Donald Trump violates the Constitution yet again launches illegal war against Iran but Republicans have their fingers up their asses

Donald Trump’s Attack on Iran Is Reckless

Echo editorial published in The New York Times editorial:

In his 2024, presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised voters that he would end wars, not start them. Over the past year, he has instead ordered military strikes in seven nations. His appetite for military intervention grows with the eating.

Now he has ordered a new attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran, in cooperation with Israel, and Trump said it would be much more extensive than the targeted bombing of nuclear facilities in June. Yet, he started this war without explaining to the American people and the world why he was doing so. 

Nor has he involved Congress, which the Constitution grants the sole power to declare war. He instead posted a video at 2:30 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, shortly after bombing began, in which he said that Iran presented “imminent threats” and called for the overthrow of its government. His rationale is dubious, and making his case by video in the middle of the night is unacceptable.

Among his justifications is the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program, which is a worthy goal. But Mr. Trump declared that program “obliterated” by the strike in June, a claim belied by both U.S. intelligence and this new attack. The contradiction underscores how little regard he has for his duty to tell the truth when committing American armed forces to battle. It also shows how little faith American citizens should place in his assurances about the goals and results of his growing list of military adventures.

Trump’s approach to Iran is reckless. His goals are ill-defined. Trump failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome. He disregarded both domestic and international law for warfare.

The Iranian regime, to be clear, deserves no sympathy. It has wrought misery since its revolution 47 years ago — on its own people, on its neighbors and around the world. It massacred thousands of protesters this year. It imprisons and executes political dissidents. It oppresses women, L.G.B.T.Q. people and religious minorities. Its leaders have impoverished their own citizens while corruptly enriching themselves. They have proclaimed “Death to America” since coming to power and killed hundreds of U.S. service members in the region, as well as bankrolled terrorism that has killed civilians in the Middle East and as far away as Argentina.

Iran’s government presents a distinct threat because it combines this murderous ideology with nuclear ambitions. Iran repeatedly defied international inspectors over the years. Since the June attack, the government has shown signs of restarting its pursuit of nuclear weapons technology. American presidents of both parties have rightly made a commitment to prevent Tehran from getting a bomb.

We recognize that fulfilling this commitment could justify military action at some point. For one thing, the consequences of allowing Iran to follow the path of North Korea — and acquire nuclear weapons after years of exploiting international patience — are too great. For another, the costs of confronting Iran over its nuclear program look less imposing than they once did.

Iran, as David Sanger of The Times recently explained, “is going through a period of remarkable military, economic and political weakness.” Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Israel has reduced the threats from Hamas and Hezbollah (two of Iran’s terrorist proxies), attacked Iran directly and, with help from allies, mostly repelled its response. The new recognition of Iran’s limitations helped give rebels in Syria the confidence to march on Damascus and oust the horrific Assad regime, a longtime Iranian ally. Iran’s government did almost nothing to intervene. This recent history demonstrates that military action, for all its awful costs, can have positive consequences.

A responsible American president could make a plausible argument for further action against Iran. The core of this argument would need to be a clear explanation about the strategy, as well as the justification for attacking now, even though Iran does not appear close to having a nuclear weapon. This strategy would involve a promise to seek approval from Congress and to collaborate with international allies.

Trump is not even attempting this (professionally responsible) approach. Instead, Trump is telling the American people and the world that he expects their blind trust. He has not earned that trust.

He instead treats allies with disdain. He lies constantly, including about the results of the June attack on Iran. He has failed to live up to his own promises for solving other crises in Ukraine, Gaza and Venezuela. He has fired senior military leaders for failing to show fealty to his political whims. When his appointees make outrageous mistakes — such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth 🤢 sharing advanced details of a military attack on the Houthis, an Iranian-backed group, on an unsecured group chat — Trump shields them from accountability. His administration appears to have violated international law by, among other things, disguising a military plane as a civilian plane and shooting two defenseless sailors who survived an initial attack.

A responsible approach would also involve a detailed conversation with the American people about the risks. Iran remains a heavily militarized country. Its medium-range missiles may have failed to do much damage to Israel last year, but it maintains many short-range missiles that could overwhelm any defense system and hit Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other nearby countries. Mr. Trump did acknowledge this in his overnight video, saying, “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties.”

He should have had the courage to say so in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, among other settings. When a president asks American troops and diplomats to risk their lives, he should not be coy about it.

Recognizing Trump’s irresponsibility, some members of Congress have taken steps to constrain him on Iran. In the House, Representatives Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, and Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, have proposed a resolution meant to prevent Trump from starting a war without congressional approval. The resolution makes clear that Congress has not authorized an attack on Iran and demands the withdrawal of American troops within 60 days. 

Senator Tim Kaine, 😇Democrat of Virginia, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, are sponsoring a similar measure in their chamber. The start of hostilities should not dissuade legislators from passing these bills. A robust assertion of authority by Congress is the best way to constrain Donald Trump.  #ImpeachTrumpNOW 

Donald Trump obviously directing Department of Justice to cover up the Epstein Trump files- Guilty of Cover Up!

Echo essay published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by 

Elie Honig:

The United States Department of Justice is getting lapped by both Congress and the British authorities on follow-up investigations around the Epstein files. There’s no excuse for either. As British police arrest astonishingly powerful men for their dealings with Jeffrey Epstein and the U.S. House of Representatives tries to force titans of finance and politics to answer tough questions, our Justice Department lags far behind. It’s not even clear the DoJ is doing anything at all.

Over in the United Kingdom., law-enforcement officials have arrested former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and former ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson. (Technically, both have been arrested but not yet formally charged, under a wrinkle in British legal procedure.) The putative defendants reportedly face potential charges of “misconduct in public office” for allegedly providing confidential government documents, including sensitive financial information about investment opportunities, to Epstein. (British authorities have accused neither man of participation in Epstein’s child sex-trafficking ring.)

The British case is based in part on emails contained in the U.S. Justice Department’s own Epstein files, which were released less than a month ago. In a matter of weeks, British police investigated and arrested a former prince (Andrew) and a lord (Mandelson); have subjected both men, and others around them, to extensive questioning; and have conducted searches at properties associated with the subjects. 

