Music for the Midterms, via Paul Krugman.

And if you need some good cheer, see James O’Keefe’s Minnesota stunt backfires spectacularly by Lisa Needham at Public Notice. O’Keefe and another doofus have been charged with felonies.

See also the TPM Morning Memo by David Kurtz, Trump Waylaid by Amazing Series of Court Setbacks on Election Eve.

I’ll be monitoring the news for reports of anything funky happening at the polls. Let’s hope not. Please feel free to comment about whatever. I plan to blog returns tonight, although some of the close races might not be called for a day or two.

May there be a mighty blue wave.

Update: I didn’t think I’d be reporting on my own neighborhood.

Tech stocks suffered a massive, trillion-dollar sell-off late last week, which I would think would be a big deal. As I very crudely understand it, the tech giants have spent enormous amounts of money preparing for the AI takeovere or whatever it is they’re preparing for. The spending has squeezed their core profit margins and cash flows. Yet the expected profits still seem far away. I understand there has been an AI stock collapse in China as well.

Do see What the Economy Is Sacrificing to AI by Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic, which was written before the tech stock implosion. To mix metapors,, Big Tech putting all its chips on AI is sucking the air out of other parts of the economy.

Investors are more pumped about AI than they have been about any technology since the railroad. If they weren’t directing a torrent of money to the handful of firms finessing algorithms and constructing data centers, the country’s employment level and economic output might be lower. Then again, if they weren’t directing a torrent of money to the handful of firms finessing algorithms and constructing data centers, they might be directing it to everyone and everything else. So is AI fueling the American economy or siphoning gas from it? Is it “crowding out” investment in non-tech enterprises, as economists put it, or boosting investment in an otherwise lackluster expansion?

It’s still not clear to me how AI is eventually going to be monetized, other than by eliminating a lot of jobs. I assume the Tech Bros have some idea how that’s going to work. But I’m also skeptical that AI is going to ever live up to the hype and be as transformative as the Tech Bros assume it will be. We’ll see.

Certainly, AI is pushing up GDP—or, to be precise, the AI build-out is pushing up GDP. In 2020, American businesses spent $3.6 trillion, adjusting for inflation, on investments in durable assets, such as software, warehouses, and trucks. Last year, they spent $4.4 trillion. Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet are shelling out $800 billion on capital expenditures just this year, a sum that has grown eightfold over the decade. It’s a Silicon Valley hard-hat stimulus, bigger than the one Washington passed to counter the Great Recession. And it is transforming national accounts. 

The smart business guys are not always right. I remember for a time during the Reagan Administration my daily commute took me past a strip of land that was filling up with new office buildings. At the time there was a housing crisis and shortage caused by a massive rollback of federal housing programs, high interest rates, and a drop in construction of affordable housing. Which Reagan, of course, dismissed as a nonissue, since he could pick up a newspaper and see houses for sale in the classifieds. But anyway, in New Jersey the smart building money was going into office space. And sure enough, most of those snazzy new office buildings sat mostly empty for the next several years and were eventually bulldozed, although I haven’t been back to see what’s there now.

At the same time, the amount devoted to building housing and retail outlets has dropped 10 percent. Spending on the construction of education facilities is down 13 percent; offices, 14 percent; hotels, motels, and resorts, 15 percent; and manufacturing plants, 24 percent.

Tech enterprises are not merely making it more expensive for non-tech enterprises to finance construction projects. They’re bidding up the cost of labor, land, and materials. They’re spurring landlords and institutional investors to buy Treasuries or stocks instead of bothering with apartment buildings and retirement homes. They’re forcing families to pay more for home loans too. As a general point, high yields are “sucking all the money out of the mortgage market,” Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, told me.

Governments trying to build infrastructure are getting hit by the same increase in borrowing costs. So are families looking to buy a new car or renovate a property. So are young people looking to launch a small business or sign up for a training program.

True Believers in capitalism and free markets will tell you that the economy always adjusts to provide what people need. The famous invisible hand created by the buying decisions of self-interested individuals naturally promotes the general social and economic interests of everybody. If only. When most of the investment money is chasing after something that people really don’t need but which promises to make some rich people richer, what everybody needs gets shoved aside pretty efficiently. And given the pushback against data centers, it appears a lot of the everybodies have realized what’s going on. 

