Tim Miller and JVL talk Vice President JD Vance’s comments on Ukraine, framing it as “Joe Biden’s war” and casted doubt on continued U.S. support.

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Two days before President Donald Trump announced dramatic plans for “reciprocal” tariffs on foreign imports, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sold stock in almost three dozen companies, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.

The Feb. 11 sales occurred near the stock market’s historic peak, just before it began to slide amid concerns about Trump’s tariff plans and ultimately plummeted after the president unveiled the details of the new tariffs on April 2.

Disclosure records filed by Duffy with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics show he sold between $75,000 and $600,000 of stock two days before Trump’s Feb. 13 announcement, and up to $50,000 more that day.

Transportation secretaries normally have little to do with tariff policy, but Duffy has presented himself as one of the intellectual forefathers of Trump’s current trade agenda. As a congressman in 2019, his last government position before Trump elevated him to his cabinet post, Duffy introduced a bill he named the “United States Reciprocal Trade Act.” The proposed legislation, which did not pass, in many ways mirrors Trump’s reciprocal tariff plan. Duffy worked on that bill with Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro. Trump’s tariffs were “the culmination of that work,” Duffy posted online, referring to his own bill in the House.

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned in the course of their official duties could violate the law. However, it’s unclear whether Duffy had any information about the timing or scale of Trump’s reciprocal tariff plans before the public did.

Trump had repeatedly promised to institute significant tariffs throughout the campaign. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume Trump wouldn’t adopt the far-reaching levies that led to the market crash following his “Liberation Day” announcement.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a Transportation Department spokesperson said an outside manager made the trades and Duffy “had no input on the timing of the sales” — a defense that ethics experts generally consider one of the strongest against questions of trading on nonpublic information.

His stock transactions “are part of a retirement account and not managed directly by the Secretary. The account managers must follow the guidance of the ethics agreement and they have done so.”

“The Secretary strongly supports the President’s tariff policy, but he isn’t part of the administration’s decisions on tariff levels,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson dismissed the notion that knowledge of Trump’s coming tariffs could constitute insider knowledge because “President Trump has been discussing tariffs since the 1980s.”

Duffy is the second cabinet secretary to have sold stock at an opportune time.

Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. A government ethics agreement required Bondi to sell the shares within 90 days of her confirmation, a deadline that would have given her until early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. After the market closed that day, Trump presented his tariffs, sending the market reeling.

Following ProPublica’s story, at least two Democratic members of Congress called for investigations. Bondi has yet to answer questions about whether she knew anything about Trump’s tariff plans before the public did. The Justice Department has not responded to questions about the trades.

Disclosure forms for securities trading by government officials do not require them to state the exact amount bought or sold but instead to provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.

Duffy’s disclosure records show he sold 34 stocks worth between $90,000 and $650,000 on Feb. 11 and Feb. 13. Per the ethics agreement he signed to avoid conflicts of interest as head of the Transportation Department, he was required to sell off stock in seven of those companies during his first three months in office. Cabinet members are typically required to divest themselves of financial interests that intersect with their department’s oversight role, which in Duffy’s case involve U.S. roadways, aviation and the rest of the nation’s transportation network. The ethics agreement was dated Jan. 13, and Duffy was confirmed by the senate on Jan. 28, meaning he had until late April to sell. His spokesperson said he provided his account manager with the ethics agreement on Feb. 7.

The stocks he sold in the other 27 companies were not subject to the ethics agreement. Those shares were valued somewhere between $27,000 and $405,000, according to the records. Among them were Shopify, whose merchants are impacted by the tariffs, and John Deere, the agricultural machinery manufacturer that has projected hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs because of Trump’s tariffs.

Other companies Duffy sold, like gambling firm DraftKings and food delivery service DoorDash, are less directly vulnerable to tariff disruptions. But even those companies will be impacted if Americans have less disposable cash to spend. Few stocks were not hit hard by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. The S&P 500, a broadbased index, fell almost 19% in the weeks that followed Duffy’s sales and 13% specifically after Trump unveiled the details of his reciprocal tariff plan. Since Trump unexpectedly walked back much of those initial tariffs, the market has rebounded.

