In one section of a sprawling warehouse in central Ukraine, workers have stacked what appear to be small airplane wings in neat rows. In another section, a group of men is huddled around what looks like the body of an aircraft, adjusting an electronic panel. In makeshift locations elsewhere in Ukraine, workers are producing these electronic panels from scratch: This company wants to use as few imported parts as possible, avoiding anything American, anything Chinese.

American mass media has been transformed in these early months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

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We are living in an authoritarian state.
It didn’t feel that way this morning, when I took my dog for his usual walk in the park and dew from the grass glittered on my boots in the rising sunlight. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re ordering an iced mocha latte at Starbucks or watching the Patriots lose to the Steelers. The persistent normality of daily life is disorienting, even paralyzing.

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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum argues that President Donald Trump is making a miscalculation in his second term. Instead of consolidating power before plundering the state, Trump has reversed the sequence, imposing massive tariffs that raise prices on ordinary Americans, flaunting foreign wealth, and enriching his inner circle at public expense.

The world laughed at Donald Trump.
Seven years ago, Trump was just a few sentences into his annual United Nations General Assembly address when most of the gathered leaders of the 193 countries represented began to chuckle—and then outright guffaw. A visibly startled Trump had been boasting about his administration’s successes; he had long claimed that other nations mocked his presidential predecessors, and now it was happening to him. Trump later publicly downplayed the moment.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Partisan claims of fraud in the presidential election. Elaborate statistical analyses. Reports of shadowy, closed-door doings. All of this, they say, points to one conclusion: The results were compromised, and the real winner was kept out of the White House.

Today, President Donald Trump threw one of the most important tenets of his own foreign policy into a 180-degree turn, reversing course without even slowing down. Trump has always been overly deferential to Vladimir Putin, including enabling the Russian president’s war in Ukraine. Now Trump appears to be signaling that he’s fed up with the Kremlin. But is he?
Trump’s latest policy reversal came after he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly for nearly an hour today.