When it comes to foreign policy, Pompeo’s penchant for undermining America’s credibility is top-notchDonald Trump’s disdain for the people, country and values his office is supposed to represent is unmatched in recent memory. And he has found in the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, a kindred spirit who has embraced his role as Trumpism’s number one proselytizer to the world.Pompeo doesn’t wield nearly as much power or have the jurisdiction to inflict damage on as wide a range of issues as the president. He’s not as crass or erratic as Trump, and his Twitter feed seems dedicated more to childish mockery than outright attacks. But when it comes to foreign policy, Pompeo’s penchant for undermining America’s credibility is top-notch.At Pompeo’s recommendation, Trump fired the state department’s inspector general, who is supposed to be an independent investigator charged with looking into potential wrongdoing inside the department. Steve Linick was just the latest in a series of inspectors general across the government that Trump had fired in an attempt to hide the misconduct of his administration – but it also shone a spotlight on how Pompeo has undermined his agency.According to news reports, Pompeo was being investigated by the inspector general for bypassing Congress and possibly breaking the law in sending weapons to Saudi Arabia, even though his own department and the rest of the US government advised against the decision. He was also supposedly organizing fancy dinners – paid for by taxpayers – with influential businesspeople and TV personalities that seemed geared more towards supporting Pompeo’s political career than advancing US foreign policy goals. And he was reportedly being scrutinized for using department personnel to conduct personal business, such as getting dry cleaning and walking his dog.But these revelations merely reaffirm a pattern of activities by Pompeo unbecoming of the nation’s top diplomat. When the House of Representatives was in the process of impeaching Trump over his attempt to extort Ukraine for personal political purposes – an act that Pompeo was aware of – Pompeo defended Trump while throwing under the bus career state department officials, like the ousted US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who spoke out. Pompeo has regularly ignored Congress, withholding documents from lawmakers – including during the Ukraine impeachment investigation – and refusing to appear for testimony. In 2019, the IG released a report detailing political retaliation against career state department officials being perpetrated by Trump officials. And Pompeo has spent considerable time traveling to Kansas and conducting media interviews there, fueling speculation that he has been using his position to tee up a run for the Senate, a violation of the Hatch Act.Pompeo is a natural Trumpist. In her fantastic profile of the secretary of state, Susan Glasser notes of his first congressional race: “Pompeo ran a nasty race against the Democrat, an Indian-American state legislator named Raj Goyle, who, unlike Pompeo, had grown up in Wichita. Pompeo’s campaign tweeted praise for an article calling Goyle a ‘turban topper’, and a supporter bought billboards urging residents to ‘Vote American – Vote Pompeo’.” Later, as a member of Congress, Pompeo made a name for himself by helping to fabricate the Benghazi conspiracy theories that shamelessly used the memory of a deceased foreign service officer to undermine the state department.Next to Trump’s assault on US values, Pompeo’s role as top Trump lackey may seem insignificant. But the secretary of state is often the most senior US official that other countries and publics hear from on any number of issues. Even with Trump in the Oval Office, a secretary of state that was committed to the constitution - not Trump - would at least be able to fight for the values that US foreign policy should embody, and shield the department’s day-to-day business from Trump’s outbursts. The work that department professionals conduct around the world – helping American citizens abroad get home in the early days of the pandemic or coordinating assistance to other countries to cope with the coronavirus – is vital to American national security, and at the core of the image that America projects abroad.> Trump is undermining American leadership in incalculable ways, and Pompeo has weaponized the state department on his behalfThe world today needs principled and active US leadership as much as ever. In a normal world, the US secretary of state would be working through international organizations like the WHO to lead the response to the coronavirus, not threatening to withdraw from the global body. The secretary would be pushing for robust foreign assistance to help other countries fight the pandemic, not cutting funding. They would be trying to find a path that balances working with China on responding to the pandemic with pushing back on the Chinese Communist party’s disturbing behavior – like signaling it may end Hong Kong’s autonomy – instead of scapegoating China.But Trump is undermining American leadership in incalculable ways, and Pompeo has weaponized the state department on the president’s behalf. Like Trump, Pompeo’s behavior is sending signals to other countries that the US government is acting more like the autocratic and corrupt regimes that Pompeo so regularly calls out. As Trump hurls daily attacks on the media, Pompeo has taken to berating journalists. These assaults by America’s leaders on the free press are giving cover to dictators around the world to criticize their countries’ media. Firing government watchdogs who are investigating top officials is exactly the kind of behavior that the United States would normally criticize in its annual human rights reports.The fish, they say, rots from the head. And Pompeo, like his boss, is actively undermining the values embodied by the state department, its professionals and the Americans they represent.

