What the French Protests Can Teach Americans

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

On Monday, France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez admitted that police have “lost control” as some cities continue to see massive waves of looting and mayhem. Social media brims with images of stores being ransacked, cars burning, and mask-wearing goons running wild. In Limoges, the beautiful Hôtel de Ville was burnt to the ground.

 

But the chaos, as is so often the case, began peacefully. And many supporters and leaders of the protests have condemned the violence. I think that violence has more to do with France’s miserable record of assimilating immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East than with budget cuts. Call me cynical, but I don’t believe the goons pillaging Louis Vuitton stores are planning to resell the handbags to buy better school supplies or to bolster their teachers’ salaries.

 

The initial protests were about budget cuts, primarily in education. As allied groups joined in—socialist and communist parties, labor unions, etc.—the argument expanded to generalized complaints about France’s “austerity” policies. In short, they argued, as they have for generations, that the government should spend more on pensions and other entitlements.

 

The problem is that France can’t afford it. It’s borrowed money to pay for its lavish government sector for a very long time. It has run consecutive budget deficits—i.e., took in less than it spent—for more than half a century. In 1974, public debt was around 15 percent of GDP. Today it’s at 116  percent. Government spending now makes up 57 percent of the GDP (compared with 23 percent of GDP for the U.S.), and France spends three times as much on “social protection” —including pensions and family benefits—as does the United States, and more than any other country in Europe and the OECD.

 

Naturally, the blame for this sorry state of affairs, according to some supporters of the protests, falls on capitalism. Famous French economist Thomas Piketty says the country’s woes are the result of the state pursuing the “capitalist logic” of underinvesting in the public sector and undertaxing the wealthy. In terms of personal income taxes alone—France has massive payroll and consumption taxes as well—the top 10 percent of French taxpayers provide 74 percent of the revenue. The top 1 percent provide a third. France also has the highest corporate tax rates of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

 

I’m hard-pressed to see how just a bit more taxing and spending will solve France’s problems.

 

I have real sympathy for the nonviolent French youth. Their economy is moribund in large part because retirees have a stranglehold on the state’s finances, consuming 14 percent of GDP. (Social Security and Medicare account for 9.4 percent of U.S. GDP. One reason education spending is so tight: A third of the education budget goes toward Education Ministry pensions.  

 

I don’t think retirees should be thrown to the wolves, but such a system is objectively unsustainable. Yet, in 2023, when French President Emmanuel Macron introduced reforms to bump the retirement age from 62 to 64, the resulting protests paralyzed the country (that modest reform was suspended last month). France is now caught in what economists call the “dependency trap,” producing too few workers to pay for the lifestyles of its older generations.

 

When protesters talk about feeling “hopeless,” what they often mean is that the gravy train will run out before they get to partake in it. I don’t blame them for being resentful, but it’s difficult to see how this is a failure of capitalism or “neoliberalism.” As Margaret Thatcher famously said, socialist governments “always run out of other people’s money.”

 

The most obvious answer to France’s problems is economic growth—much easier said than done, of course. The reason that’s so hard for France isn’t because the government is “unresponsive” to the people and their concerns., It’s because it’s too responsive. For decades, the French have demanded the economic policies that got them into this mess, and the government appeased them.

 

France is an outlier in its poor economic performance and lavish social spending, but its problems are recognizable across the West, including in America. The U.S. economy has grown twice as fast as France’s over the last quarter-century, but the demands for less “capitalism” from young Americans echo those protesting in Paris.

 

France has the sort of universal health insurance many insist would solve everyone’s problems here. It hasn’t spared France from political turmoil. Our own Social Security and Medicare aren’t far from insolvency, but demands for higher benefits and “Medicare for All” only grow louder.

 

The French canary in the coal mine is a good reminder that the best solution to some crises is to avoid them in the first place.

The U.N. Is Making Trump’s Case on the Human Rights Council

By Brett Schaefer & Danielle Pletka

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Few events as poignantly underscored the lamentable record of the United Nations on human rights as the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay. And yet, Pillay, a dedicated antisemite whose Nobel was celebrated by Hamas, is an apt avatar for the U.N. Human Rights Council, an organization whose mission and work are regularly at odds.

