The exercise involved Russia's full nuclear "triad" of ground, sea, and air-launched missiles

The drills, which involved ballistic and cruise missiles from land, sea, and air, aimed to test Russia’s readiness for a massive response to a nuclear attack.

Many Republicans would say that it is one thing, and quite an awful thing, to withhold a vote from Donald Trump—but that voting for Kamala Harris, a “San Francisco Democrat,” is nothing short of a betrayal, an act of apostasy, impossible for any true conservative to justify.

They’re wrong, though in one respect it’s understandable why they’re wrong. Harris is hardly an avatar of conservatism. She is, after all, a lifelong Democrat who, in her ill-fated campaign for president in 2019, positioned herself as a progressive champion. She embraced positions that I believe ranged from silly to harmful. But it’s a more complicated story than that.

During Harris’s pre-Senate career, when she served as district attorney in San Francisco and then as attorney general of California, her record was generally pragmatic and moderate. In those roles, according to Don Kusler, the national director of Americans for Democratic Action, her record was one “that would have many liberals, particularly our California colleagues, angered or at least rolling their eyes.” Progressives had a much deeper relationship with President Joe Biden than with Vice President Harris; according to The Washington Post, “They fear that under Harris they would lose the unique access they had to the West Wing.” The New Democrat Coalition, a moderate faction in the House, says it’s the part of the caucus most closely aligned with Harris.

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

Nor are progressives particularly happy that during the 2024 campaign, Harris has broken with some of her previous liberal stances, such as opposing fracking, decriminalizing border crossing, and ending private health insurance. Harris has spent the closing stretch of the campaign appearing with the likes of Liz Cheney, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has emphasized her support for Ukraine in its war of survival against Russia, and risks losing Michigan because she is viewed by some in her party as too supportive of Israel. During the campaign, Harris has shared that she owns a Glock, said she’d appoint a Republican to her Cabinet, and declared that she’s a “capitalist” who wants “pragmatic” solutions. Her economic focus is on tax breaks for the middle class and on creating opportunities for small businesses. Her economic plan, the Post points out, contained few items on the liberal wish list. Progressive groups say they are finding a “significant enthusiasm deficit” among left-wing voters.

It would be an affectation to say that Harris is a conservative champion, just as it would be a caricature to portray her now as a far-left liberal. She is neither, and if she’s elected president, she is likely to govern from the center-left, at least on most things.

BUT THE STRONGEST CONSERVATIVE CASE for voting for Harris doesn’t have nearly as much to do with her as it has to do with her opponent. Trump remains a far more fundamental threat to conservatism than Harris. Trump has, in a way no Democrat ever could, changed the GOP from within and broken with the most important tenets of conservatism. That’s no surprise, because his desire isn’t to conserve; it is to burn things to the ground. In that respect and others, Trump is temperamentally much more of a Jacobin than a Burkean. He has transformed the Republican Party in his image in ways that exceed what any other American politician has done in modern times.

Start with character. The GOP once championed the central importance of character in political leaders, and especially presidents. It believed that serious personal misconduct was disqualifying, in part because of the example it would send to the young and its corrosive effects on our culture. It lamented that America was slouching towards Gomorrah.  

In 1998, when a Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president and embroiled in a sexual scandal, the Southern Baptist Convention—whose membership is overwhelmingly conservative —passed the “Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials,” which said, “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” It added, “We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”

Yet for a decade now, Republicans, and in particular white evangelicals, have celebrated as their leader a felon and pathological liar; a person whose companies have committed bank, insurance, tax, and charity fraud; a sexual predator who paid hush money to a porn star; a person of uncommon cruelty and crudity who has mocked the war dead, POWs, Gold Star families, and people with disabilities. Under Trump, the party of “family values” has become a moral freak show.

