Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music Just when we thought we could get a break for the summer, geopolitics had other plans. This week on EU Confidential, host Sarah Wheaton is joined by POLITICO colleagues Jordyn Dahl, Gabriel Gavin and Jan Cienski for a catch-up on what moved while the bubble was at the beach. From Alaska to the White House: Did anything real shift on Ukraine beyond choreography? We break down the EU-U.S. tariff framework and turn to Gaza — where Brussels is grasping for some sort of leverage — and how the politics split across capitals.

Elon Musk expressed tacit support for a post accusing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of prioritizing power and money over pursuing peace, as the United States looks to negotiate an end to Russia’s war. “Zelensky doesn’t want peace, he wants money and power,” a user of Musk’s platform X wrote Tuesday, to which Musk replied with the “100″ emoji, apparently signaling his agreement. Musk has been President Donald Trump’s main hatchet man as the two look to pare down the federal government. But he has also increasingly thrown his weight around on the international stage, wading into European politics and backing far-right politicians from the United Kingdom to Germany. Musk has jabbed at the Ukrainian leader before, scoffing at his calls for Western aid to help his country fend off Russia’s invasion and mocking his statement that Ukraine is an independent country and cannot be forced to the negotiating table with Russia. In the early days of the war, Musk donated thousands of Starlink satellite internet system terminals to Ukraine to replace communications services destroyed by Russia and was hailed as one of Kyiv’s most important allies. But that narrative flipped after he began spreading what Ukraine said was pro-Russian propaganda via X. He has since condemned the provision of American aid “with no accountability and no end game” to Ukraine and has been a sharp critic of Zelenskyy. Musk made a surprise appearance on a call between Trump and Zelenskyy last November. The two had a “normal conversation,” with Zelenskyy thanking Musk for providing Starlink terminals, according to a Ukrainian official at the time. Negotiators for Russia and the U.S. met in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. But Zelenskyy claimed the negotiations were held without Kyiv’s input or knowledge, and the country did not take part. European officials were also sidelined from the meeting.

Civil society groups fighting falsehoods online have faced a barrage of political attacks ever since social media giant Meta announced it was moving away from fact-checking. The community of fact-checkers — groups of journalists and researchers that work tirelessly to debunk disinformation on social media like Facebook, X, YouTube and TikTok — have become a prime target of populist firebrands and anonymous haters online. POLITICO spoke to five people in fact-checking organizations that partnered with Meta in past years as part of its fact-checking program. Some of them described facing increasing online harassment, direct attacks from politicians and even death threats since Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he’d end a fact-checking program in the United States in an effort to combat censorship — a move widely seen as an attempt to please U.S. President Donald Trump. “The first thing we’ve noticed after Zuckerberg’s statement … was a huge spread of harassment toward fact-checkers,” said Aistė Meidutė, editor of the fact-checking project Lie Detector at Lithuanian news outlet Delfi. “It was a huge beat to our credibility. We see the after-effects right now,” she said, including death threats as part of the online blowback. “We are very worried,” she added, especially as Lithuania “is a particularly vulnerable region.” Although Meta’s January announcement won’t immediately apply in the rest of the world, it will affect the work of dozens of civil society groups and media firms that have received funding from the U.S. giant over the past eight years to check and challenge claims on its social media platforms. Other tech giants, including Google and LinkedIn, last week also dialed down their commitments to work with fact-checkers on a European Union disinformation code. X pulled out of the code altogether in 2023. As Big Tech firms turn their backs on the efforts of EU authorities to regulate social media and stop disinformation, European democracies like Romania are being increasingly hit by foreign interference and manipulation campaigns online. FAKE-NEWS FIGHTERS Meta has been paying independent fact-checkers across the world since 2016, counting on them to help fight disinformation across social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Threads. They spot viral fake news and come up with accuracy ratings, which Meta shares widely and relies on to curb the visibility of falsehoods. Zuckerberg now views those efforts as “intrusive labels and reduced distribution,” he said in a blog post. He plans to move to a looser system — an X-style community-notes system — which critics warn will be no match for newsroom corrections and may open the floodgates to unchecked disinformation. Nick Clegg, Meta’s outgoing policy chief, described the new system as a “crowdsourced or Wikipedia-style approach to misinformation” that is “more scalable” than fact-checkers. “I would urge you to look at the substance of what Meta announced. Ignore the noise and the politics and the drama around it,” Clegg told the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. HATERS ARE REJOICING Anuška Delić, the editor-in-chief of Slovenia-based media Oštro, said “connecting censorship with fact-checking” has been damaging. Fact-checkers “have been attacked from Day One of this partnership because people believe that we have access to their profiles, that we can delete content,” she said. Now the haters “are all rejoicing because they think they are getting rid of us.” Her country’s former Prime Minister and opposition leader Janez Janša was one of them: “By[e], By[e] Anuška?” he wrote on X after Zuckerberg’s announcement. Zuckerberg’s decision may have been an effort to court U.S. President Donald Trump, who has frequently railed against the media and Big Tech firms. According to the New York Times, the tech tycoon rolled out his new direction abruptly, blindsiding many of his staff. “There was some sort of pivoting toward a new direction. But what was surprising is how fast it came about,” said Sophie Timmermann, the deputy head of German nonprofit Correctiv’s fact-checking program. “Meta has always been kind of a reliable