Will Trump Bring Russia and Ukraine to the Table?

Happy Tuesday! A resident of Bend, Oregon, took responsibility for the rash of googly eyes mysteriously appearing on sculptures and art installations across the city. The man said he’d done it “just to get a laugh,” but officials said the prank cost the city $1,500 in removal fees. It seems that one man’s laugh is another man’s vandalism charge. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Immigration authorities announced that they arrested 1,179 people on Monday—the highest single-day number since President Donald Trump took office—bringing the total number of detentions to more than 3,500 in one week. The crackdown marks a stark increase from the Biden administration’s average of 310.7 arrests of illegal immigrants with criminal convictions or pending charges per day, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. Also on Monday, the Trump administration deported 110 illegal immigrants to Colombia via a Colombian Air Force plane—a day after President Gustavo Petro barred American Air Force jets carrying Colombian nationals from landing.  
• The S&P 500 dropped nearly 2 percent and Nvidia’s stock plummeted more than 16 percent on Monday after a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek performed comparably to leading American models at a fraction of the computing power and cost. According to a technical report from DeepSeek, the model costs less than $6 million to train, compared to the more than $100 million the task costs American companies. The Chinese lab also developed its model using less powerful chips than other AI labs, raising concerns with investors that AI may not require the cutting-edge chips previously thought necessary. DeepSeek is currently the most popular free app in Apple’s app store, supplanting ChatGPT in the top spot.
• Acting Attorney General James McHenry fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked with Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Trump, multiple outlets reported on Monday. “[McHenry] did not believe these officials could be trusted to faithfully implement the president’s agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president,” a Justice Department spokesperson told CBS News. Smith led Justice Department probes into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and attempts to overturn the 2020 election. 
• The Senate voted 68-29 to confirm Scott Bessent as treasury secretary on Monday, with 16 Democrats joining Republicans to support his bid. Throughout his confirmation hearing, the billionaire hedge-fund manager outlined his plans to cut taxes and reduce government spending. He will now be tasked with implementing Trump’s economic agenda, which prioritizes tariffs, deregulation, and energy production. 
• Rwanda-backed rebels said they captured the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday in what the Congolese government said amounted to a “declaration of war.” Goma has a population of about 2 million people and is located near key mineral-rich mining towns, putting the rebels in a position to further escalate the three-year conflict. The rebel group called M23 began as a faction of ethnic Tutsis who broke away from the Congolese army, briefly capturing Goma in 2012 before launching another attack against the Congo in 2021. According to United Nations experts, more than 4,000 Rwandan troops fight alongside M23 in the ongoing conflict. 

Russia Makes Slow Gains as Trump’s Peace Timeline Lengthens

As President Donald Trump signed executive orders in the Oval Office on his first day in office last week, a reporter asked about his promise to end Russia’s war against Ukraine on Day 1 of his administration. “Well, there’s only half a day,” Trump quipped. “I have another half a day left. We’ll see. We want to get it done.” 

The president campaigned on ending the war even sooner, claiming he’d have it in the bag as soon as he became president-elect, before he was even sworn in. But a week into his term, his administration is now suggesting a slightly longer timeline: 100 days. Yet as the war grinds on, no clear path has emerged for a peace settlement acceptable to both parties even as Trump has said he’ll soon meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

When we wrote to you last month about the war, we noted that neither side was making much progress but, “With Russia’s massive advantage in manpower, the scales are tipped toward Putin. Ukraine is currently struggling to find enough men, a problem exacerbated by the fact that it doesn’t conscript anyone under the age of 25.”

The trajectory has continued, with Russian forces gaining ground and even taking control of …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. You can read our 1,269-word item on Trump’s plan to end the war in Ukraine in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• In an FAQ for Stratechery, tech analyst Ben Thompson cuts through the panic around DeepSeek and explains the implications of China’s AI breakthrough. “In the long run, model commoditization and cheaper inference — which DeepSeek has also demonstrated — is great for Big Tech. A world where Microsoft gets to provide inference to its customers for a fraction of the cost means that Microsoft has to spend less on data centers and [graphics processing units], or, just as likely, sees dramatically higher usage given that inference is so much cheaper. Another big winner is Amazon: AWS has by-and-large failed to make their own quality model, but that doesn’t matter if there are very high quality open source models that they can serve at far lower costs than expected,” he wrote. “Still, it’s not all rosy. At a minimum DeepSeek’s efficiency and broad availability cast significant doubt on the most optimistic Nvidia growth story, at least in the near term. The payoffs from both model and infrastructure optimization also suggest there are significant gains to be had from exploring alternative approaches to inference in particular. For example, it might be much more plausible to run inference on a standalone AMD GPU, completely sidestepping AMD’s inferior chip-to-chip communications capability. Reasoning models also increase the payoff for inference-only chips that are even more specialized than Nvidia’s GPUs.”

Presented Without Comment 

Washington Examiner: Trump Congratulates Chiefs and Bills but Remains Silent on Eagles Conference Win

Also Presented Without Comment 

Politico: Putin Congratulates Lukashenko on Totally ‘Convincing’ Belarus Election Win

Also Also Presented Without Comment

ABC News: Tucker Carlson’s Son Buckley is Joining J.D. Vance’s Staff

In the Zeitgeist 

If you need more looming dread in your life, FX aired a trailer during the AFC Championship for Alien: Earth, a new TV spinoff of the classic sci-fi horror series. It only shows 42 seconds of a creature in a spaceship hurtling toward Earth, but we’ll go out on a limb and say that whatever is on that ship won’t be the biggest fan of mankind. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Kevin Williamson argued (🔒) that January 6 was not your run-of-the-mill crime and Nick Catoggio reflected on (🔒) Elon Musk and generational guilt. 
• On the podcasts: Sarah Isgur and David French unpack a case before the Supreme Court that challenges the Moment of Threat Doctrine on today’s Advisory Opinions.
• On the site: Mike Warren reports on why Tulsi Gabbard’s upcoming confirmation hearing might be the rare one that matters, Gil Guerra explains Donald Trump’s back-and-forth with Colombia, and Greg Lukianoff looks into Trump’s “baseless” lawsuit against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer.