‘Not something to celebrate’: As it turns 80 and faces dwindling global clout, can the UN survive?

The United Nations, a collaborative global dream built into reality out of the ashes of World War II, marks its 80th anniversary this month. There’s little to celebrate.

Its clout on the world stage is diminished. Facing major funding cuts from the United States and others, it has been forced to shed jobs and start tackling long-delayed reforms. Its longtime credo of “multilateralism" is under siege. Its most powerful body, the Security Council, has been blocked from taking action to end the two major wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

And as the latest conflict between Israel, Iran and the United States flared, it watched from the sidelines.

Four generations after its founding, as it tries to chart a new path for its future, a question hangs over the institution and the nearly 150,000 people it employs and oversees: Can the United Nations remain relevant in an increasingly contentious and fragmented world?

With its dream of collaboration drifting, can it even survive?

An act of optimism created it

When the United Nations was born in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, the overriding goal of the 50 participants who signed the U.N. Charter was stated in its first words: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

Earlier this year, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sounded that same theme: “Eight decades later, one can draw a direct line between the creation of the United Nations and the prevention of a third world war.”

There has been no such war — thus far. But conflicts still rage.

They continue not only in Gaza and Ukraine but Sudan, eastern CongoHaiti and Myanmar – to name a few – and, most recently, Iran and Israel. The needs of tens of millions of people caught up in fighting and trapped in poverty have increased even as rich donor nations, not just the United States, are reducing their aid budgets.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks in Nov. 2024 during a plenary session at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The U.N. General Assembly is planning a commemoration on the 80th anniversary on June 26. This week an exhibition on the San Francisco meeting opened at U.N. headquarters with a rare centerpiece — the original U.N. Charter, on loan from the U.S. National Archives in Washington.

But the mood in the halls of the U.N. headquarters in New York is grim.

Diplomats are anxious about the immediate future, especially the outcome expected in August of a U.S. review of the United Nations and other multilateral institutions ordered by President Donald Trump. And U.N. staff here and in more than 60 offices, agencies and operations that get money from its regular operating budget are facing 20% job cuts, part of Guterres’ reform effort and reaction to already announced Trump funding cuts.

“It’s not something to celebrate,” Kazakhstan’s U.N. Ambassador Kairat Umarov said of the upcoming anniversary.

“This should be united nations — not disunited,” he said. “Collectively, we can do a lot,” but today “we cannot agree on many things, so we agree to disagree.”

A changing world accommodated a changing UN

In a different world of land-line telephones, radios and propeller planes, the U.N. Charter was signed by just 50 nations — mainly from Latin America and Europe, with half a dozen from the Mideast, and just a few from Asia and Africa.

Over the decades, its membership has nearly quadrupled to 193 member nations, with 54 African countries now the largest bloc followed by the 54 from Asia and the Pacific. And the world has changed dramatically with the advent of computers and satellites, becoming what the late former Secretary-General Kofi Annan called a “global village.”

The U.N. system has also expanded enormously from its origins, which focused on peace and security, economic and social issues, justice and trusteeships for colonies.

Today, the map of the U.N. system looks like a multi-headed octopus with many tentacles — and miniature tentacles sprouting from those. In 2023, its secretariat and numerous funds, agencies and entities dealing with everything from children and refugees to peacekeeping and human rights had over 133,000 staff worldwide.

U.N. peacekeepers patrol on the Lebanese side of the Lebanese-Israeli border in the southern village of Kfar Kila, with the Israeli town of Metula in the background in Oct. 2023.

Kishore Mahbubani, who served twice as Singapore’s U.N. ambassador, credited the United Nations with thus far preventing World War III. While there are still wars, deaths have continued a long-term decline “and the world is still, overall, a much more peaceful place,” he said.

“And many small states still live in peace, not having to worry about the neighbors occupying them,” said Mahbubani, a respected geopolitical analyst.