Trump has also profoundly reshaped the GOP’s public policy. The GOP is now, at the national level, effectively pro-choice, and, due in part to Trump, the pro-life movement is “in a state of political collapse,” in the words of David French, of The New York Times. The Republican Party, pre-Trump, was pro–free trade; Trump calls himself “Tariff Man” and referred to tariff as “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” (In July, Trump proposed across-the-board tariffs of 10 to 20 percent, and rates of 60 percent or higher on imports from China.) He epitomizes crony capitalism, an economic system in which individuals and businesses with political connections and influence are favored.

For several generations, Republican presidents have, to varying degrees, promoted plans to reform entitlement programs in order to avert fiscal catastrophe. Trump has done the opposite. He has repeatedly said that entitlement programs are off-limits. As president, Trump shredded federalism and made a mockery of our constitutional system of government by his use of executive orders to bypass Congress. He made little effort to shrink government, and lots of efforts to expand it.

On spending, $4.8 trillion in non-COVID-related debt was added during Trump’s single term, while for Biden the figure is $2.2 trillion. Trump added more debt than any other president in history. A Wall Street Journal survey of 50 economists found that 65 percent of them see Trump’s proposed policies putting more upward pressure on the federal deficit than Harris’s, and 68 percent said prices would rise faster under Trump than under Harris. And the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that Trump’s policies would increase budget deficits by $7.5 trillion over the next decade, compared with $3.5 trillion for Harris.

Pre-Trump Republican presidents celebrated the diversity that immigrants brought to the nation, and the contributions they made to America. “All of the immigrants who came to us brought their own music, literature, customs, and ideas,” Ronald Reagan said in a speech in Shanghai in 1984. “And the marvelous thing, a thing of which we’re proud, is they did not have to relinquish these things in order to fit in. In fact, what they brought to America became American. And this diversity has more than enriched us; it has literally shaped us.” George W. Bush urged America to be a “welcoming society,” one that assimilates new arrivals and “upholds the great tradition of the melting pot,” which “has made us one nation out of many peoples.”

Trump is cut from a very different cloth. He curtailed legal immigration during his presidency. Temporary visas for highly skilled noncitizen workers were reduced. Refugee admissions were slashed. Trump, who peddled outrageous lies against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, says he plans to strip them of their legal status. (At his rallies, Trump has whipped the crowds into a frenzy, getting them to chant, “Send them back! Send them back! Send them back!”)

[Read: Under the spell of the crowd]

Edith Olmsted pointed out in The New Republic that during his first term, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras, “placing hundreds of thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation.” Trump, who refers to America as an “occupied country” and “a garbage can for the world,” also said he plans to reinstate a ban on travelers from some countries with Muslim-majority populations. And although previous Republicans have attempted to slow illegal border crossings, none has dehumanized those crossing the border by using language from Mein Kampf (“poisoning the blood of our country”). Trump believes American national identity is based not on allegiance to certain ideals but on ethnic and religious background.

It is in foreign policy, though, that Trump may be most antithetical to the policies and approach of modern conservatism. Reagan was a fierce, relentless opponent of the Soviet Union. “The one thing Reagan was more passionate about than anything else was the unsupportable phenomenon of totalitarian power, enslaving a large part of the world’s population,” according to Edmund Morris, a Reagan biographer.

Trump is the opposite. He admires and is enchanted by the world’s most brutal dictators, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and others. Trump is at best indifferent to the fate of Ukraine in its war against Russia; one suspects that deep down, he’s rooting for his friend Putin. Reagan mythologized America; Trump trash-talks it. Reagan was a great champion of NATO; Trump is a reflexive critic who, according to his former national security adviser John Bolton, would withdraw from the alliance in a second term. Reagan made human rights a centerpiece of his foreign policy; during his term, Trump praised China’s forced internment of a million or more Uyghurs as “exactly the right thing to do,” according to Bolton.