There’s no indication that the cash from Duffy’s sales was immediately reinvested. He appears to have held on to parts of his portfolio, including a Bitcoin fund, treasuries, S&P 500 funds and stock in Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, an American biopharma company. (Duffy also purchased some Microsoft shares, one of the stocks he’s prohibited from holding, days earlier on Feb. 7, only to sell them on Feb. 11 with the rest of his sales.)

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through their jobs could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. The 2012 law clarified that executive and legislative branch employees cannot use nonpublic government information to trade stock and requires them to promptly disclose their trades.

But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading. Current and former officials have also raised concerns that Trump’s Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission would not aggressively investigate activities by Trump or his allies.

The president’s selection of Duffy to lead the Department of Transportation was somewhat unexpected. Duffy, who came to fame when he starred in the reality show “The Real World” in the late 1990s, had last held public office in 2019 during Trump’s first term when he served as a Wisconsin congressman.

As a lawmaker, Duffy introduced the bill that would have made it easier for Trump, or any president, to levy new tariffs, a role that had long been largely reserved for Congress. The bill would have allowed the president to impose additional tariffs on imported goods if he determined that another country was applying a higher duty rate on the same goods when they were coming from America.

The bill did not pass, but Trump has essentially assumed that power by justifying new tariffs as essential to national security or in response to a national emergency. His Feb. 13 announcement called on his advisers to come up with new tariff rates on goods coming from countries around the world based on a number of restrictions he said those countries were placing on American products — not just through tariffs, but also with their exchange rates and industry subsidies.

Even the public rollout of Duffy’s bill and Trump’s tariffs were similar. Duffy released a spreadsheet showing how other countries tariffed particular goods at a higher rate than the U.S. Trump also used a spreadsheet during his rollout to show that his new tariffs were the same or lower than the trade restrictions other countries had placed on American goods.

More recently, Duffy has been a booster of Trump’s trade policies.

“LIBERATION DAY!!We’re not gonna take it anymore!,” he tweeted two days after Trump unveiled his reciprocal tariffs on April 2. “This week, @POTUS took a historic step towards stopping other countries from ripping off the American worker and restoring Fair Trade. In Congress, I helped lead the US Reciprocal Trade Act with @RealPNavarro and the @WhiteHouse to expand the President’s tariff powers in his first term. I am so proud to have been able to share the culmination of that work, Liberation Day, with my family this week. Thank you at POTUS!”

The Trump administration’s relentless assault on the rule of law is a kind of arson: It is setting so many blazes that the fire department is having trouble putting them all out at once. Last week, Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to cut off the water.

Trump’s executive order revoking birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants—which flagrantly overrides law, Supreme Court precedent, and the text of the Fourteenth Amendment—has, at least for now, reached the justices primarily as a procedural question. At issue during oral argument before the Court was the constitutionality of nationwide injunctions put in place by district-court judges, rather than the merits of the order itself.

Nationwide injunctions are not an inherently partisan issue—leaders of both parties have complained at one point or another about an overreaching federal judge. But in this case, allowing the federal government to revoke birthright citizenship would create a logistical nightmare for states that would have to figure out how to verify the citizenship of babies in order to allocate or administer benefits. An entire class of stateless infants would be created overnight. Indeed, one could imagine a ruling that narrows the authority of judges to issue nationwide injunctions to specific circumstances but that would still allow for such an injunction in this extraordinary case. That may be where the justices are headed, although there was no apparent agreement  at oral argument on how to do so.

After listening to the arguments, I was convinced by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s observation that, in many cases, “universal injunctions” are just the courts “telling the defendant, Stop doing this thing that the court has found to be unlawful.” However frustrating nationwide injunctions may be when you oppose them, they seem preferable to the alternatives floated. Yes, they sometimes lead to judges making overbroad decisions, as with the abortion-medication case unanimously reversed by a very conservative Supreme Court. But the Trump administration’s view that such injunctions are unconstitutional, and that district-court judges should be able to bar the executive order revoking birthright citizenship with respect to only individual parties, would produce even worse outcomes, in which the federal government would be free to trample the constitutional rights of anyone who doesn’t specifically assert them unless the Supreme Court decides to act.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor attempted to put this in a context that her conservative colleagues might understand. “So when a new president orders that because there’s so much gun violence going on in the country, and he comes in and he says, ‘I have the right to take away the guns from everyone,’ then he sends out the military to seize everyone’s guns, we and the courts have to sit back and wait until every named plaintiff gets—or every plaintiff whose gun is taken comes into court?” Sotomayor asked.