 

No surprise, then, that a 2025 Trump executive order once again ended U.S. participation with the HRC, criticizing it for protecting “human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny.” This echoes more detailed criticism in 2018 when the U.S. similarly ceased its participation, citing anti-Israel bias, human rights violators regularly winning seats on the council, and willful inattention to “the misery inflicted by regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and China.”

 

Strangely, however, the European governments and U.N. bureaucrats that predictably condemned the American withdrawal have done precisely nothing to address U.S. criticisms, nor adopted any reforms to entice the U.S. to reconsider. Instead, they have chosen to tolerate and continue its dysfunction, ignoring some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises to focus disproportionately on one country: Israel.

 

The record of bias is plain. According to a database compiled by U.N. Watch, since it was founded in 2006, the Council has adopted 346 resolutions containing language condemning a country for human rights violations. Israel was the focus of 116 (34 percent) of those resolutions.

 

Alone among the world’s countries, Israel is subject to a separate human rights item: Agenda Item 7, titled “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” Every other country is examined under Agenda Item 4, titled “Human rights situations that require the Council’s attention.”

 

In addition, the council currently has twelve “country mandates” that focus on human rights situations in individual countries, such as North Korea and Iran. All are subject to periodic renewal except for the “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” that remains in place “until the end of the Israeli occupation.”

 

Instead of taking U.S. criticism to heart, since the U.S. disengaged, the council has adopted eight new resolutions condemning Israel, and its human rights experts and an “independent” Commission of Inquiry have accused it of genocide despite lacking evidence of intent and in the face of contravening evidence.

 

Meanwhile, countries with human rights records beside which Israel pales continue to be elected to the council. The current membership includes China, Cuba, Egypt, Qatar, Vietnam, and other countries considered “not free” by Freedom House. Just this past week, Burundi and Kuwait, which are also considered “not free,” were elected to three-year terms starting in January.

 

How do they get elected? They game the system, making sure that only as many countries run for election as there are openings, thereby guaranteeing victory. Last year and this year, every election for a council seat was one of these “clean slate” elections. As Human Rights Watch accurately noted, “This uncompetitive vote makes a mockery of the word ‘election.’”

 

Historically, “not free” and “partly free” countries have jointly comprised a majority on the 47-member Human Rights Council. They have worked together to water down or block criticism of their abuses. This coordination explains why China, Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and others have never been condemned in a Human Rights Council resolution.

 

These problems are not new. The U.S. has consistently voiced concerns about these problems under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

 

As we argued several years ago, there is no way to make the council perfect. No reform can overcome or eliminate the hostility of many U.N. member states to Israel. If the council reflects the U.N. membership, disproportionate — and biased — attention will be focused on Israel.

 

But steps can be taken to address the most obvious flaws.

 

First, the U.N. General Assembly should ensure that Israel is treated like other nations institutionally and procedurally by eliminating Agenda Item 7 so that Israel’s human rights practices are examined under Agenda Item 4 as is the case for every other nation. It should also require country mandates and commissions of inquiry focused on Israel to be subject to periodic renewal, as is the case for other “special procedures” and investigations.

 

To address non-competitive “clean slate” elections, the General Assembly should amend the process to automatically list as candidates every state that is not currently serving on the council or is otherwise prohibited from running (such as having served two consecutive terms) and hold successive ballots eliminating the lowest half of vote recipients in each region until all the open seats are filled. The General Assembly could go further and increase the threshold for election to two-thirds (129 votes) of the General Assembly, as originally proposed, instead of a simple majority (97 votes).

 

Together, these changes would ensure that council elections are genuinely competitive and, by giving governments a wider pool of options, increase the odds for free countries to win seats on the council, which should make it more capable of fulfilling its claim as the premier human rights body in the U.N. system.

 

The Trump administration has been criticized for disengaging with the Human Rights Council. But Democratic and Republican administrations have both condemned council practices, although Democrats have been more willing to try and fix things from within. But U.S. reengagement alone will not fix things, as fundamental changes require support from most U.N. member states. So once again, the question presses: Do human rights really matter to the “international community”? Or is no incentive great enough to abandon the bias and omission that make the likes of Pillay proud?

