It is no state secret that Donald Trump holds an affection for the Russian despot Vladimir Putin. The depth of that affection, well, only Trump knows. This affection biases him towards Putin and the invaders that have attempted to subjugate and destroy Ukraine. The Ukrainian president’s refusal to trump up a false investigation into Joe Biden at Trump’s pleading only further pushed Trump deeper into his embrace of Putin. Given this, and the antipathy toward Ukraine of Trump’s own number two, JD Vance, it is far from startling that the second Trump administration has done very little to aid Ukraine’s fight to survive as a democratic nation, but the revelations of the last couple of weeks are shocking.

The invasion of Ukraine ignited the first true large-scale war of the twenty-first century, and as with the first large-scale war of the twentieth century, it has brought with it massive technological changes to warfare with the wide and deep deployment of drones.

The United States used drones as a supplement in the Global War on Terror that followed the horrendous September 11th attacks. In that campaign, it affixed missiles to high-flying uncrewed aircraft and rained death down from these platforms, but what has happened in Ukraine is leaps ahead of that. Instead of a few very large and very costly drones, the Ukrainians are producing cheap disposable machines that can be dispatched in large swarms. It is these drones that allow the Ukrainians to strike deep into their enemy’s territory, destroy vital logistical and command-and-control targets, and bring the war home to Russia. The drones also allow the Ukrainians to intercept Russian drones and attacks on civilians as the Russians attempt to break Ukrainian will from the air. (Has that ever worked? Nazi bombing of London did not break the British, and Allied bombing of German cities did not break the Germans either.)

Starlink is a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit that provides commercial low-latency, high-speed access to the internet via individual subscriber terminals. Starshield is a secure, military-grade service provided by SpaceX via specialized satellites, which use the Starlink network as a backbone for the hybrid system. US military assets connect to Starshield from secure, proprietary terminals that use strong encryption. To my knowledge, no one outside of the US military has access to Starshield terminals. That said, the Ukrainian military has access to Starshield, but from commercial Starlink terminals, and access to Starshield is critical to Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian attacks on their civilian population.

Overnight on October 13 to 14, Starshield in Ukraine stopped working if the receiving drone exceeded a speed of one hundred miles per hour (161 kilometers per hour). This crippled some of the Ukrainian defenses, and Russian attacks killed numerous civilians. As of this writing (October 22), it is unclear whether the speed restrictions have been eliminated; reports are in conflict.

There is also a deep conflict over the cause of the speed restrictions.

Elon Musk, owner of the Starlink and Starshield systems, said on Twitter, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” but left out of his statements that Ukraine uses Starshield via Starlink terminals, an elements that would appear to be entirely under Musk’s control.. It should be noted that Musk has shown a bias towards Russia in the conflict, parroting the Trump administration’s position that the Ukrainians should compromise with their invaders to end the war.

The Trump administration has made contradictory statements on the speed limits suddenly appearing on the system, suggesting that it is merely a technical fault that has been corrected and suggesting that the system’s owner, Musk, initiated the cap, with Trump saying, “It wasn’t me.”

Reporting from The Telegraph indicated that Musk came to President Trump with the proposal to limit Ukrainian defenses by way of the speed cap and that the White House agreed to the action. The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk and Trump conferred on the possibility of limited Starshield for the Ukrainians without saying who imitated the concept, but that Musk ordered the reduction. Reuters reports that the order to do so came out of the White House. The White House has disputed the reporting, throwing responsibility back solely to Musk.

This is a deeply troubling incident. Does one man, in this case, Musk, have the ability to cripple another nation’s defenses at his whim? Is the U.S. government undercutting a nation’s ability to deal with an aggressive invasion for the personal and petty purposes of the president without consultation with either the other branches of our government or our allies?

Since everyone involved on the US side, civilian and political, are liars, we cannot, at this moment, know the truth, but change is coming. It is a near certainty that the Democratic Party will gain control of the House of Representatives, and it is a better than even chance they will also control the Senate. Next year, the subpoenas will fly, and perhaps the world’s richest man will flee the nation to avoid the harsh questioning that will surely follow.

