Artem Kariakin and his unit would regularly cross into Russia - until last week.

Kyiv and Moscow confirm attendance at separate talks with US officials in Saudi Arabia set for Monday.

Volodymyr Zelensky says Vladimir Putin "must stop making unnecessary demands" to achieve a peace deal.

The countries on Nato's eastern flank are preparing for the possibility of being targeted by Russia

Kyiv strikes a strategic bomber base in Engels while Russia launches a series of drone strikes in eastern Ukraine.

“This is an awesome decision by Trump.”

What did Donald Trump just do, and who is this happy about it? Is this a Republican politician supporting the president’s plans for a tax cut, or perhaps a MAGA cheerleader applauding deportations? Perhaps it’s some right-wing pundit foot-stomping his approval for an executive order about trans athletes?

No. The “awesome decision” was to shut down the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the umbrella organization that provides support not only to Voice of America but also to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Martí, and Radio Free Asia, among other groups. And the clapping is coming not from Washington, but from Moscow. The pleased Trump fan is Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT and the media group that owns Russian-propaganda outlets such as Sputnik, and one of Russia’s most venomously anti-Western television commentators. (She once suggested that Russia should detonate a nuclear weapon over its own territory as a warning to the West about supporting Ukraine.)

Here’s her full comment (made on Russian television on Sunday night) regarding Trump’s order: “Today is a celebration for my colleagues at RT, Sputnik, and other outlets, because Trump unexpectedly announced that he’s closing down Radio Liberty and Voice of America, and now they’re closed. This is an awesome decision by Trump.”

Organizations such as the Voice of America and “the radios,” as they have been called collectively over the years, are among America’s best instruments of soft power. (VOA was created to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II.) During the Cold War, people behind the Iron Curtain relied on these institutions, and especially on RFE/RL, not because they wanted to hear an American point of view—they already knew all about that—but because they wanted news, real information that they could trust.  These are not independent news organizations: They receive support from the U.S. government and other sources. But the journalists at VOA and the radios are not mouthpieces for any government. They are professionals who report and broadcast news and interviews in multiple languages around the world—much to the ire of authoritarian states that wish to control what their citizens read and hear.

Turning off these sources was not some slapdash DOGE move. Trump personally signed an executive order on Friday, shutting down what a White House statement absurdly called “the Voice of Radical America.” And if the order stands—USAGM is chartered by Congress as an independent agency, and Trump likely does not have the authority to close it down by fiat—he will have succeeded in gutting crucial sources of information relied on by millions of people living under repressive governments. As Max Boot wrote in The Washington Post on Sunday, “All of this amounts to a stunning and self-defeating repudiation of America’s legacy as a beacon of freedom around the world.”

[Read: Paranoia is winning]

Trump has long had a grudge against Voice of America in particular; he has accused VOA of skewing its coverage to the left, and of supporting President Joe Biden in the 2024 campaign. He also recently bristled at what he thought was an impertinent question from a VOA reporter regarding Gaza. (“Who are you with?” the president asked the reporter. When she answered that she was from VOA, Trump said, “Oh, no wonder.”)

But this is more than just a spat with VOA. By killing off USAGM and the organizations that depend on it, Trump is pulling a thorn from the paws of the world’s worst regimes, the people he seems to believe are his natural political allies and co-religionists. (The news about VOA and Radio Free Asia was happily received in Beijing, for example, where a state-run media outlet cheered the end of America’s “lie factory” and its “demonizing narratives” about China.)

RFE/RL also monitors the press and events in other nations, and provides in-depth analysis of events there that mainstream Western media do not have the time or space to explore. I know this because I wrote some of these reports as a guest analyst for Radio Liberty’s research arm back in the 1980s, during the Cold War. (My first article for RL was a discussion of developments in Soviet civil-military relations.) Throughout my career as a Soviet and Russian expert, I counted on RFE/RL for information from Eurasia. I knew that its reporters overseas faced significant risks from the governments they covered and hostility from autocracies—as well as various terrorist groups—that wanted to silence them. Before the Soviet Union’s downfall, RFE/RL was based in Munich; later, it moved to a campus in the Czech Republic with security rivaling that of a military base.

Trump, who regards any media he cannot control as a political enemy, is anxious to shut down these vessels of news and information. Once closed, they will no longer annoy him, and he will get a pat on the back from people such as Simonyan. But the new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, seems eager to see it all burn as well. Indeed, she’s so enthused that yesterday, she shared an X post from Ian Miles Cheong, a Malaysia-based right-wing podcaster and journalist manqué. (He has written for RT and is still listed on its website.) His post claimed that these organizations “produced and disseminated far-left propaganda” and “perpetuated a pro-war narratives against Russia.”