A driving theme of Republican Party politics circa 2020 is consolidation.The GOP has tightened its ranks; its reliable voters, hovering at around 40% of the electorate, tend to approve of almost anything that President Donald Trump does.Yet throughout his term, from the 2017 battles over health care and tax cuts to his impeachment and subsequent acquittal early this year, very few people from outside the party have been coming aboard.Trump has led the charge, but his effects are being felt far down the ballot. Two years after Democrats swept the midterm House elections by a historically wide margin and with historically high turnout, polling suggests they have a shot at a similar showing this year.And in the high-stakes Senate, GOP incumbents in swing states have struggled to disentangle their numbers from Trump's stubbornly minoritarian status. That is putting Democrats in a strong position as they look to take back the Senate in the midst of a pandemic."The Republican brand seems depressed across the board," Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and founder of the New Democrat Network, said in an interview. "A lot of time senators can insulate themselves from the vagaries of the national electorate, but that doesn't seem to be happening this time."A net loss of four Senate seats -- or three, plus the vice presidency -- would hand the chamber to the Democrats, and Republicans this year must defend almost twice as many seats as their opponents. And GOP incumbents in many swing states are looking at a hard battle if they cannot expand beyond the taut Trump coalition.That includes candidates in some states, like Arizona and Georgia, that have trended more Democratic of late but have still voted Republican in every presidential election since the 1990s."The Senate majority has not been a certainty at any point this cycle," Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, acknowledged during an interview last month with Fox News Radio. "I've said consistently that it's going to be a dogfight."The Senate is of vital importance to Republicans, no matter who takes the White House. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, it had been the lab of the GOP's major political pursuit these days: confirming the president's conservative appointees to federal judgeships. Even amid the virus' spread, McConnell was eager to bring the chamber back into session to continue confirming judges and federal appointees.And if Joe Biden wins the presidency, the Senate would most likely be the only backstop against full Democratic control of the executive and legislative branches.The Trump coalitionTrump has shifted the Republican coalition toward male voters and less educated ones. At the same time, the party's advantage among older voters has all but disappeared.Those trends have played out in various statewide races since 2016, and they are likely to repeat themselves in the battle for the Senate this year.In the 2014 midterms, for instance, college graduates supported Republicans by 3 percentage points, according to exit polls. By 2018, they had swung widely in the Democrats' favor, supporting them by 20 points. In that time span, the Republicans' advantage among voters 65 and older dropped from 16 points to 2 points.In Arizona, this year's Democratic Senate candidate, Mark Kelly, held a 3-point edge over the Republican incumbent, Sen. Martha McSally, in a Marist College poll this spring, and among independent women he was ahead by 20 points.To the north, in Colorado and Montana, Democratic governors have entered the race for Senate. Polls in Colorado have shown a remarkable parity between voters' support for Trump and for Sen. Cory Gardner, the Republican incumbent; at the moment, both appear to be trailing by double digits.Two Republican senators in politically mixed states -- Susan Collins of Maine and Joni Ernst of Iowa -- have seen dips in their approval ratings since they voted to acquit Trump on impeachment charges, and they are both locked in close races.Two Senate seats are up for grabs in Georgia after the resignation of Sen. Johnny Isakson last year created a vacancy. An increase in voters of color, particularly African-Americans, has combined with a softening of Republican support in the suburbs to create a new opportunity for Democrats.In North Carolina, which has voted Democratic for president just once since the 1970s, surveys show that the race between Trump and Biden is up for grabs. The race for the state's open Senate seat, held by the Republican Thom Tillis, is equally tight.The Democrats' most threatened incumbent this year is Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, who won an upset victory in a 2017 special election against the scandal-plagued Republican former judge Roy Moore. A Mason-Dixon poll in February found Jones trailing a range of potential Republican nominees, but mostly by single digits.With a polarized electorate, turnout mattersThirty-four