Lowrey concludes her article with “But the more resources the country devotes to AI at the expense of other innovations, the more its future depends on that bet paying off.”

And if you need to be more depressed, see How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine at the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to lose in court. Yesterday a federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to stop threatening state and local election officials with criminal prosecution.  Another judge has dismissed, with prejudice, Trump’s lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for publishing the story about the Epstein birthday card.

Virginia and the District of Columbia have filed suits to stop the construction of Trump ginormous Arch that will cast a shadow over Arlington, including over the grave of John F. Kennedy. Arlington County and a group of Vietnam veterans have also filed suits to stop the arch. I hope they succeed. If it’s built the thing will have to be demonlished sooner or later, anyway. And maybe a lot of data centers, too.

Update: This happened today:

If you need a reminder of what a proper campaign rally is supposed to be be  like, do watch President Obama’s Wednesday night speech in Atlanta. Or just watch it if you missed it. This is rah-rah at its finest.

If that doesn’t get out the vote, nothing will.

Trump has been appearing at rallies all over the country. What clips I have seen reveal low energy and a lack of focus. Tuesday night he was in Texas. Greg Sargent wonders who he was trying to persuade.

Take Trump’s rally in Corpus Christi. He repeatedly insisted oil and gas prices are coming down, while claiming our country is making an “absolute fortune” off the Iran war, seemingly meaning in oil exports. …

…It’s possible this will work. But right now, Trump’s rallies look less like a considered strategy than a pure vanity project. After all, in Corpus Christi, the MAGA faithful cheered when he bragged of plundering Iran and Venezuela. They bellowed loudly when Trump called Talarico a “freako.” They were transfixed when he talked about his heroic adventures in renaming things on maps. Up there on that stage, deep in his own head, Trump heard all of America cheering him on. But outside the MAGA bubble, it’s all exhaustion, revulsion, and disgust—and most importantly, a desire to replace all of it with something far, far better.

We’ll see. Here in New York it appears Governor Hochul will win. Current polls give her a double-digit lead over her Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman. But I’m sweating the U.S. House race in my district between R Mike Lawler and D Cait Conley. Polls say it’s a toss-up. This should be a flippable district given that it went for Harris in 2024. But from what I’ve seen Conley hasn’t been running a strong campaign, and Lawler has been running ads claiming she doesn’t even live in the district, but in Virginia. And I can’t say I have seen an effective response from her on the claim. Note that a lot of Dems voted for Conley in the primary because she is definitely a squishy centrist and therefore the “safe” choice to beat Lawler. So much for that. I do plan on early voting today, so I’ll get one vote in against Lawler, anyway.

Update: I just got back from voting. The polling place was busy. I had a lovely chat with one of the poll workers, who told me that over the weekend there were lines outside the building and a considerable wait to get to vote. (Saturday, October 24, was the first day of early voting here.) This does not happen during a midterm election, he said.

Don’t listen to anyone who claims Netanyahu either won or lost the Israeli elections. There will be weeks of coalition-haggling before we learn which party will put together a majority. But see this report in Axios by Barak Ravid:

After his far-right coalition lost 11 seats in the election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to discredit the results by claiming there was mass voting fraud in Arab communities.

Why it matters: Netanyahu appears to be trying to spook the opposition bloc out of cooperating with Arab parties to form a new government.

But the opposition is concerned he has an even more ambitious goal: To prevent the results from being certified at all. That would block the swearing in of a new parliament, in which he would lose his majority.

I’ll be grateful if Netanyahu is out when the dust settles, but I’m not expecting it.

About a week ago I mentioned that Alina Habba got a $50 million deal while she was working for the Department of Justice to get some guy a pardon from Trump. Yesterday the New York Times reported that when this story leaked out Trump erupted in fury. Of course, he wasn’t angry about the quid pro quo. Like a mob boss he was angry he hadn’t gotten a cut. He demanded that Habba give a portion of the $50 million to his future presidential library or another Trump-related entity.

I apologize for being absent for a few days. I’m fine, but I’ve had a busy few days. Along with a couple of doctor appointsments I broke down and got a new phone. I’ve been postponing getting a phone for quite a while. I’d had my old phone, an LG model, for somewhere between six and seven years, and for about a year I haven’t been able to update the operating system. So things were starting to not work. But up until recently I was fine with it. It did everything I wanted it to do, so what the bleep?

