We begin this Turkey Day with Shaun Walker of The Guardian speculating about the leaked audio to Bloomberg News that U.S. special envoy Steven Witkoff gave “suggestions” coached the former Russian ambassador to the United States Yuri Ushakov on how to talk to Trump about the Ukraine-Russia “peace” negotiations.
The story covers two intercepted phone calls: one between Witkoff and top Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, and another between Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev, who has been deeply involved in negotiations with the Trump White House.
Bloomberg’s story was published without any byline or dateline, presumably because noting where the story was written or who wrote it could give clues as to the identity of the source. Bloomberg
says only that it has “reviewed and transcribed audio” of the two phone calls, without giving any hint as to the sourcing or any checks done to verify authenticity. [...]
Ukraine may have the motive to make the call public – Kyiv is extremely uneasy with Witkoff’s role in negotiations and would be keen to undermine his position, as well as publicise the shocking extent of collaboration between the Kremlin and the White House adviser. But the risk of a catastrophic bust-up with the Americans if caught would probably give Ukrainian officials pause for thought, and it would also be an impressive technical coup for Ukrainian agencies to be able to monitor a WhatsApp call that took place outside Ukrainian territory.
One senior former intelligence official said that while any number of agencies could have intercepted the call, the most likely source was someone inside the US system.
The independent Russian media outlet Meduza picks up the speculation from where The Guardian left off, naming a name.
The leak clearly disadvantages Witkoff and members of his camp, dealing a serious blow to the special envoy’s reputation. If the recordings came from within the White House, suspicion would fall on Witkoff’s adversaries in the Trump administration, namely, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is generally more hostile to the Kremlin. It’s possible that this White House faction engineered the leak to sabotage the 28-point peace plan because it was too pro-Russian.
Speaking to the newspaper Kommersant, Ushakov appeared to hint at this, as well, recalling the Michael Flynn case. Flynn is the retired American general who, in 2017, served just two weeks as Trump’s national security advisor before resigning after the U.S. Justice Department accused him of secretly discussing anti-Russian sanctions with Russia’s then-ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. The contents of those conversations were revealed by U.S. intelligence services. At that time, however, U.S. intelligence agencies were considerably less loyal to President Trump than they are today — and the United States was engulfed in scandal over suspicions that the Kremlin had interfered in the 2016 presidential election and helped Trump win.
It would be irresponsible not to speculate, no?
Peter Dreier writes for Talking Points Memo about the significance of newly elected democratic socialist mayors in New York City and Seattle.
Between now and next year’s midterm elections, the “S” word, and even the “C” word, are going to get a workout. President Trump and his allies have called New York’s socialist mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani a Communist, a Marxist, a terrorist, and even a jihadist. They’re warning that the U.S. is experiencing a wave of “socialism,” a term that they hope still carries its hoary Cold War connotations. They hope to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party, a tactic intended to discredit its candidates in swing races. [...]
Over the last decade, however, something has started to shift. Republicans have not stopped red-baiting, and they will continue to shout “socialism” as they attempt to defeat Democrats next year and in 2028. But the political climate has dramatically changed. Americans, particularly those under 50, are more open to candidates who call themselves socialists, so long as they have practical ideas for solving their problems. They are reassessing their understanding of socialism, and its place within American identity.
This is fitting: For more than a century, socialism has been integral to American progressivism, championing early many of the reforms that would eventually come into vogue on the center left. [...]
DSA members, however, represent just a tiny sliver of the Americans who offer support for socialism at the ballot box. According to a recent Gallup poll, 39% of Americans (including 66% of Democrats) have a positive attitude toward socialism. Moreover, the proportion with a favorable view of capitalism has plunged from 60% in 2021 to 54% today.
I still recall the MSM freakout over the mere possibility that a member of the Green Party possibly winning the mayoral race in San Francisco over 20 years ago.
And, of course, the 44th President of the United States was called the “S” word, the “C” word, the “N” word...the list could go on.
A number of people here at Daily Kos noticed that slowly but surely, America was becoming more and more liberal...and it continues to do so, if I am reading the numbers in Dreier’s essay correctly.
And, perhaps, the electorates in at least some big cities are beginning to reflect that reassessment of socialism.
Philip Bump of MS NOW identifies some of the Republican Party MAGA factions which may be breaking apart as evidenced by the retirement of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In March 2021, much more than four years ago in political time, the polling firm Fabrizio Lee attempted to segment the Republican Party at the outset of what one might have reasonably believed to be the post-Trump era of right-wing politics. The firm, which had worked on Trump’s first presidential campaigns (and would work on his third), split the party into five rough groups.
The largest were the “Trump boosters,” 28% of Republicans, which was a group that still viewed the then-former president positively but considered themselves more loyal to the party than to Trump. That contrasted with the “Diehard Trumpers” — 27% of Republicans — who were strongly supportive of Trump, even preferring him to the party itself. There was another group of Republicans who were just as supportive of Trump but had another differentiating characteristic: The “Infowars GOP” were the 10% of Republicans who also believed in the QAnon conspiracy theory. Then there were the skeptics. A fifth of Republicans were labeled “Post-Trump GOP,” appreciative of Trump but looking for a new face for 2024. The last 15% were “Never Trumpers,” Republicans who opposed Trump and, usually, always had.
