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Somewhere, Richard Nixon is raging with envy. Nixon was twice left for politically dead, after the 1960 presidential election and then the 1962 California governor’s race, but Watergate proved too much for even him to overcome. (Not that he didn’t try, as Elizabeth Drew reported in The Atlantic in 2014.)

Andrew Cuomo, inheritor of Nixon’s resting scowl face, may have found a way to do what the 37th president couldn’t: come back from an apparently career-ending scandal. Over the weekend, the Democrat launched a campaign for mayor of New York, and polling right now shows him with a wide lead, thanks to the corruption allegations plaguing the incumbent and newly minted Donald Trump ally Eric Adams.

The idea that Cuomo is the man to clean things up, however, is ridiculous. He was forced to step down as governor of New York in 2021 after revelations that his administration covered up mishandling of COVID and multiple allegations of sexual harassment. (Cuomo has denied wrongdoing but did admit to instances that were “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation.”) Cuomo’s candidacy is an indictment of New York City politics: A city so eager to tell the rest of us how great it is should be able to produce a better class of mayoral contender (a point made pithily by The Onion with this parody headline: “De Blasio: ‘Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy to Find a Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?’”).

The nascent comeback is also a sign of the weird amnesia some Americans seem to have developed about the past few years. After his resignation, Cuomo followed his brother, Chris, into the media, launching a podcast where he assailed cancel culture. The implication was that he was a victim; his reemergence as a candidate suggests that the podcast successfully spread that idea, but Cuomo is a victim of nothing except his own bad behavior.

In the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, Cuomo’s clear, consistent briefings made him a media star, and they provided a counter to then-President Trump’s erratic statements. As it turned out, though, New York wasn’t especially effective at fighting the virus, and Cuomo’s administration went to great lengths to cover up the number of deaths in nursing homes.

Then, in August 2021, the state attorney general’s office released an investigation finding that “Governor Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of both federal and state laws.” The probe found 11 credible accusers who brought allegations against Cuomo.. He denied wrongdoing, though he admitted to making at least some of the alleged statements. “I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that,” he said.

It is true, and irrelevant, that Cuomo was not ultimately charged with any crimes. The facts in either of these scandals still ought to disqualify him from holding public office, and his resurrection represents a failure of the Democratic Party.

“Parties help to make political choices legible for voters, and, even more importantly, they organize politicians in pursuit of collective policy goals,” Jacob M. Grumbach, a political scientist at UC Berkeley who studies state-level politics, wrote to me in an email. The system is working if “the goals of the group come before the ambitions of individual politicians,” Grumbach said. The Democratic Party knows there are potential candidates who would be better than Cuomo for the party as a whole, but it’s “unable to coordinate to stop Cuomo from using his political capital to enter and likely win the NYC mayoral elections,” he said.

Instead, Democrats seem to be either acquiescing or openly backing him. Representative Ritchie Torres, a young moderate who has become prominent for criticizing the party’s progressive wing, endorsed Cuomo—in an exclusive given to the conservative New York Post, no less—as someone who would battle extremists on the left and right. Torres refused to “relitigate” Cuomo’s resignation, telling the Post: “America loves a comeback, New York loves a comeback.” Okay, but doesn’t it matter who’s doing the comeback, and what they’re coming back from? Cuomo is likely benefiting from a broader societal backlash to cancel culture and “wokeness.” But if, in order to curb the far left, Democrats like Torres are willing to embrace an alleged sex pest who tried to cover up seniors’ deaths, is it worth it?

This kind of selective amnesia about the recent past is not exclusive to New York or to politics—it’s afflicting many areas of American culture. The film director Brett Ratner, who faced multiple credible accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct in 2017 (which he denied, and for which he wasn’t charged), released a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump that received a reported $40 million licensing fee from Amazon. Jon Gruden, a football coach who was forced to resign for emails that used homophobic language, among other things, has been restored to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Ring of Honor. The late Pete Rose, who in 2022 blithely dismissed the allegation of having had a sexual relationship with a 14- or 15-year-old girl by telling a reporter, “It was 55 years ago, babe,” is in line for a presidential pardon and possible reinstatement in Major League Baseball after he was barred for gambling.

But politics is where voters and institutions seem most ready to ignore the past. As my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote last week, the whimpering end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia has led many on the center and left to pretend that no scandal existed. “But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing,” Jonathan wrote.

