On the menu today: The downside of the large-scale prisoner swap among the U.S., Russia, and certain European allies, and recalling the circumstances of the 2016 campaign that enabled Trump’s victory and are unlikely to be replicated in the 2024 cycle. This is the last Jim-written Morning Jolt until August 12.
Terms of the Trade
We can and should rejoice at news of the release of wrongly convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Washington Post contributor and Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, and former Marine Paul Whelan, as well as 13 other unjustly imprisoned foreigners used as pawns by the vile regime of Vladimir Putin.
But there’s a catch. Once again, the United States has paid the Dane-geld and rewarded hostage-taking.
Eight arrested or convicted criminals are departing the U.S., Germany, Norway, and Slovenia and returning to Russia.
Most notable is Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who straight-up murdered a Russian dissident in broad daylight in a public park in Berlin, with children watching:
Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov, riding a bicycle, followed his target to a crowded children’s playground at lunchtime, a popular summer spot in a central-city park filled with families and workers.
As the man entered Tiergarten park, Krasikov pedaled close behind. Not far from the swings, he pulled a pistol from a rucksack and shot him in the back, leaving his victim, a former Chechen insurgent leader, slumped on the ground. Krasikov got off his bike and calmly fired twice into the man’s head, watched by children and parents, witnesses said during a court trial that ended in his conviction.
The 2019 murder of Zemlikhan Khangoshvili, a man who Moscow alleged led a 2004 attack in Russia, was determined by a German court to be an intentionally brutal message by Russia to its enemies abroad: Even if you seek refuge in the West, we will hunt you down.
Krasikov is a free man now. He’s returning to Russia, along with . . .
- Vladislav Klyushin, “convicted of participating in a $93 million insider trading scheme that involved hacking corporate computer networks.”
- Roman Seleznev, “convicted in 2016 by a U.S. federal court in Washington state for orchestrating a cyberattack on thousands of American businesses.”
- Vadim Konoshchenok, who “smuggled American-made electronics and ammunition to support Moscow’s war efforts in Ukraine, using front companies to hide his operations and violating U.S. sanctions.”
- “Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva — a Russian couple who posed as Argentine expats living an ordinary life in Slovenia — [and who] were sentenced to 19 months each in the Slovenian capital after they pleaded guilty to espionage.”
The message is clear to every Russian spy, assassin, operative, hacker, or criminal: If you get caught, don’t talk. Sit tight. Be patient. Vladimir Putin can and will get you out eventually. He can get anybody out, from an arms dealer so notorious he inspired a Nicolas Cage movie to a guy who’s executing dissidents in front of horrified kids in a German park. There is no monster so heinous and wicked that Putin can’t strongarm a foreign government into releasing him.
We should expect additional wrongful arrests, detentions, kidnappings, and abductions in the future, because the U.S. government had made clear that the tactic works; if you arrest our people on nonsense charges and throw them in prison, we will give you back the worst of the worst, the ones who required Herculean efforts to bring to justice.
(And to think, a friend suggested a particular plot twist in Dueling Six Demons involving a prisoner exchange was implausible.)
Back on December 8, 2022, after the Biden administration traded the world’s most notorious arms dealer, Viktor Bout, to the Russians in exchange for WNBA player Brittney Griner, I wrote, “It is likely that one of the reasons the Biden administration went ahead with this deal was their confidence that enough allies would choose to characterize it as a major diplomatic victory, not an epic concession to a hostile state that is likely to try to use the same strongarm tactics again in the future.”
The Russian FSB arrested Gershkovich on March 29, 2023.
If you reward hostage-taking, you get more hostage-taking.
Remembering the Lessons of Shattered
A seriously under-discussed aspect of the 2016 presidential election is the fact that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was, if not a Potemkin village, then a sleek, shining roadster with rusting engine parts inside. As I wrote after the publication of Shattered, the campaign tell-all, back in 2017:
We learn that Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, chose not to spend money on polling, relying instead on analytics surveys. “In Florida, Craig Smith, the former White House political director, and Scott Arceneaux, a veteran southern Democratic political operative, had begged Mook to poll the state in October to no avail. Mook believed it was a waste of money.” (Clinton’s campaign spent $563 million during the cycle.) Bill Clinton reportedly told one aide the Friday before the election that Florida was “in the bag.” Trump won the state by about 100,000 votes out of more than 9.4 million cast.
We learn that Clinton’s Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door-knocking. “What is the point of having a hundred people on the ground if you’re not giving them any of the tools to do the work?” asks one unidentified “veteran Democratic organizer familiar with the Wisconsin operation.”
You know, Wisconsin. The state that Hillary Clinton didn’t visit after the Democratic convention.
In other words, a big part of Donald Trump’s shock victory in 2016 was a Democratic campaign that was flying blind, insanely overconfident, wildly overestimating its odds of victory, in denial about serious problems, and botching some basic blocking-and-tackling tasks of campaigning. Donald Trump snuck up on Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and their media allies.
I don’t think that is an option for Trump in this cycle. Democrats saw polls with Trump losing for much of the year, and then watched Biden implode on a debate stage. They know Trump has a chance of winning this time. It’s not likely that they will get lackadaisical.
If you subscribe to the idea that Donald Trump is not a popular figure and that more Americans dislike him than like him, then it makes a lot of sense that Trump could win in 2016 in these circumstances but that Republicans would have bad or disappointing election cycles in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Trump won just enough votes in just enough states to win the presidency in 2016 because he was up against a uniquely bad candidate whose campaign was unusually unaware of how unpopular it really was.
Turning to today, Donald Trump is back to posting the birth certificates of his political opponents on Truth Social, and sharing the deep thoughts of Laura Loomer that “nowhere on [Kamala Harris’s] birth certificate does it say that she is BLACK OR AFRICAN.”
All of this is exactly what is foremost on the minds of America’s swing voters in the swing states, and clearly, this is a brilliant, thoroughly effective campaign message. That’s what you want to hear, right? That Donald Trump is doing great? Every time I write about what he’s doing wrong, I’m told that I’m assisting communism and socialism. Remember, if we avert our eyes from the Republican nominee’s unhinged rants that are as appealing as toxic waste to the remaining sliver of undecided voters, they won’t happen! The very best thing we can do is pretend that everything Donald Trump does is terrific and is a great way to win votes!
Nate Silver, who spent much of the past year trying to convince Democrats that Joe Biden was a likely loser against Donald Trump, writes now:
As of this afternoon’s model run, Harris’s odds had improved to 44.6 percent, as compared to 54.9 percent for Trump and a 0.5 percent chance of an Electoral College deadlock. . . .
Harris has a 54 percent chance of winning Michigan, a 50 percent chance of winning Wisconsin and 47 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania, states that would suffice to net her 270 electoral votes, one more than she needs to win (assuming she also holds lean-blue states like New Hampshire). She also has a 40 percent chance of winning Nevada, where her polling has been much better than Biden’s so far, and roughly a one-in-three chance in Georgia and North Carolina, which gives her some backup options that Biden lacked.
Trump hasn’t lost the 2024 election yet. But the race has been reset, and the Democrats are in significantly better shape than they were before. They ditched their yammering, rambling, egomaniacal, erratic octogenarian, and are enjoying dramatically improved odds of victory across the board. The Republicans, meanwhile, may never give up on their yammering, rambling, egomaniacal, erratic septuagenarian.
ADDENDUM: It’s a shame Joe Biden doesn’t know any smart, tough, experienced prosecutors.