The ‘Fifth Avenue’ Election

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

I’ll say this in defense of Steve Witkoff. You don’t need to believe that he sincerely admires Vladimir Putin to understand why he said what he said yesterday.

 

You’re free to believe it. I believe it myself. But you don’t need to believe it to make sense of why a White House envoy would praise the butcher of Ukraine—to his face, on camera, shortly before three new waves of Russian missiles crashed down on Kyiv—as a “humanitarian.”

 

For Witkoff, I imagine, bowing and scraping is simply how courtiers interact with authoritarians. He works for a president whose own Cabinet meetings are filled with effusive flattery from deputies, remember. Whether the flattery is sincere is irrelevant; what’s important is that those deputies are willing to stoop to it, acknowledging their leader’s authority by prostrating themselves before him.

 

Praise under those circumstances is probably more effective when it isn’t sincere, frankly. Telling a guy with a 31 percent approval rating that he’s the greatest president ever, or Putin that he’s Albert Schweitzer as he depopulates a neighboring country (and his own), shows him that you’ll take sides with him against reality itself. Fascists demand nothing less. That’s how they know you’re a man they can do business with.

 

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven’t been doing much,” Donald Trump himself observed a few days ago when asked about a potential summit with Russia and China to discuss Ukraine. That’s a man with whom Putin can do business. It can’t be long before reveries about the powerful muscularity of the Russian leader’s ass become a topic in the president’s increasingly homoerotic stump speeches.

 

In 1936, the U.S. Olympic delegation famously refused to salute Adolf Hitler as it paraded before him in Berlin, declining to dip the American flag as other delegations had done with their own standards. All you need to know about how Trumpists relate to authoritarian power is to understand that the president and his allies would have lowered the Stars and Stripes without hesitation. All the way to the ground, if requested.

 

Especially if there was something in it for them to do so.

 

It’s one thing for America to knife Ukraine in the back while getting nothing in return. (That’s the art of the deal.) It’s another for its leadership to resort to whitewashing Russian evil gratuitously. Witkoff’s startling Orwellian “humanitarian” slobber was an unusually shameful comment—and it came during an unusually shameful week, for an unusually shameful administration, at an unusually inopportune moment with a national election 12 days away.

 

Americans might notice. They might even (gasp) care.

 

Add it up. In the past few days, we’ve had Trump and Witkoff rhetorically shining Putin’s shoes; Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance making hay of the sexual abuse an opponent suffered as a child; various new exposés of administration corruption; de facto admissions of corruption, sometimes thinly veiled, sometimes not at all; and assorted WTF picayune weirdness from the president, whose interests include building ballrooms, admiring the derrieres of Republican men, renaming New Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, but not so much as addressing the cost of living.

 

This is the closest we’ll ever come to seeing a political party actively try to alienate voters. As undecideds, including disgruntled Trump 2024 supporters, go about making up their minds, Trump and Republican apparatchiks are doing everything possible to make backing the GOP as embarrassing as it can possibly be.

 

Unintentionally, they’ve turned the midterms into a stress test for the personality cult that’s defined right-wing politics since 2016. Is there any combination of policy failures and immoral antics that can overcome the fathomless partisan loyalty of the modern Republican voter?

 

If not now, when?

 

Now or never.

 

For an election that’s shaping up to be as lopsided as this one is, drawing firm conclusions about Americans’ big-picture political preferences from the results will be tricky.

 

I wrote about that last month. A huge Democratic wave can and will be read, fairly, as a repudiation of Trump’s first two years back in office. But it won’t be a repudiation of postliberalism.

 

How could it be? Public discontent is mostly being driven by the Iran war and its inflationary consequences; postliberals opposed that war, as they’ll eagerly remind you. If the president had stuck to “America First” isolationism and avoided another needless Middle Eastern entanglement, his approval might be in the low 40s instead of the low 30s and his party wouldn’t be sweating control of the Senate.

 

Postliberals will claim that Republicans lost not because Trump listened too much to Tucker Carlson and too little to Lindsey Graham and Benjamin Netanyahu but vice versa. And they’ll have a point.

 

Here’s another example in which drawing a firm conclusion from a result will be tricky: What’s the “lesson” if Democrat James Talarico ends up upsetting Republican Ken Paxton in Texas’ Senate race?

 

The Lone Star state is now a battleground, liberals will insist. Is that right? Or will a Talarico victory simply be the fluke result of a freak, once-in-a-lifetime perfect political storm? Trump’s approval is the worst for any president heading into a midterm in 80 years; the opposition party now leads on every major issue, in most cases by double digits; the Texas GOP nominated the worst Senate candidate it reasonably could have; and the Democratic nominee is a mild-mannered Christian seminarian—a cultural leftist, to be sure, but an awkward fit for the traditional “far-left bogeyman” role.

 

Everything that realistically could have happened to boost Democrats’ chances at winning Texas this year has happened—and even so, Talarico leads Paxton by just 1.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average. His margin was more than twice that on October 6 but has since crumbled under the weight of an avalanche of Musk-bucks. To all appearances, notwithstanding the parade of recent Republican moral imbecility that I described earlier, GOP voters are “coming home” in the final weeks of the race.

 

If I had to bet on the outcome, I’d bet on Paxton prevailing narrowly. And if he does, I think we can draw a firm conclusion from that result: Despite anger at the cost of living and an aimless war, despite the Republican candidate’s flamboyant scumminess and the Democrat’s inoffensiveness, despite screaming headlines about the betrayal of Ukraine and preposterously brazen corruption, despite the White House planning to resume a war most Americans hate, most right-wing voters would still rather reward an incompetent and dissolute GOP than endure six years of representation by the other party in a Senate that won’t be able to do anything until 2029 at the earliest anyway.

 

Not all right-wing voters. The latest Fox News poll found 28 percent of self-described “non-MAGA Republicans” supporting Talarico this year. But enough of them.

 

Texas’ “perfect storm” has made it the supreme stress test for postliberalism this year, which, as noted elsewhere, is why so many right-wing activists—and their foreign allies—are invested in the race. But the lesson of a Republican victory there would also apply in other red-state battlegrounds like Alaska, Kansas, and Ohio. If a decisive share of center-right voters can’t be persuaded to cross the aisle in this environment, with this administration behaving this way, then they’ll never be persuaded. Period.

 

Insofar as Trump getting reelected after January 6 didn’t already broadly confirm his famous hypothesis about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, the GOP holding the Senate next month will do it. And he and his team will recognize that, and act accordingly in the two years he has left—beginning with their inevitable “rigged election” campaign next month aimed at discrediting Democratic victories.

 

Lessons for postliberals.

 

Postliberals will draw their own lessons from the results, some silly and some not, if Republicans hold the Senate after doing more or less everything possible to blow it.

 

“Postliberalism is popular!” will be a silly one. Needing Elon Musk to pony up $158 million to drag Ken Paxton over the finish line in Texas—barely—does not mean that Americans have a fever and the only prescription is more right-wing amorality. It will mean, quite obviously, that nihilism and corruption are serious political liabilities even in red states and the party would be wise to penalize such qualities in candidates. How many Musk-bucks might have been spent in, say, North Carolina to defeat Democrat Roy Cooper if they hadn’t been needed in Texas?

 

But “postliberalism isn’t disqualifying, even in the worst political environments,” will be a lesson fairly drawn. In fact, I’m willing to draw it right now. Is there any doubt that Paxton and other Republicans locked in tight races in red states would be on their way to comfortable wins if inflation were down and Trump had stayed out of Iran?

