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Ukraine and U.S. Cite Progress in Talks on Ending War With Russia
Ukraine
and U.S. Cite Progress in Talks on Ending War With Russia
President
Trump lashed out at Ukraine even as the talks on his peace proposal were still
taking place, accusing the country’s leadership of being ungrateful for
American support.
By
Cassandra Vinograd and Nick Cumming-Bruce
Cassandra
Vinograd reported from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/world/europe/ukraine-switzerland-russia-peace-talks.html
Published
Nov. 23, 2025
Updated
Nov. 24, 2025, 2:31 a.m. ET
Ukrainian
and American officials said they had made good progress on Sunday in talks
about a contentious U.S. plan to end the war with Russia, even as President
Trump lashed out at Ukraine, accusing its leaders of ingratitude.
Mr. Trump
has set a deadline of Thursday for Ukraine to agree to the 28-point peace plan,
an early draft of which many Ukrainians dismissed as capitulation because it
acceded to longstanding Kremlin demands.
The
talks, which began in Geneva on Sunday, were cast as an effort to bridge the
gaps, and in a joint statement released after the discussions, Ukraine and the
United States both said that much had been accomplished.
“They
reaffirmed that any future agreement must fully uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty
and deliver a sustainable and just peace,” the statement read. “As a result of
the discussions, the parties drafted an updated and refined peace framework.”
The
statement added that “Ukraine and the United States agreed to continue
intensive work on joint proposals in the coming days.”
Earlier
in the day, Mr. Rubio said the American and Ukrainian teams were working
through the peace plan point by point and making adjustments, “narrowing the
differences and getting closer to something” that both Kyiv and Washington
would be “comfortable with.”
He said
he was “very optimistic” that an agreement could be reached “in a very
reasonable amount of time.”
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Mr. Rubio
noted that “obviously the Russians get a vote here” and will “have to agree to
this.” He later left Geneva to return to Washington, a State Department
official said.
Andriy
Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s delegation, had earlier spoken of “very good
progress” and told reporters that discussions would continue in the days ahead.
The
cautiously optimistic — and seemingly aligned — remarks, followed by the joint
statement, came despite a lengthy missive that Mr. Trump posted on social media
criticizing Ukraine, as well as its European allies, which have been largely
excluded from the plan.
“Ukraine
‘leadership’ has expressed zero gratitude for our efforts,” Mr. Trump wrote,
“and Europe continues to buy oil from Russia.”
He also
again appeared to blame Ukraine for Russia’s full-scale invasion, saying that
the war “would have NEVER HAPPENED” had there been “strong and proper”
Ukrainian leadership.
It was
not the first time that the American president had accused Ukraine of
insufficient gratitude, or of responsibility for the war that Russia started.
During a disastrous meeting with Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office in February,
Mr. Trump told the Ukrainian leader that he was not doing enough to thank the
United States for its support.
Since
then, Mr. Zelensky and other members of his administration have taken pains to
express their thanks.
Mr.
Zelensky did so again on Sunday in a series of statements, not long after Mr.
Trump’s social media posts. Mr. Zelensky welcomed the “substantive
conversations” in Geneva and appeared to respond, albeit indirectly, to the
U.S. president’s latest accusations.
“The crux
of the entire diplomatic situation is that it was Russia, and only Russia, that
started this war, and it is Russia, and only Russia, that has been refusing to
end it,” Mr. Zelensky wrote in one of the statements.
“The
leadership of the United States is important, we are grateful for everything
that America and President Trump are doing for security, and we keep working as
constructively as possible,” he added, saying later that “tomorrow will be no
less active.”
Ukraine’s
European allies, some of whom sent representatives to Geneva to participate in
the discussions, have been working to respond to the U.S. proposal and to
demonstrate their continued support for Kyiv. In their statement on Sunday
night, Ukraine and the United States said they would “remain in close contact
with their European partners as the process advances.”
A draft
of the U.S. peace proposal posted online last week contained many conditions
that Ukraine has long rejected as unacceptable, including surrendering
territory and slashing the size of its army.
On
Saturday, the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and other countries had
released a statement urging changes to the points in the plan that were most
objectionable to Ukraine.
Ursula
von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, reasserted this on
Sunday. “As a sovereign nation there cannot be limitations on Ukraine’s armed
forces that would leave the country vulnerable to future attack,” she said.
That, she
said, would also undermine European security.
There was
no immediate comment on Sunday from the Kremlin about the talks in Geneva. An
American official said earlier that plans for separate talks between the United
States and Russia were underway.
Other
diplomatic efforts are expected in the coming days.
President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who has offered to mediate between Russia and
Ukraine, said he expected to speak to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin,
on Monday about the peace efforts. And President Emmanuel Macron of France
suggested that there would be a meeting involving the leaders of Britain,
Canada and several other nations on Tuesday.
While Mr.
Trump has said he wants Ukraine’s response to the peace plan by Thursday, he
has left open the possibility that the deadline could be extended “if things
are working well.”
Ukrainian
and U.S. officials had already discussed changes to the 28-point plan before
the meeting in Geneva, according to a Western official briefed on the talks.
The working version now differs, the official said, from a version posted
online on Thursday by a Ukrainian lawmaker.
Still,
there seemed to be continued confusion about the original proposal, including
among lawmakers. A group of U.S. senators said on Saturday that Mr. Rubio had
told them that the document “was not the administration’s plan” but a “wish
list of the Russians.”
The State
Department said that was “blatantly false,” and Mr. Rubio also rejected the
characterization, writing on social media that “the peace proposal was authored
by the U.S.”
“It is
offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations,” he said. “It is based
on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing
input from Ukraine.”
Andrew E.
Kramer, Helene Cooper, John Eligon, Eric Schmitt, Lara Jakes and Roger Cohen
contributed reporting.
