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    Three Years: Reflections on the Ukraine War

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    More from our inbox:Advice for Democrats: ‘Go Home and Listen’Lab Discoveries LostBuy Back Pennies and NickelsRe-evaluating Movies Andrew Kravchenko/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “At Home and Abroad, Mourning Lives Lost Over Three Long Years” (news article, Feb. 25):Feb. 24 marked the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am inspired by, and my heart breaks for, the brave and noble Ukrainians. I wish my president were more like President Volodymyr Zelensky.Alison FordOssining, N.Y.To the Editor:Re “Dueling U.N. Resolutions on Ukraine Highlight Fissures Between the U.S. and Europe” (news article, Feb. 25):If the United States’ joining Russia to vote against a United Nations resolution to condemn Russia’s war against Ukraine isn’t giving aid and comfort to our enemy, I don’t know what is. Shame on us all.Eileen MitchellLewes, Del.To the Editor:Republicans, historically the party for a strong U.S. foreign policy and an understanding of who our democratic allies are, now remain silent.As President Trump embraces Vladimir Putin, widely suspected of being a killer of political rivals and journalists, and calls President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator, our Republican senators and representatives should understand that their silence is more than acquiescence.It should be construed as supporting our current path. So when things go wrong, as they inevitably do when you cut deals with bad actors, don’t you dare pretend you were not a part of this abhorrent change in direction in U.S. policy.Steve ReichShort Hills, N.J.To the Editor:Re “Ukraine Nears a Deal to Give U.S. a Share of Its Mineral Wealth” (news article, nytimes.com, Feb. 24):I want to register my objection to the United States’ “mineral rights” demand to Ukraine. Further, any treaty granting our nation such rights must be approved by Congress, which I hope will show a shred of dignity and ensure that it at least gives Ukraine protection and sovereignty in return.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Some Republicans Sharply Criticize Trump’s Embrace of Russia at the U.N.

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      A band of moderate Republicans in Congress sharply criticized the Trump administration this week for siding with Russia at the United Nations on resolutions regarding the war in Ukraine, even as the majority of the G.O.P. turned a blind eye to the United States’ sudden embrace of a longtime adversary.“The Trump Administration royally screwed up today on Ukraine,” Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, wrote on social media on Monday night. “The vast majority of Americans stand up for independence, freedom and free markets, and against the bully and invader.”The reproach from Mr. Bacon and others came after the United States on Monday voted against a U.N. General Assembly resolution, introduced by Ukraine, that condemned Russia for invading Ukrainian territory and demanded that it withdraw and face repercussions for war crimes. Shortly afterward, the United States succeeded in passing a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for peace in Ukraine that did not chastise Russia. Key U.S. allies, including Britain and France, abstained.“This posture is a dramatic shift from American ideals of freedom and democracy,” Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah, wrote on social media on Monday night, saying he was “deeply troubled by the vote,” which had “put us on the same side as Russia and North Korea.”The Russian representative to the United Nations welcomed the move by the United States and said the new stance gave Moscow “a certain optimism” about the future of European security.The position adopted by the Trump administration would have been anathema in recent years, during which the United States shipped arms to help Ukraine’s fighters beat back Russia’s invasion and sent funds to prop up the war-torn country’s civilian infrastructure. Even many Republicans who bristled at the tens of billions of dollars in aid packages that Congress approved for Ukraine were resolute that Russia and Vladimir V. Putin, its president, were the aggressors in the conflict.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Huntington Beach, Politics on a Plaque