 

What we’ve learned about American voters since 2016 is that they’ll elect a scumbag if they believe doing so will be good for their bottom line. Only when it turns out not to be so good does the scumbaggery bother them—although not enough for them to do anything about it, assuming the GOP holds the Senate.

 

Or is that unfair?

 

After all, Democrats are assured of winning the House. They need to flip only a few seats in the lower chamber to have a majority, and they’re far enough ahead on the generic ballot to make that a fait accompli. Whether there are any broad conclusions to be gleaned from the midterms about the state of cultishness among Republican voters probably depends on the scope of the House’s blue wave. If, in an era of ruthless gerrymandering, Democrats nonetheless manage to gain dozens of seats thanks to votes from across the aisle, that will tell us something about the right’s waning appetite for shooting people on Fifth Avenue.

 

But if Democratic gains are more modest than they were in Trump’s first midterm election, when they picked up 41 seats, the degree of difficulty created by modern gerrymandering won’t deter right-wing postliberals from finding encouragement in that outcome. “We lost because of the war and gas,” they’ll insist, “but Democrats still underperformed expectations. Americans are basically fine with everything else Trump is doing, including taking sides with Russia against Ukraine.”

 

And, again, they’ll have a point.

 

How postliberals react to the election is important because some meaningful number of Republican House (and possibly Senate) incumbents are about to be bounced out of office next month. Who succeeds them as their party’s nominees for those seats in 2028 and beyond will depend on which lessons the Republican base takes from this midterm.

 

“There’s functionally no difference between Dems having 225 vs 245 seats in 2027,” housing analyst Conor Sen argued this morning, “but I think it’d be good for the GOP (and America) to have a fresh start in 20 or so R+10 House districts in 2028.” Would it? I’m … not so sure.

 

It will be good if, as I say, the right concludes from November’s results that the electoral cost of unapologetic degeneracy is too steep to continue promoting candidates who suffer from it. “For the last decade, our party has been infected by a corrupted moral center,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said yesterday when asked about Ramaswamy’s new attack ad and the vice president’s defense of it. “Vance’s acceptance of this campaign ad only breathes life into the disease we should be seeking to cure.”

 

A string of upsets in R+10 districts might give Republican primary voters an electoral incentive to cure the disease in the next cycle. The president will be less popular then than he is now, as getting to spend two years governing as a lame duck with no electoral accountability will only make him worse. Rationally, the right-wing base should want to hedge against Trump’s unpopularity in 2028 by prioritizing electability and inoffensiveness in its congressional candidates. In so many words: fewer Paxtons, more Talaricos.

 

But this isn’t a movement known for rationality, is it?

 

Be careful what you wish for.

 

My guess is that Republican voters will do the opposite.

 

They’ll tell themselves, with some justification, that the 2026 wipeout happened only because their working-class base tends not to show up for midterms. Turnout in a presidential election year like 2028 will be plenty robust enough to flip those R+10 districts back to red no matter whom they nominate, they’ll say.

 

They’ll also have spent two years listening to Tucker Carlson and other J.D. Vance apologists insist that real Trumpism has never been tried. The president, a warmonger, betrayed “America First” postliberalism by attacking Iran, and his party paid for it in 2026, they’ll hear. The path back to power requires nominating a committed isolationist like Vance for president and like-minded postliberals downballot in Senate and House races—especially safe-ish R+10 districts where the GOP is likely to win regardless of who’s on the ballot.

 

To all appearances, as the party’s new nominee in 2028, Vance himself will follow Trump’s lead by promoting vicious ruthlessness as the indispensable quality required of all Republican leaders. “There is nothing J.D. has more personal disdain for than weak Republicans who reflexively kowtow every time the Dem-media demands a scalp,” a source close to the vice president told Axios yesterday of the backlash to Ramaswamy’s ad. “It drives him crazy to see the cucked reaction from some establishment operatives and politicians in the GOP, who he views as nothing more than useful idiots for the left.”

 

With Republican voters looking to a guy like that for political leadership, and with the right-wing media echo chamber amplifying his every word, whom do you think they’re more likely to nominate in House primaries? A Republican Talarico or Paxton 2.0?

 

Or something even worse?

 

As pleasant as it is to imagine scores of House Republicans being wiped out this year, and as much as they deserve that fate, the remorseless moral logic of 10 years of right-wing postliberalism is that things will get worse. I’m open to the possibility that the right will regain its moral bearings someday, but within one election cycle of a drubbing at the polls? Not bloody likely.

 

So if you’re excited for a “fresh start” for the GOP and its House candidates in 2028, I’ll tell you the same thing I’ve said about practically every political impulse Republicans have had since 2016: Be careful what you wish for.

 

On that note, I leave you with this link to the president’s latest Truth Social post, in which he weighs the merits of smearing Democrat Amy Acton as a liar for claiming she was sexually abused as a child—a crime for which her stepfather was indicted by a grand jury before going on the run. Can you guess whether Trump endorses that smear or condemns it? If not, here’s a hint: Postliberalism is a movement of sociopaths, by sociopaths, for sociopaths.

 

Maybe voters will care about that next month. Maybe they won’t.

They Wrecked Eisenhower’s World

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

Sometimes, the god of metaphors smiles on a writer.

 

I am an Eisenhower man. I would write “an Eisenhower Republican,” but I am not a Republican, and Eisenhower Republicans went the way of Chelonoidis abingdonii many years ago. I once made the case for Eisenhower as a political role model in a cover story for National Review, the conservative magazine that was launched in opposition to Eisenhower-style Republican politics as much as in opposition to the New Deal and postwar progressivism. I like Ike.

 

The contrast between Dwight Eisenhower and Donald Trump—and his coterie of fools, cretins, incompetents, drunks and drug addicts, grifters, deviants, and seditionists—could not be sharper.

 

Before D-Day, Eisenhower quietly composed a handwritten note taking personal blame for the operation’s failure—he was smart enough to know that success was uncertain and that he might not be in a position to talk about it afterward; Donald Trump, a dog-ate-my-homework guy if ever there were one, takes personal responsibility for precisely nothing. Eisenhower led Allied forces to victory in World War II and at the time of his retirement outranked George Washington (who received a posthumous promotion in 1976), but he was buried in a standard-issue soldier’s coffin and lay in state with no decorations on his field jacket except his two distinguished service medals and the Legion of Merit; Trump is a draft-dodging coward currently hard at work building himself a triumphal arch like some kind of limp Caesar.  

 

Eisenhower was a mediocre student at West Point but excelled in math and history and had serious intellectual interests throughout his life, reading everything from the Greek and Roman classics to Carl von Clausewitz; Trump cannot write a grammatical sentence in his native language. Eisenhower was a first-rate card player; Trump went bankrupt, more than once, owning casinos. Eisenhower was a serious negotiator whose greatest diplomatic triumph came not during his presidency but during his military career, a miraculous exercise in “managing up” to keep Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Charles de Gaulle more or less on the same page; Trump cannot get any meaningful legislation through a Congress controlled by his own party and instead tweets contemptuously at the Supreme Court when the justices remind him that, unlike de Gaulle, the U.S. president cannot quite rule by decree. Eisenhower was a model of duty and patience, spending 16 years as a major unable to win a promotion to higher rank in peacetime—the same number of years it took him to go from his next rank to being elected president of the United States; Trump has the discipline and attention span of a toddler who has just swallowed a two-pound bag of pure sugar. Eisenhower sent the 101^st Airborne to Little Rock against his own political interest in order to bring lawless segregationists to heel; Trump sent lawless masked homicidal goon squads to Minneapolis to terrorize the city for the crime of electing Democrats. Eisenhower was modest about his intellectual endowments but served ably as president of Columbia University; Trump thinks that he is an expert on artificial intelligence (and everything else) because he had an uncle who taught physics. Eisenhower presided over several budget surpluses and an average federal deficit of less than one-half of 1 percent of GDP; Trump’s first term saw the largest deficit ever recorded, which might be explained away as a COVID-era exigency, but his second term has seen deficits climbing back toward COVID levels and exceeding those of any year of the pre-COVID era going back to World War II.