Meanwhile, the most memorable step taken by our Justice Department since the release of the files was Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s public-service announcement that “the American people need to understand that it isn’t a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein.”

The contrast extends to the tone at the top. King Charles — an actual monarch who wears a literal crown and carries a scepter to work — has told British investigators (in American parlance) to do what you gotta do. Or, in the proper King’s English: “What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities. In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and cooperation. Let me state clearly: The law must take its course.” Other heads of state should follow the king’s hands-off example — in a case against his own brother Andrew, no less.

Donald Trump, however, isn’t quite of the same mind. He has long dismissed the Epstein case as a hoax, though it’s unclear what exactly he claims is fake. And he recently urged the American public to just get over it already. “I think it’s time now for the country to maybe get onto something else, like health care,” Trump responded when asked about the Epstein matter.

The DoJ has dutifully adopted Trump’s recommended approach: myopia blended with dissembling and a pinch of proactive excuse-making. As Blanche explained earlier this month, “There’s a lot of correspondence. There’s a lot of emails. There’s a lot of photographs. But that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.” Not exactly the tenacious prosecutorial posture Blanche and I learned during our concurrent early days at the Southern District of New York. But hey, if our Justice Department isn’t going to make meaningful use of its own Epstein files, at least others will.

And then there’s Congress, which has taken a flawed but aggressive approach to its Epstein investigation.

Although a bipartisan (but mostly Democratic) coalition of lawmakers forced passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee has pressed forward with a series of aggressive subpoenas for testimony.

Yes, the subpoenas are largely for political show, and no, the House has not extracted any damning admissions — but it’s putting powerful people on the spot and making them face meaningful questioning under oath. (Except, not Donald Trump, whose name appears in the Epstein Files too many numerous times to count.)

Last week, billionaire Les Wexner — whose name the DoJ originally redacted from a document listing him as an unindicted “co-conspirator” but then unredacted after Representative Thomas Massie publicly called out the redaction — faced five hours of questioning from the Oversight Committee. 

Wexner, a close associate of Epstein’s, claimed no knowledge of his friend’s criminality. Wexner also denied allegations that he had sexually abused Virginia Giuffre, who testified in 2016, that, as a minor, she had been trafficked to have sex with Wexner multiple times. (She died by suicide in 2025.)

The beauty of being a federal prosecutor is you don’t have to take a blanket denial as the final word, even from an arrogant billionaire. People disclaim wrongdoing all the time. Sometimes they’re telling the truth; other times they aren’t. So ordinarily, given the lead provided by Congress, DoJ prosecutors may take Wexner’s testimony and subject it to rigorous testing — talk to other witnesses, examine emails and texts, check out phone, financial, and travel records. Yet we’ve seen no indication of DoJ doing any such thing.

This week, the Clintons take their turn at the Oversight Committee’s deposition table. After a prolonged back-and-forth during which they played themselves into a strategic corner, the former First Couple relented and agreed to testify under the looming threat of a contempt-of-Congress charge supported by some bipartisan votes.

The Hillary Clinton subpoena was an obvious stretch by a congressional committee seeking to drag in a boldface name. 

Mrs. Clinton had nothing to do with Epstein; the best that Republican committee chair James Comer could do in defense of the subpoena was to note that — brace yourself — Clinton had hired Ghislaine Maxwell’s nephew to work on her 2008, presidential campaign and later at State. Yes, that’s the headliner. Clinton proceeded to tear the committee a new one with her opening statement on Thursday and, predictably, nothing of relevant substance came of her testimony.

But, Bill Clinton will have to squirm when he answers questions. The committee surely will confront the former president — a frequent flier on Epstein’s private jet — with photographs that show him partying with Epstein (not a crime, remember, per the deputy AG); swimming in a pool with Maxwell and a female whose identity has been redacted, and reclining in a hot tub at night, hands behind his head, along with a female whose image has been blacked out.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen no sign that the Justice Department has subpoenaed or otherwise sought to interview Wexner or Clinton or any other powerful Epstein associate — and certainly not the most powerful of all former Epstein pals, Trump himself. (Notably, even the aggressive House Oversight Committee hasn’t sought testimony from the current president.)

The DoJ’s apparent inaction is particularly galling given that prosecutors hold far more potent investigative tools than Congress does. Prosecutors have the vast resources of the Justice Department and FBI at their disposal, while Congress must make do with minimal investigative staff. Prosecutors can obtain search warrants and wiretaps, while Congress can’t. And prosecutorial subpoenas generally can be broader in scope than congressional subpoenas and are enforced more rigorously by the courts.

The Justice Department has been flailing for months now to justify its inactivity. Back in July 2025, top DoJ officials released a memo declaring that, after an exhaustive review of over 300 gigabytes of information, “We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

Since then, the Justice Department has offered mixed messages (at best) about its ongoing investigative efforts. And while prosecutors could be moving stealthily behind the scenes, entirely undetectable to the public — I’m dubious, but it’s possible — we’ve seen zero public indication of actual in-the-field enforcement activity: no search warrants, no subpoenas, no interviews with key players, no arrests.

Meanwhile, the British authorities and Congress forge ahead. It’s an embarrassing moment for our Justice Department’s leaership and a telling indictment of its own stubborn — and perhaps purposeful — indifference.

Donald Trump gave a State of Delusion speech to Congress. Nothing was said to help Americans pay for health care!

Opinion letter published in Lancaster OnLine, in Pennsylvania:

The Media’s Failure to Correct the Republicans’ Obscene Trumpcare Lies. Trump seems to be focusing on everything but a health care plan.

For years, Donald Trump talked🤥 🙄about his fantastic health care plan. We are still waiting for that plan, but health care is not as important to him as it is to millions of Americans who face rising costs and loss of coverage. 💢

Trump appears to have too many personal items to address before he can focus on American health care. (Like his name redacted thousands of times in the Epstein Files❗)

It seems the American people will have to wait and suffer until Trump finishes his ballroom, his arch and the renovations to what he wants us to call the Trump Kennedy Center.

In addition, Trump needs funding for detention centers to house immigrants and, conceivably, American citizens who don’t meet his idea of being worthy citizens.

