A Proper Shame

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, October 19, 2026

 

With due respect to Lindsey Graham, it’s fitting that the knife in Ukraine’s back bears his name.

 

The late senator spent the last decade of his life reconciling himself to Trumpism, mainly to spare himself from a primary challenge, but partly to gain “influence” with the new leader of his party. Graham was the Senate’s most ardent hawk and hoped he could blunt Donald Trump’s postliberal instinct to slobber over tyrants, particularly Vladimir Putin.

 

Thirty-six hours before he died, Graham was in Kyiv showing solidarity with Volodymyr Zelensky. He was consumed at the time with legislation he had drafted that would impose new sanctions on Russian officials, oligarchs, and financial institutions to try to force the Kremlin to end its atrocities in Ukraine. After his death, Graham’s colleagues in Congress passed his bill overwhelmingly. The president signed it, and Lindsey Graham’s bid to strangle Russia’s economy became law.

 

On Friday evening, Trump issued an executive order lifting the new sanctions before they could take effect. “The order does not explain why waiving the sanctions is in the interests of the United States or what rationale Mr. Trump is providing to Congress for the waivers,” the New York Times dryly noted.

 

The so-called Graham Act, designed as a weapon against Moscow, has become another dagger aimed by the president at Ukraine instead.

 

In the past week, the White House has stopped warning the Ukrainians of Russian missile launches, throttled Ukraine’s access to the Starlink satellite system on which its drones depend, threatened to cut off sales of weapons for Ukraine’s use, has mulled unfreezing Russian funds held abroad, pressured Europe to resume purchasing Russian natural gas, and, as of Friday, lifted U.S. sanctions that were enacted into law just a month ago.

 

As icing on the cake, the president justified his actions in a Truth Social post on Sunday explicitly in terms of appeasement. “Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing,” he explained, “and I want to keep it that way, and will, unless stupid people get in the way.” Not only is the claim about Russia doing “very little” a lie, but this must be the first time in U.S. history that the commander in chief has acknowledged a foreign power’s role in killing American soldiers and essentially thanked them for not killing more.

 

All of this is just deserts, not just for Lindsey Graham but for Republican hawks everywhere.

 

Throughout the Trump era, foreign policy has remained the last redoubt of Reaganism in Congress and among the broader GOP establishment. Conservatives have gone along with tariffs, with the government taking ownership stakes in private companies, with blatant abuses by federal law enforcement, with mind-boggling deficits, and with even more mind-boggling corruption—with basically everything except the idea that America should align itself with authoritarian predators abroad. To this day, if asked about Ukraine or Taiwan, the average Republican member of Congress will sound more like Lindsey Graham than Tucker Carlson.

 

Conservatives made a deal with the devil, believing that a postliberal Republican Party would at least sustain America’s commitment to the Western liberal order. That deal is now ending the way deals with the devil typically do, with a knife in someone’s back.

 

Our sabotage of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself from Russian fascism is a moral abomination, an act of villainy so extreme that even a White House that normally prides itself on ruthlessness feels obliged to play dumb about aspects of it. (“Nobody ordered that Starlink speed to be slowed down. It sort of happened,” Marco Rubio told reporters on Saturday, falsely and stupidly.) I wonder if, after 10 years, Americans’ fathomless tolerance for Trumpist degradation is finally running out.

 

How much shame might we expect the average Joe to feel about the White House’s betrayal of Ukraine?

 

Backlash.

 

I have no data to offer on that point, only anecdotes. But here’s one that’s noteworthy: Sen. Darline Graham, Lindsey’s sister, broke with Trump on Saturday over the sanctions waiver for Russia.

 

Graham was the president’s handpicked choice to replace her brother in the Senate and needs Trump loyalists to turn out for her next month to avert an upset in South Carolina. She also famously admitted to knowing little about national security during a Republican primary debate this summer. All of that pointed toward her playing it safe on this subject and dutifully backing the White House’s waiver. And the president would have relished her support if she had, treating it as a benediction from Lindsey himself by proxy.

 

She couldn’t do it. “Personally, I would choose to put the pressure on Russia to end the war and get gas prices down,” she told reporters. “Because I don’t trust Putin, and I don’t trust Russia.” Darline Graham understands national security better than her patron does.

 

Another anecdote, for what it’s worth: A relative who voted for the president three times told me this weekend that she “might be coming around to where you are” (i.e., a Trump-loather) as we got to talking about Ukraine. Never before had she said such a thing, even after January 6.

 

That’s not because she follows foreign policy closely and has strong views about the nuances of Ukraine policy. It’s because she doesn’t. For her, and probably for Darline Graham, this is simple right-and-wrong stuff: If one side is firing missiles at apartment buildings and power plants after launching a war to conquer and subjugate its neighbor, the United States should be on the other side unambiguously.

