The year 2023 has been a grinding one for Ukraine. Battlefield wins have been fewer and less definitive than during the first 10 months of the war, and Russia has gained ground. Now the United States—Ukraine’s biggest military backer—may stop providing assistance. Without that aid, Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, recently said in Washington, Ukraine stands a “big risk” of losing the war.

From the moment Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, Kyiv has relied on external help to defend itself. Most of its military needs are funded by outside states, even though the government also spends all taxpayer money on the military. Foreign countries and institutions finance most (and according to some experts, all) of the nondefense parts of Ukraine’s government. Together, Kyiv’s partners have given the country roughly $100 billion in defense aid—about half of it donated by the United States.

[George Packer: ‘We only need some metal things’]

That Ukraine requires outside help is not surprising. With a third as many people as Russia and an economy roughly a tenth as big, Kyiv could have the most sophisticated military in the world, and it would still need external assistance to defeat the Kremlin. But relative size is not the only reason Ukraine has trouble filling its military demands. Kyiv has wrestled with two problems, on and off, for decades: defense corruption and a struggling industrial base. Since well before the Russian invasion, Ukraine has bought military goods at inflated prices and used shady middlemen in its weapons trade. Meanwhile, its domestic defense manufacturers lack the capacity to meet more than a fraction of the country’s requirements.

“Our military is not being properly equipped,” Daria Kaleniuk, a co-founder and the executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Centre, told me. “The challenge to the country was huge, and our state, particularly our Ministry of Defense, was not able to provide the army with everything it needed.”

Activists, entrepreneurs, and committed government officials across Ukraine are working to expand and clean up the country’s defense sector. They want the country to reform how it buys military supplies, and they’re building companies that can help amp up defense production. Some of Ukraine’s domestic manufacturers dream not only of helping their country defeat Russia, but also of selling weapons to Europe and the United States.

This work is an investment in the country’s future, reformers and entrepreneurs explained to me. Ukraine’s defense sector has long been fundamental to the country’s identity. Making the industry more productive and functional is not only necessary to meet Kyiv’s immediate battle needs, but central to the larger ambition to make Ukraine integral to the West. To secure sustained NATO backing, Ukraine is going to need to demonstrate a cleaner defense sector and, likely, a bigger one. More than that, many Ukrainians suspect that to be fully accepted as a Western nation, their country may have to prove that it can give to NATO states, especially after all it has taken.

During the Cold War, when it was part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was one of the world’s top defense manufacturers. The republic was home to 750 military factories, including the shipyards that made every Soviet aircraft carrier, as well as plants that produced helicopter engines, ballistic missiles, tanks, and radio-communications systems. On the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Ukraine accounted for a whopping 30 percent of the country’s defense manufacturing.

For Moscow, loading Ukraine up with military factories made sense. Ukraine was on the Soviet Union’s southeastern flank, so it was integral to the Communist bloc’s efforts to contain the West. To that end, Moscow had Ukraine hold—as well as make—large quantities of weapons. When the country gained independence, it inherited a big defense industry and a big military, including more than 6,000 tanks, 1,000 combat aircraft, 500 ships, and 170 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Almost immediately, Ukraine began shedding these assets. The United States—concerned about Ukraine’s ability to control such a large arsenal—pushed Kyiv to sign a deal to rid itself of long-range missiles and strategic bombers. Ukraine then transferred many of these weapons to Russia and demolished virtually all of the rest. (Only four bombers were spared: Two were converted into environmental-reconnaissance aircraft, and two were put in a museum.) When the country destroyed its final Tu-95 aircraft in 2001, Kyiv even held a ceremony. U.S. defense officials attended.

In retrospect, Ukrainians deeply regret the dismantlement—especially given that Russia has used these very weapons in its invasion. But at the time, the transfer wasn’t so controversial.

“Ukraine wasn’t planning to be a superpower,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, the country’s defense minister from 2019 to 2020, told me. “We certainly weren’t planning on waging any wars.”

What Ukraine needed, so it seemed, was not a large military but money, particularly for gas. And Russia forgave large chunks of Kyiv’s energy debts in exchange for the stockpiles. Ukraine made even more money by selling many of the arms it kept: Over the course of the early 2000s, Ukraine exported tanks, guns, and other types of weapons all over the globe. From 2009 to 2013, it was the world’s eighth-largest arms exporter. In 2012, it was the fourth. The country’s two biggest customers were China and Pakistan. Russia came in third.

International sales helped keep some of Ukraine’s factories alive. The country’s aircraft- and helicopter-engine manufacturer, for example, stayed afloat by selling motors to the Russian military. But Ukrainian plants specialized in making Soviet-era gear, and international demand for such products nose-dived after the Cold War ended. Kyiv allowed many of its factories to close—and the defense sector to shrivel.

“It had nothing to do with the safety of our country,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “And then it did.”

