Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. Normally, this would be your Tuesday foreign policy installment, but I am laid up with the flu, so my colleagues are stepping in to save me—Abby Livingston on Capitol Hill mishegoss and Baratunde Thurston on the underappreciated depth of Biden’s challenge with Black voters. I’ll be back next week.

But first…

• Correcting a Navalny fantasy: I wanted to chime in on an explosive claim made yesterday by Alexey Navalny’s team. Maria Pevchikh, the investigative maven who heads Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, posted a video in which she said that the reason Vladimir Putin had Navalny killed in an Arctic prison camp earlier this month was to scuttle a prisoner swap deal. According to Pevchikh, a deal had been reached to swap F.S.B. hitman Vadim Krasikov, currently serving a life sentence in Germany, for jailed Americans Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich—and Navalny. The deal, Pevchikh said, was on the verge of being executed when Putin, driven by his pure hatred and jealousy of Navalny, killed Navalny and the deal.

  There’s only one problem with Pevchikh’s story: There was no deal. According to three senior Biden administration officials, not only was no deal made, there hadn’t even been an offer of a deal. There were, however, conversations about making such a swap: Krasikov for Whelan, Gershkovich, and Navalny. But according to all three officials, these conversations were in their earliest, drawing-board stages. “There were nascent discussions to that effect, but a formal offer had not been extended,” one of the senior administration officials told me. “[Pevchikh is] not wrong in that it was being kicked around and [we were] hoping it would work, but no formal offer had been made. It just wasn’t quite there.” And there’s no way that the deal could have happened without the Biden administration’s knowledge, added the official. “Any deal would’ve gone through us.” The German government is similarly pouring cold water on this idea.

  As for why Pevchikh and the rest of Navalny’s team are making such claims, I have no idea. Grief is a powerful, terrible thing.

Alas, nobody I spoke with this afternoon even pretended to have a sense of what the next week will bring. Some sources were confident that the ritual of a last-minute, short-term spending bill would save the day. But other Capitol Hill minds—particularly within the rank-and-file House Republican world—are losing confidence that the Little Dutch Boys will do their thing this time around. Here’s why there’s so much uncertainty, only three days away from a shutdown:

• Member absentia: The shutdown deadline is Friday night, and member fly-in day is Wednesday. Things in House circles feel… lethargic. As one House Democratic chief texted me: “Because Members are not in town, I think this seems more slow-boiling.” There is, however, considerable optimism among the staff and consultant class that urgency will pick up once members return. But it’s also worth noting that nearly every single return-from-recess since Labor Day has been far more nightmarish for House Republicans than anyone anticipated.

• Déjà vu: There’s an undeniable boy-who-cried-wolf quality to the whole notion of a March shutdown. In late September, members and staff were canceling fundraisers and freaking out about missing a D.C. Springsteen concert because a shutdown seemed inevitable. (It didn’t happen, although Kevin McCarthy paid the price with his gavel). Short-term spending bills are now so routine that the same Dem chief described it as: “Republicans wait until the last minute, overpromise [to their base] what they can deliver, take us to the brink of a shutdown, and then pass a C.R. with Democratic votes. Right flank complains. Lather, rinse, repeat!”

• March madness: Despite routine shutdown threats and the inevitable numbing effect, this is not September. A March shutdown will inevitably serve as a backdrop to the State of the Union address, and usher in a tumultuous start to congressional primary season. Ukraine is deteriorating; impeachment articles for Mayorkas are due imminently; and spring break season—when families and hordes of school children flock to federal tourist destinations—is barreling down, just as funding for the Department of the Interior is scheduled to run out on March 8. Good work, people.

But today, that historic coalition is obviously weaker, in large part due to declining support for Biden among the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency: Black Americans. From NBC News to the AP, all the surveys point in the same direction. According to exclusive polling produced for Puck by Echelon Insights, 18 percent of Black voters said the outcome of this year’s presidential election didn’t matter to them personally—five points above the national average. For non-college-educated voters of color, that number is even higher.