FURIOUS MINDS by LAURA K. FIELD
Mark
Lilla,
The New
York Review of Books
The most
up-to-date introduction we have to the MAGA intellectual right reshaping
America with astonishing speed today ... [Field] is particularly good on the
less well known National Conservatives ... But the most interesting chapters
are those that Field devotes to a sect of Leo Strauss admirers at the Claremont
Institute in California ... Insightful.
Richard M. Reinsch II,
The Wall Street Journal
The National Conservatives, or natcons, emerged
in 2019. Ms. Field struggles to provide a clear definition of their mission
.... The idea that Jaffa’s famous pugnacity arose from his Straussian ideas
rather than his personality strikes me as tendentious. More notable, though, is
that Ms. Field, in a work about political theory and practice, hardly bothers
to counter Jaffa or other influential thinkers with her own liberal version of
a polity that upholds individual dignity while allowing civic pluralism ... Nor
does Ms. Field have much to say about the ludicrous descent of modern
liberalism into racial and sexual tribalism. With apologies to Ms. Field, this
descent has done far more to birth the 'furious minds' of the New Right than
the speculations of philosophers and intellectuals.
Alexandre Lefebvre,
Los Angeles Review of Books
The closest thing we have to a mole’s-eye view of
the New Right, and it is revelatory ... Few books in political theory
foreground the author’s biography as much as this one. But it lands in this
case, establishing Field’s authority to identify what unifies the leading
intellectual lights of the New Right ... Sociologically rich and intellectually
precise political theory of and for the moment ... Despite running over 400
pages, the book carries not an ounce of fat ... In Field’s culminating claim,
lies the book’s unsettling insight: despite a decline in mainstream media
coverage since the 2017 Charlottesville riots, the Hard Right never went away
... [A] Smart, stylish, scathingly critical overview of the New Right ...
Generous and withering ... An important service.
Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas review – superb hate-reading
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This
article is more than 6 years old
Review
Winners
Take All by Anand Giridharadas review – superb hate-reading
This
article is more than 6 years old
A
spirited examination of the hubris and hypocrisy of the super-rich who claim
they are helping the world
Aditya
Chakrabortty
Thu 14
Feb 2019 08.30 CET
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/14/winners-take-all-by-anand-giridharadas-review
Davos is
no place for fighting. It is where chief executives fly to in private jets to
discuss the dire consequences of climate change, where hot-money speculators
deliver homilies on responsible investing, and the world’s media receive every
falling cliche with unctuous warmth. Yet last month it was here in Switzerland,
amid the sharp shooters and roadblocks, that a very revealing skirmish broke
out.
At a
panel devoted to “making digital globalization inclusive” (for Davos is mainly
a hollow-eyed human re-enactment of the drabbest Economist editorials),
computer tycoon Michael Dell was asked what he thought about a 70% tax on
earnings of more than $10m a year. The very idea provoked speakers and audience
to peals of laughter. What a joke, to take money away from these deserving
multimillionaires! Dell, the 39th richest person in the world, replied that he
and his wife already give to charity: “I feel much more comfortable with our
ability … to allocate those funds than I do giving them to the government.” Who
needs the imprecise squall of democracy when a man worth $33bn can decide what
the masses need? He went on: “I don’t think it will help the growth of the US
economy. Name a country where that’s worked – ever.” Fervent agreement followed
until economist Erik Brynjolfsson butted in, citing one country that had had
such high tax rates: “The United States … from about the 1930s to the 1960s …
and those were pretty good years for growth.” Brynjolfsson is not known for his
socialism and his intervention was far milder than that made two days later by
historian Rutger Bregman (“Taxes, taxes, taxes … all the rest is bullshit”),
but still, the aromatic consensus had been broken.
Were I
Anand Giridharadas’s publisher, I would broadcast that exchange as an
advertisement for his latest book, in which he takes aim at his favourite
targets. The elevation of business people to “leaders”, whose views somehow
soar above self-interest; the nose-wrinkling dismissal of messy politics; the
blimpish disregard for even recent history – all are present and shown as
incorrect in Winners Take All.
As
reporting assignments go, this calls not so much for a flak jacket as a sick
bag
The big
questions animating this book are the ones central to western politics today:
why is the state of affairs made nonsense by the economic crisis still in
place? What explains both the governing class’s lack of serious response to
2008’s banking crash, and the vast inequality that continues in its wake?
Rather than economic or political analysis, Winners Take All is a study of the
alibis and strategies used by Dell and his kind to justify inertia.
Giridharadas takes us inside charitable foundations and back-slapping summits
to meet management consultants, greying politicians and a few of the most
important names in philanthropy. His is the view from the panel discussion, the
venture capitalist’s boardroom and the fundraiser with its bespoke canapes.
As
reporting assignments go, this calls not so much for a flak jacket as a sick
bag. In a Manhattan crammed with visiting dignitaries for UN week, Bill Clinton
convenes a conference at which the audience is told: “Empowering girls and
women is the hot new branding thing!” David Miliband gazes on as the boss of
Western Union chides the prime minister of Sweden: “One of the issues in the
politicians, with all due respect, Mr Prime Minister, is that you guys are
voted by local people, but you’re responsible for global issues.” Never mind
that Mr Western Union is beholden to his shareholders, it’s the nation state
that’s parochial.
Giridharadas
boards a cruise ship bound for the Bahamas, doubling as a floating conference
for entrepreneurs apparently hungry for social justice. Into this arena is
beamed Edward Snowden, whose exposing of the US’s surveillance regime led to
his exile in Moscow. He talks to the assembled cruisers about the necessity of
heretical thinking, before the Silicon Valley moneyman interviewing him breaks
in: “So I invest in founders for a living. And I gotta tell you … I smell a
founder here … there’s probably investors waiting for you here.”