 

And, of course, Eisenhower was served by able, patriotic subordinates who made the wrong call from time to time but were serious men: John Foster Dulles, Herbert Brownell Jr. (architect of the Civil Rights Act of 1957), Walter Bedell Smith, etc.; Trump is served by the likes of television personality Pete Hegseth, who cannot quite decide whether his next gig should be social-media influencer or president of these United States—and who may not understand at all that those are different jobs.

 

Hegseth, the hilariously incompetent, imbecilically strutting secretary of defense who imagines a testosterone-enhanced military that looks like something dreamt up by Tom of Finland, would like to be thought of as a great commander on the order of Eisenhower. To help him along in his preposterous Generalissimo Walter Mitty fantasy, he requested that a globe that had belonged to Eisenhower be moved to his office. (God knows what he planned to do with it.) The globe was old and fragile (like Hegseth’s boss) and the specialists who would normally handle relocating such an artifact had been furloughed by the administration Hegseth serves. But Hegseth imagines himself to be a man of action—though not in Iran, not in Ukraine, not really anywhere beyond the cushy wall-to-wall carpeting of his natural environment—and so he sent people who didn’t know what they were doing over to move the globe like a couple of college students loading up a secondhand sofa on a U-Haul, ripping a hole in the globe in the process.

 

Maybe Hegseth just wanted to make the map of the world more semiotically accurate by giving it a big ugly gash made by clumsy Americans.

 

The postwar global order was in no small part the creation of Dwight Eisenhower, who secured the U.S. victory in World War II, served as the first supreme commander of NATO, and helped to implement the Marshall Plan before expanding on it as president. Trump has helped to fan the flames of war in Europe by his shameful sucking up to Vladimir Putin, wrecked NATO by threatening repeatedly to invade the sovereign territory of another NATO country, and heedlessly gutted U.S. support of allies and programs serving U.S. interests around the world. As secretary of defense, Hegseth has helped to advance an approach to the world that veers from the criminal (kidnapping the Venezuelan dictator, murdering seafarers in the Caribbean and elsewhere) to the catastrophic (Iran, Ukraine, etc.) The Trump administration has been reduced to begging (“like a dog,” as Trump would say) Moscow to help the president buy a few midterm votes with the promise of cheap Russian diesel. Eisenhower helped to rebuild a world crippled by war and economic catastrophe; Trump et al. have undone the better part of a century’s work securing American interests and prosperity by bringing war, inflation, humiliation, and dishonor to everything they touch.

 

As a literary matter, it was practically inevitable that Hegseth would tear up Eisenhower’s globe. The god of metaphors is not mocked.

The Beginning of the End of the Lies

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

I have no idea what’s going to happen in the midterms (most consequentially in Michigan) or where the investigations into Ilhan Omar’s finances and immigration status are going to wind up. But whatever comes next in these and other significant national dramas, I’m feeling (uncharacteristically) optimistic that some large lies are on the verge of broad exposure.

 

Important things are already shaking loose.

 

Abdul El-Sayed’s documented trail of connections to and sympathies for Islamists is now the central issue of the U.S. Senate race in Michigan. And Omar’s defense against assorted allegations seems less than robust. Last night, on MS Now, when Chris Hayes asked her if she had married a man who was in any way related to her, Omar responded, “Not to my knowledge.” I’ll leave that there.

 

All sorts of pivotal truths have recently been coming to light. On the third anniversary of October 7, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani outed himself as an undeniable anti-Semite with a social media screed attacking Israel for supposed war crimes. Jews, liberals, and even friendly media noticed.

 

The next day, Ukraine launched drone strikes that significantly damaged three Yandex data centers in Russia. “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted days later. “There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.” The hate and division have probably returned already, but the successful strikes offered a small hint at how much online propaganda is a function of foreign influence. On X, there has since emerged a viral “I’m a Zionist” trend, and it’s still going strong.

 

Roughly a week ago, France began to unravel as rioters looted and burned city after city. The country, whose leaders promote Palestinianism, anti-Americanism, and Islamist Jew-hatred, was exposed as a demographic and economic basket case. One could see above the scenes of charred wreckage the official symbol of indiscriminate upheaval, the Palestinian flag. Before the Lebanese Civil War, people liked to call Beirut “the Paris of the East.” Since then, Paris has become the Beirut of the West. The only question now is which European city turns into its Damascus or Jenin.  

 

The truth is often disturbing but always necessary. Its revelation brings reality back into focus. I appreciate such moments. When Hunter Biden’s laptop was found to be legitimate; when Russiagate was discredited; when it became clear that Joe Biden was cognitively unfit for office; when Graham Platner was exposed as a creep; when Anthony Fauci was shown to have buried the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins; when Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, was uncovered as a sexual predator attacking Israel as a distraction—truth bombs with the potential to right wrongs.

 

Of course, the usual parties are still doing their best to contain explosive truths from detonating. The media decided that the French riots were mostly peaceful student protests. Last night, Chris Hayes tried his best to portray Omar as the victim of crazy bigots, and this morning, ABC News claimed that there’s no evidence of El-Sayed’s ties to Islamic extremists. That’s okay. The propagandists played this game with Biden, Fauci, and Platner, too, and then they were unmasked along with their wards.

 

I’m even going to allow myself some modest expectation of truth about Israel. Hamas’s October 7 attack inaugurated a dark age of sinister lies about the Jewish state and flattering lies about its enemies. The latter are nearing a kind of reckoning. With a little luck, that just might begin to expose the former.

Putin Wants His Own Munich

By Leon Aron

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

History, Marx wrote, paraphrasing Hegel, repeats itself: What was first tragedy becomes farce the second time around. Yet as historical analogies go, Vladimir Putin’s invitation to Xi Jinping and Donald Trump to meet next month to talk about ending the war in Ukraine rests firmly in the tragic mode.

 

The putative summit’s historical twin is the September 30, 1938, Munich Agreement. On that date, two fascist dictatorships (Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy) and Europe’s two largest democracies (the United Kingdom, represented by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and France, led by Prime Minister Édouard Daladier) assented to ceding Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Germany. The Czechoslovak armed forces, among the strongest in Europe, were ordered to stand down. In Munich II, Putin will aim to have two heavily militarized police autocracies, Russia and China, and the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States, agree, under the guise of “peace,” to bring about the capitulation of Ukraine, which continues heroically and skillfully to thwart Russia on the battlefield.

 

Of the three principals, Putin has the most urgent needs. Throughout the course of a four-and-a-half-year war he cannot win yet cannot walk away from, he’s gone through some half a million men killed and around 1 million wounded or missing, and he continues to lose between 30,000 and 34,000 soldiers every month. Casualties may soon exceed the number of draftees and volunteers Putin is able to scare up.