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To the things I learned because of this administration’s clumsy, corrupt, and stupid nature, now, I can add to the list the fact that diesel fuel in America is sold in two varieties: clear and red.

Clear diesel is used for transportation; it is what those massive trucks on the highways and interstates fill up with before they go off to terrorize henpecked men on lonely stretches of the desert. Red diesel is functionally identical to the clear stuff sold to truckers and the like but dyed so that its unique color so it can be easily identified for tax purposes. You see, the red stuff is sold for use that doesn’t involve the US interstate or road network: farm equipment and home heating for the northern reaches of the nation. As it is never supposed to touch the highways, it is exempted from the federal highway fuel tax, making its per-gallon cost somewhat cheaper, a benefit that accumulates when one needs to buy so much of the red diesel to make your farm work or to keep from freezing to death in the middle of a New England winter. The highways taxed and non-highway taxed versions of the fuel is logical and serves both consumer communities, until now.

Trump, either manipulated by allies or as a product of his own narcissistic ego, launched a war in the Middle East disrupting the global petroleum markets, driving up the costs of everything downstream of the oil wells, including diesel fuel. The escalating fuel costs combined with the economic terrorism of his tariffs accelerated inflation, the beast that had slain the Biden administration just as inflation had begun to falter. The vast farm states in the middle of the country suffered from both policies as retaliatory tariffs destroyed their markets and skyrocketing fuel costs consumed their budgets from the other side of the equation. Of course, no fence kept the inflation to merely the Trump-supporting farm belts and prices rose throughout the country and an electorate content to ignore the administration’s criminality are unwilling to ignore the injuries it inflicts upon them.

So, the president who helps maintain a far-left socialist government in South America, that considers the Red China leadership his friend, and acquires ownership stakes in private US corporations, turns to his friends in the Kremlin to try, vainly, futilely, to save his government in the face of public wrath. Trump announced a “deal” to purchase fuel from Russia, a small and insignificant amount that he attempted to disguise by reporting it in tons instead of the industry standard of barrels and which is even questionable, given the war there, if it will ever be delivered. In addition to a phony deal that supplies hard cash to a nation that is assisting the killing of American troops, Trump has also announced an intention to allow red diesel to be sold and used for transportation purposes, hoping, irrationally, but everything he does is irrational, that this will somehow and magically tame inflation in time to save him from a hostile House and Senate.

However, the cold equations of supply and demand doom this move to failure with the predictable result that those farmers, who so enthusiastically threw their support to Trump, will suffer even more. Without expanding the supply of the fuel, allowing the trucking industry to use it on the nation’s highways only increases the demand for the red-dyed diesel which, as any highschool-level economics class with tell you, correspondingly drives up the price.

The Midwest is learning the lesson of the Second law of Trump, the first being that Everything Trump Touches Dies, and the Second that is Trump Always Betrays His Partners.

From installing industry-nationalizing socialists, to close friendship with dictators, to acquiring ownership stakes in private business, to his inclination to command the economy, Trump is the most communist, most socialist chief executive this nation has ever seen. It is fitting that his most recent idiotic move is to make red fuel available everywhere.

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Jonathan V. Last, staff writer and watch-geek over at The Bulwark, has intoned both in print and on various podcasts from that fine publication that if Donald Trump does not run for a third term as President of the United States, then the man would be unwilling to hand such awesome moneymaking and criminal authority over to anyone who is not in the family by blood. JVL has suggested that one of the prime contenders to take the Republican nomination, should Trump, in a break from character, obey a law that disadvantages him, would be the eldest son, Don Jr.

While JVL is often right and can do a pretty decent job as a modern Cassandra seeing the disaster around the corner while far too many ignore his warnings, here I think his gift of prophecy fails him.

Several factors worked synergistically to curse our nation with the two terms of Donald J. Trump, destroying our alliances and our institutions, causing the deaths of countless people, loosing masked police madness on our streets, all while engorging himself and his cronies at the public trough. Decades of priming the GOP base for cruelty and to view their fellow Americans not as people with a different view as to how this nation might improve but as ‘the enemy’ worthy only of contempt and destruction cultivated the poisonous soil for a crude, mean man like Trump. A 40-year parasocial relationship built on the myth and the lie that Trump possessed some innate and superhuman talent for business, despite managing to drive casinos into bankruptcy, paired against a professional politician who had been the subject of vicious attacks for more than twenty years, made the unthinkable a reality with Trump’s election in 2016. Biden’s physical feebleness combined with the toxic stew of his inherent arrogance made it impossible for him to step aside in 2022, and then his far too late departure in 2024 crafted the conditions to return to the presidency a convicted felon who, despite Senator Collins’ insistence, had never learned a lesson in his life.