There are two clear factors driving this shift: a perception that Biden has failed to deliver on key campaign promises, and his full-throated (though increasingly qualified) backing of Israel in its response to Hamas’s horrific October 7 attack. Of course, there’s a danger in simplifying a complex story. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Black voters remain overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats. There isn’t some sort of great exodus, or “Blexit,” underway. Nor is every Black American aligned with Palestinians over Israelis. But in yet another tight presidential race, likely to come down to tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states, the disillusionment of Black Americans could very well decide the election.

The White House is certainly aware of this enthusiasm gap. They’ve responded with a flurry of fact sheets, dispatched the president to Black churches, and launched a Black History Month media blitz to spread the word about Biden’s accomplishments for Black people. There’s data to support their case: Unemployment, inflation, and crime are all down; small business formation, healthcare access, and wages are all up. In fact, median inflation-adjusted wages for Black Americans have grown faster than for any other racial group over the last four years.

So why the obvious disconnect? I wanted to better understand this myself, so I called plugged-in members of the Black community, dug through historical records, and reflected on my own life to make sense of the shifting sentiment on the ground.

“The biggest word that rings out for me these days is ‘dissonance,’” Pastor Michael McBride told me when I asked how he saw the 2024 election, and Biden’s fraying relationship with Black voters. McBride, who goes by “Pastor Mike,” is a Berkeley-area faith leader, was active in Ferguson, and has led successful campaigns against gun violence and mass incarceration. He also served on President Obama’s Faith-Based Advisory Council, and is regularly in touch with the Biden White House and Congressional Black Caucus. And he’s deeply worried that a meaningful number of these voters will express their frustration—with the economy, the lack of progress on criminal justice reform, and especially Israel’s war in Gaza—by tuning out the election or even voting for the other guy.

Like me, he’s aware of the statistics being touted by the administration and the Biden campaign. But that message is notably out of sync with the sentiment in his community: “Man, here we are in 2024, and life just feels like it’s worse. They told me voting for Biden would make things better. But it doesn’t feel better, doesn’t look better, doesn’t seem better,” McBride said, channeling the frustrations of Black voters he talks to. “But there’s this looming madman who we just experienced four years ago, in Donald Trump, and that really didn’t feel that good, either. So why are we only being offered these two choices where it just doesn’t feel like it’s getting better?”

But economic frustrations are only part of the equation. In the Black community, voters are hyper aware of the cultural and political backlash surrounding racial justice following the revolutionary summer of 2020. In the years since, the Supreme Court killed affirmative action; red states are attempting (often successfully) to reverse years of diversity, equity, and inclusion work; and after record-setting demonstrations and demands for changes in policing and public safety, public opinion has moved back toward favoring “tough-on-crime” policies. As a result, progressive prosecutors have been ousted, Biden has emphasized funding the police, and news stories about rising retail theft are fueling the perception of a nation out of control. In the past, moves in this direction have led to increases in the types of criminal-legal action that prompted moves for reform in the first place, because they disproportionately fall on the Black community through surveillance, policing, arrests, or sentencing.

“Notwithstanding the president’s accomplishments, there are key items on, I’ll call it the Black and Brown Agenda, that did not get done,” said Marc Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans and current president and C.E.O. of the National Urban League. The civil rights organization plans to release The State of Black America report on March 5, which will include a report card on Biden’s promises to the Black community. I haven’t yet seen the report, but it seems safe to say that grades will be handed out on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which aimed to establish a comprehensive framework to prevent and remedy racial profiling by law enforcement, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was meant to modernize the seminal 1965 legislation by strengthening legal protections against discriminatory voting practices. Both bills passed in the House but failed in the Senate.

American presidents aren’t kings or queens (at least not yet), and they aren’t solely responsible for the failure or success of their agendas. But for many younger voters, in particular, the politics of the current moment are a crushing reality check after the pandemic era, when the government flirted with novel, even radical, forms of economic relief. Deep frustration with this course reversal—the undoing of important racial justice work, and a deepening political stasis—is clearly a detrimental factor in Biden’s support among Black voters, which has dropped from 91 percent on election day in 2020 to 75 percent, according to a February NBC News poll.

