Civics

President Trump said, in remarks reported overnight, that it might be time for Ukraine to find someone else to negotiate, and he defended a sanctions waiver that will send more than 300,000 metric tonnes of Russian diesel into world markets. Ukrainian and American officials were due to meet in Oslo the same day. The morning’s crude print is the other half of the story: front-month WTI at $110.00 a barrel, up $6.34, or 6.12 percent, as of 6:47 a.m. ET, on supply risk from the war with Iran rather than from Russia. The ten-year Treasury stood at 5.119 percent, and September’s consumer prices were 0.9 percent higher than July’s. Energy is the hinge on which the rest of the day turns. ...

Russia struck Kyiv’s power grid overnight with ballistic missiles and drones, damaged more than ten energy facilities, and left roughly 550,000 families without electricity by morning, according to Ukrainian officials. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attack came with “no early warning from our partners.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters in Uzbekistan, answered that there had been no pause in intelligence sharing. The exchange puts the two governments’ accounts of the war at odds in public, on a morning when the ten-year Treasury yields 5.08 percent, oil trades above $100 a barrel, and Friday’s equity close was down across all three indexes. ...

Question: Sixteen days before Election Day, Democratic Senate candidates raised four times what Republicans raised, nine of the week’s eleven rating changes moved their way, and the president’s approval fell to a record low, so why does control of the Senate still come down to five states that could go either way? Answer: Because a lead is not a majority, and this week made the difference between them visible. The third-quarter filings, due October 15, showed Democratic candidates raising $253 million to the Republicans’ $56 million across the fifteen races NBC News rates as competitive, and winning the money race in fourteen of them.1 Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved five Senate ratings, four of them toward the Democrats, and its tally now stands at 49 seats at least leaning Democratic, 46 at least leaning Republican, and five toss-ups: Kansas, Iowa, Maine, Ohio and Texas.2 That arithmetic is the week’s most important number. A week ago Republicans needed three of four toss-ups to hold a 50-50 chamber with the vice president’s tiebreaker, and Democrats needed two of four. This week Republicans need four of five, and Democrats still need two.2 The path got cheaper for one party and narrower for the other in the same seven days. ...

The order the President signed on Friday night did more than pause a diesel arrangement with Moscow. It set aside, for sixty days, sanctions that Congress had passed and he had signed into law in September, and it did so two days before they were due to take effect. The measures suspended include tariffs of up to 100 percent on imports from the five largest purchasers of Russian oil and gas, most significantly China and India, along with sanctions on senior Russian figures including Vladimir Putin, on Russian financial institutions, and on the shadow fleet. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, described the suspension as a pause to analyse the effect on the American and global economies. The order drew objections from senators of the President’s own party: Ted Cruz called it a mistake, John Cornyn called it “reckless,” and Thom Tillis called it “beyond irresponsible.” In the same forty-eight hours, Ukrainian drones struck the St Petersburg oil terminal, killing at least one person, and Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces had attacked Ukraine’s energy sector 76 times since the “energy ceasefire” was announced a week ago. Equity markets had closed Friday with the Nasdaq down 2.15 percent and the volatility index up 21.45 percent. ...

Question: When a plaintiff tells a court that a privilege has never been properly invoked, what does the government do next? Answer: It invokes it. On October 14, Joshua T. Hoyt, a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President, filed a declaration in the Kennedy Center case stating that “at the direction of the President” he was “formally invoking the presidential communications privilege” over what Representative Joyce Beatty has sought in discovery. The same afternoon, Judge Christopher Cooper issued the scheduling order the parties had spent a week arguing about: Beatty’s opposition to the motion to lift the injunction is due October 30, the government’s reply November 6, and briefing on summary judgment is stayed until the court rules on the motion to lift. Discovery closes October 23. In the Epstein files case, the government spent the week arguing that no administrative record is needed, and on Friday morning it hand-delivered a binder of redacted interview notes that the court had asked for twice. In the third docket, the D.C. Circuit let the stay motion sit, now eighteen days past the last brief. ...

On Friday the President signed an executive order waiving the new Russia sanctions package, setting aside the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, a statute he had signed into law himself in September, and with it the sanctions on Russian government and military officials, on major banks, and on vessels in the shadow fleet, together with duties on Russian goods and on goods from nations that still buy Russian oil and gas. In return, Russia is to supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel to the American and global market immediately, 500,000 tons in November, and larger volumes after that. The tonnages were announced by the President himself, on Truth Social. Moscow’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev called the pause “a significant and truly historic moment” and said the package it suspends could have “brought economic cooperation between Russia and the US to a complete standstill.” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Brussels, said Ukraine “can’t accept diesel deals, because gas deals will come next,” and warned that relief would spread to banking, to individuals, and to chemicals. Within the same twenty-four hours a supertanker burned in the Strait of Hormuz, and front-month crude closed at $101.84, up 3.95 percent. ...

“Have I done something for the general interest? Well then, I have had my reward.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.4 (trans. George Long, 1862) The reflection This week produced a great deal of evidence and almost no verdict, and the gap between those two things is the whole difficulty of living in a moment like this one. The V-Dem institute measured the damage and found the country has fallen to its 1965 level; a political scientist at Harvard named the regime and said it is reversible; an essay I published on Thursday assembled the record and then, because a record is not a plan, listed what a citizen might actually do about it. Every one of those items is an act of description. Not one of them, by itself, changes anything. So the week raises the question the epigraph answers: if the work is not rewarded with the outcome you want, what is the reward? ...

The breach between Washington and Kyiv became public on Thursday, and Europe answered it in Brussels on Friday morning. In an interview with Newsmax aired Thursday, the President called Ukraine’s renewed strikes on Russian oil refineries “a disgrace,” said that “all he’s doing is making the world oil price higher,” and said of Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “I think I find Zelenskyy to be more difficult to deal with than Putin.” Zelenskyy had paused the strikes for three days at the President’s request, then resumed them on Thursday on the ground that Moscow had never stopped hitting Ukraine’s grid. He arrived at a European Union summit in Brussels flanked by Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa, where von der Leyen said the EU had supported the energy ceasefire “but we have seen that Russia did not respect it, not a single minute,” promised a twenty-second round of sanctions, and added: “We will not lift any sanctions unless Russia stops the war.” Russian drones killed several people in Kharkiv overnight and left some 270,000 households without power in the western Volyn region, according to the local governors. ...

Whether the second Trump administration has damaged American self-government is no longer a matter of opinion. It is a matter of measurement, and the people who measure it have reported. The open questions are narrower and harder: how much of the damage is structural, how much is reversible, and what a citizen who wants to oppose it can do on an ordinary Tuesday. This essay takes up the record first, because the argument rests on it, and then the work, because a record is not a plan. ...

The energy ceasefire announced at the weekend is over, and it ended where it began: over oil. Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine attempted a large-scale attack on a refinery at Ryazan, about 180 kilometres south of Moscow, and that a “fire broke out after drone debris fell onto the refinery site.” Regional officials told the Guardian the plant had been targeted by 69 drones and four Flamingo cruise missiles, and images from the site showed flames. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told the Financial Times that strikes on Russian refineries would resume, and Al Jazeera reports he had said Kyiv was “done” with an arrangement he first learned about from the news. Moscow answered with what the Guardian calls a record overnight swarm of drones over central Ukraine and with hypersonic and ballistic missiles aimed at power plants, leaving cities including Kyiv without power and water for hours. ...