Let’s not forget all the tax money- more than was allocated to the United States Marine Corps❗ - needed to pay for U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (evil ICE❗) agents and federal troops who are sent to U.S. cities.

Let’s also remember that Trump seems obsessed about getting his name onto Washington Dulles International Airport, New York City’s Penn Station, naval battleships and a new NFL football stadium.

Everyone has their priorities. But, Donald Trump should put the welfare of the American people first before his own personal interests and his self-gratification.

Who would have thought that a convicted felon and man who has been found liable in civil court for sexual abuse could be such a narcissist❓

From Douglas Groover in Manor Township, Pennsylvania

Vladimir Putin may have been a formidable spy but proving to be inept as a military strategist- Ukraine Resists!

Maine Wroter: Donald Trump hardly mentioned the Ukraine during his long and boring "State of Delusion" speech to Congress on February 24, 2026. *See my note below.

Maybe a literate person in the White House can read this excellent essay to Donald Trump and also explain who Winston Churchill was.....just sayin'.:😟😧😠  "A Bitter Winter in Ukraine" by Tom Judah published in The New York Review of Books.

In August 2014, I went to see the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov in Kyiv. Ukraine was emerging from the pro-Europe Maidan Revolution the previous winter; Russia had seized Crimea and was aiding and abetting pro-Russian rebels in the east of the country. Kurkov had just published Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev,
in which he imagined digging up potatoes at his country house in September, “regardless of the military situation,” and asked:

Where will I be❓ Where will my wife and children be in September❓ I want to believe we will be at home in Kiev, going to our country house every weekend like we usually do—grilling shashlik, gathering the harvest, making apple jam and spending the evenings in the summerhouse with a glass of wine, talking about the future.

He added, “It’s funny, but the future we talk about never seems to come.”

On the night of February 23, 2022, Kurkov invited me to dinner with friends at home in Kyiv. “I will cook borscht,” he said. The atmosphere was febrile. We made toasts “to victory” but had no idea of what was about to happen. A few hours later the Russians began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

For a while Kurkov set aside fiction. He wrote essays about the war, and last year he published Three Years on Fire: The Destruction of Ukraine, his fourth nonfiction book chronicling the revolution and then the war. The essays in Three Years on Fire accurately reflect the atmosphere of the Ukraine I know and have been reporting from for many years. In one he writes about a soldier who campaigned against the country’s predatory gambling industry—in the last few years gambling addiction has become a serious problem among soldiers who place bets on their phones—until he was killed in battle. In another essay we learn about the owner of the tropical fruit farm close to Kyiv who developed miniature banana trees that Ukrainians have been buying. At the beginning of the war, shelling cut the gas and electricity that kept his greenhouses warm, but he found that the trees were frost-resistant. Kurkov comments, “You could say the astonishing survival of these trees mirrors the unexpected staunchness with which Ukrainians are facing adversity.”

In January I was back in Kyiv. Kurkov and his wife had just returned from their country house. “Does the future still not come❓” I asked. Well, he said, reflecting a common feeling of resignation, “the future is just too far away. We live every day only in reality and we wait for the next morning and then we take that as reality.”

In the first part of the war in 2014–2015, it was easy for people in Kyiv to think of the fighting in the east as very far away, but four years into this second part it is anything but. In 2022 the Russians reached the outskirts of Kyiv before being driven back. 

Now Vladimir Putin and the Russians are trying to freeze Ukrainians into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid. For much of the day there is no electricity in Kyiv or most of the rest of the country. Some 60 percent of Ukrainians get their heat and hot water from power stations, which have also been under attack. Kurkov’s radiators were cold, but he said his apartment was still warm because the building was old and took a long time to cool down. However, in many districts radiators are only lukewarm even when they are on.

When Russia began the full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians at first could not believe that it was launching a war to conquer the entire country rather than a more limited operation in the Donbas region in the east. Then came fear, followed by euphoria, as the Russians were driven back that summer and winter. Many in the West admired the Ukrainians’ resilience—so many volunteered to fight that the armed forces had to turn people away, and civilians mobilized in huge numbers to help their soldiers and refugees. Later came admiration for the drone technology Ukrainians have developed, which has transformed warfare. Now things are different again. “People are changing,” said Kurkov. “Attitudes are changing, dreams and hopes are changing.”

In Kyiv it was −17 degrees Celsius (roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit), and the trees, with their bare branches coated in glistening ice, looked as if they had been turned to glass. 

Streetlights were on in some places, but others were completely dark. Kurkov described the mood as “like when you get an overdose of bad news. You stop reacting, you just accept it.” He said he had stopped counting the children of friends who had been killed in the fighting and people he knew who had died after they had stopped seeking care when they were ill, “because they think that doctors should be paying attention to wounded soldiers, not to civilians.” The nation, he said, was living through amassive nervous breakdown because people don’t see the exit from this situation. People don’t understand how it can end. And they can imagine only a very bad ending to this story, because you cannot stop the war. I mean that is not up to Ukraine.

One night, in the southeastern city of Dnipro, I was in bed working on my laptop when I heard explosions. At first I ignored them, and then I sent a WhatsApp message to my Ukrainian colleague Taras Semenyuk: “Did you hear that❓❗” He replied:

Yes- News reporting about Shaheds
It’s a massive attack going on

Shaheds are Iranian-designed drones that are now produced in Russia and are much more sophisticated, powerful, and destructive than earlier models. I checked local Dnipro channels that report where drones are and where they are heading and replied:

Yes, I can see on Telegram.  Strange my air alert did not go off.

And that was it. I went on working. For the first two years of the full-scale war Semenyuk, like many Ukrainians, was extremely anxious and always went to a shelter when there was an attack. That was not surprising. In the first weeks of the war, his apartment in Kyiv had been destroyed by a missile aimed at a nearby heating plant. It was only by chance that he was not there, and his wife and child had already left for Poland. But now, like millions of others, he just shrugs. This is not to say that people are not frightened by major drone, cruise, and ballistic missile attacks but simply that the chance of being killed or injured in one is actually quite small. According to the UN, in government-controlled territory in 2025, 2,395 civilians were killed and 11,751 injured, but 63 percent of all civilian casualties on both sides were in frontline areas. The attacks in Dnipro that night were aimed at energy facilities, and the next day there was no electricity in the city.