Nicholas Bagley: The birthright-citizenship case isn’t really about birthright citizenship

This is more or less what is happening now with birthright citizenship. The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to let Trump run riot over the Constitution indefinitely while narrowing the ability of those affected to challenge violations of their constitutional rights. And its proposed remedy—class-action lawsuits—is something that it also believes to be legally suspect, and that it would presumably attack later. As Solicitor General D. John Sauer made clear to the justices, “I do not concede that we wouldn’t oppose class certification in this particular case.” It was reminiscent of when, during Trump’s second impeachment, his lawyers argued that impeachment was unnecessary because he could be criminally prosecuted; once prosecutions began, those same people argued that prosecuting him was unconstitutional. There is no acceptable way to oppose Trump and his agenda.

At one point, Sauer complained that nearly 40 nationwide injunctions against the administration have been issued in the past four months. His implication was that the courts are out of control. But another explanation is also available: An out-of-control executive who ignores constitutional restraints on his authority also results in a lot of injunctions. Even accepting the premise that there are too many nationwide injunctions, executive—not judicial—overreach seems like the actual problem here.

Nationwide injunctions certainly aren’t a perfect solution to the problem of a lawless president, but class-action lawsuits are even more flawed. To begin with, a class action requires that a group get a lawyer and persuade a judge to certify it as a class. That’s already a difficult task—and likely not a speedy process—and in doing so, those bringing suit might reveal themselves to the federal government, which now claims that it can clap undocumented people in irons, put them on a plane, deport them to an overseas Gulag in El Salvador, and then refuse to bring them back. Many people likely would not participate for fear of this outcome. Then there’s the fact that the Trump administration has successfully bullied so many white-shoe law firms out of doing pro bono work opposing it that those seeking to assert their constitutional rights may find themselves short of advocates.

Even beyond this nightmarish but realistic scenario, the government’s solution is to impose ever-heavier administrative burdens on the people whose rights are at stake. This is the reverse of how it should be. Having each individual get a lawyer to assert his or her constitutional rights is much more difficult and complicated than one judge telling the government to stop breaking the law.

“Your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” Jackson told Sauer. “Your argument says, We get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, et cetera. And I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

To appeal to a higher court, one has to lose a case. Winners cannot appeal, meaning that if the administration lost in the lower courts, a final resolution on the question would be elusive, and a lawless administration could continue to violate the Constitution. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, under the Trump administration’s theory, the government could lose in one part of the country and then decide not to appeal, allowing it to keep enforcing an unconstitutional executive order elsewhere. “The government has no incentive to bring this case to the Supreme Court, because it’s not really losing anything. It’s losing a lot of individual cases, which still allow it to enforce its EO against the vast majority of people to whom it applies,” Kagan said.

That’s why the nationwide injunctions are necessary for getting cases to the Court. “If the Court narrows the scope of the nationwide injunction or eliminates it entirely, it means that the administration will have free rein to basically bring these cases in whatever district they want, and they’ll get unfavorable resolutions, and then they just sit on them, and there’s no way to actually get to a final resolution where the court weighs in on the merits,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “They can win by losing by simply sitting on their hands and not appealing any of their losses.”

The argument against birthright citizenship is an entirely ahistorical and atextual one that would restore the antebellum understanding of citizenship, in which one inherits the status of their parents—a kind of “blood guilt” where the sins of the parents are visited on the child. As the legal scholars Anthony Michael Kreis, Evan Bernick, and Paul Gowder dryly put it, “There was, to be sure, one circumstance where the American founders permitted degraded legal status to be heritable, but we hope that it is not one that today’s denationalizers would embrace.” (They mean slavery.)

Sauer, for his part, kept insisting that “the Fourteenth Amendment related to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens who weren’t even present as a discrete class at that time.” The Framers could have easily written “the descendants of the emancipated” if they had meant it that narrowly. Instead, they enshrined nonracial citizenship in the Constitution with the phrasing “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Martha S. Jones: The real origins of birthright citizenship

Indeed, President Andrew Johnson complained that the 1866 Civil Rights Act, parts of which were later adopted in the Fourteenth Amendment, extended citizenship to “the Chinese of the Pacific States” and “the people called Gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood.” Yes, and that was the point. “A liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States, is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt,” Frederick Douglass declared in 1869. “It would be madness to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or proscribe any on account of race color or creed.”

