Does Trump Need a Win?

Zelenskyy comes to Washington: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems to believe Russia is preparing to bring 30,000 North Korean troops into the war. “This is a ​threat not ​only to ⁠Ukraine. Russia is helping North Korea learn how to wage war, improve ​its weapons and gain real combat ​experience ⁠in using them,” said Zelenskyy this past week. Now he’s come to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Donald Trump—who seems to be surprisingly amenable to meeting with him, despite past tensions—and to honor Ukraine defender Lindsey Graham, who died earlier this month and whose funeral will be held this week.

“The relationship with Iran is still very much fragile,” Harry Nedelcu, a senior director at Rasmussen Global, told The New York Times. “Ukraine comes to the forefront.”

“But most importantly for both men, this is a moment where they could validate each other’s diplomatic efforts and leverage each other. Trump could leverage Zelensky, and Zelensky could help him validate his own administration at a time when domestically, Trump is not doing very well,” Nedelcu said. Trump has struggled to reach a durable ceasefire with Iran, and war keeps flaring back up. It’s possible Trump is shifting his focus once again—just as he shifted from deposing Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela to the Iran war—to try to log a win.

Interestingly, the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran newly risk spilling over into each other: On Saturday, Ukraine struck an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea that it says was carrying military supplies from Iran to Russia. Iran has given long-range attack drones to Russia that have been used to ravage Ukraine. This past weekend, Zelenskyy “said Ukraine’s intelligence services had gathered evidence that Russia was providing Iran with satellite surveillance of Gulf states and U.S. military bases in the region, helping Tehran plan and carry out attacks,” reports the Times. 

Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are also set to meet this week, reports Politico. The anti-Netanyahu types of Trump administrations past and present are absolutely pissed: “Netanyahu has had twice as many visits to the White House in 18 months as Churchill had in all of World War II—with every one of them a disaster for America First,” Steve Bannon told Politico.

More on this over the course of the week.

Scenes from New York: Mayor Zohran Mamdani says city-owned grocery stores will offer a 30 percent discount on produce, meat, and certain kitchen staples. So they’re soup kitchens or grocery stores? It’s not clear what exactly he wants to do other than maximum populism. A grocery store per borough (as he’s planning) won’t make a meaningful difference in anything; this is a stunt.

QUICK HITS

• “President Trump has tried to strangle Cuba by blocking its oil imports,” teases The New York Times in the subheadline of a shiny new feature piece. “But six months later, the island is finding ways to endure.” Pretty sure it’s the communism that’s been the main problem. Won’t someone please alert the Times to this fact?
• “The Fed meets again this week with an outcome that is unusually uncertain,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Many expect it to hold rates steady, but a renewed inflation scare has put a surprise increase in play. Part of why it’s so hard to call is Warsh’s signature early move on Fed reform: He is saying less—about the economy, about where policy is headed, about his own thinking—and that silence is generating its own tension.…Warsh, a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011, has argued for more than a decade that the Fed’s forecasts breed conformity and its data are stale by the time policymakers see them. In a 2016 speech to economists, he questioned the precision the Fed claims in measuring inflation. After an external review he led of the Bank of England’s operations in 2014, Warsh lamented how the Fed’s decision-day discussions had become stilted recitations of prepared remarks—a shift that followed the Fed’s agreement to publish verbatim transcripts in 1993.”
• You should be following Francesca Hong, a bartender and Democratic Socialist who is vying to be Wisconsin’s governor amid a crowded field of candidates who are a fair bit more qualified. Yet Hong, who seems to be enacting the AOC playbook, is now leading (at least per a recent Marquette Law School poll). Her proposal feels familiar, similar to Mamdani’s, but with some extra nonsense in there (like instituting a 32-hour workweek).
• “The staggering scale of spending required to keep up in the global A.I. race was highlighted this week by OpenAI, the parent of ChatGPT, nearing a deal to lease a $500 billion data center in Ohio, supported by $250 billion in financial backing from Nvidia. Last week, earnings reports by Tesla and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, shook the markets as they revealed their own enormous A.I. spending needs,” reports The New York Times. And “on Monday, the Chinese start-up Moonshot publicly released the details of its latest A.I. model, adding to investor concerns about an A.I. arms race between China and the United States.”
• True:

It is not a coincidence that socialism is more popular among people with high social and educational capital and less popular among the working class––both cohorts understand who is best able to game centrally planned systems. https://t.co/C4wXirkVcD

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) July 27, 2026