partner.” Morten Langfeldt Dahlback, the head of innovation at Norway’s Faktisk, seems to think the days are numbered for Meta’s fact-checking program in Europe. Slovenian opposition leader Janez Janša wrote on X: “By[e], By[e] Anuška?” | European Union “It’s hard for me to understand why they would keep the program here in its current form if they won’t have it in the U.S. where they are under the most direct political pressure anyway,” he said. REGULATORY ROADBLOCKS Zuckerberg’s jibe at the EU’s “ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship” is another clue he will eventually extend the new policy to Europe, Langfeldt Dahlback said, even though there may be some regulatory “roadblocks.” The biggest of those obstacles is the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires the largest online platforms to be more transparent and accountable for systemic risks, including disinformation, that can run wild on their networks. Meta has already fallen foul of the DSA, with the Commission having opened a probe into whether the company does enough to protect children online in addition to scrutiny of how it shows political content and its transparency with researchers. Violations run the risk of fines of up to 6 percent of annual global revenues. The rules also require social media firms to check with the Commission before making big changes, which could delay any Meta move to mimic what it’s doing in the U.S. “Prior to deploying functionalities that are likely to have a critical impact on systemic risks, very large online platforms are required to perform a risk assessment and submit a report to the Commission’s services,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said. Social media firms must check with the European Commission before making big changes to their rules, which could delay any Meta move to mimic what it’s doing in the U.S. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Press freedom organizations have urged the Commission to weigh in on Meta’s fact-checking decision and “forcefully resist the pressures exerted against European democracy.” Delić said she hopes “that someone in the EU will have the guts to uphold the act,” worrying that the “slow bureaucracy machine that is the EU” may not be up to fighting “much faster … private individuals with a lot of money.” European fact-checkers aren’t fearing for their jobs just yet, despite the potential loss of income and of “a form of distribution” to people that “tend not to be very regular consumers of traditional media,” Langfeldt Dahlback said. “There’s an iteration of the fact-checking profession that’s maybe threatened,” he argued, which is about “limit[ing] the impact of viral misinformation on social media” and relies “heavily on having a least a working relationship with the platform companies.” Keeping up the fight against misinformation is too important to abandon, Delić stressed, even without Meta’s money or the risk of “even more attacks, even more smears.” “We will not not survive this,” she said. This article has been updated to correct Sophie Timmermann’s title as the deputy head of the fact-checking program at Correctiv.

LONDON — Few things in politics are as tricky as meeting Donald Trump. A half-hour phone call is one of them. Just like other world leaders, Keir Starmer is — still — waiting in line for his first call with the newly returned United States president. The United Kingdom’s prime minister likes to point out he bagged a two-hour chicken dinner with Trump in September, and two pre-inauguration calls. But he’d best be on his guard. Whether it was fastidious, buttoned-up Theresa May or irreverent Boris Johnson — Britain’s two prime ministers during Trump’s first term — calls with the president used to be box office events at No. 10 Downing Street. Civil servants and special advisers would gather to listen in on the conversation unfolding in their boss’s study, either from No. 10’s secure basement room or the prime minister’s private office one door away.  “The calls were extraordinary … brilliant,” recalled one former Downing Street official, who — like five others POLITICO spoke to for this piece — was granted anonymity to talk candidly. “Everyone was in there with tears [of] laughter because they were hilarious.” “The agenda would quite quickly fall by the wayside,” admitted a second former No. 10 official. A third added: “They were never what you wanted them to be about, broadly. If you were calling about trade or Israel or something, it would always go off beam.”  Former No. 10 officials describe Trump careening onto his pet issues, such as golf, Scotland (home to his golf courses) and wind turbines — the latter of which he brought up again with Starmer before Christmas, according to The Times. Occasionally he might veer into a story that was before the courts, a traditional no-go zone for British ministers.  Trump would even, said the third ex-official, ask after Queen Elizabeth II’s health. Any leader talking to Trump needs to be “straight to the point, robust and openly transactional,” this person added. “I think I would only go in with one or maximum two asks, and count myself lucky if I managed to mention both in any substantive way.”  MR. RULES All this presents a challenge to Keir Starmer — a straight-laced former prosecutor whom a Labour colleague memorably called “Mr Rules” in 2022. Starmer has insisted he had a “really good meeting” with Trump in September and promised to “take our partnership to the next level.” Downing Street has pitched publicly for another face-to-face “as soon as possible,” with U.K. officials hoping the prime minister and Foreign Secretary David Lammy could jointly visit Washington, D.C. in Trump’s first few weeks. Yet Starmer will be jostling for position with right-wing leaders more in tune with Trump’s politics — Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Argentina’s Javier Milei both attended the inauguration — and those unburdened by disputes with the new administration. Trump’s team attacked members of Starmer’s Labour Party for helping the Democrats in the 2024 election, while his ally Elon Musk has called for the U.S. to “liberate” the U.K. from Starmer over grooming gangs. Then there’s the character clash. Boris Johnson would “obsequiously flatter Trump,” according to a Downing Street official. | Andrew Parsons-WPA Pool/Getty Images Starmer has railed against populism and said in 2023 that he “loathed” his predecessor Boris Johnson, who had “no principles … no integrity.” Yet it was Johnson who struck up a better rapport with Trump than May, according to four former No. 10 officials, including the three quoted above. Trump “absolutely bulldozed her” in phone calls, said the first ex-official. “She had absolutely no idea how to deal with somebody like Trump. It was a vicar’s daughter we were sending off to deal with a very, very hard-nosed, ruthless businessman who was there to get the best deal for Americans … there was more than a whiff of misogyny.” Trump would use phone calls to vent his opinions on other world leaders — even disparaging May while he spoke to Johnson, a fourth former Downing Street official suggested: “In subsequent calls when she was no longer prime minister, he wasn’t particularly respectful of her.” By contrast, Johnson, the first former official added, would “obsequiously flatter Trump,” telling him to ignore the “naysayers” such as London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Johnson would WhatsApp directly with members of Trump’s team and helped persuade the president to pull out of an interview with TV presenter Piers Morgan, the ex-official added. “It was interesting, because Boris never liked Trump. I think he thought he was vulgar and a bit of an idiot. But he certainly played him incredibly well.” Even Johnson’s flattery wouldn’t always work, though. He failed to persuade Trump of the merits of letting Chinese firm Huawei help build the U.K.’s 5G phone network. Britain eventually U-turned and banned it. KNOCKED OFF COURSE Starmer is starting from a tricky place. Aside from Musk’s endless brickbats and Labour’s run-in with the Republican Party, there are tensions over incoming Ambassador to D.C. Peter Mandelson, a Labour grandee who has previously criticized Trump’s stance on Beijing.  The leak of details from the president-elect’s call with Starmer on Dec. 18 — including a tangent about birds dying in wind turbines — has done nothing to help relations with some around Trump, a person familiar with transatlantic conversations said. U.K. officials are straining to avoid further leaks, including by keeping a tight number of officials on future calls. With May, the relationship struggled to get off the ground because she and Trump took different stances on Brexit. Starmer, who is pursuing a “reset” with the European Union, could face a similar gulf. “Don’t underestimate or seek to downplay his antipathy toward the EU,” a fifth ex-official said. “He is very focused on the trade imbalance, and thinks Brussels — Germany in particular — has been screwing America for years. Be ready for the moment he asks the U.K. to choose between either the U.S. or EU.” Even with the best relationship, there will always be times when Trump’s style blows Britain’s plans off course. A sixth ex-official recalled a time the then-president said a terror suspect had been “in the sights of Scotland Yard,” earning a rebuke from May. It was “catastrophically wrong,” the former official added. HALF AN HOUR WITH TRUMP Britain’s new government will be aware of the challenges. Some U.K. officials have been picking the brains of people who were around in Trump’s first term, and Starmer already has experience under his belt — his most recent call with Trump lasted a solid half hour, two people with knowledge of it said. The opposition Conservative Party is also studying its notes, with leader Kemi Badenoch having exchanged WhatsApps in recent months with Vice President JD Vance. Starmer’s first call now that Trump is in office will be critical. The president will likely “try [to] push some boundaries and tests and just see, try to work out the man that he’s dealing with,” said the fourth former official. Of course there are ways to get in the president’s good books, and his allies are not always like-minded. Labour has been studying how the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe managed to get close enough to Trump to secure a trade deal, while even May earned moments of praise — helped partly by wheeling out Britain’s royal splendor and rich history. Using the trappings of the British state will ease the path, but won’t always work. When arranging Trump’s 2018 visit to the U.K., the third ex-official recalled, “he basically was not interested in anything we had to offer.” No. 10 aides talked about bringing a troop capability demonstration to wherever Trump was in Britain — even flying to him — so he wouldn’t have to travel, the ex-official added: “We went through a huge list of shiny things to show him … the one thing he wanted to do was meet the queen [the late Elizabeth II], and that was it. There was nothing else he wanted to do.” It’s possible that Starmer, a self-confessed “ruthless” politician who is warmer in private than in public and has crushed a recently dominant left flank in his own party, will find a rhythm with the ultimate dealmaker. The first ex-official, however, wasn’t convinced: “Keir would be at home in the diplomacy of 2002. The rules-based order, all very sensible. It is Trump’s world now.” THE ART OF THE DEAL One piece of advice for No. 10 aides — read Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal.” With Trump, the normal “sherpa” process — in which officials work out exactly what each leader will say and the meeting itself is mostly a formality — does not apply. Nor do the usual rules of the No. 10 press office, which sometimes prewrites parts of the official “readout” of a call between leaders before it has even happened. With Trump, there was no point. “He sees himself as the dealmaker-in-chief, and that, in some ways, limits the political usefulness of some of the other people on his staff,” said the second former official. The ex-official encouraged regular face time with Trump as the way to get things done — especially if the president’s aides don’t know what’s on his mind. The “enormous churn of key personnel” in the White House was a problem in Trump’s first term, the second ex-official added — including former national security adviser John Bolton. “The bilateral relationship between our national security adviser and Trump’s at the time became less and less valuable, because he was not necessarily always in agreement with what the president was proposing, particularly on issues like Iran,” the ex-official said. “Their NSA was saying, ‘I cannot tell you with confidence what I expect him to do.’” If all else fails, there are some basic principles to follow. “Always treat Trump with respect,” the fifth ex-official said. “Yes, he will say some mad or unpredictable things, but there’s almost always an underlying argument or basis for a negotiation.” And if that doesn’t work, there’s an even simpler fallback: “[Learn about] his U.K. golf courses. He will talk about them, so do a couple of minutes of homework on how they’re doing. It’ll go a long way.”