Witnessing
such hubris and hypocrisy must have been hard on the stomach; it does, however,
make superb hate-reading. Through these vignettes, Giridharadas depicts an
elite he dubs MarketWorld, an international nexus of consultants and business
people and centrist politicians who want “to change the world while also
profiting from the status quo”. Its hubs include Silicon Valley and Wall
Street, its feeding stations Davos and all the other expensive talking shops.
Its denizens have access to political power and millions to buy wider
influence, through donating to universities and museums. In his bemused
defensiveness over higher taxes, Dell was the embodiment of MarketWorld. The
billionaires in this book prefer markets to governments, policies to politics, and
love solutions that are win-win – which is another way of saying that they
should never lose. Theirs is conservatism camouflaged in radical adjectives;
change you can’t believe in.
In this
exotic land, Giridharadas is an insider-outsider. Having spent half a chapter
beating up McKinsey management consultants, he later reveals that he worked
there. Pages are spent laying into TED talks, even though the author has
delivered two. His wife is Priya Parker, who describes her business as helping
“activists, elected officials, corporate executives, educators, and
philanthropists create transformative gatherings” of precisely the kind her
husband skewers in this book. As for networking, Giridharadas admits to
mingling with “the ultra-rich in antler-decorated mansions overlooking the
Roaring Fork Valley”. Fair enough: a man’s got to eat – and he might as well
eat devilled eggs.
Power has
been put in the hands of a group that believes trade unions are merely cartels
and hell is other people voting
That
background allows him precious access and imbues the text with a catty intimacy
that is hugely enjoyable. His one-liners and storytelling zest make
Giridharadas the guy who you want to hang out with on the sidelines of that
earnest cocktail party. But his analysis could do with some deepening. The ugly
vanity of MarketWorld may be eye-catching, but what makes it unfair is that it
is bankrolled by the rest of us, through lower wages and low taxes on wealth.
Simply put, we pay the billionaires to tell us what to do. What gives their
demands such amplification isn’t just their money, vital though that is, it is
that they and their friends in government have razed many of the countervailing
institutions, whether organised labour or local government. Winners Take All
doesn’t name it, but what it’s really describing is an institutional crisis in
which the political landscape has been cleared of its forces for representation
and reformation. Instead, power has been put in the hands of a group that
believes trade unions are merely cartels, thinkers are far inferior to “thought
leaders” and hell is other people voting.
Giridharadas’s
answer to all this is simple: a bigger and more powerful state. “The government
is us,” he quotes Italian philosopher Chiara Cordelli approvingly. And he is
right that it is high time politics took back the ground it has lost to policy.
But barely more than a line is spent acknowledging that there are plenty of
times the government is not us – when it is taking away our benefits, when it
is displacing us from our homes, or when it is cutting taxes for corporations
while closing children’s centres.
Arguments
aside, this is a good book whose most subtle and powerful moments come when
Giridharadas finds other insiders with a hankering to be on the outside, agents
of change who know that the system they work within only shortchanges us.
People such as Darren Walker, the sharp-minded African American head of the
Ford Foundation charity, who knows the root problem goes deeper than poverty
and bad luck; it is inequality. Riding his black limousine into “the belly of
the beast”, a private equity firm, Walker plans how he will broach that
argument, but finds himself in front of an impassive audience and resorts to a
familiar vaudeville act of telling his harsh life story: born in a hospital run
by a charity, raised single-handedly by his mum, working as a busboy aged 12 …
The executives respond by asking how he motivates staff.
In this
way, banal humiliation is heaped on a good and relatively powerful man trying
to reform a system that, on all the available evidence, may not be reformable.
How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails
Opinion
Guest
Essay
How the
Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails
Nov. 23,
2025
By Anand
Giridharadas
Mr.
Giridharadas is the author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing
the World” and publisher of The.Ink newsletter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/opinion/meaning-epstein-emails.html
As
journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning
luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How
could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb
to this?
A close
read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey
Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to
rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at
disregarding pain.
At the
dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment
with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in
which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because
they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the
financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars
some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the
monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis
they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.
The
Epstein story is resonating with a broader swath of the public than most
stories now do, and some in the establishment worry. When Representative Ro
Khanna, Democrat of California, speaks of an “Epstein class,” isn’t that
dangerous? Isn’t that class warfare?
But the
intuitions of the public are right. People are right to sense that, as the
emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the
intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups,
academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its
own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite
second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived
of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether
they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes,
raped.
It is no
accident that this was the social milieu that took Mr. Epstein in. His
reinvention, after he pleaded guilty to prostitution-related charges in Florida
in 2008, would never have been possible without this often anti-democratic,
self-congratulatory elite, which, even when it didn’t traffic people, took the
world for a ride.
The
emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how
our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way
this elite operates is.
The idea
of an Epstein class is helpful because one can be misled by the range of people
to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself. Republicans. Democrats.
Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Royals.
Superlawyers. A person he emailed at one moment was often at war with the ideas
of another correspondent — a Lawrence Summers to a Steve Bannon, a Deepak
Chopra to a scientist skeptical of all spirituality, a Peter Thiel to a Noam
Chomsky. This diversity masked a deeper solidarity.
What his
correspondents tended to share was membership in a distinctly modern elite: a
ruling class in which 40,000-foot nomadism, world citizenship and having just
landed back from Dubai lend the glow that deep roots once provided; in which
academic intellect is prized the way pedigree once was; in which ancient caste
boundaries have melted to allow rotation among, or simultaneous pursuit of,
governing, profiting, thinking and giving back. Some members, like Mr. Summers,
are embedded in all aspects of it; others, less so.
If this
neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood, it may be because it is
not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a
political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these,
lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions. If it’s a jet set, it’s a
carbon-offset-private-jet set. After all, flying commercial won’t get you from
your Davos breakfast on empowering African girls with credit cards to your
crypto-for-good dinner in Aspen.
