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Happy Thursday! This morning, the U.S. officially hit $38 trillion in debt, adding $1 trillion since August. Having tried the “Don’t think about it” budget strategy, Treasury officials are now looking to see if Klarna offers a sovereign debt tier.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed reports Wednesday that the government is considering implementing export controls on a wide variety of software-powered products, adding that any moves would “likely be in coordination with our G-7 allies.” When asked about the limits of the prospective export restrictions, Bessent answered that “everything is on the table.” The move comes after China issued export curbs for rare earth minerals earlier this month. Meanwhile, according to Reuters calculations, China in 2025 overtook the U.S. as Germany’s top trading partner. Also, President Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he plans to reach a deal on trade and possible nuclear weapon limits with Chinese leader Xi Jinping when they meet next week in South Korea.
- NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte met with Trump on Wednesday to discuss Russia-Ukraine negotiations, with the White House later issuing new sanctions on two of Russia’s largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. The Wall Street Journal also reported on Wednesday that the Trump administration approved Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles supplied by Western allies deep within Russian territory—a claim Trump later said on Truth Social was “FAKE NEWS!” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday that he supported the ceasefire proposal Trump suggested last week, in which Ukraine and Russia pause fighting along the current front lines. Meanwhile, Russia’s military conducted a nuclear missile launch drill.
- The Senate once again voted against a House-approved, Republican-backed bill to fund the government on Wednesday, extending the current federal shutdown to 22 days and running, now the second-longest funding closure in U.S. history. Trump responded to Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ request for a meeting with him, stating that he would only accept the invite “if they let the country open” and vote to end the shutdown. Meanwhile, in response to Jeffries’ comments earlier this week that a GOP-backed bill to temporarily compensate troops during the shutdown was a “political ploy” allowing Trump to choose which federal employees to pay, the White House X account tweeted that “Democrats keep the government shut down for free healthcare for illegal aliens.”
- Hamas said on Wednesday that its forces dealt a “severe blow” to a Palestinian militant group opposing its rule in Gaza, part of the terrorist group’s broader push to eliminate what it says are “dens of treason” in the region. Meanwhile, Israel’s legislature passed two separate bills on Wednesday to annex all settlements in the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposed both bills, and Trump said last month that he would “not allow Israel to annex the West Bank.” That same day, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel must allow U.N.-organized aid to enter the Gaza Strip, though the body has no mechanism to enforce its decision.
- Graham Platner, the populist Maine Democratic candidate for Senate, said on Wednesday that he covered up a tattoo logo that resembled an emblem of a Nazi Germany paramilitary force. Platner said on Tuesday that he got the tattoo in 2007 while serving in the Marines in Croatia, and was only recently made aware of the symbol’s Nazi-ties. Earlier this month, news outlets reported on Reddit comments made by Platner as recently as five years ago, in which he described himself as a “communist,” shared that he had armor with the label “antifa supersoldier,” and suggested that a “good semi-automatic rifle” is necessary to “fight fascism.” Earlier this month, Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills announced her campaign for Senate, challenging Platner and other candidates in the party’s primary election.
Yes, No, Maybe So
For a brief moment, Ukraine had Washington’s favor.
At the United Nations in September, President Donald Trump said that Ukraine could win back all of its territory that Russia began to occupy at the start of the war. And when asked by a reporter whether NATO countries should shoot down Russian aircraft that enter their airspace, Trump said yes. On October 13, Trump suggested that he was open to giving Ukraine long-range Tomahawk missiles. He was growing publicly frustrated with the intransigence of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and looking to put an end to the war, one way or another.
But things have been shaky over the past fortnight.
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After news broke on October 13 that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would visit the White House later that week, Putin quickly set up a call with Trump for the day before the visit. In a subsequent Truth Social post, Trump described the conversation as “very productive” and announced he would meet the Russian dictator in Budapest in the coming weeks. Trump’s colloquy with Zelensky the next day was less pleasant. According to the Financial Times, the meeting became a shouting match at multiple points, and Trump “repeatedly echoed talking points the Russian leader had made in their call.” He reportedly pressured Zelensky to surrender the entire Donbas region to Putin—even parts Russia does not control—in exchange for an end to the war. Publicly, Trump’s ceasefire proposal is to pause fighting on the current lines—which Zelensky says he would support.
But then, following a phone call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov this week, the White House announced the Budapest meeting with Putin was off. Trump said yesterday that he “didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get.” And shortly after, he announced sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies.
