Trump Wants Cop Violence in Your FeedPlus: How much of the damage of the Alaska summit can Zelensky and the Europeans undo?
Volodymyr Zelensky and a host of European leaders have been arriving in D.C. for a series of meetings with Donald Trump. Their mission: somehow impressing again on the president’s brain that Vladimir Putin is a flattering liar who shouldn’t be trusted. We’re waiting with bated breath to see how that goes. Happy Monday.
Blood for the Blood Godby Andrew Egger By any objective measure, Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C. has gone off like a wet firework. Hundreds of masked federal agents aimlessly rove the capital downtown—the parts with the monuments, of course, not the parts with the crime. White House officials boast of the more than 300 arrests they’ve already made in the last two weeks—a more striking number before you remember that D.C. police already make an average of 68 arrests per day. It probably says something that the most notable headline that’s come out of the deployment was the arrest of the polo-and-shorts-clad lawyer who clocked an agent with a sub sandwich. (The FBI and U.S. Marshals dispatched a squad of agents in full tactical gear to nab him at his apartment, then posted the footage on X; U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro hit him with a felony charge.) As the city settles into its unsettled new status quo, it’s worth pondering: What’s Trump’s endgame here? I’m not talking about his goals in maximizing his own power—here, as ever, his goal in that department is simply “get as much as I can.” What I’m wondering is: What is the outcome for his D.C. takeover that Trump would be able to score as a success? The whole rollout is as clownish as it is alarming. Violent crime was already falling in the city. And it’s far from clear how simply pumping in agents from an alphabet soup of federal agencies, plus the National Guard—all of whom have their own procedures and chains of command—is supposed to be a boon to order rather than chaos. It’s easy to imagine the whole thing backfiring, with Trump’s troops failing to make a significant further dent in crime while trampling residents’ civil rights, sparking an even bigger backlash. (Be sure to read Jonathan Blanks’s article over on the homepage for a smart analysis of this mess.) But that analysis assumes that a further reduction in D.C. crime is actually what Trump wants. Here’s something Trump has grasped much more quickly than the rest of us: After a decade of feeding at the slop trough of our online political discourse, a critical mass of Americans are in such an advanced state of epistemic collapse that they have essentially given up on the idea that broad facts about the public—things like crime rates that can’t be felt or seen but can only be grasped as data—are knowable at all. The graphs, the numbers, the charts simply don’t matter. These voters either won’t ever see them in the first place, or, if they do, they’ll assume prima facie that the numbers are cooked. Many of these Americans don’t even trust their own experience—at least not first and foremost. The vast majority of people who care about violent crime as an issue haven’t suffered violent crime, and they’re not poring over the statistics. How do they get their sense of what’s what out there? Like everyone else does: by scrolling their apps and soaking in the algorithm. To win those people, Trump and his retinue realize, you need to win the algorithm. It’s not merely that the old methods of political persuasion don’t work. For all intents and purposes, the old methods don’t even register. They might as well not be happening at all. If a piece of political content, whether it be reasonable argument or pure uncut horseshit propaganda, doesn’t exceed a certain threshold of emotional stimulation, it essentially doesn’t exist. Why do Republicans think America in general—and its cities in particular—have a massive raging crime problem? Because their scroll surfaces them a parade of crime content—brawls, shopliftings, gangs of teens up to no good—and a barrage of right-wing influencers confirming for them that that content adds up to an epidemic. On this model, crime quietly going down in a given city literally doesn’t matter. No matter whether crime rates are screamingly high or admirably low, there will always be some crimes happening.¹ And in our camera-phone society, somebody might be taping when it happens. Trying to beat a drip-feed of highly alarming crime videos by brandishing statistics showing such crimes are in fact becoming more rare is like bringing a pool noodle to a gun fight. Trump has a different, more algorithm-oriented strategy. Somewhere deep in the brain stem, he senses that, in our incredibly stupid age, the difference between a peaceable law-and-order society and a disaster zone of lawless anarchy is that, under law and order, citizens’ streams of shortform videos of criminal content are punctuated by equally stimulating videos of cops. As he takes over D.C., Trump isn’t acting like a politician so much as a film producer. The goal isn’t quiet on the D.C. streets. It’s making something new for the content beast: video of clashes between masked cops and D.C. residents. Picking Up the Piecesby Cathy Young In the aftermath of the Alaska summit—and of the nauseating spectacle of Vladimir Putin being given a literal red-carpet welcome by Donald Trump—it looked like the worst might have been avoided: The meeting accomplished nothing, and Trump might even be annoyed at Putin over the lack of results. (Never mind Trump’s cordial, bantering response to Putin’s “Next time in Moscow” at the end.) Alas, Trump’s subsequent interviews made it clear that he had been snookered once more by the Kremlin autocrat. (Validating his narcissistic narratives—the stolen 2020 election, the idea that the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have started if he had been in the White House—was the easiest button for Putin to push.) As Volodymyr Zelensky prepares to meet with Trump in Washington today, signs point to precisely the kind of scenario Ukraine supporters feared when Trump won the 2024 election: that he would try to bully Ukraine into a dangerous and humiliating peace while rewarding the aggressor. Putin’s offer, apparently, is for Ukraine to give up all of the Donetsk region—of which it currently controls roughly one-third—plus the Luhansk region, nearly all of it already occupied by Russia. In exchange, he