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    Are Liberal Democrats Really ‘Bewildered’?

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    To the Editor:Re “Join My Bewildered Liberals Book Club,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, Feb. 23):I had previously read the books recommended by Mr. Kristof in his column. I take from them many of the same lessons he reiterates. I did find, though, his “bewildered liberals” characterization insulting. Many of us are frustrated, certainly, but not bewildered.As someone who graduated from college, but also worked for three different unions over a 40-year career, I have had firsthand experience with the travails of working men and women. But I part company with Mr. Kristof in laying so much of the blame for President Trump’s rise on misguided, liberal “elites,” who supposedly disdain or dismiss working people.Working men and women abandoned the labor movement in large numbers over the last four decades in part because their U.S.-based unions were ill equipped to deal with cheap, foreign competition that eliminated so many of their jobs.That competition was fostered by offshoring promoted by U.S. corporate and political elites from both sides of the aisle. But workers disarmed themselves politically and economically by too often blaming and abandoning unions in the face of that competition, instead of using the leverage that organizing provides to elect and influence more local, state and congressional allies.Elections have consequences, and until working people vote in their own interests again, aspiring despots like President Trump and Vice President JD Vance will win elections and workers will lose them.Doug AllenTruckee, Calif.To the Editor:I would add to Nicholas Kristof’s “Bewildered Liberals Book Club” list the sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s two excellent books about why low-income white people feel shamed and abused by liberals: “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” (2016), based in rural Louisiana, and “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right” (2024), focused on Pikeville, Ky.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Sums Up His Zelensky Showdown: ‘This Is Going to Be Great Television’

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      One of the most surreal moments of Friday’s Oval Office showdown between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine came at the very end.After all the shouting and the saber-rattling and the lecturing and the pleading and the politicking had ceased, the American president shifted a little in his seat and shared an observation.“This is going to be great television,” he remarked. “I will say that.”It was a conclusion as startling as it was fundamentally Trumpian.This was not a season finale boardroom scene of “The Apprentice” that had just taken place. It was the highest of high-stakes talks — one that could determine the fate of millions, the existence of a sovereign nation and the security of a continent — going wildly off the rails.But for Mr. Trump, one thing that was on his mind, as always, was the ratings. He sounded almost excited by the drama of the spectacle, as though he could feel the front pages of the world’s newspapers being written in real time.This is a man who spent years yelling at people on TV as a way to make a living. He is wired to think about things in terms of “great television.” He is a highly conscious performer. But playacting as a tough guy on NBC on Thursday nights between 9 and 10 p.m. is not the same thing as bossing around an ally before the eyes of the world, even if Mr. Trump uses the same language to describe one performance as he would the other.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Several Lawsuits Target the Lack of Transparency in Elon Musk’s DOGE

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      The lack of transparency surrounding the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is emerging as a target in the courts.Elon Musk likes to talk about transparency. But a major story my colleagues published today shows how he baked secrecy into his Department of Government Efficiency from the start.When devising a plan to overhaul the federal bureaucracy, Musk and his advisers deliberately designed an organizational structure that they thought would be outside the purview of federal public records laws, my colleagues wrote:The operation would take over the U.S. Digital Service, which had been housed within the Office of Management and Budget, and would become a stand-alone entity in the executive office of the president. Mr. Musk would not be named the DOGE administrator, but rather an adviser to Mr. Trump in the White House.White House advisers, unlike employees at other departments in the executive branch, are covered under executive privilege and typically do not have to disclose their emails or records immediately.Now that secrecy is emerging as a key legal target in the courts.Several lawsuits filed in recent weeks are pushing the administration to be more transparent about Musk’s and his initiative’s activities. They argue that the administration is violating the nation’s public records laws, and in some cases they are essentially asking judges to determine that the department is an agency that’s subject to those laws.“These lawsuits are essentially saying you can’t have an agency that’s this powerful, that’s making these enormous decisions, that’s also entirely secret and cut off from the public,” said Jonathan Shaub, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who advised President Biden on matters of executive privilege.That privilege is vast, and entities like the National Security Council have successfully drawn protections from it by arguing that their officials simply advise the president, who makes the final decisions. Some legal experts think that could be a harder case to make about the Department of Government Efficiency.It could all turn on the question of how much power Musk really has — an issue that came up in a hearing in another lawsuit in Washington today — and what his department really is.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World. Trump Just Handed Him the Knife.