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      MAGA references on a library plaque have divided the Southern California surf town and thrust it into the national spotlight.They call themselves the “MAGA-nificent 7.” They once posed for a picture inside City Hall wearing red caps with the slogan “Make Huntington Beach Great Again.”But the Huntington Beach City Council, in Southern California, had even more MAGA in store. The seven-member body, all of whom are Republicans, decided to turn a seemingly humdrum municipal task — commemorating the 50th anniversary of the city’s central public library — into a political statement, using their favorite acronym.The council-approved design of the plaque describes the library in this bold-letter fashion:Magical Alluring Galvanizing Adventurous“This is a historical moment,” said Councilwoman Gracey Van Der Mark, who came up with the idea for the plaque. “And if people do not think America is great and don’t want to make it great again, they’re in the wrong country — because millions of people risk their lives to come to this one country.”Gracey Van Der Mark, a member of the Huntington Beach City Council, voted with six other colleagues to approve the design of the library plaque.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe wording of the plaque has thrown Huntington Beach — an Orange County surf town with 192,000 residents that’s about 30 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles — into the national spotlight. But the dispute is part of a yearslong battle over the city’s political and cultural identity.Huntington Beach has become one of the reddest cities in one of the bluest states in America. Both before and after voters in November ousted the last three remaining Democratic members of the Council, city leaders have pushed a series of Trump-style policies and tangled in court with state officials.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republicans Face Angry Voters at Town Halls, Hinting at Broader Backlash

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      Some came with complaints about Elon Musk, President Trump’s billionaire ally who is carrying out an assault on the federal bureaucracy. Others demanded guarantees that Republicans in Congress would not raid the social safety net. Still others chided the G.O.P. to push back against Mr. Trump’s moves to trample the constitutional power of Congress.When Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, arrived at a crowded community center on Saturday in the small rural town of Trinity in East Texas, he came prepared to deliver a routine update on the administration’s first month in office. Instead, he fielded a barrage of frustration and anger from constituents questioning Mr. Trump’s agenda and his tactics — and pressing Mr. Sessions and his colleagues on Capitol Hill to do something about it.“The executive can only enforce laws passed by Congress; they cannot make laws,” said Debra Norris, a lawyer who lives in Huntsville, arguing that the mass layoffs and agency closures Mr. Musk has spearheaded were unconstitutional. “When are you going to wrest control back from the executive and stop hurting your constituents?”“When are you going to wrest control back from the executive?” Debra Norris, a lawyer who lives in Huntsville, asked Mr. Sessions.Mark Felix for The New York TimesLouis Smith, a veteran who lives in East Texas, told Mr. Sessions that he agreed with the effort to root out excessive spending, but he criticized the way it was being handled and presented to the public.“I like what you’re saying, but you need to tell more people,” Mr. Smith said. “The guy in South Africa is not doing you any good — he’s hurting you more than he’s helping,” he added, referring to Mr. Musk and drawing nods and applause from many in the room.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Senate G.O.P. Passes Budget Resolution, and Punts on Tough Questions

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      The budget plan that Republicans pushed through the Senate early Friday was a necessary first step toward enacting President Trump’s ambitious domestic goals, but it punted the most difficult and divisive questions about how Congress will do so.On a largely party-line vote, 52-48, Senate Republicans won adoption of a blueprint that calls for a $150 billion increase in military spending and $175 billion more for border security over the next decade.How will they pay for it? That’s a question for another day. What about the huge tax cuts they and Mr. Trump have promised? We’ll figure that out later, senators say.Over in the House, Republicans have been agonizing to come up with at least $2 trillion in spending cuts to pay for Mr. Trump’s fiscal agenda and placate their most conservative members. Their plan, which G.O.P. leaders hope to put to a vote as early as next week, loads vast tax cuts and policy changes into one huge package and calls for slashing government programs deeply to finance it all. But it faces a perilous road through the closely divided House, where Republicans hold a razor-thin majority.Republicans in the Senate have essentially delayed any decision on those thorny details, focusing instead on delivering an early win to Mr. Trump in the form of money for his hard-line anti-immigration agenda. They said they would address questions of spending and tax cuts later in a separate bill.“We’ve decided to front-end load security,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the chairman of the Budget Committee. “We want to make the tax cuts permanent. We’re going to work with our House colleagues to do that. They expire at the end of the year, but we have time to do that. It is the view of the Republican Senate that when it comes to border security, we need not fail. We should have the money now to keep that momentum going.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republicans Want Lower Taxes. The Hard Part Is Choosing What to Cut.