None of this applies to Junior.

Prior to 2016, I doubt many people could pick this man out of a photograph. He has no long parasocial relationship either through culture or politics. He has displayed none of his father’s dubious talents for working a crowd, and outside the circle of sycophants, grifters, and foreign money, he has no base of support from which to build any sort of electoral coalition. Trump commands a cult of personality that built around himself and solely himself. While the cultivated ground will be there for another ideologue to harvest a crop of hate, that gardener will not be Junior. Trump has expended zero energy in building anything around his son, or any of his children. For a cult leader to successfully transfer the devotion of the cult to a chosen successor, that leader must work, and work hard, to affix the affections of the masses to the next in line. Trump, handicapped by his own blinding narcissism, finds such action an impossibility.

Perhaps most damning of all, I would suggest to you that to the broader public not only does he have no real base, he is, in fact, for all intents and purposes, an unknown.

I have laid out the reasons why, practically speaking, Junior has no real base of support, but here is a different yardstick by which we can measure the man’s invisibility to the public at large: do an impression of him.

As with every sitting president, Trump impressions are everywhere. That is true for every person who has sat in that office and for all the major contenders for that post. The satirical impression is a marker for how far your star has risen above all the other people vying for the public’s attention. Fifty years later, people can still recognize even a bad impression of Richard Nixon, but is anyone anywhere doing an impression of Junior that isn’t simply a one-note punchline about rumored cocaine use? Elections are about public perceptions, good or bad, and frankly, in my opinion, the public has no perception of Don Junior at all.

I don’t know what the presidential field in 2028 will look like on either side, but I am confident that even if Junior makes the attempt, it will flame out rather quickly.

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Adam Serwer titled an Atlantic article, The Cruelty Is the Point, arguing that the first Trump administration and its supporters were more interested in inflicting harm on their enemies than in any actual outcome of their various initiatives and programs. The concept struck such a chord that the phrase has become a shorthand for everything cruel and malicious that originates with Trump, his administration, and his supporters. The phrase is almost certain to gain usage with October 8’s revelation that not only does the administration plan to execute a mass-murdering soldier by firing squad, but that the Department of Defense, at the prompting of ‘No Tab, Whiskey Pete,’ wants to livestream the killing, much in the same manner that mass shooters have utilized social media to glorify their killings.

There is no doubt, none at all, in my mind that both the method of execution and the desire to stream it live to the world were chosen for their cruelty, but there is another factor beyond that reason which I believe motivates this heinous proposal.

It is a psychological imperative for Trump, Hegseth, Miller, and the rest of this depraved and damaged administration that they be seen as ‘strong.’ These are men whom life, childhood and beyond, has wounded deeply with a powerful and crippling insecurity at the heart of their psyches that compels them to behave in a manner that they need others to perceive as evidence of their tremendous, but entirely illusory, strength.

I have often said that a grave error a person can make is to mistake cynicism for wisdom. Here is a companion piece of knowledge: what these men are doing with nearly every official act is cruelty masquerading as strength. The brutal imposition of a twisted and corrupted form of ‘justice’ serves dual purposes and fails at both. It seeks to cow and impress the people into believing that Trump and his broken and frightened cabinet are actually strong, like the mafia goons and tin-pot dictators that they so idolize. And second, it vainly tries to fill the hole in their souls, because no matter how cruel you are, no matter what torments you inflict on others, you cannot escape yourself, and it is their own terror and intuitive understanding of their weakness that proves inescapable.

If they were not doing so much damage to our nation, our government, and our people, I might feel more sympathy for these pathetic persons. They weren’t born monsters: life made them into monstrosities, but these men in particular would rather the world burn to ash around them than admit fault or seek help that they so desperately require.