Mahbubani and others also point to successes in the 71 U.N. peacekeeping operations since 1948, including in Angola, Cambodia, Sierra Leone (which is currently a member of the Security Council) and Liberia (which will join in January).

There is also wide praise for specialized U.N. agencies, especially those dealing with hunger, refugees and children as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the U.N’s nuclear watchdog, and the International Telecommunications Union. Among numerous responsibilities, it allocates the global radio spectrum and satellite orbits and brings digital connectivity to millions.

As Guterres told the Security Council earlier this year, “The United Nations remains the essential, one-of-a-kind meeting ground to advance peace, sustainable development and human rights.”

What actually gets done at the UN?

Every September, world leaders get a global platform at the General Assembly. And every day their ambassadors and diplomats meet to debate issues from conflicts to climate change to the fight for gender equality and quality education. Sometimes, such talks produce little or no results. At others, achievements get overlooked or ignored by the broader world community, far from the hubs of diplomacy.

And the Security Council is the only place where Russia and Ukraine regularly face off over the ongoing war following Russia’s 2022 invasion — and where the Palestinian and Israeli ambassadors frequently confront each other.

The United Nations Security Council meets in June 2023.

Despite its successes and achievements over past decades, Singapore’s Mahbubani called the U.N. today “a very sad place,” lamenting that Guterres had failed “to inspire humanity” as the late Pope Francis did. “But,” Mahbubani said, “it should celebrate the fact it is alive and not dead.”

John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who was national security adviser during Trump’s first term, was also critical of the state of the U.N. in 2025. “It’s probably in the worst shape it’s been in since it was founded,” said Bolton, now an outspoken Trump critic.

He pointed to gridlock in the Security Council on key issues. He blames rising international tensions that divide the council’s five veto-wielding powers – with Russia and China facing off against U.S., Britain and France on many global challenges.

Richard Gowan, U.N. director of the International Crisis Group, a think tank, said the United Nations has bounced from crisis to crisis since the 1990s. With the gloomy geopolitical picture and U.S. funding cuts impacting humanitarian operations, he said this “is not just another blow-up that will blow over."

"Everyone seems to be resigned to the fact that you’re going to have a smaller U.N. in a few years’ time," Gowan said. "And that is partially because virtually every member state has other priorities.”

What happens in the UN's next chapter?

Guterres has launched several major reform efforts, getting approval from U.N. member nations last September for a “Pact for the Future” – a blueprint to bring the world together to tackle 21st-century challenges. Gowan said Guterres’ successor, who will be elected next year and take over in 2027, will have to shrink the organization. But many cuts, consolidations and changes will require approval of the divided U.N. membership. Possible radical reforms include merging U.N. aid and development agencies to avoid duplication.

Don’t forget, says Gowan, that a huge amount of diplomatic business — much of it having nothing to do with the United Nations — gets done because it is in New York, a place to have those conversations.

“If you were to close the U.N., there would also be a lot of intelligence people and spies who would be deeply disappointed. Because it’s a wonderful place to cultivate your contacts,” Gowan said. “Americans may not realize that having the U.N. in New York is a bonanza for us spying on other nations. So we shouldn’t let that go.”

Flagpoles in front of the United Nations building in Geneva, Switzerland.

Ian Bremmer, who heads the Eurasia Group, a political risk and consulting firm, said the Trump administration’s attempts to undermine the United Nations — which the United States conceived in 1945 — will make China more important. With Trump exiting from the World Health Organization, the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees known as UNRWA and cutting humanitarian funding, he said, China will become “the most influential and the most deep-pocketed” in those agencies.

Bremmer, who calls himself a close adviser to Guterres, insisted the United Nations remains relevant — “with no caveats.”

“It’s a relatively poorly resourced organization. It has no military capabilities. It has no autonomous foreign policy,” Bremmer said. “But its legitimacy and its credibility in speaking for 8 billion people on this little planet of ours is unique."

He added: "The important thing is that as long as the great powers decide not to leave the United Nations, every day that they stay is a vote of confidence in the U.N."

