Good morning! Wasilla, Alaska, Tuesday afternoon. Eight hours on Air Force One, a 3,500-seat arena, and the president of the United States explaining how much the world admires him.
“They disrespected us. They laughed at us,” he told the crowd. “They don’t laugh anymore.” Foreign leaders, he said, now tell him, “Sir, you’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.” His summary: “We’re respected like never before.”
Hold that thought. This week put it to the test.
On Sunday, Trump announced on Truth Social that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “ENERGY CEASEFIRE,” effective immediately, with a stern “Do not break it!” Zelensky said the news came as a surprise to him. Moscow replied Tuesday night into Wednesday morning with 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 attack drones aimed at power plants and energy infrastructure, the very targets the ceasefire was meant to protect. Ukraine’s air defenses intercepted just four of the 39 ballistic missiles, although most of the drones were neutralized. Twenty-six power facilities were damaged, and at least 600,000 people woke up without electricity. “Russia has never before shown such ostentatious disrespect towards the United States,” Zelensky said.
An adversary defying Washington is one kind of problem. Allies correcting it is another, and Europe spent the week doing exactly that.
Brussels went first. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, warned that lifting sanctions on Russian diesel would only help sustain Moscow’s war. The bloc’s message boiled down to: we stand with Kyiv, and we’ll continue on our own path. That’s diplomatic language for telling Washington that Europe isn’t obligated to change its policy every time Trump gets off the phone with Putin.
Then came Rome. Giorgia Meloni was the only European leader at Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the ally Brussels hoped would be its bridge to his White House. That bridge has been burning all year. She called his attacks on Pope Leo XIV unacceptable and the Iran war illegal, and in June she said his claim that she had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 was “completely made up.” Her foreign minister cancelled a trip to Washington, saying Trump’s words offended “the whole of Italy.” On Wednesday she finished the thought in parliament, calling his Russian diesel deal “very risky,” a “legitimization of Moscow while its bombs continue to fall on Ukrainian cities,” and adding that fuel prices are surging “above all” because of the war in Iran, not Ukraine. She said it amid renewed pressure from Italian industry to reconsider Russian energy imports, including calls for a less ideological approach to Russian energy. Less than two years after she stood at his inauguration, “respected like never before” needs a footnote.
London added its own chorus. Kemi Badenoch, leader of Britain’s Conservatives and Trump’s natural ideological kin, said “Ukraine’s freedom is not President Trump’s to bargain away.” On national radio, Luke Harding, the Guardian’s former Moscow correspondent, was asked whether the American president is effectively a Russian asset. He said it was hard to reach any other conclusion, and named compromising material as the likeliest explanation. He offered no evidence beyond the pattern itself, and a former British defence attaché on the same program pushed back on some of the week’s claims. Consider how far the conversation has traveled. On British national radio, the question has nothing to do with the American president commanding respect, but whether his puzzling relationship with Putin might be explained by compromising material.
This spring, Pew surveyed 42,151 people in 36 countries. Across those countries, the median share expressing confidence in Trump’s handling of world affairs was just 23%. U.S. favorability sat at 37%, against 57% unfavorable. In Canada, the share calling the U.S. a reliable partner fell from 83% in 2022 to 35% this year.
Respect between nations rests on something duller than applause: predictability. Last month, Trump signed a sweeping Russia sanctions law. Last Friday, after a call with Putin, he announced that Russia would supply diesel “to the American and Global Marketplace,” and Treasury suspended sanctions on Russian diesel until April. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis says there’s a legitimate case that the president isn’t following the law. On Tuesday, Trump told reporters the deal was “not for us.” His original Truth Social post said otherwise, and the Treasury license explicitly authorizes Russian diesel imports into the United States.
Then there’s the private power riding alongside the public kind. Elon Musk, by his own team’s count the midterms’ biggest known donor at more than $276 million since July, owns the satellite network Ukraine’s military depends on. Early Wednesday, with no warning, Ukrainian drone units found their Starlink connections failing at speed. Even Starshield, SpaceX’s military-grade service, was affected, and some missions were cancelled.
Here’s the twist. In February, SpaceX worked with Ukraine to restrict Russian drones using Starlink, including speed-based cutoffs. Ukrainian officials praised the effort. Now speed restrictions are disrupting Ukraine’s own drone operations, including missions relying on military-grade Starshield. This week, Musk posted that “Zelensky has gone too far.” Ukrainian officials suspect a connection. Nobody has shown one, and SpaceX hasn’t explained. Poland, which pays about $50 million a year for Ukraine’s Starlink service, didn’t wait for an explanation. “Hey, @elonmusk, big man, are you playing politics with your products again?” Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski wrote. “As your European customers, we are watching you.” (More on Starlink in a standalone piece soon.)
Add the habit of treating preliminary arrangements as completed accomplishments. In Wasilla, Trump told Sen. Dan Sullivan that every permit for the Alaska LNG project was in hand: “You can start tonight.” The federal permits really have been approved. But Taiwan’s planned purchases build on a nonbinding letter of intent signed in March 2025, the commercial terms are still being worked out, and its government says deliveries could begin in 2032 at the earliest. In Trump’s parlance, being ready to start construction and being ready to deliver natural gas are now interchangeable achievements.