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and, via proxies, invaded Ukraine’s east. So Kyiv drastically shifted course, more than doubling its defense budget: The share of government spending on the military went up 106 percent. Private capital, largely absent from Ukraine’s defense industry, began flowing in.

Yet even as the state ramped up spending, corruption bedeviled its military. The problem went back to Soviet times, when manufacturers routinely bribed officials to purchase overpriced gear, and graft was deeply ingrained in the operation of the defense ministry. In independent Ukraine, too, military officials bought goods at inflated prices in exchange for kickbacks. According to a 2012 analysis by Leonid Polyakov, a former senior Ukrainian defense official, officers took military supplies and used them to build homes. Some officials even auctioned off defense-ministry land.

When Ukrainians drove the country’s corrupt, pro-Russian president from power in the 2014 Maidan revolution, they ushered in a new era of civil-society activism to root out graft. But these efforts did not put an immediate end to the problem. Serhiy Pashinsky, who chaired the Ukrainian Parliament’s defense committee during the back half of the 2010s, controlled a major private arms supplier. His company’s pricing and his cozy relations with state officials came under repeated investigation. In 2019, the son of a senior defense official was caught bribing military factories to purchase overpriced goods he smuggled in from Russia. Pashinsky, Oleh Gladkovsky—the senior official—and Gladkovsky’s son denied wrongdoing.

Western officials paid attention to Ukraine’s struggles. “You also have a battle, a historic battle against corruption,” then–Vice President Joe Biden declared in 2015, while speaking before the Ukrainian Parliament. “You cannot name a single democracy in the world where the cancer of corruption is prevalent.” The vice president called for a major reform effort: “Anything else will jeopardize Ukraine’s hard-won progress and drive down support for Ukraine from the international community,” Biden said. “It’s always tenuous.”

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the country’s defense spending took another leap. Military expenditures went up by a factor of seven from 2021 to 2022. The share of GDP spent on defense multiplied by 10. Kyiv does not say what percentage of that figure goes to military manufacturing, but it is doubtless significant. In a November 2023 interview with the Associated Press, Oleksandr Kamyshin—the minister in charge of defense production—said that artillery-ammunition manufacturing had gone up 20 times in the previous 10 months, and that armored-vehicle production had quintupled. The private sector produced 70 percent of the country’s military purchases in 2022.

Still, the defense industry is struggling. New firms have had trouble raising capital. Russia regularly bombs defense factories. And one complaint comes up again and again: corruption.

Viktor Lokotkov, the chief marketing officer for the drone maker Skyassist, told me that corruption bollixed his supply chain. His company imports necessary components from other countries—but when the firm’s goods hit Ukrainian borders, customs officials held them for ransom. His company is not the only one that had this problem: In early 2023, one of Ukraine’s top legislators estimated that the state lost $271 million a month on customs graft, an amount that was roughly the same before the war.

Procurement scandals, too, have repeatedly hit the defense ministry since the start of the full-scale invasion. In January 2023, for example, an investigative journalist found that the ministry was purchasing eggs at 47 cents apiece—more than twice what they cost in Ukrainian supermarkets. Oleskii Reznikov, the country’s defense minister, denied wrongdoing, saying that the higher prices were the product of “technical mistakes” and not an attempt to skim money off contracts. But the country’s deputy defense minister, who oversaw military procurement, resigned and was arrested for his purchases. Government investigators later accused him, along with another senior government official, of embezzling millions of dollars allocated for buying body armor. In August 2023, journalists discovered that the ministry was overpaying for military jackets from a Turkish company co-founded by the nephew of a legislator. Also this year, the Ukrainian Parliament reported that nearly $1 billion worth of weapons contracts had missed their delivery dates, and some of the funds used to buy them had disappeared into overseas accounts.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: People forgot how war actually works]

Anti-corruption activists believe that many more scandals lurk where these were found. Defense corruption is particularly difficult to unveil, Kaleniuk, of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, told me: “It’s hard to do watchdog activities and civil oversight over a sector which is naturally supersecret and super complicated.” And the task is further complicated, she said, by the lack of interest many government officials show in fighting graft. Kaleniuk and other activists point in particular to high-level officials in the presidential office (although not to the president himself). In October 2022, the deputy head of that office, for example, was caught driving a Chevrolet truck donated to the state’s emergency services. At the beginning of December, journalists reported that he was driving a Porsche owned by a wealthy businessman and cheaply renting a mansion from a well-connected construction magnate. Almost two months passed before the deputy stepped down.

Ukrainian activists have used these controversies to apply more pressure to their government. The journalist who uncovered the high egg prices declared that the Ministry of Defense “seems to have increased its appetite for embezzlement” and called for change. In the weeks and months after that story broke, many Ukrainians blasted Reznikov for the waste. A meme circulated, showing Reznikov’s face superimposed on an egg. Some activists, including Kaleniuk, demanded that he step down. Activists also insisted that the government take military procurement out of the hands of the defense ministry.

