From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dramatically changed his tune on peace negotiations with Russia just hours after President Donald Trump pulled the plug on military aid Monday.

Zelenskyy issued a long statement to X Tuesday, floating prisoner exchanges, a halt on air operations and naval operations as potential first steps towards peace, while also lamenting his fiery meeting in the Oval Office on Friday. Just a day earlier on Monday, Zelenskyy said that he believed an end to the war with Russia was “very, very far away,” prompting Trump to halt all military aid to the nation that evening and slam his comments on Truth Social.

“None of us wants an endless war,” Zelenskyy said on X. “My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.”

“We do really value how much America has done to help Ukraine maintain its sovereignty and independence. And we remember the moment when things changed when President Trump provided Ukraine with Javelins,” Zelenskyy continued. “We are grateful for this. Our meeting in Washington, at the White House on Friday, did not go the way it was supposed to be. It is regrettable that it happened this way. It is time to make things right. We would like future cooperation and communication to be constructive.”

Zelenskyy originally came to the White House Friday to sign a mineral deal that would have allowed for U.S. investment in mining projects in the nation, which was seen as the first step towards a U.S.-brokered ceasefire. However, he was asked to leave the White House without signing the deal after making statements Trump and Vice President Vance deemed “disrespectful.”

For instance, Zelenskyy implied that the U.S. might “feel” the impact of war in the future. The U.S. has spent over $170 billion on Ukraine’s defense since the war began three years ago.

After the meeting, Trump said in a Truth Social post that Zelenskyy was “not ready for peace” because U.S. involvement grants him a “big advantage in negotiations.”

In Zelenskyy’s new post Tuesday, he said he was ready to sign the mineral deal at “any time and in any convenient format.”

“We see this agreement as a step toward greater security and solid security guarantees, and I truly hope it will work effectively,” Zelenskyy said on X. The deal in its final form did not explicitly make any security guarantees from the U.S. 

Trump’s exchanges with Zelenskyy are not the only example of his penchant for aggressive advocacy abroad, as earlier in his administration, he leveraged tariff threats to gain concessions from Mexico and Canada to crack down on the fentanyl epidemic among other issues.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry and the White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew D. Mitchell

President Trump has made deregulation a priority and charged Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency with suggesting ways to cut red tape. Some progressives are cautiously supportive of deregulation. More should be.

From Jimmy Carter to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), progressives once saw the wisdom of cutting red tape — especially if that tape tied the hands of consumers and would-be competitors in order to privilege industry insiders.

After the election, Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) former chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, encouraged Democrats to embrace “supply-side progressivism,” calling for “limited deregulation that advances liberal policy goals.” He pointed to successful Democratic candidates like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) and Jared Golden (D-Maine), both of whom have raised the alarm about overregulation.

Vice President Kamala Harris recognized that the regulatory state sometimes hurts those whom it is supposed to help. In campaign proposals to address the housing crisis, she vowed to “take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels.”

Cautious Democratic support for deregulation may surprise those who think only of the Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) approach. Warren once claimed that “deregulation” was “just a code word for ‘let the rich guys do whatever they want.’”

In reality, regulations often help the rich guys at the expense of consumers and fair competition. New Deal regulations, for example, forced prices up in more than 500 industries, causing consumers to pay more for necessities like food and clothing when a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. Economists have documented similar price-raising regulation in agricultural, finance and urban transportation. In other cases, regulations require customers to buy certain products such as health insurance. Licensing rules protect incumbent service providers in hundreds of occupations despite little evidence that they protect consumers from harm.

More subtly, regulations can protect industry insiders by limiting the quantity of available services. State certificate-of-need laws in health care, for example, limit dozens of medical services in two-thirds of states, raising prices, throttling access, and undermining the quality of care.

That’s one reason why Rhode Island’s Democratic governor wants to reform his state’s certificate-of-need laws.

If you don’t believe that regulations protect big businesses instead of their customers, take a closer look at how firms lobby. In 2012, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association lobbied to maintain a ban on incandescent light bulbs. Why? Because it raised the costs of smaller, rival firms that specialized in making the cheaper bulbs. Local car dealerships lobby to preserve state restrictions on direct car sales, which limit potential competitors that sell online.

In international comparisons, researchers find that heavier regulatory burdens depress productivity growth and contribute to income inequality.

In the U.S., the accumulation of regulations between 1980 and 2012 is estimated to have reduced income per person by about $13,000. Since low-income households tend to spend a greater share of their incomes on highly regulated products, they bear the heaviest burden.

Progressives can help break the symbiotic relationship between special interests and overregulation. Indeed, they’ve often been the first to identify the problem.

Writing a century ago in his book “The New Freedom,” President Woodrow Wilson warned that “regulatory capture” would grow as government itself grew: “If the government is to tell big businessmen how to run their business, then don’t you see that big businessmen have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don’t you see that they must capture the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it?”

The capture Wilson warned of took root. By the early 1970s, progressive consumer advocates Mark Green and Ralph Nader were noting that “regulated industries are often in clear control of the regulatory process.” The problem was so acute that President Jimmy Carter tapped economist Alfred Kahn to do something about it.

In his research, Kahn meticulously showed that when “a [regulatory] commission is responsible for the performance of an industry, it is under never completely escapable pressure to protect the health of the companies it regulates.” As head of the Civil Aeronautics Board, Kahn moved to dismantle regulations that sustained anti-consumer airline cartels. Then he helped abolish the board altogether.

Liberals such as Nader and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) supported the move. Kennedy’s top committee lawyer, future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, later noted that the only ones opposed to deregulation were regulators and industry executives.

Their reform efforts unleashed competitive forces in aviation that had previously been impossible, opening up airline routes, lowering fares and increasing options for consumers.

It’s an embarrassing truth for both Democrats and Republicans that none of Carter’s successors, including Ronald Reagan, have pushed back as much as he did against the regulatory state.

Trump faces an uphill battle. He’ll stand a better chance if progressives acknowledge once again that lower-income Americans stand to gain from deregulation.