 

Just as important, Putin’s implied social contract with his subjects—support the war and I’ll protect you from its consequences—is beginning to wobble. Russia’s economy is on the brink of recession: This year’s projected GDP growth is under 1 percent. With hundreds of thousands of working-age adults lured by higher salaries into the hypertrophied defense sector, drafted into the war, killed in battle, or emigrated out of the country, the civilian economy is rife with labor shortages and depressed by a 14 percent interest rate. As of the first nine months of this year, the government’s expenditures are up 15 percent while revenues are lagging behind with a 10 percent increase and an expanding budget deficit—with no way to cover the deficit except by raising taxes and forcing banks to buy government bonds. Although inflation officially sits at 6 percent, prices for staples, like chicken and eggs, have risen almost three times as much. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drone attacks have brought down Russia’s gasoline production to 30 percent below domestic needs, causing nationwide shortages and long lines at gas stations.

 

Although not nearly as pressing as it is for Putin, Ukraine’s submission to the Munich II diktat would be deeply gratifying to Xi. Apart from geostrategic reasons, including implications for the annexation of Taiwan, such an outcome would be a momentous vindication of Xi’s ideological verity: the inexorable attrition and eventual demise of the world’s capitalist democracies, Kyiv’s main supporters. A fervent Marxist—he called Marx the “greatest thinker in human history,” whose teaching remains the party’s “guiding theory and ideology”—Xi marked the nationwide celebration of Marx’s 200^th birthday in 2018 with a speech titled “Marx’s Theory Still Shines With Truth.” A key part of that “theory” is historical materialism, a philosophy of history that postulates an unstoppable progress toward communism.

 

In large measure to help that history along, China has thrown a lifeline to Putin’s Russia. As the largest buyer of Russian oil, at 50 percent of total exports, Beijing has paid Moscow between $40 billion and $61 billion a year over the last six years. In addition to cash, China supplies the Kremlin with critical components of Putin’s war machine, including microelectronics for missiles, metalworking machine tools for making ammunition, and nitrocellulose, a key component of artillery shells. In 2024, a NATO summit labeled China the “decisive enabler” of the war against Ukraine.

 

As for Trump, who plays the role of Chamberlain in this emergent historical script, he too lusts after the image of a hero who brings about what the British prime minister called “peace for our time.” Yet when it comes to the war in Ukraine, Trump’s repeated instances of moral turpitude and studied ignorance have by now far exceeded Chamberlain’s description of the Sudetenland crisis as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

 

Apparently taking at face value what Putin—an ex-KGB lieutenant colonel and a graduate of the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Academy of Foreign Intelligence—tells him in long and invariably friendly phone chats, the U.S. president professes to believe that Ukraine started the war. He is also likely to have bought Putin’s explanation for seeking to conquer and annex Donbas in order to end the suffering of the ethnic Russians there, a borrowing from Hitler’s justification for detaching the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia because of the entirely bogus oppression of the territory’s ethnic Germans.

 

Trump also seems to have internalized Putin’s canard of the “illegitimacy” of the democratically elected President Volodymyr Zelensky because Ukraine has not held presidential elections, which are banned by the country’s constitution in wartime. Calling Zelensky a “dictator without election,” Trump rolled out the red carpet for the Kremlin ruler in his 27^th year in power. Unable to distinguish between the aggressor and his victims and exasperated by Ukraine’s reluctance to give in, Trump also accused Zelensky of not wanting to “settle” this war.

 

Trump insists on jollying Putin into “peace” with blandishments while Moscow steadily escalates the killing of Ukrainian civilians by bombing their homes, hospitals, and schools. After waiving the ban on Russian imports by contracting for $4.5 billion worth of diesel oil for the U.S. and global markets, Trump halted, via executive order, the implementation of multiple sanctions on Moscow spelled out in a bill that had passed the House and the Senate with big majorities. The order was signed amid a Russian bombing campaign against commuter buses in Ukraine.

 

Should the historical analogy hold, Ukraine’s giving in—either by ceding all of the Donbas or, even worse, by recognizing the provinces of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk, and Donetsk as Russian—is not likely to lead to lasting peace. Munich was followed five months later by Germany’s invasion and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. In another six months, World War II began with Hitler’s assault on Poland.

 

In a replay of this scenario, Russia would likely insist—as it consistently has in the past—on a dramatic reduction of the Ukrainian armed forces and the break of all military ties to NATO. The Kremlin would also be poised to steadily manipulate Ukrainian domestic politics, engineering the installation of a Quisling government and eventually turning Ukraine into a protectorate a la Belarus.

 

Exhilarated by victory and emboldened by the sight of a demoralized Europe and NATO bereft of America’s support, Putin would also be likely to follow up with an attack on a vulnerable country on NATO’s eastern flank. Nuclear blackmail would follow, forcing an “overall settlement,” which would fulfill Putin’s key strategic goal of rolling back the post-1990 NATO expansion, effectively recovering the Soviet Union’s dominance of Eastern and much of Central Europe.

 

Of course, the historical parallel may come well short of a complete script. The tripartite summit may not take place. Even if it does, Europe’s support for Ukraine may become strong enough to enable Kyiv to defy Munich II and, instead, continue the fight even without U.S. backing. And NATO’s cohesion and rearmament may prove impressive enough to make Putin put the grand schemes on hold, while not abandoning the dream of repeating Stalin’s feats.

 

Still, it would be a pity to let the historical concordance go to waste without at least considering, and perhaps readying for, the repeat of some of its most unsettling possible consequences.

Elon Musk’s Moral Confusion on Ukraine

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

We have, to my mind anyway, extremely welcome news that President Trump called Elon Musk and prevailed on him to restore full functionality of Starlink/Starshield for the Ukrainian military. It gets to what I wrote about in my piece on the homepage today — that a number of factors conspired to make it unlikely that the administration could maintain its latest apparent shift away from Ukraine and toward Russia.

 

But the reporting seems to confirm that it was Musk’s initial call to hobble access (whether it was made with or without White House blessing is less clear).

 

And that’s still troubling.

 

Musk has been all over the place on Ukraine. Two days after the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukrainian officials begged Musk on Twitter to provide Starlink access, and Musk responded almost instantly: “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.” This probably did no less than save the country. The system became the very backbone of Ukrainian military operations, used for command-and-control, intelligence transmission, artillery targeting, drone operations, and air defense.

 

Then something changed in the fall of 2022: Ukraine took the offensive, liberating vast swaths of occupied territory and, more consequentially, prompting mobilization and nuclear saber-rattling from Vladimir Putin. This clearly spooked Musk, who frankly overrated the threats (along with plenty of people inside the Biden administration and the commentariat, myself included). Emanations from Russia that commerical infrastructure supporting Ukraine could become military targets surely didn’t help.

 

So Musk seems to have ordered the shutdown of Starlink terminals along the line of contest, with something like a hundred terminals affected. It interrupted the counteroffensive and may have cost Ukraine territory at the margins, but service was eventually restored for reasons that never became clear. Later in 2022, Musk also refused a request to activate Starlink coverage over Crimea to facilitate a Ukrainian attack on the Black Sea Fleet. And SpaceX subsequently restricted offensive military applications of Starlink, including operations inside Russia, the status quo we have more or less been under until the events of the last week.

 

The recent service interruptions, and the ones of almost exactly four years ago, both came at times when it was clear momentum was shifting in Ukraine’s favor and when Russia, feeling this pain, did what Russia always does and escalated threats and hybrid action against Ukraine’s Western backers. One could say simply that Russia’s strategy seems to have worked on Musk in both instances, at least temporarily.

 

But at the same time, Musk has been openly pessimistic about Ukraine’s military prospects from the start. That pessimism informed long stretches, notably when Russia was back on the front foot in recent years, where his thinking was that American assistance would merely prolong an unwinnable war of attrition: “This spending does not help Ukraine — prolonging the war does not help Ukraine.”

