Harvard’s Decision Was the Only Decision

The world’s most famous university has done the right thing, and this is major news. It shouldn’t be. But less than three months into the second Trump administration, we are surprised by simple dignity. Capitulation would have garnered smaller headlines.

On Friday, the Trump administration sent a five-page letter to Harvard accusing the university of failing “to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” The letter demanded that the university change its governance structure; overhaul its admissions policies; submit to an external audit of the medical school, the School of Public Health, the Divinity School and several other programs that the letter claimed have “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias”; revamp student-discipline procedures; “end support” and withdraw university recognition of several pro-Palestinian student groups and the National Lawyers Guild; and commit to a process of reform running “at least until the end of 2028,” during which the university would submit quarterly reports on its compliance with the government’s demands. In the manner of a racketeer, the letter implied, without quite spelling it out, that if the university failed to comply, it would lose its federal funding.

The letter came from the Education Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration. These are all agencies that can have a role in overseeing the university. Laws and rules exist for such oversight. They involve negotiations, investigations and, when it comes to federal funding, congressional procedures, complete with periods of public notice. This process is complicated by design — a design intended to protect universities from capricious, politically motivated meddling and to make the withdrawal of federal funding an option of last resort.

But the Trump administration pulls funds first and negotiates second, dispensing with the rest of the process. Its first target was Columbia University. When that school acceded to the administration’s demands, it didn’t get its funding back. Instead, the administration is reportedly considering demanding that Columbia agree to direct government oversight — effectively, a takeover of the university.

Harvard chose a different response from Columbia’s. On Monday, its lawyers sent a letter to the administration pointing out that the administration was in violation of the law. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” the letter said. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms.”

No other response should have been possible by the logic of the law — or the logic of academic freedom or the logic of democracy. And yet, the Harvard lawyers’ letter sent waves of excitement through academic circles. This is a measure of how low, and how fast, our expectations have fallen.

One of the people who seemed surprised was Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican and the self-appointed gendarme of higher education who issued a statement declaring Harvard the “epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education.”

Trump administration officials, on Monday evening, promptly announced what they had suggested: that they will freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants.

Still, one hopes that other universities that find themselves in the administration’s cross-hairs — and there are many of them now — follow Harvard’s example and make self-respect, and respect for the law, unsurprising again.

Over the weekend, TikTok was awash in videos of Americans cheering on Chinese manufacturers for disclosing the names and locations of the Chinese factories thought to be behind luxury brands. Did you just pay $100 for Lululemon yoga pants? They might have been sewn by Xianglong Clothing and Hung Qisan Clothing Company in two factories in Yiwu, which sell them for just “five or six bucks” for a pair, claims one video from LunaSourcingChina. Have you been pining for a $2,000 Dior cardigan sweater? Dior’s cardigans are made by Beyond Garments in Hangzhou, another video declares.

Some of the Chinese videos that Americans were commenting on predate the tariff war President Trump started this month. But they took on a new meaning as Americans ponder paying a 145 percent markup — what’s the latest number? — for shoes, bags and clothing brands they love. Many Americans interpreted the Chinese videos as clever acts of resistance to Trump.

“Right now, the Chinese manufacturers are the best content on TikTok,” one woman, who appeared to be an American who once lived in China, said. “I don’t know how this tariff thing is going to play out, but the way that the Chinese manufacturers are playing their hand is absolutely well done.”

It’s a fascinating cultural moment, as Americans confront their place in the global value chain. We used to be the world’s biggest producers. Now we have become the world’s biggest consumers, so much so that Trump is using our appetite for stuff to bring the world to its knees for the privilege of selling it to us. But the real power of these videos is that they purport to give Americans a glimpse of who is really ripping them off. It’s not the Chinese artisans sitting at their sewing machines, earning a tiny fraction of what customers pay at the cash register. It’s not even, arguably, the Chinese government, which has used its newfound wealth to build infrastructure and fuel growth, which lifted millions of its people out of poverty. It’s the multinational corporations that charge a huge premium. Their added value? Marketing a brand.

“We were the real O.E.M. factory for those luxury brands,” one Chinese bag seller tells the camera in a widely shared video, referring to the original equipment manufacturer that makes in anonymity what a far more famous company sells.

“Some say that as long as there is a tag ‘Made in China,’ the bag can never be luxury,” another video states. But the truth is, the bag seller goes on to assert, “more than 80 percent of luxury bags are made in China.”