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      House Republicans are preparing to adopt a plan that puts a $4.5 trillion limit on the size of the tax cut, but even that will not be enough for some of President Trump’s promises.Since their party swept to power, Republicans have entertained visions of an all-inclusive tax cut — one that could permanently lower rates for individuals, shower corporations with new incentives and deliver President Trump’s sprawling suite of campaign promises.If only it were so easy.House Republicans are preparing to adopt a budget plan that puts a $4.5 trillion upper limit on the size of the tax cut. Even such a huge sum is not nearly enough for all of their ideas, and so lawmakers must now decide which policy commitments are essential and which ones they can live without.For a sense of the Republican predicament, take a look at the 2017 tax cuts. Many of the measures in that law, including a larger standard deduction and more generous child tax credit, expire at the end of the year. The overriding goal of this year’s bill is to extend the expiring provisions, which provide their largest benefits to the rich, before they end.But accomplishing just that would cost roughly $4 trillion over the next 10 years. Then there’s a coveted business tax break for research and development — which, in an example of the zigzag of tax policy in Washington, Republicans wound down in 2017 and now want to revive. That would be another $150 billion. Allowing companies to once again deduct more of the interest on their debt is another $50 billion.Those changes are the table stakes. They essentially amount to preserving the status quo. And together they would eat up all but $300 billion of the $4.5 trillion Republicans are giving themselves to cut taxes. That’s not very much money, considering the ambitions Mr. Trump and other Republicans have for the bill.The squeeze is on.“You do start running out of space to do other things,” said Andrew Lautz, a tax policy expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The MAGA Youth Remind Me of the 1980s and Not In a Good Way

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      When I was 7, I sent a birthday card to President Ronald Reagan. It was the 1980s. I lived in rural Alabama, and pretty much all the adults around me were loudly on board with what was then the Reagan revolution, which had swept Jimmy Carter and his timid liberal apologists for America’s greatness out of power and made the presidency, especially to my young eyes, a glamorous exemplar of everything good about the country. I remember the seductive appeal of the story he told about America as a global superpower, a “shining city on a hill” where anyone could be successful with enough elbow grease, so long as those meddlesome big-government liberals didn’t get in the way.Being young and preppy and rich back then looked cool to me. Within a few years I had a crush on Alex P. Keaton on “Family Ties,” who horrified his ex-hippie parents with his love of heartless capitalism and harebrained business schemes. I didn’t see that the show was making fun of him, too. The young conservatives of the ’80s were all molded in his image (and he in theirs).Now, in 2025, some young people (who were not yet born in the age of Reagan) are renouncing the progressive politics of their millennial elders and acting like it’s the ’80s again. There was a marked shift toward Donald Trump by voters under 30 according to exit polling in last November’s election, so maybe they are just dressing the part. But when I read about a group of younger MAGA supporters reveling in their victory at the member’s only Centurion New York (declaring, as one 27-year-old in attendance did, that Trump “is making it sexy to be Republican again. He’s making it glamorous to be a Republican again”) or see photos or watch videos of MAGA youth at, say, Turning Point USA events run by Charlie Kirk, a preppy right-wing influencer whose organization recruits high schoolers and college students to be soldiers in the culture war, or in Brock Colyar’s New York magazine cover story about the young right-wing elite at various inauguration parties — I get a very distinct feeling of déjà vu. It’s laced with nostalgia but grounded in dread.These young right-wingers have a slightly modernized late ’80s look. I doubt they use Aqua Net or Drakkar Noir, but I imagine their parties have the feel of a Brat Pack movie where almost everyone is or aspires to be a WASPy James Spader villain. Few of the people I’m talking about were even alive in the 1980s, and so they can’t understand what it means for Mr. Trump to be so stuck in that time, still fighting its battles. Now, instead of renouncing hippie counterculture, they’ve turned against whatever their generation considers to be woke. The incumbent liberal they detested was Joe Biden instead of Jimmy Carter. Instead of junk bonds, many of them plan to get rich by investing in crypto and trust that this administration will pursue or exceed Reagan levels of deregulation to facilitate it. After all, Project 2025 mentions Reagan 71 times.Mr. Trump’s ’80s were, until now, his glory years, when he built Trump Tower, published “The Art of the Deal” and called the tabloids on himself using a made-up name, John Barron. He was routinely flattered in the tabloids thanks to the excellent public relations skills of Mr. Barron, popped up regularly on TV and wrestling promotions and started making movie cameos. Urban elites looked down on him — Spy magazine called him a “short-fingered vulgarian” — but he embodied what many people who weren’t rich thought rich people looked like, lived like, and, in his shamelessness and selfishness, acted like.More important for us now, his formative understanding of politics seems to have been shaped by that era, when America, humbled by the Vietnam War, Watergate, crime and the oil crisis, was stuck with a cardigan-wearing president who suggested that we all turn down our thermostats for the collective good. Reagan told us to turn the thermostat way up, live large and swagger again. Hippies became yuppies, at least in the media’s imagination.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      I’ve Covered Authoritarians Abroad. Trump’s Actions Look Familiar.