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      Washington and Moscow have been repairing relations at breakneck speed, comparable only to the speed at which the Trump administration is breaking things at home. After meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the two sides had resolved to “eliminate impediments” to improving bilateral relations, a phrasing that sent chills down the spines of Russian exiles — myself included — who have sought what at the time seemed like safe harbor in the United States.Of course, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has his sights set on much more than a bunch of political exiles. And his negotiations with President Trump about Ukraine are not just about Ukraine. Putin wants nothing less than to reorganize the world, the way Joseph Stalin did with the accords he reached with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945. Putin has wanted to carve the globe up for a long time. Now, at last, Trump is handing him the knife.How do I know Putin wants this? Because he has said so. In fact, he, Lavrov and a cadre of Kremlin propagandists and revisionist historians haven’t shut up about Yalta for more than a decade. After illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, Putin addressed a gathering celebrating the 70th anniversary of the accords; it culminated in the unveiling of a monument to the three Allied leaders.His reverence for the Yalta accords goes beyond the glorification of the once-mighty Soviet Union and its leader Stalin; he believes that the agreement those three heads of state struck — with the Soviet Union keeping three Baltic States it had annexed as well as parts of Poland and Romania, and later securing domination over six Eastern and Central European countries and part of Germany — remains the only legitimate framework for European borders and security. In February, as Russia celebrated the accords’ 80th anniversary, and prepared to sit down with the Trump administration, Lavrov and the official Russia historians reiterated this message in article after article.This week, Alexander Dugin, a self-styled philosopher who has consistently supplied Putin with the ideological language to back up his policies, sat down for a long interview with Glenn Greenwald, the formerly leftist American journalist. Dugin affably explained why Russia invaded Ukraine: because it wanted and needed to reclaim its former European holdings but realistically could attempt to occupy only Ukraine. He also laid out potential pathways to ending the war. At the very least, he said, Russia would require a partition, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. He was purposefully using the language the Allies applied to Germany in Yalta.On X, where Dugin has been hyperactive in the last weeks, he is even bolder. In the lead-up to elections last week in Germany, he posted, “Vote AfD or we will occupy Germany once more and divide it between Russia and USA.” (A German journalist friend sent me a screenshot asking if the post was real — German journalists are less accustomed to the unimaginable than Russian ones.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Team Leaves Behind an Alliance in Crisis

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      European leaders felt certain about one thing after a whirlwind tour by Trump officials — they were entering a new world where it was harder to depend on the United States.Many critical issues were left uncertain — including the fate of Ukraine — at the end of Europe’s first encounter with an angry and impatient Trump administration. But one thing was clear: An epochal breach appears to be opening in the Western alliance.After three years of war that forged a new unity within NATO, the Trump administration has made clear it is planning to focus its attention elsewhere: in Asia, Latin America, the Arctic and anywhere President Trump believes the United States can obtain critical mineral rights.European officials who emerged from a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said they now expect that tens of thousands of American troops will be pulled out of Europe — the only question is how many, and how fast.And they fear that in one-on-one negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump is on his way to agreeing to terms that could ultimately put Moscow in a position to own a fifth of Ukraine and to prepare to take the rest in a few years’ time. Mr. Putin’s ultimate goal, they believe, is to break up the NATO alliance.Those fears spilled out on the stage of the Munich Security Conference on Saturday morning, when President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that “Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs.” He then called optimistically for the creation of an “army of Europe,” one that includes his now battle-hardened Ukrainian forces. He was advocating, in essence, a military alternative to NATO, a force that would make its own decisions without the influence — or the military control — of the United States.Mr. Zelensky predicted that Mr. Putin would soon seek to manipulate Mr. Trump, speculating that the Russian leader would invite the new American president to the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. “Putin will try to get the U.S. president standing on Red Square on May 9 this year,” he told a jammed hall of European diplomats and defense and intelligence officials, “not as a respected leader but as a prop in his own performance.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Zelensky Says Ukraine Is Unlikely to Survive the War Without U.S. Support

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      His comments came on the first day of the Munich Security Conference, where anxious European officials had hoped to learn more about U.S. plans to broker peace talks.President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an excerpt from an NBC interview published Friday night that Ukraine had a low chance of surviving Russia’s assault without U.S. support.In the excerpt from “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” Mr. Zelensky said: “Probably it will be very, very, very difficult. And of course, in all the difficult situations, you have a chance. But we will have low chance — low chance to survive without support of the United States.”The full interview is set to be broadcast on Sunday, according to NBC.His comments were aired on the first day of the Munich Security Conference, where hundreds of anxious European diplomats and others gathered expecting to hear Vice President JD Vance speak about President Trump’s strategy to broker peace negotiations with Russia to end the war in Ukraine.But Mr. Vance mentioned Ukraine only in passing and offered no road map for negotiations or even any strategic vision of what Europe should look like after the most devastating ground war being waged on the continent in 80 years. Instead, he urged European nations to stop isolating their far-right parties, saying the biggest security threat was the suppression of free speech.Earlier in the week, Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, jolted Kyiv and European allies of Ukraine by saying in a meeting with NATO and Ukrainian defense ministers in Brussels that the United States did not support Ukraine’s desire to join NATO as part of a peace plan. He also described a return to Ukraine’s borders before 2014 — when Russia annexed Crimea — as “unrealistic.”Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested trading U.S. aid for Ukraine’s critical minerals, telling Fox News earlier this month that he wanted “the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earths,” a group of minerals crucial for many high-tech products, in exchange for American aid. Ukraine had “essentially agreed to do that,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance Is in Charge of Getting a TikTok Deal. Can He Find a Buyer?

