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| Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your Tuesday foreign policy edition. I’m Julia Ioffe.
A couple of things before we get into it. First, on May 29 at the French Embassy in D.C., Puck will host a screening of For Love & Life: No Ordinary Campaign, a film chronicling the life and times of attorney-activist Brian Wallach and his wife, Sandra, in the aftermath of his A.L.S. diagnosis at age 37. Following the screening, I will be interviewing the filmmaker, Christopher Burke. You can RSVP here.
Second, last night, The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper premiered his special, Moscow Tools, about how MAGA world is increasingly enamored with Vladimir Putin and Russia. Klepper and his team asked me to be a part of it, which was, of course, a blast. (I was once on Klepper’s solo show, The Opposition, where I taught him about an obscure and bizarre Russian beauty procedure.) The special is genuinely hilarious and disturbing, and Klepper does a fantastic job of showing just how bamboozled a lot of MAGA supporters have been, both by Moscow and by Donald Trump himself.
During the special, I reference a Kremlin document that my friend, the legendary Catherine Belton, got a hold of and wrote about in The Washington Post. It’s a proposal by one of the political consulting firms that the Kremlin uses to help get its message out, and its owner, Ilya Gambashidze, has been sanctioned by the U.S. for his “malign influence efforts.” According to the Treasury Department, Gambashidze and his firm, Social Design Agency, worked “on behalf of the GoR”—that is, government of Russia—and “implemented a campaign that impersonated news websites, staged videos, and fake social media accounts.” According to the sanctions announcement, among other things, “Gambashidze, … on behalf of GoR, [created] a sprawling network of over 60 websites that impersonated legitimate news organizations, and which used misleading social media accounts to amplify the content of the spoofed websites.”
The paper I’m holding in my hand as I talk to Klepper is the document Catherine discovered, a pitch for how to keep spreading this malign Kremlin influence inside the U.S. Klepper and I talked about it for a long time, and so obviously a lot of it got cut from the half-hour special, but the document is a gold mine and the stuff that got left on the cutting room floor is so deeply telling about how Moscow thinks about American politics—as well as about how it continues to influence them.
The document begins by setting the scene. America is by far the most politically polarized country in the West, it says. The split is between Democrats and Republicans. The former, the document says, “from our point of view, are left or extreme left globalists who advocate for the perversion of traditional moral and religious values.” The G.O.P., on the other hand, “are normal people who advocate for the preservation of the traditional American way of life,” the document states. “It’s important to note that ‘Democrats’ are also colored and are proponents of ‘affirmative action’ and ‘reverse discrimination,’ that is, the infringement of the rights of the white population of the U.S.A., while ‘Republicans’ are victims of discrimination by the colored.”
Sound familiar?
The proposal is very clear about who the target audience for this influence campaign is: “Republican voters, supporters of Donald Trump, supporters of traditional family values, white Americans from the lower middle class.”
The themes that the campaign wants to push out into the American media space will sound familiar, too. The economy is bad under Joe Biden (“general poverty, record inflation, stalled economic growth, impossible grocery prices”); “the risk of unemployment for white Americans”; reverse racism (“privileges for the colored, perverts, and invalids”); crime “committed by the colored and immigrants”; government spending on far-away wars (“too much spending on foreign policy that comes at a cost to white citizens of the U.S.A.”); Biden is getting the U.S. sucked into a war with Russia (“we are getting dragged into a war, our boys will die in Ukraine”). If you’ve followed the messaging on the right—for example, by reading Tina and Tara here at Puck—all of that will ring some very eerie bells. Which is why one of the ways the proposal suggests getting all that information out there is through comments on social media, memes, articles and “video content … in the style of Fox News.”
It’s an incredible document in part because it just comes out and says it, which is why I thought I’d share with you what’s in it—and what got left out of the Post story and the Klepper special.