 

Instead, as of last week, the United States is on the aggressor’s side. Unambiguously.

 

Criticism from Reaganites within the political class has also been unusually pointed. Trump’s sanctions waiver “dishonors the legacy of the late Senator Lindsey Graham and is decidedly not in the national interests of the United States,” Mike Pence, the president’s former right-hand man, declared. Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, called the waiver a “history-defining moment” that will make Putin’s bid to “destroy the West” easier.

 

Numerous congressional Republicans also denounced it, with some promising hearings into the Starlink matter and others warning that hawks could roadblock Trump’s agenda during the House’s lame-duck session if the president doesn’t relent. Do I believe that Trump’s cowardly party is going to make trouble for him in Congress over this? I do not—although a wipeout next month that unseats many Republicans would free those members from the usual electoral calculus that inhibits them from confronting him.

 

But I do believe that most of the House and Senate GOP is sincerely mortified by what he’s doing to Ukraine. My guess is that many privately agree with Andy McCarthy’s assessment at National Review: The president is giving “aid and comfort” to Russia, McCarthy wrote, borrowing a loaded phrase from the law of treason, and Congress should investigate it immediately. I wrote recently that Trump will be capable of anything once he’s past the election and into his lame-duck period, including sending aid to Moscow. But in hindsight, I don’t know why I phrased that as a what-if. By sabotaging Ukraine, he’s effectively sending aid to Moscow right now.

 

If people like Pence, Graham, McCarthy et al. who normally side with the Republican Party feel this ashamed by Trump’s betrayal, how are Americans who aren’t inclined to defend him likely to feel about it?

 

Why now?

 

I’ll believe that the people of this country are capable of a meaningful moral backlash toward the president when I see it, as it’ll be the first time it’s happened. But it isn’t hard to see why the dagger between Ukraine’s shoulder blades might do the trick.

 

It starts with the timing. We’re two weeks out from a national election, when even casual voters are paying attention to the news, and those voters are already angry about Iran and gas prices. Three new polls have Trump’s job approval at 36 percent or lower(!), and one has him below 50 percent among Republicans who describe themselves as “non-MAGA.” Knifing Ukraine is the sort of thing for which a president might get the benefit of the doubt if he’s popular and if people are looking for excuses to vote for his party—but not if they’re looking for excuses not to.

 

Relatedly, and importantly, Americans have begun to admit feeling shame over Trump’s presidency. A recent Fox News poll gave respondents a list of issues and asked whether they’re “extremely” or “very” concerned about them; the top vote-getter wasn’t the cost of living, surprisingly, but corruption. Trump’s flagrant racketeering has made an impression on voters, and that impression might color their assessments of other questionable actions he takes going forward. Instead of understanding his deal to buy diesel from Russia as a desperate effort to bring down gas prices, they might now be disposed to understand it as another case of President Scumbag doing scumbaggy things to Ukraine.

 

Republicans’ shrinking investment in Trump might also influence the moral calculus. He’s two weeks away from lame-duckery and the start of the 2028 presidential cycle, when his party will have no choice but to start looking for a new leader. The GOP base doesn’t need to cut him as much moral slack anymore as it has traditionally. Zelensky, meanwhile, isn’t the typical obscure foreign leader whom most Americans would struggle to identify. He’s a figure in whom many are emotionally invested—the human face of Ukraine’s resistance, a savvy messenger for his cause on social media, and a recurring guest on U.S. news shows for years (including this past weekend).

 

Weigh those two investments against each other and you can see why the backlash toward the president might be harsher than he expects.

 

There’s also this: Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine seems genuinely inexplicable, not just morally but politically. If there were some clear national interest involved in abandoning the Ukrainians to their fate, the public might be convinced to swallow it as a cold-eyed application of “America first.” There is no such interest. Every possible explanation for why the president has taken sides with Russia is an ugly one.

 

The likeliest explanation is that he thought he could snooker American voters before Election Day into believing that Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries, not the war in Iran, are the reason they’re paying so much for gas. So he warned Zelensky to stop targeting the refineries—and Zelensky did, grudgingly, for a few days in hopes that Trump would in turn insist that Putin stop targeting Ukraine’s power plants.

 

But the president didn’t. Not once recently has he made any demands of Russia or penalized the Kremlin for continuing to pound Ukraine. My best guess as to why he went on punishing Ukraine with various forms of relief for Russia after Kyiv tried to honor his ceasefire is that he’s mad at Zelensky for mouthing off about how unfair the White House is being. The Ukrainian president caused Trump some political trouble, so Trump is repaying him by abetting the slaughter of his citizens.

