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So you’re a politico heading out on vacation and you’re looking for something “political” to read. You might not want something as on the nose as All the President’s Men. You’ve probably already read This Town. And you’re tired of the classic political autobiography or ponderous memoir.
We’ve got you covered.
We reached out to our contributors, and the broader POLITICO newsroom, to find fun-to-read books that you won’t necessarily find in the zoom backgrounds of a typical politico or filed in the bookstore under “politics” but that do help us understand the power and politics of our time. The resulting list is a love letter to novels, poems and nonfiction titles that use beautiful writing and propulsive narrative to untangle the complex issues around environmentalism, authoritarianism, artificial intelligence, health care and more. What better time to dive into these page-turners than a long July 4 weekend?
This Swedish book translated into English is many things: A non-fiction science history tale, an autobiography, a nautical mystery and an in-depth look at climate change's impacts on communities and industries. The politics of the 2020 bestseller aren't front and center, but seep through the pages as you read. Whether it's fishing regulations on eels, or Rachel Carson's fight to protect the environment, the book provides a microscope on the various aspects of the green movement over the last century and how it impacts the whole of society. The Book of Eels is a slightly heavy beach read, but one that may change your vacation plans afterward. (You probably won't be seeking eel on the menu of your favorite getaway restaurant.) — Tyler Weyant, deputy congress editor
“We Lived Happily during the War,” confesses the title of the first poem in Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, a shapeshifting collection that tells the story of an unnamed Eastern European town under the thumb of a repressive military. When soldiers gun down a deaf boy at a puppet show, townspeople respond by adopting his disability, wielding deafness as resistance by refusing to listen to unjust orders. But the violence continues — and silence carries its own burden. Published in 2019, the work takes on an added eerie resonance in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Kaminsky’s native Ukraine. But the poems’ tragedy and vision transcend any one place. “The deaf don’t believe in silence,” Kaminsky writes in an end note. “Silence is the invention of the hearing.” At barely 75 pages, this book makes for a quick though not breezy read; you can zip through it and then keep living, happily and indicted, as wars rage elsewhere. — Eli Okun, playbook reporter
Like many novels by this masterful author, stunning prose complements complex and flawed characters to tell a story of what it means to forge deep connections despite difficult circumstances. This one’s a bit different from Ishiguro’s past work for one glaring reason: Klara, the protagonist and narrator, is a humanoid robot powered by artificial intelligence, whose primary function is to serve as a companion to a child in a dystopian future. Unlike other robots in the book, Klara is particularly perceptive, curious and emotional — a stark contrast to the doomerism we’re inundated with in today’s news cycle about artificial intelligence’s place in society. Don’t be fooled, though. While Klara and the Sun is a quick beach read, you’d be wise to bring some tissues as you wonder, what lengths will we (artificial intelligence included) go to in order to save those we love? — Matt Berg, national security and breaking news reporter
This book reads like an Indiana Jones sequel as different teams of fossil hunters race across Ethiopia. The protagonist is as colorful as he is controversial. And his team's findings about who our ancestors were are even more surprising. This is a book about the ongoing quest to find us — and what human nature is at its core. But reading this page-turner, one also can't help feeling that history is whoever gets to tell their story and that every group — be it political parties or anthropologists — have their own factions and fights. — Sarah Isgur, contributor
These aren’t exactly your typical summer beach reads. Each book weighs in at a hefty several hundred pages, with dense talk of science and technology; character development is regularly an afterthought.
But this sci-fi trilogy is both a mind-boggling exploration of far-out science and aliens (the conclusion of the trilogy in the third book is one of the trippiest things you’ll read) paired with realistic depictions of how our political systems would react if ET ever visits us. The first book includes a deft look back at China’s Cultural Revolution, while the second subtly explores nuclear deterrence and how well our system of international governmental institutions would handle an existential crisis. With increasing political attention on whether (cue X-Files music) The Truth Is Out There, these books are compelling page-turners that will also prime you for how the world might respond should extraterrestrials ever arrive. — Patrick Caldwell, senior magazine editor
In this hauntingly beautiful novel, an authoritarian government rules supreme in a world where day by day, items such as birds, perfume and bells disappear — along with people’s memory of them. The government is ruthless in its methods to keep people silenced and erased items forgotten; nobody is safe from surprise interrogations or violence. Despite such brutality, everyday life chugs along under an authoritarian police state, an unspoken warning to the reader that such governments are not as unfathomable as they seem. The book is both a lesson on totalitarianism — and how it thrives off of erasure of identity — and human resilience against government-sanctioned violence. Few books have managed to warn us against an authoritarian police state as devastatingly and directly as Memory Police. — Catherine Kim, assistant magazine editor
Amis died this spring, and there’s no better way to remember him than to pick up his darkly comic 1984 novel Money. Based loosely on his own experiences writing feature scripts, Money follows John Self, a commercial director tasked with shooting his first feature film in New York. While there, he runs into a series of actors with personal conflicts, along with various other misfits and lowlifes that form the cityscape. Amis injects every interaction with otherworldly mystery and humor, and what results is a novel that’s a critique of modern excesses and the way we interact with one another. While not expressly political, the novel brilliantly captures both some of the social anxieties and excesses of the time in New York, and critics have argued that the book is in direct conversation with the cynicism, greed and amorality brought on by the Margaret Thatcher years in England (Amis’ birthplace) and the Ronald Reagan years in America. — Calder McHugh, deputy Nightly editor
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window made a big splash when it was revived on Broadway earlier this year (starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, no less), but Lorraine Hansberry’s writing is just as lively on the page as it is on the stage. Set in New York’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, the play revolves around the bohemian lives of Sidney Brustein, a nightclub purveyor moonlighting as a newspaper publisher, and Iris, his wannabe-actress wife. The couple begins the play thoroughly disillusioned by the lefty political milieu that they’re immersed in — Sidney has vowed to publish a newspaper that steers entirely clear of political subjects — but their apathy gives way when Sidney hangs a sign in his window supporting a friend who’s running for local office as a progressive reformer. Brustein throws himself head-first into the campaign, but the real political action happens in the couple’s cramped apartment, where Sidney, Iris and a rotating cast of their downtown friends negotiate the changing sexual and racial politics of the day. The play is often overshadowed by A Raisin in the Sun, but it captures the same cycle of disillusionment, optimism and despair as Hansberry's masterpiece — a cycle that feels all too familiar to contemporary audiences. — Ian Ward, contributor
This 2004 account of the so-called “Spanish flu” — which may well have emerged at or around a Kansas military recruitment barracks far from Spain — depicts how during President Woodrow Wilson’s administration, federal, state and local officials, both civilian and military, downplayed the deadly disease in order to not sow terror, disrupt public life or undermine national unity just as the U.S. was making its late entry into World War I. Accessible to readers who know nothing about epidemiology — or at least who knew nothing about epidemiology until 2020 — Barry’s takeaway is clear: The most important tool to fight a killer virus (other than a vaccine) is open, consistent and honest communication from our leaders. What better proof than the denialism in our own time, fueled by top government officials? When a novel virus showed up during an election year that might otherwise have hinged on the strong economy, misinformation pedaled by our own commander-in-chief left us with excess deaths, political schism and a widespread distrust of science and public health among millions of Americans that may haunt us for years to come. — Joanne Kenen, contributor
File under: Beach Reads for Our Audience (you know who you are, political nerds!). Yes, folks, you heard me right: This one-volume biography of our only unelected president is a page-turner. Don’t believe me? Start with the gripping chapter on America’s 1975 withdrawal from Vietnam and tell me the you-are-there scenes from Saigon to the SitRoom shouldn’t be made into a movie. — Jonathan Martin, politics bureau chief
Jane Smiley's The Last Hundred Years trilogy of novels follows an Iowa farm family as they experience the American Century, starting around 1919 as World War I drew to a close. Much like John Dos Passos' USA trilogy, John Updike's Rabbit series and Philip Roth's American trilogy, Smiley's novels brilliantly capture the tenor and tone of American society, culture and politics. These aren't political books, per se, but we experience the great events of that century through the family's eyes — the Depression years, which bore down hard on rural America; World War II; the Cold War; Vietnam, 1970s-era stagflation and economic disruption; the AIDS crisis of the 1980s; and the aftermath of 9/11. Smiley deeply researched these books, and it shows. Even as we're engrossed in the personal stories of Walter and Rosanna Langdon, their kids and their many grandkids, the novels operate as a literary documentary that helps us understand the nation's trajectory. — Joshua Zeitz, contributor
Don Lemon’s infamous comment about Nikki Haley being past her prime set off a spark in me: Muriel Spark. The best-known work of the late, great British novelist is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which seemed like a great venue to explore what exactly constitutes the prime of life. It’s an intriguing concept — the idea that we all have a “prime” and risk wasting it. Spark’s trim novella, 137 pages in large-print paperback, explicates the theme.