Anyway, onward to antisemitism in America. But first, here’s Abby Livingston from the Hill… |
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A draft of the new monthly D.C.C.C. dues sheet is being passed around the House Democratic caucus today. This widely disseminated and anxiety-inducing spreadsheet outlines exactly how much progress each House Democratic member has made toward paying their “dues,” or their assigned donations that fund Democratic campaigns in competitive districts. This routine shaming exercise is unique to House Democrats; House Republicans have a golf-style leaderboard, but alas, they don’t distribute the results in emailable format. Here’s the readout…
- Jefferies’ largesse: Members’ dues are calculated based on their committee assignments, party rank, and seniority. So far, 50 Democratic members have hit their marks. This includes Hakeem Jeffries, who’s paid out almost three times more than the $1 million the D.C.C.C. requested of him, while topping every other category encompassing colleague campaign support. Dozens of other members have paid off much smaller dues requests, some as low as $160,000.
- Spanberger’s parting gift: Members who are retiring or leaving office to run statewide are exempt from dues requirements. Given that they won’t be returning, there’s no need to earn brownie points from leadership. In fact, opting against paying dues is sometimes a tell that a member is considering retirement.And then there’s Abigail Spanberger. More than a month after launching her gubernatorial campaign in November, the Virginia Democrat began cutting checks from her federal campaign and leadership PAC to pay off her $190,000 in dues. Spanberger could have legally transferred all of that money to her gubernatorial campaign. It’s unusual, but it seems Spanberger, a former frontliner, is making an exit donation as a show of moral support to the current frontliners, and to set an example for members who don’t pay their dues at all.
- A.O.C. murmurs: We now know a bit more about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first-ever donation to the D.C.C.C. As previously reported in a widely noted New York Times story, A.O.C. paid $260,000 to the committee, which was exactly the amount requested of her. She sits on over $6 million in cash, and it remains to be seen if she is interested in spending more in the fall. Donations from elsewhere in the Squad are scant and limited to freshman Greg Casar, who donated $27,500, and Jamaal Bowman, who donated $500.
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| Yesterday, my colleague Peter Hamby published the results of a poll from Puck and Echelon Insights that really crystalizes what’s plaguing the Biden reelection campaign. In short, Americans have the political memories of goldfish. They increasingly interpret the world in ways that don’t actually intersect with reality. For example, crime is falling, but this poll, like several others, shows Americans are worried about crime rising.Of course, this view of reality is not one that rewards Biden for his own pretty successful and popular policies. In fact, voters’ perceptions of reality clash even with their own past experience. “The Echelon poll, which surveyed 1,023 likely voters from May 13-16, found that 49 percent of voters strongly or somewhat approve of how Trump handled his job as president,” Peter wrote. “That means a lot of voters have changed their minds about his presidency in the last three and a half years. Trump was averaging a 38 percent job approval rating when he left office, and never had an approval rating over 45 percent during his actual term.”
What gives? Honestly, I don’t know. But I’m guessing that, given Americans’ fondness for change—how many of the last few presidential contests, after all, have been touted as “change elections”?—they’re feeling a four-year itch. Prices are high, the president is old (as they’ve been repeatedly told), and though there isn’t a clear outsider candidate this time around, there’s a guy who passes for one, mostly because his M.O. during his first term was smashing up the established ways of doing things. Americans, spoiled by systems that work far better than they realize, love challenging the status quo. And sure, Donald Trump presided over the Covid pandemic, when the unemployment rate surged to 13 percent and the end seemed extremely nigh, but that was a long time ago and the stock market was booming beforehand. Or something. Right? And change is better than more of the same, right?
When Peter sent me the Puck/Echelon poll, he urged me to take a look at the results for the questions on antisemitism and the pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. (Yes, now you see why I’m writing about a domestic political poll.) Well, I dug into the crosstabs, as they say, and the results were extremely interesting—but also kind of insane.
