Trump Just Put the Quiet Part in Writing

And I'm grateful for that.

This headline captures the moment we find ourselves in: “The Kremlin praises new US security strategy as Russian strikes kill 4 in Ukraine.”

We’ll get to Trump’s new National Security Strategy policy in a moment, but let’s catch up first: (Editor’s note: None of these stories are parodies.)

• Trump’s birthday added to list of free days at national parks; MLK Day, Juneteenth removed. (FFS.)

• ICE launches horrifying ‘you’re going ho-ho-home’ Christmas deportation campaign -

  

  The first picture shows eight digitally altered officers alongside an armoured vehicle and covered in bright lights. One is aiming a gun into the distance, while a second is behind a police shield. In the background of the AI image are presents and decorations.

• Mom of Karoline Leavitt’s nephew rejects White House narrative of her ICE arrest - The Washington Post

  From her confinement in a remote detention center in Louisiana, Bruna Ferreira recounted all the ways she said she has tried to maintain a friendly relationship with the family of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. After all, Ferreira shares a child with Leavitt’s brother.¹

• And don’t miss this feculent kicker: “Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide” | GBH

  Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin….

  “Officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.”

  Happy Monday. Note to readers:

  I know that many of you feel overwhelmed by all of the newsletters. There are a lot of claims on your time and your resources. I get it.

  More than 90 percent of you read everything we write and post for free — and I want to keep it that way, because you really can’t defend democracy from behind a paywall.

  But I want you to know that I am deeply grateful for those of you who have become paid subscribers, because you make it possible for me to stay on this hamster wheel of crazy.

“Kremlin says new US security strategy accords largely with Russia’s view”

Of course it does.

And I, for one, am glad that the Trump Administration has put it in writing, because it is a genuinely clarifying moment, settling the question whether we should take Trump’s bizarre gestures literally as well as seriously.

This isn’t a social media bleat, a MAGA troll designed to trigger the libs, or an incoherent Trumpian ramble. It can’t be brushed off as joke, or “Trump being Trump.” The racism isn’t just an irritable gesture. It’s official US policy. And it is right there in writing.

Of course, it is a foreign policy disaster. As Anne Applebaum notes, “The new National Security Strategy is a propaganda document, designed to be widely read. It is also a performative suicide. Hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and so publicly.”

The document is not merely a full-throated rejection of the foreign policy vision of GOP presidents like Ronald Reagan; it is a rejection of the policy vision of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Bush, and actually every president since WWII.

Even so — and this is my admittedly contrarian take — I’m glad they published it. Because now we have a concrete basis for debating and confronting what’s right in front of us. Republicans would prefer to deflect or rationalize what Trump is doing to America’s place in the world. Now they have to defend it. Critics need not speculate or hypothesize. It’s right there in writing.

Not surprisingly, the Russians are thrilled. And, why not? It gives them everything they could possibly have dreamed of when they embraced Donald Trump and boosted his candidacy.

“The adjustments that we see correspond in many ways to our vision,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state television reporter Pavel Zarubin when asked about the new U.S. strategy.

**

Let’s break it down.

Trump’s new foreign policy trashes the post-WWII rules-based international order, shifting toward a system of spheres of influence, while injecting toxic culture war issues into the heart of the American worldview. It is a document that drips with contempt for our democratic allies. Writes Andrew Fox:

What lingers most is the contempt. It sits behind the sentences aimed at allies, institutions, and the postwar architecture that the United States once led with pride because it worked, by making Americans safer, wealthier, and less alone. The NSS treats that inheritance as an insult. It casts global leadership as naïve charity, alliance management as humiliation, and the idea of shared rules as an elite trick played on ordinary Americans. The proposed solution reads like spite, and spite has never built durable security.

What could go wrong? Other than profound risks to global stability, alliance cohesion, the empowerment of adversaries, and massive domestic costs? Let’s review:

1. The destruction of alliances and trust

• Undermining Trust: The document is a “brief against trust”. It treats global leadership as naïve charity and alliance management as humiliation. This posture forces allies to “hedge, to insulate, [and] to treat Washington less as a partner and more as a variable”.

• The End of Transatlantic Ties: Europe absorbs the “full force of that disdain”. The new strategy of confrontation and conditionality drives a “stake through the heart of the NATO alliance” and turns necessary burden-sharing into humiliation. The NSS officially signals that “The transatlantic relationship as we know it is over,” meaning “The West as it used to be no longer exists”.

