On the menu today: This is the last Morning Jolt until Monday, December 1; enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday and the following weekend. Perhaps it is the spirit of the coming holiday, but I don’t see much reason to get upset with President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff in his leaked conversation with a senior Putin adviser. This is just the way this administration operates — lots of schmoozing, minimal focus on the details, and a credulous approach to a regime that has declared the United States “an enemy country.” Read on.
For Steve Witkoff, the Schmoozing Call Is Par for the Course
I’m going to do something extremely uncharacteristic, and I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt to Steve Witkoff.
I’ve been more than a little critical of the presidential envoy, who is prone to less-than-reassuring statements like, “Maybe Hamas duped me” or “I don’t consider Putin a bad guy.” (But I also gave him credit for his work getting the Israeli hostages released by Hamas.)
When it comes to the question of who leaked a recording of Witkoff’s phone call between Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s most senior foreign policy adviser, there’s no shortage of suspects. Every country with a stake in the war in Ukraine would have interest in intercepting communications between Witkoff and Ushakov, and countries put considerable resources into those efforts.
Ushakov is quoted in Russian media saying that he was using WhatsApp for the call:
“Of course it’s unusual,” Yuri Ushakov confirmed. “It’s all very unusual! Yes, contacts occur over secure communications, where leaks are practically nonexistent unless one party specifically prevents them. But there are some WhatsApp conversations (owned by Meta, which is considered extremist in Russia and banned), which, apparently, someone could somehow eavesdrop on. It’s unlikely that the participants in the conversation could leak anything like that.”
There are questions about whether WhatsApp is as secure as it claims, and keep in mind, the location of either participant may well have been bugged.
The recording may well have been made by U.S. or Russian sources, and the leak may have been an effort to derail these ongoing peace talks. Honestly, I don’t think derailing the peace talks will take much effort, because we’re seeing a familiar pattern repeat itself. The Trump administration pressures Ukraine to make concessions, Ukraine says it’s willing to talk, and Russia rejects whatever’s on the table because it thinks it can get more if it holds out. From the New York Times:
Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said earlier that Russia was waiting for the United States to submit an “interim” version of the modified plan.
“Then we will see,” Mr. Lavrov said after a meeting in Moscow with his Belarusian counterpart.
If the plan “erased” what Mr. Lavrov called “the spirit and letter of Anchorage” — referring to an August meeting in Alaska where Mr. Trump sided with Russia’s approach to end the conflict — then “it will be a fundamentally different situation,” he said, suggesting that Russia would resist rolling back the maximalist positions that were in the plan.
After the administration’s embarrassing Signal chat mess discussing war plans against the Houthis, the White House issued a statement declaring that Witkoff was “provided a secure line of communication by the U.S. Government, and it was the only phone he had in his possession while in Moscow.”
While the leaking of a sensitive call between Trump and Putin’s top envoys is a big deal, I find the contents of the call to be fairly mundane. It’s only five minutes, and while I wouldn’t want my top envoy telling a foreign government what approach is most likely to persuade me, this is not the sort of thing that is likely to bother President Trump. Remember, making a video that urges the military to not obey unlawful orders is “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” but telling a hostile foreign government how to get the president to agree to what they want is just routine back-and-forth negotiations.
It’s not exactly a state secret that Trump likes to be flattered, and that if you congratulate him and praise him at the beginning of the conversation, he’s more likely to listen to what you have to say. Witkoff told Ushakov:
I would make the call and just reiterate that you congratulate the president on this achievement, that you supported it, you supported it, that you respect that he is a man of peace and you’re just, you’re really glad to have seen it happen. So I would say that. I think from that it’s going to be a really good call.
If the Russians didn’t know this already, then everyone at the FSB is incompetent and we have much less to worry about than we thought.
Appreciate Your Family This Thanksgiving — It’s Just One Day
It’s that time of year when columnists write pieces with titles like “six ways to jab at your MAGA uncle at Thanksgiving dinner” or “nine ways to berate your insufferable woke niece between football games.” You would think this tired genre would die out, but already USA Today is offering the headline, “I dread confronting my family’s hateful politics on Thanksgiving.” At Above the Law, Jonathan Wolf contended, “It is not only alright to shame, and ultimately ostracize, your MAGA relatives, it is your patriotic duty as an American.”
Last year, a lefty columnist apparently earnestly called upon President Biden to cancel Thanksgiving because, “I’m not interested in breaking bread with people who don’t share my values.” First, pal, federal holidays are set by acts of Congress, so that’s calling for something that violates the U.S. Constitution.
Second, the last thing you want to do is give the current president the idea that he has the power to cancel or alter holidays, or else next year he’s going to try to get all of us to celebrate “Trumpmas.”
I would quote the wise philosopher Rodney King — “can’t we all just get along?” — but apparently a decent-sized chunk of America has concluded that’s an impossible request. Last year, the American Psychiatric Association released a survey that found 21 percent of Americans have become estranged from a family member, 22 percent have blocked a family member on social media, and 19 percent have skipped a family event due to disagreements on controversial topics.
It is horrific to see so many American families pulling apart over political differences. Particularly when there are so many perfectly valid non-political reasons to get angry with your relatives — like how they’re always telling you how to live your life, and how they’re always judging you, and how they always tell the same stories and no, I do not want another serving of your abominable corn casserole, I just scooped a small portion on my plate and pushed it around with my fork to be polite.
We reach this point when we see our relatives — and perhaps everyone — as just their voting record and political beliefs. But we’re all like Walt Whitman — we contain multitudes. Maybe your woke niece is a talented artist or musician or is acing her classes. Maybe that MAGA aunt you can’t stand is active in her church or volunteers with some charity. Or maybe through it all, you love them anyway, because they’re family, and in this life, you only get one — although I suppose in marriage you get a second one.
Every now and then in political debates, the moderators will ask the candidates if they can find anything nice to say about their opponent. (Back in 2007, then-Senator Joe Biden said to Representative Dennis Kucinich, “Dennis, the thing I like best about you is your wife.”) If politicians can find something nice to say about their opponents, you can find something nice to say about your relatives — even if it’s a somewhat backhanded compliment, like, “You’re brave enough to stand up for what you believe in, even if it’s unpopular and everyone else thinks you’re crazy.”
If President Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can seem so buddy-buddy in that Oval Office meeting, you have no excuse.
There are 77.3 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2024, and there are 75 million Americans who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Nobody’s going anywhere; we’re all going to have to live with each other from here on out. Sure, the Republicans won big in the last presidential election cycle, but the Democrats came back in this November’s off-year elections, and the outlook for them in next year’s midterm elections seems pretty good right now. We’re a roughly evenly divided country, and neither side can impose its will on the other for very long.
You’re not going to have these relatives forever, you know. Your elderly relatives might not be at the Thanksgiving table a year from now, or five years from now, or ten years from now. Or God forbid, some tragedy claims the life of one of your younger relatives. The whole point of the holiday is gratitude. Be thankful for any happy memories you have with those relatives you now deem political apostates.
The assignment for Thursday is simple. Smile, be polite, find something nice to say, pass the gravy, root against the Dallas Cowboys so that the New York Jets will get a better draft pick next year, and express thanks to God and each other for what everyone in your family brings into your life.
Save all that pent-up frustration and aggression for the crowds on Black Friday.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication, a look at the signs that the Russian economy is creaking and cracking from the high costs of the invasion of Ukraine.