Historian: Trump’s Ukraine Tightrope
President Trump must “move quickly and decisively” to end the “Biden killing-field policy” in Ukraine, Victor Davis Hanson explains in American Greatness. That’s why he’s pushing a “deal no one will like now — but may be appreciated once the slaughter ends.” Last week’s rhetoric was aimed at persuading Zelensky “to rebuild a new, somewhat smaller, more secure, and even better-armed Ukraine” as a neutral, non-NATO buffer between Russia and Europe. Trump must convince Putin that détente “is in Russia’s interests” — because “unlike Moscow’s current partner of convenience, China,” the West “does not have any territorial ambitions” in Russian territory. In short, Trump “can end the war to no one’s satisfaction, or let Europe and Zelensky negotiate and see the war continue endlessly to no one’s satisfaction.”
Former G-man: How To Fix the FBI
Kash Patel’s efforts to reform the FBI — which “has become far too large, centralized, top-heavy and political” — won’t “be easy,” warns Thomas J. Baker at The Wall Street Journal. Its “problems began under Director Robert Mueller, who after 9/11 set out to change the FBI’s culture from a law-enforcement agency to an ‘intelligence driven’ organization.” Successors James Comey and Christopher Wray then “added layers” to management. Last month’s firing of six senior officials is a good start, but “mass purges won’t fix the FBI.” Patel must make the Constitution the agency’s “North Star” and lead it “back to a law-enforcement culture.” The Bureau should be “an organization guided by the Constitution,” aiming to be “a guarantor of the Bill of Rights, not a threat to it.”
Europe desk: What the Germans Want
“German voters have decided that stopping mass immigration, legal and illegal, is a national emergency,” notes Christopher Caldwell at The Free Press. “Germany is getting less efficient” and “it is getting poorer, too,” even as its “foreign-born population has risen by millions.” “Immigrants have lately committed a succession of macabre murders,” and the Alternative for Germany — which won 21% of the vote Sunday, “doubling its share of seats — is the only party “willing to talk about these things bluntly.” Any future failure of election winner Friedrich Merz and his Christian Democrats “would vindicate the AfD’s claim that Merz cannot solve the immigration problem because his ties to the system mean more to him than his ties to the voters.”
Libertarian: Sunny Side of Trump’s Power Grab
President Trump’s “arsonist’s blitz through the institutions will leave us with a smaller, enfeebled federal government more in line with a libertarian vision than the one he inherited” on Jan. 20, argues Reason’s Christian Britschgi. No, “he doesn’t want to shrink the state. He wants to use it for his own ends.” But he and Elon Musk are dethroning “the government expert class” which “inherently lends itself to big government.” And “replacing a civil servant-staffed leviathan with his own lackeys” will make the federal government “more Trumpy. But it will also become less effective at doing the things Trump wants” as he’ll never find enough competent loyalists. “A MAGAfied executive branch thus becomes a smaller, less capable government by default.”
From the right: News Media Triple Down on Bias
As bad as the media’s “knee-jerk defense” of European anti-free speech laws was, “it paled in comparison to CBS’s exaltation of Germany’s draconian censorship laws,” notes Becket Adams at The Hill. CBS anchor Margaret Brennan falsely claimed “that freedom of speech had paved the way to the Holocaust” and that Vice President Vance spoke in a country where it was “weaponized to conduct a genocide.” While CBS portrayed Vance “as a villain for pointing out that Europe’s commitment to freedom of speech has been somewhat lacking,” it painted Germany’s censorship regime “as a net positive.” It’s “just one more sign of what the media will look like in Trump 2.0” — “another four years of full-on anti-Trump resistance” and a “descent into political advocacy.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