In some Trump-related cases, his administration is trying to force the country to forget what happened. The most maddening of the Trump scandals was his alleged hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The president escaped a trial on the case by winning the election, but the basic facts were not really in dispute: He possessed boxes and boxes of documents, he had no credible claim to them, and he didn’t give them back when asked to by the government. Now the FBI has handed the materials back over to Trump. And as my colleague Quinta Jurecic recently wrote, Trump and his administration are trying (in vain) to pretend that the January 6 insurrection never happened, yanking down government webpages and issuing pardons.

At the peak of social-justice activism in America, critics complained that pulling down statues of Confederates or removing the names of tarnished figures from institutions was tantamount to erasing history. Now, as the movement wanes, a different message is emerging: Some parts of history are apparently fine to erase.

Related:

Portrait of a leader humblebragging (From 2021) January 6 still happened.

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Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post Trump’s cultural revolution The man who would remake Europe Conan O’Brien understood the assignment.

Today’s News

Donald Trump said that 25 percent tariffs will be imposed on Canada and Mexico tomorrow, and that there is “no room left” for last-minute deals. In the first full month of Trump’s presidency, the number of migrants illegally crossing America’s southern border hit a new low not seen in at least 25 years, according to preliminary government data obtained by CBS News. Israel will stop all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza until Hamas accepts the new terms for an extension of the cease-fire agreement, Israeli officials said yesterday.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: With the best intentions, the United Kingdom engineered a housing and energy shortage that broke its economy, Derek Thompson writes. The Wonder Reader: Shan Wang compiled Atlantic articles about why the egg is a miracle.

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Evening Read

lllustration by Katherine Lam

Migrants Prepare to Lose Their American Lives

By Stephanie McCrummen

At a Mexican restaurant, the owner stashed newly laminated private signs under the host stand, ready to slap on the walls of the kitchen and a back dining room where workers could hide if agents arrived without a proper warrant.

Inside a house nearby, a woman named Consuelo went to the living-room window and checked the street for unusual cars, then checked the time as her undocumented husband left for work, calculating when he was supposed to arrive at the suburban country club where he’d worked for 27 years, where he’d earned an “all-star” employee award, and which now felt like enemy territory. She lit the first prayer candle of the day.

Read the full article.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: NEON; Patrick T. Fallon / Getty; Trae Patton.

Watch. Anora (available to rent online) swept the Oscars, proving that Hollywood’s biggest night can still recognize indie movies, David Sims writes.

Examine. The trend known as “anti-fan art” hinges on irony: The creators’ best works are inspired by the pop culture they disdain, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If I invoke the musical style called Americana, who comes to mind? Jeff Tweedy? Tyler Childers? Jason Isbell? As Giovanni Russonello wrote in 2013, the genre is heavily white and male, in contrast to its influences. I’ve been listening a lot over the past week to “Cry Baby,” a song by Sunny War that features Valerie June. It’s a summit of two young Black women from Tennessee who are making music—and a reminder that there’s no American music, or Americana, without Black music. Sunny War’s Anarchist Gospel was one of my favorite records of 2023, and Armageddon in a Summer Dress, which features “Cry Baby,” is one of my favorites of 2025 so far.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event.

Then Trump explained just why he deemed such an event so unlikely. “They respect me,” he thundered. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? … It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”

Trump seems to genuinely feel that he and Vladimir Putin forged a personal bond through the shared trauma of being persecuted by the Democratic Party. Trump is known for his cold-eyed, transactional approach, and yet here he was, displaying affection and loyalty. (At another point, Trump complained that Zelensky has “tremendous hatred” toward Putin and insisted, “It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”) He was not explaining why a deal with Russia would advance America’s interests, or why honoring it would advance Russia’s. He was defending Russia’s integrity by vouching for Putin’s character.

In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown. But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied about it, giving Putin leverage over him. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, was in business with a Russian intelligence officer. Russia published hacked Democratic emails at a time when they were maximally useful to Trump’s campaign, and made another hacking attempt after he asked it on television to find missing emails from Hillary Clinton. The pattern of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, but it was extraordinarily damning.

Conservatives have invested even more heavily in denying any basis for the Trump-Russia scandal. A handful of MAGA devotees have openly endorsed Russian propaganda, but more Republicans have explained away Trump’s behavior as reflecting some motivation other than outright sympathy for Moscow: He is transactional, he is a nationalist, he admires strength and holds weakness in contempt.

