Feb
20
2025

We Coulda and Shoulda …

… elected Nikki instead.

As I keep mentioning, this blog is guided, as much as possible by Elvis Costello's advice: try to be amused. But certain things deserve disgust, and today is one of those days. Jim Geraghty tells the sad story: The American Betrayal of Ukraine Begins.

There’s still time for President Trump to turn it around. But so far in his second term, regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump has offered to Vladimir Putin that Ukraine will not retake all its annexed and occupied sovereign territory, that Ukraine will not join NATO, that there will be no U.S. troops on Ukrainian soil after the war, and that the U.S. will lift sanctions on Russia. And Trump might even throw in a withdrawal of the extra 20,000 U.S. troops that Joe Biden sent to NATO’s eastern flank after the invasion of Ukraine.

And in exchange, Putin offered . . . well, nothing, really.

Apparently, this is the Art of the Deal.

Over at the Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg is also contemptuous: Realism for a Condo Salesman.

Donald Trump lashed out at the democratically elected Ukrainian president today, calling him “a dictator.”

Forget that this is a lie, just like Trump’s insinuation that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia—a claim that is the geopolitical equivalent of saying a rape victim started it by, well, being rapable.

But I don’t want to talk about the lie. You can defend Trump by telling me that it’s sort of true because elections are overdue in Ukraine. They are! You know why? Because the entire country is mobilized for a war it didn’t start and about a fifth of it is occupied by a country led by an actual dictator who targets children’s hospitals and sanctions rape, child abductions, and mass slaughter by its troops. But if you don’t have something better than that, don’t even bother trying.

No, what I want to know is, why does Trump care if Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator? He doesn’t care that Putin, Xi, or Kim are dictators. Heck, America is negotiating over Ukraine’s survival in Saudi Arabia, which is not exactly a democracy.

And John Podhoretz can't believe his ears: What Did Trump Just Say About Ukraine? WHAT???

Over the past week, Donald Trump has been talking himself into becoming an enemy of Ukraine. It seems he needs to feel this way in order for him to do what he wants to do, which is impose terms of surrender on a sovereign nation that committed the crime—in his eyes now—of refusing to allow Russia to take it over.

That is the only logical way to understand Trump’s utterly despicable comments this afternoon. Annoyed, apparently, that Ukraine’s democratically elected leader objected to negotiations to which he was not invited—negotiations over a war in which he is one of the two combatants—Trump literally blamed him and the country he leads for the war itself. “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it—three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.”

You should never have started it. What madness, what cravenness, what repulsive factitiousness, is this? Volodymyr Zelenskyy offended him by raising the perfectly logical problem of a negotiation that included him out, and so Trump began talking about Ukraine’s leader as though he were Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who hasn’t permitted a vote on his leadership in two decades. “Well, we haven’t had an election there,” Trump said by way of explaining why he is insisting that Ukraine go to the polls as part of the peace deal Ukraine is not even involved with! We all assumed this was a Putin condition, but no, Trump said it was his idea. Zelenskyy became president of Ukraine in 2019. He was elected to a five-year term. The Russians invaded in February 2022. Generally speaking, it’s very difficult to hold an election when your country is fending off a near-genocidal action against it, and in any case, there was no requirement that there even be an election under peacetime Ukrainian law Yes, the U.S. had an election during World War II, but we weren’t a battleground.

I don't know how things will turn out. With a loose cannon like Trump rolling around the decks of the Ship of State, I am not particularly hopeful.

On to more cheerful topics, I hope:

  • Spoiler: the 'Wall Street of Eggs' is Broadway, in Dover, New Hampshire. Page One of the WSJ's Business section yesterday: 'Buyers Flock to ‘Wall Street of Eggs’.

    The nation’s biggest egg marketplace doesn’t own hens, farms or processing plants.

    From an office building in New Hampshire, roughly a dozen people facilitate the trading of billions of eggs a year, a task that shapes what Americans pay per dozen at the supermarket or for omelets at diners.