Expansion of the U.N. Security Council is probably the most fertile area for potential change. Decades of discussions have failed to agree on how to enlarge the 15-member council to reflect the global realities of the 21st century, though there is wide agreement that Africa and Latin America deserve permanent seats.

Singapore’s Mahbubani said he believes the United Nations “will definitely survive.” The “genius” of its founders, he said, was to give the big powers after World War II a veto in the Security Council, preventing the global body from dying as its predecessor, the League of Nations, did. That survival, Mahbubani believes, will continue: “It will," he said, "outlast us all."

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Biden challenger Dean Phillips gets his shot at primetime interview and it goes pretty poorly

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips is running in the Democratic Party’s primary to try and unseat incumbent President Joe Biden. The launch of his campaign has been met with dismal polling numbers, coming in at 6% support, which trails Marianne Williamson at 8%, who in turn trails Biden by more than 50 percentage points.

On Tuesday, Phillips’ campaign made a push, releasing attack ads against Biden and sitting down with CNN’s Abby Phillip for a primetime interview. It didn’t go particularly well. The CNN host asked Phillips about the backlash he’s received from a recently published interview with The Atlantic, where he obliquely questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ competency to be president.

Phillips’ response was to try on what seemed to be an attempt at a shoot-from-the-hip catchphrase, saying, “I'm the one who says—I'm the one who says the quiet part out loud. I think that's pretty well documented,” but the CNN host pressed him as to why he would repeat these “comments.”

The man who just told everyone that it is “pretty well documented” that he is “the one who says the quiet part out loud” explained, “I do not recall saying those words. I recall those words being shared with me, and saying that’s what people have been saying.”

He proceeded to say both Biden and Harris were good people and that it wasn’t him saying these things. He switched tacks to argue that, in fact, the low approval ratings being touted by media outlets prove that both Biden and Harris have people saying these things about them. Of course, if that’s the metric, Phillips is even less exciting to Americans.

While that didn’t go well, maybe Phillips could get back on board and show solid leadership and diplomacy around Biden’s behind-the-scenes success in helping to broker a hostage deal and temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

ABBY PHILLIP: The reporting is that Hamas would release kidnapped Israeli hostages in exchange for a 3-to-1 ratio of Palestinian prisoners: women and minors—children who are in Israeli prison. If you were president of the United States, would you accept that deal?

REP: DEAN PHILLIPS: No, because we have nine Americans held hostage right now by Hamas, have been there for six weeks, including at least one child. And by now, I would have expected American special forces to perhaps play a hand in extracting them. I think it's absurd, shocking, and dismaying that six weeks later we still have American hostages held by a terror organization in Gaza. I'm happy for the Israelis, don't get me wrong. Hamas should release all hostages. But the fact that we have Americans sitting in Gaza right now held hostage is appalling and should be addressed immediately.

PHILLIP: ​​So to be clear, you would turn down even this opportunity to free 50 hostages, and I want to just clarify for the audience, these are Israelis, but some of them are dual citizens—they hold dual passports, including some Americans.

PHILLIPS: If all Americans are included that are held hostage right now, of course I would approve it. If there's a single American that is still held hostage after this deal. No, I think it's that important, Abby. I think the American president has an obligation to extract Americans. It's been six weeks, and I'm happy that some are being released, but every single American citizen should be part of that group. And if I were the American president, I would not agree to anything until every single one of them is released. I would demand it. And if it wasn't done, we have to use every lever available to us to ensure it.

Phillip decided to try and tease out how unsophisticated the candidate’s statement is as an actual policy position.

PHILLIP: Well, you have said that the war has taken an unacceptable toll on Palestinian citizens and civilians—

PHILLIPS: —And Israelis.

PHILLIP: And, of course, on Israelis. But in terms of the toll on Palestinians in Gaza, you're saying a cease-fire only in exchange for the hostages. It seems pretty clear at this point those are not terms that Hamas will accept. So how will you get them to agree to release all of the hostages, which they've refused to do up until this point, simply by putting a cease-fire on the table?

