The president and vice president of the United States spent February 28, 2025, berating the leader of a country fighting to survive, and that day I wrote that this was an emergency. “Not just emergency. Catastrophe.” Congress, I argued, ought to begin emergency impeachment proceedings “as if the lives of their own children depend on it.” Within six weeks I was writing about the time of monsters and about the friends and relatives who had begun to suspect I was turning into an unhinged paranoiac. That essay was cautious almost to a fault: I wrote that I was making no prediction of war, merely reading heightened risk off conditions anyone could observe, and that those who brushed it aside were showing a familiar, well-studied case of normalcy bias.
Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin for the ninth time on Wednesday, at the Constantine Palace just outside St. Petersburg, where he thanked the Russian leader for freeing Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American teacher whom Moscow had held for more than four years on what the State Department called fabricated charges. A hostage was taken, kept four years, then returned, and for that the American envoy bowed. “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Witkoff told a man whose army has shelled Ukrainian apartment blocks and carried off Ukrainian children for four and a half years. Then he added, “You are a humanitarian also, sir.”
Surprise would be a pose, and I will not strike it. These chickens have come home to roost on the complacency of a nation that was shown, clearly and again and again, exactly what was in front of it.
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Begin with the past two months. Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act in September, a law the Senate had approved 86 to 11 to honor a senator who was fresh back from Ukraine when he died in July. Having signed his dead friend’s law, he hollowed it out. A Russian diesel purchase came first, one that Foreign Policy said “sharply undercuts” the statute, followed by an executive order that spared Russia the sanctions entirely. Over those same weeks the satellite network Ukraine relies on to shoot Russian drones out of the sky was slowed, and at times the administration held back real-time intelligence about Russian strikes on the way.
After that he let us hear his view. “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” he said this week. “They haven’t been doing much.” As the words left his mouth, Russian missiles were hitting Ukrainian power plants. By Tuesday he had turned his fire on the victim. “Zelenskyy has to want to settle this war,” he said, “and if he doesn’t, I think it’s going to be a very bad thing.” Going back to the ambush of February 2025, he claimed Zelensky could have gotten a “better deal” at the time, as if being humiliated in the Oval Office had been a generous offer. Putin, meanwhile, is angling for a summit in China next month with Trump and Xi Jinping to wrap up the war, according to The Atlantic, “without having a seat at the table for Ukraine.” Zelensky’s answer took five words: “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”
Reading this takes no special skill. Trump and his people regard Ukraine as an obstacle and want it cleared, since money waits on the far side. Moscow has never been subtle about its pitch. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the Kremlin had sold the White House on peace through business, with the president and his envoy signed on. In February The Economist reported that Russia had drawn up what it called “the Greatest Deal” for Trump, featuring Arctic oil and gas, rare-earth mines and a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait, while Zelensky, drawing on Ukrainian intelligence, valued the offers at $12 trillion. Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy, called that figure a fake. So be it. Discount the number. All of Russia produces roughly $2.5 trillion a year. When a nation dangles deals several times the size of its own output, it is working a con, and the mark is a man who has always been sure his next deal will be the largest anyone has ever seen. Gullibility and narcissism are, in Trump, a single flaw with two names, and Putin has been playing on it for ten years.
Then the fog arrived. On Monday I wrote about Musk pinning the Starshield slowdown on the president while the president pinned it on no one. According to Musk, any speed limits were the military’s call and “ultimately POTUS.” Rubio said “It sort of happened,” insisted that Starshield “has nothing to do with Ukraine,” and a few days later conceded that Ukraine “has benefited from it.” Monday brought Trump’s claim that he did not know who was responsible. Tuesday brought a Wall Street Journal report, sourced to US officials, that Musk himself ordered the slowdown and talked it over with Trump by phone shortly after it went public. Come Wednesday, Rubio was describing the call as one for SpaceX and Musk to make, and whether the White House had advance knowledge as “irrelevant.” Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, pointed at SpaceX. Each version of events has its own author, and each author turns out to be the one party who bears no responsibility.
I cannot see an accident in any of this. To my eye it is deliberate, the Kremlin’s playbook run from Washington: flood the public with so many conflicting stories that no one can work out what happened, then wait for attention to drift. Did Moscow coach them? It would not surprise me, though coaching was hardly necessary. These men have been fluent in this dialect for years.
Back in April 2025, I laid out a feedback loop. Economic hardship produced by nationalist policy, I argued, gets felt as proof of a grievance instead of as a failure of policy, and “economic pain leads not to policy reconsideration but to doubling down.” My subject then was tariffs. Which shock came next I could not say; what I could see was that the machine for converting each shock into the following one had already been assembled and turned on.
Exactly one year after the Oval Office meeting, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel began striking Iran, and the wider war that followed strangled shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. In September diesel reached a record $6.53 a gallon, and Moody’s Analytics puts the war’s cost to the average American household at almost $2,000. Rather than rethink the war, the administration went looking for diesel, and Moscow had some to sell. According to The New York Times, the sanctions waivers were a last-ditch effort to push fuel prices down ahead of the midterms, and Trump is now “explicitly seeking economic support from Russia.” One war’s bill, then, is being settled by deserting the people who fight the other, and those presenting the invoice to Kyiv are the same men who launched the war that ran it up.
