Turn to Europe

Will Trump turn to Ukraine next? He bombed some boats in the Caribbean. He deposed Nicolas Maduro. (He mostly left the region, and it’s not totally clear what’s been solved.) Something similar happened in Iran: He assassinated some nuclear scientists, targeted some nuclear sites, and deposed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (The enriched-uranium stockpile appears to at least partially remain, and, again, it’s not totally clear what’s been solved.)

Never one to stick around and actually really get to the bottom of a foreign-policy situation, President Donald Trump may now be setting his sights on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“I’m the boss,” Trump told world leaders at the G7 summit yesterday, at which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy aims to make his case to the American president that Ukraine has been faring better lately and is worth supporting. (Trump said he’d had a “very good” meeting with Zelenskyy on Tuesday.)

“There has been a change in position on the part of the United States and President Trump,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark ​Carney told the press, per Reuters. “There is a position that is harder toward Russia and more realistic, in our view, of the situation on the ground of the war.” It also “remains to be ​seen if Washington will allow waivers to lapse on sanctions restricting Russian oil exports, now that he has secured a preliminary Iran deal.”

It’s possible Trump will just keep plugging away at each of these foreign policy situations—Russia, Venezuela, Iran—biding his time, waiting until he’s well-positioned to make more progress. At minimum, it will be interesting to see whether Zelenskyy’s patience has paid off, whether he’ll be asked to “say thank you” again, and what Trump asks of European allies. He’s communicated, over the course of his two terms, his desire to have them step up and depend less on the U.S. for defense. Will he finally start to truly force this self-reliance?

MAID contagion? Is the media covering assisted suicide all wrong? asks Valerie Pavilonis over at The Dispatch. “A study of assisted suicides in Basel, Switzerland, from 1992 to 1996 found a statistically significant rise in assisted death in the two-year period following extensive media coverage of the assisted deaths of a prominent couple in the area in March 1995,” she adds. “More recently, two researchers in Vienna published an article in January about possible contagion effects of assisted dying: ‘It appears likely that the social and psychological mechanisms for imitation effects also apply in principle to assisted suicide, and that sensationalist reporting has a strong advertising effect.'”

For a long time, journalistic ethics dictated that coverage of suicide—the methods used, the intimate details of the person who did it—be very careful, so as to not lead to a contagion effect. But now that Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) has become increasingly legal and accepted, no similar ethical standard has been adopted in the United States. Instead, profiles of people covered by MAID are frequently flattering and detailed. (I am in favor of a tighter ethical code that treats assisted suicide and conventional suicide more similarly, but my biases on this topic—and objection to MAID—are also well-documented.)

Scenes from New York: 

Knicks ‘chip on film. 📸🎞️ pic.twitter.com/kgD99hnVpE

— Jenny Fischer (@jennylynnfisch) June 16, 2026

QUICK HITS

• Interesting possible pitfall:

Lifting the IRGC’s FTO designation would almost certainly be required to implement the broad sanctions relief the admin has outlined under the MOU, per multiple senior Hill staffers who wrote the 2024 bill.

Trump can waive 4-year requirement if he tells Congress it’s “vital” for…

— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) June 16, 2026

• “There is a path here that leads to nationalization in all but name and a path that leads to a kind of de facto corporate takeover of the government, or at least a too-big-to-fail symbiosis,” writes Ross Douthat on the Anthropic/Trump administration battles covered earlier this week. “And along the way there may be not just conflicts between presidents and A.I. executives but also increasingly ruthless corporation-on-corporation action, out of fear that the A.I. landscape is winner-take-all to an extent we’ve never seen in capitalism before.”
• “Early Tuesday, SpaceX formally agreed to buy Cursor in a deal that will entitle the startup’s investors to SpaceX stock,” reports Bloomberg. (Censor is an AI coding startup.) “In doing so, Elon Musk is signaling his desire for SpaceX’s xAI to rapidly rebuild and catch up to rivals including Anthropic PBC and OpenAI that have capitalized on demand for artificial intelligence-powered coding tools in a way that his AI business hasn’t.” This means that SpaceX is now valued more highly than Amazon and Microsoft.
• “A Maryland church is gearing up to sue Ocean City officials for threatening to impose thousands of dollars in fines for hosting an indoor homeless shelter,” reports The Christian Post. “St. Paul’s By-the-Sea Episcopal Church of Ocean City will soon file the lawsuit in federal court, according to the Rev. Jill Williams, rector and spokesperson of the congregation.”
• I’m following this:

Since moving back to San Francisco last fall, I’ve been struck by how everyone seems to be chasing material comforts, and moral vision is in short supply. But I also think that San Francisco is just a reflection of the world a few years ahead, and that this isn’t its final… https://t.co/sPLbVYeQRi

— Nadia Asparouhova (@nayafia) June 16, 2026

• Baseball players for the San Francisco Giants are in trouble for writing “Gen. 9:12-16” on their (mandated) Pride-themed hats:

This is the bible verse in question. I would imagine their statement is about the coopting of the rainbow and the forced allegiance to LGBTQ inclusivity which might violate their faiths. https://t.co/sP1oOdRddA pic.twitter.com/dxPFvlbLGj

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) June 16, 2026

It’s not clear to me why we need corporations or sports leagues or any form of bureaucracy to do “Pride night” or any sort of Pride-related programming. It seems like it just invites conflict—conflict of conscience, conflict of values, conflict of tactics—and sullies otherwise-wholesome acts, like just playing baseball. (Never forget the Kramer/AIDS plotline from Seinfeld, which feels all the more prescient now.) It also seems like they could do away with all other themed nights, to just get back to the actual sport.