Russian drones and missiles are often inaccurate, says the military analyst Ivan Stupak. Between 60 and 80 percent of them are shot down, though falling debris from them also causes damage, as do Ukrainian antiaircraft misfires. For civilians it is often hard to know what hit their building. Stupak says it is possible that 10 percent of attacks target residential blocks in order to strike terror, which has the intended effect. “I don’t want to pretend we are all Rambos❗”

From Dnipro, Semenyuk and I went to Zaporizhzhia, a major industrial city on the Dnieper River. In 2022 the Russians seized roughly 75 percent of Zaporizhzhia province, including its nuclear power plant, which is the largest in Europe. It used to supply about one fifth of Ukraine’s electricity and is now shut down. The Russians failed, however, to take the city of Zaporizhzhia. Many of its people fled, but they were replaced by refugees from occupied areas. Like all big cities it has been subjected to missile and Shahed attacks, and now the Russians are creeping closer from the south. In November a southern district of the city was hit by its first FPV (first-person-view) drone attack. These are short-range drones with a video feed that are controlled by a pilot using a screen or goggles and that can chase and target individuals, unlike Shaheds and other long-range drones whose target is preset.

The telltale sign that you are within range of FPVs is netting, which snarls drones that fly into it. We drove to the village of Balabyne, a few minutes south of the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia, and found that a net tunnel had been erected to protect the entire main street. People were beginning to leave, we were told by Tetiana, who works in a local shop. The drones attack civilians and their cars for no reason, she said. There is a reason, of course: to terrorize. On social media there are endless films from FPV drones released by both Russian and Ukrainian military units that like to show off their prowess. You see the drones carefully maneuvering through windows and buildings and zeroing in on soldiers who see them and run or try to bat them off. The last image is someone’s face a split second before the drone explodes and kills them.

In towns in the east of Ukraine from which I have reported, FPV drones are an increasing menace. In Kramatorsk, which was held by pro-Russian rebels in 2014 for almost three months, people have begun to leave because of them. After Bakhmut fell in 2023 and then Avdiivka nine months later, then Pokrovsk was next. As the Russians crept closer the drones made ordinary life impossible, and now it has all but fallen. Kostyantynivka, another town I have reported from but did not name because the unit I was with did not want me to identify their location, has now become part of the drone-terrorized zone and is gradually being reduced to rubble.

Anti-drone netting protecting the main road from the Kharkiv provincial border to Sloviansk, Ukraine on January 6, 2026.

The center of Izium, southeast of Kharkiv, has also been netted up to protect people. Much of the twenty-eight miles of road from the Kharkiv provincial border southeast to Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk has been turned into a net tunnel.

It is wise to take other precautions as well. Just over a year ago I wrote about traveling with soldiers with a drone detector.
That was the first time I had seen one. Now they are commonplace. The Journalists’ Solidarity Center of Kharkiv, organized by Ukraine’s journalists’ union, loaned us one. It was handheld and the screen fizzed like an old-fashioned television with no reception. If it suddenly came to life with a picture, though, that meant it had locked on to a nearby drone and we could see what its pilot was seeing. It could, of course, be flying somewhere else, but if it was flying toward us, we would have just a minute or two to find cover. At the checkpoint-cum-junction where the net tunnel between Izium and Sloviansk begins, some cars, like ours, drove straight on while others, including delivery trucks, turned off to take a detour out of Russian FPV drone range.

All these towns, except for Izium and Kharkiv, are in the Donbas, which has become a major point of contention in the peace talks among Ukraine, the US, and Russia. Vladimir Putin wants this entire rust belt region, which consists of the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. In the military campaigns of 2014–2015 and 2022, Russia took 99 percent of Luhansk, and it now occupies about 75 percent of Donetsk. Taking the rest is Putin’s “minimum plan,” said Major Viacheslav Shutenko, the commander of the Legion North drone battalion of Ukraine’s 44th Mechanized Brigade, as he showed me the massive fortifications of razor wire, anti-infantry wire, and anti-tank ditches and berms that snake as far as the eye can see around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Putin desperately needs an achievement to show off to Russians, he said. After all, in the time it took the Soviet Union to recover from its initial defeats by the Germans in World War II and its men to raise their flag above the Reichstag in Berlin, Putin’s troops have failed to retake even little Kramatorsk.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has resisted ceding this territory to Russia, and there has been vague talk of turning it into a “free economic zone” and of “demilitarization.” Since the biggest local industries have always been mining and old-fashioned heavy manufacturing, it is hard from here to see why anyone would invest in the Donbas in the future, although clearly things look different from Mar-a-Lago. Yet it is obvious why handing it over to the Russians or demilitarizing it without rock-solid security guarantees is a trap. Major Shutenko and I stood on the crest of a hill from which, beyond this so-called fortress belt, Ukraine is as flat as a pancake for more than six hundred miles, all the way to the Polish border. The Dnieper, which flows from the north down to the Black Sea, divides all of Ukraine, including Kyiv, into two parts and is the only natural barrier after these soft, rolling hills.

No one I have met in Ukraine believes that a cease-fire will come this year or would be anything other than a limited truce, as the one in 2015 was, rather than part of a full peace deal. If Ukraine were forced to accept a truce that included handing over to Russia the last bit of the Donbas that Ukraine controls, which is what the US has been reported to have demanded, it would be akin to Czechoslovakia being forced by France and Britain to hand over the Sudetenland to Germany in 1938, despite the fortifications it had built in those border areas. As a result the Czechoslovaks could not defend themselves when Hitler proceeded to take over the rest of the country a few months later. Yevhen Hlibovytsky, the director of the Frontier Institute, says, “Russia won’t want a deal unless it becomes really vulnerable, and if it does, then Ukraine won’t want one.”

Hlibovytsky may be right, but Ukrainians are struggling to survive the slow erosion of their economic and military capabilities. They lack men, they lack energy, and their economy is being ground down. The Russians are advancing very slowly and tens of thousands of them are dying in the process, but there is no evidence that Putin cares. Apart from the energy grid, says Stupak, the Russians are now choosing high-value targets like ballistic and cruise missile plants rather than trying to take out the hundreds of small drone companies. Although such matters are a tightly guarded secret, it is likely that the Russians have caused significant damage to military production, but thus far he has not heard of any disruption of drone and ammunition deliveries to the front. And the Russians have not broken Ukrainian morale.