will freeze the current frontlines in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, give up small patches of land Russian troops have seized in two other regions, and solemnly promise not to grab any more land. He also has demands dictating Ukraine’s self-governance: the recognition of Russian as a second official language and a lifting of the ban on the Kremlin-aligned branch of the Orthodox Church. And what does Trump think Zelensky should do? As he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity, his advice would be, “Gotta make a deal” (but of course!) because “Russia’s a very big power. And they’re not.” And so we’re back to the bad old days of “You don’t have the cards” and of putting the onus on Zelensky. According to Trump’s Sunday night postings, the Ukrainian president “can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to”—he just needs to accept that there’s no getting back Crimea and “NO GOING INTO NATO BY Ukraine.” While Zelensky may reluctantly accept the last two conditions, he absolutely cannot—as he has already signaled—accept Putin’s deal, for both military and political reasons. Surrendering the heavily fortified areas of the Donetsk region would open the way to a new Russian attack (for which Putin would readily find a supposedly non-aggressive pretext). What’s more, despite war weariness, more than 80 percent of Ukrainians still reject the transfer to Russia of additional Ukrainian territory. It’s entirely possible that the next developments are that Zelensky reiterates his rejection of the Putin deal, and then Trump punishes him for being an “obstacle to peace” by cutting off or severely curtailing aid, including intelligence-sharing and perhaps weapons shipments paid for by the Europeans. The silver lining? Trump is offering U.S. participation, along with European powers, in “security guarantees” meant to safeguard Ukraine from a new Russian invasion—a de facto equivalent of NATO’s Article 5, which obliges member states to come to the defense of an ally under attack. Supposedly, Putin agrees to this—which, if true, would in fact be a meaningful concession. But the source is Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, who has a bit of a problem with reporting garbled versions of what Putin tells him. The Kremlin has yet to confirm. The real good news is that this time, Zelensky won’t be in the White House alone: He’s being joined by the leaders of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Finland, along with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. (His “human shields,” analyst Mark Galeotti has called them.) As expatriate Russian journalist Michael Nacke put it on his YouTube stream this morning: “All of Europe is flying in to talk Trump out of caving in to the aggressor Putin.” Meanwhile, between the Alaska summit and the White House meeting, Putin seems to have stepped up his carnage against Ukrainian civilians. Maybe humanitarian-in-chief Melania Trump should join the meeting too? AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsMISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Our great patriotic ICE agents are some of the best warriors our great president has. Yesterday, ICE tweeted out a video of one of its most fearless and daring exploits yet: agents tearing down a protest banner in Washington, D.C. The operation, which apparently required no fewer than eight agents to carry out, took place in D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, where someone had hung a hand-painted sign reading “CHINGA LA MIGRA” and “MOUNT PLEASANT MELTS ICE.” “We’re taking America back, baby,” said one of the armed agents of the state, his entire head and face invisible beneath a balaclava, sunglasses, and baseball cap, as he balled up the sign and walked away. “ICE is dedicated to removing criminals from American cities, and D.C. is no exception,” the agency tweeted. NO END TO THE HATE: Laura Loomer discovered recently that there are limits to her influence on the White House, when an RFK Jr. ally she managed to get fired from the FDA last month, Dr. Vinay Prasad, was quietly reinstated, reportedly after an intervention from the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. But Loomer seems to be consoling herself by venting her spleen against a group with fewer well-placed friends: wounded children from Gaza. In recent weeks, a handful of grievously wounded Palestinian kids, many of whom have lost limbs in Israel’s relentless bombing campaign of the Gaza strip, were evacuated to the United States on visitor visas for medical treatment. It’s just a drop in the ocean of civilian suffering there: The nonprofit coordinating the effort, HEAL Palestine, says it has evacuated 63 injured children to the United States since last year. But this was apparently far too many for Loomer, who began banging a drum against the program last week. “Who from the State Department is assisting ‘Heal Palestine’?” Loomer asked. “Why are any Islamic invaders coming into the US under the Trump admin?” She went on for post after post in the usual Loomer style. Texas, she claimed, was being “flooded” with Palestinians. “I thought they were all starving and had all their belongings destroyed by a bomb? I thought they lost their homes,” she wrote. “So why do they have more luggage than the Kardashians?” These are the rants—coming from a woman who has described herself as a “proud Islamophobe”—that apparently drive U.S. foreign policy today. On Friday, Loomer said she’d spoken to Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the program. One day later, the Trump administration announced it had paused all visitor visa approvals from Gaza “while we conduct a full and thorough review.” A DOLLAR FOR YOUR THOUGHTS: Politico reports this morning on Democrats’ ongoing money troubles:
The same problems don’t extend to other Democratic fundraising groups: The party’s House and Senate fundraising groups are keeping pace with the GOP. But it’s yet another bracing reminder of the DNC’s ongoing brand woes nearly a year out from the 2024 election. Cheap Shots
1 I live in Northern Virginia, a region Kash Patel last week held up as a model of suburban tranquility compared to the war-zone hellhole of D.C. In the last week, there have been two reported assaults and three reported thefts within a couple thousand feet of my house. That’s density for you. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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