states elected senators in 2016, and in each case, their choice for Senate lined up with their pick for president. Political persuasions have hardened significantly in recent years, partly a result of an increasingly polarized media landscape and online consumption habits.Lee Miringoff, who runs Marist's polling institute, said the starkly partisan nature of Trump-era politics had changed the way elections must be fought."We're so polarized that there's no trade-offs going on, there's no persuasion, so it's all about the turnout and the enthusiasm," he said.In this regard, Trump and Republicans see room for hope. In key early-voting states this primary season, Republican turnout was strikingly high, considering that the party's presidential nomination is uncontested this year. And GOP voters remain more motivated to vote in November than most Democrats, according to recent polls -- although that trend could reverse itself as Biden amps up his campaign in the summer and fall.The registered electorate leans more Republican than the general population by a few points, and the Electoral College adds to the Republican tilt by increasing the influence of rural states. In the days leading up to President George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, approval of his job performance was split, 48-47%, among all Americans, according to Gallup, but Bush went on to win by a 2-point margin. Republicans also outpaced Democrats by 2 points in House elections nationwide that year.In 2012, President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by 4 points, shy of his 7-point Gallup net approval rating just before the election, more evidence of the electorate's crimson tint.This year, Republicans are looking to a similar calculus: Trump's approval rating has yet to hit 50% in most major polls -- a first in modern history -- but it has generally remained in the 40s. If he finishes the campaign strong, he could feasibly eke out a win despite minority approval, as Bush did in 2004.That would most likely provide some coattails to Republicans running for the Senate, given the lack of variation in people's voting habits nowadays.When turnout matters, access matters (especially in a pandemic)There is another complicating factor that could play to Republicans' favor: The very process of voting during a pandemic is different from voting in normal times.While the electorate always skews a little bit more affluent and white than the population as a whole, access to the ballot may be particularly limited for voters in urban areas hit hard by COVID-19, and in areas with large populations of people of color who are disproportionately affected by Republican efforts to limit access to the ballot."There's an open question about what kind of electorate you're going to be seeing in the fall," Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said in an interview. "Many of us prior to the public health crisis were expecting a turnout probably higher than 2016, at least in a lot of places. Interest in politics was high, the midterm elections had a historically high turnout."All of that has been scrambled now, as demonstrated by the experience of Wisconsin's fractious elections in April, when all of Milwaukee was left with just five polling places serving a city of 600,000."How easy will it be to vote in the midst of the pandemic?" Kondik said. "We don't know what the situation is going to be in November."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

It was a seemingly off-the-cuff bit of concern trolling that few in Washington could pull off other than Speaker Nancy Pelosi. On Tuesday, in her best Italian grandmotherly tone, Pelosi expressed concern at President Trump’s use of the unproven COVID-19 remedy hydroxychloroquine because of possible side effects stemming from the president’s health condition. Specifically, his weight. “As far as the president is concerned, he’s our president and I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group and in his, shall we say, weight group, morbidly obese, they say,” Pelosi told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “So, I think it's not a good idea.”The quip spun up a brief furor and outrage cycle; Trump responded that Pelosi was “sick” and had “mental problems,” comments which then spun up an outrage cycle of their own. Two days later, Pelosi defended herself, saying “I was being factual in a very sympathetic way” and called the whole dust-up “unimportant.”But to those who’ve known and watched Pelosi for a long time, there’s a sense that there’s very little that she does or says that is not deliberate. With that in mind, some in the House Democratic caucus are looking at this week’s spat between Pelosi and the president as evidence of a greater willingness on her part to push his buttons with the kind of personal attacks that he frequently doles out himself.