I don’t know if that’s true. So much of what’s on TikTok is hard to verify. (A spokesperson for Lululemon told Bloomberg, for instance, that about 3 percent of its finished goods are made in China.)

What I can say for sure, though, is that a huge percentage of the things we wear and use daily — about 60 percent of all imports sold in Walmart — were made in China.

Forget, for a moment, what Trump’s tariff war is going to do to our economies. Think of what it will do to our identities. The mask is going to come off, and we are going to find out just how much of what we do, what we wear and who we are depends on someone in China who we haven’t had to think about, until now.

“Ain’t I a woman?” Well, no, I’m not.

Yet ever since I first read that refrain in Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, I’ve thought of it as belonging to the canon of great American rhetoric — right up there with Abraham Lincoln’s “With malice toward none” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream.”

It’s for that reason that I cited the line in my April 8 column as an example of the kind of American spirit I treasure — what I called “the shared conviction that strong and weak are united in a common democratic creed.”

The problem — as I learned after the column was published — is that Truth may never have said it.

We may never know for sure. A near-contemporaneous transcript of the speech, published in June 1851 in the Anti-Slavery Bugle newspaper, does not contain the famous phrase. The phrase did appear (as “And ar’n’t I a woman?”) 12 years later, in a very different version of the speech published by the feminist abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage, who had presided over the convention.

Among the reasons not to believe Gage’s account: Her version of Truth’s speech is rendered in a Southern dialect. But Truth was born in upstate New York as a slave to a Dutch-speaking family, and spoke English with a Dutch accent. Much of this was elevated by Nell Irvin Painter in her scholarship on Truth’s life.

Whatever the case, both versions of the speech are powerful and ring true, morally speaking, and Truth’s place in the pantheon of American heroes remains secure.

There are also less-heralded heroes in the American story, including two who came to my attention this week almost by accident.

In my column, I noted some of the names that appeared on the passenger manifest of the ship — the M.V. Italia — that brought my mother to the United States as a 10-year-old refugee in 1950. Among them was Gerda Nesselroth, then 45, who was listed as “stateless.” She arrived along with her 15-year-old son, Peter, whose name appears below hers on the manifest.

The day after my column was published, I received an email from Peter’s daughter, Eva Nesselroth Woyzbun of Toronto. Eva steered me toward a brief biography of her dad from the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program, produced by the Azrieli Foundation. He was born in Berlin in 1935 and fled to Antwerp, Belgium, after Kristallnacht. Following the Nazi invasion in 1940, the family went into hiding but were betrayed in 1944. Peter managed to be smuggled to safety in Switzerland, while Gerda and his father, Laslo, were deported to Auschwitz. Only Gerda made it out alive: Eva called her “the toughest human I will ever know.”

In America, Peter earned a Ph.D. at Columbia and spent most of his career as a distinguished professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. But, as Eva wrote to me, he “never acquired Canadian citizenship — he was committed to the project of becoming and being ‘American’ and saw himself as nothing but. The mythology of America sustained him.”

Eva added this: “Were he alive today” — he died in 2020 — “he’d be terrified for those the Trump administration is rounding up and deporting, having spent his own childhood living in hiding and on the run.”

Eva sent me a picture of her father, newly arrived in the United States, standing before the Statue of Liberty. May his memory be for a blessing — and so may be the memory of what America used to stand for.

By the time their spending accounts were reactivated on Thursday, some scientists at the National Institutes of Health said they were running on fumes.

They had spent weeks scrambling to keep their labs running amid spending freezes, firing rampages and the chaos and confusion brought on by both. They were reusing latex gloves in an effort to conserve supplies. They were borrowing, donating and sharing a long roster of crucial but dwindling reagents with one another, in email threads that had morphed into virtual bazaars. In interviews, several of them said they would have to close up shop in as little as two or three weeks if something didn’t change drastically, and soon.

The unfreezing of agency credit cards (what scientists there call purchasing cards or p-cards) is a welcome but insufficient reprieve from this spiral. It will restore at least some hope to a work force disillusioned by major changes under the Trump administration, but it will improve things materially only at the margins: For one thing, several other financial restrictions remain in place (and many of the people with the clearance needed to use the reinstated cards have been fired).