It’s one thing for the DNI to say that she supports the president’s decision; it’s another to see her reposting material from an online provocateur who came to prominence fighting on Reddit over “Gamergate” a decade ago. (I contacted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to ask if Gabbard agrees with Cheong and believes he is a reliable source of information. ODNI has not responded.)

No one should really be surprised that Gabbard is amplifying such nonsense. As I wrote last November, her views are so pro-Russian that allowing her to serve as DNI constitutes a national-security threat. But you don’t have to take my word for it: The journalist Julia Davis, who monitors Russian media, has kept track of the affection with which Gabbard is regarded in Russia. In December, the Russian state-television host Evgeny Popov surveyed Trump’s prospective Cabinet nominees and declared that none of them were “friends of Russia, except for Tulsi Gabbard.” And Vladimir Solovyov, a talk-show host whose rants are depraved even by the low standards of Russian television, referred to Gabbard as “our girlfriend Tulsi.” (“Is she some sort of a Russian agent?” another guest asked. “Yes,” Solovyov snapped.)

Now, some of this gloating in the Russian media is likely just an attempt to pull on American pigtails. The Russians are very good at this game, and they know that referring to the DNI as Russia’s “girlfriend” will throw some Americans into a swivet. But if Gabbard isn’t a Vladimir Putin supporter, she’s doing a good imitation of one: Any sensible American politician would dread a public association with Cheong—today he referred to Russia’s horrendous 2022 massacre of civilians in the town of Bucha as a “hoax”—but Gabbard thought highly enough of his comments to send them out under her official X account.

The courts may yet stop Trump’s assault on USAGM, although if the agency survives, it will be headed by Kari Lake, who has her own irresponsible plans for VOA. (If there is one bright spot in all of this, it is that Trump’s executive order may have put Lake out of a job.) But regardless of the eventual legal outcome, the president is proudly showing America and the alliance of democracies it once led that he is on the side of the world’s dictators. The Kremlin and other autocracies have long ached to see Voice of America and Radio Liberty destroyed, but even in their most fevered dreams, they could never have imagined that the Americans would do the dirty work themselves.

Vladimir Putin isn’t going to make this easy for Donald Trump.

For weeks, Trump has bragged about his close relationship with his Russian counterpart and declared that Putin wanted to bring a quick end to the war that he, of course, started more than three years ago. Trump’s national-security team worked with Ukraine to come up with a 30-day cease-fire proposal in hopes of persuading Moscow to accept it. And his press secretary declared yesterday that Ukraine and Russia were on the “10th yard line of peace.”

But when the two men spoke today, Putin had his own ideas.

Putin did agree during the more-than-two-hour call to halt strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, and he pledged to continue negotiations. But that limited deal fell far short of what the White House had forecast in recent days, and it now confronts Trump with a dilemma. In order to secure the peace he has promised, he might have to engage in something he has yet to do: get tough with Putin.

Trump, predictably, dressed up his call with Putin as a win, posting on social media that the conversation was “a very good and productive one.”

The peace process “is now in full force and effect, and we will, hopefully, for the sake of Humanity, get the job done!” he wrote.

In truth, Putin offered next to no concessions, and his goal, according to a Kremlin readout of the call, remains maximalist: preventing Ukraine’s rearmament and sovereignty. In order for him to accept Trump’s full cease-fire proposal, Putin said, Ukraine would have to stop rearming its military and sending new soldiers to the front lines, and all foreign governments—including the United States and Kyiv’s European allies—would have to stop sending military assistance or intelligence to Ukraine.

[Read: Trump is Nero while Washington burns]

Taken together, those demands would severely weaken Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, and Trump did not agree to them in the call. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking with reporters in Ukraine after the Trump-Putin call, expressed “skepticism” about Putin’s motivations and made clear that no lasting deal could be made without his nation’s involvement. Still, he added, “if there is a partial cease-fire, this is a positive result,” and he signaled that Ukraine would accept the limited agreement, even though it would allow Russia to continue to pummel his nation’s cities and towns.

If the strikes on energy infrastructure indeed stop, it would be the most significant mutually agreed suspension of attacks in the war. A senior White House aide framed that to me as a major achievement, the first step toward a broader peace (Trump long ago abandoned his campaign promise to end the war in 24 hours). But Trump’s national-security team will now need to debate a course of action, and the aide, who requested anonymity to discuss internal conversations, conceded that difficult decisions lie ahead. Will Trump allow the U.S. to pressure Moscow—by toughening sanctions on Russia or increasing aid to Ukraine—to push Putin to soften his demands? Or will Trump once more defer to Putin and isolate Kyiv?