The text of the Constitution is at odds, however, with the Trumpist project. The conservative legal movement has done what it does best, which is fabricate a historical justification for a contemporary political goal. Former Justice Warren Burger called the transformation of the Second Amendment into a personal right to firearm ownership a “fraud,” but that interpretation of the right to bear arms at least has a long cultural tradition of firearm ownership behind it. Trump’s executive order is an attempt to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment by fiat as the Confederacy would have written it—the precise opposite of the intent of the Republicans who drafted it.

“They wanted everyone to have citizenship. They did not want to leave it up to the political parties, and they wanted it to be clear,” Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, told me. “They said, We’re going to resolve this question of citizenship once and for all, and if we leave it unclear, we’re afraid a future political party who doesn’t share our view of basic equality will have a different view.” That was prescient, although they couldn’t have imagined that the party that would not share that view would be their own.

A few days ago, Chief Justice John Roberts warned in an appearance at Georgetown Law School that the rule of law is “endangered.” One reason for that is Roberts’s own opinion that the president is nigh immune to criminal prosecution for lawbreaking, a finding that has emboldened Trump to ignore the law. Immunity is apparently insufficient, however—Trump also wants the ability to violate the Constitution at will without meaningful resistance from the courts. In the cases involving his deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration has already begun to ignore the judiciary and the Constitution. Here, Trump is asking permission. Have the justices learned their lesson yet?

It took just a few hours for devotees of the “Make America healthy again” movement to question former President Joe Biden’s prostate-cancer diagnosis. Tumors of the prostate are the most common serious malignancy identified in men: Even aggressive ones like Biden’s are diagnosed roughly 25,000 times a year in the United States. Although Biden’s condition is conventional, a certain segment of the public has been beguiled into blaming mainstream medicine for every unexpected death or health-related tragedy it comes across. The anti-vaccine community, including the group formerly led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has spent years promoting the idea that mRNA vaccines for COVID regularly push tumors into overdrive. (Rare anecdotes aside, there is no evidence to support this fear.) Now, predictably, the claim is cropping up again on social media. “Prostate cancer takes years to metastasize to bone unless super aggressive or turbo cancer,” the Kennedy-endorsed physician Craig Wax suggested.

That an 82-year-old man who had aged out of prostate-cancer-screening tests has been found to have an advanced malignancy should not be surprising. In my experience as a doctor who diagnoses cancer, many tumors are discovered out of the blue. Prostate cancer in particular may not become apparent until an individual goes to his doctor with a minor complaint—in Biden’s case, urinary symptoms, according to the announcement—only to have further testing discover the worst. (Biden’s cancer isn’t curable; people with Stage 4 disease like his live for about three years on average—although the outlook is worse for men who are more than 80 years old.)

Cancer is an enigmatic disease, one that is simultaneously influenced by genetics, environment, personal habits, the aging process, and—not to be discounted—bad luck. But its muddled nature can be uncomfortable for those who share the view that nearly all sickness is preventable with virtuous behavior and a clean environment. According to Kennedy, the current leader of the U.S. health-care system, tumors are a product of not only the vaccines in our arms, but also the fluoride in our water, the toxins in our school lunches, the signals from our phones, and surely many other ubiquitous aspects of modernity. Indeed, in MAHA land, cancer is not just a misfortune, but a cover-up. Before he became health secretary, Kennedy ominously suggested that doctors might find its cause in the “places they dare not look.”