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      The vice president is in a tricky position as he looks for a deal to save the popular short-form video app, which is subject to being banned in the U.S. if it is not sold to a non-Chinese owner.Last week, an aide for Vice President JD Vance reached out to the billionaire Frank McCourt.The topic at hand was Mr. McCourt’s $20 billion long-shot offer to buy TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app. Mr. Vance’s aide wanted details about the bid, which was one of several public overtures for the app, according to two people familiar with the process.The inquiry was one of Mr. Vance’s earliest moves toward corralling a deal for the popular app after President Trump tapped him earlier this month to find an arrangement to save it. TikTok was recently banned in the United States under a new federal law that prohibited distribution in the country if it was not sold to a non-Chinese owner, though Mr. Trump delayed enforcement of the law until early April.Mr. Trump’s assignment plunges Mr. Vance into a fraught geopolitical and corporate negotiation over the fate of the app, which counts some 170 million American users. It is not clear who could buy TikTok in the United States, or even whether China or ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, would allow a sale. And the Trump administration is under scrutiny for its decision to disregard the law’s Jan. 19 deadline for a sale or a ban. Mr. Vance’s involvement ensures that he and Mr. Trump — both of whom once supported banning TikTok because of national security concerns — have some public accountability for saving it, according to analysts and people involved in negotiations for a sale. Tapping Mr. Vance could also help lend negotiations more credibility, said Peter Harrell, a former Biden White House official who worked on national security, tech and economic issues.“What he brings to the role is everybody’s going to take his call and take him seriously,” Mr. Harrell said. “Most people, given Trump has been pretty clear he’s tapped Vance for this, will assume that Vance is speaking for the president.”An electronic billboard for TikTok in Times Square. Mr. Vance’s involvement adds some credibility to the White House’s efforts to find new owner for TikTok.Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Vance Tells Europeans to Stop Shunning Parties Deemed Extreme

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      Vice President JD Vance told European leaders on Friday that their biggest security threat was not military aggression from Russia or China, but their own suppression of free speech — including efforts to block hard-right parties from joining governments.An audience that was largely expecting Mr. Vance to lay out the Trump administration’s priorities for the trans-Atlantic alliance, NATO military spending and negotiations with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, instead received a lecture on what Mr. Vance described as the continent’s own failures in living up to democratic ideals.Those failures, Mr. Vance said, included efforts to restrict so-called “misinformation” and other content on social media and laws against abortion protests that he said unfairly silenced Christians.Perhaps most strikingly, the vice president called on Europeans to drop their opposition to working with anti-immigration parties, calling them a legitimate expression of the will of voters angered by high levels of migration over the last decade. Those parties include the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, parts of which have been classified as extremist by German intelligence.Supporters of the Alternative for Germany party at a campaign launch event in Halle, Germany, last month.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesAll other parties in Germany refuse to join with the AfD in forming governments, an effort known as a “firewall” against extremism in a country where memories of the Nazis still dominate its political culture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Vance, in First Foreign Speech, Tells Europe That U.S. Will Dominate A.I.

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      Speaking in Paris at an artificial intelligence summit, the vice president gave an America First vision of the technology — with the U.S. dominating the chips, the software and the rules.Vice President JD Vance told European and Asian leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the Trump Administration was adopting an aggressive, America First approach to the race to dominate all the building blocks of artificial intelligence, and warned Europeans to dismantle regulations and get aboard with Washington.On his first foreign trip since taking office, Mr. Vance used his opening address at an A.I. summit meeting hosted by France and India to describe his vision of a coming era of American technological domination. Europe, he said, would be forced to chose between using American-designed and manufactured technology or siding with authoritarian competitors — a not-very-veiled reference to China — who would exploit the technology to their detriment.“The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful A.I. systems are built in the U.S. with American design and manufactured chips,” he said, quickly adding that “just because we are the leader doesn’t mean we want to or need to go it alone.”But he said that for Europe to become what he clearly envisions as a junior partner, it must eliminate much of its digital regulatory structure — and much of its policing of the internet for what its governments define as disinformation.For Mr. Vance, who is on a weeklong tour that will take him next to the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s premier meeting of leaders, foreign and defense ministers and others, the speech was clearly intended as a warning shot. It largely silenced the hall in a wing of the Grand Palais in the center of Paris. Leaders accustomed to talking about “guardrails” for emerging artificial intelligence applications and “equity” to assure the technology is available and comfortable for underserved populations heard none of those phrases from Mr. Vance.He spoke only hours after President Trump put new 25 percent tariffs on foreign steel, essentially negating trade agreements with Europe and other regions. Mr. Vance’s speech, precisely composed and delivered with emphasis, seemed an indicator of the tone Mr. Trump’s national security leaders plan to take to Europe this week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More