https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-20-2026

Letters from an American
October 20, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson

A blockbuster story in the Wall Street Journal tonight by Alexander Ward, Natalie Andrews, and Josh Dawsey says that it was billionaire Elon Musk who ordered Space X to slow down its service in Ukraine, rendering some drones that stopped incoming missiles and others aimed at Russian targets useless.

The reporters say it is unclear if Musk operated without input from White House officials. Some of their sources say he did; others say he coordinated with multiple senior officials, including Trump.

According to Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to try to dismiss the slowdown as a business decision: “We haven’t pulled anything back. There are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to. And that’s where Starlink has the option to make those decisions, but nothing’s changed from our view. We haven’t made any directives or anything like that.” He added: “[W]e wish the Ukrainians, obviously, success.”

After the slowdown caused a public uproar, the Wall Street Journal reporters write, representatives from SpaceX, the parent company of Starlink, called the White House to coordinate messaging to say that Starlink and the administration had agreed to the slowdown ahead of time.

Musk’s decision to change the course of a war with “a seeming flick of a switch,” taking it upon himself, with or without the complicity of White House officials, to reverse the foreign policy of the United States of America for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is a stunning assumption of power reminiscent of Revolutionary War general Benedict Arnold’s weakening of the Americans’ defenses and draining of supplies at the strategic fort at West Point to enable the British to capture it before he was discovered and defected to the British Army.

Another lens through which to see this story is the apparent eagerness of White House officials to turn Musk into a scapegoat for a decision they were happy to endorse until it blew up in their faces.

A New York Times story by Tyler Pager suggests a different leak from the White House. Pager relates that billionaire Venezuelan banker Julio Herrera Velutini wanted a presidential pardon. His family hired Alina Habba, a former Trump lawyer who at the time was working at the Justice Department, as general counsel at a company, Concord Partners, that was launched by Herrera’s daughter, has no public profile and whose business is unclear. Habba’s contract is worth more than $50 million over four years. Just weeks after she began to work for Concord Partners, Trump granted Herrera a full pardon.

Habba denied having any role in the pardon and refused to describe her work for Concord Partners, but Pager reports that “[p]eople familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.”

Thomas Frank at Politico received a recording of a speech Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Cameron Hamilton gave today at a private conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, in which he said the Trump administration plans to shift responsibility for disaster management to the states.

Hamilton’s speech built on an internal memo from October 15, which Frank also covered, that said the administration seeks to turn disaster response over to local and state government, thereby “reducing federal dependency.” “Federal dollars should be building greater capability, not creating greater dependency,” Hamilton said today.

Today Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that sources have told them that Trump wants to move the press out of the White House and that Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who has pushed to go after Trump’s political opponents for mortgage fraud, is one of those pushing the idea of restoring the press briefing room to its original form as a swimming pool. Another is Boris Epshteyn, the lawyer who has pushed the lawsuits the president has launched against journalists.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the pool installed because swimming helped strengthen his muscles, weakened by polio. President Richard Nixon had it covered over and turned into a briefing room to accommodate the growing White House Press Corps. Haberman and Swan note that forcing the press out of the White House would be “highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.”

These four stories, just from today, encapsulate the administration’s betrayal of U.S. national security, its corruption, and its disregard for the welfare of Americans. It’s not a great record to run on, and the leaks from the administration show that at least some insiders are aware of how unpopular and dangerous that record is.

And so, Trump is pulling out all the stops to keep Democrats from winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.

In what appears to be a transparent attempt to shore up wavering support from a constituency that until recently was one of his most loyal, Trump announced yesterday that the Agriculture Department would provide $8 billion to help farmers slammed by the high cost of diesel. Kevin Draper of the New York Times reported that rates of payment will be announced next month, and the money will come no sooner than late November or early December, well after the election.

Trump announced the prospective payments at an event for Republican senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, whose reelection campaign is facing a strong challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton. Meredith Lee Hill and Grace Yarrow of Politico report that Marshall had asked Trump for the program. Republicans like Marshall are hoping Trump’s announcement will help stop the flow of voters away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats in the farm states. Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, whose reelection is uncertain given the strength of his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke, said: “This will go a long way to making sure the folks that feed us have it a bit easier when they most need it.”

But Trump officials told Hill and Yarrow that the fund Trump intends to use for the payments—a taxpayer-funded account in the Department of Agriculture—doesn’t have enough money in it to make the payments. Either Congress will have to add more to it, or the administration will have to take the money from a different program.

Top agricultural groups say farmers need at least $50 billion to make up for the impact of tariffs, disasters caused by weather, and the high cost of fuel and fertilizer caused by the war on Iran.

Trump told the Kansas audience at the announcement that if they reelect Marshall, he will also allow year-round sales of gasoline containing 15% ethanol, a big deal for corn growers. But, he added, “if Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it.”

Still, Democrats are not letting the White House change the subject from its betrayal of Ukraine. This morning, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) posted a video, saying he had just gotten off a phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and a number of other representatives and senators.

“I was just appalled by what I learned,” he said. “The president said that Starlink—Starshield—has been throttled so that the Ukrainians can no longer intercept most of the Russian drones that are wreaking havoc at schools and hospitals and civilian centers. He said that they are completely out of missile interceptors. And make no mistake: that’s our fault.

“More significantly, that’s the fault of Donald Trump, who has now shown his hand as an ally of Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. We can’t really get straight answers about whether it’s Elon or Donald Trump, but at the end of the day, because they throttled Starlink, Ukrainians are dying.

“In the call, I made the point to some of my colleagues, which is, it’s time to accept that Donald Trump is rooting for a Russian victory here. And that the Congress needs to step up and actually pass veto-proof legislation. Enough dilly-dallying with the secretary of state in the Oval Office. We need to step up and pass veto-proof legislation that will provide assistance, military aid, and access to Starlink for the Ukrainians. That’s the only way this is gonna get done, and it needs to get done now.

“Ukrainians are dying, and Putin will win this if Donald Trump has his way,” Himes said, “[W]e’re going to act as a Congress and override this president’s desire to see Vladimir Putin win.”

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Notes:

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-starlink-elon-musk-trump-dbc49193

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-ukraine-spacex-starshield-trump-administration/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/us/politics/julio-herrera-pardon-alina-habba.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/20/fema-states-disasters-exclusive-energy-environment-01128120

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/16/fema-state-reliance-federal-aid-01124455

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/us/politics/trump-white-house-media.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/business/trump-farmer-bailout.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/20/trump-farmers-payments-gop-midterms-01128165

Bluesky:

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