 

Musk seems to sincerely share the view espoused by Western doves, retrenchers, and Kremlin apologists alike that ending the killing takes precedence over the justice of the peace that follows. Musk’s own October 2022 peace proposal would have recognized Russian sovereignty over Crimea, imposed permanent Ukrainian neutrality, and subjected occupied territories to new referendums. It was, he insisted, “just a question of how many die before then.” By March 2025, he was explicitly assigning moral responsibility for the deaths to Zelensky, calling his continued resistence “cruel and inhumane.” Earlier this month, Musk returned to the theme: “And so the slaughter continues. . . . Time for Zelensky to go.”

 

It’s difficult to square these two things — Musk’s stated belief that Ukrainian self-defense is itself immoral because of how much Ukrainian suffering it involves, and his habit of hobbling Ukraine when Russia is at its most vulnerable — without concluding that Musk is actually just in the tank for the Kremlin. But it’s difficult to square that conclusion, in turn, with all Musk has done for Ukraine, initially at his own expense and peril.

 

Which is why I think he’s just genuinely morally confused. That’s not an excuse, but an explanation. Musk isn’t a military strategist or a seasoned diplomat. His genius lies elsewhere, and he didn’t ask to have his technology at the center of the most consequential war of the 21st century. He’s also, at this point, a famed vacillator on topics ranging from Twitter bans to Donald Trump. So it shouldn’t surprise, even if it disappoints, that he’d vacillate on Ukraine over the course of the sturm und drang. That’s why I’m very grateful that a man of Musk’s talents is a patriotic American and very glad that he’s not where the buck stops on national security policy.

Scrutinizing Abdul El-Sayed’s Radicalism Isn’t Islamophobic

National Review Online

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

As the Michigan Senate race enters the home stretch and Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s radical views and associations are garnering more attention, he and his allies are using familiar cries of bigotry to stifle a closer examination of his record.

 

Christyna Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Democratic-led Senate Majority PAC, accused Republicans of waging a campaign of “casual Islamophobia.” Bill Clinton said, “I’m tired of people denigrating Muslims because they’re Muslim.” El-Sayed compared himself to JFK, noting the first Catholic president had to overcome charges he would be more loyal to the Vatican than the U.S. Constitution.

 

As an infant at the time of JFK’s assassination, former Representative Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, was not old enough to have known Jack Kennedy, but we feel confident in saying that El-Sayed is no Jack Kennedy.

 

JFK served his nation honorably in World War II and performed heroically in saving his crew when the boat he commanded, the PT-109, was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Those questioning his loyalty to America were doing so purely on the basis of his faith.

 

El-Sayed, on the other hand, has built up a record of extreme views and associations, and has lied about them. The attacks on him on these grounds are fair game.

 

As we detailed in a previous editorial, despite his claims of having no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, there is ample evidence that his mother and other family relations did.

 

While a defender might argue that he can’t be held accountable for his family members, the associations are consistent with his own record. In 2012, he signed an open letter to Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader and president of Egypt at the time, which said, “We, leaders of the Egyptian community, support the revolutionary decisions taken by the president, and we call on him to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible.”

 

El-Sayed decided to hold multiple rallies with Hasan Piker, one of the leading antisemitic podcasters in America. Piker has claimed that “America deserved 9/11” and regularly defends terrorist groups. He said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel, that he did not have “a single issue with Hezbollah,” and that what the Houthis were doing was “not only moral, but it’s just.” The events with Piker didn’t happen long ago, but in this very Senate race.

 

El-Sayed, too, has equated Israel to Hamas and refused to say that Iran, the leading sponsor of global terrorism, is a greater threat to the U.S. than Israel.

 

According to the New York Times, by the way, while at the University of Michigan, he was president of the Muslim Students Association, an organization founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s.

 

His campaign waves off questions about his letter to Morsi, and in a viral clip, he answered a question at a town hall about whether he disavows the Muslim Brotherhood with a quick, rote disavowal followed by a long defense of the free exercise of religion.

 

In fending off questions about his family’s associations and his own views, he often portrays himself as a committed defender of the Constitution, which is rich coming from him. El-Sayed has called for packing the Court and, in an unearthed YouTube video, called for scrapping the Second Amendment.

 

The question about his campaign isn’t whether someone can be a faithful Muslim and hold public office, but whether El-Sayed deserves to serve in the United States Senate, and given his views and rank dishonesty, the answer should be a resounding “no.”

The Problem with Abdul El-Sayed’s JFK Analogy

By George Weigel

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

Trying to put some distance between himself and the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, Michigan’s Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, has taken to analogizing fears about his being a Muslim to the attacks during the 1960 presidential campaign on John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism.

 

If only.

 

While some biographers contend that JFK became more religiously serious in the wake of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the August 1963 death of his infant son Patrick, there is little evidence that Catholicism ever shaped Kennedy’s political thought. For JFK, Catholicism was more of an ethnic marker than a matter of personal conviction — a biographical fact that could be exploited in some contexts but that caused a lot of trouble in other circumstances. This was especially true in the old Bible Belt, but anti-Catholic prejudice was not limited to those quarters; its upscale WASP version was neatly articulated by none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942, when he remarked to Henry Morgenthau that the United States was a “Protestant country” in which Jews and Catholics were present “on sufferance.” That was the hoary bias with which JFK had to contend in seeking the presidency in 1960, and the key moment in that drama was JFK’s famous September 12, 1960, speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.

 

But what exactly did then-Senator Kennedy do in that famous address? Mythology aside, he described himself as an advocate of what Richard John Neuhaus would call, a quarter century later, the “naked public square”: an America not only where church and state were institutionally separated but also where religiously informed moral conviction had no place in public life. In reminding his audience of his war record and his years of public service, JFK ably turned the tables on the bigots in his audience and won a considerable amount of sympathy from the fair-minded Protestant majority in the country. He did so, however, by effectively declaring his faith a purely private matter of no consequence to his politics or policies. So while spiking the guns of the bigots, JFK also set the table for a successor generation of self-identified Catholics in public life — Mario Cuomo, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden – who would treat Catholic teachings based on the moral truths that anyone can know by reason (such as the inalienable right to life from conception until natural death) as sectarian religious opinions that ought not be imposed on a pluralistic republic.

 

Had John F. Kennedy been as serious a Catholic in 1960 as Abdul El-Sayed is a Muslim today, Kennedy could have appealed to one of America’s most venerable Catholic churchmen in rebutting claims that a Catholic could not be trusted with the presidency because he owed a higher allegiance to the pope and would have to obey any orders sent him from Rome — a charge that took a bizarre form in some of the country’s fever swamps during the 1928 presidential campaign, when it was alleged that a tunnel would be dug between the Vatican and the White House if Catholic Democrat Al Smith won. (This quickly led to the post-1928 election intra-Catholic joke that Happy Warrior Smith, after being crushed electorally by Herbert Hoover, sent Pope Pius XI a telegram of two words: “Stop digging.”)

 

Yet as long ago as 1876, almost a century before Kennedy’s address to the Protestant ministers in Houston, Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore had written a bestseller, The Faith of Our Fathers, in which America’s premier Catholic mounted a spirited defense of the American constitutional arrangement on church and state, arguing that the Bishop of Rome had no civil authority in the United States and that any attempt by the pope to order an American public official to do such-and-such would breach the boundaries of the pope’s legitimate spiritual authority. Gibbons defended the necessity of the pope himself being subject to no earthly sovereignty and therefore needing some territory that no other sovereign could claim. But that was a matter of protecting the pope’s spiritual freedom as the universal pastor of the church, not a matter of the pope being, in the bigots’ term of art, a “foreign potentate.” The Faith of Our Fathers was still in print in 1960, but Kennedy made no mention of it, nor did he appeal to Gibbons’s well-established claims.