At the front both Ukraine and Russia have been making up for flagging numbers by recruiting thousands of foreigners. Ukraine does this because its mobilization system is inefficient, nontransparent, and sometimes corrupt. Clips on social media of men being chased, caught, and bundled into vans by recruitment officers are a boon for Russian propaganda, and grabbing people off the streets who don’t want to fight is a poor way of replenishing the ranks. Putin, meanwhile, does not want to risk unpopularity by drafting people rather than offering recruits huge salaries compared with what they can earn in their often far-flung and poor provincial regions. Today 30 percent of Russian troops captured or surrendering to Ukrainian forces may be Africans and other foreigners, depending on the location. On the Ukrainian side, one of the largest contingents of foreigners fighting for money is from Colombia.

Ugandans and other Africans, who are derided on social media as “disposables” by Russians filming them, are unlikely to change the course of the war, though North Koreans did help eject the Ukrainians from Russia’s Kursk region, which they had briefly occupied in the summer of 2024. In any case, Putin now seems to be counting on the winter to swing things in his favor, just as it helped Russia defeat Hitler and Napoleon before him. But Ukrainians are used to winter combat, so the result may be different this time.

Just before the full-scale invasion started, Ukraine had 33.7 gigawatts of electrical generation capacity; in early January it had only fourteen gigawatts, and if the winter remains as exceptionally cold as it has been, it will need seventeen gigawatts to keep electricity flowing 24/7. Not all the loss of generation capacity can be attributed to destruction. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been another point of dispute in the peace talks, used to provide six gigawatts and could again.

In the past Ukraine produced more electricity than it needed and even exported some. Now its surplus capacity has been destroyed, and its energy officials are scouring the rest of Europe and farther afield for replacement equipment. Russia, meanwhile, is changing its tactics. Previously it concentrated its attacks on large power plants that had relatively good air defenses. Now it has switched to targeting some 3,500 smaller substations that are the essential links between the power plants and consumers.

From the news coverage, one might have the impression that all Ukrainians are hapless victims freezing in the dark. In fact, extremely difficult though this winter is proving to be, four years into the war most Ukrainians have made some sort of preparations to help them get through power outages, especially if they have some money. Power companies publish schedules showing when districts will have power, which allows people to plan their days, although in mid-January this system broke down in Kyiv, and on January 20 many in the capital woke up to find that temporarily they had no water either.

Shops have generators, small industries have invested in battery capacity, and larger companies have installed their own electricity production facilities using natural gas. Everyone has power banks, rechargeable lamps are common, and those who can afford them have bought large portable batteries commonly known as EcoFlows, after the best-known brand. In apartment buildings residents have often joined together to buy generators to keep elevators and heat pumps working. Getting stuck on higher floors is a real problem for the elderly and families with small children.

“We are holding on, but people are getting angrier and angrier,” said Valentina, a kindergarten teacher I met, along with her five-year-old daughter, as she was charging her phone and power banks in a well-heated orange tent erected by the emergency services in Rusanivka, a neighborhood of Kyiv. In the next tent I met a couple of cheerful pensioners who told me it was only 13 degrees Celsius (around 55 degrees Fahrenheit) in their apartments. When I asked why there were not many people in the tents trying to keep warm, they said it was not necessary because everyone in the area had gas stoves and if you kept them on then you could at least keep your kitchen warm.

Ukrainians might be resilient, but attacks on the energy system and other targets are harming the economy. According to Andrii Dligach, who heads a coalition of business associations, attacks and power outages shaved 0.6 percent off Ukraine’s GDP in the last quarter of 2025. When sirens sound in the center of Kyiv, for example, McDonald’s loses business, as does the Globus Mall next door, because its scores of shops and cafés close. Many other shops and restaurants stay open, though. The McDonald’s at the Lukianivska metro station opposite the Artem defense complex, which has been targeted several times, has installed shatterproof windows. The plate glass windows of the metro, long since blown out, have just been boarded up. Dmytro, the owner of a chain of shoe shops, said that all his colleagues agree that the last few months have been the hardest since the full-scale invasion began: “When it is cold at home and when you have no power, you are just not in the mood to go shopping.”

Some are also not in the mood to stay in the country. Dmytro said that in the last few weeks two of his shop assistants had decided to leave. One was going because her entire family was already abroad, and another was taking her twenty-two-year-old son out of Ukraine. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion men age eighteen to sixty have not been allowed to travel abroad without an exemption. In August the lower limit was changed to twenty-three. Men can be mobilized at the age of twenty-five. While I was writing this in Lviv, in Ukraine’s west, I was asked to give a talk to journalism students at the city’s Ukrainian Catholic University. Journalism courses have always attracted more girls than boys there, I was told, but among the twenty students in the room, there was not a single boy. The last few had left when the travel age limit changed. Tens of thousands of young men are estimated to have gone since August.

An opinion poll published at the end of January found that 65 percent of Ukrainians were willing “to endure the war” for “as long as it takes.” But Ukraine cannot fight alone. The US is no longer supplying much equipment directly; instead it is selling it to NATO countries, which then pass it on to Ukraine. “The war costs us nothing,” boasted Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Times in early January. “We make money with the war now.” What the US does continue to supply, though, is satellite military intelligence. It is crucial for the guidance of Ukraine’s deep-strike drones, which are inflicting heavy damage on Russia’s oil installations.

Still, Ukraine could become collateral damage from utterly unrelated events. On January 9 Trump provoked the worst crisis in transatlantic relations in our time by insisting that if the US could not acquire Greenland “the easy way,” it would have to get it “the hard way.” On January 21 he said he would not use force, but his demands helped accelerate the loss of the Europeans’ trust in the US as an ally. In the preceding weeks Britain and France thought they had received assurances from Washington that it would participate in security guarantees for Ukraine in the event of a cease-fire, though it would not send troops. Kurkov remarked of Trump that “nobody believes he is willing to do anything” about Ukraine because he was trying to “copycat [Putin] by going into Venezuela and with his desire to take over Greenland.”