The pressure resulted in important changes. In September, Zelensky replaced Reznikov with an official who has a track record of eliminating graft. He also replaced the minister in charge of military manufacturing and the person managing the state-run defense company. In June, the government reorganized that company, which has a long history of scandals, in an effort to make it more transparent. The state also began investigating and arresting customs officials, and it fired the top management of its customs service. Finally, Kyiv has created specialized agencies to procure nonlethal and lethal goods for the Ministry of Defense. Together, the new agencies will bring Ukraine’s military purchasing system closer to those of NATO countries.

I spoke with Arsen Zhumadilov, the man appointed to run the nonlethal agency, in October. The job is not his first in government. From June 2019 to August 2023, he led the Ministry of Health’s procurement agency and won plaudits from activists for cleaning up what had been a famously corrupt process. He explained to me why creating a separate purchasing body helps reduce graft: “When the ministry is the one that sets the rules and the one that executes them, there is a temptation to set the rules to favor certain suppliers,” he told me. Having an independent agency in charge of making the actual purchases, Zhumadilov said, adds a check: If the ministry issues a suspiciously restrictive rule governing what can be purchased and from whom, the agency can fight back.

Zhumadilov told me that he would not be intimidated from doing that if needed. Defense corruption, he said to me, went against not just his ethics, but his personal mission. “I am from Crimea,” Zhumadilov said. “I am a Crimean Tatar. And I have a clear interest in making sure our country is strong enough to regain control of my motherland, because I want to go back home.”

Ukraine seems a long way from retaking Crimea—or the many miles of Russian-occupied territory along the way. The much-vaunted counteroffensive has stalled, and in many parts of the country, Kyiv is playing defense. Relations with the West, once unwavering, have weakened. Anti-Ukrainian politicians are gaining prominence in Europe; the new prime minister of Slovakia, for instance, vowed during his campaign not to send “another bullet” to Kyiv. In the United States, Republicans are blocking a new aid package in Congress.

Ukraine has no easy solutions for problems that stem from political dynamics abroad. But one thing it can still do to both strengthen its military and shore up Western support is to expand and clean up its defense sector. Isolationist-minded pro-Trump Republican legislators are using Ukraine's supposed weakness and reputation for corruption as arguments against providing any help at all to Ukraine: “This is a stalemate,” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said in September. “Are we just going to spend hundreds of billions indefinitely?” Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio declared that by helping Ukraine, the United States was sending “tax dollars to corrupt governments overseas.” House Speaker Mike Johnson told U.S. Defense Department officials that Ukraine “has a documented history of corruption and government waste.”

There remains a segment of the GOP’s congressional caucus that wants continued aid packages for Ukraine. If Ukraine makes more weapons—and if Washington is confident, as Johnson put it, that “the Ukrainian government is being entirely forthcoming and transparent about the use of this massive sum of taxpayer resources”—these Republicans might have a chance at winning sustained support. The same efforts would stand Ukraine in good stead with the Biden administration—and they would strengthen Ukraine’s bid for accession to the European Union, which has made clear that Kyiv needs to tackle its problem with graft if it wants to be a serious candidate.

[Anne Applebaum: The West must defeat Russia]

For Ukraine, then, ending defense corruption may be essential to defeating the Kremlin. And the payoff could be tremendous. Over the past six months, Ukrainian officials have indicated that they see a vibrant defense industry as a means not just to win the war but, after it, to juice the country’s economy and link it with the West. Ukraine is creating “the arsenal of the free world,” Zelensky boasted at a defense-industries forum in September. Kamyshin told the Associated Press that his country hoped to export its products to its friends, almost as a way of giving back.

Many of the entrepreneurs I interviewed were optimistic about one day selling their products to foreign countries. Ukrainians have developed some creative weapons technology, they told me, and NATO states have been watching the battlefield to decide what kinds of arms to purchase. One Ukrainian drone maker showed me emails indicating that a large American defense contractor had agreed to set up a partnership with his firm.

Becoming a major arms exporter to the West would be a transformative achievement for Ukraine—and would make NATO and EU membership look that much more attainable. Such exports would also carry an unmistakable symbolism: The country that, as a Soviet republic, once made weapons for Moscow would instead become the supplier of the democratic West.

But Kyiv isn’t there yet. Its anti-corruption activists and defense entrepreneurs hope that the West will be patient—and have faith. When Ukrainian corruption scandals make the international news, Kaleniuk told me, she worries that outsiders will conclude that they’re looking at “a super-corrupt country that cannot be helped. But my message is that all these cleanups and scandals are signs that we are changing. There are forces inside the country that are pushing and driving for change.”

A majority of Americans and a majority of Congress want to help Ukraine win the war against Russia, and to stop the spread of autocracy into Europe. A majority of people in the European Union and a majority of EU leaders want the same. But small minorities of lawmakers—some inspired by Russian President Vladimir Putin or his money, some bent on bargaining for other things—have managed to block or delay that aid.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the crunch has arrived. The far-right faction that now controls the Republican Party captured the House last year and has successfully blocked a new spending bill for many months.The prime minister of Hungary, himself a de facto autocrat, is also blocking an EU financial package for Ukraine. Eventually the European prime ministers and the Biden administration alike may well do deals and allocate the money. But in the meantime—and just in case they fail—there is something else that American and European governments can do.

