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Trump's 2024 outlook: more vulnerable after Jan 6 hearings
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Happy Monday. And a Quick Take for you to get your week started off. Wanted to talk a little bit about a topic I haven't discussed very much and that is the implications of the January 6th commission and where we are heading for US elections.
It's pretty clear to me that Trump is still the most popular in the Republican Party. And if you want to make a bet, you would certainly still say that he gets the nomination. I think it's virtually a hundred percent that he's going to announce his candidacy. Closest people around him certainly believe that in relatively short order. But he is more vulnerable than he was just a few months ago. And some of this is obvious. I mean, he's not president anymore and so he doesn't have the platform that he had when he was president. Of course, he's going to lose a significant amount of attention, impact as a consequence of that. He's been banned from Twitter. He's banned from Facebook. And his new Truth Social is not doing very much to speak of, at least to date. Doesn't seem to have any real management. And a couple times I've taken a look at it, doesn't seem to have a lot going on in terms of the space. He's not attracting the same crowds he used to when he gives speeches.
Now, the January 6th committee, which has been an anti-Trump effort... There's no question that the decision by Kevin McCarthy to pull those that he had appointed to serve on it and make sure that it was basically only Republicans that were strongly anti-Trump, in this case, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, would participate, meant that it was going to be perceived as a more partisan affair than it would have if there had been full participation from across the political spectrum. No question about that. But it has still had impact. And I think one of the reasons it's had impact is because so many of the people that have participated are hardly Democrats. And in fact, many of them are people that were strong pro-Trump characters until January 6th; a bunch of former staffers, the deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews, the deputy national security advisor, someone I know pretty well, actually, Matt Pottinger, members of Pence's team, others. I mean, these were all people that had been strongly loyal to Trump for the entirety of his first term.
Now, I want to be clear, the rank and file of the Republican party still think that this whole thing is a nothing burger. There's only a small minority of the Republican party that believed on January 6th that he was responsible for it in any way. And that number has basically not moved. It's within a margin of error. But independents have shifted against Trump. And by the way, so has Rupert Murdoch. And I think it's very interesting that over the last few days, you see opinion editorials from the editorial board, from both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal saying that Trump is unfit to run again for the presidency, shouldn't be president in 2025. These are press outfits that were all in for Trump in 2020 and they're not anymore.
Now, the Wall Street Journal is an elite newspaper. It has a lot of Democrat and establishment Republican readers, few that would be considered ultra-MAGA. That's not true of the New York Post. Though, of course, New York itself is a heavily blue voting urban area, but they're going to lose a lot of subscribers in Staten Island, certainly on the basis of taking that perspective. But even Fox News itself... I mean, you watch Hannity, you watch Tucker Carlson, they're a hundred percent still for Trump. But the daily coverage that you see that has been much more straight up news over the last couple of years has also covered a lot more. They haven't been covering the January 6th commission, but they have not been promoting Trump and they've not been trying in any way to whitewash him or actively cheerlead for him in a way that Newsmax, for example, has consistently no matter what time of the day that you watch it.
So I think at the very least we can now say that we're going to have a lot of alternative candidates for 2024. I think it's increasingly likely that Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, is going to run against Trump. I think there will be a number of others as well. Again, you wouldn't bet against him at this point, but you wouldn't think it's going to be easy. And I think that's important. By the way, that's of course also true of Biden in the sense that Biden is at his most unpopular of his entire presidency right now. He's polling in the mid to high thirties. He's got big problems, particularly with the economy, particularly with inflation. He's vulnerable on COVID issues as well. And he also is looking increasingly slow, and his age is a factor, by the way, as is Trump's. And that fact is something that's going to make a lot of people much more interested in having anyone but Biden run in 2024 in the Democratic side and anyone but Trump run on the Republican side.
But this matters more about Trump because frankly, if you get Biden or if you get someone else, there's not a lot of impact in terms of the ultimate trajectory of US political institutions, the role of democracy, the kind of policies that you get in the way that the United States is perceived globally, where if it's Trump vis-à-vis another more mainstream Republican, it matters a lot, precisely because of Trump's unfitness, his willingness to call elections illegitimate and do everything he can to undermine them, certainly something you'd expect to do again, as well as his indifference to rule of law. So I do believe the fact that both Trump and Biden are increasingly vulnerable to significant challenges is a much greater impact and import when you look at the Republican side. Now, again, if you make me bet right now, I would still say that Trump gets the nomination and that it's close to a conflict for 2024. But again, overall, the likelihood Trump becomes president a second term has gone down significantly.