After the Greenland crisis erupted, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, (in a not so well veiled threat).... “The European leaders will come around…. What would happen in Ukraine if the US pulled its support out❓ The whole thing would collapse.” 

No. In fact, Ukraine would probably not collapse, but defending it and shoring up its economy, military, and morale would certainly become harder, and anti-Western sentiment there would grow if defeats were ascribed to a stab in the back by the US and weak Europeans.

As the Arctic crisis unfolded, the glee in the Russian press about Trump’s demands and the damage done to NATO could hardly be contained. But Hlibovytsky said that Ukrainians do not have the luxury of worrying about all that: “We accept these things the same way we accept the weather.” Then he cautioned:

There is an error in the calculus of many Western politicians that the alternative to not helping Ukraine is the status quo and that if they don’t help then everything stays the same. No, it doesn’t. If they don’t help Ukraine, the hidden cost that they will have to face is so tremendous that if their societies would be aware of that cost, they would probably wish that the governments of the Western countries did more.

Those hidden costs could include, for example, open Russian attacks on NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) countries such as the Baltics and Poland.

In gas stations across Ukraine you can buy the Ukrainian translation of former British prime minister Boris Johnson’s biography of Winston Churchill. It does not take much imagination to connect the historical dots. After the Czechoslovaks were betrayed in 1938, Churchill famously told Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” When you stand on a hill in the Donbas it is very easy to see that, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

—February 11, 2026

*Pope Leo XIV sent 80 generators to Ukraine to help citizens battle the freezing temperatures, according to Vatican News. The Pope responded to appeals from several bishops, with temperatures dropping to -15C and some families having to find warmth in heated shelters with the help of generators. Feb 13, 2026

Donald Trump gave a failed "State of Delusion" speech polluted by lies but Republicans applauded anyway

Echo opinion published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by By Ross Barkan, a political columnist for Intelligencer.

Donald Trump failed to deliver anything to the American people in his "State of Delusion" speech to Congress on February 24 #ImpeachTrumpNOW❗

There’s an old expression in sports that always applies to the losers: “playing out the string.” A team playing out the string has been eliminated from the playoffs but keeps on going simply because there are games on the schedule. A baseball team well under .500 plays out a lazy September series on the road and fulfills its obligations to the fans — and collects paychecks — even though the games no longer have any meaning.

It’s too soon to say if Donald Trump is playing out the string, but there was a whiff of that sort of inevitable failure in his State of the Union address last night (February 24, 2026). 

Most Americans didn’t pay attention at all, and if they did, they’d find the usual Trump — the inanities, the absurdities, the wild boasts, and the outright lies that have come to define his decade of lording over the American political scene. “Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it,” bragged Trump, very much the insult comic running through his tired material. “People are asking me, ‘Please, please, please, Donald Trump, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore, we’re not used to winning in our country. Until you came along, we were just always losing, but now we’re winning too much.’ And I say, ‘No, no, no. You’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re gonna win bigger than ever.’”

Trump is a president with an approval rating below 40 percent. 

There is little evidence to suggest his rating will ever rebound much. There may now be a lower floor than in the first term. The Trump administration’s savagery in Minneapolis destroyed the popularity he had enjoyed on the issue of immigration. 

His advantages on the economy are gone, too, as Americans confront a K-shaped recovery that has thrilled the rich and left much of the rest of the country with higher costs and a meager job market. 

Of course, since 2015, just about any pundit who underestimates Trump is bound, eventually, to face humiliation. It’s easy to suggest that this time will be like all the others. Trump has certainly been unpopular before. He was ostracized after January 6 and counted out during the brat summer of 2024. Many politicians and commentators believed he would destroy the Republican Party instead of refashioning it in his own image. And betting against Trump has typically been a fool’s game.

What’s different now is the passage of time. This year, Trump will turn 80. He is a second-term president — he is in his final term, no matter how much he indulges in the idea of illegally seeking a third term. The Constitution won’t stop Trump — he has little regard for the rule of law — but political gravity probably will. 

If Trump can’t improve his standing in the next few months, Republicans are going to be swamped in the midterms. 

Democrats are very likely to flip the House and could make a serious run at the Senate. This will make Trump’s 2027, even more perilous. Trump's goodwill with the American people is gone, and there are signs that the grip he maintains over his own party could start to slip. Indiana Republicans bucked him on his redistricting scheme, and other rank-and-file Republicans, staring up at the final Trump years, could start to cast about elsewhere for leaders — or find that it’s in their interests to finally defy the president.

Of course, liberals have hoped many times in the past that the GOP would “wake up” to Trump and toss him aside only to find he is unmovable. But, as his rambling State of the (Delusion) Union speech demonstrated, Trump’s great enemy is time. In 2019 or 2022, there was so much potential for the future of Trump. He was a first-term president or a former president gearing up for another run at the White House. A Republican thinking two, three, four, or even five years ahead had to consider Trump and calculate whether any opposition to him was worth it politically. The answer was always “no.” The political graveyard was stacked high with anti-Trump Republicans or Republicans who dared, in particular instances, to face off against him. Mike Pence was the vice-president of the United States, and now he’s a ghost within his own party.

Those days seem to be coming to an end. Republicans are beginning to understand that the second term of Trump has offered almost nothing to campaign on this fall. Inflation hasn’t eased up enough. The tariffs are messy and expensive. The immigration regime is violent and alienating. The safety-net cuts punish the working class and poor. In his first term, Americans were largely optimistic about the economy. That world is gone. In defense of Trump, there are macroeconomic factors that he alone cannot fix, beginning with the stubbornly high prices of housing and groceries. But he’s given no indication he’d care to fix them. Solutions are absent. Instead, in his State of the Union, he pretended the problems didn’t exist or blamed the Democrats.

A (visibly) weakened Trump, of course, is still a dangerous Trump. We do not know what he and J.D. Vance might be plotting for 2028. Perhaps they’ll rerun the 2020, playbook and hope for a more successful outcome. 

All scenarios have to be considered. As Trump’s hand weakens on domestic affairs, he’s increasingly turned to sowing chaos abroad. 