[George Packer: ‘We only need some metal things’]

At the very beginning of the conflict, the U.S., the EU, the United Kingdom, and other democratic governments jointly froze more than $300 billion in Russian sovereign assets, mostly in Europe. This is money that Russia cannot sell or borrow against. Nor can Russia make use of any of the interest this money earns. At the time, many believed that the decision to freeze these assets would shock the Russian government into pulling back. That did not happen. After nearly two years, the countries that hold these assets—all of them—should take the next step and transfer the money to Ukraine.

Lawrence Tribe, the American constitutional scholar, has been promoting this idea for some time. In September, he and a team of lawyers published a 187-page report making the “legal, practical, and moral case” for transferring Russian assets to Ukraine. The moral argument is the easiest: Russia should pay for the damage it has done to Ukraine. The fundamental legal case, Tribe told me, rests on the many treaties that Russia broke by invading Ukraine, destroying whole cities, murdering civilians, deliberately damaging power grids and grain storage. By doing so, Russia lost any standing to complain about the violation of its sovereignty or property rights, since it denies those to Ukraine.

In truth, we in the West already crossed that bridge when we froze the assets in the first place. “If you have the authority to freeze the assets,” Tribe told me, “you have taken them away from the sovereign that claimed to be their owner. Why should they now have to lie idle while a country is decimated?” The frozen assets would solve some of Ukraine’s immediate budgetary and financial problems. More important, $300 billion is a reasonable down payment on the reparations that Russia should pay to Ukraine. Russian money should rightly compensate Ukrainians for the harm that Russia has done, and help rebuild the Ukrainian infrastructure that Russia destroyed.

[Casey Michel: Make Russia pay]

The strongest Western objections to transferring the frozen Russian money to Ukraine have been practical ones. Tribe cited an “inchoate concern that hegemony of the dollar will be threatened, and people’s willingness to park reserves in the U.S. and other Western countries will be jeopardized.” Some countries may fear that their own assets could be at risk if kept in Western financial institutions, and will instead place them in China or elsewhere. A handful of Europeans fear that redistributing the money would set a precedent, encouraging others to take their own national assets. A range of public officials, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former World Bank President Robert Zoellick as well as David Cameron, the new British foreign secretary and former prime minister, have nevertheless argued in favor of the seizure. There isn’t an alternative reserve currency to the dollar right now, or anywhere safe outside the Western-dominated financial system for investors to go. Besides, as Tribe’s report argues, “assisting Ukraine in its time of need is worth the speculative risk to the dollar.”

This part of the argument has more significance now than it did in September, when Tribe and his colleagues published their report, because the stakes for Ukraine are higher and the need to take risks is greater. The crisis in Western funding—a crisis caused, I repeat, by pro-Russian politicians and factions in our own societies, some of whom are coordinating their activity with Russia—is now acute. It is also visibly emboldening Putin, who last week gave a press conference restating his goal in Ukraine, which is the same as it was two years ago: the destruction of the Ukrainian state. The dysfunction in Washington and Brussels is bolstering Putin’s belief that he will win the war simply by waiting for the West to give up.  

Handing $300 billion of Russian assets to Ukraine will put a dent in this confidence. It will show Putin that the West is willing to take creative, even unprecedented, measures to win the war. It will also be popular, not only in Ukraine but in the U.S. and Europe. Most people will intuitively understand the fairness of making Russia pay for its own acts of vandalism. Whatever reputational damage this transfer of assets might cause for the West, it is vanishingly small in comparison to the reputational damage that the West will suffer if Russia succeeds in conquering Ukraine. The sooner we make this decision, the more quickly the impact will be felt on the ground. What are we waiting for?

“We’re not going to negotiate in the pages of The Atlantic.”

That was the response I got from a congressional staffer when I pressed for some details, any details, on what really separated Democrats from Republicans on aid to Ukraine.

For two years, the Ukrainians have fought heroically to defend their country against Russia’s invasion. The United States and other allies have funded that defense. But Russia has not given up, and past rounds of U.S. aid are nearly exhausted. For Ukraine to keep fighting, it urgently needs more aid.

The Biden administration has sent Congress a request for $61 billion in new funds for Ukraine and $14 billion to help Israel defend itself against Hamas and Hezbollah. The package also includes humanitarian assistance to people displaced by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as assistance to Indo-Pacific allies, and $14 billion for border security (for a total of $111 billion).