So I got the new phone, a Motorola model, on Friday. I had ordered it online, so it was shipped to me. And finally today I think I’ve got it pretty much set up, with all the apps working and data transferred and everything. And I’ve received my first Spam Likely call on it, even. I don’t like the ringtone, but I’ll deal with that eventually. Also it will sometimes ping me and I can’t figure out why. But it’s working. At one point I went to a T-Mobile store for help, but what they could do was limited because I didn’t know my google password off the top of my head. It never occurred to me I would need a google password with me. Then I ended up spending about half a day on the phone with T-Mobile technical help to make the data transfer happen. And this is why I hate to buy a new phone.

Israelis are voting today, and I’m reading turnout is very high. Netanyahu’s opposition is led by former Israeli military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot. And I don’t know enough about Eisenkot to know if he’d be more than an inch or two of improvement over Netanyahu.  Al Jazeera says the polls are very close. And the Associated Press is saying that it could be weeks or months before the outcome is determined. So don’t wait up.

In the last post I mentioned that Jared Kushner allegedly was managng funds for Saudis and Emiratis while employed in the White House during Trump’s first term. Now there’s a story from the same source saying that the Emiratis paid Kushner $50 million to get Rex Tillerson fired as Secretary of State. Tillerson was indeed fired, in March 2008. I thought it was because Tillerson called Trump a bleeping moron. Maybe that, too.

Also, too, see A 28-Year-Old DOGE Operative Gutted USAID. HR Had No Record of Him Working There at WIRED. Somehow the kid — er, young man — was put into the position of head of USAID by Marco Rubio without becoming an official employee of the State Department.

Internal USAID emails reviewed by WIRED reveal that during the three-week period of March 18 to April 4, during which Lewin began canceling lifesaving aid programs and personally signed off on the termination of thousands of USAID employees, he did not sign the paperwork typically required by law to begin work at the agency, despite repeated requests. In fact, his appointment was so mysterious that USAID security was unable to issue him an ID card because they had no records of his employment.

Someday when we have a normal administration again there’s going to have to be a reckoning about the whole DOGE thing. And speaking of Elcon Musk, Robert Reich has a must-read piece up at The Guardian headlined Defund Elon Musk. Just read it.

I don’t want to write about Trump. I don’t want to write about the midterms. This time next week we’ll be waiting for the polls to close. I can’t wait.

This is how screwed we are. This morning the big news was about how Jared Kushner made millions in side hustles with foreign countries while working officially in the White House during Trump’s first term. But so much other badness is going on that the Kushner story has been shoved off the front pages already. But see “Kushner Phone Hack Reveals How Middle East Dictators Bought Him Off” by Edith Olmsted at The New Republic.

Kushner apparently was “managing” money funds for the UAE and Israel. One of these was a foreign policy “slush fund” for the “UAE government’s covert intelligence operations overseas, as well as its secret weapons-purchasing programs.” Kushner was also involved in another account, “at Israel’s Central Bank—at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging.”

Unlike the political slush fund, Kushner’s activity in this account indicated that it was for his personal use. The money was difficult to access, and so Kushner would channel requests to Netanyahu for the funds to be released through then-Ambassador David M. Friedman, and then move the money through an account in Cyprus. The former diplomat denied any involvement in the scheme, and claimed that “there are no accounts, and never were.”

Everybody is denying everything. None of this was reported to the IRS or disclosed on any government employee financial forms. But apparently this sort of thing is just not a big deal any more. So let’s go on.

Today the Department of Justice filed a suit to block certification of the Senate election in Alaska if the Republican incumbent loses. The issue is that the Republican incumbent is Dan S. Sullivan, but there is another Repubican on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan. The Democratic candidate is Mary Peltola. The polls have Peltola ahead by a hair, or maybe a couple of hairs.

The Justice Department has also accused two former FBI agents of lying about their involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop saga. I’m serious. Is the Regime dredging up the laptop to maybe fire up the base to vote in the Midterms? Or is this just Kash Patel being Kash Palel? Who knows?