Trump flirted with the full-scale occupation of Venezuela.🤪🙄He’s threatening war with Iran. (Wait! Whatever happened to the targeted bombing of the Iran nuclear site?  Obviously, it failed to completely destroy Iran's nuclear program.)

Trump can (illegally) light the world on fire without congressional authorization.

That, ultimately, may be his legacy, unless he somehow decides to restrain himself. An American president playing out the string is a little different from a baseball team. He can still kill a whole lot of people. (Maine Writer- when will media start to seriously report about the actual numbers of deaths tied to Donald Trump's name❓

Shame on Republicans like Maine's Senator Susan Collins for putting up with and applauding Trump's delusions.

Chief Justice John Roberts created a political Frankenstein when he gave Donald Trump full executive authority but now stuck with the monster

 Chief Justice John Roberts Is Losing Patience With Donald Trump

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Linda Greenhouse.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t waste words.

His majority opinion in last week’s tariff ruling was, characteristically, a model of succinctness. 

Yes, in a mere 21 pages (Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, by contrast, clocked in at 46 pages, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissent at 63), he explained why, as a matter of statutory interpretation and the constitutional separation of powers, President Trump lacked the authority he had claimed, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to impose a hodgepodge of tariffs on countries all over the world.

There was, however, one exception to the opinion’s conciseness: a meaty paragraph describing the roller-coaster course of Mr. Trump’s tariff regime. Here, with citations to seven separate executive orders omitted for the sake of readability, is the chief justice’s account:

Since imposing each set of tariffs, the president has issued several increases, reductions and other modifications. One month after imposing the 10 percent drug trafficking tariffs on Chinese goods, he increased the rate to 20 percent. One month later, he removed a statutory exemption for Chinese goods under 💲800. 

Less than a week after imposing the reciprocal tariffs, the president increased the rate on Chinese goods from 34 percent to 84 percent. The very next day, he increased the rate further still, to 125 percent. This brought the total effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods to 145 percent. The president has also shifted sets of goods into and out of the reciprocal tariff framework ([e.g.,] exempting from reciprocal tariffs beef, fruits, coffee, tea, spices and some fertilizers). And he has issued a variety of other adjustments ([e.g.,] extending “the suspension of heightened reciprocal tariffs” on Chinese imports).

For all the attention the decision in this case, Learning Resources v. Trump, has received, this paragraph has gone largely unremarked. I understand why; it’s unnecessary to the opinion’s argument. If, as a matter of law, the tariffs are invalid, it doesn’t matter whether they were imposed sensibly or capriciously. The paragraph is, in a word, gratuitous, something that can rarely be said about a passage in a Roberts opinion. So what is it doing there❓

In my opinion, the answer is that the chief justice is sending a message not necessarily or not only to Donald Trump but also to the waiting world. Something along the lines of, “People, this is what we’re dealing with.” The point being not that “some fertilizers” are now exempt from reciprocal tariffs but that a reckless president is sowing chaos in America and around the globe.

We don’t need to know Chief Justice Roberts’s innermost thoughts about Donald Trump — whatever they were before the president, in reaction to the tariff decision, described him and his majority as “fools” and “lap dogs” swayed “ by foreign interests” — to discern his exasperation.

Moreover, (why was this not reported by the media❓), for the past year (❗), the Trump administration trolled the Supreme Court, sending up one emergency application after another to demand temporary relief from adverse lower-court rulings. 

Moreover, the administration frequently got what it wanted: a stay of the ruling while an appeal proceeded. Powerful dissenting opinions from the three liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, made sure the public knew that these orders, while making no law, had the real-world effect of enabling the president to carry out his agenda, including slashing the federal work force and gutting lifesaving foreign assistance programs. Chief Justice Roberts was usually in the majority on these unsigned and generally unexplained orders; obviously he thought the stays were called for. But he probably isn’t happy with the drip-drip-drip of public perception — reflected in polls and social media chatter — that the court was handing the president a blank check.

Something different happened in late December when the justices denied the administration’s request for a stay of a district-court decision barring its use of the National Guard in Illinois. The order was unsigned, with Justices Samuel Alito, Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissenting. The three-page order essentially made new law by narrowly defining the circumstances under which a president could federalize a state’s National Guard.

This was a very big deal. Donald Trump promptly acceded to the order, removing the federalized Guard from Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., as well as Chicago. 

Yet the court’s action, coming on the day before Christmas Eve, received far less attention than the tariff case. 

In discussions about the court today, few people even seem to remember it. It is as if the view of the court as the administration’s lackey was so entrenched that evidence to the contrary was too discordant to be fully absorbed. 😖😵🤢

For the past year, Trump's corrupt administration trolled the Supreme Court, sending up one emergency application after another to demand temporary relief from adverse lower-court rulings. The administration frequently got what it wanted: a stay of the ruling while an appeal proceeded. 

Powerful dissenting opinions from the three liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, made sure the public knew that these orders, while making no law, had the real-world effect of enabling the president to carry out his agenda, including slashing the federal work force and gutting lifesaving foreign assistance programs.

Chief Justice Roberts was usually in the majority on these unsigned and generally unexplained orders; obviously he thought the stays were called for. But, he probably isn’t happy with the drip-drip-drip of public perception — reflected in polls and social media chatter — that the court was handing the president a blank check.

Something different happened in late December when the justices denied the administration’s request for a stay of a district-court decision barring its use of the National Guard in Illinois. The order was unsigned, with Justices Samuel Alito, Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissenting. The three-page order essentially made new law by narrowly defining the circumstances under which a president could federalize a state’s National Guard.

This was a very big deal❗ Donald Trump promptly acceded to the order, removing the federalized Guard from Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon as well as Chicago. Yet, the court’s action, coming on the day before Christmas Eve, received far less attention than the tariff case. 

In discussions about the court today, few people even seem to remember it.😔 It is as if the view of the court as the administration’s lackey was so entrenched that evidence to the contrary was too discordant to be fully absorbed.

The tariff decision was the first of the court’s rulings, after full briefing and oral argument, on the merits of one of the second Trump administration’s cases. A decision on the administration’s effort to fire a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors may be next. In that case, the administration claims sufficient cause to dismiss a Fed governor, Lisa Cook, based on assertions it claims she made in mortgage agreements. 