PHILLIPS: First of all, Hamas should have been eliminated years ago. The fact that a terror organization will not release 200 humans in exchange for the preservation of life of the people they ostensibly represent is appalling. By the way, this is a failure, Abby, of the past—

PHILLIP:—But what will you do about it, is my question? What would you do if you were president? What would you do to change that?

PHILLIPS: Just like I proposed, release the 200 hostages. There will be an immediate—

PHILLIP:—Hamas has to—Hamas has to do that. So how do you get Hamas to do it?

PHILLIPS: Hamas—Hamas has to do it because—ow do you get Hamas to do it?

PHILLIP: Yeah.

PHILLIPS: You make the—this is exactly the presentation: Release 200 hostages, an immediate cease-fire, and a multinational security force to maintain security for all Palestinians in Gaza. That eliminates Israel's responsibility.

PHILLIP: Do you think that the Biden administration is deferring too much to the Israeli government in how this war is conducted? Because it kind of sounds like what you're saying is that you think that the United States government should simply just go in there and release the Americans.

Regardless of your position on the conflict in Israel and Gaza, arguing that the Biden administration forgot to ask for all hostages to be released and a cease-fire is not a position. And most importantly, it isn’t a meaningful position in opposition to Biden. Phillips' candidacy remains an enigma.

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Republicans are challenging labor leaders to fights and allegedly physically assaulting one another. Donald Trump says he will abolish reproductive rights entirely and is openly calling for the extermination of his detractors, referring to them as “vermin” on Veterans Day. The Republican Party has emerged from its corruption cocoon as a full-blown fascist movement.

One of Trump’s closest White House advisers admits that ‘it’s hard to describe how little he knows’

The disgraced former president’s top national security adviser has been doing a slew of interviews the past few weeks. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, John Bolton, like most former national security advisers, has found himself being asked for his opinion on rapidly changing events. John Bolton’s bona fides as a truly terrifying warmonger span decades, and he has been critical of Trump—for a price. Bolton says what most of us already know: Trump’s extortion attempts, in the form of holding back military aid from Ukraine in order to dig up dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter, is a big part of the reason Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine until now.

“He obviously saw that Trump had contempt for the Ukrainians. I think that had an impact,” Bolton told VICE earlier this month. Bolton goes on to detail a phone conversation Trump had with Vladimir Putin, shortly after Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected, during which Trump asked Putin how he felt about him. According to Bolton, Trump’s lack of knowledge and backbone in that conversation likely reinforced Putin’s belief that Trump didn’t have strong feelings in support of Ukraine’s leadership.

Trump’s choice to bring Bolton on to replace H.R. McMaster was considered ominous at the time, since Bolton’s No. 1 foreign policy idea has always seemed to be “invade everybody.” But Bolton was in the rooms where Donald Trump conducted foreign policy discussions and played little brother to Putin. “Trump had no idea what the stakes were in Ukraine,” Bolton said.

Related: John Bolton is a warmongering jackass who just happens to have information vital to the nation

Related: Trump is replacing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster with warmonger John Bolton

Related: Lou Dobbs offers up conspiracy theory that John Bolton is working for the 'deep state'

Bolton also pointed out that Trump’s general dislike of NATO, and his work to undermine NATO, worked in favor of Putin’s position. Trump’s interest in Ukraine, according to Bolton’s book, only perked up in “the summer of 2019 when [Trump] realized that he could have the possibility of holding up the obligation and delivery of substantial security assistance [to Ukraine] in an effort to get access to the Hillary Clinton computer server that he felt was in Ukraine, finding out about Hunter Biden’s income in Ukraine, and all of these things in this spaghetti bowl of conspiracy theories. That was the first time he really focused.”

