The Birthday Present

Vladimir Putin turned seventy-four on Wednesday. His country marked the morning with about seventy missiles and a hundred and thirty drones across at least twelve regions of Ukraine. In Pryluky, a town in the Chernihiv region, a missile took down a five-story apartment building, and by Thursday the emergency service had pulled twenty-two bodies out of it. That evening a second wave hit a twelve-story building in Kyiv, and eight children were among the people carried out of the fire. The day before, a Russian airstrike had damaged a hospital in Kryvyi Rih, which Human Rights Watch wrote up on Thursday because somebody has to. The chairman of Ukraine's parliament noted the date. "On the birthday of the criminal Putin," he said, and listed the apartment blocks.

Later that day the President of the United States placed a call to Moscow. By the Kremlin's account he wished Putin well, wished him success, and passed along the regards of the First Lady. By the Kremlin's account Putin, in return, rejected any resumption of peace talks and said Russia would keep fighting until every one of its objectives was met. On Friday the President announced on Truth Social that the call had been "highly successful." Russia would ship more than three hundred thousand tons of diesel to the world market immediately, half a million in November, a million after that, and three million "within a short period of time." The Treasury issued a general license that afternoon exempting Russian diesel from sanctions through April 7 of next year, the first such exemption longer than thirty days since the invasion, and one the Treasury Secretary had earlier ruled out. "Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority," the President wrote. The post did not mention Ukraine. It did not mention the war. Volodymyr Zelensky called it "a weak decision of strong partners" and, more precisely, "a happy birthday present for Putin."

Fairness first. Diesel is a real emergency. It was $3.75 a gallon on February 28, the day the President's war with Iran began, and it hit a record $6.52 on September 22, and it sits at $6.23 now, which is nearly three dollars more than a year ago. Farmers and truckers are not imagining it. Russia has banned diesel exports since July because Ukrainian drones have cut its refinery output by something like thirty percent, by the International Energy Agency's estimate, and that does tighten the world market. If three million tons of Russian diesel actually arrive, the analysts quoted this week think they might add five or six percent to supply by the end of the year, and futures fell about four percent on the news. The paper grants all of that. It also notes that the President stood in Ireland on September 13 and said the shortage "isn't done by the Middle East, this is done by what's happening with Russia and Ukraine," and that the chart does not agree with him. The price rose by nearly three dollars after his war closed the Strait of Hormuz, not after Ukraine found the Saratov refinery.

Now look at what he asked for, and of whom. The Ireland remark was the public version: "Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel." Privately, according to a senior administration official who spoke to Axios, the President made half a dozen requests that Ukraine stop hitting Russian refineries, unilaterally, and did not regard those strikes as equivalent to Russian strikes on Ukraine's power grid. Zelensky's answer was that Ukraine would stop hitting Russian fuel if Russia stopped hitting Ukrainian power plants, which is the kind of offer a mediator is supposed to carry to the other side. A Ukrainian official says the President's envoys threatened to cut off intelligence sharing instead. The American official denies that, and in the same breath says that Zelensky "is misreading the room" and that "the attacks on the refineries cause pain in Russia, but it causes pain for the US, too." Read that sentence again. It is not Ukraine's war. Russia started it, in February 2022, by driving an army across a border it had promised to respect, and Russia has kept it going every day since. The complaint against Ukraine is that the war being waged against it is inconvenient at the pump.

The paper will not pretend Ukraine's campaign is bloodless. Drones miss. Civilians in the Belgorod border region die, five of them in one August night, and a local outlet counted a hundred and forty-seven there last year. But look at the target lists. Ukraine has conducted more than sixty strikes on at least two dozen Russian refineries, plus fuel depots and the airbase at Engels where the bombers live. Russia's list, by the United Nations' count, produced 15,280 Ukrainian civilians killed or injured in the first eight months of this year, fifty-five percent more than the same months last year, with July the worst month since 2022 at 448 dead and August close behind. One side is hitting the tanks the other side's war runs on. The other side is hitting the buildings people sleep in, and then, on the leader's birthday, doing it demonstratively. The President of the United States looked at both lists and sent his demand to the first one.