And it is all true: Trump does admire dictators. He does instinctively side with bullies over victims. He does lack any values-based framework for American foreign policy. But many Republicans who acknowledged these traits nonetheless believed that Trump could be persuaded to stay in Ukraine’s corner. They were wrong. The reason they were wrong is that, in addition to his generalized amorality, Trump exhibits a particular affection for Putin and Russia.

Immediately after Zelensky left the Oval Office, Trump posted to Truth Social, “I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved.” The clear implication is that the United States will cut off its support for the Ukrainian war effort. Trump’s allies have already tried to foist the blame for that momentous decision onto Zelensky. Trump “felt disrespected” by the Ukrainian leader’s body language and argumentative manner, White House officials told Fox News. “Zelensky was in a terrible position,” National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry acknowledged on X, “but he never should have gotten sucked into making argumentative points.” And, he added, “he should have worn a suit.”

All of this ignores the much more plausible explanation of what happened today: It was a setup. Trump and Vance appear to have entered the meeting with the intention of berating Zelensky and drawing him into an argument as a pretext for the diplomatic break. Why should anyone have expected anything different? Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. In 2018, the year preceding Zelensky’s election, he defended Russia’s seizure of Crimea; he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various murders; and he has even stuck to Russian talking points on such idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.

In the past few weeks, Trump has made very little effort to conceal his pro-Russian tilt. He called Zelensky a dictator, and when asked if he would say the same about Putin, refused, insisting, “I don’t use those words lightly.” (No president in American history has used words more lightly than Trump.) He said Ukraine “may be Russian someday” and blamed Ukraine for starting the war. The U.S. even joined Russia, North Korea, and a tiny bloc of Russian allies to vote against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The less damning explanations for Trump’s pattern of pro-Russia positions have all collapsed in the face of evidence. One line of defense, hauled out by Republican hawks to explain away Trump’s consistent efforts to undermine NATO, is that Trump actually wants to prod Europe into spending more on its own defense. Like a tough football coach, he is merely berating his team to become the best version of itself.

Except when European countries declared themselves ready to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, the level Trump claimed to have wanted, he upped the demand to 5 percent. More recently, he advocated for the election of the right-wing, pro-Russian, anti-NATO AfD party in Germany. That is a strange thing to do if your goal is to push allies to stand up for themselves against Russia, but a perfectly sensible position if your goal is to undermine the anti-Russia alliance.

Republican Russia-hawks hoped they could bring Trump around by getting Ukraine to sign a deal handing over a portion of its mineral wealth to the United States. Instead, Trump announced that the mineral deal was dead. This, too, would be a strange move if his motives were purely transactional, but a very understandable one if his motives were to abandon Ukraine to Putin’s tender mercies.

Even today, Trump’s bullying commenced well before Zelensky had opened his mouth. Trump greeted his counterpart on the White House driveway with condescending mockery, pointing at him and telling onlookers, “He’s all dressed up today,” like Bill Batts in Goodfellas belittling Joe Pesci’s character. (“Hey, Tommy, all dressed up!”) Zelensky’s attire—the Ukrainian president wears military attire, not a suit, to remind the world that his country is at war—has been a fixation on the right, and conservatives have seized upon it as a pretext to blame him for Trump’s anger. Oddly, they did not seem to mind that Elon Musk showed up at the White House this week in a T-shirt and baseball cap.

Might Zelensky have gotten a different outcome by taking Trump’s abuse and stream of lies with more self-abasement? Sure, it’s possible; if you reason backwards from a bad outcome, any different strategy is almost axiomatically smarter. Zelensky had no good options at the White House. He walked into an ambush with a president who empathizes with the dictator who wants to seize Ukraine’s territory. Everyone who spent years warning about Trump’s unseemly affinity for Putin had exactly this kind of disastrous outcome in mind.

We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s.

Unleashing Elon Musk and his DOGE cadres on the federal government, menacing Canada and European allies, and embracing Vladimir Putin’s wish list for Ukraine and beyond are not unrelated. These moves are all strategic elements of a plan that is familiar to any student of the rise and fall of democracies, especially the “fall” part.

The sequence is painfully familiar to me personally, because I marched in the streets as it played out in Russia at the start of the 21st century. With ruthless consistency, and the tacit approval of Western leaders, Putin and his oligarch supporters used his fair-ishly elected power to make sure that elections in Russia would never matter again.