In fact, Bolton explained to VICE, Trump’s lack of curiosity for anything is profound. “It's hard for me to describe how little he knows,” Bolton tried to explain. This true mediocrity is why Trump’s reasoning for things is so whimsical and useless. He has no context or knowledge for much of anything. “He once asked [then-White House Chief of Staff] John Kelly if Finland was part of Russia. What he cared about was the DNC server, and Hunter Biden, and the 2016 election, and the 2020 election. That's what it was all about. And I think he had next to no idea what the larger issues were.”

As a result, Vladimir Putin didn’t have to be aggressive about much of anything regarding U.S. policy in the region. “I think one of the reasons that Putin did not move during Trump’s term in office was he saw the president’s hostility of NATO. Putin saw Trump doing a lot of his work for him, and thought, maybe in a second term, Trump would make good on his desire to get out of NATO, and then it would just ease Putin’s path just that much more.” In another interview, Bolton said of Trump’s threats to pull out of NATO, “I think Putin was waiting for that.”

Bolton’s beef with Trump has also led him to rail against the right-wing narrative that Trump was tough on Putin, with the U.S. under Trump applying sanctions to Russia. “In almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it, saying we were being too hard,” told Newsmax when that ultra-right-wing outlet tried to get him to go along with the narrative that Biden was at fault for everything in the history of ever.

Bolton, in an interview with the Washington Post earlier in March, Bolton said that he believed Vladimir Putin’s lack of open invasion of Ukraine during the Trump administration was possibly predicated on the Russian dictator’s belief that Trump would pull the United States out of NATO during a second term in office.

Arguably the saddest exchange between Bolton and VICE’s interviewer is the one when Bolton says he is unsure what Trump would have done if Russia had invaded Ukraine when Trump was in office. He joked, “He never got that server! Those Ukrainians wouldn’t give him the server!” The interviewer remarked that Ukraine probably wished that this mythical server with Hillary’s secret plans existed so they could have ingratiated themselves to Trump. Bolton’s reply, also clearly joking (or half-joking, at least) sounds like something Trump and the MAGA world would have held up as proof, not the absurdist joke it would have been:

“They should have given him a server and said, ‘Hey, we found that—may have been erased, but here's the server.’”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger brings a bazooka to Josh Hawley’s knife fight

After being one of only 10 House Republicans to vote for Donald Trump’s impeachment, Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois announced that he would be retiring from the House in 2022. After cultivating Tea Party support back in 2010, Rep. Kinzinger has fallen out of favor with the fascist base the Tea Party movement has morphed into. Along with Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Kinzinger has become the main public target for the MAGA-wing of the Republican Party in the battle for power being waged between the old guard and the monster love child they have created.

Rep. Kinzinger has the conservative qualities we have come to expect from GOP officials: he is willing to say some heavy shit to attack the people he perceives as his enemies. He is also one of the main Republicans on the House select committee to investigate what happened leading up to and around Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. This means the GOP’s loudest, most obnoxious, and likely criminal sector of the Party, have named Kinzinger as their enemy.

On Wednesday, news reports came out that Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri—best known for being a truly abhorrent coward of a man—was “urging the Biden administration to drop any U.S. support for Ukrainian membership in NATO.” To many, this statement shows a very mysterious and frightening bit of similarity with the openly corrupt moves and policies of former President Trump and the associates he was forced to pardon. Rep. Kinzinger made a statement on Twitter that, while lacking nuance, is pretty goddamn amazing.

With a link to an article about Hawley’s position, Kinzinger wrote, “I hate to be so personal, but Hawley is one of the worst human beings, and a self egrandizing [sic] con artist. When Trump goes down I certainly hope this evil will be layed [sic] in the open for all to see, and be ashamed of.” Those are the kinds of phone typos one makes when one is fuming angry.

To be clear, Sen. Hawley’s position on Ukraine isn’t some peacenik, let us deescalate tensions with Russia foreign policy idea. Hawley would like those military members back in our country, protecting a selection of whites from Americans he doesn’t want voting. Up until [checks watch] Donald Trump and Paul Manafort, it was his political party’s position that Ukraine should be a part of NATO.