Read: The inflated risk of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest

It’s not just Kennedy. Trump’s health-care team routinely draws from the logic of this wellness-paranoia complex. Last year, Marty Makary, who has since become the FDA commissioner, told a group of MAHA wellness influencers convened by Senator Ron Johnson that cancer is a consequence of “low-grade chronic inflammation” induced by a poisoned food supply. (Years ago, he also speciously declared that undetected medical errors were a leading cause of death.) Casey Means, Trump’s new nominee for surgeon general, has claimed that “the biggest lie in healthcare” is that high blood sugar, malignant tumors, and clogged arteries “are totally different diseases requiring separate doctors and pills for life.” The truth is “simpler than we are told,” she said. (Buy her book to find out what it is.) And Mehmet Oz, the former lifestyle guru and current Medicare administrator, recently informed Americans, “It’s your patriotic duty to be as healthy as you can. It’s our job to help you get there, make it easy to do the right things.” Never mind that you can do everything right and still get sick. (For now, none of the administration’s major health officials has weighed in on Biden’s diagnosis.)

Read: Did a famous doctor’s COVID shot make his cancer worse?

Joe Biden is no stranger to tough luck. His son Beau died of a brain tumor at age 46 in 2015, leading to Biden’s participation in a government-funded “cancer moonshot” to combat the condition. The moonshot initiative was an old-fashioned approach to medicine, one that sought to ameliorate illness through advances in science and technology. RFK Jr. and his MAHA acolytes are naturally suspicious of this approach. Now their weird discomfort with disease—and their outré views on cancer in particular—is being refracted through a sea of false, indecent speculations. No, Biden’s cancer was not “courtesy of the mRNA shot.” One can only hope that the government’s bevy of vaccine skeptics will be able to resist the siren’s call to join in saying otherwise.

Hey fam: I’m doing an AMA on our subreddit this Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. in the East. If you want to hang come over to r/thebulwark.

I’ll remind you on Wednesday.

First: Please pray for Joe Biden and his family.

Second: Biden’s failures have been well chronicled. And yet, in this litany, people usually ignore his most consequential mistake.

Third: Biden’s biggest failure was that his theory of America was wrong.

He could have governed as a radical intent on destroying the populist project. This would have meant aggressively pursuing criminal charges against Trump and his confederates. It would have meant forgoing normal legislation in order to pursue broad, systemic change. Such a course would have been risky and—probably—unpopular.

Instead, Biden governed like a normal president in a normal moment. He pursued mostly popular, mostly incremental reforms. He forged bipartisan majorities. He passed a lot of legislation, most of it focused on concrete items to improve the lives of American citizens even—especially—in red states.

Biden’s belief was that the Trump moment was an aberration and that America could return to its liberal equilibrium if he governed normally and gave the Republican party space to heal itself and turn away from its authoritarian project.

Biden’s theory of the case was shredded by events.

There’s no way he could have known it would be. The course he chose looked like wisdom at the time; had he taken the radical path it would have been dangerous and there are no guarantees that it would have worked, either.

But we can say, without qualification: Biden’s strategy for defeating populist authoritarianism failed.

It’s odd that no one talks about this failure, even though it’s infinitely more important than his student loan scheme or the Hunter Biden pardon.

Fourth: Instead we focus on his failure to abandon his presidential re-election sooner.

I understand this fixation. Let’s stipulate that:

• Knowing what we know now, Biden should not have attempted to run.

• He and/or his inner circle undermined Kamala Harris’s chances during the race and—to their discredit—have abused her since.

• Perhaps Trump would have been defeated if Biden had declined to run; or pulled the plug sooner; or called for a primary instead of endorsing Harris; or endorsed Harris but then not hobbled her effort.

Yet I don’t think any of that is why we fixate on Biden’s “original sin.”

The reason we—and by “we” I mean everyone who is not part of the MAGA ummah—have made Biden the scapegoat is because the reality is too dark.

It wasn’t just Joe Biden who failed. It was America. All of it.

Let us list our failures.

“The wonderful country of Qatar, after agreeing to invest more than 1.4 Trillion Dollars in the United States of America, deserves much better than Misleading (Fake!) News. Everyone, including their lawyers, has been told that ABC must not say that Qatar is giving ME a FREE Boeing 747 Airplane, because they are not,” the president continued online, apparently incensed that a news organization was doing its job.

“Instead, and as Fake News ABC fully knows and understands, this highly respected country is donating the plane to the United States Air Force/Defense Department, AND NOT TO ME,” he posted. “By so doing, they are saving our country, and the American Taxpayer, hundreds of millions of dollars. ABC Fake News is one of the WORST.”