Many of
the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read,
took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and inquiry. In the Epstein
class, emails often begin and end with pings of echolocation. “Just got to New
York — love to meet, brainstorm,” the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein.
“i’m in wed, fri. edelman?” Mr. Epstein wrote to the billionaire Thomas
Pritzker (it is unclear if he meant a person, corporation or convening). To
Lawrence Krauss, a physicist in Arizona: “noam is going to tucson on the 7th.
will you be around.” Mr. Chopra wrote to say he would be in New York, first
speaking, then going “for silence.” Gino Yu, a game developer, announced travel
plans involving Tulum, Davos and the D.L.D. (Digital Life Design) conference —
an Epstein-class hat trick.
Landings
and takeoffs, comings and goings, speaking engagements and silent retreats —
members of this group relentlessly track one another’s passages through J.F.K.,
L.H.R., N.R.T. and airports you’ve never even heard of. Whereabouts are the
pheromones of this elite. They occasion the connection-making and information
barter that are its lifeblood. If “Have you eaten?” was a traditional Chinese
greeting, “Where are you today?” is the Epstein-class query.
Their
loyalty, it appears, is less downward to people and communities than horizontal
to fellow members of their borderless network. Back in 2016, Theresa May, then
the prime minister of Britain, seemed to capture their essence: “If you believe
you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” Epstein’s
correspondents come alive far from home, freed from obligations, in the air,
ready to connect.
And the
payoff can be real. Maintain, as Mr. Epstein did, a grandmother-like radar of
what a thousand people are doing tomorrow and where, and you can introduce a
correspondent needing a lending partner to someone you’re seeing today. Or let
Ehud Barak know a Rothschild has the flu. Or offer someone else a jet ride back
to New York and reward the journalist who tipped you off by setting him up to
meet a Saudi royal.
But the
whereabouts missive is just the first flush of connection. Motion is the
flirtation; actual information, the consummation.
How did
Mr. Epstein manage to pull so many strangers close? The emails reveal a barter
economy of nonpublic information that was a big draw. This is not a world where
you bring a bottle of wine to dinner and that’s it. You bring what financiers
call “edge” — proprietary insight, inside information, a unique takeaway from a
conference, a counterintuitive prediction about A.I., a snippet of conversation
with a lawmaker, a foretaste of tomorrow’s news.
What the
Epstein class understands is that the more accessible information becomes, the
more precious nonpublic information is. The more everybody insta-broadcasts
opinions, the dearer is the closely held take. The emails are a private,
bilateral social media for people who can’t or won’t post: an archipelago of
single subscriber Substacks. And in the need to maintain relevance by offering
edge, a reader detects thirst and swagger, desperateness and swanning.
“Saw Matt
C with DJT at golf tournament I know why he was there,” Nicholas Ribis, a
former Trump Hotel executive, wrote to Mr. Epstein, making what couples
therapists call a bid for attention. Jes Staley, then a top banking executive,
casually mentioned a dinner with George Tenet, the former Central Intelligence
Agency director, and got the reaction he probably hoped for: “how was tenet.”
Mr. Summers laid bait by mentioning meetings with people at SoftBank and Saudi
Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Mr. Epstein nibbled: “anyone stand out?” Then
Mr. Summers could offer proprietary intel. On it went: What are people saying?
Who are you hearing for F.B.I. director? Should I drop your name to Bill
Clinton?
Sometimes
these people give the impression that their minds would be blown by a
newspaper. Mr. Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein: “Love to get your sense of Trump’s
administration, policies.” And while it may seem strange to rely on Mr. Epstein
for political analysis when you can visit any number of websites, for this
class, insight’s value varies inversely with the number of recipients. And the
ultimate flex is getting insider intel and shrugging: “Nthg revolutionary
really,” the French banker Ariane de Rothschild wrote during a meeting with
Portugal’s prime minister.
Nomadic
bat signals get things going, and edge keeps them flowing, while underneath a
deeper exchange is at work. The smart need money; the rich want to seem smart;
the staid seek adjacency to what Mr. Summers called “life among the lucrative
and louche”; and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who
could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some
form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money
into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money.
Mr.
Summers wrote to Mr. Epstein: “U r wall st tough guy w intellectual curiosity.”
Mr. Epstein replied: “And you an interllectual with a Wall Street curiosity.”
In
another email, Mr. Epstein offered typo-strewn and false musings on climate
science to Mr. Krauss, including that Canada perhaps favored global warming,
since it’s cold (it doesn’t), and that the South Pole is actually getting
colder (it’s melting rapidly). Mr. Krauss let Mr. Epstein indulge in his
rich-man theorizing while offering a tactful correction and a hint that more
research funding would help.
For this
modern elite, seeming smart is what inheriting land used to be: a guarantor of
opened doors. A shared hyperlink can’t stand alone; your unique spin must be
applied. Mr. Krauss sends his New Yorker article on militant atheism; Mr.
Chomsky sends a multiparagraph reply; Mr. Epstein dashes off: “I think religion
plays a major positive role in many lives. . i dont like fanaticism on either
side. . sorry.” This somehow leads to a suggestion that Mr. Krauss bring the
actor Johnny Depp to Mr. Epstein’s private island.
Again and
again, scholarly types lower themselves to offer previews of their research or
inquiries into Mr. Epstein’s “ideas.” “Maybe climate change is a good way of
dealing with overpopulation,” muses Joscha Bach, a German cognitive scientist.
The
nature of this omnidirectional capital exchange comes into special focus in the
triangle of emails among Mr. Epstein, Mr. Summers and his wife, Elisa New. Mr.
Summers seemingly benefited from Mr. Epstein’s hosting, tip-offs, semi-insight
into Trumpworld and, most grossly, dating advice many years into his marriage.