Now, one danger I'd like to raise. I really think we need to call out those Democrats that are spending money and channeling money in a number of races to try to get pro-Trump stop the steal election deniers to win in Republican primaries, because they believe that those pro-Trump candidates are going to be easier to defeat in a general election. Now, first of all, a lot of Democrats felt that way about Trump himself in 2020 and look what happened as a consequence, but I'll go further than that. This is a very dangerous game they're playing, and they should stop.
One more Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the House is too many. One is too many. It leads to violence. It leads to lunacy. It leads to disinformation. She's a self-avowed Christian nationalist. She's doing everything she can from a weak position to try to undermine the American political system and the values that it's built upon. And if you end up with five or 10 of them in the House, a couple of them in the Senate, a couple of them as governors, you do a lot more to deeply undermine the structural integrity and stability of the American political system. So the Democrats should stop playing that game right away.
Finally, I want to make a shout-out to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, two people on the Republican Party. Kinzinger voted for Trump, was full-throated about it. Cheney votes with Trump over 90% of the time in the House. They have basically given up their political careers. Liz Cheney lost her role in the leadership of the House and is almost certainly going to lose her upcoming race for re-election. Kinzinger has already had to step down. In both cases, these are people that are standing by democracy and rule of law in the country above their narrow political preference. There are not many people in the country that are leading by example right now. And if by doing it, that means you have to lose your job, well, they're showing us what a leader really is and I tip my cap to them. That's it for me. I'll talk to you soon.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com
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Authoritarian Russia's lies and the risk of escalation against NATO
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here. And a Quick Take for you starting off the week. Once again, we're 10 weeks in and I wish I had something, anything good to say about the war in Ukraine. I'll find something for you by the end of this, but most of the signals are really heading negatively and very quickly.
The Russians are taking more territory in Donetsk and Luhansk, the focus of this second phase of their special military operations as they call it. The Ukrainians, having said that, are ramping up their attacks inside Russia. And we're seeing a lot of sabotage, a lot of fires, some strikes across the border. One of the explosions in a tank regiment was outside of Moscow. So this isn't coming from Ukraine directly, but maybe it's sympathizers inside Russia.
We're not, of course, hearing anything from the Russian government explaining any of this, nor should we expect to. Looks like the Russian army chief of staff was actually injured by a Ukrainian strike while he was on the front lines, but on the Russian side.
The goal for the West, the United States and NATO should be, and must be withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, all troops to begin with from the February 24 lines of conflict, which means all of the Donbas, and let's keep in mind that Russia denied, they lied about it, but they denied having troops there before February 24th. So if you're going to have an agreement, they have to leave. Crimea was frankly, always a place with special status. There was a Russian base in Sevastopol when Ukraine was independent. It was an autonomous republic. It had its own parliament, with a Russian tricolor above it. No one's going to agree with the Russians that they get it. The Ukrainians certainly aren't about to, but you could have a frozen conflict, and Crimean status can be sort of indeterminate.
But that should be the goal of the West, of the United States, NATO allies, and other aligned countries. The goal cannot be destroying Russia's military. That's not going to happen. It's not remotely in the cards. But many from the West are increasingly acting as if it can.
One of the reasons why I expect that we are going to see a general mobilization from Putin when he makes his big speech on May 9th, we are moving in that direction, is to prove to the West that they can throw far more troops and far more money at the outcome on the ground in the Ukraine than the Americans and its allies are going to be prepared down the road to fight against.
And I'm not against suggesting that this means that the goals should be different than what I just expressed, but rather the idea that the West is going to significantly destroy a military that is 10 times larger than that of Ukraine, with huge numbers of nuclear warheads, and other are shorts of advanced weapons. They're using their long-range missiles against Ukraine, but a lot of the broader military capabilities they have in war fighting against the West, they aren't using. Space-based weaponry, for example, I mean all of this kind of thing, cyber capabilities.
And the Americans and the Europeans are not going to destroy that without risking World War III. Everyone seriously understands this, but increasingly in the media and in the political space, you get a lot of people that are very patriotic and flag waving, and they want the Americans to sort of drive the Russians off the map. And that's just not going to happen.
I saw Adam Kinzinger and others from Congress putting forward an effort to get congressional authorization for Biden to put American troops on the ground in Ukraine if weapons of mass destruction are used by the Russians. We don't want weapons of mass destruction to be used. It will be a disaster, and it will further isolate Russia, not just from the West, but from other countries as well.
