Trump round-up: Ukraine, inflation, Red White and Blueland, and more

Your guide to this week's important news

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Happy Valentine’s Day! My gift to you is another Trump round-up. Each item combines some news with some analysis, giving you a number of bite-sized insights into the week. Today we’re covering Ukraine, inflation, Eric Adams and weaponized justice, and Red, White and Blueland - sorry, I mean Greenland.

Finally, some Ukraine news

We’ve been fairly light on news about Ukraine since the Trump administration took office. But Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s visit to Europe this week finally gave us insight into how the admin views the path forward. Hegseth said that:

• It is “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its pre-2014 borders, and NATO membership is not a “realistic” outcome of a negotiated settlement either;

• There will be no U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine as part of any settlement, and security guarantees for Ukraine will have to be backed by “European and non-European troops”;

• For good measure, he added that the U.S. was no longer “primarily focused” on European security and that Europe must outgrow its dependency on the United States.

Most of these points are obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. Even the Biden administration privately conceded them, as I wrote in a long analysis piece just after the election. But what is raising eyebrows is the extent to which Hegseth seems to be publicly conceding some fairly major points - such as no NATO membership - before negotiations even begin. And begin they have: Trump and Putin have made contact and already started the process.

On the other hand, you can only push the “abandoned leverage” argument so far. No-one seriously thinks that Putin would have agreed to Ukrainian NATO membership or the return of Crimea as part of a deal anyway, so it’s questionable whether taking them off the table really matters much. They were never seriously on the table under Biden either. So if Hegseth’s remarks were a rude shock to anyone in Europe, they shouldn’t have been - this writing has been on the wall for a long time.

A bigger concern will be if he - or Trump - goes further. For instance, Hegseth could have said no Ukrainian NATO membership ever, rather than just as part of this deal. Or he could have said Ukraine has no chance of returning to its 2022 borders as opposed to its 2014 borders. This would still exclude Crimea, but also rule out the return of territory Russia has captured in this round of fighting. These would have been much more major concessions, so watch out if someone in the administration - particularly Trump himself - starts granting them.

None of this ought to obscure the dangerous tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine and Europe as a whole. But if Europeans want to do something about it, they need to start spending more on defense and increase their ability to act as a unified bloc - fast.

Inflation

Trump was largely elected in order to do something about inflation, and many Americans are starting to wonder when he’s going to start. U.S. consumer inflation increased in January at its fastest pace in 18 months. This is mostly to do with the economy that Trump inherited rather than one shaped by his policies. But that’s little comfort given that Trump’s policies, once they actually take effect, are only likely to drive inflation even higher.

Tariffs are one component of this, but his immigration crackdown is another. The American economy relies on the cheap labor of immigrants to keep on humming. Dramatically stepped-up deportations, and even a situation in which immigrants are scared to turn up for work because they’re afraid of being deported, will reduce the labor supply and hence increase the cost of labor. Eventually, that will feed through to prices for consumers.

Then there’s Trump’s tax and spend policy. He claims that he will tackle inflation by reducing government spending, which is something that can work in theory. In practice, Trump plans to enact big tax cuts which will offset or dwarf any spending reduction - particularly because, when push comes to shove, he’s never shown much real interesting in serious spending cuts.

Concerns over whether Trump is really going to do much about inflation are starting to show up in polls. A CBS News poll had two thirds of Americans saying Trump wasn’t doing enough to tackle the problem, and a survey of consumer sentiment showed that Americans now expect steeper price rises ahead than they did before Trump took office.

Inflation is Trump’s problem now, and it’s one he can’t bluster his way through. It’s relatively easy to claim that you reached a groundbreaking deal to stop drug trafficking from Mexico even when you didn’t, because few people care enough to track down the details and question them. But high prices are something visible every day in peoples’ lives - a stubborn reality which no amount of spinning can explain away.

An additional problem for an electorate unused to inflation is that prices are not actually in any scenario going to come down. Deflation - falling rather than rising prices - is usually economically calamitous. All that is on the cards even in the best case scenario is that prices stop going up as fast as they have been, not that they actually come down. I’m not sure if all voters grasp this.

I keep noticing that in interviews on TV, voters keep saying that they are giving Trump a chance to get his policies in place, but that they expect to see prices improve by the summer. Quite what they expect to happen by then, I’m not sure. But when the sunnier months roll around and prices are still high, I expect the backlash will be swift.

Eric Adams and Trump’s weaponized justice system

We got a good indication this week of how the U.S. justice system is going to function under Donald Trump, and the results were not pretty.

Trump’s Justice Department dropped its corruption case against New York mayor Eric Adams. Once a rising star in the Democratic Party, Adams was recently accused of receiving illegal campaign contributions in exchange for political favors (I analyzed his rise and fall here). On the surface this might look like a simple case of honor among thieves - as a convicted felon himself, Trump has sympathy for other politicians who have been caught out for doing something illegal. But below the surface, something else is going on.

When it announced it was dropping the case, the Justice Department had the charges dismissed “without prejudice”, meaning that the case could be revived in the future if the president wished. In case this was too subtle, the department also noted that its reason for dropping the case was to free Adams to cooperate with Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. The investigation will now hang like the sword of Damocles over Adams’ neck, ready to swoop down if he doesn’t help Trump round up the undocumented.