But this little book offers much more. Set in the 1930s, a time of ideological shape-shifting, it is the most vivid depiction of the contradictory impulses of conservatism that I’ve ever encountered. Jean Brodie, a teacher at a girls’ school in Edinburgh, is part of a generation of women whose marital prospects were destroyed by the Great War. But this is hardly a tale of thwarted ambition. Miss Brodie is most herself when injecting a posse of girls with her own tastes, prejudices and passions. A believer in the Western canon — and “goodness, truth, and beauty” — she could be an exemplar of William Bennett’s ideas about a classical education. She is also — as a middle-class woman who summers in Italy to soak up art and architecture — an admirer of Benito Mussolini, “one of the greatest men in the world.” Miss Brodie’s antagonist, the Headmistress Miss Mackay, is a stickler for rules who discredits herself by manipulating the students; she represents a kind of soul-crushing liberalism. Not so Miss Brodie. A non-conformist who respects traditions, a sexually active single woman who refuses to challenge conventions, an individualist who is blind to the threat of fascism, Jean Brodie is a monster-hero for our times. — Peter Canellos, managing editor for enterprise
Either/Or is the sequel to The Idiot, Batuman’s semi-autobiographical novel about her first year at Harvard. In Either/Or, Selin, the protagonist, continues in her quest to understand how to live an aesthetic life rather than an ethical life. A college sophomore feels that dilemma very differently than an older adult would: Selin feels it in pressure to pursue a serious relationship rather than the fun but hardly satisfying situationship she has with an extremely tall classmate in her Russian class, or in pressure to choose a major rather than taking an assortment of the weirdest classes she can.
After I read it, I couldn’t help but think about how much the ethical vs. aesthetic conundrum has seeped into politics (or if it’s always been there). People on both ends of the ideological spectrum seem increasingly concerned that modern liberalism has privileged aesthetic choices over ethical ones, with bad results for family and civic life.
But Selin remains a champion of the aesthetic life — so much so that she feels betrayed when she hears “Head Over Feet” by Alanis Morrisette, a song celebrating a “healthy,” “rational” relationship. “It was about having the maturity to want something good for you,” Selin thinks. “I felt outraged.” — Katie Fossett, senior magazine editor
Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (2003) tells the parallel stories of the creation of the 1893 World's Fair and the serial killer who set up his operation down the road. Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect who oversaw the fair, had to manage politicians among the other egos and agendas that shaped the event — from Frederick Law Olmsted, who harbored strong opinions about formal gardens, to the socialites of the "Board of Lady Managers." But overall, this book is about the symbolism we attach to public events (how could U.S. engineers outdo the Eiffel Tower?) and the way singlemindedness and a dash of B.S. can power a massive logistical undertaking. And while I'm loath to compare politicians to criminal masterminds, there's also a lesson in there about how personality, charm and the art of telling people what they want to hear can lead people into highly unproductive places. — Joanna Weiss, contributor
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Butler received a bump of posthumous attention because in this Afro-Futurist novel first published in 1993, she depicted a U.S. president who bore an uncanny resemblance to Donald Trump. But that’s not the reason to read this book. Butler took elements of American society in the early 1990s and spun them forward to … 2024. She got some things right, depicting a society both insular and aggressive toward outsiders, a natural world being ravaged by climate change, and a society at once more multiracial but still grappling with racism. That our society is not quite as broken as the one Butler foretold provides a bit of comfort, but not enough, because there are parts of this dystopian America that feel a bit too close to reality for comfort. The ending, fortunately, offers some optimism, and you will find yourself rooting for Butler’s compelling and unusual heroine on her dark and violent journey. — Maura Reynolds, deputy magazine editor
Have you found yourself wondering what would make someone who swore an oath to defend his country hoard secret documents, some of which contained military plans that could harm his country if they fell into enemy hands? I offer you this taut thriller about the man who became synonymous with “traitor,” Benedict Arnold. For those only vaguely familiar with this Revolutionary War saga of betrayal, Arnold was esteemed as the best battlefield general in Washington’s army. But as Lengyel explains so vividly, Arnold’s need for money and social standing put him at odds with more austere officials in his own government who had him court-martialed for a variety of suspect business deals. Though he was censured, Arnold remained key to Washington’s war effort, which makes Arnold’s decision to secretly contact the British in the spring of 1779 all the more amazing.
Trust me, there are few moments in American history as riveting as the four days in September 1780 in New York’s Hudson River Valley when Arnold’s plot unraveled. And when you get to page 209, you will have a pretty good sense that Arnold’s motives weren’t any grander or more principled than revenge and greed. — Bill Duryea, deputy magazine editor
Kenneth Stampp, the celebrated historian of the 19th century, died in 2009, leaving behind a library of hugely influential books about slavery, secession and the Civil War. But at a moment when a potential national unraveling occupies the American conversation in a way it never did during Stampp's 96-year lifespan, one of his lesser-known books seems especially relevant: America in 1857 chronicles a year when disunion and war likely became inevitable. First published in 1990, it's not exactly beach reading. 1857 was the year of legendary disasters like the Dred Scott decision, the hijacking of Kansas' government by a violent proslavery minority — but also of a major economic panic and the weird takeover of Nicaragua by a posse of American filibusters. Stampp weaves together the political and social history of the year, chronicling the calamitous responses by self-interested leaders from the benighted President James Buchanan on down. Most of them couldn't imagine things might actually get worse. Kind of like us. — Michael Schaffer, Capital City columnist
Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai might at first seem like an off-putting “beach read.” The book pushes you, hard, at times. In telling the tale of a child prodigy and his single mother as the former embarks on a clandestine search for his biological father, DeWitt expects you to keep up with little Ludo’s language learning, his astrophysics, his obsession with (and effortless mastery of) now-obscure English club games. Don’t expect her to hold your hand.