The EU’s Inexplicable Aggression Toward America’s Tech Industry

By Josh Hodges

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Last month, the American AI company Anthropic reported that Chinese operators had circumvented its security safeguards to develop military software, including air-defense suppression tools simulating strikes on Taiwanese targets. Chinese AI labs have also siphoned off Claude’s capabilities to train rival models. Months before that, the EU sanctioned two China-based companies for their roles in cyberattacks across six member states. And in January, a San Francisco jury convicted a former Google engineer of stealing AI trade secrets for China’s benefit.

 

China is coming for Western technology, and neither the United States nor Europe can claim they haven’t been warned. The EU’s own sanctions show that its leaders understand the danger of an authoritarian adversary willing to hack and steal its way to technological dominance over the West and, ultimately, the world.

 

Given that threat, Europe has every reason to stand alongside the American companies that China is targeting. Instead, the EU increasingly treats those companies as enemies.

 

On September 21, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Google, whose AI trade secrets had been stolen for China’s benefit, nearly $500 million over its handling of users’ location data under EU privacy rules. That came barely two months after the separate European Commission fined Google nearly $1 billion over its search rankings and restrictions on purchases outside Google Play.

 

European penalties against America’s leading technology companies now total roughly $18 billion, with Google’s alone accounting for nearly $12 billion. According to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, the EU’s fines against Google account for “over 2 percent of the EU’s budget,” effectively making the company a larger financial contributor to the bloc than many EU member states. In late September, France’s Minister for Europe proposed using €4.6 billion in Google fines to cut what member states pay into the EU budget.

 

The rest of America’s technology sector is getting much the same treatment as Google. EU officials have already used the Digital Services Act to investigate how X moderates speech, while House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan has accused them of pressuring the platform to censor political speech the European Union disfavored. The European Commission ultimately fined X $140 million over its blue-check system, advertising database, and refusal to give them sufficient access to its data.

 

Similarly, Apple was fined $570 million by the European Commission over the App Store’s management of outside purchases, on top of a $2 billion penalty involving music-streaming apps the year before. Meta was fined another $228 million over its advertising model.

 

In June, the European Commission went further, preliminarily designating Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure under the Digital Markets Act — even though it conceded that neither meets the law’s quantitative thresholds. That move would subject both cloud services to European regulations backed by fines of up to 10 percent of the companies’ annual revenue.

 

Meanwhile, potential changes to the Digital Networks Act described in a leaked January draft raised the prospect of requiring American platforms to subsidize European telecom companies through “network usage fees.” Doing so would directly contradict the EU’s explicit promise in its 2025 trade commitment to the United States that it would not adopt such fees.

 

In its quest for “digital sovereignty,” Europe has become shamelessly determined to bleed America’s technology industry dry. Never mind that it’s targeting a democratic ally’s companies already under attack from China, or that these are the very companies whose technology European businesses and broader economy have depended on for years.

 

Even the commission has struggled to replace American technology with European alternatives. This summer the European Commission rolled out a “sovereign” backup to Microsoft Teams. Its staff kept using Teams. One official called the replacement “absolute shit,” Politico reported; another conceded that if American technology went dark, the U.S. would “instantly win the war.”

 

When Europe’s homegrown alternatives inevitably fall short, the fallback won’t be European; it will be a choice between America and China. Europe has a direct stake in keeping American companies strong, both for its own economy and for the West’s broader economic and national security.

 

Beijing, of course, isn’t complaining about Europe’s aggression toward U.S. tech companies.

 

Chinese state-owned outlets have praised the EU’s fine against X as evidence of the bloc’s willingness to confront major technology companies. They’ve also characterized European investigations into Google and Meta as flashpoints in the transatlantic relationship and described the bloc’s technology disputes with Washington as “a new focal point of transatlantic conflict.”

 

But Beijing’s support for that scrutiny disappears as soon as Chinese companies are involved. Any EU proposals to remove or even investigate high-risk Chinese suppliers are framed under the same media apparatus as “naked protectionism” and “unreasonable suppression.”