Claiming that the plane is going toward the Defense Department is a convenient workaround that would allow Trump to ethically accept the pricy present, since it is obviously illegal for a president (or any U.S. public officeholder) to accept gifts “of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State,” per the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause.

When President Donald Trump returned to office, he was laboring under a fundamental misconception about the war in Ukraine.

Trump seemed convinced that he could get Russia to stop fighting—as long as he kept Ukraine out of NATO and froze the battle lines, letting Russia keep the territory it already occupied. But that was never going to be enough for Vladimir Putin. He had other demands: strict limits on the size of Ukraine’s military, an end to its security cooperation with the West, and no European troops in the country. Moscow wanted a neutered Ukraine, not a neutral one.

Last week in Istanbul, Russian and Ukrainian officials held public talks for the first time since 2022, agreeing to exchange 1,000 prisoners each and to continue negotiating the technical details of a potential cease-fire. Some observers saw this as progress, but the underlying dynamics have not changed: Russia’s maximalist demands make a near-term settlement virtually impossible.

The next move will fall to Trump, who threatened last month to “take a pass” if the two sides don’t reach a deal. No one knows exactly what that means. Perhaps Trump will turn on Putin and increase support for Ukraine, but every indication suggests that’s unlikely. Two courses of action seem more plausible. First, Trump might decide to cut off military aid to Ukraine, which could finally tilt the war in Russia’s favor. Alternatively, he might maintain U.S. support but step back from peace talks until Russia indicates that it’s ready to compromise. This would subject Putin to a series of dilemmas as he tries to sustain a war that is costing him mightily.

Russia, Ukraine, and Ukraine’s European allies all know that a settlement is unlikely, at least in the near future. In the meantime, their main diplomatic goal is simple: Win over Trump. He wants a quick resolution, so Ukraine and Russia are each trying to convince him that the other side is the one prolonging the conflict. Whoever succeeds could shape his response to the failure of negotiations and reap significant benefits on the battlefield.

Read: Trump’s plan to sell out Ukraine to Russia

Initially, Trump saw Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, not Putin, as the stubborn one. Zelensky insisted on ironclad security guarantees from the United States, which Trump was unwilling to give. Meanwhile, Putin seemed to be striking up a friendship with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy.

The dynamic reversed soon after the Oval Office confrontation between Trump and Zelensky in February, which led the United States to temporarily withhold assistance. This catastrophe forced Kyiv to shift tack. Eleven days later, following advice from the United Kingdom, Ukraine shrewdly agreed to an unconditional 30-day cease-fire in talks with U.S. officials. Trump wanted an end to the war; now Zelensky could say that he did too.

Putin, however, would almost certainly never accept an unconditional cease-fire, which would leave significant issues unresolved, such as territorial disputes and Ukraine’s security guarantees. Russia would benefit in some ways—the country would get to keep the areas it currently controls—but Ukraine would be able to rearm without limits and admit European troops, both outcomes that Putin has balked at because he seeks Ukraine’s subjugation.

By agreeing to a cease-fire, Zelensky flipped the negotiation: Now Putin would be the one demanding conditions and denying Trump his peace deal. It seemed to work. Earlier this month, Vice President J. D. Vance said that Russia was “asking for too much,” even after the Trump administration proposed a plan that favored Putin. When Trump was asked about Vance’s statement, he said, “It’s possible he’s right.”

Perhaps sensing that he was losing leverage, Putin called for last week’s talks in Istanbul, where Russia and Ukraine had negotiated early in the war. Back then, the two sides had converged on a number of issues but were deeply divided on others; Russia, for example, wanted an effective veto over security guarantees and international assistance for Ukraine if war broke out again. This time, Putin was evidently hoping to persuade the United States to accept that same condition and put pressure on Ukraine.

Then Zelensky made another savvy move. Rather than rejecting the invitation, he said he would show up personally and meet Putin face-to-face. Zelensky knew that Putin was extremely unlikely to go, and indeed he didn’t. By calling the Russian leader’s bluff, Zelensky gave Trump another indication that Putin wasn’t serious about negotiating a cease-fire.

Still, Moscow could ultimately be rewarded for refusing to compromise. The basic diplomatic problem for the U.S. is persuading Putin to accept something he has fiercely opposed: a free and independent Ukraine that can defend itself and deter a future attack. Instead of continuing to try to solve that problem, Trump may simply end America’s intelligence cooperation, cut off its weapons supply, and perhaps even refuse to sell arms. Ukraine would face crucial shortages and rising casualties, while Russian forces would likely eke out more small gains that will add up over time.