Which is the point. As you chew your way through the book, you realize that not only does its icy exterior just barely conceal a deeply moving story about belonging, identity and parental love, you also realize that you can do this, too. In the 2016 postscript DeWitt makes the real-world political and policy implications of this explicit, writing that “It’s not hard to imagine a world where the effect of the book on what has been a coterie of readers is multiplied to the point where general assumptions about what is possible are changed,” by way of criticizing the U.K.’s National Curriculum and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top. DeWitt wants more from you, from our schools, from our institutions: She makes you believe that, to borrow a phrase from the recent history of conservative thought, “decline is a choice.” — Derek Robertson, technology reporter
If “every poem is political,” as National Book Award finalist Danez Smith told the Guardian in 2018, the poems in their 2017 collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, bring the poetry of today to new political heights. Embodying the Black, queer experience in all its pain and glory, grief and joy, this collection — along with Smith’s more recent book, Homie — is a masterclass in the ritual power of prosody. More importantly, it’s a testament to the power of imagination not just as a mere tool of #resistance, but rather as a radical capacity to conceive of something better. And isn’t that the heart, however shrunken it is these days, that’s hidden deep in the great sputtering engine of our politics? — Dylon Jones, associate magazine editor
Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal & Nev tells the fictional tale of Opal, a 70s-era Black rocker who was Afropunk decades before that was even a thing. (Think: the late great Betty Davis.) Opal, bald and beautiful, rises to fame after pairing up with Neville, a British singer-songwriter. But when a rival band shows up wielding a Confederate flag at a concert, Opal stages a protest — which ultimately leads to tragedy. Walton, a former journalist, deftly uses the oral history format to explore race, sex, gender, history and politics that feels all too relevant in today’s crazy political climate. But don’t get it twisted: This is a rollicking read. — Teresa Wiltz, deputy magazine editor
Latino politics are front-and-center these days as both parties fight to gain voters from the rapidly growing demographic, but first we need to understand the Latino identity itself — and no book provides a better look into the community than Inventing Latino. Gómez takes the reader through the histories of immigration patterns to the United States and American imperialism. She also details how place, nation of origin and race play into forming the Latino concept — already a specifically American notion. Inventing Latino is a clear-eyed look at an important set of communities in the U.S. Any assumptions one has about Hispanic American identity may not hold up by the final chapter, and readers of any background would benefit from diving deeper into the origins and futures of Latinidad. — Marissa Martinez, state policy and politics reporter
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The last few days have been alternately strange, confusing and nerve-wracking. The world watched as tension between several of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most loyal lieutenants broke into the open, and one of them turned his guns on targets in his own country.
For now, the situation appears to have been resolved with an offer of exile to Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, who resisted having his forces integrated into the Russian army and sent them into Russia to confront the military leadership. But it remains unclear to what extent Putin and the autocratic regime he has spent the last 23 years building has been damaged by the display of defiance, either short term or long term.
So we asked some of the most astute observers of Russia and its leader to share their thoughts on what we’ve learned about Putin in the last few days, and what that might mean for Russia — and the West — going forward.
Some think this is the beginning of the end of Putin’s rule while others think he could use the episode to consolidate his power. Some see a future of bitter infighting among elites in Russia and others see an escalation of the war in Ukraine. There’s also the complicating factor that there might be much more behind this settlement between Putin and Prigozhin than we understand now.
Here’s what they had to say:
Daniel Fried is former assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, former NSC senior director for Europe and Eurasia, former ambassador to Poland, and now a Weiser Family distinguished fellow with the Atlantic Council.
We have learned in the past 48 hours that Putin's hold on power is vulnerable and that the Russian state is decrepit. That doesn't mean Putin will fall tomorrow. But, faced with a military mutiny, Putin had to negotiate. Prigozhin was able to seize the city of Rostov-on-Don and drive on Moscow because, it seems, he either had tacit support in a lot of places or that a lot of people in the Russian system didn't care enough to exert themselves to stop Prigozhin and his small force.
Putin himself brought up 1917 as an analogy. Bad idea putting himself in the place of Tsar Nicholas II but apt: Nicholas II presided over an unsuccessful war, incompetently led. So is Putin. The Russian state by 1917 was huge but hollow. The burden is now on Putin to show that Putinism means something other than chaos and a failing war, weakness clear to Russians and to Putin’s friends and foes in the wider world. That’s a challenge Putin may have trouble meeting.
Kathryn Stoner is senior fellow and the Mosbacher director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute, professor of political science at Stanford University, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Her most recent book is Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (2021).
There is much we still don’t know about the peculiar end to Prigozhin’s 36-hour mutiny against the Russian military leadership. But we must be careful not to draw the conclusion, as many analysts have already rushed to do, that this incident has dealt Putin’s regime a death blow. It has merely demonstrated something that serious Russia watchers have known all along — Putin is not infallible and all powerful; Russian politics exist, there is internal strife, and elites sometimes have deadly turf battles. We just saw some of this spill rather crudely out into the open because high politics under Putin is a game of personal loyalties rather than of institutions. Putinism is a bit of a house of cards — he played Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries off Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov presumably to spur Russian defense forces onward in their ill-managed “special military operation” in Ukraine. But Prigozhin got a little carried away, and Putin overestimated his own ability to control the monster that he had created. The short-lived mutiny was the result of his mafia-style rule of Russia.
Especially striking about this whole incident are three things. First, the ease with which Wagnerites were able to seize a major Russian city (Rostov-on-Don) and their subsequent rapid progress to within 200 km of Moscow indicates they may well have been picking up followers from regular Russian military units as they went. That would explain, second, Putin’s speech to the Russian people where he seemed to be preparing the country for civil war more than assuring his fellow citizens that this was just a mutiny by a ragtag bunch of mercenaries. He seemed genuinely frightened. This undermines the narrative of Putin the all-powerful both at home and abroad — an image he has cultivated carefully through his control of the Russian media. But it doesn’t provide evidence of a serious undermining of his authority. Third, the entire rebellion ended with Prigozhin going into exile in Belarus, a Russian vassal state, rather than to a labor camp in Siberia and his mercenaries going back to barracks. Why? We still don’t know what exactly he was promised but given that we know Putin doesn’t easily forgive and forget those whom he considers traitors (recall the poisoning of former KGB spy Sergei Skripal in the U.K. a few years ago, for example), Prigozhin likely is not sleeping well in Minsk.
This whole incident, however, is a reminder that Putin is powerful, but not infallible. The war in Ukraine is causing division among his clients and he lost control of one temporarily. The other lesson is that Putin has demonstrated that he fears internal dissent and rebellion more than he fears NATO and purported “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine. And well he should.
Nikolai Sokov is senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Nonproliferation.
I am not sure we learned much about Putin and his prospects. Prigozhin’s adventure was not a coup, perhaps not even a mutiny. Putin classified it as such, but it’s worth noting that Prigozhin did not utter a single word against Putin. The thrust of his statements and action was against “Moscow generals,” Shoigu and Gerasimov first of all, but not just them. Putin sided with the military; he had signed a decree that all military groups outside the armed forces had to be inducted. All agreed without resistance except Wagner. The military, according to unconfirmed information, planned to use force against Wagner and arrest Prigozhin, hence his response, but he clearly treated Putin as the highest arbiter.
I do not anticipate any impact on the war. I do not anticipate any weakening of Putin and regime from this event. In fact, his support among the military might increase — both from Shoigu and top brass, but perhaps more importantly from generals and officers at the frontline. (Recall that Gen. Sergei Surovikin, perhaps the most popular general at the moment, chastised Prigozhin for risking a civil war in the midst of a war with outside adversaries; his attitude is the same as Putin’s.) I even suspect that what happened on June 24 may have helped somewhat defuse tensions that had been growing within the Russian body politic.
That said, I do not rule out a big shake-up within the top brass, which has demonstrated pretty poor performance during the last year and a half — exactly what Prigozhin wanted. This could make Putin more popular in the armed forces.
Rajan Menon is director of the Grand Strategy Program at Defense Priorities.