 

Beijing clearly wants European markets open to Chinese companies and European regulators occupied with American ones. And its state media is perfectly willing to encourage the fights that help make that possible. All the while, Chinese operators will keep trying to hack into and steal from companies on both sides of the Atlantic. European leaders should recognize whose interests they are serving. Burdening American companies gives their Chinese competitors more room to advance, while the resulting disputes give Beijing more opportunities to divide the allies.

 

Europe has another reason to reconsider its approach: The United States still holds substantial advantages in the global AI race. American firms drew $286 billion in private AI investment last year, 23 times China’s total, according to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index. The United States hosts roughly three-quarters of the world’s AI computing power; China, about 15 percent. And where Chinese labs have closed the gap, they’ve often done it by copying: According to Anthropic, a single Alibaba campaign used fraudulent accounts to generate more than 151 million exchanges with Claude between May and July this year to train its own models. China’s frontier is, in no small part, built on the back of America’s technology and innovation.

 

The EU claims to understand the danger of Chinese technological dominance. It cannot expect to prevent that outcome while relentlessly penalizing the American companies best positioned to compete. Each new fight with those companies is another opening for Beijing, and Europe has already given it far too many.

A New French Revolution

By John O’Sullivan

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

What is at present being enacted on our laptops, websites, and television screens is another French Revolution. It is possible — indeed, greatly to be desired — that this revolution will be contained, halted, and reversed, but that possibility seems remote at the moment. Rather, the contagion is spreading throughout France with minimal resistance from the authorities and currently leaping over borders to northern Italian cities and with almost identical slogans — Gaza! No longer an actual place but a Myth — that have little to do with either French or Italian life or serious politics.

 

This current Revolution also borrows from terrorism the doctrine of recognizing none of the usual distinctions between innocent and guilty, participant and bystander, soldier and civilian, foreign and domestic. Anyone who is not tearing down French institutions or is self-evidently prosperous or merely respectable is suspect and thus deserving of brutal punishment, not excluding rape. Such terrible confusions often happen in revolution as in war. But this Revolution has introduced some new and significant distinctions in its fragile and temporary blend of Islamo-Gauchisme — Muslim-owned stores are protected by some rioters and their advisors.

 

And because of technical advances in communications, almost every revolutionary moment — every building burnt, every bourgeois hauled from his car and stripped, every mob storming a police station, every fashion emporium or mom-and-pop shop looted — is being broadcast to the world. If or when the authorities seek to restore some semblance of order, their repression will be broadcast, too. But there will be this difference: Every revolutionary outrage will encourage the criminals and activists to greater efforts; every police overreaction will shame the authorities and be cited as an argument for “dialogue’’ and “restraint’’ by the one-eyed media.

 

There are no justifications for this upsurge of violent rebellion, of course — merely angry grievances by groups of discontented people, mainly young, many from immigrant backgrounds (even if born in France), all persuaded that they are either oppressed or uniquely sensitive to the plight of the oppressed, and protected by their ignorance and illiteracy from reality.

 

If there are no justifications, though, there are causes. Take, for instance, the original cause of their rebellion. Students stormed out of their schools complaining of poor conditions that required more expenditure. Doubtless there are some poor conditions. But why is that? Students and their communities could help to repair those conditions, but they think that is the job of the state. And it is. France spends massively on public schools as on everything else. Public spending amounts to 57 percent of the country’s GDP — among the highest rates in the European Union — but conditions are poor throughout the public sector as in all socialist societies which encourage demands but fail to reward responsibility. In schools and colleges, those low standards increasingly include the ideology that no one shall fail and all shall have prizes. The result is, as the distinguished philosopher Chantal Delsol writes in her commentary on the coming French presidential election: “Thus, in France today an immense group of illiterates is produced, wedded to screens, ignorant of spelling and deprived of a vocabulary.’’

 

They do not, however, emerge without opinions. Quite the contrary: They emerge from their socialist experience with an ultra-progressive ideology of extreme egalitarianism, anti-capitalism, and cultural hostility to France and its historical institutions and identity. That might almost be a blend of European socialism and American woke-ism and thus one step towards the internationalizing of the students’ ideology in a way that never happened (or happened much later) to the original Sixty-Eighters who failed to topple de Gaulle. On graduation, they then gravitate to the parties of the Far Left, notably La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), headed by Jean-Luc Melenchon, as activists and in due course as its leaders. Not surprisingly, it was this group that immediately joined the students and helped to broaden their cause into a wider rebellion with larger aims, a more organized base of support, and a more dangerous ideology.