I urge you to read What the U.S. Is Really Doing in Venezuela by Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic. What we’re really doing, it appears, is taking oil and minerals and tossing a little money back to the regime in Caraccas, none of which is doing the people of Venezuela any good. None of the oil companies Trump assumed would be eager to resume oil extraction in Venzuela have done so, and they aren’t showing any intention of doing so. None of the investment in rebuilding the oil infrastructure has even begun. And it appears the only reason Trump wanted Maduro out of the way was to get at the oil. But as I’ve written in the past, it isn’t even a huge amount of oil. Applebaum says the people want the opposition party headed by Maria Machado to come back, but Trump is keeping her out because he wants the oil.

On the plus side, see Republicans could lose Texas seats they redrew in their favor, poll finds at the Washington Post.

There’s a whole lot of ugliness out there right now. The Ohio governor’s race is a good example. If you haven’t see the Vivek Ramaswamy ad featuring Dr. Amy Acton’s estranged birth mother denouncing her own daughter as a liar, consider yourself lucky. It’s sickening. But it appears to be backfiring. I hope so, anyway.

The backstory is that Dr. Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio, says she was sexually abused by her stepfather as a child, and that her mother knew this and did nothing. Dr. Acton’s brother corroborates this. Years ago the stepfather was indicted for the rape of his stepdaughter by a grand jury, but he and the birth mother fled the state, and he never faced a trial. The stepfather died in 2004. Dr. Acton and her birth mother have not spoken to each other since 1978.

So now the Ramaswamy campaign is using the stepmother, who still carries an obvious grudge against Dr. Action, as their closing argument in the campaign. This is from Politico:

MAGA influencers and allies of Ramaswamy, including Donald Trump Jr., quickly seized on the video as a potential political kill shot in the governor’s race.

That shot backfired spectacularly.

And the backlash crossed partisan lines.Meghan McCainblasted the attack as “dastardly,” while Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee’s longtime aide Dan Hauserdeleted his own post sharing the video after learning more about Acton’s past.

The video prompted a broad resurfacing of the devastating family history behind it, including Acton’s own harrowing account of childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather, who faced criminal charges even as her mother remained married to him.

Even Republicans close to Ramaswamy are recoiling. “It’s so gross to forsake family members for politics,” a Republican operative close to the campaign told Playbook. “I think it’s bad. It’s just morally bad.”

And there’s a political risk. The operative pointed out the video won’t play well with women “because a lot of women are gonna say, ‘What normal mom would participate in an attack ad on their own child?’”

It’s exactly the kind of closing argument Trump’s political operation knows is not moving the needle, as Republicans lean harder into culture-war attacks and personal scandals in the final stretch.

Early voting in Ohio began October 6, so votes have already been cast. And while there are only 13 days until the midterm election, that does give the Acton campaign some time to respond. According to the New York Times, “The Acton campaign quickly released its own ad featuring Dr. Acton’s brother saying he was abused, but his sister was abused far worse as she sought to protect him.”

More ugliness, entirely on our part: The Telegraph is running a story headlined Ukrainians Turn on US after Russian Strike Kills Baby in Pram. I can’t read the article without wading through several pages demanding I subscribe to the Telegraph. But I do not blame the Ukrainians one bit. As I’ve argued in recent posts, Trump has made the U.S. an ally of Russia against Ukraine. This is disgraceful and disgusting. Our reputaqtion as a nation has been utterly trashed.

Here’s something I don’t think the Republicans thought out carefully enough when they passed the Big Ugly Bill: Those of us on Medicare Advantage plans by now have gotten letters detailing how our current plan will change in 2027. And for millions of seniors the news is that their current plan will no longer exist in 2027. Plans in 40 states are just plain evaporating.  An estimated 4 to 5 million seniors across the country are losing their plans. They’ll still have basic Medicare, but they’ll lose the extra benefits like presciption drug coverage they’ve been getting, usually without paying extra, with Medicare Advantage. Their Eliquis presciptions, for example, will go up to $470 a month. I understand a lot of rural areas will have no Medicare Advantage plans at all now. And I suspect those that will continue into 2027 may cover less than they did or require higher co-pays. Just one more reminder how the Trump Administration is not working for you.

On a personal note, it does’t look like my current benefits will change much at all, but I still need to verify that all my current providers will still take my insurance.

