Trump Pauses Military Aid to Ukraine

Plus: Tariffs go into effect, inside the fact-checker industrial complex, and more...

Aid to Ukraine paused: Following his clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Donald Trump has decided to pause all military aid to Ukraine. "President Trump has been clear that he is focused on peace," a White House official told Reuters, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "We need our partners to be committed to that goal as well. We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution."

NEWS: Trump admin pausing and reviewing military aid to Ukraine

WH tells FOX "President Trump has been clear that he is focused on peace. We need our partners to be committed to that goal as well. We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a… https://t.co/QYKb31oHfh

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) March 4, 2025

"The official said the decision could be reversed if Zelensky demonstrates a good-faith effort to participate in peace talks," per The Washington Post. "Ukrainian officials have bristled that the Trump administration did not seek early buy-in on negotiations and were surprised by the decision to exclude them from last month's meeting between U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia."

This ain't it: A lot of the MAGA right is now acting like Zelenskyy is more villainous than he is in reality; I don't believe he wants a "never-ending graft meat grinder" so much as he wants to defend Ukraine's sovereignty and not be forced to redraw his country's borders every decade.

A much more defensible critique—lobbed his way by J.D. Vance in that now-infamous Oval Office meeting—is that Zelenskyy has a manpower problem, and his forcible conscription of military-aged men is wrong; that he has suspended certain press freedoms and ought to hold elections even during wartime; that he is fighting a losing battle at great cost to his people and that negotiating a deal that cedes some amount of territory is the best move he has available to him. It shouldn't be hard to engage in measured critiques, or to lob some criticism Europe's way, vs. impugning his motives.

Zelensky wants a forever war, a never-ending graft meat grinder. This is evil. https://t.co/FVaEkIm7Gq

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 3, 2025

One of the influencers to whom the Epstein binders were given chimed in with this:

Zelensky knows if the war ends, his power ends

Elections will resume and he'll lose

Then his adversary will investigate his money laundering and he'll be sent to prison

Zelensky is sending innocent Ukrainians to die in his meat grinder so he can stay in power

Dictator https://t.co/TU6s1gjr6f

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) March 3, 2025

"True," added Musk, quote-tweeting Draino. "As distasteful as it is, Zelensky should be offered some kind of amnesty in a neutral country in exchange for a peaceful transition back to democracy in Ukraine." As I said: There are lots of critiques of Zelenskyy that can reasonably be offered. This is something else entirely.

Still, for U.S. taxpayers who no longer want their money to be funding Ukraine, this pause—a drastic step toward reevaluating American support of Ukrainian defense—is surely welcome. But the souring of relations, without clear assurances that Europe will step up their support for Ukraine, makes Zelenskyy look pretty doomed to failure.

Tariffs go into effect: A month ago, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, ostensibly to punish all of them for their roles in allowing fentanyl to flow into the United States. At the time, Mexico and Canada successfully persuaded him to hold off until March, but he went ahead and imposed a 10 percent tax on imported goods from China.

Well, now it's March. Today, a 25 percent tariff on Mexican and Canadian goods went into effect, and the tariff on Chinese goods was raised from 10 percent to 20 percent. Canadian energy products will incur a 10 percent tariff.

Expect the prices of tons of goods to rise: Cars, computers, cellphones, avocados, tequila, lots of produce, beef, maple syrup, lumber. The easier thing to do might be to list the products that won't be affected.

Retaliatory tariffs have also been imposed. China announced "15% tariffs on chicken, wheat, corn, and cotton imports from the US" per CNN, as well as 10 percent on "sorghum, soybeans, pork, beef, aquatic products, fruits, vegetables, and dairy products."

Anyway, this is not good at all. Here's the only silver lining—a beautiful morsel of art:

I put the Curb Your Enthusiasm music to the stock market falling in real time as Trump announces his tariffs. My masterpiece lmao pic.twitter.com/syNwWAgIv2

— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) March 4, 2025

"Canada and Mexico accounted for 28 percent of all imports to the U.S. last year," Reason's Eric Boehm noted last week. "If the costs of Trump's tariffs are fully passed down the supply chain, consumers could be facing $225 billion in higher costs, according to an estimate by the American Action Forum (AAF). The energy and manufacturing sectors figure to be the hardest hit, thanks to the deeply integrated North American supply chains for products ranging from crude oil to critical minerals like cobalt and zinc." Not to mention: "Mexico is America's largest source of agricultural imports, according to the USDA. That includes 63 percent of U.S. vegetable imports and 47 percent of U.S. fruit and nut imports. All of that would be affected by the new tariffs. If Trump is hoping that Americans won't notice the consequences of higher tariffs, he's deluding himself."

For more on this, read Boehm's "Trump's Theory of Tariffs Makes No Sense."

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Scenes from New York: New York City public schools have been rolling out their "black studies" curriculum—which teaches about the Black Panthers and has children read Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations"—in likely defiance of the Trump administration's new rules barring diversity, equity, and inclusion–focused curricula.

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QUICK HITS

• "Earlier this year, Meta pulled the plug on its US fact-checking program. Google now refuses to add fact-checks to Search and YouTube. Nearly a decade of work—hundreds of millions of dollars spent, thousands of people hired—is gone, essentially overnight, and for good reason," writes Pirate Wires' Lauren Wagner. "My interviews with 20 trust and safety workers at Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, and other major social media platforms reveal how a cottage industry of fact-checkers ballooned after 2016, bankrolled by tech companies' donations to nonprofit fact-checking networks. This fact-checking regime was not about truth. Instead, it evolved into a desperate stopgap and PR tactic that was doomed from the start." Relevant to this is the latest Just Asking Questions episode with Matt Taibbi:

• Blood donor extraordinaire dies. The full story is really awesome, of a blood donor with antibodies in his blood that were able to help prevent hemolytic disease of the newborn (HDN), something that can cause stillbirth if untreated. Anyway, upon discovering these antibodies, he made it his mission to donate blood as often as possible.
• "For all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington," writes Veronique de Rugy for Reason. "It feels that it is less about smaller government than it is about political transformation. While the two intersect, this strategy could fall short."
• Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York who is now running for mayor, ought to remain bedeviled by his twin scandals: Horrifyingly poor management of the state's COVID policy—including bad decisions about how to handle COVID-positive nursing home patients which allowed the virus to claim a far greater death toll than it otherwise would have—and groping, kissing, harassing, and asking to play strip poker with his many female aides. More from The Atlantic on how the pervy "love Gov" hopes to reinvent himself. (I, for one, hope he fails.)
• lol:

"I'm a huge fan of Ronald Reagan but he was bad on trade," says Trump just now

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) March 3, 2025