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      President Trump’s second term dizzies many Americans, but I find it oddly familiar — an echo of the time I lived in China as a reporter.Americans sometimes misperceive Trump’s actions as a fire hose of bizarre and disparate moves, a kaleidoscope of craziness. Yet there is a method to it, and I’ve seen parallels in authoritarian countries I’ve covered around the world over the past four decades.It’s not that I offer a unified theory of Trumpism, but there is a coherence there that requires a coherent response. Strongmen seek power — political power but also other currencies, including wealth and a glittering place in history — through a pattern of behavior that is increasingly being replicated in Washington.But let’s get this out of the way: I think parallels with 1930s Germany are overdrawn and diminish the horror of the Third Reich; the word “fascism” may likewise muddy more than clarify. Having covered genuinely totalitarian and genocidal regimes, I can assure you that this is not that.Democracy is not an on-off switch but a dial. We won’t become North Korea, but we could look more like Viktor Orban’s Hungary. This is a question not of ideology but of power grabs: Leftists eroded democracy in Venezuela and Nicaragua, and rightists did so in Hungary, India and (for a time) the Philippines and Poland. The U.S. is the next test case.When authoritarians covet power, they pursue several common strategies.First, they go after checks and balances within the government, usually by running roughshod over other arms of government. China, for example, has a Supreme Court and a National People’s Congress — but they are supine. Here in the United States, many Republican members of Congress have similarly been reduced to adoring cheerleaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Defying Johnson, Graham and Senate G.O.P. Push Their Own Budget Plan

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      For days, Speaker Mike Johnson had called and texted Senator Lindsey Graham, imploring him to wait for the House to take the lead in the legislative drive to enact President Trump’s sweeping tax, budget and immigration agenda.When the three men converged in New Orleans on Sunday in the president’s suite at the Super Bowl, Mr. Graham shut him down in person.“I’m a huge fan, and nothing would please me more than one big, beautiful bill passing the House,” Mr. Graham recounted telling the speaker, a Louisiana Republican. But, he said, the Senate would press ahead with its own bill, adding, “We are living on borrowed time.”Senate Republicans have waited for weeks for their House colleagues to resolve their differences and agree to a budget blueprint that could unlock the party’s push to pass a vast fiscal package with only a simple majority vote. But House Republicans have remained divided over major issues, including how deeply to cut federal programs to pay for the bill, and have blown past several self-imposed deadlines.Enter Mr. Graham, the fast-talking fourth-term Republican senator from South Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.A loyal Trump ally who has long relished the opportunity to be in the middle of the action, Mr. Graham has made it clear in recent days that he has no intention of waiting for the House. Instead, Mr. Graham has advanced a budget plan that his committee is set to take up on Wednesday that would increase spending for the military and border security measures. He has promised that another bill extending the 2017 tax cuts will come later.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More