Midterm panic should not be confused with concern for the Republican Party. Trump’s interest in the party reaches precisely as far as its usefulness as a shield, and at the moment that means through November. The fate of the party after him, or of the country after him, has never figured in his arithmetic, and the past twenty months offer no sign it ever will.
Seen from within, this is how the time of monsters looks. It unfolds as a chain of decisions instead of a single event that everyone recognizes together, each one marketed as pragmatic, each one shrinking the choices for the one after, until an American envoy is praising a kidnapper of children as a humanitarian and an American president is naming the kidnapper’s victim as the obstacle to peace.
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Ignorance was never the cause of the complacency. The information was there for anyone who cared to look. What was missing was the will to treat an emergency as an emergency, and normalcy bias names that missing will: the belief that tomorrow will resemble yesterday, that institutions will survive because they always have, that somebody will eventually intervene. What I wrote about in The Politics of Nothing Can Be Done as inevitability, normalcy bias acts out over dinner at home. Here is depoliticization working upward from below. No one needs to inform the public that nothing can be done, since the public informs itself each time it concludes the alarm is most likely a drill.
Among elected officials the problem is worse, since they hold tools the rest of us do not. Six Republican senators put their names to a letter calling the diesel deal “a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies.” Days afterward, when Ukraine disclosed that it could no longer stop Russian drones, many of the conference’s loudest champions of Ukraine stayed silent. The most forceful Republican voice has belonged to Thom Tillis, who is not running for re-election, and that is hardly a coincidence. Most of the Republicans talking now have nothing left to lose, and letters are what they have to offer. Yet the Senate that approved the sanctions law 86 to 11 commands subpoenas, appropriations and enough votes to enforce its own statute. You send a letter once you have resolved to leave all of that unused.
And then comes Mitt Romney, who reappeared on X last week for the first time since July. “Abandon Ukraine and we abandon liberty,” he wrote. “Eventually even our own.” On Wednesday he likened Zelensky to Churchill and Washington, who could each have “done a deal.” Both are fine sentences, and the name of the man doing the abandoning appears in neither. A statement of principle with the guilty party’s name carefully omitted is the most Romney can muster. His saying it leaves me grateful and furious at once, because he grasped the stakes in 2024 and made the other choice. One month ahead of that election he said he did not want Trump as president and expected Trump would probably win, yet he declined to endorse the only candidate able to stop him, since he hoped to “continue to have a voice in the Republican Party” once it was over. Two months on he called the party shaped by Donald Trump now, and asked what lay ahead for him he replied “nothing.” He kept his voice in reserve for the party and then left it unspent for two years. The right words for that are cowardice and partisanship above country. So when a Republican friend says they long for a return to the party of Romney, remind them what that means: a party whose finest members saw this coming, said so with good manners, and got out of the way.
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As the walls close in, Trump will keep upping the ante, and the election itself is the next thing on the table. When Time asked him this month whether he might invoke the Insurrection Act around the midterms, he answered, “I don’t rule anything out or in,” and went on: “I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.” Some of those people have names. In the Minneapolis protests earlier this year, after ICE officers killed Alex Pretti, Vice President JD Vance pressed him to invoke the act “to crush the unrest in Minnesota,” and Stephen Miller repeatedly pushed him to suspend habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants. Steve Bannon is urging him to “call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne” to “get around every poll.” Asked if he would refuse an order to station troops at polling places, Hegseth declined to answer. In Minneapolis it was optics rather than law that held the Insurrection Act back: one aide asked what it would gain them that justified the heat, and “Nobody had a good answer.” That is a flimsy barrier. In my judgment Trump is quite likely to try imposing martial law at some point, a power no president has under any statute, and I doubt the lack of authority will keep him from the attempt.
My expectation is that the Supreme Court would strike it down, and that it would do so for the wrong reason. This Court answers to capital before it answers to Trump. It struck down his emergency tariffs in February, and in June, by 5 to 4, it refused to let him fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, all while it upheld his other firings and tightened his hold over the remainder of the government. Threaten the markets and the justices discover a spine. Threaten only the voters and the record grows thinner, the rulings come after soldiers are already deployed, and an election cannot be rerun. Assuring yourself that the Court will stop him is just another way of assuring yourself that the institutions will hold, the very normalcy bias that has let this emergency run on for twenty months. A Court that protects the central bank might protect the ballot or might not, and no one should bet the midterms on learning which.
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Right now the pull is toward the vocabulary of endings, toward saying the cancer is terminal and the decline is settled, so that all that remains to ask is how long it will take. I feel that pull as strongly as anyone does. Yet it is the very move Monday’s essay went after, the forecast that frees everyone from the obligation to act. A prognosis is one thing and an emergency another. The entire point of declaring an emergency is that the outcome remains open, and that what comes next turns on what people choose to do.
For twenty months Zelensky has heard that the numbers have already delivered their verdict, that Russia has more soldiers, that America has lost interest, that the sensible course is to sign. Again and again he rejects the forecast. At the very least the rest of us can stop treating the survival of his country as weather.
February 2025 was an emergency, April was too, and so is now; what has changed is only that those who called me paranoid can see it as well. I wrote then that we needed action “now. Not in four years.” Nearly half of those four years are gone.
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