No foreign government has weighed in on how Trump blurs governing and campaigning, but it raises the same question the world keeps asking: does a presidential act mean what it claims to mean?
The Wasilla rally was paid for by Trump 47 Committee, a joint fundraising operation of the RNC and Trump’s Save America PAC. There, White House aide Natalie Harp carried official pardon documents to the stage. Trump signed pardons for Zachary Czubak and Patrick Fleming, co-owners of an Anchorage diesel shop who pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act by removing pollution controls and tampering with emissions-monitoring systems on at least 37 vehicles. The violations occurred between July 2019 and September 2020, entirely during Trump’s first term in office.
Trump told the crowd the government wanted to put the men in jail “for 10 years because they fixed an engine.” Neither was sentenced to prison. Czubak received five years’ probation and a $66,000 fine; Fleming was fined $66,000. Two other Alaska diesel mechanics Trump pardoned earlier this year, fellow shop owner Michael Hanzuk II and Mackenzie Spurlock, also received probation and fines rather than prison.
Then Czubak took the microphone: “Let’s reelect Dan Sullivan. Let’s reelect Nick.” Clemency first, then the endorsement.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick used the same stage to celebrate Taiwan’s prospective LNG purchases and investment as an accomplished deal. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, meanwhile, prefaced his remarks about additional federal broadband funding with “in my personal capacity.”
On Monday, 22 days before the election, Homeland Security Investigations agents searched the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar under a court-authorized warrant. The Justice Department confirmed an ongoing criminal investigation but hasn’t publicly explained its scope. The Washington Post reports that investigators are examining allegations that Omar or her late father misstated information in immigration and citizenship documents dating to her childhood. Omar denies wrongdoing and has not been charged.
Trump has repeatedly accused Omar of marrying her own brother to commit immigration fraud, a separate allegation never substantiated by credible public evidence. In March, Vice President Vance declared, without presenting evidence, that “Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud.” Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said an investigation was underway and promised that “something’s going to happen.”
The Justice Department has long avoided overt investigative steps involving candidates this close to an election. Asked Tuesday whether Omar, a naturalized American citizen, should be deported, Trump said, “I don’t take a position,” before calling her a terrible congresswoman who doesn’t love her country. By evening in Wasilla, he was telling the crowd that Somalia had “fleeced Minnesota.”
Norm Eisen’s Democracy Defenders Fund has filed a Hatch Act complaint, supported by former George W. Bush White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter, alleging that the search was timed to influence the election. For Senate-confirmed cabinet officials, however, any Hatch Act findings warranting discipline ultimately return to the president.
Even the new press secretary’s debut offered a specimen. “Attendance is at record highs,” Katie Zacharia announced Tuesday, with Americans “packing arenas.” The night before in Youngstown, local reporters counted roughly 2,500 to 3,000 people, compared with 7,000 in 2017 and 5,500 in 2022. Sections were tarped off, and seats remained empty. Nor was Youngstown an isolated case. In Mobile, Alabama, where estimates ranged as high as 30,000 in 2015, about 8,000 turned out this month. In Vandalia, Ohio, the crowd shrank from roughly 10,000 in 2016 to just over 4,000 in a high school facility. And in Syracuse, local reporters estimated that more people gathered to protest Trump than attended his rally. Some smaller venues have filled to capacity, but that’s rather different from setting attendance records. Sean Spicer, call your office.
Over the weekend, a man entered the tiger enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park near Doncaster in England and was killed. The park asked the public not to share footage of the attack, and South Yorkshire Police did the same. The president of the United States shared it anyway, with a caption about being careful how you handle nature. Then he posted an AI-generated video of himself wrestling with a tiger and embracing it. The man’s family has since spoken of the pain circulation of the original video has caused. Any decent human being would reject the idea of amplifying this death, but Trump saw an opportunity for content and took it.
Respect has to be earned, and it’s earned in exactly these small moments, when nobody can make you behave.
Trump may be right about one thing. They don’t laugh anymore.
In London, commentators are openly appalled. In Rome, an ally is publicly challenging his judgment. Across Europe, governments are reconsidering how much they can safely depend on Washington. Alarm isn’t respect, and increasingly, they’re making other arrangements.
The American people have to rein in the Trump administration by voting against the MAGA GOP in overwhelming numbers next month.
Trump and the MAGA GOP have already done such significant damage to our society, economy, alliances, and international reputation that it’ll take a Democratic majority Congress and a Democratic President more than a decade to recover all the lost ground (if it hasn’t been lost permanently).
This is a Code Red. America is hemorrhaging wealth, power, and moral authority. This is unsustainable. Our ship of state has run amok. Allowing the MAGA GOP to remain in power would be suicidal. This cannot be stated strongly enough.
All are wise to be making other arrangements.