The partial cease-fire holds benefits for both sides. Ukraine has struggled for years with Russia’s attacks on its energy grid, which at times have plunged cities into darkness and cold. But agreeing to the deal also was in Putin’s interest—Ukraine has recently ratcheted up its attacks on gas and oil facilities deep in Russian territory, weakening Moscow’s most crucial stream of revenue at a time when the nation’s war-weary economy is struggling.

Marc Polymeropoulos, a former U.S. intelligence official who is a Trump critic, told me that Putin’s demand for an end to those strikes—and his willingness to relinquish his own military’s ability to do the same—is proof that the strikes “are having a much more severe effect than even we imagined. Putin wants them to stop. That’s a pretty good measure of effectiveness.”

That’s all that Putin was willing to give up, though, and he telegraphed his intent to keep the war going or, at least, to end it only on terms that he could dictate. According to the Kremlin readout of the call, Putin insisted on the “absolute need to eliminate the root causes of the crisis,” which include, in Moscow’s view, Ukraine seeking security guarantees from the West, such as admission to NATO or the European Union. Putin also suggested cutting Kyiv out of future negotiations, leaving the talks solely between Washington and Moscow. And his demand for a complete end to all foreign military support to Ukraine is simply a nonstarter: Even though Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance have previously threatened to discontinue American support for Kyiv, Ukraine’s European partners have in recent weeks only increased their pledges.

“It’s clear that Russia remains the obstacle to peace in Europe,” Democratic Senator Chris Coons told me in a statement. “I’m glad to see a halt on infrastructure strikes but many of Putin’s ‘requests’—like a ban on arms or intel sharing—make clear what he is after: a neutered Ukraine that can’t defend itself.”

Of note: Neither the White House’s nor the Kremlin’s readout of the call described any discussions between the two leaders over the fate of the territory Russia has seized from Ukraine. Russia has claimed about 20 percent of Ukraine’s land, beginning with the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. Air-raid sirens continued to go off around Ukraine today. Still, the call yielded some positives for Ukraine, which will at least for now continue to receive U.S. assistance as it tries to work out backup plans with Europe in case Trump eventually cuts off Kyiv.

“Frankly, this is the Russian playbook of using negotiations as an instrument of armed conflict,” Polymeropoulos, the former intelligence officer, told me. “But in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably less bad than everyone imagined. At least the U.S. didn’t sell Ukraine down the river.”

[Read: Trump is offering Putin another Munich]

Few in the national-security community are counting on Trump to suddenly align himself more solidly with Kyiv. For weeks, he and his administration have embraced Moscow’s view of the war in Ukraine. Trump has decreed that Zelensky is “a dictator,” repeated Putin’s lie that Ukraine started the conflict, declared that Ukraine didn’t have any “cards” in the negotiations, and already denied Kyiv’s top wish—that it be allowed to enter NATO, the alliance designed as a bulwark against Russian aggression. The pause in U.S. intelligence-sharing and shipments of military supplies to Ukraine earlier this month allowed Moscow to make gains on the battlefield, most notably in the Russian territory of Kursk, land that had been Ukraine’s strongest bargaining chip in possible upcoming negotiations. And, of course, in Trump’s first term, the United States at times levied tough sanctions against Moscow, only to be undermined by the president’s warm words for Putin, including during their infamous 2018 Helsinki summit.

So far, Trump hasn’t done anything to suggest that he’s cooling on Putin. When Zelensky didn’t give Trump everything he wanted in their Oval Office meeting last month, the U.S. president berated his Ukrainian counterpart, and Trump’s allies called for new elections in Kyiv. When Putin didn’t give Trump everything he wanted today, the Russian leader still got a friendly Truth Social post from Trump, pledges of further talks, and possibly some hockey games featuring the best players from each country.

But there were signs that Trump wasn’t happy with how Putin played his hand. Trump has rarely missed opportunities to chat with reporters during the first eight weeks of his presidency; just yesterday, he fielded questions multiple times, including when predicting that Putin wanted peace, and he often boastfully engages with the press while signing executive orders.

Another such signing was scheduled for the Oval Office this afternoon. But reporters were not invited to watch, depriving them of the chance to ask questions about the Putin call. Trump remained behind closed doors.

For President Donald Trump, last month’s spat at the White House with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was “great television.” To the rest of us, it was a horrifying realization of our worst fears: a real-time crumbling of the Euro-American alliance, which has been the bedrock of the international order since 1945.