“It’s her ability to say the truth in a way that really gets under his skin, I think it’s just reminding people there’s a lot more to this story than what he says,” said one former Pelosi aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “In this situation with COVID-19 and truly needing the facts and that’s a way of actually breaking through the clutter.” The aide added, “In this environment you use everything that you have.” That strategy may rub some Democrats the wrong way, but others are welcoming the sight of their leader taking the gloves off more often, not to be petty—though they enjoy seeing Trump get it as much as he gives it—but as a show of strength.“There is a benefit in owning him like this from time to time,” said a House Democratic aide. “She engages in these fights and it says, I am not going to be pushed around, I am powerful and my power is not dependent on you.” While the Speaker has always been able to get a rise out of Trump, and vice versa, her apparent strategy in dealing with him for much of the last year was to conspicuously turn the other cheek. During Trump’s impeachment, the speaker, a lifelong Catholic, said so frequently she was praying for the president that it became grist for a Saturday Night Live sketch. In January, Pelosi said she doesn’t like to “spend too much time on his crazy tweets because everything he says is a projection.”But this year, the tension between the two leaders broke into the open in a way it hadn’t before. Before the fat crack, of course, was the infamous State of the Union snub—Trump rejecting Pelosi’s outstretched hand—which led to the infamous State of the Union slash—Pelosi ripping up Trump’s speech—which sparked a multi-day cycle of sniping and opining. The coronavirus pandemic has hardly drawn the two any closer. Though Congress and the White House have spent weeks on painstaking negotiations over historic bills to respond to COVID-19, Pelosi and Trump didn’t directly speak during any of it. In fact, the two have not spoken on the phone or in person since Oct. 16, 2019, when Pelosi went to a White House meeting on Syria, according to the speaker’s office. While few in the Democratic caucus are hoping for Pelosi and Trump to bury the hatchet—or think that such a thing is realistic—some lawmakers suggest that embracing Trump-style button-pushing will be counterproductive for Democrats.“While some encourage extinguishing fire with fire, I’ve always found water works best,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) when asked about Pelosi’s comments about Trump. “In the words of a great Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, ‘the most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency’—and that’s the spirit for which we all should be advocating.”And amid the pandemic, many lawmakers have found it easy to ignore the Pelosi-Trump fracas, said another House Democratic aide. “I think they’d very much prefer leadership of both parties to focus on the problems at hand and visibly negotiate with each other than lob insults,” said the aide.Like he does with all political adversaries, Trump has of course delighted in insulting Pelosi, who along with Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have been the president's most reliable foils during his presidency. The president has frequently called her “crazy” and has mocked her appearance—in December, for example, he claimed her teeth were “falling out of her mouth.” And their last direct conversation, in October, fell apart amid a personal insult: Schumer said that during that meeting in the White House, Trump called Pelosi a “third-rate” politician.Naturally, however, Trump’s defenders in the congressional GOP have taken umbrage on behalf of the president in the wake of Pelosi’s attack. The House GOP leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tweeted that if he is speaker, he would never “rip up a president’s speech” or call them “morbidly obese.” It all reflects, to some Democrats, Pelosi’s unique ability to get under the president’s skin—and perhaps a sign she should do it more often. “It reminds people he is small,” said a House Democratic aide. “Trump clearly fears and respects her, whereas he loathes Schumer, who is usually good cop when it’s time for wheeling and dealing.”—Additional reporting by Jackie KucinichRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