 

Because Melenchon’s party has long embraced France’s Islamists as a key faction in the “New France’’ coalition he believes to be a potential electoral majority next time, that brought a much more significant ally into the Revolution. Mass immigration by Third World migrants has imported into France new ethnic and religious communities whose cultural loyalties clash with national traditions and undermine the sense of national community that makes democracy possible. Without that, as Lee Kuan Yew pointed out, all politics becomes about race and religion. Whether he realizes it or not — and he must because it seems to be his actual strategy — Melenchon has now tapped into what is now a global leftist ideology that is less a rival than a synthesis of all other leftist causes. As the Hudson Institute scholar Zineb Riboua pointed out on X:

 

The contemporary Left is being absorbed by a new wave of Third-Worldism that treats anti-Israel politics as the core axis of moral meaning. Gaza has become the central symbol because it fuses every theme the activist Left needs: victimhood, colonial injustice, racial hierarchy, and global resistance. This is why figures like Greta Thunberg shifted from climate justice to Gaza without hesitation. Climate politics offered urgency but not a revolutionary antagonist. Gaza provides both.

 

The result is a Revolution which, in addition to its other roots in French society, has the support of a major political party, a global ideology that resonates worldwide, a much more divided society than de Gaulle faced in 1968 when its divisions were rooted in class rather than race or religion, and finally, numerous unsolved economic crises. To put it simply, the French state is running out of money. Its debts amount to more than 120 percent of annual GDP; it is paying higher rates of interest on that debt than is Italy; and its working citizens are already highly taxed. France can’t buy itself out of these problems. And the country is a long way from thinking itself out of them.

 

The parties of the right in France and other European countries cannot escape responsibility for these problems. When they were in office, they pursued many of the same policies, and in opposition they failed to oppose or even analyze them vigorously. When “populist’’ conservatives arose to champion their old causes, they joined with the left in grand coalitions to keep them out of power all costs. What will they do now to confront this growing disorder which has the potential to overthrow democracy and even to evolve into civil war? That’s an urgent question an election is due early next year and until then one of the main threats to the French Republic is the weak political leadership of President Macron. To quote an editorial in Le Figaro:

 

If the far left, criminals, and looters can turn France completely upside down within a few hours, it is above all because a self-intoxicated technocratic monarchy has systematically leveled all the moral, security-related, cultural, and economic safeguards that hold a society together.  Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s useful idiots do not just wear the kufiya, but also the necktie.

 

Thus conservatives in other French parties should be prepared to work both with the president in dealing with the immediate crisis, and with Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblemant National in shaping solutions to the deeper crises of France and its great but wounded civilization. For the moment, what France needs is the restoration of order by civilized methods that will probably have to include calling in the army. Allowing the barbarism in the streets to spread would mean more and worse.

The Anti-French Revolt in France

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

‘All my life,” Charles de Gaulle famously said, “I have had a certain idea of France.”

 

This, though, was presumably not what he had in mind. France has been wracked by riots targeting public buildings and symbols of the nation, as well as ordinary commercial concerns.

 

Of course, France has a long tradition of unrest on the streets. If someone isn’t setting a car alight somewhere in the country in protest, you almost wonder what’s gone wrong. In 1968, President de Gaulle himself briefly fled Paris for fear that student protesters were going to topple the government, before finding his nerve.

 

So, it’s not unusual that things are getting wrecked and burned, but the disorder is portentous all the same. It started as demonstrations against underfunded schools and has morphed into a red-green campaign of mayhem ranging much more widely.

 

Palestinian flags and the slogan “Free Palestine” are ubiquitous. It’s not clear what either of these things should have to do with burning down the elegant, 19th-century town hall building in Limoges or looting a Louis Vuitton store. But the Palestinian banner has become the equivalent of the North Vietnamese flag in the 1970s — a symbol of resistance to the West, and in this case, fierce opposition to Zionism and so-called settler-colonialism.

