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With help from Joanne Kenen
THE UNPOPULAR POPULIST — There will be no Boris Johnson bust in some future White House.
But like Winston Churchill, the man Johnson styles himself after, he will be dragged from high office amid scandal. It’s now a matter of when, not if.
Johnson played against type to lock in Britain’s path to net-zero emissions, but after a bungled Covid response — which almost cost him his life — he will be remembered chiefly for something he left (the European Union) rather than anything he built.
For Americans used to the Donald Trump playbook — from Twitter abuse to sexual misconduct accusations and impeachment to insurrection — the details of Johnson’s scandals may seem baffling.
But other democracies don’t hold themselves to the standards of Trump.
And though Johnson often acts like he is not bound by political convention or gravity, the British prime ministership is not the American presidency.
Britain doesn’t have a written constitution, and the prime minister is not directly elected. The role is barely mentioned in British law — meaning those who occupy 10 Downing Street are merely first among equals in the British Cabinet, and staying there is a confidence game.
Virtually no one in Britain retains confidence in Johnson: Only 18 percent of voters want him to stay, he’s lost the country’s powerful media editors and 148 of his own MPs voted to express “no confidence” in him last month.
At last count, 37 of Johnson’s ministers and senior officials resigned in 24 hours starting Tuesday night.
The tsunami began with Finance Minister Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid quitting within minutes Tuesday evening, forcing Johnson into a late-night Cabinet reshuffle. More ultra loyalists jumped ship Wednesday morning, and another group of five resigned together after Johnson’s defiant performance in Parliament Wednesday afternoon. His most senior defender — Foreign Secretary Liz Truss — was nowhere to be seen, jumping on a plane to Bali, Indonesia, for a G-20 meeting.
Late Wednesday, Johnson fired senior minister Michael Gove, another loyalist.
Johnson’ new chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, was in the job less than a day before turning on him. Former Conservative Minister Rory Stewart noted: “We are now entering the stage where it will be almost impossible for Boris Johnson to replace and fill his ministry positions.”
With nearly all his authority gone, Johnson is on course to leave the prime ministership neck-deep in scandals.
In the latest Westminister sex scandal — there were nine others in 2022 alone — it turned out that Johnson knew for three years that his loyal lieutenant Chris Pincher has been accused of sexually assaulting young men on multiple occasions. Senior staff warned Johnson in person.
The problem isn’t one person or scandal — it’s all of it. Read bellwether columnist Alice Thomson on why, for the sake of Britain’s democracy, enough is enough.
Because of Britain’s constitutional mish-mash, Johnson could stagger on for weeks or months — something he says he wants to do.
The man who made it to Downing Street by insisting on Leave, now refuses to. “Fuck that” was his pithy reply to a colleague who asked if he considered resigning Tuesday, The Times of London reported.
Johnson has built a career creating and then surfing waves of chaos.
He’s been fired from both journalism and political roles for lying; he upended the 2016 Brexit referendum by choosing the “Leave” side at the last minute (despite growing up in Brussels as the son of an EU official) and he arrived in Downing Street after spending months destabilizing former Prime Minister Theresa May, his party leader.
Johnson relied on electoral success to maintain his gravity-defying bubble. With his approval rating tanked, he is reduced to being an unpopular populist.
In that sense, Trump and Johnson are quite similar.
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Nightly contributor Joanne Kenen, the Commonwealth Fund journalist-in-residence at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, emails Nightly:
MEDICARE RX BREAKTHROUGH — It was, at the time, the longest recorded vote in the history of the House of Representatives. After two hours and 51 minutes, amid arm-twisting for the ages, the Medicare drug benefit passed in November 2003.
Medicare had been enacted in 1965, when health care was very different than it is today. And it didn’t cover prescription drugs. Filling that gap was a Democratic idea — but it was a Republican Congress and a Republican president, George W. Bush, who rammed it through.
But the GOP version, though quite popular with both parties today, didn’t allow Medicare to clip pharmaceutical companies’ control by negotiating drug costs — something that the Democrats have tried to change ever since.
They may finally be close — up to a point. President Joe Biden and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) have drafted tentative language, the crux of a bigger spending bill (but smaller than Biden’s Build Back Better legislation that Manchin torpedoed last fall). It won’t let Medicare negotiate all drug prices, but it does require the agency to negotiate some of them — and it protects low-income seniors from really big drug bills. It only took 19 years — but nowadays, the incrementalists in Biden’s Washington may take their wins where they can get them.
HOW PHILANTHROPIES CAN DRIVE GUN POLICY — The political system has not solved America’s gun violence crisis. So more philanthropies are stepping up, paying for research into things like “red flag” laws, community violence reduction initiatives and suicide prevention.
That work helped build the evidence base for the recently enacted bipartisan gun law, said Tim Daly, who directs the Gun Violence Prevention and Justice Reform program at the Joyce Foundation. He was among the foundation officials who briefed fellow donors on the gun violence landscape at a recent Grantmakers in Health conference, and he had a follow-up conversation with Nightly after the July 4 shooting in Highland Park.
Not all foundations are engaged, he said. Not because they don’t think it’s a worthy cause, but because foundations want to maximize their impact. And they aren’t sure how much impact they can have on what seems to be such an “intractable” problem.
But now, with gun deaths soaring amid the pandemic, he argues there is “absolutely a role for philanthropy.” From 1996 until 2020, it was illegal for the federal government to fund gun violence and injury prevention research. That taboo has been lifted — but the initial funding was only $25 million. Foundations can do more than that, he said.
“There’s a whole spectrum of gun violence issues,” said Daly. Foundation money can help develop and test ideas. Then, with evidence in hand, the federal government can come in and build policy around ideas that have already been proven by foundations and nonprofits.