 

Kennedy might also have drawn on the church-state scholarship and Catholic political philosophy of American theologian John Courtney Murray, S.J., which helped prepare the ground in the 1940s and 1950s for the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. Far from being antithetical to the American experiment, Murray argued, classic Catholic political theory made an even stronger case for American democracy than Enlightenment liberalism or modern utilitarianism — an argument that eventually landed the urbane Father Murray on the cover of Time magazine (founded and published by the very Protestant Henry Luce) a few weeks after JFK’s election to the presidency. Candidate Kennedy wasn’t interested in arguing Catholic political theory in Houston that September night, though. He was interested in confounding the prejudices of his audience, and he did so in considerable part by putting as much distance between his public persona and his Catholicism as possible.

 

And therein lies the deeper problem with Abdul El-Sayed’s claim that he is JFK 2.0. For the form of Islam to which he seems to adhere has no Quran-based theory of church-state distinction, much less church-state institutional separation. Moreover, there is no verse in the Quran like Matthew 22:21 and its parallels in the gospels of Mark and Luke: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” — an injunction that sharply circumscribes Caesar’s authority and helps creates the public space in which religious freedom can be lived in practice, not merely asserted in theory.

 

El-Sayed is suggesting that his Islamic faith is as peripheral to his approach to public life as JFK’s Catholicism was to his in 1960 (which is what any non-mythologized reading of Kennedy’s Houston speech would lead one to conclude El-Sayed was asserting). But it would be more honest, and more conducive to the civil public discussion of an issue of consequence throughout the contemporary West, for the Michigan Democrat to take another tack: to tell the voters if and how Islam might underwrite religious freedom as the first of civil rights, and how the long-standing relationship of his family to the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood squares with the First Amendment, properly understood.

 

Those are entirely legitimate questions, and they have nothing to do with anti-Muslim bias. Rather, those questions take Islam and its truth claims with the seriousness they deserve as a powerful force, not only in the spirituality of pious and charitable individuals, but in public life throughout the world.

A Leftist Who Defies Victim Culture

By Stephen G. Adubato

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

On February 1, 2021, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram Live to open up about her experience of hiding in her office bathroom during the January 6 Capitol riot the previous month. But rather than offering a political analysis of the event, she opted to speak about how it triggered traumatic memories of being sexually abused years ago. One commentator complained that by “participating in the emotional and communicative channels opened up to her and her generation by trauma culture and social media, she made her own story the center of the events on January 6, 2021.” The commentator went on to lambast Ocasio-Cortez’s narcissistic choice to use social media “as a public confession booth for generating likes and clout.”

 

These comments are found in the introduction of a new book about the excesses of left-wing “trauma culture” published not by a conservative press like Penguin Random House’s Sentinel or Regnery Publishing, but by the lefty Verso Books. And its author is far from a right-wing reactionary: Rather, it is the self-identified Marxist Catherine Liu.

 

Those already familiar with the 62-year-old University of California, Irvine professor won’t be surprised: Liu has made a name for herself with her sharp critiques of the left’s turn from class-based politics to “woke” identitarianism. Her 2021 book Virtue Hoarders denounced the “professional managerial class” for having the gall to prioritize its own attempts to continue climbing the proverbial ladder of capitalist ascent while “insisting on its own progressive heroism” and alleged advocacy for “underprivileged minorities.”

 

Her latest book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, builds on her previous critiques of the left’s turn toward identitarianism and political correctness, this time zeroing in on how trauma culture “promised liberation from repression and oppression but has never delivered.” Instead, it has been used to “individualize suffering” and to undermine solidarity by “demanding submission to a regime of vulnerability and accommodation.”

 

Liu’s upbringing made it difficult to go along with trauma culture’s demand to flaunt one’s hardships in order to gain social and professional currency. “My parents and grandparents lived through the most turbulent and violent times in 20^th century history,” she told me in an interview. Her mother’s parents were from northwestern China, and her father, who came from a peasant background, was kidnapped as a teenager by the Kuomintang army in 1949.

 

Her father eventually got a job as a translator at the United Nations, which allowed Liu to visit China with him every other year in the 1970s. “My mother found my Chinese relatives poor and uncouth, but I found them heroic and wonderful. The poverty was shared, not abject,” Liu told me. “Nobody had running water or electricity in the countryside then, but everyone was animated by a sense of purpose.”

 

Still, despite her esteem for her family’s work ethic, she describes them as “very controlling, neglectful and authoritarian.” Having grown accustomed to the roughness of daily life and “a strong sense of working class culture,” she could never get on board with the left’s turn from class politics to identity. Eventually, she managed to carve out her own heterodox space within left-wing cultural and media studies, learning to be unfazed by being treated as “a misfit” in her department. “My colleagues in the English department think I am a vulgar, unrefined, heavy-handed Marxist,” she told me.

 

Plenty of other theorists have critiqued the left’s shift away from class politics. But Traumatized offers a comprehensive overview of this shift, looking at strictly political factors as well as at how mental health professionals and celebrities like Oprah Winfrey have played a role in “co-opting” leftist rhetoric in order to steer it away from genuine attempts to restructure society and redistribute wealth. Trauma culture’s enabling of narcissistic tendencies and passing them off as “progressive” only serves to distract from working-class issues and further elite interests, Liu argues. So-called radical progressives like Ocasio-Cortez are foot soldiers of this coup.

 

As a privileged suburban millennial who was taught by my teachers and peers to use my “mental health” as a get-out-of-jail-free card to absolve myself of responsibilities and accountability, I found that Liu’s latest book read more like a personal attack than a work of cultural analysis. Well, perhaps calling it a “personal attack” indulges my narcissism. Maybe it’s better to think of it as a form of wisdom literature—something along the lines of Ecclesiastes or the book of the prophet Isaiah—which simultaneously excoriates our moral weaknesses while opening the door to our salvation.

 

What, I asked Liu, can fragile millennials like me do in order to grow up and start taking responsibility for ourselves? As much as I know it’s stupid, sometimes I feel like I lack the strength to get over myself and get the job done. It would be all too millennial of me to blame my parents and teachers for not giving me the tools to do so, for enabling my laziness and lack of responsibility. So what’s a snowflake like me to do?

 

While she assured me “we all have low morale at certain points,” she emphasized the need to “put boundaries” around one’s feelings and look at the bigger picture. “You’ve all been raised in this very antisocial way where your feelings can take precedence over the needs of the social contract of a collective group,” she said. “It’s actually really healthy to be able to not let your feelings overwhelm you and to say, ‘Okay, I’m having a really hard time about this, but all of these people need me … so I kind of have to suck it up.’”  Though her position is not explicitly religious, it certainly hints of certain Christian ideals like that of “dying to self” and humbly “taking up your cross.”

 

I remarked to her that the majority of my peers who publicize their suffering have only gone through minimally or mildly terrible life experiences—for example, my college classmates who kvetched about growing up in working class neighborhoods and having to deal with antiquated gender norms—whereas the ones who have had truly horrifying experiences—who come from war-torn countries, grew up in extreme poverty, were literally raped or abused—are generally less interested in talking about their trauma than in trying to forge a better life for themselves. She chalked this up to the fact that most of those people come from cultures in which one earns respect through one’s actions rather than demanding attention, and that suffering—however unpleasant—retains a redemptive quality. Suffering and self-sacrifice, for many, continue to be “framed within a religious eschatology,” something that brings you closer to a spiritual ideal “like the sacrifices of Christ or the suffering of the martyrs.” Simply put, suffering can be a means to grow spiritually and morally.