The Prigozhin saga showed that Russia's military and security forces were caught completely unawares when the Wagner Group crossed the border from Ukraine and, without encountering any significant resistance, took control of the streets of Rostov and then headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District, home to its 58th Combined Army, pillaging weapons. Prigozhin and his armed retinue then traveled up the M4 highway toward Moscow, via Voronezh and Lipetsk provinces — an astonishing achievement. The Russian state was rattled: Two senior generals made emotional appeals to Wagner forces to lay down their arms. Key highways were closed. In some places the internet was shut down to muzzle Prigozhin. Security in Moscow was tightened feverishly. Some Russians resorted to panic buying. Putin was forced to assure his people that the rebellion, which he described as a threat to the state comparable to the 1917 Revolution that toppled the tsar (itself a testimony to how seriously he viewed the threat) would be quashed. In all, a stunning chain of events.
For the moment, this much is certain: The image of invincibility Putin has sought assiduously to project for over two decades has been tarnished. Yes, the crisis was defused; but that required cutting a deal (we don’t know the terms) with Prigozhin (with Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko playing mediator), even though Putin had publicly accused Prigozhin of treason. Plus, Putin was forced to rely on help from the fighters of one warlord (Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov) to help vanquish those of another (Prigozhin). Putin’s spinmeisters will doubtless claim that he remained calm and decisive and defused the crisis. But three things are undeniable: The government was badly shaken, completely surprised and unprepared — not a good look. A state’s fundamental duty is to maintain domestic order. The last few days have called the Russian state’s readiness and competence on that front into question. Will its lapses tempt other rebels down the line? We cannot know, but Putin has doubtless pondered that possibility.
The effect of the Wagner Group’s presumed disbandment on the war in Ukraine also remains unclear. Wagner fighters have, on balance, performed better on the battlefield than regular Russian forces. But because Russia is now dug in for the defense, their absence won’t be transformative anytime soon. Eventually, however, Russia will move to offense. We’ll then have a better sense of the military consequences of the Prigozhin rebellion.
Michael Kimmage is a professor of history and department chair at the Catholic University of America. He formerly served on the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio.
Prigozhin’s curious attempt at a coup is not a harbinger of a popular revolution in Russia. It is not a 1917 redux. The rebellion was quickly wound up. When on the march, Prigozhin demanded neither an end to the war nor an end to the regime. His requests took the form of a personal vendetta against the Ministry of Defense. Though there was a period of indecision in the Kremlin and on the ground (attributable in part to the desire of Russians not to kill Russians), at no point was Prigozhin on the verge of peeling off a meaningful group of elite co-conspirators and making them a part of his insurrection. This was a coup that began as a whimper and ended as a whimper.
What this bizarre episode signals is a new way of doing business in Russia. Vladimir Putin has drained Russia of public politics. Everything is the regime and everything — supposedly — is in harmony with the regime. The people are quiescent. But this is merely the surface of Russian politics. The reality is fierce infighting within the elite, a sprawling and often miserable war (for Russian soldiers) and an aging autocrat whose style balances improvisation with procrastination; and this autocrat has mired himself in a war that he may not lose but that he cannot win. As in ancient Rome, enterprising generals have the potential to take matters into their own hands and to declare themselves Caesar. Prigozhin’s trial run was a burlesque version of what may become a regular feature of Russian politics: calculated plans for depriving the state of its monopoly on violence (not to destroy the state) and thus to take power at the barrel of a gun, continuing the regime while changing its leadership. The tsar is old; the state is weak; the future is open.
Tatiana Stanovaya is founder/CEO at R.Politik and senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
Prigozhin's rebellion wasn't a bid for power or an attempt to overtake the Kremlin. Prigozhin's objective was to draw Putin's attention and to impose a discussion about conditions to preserve his activities — a defined role, security and funding. These weren't demands for a governmental overthrow; they were a desperate bid to save his enterprise.
Prigozhin was caught off-guard by Putin’s reaction (he vowed to put down the rebellion with force) and found himself unprepared to assume the role of a revolutionary. He also wasn’t prepared for the fact that Wagner was about to reach Moscow, where his only option remained to "take the Kremlin" — an action that would inevitably result in him and his fighters being eradicated. Lukashenko presented Prigozhin with a Putin-endorsed offer to retreat on the condition that Prigozhin would leave Russia and Wagner would be dissolved.
Putin and the state have been dealt a severe blow which will have significant repercussions for the regime. However, I want to emphasize that image has always been a secondary concern for Putin. Setting optics aside, Putin objectively resolved the Wagner and Prigozhin problem by dissolving the former and expelling the latter. The situation would have been far worse if it had culminated in a bloody mess in the outskirts of Moscow. And no, Putin doesn't need Wagner or Prigozhin. He can manage with his own forces. He's now certainly convinced of that.
Matthew Rojansky is CEO of the U.S. Russia Foundation and distinguished fellow of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute.
Prigozhin’s gambit may have failed, but it was a stress test of Putin’s public image and of the regime’s internal security order — from which both have emerged looking more vulnerable. Most troubling for Putin will be to figure out just how far the treasonous tentacles of Prigozhin and his likely higher-up allies within the regime may have spread. The relative silence of some senior regime figures when Prigozhin openly challenged Putin’s authority, and when his forces appeared likely to drive all the way to Moscow, means that purges are likely — even if they happen quietly and at a later date. That Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov’s private militia set out to dislodge Prigozhin’s mercenaries from Southern Command HQ in Rostov, meanwhile, raised serious questions about how far Moscow’s authority really extends in this vast country of 11 time zones.
Apart from scouring the ranks of his own regime for disloyal elements, and potentially alienating many others in the process, Putin will face hard choices in his ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv wisely focused on exploiting the insurgency for tactical gains, such as around Bakhmut and in the South, and on reinforcing its requests to western partners for more advanced weapons to sustain the fight in the long term. The events of the past two days, which pitted one Russian force against another, can hardly have helped the morale of Moscow’s troops in the field. Yet Putin is unlikely to respond by accepting the need to back down from a disastrous war that has now, perhaps, become existential for his dictatorship. Instead, Putin may well see doubling down as the solution to all his problems — declaring martial law and a new round of mobilization to enable stepped up repression, to distract from his weakness at home, and to try to make the war match his dark fantasy of a fight for survival for Russia itself.
Erica Frantz is an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University, where she studies authoritarian politics and the dynamics of political change.
It has always been in the cards that the situation with Prigozhin could escalate. Putin has thus far managed to stay above the fray with the infighting between Prighozin and the military elite, and one could say that in some ways he used the rivalry to his advantage: So long as different actors with arms were bickering with one another but maintaining loyalty to Putin, his rule was secure. That said, the fact that Prigozhin’s recent actions were so public — and pretty much impossible to hide from the Russian people — was undesirable (to put it mildly). Not only did they place divisions over the war effort on the public’s radar, but they raise questions about the extent to which Putin truly has the security apparatus under control.
Once the dust settles, however — and it likely will, given that others with arms did not join Prighozin’s rallying call — Putin will probably emerge even stronger in terms of immediate internal threats to his rule. When dictators survive public challenges like this, they often ratchet up repression in the period after and engage in all-out campaigns to signal their strength. But where the Prigozhin incident could be most consequential is with developments in Ukraine. The visible crack in Putin’s armor could prove to be a major motivator for Ukrainian forces and, importantly, the world powers who back them. And, should Putin lose the war, opportunities for political change in Russia may present themselves that did not exist otherwise.
Steven Pifer, an affiliate of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, is a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
Life comes at you fast. In Russia, a lot changed over the course of June 24. The day began with Prigozhin’s forces in Rostov and heading to Moscow, as their leader demanded to see the defense minister and General Staff chief. In Moscow, the FSB issued an arrest order for Prigozhin, while Putin said he would crush the mutiny and bring the traitors to justice. By nightfall, Prigozhin’s troops were returning to their camps, abandoning Rostov and their march on Moscow. Prigozhin himself was headed to Belarus, with his arrest warrant canceled and his troops offered the opportunity to join the Russian army.