Having said all of that, Biden has made clear, and rightly so in my view, that the United States will not send troops on the ground to Ukraine to fight against Russia in any circumstances. I think that's absolutely the right call. And I think that Congress needs to back them up on that. I don't want the United Kingdom making those sorts of statements either. It's very dangerous.
Okay. What about Russia? Well, for now, I don't see any movement. And I think it's important for us to all recognize that the Russians still really don't feel the war. The sanctions are not significantly biting the average Russian yet, in part because the Russians have reserves they're willing to spend. And also because energy prices are really high and they're still selling energy, oil and gas to Europe. They're still selling all of their exports to everyone that isn't basically an advanced industrial democracy.
And so that means it's going to take a while; the sanctions are going to bite in terms of Western goods. They already are, wealthier Russian in the urban centers; but more broadly, I think it's going to take much longer than the level of escalation we're expecting in this war over the coming months.
And until then, what we see is Russian people who believe that Russia is winning, that NATO started the war, that Ukrainians are Nazis whose main function is to tell lies about their own motherland. And when Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister came out in the last day comparing the Zelensky to Hitler and saying that the biggest antisemitism in the world are Jewish. And in the same way that Zelensky is Jewish; Hitler had Jewish blood in his background. And this is an astonishing, vile, disgusting, racist comment from the foreign minister who I've known well over the years.
And when he was ambassador to the UN, was one of the most respected and capable diplomats in the UN, and any ambassador from Western countries back then would've said that. Has functionally become a war criminal who needs to be imprisoned. It's so painful to watch. And yet what he is saying is frankly important for people to see, because it's what is being piped through state media in Russia every day and night. And it's what the average Russian believes.
And as a consequence of that, I think that a majority of Russians would much rather believe all of those lies than face any personal culpability for the state of affairs in Russia. Disinformation works that way, and not just in a country like Russia. We've experienced some of that in my own country, in the United States, but Russia is not in any way a dysfunctional democracy.
It is an authoritarian state. That's increasingly becoming a police state. And the state of affairs is increasingly reverting to 1937. It's getting decidedly Stalinist in Russia. And that is an incredibly dangerous place for such a powerful and well-armed country to be. And as a consequence, I fear that next week is looking very ugly indeed, that as we see the Putin speech on May 9th, on Victory Day, is frankly something I fear that all of us are going to need to watch, and very carefully, and see just how much Putin is prepared to take this war to NATO, and how much of his personal domestic credibility he's willing to risk.
A general mobilization of some 150,000 additional Russian soldiers called up in a few months to fight the war in Ukraine, and to fight a broader war that Putin sees is against NATO would be a very risky thing for him to do medium term in Russia. And if he decides to make that step, that is, it shows a lot more resolve and a lot more willing to take downside to ensure that he gets what he wants in Ukraine. It's all not where we want this conflict to be.
I will say one piece of good news is that my friend, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres had a successful trip in Moscow and Kyiv and got out alive, especially since, while he was in Kyiv, the Russians were actually bombing it, which is you know, just again, shows the state of affairs right now, but actually made progress, made a breakthrough on the humanitarian front, with the Russians agreeing to allow civilians out of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, which has been under siege now for the better part of a couple of months. They have gotten civilians out through the ICRC, the Red Cross.
Interestingly about only 100 have left so far, despite the fact that on the ground, the ICRC is seeing that the Russians in the operation have actually fully respected the agreement, one of the only times I can say that about Russia in the last 10 weeks.
So I'm kind of wondering why we haven't seen more civilians get out. We should watch that carefully. Is it because there weren't as many as we thought. Are they petrified? Are they scared? Is there disinformation saying that they're not actually safe leaving?
I mean, again, the human conditions there are abysmal. Or the worst possible case are the soldiers from the Azov Battalion hold up there actually keeping some of them as hostages unless they are allowed to leave as well. This is all speculation, but we certainly need to know what the hell is happening to these civilians. And I think we should all be very deeply concerned because the conditions at this point on the ground are those of a concentration camp. So anyway, I mean even the good news has the dark lining at this point. And that has pretty much been par for the course when we're talking about the war in Ukraine.
So that's it for me. I hope everyone's well, I'll talk to you all real soon. New book's coming out, "The Power of Crisis," just a couple weeks. I'll start talking about that a lot more, but for now, let's all, you know, think good thoughts about those that are still stuck on the ground in occupied territories in Ukraine, and particularly in the Azovstal plant. Talk to you soon.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com