Ms. New
sought Mr. Epstein’s help contacting Woody Allen and revising her emails to
invite people on her televised poetry show. Mr. Epstein tutored her in elite
mores and motives: Don’t say, Come on my show; say, Join Serena Williams, Bill
Clinton and Shaq in coming on my show. Mr. Epstein reaped the benefits of
smarts by association in hanging around them, of the reputation cleanse of
affiliation with Harvard professors and a former Treasury secretary, and of
getting to cosplay as statesman, once sending an unsolicited intro email to Mr.
Summers and Senegalese politician Karim Wade, who, Mr. Epstein informed Mr.
Summers, is “the most charismatic and rational of all the africans and has
there respect.” There are 1.5 billion people and 54 countries in Africa.
This
class has its status games. One is, when getting a tip, to block the blessing
by saying you already know. Another is to apologize for busyness by invoking
centrality — “trump related issues occupying my time.” When an intro is
offered, the coldest reply is “no.” The ultimate power move is from Mohamed
Waheed Hassan of the Maldives, whose emails ended: “Sent from President’s
iPad.”
If you
were an alien landing on Earth and the first thing you saw was the Epstein
emails, you could gauge status by spelling, grammar, punctuation. Usage is
inversely related to power in this network. The earnest scientists and scholars
type neatly. The wealthy and powerful reply tersely, with misspellings, erratic
spacing, stray commas.
The
status games belie a truth, though: These people are on the same team. On air,
they might clash. They tout opposite policies. Some in the network profess
anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a
group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that
decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the
network wins.
Mr.
Epstein may despise what Mr. Trump is doing, but he still hangs with Steve
Bannon, the Trump whisperer and attack dog, seeking help on crypto regulation.
Michael Wolff is a journalist, but that doesn’t stop him from advising Mr.
Epstein on his public image. Kenneth Starr, who once doggedly pursued sexual
misconduct allegations against Mr. Clinton, reinvented himself as a defender of
Mr. Epstein. These are permanent survivors who will profit when things are
going this way and then profit again when they turn.
“What
team are you pulling for?” Linda Stone, a retired Microsoft executive, asked
Mr. Epstein just before the 2016 election.
“none,”
he replied.
In one
email, he commiserates with Mr. Wolff about Mr. Bannon’s rhetoric; in another,
he invites Mr. Bannon over and suggests an additional guest — Kathryn Ruemmler,
who served as President Barack Obama’s White House counsel.
His
exchanges with Ms. Ruemmler are especially striking — not for the level of
horridness, but for how they portray this network at its most shape-shiftingly
self-preservational, and most indifferent to the human beings below.
Like so
many, she had gone from Obama-era public service to private legal practice,
eventually becoming the chief lawyer for Goldman Sachs. That people move from
representing the presidency to representing banks is so normal that we forget
the costs: the private job done with the savvy to outfox one’s former
public-sector colleagues, the public job done gently to keep open doors.
In some
exchanges in 2014, Ms. Ruemmler appears to be contemplating a job offer:
attorney general of the United States, according to contemporary reports. And
who does she seek advice from? A convicted sex offender.
In
another email, Mr. Epstein asks a legal question about whether Mr. Trump can
declare a national emergency to build a border wall. She responds that a
prospective employer has offered her a $2 million signing bonus. The glide from
tyranny to bonus distills a core truth: Regardless of what happens, the members
of this social network will be fine.
Ms.
Ruemmler told Mr. Epstein she was going to New York one day. “I will then stop
to pee and get gas at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, will observe all
of the people there who are at least 100 pounds overweight, will have a mild
panic attack as a result of the observation, and will then decide that I am not
eating another bite of food for the rest of my life out of fear that I will end
up like one of these people,” she wrote in 2015.
But in
the class of permanent survivors, today’s jump scare may yield to tomorrow’s
opportunity. A few years after she joined the company, Goldman Sachs declared
anti-obesity drugs a “$100 billion opportunity.”
Generally,
you can’t read other people’s emails. Powerful people have private servers,
I.T. staffs, lawyers. When you get a rare glimpse into how they actually think
and view the world, what they actually are after, heed Maya Angelou: Believe
them.
American
democracy today is in a dangerous place. The Epstein emails are a kind of
prequel to the present. This is what these powerful people, in this mesh of
institutions and communities, were thinking and doing — taking care of one
another instead of the general welfare — before it got really bad.
This era
has seen a surge in belief in conspiracy theories, including about Mr. Epstein,
because of an underlying intuition people have that is, in fact, correct: The
country often seems to be run not for the benefit of most of us.
Shaming
the public as rubes for succumbing to conspiracy theories misses what people
are trying to tell us: They no longer feel included in the work of choosing
their future. On matters small and big, from the price of eggs to whether the
sexual abuse of children matters, what they sense is a sneering indifference.
And a knack for looking away.
Now the
people who capitalized on the revolt against an indifferent American elite are
in power, and, shock of all shocks, they are even more indifferent than anyone
who came before them. The clubby deal-making and moral racketeering of the
Epstein class is now the United States’ governing philosophy.
In spite
of that, the unfathomably brave survivors who have come forward to testify to
their abuse have landed the first real punch against Mr. Trump. In their
solidarity, their devotion to the truth and their insistence on a country that
listens when people on the wrong end of power cry for help, they shame the
great indifference from above. They point us to other ways of relating.
Extortionate tickets and matches moved at Trump’s whim: are you ready for the ‘greatest World Cup ever’?
Extortionate
tickets and matches moved at Trump’s whim: are you ready for the ‘greatest
World Cup ever’?
Marina
Hyde
You may
have thought Qatar and Russia were tournament lows. You didn’t account for the
US president and his Fifa soulmate, Gianni Infantino
Tue 18
Nov 2025 15.45 CET
“It’s
very clear,” claimed haunted Fifa cue-ball Gianni Infantino not so long ago,
“that politics should stay out of football and football should stay out of
politics.” But is it clear? Is it really? On Monday, the worst man in world
sport was – yet again – to be found in the Oval Office, this time nodding along
to Trump’s declaration that games could be moved from host cities for next
summer’s World Cup if the US president deems there’s “a problem” with security
or that the cities are non-compliant in some other way. In practice, that seems
to mean if they’re run by a Democrat/“communist”. Amazing that the Fifa
president will gladly allow his tournaments to be held in any old violent
autocracy but, for the purposes of the White House cameras at least, might need
to draw the line at Boston.