 

The flag also speaks to the immigrant component of the riots. France has done a poor job of assimilating immigrants and their children, a large portion of whom are Muslims from North Africa, thanks to France’s colonial history and, in particular, its incorporation of Algeria into France for a period of time (an insanely unrealistic project).

 

The problems that France has been creating for itself were foreseeable, and indeed foreseen. As long ago as March 1959, de Gaulle is reported to have warned, “The Arabs are Arabs, the French are French. Do you think that the French can absorb ten million Muslims who will tomorrow be twenty million and after tomorrow forty?”

 

One way to look at these riots is as Frantz Fanon’s revenge. What the great mid-20th-century theorist of anti-colonial resistance called “the wretched of the earth” are living in the downtrodden suburbs of Paris and, in effect, seeking to colonize the colonizers.

 

Make no mistake, though — white radicals, too, have taken a large hand in the disorder. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of an ascendant left-wing party, has participated in the protests and condemned police for their supposedly brutish tactics. He celebrates the “creolization” of France and views immigrants and their children as part of a potential “bloc de rupture” that can revolutionize French politics and shift it radically to the left.

 

What’s ultimately in play is French identity. The country has traditionally had a universalizing mission (whether advancing Christianity or evangelizing for Enlightenment values, depending on the regime) joined to a deep pride in the French nation. The rioters, who are illiberal and unpatriotic, aren’t much interested in either. Mélenchon has said that French identity cannot be a “tradition” but is a “creation in permanent evolution” — and here, as has often happened in France’s history, it is evolving on the streets.

 

The unrest also serves as a warning that, should the French public reject this left-wing vision and turn to the outré nationalist Marine Le Pen in next year’s election, the country will be made ungovernable. With the disorder spreading elsewhere, other Western European countries will also have to take note.

 

A key element of de Gaulle’s “certain idea of France” was its inherent greatness. His beloved France, though, is already a second-rank power. Its debt-to-GDP ratio is 120 percent of GDP, while much of the public apparently believes it is living under intolerable austerity and that there is no political will to pull back on spending. An overmatched President Emmanuel Macron, presiding over a restive country, represents an exhausted center that has done much to bring the nation to this point.

 

Whatever France’s immediate future, greatness is not going to be part of the picture.

Trump Shouldn’t Throw Ukraine to the Wolves

National Review Online

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Hanlon’s razor cautions us to never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. Perhaps that explains the interruption in the availability of Starshield, the satellite communications network, to Ukraine, but we have our doubts.

 

President Trump followed up his execrable diesel deal with Russia with a pressure campaign against Ukrainian President Zelensky that coincided with Starshield being throttled down.

 

When Starshield — the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink, which Elon Musk’s company provides on a contract basis to the Pentagon — went down for about 72 hours, it had devastating consequences for Ukraine. Though Starshield can be used by Kyiv for offensive attacks, it is most useful in providing services critical to Ukraine’s air defenses against Russian aerial assault. While the system was throttled down and the Ukrainians were vulnerable, the Kremlin conducted some of the most intensive aerial attacks against Ukrainian territory since the war began, firing 39 ballistic missiles and 128 Shahed drones, primarily at Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s largest cities. Dozens were killed and wounded in the strikes, and Zelensky’s government says 26 power facilities and four oil and gas facilities were damaged. As colder weather approaches, more than 600,000 people lost power in the capital.

 

In an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday, an obviously angry Ukrainian president said the Starshield slowdown was a “message” to his country that “came from government,” i.e., the American government. Lamenting the recent Trump administration decisions, Zelensky said that “if United States will support Putin, I mean, it’s unbelievable.” “It’s a tragedy,” he added. “It’s a historic mistake.”

 

Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have publicly denied that they ordered restrictions on Starshield. But it should raise eyebrows that Musk pointedly tweeted that “Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the U.S. government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” On Tuesday, The Telegraph reported that its sources say that Musk approached Trump with the idea to degrade Ukraine’s access to Starshield and the president “agreed.”

 

The good news is that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Zelensky had what both sides are characterizing as a productive meeting, where it was agreed to restore Starshield and preserve Ukrainian access to it going forward.