The “settlement” supposedly brokered by President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus leaves Putin, who was invisible during the day except for a short morning TV broadcast, as damaged goods. It provided the impression that all was forgiven, likely because the Russian president feared the prospect of Prigozhin’s troops parading in Moscow — even if they lacked the numbers to take control of the capital. It is harder to understand Prigozhin. His demands went unmet, yet he ordered his troops back to garrison, accepted that they might join the Russian army that he detests, and meekly set off for Belarus. There clearly is more behind this “settlement” than we understand.
Evelyn Farkas is the executive director of the McCain Institute and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia.
The now-arrested military revolt by Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenary group is the biggest challenge to Vladimir Putin's authority in the 23 years he has governed Russia. Prigozhin not only challenged the way the war has been unfolding — something he’s been doing for months — but this time he questioned Putin’s justification for the war, rejecting Putin’s claim that Russia’s military operation was necessary to save Ukrainians from neo-Nazis controlled by the West. Instead, Prigozhin stated that the war objective was to enrich elites and raise the military rank of Defense Minister Shoigu (his military titles were awarded to him in his previous civil defense role running Russia’s emergencies ministry). Prigozhin avoided calling Putin out by name, and Putin returned the favor when he called Prigozhin’s revolt “treason.” This left both of them the room to engineer what looks like a compromise. But it is undeniable that Putin lost control of Prigozhin. He lost the monopoly on the use of force and though he appears to have restored his control, the episode revealed his weakness. His speech — the content of it, raising the specter of historic revolution on par with the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the anger in his voice — revealed his lack of control and worry over the situation.
There is now blood in the water. Elites around Putin, including key security leaders, will likely seek to take advantage, and Putin will almost certainly clamp down further on Russian officials and society. He will likely take retribution against anyone who helped Prigozhin. He may also fire Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov (he did fire Shoigu's predecessor for unpopularity with the military and an appearance of ineptitude). But this may well be the beginning of the end for Putin, politically, even if it takes time. The clear winners of yesterday's events are Ukraine and Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko. Belarus’ sovereignty hangs by a thread — having Prigozhin as his prisoner gives Lukashenko a bargaining chip to use against Putin.
As for Ukraine, a Russian military and defense establishment distracted by infighting, and troops further demoralized by attacks against the legitimacy of the war, may be easier to defeat. Having said that, Ukraine’s military victory is not a foregone conclusion. The United States, our allies and partners will have to continue to provide more and better equipment, including more fighter aircraft, intelligence and training to Ukraine. If we remain united and increase pressure on Putin, we can get Russia to withdraw from Ukraine and to back down. We have seen that Putin is capable of de-escalation and we cannot afford to become complacent. No Russian leader can be expected to relieve us of our responsibility to stop Putin’s brutal inhumane neo-imperial foreign policy once and for all.
Terrell Jermaine Starr (@terrelljstarr) is an independent journalist and host of Black Diplomats podcast. He is based in Kyiv.
Everyone here in Kyiv feels the dysfunction between Putin and Wagner head Prigozhin benefits Ukraine. How? That’s a tougher question to answer — especially on the battlefield. Mamuka Mamulashvili, head of the Georgian Legion, told me it will take some time before he and his men can ascertain if any weak points have been created amid the uncertainty of Wagner. So far, he’s seen no difference in Russian resistance. Keep in mind Ukraine has been conducting “shaping operations” looking for weak points in this first interaction of the counteroffensive and Wagner’s actions in Russia haven’t changed that. Had Prigozhin made it to Moscow and tried to overthrow the Kremlin, military resources could have possibly been reallocated to Moscow from the Ukrainian theater. But that didn’t happen.
If Prigozhin does go to Belarus, as the Kremlin claims, there are concerns that Wagner could attempt a march towards Kyiv from the North. But we don’t know how many troops he’ll take with him or, frankly, if he’ll be alive long enough to lead such an offensive. Not to mention that such an attempt would likely fail; Putin failed in his first attempt with his best forces to take the capital in 2022 and Ukraine repelled them. This ordeal has humiliated Putin. Keeping Prigozhin breathing will continue to weaken his standing in Russia, so the Wagner head’s days are likely numbered — no matter how instrumental he’s been in keeping Russia viable in this war.
But one thing is clear: There are major cracks in Putin’s power. How Ukraine will exploit them politically and militarily remains unclear at the moment.
Olga Oliker is Crisis Group's program director for Europe and Central Asia.
The big thing we learned about Putin was that he doesn't seem to have prepared for this contingency. After so many years of crushing dissent from the left, the actual threat came from the right, where the Kremlin had actually allowed criticism. The announcement of a speech, followed by a delay, followed by the release of a pre-recorded statement speaks volumes. The Kremlin seems to have thought that the experiment they were running with easing the state monopoly on violence was under control. This weekend proved that it wasn't.
I don't expect immediate impact on the war as a result of this. The Kremlin may choose to punish Ukraine because it's there, but it has been punishing Ukraine for 14 months. But it will be interesting to watch what this experience does to strategy, morale and command and control. This isn't so much about integrating Wagner, which will surely present challenges, as it is about how undefended Russia is and the now visible limits of state power. Furthermore, Moscow has been sending the message to both its domestic audience and the world for some months now that it can keep the war going forever, and that therefore it is set to outlast Ukraine and its Western supporters. The events of this past weekend suggest that Russia's staying power is rather more brittle than advertised.
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on Russia and Eurasia.
We’ve learned the danger of allowing a private mercenary force to be a cornerstone of Russian foreign policy. Prigozhin has shown that he is not trustworthy and that the Ministry of Defense’s move to incorporate Wagner into its purview likely resulted from this realization. Moreover, Russian elites have remained quiet about what happened, and Prigozhin has not attacked Putin. Instead, his comments were aimed at the Ministry of Defense and General Staff, people he has been feuding with for months.
It is too early to see this as the death knell for Putin’s regime. We have seen columns of Wagner troops barrel toward Moscow then turn back; Prigozhin agree to exile in Belarus; and continued Russian shelling of Ukrainian targets. So, the next few days to weeks will be critical to Putin’s longevity, and I expect to see severe political repressions against those he has marked as incompetent or untrustworthy since Prigozhin began his March for Justice.
Rose Gottemoeller is the Steven C. Házy lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Formerly, she was deputy secretary general of NATO and undersecretary of state for Arms Control and International Security.
Putin has become careless about brandishing nuclear weapons during the war in Ukraine, even setting out an apocalyptic vision by insisting that a world without Russia is not a world worth having. This extreme language of nuclear Holocaust, whether he believed it or not, was for deterrent effect. He embraced nuclear weapons to keep the United States and its NATO allies off his back and out of his way as he pursued his adventure in Ukraine.
It did not work out that way. The United States and NATO were not ready to fight inside Ukraine, but they were willing to do everything else to support Kyiv’s cause — economic, political, security and military assistance to ensure Russia’s defeat. Nuclear weapons failed Putin as a guarantee against external meddling.
We learned on June 24 that they are no help to him internally, either. He could not brandish nuclear weapons in the face of the Wagner Group uprising. It would have meant national suicide if he had done so — the potential for nuclear weapons to be used on Russian territory in the midst of a burgeoning civil conflict.
Russian nuclear attacks against Russians — a terrible notion that highlights again the limited utility of nuclear weapons as anything but a deterrent against other nuclear use. They are not the authoritarian’s silver bullet when his power is strained to the breaking point — far from it. In fact, they represent a consummate threat to national and global security if they should fall into the wrong hands in the course of domestic unrest.
