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Republicans averted the self-inflicted wound of a government shutdown this weekend. The main casualty of the process was aid for Ukraine, but foreign aid was always a fig leaf—for both GOP dysfunction and the determination of a small group of Republicans to help Russia.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

California’s math misadventure is about to go national. Artists are losing the war against AI. What Emily Wilson’s Iliad misses

It’s Not About the Money

The Republicans in Congress have delayed a shutdown for another 45 days while they continue their family food fight. They are all very angry with one another, and they seem to agree on only one issue: They hate Matt Gaetz. But don’t blame Gaetz, who is clearly having the time of his life being famous. The Republicans, as the economist Michael Strain noted, have for weeks been careening toward a Seinfeld Shutdown, a budget impasse about … nothing.

Some $6 billion of aid to Ukraine, however, was removed from the budget, a temporary casualty of the near shutdown. (I say “temporary” because I have confidence that sensible members of Congress will act to restore the funds.) Republicans are trying to cloak their opposition to military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine in a lot of codswallop about oversight and budget discipline. But the opposition to aid for Ukraine among Republican extremists on the Hill is not about money.

Most congressional Republicans are in favor of helping Ukraine. The extremists, however, warned Joe Biden last month that they would oppose additional assistance to Kyiv. The list of signatories to a September 21 letter to the Office of Management and Budget is a roster of shame, including the new America Firsters in the Senate (J. D. Vance, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Tommy Tuberville among them) and the grotesque caucus-within-a-caucus of some of the most unhinged and weirdest members of the House, including Clay Higgins, Harriet Hageman, Andy Biggs, Anna Paulina Luna, and that titan of probity and prudence, Paul Gosar.

The drumbeat of propaganda from these members and their “amen” chorus in the right-wing media is having an effect: An Economist/YouGov poll released last week found a slight uptick among all voters for reducing military aid to Ukraine, but for the first time found that a majority of Republicans now support such reductions. Fortunately, Americans overall—even many voters in the GOP—are still holding firm in their support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian imperialism.

Nevertheless, GOP hostility to Ukraine on the Hill and among its rank-and-file voters is growing for several reasons—none of them principled.

First, foreign aid is always an easy hot button for the know-nothing right to push. Most Americans have no idea how much the United States spends on foreign aid, and they grossly overestimate how much goes to such programs. (Most Americans think it’s about 25 percent of the U.S. budget and want it reduced to about 10 percent. Their wish is already granted: It’s actually about 1 percent.) Worse, so many years after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine (in Crimea), some two-thirds of Americans still don’t even know where Ukraine is.

They also do not understand that most foreign assistance is not a cash handout: Money is spent to buy weapons, food, and other products made in America, which we then ship to other nations. Instead, many Americans think of assistance—mistakenly—as bags of untraceable money handed to foreigners to do with as they will, which is why opportunists such as Ron DeSantis (who once supported aid to Ukraine) try to exploit provocative terms such as blank check to describe helping Ukraine. DeSantis knows better; so do other Republican leaders.

But the Trumpist right has a more specific beef with Ukraine because of the role Ukraine played in Donald Trump’s impeachment and eventual electoral downfall. Interestingly, Vance has tried to make the opposite argument: “Sorry, this needs to be said,” he tweeted on Saturday, while clearly being not sorry. “A lot of the anti-Russia obsession on the left has nothing to do with Ukraine. It’s a revenge fantasy over 2016. They blame Russia for Donald Trump’s election and they’ll bleed Ukraine dry for payback.”

As is so often the case with modern Republicans, every accusation is a confession, and every assertion is projection. The majority of the country—not “the left”—is supporting Ukraine because it’s the right thing to do, not because they hate Russia for electing Trump. Rather, it’s the other way around: The MAGA Republicans are opposing Ukraine because they hate Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for their role in the impeachment drama.

Unlike Vance and his isolationist colleagues, most Americans recognize the immense threat that Russia’s war of conquest poses to our allies, to global peace, and to the security of the United States itself. Republicans once stood at the forefront of opposition to Kremlin aggression—Ronald Reagan’s steadfast opposition to Moscow was one of the reasons I was a young GOP voter in the 1980s—but now the party is saddled with a group of shortsighted appeasers, buttressed by a squad of right-wing cranks, who would doom tens of millions of innocent people to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s butchery just to own the libs.

