As you can see here, this morning Steve Bannon is using his contempt of Congress charges to publicize his podcast and fundraise. Tweet or I guess publicize through it, you might say. It’s not surprising. This is pure Bannon: all defiance and spectacle. As we learned with Trump 5+plus years ago, there’s no shaming people in the Trump world. They lean into it. The only way forward is bringing all the reality of the situation to the foreground, the movement’s penchant for violence, contempt for democracy and eagerness for foreign subversion. Along these lines I wanted to point out an abiding feature of Trumpism and Bannon’s role in it: in this self-styled American ‘nationalist’ movement it’s surprisingly difficult to find … well, Americans.

Russia experts are wondering what Vladimir Putin is up to. We are witnessing one of the recurrent build-ups of Russian military forces on the Ukraine border. For a variety of reasons experts on the region believe this may be building to a new full-scale military engagement. Putin also seems at least passively involved in the engineered refugee crisis on the border between Belarus and Poland. Josh Kovensky surveyed these developments here on Friday. Meanwhile we’ve seen a new round of saber-rattling over Taiwan, with aggressive military exercises from the mainland and deepening expressions of support from the US. All of which is to say that while we in the US see a deepening wave of crises in the US, this is matched by an increasingly tense and dangerous climate abroad. Both of these tension points – Ukraine and Taiwan – hold the possibility of direct military confrontations with nuclear powers Russia and China. And that’s not great.