[George Packer: ‘We only need some metal things’]

Republicans in the House and Senate are resisting this request. The ostensible reason is that they want more radical action on the border than the Biden administration has offered. The whole aid package is now stalled, with potentially catastrophic consequences for Ukraine. Ukrainian units are literally running out of ammunition. If supplies of military equipment are interrupted, restarting them will take a while, which means that Ukraine could be left unaided over the winter unless Congress acts in time. And with both the House and the Senate scheduled to go into recess at the end of this week for their Christmas break, very little time remains in which to act.

How is any of this happening? On past evidence, a clear majority of Senate Republicans sincerely want to help Ukraine. Probably about half of House Republicans do too. In a pair of procedural test votes in September, measures to cut or block aid to Ukraine drew, respectively, 104 and 117 Republican votes of the 221 then in the caucus.

The offer that President Joe Biden is making regarding the border represents a meaningful opening bid. The fundamental reason for America’s present border crisis is that would-be immigrants are trying to game the asylum system. The system is overwhelmed by the numbers claiming asylum. Even though the great majority of those claims will ultimately be rejected, their processing takes years, sometimes decades. In the meantime, most asylum seekers will be released into the United States. This makes claiming asylum a rational bet for would-be immigrants to try their luck, and millions of people are doing just that. The $14 billion of proposed additional funding would pay for some 1,600 new staff in the asylum system. New hires can speed up the process, reducing the incentive of de facto U.S. residency pending a claim’s hearing that attracts so many to seek asylum here.

Maybe the Biden administration’s budget proposal on immigration enforcement is not high enough. Asylum abuse might be checked by rejecting asylum seekers who passed through other safe countries on their way to the United States. (Such a policy has been in force in the European Union since 2013.) But in the multilateral negotiations among the White House and Republicans in both houses of Congress, the normal process of offer and counteroffer seems to have broken down altogether. I stress the word seems because getting clarity on the state of play is very difficult—as the response I received from the congressional staffer suggests.

On December 6, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer issued the following invitation to Republicans: Write an amendment detailing everything you want, and the Democratic Senate majority will let you bring it to the floor for a clean vote. That offer was rejected by Senate Republicans. How do you get to “yes” when the other side refuses to state its terms?

In a letter to Biden dated December 5, House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that nothing less than “transformative” border policies would do. The House Republican vision is contained in a bill known as H.R. 2.

H.R. 2 is certainly transformative. It would rewrite the asylum system from top to bottom; it passed the House in May by the narrow margin of 219–213. All Democrats present plus two Republicans voted no. H.R. 2 is obviously going nowhere in the Senate. For that matter, it’s not at all clear that H.R. 2 would have commanded a majority in the House if there were any prospect of its becoming law. H.R. 2 was an easy vote to please the Fox News audience without any need to weigh potential negative consequences.

So how did this unpopular item become the absolutely indispensable precondition for a Ukraine aid deal?

As well as anyone not in the negotiating room can figure, the impasse on the Republican side is powered by four main impulses:

Playing to the gallery

A lot of House Republicans do not much care about enacting laws and solving problems. They are in Congress to strike poses and score television hits. They do not want to make deals. They want to position themselves as the one true conservative too pure for dealmaking. The only things they’re willing to say they want are the things they know to be impossible.

The politics of domination

On December 4, Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas told reporters: “There’s a misunderstanding on the part of Senator Schumer and some of our Democratic friends. This is not a traditional negotiation, where we expect to come up with a bipartisan compromise on the border. This is a price that has to be paid in order to get the supplemental.” For many Republicans, what mattered was not what they got but how they got it: We demand, you comply; we win, you lose.

A deal, no matter how juicy, is less interesting to them than a ritual of submission. If they cannot enforce that ritual, they are not interested in any deal.

Intentional failure

The border is Biden’s single greatest political vulnerability. A recent NBC poll puts the Republican advantage on immigration at 18 points and border security at 30 points. Suppose Republicans did extract a big border concession in 2023; suppose they got everything they wanted. Then suppose their policy worked, and the flow of asylum seekers really did taper off dramatically in 2024. Would not the result of that success be only to strengthen Biden’s reelection chances and hurt Donald Trump’s? Maybe the reason Democrats are having so much difficulty getting to “yes” with Republicans is that many Republicans are committed to “no,” regardless of what the offer is.

Animosity toward Ukraine

The premise of much of the reporting about the negotiation is that Republicans sincerely care about the border and are using Ukraine and Israel as leverage in order to get their way on their higher priority. But for some Republicans, at least, stopping aid to Ukraine seems a priority in itself. A few actively subscribe to the pro-Putin politics of the far right. Others—including Speaker Johnson himself—started as supporters of Ukraine but have bent their view under the influence of anti-Ukraine party spirit. (Johnson supported the initial tranche of Ukraine aid in March 2022 but had defected to the anti-Ukraine side by May of that year.) Whatever each member’s motives and story are, the result has delivered them to the point where immigration-for-Ukraine no longer looks to them like a win-win deal.

The story’s not over yet. A last-minute reprieve for Ukraine and for the national honor of the United States may come through. Majorities in both the House and the Senate want this deal to happen. Significant counteroffers for immigration control are on the table, and agreement can surely be found. But the malign forces are strong, and they will not vanish on their own.