Honestly,
the very sight of Infantino these days causes decades of writing about Fifa to
flash before my eyes. How could it have happened? How could we have ended up
with an even bigger horror in charge of world football’s governing body than
the various ones who went before? When Sepp Blatter was thrown from a moving
gravy train in 2015 amid an explosive corruption scandal, it would have felt
like a genuine feat of sporting excellence to have beaten his record for craven
awfulness.
And yet
here we all are. This year, the Fifa president has been the Forrest Gump of
Trump’s administration. Back in May, he attended the US president’s Middle East
peace summit, causing him to be so late for Fifa’s own congress that even Uefa
accused him of prioritising “private political interests” and staged a delegate
walk-out. Last month, Gianni was back on the political trail at Trump’s Gaza
peace talks in Egypt, and earlier this month instituted some preposterous Fifa
peace prize that he’s going to inaugurate at the final draw for the 2026 World
Cup in Washington next month, quite possibly so that the orange organ grinder
can be the first winner of it. He spent yesterday grinning along while Trump
announced things such as the possible ordering of “strikes” on one of the US’s
2026 World Cup co-host nations, Mexico. Perhaps the writing was on the wall
when Gianni kicked off the year of ceaselessly grim politicking by attending
Trump’s inauguration, where he was filmed giggling appreciatively during the bit
where the US president announced he’d be changing the name of the Gulf of
Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Back
then, in January, Infantino looked like a competition winner. Now he resembles
a fully operational member of Trump’s troupe of winged monkeys. It used to be
host governments that got co-opted into Fifa’s supra-national edicts – I
remember South Africa being forced to set up highly dubious “Fifa World Cup
Courts” for errant fans during the 2010 tournament. But now Fifa is a wholly
owned tool of whoever will have it. Like all parasites, it relies on its host
organisms.
As far as
I can tell, a political leader removing a game from a host city has never
happened in the entire 95-year history of the World Cup tournament, which
should perhaps confirm the increasing global impression that the US might just
be a uniquely backward country. Football fans considering buying expensive
tickets and making even more expensive travel arrangements should consider that
they are journeying somewhere so apparently volatile that even its own
president talks its safety down. Hopefully here in the UK there will be
official Foreign Office advice warning of the logistical and political dangers
of watching a remorselessly poor match between two of the 48 countries that
Infantino has triumphantly ruined the group stages with. Or, indeed, watching
no match at all, because Seattle’s mayor has been deemed less politically
acceptable than anyone connected to the leadership of the last two host
countries, Qatar and Russia. Which, by way of a reminder, were not actually
even democracies.
Or as
Trump’s White House World Cup taskforce head, nepo gimp Andrew Giuliani, put it
on Monday, the next World Cup could only have happened because of Trump’s
“vision”, and is going to be “one of the greatest cultural events in world
history”. Infantino went with different superlatives, promising that it would
be “the greatest and most inclusive World Cup ever”. Mm-hm. In the hands of
marketing men, of which Mr Infantino is most certainly one, there are few more
telltale red flags than use of the word “inclusive”. If you ever hear the word
inclusive in what amounts to an advert, you can be sure someone’s about to get
done over or excluded – and in this case, would you believe, it’s the fans. Not
only has the Fifa overlord allowed World Cup game tickets to be subject to the
loathed dynamic pricing, but those games might be shifted hundreds or even
thousands of miles away due to politics.
No doubt
Infantino is patting himself on the back for all this. But his true achievement
– so far – is presiding over an era in which “sportswashing” stopped being some
niche critical term of art, and became something that all football fans know
the minute they see it. Because they see it all the time. As for that peace
prize, please don’t limit yourself to thinking it will be annual. The last time
Gianni invented a prize – Fifa’s The Best Awards – he held them twice inside
nine months. So there is every chance Trump could win it again before next
summer’s World Cup kicks off. It’s all thanks to the least political man in
world sport – or certainly, the least sporting man in world politics.
domingo, 23 de novembro de 2025
Ronaldo dines with Donald for glamour portion of grotesque Saudi-funded spectacle
Ronaldo
dines with Donald for glamour portion of grotesque Saudi-funded spectacle
Barney
Ronay
A
pension-pot World Cup looms and with Trump in the White House and a crown
prince at his back, it is now a safe space
Sat 22
Nov 2025 09.00 CET
It was
hard to choose one favourite photo from football’s double-header at the White
House this week. In part this is because the pictures from Donald Trump’s state
dinner with Mohammed bin Salman and his in-house hype men Cristiano Ronaldo and
Gianni Infantino were everywhere, recycled feverishly across the internet,
dusted with their own drool-stained commentary by the wider Ronaldo-verse.
Mainly
there were just so many jaw-droppers. Perhaps you liked the one of Trump and
Ronaldo strolling the halls of power, Ronaldo dressed all in black and laughing
uproariously, like a really happy ninja. Or the one of Ronaldo and Georgina
Rodríguez standing either side of a weirdly beaming Trump at his desk, holding
up some kind of large heraldic key as though they’ve just been presented with
their own wind-up wooden sex-grandad.
Perhaps
you preferred footage of the dinner itself where even the air in the room looks
thick and smudged and strange, the kind of room where you look down and notice
the chair you’re sitting on is made out of human fingernails. There was the bit
where Trump is giving a speech about all the “unbelievable dignitaries”,
impresario-style, like he’s cutting the ribbon on a shopping mall in Boca
Raton. As you look closer it becomes clear his hair has now decisively evolved
from its previous form as a kind of flat orange hat and has gone full 1980s
newsreader bouffant, so thick with spray and chemicals it’s closer to a kind of
gauze, hair you could stick your hand in and then never get it out, like
flypaper.