Here and there, now and then, Trump is conservative—on court appointments, for example—but it’s something that he’s stumbled into, for reasons of political expediency, and that he’s just as liable to stumble away from. (Trump was pro-choice before he was pro-life before he moved once again toward the pro-choice camp.) Trump is fundamentally a populist and a demagogue, a destroyer of institutions and a conspiracy theorist, a champion of right-wing identity politics who stokes grievances and rage. He has an unprecedented capacity to turn people into the darkest versions of themselves. But he is something even beyond that.

IN RECENT WEEKS, Trump has been called a fascist—not by liberal Democratic strategists, but by people who worked closely with him. They include retired General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff; retired General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump presidency; and Mark Esper, Trump’s former secretary of defense, who has said that Trump has fascistic “inclinations” and is “unfit for office.” In addition, retired General James Mattis, who also served as Trump’s secretary of defense, has said he agrees with Milley’s assessment. And Dan Coats, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, has said he suspects that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin.

The historian Robert Paxton, one of the nation’s foremost experts on fascism, was initially reluctant to apply the term fascism to Trump. The label is toxic and used too promiscuously, he believed. But January 6, 2021, changed all of that.

“The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told Elisabeth Zerofsky, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”

Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” Paxton wrote in Newsweek shortly after Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

Paxton could add to the parade of horribles the fact that Trump encouraged the mob to hang his own vice president, came very close to deploying 10,000 active-duty troops to the streets of the nation’s capital to shoot protesters, invited hostile foreign powers to intervene in our election, and extorted an ally to find dirt on his opponents. Paxton could have mentioned that Trump threatened prosecutors, judges, and their families; referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and the “enemy from within”; and called the imprisoned individuals who stormed the Capitol “great patriots.” He could have cited Trump’s call for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution and his insinuation that Milley deserved to be executed for treason.

Trump’s supporters may be enraged by the fascist label, but they cannot erase the words or the deeds of the man to whom the label applies. And the only way for the GOP to become a sane, conservative party again is by ridding itself of Trump, which is why even conservatives who oppose Harris’s policies should vote for her. Harris’s election is the only thing that can break the hold of Trump on his party.

Acquaintances of mine, and acquaintances of friends of mine, say that they find Trump contemptible, but that they can’t vote for Harris, because they disagree with her on policy. My response is simple: The position she once held on fracking may be bad, but fascism is worse. The position she holds on any issue may be bad, but fascism is worse.

[Read: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal]

A friend told me he won’t vote for either Harris or Trump. If Trump wins a second term, he said, “I suspect he will give more attention to his golf game than to siccing the IRS, FBI, or whoever on his political opponents.” His message to me, in other words, is to relax a bit. Trump may be a moral wreck, but he won’t act on his most outlandish threats.

My view is that when those seeking positions of power promote political violence, have a long record of lawlessness, are nihilistic, and embody a “will to power” ethic; make extralegal attempts to maintain power and stop the peaceful transfer of power; and use the words of fascists to tell the world that they are determined to exact vengeance—it’s probably wise to take them at their word.

If Trump wins the presidency again, conservatism will be homeless, a philosophy without a party, probably for at least a generation. And the damage to America, the nation Republicans claim to love, will be incalculable, perhaps irreversible. The stakes are that high.

Harris becoming president may not be the best thing that could happen to conservatism. But if she becomes president, she will have prevented the worst thing that could happen to conservatism and, much more important, to the country.

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Yesterday, The New York Times reported that people around Donald Trump are trying to figure out how “to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks.” Trump’s people, unsurprisingly, are worried about whether they’d pass a background check: As Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner wrote in September, the MAGA-dominated GOP “is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks”—who tend to have a hard time getting security clearances. The first Trump administration was rife with people (including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner) who were walking national-security risks, none worse than Trump himself. A second term, in which Trump would be free of adult supervision, would be even worse.

By the way, elected government leaders (even if they are convicted felons) do not go through background checks or have actual security clearances. Their access to classified information is granted by virtue of the trust placed in them by the voters; the president, as the chief executive, has access at will to information produced by the military, the intelligence community, and other executive-branch organizations.