For another, much more chaos is still in the offing. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has ordered the N.I.H. to cut 35 percent of its $16.7 billion contract spending budget. If “contract spending” sounds like a code for bureaucratic waste, it is not. Scientists, research assistants and animal technicians are often funded through contracts. So are the clinical trial coordinators who process samples and monitor patient safety, the skilled machinists who maintain microscopes and mass spectrometers and M.R.I.s and the office managers who serve as the institutes’ de facto nerve centers.

“They don’t just order supplies and book travel,” one scientist, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters at the agency, told me. “They filter every request through a web of restrictions and regulations meant to keep N.I.H. compliant with federal laws. If we lose our office managers, everything falls apart.”

As if none of that were bad enough, people in the agency said the N.I.H. is also set to lose a majority of staff members who work on contracts on June 2, when the 60-day notice period (legally required for firings related to force reduction) concludes; the scientists I spoke with said all of those working for the scientific institutes had been fired.

Contracts are far more complicated than grants. They involve much more oversight and require greater expertise to manage. They are also far-reaching. In addition to everything they cover in-house, they also fund some $10 billion to $15 billion in outside (or extramural) research — including large clinical trials and long-term epidemiological projects like the Framingham Heart Study.

It’s anyone’s guess what happens when the people who know how to manage these complex and hugely consequential documents are gone. But it seems clear that you can’t have contracts if there’s no one to execute them (no one to make payments or authorize work or resolve disputes), and you can’t have an N.I.H. without contracts.

It’s unclear what help, if any, is on the way. The N.I.H.’s newly minted director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, seems to have been instrumental in restoring the purchasing cards, but he has not managed to stop the firing rampage.

After a lifetime spent asking big, complicated questions, what the scientists most want to know now is this: Why? What, truly, is the goal of so much cruel and clumsy destruction?

Efficiency is not being enhanced, nor is waste being eliminated. (If anything, it’s increasing.) American interests are not being protected. And the quest to cure diseases or improve human health is not being advanced.

So when it’s all over, if the crown jewel of biomedical research — the enterprise that gave us the human genome sequence, Covid vaccines and treatments for cancer and H.I.V. and obesity — has been destroyed, what will have been the point?

I have many reactions to President Trump’s largely caving on his harebrained plan to tariff the world, but overall, one reaction just keeps coming back to me: If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And my fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns.

Think of what Trump; his chief knucklehead, Howard Lutnick (the commerce secretary); his assistant chief knucklehead, Scott Bessent (the Treasury secretary); and his deputy assistant chief knucklehead, Peter Navarro (the top trade adviser), have told us repeatedly for the past weeks: Trump won’t back off on these tariffs because — take your choice — he needs them to keep fentanyl from killing our kids, he needs them to raise revenue to pay for future tax cuts, and he needs them to pressure the world to buy more stuff from us. And he couldn’t care less what his rich pals on Wall Street say about their stock market losses.

After creating havoc in the markets standing on these steadfast “principles” — undoubtedly prompting many Americans to sell low out of fear — Trump reversed much of it on Wednesday, announcing a 90-day pause on certain tariffs to most countries, excluding China.

Message to the world — and to the Chinese: “I couldn’t take the heat.” If it were a book it would be called “The Art of the Squeal.”

But don’t think for a second that all that’s been lost is money. A whole pile of invaluable trust just went up in smoke as well. In the last few weeks, we have told our closest friends in the world — countries that stood shoulder to shoulder with us after Sept. 11, in Iraq and in Afghanistan — that none of them were any different from China or Russia. They were all going to get tariffed under the same formula — no friends-and-family discounts allowed.

Do you think these former close U.S. allies are ever going to trust getting into a trench with this administration again?

This was the trade equivalent of the Biden administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan, from which it never quite recovered. But at least Joe Biden got us out of a costly no-win war for which America, in my opinion, is now much better off.

Trump just put us into a no-win war.

How so? We do have a trade imbalance with China that does need to be addressed. Trump is right about that. China now controls one-third of global manufacturing and has the industrial engines to pretty much make everything for everyone one day if it is allowed to. That is not good for us, for Europe or for many developing countries. It is not even good for China, given the fact that by putting so many resources into export industries it is ignoring the meager social safety net it offers its people and its even more threadbare public health care system.

But when you have a country as big as China — 1.4 billion people — with the talent, infrastructure and savings it has, the only way to negotiate is with leverage on our side of the table. And the best way to get leverage would have been for Trump to enlist our allies in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia and Indonesia into a united front. Make it a negotiation of the whole world versus China.