[David Frum: Yes, the U.S. can afford to help its allies]

We’re headed to a “no” that will doom Ukraine and disgrace the U.S., while doing nothing to remedy the crisis at the border. A “yes” on both Ukraine and the border is still within reach, if only pro-Ukraine Republicans will press their colleagues to grasp it. If leadership was ever needed, it’s needed now.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

The Trump years had a radicalizing effect on the American right. But, let’s be honest, they also sent many on the left completely around the bend. Some liberals, particularly upper-middle-class white ones, cracked up because other people couldn’t see what was obvious to them: that Trump was a bad candidate and an even worse president.

At first, liberals tried established tactics such as sit-ins and legal challenges; lawyers and activists rallied to protest the administration’s Muslim travel ban, and courts successfully blocked its early versions. Soon, however, the sheer volume of outrages overwhelmed Trump’s critics, and the self-styled resistance settled into a pattern of high-drama, low-impact indignation.

Rather than focusing on how to oppose Trump’s policies, or how to expose the hollowness of his promises, the resistance simply wished Trump would disappear. Many on the left insisted that he wasn’t a legitimate president, and that he was only in the White House because of Russian interference. Social media made everything worse, as it always does; the resistance became the #Resistance. Instead of concentrating on the hard work of door-knocking and community activism, its members tweeted to the choir, drawing no distinction between Trump’s crackpot comments and his serious transgressions. They fantasized about a deus ex machina—impeachment, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the pee tape, outtakes from The Apprentice—leading to Trump’s removal from office, and became ever more frustrated as each successive news cycle failed to make the scales fall from his supporters’ eyes. The other side got wise to this trend, and coined a phrase to encapsulate it: “Orange Man Bad.”

The Trump presidency was a failure of right-wing elites; the Republican Party underestimated his appeal to disaffected voters and failed to find a candidate who could defeat him in the primary. Once he became president, the party establishment was content to grumble in private and grovel in public. But the Trump years demonstrated a failure of the left, too. Trump created an enormous reservoir of political energy, but that energy was too often misdirected. Many liberals turned inward, taking comfort in self-help and purification rituals. They might have to share a country with people who would vote for the Orange Man, but they could purge their Facebook feeds, friendship circles, and perhaps even workplaces of conservatives, contrarians, and the insufficiently progressive. Feeling under intense threat, they wanted everyone to pick a side on issues such as taking the Founding Fathers’ names off school buildings and giving puberty blockers to minors—and they insisted that ambivalence was not an option. (Nor was sitting out a debate, because “silence is violence.”) Any deviation from the progressive consensus was seen as a moral failing rather than a political difference.

The cataclysms of 2020—the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd—might have snapped the left out of its reverie. Instead, the resisters buried their heads deeper in the sand. Health experts insisted that anyone who broke social-distancing rules was selfish, before deciding that attending protests (for causes they supported, at least) was more important than observing COVID restrictions. The summer of 2020 made a best seller out of a white woman’s book about “white fragility,” but negotiations around a comprehensive police-reform bill collapsed the following year. As conservative Supreme Court justices laid the ground for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, activist organizations became fixated on purifying their language. (By 2021, the ACLU was so far gone, it rewrote a famous Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote on abortion to remove the word woman.) Demoralized and disorganized, having given up hope of changing Trump supporters’ minds, the left flexed its muscles in the few spaces in which it held power: liberal media, publishing, academia.

[From the April 2023 issue: George Packer on the moral case against equity language]

If you attempted to criticize these tendencies, the rejoinder was simple whataboutism: Why not focus on Trump? The answer, of course, was that a bad government demands a strong opposition—one that seeks converts rather than hunting heretics. Many of the most interesting Democratic politicians to emerge during this time—the CIA veteran Abigail Spanberger, in Virginia; the Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock, in Georgia; Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who promised to “fix the damn roads”—were pragmatists who flipped red territories blue. When it came to the 2020 election, Democrats ultimately nominated the moderate candidate most likely to defeat Trump.

That Joe Biden would prevail as the party’s candidate was hardly a given, however. He defeated his more progressive rivals for the Democratic nomination only after staging a comeback in the South Carolina primary. He was 44 points ahead of his closest rival, Bernie Sanders, among the state’s Black voters, according to an exit poll. That is not a coincidence. These voters recognized that they had far more to gain from a candidate like Biden, who regularly talked about working with Republicans, than from the activist wing of the party. As Biden put it in August 2020, responding to civil unrest across American cities: “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?”

Biden is older now, and a second victory is far from assured. If he loses, the challenges to American democratic norms will be enormous. The withering of Twitter may impede Trump’s ability to hijack the news cycle as effectively as last time, but he’ll only be more committed to enriching himself and seeking revenge. I hope that the left has learned its lesson, and will look outward rather than inward: The battle is not for control of Bud Light’s advertising strategy, or who gets published in The New York Times, but against gerrymandering and election interference, against women being locked up for having abortions, against transgender Americans losing access to health care, against domestic abusers being able to buy guns, against police violence going unpunished, against the empowerment of white nationalists, and against book bans.