Spreaking of not working for us, yesterday Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Cameron Hamilton let it slip that in the future states will  have to take care of disasters on their own. Which makes me wonder why there’s a federal government at all. But I guess they still run the military.

But see ‘I was terrified’: Military families describe their harrowing evacuation from a Navy base in Bahrain by Priya Sridhar at MS NOW. Our armed forces under Trump and Hegseth are in serious trouble, and Trump and Hegseth are covering up a lot of their incompetence.

Oh, and if you missed the story about how Alina Habba got a $50 million deal while she was working for the Department of Justice to get some guy a pardon from Trump, here it is.

Finally, you may have heard that last week the DoJ sent California a list of alleged noncitizen voters on a thumb drive (with the password on a sticky note) and demanded that the state not allow those people to vote without verifying their citizenship status. This is from last week:

The US Department of Justice sued California on Thursday, seeking a court order to prevent the state from tabulating certain ballots cast in the midterm elections.

The suit came two days after the department made a specious demand to the state. On Tuesday, the department sent election officials in Los Angeles county a thumb drive with a handwritten password purporting to contain the names of noncitizens registered to vote. The department asked officials to confirm the citizenship of anyone on the list and set aside ballots from those whose status could not be confirmed. It gave the state 48 hours – an extremely narrow window – to take action. It did not provide details on how it came up with the names on the list. In its lawsuit, filed in federal court in the central district of California, the justice department said it had provided the state with more than 20,000 names of likely noncitizens.

Today David Kurtz at TPM tells us DOJ’s List of Noncitizen Voters Exposed As Crap.

The top election official in Los Angeles County has done a preliminary review of the Trump DOJ’s purported list of alleged noncitizen voters and found it to be … shoddy. Surprising absolutely no one.

Out of DOJ’s list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters in California, more than 7,000 had Los Angeles County addresses. Dean C. Logan’s office took a sample of 200 of those L.A. voters and found that 1/4 may have been born in the United States, nearly 1/2 were cancelled or inactive voters, and nearly 3/4 had never voted, according to a new court filing:

On Monday, the Trump DOJ announced charges against 28 Californians for voting crimes, far fewer than the earlier 20,000. But during a press conference, a Trump DOJ official admitted that there may be U.S. citizens mistakenly on their list of 20,000 of suspected “illegal” voters. Do tell. And there has been other reporting that most of the people on the list were registered Republicans.

So basically the DoJ just pulled some random names of Californians off something and put them on a thumb drive and sued California about it. They are probably trying to set up a pretense for challenging the midterm election results. But why California? I would think they would be going after a state that could flip either way. I understand the Democrat is way, way ahead of the Republican in the governor’s race in California, and neither of California’s U.S. senators is up for re-election this year. WTF?

Yesterday there was a headline in the New York Times — Trump Offers Putin Economic Relief in Hopes That Russia Will Return the Favor. So the U.S. is just a supplecant nation to Russia now.

Trump waived all of the sanctions against Russia in the recently passed Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which of course he doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do. And this was done in a desperate attempt to lower gas prices before the Midterms, which are 16 days away. And early voting has already started in several states. How is this even supposed to work?

The fourth “K” (see last post) was fired today after only five days in the job of White House Press Secretary. Katie Zacharia was offered the job just a week ago. Per the New York Times: “She was not a deft communicator.” For the Times, that’s going out on a limb. But I suspect she will enjoy holding the record as the shortest-serving White House Press Secretary for a long time. See also Anthony Scaramucci Weighs in on Katie Zacharia Breaking His Record,

Alexandra Petri predicted that since Trump chooses White House Press Secretaries by turning on the teevee and pointing, Zacharia’s replacement will be a Kalshi commercial.

For another bad idea that thankfully died on the vine, Pentagon Pete’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan on YouTube has been canceled. Apparently Trump was for it, but then got swamped by pushback from Congress and even from some of his own staff, and he has nixed it. The livestreaming, anyway. The execution by firing squad is still on. I hate the death penalty. It’s barbaric.

The big story today, IMO, regards Ukraine being cut from Starlink. We’ve known this for a while. Was this Elon Musk’s decision? Apparently not. It’s near certain that the order came from within the White House. But reporting is contradictory. Trump is denying he ordered anything to be cut off from Ukraine. Musk says that Starshield systems are controlled by the U.S. government, Hafiz Rashid writes at The New Republic that Elon Musk and Trump Were Both in on Ukraine Starlink Shutoff. Sounds about right.