 

If you don’t like that theory, the alternatives aren’t any more comforting. Another is that the president is trying to distract Americans from the latest news in the Strait of Hormuz, where attacks on oil tankers have picked up again lately as Iran tries to spoil Republicans’ midterm chances. Maybe Trump, fearing that gas prices were about to spike anew just as voters went to the polls, scrambled to manufacture an excuse preemptively that didn’t involve the strait. The spat with Ukraine over its attacks on Russian refineries, which Kyiv has now resumed after getting a knife in its back, is that excuse.

 

Or maybe the explanation is even darker. “A number of people have asked why Trump has suddenly torn the mask off and gone fully pro-Putin,” one leftist commentator speculated this weekend. “My guess: He knows the GOP is hosed in the midterms, and he needs full Russian support to help shape public opinion that it was rigged, and thence to overturn the results.” That’s more conspiratorial than I’m willing to be—although it’s not crazy, and certainly not beneath what the major players in Washington and Moscow are willing to stoop to morally.

 

A more plausible theory, I think, is that the president inadvertently revealed the truth in his Truth Social post. Perhaps Putin threatened to scale up Russian military aid to Iran if Trump didn’t cut American support to Ukraine, and the president, being a weak chump when confronted by someone he can’t push around, appeased him. Or, in the same vein, maybe Putin whispered sweet nothings to him about holding some sort of fascist version of Yalta with Xi Jinping in which the three would carve up the world among them, just as soon as this ugly Ukraine business is resolved. Nothing would make Trump happier than getting to play emperor with two other degenerate autocrats.

 

But if all of that’s too complicated, never underestimate good old-fashioned bribery as a potential explanation.

 

Whichever way you slice it, the American average joe must be watching this with total befuddlement. After nearly five years of U.S. support for Ukraine across two administrations, with the Ukrainians having demonstrated magnificent guts and ingenuity in taking the fight to the Russians, the president has suddenly decided that peace requires hobbling Kyiv and lavishing money on Moscow. There’s never been a virtuous reason to support Russia in this war and there’s never a virtuous reason for anything Trump does; put those two together and, whatever the true motive for betraying Ukraine might be, it has to be shameful.

 

And the people of this country might no longer be willing to kid themselves about it. But then, I would have said the same thing after January 6: Trump’s conduct has been egregious, he’s a lame duck in whom Republicans are no longer invested, people finally see him for who he is. That was the last time I wagered on the decency of Americans. Never again.

 

Hearings.

 

I support Andy McCarthy’s call for congressional hearings—although I’m really not sure why. Hearings won’t lead to any meaningful official action, especially if Republicans are in charge.

 

At best, a new Democratic Congress might dig something up that warrants impeachment and Trump would be acquitted by the Senate again, as usual. The fact that the Graham Act, absurdly, included a provision permitting the president to waive the penalties it imposed is a preview of how feeble the congressional GOP will be in policing his treachery toward Ukraine. A party that was serious about sanctioning Russia wouldn’t have embedded a mechanism for Trump to nullify those sanctions within the law itself.

 

And so the only productive thing that can come from congressional hearings is shame, insofar as Americans—and Republicans, in particular—are still capable of such a thing. Who gave the order to cripple Ukrainian drones by throttling Starlink? Were American diplomats offered financial opportunities by Russia in exchange for pressuring Ukraine? Did this whole thing start as a ham-fisted attempt to pin the high gas prices caused by Trump’s dumb Iran war on Zelensky?

 

The answers to those questions might shame the United States, but shame would be civically salubrious. And, I assume, reassuring to America’s shrinking pool of allies, who are surely wondering right now—especially in Taipei—whether the next dagger will be aimed at their back.

 

Electing a new Democratic majority next month will boost the odds that we’ll get those answers, but there’s no near-term democratic fix for a renegade president who’s constitutionally entitled to keep on aligning America with wolves and vultures and making mincemeat of U.S. credibility abroad for two more years. Reelecting Trump in 2024 ensured that foreign policy would become a ruthless calculus of “leverage” without respect for alliances or values. To gain leverage over adversaries who threaten us, we would give them things; to gain leverage over allies who depend on us, we would take things away. That’s the reptilian logic of how the White House is now handling Russia and Ukraine.

 

Hopefully Americans will feel some very belated shame about it, but there’s nothing to be done until 2028. We, and Ukraine, are stuck. The Republican hostage crisis was destined to become a national hostage crisis if voters gave postliberals a second chance at power, and they did, and now it is. Import the Third World, become the Third World.