Knowing is half the battle

Recently in The Signal: If Donald Trump isn’t an autocrat, what is he? Stephen Hanson on the old historical model for the new American presidency.

Today: What can democracies do about autocratic interference? Josh Rudolph on the challenges of resistance and resiliency. + The U.S. is on the hunt for new sources of critical minerals. & The jig us up for Gadalias and Saulos. 

And first: Developments we’re tracking for this week’s despatch …

Palm Sunday killings in Ukraine

Russia hit the Ukrainian city of Sumy with two ballistic missiles on Sunday morning, killing 34, including two children, and wounding more than 100. It’s the highest civilian death toll in Ukraine this year. Relations between Moscow and Washington had previously been warming. Now what? 

• The attacks have evidently angered some senior U.S. officials and Republicans, who responded with pointed criticisms of the Kremlin and by questioning Putin’s desire to end the war at all.
• U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham says, “Putin and peace apparently do not fit in the same sentence. … Russia’s barbaric Palm Sunday attack on Christian worshippers in Ukraine seems to be Putin’s answer to efforts to achieve a ceasefire and peace.”
• Keith Kellogg, another U.S. envoy for Ukraine and a retired general, comments, “Today’s Palm Sunday attack by Russian forces on civilian targets in Sumy crosses any line of decency. There are scores of civilians dead and wounded. As a former military leader, I understand targeting, and this is wrong.”
• U.S. President Donald Trump says, “I think it was terrible. And I was told [Russia] made a mistake.” During the weekend, he also posted social-media messages inexplicably blaming Ukraine for starting the war.

During the U.S. presidential campaign last year, Trump often remarked that he’d be able to stop the fighting within 24 hours of taking office. But almost three months into his presidency, Moscow has only scaled up its assaults. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accepted a U.S. proposal for a 30-day, full ceasefire, but Moscow rejected the plan. The two sides tried but failed to strike a deal to halt fighting in the Black Sea. All of which raises the question: What are the real obstacles here to stopping the conflict?

A clampdown on Pride celebrations—and regime critics—in Hungary

On Monday, Hungary’s Parliament approved amendments to the Constitution that can be used to ban public LGBT gatherings, such as Pride marches, as well as to strip Hungarian citizenship from anyone who has dual citizenship in another country. Why?

• Prime Minister Viktor Orbán says, “The international gender network must take its hands off our children. Now, with the change in America, the winds have shifted in our favor.” Orbán was referring to the re-election of U.S. President Donald Trump.
• Talking about the citizenship law last month, Orbán says it was part of a “spring cleaning” to cleanse Hungarian politics of “stink bugs.”
• Critics say Orbán is using the amendments to restrict the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. 
• These new amendments are the 15th time Orbán has changed the Constitution since returning to office in 2010.

The amendments appear to be more of the same in Orbán’s politics, but the situation in Hungary isn’t the same as it was 15 years ago. While Orbán has won four national elections in a row, polls now show him potentially losing to a new political party led by a former senior member of his own. Hungary, meanwhile, has the highest inflation rate in the European Union, and polling has also shown anger among Hungarians at a proliferation of corruption scandals involving Orbán’s government. Elections are scheduled for next year.

Meta goes on trial in D.C.

The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, faced charges in a Washington district court on Monday. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is suing Meta for violating antitrust law by trying to create and maintain a monopoly in social networking. What’s at stake? 

• The FTC has what it sees as a damning email from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2012, saying that he wanted to “neutralize a potential competitor” in Instagram by buying it.
• The FTC argues this violates antitrust law, which protects free-market competition by preventing big firms from buying up smaller rivals instead of competing against them. 
• The FTC is asking the court to force Meta to unwind Meta’s merger-acquisitions with Instagram and WhatsApp by selling them.
• Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice won a lawsuit against Google for monopolizing internet search. The JoD has a second case against Google for an alleged monopoly in online advertising.
• The U.S. government has also sued Apple and Amazon for antitrust violations. Both cases should go to trial next year.

Assertive action against America’s tech giants is a rare area of bipartisan agreement in the U.S., with all of these lawsuits having been started by the previous U.S. administration of Joe Biden. Still, many leaders of tech firms the government is suing have become closer to President Donald Trump since his election, while Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has made an offer to buy TikTok—which Trump wants to see sold to a U.S. buyer. So it remains an open question whether Trump will want his agencies to continue suing these companies—and whether the Supreme Court will accept the interpretation of antitrust law that won over the lower court in the Google case.

‘It’s a hydra’

What can democracies do about autocratic interference? Josh Rudolph on the challenges of resistance and resiliency.

Meanwhile

• The recent analysis of a 1,900-year-old papyrus, found decades ago in the Judean desert, has shown that it registers a Roman tax-evasion scheme. Two men, Gadalias and Saulos, allegedly forged documents to orchestrate fake slave sales across provincial borders, making the slaves vanish from tax records while physically keeping them: “On paper, the slaves disappeared in Judea but never arrived in Arabia, thereby becoming invisible to Roman administrators.”

Elsewhere

• Finding sites and apps that can actually simplify your life and help you be more effective is a challenge. More than 55,000 subscribers count on Wonder Tools—a free, weekly email that catches you up in five minutes on what's most useful, from new AI services to surprisingly simple productivity apps. Sign up here.

+ From the member’s despatch

• Minecraft. Why is the U.S. trying so hard to find new sources of critical minerals?

Coming soon: Martin Wolf on a new world of radical uncertainty in global trade …