What Fresh Hell Do We Have Today?

Sure, we’ve abandoned Ukraine, launched a trade war with our neighbors, and insulted close allies. But at least we’re screwing over our veterans, too.

Still deeper abandonments of Ukraine! Slapdash DOGE cuts at the VA! Day one of our brave new economy-curdling trade war with Canada and Mexico! Strap in: It’s a big old overstuffed burrito of a Morning Shots today. Happy Tuesday.

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(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.)

A Doctrine of Abandonment

by William Kristol

Encouraged by the cheers of his sycophants, empowered by the silence of his enablers, Donald Trump took another step yesterday down the dishonorable and dangerous path of betraying Ukraine and siding with Vladimir Putin.

And there will be further steps. The administration’s cutoff of aid to Ukraine will surely be followed by further attempts to isolate President Volodymyr Zelensky and further weaken Ukraine. Trump’s expression of solidarity with Putin in the Oval Office on Friday will be followed by the restoration of ties with, and relief from sanctions for, Putin’s regime—which is already reportedly being planned. The failure to notify NATO beforehand of the aid cutoff is simply a precursor to further moves by the Trump administration to undercut and abandon that alliance, which Trump’s top adviser publicly endorses.

And so we are at a moment of truth: Can something resembling a stable and decent world order be maintained without the support of the American president? Can it be maintained with the outright hostility of the American president?

We haven’t had to test this proposition during my lifetime. We are about to do so now.

It’s a daunting thought. For the last eighty years, the United States has been the anchor of the liberal world order. And it’s almost always been the president of the United States who has helped that anchor hold firm when the U.S. Congress or our European allies were uncertain.

Even when American presidents have occasionally gone wobbly, they haven’t previously gone to the other side.

So, as the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, put it yesterday, “We are living in the most momentous and dangerous of times.”

Can we survive them? Can the civilized world survive in the face not merely of a failure of leadership on the part of the U.S. president, but in the face of his active antipathy to democracy, to the Western alliance, to the cause of freedom in the world?

The odds aren’t great. The jungle will most likely grow back. We and our children and our children’s children will likely face a world of dictators triumphant, wars of aggression encouraged, nuclear weapons proliferating, and authoritarian ideologies empowered by success.

What can be done?

Congress could step up here at home and Europe could step up abroad.

But while a revival of European will and purpose looks more possible than I’d have thought a few years ago, Congress has so far been missing in action.

Members could still conceivably be moved to act. But they will not do so without an American public that supports—nay, demands—that action. That is true across the Atlantic, too. European nations will not have the confidence to move forward without the sense that the American public is with them. So the American people—and American leaders from outside of government, from all the institutions of civil society—are key.

In his eloquent open letter to President Trump yesterday, Lech Wałęsa, the Polish dissident who became the first elected president of Poland after the fall of communism, was joined by dozens of other former political prisoners of the communist regime there in expressing “horror and disgust” at Trump’s Oval Office meeting.

Wałęsa reminded Trump that “Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world,” and added, “We do not understand how the leader of a country that is a symbol of the free world cannot see this.”

Donald Trump cannot see this. Do the American people?

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Bear-Hugging the Third Rail

by Andrew Egger

As DOGE rampages through the federal government, they’re not so much touching the third rail as bear-hugging it. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the cuts at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where more than 2,400 employees were fired last month.

By now, it’s a familiar story. After DOGE rampaged through the VA, agency leadership put out statements saying laid-off employees were “non-mission critical” and “probationary” (some were even in DEI!). Meanwhile, press reports trickled out detailing who had actually been fired: hospital staff, veteran outreach workers, employees manning a Veterans Crisis Line.

They weren’t done. Last week, VA Secretary Doug Collins announced that the agency would cut $2 billion in current contracts: “No more paying consultants to do things like make Power Point slides and write meeting minutes!” he boasted.