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has Germany’s diplomatic corps bracing for what it sees as a deliberate dismantling of United States democratic norms. A confidential memorandum written by Andreas Michaelis, Germany’s ambassador to the U.S., warns of an agenda of “maximum disruption” that could redefine the American constitutional order. The document, obtained by Reuters and addressed to German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, outlines stark concerns about the erosion of democratic norms under Trump’s second administration. Michaelis describes Trump’s vision as one focused on the “maximum concentration of power with the president at the expense of Congress and the [U.S.] states.” According to the document, key democratic institutions, including the legislature, law enforcement and the media, risk an erosion of their independence and could be “misused as a political arm.”  The memo also highlights the involvement of Big Tech companies, which Michaelis claims could be granted “co-governing power.” Publicly, Germany’s foreign ministry has taken a cautious tone, acknowledging the democratic choice of U.S. voters and expressing a willingness to work with the Trump government. The ministry hasn’t responded to a request from POLITICO for comment on the leaked memorandum. “We will work closely with the new U.S. administration in the interests of Germany and Europe,” the ministry said in a statement to Reuters. The ambassador’s internal assessment is far more critical. A lingering unease within Berlin about the broader implications of Trump’s domestic policies could signal a turbulent beginning for U.S.-German relations under the interim government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and Baerbock’s Green Party. This unease is not new — Trump’s first term saw contentious disputes over trade tariffs and Germany’s failure to meet NATO targets for defense spending. The warning from Michaelis suggests the stakes are now even higher. The briefing memo underscores Trump’s reliance on the judiciary to advance his goals. Michaelis notes that the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions to expand presidential powers could enable Trump to bypass traditional checks and balances. However, the ambassador offers a glimmer of reassurance, stating that “even the biggest critics assume that [the Supreme Court] will prevent the worst from happening.” The document further raises concerns about Trump’s ability to exploit legal loopholes for political ends. These include potentially using the military domestically in cases of “insurrection” or “invasion,” an act that could test the boundaries of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars military involvement in law enforcement. Michaelis also highlights Trump’s apparent alignment with tech billionaire Elon Musk as a potential risk to media independence. Trump has employed tactics like “lawsuits, threatening criminal prosecution, and license revocation” against critics, according to the report. Meanwhile, Musk is accused of manipulating algorithms and blocking accounts critical of his platform. The ambassador warns of a “redefinition of the First Amendment,” suggesting a troubling merger of political and technological influence. Musk’s behavior has already caused unease in Berlin. His public endorsements of the far-right Alternative for Germany party ahead of Germany’s election next month have raised fears of foreign interference. While individual agencies — like the ministry of defense — have left Musk’s platform, the German government remains active on X.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will attend U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington on Monday, her office confirmed on Saturday. Meloni will be one of the highest-profile European politicians to attend the event. Trump conspicuously snubbed the continent’s centrist mainstream, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in his invitations. Instead, he has invited many of the foreign leaders he’s spoken to by phone or welcomed in person at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, such as Argentinian President Javier Milei — who will also be in attendance — and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Xi is sending Vice President Han Zheng in his stead. Prominent representatives of Europe’s populist far right, from Britain’s Nigel Farage to France’s Eric Zemmour, also scored an invite. Meloni, who earlier this month paid a surprise visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, was dubbed “a fantastic woman” who “had taken Europe by storm” by the president-elect. The visit was part of a sustained effort to build a reputation as Trump’s main interlocutor in Europe. Meloni also has a good relationship with Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who is a close ally of Trump.

he last time an American president deployed the U.S. military domestically under the Insurrection Act — during the deadly Los Angeles riots in 1992 — Douglas Ollivant was there. Ollivant, then a young Army first lieutenant, says things went fairly smoothly because it was somebody else — the cops — doing the head-cracking to restore order, not his 7th Infantry Division. He and his troops didn’t have to detain or shoot at anyone. “There was real sensitivity about keeping federal troops away from the front lines,” said Ollivant, who was ordered in by President George H.W. Bush as rioters in central-south LA set fire to buildings, assaulted police and bystanders, pelted cars with rocks and smashed store windows in the aftermath of the videotaped police beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist. “They tried to keep us in support roles, backing up the police.” By the end of six days of rioting, 63 people were dead and 2,383 injured — though reportedly none at the hands of the military. But some in the U.S. military fear next time could be different. According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants. On Nov. 18, two weeks after the election, Trump confirmed he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military for the mass deportations of illegal immigrants. One fear is that domestic deployment of active-duty troops could lead to bloodshed given that the regular military is mainly trained to shoot at and kill foreign enemies. The only way to prevent that is establishing clear “rules of engagement” for domestic deployments that outline how much force troops can use — especially considering constitutional restraints protecting U.S. citizens and residents — against what kinds of people in what kinds of situations. And establishing those new rules would require a lot more training, in the view of many in the military community. “Everything I hear is that our training is in the shitter,” says retired Army Lt. Gen. Marvin Covault, who commanded the 7th Infantry Division in 1992 in what was called “Joint Task Force LA.” “I’m not sure we have the kind of discipline now, and at every leader level, that we had 32 years ago. That concerns me about the people you’re going to put on the ground.” In an interview, Covault said he was careful to avoid lethal force in Los Angeles by emphasizing to his soldiers they were now “deployed in the civilian world.” He ordered gun chambers to remain empty except in self-defense, banned all automatic weapons and required bayonets to remain on soldiers’ belts. But Covault added that he set those rules at his own discretion. Even then Covault said he faced some recalcitrance, especially from U.S. Marine battalions under his command that sought to keep M16 machine guns on their armored personnel carriers. In one reported case a Marine unit, asked by L.A. police for “cover,” misunderstood the police term for “standing by” and fired some 200 rounds at a house occupied by a family. Fortunately, no one was injured. “If we get fast and loose with rules of engagement or if we get into operations without a stated mission and intent, we’re going to