More than three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, hoping for a swift conquest, Zelensky faces an enemy that deliberately attacks civilian infrastructure, and an inconsistent American president who is pulled in various directions by different voices in his inner circle. Strikes from both sides are constant—a rescue worker died Wednesday after the second straight night of drone attacks on Ukrainian civilian areas, and a large Russian oil refinery was on fire this morning after a Ukrainian drone attack. But for all intents and purposes, the war is deadlocked, with the frontlines remaining relatively static since Trump and Putin’s Alaska summit in August.
“There has been very little change on the military side,” Mark Cancian, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told TMD. “For the last year and a half, the military side has been essentially the same.”
With minimal advances on the front, both sides have tried to wear down the other’s war machines, using military drones to attack inside their opponent’s territory. The two nations are hitting each other’s energy infrastructure, while the Russians are also trying to damage Ukrainian railroads and other transportation mechanisms, Jacquelyn Schneider, director of the Hoover Institution’s Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, told TMD.
“It signals that both sides think that the way to make headway on the battlefield is degrading each state’s ability to sustain conflict—both civilian willingness to sustain conflict and then the actual kind of energy and logistics behind that sustainment,” she said. “And I think that signals what we’ve been seeing, which is that both states don’t believe that they can easily achieve a major breakthrough on the battlefield and are hoping that some degradation of political or logistical support will lead to a battlefield success.”
That’s where the Tomahawk missiles could help Ukraine. In a war of attrition, where the path to victory appears to be breaking down the other side’s resources and mettle, long-range strikes would give Zelensky’s team a strategic advantage. The United States has provided ATACMS, which have a range of just under 200 miles, but Tomahawks can strike targets from 1,000 to 1,600 miles away.
“It’s not that it’s going to do anything on the front lines, but it might be able to strike these targets—energy, particularly—that really might put enough pressure on Russia that it would decide that negotiations were better than taking the risk of declining revenues and not being able to equip the troops and, perhaps, domestic unrest,” Cancian told TMD.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House approved Ukraine’s use of European long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia, which Trump denied shortly after.
Another way to attack Russia’s economic vulnerabilities is through sanctions to keep it from profiting from oil sales to other countries. The U.S. Senate may consider a bill with that goal from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, which goes even further than what Trump announced Wednesday. Under the legislation, if the president determines that Russia is taking actions such as refusing to negotiate a peace agreement with Ukraine or violating a negotiated agreement, he must impose a bevy of penalties on Russian products. Those punitive measures include not only sanctions but also a 500 percent tariff on both Russian goods and imports from countries that knowingly buy uranium or petroleum products from Russia.
Whether that will work is questionable, however. “As we’ve seen, Russian society is willing to tolerate quite a lot of discomfort,” Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Luke Coffey told TMD. “And Putin continues to have a lock or complete control over the messaging and the narratives inside Russia, as you would expect from an authoritarian leader, and any economic impact will take time to work its way through the system and to be felt.”
Still, the sanctions bill, which has overwhelming support in the Senate with 84 co-sponsors, could be a barometer of how much Republicans in Congress, many of whom are in favor of taking a much stronger posture against Russia than Trump is taking now, can pull the president to their side.
“There is a big appetite among Republicans, House and Senate, I can tell you, for tough sanctions on Russia,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said at a Tuesday press conference in response to a question from TMD. “The president, as you know—you can take him at his own word—he’s lost his patience with Putin. He’s not a good-faith operator. Obviously, he’s the aggressor in an unjust war.”
But the bill has been in limbo ever since Graham and Blumenthal introduced it in April. For most of the spring and summer, Senate Majority Leader John Thune had been waiting for a cue from the White House on whether to put the legislation on the floor. But last week, Thune said the time was approaching to consider the bill, setting a timeline of roughly 30 days for starting that process.
This, however, came before the Trump-Putin phone call and Zelensky’s visit to the White House. When lawmakers came back to Washington after the weekend, Thune indicated the bill was on hold until after Trump and Putin’s expected Budapest meeting. With that meeting now on hold, the bill’s fate remains unclear—though the legislation’s GOP supporters will try to convince Trump that the time is right to move on it.
“We’re trying to empower the president to end the war,” Graham told TMD. “If he can end the war without the bill, great. It seems to me that Putin is not interested in ending the war, that Ukraine agreed to the Trump ceasefire proposal, but Putin clearly has not, so I think now would be a good time to give President Trump those tools.”
