminent deal — often sourced to bankers who learned of it from private speeches by Bessent that encourage insider trading — with one or another country. The market spikes. Then the deal never happens. Sunday, when asked about Trump’s claim to have hundreds of deals, Bessent explained those are just sub deals. Along the way, Bessent confessed that they’re only focused on 17 deals plus China in the 90 day period when (Peter Navarro promised) Trump would make 200.

BESSENT: I believe that he is referring to sub deals within the negotiations we’re doing. And, you know, Martha, if there are 180 countries –

RADDATZ: But those aren’t actual deals?

BESSENT: Martha, if there are 180 countries, there are 18 important trading partners, let’s put China to the side, because that’s a special negotiation, there’s 17 important trading partners, and we have a process in place, over the next 90 days, to negotiate with them. Some of those are moving along very well, especially the – with the Asian countries.

All the while, Bessent posts frequently and obsequiously on Xitter to butter up Trump’s ego.

But even Gasparino admits Trump is looking for little more than some means to save face. Justin Wolfers has been having fun on TV pointing out that Trump is preparing to claim that the existing free trade deal with key allies is a big victory (like he did during early confrontations with Mexico and Colombia). And even then, the American allies with which Bessent claims will be the easiest to make deals are instead making deals with each other (and India, another country allegedly prepared to deal, is instead threatening military action against Pakistan).

As it is, China knows it has leverage over the United States, both because Trump already blinked and because he backed himself into a hole, and that’s before shortages start showing up in a few weeks. Bessent, desperate to sustain the con, insists that the Big Box stores who were issuing dire warnings exactly a week ago, today said, “I assume they preordered,” as if it’s not his job to check.

I fear that, having talked Trump off the ledge Navarro built for him, having staved off Trump frustration only by public obeisance and attacks on the press, Trump will now hold Bessent responsible for the impossibility of this task (though to be sure, Bessent appears to have oversold how easy this would be). When the shit really starts to hit the fan in a few weeks and Bessent’s proposed way out doesn’t work, Trump will need someone to blame.

At this point, I worry Bessent will be the first cabinet member to be fired, before more worthy candidates like Pete Hesgeth and Mike Waltz, because Trump will need a scapegoat. If that happens, there could be a snowball effect, not least because Bessent is the one who backed Trump off his plans to fire Jerome Powell.

Trump’s desperation to reassure the markets that all the damage he caused will have an upside increasingly results in batshit exchanges like this one.

Can you share with whom?

Because the deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. Some have been horrible to us. Some have been okay. Nobody’s been great. Nobody’s been great. Everybody took advantage of us. What I’m doing is I will, at a certain point in the not too distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries. These are countries—some of them have made hundreds of billions of dollars, and some of them have made just a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing because the United States was being ripped off by every, almost every country in the world, in the entire world. So I will set a price, and when I set the price, and I will set it fairly according to the statistics, and according to everything else. For instance, do they have the VAT system in play? Do they charge us tariffs? How much are they charging us? How much have they been charging us? Many, many different factors, right. How are we being treated by that country? And then I will set a tariff. Are we paying for their military? You know, as an example, we have Korea. We pay billions of dollars for the military. Japan, billions for those and others. But that, I’m going to keep us a separate item, the paying of the military. Germany, we have 50,000 soldiers—

I’m just curious, why don’t you announce these deals that you’ve solidified?

I would say, over the next three to four weeks, and we’re finished, by the way.

You’re finished?

We’ll be finished.

Oh, you will be finished in three to four weeks.

I’ll be finished

This goes to the core of why Trump is facing three embarrassing failures.

Trump believes he has this power. He has to believe he has this power. He has to believe he has leverage, at least for psychological reasons, and probably for very big political ones too.

He has to sustain the con.

He also has surrounded himself with sycophants — Bessent is the least unqualified!! — who refuse to do anything but applaud his disastrous instincts. And whether it’s miscalculating in response to Harvard and then trying to deny it, sending someone who knows nothing about Russia to “negotiate” with an old KGB hand, or letting Peter Navarro anywhere close to a decision-maker, the sheer incompetence of the people who surround Trump make it less likely he could negotiate if he had a clear strategy.

But he doesn’t. We’ve heard from international partners and Harvard that he couldn’t explain what he wanted. We know what Trump wants for Russia, but as a result his demands on Ukraine keep changing.

Ultimately, Trump is staking one after another negotiation on his need for everyone — the entire world — will bow down to him.

And that may cause follow-on problems.

Most Americans won’t feel the pain of the fight with Harvard — at least, they won’t understand that the lifesaving cancer treatment they were hoping would save their lives has been shut down thanks to Trump.

Thus far, Trump has managed to spin the totality of his humiliation at the hands of Vladimir Putin. That may change. Particularly if the rest of his con starts to collapse, his claim to be a peacemaker might too. But for now, that’s a sideshow for most Americans.