Europeans have recently been discovering a new resolve for standing on their own. Perhaps the most candid response came from the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, who said that “the free world needs a new leader.”

There is plenty of good sense in the EU taking a resolute stand. The need for “strategic autonomy” is not only the preoccupation of French President Emmanuel Macron; it has been part of the bloc’s codified global strategy since 2016 as well. Now Trump is fulminating against the EU, claiming that it was “formed in order to screw the United States,” and European autonomy has become an urgent priority.

But to reduce this moment to a Euro-American clash, let alone to resort to clichés about the supposedly essential qualities of Europe and the United States, would be a fundamental mistake. The current rift is part of a broader battle for the soul of the West. On one side are those who believe that Western countries should continue to be characterized by open societies, Enlightenment values, pluralism, and liberal democracy, as they mostly have been for the past few decades. The most notable opposition to this status quo comes from ultranationalists who believe that the West has gone too far in its espousal of progress and liberalism, and that it must revert to a civilizational ethos centered around Christianity—one that is more traditional and less libertine, less feminist, and less internationalist (or “globalist,” as they like to call it). As a shorthand, I call them anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries.

Both sides have long had partisans in both America and Europe. For about a decade, the standard-bearer for the nationalist right has been Viktor Orbán, the self-styled “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary. Orbán’s fellow anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries have grown in political relevance and popularity across the EU, though they are still relatively marginal. For inspiration, they look to the Russia of Vladimir Putin, whose national chauvinism, banning of “gender ideology” and “gay propaganda,” and revisionism against the world order fit well with their agenda.

[Michael McFaul: The tragic success of global Putinism]

The European far right traditionally fulminated against Atlanticism, decrying the United States as the fulcrum of a global liberal order from which Europeans must de-link. But the immense influence of anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries over Trump, especially evident in his second administration, has turned the tables. The world’s mightiest country is now an ally for Europe’s far right. Trump’s first term also encouraged these elements, but its direction wasn’t always stable or clear.

This time around, some of the most influential figures in Trump’s court have commitments to the anti-liberal counterrevolution: Vice President J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and Tucker Carlson, to name a few. One common theme among these men is their championing of Orbán’s Hungary. In 2022, Carlson made a documentary about the country, portraying Orbán as leading “the fight for civilization” against the liberal philanthropist George Soros. Don Jr. made a well-publicized trip to Budapest last year and spared no words in praising Orbán’s Hungary as “one of the last beacons of hope in Europe.”

[Zack Beauchamp: Make America Hungary again]

American proponents of Orbán often praise his hard-line policies on migration and refugees, but this is a red herring. Politicians across the political spectrum in Europe have taken anti-migration positions of various kinds. The admiration for Orbán comes from his unapologetic assault on the liberal values that have defined the West for generations. In a now-famous speech in Romania in 2014, Orbán espoused his anti-liberalism in detail and attacked the United States in terms that have become familiar on the American right: “The strength of American soft power is in decline, and liberal values today embody corruption, sex, and violence and, as such, discredit America and American modernization.”

Orbán’s critique is not of any one policy but of something fundamental about the soul of the West. And it reflects a view that has found fuller expression in the words of the Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, a treasured guest on Carlson’s show last year. Dugin sees a dichotomy between liberalism and its enemies that goes back to antiquity. For him, Putin’s Russia represents the “eternal Rome,” a land-based empire of conservative virtue, set against the liberal West’s “eternal Carthage,” a maritime empire of circulation and exchange. Dugin rails against the European Enlightenment, the intellectual root of modern rationalism and liberalism, and defines himself in the lineage of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

The American right has another major critic of the Enlightenment much closer to home. The billionaire Peter Thiel has been compared to Dugin by the latter’s biographer. As early as 2007, Thiel offered a sweeping critique of Western enlightened thought, inveighing against both Karl Marx and Adam Smith for giving primacy to earthly human needs. Instead, he advocated for “an older Western tradition” that wasn’t afraid to “seek glory in the name of God or country.” Thiel argued that the Enlightenment was a “very long intellectual slumber and amnesia,” from which the West should reawaken into something more like the medieval age. He criticized George W. Bush’s administration for fighting the War on Terror in the name of democratic values and suggested instead an explicitly anti-Islamic campaign in the tradition of the Crusades. Thiel evinced an affinity for the German jurist Carl Schmitt—one of the Nazi luminaries, along with Heidegger, of the anti-liberal counterrevolution.