The House will have to wait a little longer to see what's inside secret grand jury materials from the Mueller investigation.The House Judiciary Committee issued an emergency request for the undisclosed files last summer, and Washington, D.C.'s federal appeals court ruled in the committee's favor in March. But the Supreme Court overturned the appeals court's order on Wednesday, likely keeping the materials under wraps through the 2020 election, The Wall Street Journal reports.The Justice Department has tried to keep grand jury testimonies from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation private. But because the investigation had "stopped short" of drawing conclusions about President Trump's conduct and potential obstruction of justice, the appeals court decided the House Judiciary Committee deserved to see the testimonies, The Washington Post notes. A previous court had also ruled in favor of the committee.Yet on Wednesday, the Supreme Court agreed with the Justice Department, which had argued the House hasn't indicated it "urgently needs these materials for any ongoing impeachment investigation." The House countered by saying even though Trump's impeachment trial is over, it was essential to see those materials before voters went to the polls this fall.More stories from theweek.com Taxpayers paid for food, a harpist, and goody bags for Pompeo's frequent 500-guest formal dinners Republicans are up in arms about Flynn's 'unmasking.' He was reportedly never masked in the first place. A predictable catastrophe in Michigan

Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber attended a meeting of the parliamentary judicial committee on Wednesday to answer questions about how he handled an investigation into corruption at soccer body FIFA. Lauber, who was narrowly re-elected for another four-year term last year, has been accused by anti-corruption campaigners of bungling a fraud trial over payments linked to the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The judicial committee said in a statement earlier in May: "For his part, Michael Lauber denies the form and content of the accusations made against him and accuses the AB-BA of numerous procedural errors, exceeding its authority, and bias, among other things."

Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president, has welcomed a criminal investigation against his predecessor whom he beat in last year’s election. Mr Zelenskiy’s comments refer to a leaked phone call which shows then-President Petro Poroshenko and then-U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden discussing the dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor in exchange for U.S. support for an IMF loan in 2015. The heavily edited recording was published on Tuesday by Andriy Derkach, an Ukrainian member of parliament known for a friendly relationship with Rudy Giuliani, a personal attorney for U.S. President Donald Trump in a throwback to last year’s Ukraine scandal that led to impeachment proceedings against Mr Trump. A day after Ukrainian prosecutors launched a formal inquiry into suspected treason by Mr Poroshenko, President Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that it was up to law enforcement agencies to investigate those allegations while voicing support for the probe. “I think (Poroshenko and his allies) were running in the country in such a way that they have a lot of adventures and verdicts ahead of them,” he told a news conference marking his first year in office. Mr Zelenskiy, a popular comedian without any political background, during last year’s election campaign repeatedly accused Mr Poroshenko of corruption and abuse of power, citing recurrent media reports that document possible conflicts of interests and other misdemeanours. Mr Poroshenko has denied those allegations. President Zelenskiy’s declared willingness to go after his former opponent has evoked uncomfortable comparisons to Viktor Yanukovych, a former Ukrainian president who oversaw an investigation that landed his arch-rival Yulia Tymoshenko in jail. The impeachment inquiry against President Trump was triggered by last summer’s phone call with Mr Zelenskiy in which Mr Trump asked the Ukrainian leader to investigate Democratic candidate Biden and his son’s work for a Ukrainian oil company in exchange for U.S. military aid. Mr Zelenskiy has denied that Mr Trump pressured him to look into the allegations that Mr Biden got then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired because he planned to investigate Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. Mr Shokin, who served as Ukraine’s Prosecutor General in 2015-2016, was widely accused of failing to pursue any major anti-corruption investigation, which left Ukraine’s international donors deeply frustrated. Foreign officials as well as Ukraine’s respected anti-corruption activists openly urged for the dismissal of Mr Shokin who never had an active investigation in Hunter Biden’s work.

Trump and his allies are dusting off the playbook that helped defeat Hillary Clinton, reviving it in recent days as they try to frame 2020 as an election between a dishonest establishment politician and a political outsider being targeted for taking on the system. Eager to distract from the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 89,000 Americans and crippled the economy, Trump and his advisers have started their fog machine again, amplified by conservative media as it was during the Russia probe and the impeachment investigation. The strategy already centered on playing up allegations that Biden’s son, Hunter, profited off the vice presidency.