What jumped out at me first was that, despite all the national news coverage and hand-wringing about the leftist youth losing Biden the reelection because of Israel’s war in Gaza, a full 60 percent of those polled say they oppose the college protests. Of course, most of that opposition comes from older, whiter, and more conservative Americans, but it also includes 47 percent of self-identified Biden 2024 voters. Among the demographics that Democrats are fretting over most this cycle, things are far more split than would seem from national coverage. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, 41 percent support the protests but 34 percent oppose them. Nearly one-third of Black voters oppose, while 39 percent support the protestors. About half of Hispanic voters, on the other hand, don’t like the protests, while just one-third are in favor. Not great for Biden by any stretch, but perhaps not as lopsided as one would think from watching the news.
What I found more shocking was the fact that a plurality of those polled—47 percent—saw the protests as inherently antisemitic. I’ve written extensively here about how anti-Zionism can quickly, seamlessly veer into antisemitism, but this, to me, seems like a stretch. Here again we see a similar dynamic—the older, whiter, and more conservative someone is, the more likely they are to agree with that statement. Surprisingly, however, the richer and more educated someone was, the more likely they were to agree with the idea that the pro-Palestine protests were inherently antisemitic. Even more surprising? A plurality of Black voters, 38 percent, agreed.
Here’s what was not surprising. Most of those polled felt antisemitism was on the rise in the country at large (63 percent) and on college campuses (66 percent), but very, very few of those polled agreed that it was rising in their own communities (27 percent). It’s a pretty easy phenomenon to explain. Antisemitism is, most Americans would agree, a bad thing. They watch the news and many of them think the college protests are antisemitic, too (or, at least, have had an unfortunate number of antisemitic incidents associated with them), but no one wants to admit it’s them—that the antisemitism that’s feeding this broader national trend originates in their community, in their family, in themselves. That is too close for comfort. And so you get this: voters who see a lot more antisemitism out there, somewhere in the country, somewhere other than here.
(It’s also interestingly analogous to how voters view the economy, which shows a similar disconnect between the national and the personal. According to the Fed’s survey on economic wellbeing, about three-quarters of Americans say they’re doing well, themselves; 42 percent think their community is doing well; but somehow, less than one-quarter of Americans think that the larger national economy is doing well.)
Here’s what really shocked me, though: Americans, at least those polled by Echelon, who see antisemitism rising everywhere think Donald Trump would be better at fighting it than Joe Biden, 48 percent to 41 percent. Here, too, the dynamic was similar: whiteness, maleness, conservativeness, and lower education translated to trusting Trump to fight Jew-hatred. No surprise there.
But, and you may want to sit down for this, among 18- to 34-year-olds, 55 percent said Trump was better than Biden to take on antisemitism. Just 34 percent thought the incumbent president was better equipped to handle it, despite all his speeches, statements, and task forces.
Talk about a lack of political memory. The rise in antisemitism that so many Americans are seeing now did not start with the Gaza solidarity encampments at Columbia or U.S.C. It did not even start on October 7. This relentless rise started a decade ago, with Trump’s entry into presidential politics. His campaign emboldened the alt-right, who waged relentless war on his behalf against Jewish liberal journalists. And if it wasn’t on his behalf, he famously said nothing to condemn his antisemitic fans or tell them to stand down. In fact, when they rallied in Charlottesville, in 2017, and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” Trump said there were very fine people among them. He himself constantly invoked Jews and money, Jews’ alleged disloyalty to America because their first loyalty would always be to the Jewish state; he flirted with QAnon, whose belief system (if you could call it that) is based on something eerily similar to the blood libel; and he refused to denounce David Duke. That’s a short list. The full one goes on and on.
Which is why it’s no coincidence that, according to the A.D.L., the first year of Trump’s presidency coincided with the largest one-year rise in antisemitism that the group had ever recorded. Ever. How in the world is the old antisemite in chief going to be the anti-antisemite in chief the second time around?
I get that 18-year-olds were 11 when Charlottesville happened. But what’s the 34-year-olds’ excuse? They were, after all, 27. I generally hate when older people kick down at younger generations, forgetting when their cohort was the target of the exact same complaints and eye-rolling that they’re dishing out now. But this specific result makes me want to shake some people who are not much younger than me and ask them what in the actual fuck they are thinking. |
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| That’s all from me this week, friends. I’ll see you back here next Tuesday. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.Julia |
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