The reality was starkly different. The AP, which obtained the list of affected contracts, reported the cuts “would affect everything from cancer care to the ability to assess toxic exposure.” A day of frantic interventions from lawmakers and veterans’ groups later, Collins backtracked, announcing the contract cancellations would be paused until they could be individually assessed.

As in other agencies, the whole episode—haphazard, destructive, opaquely done and more opaquely communicated—left the agency in a state of semi-shock.

Here’s just one illustration of the low-level state of ambient chaos. For more than a decade, work has been in progress to build a massive new 470,000-square-foot outpatient VA health center outside Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was all set for its triumphal opening, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony to take place Friday.

And then, with a week to go, the federal VA informed its central Virginia office that the site’s general contractor might be on the DOGE chopping block.

The facility was fully built, but with doors opening to veterans in less than a week, contractors were still bringing in and installing medical equipment and setting up rooms. Rumors started swirling immediately: What would happen if the contract was yanked? Would workers still show up? Would they be able to open at all? A press release for the ribbon-cutting was quietly deleted from the regional VA website, sparking more concern and speculation.

Ultimately, the VA decided not to cancel that particular contract. The ribbon-cutting went forward as scheduled. But it wasn’t all celebration. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a longtime champion of the project, took the opportunity to denounce the recent VA firings: “This is no time to be laying off veterans. This is no time to be laying off folks in VA hospitals. This is a time to be celebrating the amazing veterans, VA employees—” He kept speaking, but was drowned out at this point in audience applause.

After the ceremony, Kaine told The Bulwark that the federal hiring freeze was still presenting barriers to quality VA care. “The folks who are running this facility, they are doing everything they can to staff up, but they got both the hiring freeze and this probationary layoff thing in their face, which makes it pretty difficult for them to get people to make the commitment. We have asked President Trump, they shouldn’t be doing any of this craziness.”

Kaine stressed that the government has left Congress in the dark in all this: “The administration is not saying, ‘Here’s our plan.’ Every time somebody tells us something, it’s like, okay, I see a different piece of the puzzle. But the administration isn’t sharing it with us, or the Republicans for that matter . . . They’re just willy-nilly taking action and we have to find out about it because somebody calls the office.”

On that front, Kaine’s clearly right: For the most part, Republican lawmakers have been reduced to DOGE bystanders and cheerleaders in all this. Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, was asked yesterday whether he could guarantee that DOGE cuts would not affect veterans’ benefits and care. “No, I can’t guarantee anything,” he said. “But the whole purpose, again, of restructuring is to make sure that that agency is efficient.”

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Whoa, Canada

by Martyn Wendell Jones

Donald Trump’s massive tariffs on goods from Canada dropped into place last night at midnight, and the initial monthlong delay that he apparently thought would soften up the neighbors to the north has instead radicalized them. His repeated remarks about Canada being absorbed into the United States have heightened their rage.

One minute after midnight, Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and 10 percent on energy products triggered retaliatory tariffs on the Canadian side: an initial 25 percent levy on $30 billion (CAD) of American imports, to be followed in three weeks by a further 25 percent on another $125 billion (CAD). (The delay between stages is intended to give Canadian businesses a chance to unlink their supply chains from American producers.)

But the dollar-for-dollar tariffs everyone is focusing on, much as they will hurt, are only a starting point for Canada’s response to Trump’s trade war. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said last night, “should U.S. tariffs not cease, we are in active and ongoing discussions with provinces and territories to pursue several non-tariff measures.”

It’s those non-tariff responses that Americans would do well to think about. Trump’s moronic gibes about annexation have incensed the most-educated country in the world, and much brainpower has been channeled into creative methods for causing Americans economic pain.

For starters, there is the possibility, endorsed by a progressive Canadian think tank, of placing punishing export taxes on Canadian goods for which American demand is both high and inelastic—including crude oil, unalloyed aluminum, and potash, a key fertilizer ingredient.

