Programming note: Greetings from Ukraine, where I am finally free of the eastern oblasts with their surly Russian menfolk and dispiriting cuisine. In Kharkov, which must surely be one of the ugliest cities in Europe, I was losing the will to live and waiting till the commencement of nightly bombardment to light up the sky before taking my evening stroll.
But this morning I arrived in Odessa, a truly handsome city - Lviv is Habsburg, Kharkov is Soviet, but Odessa was "Little Russia" under the Tsars and, although Putin covets it more than any other Ukrainian-held territory, he doesn't want to take possession of just another huge pile of rubble (which in Kharkov would be a vast improvement) so he bombs more discriminately than he otherwise would, although just as lethally (two dead women plus many more injured in the last twenty-four hours). Still, this morning I left the most beautiful railway station I've yet seen here, took breakfast at a sidewalk café with charming and pulchritudinous service - and then, on a beautiful spring morning, walked the short distance to sit and contemplate the Black Sea, whence my family in the late nineteenth century booked passage to New York. It didn't quite work out as planned, as some of you may have heard. Mickey Kaus, America's migration mastermind, told me it was the saddest immigration story he'd ever heard.
Anyway, tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here to take questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is now restored to its regular hour across the Atlantic: 8pm in London, 9pm in Berlin, and 10pm here in Odessa. I hope you'll want to join me.
~Distance lends a smidgeonette of enhanced perspective, but I like to think that, if I was back in America and watching it on Fox News, I would still be fighting the old ennui with regards to the shootout at the Self-Regarding Correspondents Dinner. After years of similar events, it should be obvious to any creature more sentient than an earthworm, in the first few moments of breaking news, that any assumptions you have about the unutterable crapness of your institutions will be exceeded, and then some. So there is no real need to be agog before your telly screens for the drip-drip-drip of the entirely predictable.
The lavishly-funded Secret Service is still being coy about whether the agent requiring hospitalisation was hit by the would-be assassin or by friendly fire. That really should not be unknown by this stage. From The Daily Mail:
Secret Service agents fired five shots at the man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump but failed to hit him and may have accidentally struck one of their own, the acting attorney general revealed.
Todd Blanche told reporters Monday that agents subdued alleged gunman Cole Tomas Allen, 31, only after he tripped and fell while breaching a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
So the bad news is that every shot went wide, but, in the interests of self-protection, the Secret Service does not want us to know quite how wide. And the good news is that they didn't need to sprint and tackle him, because he "tripped and fell". Perhaps for future events the money-no-object Secret Service could move to a Trip-and-Fall security posture which would produce the same results but for a reduced annual budget of a buck forty-seven.
It's bollocks that should make any American ashamed. And I'm so bored by the bollocks. The Fox News types say it's horrifically real and the Secret Service performed terrifically; the Internet conspiracy theorists say it was obviously staged. The point is, either way, it was unutterably crap. Why? From Denyse O'Leary in our comments section:
Perhaps his praise for the SS goof-a-rama is a signal that can be read differently by different people. After all, what choice does he have? Any attempt to purge the Deep State elements could prove fatal sooner rather than later. And they are the coverup experts. And legacy media will do everything they can to help. If so, his praise of the SS signals that he knows that.
The "Fight! Fight! Fight!" stuff is genuine, to be sure, but he can hardly afford to be explicit about ALL the fronts he is fighting on.
How many Nights of Crap is the President expected to survive? Or haven't they decided that yet?
~It is sobering to be vacationing in The War The World Forgot. Since I've been here, the once universally adored Zelenskyyyy has received in Kyiv such global bigshots as, er... the King of Sweden... the Duke of Sussex... the President of Moldova... Not exactly the geopolitical A-list anymore, is it? But then a lot of wars are quickly forgotten. Judging by their enumeration by one of America's most eminent and accomplished political figures, I've forgotten most of them:
Ilhan Omar referred to World War II as "World War Eleven."
I can't believe this dummy is in Congress
DEPORT this Somali already pic.twitter.com/UGtiNDiFDW
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 27, 2026
Given that World War Two is what Veronica in our comments calls "the origin story" of the modern world, it's weird to find someone who doesn't know the difference between Cardboard Man 2 and Franchise Girl 11. At the moment on the right, there is a vigorous debate between "civnats" and "ethnonats". Civnats believe that, just by marrying your brother and committing immigration fraud, you can be as American as someone who came over on the Mayflower. That said, I feel a little sorry for Miss Omar. If you believe that white men are irredeemable racists launching wars across the planet every fortnight, it's entirely reasonable to assume that at some point or other they must have pulled off a World War Eleven.
On the other hand, in a more practical sense, it does suggest that even the most crude and reductive sense of "civic nationalism" is pretty much a bust.
~Nevertheless, the list of Wars the World Forgot is ever lengthening. The Iran War is now off the front pages in America, and the President would be prudent to keep it that way. In the rest of the world, the war, after a fashion, goes on. Last night, I was in a bar with a Ukrainian sergeant entirely fluent in English, in that every third word was muthableeper and every ninth word was bleepsucker. While he was getting another round, the subtitled TV on the barrom wall played a clip of Fred Merz, the German chancellor, breezily observing that the Iranians had "humiliated" America:
I mention this not because I have any regard for Merz (I don't) or because most world leaders would disagree with him (they don't). But because I find it interesting that he felt comfortable just going before the cameras and saying it out loud. For the record, the President of the United States feels differently:
— Department of State (@StateDept) April 28, 2026
For a similar take, see Victor Davis Hanson:
How Iran Committed Suicide
If you say so.
I understand the President thinks his imaginary Iranian friends are useful to him, but the weekend demonstrated that it's much better for him and his party if he lets something else take the place in the headlines of what he famously called "the fuckin' strait" - which is how most Americans feel about it.
Back in the real world, oil has inched up to $110 a barrel (as I write) and a Putin ally sanctioned by the US has managed to sail through the Strait of Hormuz without being troubled one jot or tittle by the American blockade. The decapitation strategy failed, and the social-media pretence that it worked has also failed. Today the same old same old Iranian Foreign Minister was being received at the Kremlin by President Putin.
Since I am in Odessa, I may as well say that America's second biggest strategic failure in the Nineties (after its insane decision to transfer the global economy to China) was its decision to treat Russia as if the Cold War had never ended. This will not end well.
~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a Gift Certificate or a Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