Then you say to Beijing: All of us will gradually raise our tariffs on your exports over the next two years to pressure you to shift from your export economy to a more domestic-oriented one. But we will also invite you to build factories and supply chains in our countries — 50-50 joint ventures — to transfer your expertise back to us the way you compelled us to do for you. We don’t want a bifurcated world. It will be less prosperous for all and less stable.

But instead of making it the whole industrial world against China, Trump made it America against the whole industrial world and China.

Now, Beijing knows that Trump not only blinked, but he so alienated our allies, so demonstrated that his word cannot be trusted for a second, that many of them may never align with us against China in the same way. They may, instead, see China as a better, more stable long-term partner than us.

What a pathetic, shameful performance. Happy Liberation Day.

Amid the whipsaw changes in President Trump’s tariff announcements the last two weeks, something unusual has been happening in the critically important — and immense — market for U.S. Treasuries. When Trump unveiled his expansive tariff plans on April 2, investors quickly concluded that the massive new taxes might trigger a recession. The stock market swooned and the yields on Treasury securities plunged — as you might expect, because these are conventional responses to a prospective downturn.

But then, earlier this week, even as the stock market remained weak, something changed: Yields on longer term (10- and 30-year) Treasuries turned up and even eclipsed pretariff announcement levels. That seemed scary. Was some big holder of Treasuries — China quickly became the obvious suspect — dumping them? Many have worried for years that the Chinese could make their holdings of more than $700 billion of our debt a weapon of economic warfare.

While anything is possible in opaque global markets, that seems a less likely solution to me. For one thing, some experts believe China tends to own Treasuries of much shorter duration. More likely, what was happening to Treasuries is an example of the strange behavior that can occur in times of financial and economic stress.

In this case, a probable — but by no means certain — explanation is that following the tariff announcement earlier this month, the market quickly took its anticipated number of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts this year to four from three. That in turn, changed rates up and down the “yield curve” — the range of Treasury maturities from very short term to 30 years.

Hedge funds and other dealers often engage in very sophisticated forms of arbitrage, betting on small discrepancies between the price of one Treasury and another. Because the discrepancies are so small, large amounts of leverage are often employed. When a re-pricing or fear of one occurs, investors can seek to unwind these trades quickly, causing unusual and cascading price movements.

If things get bad enough, the Federal Reserve can step in to provide liquidity, as it did in the early days of Covid in March 2020. Or the Treasury market can normalize on its own. And of course, there’s always the chance that this time could be different.

After two trips to China in the last four months, I’ve been trying to say this every way I know how: Folks, you just don’t understand.

Covid had terrible effects on human health and mortality, but it also had a terrible effect on our ability to understand China. American and European business executives left China in droves at the start of the pandemic. Very, very few of them ever went back afterward. They entrusted their China businesses to local managers. While they were gone, Beijing took a great leap forward in advanced manufacturing that the world missed. It has created a manufacturing engine the likes of which may never have been seen in history.

China already controls one-third of all global manufacturing (up from 6 percent in 2000), and whether you are talking about cars or robots or phones, what is coming out of China today is not just cheaper and faster. It is cheaper, faster, better and smarter — and it is all about to be dramatically supercharged by China’s headlong rush to put artificial intelligence into everything it makes.

This engine is the product of decades of massive government investments in education, infrastructure and research, behind walls of protection — in a society where people are ready to work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. While China was building that, America’s biggest new industry was political polarization and getting its children addicted to TikTok and Instagram.

Read my newsroom colleague Keith Bradsher’s article from China on Monday:

Recent data from China’s central bank shows that state-controlled banks lent an extra $1.9 trillion to industrial borrowers over the past four years. On the fringes of cities all over China, new factories are being built day and night, and existing factories are being upgraded with robots and automation. China’s investments and advances in manufacturing are producing a wave of exports that threatens to cause factory closings and layoffs not just in the United States but also around the globe. “The tsunami is coming for everyone,” said Katherine Tai, who was the United States Trade Representative for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

That is why President Trump’s strategy is so foolish. Instead of putting tariffs on the whole world, we should be looking to line up all our industrial allies in a united front to say to China: You cannot make everything for everyone. While China is one-third of global manufacturing production, it accounts for only 13 percent of global consumption. That is not sustainable — and it is not just freaking out the U.S. and Europe but also Brazil, Indonesia, India and others; even Russia has suddenly cut back on auto imports from China.