For that reason, the United States has a clear interest in reminding Putin and the power actors in Russia that their nuclear weapons and fissile materials must never fall into the wrong hands, whether militia strongmen or death merchants willing to sell them to the highest terrorist bidder. We conveyed this message well at the time of the Soviet breakup in 1991-92 and ended up closely cooperating to ensure that Soviet nuclear assets did not go astray.
Although such cooperation is impossible today, we can take this message to the global community and especially, to the states possessing nuclear weapons. We must engender intensive and active cooperation to prevent nuclear theft and terrorist misuse. Perhaps we need to look again, as the United States of America, at the nuclear security summits that President Barack Obama pioneered. The concept got leaders around the world to focus on the problem, stop loose nuclear talk, and put new measures in place to protect, control and account for nuclear weapons and the fissile material that go into them. This is what we need to do with nuclear leaders again — and especially with Putin.
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On Tuesday afternoon, against the blue-sky backdrop of one of the first spring-like days in New York, Donald Trump’s eight-car motorcade arrived at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He was there to turn himself in ahead of his arraignment on criminal charges related to hush money he paid to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, during the 2016 campaign. His indictment marks the first time a former — and certainly the first time a former and possibly future — president has been charged with criminal conduct.
After almost a decade of Trump’s rewriting most of the rules in politics, his indictment could blow up another norm: The perception of the legal system’s independence from politics. Conservatives and Republicans have argued that Trump’s prosecution was politically motivated, coming from a liberal DA who campaigned on holding Trump accountable. (Even some liberal analysts have pointed to the flimsiness of the 34 felony counts Trump has been charged with.) Meanwhile, most liberals and Democrats argue that it’s a triumph of law and order over a president who has long evaded consequences for his actions.
Will this prosecution change politics as we know it?
POLITICO Magazine reached out to a group of the sharpest legal and political minds to get their take on how the charges leveled at Trump could usher in a new era of politics, with consequences that will reverberate long after Trump’s trial, long after the 2024 campaign and long after Trump is out of office — or, as the case may be, out of prison.
Sarah Isgur was Justice Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration and is the host of the legal podcast Advisory Opinions for the Dispatch. She is a POLITICO Magazine contributing writer.
In the United States, no citizen is privileged above any other. The problem for Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, therefore, is not to show that Donald Trump was indicted despite being a former president but to prove that Trump wasn't indicted because he was the former president. Trump isn’t above any law, no matter how relatively small, but he also shouldn’t be below basic notions of fairness. Even after Bragg unveiled the 34-count indictment and 13-page statement of facts, it is still not clear what the legal theory of this case is. And that is a problem.
The DA has brought a charge that is on shaky legal ground — and in all the explanations he provided this week, he has not specified the elements he intends to prove at trial and has left open questions about what evidence he has to prove basic parts of his case. Despite some wishful thinking I’ve seen from some folks online, I can tell you these are not signs of strength from a prosecutor.
This gets to the political ramifications of these charges. By bringing a case that is so open to criticism from lawyers across the political spectrum, Bragg has left himself open to criticism that he has brought charges against Trump because Trump is a politically popular target with his largely liberal constituents. During his 2021 campaign, Bragg emphasized the importance of the Trump investigation and of electing someone who could hold Trump accountable.
The predictable result is that Republicans — both voters and Trump’s potential rivals for the nomination — have responded to these perceived political attacks by circling their wagons around Trump despite the fact that his alleged conduct, paying off an adult film actress, would seem to put him at odds with most social conservatives. Meanwhile, Democrats are quietly rooting for Trump to be the Republican nominee because they believe he is the easier candidate to defeat in a general election.
And if all that sounds eerily familiar, it’s because it is. Last time, it resulted in Trump being elected as the 45th president of the United States.
Ankush Khardori, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, is a POLITICO Magazine contributing writer.
I think the situation surrounding the prosecution is too unstable and unprecedented to venture any firm predictions for how it might affect politics in the short term, including the 2024 election. Trump and his supporters have been touting the fact that many of his supporters are rallying around him, but that gives us only a partial and potentially very misleading picture of the political impact across the entire U.S. voter base. It is useful to recall that during his presidency, Trump would tout the fact that he had high favorability numbers among self-identified Republicans even though national polling consistently showed that he was well underwater with voters across the country, and of course, he went on to easily lose to Joe Biden in 2020.
I do not have a crystal ball, but I find it hard to believe that in the aggregate it could help a national presidential candidate in this country to be under indictment. Indeed, at the moment, Democratic voters — at least judging by my inbox! — appear just as energized by the indictment and just as uninterested in questions about the strength or propriety — or even the underlying facts — of the case against Trump. Many of them believe (not unreasonably) that the man is a uniquely dangerous political figure, and after years of many liberal legal pundits telling the public that Trump could easily be put in prison if only some prosecutor had the courage to do it (which has always been far too simple-minded), they seem to believe that the prosecution is justified in large part because it could help prevent Trump from retaking office. They may ultimately be right about that.
Over the long term — and here I am talking about years, if not decades — I expect local Republican prosecutors may explore whether they, too, can criminally pursue national political leaders from the opposing party, even if the case appears literally unprecedented. Needless to say, we do not know whether Trump will be charged by the Justice Department in the ongoing investigation into January 6 and the classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago, but if that happens, that could dissipate the short- and long-term political effects of the Manhattan DA’s case.
It could also re-focus the country’s attention on where I think it should have been immediately after Biden came into office — ensuring that our presidents are subject to swift and robust legal accountability from our only nationally representative prosecutorial body. Such an outcome in that case, I believe, is more likely to secure broad-based public and political support, more likely to demonstrate strong and compelling legal cases and more likely to obtain significant sanctions upon a conviction, like imprisonment.
Mark Bauerlein is an English professor emeritus at Emory University and a senior editor at First Things.
Anyone who spends a single second treating this case as a legal action is either wasting his breath or participating in the program. At the upper levels, our juridical condition changed forever on November 9, 2016, when the unexpected, the impossible, the unthinkable happened, and the “power elite” haven’t recovered. The very fact of Trump’s victory proved that the system itself needed a correction.
It was necessary to manufacture the undoing of Trump, the withdrawal of legitimacy, the reversal of history by other means. And so we got allegations of collusion with Russia, Stormy Daniels, “RESIST!,” impeachments, lawfare of various types, the Jan. 6 show trial, the Mar-a-Lago raid … and now the indictment. They’re all of a piece. Who cares how much these actions have distorted and vulgarized the public square? If they demoralize Trump supporters, the Great Unwashed, so much the better. Anything to discredit and topple their leader, no matter how flimsy and perverse the aggression.
A day or two after Trump won, I stepped inside the Union Square subway station in New York and discovered a long wall covered with post-it notes, thousands of them, all from Trump opponents, each bearing an expression of pain, dismay, fear or rage. This is not a sane reaction, I thought. None of the authors would worry if a newspaper broadcast an allegation against Trump using only one anonymous source, or if a prosecutor bent the law to absurd lengths to get an indictment. Rule of law, equal treatment, due process, democratic process, a Fourth Estate suspicious of the power elite … such norms don’t apply to a malignant agent. As a result, Trump opponents have become so illiberal, tribal and fixated that they’re ready to accept gross violations of civic tradition in order to take him down.
Those who support Trump must acknowledge this new illiberal reality. The elite’s destruction of civic customs is complete. In the coming months, we shall see pro-Trump forces using the same corrosive tactics — or lose utterly.
Julia Azari is a professor of political science at Marquette University.
Trump’s indictment might have a somewhat counterintuitive effect on the 2024 nomination race: His legal troubles might encourage other Republicans to get into the race, as we saw with long-shot candidate Asa Hutchinson last week. So far, we haven’t seen a stampede of new candidates. But if that does happen in response to any perceived vulnerability on Trump’s part, having a larger field of candidates could help him win the nomination by splitting up the non-Trump vote.