 

How has this mindset affected our body politic? On one hand, Liu fears that universities “are in so much trouble” for pushing ideological fodder in place of actually educating students. Increasingly, she added, “people who want to learn things might find the universities the last place where serious study and free discussion are taking place.” Yet she also finds reason to hold out hope. As much as they may “have a hard time reading long things,” her undergraduate students are “just as lively and curious as always.”

 

She’s also optimistic about how the two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns focused more on class and less on identity. On whether she thinks this also opens the door for a potential left-right antitechnocratic, pro-working-class coalition, she remains skeptical. While she has hope for conservatives like Sen. Josh Hawley and his commitment to working-class issues, he still “has to appease his conservative donors.” As for the left, she’s interested in whether or not someone like Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed could appeal to working-class Midwesterners if he is indeed elected.

 

I can’t say I share all of Liu’s politics, nor do I have as much hope as she does that millennials like me can turn things around for ourselves after having been brainwashed by trauma culture all of our lives. (That may sound like a stereotypical millennial cop-out from taking responsibility for my life, but alas, I’m a product of my times.) At the same time, I can’t help but find her no-bulls–t, commonsensical attitude toward life compelling. Furthermore, Liu strikes me not only as a well-adjusted person, but as a genuinely happy person. Rather than souring her outlook, Liu’s suffering and the challenges she’s faced have sharpened her sense of purpose and her determination to give to others through her work.

 

While I can’t claim to have figured my life out, nor to have overcome my numerous fragilities, it’s through encountering people like Liu that I’m reminded that true freedom comes not from hiding from reality, but from running headfirst into it. Indeed, it seems that her lack of fragility is what grants her the freedom to embrace life as it comes to her, and to relish it all with a kind of joie de vivre lacking in most of my peers. I aspire to live with such gusto for life in all of its fullness—both the good and the bad—without demanding any filters or trigger warnings.

Trump’s Capitulation to Putin Is Undermining U.S. National Security

By Michael McFaul

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

Donald Trump has never hidden his admiration for Russia’s imperial dictator, Vladimir Putin. Shortly after taking office for his first term in 2017, President Trump was asked by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly to defend his respect for Putin, whom O’Reilly called a “killer.” Trump replied, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?” The following year, at a press conference in Helsinki during his first summit with Putin, Trump publicly questioned the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The Russian leader was standing right by his side.

 

These expressions of affinity for Putin were shocking at the time, but crucially, they did not produce consequential shifts in U.S. foreign policy. The first Trump administration included many senior national security officials who had a different, more accurate assessment of how Putin’s policies threatened American national interests. Trump’s own 2017 National Security Strategy identified Russia (and China) as revisionist powers that “challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” Reluctantly, in 2017, Trump also signed a new sanctions law, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, that focused on Russia and other adversaries. His first administration even provided a limited number of anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine. The gap between Trump’s friendly rhetoric toward Putin and actual policy was real.

 

Not anymore. No longer constrained by Gens. H.R. McMaster or Jim Mattis, Trump has gradually but consistently turned his effusive admiration for Putin into the most radical shift in American foreign policy in the last century—and maybe ever. Today, under Trump, the United States—a country that once was considered the leader of the free world—is now openly and shamelessly supporting an imperial dictatorship in Russia.

 

This tragic pivot started slowly after Trump returned to the White House for a second term. As a presidential candidate in 2024, Trump had claimed he could end the war in Ukraine in one day. Once back in power, he and his team seemed to be trying to mediate an end to the fighting. I applauded these efforts at the time. Putin’s barbaric invasion has killed too many people: soldiers and civilians in Ukraine, but also scores of young Russian men, many sent to the front only to become casualties within days and sometimes even hours of their arrival. Russia is losing on the frontline. Ukrainian warriors have stopped the advance of Russia’s invading army and have recently begun taking back chunks of occupied territory. So, Putin has changed tactics, focusing instead on expanding an intensified campaign of attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure. His military now targets Ukrainian civilians on a near-daily basis, while seeking to eliminate their energy and water infrastructure to heighten their suffering during the winter. This terrorism is motivated by the inaccurate belief that a traumatized Ukrainian society would pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky to capitulate. Who could not support ending such a war?

 

I cannot say for sure if Trump genuinely was trying to end the war, or whether his desire to improve relations with Putin and do business deals with Russian companies was always the greater priority. What I can say is that his approach to negotiations has been fundamentally flawed and ineffective. Trump and his negotiators—real estate businessmen Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—decided early on that they would give concessions to Putin in the hope that he would stop fighting. For instance, while still allowing American companies to sell arms to Europeans who then transfer them to Ukraine, Trump has ended direct military and economic assistance to Kyiv. Trump has also made it clear that Ukraine could not join NATO while he was president, and he consistently ridicules Zelensky and berates him for not wanting peace. The latter is a talking point Kremlin propagandists could have written. Conversely, Trump hosted Putin for a summit in Alaska in August 2025, personally greeting him on the tarmac with a red-carpet welcome. But none of Trump’s gifts to Putin have produced even a small change in Putin’s commitment to continue his war.

 

This month, Trump’s pivot toward Putin became more pronounced, with real-world negative consequences for Ukraine. He eased sanctions on Russian diesel, allowing Moscow to release millions of barrels of fuel onto the global market. He then signed an executive order waiving most of the new sanctions and tariffs against Russia under the Lindsey O. Graham Act, two days before they were to take effect. Then, most damagingly of all, came the restrictions on SpaceX’s satellite communications service, which Ukraine relies on for battlefield communications and drone operations. Reuters reported that the order to limit access originated inside the White House, although it remains unclear who authorized it. Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have both denied personal responsibility, suggesting they knew how unpopular this decision would be with the public. But the effect on Ukrainian air defenses has been serious. As Zelensky put it: “We couldn’t use a tool that helps protect people. That’s very painful and frustrating.”

 

Trump has defended the diesel deal and waiving of sanctions as necessary to keep Putin at the negotiating table. It’s the same old playbook—appease Putin and then hope he will kindly end his invasion. It hasn’t worked before; it isn’t working now. In fact, these new gifts will have the opposite effect. They will encourage Putin to keep fighting, knowing that if he does, Trump will offer him still more concessions. And to make things even worse, we have now learned that Putin has floated the idea to Trump of a meeting among China, Russia, and the United States to deal with the “Ukraine crisis,” just as imperial powers used to do in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

 

Thus, the past week has been one of the darkest in the history of U.S.-Ukraine relations; Trump’s longstanding admiration for Putin has given way to a radically new American foreign policy that puts the United States unabashedly on the side of autocratic Russia and tragically against democratic Ukraine. Trump is finally backing up his words with actions—actions that are both immoral and contrary to America’s national interests.

 

Call me old-fashioned or idealistic, but I still believe that morality should play a role in American foreign policy. Of course, American presidents and diplomats sometimes must engage with autocrats to advance U.S. interests. I did as the U.S. ambassador to Russia. But we do not have to embrace them as friends or allies, especially imperial dictators like Putin, who uses terrorism and kidnapping as instruments of his war against Ukraine. I do not want my country helping such an evil leader. I want my country to be against imperialism and for sovereignty, to stand against dictatorship and for democracy, to aid those fighting for independence and against occupation.

 

But it’s not just the right thing to do; it’s also the pragmatic thing to do. Let’s be realistic. Putin is not going to abandon his autocratic partners in China, Iran, and North Korea just because Trump offers him concessions. That is a naïve reading of Putin. He sees the United States as his enemy, no matter how many gifts he gets from Trump.

