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FASTEST FIRED

Press secretary fired after five days, replacing the Scaramucci as American politics' base unit of time

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the afternoon edition, 16 October 2026

Today we are making a press secretary, which does not keep. You will need five days: Katie Zacharia was picked on the ninth of October and fired on Friday, five days after she took the job, which a White House official told the Guardian before anyone had announced it formally.

For the rest you will need a conservative commentator who had been a communications adviser at Trump Media and Technology Group; the vacancy left by Karoline Leavitt, who went in August; a law degree from Pepperdine, 2011, which the university confirms; and the midterm elections, less than a month off. No, you cannot substitute.

CLIVE: Does not keep. Nothing I write keeps either, not in this house, and I am the only one at this table producing anything at all.

GARY: You are producing a smell of toast and a locked door. I could have that door off in an afternoon and the house would thank me for the light.

Begin on Tuesday, with the first briefing: fourteen minutes of it, and widely panned. That one went on the floor in front of the whole room. Anthony Scaramucci, whom the president made communications director in July 2017 — Sean Spicer announced he would resign over the appointment — posted that afternoon, "The clock is running," and then, "Thus far 1/11th of a Scaramucci."

ROB: You took the shed door off in the spring and it is still leaning on the boiler. It was always going to end like this.

KEITH: There is an angle in it. Tenure sold by the unit, American, stamped on a mug — moving by Thursday, and the kitty takes its cut.

Thursday she sat with Sean Hannity on Fox News and said she had not passed the bar exam, which is the examination that decides whether a person with a law degree may practise law at all; a graduate who has not passed it cannot. She had said before that she practised law, and the president had described her as an attorney. You will be looking for the hearing. There is none: the job is handed over by one man and taken back by the same one, and on Friday a press official said she had been "let go."

RTÉ, the Irish broadcaster, printed it as arithmetic — "Scaramucci replaced by shorter unit of time - a Zacharia." Le Monde called the stint gaffe-filled. At home the word was "let go."

CLIVE: A mug. I offer this house a verse and it wants crockery; I shall read it anyway, and the meter can listen.

Serves the president, who is flying round the country boosting Republican candidates with the elections less than a month away. The briefing room pays: five days of press secretary, fourteen minutes of it at the podium.

ROB: Read it to the meter, it is the only thing here still on. They have got through theirs already, and we have not had a rota since the clocks went back.

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THE WAIVER

Trump signs Russia sanctions law named for Lindsey Graham, then waives it the day before it takes effect.

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the morning edition, 17 October 2026

Today we are making a sanctions waiver, which is not a dish you can get over here, so I shall go slowly. You will need a law Congress already passed, a signature already on it, and a second signature, later, taking the first one back.

CLIVE: Two signatures. I am drafting a reply myself, one line that promises and the next that quietly withdraws it. I think we know who does that best at this table.

The law is the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, signed the nineteenth of September, named for the South Carolina senator who died in July, the New York Times notes. It authorised sanctions on Russia's energy sector and tariffs up to 100 percent on its buyers, the Washington Examiner says.

GARY: Authorised. We authorised Keith to fix the boiler in March. He has since authorised himself a jumper, and the boiler is still cold.

The law was already bending before Friday. On the ninth of October the President lifted sanctions tied to Russian diesel exports, then two days later announced an energy ceasefire with Russia. That Sunday Senator Thom Tillis said chasing Russian oil was "tarnishing Lindsey Graham's efforts" to get the sanctions enforced.

ROB: Tarnishing. Heavy word. I said this house would tarnish the minute the meter went in March, and nobody thanked me for the lentils that got us through it.

By Thursday the sixteenth, before Friday existed, Le Monde had Zelensky at the Brussels summit asking the allies for seventy billion more euros for 2027, weakened, in his own word, by what he called Donald Trump's "betrayal." The ask was filed before the order it is now meant to answer.

CLIVE: Nobody thanks me either. Mine has been unfinished three weeks, which outlasts any lentil in this house.

Then Friday, the seventeenth. The BBC, which is what they have here, calls it waiving "many restrictions on Moscow" over "national security" concerns. NBC has the President's own phrase: the pause is "in the national interests of the United States." CBS has the waiver reaching tariffs on the largest buyers of Russian oil, timed to ease prices by tapping Russian energy; RTÉ confirms it targets Russia's energy revenues. The Examiner calls the hold indefinite; the Guardian calls it a pause.

You will be looking for the vote that undoes this. There is none; Congress passed the law in both chambers, and now watches the waiver stand.

A pause sitting next to the word indefinite does not resolve itself by Monday.

Russia's oil buyers keep the exemption Friday gave them. Brussels was already a day short of its seventy billion euros before the order existed, and is shorter now.

KEITH: Short. I can move short. I know a man who will take the whole law off your hands, nameplate included, and never ask whose name was on it.

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Administration axes election-threat unit, Republican senators start receiving the threats it no longer tracks.

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 17 October 2026

I went to the post office to mail the renewal for my car registration — the form with the box that wants a return address — and I didn't have a label, so I stood at the counter trying to remember my own zip code like a man accused of something. I got the stamp. On the way out, the rack by the door had this morning's paper folded open to a page that had nothing to do with my car.

That page, from the New York Post, today, said a congressman from California got an envelope mailed from New York with a return address linked to something called the DSA, and powder inside, the kind the FBI is now checking alongside the Postal Inspection Service and Capitol Police. A return address linked to a group isn't the same as one belonging to it. The paper didn't say the group sent it. It said the address was linked, and I'd rather leave that word where the paper left it.