The consequences of tariffs on minerals imported into the United States from Canada will be “particularly profound for the [U.S.] defense industry, nuclear energy, and heavy manufacturing,” according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Canada supplies a quarter of the United States’ uranium imports and half its nickel; the two countries’ aluminum industries are deeply integrated. Both Canada and the United States could see their energy and security positions against China weakened.

Not to be outdone, the Canadian Labour Congress published its call to action last month under a forthright headline: “Cut Off U.S. Energy and Resources Now: No Electricity, No Critical Minerals, No Oil and Gas.”

“You need our uranium. You need our potash. You need our high-grade nickel,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford told NBC News on Monday. “Your aluminum. The steel. The lumber. It will be an absolute disaster.”

But Ford wasn’t talking about placing export taxes on these goods. He was describing plans for retaliatory export bans. And those aren’t the only stoppages Ford has said he’ll enact: “I’m going after absolutely everything.”

Imagining Ford’s forceful response to be unreflective of the constituents’ feelings—don’t they say “Sorry” at everything up there?—would be a mistake. Many Canadians want their leaders to go after absolutely everything. Even energy.

“We keep the lights on for 1.5 million homes and manufacturing in New York, in Michigan, and in Minnesota,” Ford told NBC News. “If [Trump] wants to destroy our economy and our families, I will shut down the electricity going down to the U.S. And I’m telling you, we will do it.”

“With a smile on my face,” he added in a speech on Monday: “They need to feel pain.”

One other possible mode of retaliation, unimaginable just a few weeks ago: intellectual property. A think tank based in Waterloo has advocated suspending U.S. patent rights. An Albertan pundit argued on Monday that by instigating a tariff war, Trump broke “the free trade agreement he signed during his first term, and we should move forward as if the agreement does not exist.” Among other things, she writes, this “frees up a lot of space in intellectual and technological property rights.” Further, “We can also disregard registered trademarks.”

In the minds of many Canadians, extreme measures like this are legitimate because, as one commentator puts it, “this isn’t really a trade war—it’s a shakedown.”

Coincidentally, the same day Trump said tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods would go ahead, a story broke that his administration is seeking to ease sanctions on Russia. After appeasing the bear, he has decided to drive his car into the moose. All of us are about to find out what happens next.

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Quick Hits

IF YOU WANNA MAKE AN OMELET: It’s tough times for the egg lovers out there. The persistence of bird flu has led to a continued surge in prices for said eggs. The Trump administration is reconsidering the main approach for dealing with the disease—which is to kill all the chickens on a farm where the virus is found. But until then, they are offering another idea: raising your own chickens. “People are sort of looking around thinking, ‘Wow, well maybe I can get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome,” Secretary of the Department of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told Fox News over the weekend.

Your Morning Shots correspondents have not yet seriously studied the question of backyard chickens. (Bill has shown a knee-jerk opposition to backyard fowl in internal discussions. The rest of us have an open mind, although we’ll want to ask Sarah if we can expense it.) But lest you think this was a gaffe from Rollins, keep in mind she proposed the same idea in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month. “We also want to make it easier for families to raise backyard chickens,” she wrote.

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THE MAN WITH THE SILVER TONGUE: With America apparently no longer concerned with what happens in Ukraine, Europe is trying to rise to the challenge of blocking Vladimir Putin’s advance. You’d think Trump, who has railed for years about Europe not paying enough for its own defense, would be pleased at the development. But the White House somehow still can’t resist taking further potshots at our allies (still our allies, we think!). In a Fox News interview last night, Vice President JD Vance sneered at a proposed joint British and French peacekeeping force in Ukraine, saying the U.S.’s proposed minerals deal was a better security guarantee than “20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.”

After a scandalized reaction in the British press, Vance tried to walk his comments back this morning, calling the idea he was referring to the U.K. or France—the only countries that had proposed putting troops on the ground—“absurdly dishonest.” He added: “But let’s be direct: There are many countries who are volunteering (privately or publicly) support who have neither the battlefield experience nor the military equipment to do anything meaningful.” Vance was so “direct” that he declined to name the countries he was trash talking.

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