White House adviser Peter Navarro downplayed the firing of the State Department's inspector general in a TV appearance on Sunday, linking him to the “deep state” and saying that those who are not loyal to the administration must go.Steve Linick became the fourth inspector general Donald Trump has fired in two months, following his acquittal by the Republican-controlled Senate in his impeachment trial.

Molly Ball’s biography of the most powerful woman in American history is worthy of its subjectFrom her perch as speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi has bested Donald Trump in budget battles, mocked him at the State of the Union and won an outsized place in his brain. Now Molly Ball of Time magazine delivers a biography that does justice to the most powerful woman in American history: well-researched, a smooth read that goes back to the beginning.Ball traces Pelosi’s rise from a childhood in Baltimore, the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro Jr, a Democratic mayor and former congressman. Pelosi’s politics were shaped by the New Deal, the Depression, the Catholic church and the city’s cacophonous tapestry. Think ethnic reductionism leavened by transactionalism. Good government was not an end in itself.The young Pelosi was privy to the needs of her father’s constituents but also to the frustrations of Annunciata Lombardi D’Alesandro, her immigrant mother. As Ball makes clear, her ambition was thwarted for the sake of family and her husband.“Big Tommy’s” career came to a halt after a criminal investigation, an unsuccessful bid for the US Senate and a failed comeback at city hall. When their mother died, Pelosi’s brother Tommy, like their father a former Baltimore mayor, called their mother the “really true politician of the family”.While politics was part of Pelosi’s upbringing, her own entrance came later. Soon after college she married Paul Pelosi, an aspiring banker. Unlike other rich legislators such as Dianne Feinstein, Kelly Loeffller and Mitch McConnell, Pelosi’s money is seldom a source of headlines.> Pelosi is an unabashed liberal. But she is also an institutionalistThe pair moved to New York and then to San Francisco. By the time Pelosi turned 30, in 1970, she was the mother of five children. The speaker’s gavel was not on the horizon. But within a decade, life would change.As a young mother with a penchant for books, San Francisco’s libraries were a natural destination. In Ball’s telling, one day Joseph Alioto, the mayor, called Pelosi and asked if she was “‘making a big pot of pasta e fagioli?’” An obnoxious question, in Ball’s view, but dinner was not Alioto’s point. He wanted to appoint Pelosi to the public library commission.After Pelosi said she enjoyed volunteering, Alioto pushed back. His take was simple: if “you’re doing the work … you should get official recognition for it”. Later, Pelosi came to view the call as a feminist-minded assist from an unexpected source.Pelosi emerged as a bridge between rival Democratic factions. She also offered a roadmap to California governor Jerry Brown’s run for president in 1976. When Brown won the Maryland primary he thanked Pelosi as the “architect” of his campaign. At that point, Pelosi “was more than a housewife, more than a pocketbook, more than a hostess”, in Ball’s words. “She was a strategist.”In 1981, Pelosi became chair of the California Democratic party and embarked on a voter registration drive that added 700,000 to the electoral rolls. She successfully pushed for San Francisco as the site of the 1984 Democratic convention, and along the way had a brush with Feinstein, then mayor of the City by Bay. She thought the cost excessive.Following the death of Representative Sala Burton, the wife of legendary congressman Phil Burton, Pelosi was elected to the US House in 1987. There, she “gravitated toward the ‘hard’ committees” like appropriations and intelligence, the “ones that did work traditionally seen as masculine: dollars and cents, war and peace”. Early on, Pelosi understood where actual power and influence resided.> When it came to impeachment Pelosi moved slowly, and discounted the trigger-happy voices of AOC and the 'Squad'As a congresswoman, Pelosi did her homework. She raised money, collected chits and made friends in unexpected places. The late John Murtha, a gruff congressman and ex-marine from Pennsylvania’s God and guns country, became an ally. The two had sat on the appropriations committee, which Murtha chaired.When George W Bush’s “mission accomplished” moment degenerated into a mordant fiasco, Murtha became Pelosi’s point person in attacking the Iraq war. To her credit, Pelosi was mindful of the potency of culture in politics, that her home district was not a mirror image of the US. Murtha was a more effective attack dog than the left’s usual suspects.Pelosi is