The path back to sanity in the United States lies in persuasion—in defending freedom of speech and the rule of law, in clearly and calmly opposing Trump’s abuses of power, and in offering an attractive alternative. The left cannot afford to go bonkers at the exact moment America needs it most.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Left Can’t Afford to Go Mad.”

The next Trump presidency will be worse.

A special issue of The Atlantic, launching today, warns of the grave and extreme consequences if former President Trump were to win in 2024––building an overwhelming case, across two dozen essays by Atlantic writers, that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. With each writer focusing on their subject area of expertise, the issue argues that assuming a second term would mirror the first is a mistake: The threats to democracy will be greater, as will the danger of authoritarianism and corruption. A second Trump presidency, the opening essay states, would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of those rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse.

The Atlantic has made covering persistent threats to democracy its top editorial priority. Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg explains this focus in an editor’s note to lead the issue: “Our concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces—when convenient—certain conservative ideas. We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish. Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency.” Goldberg recounts a meeting at the White House with Jared Kushner, who said of his father-in-law: “No one can go as low as the president. You shouldn’t even try.”

In the lead essay, “The Revenge Presidency,” David Frum writes that a restored Trump would lead the United States into a landscape of unthinkable scenarios. “In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead.

“By Election Day 2024, Donald Trump will be in the thick of multiple criminal trials. It’s not impossible that he may already have been convicted in at least one of them. If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury. A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War.”

Frum’s is one of the first eight pieces from the issue publishing today, along with those by staff writers Anne Applebaum on NATO, McKay Coppins on Trump’s loyalists, Caitlin Dickerson on immigration, Barton Gellman on the Justice Department, Sophie Gilbert on misogyny, Zoë Schlanger on climate, and George Packer on journalism.

Today’s pieces are:

David Frum: “The Revenge Presidency”

Anne Applebaum: “America Will Abandon NATO”

McKay Coppins: “Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies”

Caitlin Dickerson: “The Specter of Family Separation”

Barton Gellman: “Trump Will Get Away with It”

Sophie Gilbert: “Women Will Be Targets”

Zoë Schlanger: “Climate Denial Will Flourish”

George Packer: “Is Journalism Ready?”

More essays will publish across the week from more Atlantic writers, each exposing the dangers a second Trump term poses to all aspects of American life. Megan Garber, an expert in disinformation, writes about how Trump’s falsehoods will challenge the public’s willingness to accept a shared reality. Clint Smith describes how Trump will suppress American history, including January 6, to align with a MAGA version of events. Helen Lewis writes that the American left can ill afford to be simply oppositional to Trump, that bad government demands persuasion and the seeking of converts rather than the hunting of heretics. Jennifer Senior writes about the daily psychic toll that another Trump term would entail. Adam Serwer writes that Trump will be better-positioned to fill the judiciary with judges who are not just ideologically conservative but who are dedicated right-wing zealots more committed to Trump than to the Constitution.

Coming Tuesday, December 5:

Sarah Zhang: “When Science Becomes a Slogan”

Franklin Foer: “Corruption Unbound”

Michael Schuman: “China Will Get Stronger”

Adam Serwer: “A MAGA Judiciary”

Coming Wednesday, December 6

Juliette Kayyem: “Extremists Emboldened”

Elaine Godfrey: “A Plan to Outlaw Abortion Everywhere”

Megan Garber: “The Truth Won’t Matter”

Clint Smith: “Trump Will Suppress American History”

Coming Thursday, December 7

Ronald Brownstein: “A War on Blue America”

David A. Graham: “Trump Isn’t Bluffing”

Vann R. Newkirk II: “Civil Rights Undone”

Spencer Kornhaber: “Trump Will Stoke a Gender Panic”

Coming Friday, December 8

Tom Nichols: “A Military Loyal to Trump”

Helen Lewis: “The Left Can’t Afford to Go Mad”

Jennifer Senior: “The Psychic Toll”

Mark Leibovich: “This Is Who We Are”

Please reach out with any questions or requests to interview the issue’s contributors.

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

This morning, Republican Representative George Santos became the sixth House member in American history to be expelled from Congress. Though Santos managed to hang on to the support of the majority in his party, he was ousted in a 311–114 vote. I spoke with my colleague Russell Berman, who covers politics, about why some members voted not to expel Santos, and how much of an outlier he really is.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Inflation is your fault. Ron DeSantis debates his grievances. Expelling George Santos was a mistake.

Republicans find their line

Lora Kelley: How did we get to a place where Santos is being expelled, and how did he make it to Congress in the first place?