Today’s Must-Read
In the wake of the Haystack affair, the Broadcasting Board of Governors—the federal agency that would later be renamed USAGM—decided in 2012 to invest some of its meager internet freedom budget toward a new pilot called the Open Technology Fund. Initially, OTF was located within Radio Free Asia, the congressionally authorized nonprofit supporting local independent media throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The goal was to harness the power of private sector ingenuity to create secure censorship circumvention tools that permit those in authoritarian countries to access a free internet and independent media. OTF partnered with dozens of companies, including Signal and the Tor Project, to develop circumvention technologies and conduct security audits of new software. Perhaps its greatest contribution to digital freedom was its partnership with Signal: OTF’s funding led to the creation of the Signal algorithm that supports the encrypted communication of billions of people around the world through WhatsApp, Signal, and other platforms.
Toeing the Company Line
Vance, Without Illusions
The vice president’s continued ascent has a lot of obstacles.
Blue Oyster Cult
How scummy is too scummy for a populist candidate?
The Dust-Up Over Rare Earth Elements
Building supply chains to counter China’s dominance will take work.
Assessing Mike Johnson’s Claims About Democrats and the Government Shutdown
The House speaker called out Democratic demands to reopen the government on social media.
In Other News
Today in America:
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday that the U.S. military conducted an airstrike against a suspected drug-trafficking boat traveling in international waters in the Pacific Ocean, killing the two people aboard.
- NBC News reported Wednesday that the Pentagon plans to require that all Department of Defense employees request permission before speaking with congressional members, Capitol Hill staff, or other elected officials.
- Former Republican Sen. John Sununu announced he is running for Senate, to reclaim his old seat.
- North Carolina adopted a new congressional redistricting map on Wednesday, which Democrats say will favor Republicans in one additional seat, after the GOP-controlled state House voted to approve the proposal earlier that day.
- Democratic Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes on Wednesday sued Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson for his delay in seating Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona. Johnson says she will be sworn in once Congress passes a Republican-backed bill to end the shutdown.
Around the World:
- The U.K. revoked its terrorist label for Syria’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, a formerly al-Qaeda linked force, that last year led the push to oust dictator Bashar al-Assad.
- Reuters reported on Wednesday that Turkey proposed acquiring used, advanced fighter jets from the U.S. and other Western countries.
- Argentinian Foreign Minister Gerardo Werthein resigned from his position Wednesday, ahead of Sunday’s Argentinian midterm elections.
- South Korea’s military said that North Korea fired several short-range ballistic missiles in a test drill on Wednesday.
- Riots in Dublin on Wednesday injured two Irish police officers and resulted in 23 arrests. The disorder stemmed from protests that erupted earlier this week following reports that an asylum seeker had sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl.
- Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro on Wednesday ordered the country’s military to design a new app allowing residents to report “everything they see and everything they hear, 24 hours a day.”
- Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said his country will aim to double its non-U.S. exports over the next 10 years, citing the impact of U.S. tariffs.
On the Money:
- Meta plans to cut about 600 jobs from the company’s AI superintelligence lab.
- Bloomberg reported that the Federal Reserve plans to rescind increased capital requirements for major banks, which were first implemented in 2023.
- Following a slight decrease in the company’s share price earlier this week, Beyond Meat’s stock value has soared more than 1,000 percent in the last four days, as a “meme stock.”
- Reddit sued four AI companies on Wednesday, including Perplexity, for allegedly using data in their business product without the company’s permission.
- Google said it reached a breakthrough in quantum computing Wednesday after running an algorithm on its advanced computer chip, Willow, that the company said is 13,000 times faster than the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
Worth Your Time:
- Laura Lungu and Alvin Djajadikerta dive into why the geniuses behind scientific breakthroughs are often outsiders to the academic community. (Works in Progress)
- Matthew Yglesias considers the risks of “big-tent” coalitional politics. (The Argument)
- Karl Ove Knausgaard reflects on “The Brothers Karamazov.” (The New Yorker)
- George Will remembers the oft-forgotten transformative effect of the Erie Canal on its 200th birthday. (Washington Post)
- River Page on whether the drugs kratom and 7-OH should be banned. (The Free Press)
- Apple releases the first full trailer for Pluribus, a new show from Vince Gilligan, the maker of Breaking Bad.
Presented Without Comment
The Hill: Prosecutors Not Ruling Out State Charges for Santos
Also Presented Without Comment
Barrons: Paris Firefighters Probe Blackface, Ku Klux Klan Fancy Dress Party
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Correction, October 23, 2025: This newsletter has been updated to show that Chuck Schumer is the Senate Minority Leader.
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