Since 2019, Thiel has been a major supporter of the national conservative movement that has helped give an intellectual identity to Trumpism. Vice President Vance is a prominent figure in that movement. As early as 2021, Vance warned about a “civilizational crisis” in the West and claimed that “every single major cultural institution” in the U.S. had been “lost.” Earlier this month, when asked about European-American ties, he praised Europe as the “cradle of the Western civilization,” with which the United States has “religious bonds” and “cultural bonds,” before stating that Europe was “at risk of civilizational suicide.”

Vance’s answer is notable not just for what it states but for what it omits. The actually existing transatlantic relationship has long been based on a common espousal of liberal democracy, built on the legacy of defeating fascism in World War II. But for Vance, the proper foundation for Euro-Atlantic ties should instead be Christian faith.

The postwar order we have known was the product of a broad alliance that brought together socialists and liberals against fascism. This order dismantled colonial empires; it conceived of new institutions, such as the United Nations, to foster international dialogue in place of aggression, and new covenants, such as the International Bill of Human Rights, to codify both the civil rights advocated by liberals and socioeconomic rights advocated by socialists.

Unsurprisingly, the anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries of today have no sympathy for this legacy. In fact, historical revisionism about World War II is an important feature of their movement. For years, the European far right has engaged in various forms of Holocaust relativization or outright denial. Last year, Carlson hosted the Holocaust-denying podcaster Darryl Cooper and introduced him as America’s “best” historian. Not only did Cooper make denialist claims about the Holocaust—he criticized the post-1945 order as making it “effectively illegal in the West to be genuinely right-wing.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

These are not isolated ideas but a political campaign, with proponents on both sides of the Atlantic, against the post-1945 order and the broader Enlightenment tradition. Its proponents reject the full spectrum of European and American liberal thought, from left to right, and hark back to a West defined by their reading of Christianity and traditional values.

The anti-liberals are a growing force in European politics. Last year, Orbán’s Fidesz party helped establish Patriots for Europe (PfE), the third-largest grouping in the European Parliament, with which 86 of 720 MEPs identify. Its most notable member is France’s National Rally, a once-marginal party that is now the main opposition force in the EU’s second-largest economy. The bloc’s other member parties are currently parts of governments in the Netherlands and Italy. The Trump administration has given these far-right entities new momentum. Elon Musk openly supports not just Orbán’s sister parties, such as Spain’s Vox, but even Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Germany), which was deemed too extremist for PfE and instead joined the more extreme Europe of Sovereign Nations, whose member parties are even more explicitly pro-Putin, anti-NATO, and anti-American.  

Such extreme parties are still relatively marginal in European politics. Of the 27 member states of the European Union, at least 20 are currently led by mainstream liberals, centrist conservatives, or Socialists. For now, thinkers spanning a wide spectrum—the American center-right political theorist Francis Fukuyama, say, and the Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek—can still share in the view of Europe as a bastion of Enlightenment values worth preserving.

To uphold the best of this European tradition now will require more from liberals than just a defense of the old continent against the new. Much as their anti-liberal rivals have done, Western liberals will have to forge transatlantic links and demonstrate their willingness to fight for their values. Broad fronts and global alliances made the post-1945 order. To keep it will require nothing less.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“Everyone is calling it the”—Donald Trump paused while speaking to a crowd at a rally the day before his inauguration. “I don’t want to say this,” he insisted. “It’s too braggadocious, but we’ll say it anyway—the Trump effect.” He went on to describe how the stock market was booming and bitcoin prices were surging, and then boasted about a domestic-infrastructure investment from Apple, much of which had already been planned before the November election.

In spite of his claims to the contrary, Trump has no qualms about taking credit, including for achievements that were in progress or complete before he took office. The president has taken full responsibility for negotiating a hostage swap and a cease-fire deal in the Israel-Hamas war (Trump posted on social media in mid-January that “this EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November”), not mentioning that President Joe Biden had announced some of the deal terms last year. The Trump administration said that its policies had quashed migrant border crossings; immigration data are hard to parse, especially for such a short time period, but tallies show that border crossings had already been on the decline during the Biden administration. And this week, Trump credited himself with returning two astronauts who had been stranded for months at the International Space Station; last summer, NASA announced its plan to bring them home in 2025, but Trump still claimed without evidence that Biden “was embarrassed by what happened, and he said, ‘Leave them up there.’”