• Encouraging internal interference: The NSS threatens to “cultivate resistance” inside allied European nations against their current trajectory, exporting domestic grievance into allied democracies and elevating factionalism into policy.

2. The new document is a strategic windfall for adversaries and ensures global instability.

• Empowering Russia (Pro-Russia in effect): The NSS advances nearly every major strategic objective Russia has pursued since 2000, functioning as a “geopolitical windfall” for Moscow.

◦ Fracturing the West: The NSS replaces Western unity with a vision where the Western Hemisphere is the priority, Europe is a problem to be managed, and nationalist movements are preferred European partners.

◦ Weakening NATO: The document’s language about ending NATO’s “perpetual expansion” carries a “pleasing resonance in Moscow” because it frames the alliance’s choices as the problem instead of Russian violent aggression. The NSS weakens NATO’s political core, effectively doing openly what Moscow had to do covertly through dark money and kompromat.

◦ Betraying Ukraine: By leaning toward an “expeditious” cessation of hostilities and expressing impatience with the victim, the NSS risks teaching the “ugly lesson” that conquest can be rewarded with time. The U.S. repositions itself as a mediator whose priority is “stability” with Russia rather than Ukrainian sovereignty, aligning perfectly with Russia’s goal of forcing a settlement. A compromised Ukraine creates a “frontier of permanent instability”.

• Clearing the path for China: The NSS celebrates withdrawal from global responsibility while demanding global deference, which “leaves a vacuum”. Because China builds influence through non-military instruments like financing and infrastructure, American disengagement “clears the runway” for China’s reach and makes America less safe.

**

And then there is the racism. The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) is filled with themes and language commonly associated with white supremacy and identitarians, both of which play a central role in the document’s rationale for shifting U.S. foreign policy.

Heather Cox Richardson argues that the authors of the NSS explicitly state their vision is to achieve a “white supremacist country” and, to this end, they reject immigration and call for the U.S. to “help Europe correct its current trajectory” by “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity”.

The document applies language belonging to the “darkest corners of the internet” to describe Europe, spending extraordinary energy portraying it as decadent and demographically doomed.

The NSS uses rhetoric such as “civilizational erasure” and describes Europe as becoming “unrecognizable” due to migration. It treats an ally’s internal complexities (migration, identity) as an American culture-war exhibit, reducing the future of European societies to “fear, suspicion, and a crude arithmetic of ‘European’ and ‘non-European’”.

**

Exit take: Every Republican should be asked about this. Many will pretend not to have read it. Press them. Quote it.

BONUS: To no one’s surprise, Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth is all-in:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday launched a full-throated attack on post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy, castigating former presidents and generals by name while declaring the age of American “utopian idealism” over.

Hegseth, speaking at the annual Reagan Defense Forum, outlined a new military focus on the Western Hemisphere, demanded allies fend for themselves and took a more conciliatory approach to China’s armed forces.

Trump Regrets a Pardon

Perhaps the most delicious story of the day, Via Rachael Bade:

The president surprised Washington earlier this week by pardoning Cuellar, a centrist Democrat in a swingy Texas district, who Trump argued was targeted unfairly by Democrats for his tough-on-border stances. This morning, Trump went after Cuellar on Truth Social, accusing him of “continuing to work with the same Radical Left Scum that just weeks before wanted him and his wife to spend the rest of their lives in Prison - and probably still do!”

“Such a lack of LOYALTY… something that Texas voters, and Henry’s daughters, will not like,” Trump wrote. “Oh well, next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy!”

It’s unclear if the president was hoping Cuellar would switch parties or decline to run for re-election, thus giving Republicans a better chance to flip his district in their quest to keep the House. But Democrats and reporters are all over this today, assuring this chatter will continue into the week.

Monday dogs

It’s cold here. But not this cold. Flashback to the Polar Vortex in 2018.

1. From the Wapo story:

“The Brazilian immigrant selected Leavitt to be her son’s godmother. She signed off on her son’s trip to the White House Easter egg hunt this spring. And she said she “moved mountains” to ensure he could attend Leavitt’s wedding in January.

“Arrested Nov. 12 by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ferreira, 33, said it is insulting to sit in orange prison scrubs facing possible removal to Brazil after spending most of her life in the United States while the Trump administration paints her as a criminal. She is being detained for being in the United States illegally, a civil violation, after overstaying a visa when she was a child.”