Ukraine’s noble resistance to Russia’s onslaught is as glorious as Britain’s lonely resolve during Hitler’s Blitz of autumn 1940. Donald Trump’s situational ethics — what is ethical depends on his situation — has produced this grim serendipity: His enlistment in Vladimir Putin’s criminality is an election-eve illustration of the cascading absurdities of his downward-spiraling presidency.
By waiving various sanctions on Russia, he has essentially nullified a recently passed law by which Congress intended to intensify economic pressure on Russia. This benefit for Putin’s criminality coincided with reported delays in intelligence sharing with Ukraine, and delays of planned transfers of missile interceptors to Ukraine.
“Russia,” said Trump, “frankly has been fine on Ukraine, they haven’t been doing much.” Not much other than missile and drone barrages against civilian targets and energy infrastructure as winter approaches. Trump seems receptive to Putin’s suggestion that he, Putin and China’s Xi Jinping should meet to end the war without Ukraine participating. Not a new idea. The September 1938 Munich conference sealed Czechoslovakia’s fate without the nuisance of Czechoslovakia’s involvement.
Trump, however, is thinking about something more important to him than Europe’s largest war since the one that Munich presaged. He is after votes for Republicans, so he wants to shred another law, the one against buying energy from Russia.
He wants to buy diesel, which he weirdly thinks will arrive in time to lower the prices that have furious farmers blaming the Iran war for making it excruciating to fuel their combines. And long-haul truckers are incandescent about $1,000 fill-ups.
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, 93, who has seen much but not learned enough in his 51 years on Capitol Hill, wants Trump to ban diesel exports. He approvingly cites President Richard M. Nixon’s 1973 ban of soybean exports. Herewith another tutorial about the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is: The unintended consequences of 10-thumbed government interventions in social complexities are often larger than, and contrary to, the intended ones.
The Financial Times’s Gillian Tett says Nixon’s measure did briefly suppress domestic soybean prices. But (per a University of Illinois scholar’s report) it also infuriated some U.S. customers. In 1974, Japan began investing heavily in Brazil’s soybean potential. By 2015, Brazil exported more soybeans than did U.S. farmers. In 2025, Brazilian soybean sales were almost double U.S. sales.
Winter is also coming — who knew? — to Maine, where 50 percent of homes are warmed by heating oil. Trump did not intend the war with Iran to make the price of now filling a standard home heating-oil tank (according to the New York Times) $1,650, about 80 percent above last year’s price. Trump did not intend to complicate the reelection campaign of Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
When Trump unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport what he calls “the worst of the worst,” he did not intend to raise beef prices. But a joint statement from the Kansas Livestock Association, the Texas Cattle Feeders Association, and the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association says ICE activities against workforces have delayed cattle shipments and disrupted supply chains. The Republican U.S Senate candidates in Kansas and Texas are in jeopardy. In August, Trump issued yet another executive order to increase some beef imports — and to require them to be sold at below market prices. Here we go again.
In “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy,” Dartmouth professor Douglas A. Irwin says that a century ago, cotton was the largest U.S. export. But in the 1930s, government price supports guaranteed farmers a particular price regardless of how much they exported. This price was so high that domestic cotton was often priced out of the world market. Exports declined and government stockpiles of cotton grew, so government introduced an export subsidy.
This widened the gap between the high domestic and lower world price of cotton, encouraging cotton imports. So, government imposed an import quota to support the high domestic price, and to prevent U.S textile and apparel firms from importing cotton —sometimes U.S cotton that had been exported because of the export subsidy — at the lower world price.
Lesson learned? Not exactly. Irwin says 1948 legislation extended price supports to milk, peanuts, potatoes and other commodities, “and soon import quotas on those goods were necessary as well.”
“We no longer farm in Mississippi cotton fields,” a Mississippian explained. “We farm now in Washington corridors and Congressional committee rooms.” So said the novelist William Faulkner. Stranger than fiction? What government does often is.
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