A reminder, Rep. Kinzinger is still a large part of the problem, but he is fighting to wrestle it away from politicians who are somehow even more detestable than him and Liz Cheney. The fact that former dark lord of the underworld, Dick Cheney’s daughter isn’t evil enough for the current crop of GOP operatives is terrifying.

History will remember that when democracy was at stake Adam Kinzinger voted against voting rights, by proxy. pic.twitter.com/vgvSOrIvvn

— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) January 13, 2022

Sen. Hawley has already said all of the quiet things out loud. He has called Republican Jesus, Ronald Reagan, “ancient history,” and saluted the prospective insurrectionists with what seemed to be a white power sign, the morning of January 6, 2021. And he has always been this way. Since he was 15-years-old, he has defended the indefensible, people like disgraced racist Los Angeles cop Mark Fuhrman, and the Oklahoma City bombers. The state he represents has recently proposed a law that would in essence make murder legal, and more specifically the kind of murder our history books more correctly term “lynching.” 

Rep. Kinzinger and Rep. Liz Cheney are fighting for their political lives at this point in time. They represent the previous GOP establishment that had a little more generational wealth attached to their version of white supremacy. Rep. Kinzinger made the mistake of believing that Trump would leave and that the rest of the GOP would rally around moving forward with their big donor list and the billionaires that support them. Unfortunately, we are living in desperate times and the only way that Cheney and Kinzinger can survive is to do the right thing and bring criminal charges to light about the complicity and the possible conspiracy by Republicans like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Louie Gohmert, Mo Brooks, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, and others, to overturn our democratically elected 46th President.

John Kelly defends Vindman for doing ‘exactly’ the right thing in response to an illegal order

For better than a year, John Kelly played the role of chief of staff for Donald Trump, during which time he was the designated the “adult in the room” who would supposedly keep Trump’s bad-baby behavior under control. That went so well. Kelly, who spent the six months before that running Homeland Security and turning the Border Patrol into a meaner and also a meaner force, was apparently unhappy during those White House days. But he could keep quiet for the sake of the children … that he put in cages.

Since then, Kelly has sat out any number of outrages. But it seems that in the post-impeachment world, as Trump is systematically disassembling the vestiges of the Justice Department and sending a key witness in his impeachment proceedings, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, off to somewhere so that “the military can do what they want” to him, Kelly has reached the point of being concerned enough to speak up—just like everyone else who leaves Trump’s White House and speaks out only when it can’t do a damn bit of good.

During his time sitting outside Trump’s office door, Kelly was often described as angry at some Trump policy, or frustrated by his inability to control Trump’s chaotic behavior, or infuriated by Trump’s willingness to listen to anyone who praised him, even when they didn’t have a clue about the facts. But the only effect of that anger seemed to be that for much of his time in office, Kelly was something less than a figurehead. He and Trump seemed to rarely talk, and policies were made without his knowledge or presence.

Now that he’s borrowed Susan Collins’ wagging finger of concern, Kelly has quite a few items on his list. As The Atlantic reports, Kelly spoke to students and guests at Drew University in New Jersey for over an hour, laying out concerns about

Trump’s personal relationship with Vladimir Putin and how it shaped U.S. policy with regard to Russia. Trump’s personal relationship with Kim Jong Un and how it shaped U.S. policy with regard to North Korea. Trump’s intervention in military discipline to pardon service members accused of war crimes. Trump’s absolute fixation on building a border wall and how it shaped policy with regard to Mexico and Central America.

On that last point, Kelly also expressed concern about about the language and tactics Trump used in his immigration policy, including calling all immigrants rapists. Which was very much not an apology for his role in the whole system.

However, one topic on which Kelly was particularly vocal was Trump’s actions against Vindman. Kelly praised the Army colonel, saying that Vindman did just what he was supposed to do when he reported his concerns about Trump’s call to the Ukrainian president. As The Hill reported, Kelly painted Vindman’s actions as just what would be expected of a good officer. “He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave,” said Kelly. “He went and told his boss what he just heard.”

Kelly described what Trump has said was a “perfect call” as a fundamental change in the relationship between the United States and Ukraine. Until that point, starting during the Obama administration, the United States had a policy of supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia. With that call, Trump predicated that support on getting a personal political advantage.

“We teach them, don’t follow an illegal order.” said Kelly. “And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.”

But, of course, John Kelly is just one of “Trump’s generals”—the group that Trump used to give himself a semblance of credibility during his first days in office. All of them have since been disposed of, and Kelly’s words are likely to have all the sting of a tongue-lashing from James Mattis, or … Pufnstuf? Something like that.

Trump doesn’t need generals anymore. Or laws. But he may learn something from Kelly—that it’s time to get rid of the idea of an illegal order. When it comes from Trump, it can’t be illegal.

More leaks show Bolton’s book skewers Trump on his fondness for dictators

Even as Alan Dershowitz was wrapping up a day in which Trump’s legal team operated on the pretense that contents from John Bolton’s upcoming book had not been leaked over the weekend, The New York Times released more material from the manuscript. The primary subject of the new material was not Trump’s efforts to extort Ukraine, but some of his connections to other foreign governments, including those of Turkey and China, where Trump appeared to be placing a personal relationship—or personal benefits—above national concerns.

The most interesting point from the just-reported pages might not be so much what as who. Because it was not only John Bolton who expressed concern about Trump’s willingness to nod along with dictators. Also worried by Trump’s actions was the man who has been Trump’s primary enabler: Attorney General William Barr.

While Bolton was fretting that Trump was weakening national security policies toward Turkey and China to maintain his personal relationships with Tayyip Erdoğan and cake-buddy Xi Jinping, Barr had other concerns. The issues with both Turkey and China were the subjects of independent investigations by the FBI and the Department of Justice. But Trump was directly putting his fingers all over the issues involved in those investigations. That appears to include having had conversations with both Erdoğan and Xi in which he may have passed along information on the status of the investigations.

Even before his election, Trump had a fondness for dictators. Since he has occupied the White House, that unbridled power has become the model for how he does business, and for what he looks for in a “peer.” Erdoğan, Xi, Mohammed bin Salman, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Rodrigo Duterte come in for almost unlimited praise for their “toughness,” even when that toughness is expressed in mass murder. On the other hand, more democratic leaders of traditional allies—from Canada to European countries—have come in for constant attacks by Trump. Apparently even senior officials in Trump’s White House are less than thrilled with his willingness to embrace dictators and swoon over those whose policies are far from democratic ideals. Trump’s actions have also interfered in investigations targeting financial institutions involved in money laundering and evading international sanctions.

As The Washington Post reports, each release of information from Bolton’s book is turning up the heat in D.C. While this certainly isn’t the first book in which a former member of the Trump White House details the deep dysfunction and struggle to patch over Trump’s latest disasters, Bolton’s long history within the Republican Party is giving this manuscript extra impact. That impact is multiplied a thousandfold by the timing of the leak during Trump’s impeachment.

According to the Post, the connection between Ukraine funds and the desired investigation into a political rival isn’t a quick hit in the manuscript, but part of over a dozen pages devoted to Bolton’s involvement in the Ukraine scheme. The Post also notes a lot of friction that existed between Trump’s staff of personally loyal toadies and Bolton as a representative of old-school Republican conservatives. Bolton was looked on from the beginning not as an agent of the deep state, but as an agent of the traditional right—and there was no love lost between Bolton and Trump, or Bolton and Trump’s closest supporters.

What both the manuscript and White House reports indicate is that Bolton “was regularly appalled” by Trump’s actions and statements. So appalled that he was willing to tell anyone—after he left the administration and signed a seven-figure contract.