By November 2024, the party had consolidated the votes of nearly all of those Republicans, with 95% of Republican voters supporting Trump’s candidacy. The lines that made sense in Fabrizio Lee’s 2021 analysis had blurred or vanished. The election and its aftermath also demonstrated a flaw in that analysis: It only included Republicans, and not the broader right.
Still, as a guidepost, the Fabrizio Lee analysis is informative. Similar fault lines that existed then still do today, but I’d say there are now six post-Trump coalitions to consider.
Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker says that Americans search for a “Unified Field Theory” of politics in vain.
I believe we are in the middle of a quietly revolutionary moment in this country, which began with the pandemic and the protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. (I suppose that this column is, more than anything, an attempt to chronicle that revolution.) The precipitating factors can be traced back as far as you like, but the shift became evident during the lockdowns, with the sight of millions of people taking to the streets and the displays of supposed capitulation from members of Congress kneeling at the Capitol and major corporations meekly putting out “social-justice” messages on social media—which, of course, occurred alongside red-state fights about quarantines and, later, vaccine mandates. That moment did not lead to a change in the world order, but it decimated whatever authority “the establishment” had left in this country. The subsequent unrest has taken on a variety of forms, including a continued and drastic decline in trust of the traditional news media and attacks on universities from both the left and the right. It was also channelled into Trump’s 2024 campaign, which was less about any one issue than it was about a renewed and utterly hollow promise to drain the swamp all over again.
What that insurrectionary energy sought was a single theory of the world, ideally one that did not rely on partisan leanings—or, really, on politics at all. Epstein has provided that. Lest we forget, Epstein died more than six years ago now, and although the story certainly had not been forgotten by the public, it had at least been moved to a low-heat back burner when Greene; Thomas Massie, a U.S. representative from Kentucky; and a handful of other politicians began to talk about the Epstein files again. The ham-fisted response from the Trump Administration certainly didn’t quiet things. The fact that an increasing number of Americans, spurred on by the war in Gaza and by new-media commentators across the political spectrum, were starting to question the influence that Israel had on Washington, D.C., has also played a role.
David Wallace-Wells of The New York Times says that proposals by the National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya will leave Americans ill-prepared for the next pandemic.
It’s been nearly six years now since the United States’ first reported cases of Covid-19, and the country is in a merciful lull when it comes to pandemic recriminations, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ongoing war on vaccine confidence now dominates the public health culture wars. But Bhattacharya, writing with his deputy Matthew Memoli in City Journal, returns with a bill of Covid complaints, arguing that to prepare for a future infectious disease threat, the country should toss out the longstanding “pandemic playbook” and focus instead on making the population “metabolically healthy” — what you might think of as being fit.
Forget social distancing, in other words; forget masks and forget even a next-generation equivalent of Operation Warp Speed to deliver a next-generation equivalent of miraculous Covid vaccines, which saved millions of American lives and tens of millions of lives abroad. The best way to fight off a novel infectious disease, Bhattacharya and Memoli write, is to get the country into better physical shape before the emergency arrives and bet that our fitter bodies will be capable of simply fending it off, whatever the pathogen, however quickly it might spread and however deadly it might be. [...]
This is all fine as generic health advice, of course. But 38 million Americans have diabetes. More than 100 million have heart disease. More than 100 million are obese. Massively improve those numbers and there will still be tens of millions staring down a novel pathogen in ill health. And as a program of pandemic response? Like much of MAHA, it is magical thinking that has the secondary effect of laying responsibility for public health outcomes at the feet of the individual. Imagine sitting in the National Institutes of Health, contemplating the arrival of a disease like H.I.V./AIDS, which has killed 700,000 Americans, and advising the country that, as Bhattacharya and Memoli write, “the best pandemic preparedness playbook for the United States is making America healthy again.”
Finally today, Daniela Altimari of Roll Call reports that the state House in Indiana will hold a special session to reconsider midterm redistricting plans.
The state House will reconvene on Dec. 1 to take up “all legislative business,” including redrawing the state’s congressional map, Speaker Todd Huston said in a statement Tuesday.
The state Senate will gavel in on Dec. 8. “The issue of redrawing Indiana’s congressional maps mid-cycle has received a lot of attention and is causing strife here in our state,” Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray said in a statement, adding that his chamber would “make a final decision that week on any redistricting proposal sent from the House.”
Bray had initially resisted the effort to redraw Indiana’s congressional map, declaring that there weren’t enough votes in the state Senate.
That prompted an angry reaction from Trump, who referred to Bray and state Sen. Greg Goode as RINOs, or Republicans in name only, and signaled he would support primary challengers against Republican state senators opposed to the effort. Goode was subsequently the target of a swatting incident at his home.
Everyone have the best possible Turkey Day (or whatever you may be celebrating...or not celebrating...) that you can!
And since you will not see me here until Sunday...Go Blue!