Trump relied on similar framing during his campaign: Ahead of a debate with Biden last year, he posted that “low INSULIN PRICING was gotten for millions of Americans by me, and the Trump Administration, not by Crooked Joe Biden,” saying of his opponent that “all he does is try to take credit for things done by others, in this case, ME!” Shared credit would have been appropriate here: Trump did sign an executive order in his first term that capped out-of-pocket costs of insulin for some Medicare patients at $35 a month, but Biden expanded this cap to all Medicare drug programs through the Inflation Reduction Act, affecting significantly more patients. Trump enjoyed taking credit for Barack Obama–era achievements during his first term too: In 2017, for example, he claimed credit for Obama’s immigration plan and bragged about a Ford-factory investment that had been in progress since a 2015 union contract.

Politicians are storytellers, and Trump is shameless about telling only the version of the story that flatters him. The stock market is thriving under the Biden administration? That’s thanks to projections that Trump will win, he claimed last year (even though economists suggested that such gains were also linked to low unemployment, flagging inflation, and solid growth). The economy is struggling after Trump takes office? Blame the “catastrophic” situation Biden left him with (even though many economists suggest that recent stock-market downturns are due to anxiety about the effects of Trump’s trade war). Talking about the egg-price crisis in January, the White House team pilloried the Biden administration for killing sick chickens, neglecting to note that this was a tack Trump also took during his first term.

Biden struggled to communicate victories during his term, particularly those related to the economy, which left a “void” for Trump to fill, Lori Cox Han, a scholar of the presidency at Chapman University, told me. And Americans’ perception that the economy was struggling under Biden, boosted by their personal experience of inflation, affected how they voted. Whenever the White House changes hands, some projects inevitably bleed from one administration into the next. Embracing continuity between terms can be a sign that a president cares more about good policy outcomes than about bucking his predecessor: If a federal initiative is good for Americans, why not continue? But Trump is doing something different—he’s attempting to erase other presidents’ role in policy achievements entirely.

Past presidents have also tried to claim credit for a victory set in motion by the previous administration—or perhaps even to hold off the victory until they can take office. The question of whether Ronald Reagan’s aides tried to delay the release of U.S. hostages in Iran so that they could come home during the early days of his administration—with the accompanying photo opportunities—has been discussed for years. Still, Han said, unspoken rules of decorum generally prevent new presidents from claiming full credit or trashing their predecessors. This, she noted, is another norm that Trump has disregarded.

Trump has long sought to portray himself as America’s sole savior. Recall his 2016 campaign refrain: “I alone can fix it.” As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum wrote at the time, in beseeching Americans to place trust in him and only him, Trump “broke with two centuries of American political tradition, in which candidates for office—and above all, for the nation’s highest office—acknowledge their fallibility and limitations, asking for the help of their fellow Americans, and of God, to accomplish what they cannot do on their own.” Trump seems set on sending the message that he doesn’t need help—and that, implausibly, he hasn’t received any along the way.

Related:

The 21st century’s greatest, ghastliest showman Trump’s sinister assault on truth (From 2019)

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Stephen Miller has a plan. The cost of the government’s attack on Columbia The DEI catch-22 There are two kinds of credit cards.

Today’s News

Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held a call to discuss cease-fire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Trump suggested that America could assume control of Ukrainian power plants to protect that infrastructure. The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged and signaled that inflation may be slightly higher than their December forecast predicted. Turkish police arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a top political rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on allegations of corruption and terrorism.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jake Rosenberg / Netflix.

What Impossibly Wealthy Women Do for Love and Fulfillment

By Sophie Gilbert

As With Love, Meghan went on, it started to hit a few of the classic pleasure points. A beautiful woman with a wardrobe of stealth-wealth beige separates and floral dresses? Check. A fixation, both nutritional and aesthetic, on how best to feed one’s family, down to fruit platters arranged like rainbows and jars of chia seeds and hemp hearts to sneak into pancakes? Check. A strange aside where she details what it meant for her to take her husband’s name? Ding ding ding: We’re in tradwife territory now. This is absurd, of course. Meghan isn’t a tradwife; if anything, she’s a girlboss, a savvy, mediagenic entrepreneur with a new podcast dedicated to businesswomen and a nascent retail brand. So why does she seem to be trying so hard to rebrand as one, offering up this wistful performance of femininity and old-fashioned domestic arts that feels staged—and pretty familiar?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Trump gets a taste of Putin’s tactics. A battle for the soul of the West Even Tom Cole is defending DOGE. The global populist right has a MAGA problem. Trump’s attempts to muzzle the press look familiar.

Culture Break

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Watch (or skip). The Electric State (streaming on Netflix) is a lesson on how to make an instantly forgettable, very expensive movie, Shirley Li writes.

Read. In his latest book, the writer Julian Barnes doubts that we can ever really overcome our fixed beliefs. He should keep an open mind, Kieran Setiya writes.

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No one can say they didn’t know.