Russell Berman: George Santos ran in what should have been a high-profile, competitive race last year in Long Island. He was in a swing district that was fiercely contested because control of the House was on the line. And yet, he basically snuck into Congress without the scrutiny that comes with being a candidate in a competitive race. It was only a few weeks after his election that The New York Times reported that he’d basically lied about his entire résumé: He’d lied about getting degrees from Baruch College and New York University. He’d lied about working on Wall Street for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. He’d even allegedly lied about having grandparents who’d fled Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, and he claimed that his mother was in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

When Santos arrived in Congress, in January, Republicans had a very thin majority. Kevin McCarthy needed Santos’s vote to become speaker, so he was unwilling to sanction him. Instead, he sent the issue to the House Ethics Committee, which spent months investigating Santos.

It turned out, his lies about his résumé were only the tip of the iceberg. According to the indictment that was filed in federal court, he used made-up loans and contributors’ credit-card information to inflate his campaign. The Ethics Committee also alleged that he’d exploited his congressional funding to benefit himself financially, spending money on things like OnlyFans and Botox. (Santos has generally denied the allegations and called the report a “smear,” but he has refused to address them specifically.) For many Republicans, the report was the last straw.

Lora: Santos has faced two previous expulsion attempts. Why did those votes fail while today’s passed?

Russell: Before Santos, the House had expelled only five members in its history. Those representatives were either members of the Confederacy during the Civil War or had been convicted of crimes in court. Santos has been accused of crimes, but he has so far not been convicted.

Politicians are sensitive to having their career upended based solely on accusations of wrongdoing. Before this ethics report came out, dozens of Democrats opposed Santos’s expulsion. They did not want to set this precedent that damning accusations were enough to expel somebody. A couple of Democrats ended up voting against expelling him today, and two voted present.

Many Republicans, similarly, said they were worried about precedent. That was the official reason for backing him, but it was, of course, wrapped up in congressional politics, as so many of these things are. The new speaker, Mike Johnson, along with basically the entire Republican leadership and the majority of Republican representatives, voted against expelling Santos. They still have a very narrow majority. Now there’s going to be a special election for Santos’s seat, and it’s certainly possible that a Democrat could replace him.

Lora: Did the fact that his alleged crimes were so brazen affect the calculus about voting him out?

Russell: Certainly, Republicans wanted to get rid of the headache and the drama. But Republicans have made plenty of drama on their own. So it’s hard to say that, by getting rid of this allegedly corrupt member, all of a sudden they’re going to have a smoothly functioning, business-oriented House of Representatives.

Santos had already announced that he’s not running for reelection, which, for some members, might have been a reason not to expel him. But for other members, the thinking was likely: If he’s not running, we might as well lance the boil now. There’s been such a circus atmosphere around him.

Lora: To what extent do you see him as representative of the Republican Party at this moment, versus a true outlier?

Russell: We’ve seen all of these performative, not very substantive members of Congress lately: Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert. Some of them seem to prioritize gaining followers on social media and getting on Fox News over passing bills. They don’t actually want to be legislators; they want to be political celebrities. In that sense, Santos was not unique.

But in the sheer breadth of his deception and lies, he was. We’ve seen corrupt members of Congress: people who have used campaign accounts for personal benefit, who have taken bribes. That’s as old as politics. But what we haven’t seen until now is someone who created their life story out of whole cloth.

Lora: What, if anything, will this change for Republicans?

Russell: I don’t think this changes much. The Republican Party was not even close to unanimous on this vote. Remember, at the same time that they’re holding Santos accountable, they are largely rallying around Donald Trump, who has been indicted in four different criminal cases, who is known to lie, and who has had all kinds of ethical lapses over the course of the past several years. I don’t think this is going to set any new precedent on the part of the Republican Party.

Related:

George Santos was finally too much for Republicans. Expelling George Santos was a mistake.

Today’s News

The Israel-Hamas war has resumed after a seven-day truce. Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, has died at the age of 93.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: ChatGPT is celebrating its first birthday, Matteo Wong writes. For the past year, our brains have been trapped in its world. The Books Briefing: Anthony Tommasini, the former chief classical-music critic for The New York Times, recommends books and music in conversation with Gal Beckerman. Weekly Planet: Something big just happened at COP, Zoë Schlanger reports. Work in Progress: Persistent employment misery is a myth, Derek Thompson writes. What if Americans are happy at work?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Stephen Voss / Redux

What Kissinger Didn’t Understand

By George Packer

Henry Kissinger spent half a century pursuing and using power, and a second half century trying to shape history’s judgment of the first. His longevity, and the frantic activity that ceased only when he stopped breathing, felt like an interminable refusal to disappear until he’d ensured that posthumous admiration would outweigh revulsion. In the end none of it mattered. The historical record—Vietnam and Cambodia, the China opening, the Soviet détente, slaughter in Bangladesh and East Timor, peace in the Middle East, the coup in Chile—was already there. Its interpretation will not be up to him.

Kissinger is a problem to be solved: the problem of a very human inhumanity.

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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