The connection between politics and presidential accountability is an even more interesting one, in my opinion. We don’t have a monarchy in this country, and presidents are supposed to have the same status as everyone else. But the presidency has long had an air of ceremony and statesmanship, signifying the power it holds. This makes the politics of holding the president accountable especially painful, for their political supporters and the country as a whole. Part of the logic of President Gerald Ford’s pardon of President Richard Nixon after Watergate was to end our “national nightmare.” But in 2023, things have changed. Politics often feels like a nightmare anyway, so there’s no sense in trying to dodge the conflict inevitable in a post-presidential investigation. Polarization has helped to erode some of the mystique of the office, and that might be a good thing in the end.
It’s impossible to separate law from politics entirely when charging a former president. It’s going to be messy, but possibly the start of a new era in which no one is above the law — not even those once charged with executing it.
Kimberly Wehle is a visiting professor at the American University Washington College of Law.
As I wrote for POLITICO Magazine precisely a year ago, the cost of not indicting Trump would be a presidency without guardrails. Today, the stakes of this prosecution are arguably even higher, as he’s now a candidate for the 2024 presidential race and favored for the Republican nomination. Numerous polls have him at a double-digit lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
A criminally convicted Trump would look unappealing to many swing voters, potentially knocking him out of serious contention for the White House. It thus may be the only way to avert either another contested presidential election with widespread violence or, worse, a slide into authoritarianism.
Trump deserves credit for one thing, at the very least: He says what he is going to do, and he does it. If he is the GOP nominee, there are two possible outcomes. Both are deeply disturbing.
Trump could lose the election again. If that happens, he won’t go quietly. Nor will his supporters, who could revert to violence. A survey conducted for CNN last month showed that 63 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents still believe that President Joe Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency. A study by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund found that, over the 18-month period from January 2020 through June 2021, there were 560 events where demonstrators brandished firearms, with violence erupting 16 percent of the time. The authors find that armed demonstrations are nearly six times as likely to turn violent than unarmed ones, and that the majority of armed demonstrations are driven by far-right mobilization and reactions to liberal and progressive activity.
The second option is that Trump wins the election, either legitimately or with the aid of Republican state legislatures’ caving to pressure to cancel popular votes for the Democratic candidate. GOP members of Congress could also refuse to gavel in a Democratic winner in January 2025, and successfully halt the vote count. Assuming he manages to take office, a second Trump presidency is a terrifying prospect. Just this week, Trump argued for defunding the Justice Department and the FBI, and he has previously planned to empty the national security and intelligence apparatuses and the State Department and replace staff with loyalists — a plan reported back in July. In 2019, Trump tweeted that his supporters could “demand” that he not leave office after two terms.
If any of that happens, America will no longer be a democracy. One way to prevent these outcomes is a criminal conviction for Trump, which will make it much harder for voters to support him and for GOP allies in Congress to continue their unabashed support. For now, we best not avert our gaze from the possible dangers ahead.
John Culhane is distinguished professor of law at Delaware Law School, where he teaches courses in constitutional and family law.
I’m not the best at political prognosticating. For instance, I never expected that Trump would survive a full term in office. And on the merits, he shouldn’t have. (Remember the first impeachment?) What I didn’t expect was the GOP’s craven complicity in his serial misdeeds. With few exceptions, they have slowly allowed themselves to be boiled alive in the toxic stew that Trump created — and kept refilling.
Will this historic first indictment of a U.S. president snap them out of it? I doubt it. Before even seeing the indictment, a large swath of the GOP and conservative media were condemning New York City’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for what they claim is a politically motivated prosecution. The criticism has hardly abated since the arraignment, either. Part of the problem is the complex, connect-the-dots nature of the crime alleged — paying a porn star “hush money,” but doing so by allegedly falsifying business records, which in turn is alleged to have been done to hide the story during the end stages of the 2016 presidential campaign. This isn’t the sort of crime that most people can really wrap their heads around, so Trump’s supporters can continue to trash the prosecutor. Even Utah Senator Mitt Romney has joined the condemnation choir, accusing Bragg of “stretching” the law to “fit a political agenda.”
But maybe this first indictment is just proof of concept; that, after well over 200 years since the founding of the country, a U.S. president can be held accountable. The dam has broken. And there are other, more significant investigations that may soon lead to further indictments — both by Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, and by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice. Whether our dismal political landscape may finally begin to shift will likely turn on whether these cases lead to further legal jeopardy for the former president, and whether the GOP will be made to pay at the polls in 2024 for continuing to ride the Trump train until it derails for good.
Renato Mariotti is Legal Affairs Columnist for POLITICO Magazine.
Donald Trump now faces criminal charges in Manhattan, and soon he may face charges in Fulton County, Georgia, and perhaps in one or more federal courts. He has been attacking prosecutors and judges long before these criminal investigations were initiated, and he has already started making personal attacks against the judge and prosecutor in the Manhattan case. His words and actions have sown distrust in our criminal justice system and distract from the charges brought in Manhattan, which may soon be eclipsed by weightier charges brought in other jurisdictions.
Regardless of how those charges play out, the end result is long-term damage to the public’s confidence in the rule of law and the ability of the criminal justice system to police corruption in politics. We will ultimately pay a higher price than Trump does.
Will Stancil is a policy researcher at the University of Minnesota.
It's about time. A terrible legacy of Trump’s presidency is how he taught the worst political figures that they could bluff their way into total impunity. It’s become self-perpetuating: Authorities looked at the system’s inability to hold Trump accountable and took it as proof of his untouchability — or worse, assumed that accountability risks devastating political backlash.
Trump hasn’t wriggled his way out of various legal jams so much as law enforcement has talked itself out of putting him into those jams. It’s telling that the conspiracy at the root of Trump’s New York charges was also the subject of federal investigation — an investigation which has seemingly vanished into Merrick Garland’s filing cabinet. And of course, these charges are the least of Trump’s crimes.
We endanger ourselves when we won't impose consequences on the powerful. This prosecution marks an end to the era of conflict avoidance with Trump and his political fellow travelers. That's bad news for someone like Donald Trump, but a happy day for America.
Photos by Francis Chung/POLITICO and Bryan Anselm for POLITICO
Like seemingly everyone else in American journalism, we endlessly debated New York Magazine’s viral list of etiquette rules — a long firehose of life advice ideal for getting through the world as a charming, very social New Yorker in 2023.
Washington, D.C., though, is a unique place — where some of the old formal rules actually do still apply, and where, let’s face it, some of that social-climbing rudeness that New Yorkers, and most normal people, seem to disdain is just baked into social conventions. (Don’t look over someone’s shoulder to see who else is at a party? How quaint.)
This is a city where the line between work and play is always blurry, where you regularly encounter the same group of people who aren’t currently your coworkers but were or probably will be one day, and where you want to keep people close — your job depends on it — but not that close. It’s a city where the sucking up and jockeying for attention and competitiveness doesn’t end at the office, but you can’t be too transparent about how hard you’re trying. And it takes a lot of social know-how — and a bit of strategic elbow-throwing — to navigate that.
We asked Politicos, friends and acquaintances — the kind of people we’d say “nice to see you” to, even if we weren’t sure we’d ever met them before or just knew their face from TV — how they really make it in this city so many of us love to hate.
Say “Nice to see you” — even if it is your first time seeing the person.
Too much hobnobbing at Correspondents’ Dinner after-parties and now you can’t remember if you’ve actually met someone when you see them out? Don’t worry; that happens to everyone here. “Nice to see you” is an easy way to avoid offending someone who you’ve forgotten you’ve met.