During his first official campaign rally for the 2024 Republican nomination, held in Waco, Texas, Donald Trump vowed retribution against those he perceives as his enemies.

“I am your warrior,” he said to his supporters. “I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Sixty days into Trump’s second term, we have begun to see what that looks like.

The president fired the archivist of the United States because he was enraged at the National Archives for notifying the Justice Department of his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office following his first term. (The archivist he fired hadn’t even been working for the agency at the time, but that didn’t matter.) He also fired two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, a traditionally independent regulatory agency, in violation of Supreme Court precedent and quite likely the language of the statute that created it. (Both members plan to sue to reverse the firings.)

[Read: Gulag humor is now everywhere in D.C.]

Trump stripped security details from people he had appointed to high office in his first administration and subsequently fell out with, including General Mark Milley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the former diplomat Brian Hook, and the infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci. The National Institutes of Health, where Fauci worked for 45 years, is being gutted by the Trump administration. The environment there has become “suffocatingly toxic,” as my colleague Katherine J. Wu reported.

Trump has sued networks and newspapers for millions of dollars. His Federal Communications Commission is investigating several outlets. And he has called CNN and MSNBC “corrupt” and “illegal”—not because they have broken any laws, but simply because they have been critical of him.

Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, told the MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon in a 2023 interview that “we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you.”   

Trump has also come after the legal profession, expanding his attacks on private law firms and threatening the ability of lawyers to do their job and private citizens to obtain legal counsel. U.S. Marshals have warned federal judges of unusually high threat levels as Elon Musk and other Trump-administration allies “ramp up efforts to discredit judges,” according to a Reuters report. On his social-media site, Musk has attacked judges in more than 30 posts since the end of January, calling them “corrupt,” “radical,” and “evil,” and deriding the “TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY.”

Earlier this week, Trump targeted a federal judge, James E. Boasberg, who ordered a pause in deportations being carried out under an obscure wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Trump, who ignored that court order, called the judge a “Radical Left Lunatic” and demanded his impeachment. (Chief Justice John Roberts responded to the president’s attack with a rare public rebuke.) Trump and his supporters are clearly looking for a showdown with the judicial branch, which could precipitate a constitutional crisis.

But that’s hardly where the efforts at intimidation end. Trump’s antipathy for Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was on vivid display a few weeks ago, when the president berated Zelensky in a televised Oval Office meeting. Trump’s hostility toward the Ukrainian president, whom he referred to as a “dictator,” is explained in part by his long-standing affinity for totalitarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine three years ago. But it almost surely also has to do with Trump’s embrace of a conspiracy theory that Ukraine intervened in the 2016 presidential election in an effort to defeat him. (In fact it was Russia, not Ukraine, that interfered in the election, and on behalf of Trump.)

Last Friday, in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, the president described his adversaries as “scum,” “savages,” and “Marxists,” as well as “deranged,” “thugs,” “violent vicious lawyers,” and “a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government.”

No one has any doubt what this means: The department is under Trump’s personal control. As if to underscore the point, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who called Trump “the greatest president in the history of our country,” said she works “at the directive of Donald Trump.” The Justice Department is Trump’s weapon for revenge. And his appetite for vengeance is insatiable.

REVENGE HAS LONG BEEN a central theme for Donald Trump. In a 1992 interview with the journalist Charlie Rose, Trump was asked if he had regrets. Among them, he told Rose, “I would have wiped the floor with the guys who weren’t loyal, which I will now do. I love getting even with people.” When Rose interjected, “Slow up. You love getting even with people?” Trump replied, “Absolutely.”

It’s one thing for a real-estate developer to act like a vindictive narcissist; it’s entirely another for an American president to act that way. And in Trump’s case, he’s been untethered in his second term in ways he wasn’t in his first, when top aides were able to check some of his worst tendencies. That won’t happen this time.  

The threat this poses to American democracy is obvious. A president and an administration with a Mafia mentality can create a Mafia state. They can target innocent people, shut down dissent, intimidate critics into silence, violate democratic norms, act without any statutory authority, sweep away checks and balances, spread disinformation and conspiracy theories, ignore court orders, and even declare martial law.

[Read: Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’]

Whether all of these things will come to pass is unknowable, because Trump is just getting started. But there is no reason to believe that any internal checks will keep Trump or his administration from crossing any lines. That’s especially the case since the Supreme Court issued a ruling last year that provides a former president with immunity from criminal prosecution for all “official acts” taken while in office. Trump and MAGA world interpret this, and not without cause, as giving them carte blanche. (Recall that Trump’s legal team suggested that a president’s directive for SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent would be an action barred from prosecution, given a former executive’s broad immunity.)