Fortunately for Zelensky, however, Ukraine does not rely on the U.S. as much as it did in the first three years of the war. President Joe Biden’s decision to accelerate weapon transfers in the final months of his administration has given the Ukrainians most of what they need to fight for the rest of the year. And even though Trump clearly has no desire to renew aid for Ukraine, the country has cranked up its own defense industrial base with help from allies—especially its capacity to produce large quantities of drones, which have largely supplanted artillery on the front.

But if America continues to support Ukraine, Russia could have trouble generating enough manpower to sustain the invasion into next year. During its offensive of the past nine months, Russia has won only small slivers of territory and paid an enormous cost for them. The country has sustained more than 1,500 casualties a day, and nearly 800,000 since the start of the war, according to one U.S. military estimate last month. Putin is not a reasonable person, but he does sometimes adjust to battlefield realities. If his losses continue at this rate, he may have to order a larger mobilization, which he has been keen to avoid, or compromise at the negotiating table.

Read: Why Trump is giving Putin everything he wants

Judging by recent comments from Witkoff, Trump doesn’t seem to grasp that negotiations will succeed only if Russia feels pressure on the front lines. Neoconservatives believe that “war is the only way to solve things,” the president’s envoy said earlier this month. But Trump “believes that his force of personality—the way he is going to respond to situations—can bend people to do things in a much better way for the interests of the United States government, and I believe in that too.” Putin is far too determined to be swayed by mere personality.

There is a realistic way forward, though, that benefits both Trump and Ukraine. It will take a helping hand from Europe. The goal is simple: Show Putin that, as long as he sticks to his maximalist demands, he won’t make any significant territorial gains and will continue paying a huge price on the battlefield.

Although some of America’s military support is irreplaceable—particularly its intelligence cooperation, air-defense missiles, mid-range rockets, and heavy vehicles—Europe has the capacity to take on most of the burden of backing Ukraine. Given that Trump almost certainly won’t ask Congress to fund additional aid, leaders close to him, especially British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, could broker a compromise whereby the U.S. provides Ukraine only the kinds of assistance that Europe can’t—granted that Putin, not Zelensky, remains the primary obstacle to peace. The Europeans could also offer to pay the U.S. for its weapons and equipment, perhaps by tapping Russia’s sovereign assets.

This compromise would allow Trump to tell Americans that he has significantly reduced aid for Ukraine but has not abandoned it; even better, he could say that Europeans are footing the bill. This would help facilitate a deal with Russia by showing Moscow that victory is not possible. Ending this war quickly will require convincing Putin that it could go on indefinitely. As long as Trump denies this and flirts with ending U.S. support for Ukraine while letting Russia off the hook, the deal he’s desperate to close will continue to elude him.

Declared brain-dead in February, Adriana Smith remains on life support in Georgia against her family’s wishes—revealing the chilling consequences of abortion bans that override bodily autonomy, even in death.

Three months ago, 30-year-old Adriana Smith was declared brain-dead. But a hospital in Georgia is keeping her “alive” on life support, against her family’s wishes, because of the state’s strict abortion ban.

Smith, a registered nurse in metro Atlanta, was nine weeks pregnant in early February when she started suffering from intense headaches. Smith initially sought treatment at Northside Hospital but was released that same day after being given medication. According to Adriana Smith’s mother April Newkirk, “They didn’t do any tests. No CT scan. If they had done that or kept her overnight, they would have caught it. It could have been prevented.”

The next morning, Smith’s boyfriend found her unresponsive and gasping for air. Smith was taken to Emory Decatur, then transferred to Emory University Hospital, where she worked. Doctors found multiple blood clots in her brain and determined Smith to be brain-dead, the legal and medical standard for death in the United States. But because she was pregnant, Georgia’s antiabortion laws have created a legal gray area: Emory staff say they are legally required to keep her breathing until the fetus reaches viability.

Last week, Smith was moved again, this time to Emory Midtown, which doctors told the family is better equipped for obstetric care. 

In what universe does a hospital in Georgia … believe that they can take ownership of Adriana Smith’s body?