Of course, American institutions and traditions are far stronger than Russia’s fragile post-Soviet democracy was when Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin, who had already done his share of damage before anointing the former KGB lieutenant colonel to be his successor in 1999. But those who dismissed my warnings that yes, it can happen here at the start of Trump’s first term, in 2017, got quieter after the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and are almost silent now.

Trump’s personal affinity for dictators was apparent early on. His praise for Putin and other elected leaders turned strongmen, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, was tinged with undisguised envy. No feisty parliament to wrangle. The free press turned into a propaganda machine for the administration. The justice system unleashed against the opposition. Elections staged only for show. What’s not to like?

[Read: Behind the American right’s fascination with Viktor Orbán]

Putin and Russia always held a special place in Trump world, however. Russian intelligence and propaganda worked full-time to promote Trump once he won the Republican nomination to face Hillary Clinton in 2016. WikiLeaks, long in the service of Russian intelligence but still nurturing its old whistleblower image, fed hacked documents to a naively cooperative American media. The Mueller Report makes the degree of cooperation between various Russian assets and the Trump campaign clear—damningly so, despite years of MAGA crying “Russia hoax” because Special Counsel Robert Mueller decided not to prosecute.

Trump made Paul Manafort his campaign chair in May 2016, turning the Russia alarm bells into air-raid sirens for anyone paying attention. Manafort was a former fixer for Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich, who attempted to thwart Ukrainians’ desire to join Europe only to be deposed by the Maidan Revolution of Dignity and forced to flee to Moscow in 2014.

Manafort’s recent expertise was mostly in money and reputation laundering. Adding him to the campaign when Trump’s oddly pro-Putin rhetoric (“strong leader,” “loves his country,” “you think our country is so innocent?”) was already drawing attention seemed a little too on the nose: Why double down? From affinity, the campaign tilted into deeply suspicious fealty toward the Kremlin. Manafort’s subsequent plea of guilty for conspiracy to defraud the United States, and Trump’s later pardon, only threw more wood on the raging collusion fire.

Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, during President Barack Obama’s second term. It annexed Crimea and entered eastern Ukraine, offering up feeble pretexts about protecting Russian speakers (whom it bombed indiscriminately), Nazis in Ukraine (also, naturally, the Jews running Ukraine), NATO expansion, and so-called Ukrainian separatists. Russia launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, in the second year of Joe Biden’s presidency, attempting to take Kyiv in what the Kremlin famously planned to be a three-day special military operation. The timing led Trump and his defenders to say that he had been tough on Russia: The invasion would never have occurred on Trump’s watch.

Now that the second Trump administration is racing to tick off every point on Putin’s long wish list, the reason for this has become clear. In Trump’s second term, Putin was expecting him to abandon Ukraine, lift sanctions on Russia, create divisions within NATO, and leave Ukraine relatively defenseless before Europe could get organized to defend it. That is, exactly what is happening today.

But Trump lost to Biden in 2020, and, entering his 23rd year in power, Putin needed a new conflict to distract from the dismal conditions in Russia. Dictators always wind up needing enemies to justify why nothing has improved under their eternal rule, and once the domestic opposition is eliminated, foreign adventures are inevitable. Putin didn’t expect much resistance from Ukraine or from the West, which he had successfully corrupted, bluffed, and bullied for decades. But then an unlikely hero appeared in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and actor who, it turned out, could perform a phenomenal impression of Winston Churchill under enemy fire.

Ukraine’s brave resistance to the supposedly overwhelming might of the Russian military lasted long enough to force the United States and Europe to join its defense, albeit reluctantly and slowly. Three long years have passed. Iranian drones crash nightly into Ukrainian civilian centers; Russian artillery and missiles reduce entire cities to rubble; China supports Russia’s attempt at conquest while hungrily eyeing Taiwan. Three years of documented reports of Russian torture, rape, and the mass kidnapping of children. North Korean soldiers have arrived to fight and die in Russia’s invasion, while NATO nations stand by, letting Ukrainians die in the war NATO was created to fight. Yet somehow Ukraine holds the line while Russia’s military losses grow and its economy wobbles.

Once more unto the breach arrives Donald Trump, back in office with more help from the Kremlin—and the inept Democrats—ready to throw his old pal Putin a lifeline. At his side is someone new: the richest private citizen in the world, Elon Musk. (Putin controls far more money than Musk or Trump—do not underestimate how that affects their perceptions of him as the big boss.) With Musk arrives an overused and misunderstood word in the American vernacular: oligarch.