be headline news, and it’s not going to be good,” Covault said in the interview. Trump has repeatedly said he might use the military to suppress a domestic protest, or to raid a sanctuary city to purge it of undocumented immigrants, or possibly defend the Southern border. Some in the military community say they are especially disturbed by the prospect that troops might be used to serve Trump’s political ends. In 1992, Covault said, he had no direct orders from Bush other than to deploy to restore peace. On his own volition, he said, he announced upon landing in LA at a news conference: “This is not martial law. The reason we’re here is to create a safe and secure environment so you can go back to normal.” Covault said he believes the statement had a calming effect. But 28 years later, when the police killing of another Black American, George Floyd, sparked sporadically violent protests nationwide, then-President Trump openly considered using firepower on the demonstrators, according to his former defense secretary, Mark Esper. Trump asked, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Esper wrote in his 2022 memoir, A Sacred Trust. At another point Trump urged his Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. Mark Milley, to “beat the fuck out” out of the protesters and “crack skulls,” and he tweeted that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Esper wrote that he had “to walk Trump back” from such ideas and the president didn’t pursue them. Some involved in the current debate say they are worried Trump would not be as restrained this time. He is filling his Pentagon and national security team with fierce loyalists. The concern is not just in how much force might be used, but also whether troops would be regularly deployed to advance the new administration’s political interests. This topic is extremely sensitive inside the active-duty military, and a Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment. But several of the retired military officials I interviewed said that they were gingerly talking about it with their friends and colleagues still in active service. And Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who has long represented military and intelligence officers who run afoul of their chain of command, told me: “A lot of people are reaching out to me proactively to express concern about what they foresee coming, including Defense Department civilians and active-duty military.” Among them, Zaid said, are people “who are either planning on leaving the government or will be waiting to see if there is a line that is crossed by the incoming administration.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- After the D.C. National Guard was ordered to clear demonstrators from Lafayette Square across from the White House in 2020 using tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades, a group of lawyers founded “The Orders Project” aimed at connecting up lawyers and troops looking for legal advice. One of the founders, Eugene Fidell of Yale Law School, said that the group disbanded after the first Trump administration but is now being resurrected. “With the return of President Trump, we’re ready to help people in need,” Fidell said. The Lafayette Square incident remains a topic of some debate inside the military community. One DC guardsman, Major Adam DeMarco, an Iraq war veteran, later said in written testimony to Congress that he was “deeply disturbed” by the “excessive use of force.” “Having served in a combat zone, and understanding how to assess threat environments, at no time did I feel threatened by the protesters or assess them to be violent,” he wrote. “I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. Anthony Pfaff, a retired colonel who is now a military ethics scholar at the U.S. Army War College, said this confusion reveals a serious training deficiency: Domestic crowd control and policing “is not something for which we have any doctrine or other standard operating procedures. Without those, thresholds for force could be determined by individual commanders, leading to even more confusion.” Protests continued over the death of George Floyd on June 3, 2020, near the White House in Washington. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly said he might use the military to suppress a domestic protest, to raid a sanctuary city to purge it of undocumented immigrants or possibly defend the Southern border. | Alex Brandon/AP For active military, most of the current debate is happening behind closed doors. As a result, some retired military as well as scholars and lawyers are trying to bring the issue into public view. “It’s legally and ethically dicey to have open conversations about this,” says Graham Parsons, a philosophy professor at West Point who urged military officers and troops to consider resisting “politicized” orders in a New York Times op-ed in September. One concern is whether the military could tarnish itself with an incident like Kent State, when four college students were shot to death by jittery and poorly trained Ohio National Guardsmen in 1970. “Soldiers are trained predominately to fight, kill and win wars,” says Brian VanDeMark, a Naval Academy historian and author of the 2024 book Kent State: An American Tragedy. “Local police and state police are far better trained to deal with the psychology of crowds, which can become inherently unpredictable, impulsive and irrational. If you’re not well trained to cope, your reaction might be inadequate and turn to force.” He adds that at the Naval Academy as well as West Point, “my impression is this is an issue that is being thought about and worried about a lot but it’s not openly discussed.” Some lawyers and experts in military law say a great deal of confusion persists — even among serving officers — over how the military should behave, especially if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and calls up troops to crush domestic protests or round up millions of undocumented immigrants. In most cases, there is little that officers and enlisted personnel can do but obey such presidential orders, even if they oppose them ethically, or face dismissal or court-martial. But as Covault puts it bluntly: “You don’t always follow dumb orders.” A file image captured by an RC-26 flying over Minneapolis on June 4, 2020. When the police killing of another Black American, George Floyd, sparked sporadically violent protests nationwide, Trump openly considered using firepower on the demonstrators, according to his former Defense Secretary Mark Esper. | Department of Defense via AP Under long-standing military codes, troops are obliged to disobey only obviously illegal orders — for example, an order to conduct a wholesale slaughter of civilians as happened in the village of My Lai during the Vietnam War. But under the more than 200-year-old Insurrection Act, Trump would have extraordinarily wide latitude to decide what’s “legal,” lawyers say. “The basic reality is that the Insurrection Act gives the president dangerously broad discretion to use the military as a domestic police force,” says Joseph Nunn, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s an extraordinarily broad law that has no meaningful criteria in it for determining when it’s appropriate for the president to deploy the military domestically.” Nothing in the text of the Insurrection Act says the president must cite insurrection, rebellion, or domestic violence to justify deployment; the language is so vague that Trump could potentially claim only that he perceives a “conspiracy.” The Insurrection Act, a blend of different statutes enacted by Congress between 1792 and 1871, is the primary exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, under which federal military forces are generally barred from participating in civilian law enforcement activities. Most Americans may not realize how often presidents have invoked the Insurrection Act — often, in the view of historians, to the benefit of the nation. While it’s been 