 

But it shouldn’t have come to this.

 

On September 18, President Trump signed into law the aptly named Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. The law may not have been perfect, but it was widely seen at the time as an important step in keeping the pressure on Russia and its allies. A month later, Trump is waiving the pressure points that Congress enacted on the Kremlin, and for no discernible American interest. At the same time, his negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, are reportedly negotiating the outlines of the purchase of Lukoil, a Kremlin-aligned Russian energy firm, in an apparent bid to build confidence with Moscow for future negotiations on a wider range of matters.

 

A bipartisan group of nine U.S. senators has demanded an inspector general investigation into the Starshield disruptions. But Congress should provide real oversight by holding public hearings and calling witnesses under oath to explain why its legislative intent was so directly undermined.

 

President Trump has long desired to normalize relations with Russia. He views such a goal as in the American interest, and he views the continuation of Russia’s war in Ukraine as an obstacle to that goal. But he should remember — or relearn — that Russia is the aggressor in that invasion and that it is a self-conscious and willing pillar of an anti-American axis that includes China, Iran, and North Korea. Moreover, the Kremlin is actively aiding Iran’s operations against the United States in the Persian Gulf. Vladimir Putin seeks to diminish America’s place in the world and enhance Russia’s. Neither Trump nor his party nor the United States will gain any benefit from abandoning Ukraine to the wolves or attempting to appease Russia into doing something that it has no power to do, which is to lower the price at American pumps.

It’s the Corruption, Stupid

By Daniel Foster

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

JD Vance previewed a possible 2028 argument, one he will no doubt have to make a few hundred times, on the question of corruption and self-dealing inside the Trump administration.

 

In an interview with Mark Halperin, Vance said, “I just don’t understand the argument that politics has somehow made Donald Trump or his family much better off. I mean, their lives were nearly destroyed, their business was nearly destroyed, they tried to throw the president in jail for something like 900 years. So I don’t see the benefit there.” Later he adds, “It’s laughable to me the idea that Donald Trump has somehow been enriched by political office.”

 

Vance does say there is a separate concern “that sometimes gets muddled” with the first one, that D.C. is simply “too corrupt of a town” and people may be selling access. But, adds Vance, he hasn’t seen any evidence of that as far as Trump.

 

Credit to Vance, it’s as good an argument as is available to him. The bad news is it’s still not very good. The core rhetorical maneuver is to make the question a net–net proposition. That is, have Donald Trump and his family (and friends) materially gained more from his presidencies than they’ve lost. That gives Vance some leverage with voters who found the post–January 6 lawfare against Trump outrageous, as they’ll presumably weigh the costs heavily. The problem is it’s hard to weigh them at a couple of billion dollars. That’s the value of Trump family crypto ventures alone, just to pick one simple number. The potential gains extend far beyond that one slice, and there exist multiple other efforts to track them — of various methodologies, scopes, and levels of trustworthiness — that go as high as $4 billion. They also include business dealings that exist on a spectrum from the merely unseemly to the actively outrageous, so mileage will vary on what gets counted as kosher. Regardless, there’s already plenty of evidence, and two years of House Democratic control will undoubtedly furnish more still.

 

Vance leaves himself room to pivot on the campaign trail to a familiar good czar and bad boyars argument. That the real problem is that the opportunists around Trump took advantage of his good name for their own greedy ends. And that it will take another four to eight years to properly finish draining the swamp. Color me skeptical, but a lot can happen in two years.

 

In any case, it’s already a problem. A recent Fox poll showed the top concern among voters heading into the election is government corruption, with 88 percent extremely or very concerned. That includes 47 percent of Republicans who said they were extremely concerned. I’ve seen some commentary that the question may be capturing MAGA-leaners who think about corruption primarily in terms of Somali daycares, and there’s probably some of that. But the same poll shows a majority of respondents trust Democrats more than Republicans to address the issue. Less ambiguous is a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll showing nearly two-thirds of Americans believed Trump was using the presidency to enrich himself. That included 34 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners, half again more than said they had the same concern last year.

 

Heading into the lame-duck half, this doesn’t strike me as friendly territory for Vance.