No matter your politics, it’s impossible to not be appalled at the relentless killing, displacement, starvation, and destruction of infrastructure inflicted on millions of Palestinians in Gaza over the past several months. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s punishing ground operation has led to a chorus of concern from many walks of public life, including Black religious leaders—more than 1,000 of whom have publicly issued a demand for a bilateral ceasefire, the return of hostages, an increase in humanitarian aid, and the end of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. “This whole thing has just turned into quite a moral conundrum for a lot of us who operate in the sphere of ethics,” McBride told me. “Our concerns are largely either trivialized or ignored as naive, and there seems to be no political will to stop it.”

In this fraught moment, after the atrocities on October 7, I’ve been asked by several Jewish friends why Black people feel such a strong sense of solidarity with Palestinians. Several expressed concern and hurt after showing up, both historically and in recent years, in support for Black Americans. In trying to understand this, I considered my own journey: I grew up in the 1980s, in the shadow of both the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement. While both sought liberation for Black people from America’s racist systems, they differed in emphasis and tactics. This tension is explored beautifully in the current NatGeo series Genius: MLK/X, which chronicles the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in parallel.

The connection between Black and Jewish Americans, especially around the civil rights movement, is legendary. Jewish Americans were among the founding members of the nation’s oldest and most well-known civil rights organization, the NAACP, and funded and co-led many of its key civil rights legislative battles, including for desegregation. The Ku Klux Klan murdered Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney because of their work to help register Black voters during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Black Americans also showed up for our Jewish allies, having bravely fought in World War II, in part to bring an end to the Nazi regime, with leaders ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Marcus Garvey to Bayard Rustin supporting the establishment of Israel, having been inspired by its goals of self-determination.

There’s also a parallel history of Black solidarity with Palestinians, largely born in the 1960s as Black Power activists reframed our domestic struggle as part of a global movement for liberation. These leaders encouraged solidarity with “third world” citizens freeing themselves from European colonial powers. A pioneer in building this bridge was Malcolm X, whose 1964 visit to Gaza, and the refugee camp of Khan Yunis, left an indelible mark on him. Others followed: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, poet June Jordan, and activist and scholar Angela Davis all embraced the Palestinian cause. Jesse Jackson used his presidential campaigns to link the plight of Palestinians to Black South Africans under apartheid. And James Baldwin, in a prescient 1979 piece for The Nation, warned, “There is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East … without dealing with the Palestinians.”

There are 21st century parallels, as well, between the Palestinian cause and the Black Lives Matter movement, with their mutual focus on state violence and systemic racism. Palestinians echoed cries of “I can’t breathe,” and used George Floyd’s image while protesting Israeli occupation in the West Bank; Palestinian activists advised B.L.M. activists on how to survive police assaults and tear gas. After several months of heart-breaking, gut-wrenching images of war—made possible in part by American weapons and funding—it should come as no surprise that Black Americans are feeling a deep sense of solidarity with Palestinians.

Of course, this need not—and for most it does not—come at the expense of solidarity with Jewish people. As with the civil rights movement, many Jewish Americans were allies of B.L.M., and marched for George Floyd. I recall this dramatic letter, signed by over 600 Jewish organizations, forcefully declaring “Black Lives Matter,” and making explicit the interconnected nature of justice for all.

But the devil is in the details, and sometimes in the words. Some of the solidarity expressed for Palestinians also includes sympathy for the idea of eliminating the Jewish state. Meanwhile, many Black Americans take offense at being labeled antisemitic for demanding action to stop a humanitarian catastrophe inflicted on Palestinians. Underpinning the sense of hurt or betrayal for both groups is the fact that the historical bond between Black Americans and both Jewish and Palestinian communities runs deep. That duality makes this moment extra fragile and confusing.

In under-resourced Black communities, this goes beyond a moral issue. It’s also a matter of resource allocation. As McBride shared with me, “You’ve got some of the least politically conscious people around U.S. imperialism and global affairs asking, Why are we sending all this money to Ukraine, to Israel, and I can’t get none of that to help relieve my own challenges here? This moment is the water on the seed that Tupac planted in the hip-hop generation when he said ‘They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.’”