For many other federal workers, however, security clearances are a necessary component of government service. Over the course of some 35 years, I held relatively ordinary secret and top-secret clearances while in various jobs, including my work for a defense contractor, my time as an adviser to a U.S. senator, and then in my position as a professor at a war college.

All of these, even at the lowest levels, involve allowing the government to do some uncomfortable peeping into your life—your finances, your family, even your romantic attachments. Clearances are meant to mitigate the risk that you will compromise important information, so the goal is to ensure that you aren’t emotionally unstable, or exploitable through blackmail, or vulnerable to offers of money. (Want to get a really thorough investigation? See if you can get cleared for CNDWI, or “Critical nuclear weapons design information.”)

You screw around with this process at your own professional and legal peril. Don’t want to admit that you cheated on your wife? Too bad. After all, if you’ll lie to her and then lie to the government about lying to her, what else will you lie about? Are you a bit too loose at the poker table, or are you a casual drug user but don’t think either is a big deal? That’s not for you to decide: Better fess up anyway. (And of course, you have to promise not to do it anymore.)

Once you have a clearance, you’ll be subjected to refresher courses on how to keep it, and you’ll have to submit to regular reinvestigations. You must also sit through “insider threat” training, during which you are taught how to recognize who among your co-workers might be a security risk—and how to report them. Red flags include not only signs of money issues, emotional problems, or substance abuse but also extreme political views or foreign loyalties.

Which brings me to Elon Musk, who runs SpaceX, America’s private space contractor and an organization presumably full of people with clearances. (I emailed SpaceX to ask how many of its workers have clearances. I have not gotten an answer.) Trump is surrounded by people who shouldn’t be given a clearance to open a checking account, much less set foot in a highly classified environment. But Musk has held a clearance for years, despite ringing the insider-threat bells louder than a percussion maestro hammering a giant glockenspiel.

Leave aside Musk smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan’s show back in 2018, a stunt done with such casual smugness that it would have cost almost anyone else their clearance. (The feds, including the U.S. military, don’t care about state laws about pot; they still demand that clearance holders treat weed as a prohibited substance.) But sharing a joint with bro-king Rogan is nothing. Six years later, The Wall Street Journal reported much more concerning drug use:

The world’s wealthiest person has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter, according to people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it.

An attorney for Musk denied the report, but even the rumor of this kind of drug use would be a five-alarm fire for most holders of a high clearance. But fine, even if the report is true, maybe all it means is that Musk is just a patriotic, if somewhat reckless, pharmaceutical cowboy. It’s not like he’s canoodling with the Russians or anything, is it?

Bad news. Musk (according to another bombshell story from The Wall Street Journal) has reportedly been in touch multiple times with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions. At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.

Now, it’s not inherently a problem to have friends in Russia—I had some even when I was a government employee—but if you’re the guy at the desk next to me with access to highly classified technical information, and you’re chewing the fat now and then with the president of Russia, I’m pretty certain I’m required to at least raise an alert about a possible insider threat.

So why hasn’t that kind of report happened? Apparently, it has: Last week, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that Musk’s alleged contacts with Russia “should be investigated.” But the United States government seems to think that Musk is too big to fail and too important to fire. As an opinion piece in Government Executive put it this past winter:

In the case of Musk, it is clear the government has decided the benefits of his maintaining eligibility are worth the risks. It’s an easier case to make when you’re creating groundbreaking technology and helping get humans to Mars. It may be a harder case for you to make if your name is Joe and your job is to get a truck to the naval yard … That may seem like a double standard, but that’s if you forget that there is no universal standard.

If Trump is reelected, Musk likely won’t have anything to worry about. But at what point does Musk’s erratic behavior—including allegations of drug use, accusations of some two years of regular discussions with the leader of Russia, and his obvious, intense devotion to one party and its candidate—become too much of a risk for any other U.S. administration to tolerate?