The trade war is different. That has begun to cause and will cause increasingly sharp pain going forward, At some point, starting in a few weeks, Trump will face the political and psychological blowback from the damage his trade war has caused. I wouldn’t be surprised if China aimed to ensure maximal humiliation in how he does that.

And all these things are happening at once.

This certainly presents an organizing opportunity — a moment to convince Americans Trump has harmed, and their elected representatives, to take steps to reverse the damage Trump has done. A moment to point out that Trump, given the team he wanted with no limits on what he could do, shat the bed, and did so after bullying the rest of the world and losing; Trump’s opponents need to be laying the ground for accountability, with lockstep discipline, now. This is a moment to point out that Trump invented an emergency to make a power grab, and with that invented emergency created a real, global one.

That’s an opportunity. But even setting aside the likelihood of follow-on damage as Trump tries to avoid accountability, this moment of failure will also be one of extreme risk for a malignant narcissist like Trump.

These failed negotiations happened because Trump sought to create the appearance that he has unlimited power; they failed because he does not have that power. As the impact of Trump’s disastrous attack on the economy begins to hurt Americans, exposing that Trump doesn’t have the power he claims to impose his will, he will have both a psychological need to do something else to look strong, and a political need to convince Republicans he still has the power to determine their political fate.

He doesn’t have the power to win these negotiations. But he still has plenty of ways to avenge the exposure of his own weakness.

Update: Thomas Edsall interviews a bunch of experts on how Trump might respond to losing support. Most raise the kinds of concerns I do here.

Update: I beat Paul Krugman to making a similar argument because I didn’t lose power yesterday.

The Canadian election, then, demonstrates why Trumpist trade policy, and foreign policy in general, is doomed to catastrophic failure. Trump isn’t trying to drive tough substantive bargains. Mainly, he seems to want to indulge in narcissism, demanding that other nations humiliate themselves so he can put on a display of dominance. And America doesn’t have remotely enough leverage, even against Canada, to make such demands. You could say that Trump is a reverse Godfather, making offers other countries can’t accept.

Consider the state of negotiations — or, actually, non-negotiations, since talks appear to have broken down — with Japan, another country Trump appears to have thought he could bully. Japan does sell a lot to the United States and might have been willing to offer something to preserve its access to our market.

But reports indicate that Japanese representatives sent to Washington left without accomplishing anything because they found Trump’s people impossible to deal with. The Americans insisted that the Japanese make offers without giving any indication of what our side wanted — in effect, they demanded that Japan make a show of obeisance without any reason to believe that it would get anything in return. The Japanese government wouldn’t, probably couldn’t do that. After all, it has to answer to its own voters. So there is no deal.

And then there are the Chinese, who — unlike the Canadians or even the Japanese — probably have more economic leverage over us than we have over them. They have no interest in helping Trump sustain his fantasies of dominance. Bear in mind that Trump’s trade war is working out very well for them. Bloomberg reports that

President Xi Jinping’s diplomats are fanning out across the world with a clear message for countries cutting deals with Donald Trump: The US is a bully that can’t be trusted.

Unfortunately, they’re right. And Trump’s repeated insistence that the Chinese are negotiating with him, when they say they aren’t, comes across as pathetic.

Update: Dan Drezner catalogs four ways Trump broke basic rules of negotiation:

LESSON #1: Hurt the target more than one’s self. The U.S. economy is much bigger than most other economies in the world, so the administration clearly believed that it had leverage over everyone else. And, to be fair, that is likely still true of a lot of smaller countries. The administration may well succeed in wringing concessions from India or South Korea.

It is far from obvious that this is true of China or the European Union however.

[snip]

LESSON #2: Clearly articulate one’s demands. This ain’t rocket science! For a deal to be struck, the target needs to know what concessions would satisfy the coercer! Instead, there are widespread reports that even loyal allies don’t know what the Trump administration wants. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is even trying to claim that this is a purposeful strategy!

[snip]

LESSON #3: Minimize expectations of future conflict. All else equal, when the target anticipates more frequent coercion attempts in the future, they will be less willing to acquiesce in the present. And if Trump has succeeded in one thing, it is in making the rest of the world believe he will coerce anyone and everyone again and again and again and again. For fuck’s sake, some of his first targets during his second term were signatories to a trade deal he negotiated during his first term!

Everyone expects Trump to break deals in the future — which disincentivizes negotiating any concessions in the present.

LESSON #4: Build a multilateral coalition. Multilateral economic sanctions tend to work better than unilateral sanctions. An institutionalized coalition of sanctioners can give a target pause in a way that unilateral action might not. And, of course, Donald Trump did the exact opposite of this. Only too late did they realize that maybe coordinated approach towards China could be a good idea. Instead, now it’s China going around talking to other countries about how crazy the United States is behaving.

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