Even the surge of resources to deal with the migrant crisis at the U.S. southern border causes many in the Black community to ask, Why aren’t we surging resources to the Southside of Chicago or South Philadelphia or East Oakland? Part of the answer is that we never really have, regardless of the international activities we’ve funded. And certainly the modern Republican Party has no intention of reallocating the money they say they want to save in Ukraine toward poor Black communities. Those programs are on the chopping block too.

Still, Biden and the Democrats can do more to engage with the frustration and disappointment that McBride references. “You’re going to have to sit with some Black folk in the hot seat, and I don’t think they feel like they should have to do that,” he told me. Instead, he said, “they try to sell you some line about how this is better than that [referring to Trump]. But this ain’t good enough.”

As McBride told me, “I’ve had formerly incarcerated people on my team, who still don’t have their full rights restored, and they’re like, I’m not trying to defend democracy. I’m not even a part of democracy.” Unless “democracy” gets translated into tangible, positive outcomes in people’s lives, not just in data, it won’t resonate and will contribute to the dissonance McBride has noted. Ultimately, he told me, “I think people aren’t holding the whole of this country more than they’re trying to hold together the fragments of their own lives and neighborhoods and people they know and love.”

To be clear, democracy is under threat in a literal sense when Trump promises to act like a dictator on Inauguration Day. Freedom of assembly and the ability to protest government decisions will come under threat if he manages to return to the White House. But we can’t just scream “democracy” and assume people will rally around it, especially when our existing democratic systems aren’t responsive to the will of the people. And that failure to deliver isn’t solely attributable to Trump or Republicans. Leaders from the Democratic Party have overseen rises in unaffordable housing and growing wealth inequality, among other things. And ironically, the party positioning itself as the standard-bearer of democracy has chosen a presidential candidate through a decidedly nondemocratic process. At a minimum, we have to acknowledge people’s skepticism and doubt, and rebuild trust from there.

A few days later, at a rally in South Carolina, Trump claimed that “the Black people like me” because of all his indictments, which he suggested they could relate to. “My mug shot, we’ve all seen the mug shot. And you know who embraced it more than anybody else: the Black population. It’s incredible.”

The comparison is offensive, and his conclusion is absurd. But in a system that has failed to deliver overall, we can’t deny the appeal of the Trump mythos: He appears successful. He still carries the brand of businessman. He (mostly) evades legal consequences for his transgressions, and has been talking up his legal woes as if he is a rebel or political dissident, rather than a twice-impeached former president who tried and failed to orchestrate a coup.

As Pastor McBride noted, “There’s a certain fascination that Black men have with a billionaire,” especially if those men are far from being a billionaire themselves. Of course, most Black men in America wouldn’t be able to host rallies and hock sneakers while facing 91 criminal counts in multiple jurisdictions, either. “You and Trump have totally different experiences of life, bro,” McBride joked about anyone seeing themselves in Trump. “You wouldn’t be flying on a private jet back and forth to Mar-a-Lago with all these indictments. You’d be in jail, bro! While you fight your cases, you would be in jail.”

Yet Trump feeds off of despondency. He lies repeatedly, takes credit for things he didn’t do, and promises things he can’t deliver. As McBride said, “I think Black men are looking at the state of their life and they’re feeling like, ‘I’m out here on my own and I’m grasping for straws.’ If you were drowning in an ocean and someone comes along and throws you a lifeline, you wouldn’t care what is in the boat on the other side because you’re in such a state of emergency.”

We are still far from the election, and I find it hard to believe that large numbers of Black people will vote for Trump instead of voting for a third-party candidate, or opting out entirely. But that depends on what Biden, the Democrats, and all of us who believe in the possibility of a better democracy—even as we struggle against the ineffectiveness of the current version—do in this moment. What’s required is delicate and complex choreography.

On the economic and justice agenda, Democrats must humbly engage with voters who are drifting from Biden rather than repeat talking points about how great everything is. On the Israel-Hamas war, we must simultaneously hold that Black solidarity with Palestinians isn’t necessarily a rejection of Jewish people, and that Jewish fears of resurgent antisemitism and the erasure of Israel are legitimate. As for Trump, I sincerely hope he’s convicted of everything, but I wouldn’t count on institutions saving us. We have to save ourselves, and it’s going to take a broad, though imperfect, coalition to do it. Again.