It’s bad enough that Musk could be careless with classified data or expose himself to blackmail; it’s even more unsettling to imagine him undermining American security because of poor judgment, political grudges, and unwise foreign associations. Remember, this is a man who had to pay a $20 million fine for blabbing about taking Tesla private and had to agree to have some of his social-media posts overseen by a Tesla lawyer—and that’s not even close to classified information.

As a former clearance holder, I also worry that indulging Musk (and allowing future Trump appointees to bypass the clearance process) would be a toxic signal to the conscientious public servants who have protected America’s secrets. They have allowed the government to intrude deeply into their personal lives; they have worked to keep their finances tidy; they have avoided the use of prohibited substances and the abuse of legal ones.

If only they were more important; they could get away with almost anything.

Related:

What Elon Musk really wants Elon Musk has reached a new low.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

This is Trump’s message. The truth about polling Why major newspapers won’t endorse Kamala Harris Anne Applebaum: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal.

Today’s News

Two ballot boxes were set on fire in Oregon and Washington. Hundreds of ballots were burned in Washington, and the police said that they believe the fires were connected. Philadelphia’s district attorney sued Elon Musk and his America PAC for “running an illegal lottery” scheme by promising to pay $1 million a day to registered voters who signed America PAC’s petition defending the First and Second Amendments. The Pentagon announced that if North Korea joins the war in Ukraine, the U.S. will not set any new limits on Ukraine’s use of American-supplied weapons. In an updated estimate, the Pentagon said that roughly 10,000 North Korean troops have entered Russia.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: We’ve strayed from the spirit of Halloween, Stephanie Bai writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Pamela Littky / Disney / Hulu.

MomTok Is the Apotheosis of 21st-Century Womanhood

By Sophie Gilbert

If you’re interested in modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture, Hulu’s recent reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a rich, chaotic product. I watched the entire series in a couple of days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly every time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self in the mirror compared with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced women. The stars of the show are young wives and mothers in Utah who have become notable in a corner of the internet called MomTok; their online side hustles include performing 20-second group dances and lip-synching to clips from old movies, the financial success of which has helped them eclipse their husbands as earners. As an encapsulation of 21st-century womanhood, it’s almost too on the nose: a discordant jumble of feminist ideals, branded domesticity, and lip filler.

Read the full article.

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Sergei Skripal said he could not return to Russia or there would be "reprisals".

Thousands of North Korean troops are now in Russia, preparing to help Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine. The newly arrived soldiers reportedly come from the Special Operations Force—the most capable part of North Korea’s army—and could be deployed in Russia’s Kursk region, in an effort to take back territory that Ukraine seized in an offensive this past summer. But Western military observers can only guess at how well equipped they are or how well trained they’ll be relative to battle-hardened Ukrainian forces.

What we do know is this: Putin saw an opportunity to improve Russia’s position in the war that he started, and he took it—apparently with little regard to what the West might think.

Counting on the United States to do nothing appears to have been a good bet. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged what Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence had been saying for some time: that Kim Jong Un’s hermit state had joined forces with Russia. When pressed by reporters about what North Koreans’ role might be, Austin responded, “If they’re co-belligerents—[if] their intention is to participate in this war on Russia’s behalf—that is a very, very serious issue.” He is trying to sound tough, but his comment means nothing.

Since the beginning of the current war, in February 2022, the Biden administration has dithered again and again. Should Ukraine be offered high-tech American weaponry, such as HIMARS rocket equipment, Abrams tanks, ATACMS missiles, F-16 fighters, and even long-range JASSM missiles? (In most of these cases, the U.S. relented and provided the requested equipment, but Ukraine missed valuable opportunities to set back Russia’s war machine.) Would the U.S. allow Ukraine to use Western weaponry to attack Russian-occupied Crimea, the Russian-built Kerch Bridge, or military assets being used to attack Ukraine from just across the border in Russia? Could Ukraine attack military targets deeper in Russia? The U.S. is Ukraine’s most important ally—but it has subjected Kyiv to an endless process in which vital aid has been delayed or denied because the U.S. fears what Putin might think of each step.

