On Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine that illuminated the administration’s approach to the world at home, as well as overseas.
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
On Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine that illuminated the administration’s approach to the world at home, as well as overseas. Authors Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson explained that the administration’s plan for peace was a Russian-led blueprint for joint U.S.-Russia economic cooperation that would funnel contracts for rebuilding Ukraine, extracting the valuable minerals in the Arctic, and even space exploration to a few favored U.S. and Russian businessmen.
Many of those business leaders have close ties to the White House.
“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Trump envoy Steve Witkoff told the journalists. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”
On ABC’s This Week this morning, Representative Don Bacon (R-NE), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said to host Jonathan Karl: “Putin’s the invader, he’s the dictator, he’s murdered all his opponents. But I just don’t see that moral clarity coming from the White House. We saw that Wall Street Journal article yesterday that many people around the president are hoping to make billions of dollars—these are all billionaires in their own right—from…Russia, if they get a favorable agreement with Ukraine. That alarms me tremendously. I want to see America being the leader of the free world, standing up for what’s right, not for who can make a buck…. I don’t want to see a foreign policy based on greed. I want to see it based on doing the right thing.”
There is far more at stake here than morality, although that is clearly on the table.
The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain. It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law.
It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America. . . .
As wealth and power flow through the executive branch, Trump is overriding the rule of law that is designed to protect the rest of us from self-dealing by unscrupulous individuals. On Wednesday he commuted the sentence of private equity executive David Gentile, convicted in August 2024 of defrauding 10,000 investors in a $1.6 billion scheme that included securities and wire fraud. According to Kenneth P. Vogel of the New York Times, prosecutors said the victims were small business owners, teachers, nurses, farmers, and veterans: “hardworking, everyday people.” “I lost my whole life savings,” one victim wrote about his losses. “I am living from check to check.”
A judge sentenced Gentile to seven years in prison. He reported to authorities on November 14, was incarcerated, and was released less than two weeks later after Trump commuted his sentence.
There is a growing sense that an elite group of wealthy people is running the world without accountability to the law, and that the Trump administration is protecting and even advancing the people in that group. That sense is key to popular anger at the administration’s refusal to release the FBI files about its investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The documents from the Epstein estate released by the House Oversight Committee on November 12 showed a chummy friendship between Epstein and political, academic, and economic leaders eager to retain access to Epstein’s money, information, and connections even after he pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution.
MAGA voters backed Trump in the belief that he would hold such people to account, but it is now clear he is protecting them instead. Indeed, as Mona Charon of The Bulwark noted today, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon, whom Charon describes as “Trump’s consigliere, strategist, propagandist, and former senior counselor at the White House,” was on such friendly terms with Epstein that it was to him Epstein turned to scrub his public image after his initial guilty plea.
The realization that Trump is bolstering and protecting an entitled elite rather than defending everyday Americans victimized by them has dovetailed with this administration’s undermining of the economy, firing of civil servants, attacks on public health, and destruction of the nation’s social safety net to create angry references to “the Epstein class” . . . .
Good friends. Smart, rational, thoughtful, compassionate. Thanks for keeping their memory alive.