During oral argument, Chief Justice Roberts seemed to recoil from the overwrought tone of Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s argument, which began with, “Deceit or gross negligence by a financial regulator in financial transactions is cause for removal,” even though there has been no judicial finding that Ms. Cook engaged in either.

“You began by talking about deceit,” Chief Justice Roberts said to Mr. Sauer. “Does what you said after that apply in the case of an inadvertent mistake contradicted by other documents in the record?” Mr. Sauer’s answer, “We would say yes,” hung unsatisfactorily in the air as the argument proceeded for the next two hours.

It’s worth remembering that Chief Justice Roberts is the head of the entire judicial branch. 

In that impressive capacity, his vexation with Donald Trump verges on acute concern. 

Donald Trump denounced judges who ruled against him, including by calling for a Federal District Court judge’s impeachment. 

Donald Trump helped to create an atmosphere whereby judges appropriately fear for their personal safety and worried about their families. Many people expected the chief justice to address this issue directly in his year-end report in December, but he 😥  did not. 

In two decades as the nation’s top jurist, Chief Justice Roberts has, at times, spoken directly in defense of the judiciary, as in his 2024, report. But, these occasions were infrequent, as if the only messages this notably self-possessed and buttoned-down man cares to send are those he writes and his opinions deliver.

Donald Trump State of Delusion speech was long, boring and a litany of lies. Republicans behaving badly!

Obviously, "in order to form a more perfect union", was omitted from this daunting rant. Can anybody donate a copy to him or to somebody who can read it aloud to him❓

Donald Trump’s unworthy state of the union: An address not fit for America’s 250th birthday echo essay published in The Economist. 

At the beginning of his first term, Donald Trump used his address to a joint session of Congress to deliver “a message of unity and strength”, urging bipartisan action as he looked nine years ahead to America’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of its declaration of independence. “What will America look like as we reach our 250th year?” he wondered then.

As Trump marked the arrival of that anniversary in his state-of-the-union speech on February 24th, America does not look at all like the country that, on the occasion of his rookie outing nine years ago, he tried to conjure.

Trump began that address, in February 2017, by observing that it was Black History Month and declaring there was still work to be done on “our nation’s path toward civil rights”. 

He urged support from Congress for some initiatives that remain central to his politics, such as building a border wall, but also for others that have long since shriveled, such as “positive immigration reform”, along with “accessible and affordable” child care, new investment in women’s health and for “clean air and clean water”, and a “rebirth of hope” in “our neglected inner cities”. Trump told Congress then, “True love for our people requires us to find common ground.”

But, this week, as Trump heralded the American anniversary, he still touted grandiose visions—of a “golden age” and a “turnaround for the ages”, achieved in just his first year back in office—but they did not include any summons to an American common ground. 

Incredible, but he did not even mention unity. Instead he repeatedly called Democratic congressmen “sick” and “crazy” and said they were “destroying our country”. 

If they had power, he warned, they would open America’s borders to “some of the worst criminals anywhere in the world”, the likes of the “Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota” by committing fraud. He said Democrats can win elections only by cheating. 🤥💢

What happened, in the past decade, to the president who once talked about unity❓ And to the country where that idea still seemed plausible, or at least desirable, in its politics? An impeachment, a pandemic, a racial reckoning over police violence, an insurrection to block the peaceful transfer of power and then another impeachment, plus assorted lawsuits and prosecutions probably all played roles. 

So did Trump’s growing confidence in the power of his polarizing politics. After all, he dutifully read that first speech to Congress off the teleprompter, and it lasted just an hour. This time, he set a numbing record for such speeches, at an hour and 48 minutes, and he was most engaged with his material when he departed from his script, though his “weave” became ever more frayed as the evening wore on. (“Space Force is my baby, because we did that,” he said, to entirely Republican applause, though he said nothing about what the force was up to.)

Consider the House chamber from the president’s vantage point. To his right sat Democratic representatives, who he believes, with reason, will support him in almost nothing he does. 

Directly in front of him sat four justices of the Supreme Court, which, though dominated by conservatives, had just signaled its commitment to its independent authority. By ruling unlawful his novel assertion of a presidential power to impose border taxes at whim, it stripped  Trump of his prized thunderbolts, his most reliable means of dominating the world’s attention and extracting obeisance from abroad. “An unfortunate ruling”, Trump called it in his speech, with uncharacteristic restraint.

With those two constituencies beyond his control, Trump focused his message upon the Republican representatives in the chamber. He cannot afford to lose them. But he knows that, with midterm elections this autumn, they are growing restive. 

Recent polling shows that public approval of Trump is plumbing depths not seen since the insurrection of January 6th 2021. Key constituencies, including independent voters, Latinos and even young Republicans, are losing confidence in him. Fully six in ten respondents told the Marist poll this month that America is worse off now than a year ago.

SOTU voce: Although Trump savaged Republican members of Congress who have broken with him in recent months on tariffs or making war, he was careful in his speech to make no such criticisms. He offered few new policy ideas. But his open contempt, if not hatred, of Democrats along with his trademark braggadocio about his own accomplishments helped draw Republicans together by signaling his intention to go on the offensive over the economy and immigration. Seeming, as usual, less like the House speaker than a house elf, Mike Johnson sat perched over Trump’s left shoulder, grinning eagerly at his faintest witticism; the president has learned that Mr Johnson will serve as his loyal whip rather than the leader of a coequal branch of government.

Trump did supply some uplift. The Olympic men’s hockey team and the heroic servicemen he pointed to in the gallery were reassuring evidence that, in this 250th year, Americans still have passions apart from politics and values that transcend partisanship.

But when it came to politics, culture war substituted for any loftier ambition; Trump’s invocation of Black History Month in 2017, gave way in 2026, to acronymic sloganeering: “We ended DEI in America!” (Meanwhile, the leader of the DEI movement being Justice Clarence Thomas was seated only a few feet away from Trump's rants❗)

On a momentous question, whether America will again attack Iran and if so why,❓🥺 , Trump offered only a muddle. 

On the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine he had no new vision for ending the war. He had nothing to say about the challenge posed by China or the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. This speech is likely to be remembered only for its length, but its effect will be to further shrink the significance of the state-of-the-union address. ■