[Anne Applebaum: The only way the Ukraine War can end]

I don’t mean to sound flippant, but the dynamic reminds me of a classic Gary Larson cartoon that shows, in a split screen, a man and a woman lying awake at night in different homes. He is agonizing about what she thinks about him, whether he should call her, whether she even knows he exists. She is thinking simply, “You know, I think I really like vanilla.” The caption reads, “Same planet, different worlds.” Like the man in the cartoon, the U.S. is full of self-doubt and wrestles endlessly with how Russia might feel. The Biden administration has withheld weapons systems at precisely the moments when they would be most useful, thereby allowing Russia to turn this war into a long-term attritional conflict that it did not need to be.

Putin’s thinking about how to conduct the war isn’t complex at all. He regularly and swiftly escalates whenever he believes that doing so will afford him a strategic advantage. He has bombed Ukrainian hospitals and power supplies, plotted sabotage attacks on military facilities in Europe, hit up Iran for large numbers of drones and missiles, and bargained with North Korea for millions and millions of shells—all to help him in his quest for military success.

A major factor in American vacillation is the Biden administration’s fear that if the West helps Ukraine too much, Putin will escalate by using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. But Putin has shown many times that his nuclear threats are hollow. Following through on them would isolate him from his most important ally—China has repeatedly signaled its opposition to the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict—and would not necessarily provide a clear military benefit that would help Russia defeat the Ukrainian army.

He will, however, use any other means to win the war. And the United States, apparently, will keep overthinking—and finding excuses to do nothing. A few weeks ago, Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence started reporting that North Korean forces were getting involved on Russia’s side. Downplaying the importance of Pyongyang’s involvement, American military and intelligence officials initially suggested to The New York Times that the regime had sent engineers to build and operate North Korean military equipment in Russian hands. Subsequently, a video surfaced that seemed to show North Korean troops in Russia being given Russian military equipment. Earlier this week, the British government asserted that North Korean combat troops were on their way to Russia.

Even when the U.S. government finally acknowledged what was happening, its words showed indecision. “What exactly they’re doing will have to be seen,” Austin said.

[Eliot A. Cohen and Phillips Payson O’Brien: How ]defense experts got Ukraine wrong

That reaction will not deter Putin, who understands that he is in a war, not a negotiation. He appears to doubt the steadfastness of Ukraine’s supporters—and he may be proved right, particularly if U.S. voters return Donald Trump, a Putin admirer, to the White House. The Russian dictator seems intent on bleeding Ukraine to death on the battlefield. Toward that goal, he has tolerated more than 600,000 casualties among his own soldiers, the U.S. estimates. The Russian military under his command has committed innumerable war crimes—against Ukrainians and even its own troops—in pursuit of an advantage. After all this, if Putin believes that using troops from North Korea, a global outcast, will give him an edge, he won’t hesitate to employ them.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, its most important partner isn’t thinking as clearly. We still don’t know, almost three years into the conflict, whether the U.S. wants Ukraine to win or is more concerned that Russia does not collapse. Just a few weeks ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky presented Washington with a considered plan for victory, which involved using longer-range American weaponry to conduct strikes against Russian targets—much as Russia regularly uses Iranian weapons to hit Ukrainian targets.

The Biden administration’s response has been to run out the clock and pass the issue off to its successor. Its excuses have become self-fulfilling: The U.S. has had countless opportunities to step up and help Ukraine promptly, and in every instance, it has prevaricated and wasted time. At some point, Americans should realize that Putin isn’t wondering what the U.S. thinks about him; he is trying relentlessly to win his war. The U.S. should respond to North Korea’s involvement by doing the one thing it always should have done: give Ukraine the means to defeat the Russian invasion.

Elon Musk, whose SpaceX is a major government contractor, has been in “regular contact” with Russian President Vladamir Putin, raising security concerns, The Wall Street Journal reports.

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