I grew up a Reagan Republican in the middle of the Cold War, and I never thought I’d see the day when the president of the United States became the world’s most prominent and effective Russian propagandist.
Yet that’s exactly what happened last week, when President Trump began a diplomatic offensive against the nation of Ukraine and the person of President Volodymyr Zelensky.
This month, the administration couldn’t seem to get its message straight. First it seemed to want to offer unilateral concessions to the Russian government — including by taking NATO membership for Ukraine off the table and recognizing Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine — only to walk back the concessions days (or hours) later.
The cumulative effect was confusing. What was the administration’s position on Ukraine? Last week, however, the words and actions of the administration left us with no doubt — the United States is taking Russia’s side in the conflict.
What other conclusion should we draw when Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, begins peace negotiations with Russia without Ukraine or any of our NATO allies at the table, dangling “historic economic and investment opportunities” for Russia if the conflict ends?
What other conclusion should we draw when Trump demands ruinous economic concessions from Ukraine to compensate America for its prior aid? He’s demanding a higher share of gross domestic product from Ukraine than the victorious Allies demanded from Germany after World War I.
What other conclusion should we draw when Trump — incredibly enough — blames Ukraine for starting the conflict and calls Zelensky a “dictator”?
What other conclusion should we draw when the Trump administration reportedly proposed sending Chinese soldiers to police a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine, an act that would place troops from our chief geopolitical foe on allied soil in the heart of Europe?
As the noted Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama observed last week: “The United States under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism. It is actively joining the authoritarian camp, supporting right-wing authoritarians around the world from Vladimir Putin to Viktor Orban to Nayib Bukele to Narendra Modi.”
The conclusion is inescapable. As JD Vance said in his speech to the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14, the administration is much more concerned about the “enemy within” — what it sees as censorship in Western Europe — than it is about hostile foreign powers.
The pattern we are seeing abroad mimics the pattern we’ve been seeing at home. Trump’s enemies are now the American government’s enemies. There is one standard of justice for friends of Trump and another one for everyone else.
He began, of course, by pardoning his shock troops — the men and women who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, beat police officers and then tried to disrupt the lawful transfer of power to Joe Biden.
The full extent of Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons is only now coming into focus. Department of Justice officials are arguing that Trump’s clemency even covers unrelated crimes — including gun crimes — uncovered as part of the Jan. 6 investigations.
The favors haven’t stopped. He pardoned the former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich for no apparent legal reason at all — other than the fact that Blagojevich had declared himself a “Trump-o-crat.”
Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer and his acting deputy attorney general, ordered federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to drop the government’s corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams. Despite denials, the decision appeared to be a pure quid pro quo — the case goes away so long as Adams cooperates with Trump’s immigration enforcement policies.
The decision was so improper it triggered a righteous revolt in the Department of Justice. Conservative attorneys resigned, writing letters of resignation that outlined the course of events, exposed the flaws in the administration’s legal rationale and condemned the administration’s misconduct.
Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, led the way. Her letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi was a master class in legal writing. She explained why her duties of candor to the federal court meant that she could not in good conscience support the administration’s position.
But the most memorable words belonged to Sassoon’s colleague Hagan Scotten, a conservative attorney and decorated veteran. He wrote words of dissent that should echo in Department of Justice history:
Any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
At the same time, Trump is vengeful against his enemies. His decision to remove personal security from Anthony Fauci, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and — even worse — announce their vulnerability to the world, is petty, vindictive and (most important) dangerous to American lives.
It’s one thing for presidents to test the limits of their authority. Presidents of both parties have been pushing the envelope of presidential power for generations. In some cases, the Supreme Court has ratified their actions. In many cases it has rejected presidential power grabs.
Some have argued that Trump is merely the culmination of a very long trend. His actions might be different in degree from other presidents, but not in kind.
But no modern president has pushed as far and as fast as Trump, and no modern president has done so even as his team has laid the groundwork for breaking the final constitutional firewall by defying the Supreme Court. Trump likes to reassure us on this front. “I always abide by the courts,” as he put it recently. But that’s not the consensus view in his own administration.
Vance has threatened to defy court rulings. In 2021, he said that Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and that “when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, has written that the right “needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last 200 years.”
Elon Musk has called for an “immediate wave of judicial impeachments,” an almost comically obvious effort to intimidate judges who are hearing challenges to Trump’s actions.
Compounding the crisis, an atmosphere of fear pervades the Republican Party. Those who cross the MAGA movement can expect threats and intimidation, not to mention a primary challenger backed by Musk’s millions. As Gabriel Sherman reported last week in Vanity Fair, “In private, Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions.”
This is nothing new. In December 2021, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta published a profile of a Republican congressman, Peter Meijer, one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. Alberta told a chilling tale. After the Jan. 6 riot, he wrote, “Meijer approached a member who appeared on the verge of a breakdown. He asked his new colleague if he was OK. The member responded that he was not; that no matter his belief in the legitimacy of the election, he could no longer vote to certify the results, because he feared for his family’s safety.”
In 2016, a reporter named Salena Zito wrote a piece in The Atlantic that helped define early perceptions of Donald Trump. The press takes Trump “literally, but not seriously,” she said; meanwhile, she wrote, his supporters “take him seriously, but not literally.”
We now know that we should have taken him literally and seriously. He intended to be taken literally and seriously his first term. He remains furious that key members of his team kept trying to block his worst and wildest ideas.
The first month of Trump’s second term should tell us that no one in the administration is stopping Trump now. He’s surrounded by fanatical supporters, and any dissent will be crushed.
It wasn’t enough for Bove, Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, to accept the resignation of the attorneys who objected to the deal with Eric Adams; he placed the assistant U.S. attorneys who worked on the case on administrative leave and launched an investigation into their conduct.
And we can’t forget that the Senate just confirmed Kash Patel as director of the F.B.I. — a man who wrote a book called “Government Gangsters” that includes an enemies list of 60 current and former public officials he calls a “cabal of unelected tyrants.”
America has endured dangerous periods of democratic backsliding before. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction and helped plunge the South into the darkness of Jim Crow. Woodrow Wilson was a racist authoritarian who segregated the Civil Service and prosecuted thousands of Americans who objected to U.S. entry into World War I.
But I cannot recall a moment in which a president broke free of the bounds of law and morality so quickly and comprehensively. In one month, Trump has endorsed Russian propaganda, switched sides in the Ukraine war, threatened our closest allies, attacked the constitutional order and begun imposing a two-tiered system of justice.
This state of affairs is unrecognizable to most Americans. But Putin recognizes it. So does Xi Jinping. In Trump, they can plainly see a version of themselves. He is doing their work for them. He is damaging American democracy, diminishing American power, and destroying American alliances with an energy and an efficiency that must exceed their wildest dreams.