32 years since Bush used it to help quell the Los Angeles riots, the Insurrection Act was also invoked by President Dwight Eisenhower following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Board v. Board of Education decision, when Ike deployed the 101st Airborne Division (with fixed bayonets on their rifles) to help desegregate the South. George Washington and John Adams used the Insurrection Act in response to early rebellions against federal authority, Abraham Lincoln invoked it at the start of the Civil War, and President Ulysses Grant used it to stop the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- But when it comes to the next Trump administration, the real question for most military lawyers and personnel will likely be less purely legalistic and more ethical: Even if Trump decides something is legal and the courts back him up, are troops still bound to do as he says under the Constitution? One lawyer, John Dehn of Loyola University — a former Army career officer and West Point graduate — calls this the “Milley problem,” referring to the well-documented angst of the former Joint Chiefs chair during Trump’s first presidency. Milley stirred controversy by publicly apologizing after Trump used him in a staged photo of the Lafayette Square incident. During the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, he reportedly assured then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he would “prevent” any unwarranted use of the military, and he has acknowledged calling his Chinese counterparts to assure them that no nuclear weapons would be launched before Trump left office. Milley, who has called Trump “fascist to the core,” later told Bob Woodward for the 2024 book War that he feared being recalled to active duty to face a court-martial “for disloyalty.” At one point Trump himself suggested Milley could have been executed for treason. In a newly published law review essay, Dehn argues that while Milley might have breached his constitutional duties, the Constitution “is not a suicide pact,” and Milley served a higher purpose by protecting the nation. He quotes Thomas Jefferson as writing “strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen: but it is not the highest. [T]he laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation.” Similarly, some within the military community are urging troops to “lawyer up” and prepare to resist what they consider unethical orders, saying resistance can be justified if the soldier thinks it would jeopardize the soldier’s own conception of military “neutrality.” Trump departs the White House on June 1, 2020. Trump’s former Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. Mark Milley (right), has called Trump “fascist to the core.” | Patrick Semansky/AP “By refusing to follow orders about military deployment to U.S. cities for political ends, members of the armed forces could actually be respecting, rather than undermining, the principle of civilian control,” wrote Marcus Hedahl, a philosophy professor at United States Naval Academy, and Bradley Jay Strawser, a scholar at the Naval Postgraduate School, in a blog post on Oct. 25. Others within the military community disagree, sometimes vehemently. Such thinking is seriously misguided and could lead to widespread legal problems for military personnel, says retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, a former deputy judge advocate general now at Duke Law School. “I am concerned because I do think there’s been some mistaken information that’s out there. The fact is, if an order is legal then members of the armed forces have to obey it even if they find it morally reprehensible.” In a Washington Post op-ed published after the election, another retired general, former Joint Chiefs Chair Martin Dempsey, agreed, saying it was “reckless” to suggest that “it is the duty of the brass to resist some initiatives and follow the ‘good’ orders but not the ‘bad’ orders that a president might issue.” Dunlap cites the military’s standard Manual for Courts-Martial, which states clearly that “the dictates of a person’s conscience, religion, or personal philosophy cannot justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.” Dunlap and other lawyers also note that Supreme Court precedent backs that up; in 1974 the Supreme Court ruled: “An army is not a deliberative body. It is the executive arm. Its law is that of obedience.” Inside the military this conundrum is known as “lawful but awful”: Active-duty troops have no choice, especially if the order comes from the commander-in-chief. “No one should be encouraging members of the military to disobey a lawful order even if it’s awful,” says Nunn. “And it’s crucial that is as it should be. We do not want to live in a world where the military picks and chooses what order to obey based on their own consciences. We don’t want to ask a 20-year-old lieutenant to interpret an order from the president.” Indeed, that could set another dangerous precedent, some military lawyers say, by undermining the principle of civilian control that the Founders said was fundamental to the U.S. republic. “You don’t have to look far for examples of countries where the military is picking and choosing which orders to follow,” says Nunn. Most legal experts agree that troops must obey all nominally legal orders. But military lawyers say it’s important for troops to remember that even if called into action they must obey peoples’ constitutional rights — including the right to assemble and to be protected from unlawful arrest and seizure or unreasonable force. Esper, left, and Milley, right, listen during a Senate Armed Services Committee on budget posture on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 4, 2020. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP “You have to follow the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth amendments. They don’t get waived,” said Dehn. When it comes to the Fourth Amendment, for example, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, “the requirement of reasonableness applies” to the military just as it does to police, said Dehn. So do protections for due process and other rights of the accused enshrined in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. “Due process still applies,” Nunn agreed. “Military personnel deployed under the [Insurrection Act] can’t do what law enforcement can’t do. They can’t shoot peaceful protesters.” Yale’s Fidell says any successful legal challenges to Trump’s orders will likely be more “retail than wholesale.” By this he means that even if the president can broadly justify the Insurrection Act legally, “you might able to show a particular order is unlawful, for example if you’re ordered to use your helicopter to create a downdraft to disperse rioters — remember that happened at Lafayette Square — or shoot at students.” In the end much will depend on what Trump’s senior legal advisers tell him and what courts decide, lawyers say. But for the first time in memory, “we have to consider the possibility we could have a commander-in-chief who is willing to order the military to do something that is pretty threatening to the constitutional order,” says Parsons, the West Point scholar. “Even if we get the law straight, what’s the right thing to do?” adds Parsons. “If the president invokes the Insurrection Act we don’t really know what the ethical boundaries are. Among the military lawyers this is just uncharted territory.” Says one lawyer who has studied many cases of military-civilian conflict and spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears retribution from the new Trump administration: “I think things are going to be bad, really bad. This is going to be worse than last time. Trump is angry. He desperately wants to turn on his TV and see guys in uniform on the streets.” But Dunlap, for one, hopes that “cooler heads will prevail”: “I’m cautiously optimistic that people are going to realize that not all the campaign rhetoric is going to be translatable into action.”