Also, we should not look away from a nauseating truth about the extremist caucus within the GOP: Some of them genuinely admire Putin and what he has created in Russia. Tucker Carlson, after all, didn’t get taken off the air for supporting Putin in ways that would have made Cold War Soviet propagandists blush; he got canned after a defamation lawsuit from an election-machine company. These GOP extremists have swallowed the gargantuan lie that Putin is a godly defender of white Christian Europe against the decadent West and its legions of militant drag queens. (They believe this, in part, because they know less than nothing about conditions in Russia or its demography.)

Finally, some Republicans oppose aid to Ukraine because of the more general and bizarre countercultural obsession that has seized the American right: Whatever most of their fellow citizens approve of, they must oppose, or else they risk losing their precious claims to being an embattled minority. If they were to support aid to Ukraine, how would they be different from everyone else, and especially from Biden? How would they mark their tribal loyalty if they crossed party lines to oppose a dictator—while supporting a wannabe dictator of their own?

Some Republican opponents of assistance to Ukraine are merely cynical manipulators who care little about national or international security. Many genuinely admire Putin and hope for Ukraine’s defeat. Others are merely ignorant. But all of them are bound together by the reflexive urge to reject whatever it is that most other Americans accept. As a commenter on social media said to me today, if liberals were opposing aiding the Ukrainian war effort, “the GOP would shut down the government to ensure aid and you’d see Ukrainian flags waving on the back of pickups.”

To adopt a line from Senator Vance: Sorry, but it has to be said.

Related:

Kevin McCarthy finally defies the right. The emptiness of the Ramaswamy doctrine

Today’s News

The civil fraud trial brought against Donald Trump by Attorney General Letitia James began in New York. Representative Matt Gaetz vowed to present a resolution to oust Kevin McCarthy after the House speaker worked with Democrats to avert a government shutdown. Laphonza Butler, the first Black woman to lead the abortion-rights group Emily’s List, will succeed the late Senator Dianne Feinstein in California.

Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Cooper Neill / Getty; Jeff Kravitz / Getty; David Eulitt / Getty.

Taylor Swift Is Too Famous for This

By Devin Gordon

Has Taylor Swift ever been more popular, more all-powerful, more white Beyoncé than she is right now? She’s in the middle of an era-defining tour that is literally called the Eras Tour. A concert-film version of the show is about to arrive in theaters nationwide—she dropped the news a few weeks ago, and within hours, Hollywood studios were scrambling to get their movies out of her way. The bracelets are everywhere. And now, to her vast dominion, she has added untold millions of football-loving (mostly) men, thanks to her escalating flirtations with the Kansas City Chiefs’ sexy goofus tight end, Travis Kelce …

Maybe they’ll fall in love. Maybe they’ll have babies and co-host Saturday Night Live and grow old together.

No, this is going to end badly. Sorry to be a party pooper. But this isn’t really about Travis and Taylor at all. It’s about a sports-media cycle that simply cannot coexist with the gossip-manufacturing industry—two unruly mobs smacking together like 300-pound linemen.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How financial strength weakened American feminism Daniel Clowes is ready to face the truth. New York City is not built for this.

Culture Break

Photograph by Laura El-Tantawy

Read. “Love Is Not Always Song, but the Swelling,” a new poem by Athena Nassar:

“You are waist deep, wading / in what mauls you and also / what loves you.”

Listen. Senior editor Jenisha Watts narrates her October cover story, “I Never Called Her Momma.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Well, after weeks of being excited about coming to The Atlantic Festival—where I was going to share a stage with my colleagues David Frum, Helen Lewis, and Rebecca Rosen—I threw out  my back and couldn’t attend. (I couldn’t even stand up for a few days. Back spasms are no joke.) I’m on the mend thanks to my wife, my cat, and modern chemistry, but I had to pass up a terrific festival.

If you missed it live, as I had to, you can join me in watching some of the events here. (And don’t miss this interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.) In the meantime, I’m going to start working out so I can be in shape—okay, at least standing upright—for next year’s festival.

— Tom

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