[Read: The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine]

Although it’s not a Russian word, post-Soviet Russia popularized its use and attempted to perfect the system it described. In the 1990s, those most capable of manipulating the newly privatized markets became the richest people in Russia. They quickly seized the levers of political power to expand their resources and fortunes, persecute their rivals, and blur the lines between public and private power until they were erased.

Putin, a nondescript technocrat, was a useful front for billionaires such as Boris Berezovsky: Putin appeared to be the hard veteran of the KGB, cleaning up corruption—while what he was really doing was bringing it inside, legitimizing it, and creating a mafia state. Oligarchs could bend the knee and profit, or resist and end up in jail or in exile, their assets ripped away.

Russian democracy had no institutional memory, no immune system to fight off these attacks. It was like a baby deer hit by a locomotive. The Russian Duma, purged of real opposition, became a Putin cheer squad under the new United Russia party. Judges and the security services fell in line or were removed in purges. Oversight was twisted into enforcement of the presidential will. Economic policy aimed to nationalize expenses and privatize profits, looting the country to line the pockets of a few dozen well-connected oligarchs. Foreign policy also moved out of public view, conducted by billionaires in resorts and on yachts. A flood of Russian money washed over European politicians and institutions. Kremlin troll farms and bots made social media into a national and then global weapon.

If all of this is starting to sound a little familiar, welcome to the Putinization of America, comrade! Trump’s deference to the Russian autocrat has become full-blown imitation. Musk’s promotion of Kremlin-friendly candidates in Germany and Romania and his attacks on Ukraine are bizarre but not random. Berezovsky, who elevated Putin to power from behind the scenes, was soon exiled and replaced with more compliant oligarchs. He also met a grisly end—found hanged at his Berkshire mansion at 67—a precedent that might give pause to anyone thinking of risking his business empire to play that gray-cardinal role for the likes of Trump and J. D. Vance.

Trump didn’t campaign on cutting cancer research and foreign aid any more than he did on threatening to annex Greenland and Canada or lifting sanctions on Putin’s dictatorship and extorting Ukraine. What these things have in common is that they provoke conflicts with allies, which then allow him to distinguish the truly loyal.

Imitation and servility aren’t the same thing. Trump and Musk could attempt to undermine American democracy and create a Russian-style power vertical without kowtowing to Putin or abandoning Ukraine. But they haven’t. And while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, affinity and envy aren’t enough to explain the abruptness and totality of the Trump administration’s adoption of every Russian position. On Monday, the anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion, the United States even joined Russia in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Ronald Reagan gave a famous speech supporting Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 in which he said, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size … A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” As a “Reagan Communist” myself back in the U.S.S.R., I sympathize with those who want to shrink and limit government power. But replacing it with a junta of unaccountable elites—the Putin model—is not an improvement.

Cutting bureaucracy isn’t usually associated with despotism and power grabs. We tend to think of wannabe dictators packing the courts and increasing the size and power of the state. But that isn’t what you do when you want to make the government impotent against private power—your private power. The Putin model was to weaken any state institution that might defy him and to build state power back up only when he had total control.

But why has Trump made Putin’s agenda his top priority? The GOP has been compliant with every Trump move so far, but a few members still take issue with Trump calling Zelensky a dictator while cozying up to Putin. So why pick fights with his narrow congressional majorities over Russia so early, with such urgency? The same could be asked of Musk’s reckless slash-and-burn tactics with DOGE, which are beginning to provoke backlash as popular programs are cut and job losses pile up, along with lawsuits.

We may never know why Trump is so perversely loyal to Putin. We don’t know exactly why Musk went all in for Trump and Russia or what his deep conflicts of interest in the U.S. and China portend. But the urgency of their actions I do understand, and it’s a dire warning.

[Read: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power any time soon, or ever. They are racing to the point where they will not be able to afford to lose control of the mechanisms they are ripping up and remaking in their image. What such people will do when they believe that mounting a coup is the lesser risk to their fortunes and power cannot be predicted.

There may be a Pulitzer Prize awaiting the person who discovers the answer to the question “Why?” But stopping Putinization—the looting by cronies, the centralization of authority, the moving of decisions into unaccountable private hands—is the vital matter of the moment. Trump admiring Putin is far less dangerous than Trump becoming him.