• President Donald Trump’s rally comments about male candidates are getting more and more, er, specific. Maybe he’s listened to “YMCA” too many times?
• The aftershocks of Trump’s reprehensible diesel deal with the Kremlin continue to reverberate. Late last week, Starshield—the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink, which Elon Musk’s company provides for the Pentagon, and which Ukraine uses to coordinate its air defenses—went down for about 72 hours. During this outage, Russia conducted some of the most intensive aerial attacks against Ukrainian territory since the war began, killing and wounding dozens and shutting down power for 600,000. Trump and Musk each denied ordering restrictions on Starshield, but public reporting strongly suggests that Musk approached Trump with the idea in order to turn the heat up on Kyiv for objecting to Trump’s unilaterally declared “energy cease-fire.” As the furor over Starshield grew, on Wednesday the Kremlin released an imprisoned American, Stephen Hubbard of Michigan, whom the State Department says Russia had “wrongfully detained.” On social media, Trump crowed that Russia released its hostage “out of respect for”—well—Trump. He added that the United States “was not required to give anything in return.” But the president also later told reporters that Hubbard would not have been released if the sanctions had stayed. A bipartisan group of nine U.S. senators has demanded an inspector general investigation into the Starshield disruptions. But Congress should provide real oversight by holding public hearings and calling witnesses under oath to explain why its legislation sanctioning Russia—both a 2022 sanctions law and another one passed just weeks ago—was so directly undermined. It is good that an American has been brought home from captivity. But Trump ought to remember that paying the Danegeld invites more Danes.
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