Michele Goodwin, “Fifteen Minutes of Feminism: Dead, Pregnant and Imprisoned in Georgia—The Adriana Smith Case“

Abortion is currently illegal in Georgia after six weeks. And even though ending Smith’s life support would not be an abortion, hospital staff say they plan to keep Smith’s dead body on life-support machines until the fetus reaches a gestational age when it can survive outside the womb.

When she died, Adriana Smith was already a mother to one young son. Doctors told Newkirk and her boyfriend that, legally, they aren’t allowed to consider other options while Smith is technically pregnant, even though her family wishes she could be allowed to die in peace.

“She’s been breathing through machines for more than 90 days,” Smith’s mother Newkirk said. “It’s torture for me. I see my daughter breathing, but she’s not there. And her son—I bring him to see her.”

Meanwhile, the fetus is not healthy. Doctors told Smith’s family that the baby has fluid on his brain and might not be able to see, walk or survive once he’s born. “This decision should’ve been left to us. Now we’re left wondering what kind of life he’ll have—and we’re going to be the ones raising him,” said Newkirk. Smith’s family is already facing mounting medical bills as the hospital keeps her body on life support for weeks and weeks.

In an emergency episode of Ms.’ On the Issues With Michele Goodwin: 15 Minutes of Feminism podcast on Friday, host Michele Goodwin said the state of Georgia is treating Smith’s body as an “incubator,” which brings up 13th Amendment questions.

“One can’t help but think about a throughline from that period of time where Black women were forced into involuntary reproductive servitude for the benefit of other people and not for them,” said Goodwin. “Certainly, Adriana will experience … no benefit from what her body has been put through and what the state hopes to accomplish.”

Goodwin also pointed out the similarities between Smith’s case and that of Marlise Muñoz, who died in 2014, but the state of Texas forcibly kept her on a ventilator because she was pregnant, for weeks while her body decomposed, despite the wishes of her parents and husband.

These cases, Goodwin argued, represent “disparate treatment at the end of life involving a person who happens to be pregnant.” If a man died at one of these hospitals, it’s hard to imagine that the hospital would force his body to stay on life support against his family’s wishes, she mused.

Adriana Smith should be here with her 5-year-old son. Her severe headaches were dismissed and at 9 weeks pregnant she was declared brain dead, the result of blood clots. … Emory hospital says the Georgia abortion ban requires she stay on life support until delivery, though it has been nearly 3 months. Horrifying. Devastating. Unacceptable.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)

This harrowing case is the latest result of Georgia’s strict abortion ban, which led to the deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller in 2023. Neither women were allowed a life-saving abortion, despite going through a medical emergency. Many other women, including Josseli Barnica, Porsha Ngumezi and 18-year-old Neveah Crain in Texas, have died as a result of other state’s draconian abortion bans.

Georgia state legislators have defended the hospital’s actions to keep Smith’s body on life support. State Sen. Ed Setzler (R-Ga.)—who sponsored Georgia’s six-week abortion ban in 2019—told PBS, “I think it is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child. I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life. I think the hospital is acting appropriately.”

Other lawmakers and reproductive rights advocates are sounding alarms about the tragic case.

“Adriana’s story is gut-wrenching,” said Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.). “It’s also a painful reminder of the consequences when politicians refuse to trust us to make our own medical decisions.” 

Monica Simpson, executive director of reproductive justice organization SisterSong, said “[Smith’s] family deserves the right to have decision-making power about her medical decisions. Instead, they have endured 90 days of retraumatization, expensive medical costs, and the cruelty of being unable to resolve and move toward healing.” SisterSong is the lead plaintiff in the current lawsuit SisterSong v. State of Georgia challenging Georgia’s six-week abortion ban.

“Black women must be trusted when it comes to our healthcare decisions,” Simpson said in her statement. “After the devastating and preventable deaths of multiple Black women, the message still rings clear: our lives are on the line, and our human right to bodily autonomy has been violated.”

“I think every woman should have the right to make their own decision,” Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, said. “And if not, then their partner or their parents.”

Listen to Ms.’ emergency episode of On the Issues With Michele Goodwin: “Dead, Pregnant and Imprisoned in Georgia—The Adriana Smith Case.”