Learn the magic of asking enthusiastically, “Where are you now?”
This is another way of evading “I am not totally sure we have met before … and even if we have, I do not remember your name or what you do.” The sentence works whether the truth is “We have never met before” or “I used to work for you and you never remembered my name then either” or even “I used to be married to your spouse.”
Make sure you address former bigwigs appropriately, especially in public.
If someone has ever been elected or appointed to anything, ever, they are to be addressed by that title going forward — a requirement that does not expire at death. And if they’ve held numerous senior roles, you are to address them by the most senior title they’ve ever had. (When Andrew Card was George W. Bush’s chief of staff, everyone called him Secretary Card, because he had previously been secretary of Transportation, a position that is technically higher than a chief of staff in the executive branch, even if the chief of staff is the second most powerful person in the White House (not counting the vice president).)
Things get confusing when you’re addressing someone who used to be a senator and an ambassador, like Max Baucus, who was a long-time senator from Montana and also served as ambassador to China — the right move then is to pick one or the other, but you can't go wrong by sticking with the legislative title, which the person did earn, after all, by winning an election. And yes, that person who cheerfully told you “call me Ted” in the greenroom fully expects to be “Senior Deputy Assistant Commissioner” the minute you’re in front of other people.
Don’t overdo it on sympathy if you run into someone who’s just lost an election.
Play it cool. They might have lost, but you don’t have to make them feel like a loser. If they’ve had a long career, say, “Well you’ve had a helluva run.” If their public life is being cut short, say, “Well, it was just a crazy cycle.”
Be subtle about asking what someone does for a living.
D.C. is a city of tribes, and to avoid conflict, you’ve got to figure out the basics of what the person you’re talking to at a party does for work to avoid awkward fault lines. (Ever sprung it on a Hill staffer you’re a journalist 20 minutes into the conversation? They don’t appreciate it.) But digging into one’s career background right off the bat is also a problem; you could look too opportunistic — even by this town’s standards. So start with “How long have you been in D.C.?” or “How do you know the host?” This one also does the trick surprisingly well, when applicable: “How did you and your spouse meet?”
Someone peers over your shoulder in search of a more important person? Two can play that game.
This phenomenon might be rude in other cities. Here, it’s still rude, though it’s also to be expected. The right response is to follow your conversation partner’s gaze and then ask them: “Oh my god, is that Ron Klain? I’ve been meaning to talk with him.” Then make a beeline to him. If you want to make this exit especially graceful, you can pair up the person you were talking to with someone else you know nearby.
You have to get gossip, but you can’t ask for it.
This city runs on gossip. Journalists are actually paid to keep track of it. But lobbyists, members of Congress and Hill staffers need to know who’s up and who’s down, too. To master the art of asking for gossip without asking for gossip, turn to flattery. Try this: “I bet you know Pete Buttigieg. What’s he really like?” Or you can always give a little bit of gossip to get it.
Before trashing someone to a stranger, make sure the two aren’t married to each other.
Tons of D.C. couples are married, but they have different last names. It can get awkward if you unknowingly bad mouth someone in front of their spouse.
Don’t surprise your host if you’re arriving with staff.
If you are an elected official attending a D.C. cocktail party, RSVP for all staffers accompanying you. If you forget, you can probably get away with bringing a maximum of 2 uninvited guests without judgment. If a host runs out of food — or, worse in this city, booze — because they were surprised by your large group, you might not get an invite back.
Be discreet about your move from public to private.
The classic Capitol Hill blast email announcing your departure from a congressional office or committee should never reveal the name of your new “downtown” employer — that’s to be relayed later on your Linkedin page, in POLITICO’s Influence or privately, not in the context of your current, taxpayer-funded job. The revolving door thrives because people pretend there is some distance between the two worlds; shattering that illusion would be considered in poor taste.
When on Capitol Hill as a member of the media, wait your turn.
If you’re a reporter and see a fellow journalist having a one-on-one conversation with a member, wait your turn. Don’t interrupt or join the conversation or listen in — you’ll regret it when your cable show invites dry up. But if it’s a full gaggle, rules don’t apply; jump in.
Make sure you have the same definition as your conversation partner of “off the record,” “on background” and “deep background.”
The media-savvy people of D.C. think they know what these terms mean, but many a political staffer has been surprised to learn that people have different definitions — and that’s a morning-after call no one enjoys. Make sure you are on the same page before the dishing begins. For more tips, look no further than the Treasury and Justice Department’s website on how to leak info.
Just slammed someone in print? Don’t feel bad.
Look the person right in the eye and ask: “How are ya?” This is what it means to be a part of official Washington.
If you have something important to say, text it.
D.C. is a formal city; to reach people, you often have to go through official channels — a communications director, or a press secretary. But if you need to ask a real question, or if someone needs to get in touch with you about something important, texting is the way to go. There’s no better way to set up a meeting — without staff — or disclose substantive information than the humble text.
Treat interns like future speakers of the House. Because ... sometimes they are.
You never know who is going to be your future boss. Case in point: There was a time when Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was a Senate intern, all the way back in 1963, alongside Rep. Steny Hoyer.
Don’t ask hardball questions at book party Q&As.
The best questions show how smart you are by making an interesting point and getting a good answer from the author. If you can add a joke during your question, that's a bonus.
You don’t have to read your colleague’s book.
But you do have to tweet something nice suggesting you did, or have plans to.
But you do have to buy it at the party.
They didn’t ask you to come for your witty banter.
Keep your two phones to yourself during dates.
Yes, insiders know that having two phones means you likely are a government employee with a very important job. But anyone savvy enough to know that will also see your choice to flaunt your two-phone status for the needy, attention-seeking move it is.
If you’re a conservative on a dating app, own it.
Don’t be the guy or girl who puts “moderate” when you’re actually very conservative. Nobody likes false advertising, especially in a city where political identity trumps all.
Don’t put your Twitter handle in your Hinge profile.
If someone’s interested, they’ll probably find a way to stalk you online eventually. A Twitter handle will just get you a left swipe.
Don’t tell a reporter on a date that you’re off the record.
They know that already, and besides, no one cares about the consulting you do for Deloitte.
Don’t have any shame about asking to get put on a WHCD after-party list.
This is the weekend when Washington celebrates its core value: shamelessness. So embrace it. There is at least one person in your circle of friends who knows the right person to email about getting into an after-party. So go ahead and send that email asking if you can come.
Spot Kim Kardashian? No need to play it cool.
This isn’t New York or L.A., where people are — or act — unimpressed when they see a celebrity. Here, we hardly ever see real celebrities, so go ahead; freak out a little. Ask for an autograph or picture. You might be surprised when you see Kim losing her cool over getting to meet Jake Tapper or Tony Blinken.
When in doubt, skip the main event and dress down.
WHCD is basically nerd prom, and the real would-be cool people just show up to after parties not in black-tie. The goal is to communicate: “I’m too cool to go to anything as banal as the dinner.”
Don’t be too loud in public — especially if you’re talking about anything you don’t want reported.
You’re likely within earshot of a journalist who will hear it and is totally within their rights to report it.
Keep virtue-signaling at a minimum.
We know you try to avoid Uber as much as possible, tip wait staff very, very well and even think all the new tipping add-ons are long overdue. But this is a deep-blue city, where progressives are very committed and outspoken. We’ve heard it all before. So you can keep your tipping and transportation habits to yourself and move on.
Learn the polite way to dodge people — and don’t take it personally when someone blows you off.
“Let’s get lunch” or “Let’s get drinks over recess” is how people sign off here. They likely don’t mean it. If they do, they’ll follow up with a date and time.
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