an unabashed liberal. But she is also an institutionalist, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee until she was elected minority leader in 2006. These days, Adam Schiff, another Californian by choice, chairs the committee.When it came to impeachment Pelosi moved slowly, and discounted the trigger-happy voices of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad”. Instead, she pivoted on the issue when seven first-term “security” Democrats, who had served in the military or intelligence, penned a Washington Post op-ed calling for impeachment proceedings.Four of the seven had refused to vote for Pelosi as speaker. Swing-district America weighed on Pelosi’s calculus.There are sentiments and then there is unvarnished math. Pelosi is by far a more adroit vote-counter than Paul Ryan or John Boehner, the past two Republican speakers. She is better at it than her own whip team, as Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, can attest.Pelosi’s weaknesses are delivering a set speech and the Sunday morning talkshows. That doesn’t seem so serious next to Newt Gingrich, the speaker who led the impeachment charge against Bill Clinton and resigned in disgrace. For that matter Denny Hastert, Gingrich’s successor, eventually went to prison for covering-up hush money payments to former students he had sexually abused.Pelosi is the one politician to repeatedly humble Trump in front of national audiences. She exudes competence, avoids scandal and has earned the gratitude and loyalty of her caucus. Her rise and return to the speakership were anything but inevitable. That’s what makes her story worth telling, and Ball is definitely up to the task.

President Donald Trump fumed in his remarks to the press last week: “What they’ve done is a disgrace, and I hope a big price is going to be paid. A big price should be paid. There’s never been anything like this in the history of our country...”Trump’s fury wasn’t directed at Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections, but instead at the Obama administration’s efforts to investigate the Kremlin’s malign operations. And his account of a phone call earlier in the day with Russian President Vladimir Putin suggests—as the Kremlin quickly inferred—that as Trump confidently wraps up the “Russia hoax,” Putin can be confident Trump’s in his corner, if not in his pocket.There’s Nothing Generous About Putin’s Coronavirus Aid to USDuring that phone call, as Trump told reporters, he told Putin the investigation of Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller was a “Russia hoax.” And since Russia is under heavy economic U.S. sanctions for its election-meddling, such a dismissive description would seem a clear signal Trump wants that restrictive regime to come to an end. If there was no meddling and it was all part of a conspiracy by Barack Obama, why would you punish the falsely accused Putin?Trump’s remarks, coming amid a flurry of questions about COVID-19 at a press opportunity with the governor of Texas, had started with a musing about sharing ventilators with Moscow, then Trump pivoted to elaborate on a theme mentioned nowhere in the official readouts of the call by the White House or the Kremlin.“And that was a very nice call,” said Trump. “And remember this: The Russia hoax made it very hard for Russia and the United States to deal with each other. They’re a very important nation. We’re the most powerful nation; they’re a very powerful nation. Why would we not be dealing with each other?”“But the Russia hoax is—absolute, dishonest hoax,” Trump continued. “Made it very difficult for our nation and their nation to deal. And we discussed that. I said, ‘You know, it’s a very appropriate time.’  Because things are falling out now and coming in line, showing what a hoax this whole investigation was. It was a total disgrace. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a lot of things happen over the next number of weeks. This is just one piece of a very dishonest puzzle.”One of those “things” that are “falling out” is the attempted dismissal of criminal charges against Mike Flynn—Putin’s dinner companion at a gala for the Kremlin propaganda organ RT television in December 2015. Trump’s overtures sounded very good to Kremlin ears. The upending of an investigation into the Russian election interference implies the end of sanctions against the perpetrators, if Trump can work his will on Congress.While the tidbits revealed by the American president were notably absent from the White House and Kremlin readouts, which also omitted any mention at all of the said commentary about Russia’s election interference, the Kremlin did note the “satisfaction” of both presidents at the conclusion of the phone call. Exchanges between the two leaders have become, in fact, unusually frequent in 2020, and Russian analysts