Tech CEO Elon Musk reportedly approached President Trump on slowing down his Starlink communications service in Ukraine earlier this week, contradicting both Musk’s statement that it was Trump’s idea and Trump’s statement that he has no idea who did it.

The Telegraph, citing four anonymous sources, reports that Musk proposed slowing down Starshield, the military-grade version of Musk’s Starlink satellite communications system, and that Trump agreed. The move hindered Ukraine’s drone defenses of Russian attacks, and came while Trump is upset with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s decision to target Russian oil refineries and infrastructure after Trump lifted sanctions on Russian fuel. After Ukraine’s Starlink access was restricted, Russia launched a massive aerial attack on Wednesday that continued into the next morning.

Again, we’ve become allies of Russia against Ukraine. Trump and Musk are both denying they had anything to do with this. Sure.

The big headline at the New York Times is “Soaring Energy Prices Push U.S. Inflation Higher.” And in usual NYC understatement, one of the subheads is “Surging inflation complicates Trump’s final push to sell voters on a strong economy.” Gee, ya think?

It really looks like Trump’s world is falling apart. He was humiliated by a half-empty rally in Youngstown, Ohio, Monday night. His Russian diesel “deal” is being opposed even by Republicans. Yesterday he was downplaying the plan as “not really a deal with me.” The revised story is that none of the diesel is coming to the U.S. but it for the rest of the world. Meanshile, Trump’s War gets messier as Iran-backed Houthis strike Saudi oil facilities.

Charlie Cook of the Cook Politico Report says that Trump has gone from “very unpopular” to “toxic” to “radioactive.”

As part of his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC, Trump was scheduled to sit for a deposition with the BBC’s lawyers this Friday. But yesterday Trump’s lawyers canceled the session. And they said he won’t be available for more than two months. By some coincidence, the discovery period ends in two months. The Trump offspring also are dodging subpoenas in the case. The BBC is trying to get the case, which was filed in a court in Florida, dismissed.

It gets messier. There are reports the recently fired Kimberly Guilfoyle is thretening to expose Trump family secrets. That might just be gossip, but if anybody knows where the bodies are buried, so to speak, it’s Guilfoyle.

And then there’s the new press secretary. I though y’all would get a kick out of this.

The best answer I saw was KKK + K. Another good one was The Clairols. Mine was The Roots (Are Showing). But it kind of brings home how much Trump isn’t really hiring staff  as much as casting people in the television show he is producing in his head. Aparently the role of “press secretary” must go to a blond woman. The new one, Katie Zacharia, was so inept in her debut yesterday that the world is just making fun of her. Among other issues, she has been claiming to be a corporate lawyer but can’t provide proof she ever passed a bar exam. See also Hi, I’m Your New Press Secretary, and It’s My First Time Reading Words Out Loud by Alexandra Petri at The Altantic.

While we all weren’t looking it appears the U.S. is now an ally of Russia against Ukraine. There wasn’t exactly a formal announcement of this, but I don’t see any other way to look at events over the last several hours.

Yesterday Trump very proudly announced that he and Vlad Putin had reached a great deal. The U.S. is suspending sanctions on Russian diesel exports  until April 7  Putin agreed to release 300,000 tons of diesel immediately “to the American and global marketplace,” followed by 500,000 tons in November and another million after that.

Trump then wrote on Truth Social that another three million tons of Russian diesel would be delivered “within a short period.” But this depended on the condition of Russian refineries, which have been attacked by Ukraine. Whether the three million tons were really part of the deal or just Trump not knowing how many zeros are in three million I cannot say. But commentators I saw on the teevee said that the Russian diesel would’t make a whole lot of difference to the price of diesel in the U.S. There’s a headline at Barron’s that calls the deal “a drop in the bucket that won’t move the needle on prices.”  But it would make Putin a lot of money. So it’s a stupid deal. I feel for farmers and others who are being ruined by diesel prices who may now get their hopes up there will be relief soon. There won’t.

And then there’s the little matter of the sanction Trump suspended, which was imposed by Congress. Many senators are not happy, and not all of those senators are Democrats.

