Despite recent comments by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian forces have not been encircled by Russian troops in the Kursk region or anywhere else on the frontlines.

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.

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“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:

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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.

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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.

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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.