have taken notice. Indeed, they have offered up some extremely ambitious predictions, anticipating that the standoff between the United States and Russia eventually will play out bigly in the Kremlin’s favor.Vitaly Mankevich, international-relations expert and the president of the Russian-Asian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, told Komsomolskaya Pravda—one of the most popular newspapers in Russia—that “the United States will abandon excessive pressure on Russia, since it does not pose an existential and ideological threat to Trump’s America (unlike the USSR during the Cold War). The White House will probably even try to pull Russia over to the U.S. side, offering investments and lifting sanctions.” Mankevich further predicted “a decrease in American activity in the Baltic states, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East.”Perhaps the tastiest bargain of all would be the anticipated handover of Ukraine to the Kremlin, in exchange for Russia’s support of the United States in its brewing conflict with China. Komsomolskaya Pravda concluded: “The United States may give Ukraine to Russia in an exchange for an alliance against China.” While Ukraine obviously is not Trump’s to give, the country is heavily dependent on the U.S. assistance for its very survival. Information revealed during the impeachment proceedings laid bare President Trump’s callous disregard toward Kyiv, combined with his overt longing to cozy up to the Kremlin.  On a larger scale, Vitaly Mankevich predicted the disintegration of NATO and the opportunity for Russia to re-establish a  hold over Eastern Europe unseen since the times of the Soviet Union. Of course, Mankevich emphasized, “this scenario is relevant only if Donald Trump is re-elected for a second term in November of 2020.”The ongoing motivation for Russia’s continued election interference explains why the English-speaking Kremlin-controlled networks have latched on to reports that aim to discredit former Vice President Joe Biden, while also presenting the U.S. democracy as “a sham,” with no one worth voting for. Destroying faith in the U.S. electoral process is one of the most important goals of the Kremlin’s anti-American propaganda. Another aim is to exacerbate the divisions in American society, but Trump is aptly accomplishing that—with or without Russia’s help. Trump’s re-election would provide a bouquet of benefits for the Kremlin and Biden’s considerably higher poll numbers are discussed with concern in the Russian state media.While the English-speaking bullhorns of the Kremlin have zeroed in on Tara Reade’s allegations against the highest-polling presidential candidate, the Russian state media back home quietly acknowledged that the timing of Reade’s disclosures clearly indicates an effort to undermine the candidacy of Biden. During his eponymous evening news show, host Vladimir Soloviev dismissively described Reade’s disclosures as a typical pre-election ploy, designed to erode Biden’s support (crude even by Kremlin standards). But that has not deterred the English-language state media from pushing the Reade accusations in hopes they’ll successfully torpedo Biden’s chances.The main incentive for the Kremlin’s ongoing support of the Trump presidency was eloquently summed up by Karen Shakhnazarov, CEO of Mosfilm Studio and a favored pundit on Russian state television: “Trump is a weak leader—and that is great for Russia. It’s also good for China.” Describing Trump as a synthesis of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—Russian leaders of the past associated with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the weakening of Russia— Shakhnazarov expressed his hope that Trump would bring about the destruction of the United States of America, akin to what happened to the USSR.But let’s return to the matter of ventilators that segued into Trump’s musings about his phone call with Putin.“I suggested if they need—because we have a lot of ventilators—if they need ventilators, we’d love to send them some, and we will do that at the appropriate time. We’ll send them some ventilators.”Question: “Did he take you up on it? Did he say—”Trump:  “Yeah. We’ll be doing that.”On this matter, the Kremlin’s commentators were far from enthusiastic. The absurdity of buying ventilators from Russia in April, only to offer U.S. ventilators to Russia in May, laid bare the propagandistic nature of such exchanges. And there’s this: Faulty Russian ventilators of the same make and model have caused fires and killed coronavirus patients in at least two Russian hospitals to date. It is unclear whether the potentially faulty Russian ventilators are currently being utilized in American hospitals, or sitting in storage as dormant metaphors of the Kremlin’s Trojan gifts.     Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.