    The Egg Clearinghouse, or ECI, is little known outside the industry: It operates an online marketplace that allows participants to place bids on eggs listed for sale and see the results of trades. Only ECI members—farmers and egg buyers—are allowed to trade.

    Top comment: "Wow! The Egg Clearinghouse is real - I thought it was a shell company".

    ECI is located at 122 Broadway, and it's not just an office building, it's a dinky office building, easy to miss as you're heading into, or out of, Dover.

    Personal trivia: they used to be in Durham, next to my dentist's offices. I could see it out the window while getting my teeth cleaned!

  • In other news: broken clock is occasionally correct. Jacob Sullum is no fan of the Imperial Presidency. So attention should be paid when he claims Trump has reason to complain about limits on his ability to fire executive officers.

    Donald Trump likes to fire people, and he resents congressional constraints on that presidential prerogative. While Trump's opponents may view that attitude as one more manifestation of his autocratic instincts, his complaint is grounded in legitimate concerns about the separation of powers that presidents of both major parties have raised for many years.

    Jacob goes through the history: postmasters, FTC commisioners, the CFPB. Bottom line:

    Under the Constitution, the federal government consists of three distinct branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. In recognizing an amalgam that is independent of presidential control, the [SCOTUS] justices effectively authorized a fourth branch of government that the Framers never imagined.

  • Speaking of SCOTUS… George F. Will holds out some hope that The Supreme Court can fix this mess of its own making.

    This week, the Supreme Court can begin cleaning up a predictable mess — it was predicted by a justice at the time — that it made with a misbegotten decision 20 years ago. The justices in conference on Friday are set to begin considering whether to decide a case that gives the court an opportunity to overturn Kelo, a decision so bad it provoked the passage of many beneficial state laws.

    Fingers crossed. GFW notes that the Connecticut property at issue in Kelo is an empty lot "where feral cats now roam."

  • And it's Jeff Maurer, so that opening will be filled with dirty words. He thinks that Democrats Have an Opening on Housing.

    What’s the Democrats’ message? “Orange man bad'“? I mean, yes, that’s the honest answer. “That wasn’t me throwing bags of piss at cops in Portland five years ago”? That’s a message we use, too. “I’m sorry that I once supported giving anyone who crosses the border complimentary gender reassignment surgery, a taxpayer-funded job, and $1,000 cash every week for life, I ate some expired yogurt and was hallucinating but I’m all better now”? All of these messages are in the mix, but I’m not sure that any of them are winners.

    Democrats need messages that speak to the challenges in people’s lives. Life, despite being generally easier than it’s ever been, is still really fucking hard. Everything costs too much. Work blows. The Star Wars franchise is shit, last year’s World Series was the goddamned Yankees versus the motherfucking Dodgers, and — I’m just going to say it — your kids are ugly. Voters want a message about removing the barriers that stand between them and their goals, and if that message happens to be true, that’s a nice little bonus.

    I think the opening for Democrats in 2026 is going to be housing costs. The rent is too damn high, folks — that simple message from the 2013 New York mayoral campaign stuck in people’s heads even though the man delivering it was five percent too crazy even for New York politics. It’s likely that two years from now, rent, mortgages, and housing costs, generally, will still be too damn high. And there will be a true story about why that’s Republicans’ fault.

    Jeff is convincing that Trump has no policies that will alleviate housing costs, and a number of policies that will make things worse (like tariffs).

    Left unmentioned: the Democrats are in the same position. With probably the additional bad idea of price controls.

  • AI Report A book I recently read was insistent that rich elites in America were geographically concentrated, and leaned heavily toward Democrats. I decided to ask Grok, the AI embedded in Twitter, a question that might provide evidence for that. My admittedly clunky first whack at that:

    What is the party breakdown of the Congress members representing the 20 richest districts in the USA?

    Grok was impressive: it clarified my query (correctly), showed its work, and came up with an answer: 15 Democrats, 5 Republicans.

    I also tried Google's Gemini. Which simply refused to answer.

    Finally, ChatGPT from OpenAI: they found 20 Democrats, 0 Republicans. But their data was not the latest.

    Winner: Grok.