Maybe
it’s the simple game of trying to work out what might have been on the menu
given Ronaldo dines off swordfish, lettuce and a gallon of mineral water,
whereas an average Trump dinner is two Filets-O-Fish covered in ketchup, 12
cans of Diet Coke and a wheelbarrow full of biscuits.
My
favourite bits are where Infantino keeps wandering into shot. There he is
again, gurning at the back of Ronaldo’s post-dinner power-selfie, looking as
ever like a vampire who does card tricks, but also seeming, at this ultimate
level of weirdness, to be showing some slight sense of impostor syndrome.
Albeit,
in Infantino’s case this is not a syndrome. He is an actual impostor, out there
pretending to be a disinterested administrator. And he is correct to feel this
way, in so much as essence of human vanity compacted into a dinner jacket and
taught to say the phrase “Today I feel like a hazelnut” can feel anything.
It is
worth being totally clear on what was happening here. This was, first of all, a
state visit and a significant refresh of US-Saudi relations. But it was also a
kind of executive benediction. First for Ronaldo, who hadn’t been photographed
in the US since the leaking in 2017 of allegations of sexual assault, which he
denies and have never been proven.
Not being
in the US has cost the Ronaldo brand millions. A final pension-pot World Cup is
looming. With Trump in the White House and MBS at his back, it seems this is
now a safe space. The quid pro quo is obvious. CR7 is huge among young men on
the internet. He’s the most winningest World Cup mascot. He’s a tall handsome
guy. This is where we are, why Trump is up at his dais saying the word
“Roonnnallldoo” in those sensuous cooing tones, like he’s whispering into the
ear of his favourite doughnut.
The
second returnee is MBS, overlord of the next World Cup-but-two. The crown
prince was on his first visit to the US since being accused by its intelligence
service of complicity in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Here he was casually
exonerated by Trump (“He knew nothing about it”) in an aside to journalists.
How do
you get hold of one of these off-the-cuff pardons? By sheer coincidence, on
Wednesday night Trump also got to announce that Saudi Arabia is investing $1tn
in the US. But whatever the lines of cause and effect, here was a man
previously accused of complicity in murder and a man previously accused of
sexual assault being welcomed back by the most indicted president in US
history. All of them talking about the power of love and peace. All of it
glossed and legitimised by the presence at the table of football.
And so
here we have it, the ultimate in grotesque sporting spectacles. For Ronaldo,
this represents a convincing nadir, confirmation of the moral emptiness of his
entire schlocky persona. But Ronaldo is also a private individual who can come
and go as he pleases. Football, Fifa, the World Cup. These things belong to us
and they really shouldn’t be in this room.
There is
a sense of outrage fatigue about all this. Infantino is doing something awful
again? No way dude. Maybe humans just prefer evil stuff on some level. It’s
more cinematic. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, the world’s first unintended rock
star, out there throwing TVs out the hotel window, the bad guy usually does
steal the show.
But it is
still necessary to ramp up the anger thrusters again, because this is a level
up. Here we have an all-time footballer, who doesn’t need more money, being
paid hundreds of millions of dollars to play in Saudi Arabia and who is now a
mascot to the travelling court.
For all
Ronaldo’s alpha-dog stylingthis is such invertebrate behaviour. I will perfect
my physical form. I will rise to become the most famous human. All the better
to polish the boots of power. None of this will dissuade any of Ronaldo’s
online supplicants. This is the point. His influence is being entirely
co-opted, the greatest one-man act of multiple regime-washing yet devised.
It also
matters because of next year’s World Cup. Infantino’s dog-like devotion to
Trump is not just a personal oddity, but a breach of his duty of care. Fifa is
non-political. Fifa is an administrator, not a player on the stage. Fifa has no
mandate to use football’s popularity to endorse a movement, to be present while
globally significant arms sales and nuclear cooperation are agreed.
The day
before the Ronaldo buffet, Infantino sat nodding along while Trump talked about
moving World Cup games from cities run by his political opponents and
threatened to bomb Fifa’s co-host Mexico. Trump is already shaping this global
show as a projector screen for his own divisive politics and the power-play
with fellow autocrats, to the extent it is fair to say the US World Cup is as
bad as Qatar and Russia on a register of political cynicism. At least neither
of those two ever pretended to be the world’s leading liberal democracy.
There was
an obvious emotional counterpoint this week in the glimpses of that other
sporting world, Troy Parrott saying: “That’s why we love football,” the joy of
Scotland’s qualification, little shots of beauty that keep you coming. We don’t
have to give up on the World Cup. But we can give up on the people who have
weaponised it. And demand, wherever it is still possible, a great deal better
than this.
The COP30 deal includes a compromise to boost climate finance for developing nations, but notably lacks any mention of fossil fuels due to opposition from fossil fuel-producing countries.
The COP30
deal includes a compromise to boost climate finance for developing nations, but
notably lacks any mention of fossil fuels due to opposition from fossil
fuel-producing countries. Key points are the increased financial support for
vulnerable countries and the establishment of voluntary roadmaps, such as a
just transition away from fossil fuels and halting deforestation, which are not
part of the formal UN agreement.
Key
takeaways from the COP30 deal
Compromise
on finance: The deal prioritizes boosting financial aid for countries dealing
with climate change impacts.
No mention
of fossil fuels: Despite calls for a roadmap, the final agreement does not
include any explicit reference to phasing out fossil fuels like oil, gas, and
coal, due to objections from countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Voluntary
measures: The COP30 president, Andre Correa do Lago, announced voluntary
roadmaps to address fossil fuel transition and deforestation, inviting all
countries to join, but these are not formal parts of the UN deal.
