Dec
30
2025

He's Not Great on the Goodwill, Either

Pun Salad is admittedly weak on foreign policy, torn between a sensible isolationism on one hand, and not wanting to see bad guys win on the other.

So: I link, you decide. Jim Geraghty, as always, makes a lot of sense: No, Vladimir Putin Does Not Want to See Ukraine ‘Succeed’.

The president of the United States, offering an update on his efforts to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine, after meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky on Sunday at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla.:

Q: So, in your conversation with President Putin, did you discuss what responsibility Russia will have for any kind of reconstruction of Ukraine post an agreement?

President Trump: I did. They’re going to be helping. Russia’s going to be helping. Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed once — it sounds a little strange, but I was explaining to the president, President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity, and other things at very low prices. So, a lot . . . of good things came out of that call today, but they were in the works for two weeks with Steve [Witkoff] and with Jared [Kushner] and Marco [Rubio] and everybody.

Got that? Vladimir Putin and Russia want to see Ukraine succeed, the president assures us. (Zelensky, standing beside Trump at the press conference, attempted to keep a poker face but gave a brief “oh, really?” head tilt and smiled when Trump said, “It sounds a little strange.”)

Jim is pretty convincing that Trump's attitude and opinions toward Putin are based (at best) in fantasy. Which makes him the wrong guy to be running the foreign policy shop these days.

Also pretty damning is Peter J. Wallison over at AEI, who explains Why Trump Will Never Be Able to End the War in Ukraine.

I’m always amused by people—many in our own government and media—who are astonished by Vladimir Putin’s refusal to accept any Russia-Ukraine agreement that is put before him. Stolidly, he says that he will accept nothing short of a Ukraine capitulation, a halt to the fighting where Russia will retain everything—as little as it is—that it has attained in four years of fighting. He protests, against all evidence, that Russia is winning.

Why is Putin so immovable, when his policies appear to most experts as bleeding Russia dry? True, Ukraine is suffering even more, but there are no indications that Ukraine’s people are ready to give up.

Peter's theory, which sounds plausible to me:

Why is it so difficult to make an agreement with Putin to stop the war? The answer is simple. The war is the only thing that is keeping Putin alive. The oligarchs who hold the real power in Russia do not dare to overthrow him, because they’d be blamed for Russia’s surrender, and his death will produce a struggle for power among the oligarchs that will be hellish in its brutality. Moreover, those who overthrow Putin will be blamed for the loss of the war in Ukraine, which will swiftly follow.

But see above. What do I know?

Also of note:

  • Just say no. Or have ChatGPT say no for you. Elizabeth Nolan Brown is thumbs-down on the latest stupid acronym: The TRUMP AMERICA AI Act is every bit as bad as you would expect. Maybe worse.

    Sometimes you can tell a bill will be really bad just from its title. So it goes with The Republic Unifying Meritocratic Performance Advancing Machine Intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Across American Industry Act, from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.). And, boy, does it deliver on that disaster of a name, managing to combine nearly every bad tech policy idea of the past half-decade—including gutting Section 230 and creating new requirements around the suppression of sexuality online—into one massive piece of Trump-branded legislation.

    The bill's title alone is asinine, even if we put the North Korea-ness meets word-salad nature of it aside. Following the normal rules of making acronyms, it would be the TRUMP AMIERICA (or perhaps AMIBERICA) AI act, though Blackburn is throwing rules to the wind and referring to it as the TRUMP AMERICA AI act.

    If only the problems stopped there!

    Narrator: The problems do not stop there.

  • If the right one don't getcha, then the left one will. Greg Lukianoff, who keeps his eyes wide open all the time, sees The Worst of Both Worlds for Campus Free Speech. (archive.today link)

    2025 was the worst year for campus censorship in decades, and that’s because it’s coming from every possible direction—especially the MAGAverse.

    For most of my career, the biggest threat to free speech on campus came from inside higher education: the on-campus left (students, yes, but more importantly administrators) using the power of investigation and discipline to punish “wrongthink.” The right pushed, too, but those pushes overwhelmingly originated off campus. This makes sense, given that there simply aren’t that many conservatives in the student body, on the faculty, or—least of all—among administrators in higher education.

    In 2025, what changed was the balance of power and the source of the pressure. The federal government and state governments, using the levers of state power, are now the leading forces behind attempts to punish campus speech. In the data my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tracks—our Students Under Fire database—incidents involving censorship attempts from politicians or government officials jumped to roughly a third of all cases this year. In 2024, those incidents didn’t crack double digits.

    [Headline inspiration: Tennessee Ernie Ford, Sixteen Tons]

  • An inspiration to all pundits. The Free Press invites some of its contributors to confess: What We Got Wrong This Year. First up is Nellie Bowles:

    This year, I really was wrong about why our government wastes money. I always knew the government was a little careless, a little silly. I’ve been following the California high-speed rail debacle for heaven’s sake, with more than $100 billion budgeted since 2015 and no high-speed track laid. I know how much San Francisco spends on “homelessness,” i.e., funding a vast array of nonprofit workers to wander around making sure addicts stay on the sidewalk as long as possible. I know these things. I think of them as absurdities that come from good intentions and silly plans. But then came the Minnesota fraud. It has rattled me to the core.

    There is no way for corruption that deep to happen without massive collusion from regulators, whose salaries are, of course, also paid by taxpayers. So this is the year I realized that the government doesn’t accidentally misspend money—it does it on purpose! Until this year, it really never occurred to me that there could be true corruption like that in America.

    To some extent this revelation is comforting: It reflects competence. It reflects sophistication, foresight, strategy, all of which I thought our elected officials lacked. So really there are pros and cons here. That’s just one thing I was wrong about, but the list is very, very long. Anyway, this is the year I open a Minnesota day care.

    Will Pun Salad carry an end-of-year confession of error? Tune in tomorrow!

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