The timing has its own weight. On September 18 the President signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, and it directs him to hit the top importers of Russian oil with tariffs of up to a hundred percent and gives him thirty days to begin. The thirty days run out on October 18. Three weeks after the signing he handed Russian diesel the longest sanctions holiday it has had since the invasion, and the law's own co-sponsor, Senator Blumenthal, called the move "directly contrary to the intent of Congress." The President had not, as of this writing, explained the contradiction, perhaps because the explanation is in his own post. The midterms are on November 3. The November shipment is the one that matters. And the senior official's parting line, that "Putin is hitting Ukraine hard but we think he is open to a discussion on ending the war," was issued in the same week that Putin's own aide said he was not.

Which brings the paper to the prize. On Friday the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, an eighty-five-year-old South African jurist and former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, for a career spent making sure that war crimes get prosecuted. Friday evening the President was in Syracuse for a rally and gave the award more time than he gave Ukraine. The decision was "an indelible stain on the country of Norway." The prize had been "forever discredited by a handful of radical ideologues." "We will not forget Norway." "The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but didn't." He has ended eight wars, he said, and so was owed eight of them. He did not mention the war in Ukraine among the eight. Of the winner he said, "I know nothing about this woman, and neither does anyone else." Pillay, told of the award at a law conference in Germany, said, "If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump." Last year's winner, María Corina Machado, went further than a joke. In January, after the American raid that removed Nicolás Maduro, she came to the Oval Office and handed him her medal, framed, "as a personal symbol of gratitude on behalf of the Venezuelan people." He posted the photo. The Nobel Committee noted that a prize can be neither revoked, shared nor transferred, so what he has is a medal that belongs to someone else, which is the closest he has come.

He is not without honors. Weeks after the 2025 snub, FIFA invented something called the FIFA Peace Prize and presented the first one to the President at the Kennedy Center on December 5, during the World Cup draw, on a certificate explaining that it is awarded annually "on behalf of the billions of football-loving people from around the world." He called it one of the great honors of his life. The paper notes that the second one is due in about two months if FIFA keeps to its calendar, that the World Cup was in his country, and that nothing in the certificate rules out a repeat. He may yet be the only two-time FIFA Peace Prize laureate in history, which is a sentence the committee in Oslo cannot take away from him.

The prize is one item in a longer wish list, and the list is worth setting down because no single entry conveys it. In January 2025 a Florida congresswoman filed a one-page bill directing the Interior Department to carve his face into Mount Rushmore. The Interior Secretary, asked about it, said "they certainly have room for it there." This May the President posted an AI image of himself alongside the four presidents, twice in one day. On July 3, before speaking at the monument, he posted a video in which a golden likeness of his head rises out of the mountain while his own voice says, "I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come," and a White House spokesperson told the Washington Post that "there would be no better addition to the iconic Mount Rushmore." At the monument itself, on the eve of the country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, he brought up the Nobel. "Well, they haven't given me one," he said. The Kennedy Center got his name in December, a federal judge ordered it down in May, workers pried it off in June, the board tried again with a "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" inscription and a Trump Plaza, a judge blocked that on September 15, and the board voted hours later to close most of the building. The United States Institute of Peace is now the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace. There are Trump accounts in the tax code, TrumpRx, the Trump Gold Card, a Trump-class battleship, his portrait on the national parks pass and on a special passport, his birthday replacing Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth as a fee-free day at the parks, banners of his face on the Agriculture, Labor and Justice buildings, an offer, confirmed by his own press secretary, to release tunnel money for New York if Penn Station and Dulles Airport took his name, and a request to the Washington Commanders to put it on their stadium. This is not a list of accomplishments. It is a list of places a man wants his name to be, compiled while the accomplishments were pending.