Future
talks: The agreement launches an ongoing dialogue on issues like trade and just
transitions, which will be discussed in future talks.
Compromises, voluntary measures and no mention of fossil fuels: key points from Cop30 deal
Explainer
Compromises,
voluntary measures and no mention of fossil fuels: key points from Cop30 deal
A deal is
welcome after talks nearly collapsed but the final agreement contains small
steps rather than leaps
Damian
Carrington and Jonathan Watts
Sat 22
Nov 2025 21.33 CET
The UN
climate summit Cop30 moved forward the fight against the climate crisis and the
damage it is already causing to lives and livelihoods. But the measures agreed
are steps, rather than the leaps needed.
1.
Multilateralism survived … just
The
negotiations between more than 190 countries came close to collapse, as
ambitious countries and petrostates threatened to block any deal or walk out.
But global heating requires a global response and in today’s fractured
geopolitical climate sealing a deal backed by all countries keeps the UN
climate show on the road.
“At a
time of great political challenge, 194 countries have come together within the
Paris agreement to recommit to acting on the climate crisis,” said the UK
energy secretary, Ed Miliband. “This agreement does not have all the ambition
we would have wanted but it commits to keeping 1.5C alive.”
The US
did not send a delegation – Donald Trump has dismissed the climate crisis as a
“con job”. Some at Cop30 in Belém said the US stance had emboldened Saudi
Arabia and other petrostates to fight even harder to block progress.
2.
Adaptation funding tripled – but critics say it isn’t enough
The
nations at Cop30 agreed to triple funding for adaptation – money provided by
rich countries and desperately needed by vulnerable countries to protect their
people from the accelerating impacts of the climate crisis. It is a significant
advance but the goal of $120bn (£92bn) a year was pushed back five years from
the initial suggested date of 2030.
Many
countries and observers reacted angrily. “The outcome on adaptation is an
insult to every community currently underwater or on fire,” said Harjeet Singh
at the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation. “The refusal to commit to scaling up
finance to the necessary $300bn annually for adaptation leaves the unprepared
defenceless against inevitable ruin. The timeline ignores the urgency of the
climate disasters striking us today.”
3. Plan
for a just transition welcomed
A major
outcome was the agreement of a just transition mechanism (JTM), a plan to
ensure that the move to a green economy around the world takes place fairly and
protects the rights of all people, including workers, women and Indigenous
people.
Climate
Action Network International, a huge coalition of campaign groups, welcomed the
JTM as one of the strongest rights-based outcomes in the history of the UN
climate negotiations.
“The
adoption of JTM was a win shaped by years of pressure from civil society,” said
Tasneem Essop, the executive director of the network. “This outcome didn’t fall
from the sky: it was carved out through struggle, persistence and the moral
clarity of those living on the frontlines of climate breakdown. Governments
must now honour this JTM with real action. Anything less is a betrayal.”
Efforts early in the talks to attach funding to the JTM failed.
4. No
mention of fossil fuels in final text
Fossil
fuels were not mentioned in the key final decision, despite a coalition of 90
developed and developing nations having pushed for a commitment to a roadmap to
phase out fossil fuels to be included. Petrostates including Saudi Arabia and
its allies fought fiercely to block this and succeeded.
The final
text did add a reference to the “UAE consensus”, the overall package from Cop28
in Dubai in 2023 that contained the first pledge to move away from fossil
fuels. However, the obliqueness of this reference is a retrograde step
according to Dr Joanna Depledge, a Cop expert at the University of Cambridge:
“The UAE consensus is [a] broad package including fully eight decisions adopted
in Dubai on a whole range of issues. The Dubai fossil fuel transition language
is therefore being deliberately diluted and obscured, not highlighted.”
5.
Roadmap for transition away from fossil fuels survives – but it is voluntary
The
roadmap for the transition away from fossil fuels was blocked from the formal
Cop30 decision and the Brazilian presidency announced the plan would proceed
outside the UN process. It will be merged with a plan backed by Colombia and
about 90 other countries, with a summit set for April. This “coalition of the
willing” could push progress forward.
The Cop30
president, André Corrêa do Lago, said the plan to develop the roadmap had the
support of President Lula and would involve high-level dialogues over the next
year, led by science and involving governments, industry and civil society.
Once complete, he said they would report back to Cop.
“Those
governments committed to tackling the climate crisis at its source are uniting
to move forward outside the UN, under the leadership of Colombia and Pacific
Island states, to phase out fossil fuels rapidly, equitably, and in line with
1.5C,” said Nikki Reisch, at the Center for International Environmental Law.
“The international conference next April is the first stop on the path to a
livable future.”
6.
Rainforest conference fails to create deforestation roadmap …
Cop30 was
deliberately sited in the Amazon to put focus on the vital role in climate of
forests. Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, tried to include a
roadmap on ending deforestation in the core agreement at Belém.
But it
was killed after being tied to the fossil fuels roadmap. The tying of the two
appears to have been either an awful diplomatic blunder or sabotage by the
Brazilian foreign ministry, which has long had a focus on selling the country’s
oil abroad.
Toerris
Jaeger, of Rainforest Foundation Norway, said: “The Amazon insisted on being
heard. She forced her way into the climate negotiations with tropical heat,
torrential rain, and the largest Indigenous delegation of any previous Cop.
“It is
disappointing that countries did not agree to develop concrete plans to halt
deforestation.”
7. … but
new fund launched to help keep trees standing
Brazil
did launch the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, again outside the UN process,
but a multibillion-dollar investment fund that will pay nations to keep trees
standing.
“The TFFF
reflects a growing recognition that climate integrity and forest protection are
inseparable,” said Dr Fernando Barrio, at Queen Mary University of London.
“Whether it will be effective depends on its design. But the political signal
is important because there is no path to 1.5C that does not involve ending
deforestation this decade.”
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