Special counsel Jack Smith has completed his work on two criminal investigations of President-elect Donald Trump and resigned Friday from the Justice Department. Word of Smith’s departure came in a footnote to a court filing Justice Department officials submitted to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon Saturday afternoon, urging her not to extend a court order she issued last week temporarily blocking the release of the final report Smith submitted to department leaders on Tuesday. Justice Department officials say Cannon’s order overstepped her authority and that she has no power to block Attorney General Merrick Garland from releasing Smith’s findings. Her ban on disclosure of Smith’s report currently runs through Monday. Garland has said he plans to release publicly only the portion of Smith’s report that covers his investigation into Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election. The attorney general has said in court filings that he agreed with a recommendation from Smith to keep the other volume — which addresses the probe into Trump’s possession of a raft of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after he left office in 2021 — under wraps due to prosecutors’ ongoing efforts to revive a criminal case against two Trump allies and former co-defendants. Instead, Garland intends only to show that report to a handful of members of Congress. Smith’s resignation before the end of President Joe Biden’s term was widely expected and foreshadowed by other Justice Department officials. Trump has repeatedly urged that Smith be prosecuted for his handling of the Trump cases and has even suggested that he be thrown out of the United States. A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment on Smith’s exit. A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Smith’s departure ends one of the most extraordinary and tumultuous chapters in the Justice Department’s history, resulting in grave criminal charges against Trump, the first former president to ever face prosecution. But both of Smith’s cases were stymied by the courts. Cannon dismissed the documents case in July, ruling that Garland lacked the authority to appoint Smith in the first place. And the Supreme Court sidelined the 2020 election case for months while it considered Trump’s claim to be immune from the charges — resulting in a landmark ruling enshrining sweeping presidential immunity. Ultimately, it was Trump’s election to a second term that ended both cases. Smith dropped his pursuit of both prosecutions shortly after Trump was declared the winner, citing the Justice Department’s longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president. That cleared the way for Smith to capture his findings in the final report he submitted to Garland this week. Intense litigation over the release of Smith’s report began earlier this week and has continued into the weekend. While Cannon, a Trump appointee, put a temporary hold on the release of the report, Justice Department officials have asked the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to lift her order. The fight has left a muddle over when the public will see even the portion of Smith’s report related to the 2020 election. Garland has indicated he won’t release it until he is no longer under a court order that blocks him from doing so. The 11th Circuit has not signaled how quickly it will move to resolve the matter. Though the court initially rejected the effort by Trump and his former Florida co-defendants to block the report, it has not yet acted to disturb Cannon’s order, which blocks Garland from releasing the report until at least Monday night. Trump’s two former co-defendants — Walter Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira — have asked Cannon to extend the order and to ensure that any information Garland is permitted to release has no bearing on them. However, the Justice Department noted in its filing Saturday that it has appealed Cannon’s order, which typically blocks a district court judge from tinkering with it until the appeals court acts and formally returns the case. If the report doesn’t emerge by the time Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, it’s unclear when and if it would be officially released by DOJ officials who answer to Trump. Though Trump and his allies have warned that aspects of the report might leak if Garland is permitted to share it with Congress, the only details of the report that have become public came from Trump and his attorneys, who spent three days this month reviewing the report. In a letter, Trump’s allies attached to a court filing, Trump’s lawyers indicated that the 2020 election report characterized Trump as being “engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort,” as “the head of the criminal conspiracies” and concluded that he harbored a “criminal design.” And Trump suggested in a press conference last week that he anticipates the final report will clock in at 500 pages.

Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni made a whirlwind visit to Donald Trump at his Florida retreat on Saturday, as European leaders attempt to bolster ties with the incoming United States president. Meloni flew to Palm Beach to spend a few hours with Trump ahead of his inauguration on Jan. 20. Trump called her “a fantastic woman” who “had taken Europe by storm.” The unannounced visit to Florida came ahead of Meloni’s planned talks with President Joe Biden this week in Rome, the last international trip of Biden’s presidency. Observers expected Meloni and Trump to talk about Ukraine, potential U.S. tariffs on European companies and the Middle East. Meloni is above all keen to find a quick solution to the detention of an Italian journalist in Iran. The journalist, Cecilia Sala, was arrested in Tehran after Italian police detained an Iranian wanted by the Americans, Mohammad Abedini-Najafabad. If the U.S. were to drop the extradition request or make other concessions to Iran it would facilitate Sala’s release, which would be a big win for Meloni at home. According to media reports, Trump and Meloni met for 90 minutes before viewing a screening of a documentary questioning the criminal investigations faced by John Eastman, Trump’s former lawyer. Trump told the gathered members of his Mar-a-Lago crowd: “This is very exciting. I’m here with a fantastic woman, the prime minister of Italy,” according to the reports. “She’s really taken Europe by storm,” Trump reportedly said. The visit will add to the hopes of Meloni’s supporters that she could become Trump’s main interlocutor in Europe, despite Meloni’s alignment with the Biden administration on Ukraine. The two met in Paris last month at the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral. Meloni also has a good relationship with Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who is a close ally of Trump.

Jimmy Carter had such confidence in his improbable path to the White House that he bet Americans worn down by Vietnam and Watergate would welcome a new kind of president: a peanut farmer who carried his own bags, worried about the heating bill and told it, more or less, like it was. And for a time, the voters embraced him. Yet just four years later, in the aftermath of a presidency that was widely seen as failed, it sometimes seemed as if all that was left of Carter was the smile — the wide, toothy grin that helped elect him in the first place, then came to be caricatured by countless cartoonists as an emblem of naïveté. But it was Carter’s great fortune to enjoy a post-presidency more than 10 times as long as his tenure in office — in March 2019, he became the longest-lived president ever — and by the time he died at 100, he had lived to see history’s verdict soften. Carter entered home hospice care after a series of hospital stays, the Carter Center confirmed Feb. 18. His wife, Rosalynn Carter, passed away Nov. 19, 2023. If the 39 th president did not achieve all he sought in four years in the White House — and he did not — his abiding concern for human rights in international affairs, and for energy and the environment as a defining challenge of our time, can now be seen as prescient. If, in later years, his unyielding support for Palestinian rights (and his frequent sharp criticisms of Israel) drew many detractors, his brokering of the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt stands as a milestone of modern diplomacy. If he was the first president to confront what we now call “Islamic extremism,” he was far from the last. And if he sacrificed his re-election to the super-powerlessness of the Iranian hostage crisis — and a botched military raid to rescue the captives — his administration’s persistence nevertheless brought all 52 diplomats safely home in the end. From left, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin meet at Camp David on Sept. 6, 1978. The three leaders hammered out a historic peace agreement. | The White House via AP At a time when only six women had ever served a president’s Cabinet, Carter had appointed three of them — along with three of the five women ever to serve as departmental undersecretaries, and 80 percent of those to serve as assistant secretaries. There is almost no battle over policy or public image that Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama ever faced as first lady that Carter’s trusted wife, Rosalynn, did not fight first — whether campaigning for mental health, or sitting in on Cabinet meetings. James Earl Carter Jr. could be pious (“I’ll never lie to you,” he pledged while campaigning in 1976). He could be petty (his micromanagement of the White House tennis court was roundly mocked). He could be tone-deaf (lecturing his countrymen on a national “crisis of confidence” in a way that only accented the problem, and dispensing with some of the pomp of the presidency that ordinary people actually liked and expected). But he could also be disarmingly candid, in a political culture that almost never rewards that trait (who can forget his confession to Playboy magazine that he had lusted after women not his wife and committed adultery many times in his heart?) And he had a gift for improbable friendships — not least with the man he so narrowly and bitterly defeated, Gerald Ford, and with John Wayne, the arch-conservative whose support nevertheless helped him pass the 1977 treaty surrendering the Panama Canal. He grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, on a dirt road in rural Georgia, surrounded by poor blacks, and was the only president ever to live in public housing — upon his discharge from the Navy, when he went home to take over his family’s peanut business after his father’s death. He was the son of a staunch segregationist, and in his early career, right up to his election as governor of Georgia in 1970, he often finessed the issue of race. But on taking office in the state house, he proclaimed that “the time for discrimination is over,” and Time magazine hailed him on its cover as the face of America’s New South. Carter’s life had a classic Horatio Alger arc. As a teenager, he joined the Future Farmers of America and cultivated, packed and sold his own acre of peanuts. He fulfilled his dream of an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, and went on to become a protégé of Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, in the post-World War II submarine fleet. He married a childhood friend of his sister Ruth, and raised four children. His first political post was that quintessential American office: chairman of his local school board, where in the early 1960s, he first spoke up in favor of integration. Two terms in the Georgia State Senate and an unsuccessful run for governor in 1966 paved the way for his election as governor in 1970. By the end of 1972, he had become determined to launch a presidential campaign, but the long odds against him were exemplified in a 1973 appearance on “What’s My Line,” where none of the celebrity panelists recognized him and only the movie critic Gene Shalit eventually guessed he was a governor. But Carter’s status as an unknown outsider was a distinct advantage in the wake of Watergate — an edge understood early by the late R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times — and he quickly became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, winning the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. In 1976, he published his campaign manifesto-cum-memoir, the self-confidently titled, “Why Not the Best?” and the rest is history. Rosaylnn and Jimmy Carter wave during the 1976 Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York. | AP At his inauguration, Carter brought a bracing fresh breeze to Washington, walking from the Capitol to the White House after his swearing-in. But soon enough he brought a stern and scolding tone as well, ordering the White House thermostats to be set at a frigid 65 degrees (a move he ostentatiously announced in a televised “fireside chat,” wearing a tan cardigan), selling off the presidential yacht Sequoia, banning hard liquor from White House parties and limiting the playing of “Hail to the Chief” at official functions. Much of the national media and Washington’s chattering class quickly pronounced the new president a rube, out of his depth and surrounded by a “Georgia Mafia” equally unschooled and uncouth. He requited with prickly disdain for his critics. The very style that had seemed unpretentious and refreshing now seemed sanctimonious and crabbed, and on the substance, he just couldn’t seem to catch a break. He was saddled with a national economy stuck in “stagflation,” and by June 1978, Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution was analyzing why his presidency had failed: because it lacked an overriding vision. In an afterword to excerpts from his White House diaries, published in 2010, Carter would write: “As is evident from my diary, I felt at the time that I had a firm grip on my presidential duties and was presenting a clear picture of what I wanted to accomplish in foreign and domestic affairs. The three large themes of my presidency were peace, human rights and the environment (which included energy conservation).” But, he added, “In retrospect, though, my elaboration of these themes and departures from them were not as clear to others as to me and my White House staff.” In 1980, Carter faced a challenge for re-nomination from Sen. Ted Kennedy, and then lost the November election to his polar opposite, Ronald Reagan. He sulked for a while, then bought a $10,000 Lanier word processor, composed the first of the more than two dozen books he would write on leaving office, and set about establishing his presidential library and Carter Center in partnership with Emory University in Atlanta. The Carters attach siding to the front of a Habitat for Humanity home in LaGrange, Georgia, in 2003. | Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images Over the ensuing decades, he would build houses Habitat for Humanity, monitor foreign elections, conduct semi-sanctioned (and sometimes unsolicited) diplomacy, and continue to offer various unvarnished assessments of his successors of both parties. Posing in 2009 in the Oval Office with all the living members of the presidential club just after Barack Obama’s election, he could not restrain himself from leaving a conspicuous physical distance between himself and his fellow southerner Bill Clinton, an old frenemy whose extramarital affair in office so offended Carter, long the nation’s Sunday school teacher-in-chief. (He continued to live the part: Carter kept teaching Sunday school in Georgia year after year, taking a picture afterward with everyone who attended.) Most surveys of professional historians still rank Carter in the third quartile of effective presidents (as it happens, on par with his friend Jerry Ford). Carter himself preferred the simple summary of his vice president, Walter Mondale: “We obeyed the law, we told the truth, and we kept the peace.” In the long line of the presidency, that’s not the best boast ever. But it’s far from the worst.