Instead of making our strategy America against the whole world on tariffs, Trump should have made it all the industrial democracies, led by America, against China.

The purpose would be to effectively negotiate a way forward that both compels China to redirect its energies inward — to investing in its meager social safety net and health care system and stimulating its domestic demand — while inviting China to build new factories, not in Hanoi but in Hamtramck, Mich., and to transfer its technologies and supply chains to us in 50-50 joint ventures.

Unfortunately, our president and vice president were so busy flexing their muscles in Greenland, firing our top generals for not being sufficiently slavish to our Dear Leader and insulting our European allies for being too woke that they have squandered the leverage we needed to deal effectively with this formidable Chinese engine.

But here is what America’s business leaders really don’t understand: Trump and JD Vance have freaked out China and the E.U. by their erratic behavior. When they see a U.S. president just ignore a trade agreement with Mexico and Canada — U.S.M.C.A. — that he himself negotiated, they ask themselves: How can we trust any deal we cut with him? This could drive China and the E.U. closer together.

I hear my fellow Americans say: We just have to get to the midterms and have the Democrats regain the House, and we will be OK. Sorry, folks, we cannot wait that long. Another 20 months or so of this erratic leadership, and our country will be irredeemably broken. We need a handful of Republicans in the House and the Senate — right now — to cross the aisle and put a stop to this devastating man-made economic disaster.

It’s been nearly 12 years since Barack Obama made what was arguably the most consequential foreign policy decision of his presidency: Rather than order airstrikes on Syria after Bashar al-Assad killed hundreds of people with sarin gas, which the president had said would be a “red line,” Obama agreed to a Russian plan to arrange for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or O.P.C.W., to remove and dispose of those weapons.

Critics of the decision, including me, charged that Obama (and the isolationist Republicans who implicitly agreed with him) had shown America was a paper tiger whose threats would not be taken seriously by other dictators — including Vladimir Putin, who seized Crimea a few months later. But supporters crowed that diplomacy had achieved what military force could not.

“We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out,” John Kerry, the then-secretary of state, boasted on NBC the following summer.

Or not. Long before Assad was overthrown, there was extensive reporting that, true to the habit of most dictators, he had lied to the inspectors and surrendered only a fraction of his chemical weapons — a point demonstrated when Assad kept using them. Yet, aside from a limited U.S. strike ordered by Donald Trump in 2017, there were no consequences to the dictator for his cheating. Indeed, shortly before his unexpected ouster late last year, part of the world was moving toward re-normalizing ties with his regime.

Now comes news of just how extensive Assad’s cheating seems to have been. Reporting from Damascus, The Times’s Megha Rajagopalan found that, according to the O.P.C.W., “more than 100 chemical weapons sites are suspected to remain in Syria,” information that’s especially terrifying given the possibility that some of stockpiles could fall into terrorist hands. To its credit, the new government, whose leaders were once linked to Al Qaeda, promised the O.P.C.W. that it would destroy the remaining chemical stocks. Whether they make good on the promise remains to be seen.

The world is now approaching a similar crisis when it comes to Iran’s growing stockpiles of a different kind of dangerous substance: enriched uranium. Trump has warned Tehran that he’s prepared to use military force to end the regime’s nuclear bids, while also saying he prefers a deal. So far, the administration is demanding direct talks, while Iran prefers indirect talks of the sort it conducted, to no effect, with the Biden administration.

However it turns out, the Trump administration should bear in mind the costs of the diplomacy that yielded the Obama team its fake victory back in 2013: years of additional depredations by the Syrian regime, and an American president who looked, to America’s enemies, like a pushover and a sucker. Whatever else Trump might want, surely that wouldn’t be a reputation he’d relish for himself.

“America is an economic coiled spring,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared jubilantly in November, embracing the role of MAGA spokesman a couple of days after Donald Trump’s election. “We should be growing at least 4% annually and ideally 6-8%+. Growth has been brutally suppressed since before I was born. But there is so much to build. And the payoff for all Americans will be incredible.”

In his exuberance, Andreessen was far from alone. Perhaps the most lasting image of Trump’s second inauguration depicted the assembled tech oligarchs, many of whom previously allied with Democrats but had donated millions of dollars to the president’s inaugural fund. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Mark Zuckerberg talked about needing the return of “masculine energy” to the business world, and on X, Silicon Valley accelerationists cheered the candidate they saw as a fellow traveler.