— Parade shooting suspect contemplated second shooting: The man charged with killing seven people at an Independence Day parade confessed to police that he unleashed a hail of bullets from a rooftop in suburban Chicago and then fled to the Madison, Wis., area, where he contemplated shooting up an event there, authorities said today. The suspect turned back to Illinois, where he was later arrested, after deciding he was not prepared to pull off another attack, Lake County Major Crime Task Force spokesperson Christopher Covelli said at a news conference following a hearing where the 21-year-old man was denied bond.
— Appeals court panel casts doubt on DACA legality: A three-judge panel in New Orleans is hearing appeals by the Biden administration, liberal states and individual DACA recipients to a district court judge’s decision a year ago that held DACA to be unlawful — and the fate of nearly 600,000 so-called Dreamers hangs in the balance. Much of the roughly 45-minute argument session today was devoted to whether Texas and other states suing to block the program could show enough impact on them to proceed with the court case.
White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield calls on a reporter during a press briefing. | Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
— Kate Bedingfield is leaving the White House: Biden’s communications director is exiting the White House, marking another departure of a high-ranking communications official ahead of the midterm elections. This comes on the heels of Jen Psaki’s decision to step down as press secretary and during a period of internal uncertainty over the structure and makeup of the White House’s larger press operations. It’s not clear where Bedingfield will go next.
— Judge holds Cushman & Wakefield in contempt, orders fines in Trump probe: The real estate services firm was given the Trump treatment on Tuesday when a New York state judge ordered it to pay $10,000 for every day it fails to comply with a subpoena in Attorney General Tish James’ lawsuit against the Trump Organization investigating whether it unlawfully inflated the value of its properties.
— Putin’s aide warns U.S. against pressing for war crimes court: A top Kremlin official warned the U.S. today that it could face the “wrath of God” if it pursues efforts to help establish an international tribunal to investigate Russia’s action in Ukraine, while the Russian lower house speaker urged Washington to remember that Alaska used to belong to Russia. The warning follows a series of tough statements from Putin and his officials that pointed at the Russian nuclear arsenals to warn the West against interfering.
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WNBA star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner is escorted to a courtroom for a hearing, in Khimki just outside Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 1, 2022. | Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo
THE FIGHT FOR GRINER — As much as the Biden administration wants to bring her home, Brittney Griner will likely remain in a Russian prison for at least a few more months. That fear, which multiple U.S. officials and people familiar with Griner’s situation expressed to NatSec Daily and West Wing Playbook, stems from two main issues that combine to delay her safe return, write Alexander Ward and Quint Forgey.
The first is that the Kremlin seeks to leverage her celebrity for its gain. “The Russians are making maximalist demands in exchange for Griner,” a U.S. official told NatSec Daily, refusing to elaborate.
It’s widely believed that Russian authorities have specifically asked to trade Griner for Viktor Bout, a 55-year-old arms dealer and former Soviet military officer caught in a 2008 federal sting operation. Moscow has made securing his return a top priority, and apparently sees a swap for Griner as the way to get him back.
The Biden administration likely considers Bout too high a price. He built a global network to sell his weapons around the world, fueling crises and violating international law. He may not have the power he once did following his arrest and 2011 conviction, but few in the U.S. and elsewhere want to give him the chance to regain it.
The other problem is the protracted nature of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin believes that the West will eventually relent from its pressure campaign. But in case it doesn’t, Putin could dangle Griner’s return as a way to extract some sanctions relief, U.S. officials suggested.
WEST WILL PROTECT UKRAINE … TO A POINT — Western countries are willing to safeguard Ukraine’s future existence with security guarantees, but they can’t amount to a similar level of protection as the NATO military alliance provides, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said today.
Countries like the U.S., U.K., Germany and France have started discussing with Ukraine how to ensure that a potential post-war peace agreement between Kyiv and Moscow will be respected by both sides so that Russia does not use such a truce to regroup and attack its neighbor again in the future, writes Hans Von Der Burchard.
However, answering questions from lawmakers in the Bundestag, the German lower house of parliament, Scholz said that it was “clear” that such security guarantees for Ukraine “won’t correspond to Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.”
For Ukraine, which is in its fifth month of fighting off a Russian invasion, Scholz’s remarks must sound particularly disheartening: It was Germany, together with France, that denied the Eastern European country a clear path to NATO membership in 2008. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy argued in March that Russia would not have attacked his country if it had been a NATO member.
The number of people around the world who faced hunger in 2021, according to a U.N. report released today. The report found that between 702 million and 828 million people suffered from hunger last year. That's at least 50 million more than the year before it, indicating that efforts to eliminate hunger and malnutrition are sliding.
Illustration by Shira Inbar for POLITICO
THE FUTURE OF MONEY — The kiosk at this corner gas station just off Highway 101 in California’s hilly Central Coast warns that you’re on your own: “The attendants at this store cannot help you with this machine,” writes Susannah Luthi.
The kiosk stands right beside a more typical cash-withdrawal ATM, with an identical keypad and slot for a plastic card. But it’s bigger and glitzier, with a brightly colored screen like a casino slot machine. It takes your cash and converts it to Bitcoin in a virtual wallet.
Welcome to the world of cryptocurrency ATMs, also known as “BTMs” (the B is for Bitcoin), which have mushroomed in the past several years, even if most people don’t understand exactly what they’re for. The precise number of these machines in the United States seems to depend on who’s counting, but most analyses put it at about 34,000. That’s nearly 90 percent of the world’s total tally. Canada ranks a distant second with an estimated 2,500.
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