BUT SOMETHING ELSE, something quite far-reaching, is going on as well. Trump is having a corrosive effect on the public’s civic and moral sensibilities.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, in a section on corruption and the vices of rulers in a democracy, warned:

In a democracy private citizens see a man of their own rank in life who rises from that obscure position in a few years to riches and power; the spectacle excites their surprise and their envy, and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday their equal is today their ruler. To attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is unpleasant, for it is tacitly to acknowledge that they are themselves less virtuous or less talented than he was. They are therefore led, and often rightly, to impute his success mainly to some of his vices; and an odious connection is thus formed between the ideas of turpitude and power, unworthiness and success, utility and dishonor.

Tocqueville’s concern was that if citizens in a democracy saw that unethical and corrupt behavior led to “riches and power,” this would not only normalize such behavior; it would validate and even valorize it. The “odious connection” between immoral behavior and worldly success would be first made by the public, which would then emulate that behavior.

That is the great civic danger posed by Donald Trump, that the habits of his heart become the habits of our hearts; that his code of conduct becomes ours. That we delight in mistreating others almost as much as he does. That vengeance becomes nearly as important to us as it is to him. That dehumanization becomes de rigueur.

Tocqueville believed, as did the American Founders, that religion would be the source of republican virtues. What they didn’t anticipate was that religion might become a source of republican vices. What happens when, in many cases, religion summons the darker, and sometimes the darkest, impulses in people? When it is Christians who are excusing immoral conduct in our leaders and spreading conspiracy theories, who are at best silent at the decimation of humanitarian programs that may well lead to millions of deaths and who at worst cheer it on, and who champion a public figure who is shattering the load-bearing walls of our democracy?

THERE IS an important psychological component to all of this as well. Trump’s vindictiveness—relentless, crude, and capricious—has reshaped the emotional wiring of many otherwise good and decent people. He tapped into their fears and activated ugly passions that in the past had been kept at bay. In the process, he created a MAGA community that provides its members with a sense of purpose and feelings of solidarity.

A clinical psychologist who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly told me that primal fear is an immediate, instinctual response to perceived danger. Trump was reelected, at least in part, because Americans were told for a very long time to feel very afraid. These Americans believe they will lose their country without Trump. For those in MAGA world, the feeling is: If you’re not for me and you’re not for Trump, you have no place here.

The culture war is, for them, a real war, or very close to it, and in real wars, rules have to be broken and enemies have to be destroyed.

“We’re not reasonable,” Bannon told my colleague David Brooks last year. “We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.”

“Many people truly believe their country is under siege,” the psychologist I reached out to told me, “and they must abandon compromise to save their country. Decency, faith, compassion, and respect are irrelevant in wartime. If one believes their livelihood and legacy is threatened, there is no time for curiosity or compassion.”

My Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch wrote to me that one thing that’s surprised him is, among Trump’s supporters, “the sheer energy that’s generated by transgression. The joy of breaking stuff and hurting people. It’s a million-volt battery.” He added: “I don’t think this ends after Trump. He has raised a half generation of ambitious men and women who have been (de)socialized by his style. The most successful businessman in the world is a troll. It’s just what smart people do.”

IN HIS FIRST BOOK written as president of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, Václav Havel—a playwright, human-rights activist, and dissident whose words shook the foundations of the Soviet empire—meditated on politics, morality, and civility. He emphasized, again and again, “the moral origins of all genuine politics.”

Some people considered him naive, a hopeless idealist, but he pushed back. “Evil will remain with us,” Havel wrote, “no one will ever eliminate human suffering, the political arena will always attract irresponsible and ambitious adventurers and charlatans. And man will not stop destroying the world. In this regard, I have no illusions.”

Havel went on: “Neither I nor anyone else will ever win this war once and for all. At the very most, we can win a battle or two—and not even that is certain. Yet I still think it makes sense to wage this war persistently. It has been waged for centuries, and it will continue to be waged—we hope—for centuries to come. This must be done on principle, because it is the right thing to do.”

[Read: A gala for right-wing revenge]

This 20th-century voice of conscience, who was arrested, tried, and convicted of subversion and spent years in jail as a political prisoner before he became president, wrote this near the end of an essay in Summer Meditations:

So anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong. I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.

Our republic and its ideals are supremely good causes. We should strive to protect them, which begins by speaking out for them, and by trying to do, in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, what Havel did during his ennobling and consequential life: to once again give depth and dimension to notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, and forgiveness. To refuse to live within the lie. And to awaken the goodwill that is slumbering within our society.