Less than a month ago the Senate passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, intended to toughen up sanctions on Russia. The late Miss Lindsey’s sister, Darline Graham, was given a big role in introducing and passing the bill, and so far it’s been her big moment in the Senate. Darline is currently in a neck-and-neck race with Dr. Annie Andrews for the Senate seat. One might argue Trump’s suspension of one sanction undermines Darline a tad.

But it gets better. Trump’s next move was to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy :to halt strikes on Russian oil refineries and other infrastructure used to produce and distribute diesel, saying the attacks are causing a global shortage. The part about Ukraine being in a war with Russia for its existence as a nation seems to have slipped past Trump’s attention.

So now, having stabbed Ukraine in the back, Trump is saying that Ukraine had better get a new leader. That should make Zelenskyy president for life. And Trump is blaming Zelenskyy for high diesel prices. There are a lot of factors impacting diesel prices, and the Russia-Ukraine war is one of them, but I suspect Trump’s mess in Iran is at the top of the list.

I see also that Andy Burnham, the UK Prime Minister, called Zelenskyy today. The PM assured Zelenskyy that the UK would continue to strengthen its sanctions on Russia and take action to constrain the Russian war machine. I hope President Zelenskyy gets other such calls. But it’s another sign of the times of how isolated Trump is, and how isolated he has made the U.S. And I’m sure Trump has no clue.

At The Atlantic, David Frum tells us (as if we didn’t know) that Trump is an easy mark for Putin.

For the American truckers and farmers Trump claims to be serving, the deal means little or nothing. Trump may not know or may not care that his latest gambit will not reduce diesel prices. His poll numbers are plunging to Herbert Hoover levels. He needs a last-minute electioneering gimmick.

But while the deal will not benefit American consumers, it has immense consequences for others. For Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the deal is a potential lifesaver. For war-ravaged Ukraine, it is the most outrageous and heartless Trump betrayal to date. For Trump’s entourage, the deal promises corruption opportunities on a multibillion-dollar scale. And for people trying to understand the Trump presidency, the deal is further proof of the accusation that Nancy Pelosi flung in Trump’s face in 2019: “With you, all roads lead to Putin.”

I encourge you to read this article. Trump’s “entourage,” in particular Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have been trying to work a Russia-Ukraine deal that somehow includes some special sweeteners for special Trump donors and some Middle Eastern groups that do business with Kushner and Witkoff. One suspects it’s understood that some of those sweeteners will make it into the pockets of Kushner and Witkoff eventually. Meanwhile, Ukraine is being told to suck it up and make concessions. Or just surrender; that would be great.

Another thing I learned from Frum’s article is that the U.S. actually produces more diesel than we use. Of course, the price is set by global markets.  But if Trump weren’t pouring how many billions of dollars into  his stupid war, maybe the government could provide relief to farmers and businesses that use kiesel with subsidies or something. That might actually help. But then if Trump hadn’t started the stupid war the price of diesel wouldn’t be quite so high.

But here’s a new development — Axios reports that House Republicans are moving to block Trump’s oil deal.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) vowed Saturday to force a House vote to block Russian oil purchases, challenging President Trump’s diesel deal with President Vladimir Putin.

Why it matters: Trump has touted the deal as a way to lower fuel prices, but it could also provide revenue for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Driving the news: Fitzpatrick, co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, said he would introduce the “Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Act” and force a vote through a discharge petition.

“It will be forced to the Floor via discharge and it will pass overwhelmingly,” Fitzpatrick wrote on X.

Retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) tells Axios he has “already agreed” to sign the petition.

Well, okay, not a lot of Republicans, and considering the House is hardly ever in session any more this will probably go nowhere. But it’s still interesting.

Update: Today (Sunday) Trump announced that Putin and Zelenskyy have agreed to an “energy ceasefire,” meaning they have agreed to stop attacking energy facilities. But President Zelenskyy, when asked about it, says this was news to him. Zelenskyy says he will agree to it if Putin agrees to it. But whether Putin has agreed to anything isn’t clear. Trump made a similar announcement last month, but neither party confirmed that there was a deal. Both Russia and Ukraine continued attacking energy infrastructure.

Update: Russia strikes power plant in Ukraine after Trump announces energy ceasefire. So much for that.