So consider the accomplishments, since that is the real column. He promised to end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours, and later said he had been "a little bit sarcastic." He promised prices down "starting on Day 1," and in December called affordability a hoax, and in January said inflation was done, and in August told Fox News that prices were "all coming down now," which PolitiFact rated Mostly False because, with eggs and a few other items excepted, they were going up. He promised, at a Pennsylvania rally, "no more wars," and in June told NBC he had never guaranteed it, and CNN found the tape. His signature tariffs were struck down six to three by the Supreme Court in February, as unlawful from the day they were imposed, and the government may owe importers somewhere between a hundred and sixty and a hundred and seventy-five billion dollars in refunds. His war with Iran is in its eighth month, has cost at least thirty-eight billion dollars by the Pentagon's count and more by everyone else's, has damaged or destroyed eighty-one aircraft, has drained the petroleum reserve to a level last seen in 1983, and has not produced the peace he wants a medal for.

Then put the two years side by side with the two years before them, as he has invited the country to do every day since he took the oath. On January 20, 2025, he inherited an unemployment rate of 4.0 percent, inflation at 3.0 percent, gasoline at about $3.10, an economy that had grown 2.9 percent in 2023 and 2.8 percent in 2024, and a deficit that had just come in at $1.82 trillion. In the twenty-one months since: growth slowed to about 2.2 percent last year; the economy added 29,000 jobs in September and lost jobs in July; wage growth is the slowest since 2021; unemployment is 4.2 percent; inflation is 3.4 percent and expected to rise when the September number arrives on Wednesday; the Federal Reserve raised interest rates on September 16 for the first time in three years, with mortgages back above seven percent; gasoline is $4.41; the deficit for the fiscal year that ended last week was two trillion dollars, more than two hundred billion above last year's and larger than the one he inherited; and the University of Michigan reported on Friday that Americans' assessment of current economic conditions is the worst it has ever measured. In fairness, the stock market is up about thirty percent since the inauguration and eggs are cheaper. Those are the two entries in the credit column. Thirty percent of the country approves of the job he is doing, by Pew's count last week. Seventeen percent approve of his handling of the cost of living, by the AP's. Which is to say that even a share of the people who voted for him can read a receipt.

And through all of it, the company he keeps. Putin called him on his eightieth birthday in June for fifty-five minutes, called him "a bright, remarkable person," and heard back, by the Kremlin's account, that he had been the first foreign leader to phone the new President at the White House. By one wire service's count it was their thirteenth call. The President had flown to Anchorage the August before to shake his hand on a red carpet. In the same stretch he put fifty-percent tariffs on twenty-eight billion dollars of Canadian goods, then banned a list of its dairy, liquor and vehicle products outright as of September 29, and watched the Canadian prime minister's approval rise to sixty percent while Ottawa matched him dollar for dollar. He ordered five thousand troops out of Germany after the chancellor criticized the Iran war, promised to cut "a lot further," and drew a "very concerned" from the Republican chairmen of both Armed Services committees. His press secretary said in January that using the military to take Greenland was "always an option," and France, Germany and Sweden sent soldiers to the island to make a point of their own. Britain restricted its bases to defensive use. Europe and Canada refused the alliance any role in his war. The pattern is not complicated. The countries that bled with Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan get tariffs, troop withdrawals and threats. The country that bombed a hospital on Tuesday and an apartment block on Wednesday gets birthday wishes, the First Lady's regards and a fuel contract.

The President would like a prize for peace, a face on a mountain, his name on the opera house, and the country's agreement that things are good and getting better. The paper can offer him a ledger instead. The man he called on Wednesday told him, through an aide, that the war would continue until Russia had everything it wanted. The man he leaned on for a month was the one being bombed. The prize went to a woman who prosecutes war crimes, and he said he had never heard of her. Five clowns, and the paper would add a sixth for the timing if the scale went that high. The election is November 3.