 

By trying to appease Putin, Trump is also weakening America’s relationships with our democratic allies and partners in Europe. In this new era of great power competition with China and Russia, our democratic allies are America’s greatest comparative advantage. Together, the free world has far greater economic power and military strength than autocracies, and our democratic values and ideals have significantly more global appeal than those of autocracies. But Trump’s embrace of Putin and his abandonment of Ukraine are weakening these ties.

 

And Xi Jinping is watching too. As America proves feckless in standing with Ukraine, Xi must increasingly believe that Trump will show similar indifference when it comes to defending Taiwan.

 

The good news, however, is that the United States is not a dictatorship. We remain a democracy with competitive elections just around the corner. Polls show clearly that the American people do not share Trump’s admiration for Putin. According to the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of Americans have little or no confidence in Putin “to do the right thing regarding world affairs.” A recent YouGov poll also found that most Americans sympathize with Ukraine, with just 4 percent saying they sympathize with Russia in the conflict. Another recent YouGov poll suggests that more Americans want to increase aid to Ukraine than decrease it. Therefore, I am hoping that early in the new year, with a new balance of power in Congress and Trump fully into his lame-duck era, the House of Representatives and Senate will introduce legislation to provide a new military aid package to Ukraine and another bill to make any business deal with Russian companies illegal until Putin ends his war. Dare President Trump to veto them.

 

In embracing Putin and abandoning Ukrainians, Trump is out of step with American society. Hopefully, more emboldened and courageous leadership in the U.S. Congress next year will realign American actions regarding Putin’s barbaric war in Ukraine with the will of the American people.

How Democrats Lost Their Way on Gaza

By Ludovic Hood

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

There has been much public handwringing in the Democratic foreign policy establishment in recent months over Gaza policy. The party’s establishment and progressive factions were engaging in vicious finger-pointing about the Gaza war and America’s relationship with Israel even before the release of Biden adviser Brett McGurk’s new book about the October 7 hostages.

 

Biden confidants such as former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan strike me as decent and principled men. While in office, both evinced frustration, publicly and privately, about the twisted discourse in Washington policy circles and the prejudiced media coverage of the Gaza war — and how that affected Hamas’s strategic calculus at critical junctures.

 

While party leaders now seem content allowing far-left voices to come to the fore, the Democratic foreign policy establishment needs an honest accounting of why and how the administration’s deliberations and messaging on Gaza lost their way — including muddying moral clarity about what happened on October 7, the ideology underpinning the atrocities, and how a sovereign nation-state should respond.

 

In the days following the Hamas-led October 7 onslaught, President Biden made clear his revulsion at the scale of the barbarity and his solidarity with the government and people of Israel — including his visit to Tel Aviv eleven days after the attack. That deeply felt outrage and sincere support for the Israeli people should have been the guiding light in the two years that followed.

 

Instead, narrow political considerations, biased media coverage, and far-left, anti-Israel activists’ demands were allowed to shape policy deliberations and official messaging, including the president’s. This miscalculation prolonged the conflict, increased Palestinian suffering, and fueled anti-Israel discourse in American society that nurtured antisemitism.

 

Israelis and Palestinians alike would be better off had the United States proceeded with strategic and moral clarity about the October 7 attacks and the responsibility of nations to respond. Israel was right to exercise military force against Hamas and its army of over 25,000 militants. Any other government, tasked with the primary responsibility of defending its people, would have done the same — and should be expected to do so.

 

Like the U.S. military, the Israel Defense Forces operate under legal frameworks requiring distinction, precaution, and proportionality in military action. But those laws were never designed to guarantee zero civilian harm when fighting an enemy deeply and intentionally embedded in civilian infrastructure. Credible allegations of operational misconduct demand transparent investigation and accountability within the Israeli military justice system.

 

Rather than helping the public understand these legal standards and Hamas’s practice of operating from high-density civilian locations, the Biden administration too often allowed the grim realities of urban warfare to be reframed as inherently unlawful — by failing to speak up about heavily biased media coverage and about Hamas’s use of human shields.

 

Americans are right to care about Palestinian suffering, and because Israel is an American ally using U.S. weapons, its conduct deserves scrutiny. But that scrutiny was not applied evenly. Hundreds of thousands have died in Syria and Sudan with a fraction of the outrage. Mosul and Raqqa were reduced to rubble at the cost of thousands of civilian lives during U.S.-led counter-ISIS operations, yet no comparable moral outcry followed. Demanding of Israel a standard that no army has met and no other conflict has faced is not accountability; Biden administration officials should have rejected that double standard and selective outrage early and repeatedly.

 

The Biden administration was right to press Israel on humanitarian access at certain junctures. Aid restrictions and the collapse of public order inside Gaza produced real hardship. The mistake was letting that pressure be heard as a verdict on the war itself, while saying far too little about Hamas’s systematic looting and diversion of aid.

 

There never was, and there is not, a “genocide” in Gaza. The administration should have been forthright about this from the start, including repudiating rhetoric from discredited UN officials. The misuse of this term is a grave disservice to the millions of Armenians, Jews and other victims of Nazi Germany, Cambodians, and Rwandans murdered en masse in the 20th century.

 

Washington also failed to challenge the figures released by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. Officials should have consistently noted that the published statistics included deaths of Hamas and other militants, as well as those who died of causes unrelated to the conflict. Despite the terrible destruction of parts of Gaza, Israeli procedures ensured that the ratio of combatant to civilian deaths among Gazans remained historically low for dense urban combat.

 

Furthermore, the administration should have pushed back on slanted media coverage, reminding U.S. outlets to be thorough and judicious in their reporting — especially given that news organizations around the world look to American media to validate sensational claims. U.S. officials should have regularly reminded the world that Hamas conducted the vast majority of its military operations from homes, apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and mosques, putting Palestinian women, children, and men in harm’s way every hour of every day.

 

Hamas had every opportunity to surrender. Israel even signaled a willingness to consider exile for its leaders. Hamas chose instead to keep fighting, using innocent Palestinians as human shields. The responsibility for Palestinian deaths lies overwhelmingly with Hamas and its enablers, including the regime in Tehran.

 

The Netanyahu government’s mistake was not the decision to fight Hamas, but the refusal to plan for “the day after.” The Biden administration’s mistake was failing to prioritize this. That left a campaign with no agreed political exit, allowing critics to brand the war aimless. A clearer American position would not have ended the war on Washington’s schedule, but it would have forced Hamas and Western critics to argue with an explicit postwar plan rather than a political vacuum.

 

America and Israel need one another: The strategic and economic partnership is too deep to squander in a political food fight. Future administrations must bring mutual respect and long-term stability back to the relationship.

 

Too many Democratic foreign policy figures currently defending their records on Gaza are reluctant to acknowledge these truths. But Democrats who want to govern again must face them. Biden flew to Tel Aviv in October 2023 and embraced Israel’s cause, and the Democratic Party has spent the past three years arguing over whether to disown that instinct. Ambivalence in American leadership was read by Hamas as a reason to keep fighting, by Tehran as proof of American fatigue, and by allies as a reason to hedge.

 

A party that wants to govern again must be able to say three things at once: that Israel’s war against Hamas was just; that its conduct, like U.S. operations in wartime, deserves scrutiny; and that the singular, selective condemnation applied to Israel but no other ally or adversary is wrong. Until Democrats can say all three, they will keep arguing about the last war while their adversaries prepare for the next one. A party that presided over the war and still cannot describe it with moral clarity will not be trusted to shape the one that follows.