Members of the business class have long believed that the Democratic Party hated them, but the fall campaign produced in a certain kind of entrepreneur a new opportunistic frenzy. Through some mercurial combination of pro-business energy, hands-off regulation and hostility to diversity, equity and inclusion, the country’s futurist billionaires believed Trump would make America into Galt’s Gulch again. “The business community is giddy with excitement,” Bill Ackman wrote. “Growth is about to explode.” Dan Loeb used the word “unleash.”

It is almost too easy to dunk on these predictions now. But even before “Liberation Day,” the stock market was having its worst quarter in years (and even worse when compared with other markets). Business uncertainty was, by some measures, higher than at the peak of Covid panic. Some forecasters have raised their odds of a recession past 50 percent. The Magnificent 7 companies lost more than a trillion dollars in market cap.

The country as a whole is on the losing side of that Trump bet. And even the immediate losses show its biggest cheerleaders suffered from two nested delusions. The first, somewhat familiar from the first term, was that Trump could be controlled, managed, cajoled and persuaded — that he was a puppet who could be played and that even his fiercest pledges could be disregarded.

The second delusion is perhaps more important, because it has been more pervasive: that the old liberal regime had conducted an aggressive war on business and entrepreneurship and merit more generally and altogether hobbled innovation and dampened economic growth for years. This was the Flight 93 election for the economy, in other words. “The Biden administration just, like, flat-out tried to kill us,” Andreessen told Rogan. Andreessen asked my colleague Ross Douthat, “After what I’ve been through in the last decade, could it get worse than it’s been?”

Among many other things, Trump’s election was a test of exactly that. It’s early, but for now, the answer is an obvious and emphatic yes. Eight percent growth does not appear to be right around the corner — or six or even four. And the vibe shift of the week is less American triumphalism than Chinese century to come.

Given the head-spinning pace of President Trump’s proclamations and executive orders, it is not surprising that yesterday’s shock is continually being buried under today’s awe. Take Ukraine, for example. Even before coming back to the White House, Trump said he wanted a quick end to the war, starting with a 30-day cease-fire.

There arose a great flurry of activity, of which the highlights include the dramatic ouster of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky from the White House for insufficient deference, the deal Zelensky couldn’t refuse to give the United States considerable control over Ukrainian minerals, a very long and seemingly friendly phone call between Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin and meetings in Saudi Arabia to hammer out the fighting pause. At last report, Russia nixed a 30-day cease-fire, and instead the two sides agreed only to stop attacks on each other’s power plants and in the Black Sea.

Then came Signalgate, an assault on elite universities and Wednesday’s bombshell “Liberation Day” announcements of tariffs against most of the world. Ukraine fell way down the attention scale.

So here, to catch up, is what has happened: nothing.

At least nothing by way of peace. Russia and Ukraine never reached a formal agreement on striking energy facilities and accused each other of continuing to do it. No mineral deal has been reached with Ukraine. Russia has continued battering Ukraine with missiles and drones and trying to advance on the ground. This week, attacks included a missile strike on Zelensky’s hometown and a deadly barrage of drones against Kharkiv.

There’s no sign that Putin is getting ready to stop fighting. He just signed a decree ordering a huge new round of conscription. North Korea, meanwhile, has apparently sent at least 3,000 more soldiers to join 11,000 already fighting for Russia, according to South Korea, mostly trying to dislodge Ukrainians from a pocket they seized around Kursk.

All that is said to have made Trump unhappy. On Sunday, in a rare display of displeasure with Putin, the president said he was “very angry” and “pissed off” with the Russian. But he also accused Zelensky of “trying to back out of” the minerals deal, warning that this could lead to “big, big problems.” On Wednesday, Putin’s special envoy for investment and international economic affairs, Kirill Dmitriev, arrived in Washington for a round of talks. He has already met more than once with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy for Russia and the Middle East. Still, Reuters reported that senior Trump officials doubt any peace deal can be reached in the next few months.

Despite the purported anger with Putin, Trump’s list of countries facing new tariffs excluded Russia. The reason, the White House explained, was that there is no trade with Russia. But Ukraine was on the list, as were countries that have even less trade with the United States than Russia does, like Brunei.

All of which is to say that the Nobel Peace Prize may have to wait.