I have to go back a little for the order. On October 1st, the Guardian reported the administration had let go of the bodies built to look into direct threats to U.S. elections from foreign actors and from people already here — the paper's language, not mine. That's on the record; I won't retype it.

Today the list runs longer. The Post has Senator Cruz and Senator Collins both getting the powder — joining a growing list, their phrase, not CBS's; CBS, the same day, said only that federal investigators are looking into letters with unknown substances sent to state election officials and to congressional offices, no adjective on the word investigation at all. The Hill's fuller count: Senator Klobuchar, Senator Rounds, Senator Ricketts, Senator Smith, Senator Cruz, and more than fifteen House members, offices hit Friday. The Collins letter carries no day in the paper that has it. I'm not saying it wasn't Friday. I'm saying the sheet in my hand doesn't tell me that.

On the way home I sat through the toll plaza that lost its cash lane two summers back. Six lanes narrow to two ramps now, electronic, and the light changes on its own clock whether or not the car ahead has a transponder. Nobody's posted at that gate. The gate goes up anyway. I came home and read a wire story with three agency names in the same sentence — FBI, Postal Inspection Service, Capitol Police — and not one of them listed ahead of the others.

This shape isn't new. In October 2018, the Secret Service caught two packages addressed to a former president and a former secretary of state before they went anywhere; a third turned up at a cable news building and cleared the floor; a fourth carried a sitting congresswoman's name on the return label of a package meant for someone else, wrong address and all. A directory did the whole job then.

So was the office let go on October 1st built for this shape of letter, or a different threat with a different shape — foreign, the paper said, and domestic terrorism — with nothing in what I read naming a county clerk's office or a senator's desk? I don't have that answer.

I was almost out the post office door a second time today — stamps, this trip — when the clerk called after me. Excuse me, she said, you'll want your receipt. I said I meant to ask something first: the letters on the news — who's running that, the FBI, the Post Office, or the Capitol Police? She said she just works the counter. I told her so does everybody else in this story, far as I can tell.

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Senators demand answers on throttled soldiers' Starlink; Musk answers with a flying car.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the morning edition, 17 October 2026

The chief walks into the shop with a count, not a feeling: one company throttled a war zone's internet, and its sister company answered the resulting uproar with a flying car.

On Thursday, in Texas, Elon Musk's Tesla rolled the Roadster onto a runway, strapped it with the same high-pressure air thrusters SpaceX puts on its rockets, and had it flip and hover for a cheering crowd. CBS News filmed the acrobatics and then asked the follow-up the stage left out: who regulates this thing, on the road or off it? CBS put the question to the Department of Transportation that same afternoon. The outlet could only publish the question itself — no fuller answer has turned up since.

The day before, in Washington, a harder question was already sitting unanswered. Ukraine's access to Starshield, the military-grade branch of SpaceX's Starlink network, had been throttled, and President Zelenskyy said the slowdown disrupted drone operations and put lives at risk. The Hill reported that same day that a bipartisan group of senators — four Republicans standing with their Democratic colleagues — had written the Pentagon demanding to know which official gave the order. By Thursday, ABC News was reporting the same bipartisan demand, unanswered still. Two days earlier, Common Dreams had already named the deeper problem: a government that leans this hard on one man's satellites has no strong position left when his satellites misbehave.

The planner points out that the government is not actually out of position — it has simply not used the position it holds. The administration can summon Musk for an honor one week and claim it cannot summon an answer from him the next; the Pentagon is Starshield's buyer, and a buyer's unused leverage is still leverage.

The tinkerer's assembly needs no new statute. Part one: the Department of Transportation puts its jurisdiction, or the lack of it, on the record before the next thruster-car livestream, not after. Part two: the Pentagon spends the leverage it already owns as the customer and gets a written answer from its own satellite contractor about who ordered the throttling. Both parts were sitting in the shop before Thursday's unveiling. The muscle just has to swing the tool already on the bench, and the pilot flies the answer back to the senators still waiting for one.

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THE WAIVER

Russia hits the power grid with over 320 drones hours after sanctions meant to protect it are waived.

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the morning edition, 17 October 2026

Today's dish is a bill the host already signed and then declined to pay. On the nineteenth of September, Congress's Russia sanctions law — the one bearing the name of the senator who championed it before he died in July — took its first signature. On Friday evening, the day before that law was due to take effect, a second signature waived nearly all of it, sanctions and tariffs together.

This did not begin on Friday. On the tenth of October, Zelensky criticised a separate deal letting Russian diesel back onto world markets; the same day, Trump told reporters Zelensky 'could have settled this war many times' and that Ukraine should 'get a new leader.' On the eleventh, seven senators on the Foreign Relations Committee answered that Congress had banned Russian energy imports in 2022 to stop American money financing the war.

CLIVE: Settled. I settled an argument with Gary on Tuesday in one line of verse, no second signature required, no walking it back by evening.

GARY: Settled nothing — you redrafted it four times and it still didn't rhyme. I'll settle things properly, with a hammer, on the toaster that's been live since March.

Now we come to the part that happened since. Zelensky called the waiver 'unfortunate' and said plainly that 'this Act could have helped enormously,' pointing to the attack already under way on the energy sector as the decision was made. On his own side of the aisle, Senator Thom Tillis called the waiver 'beyond irresponsible,' and other Republicans said the same.

ROB: Does anyone round here still pay the electric, or are we all just irresponsible together now?

KEITH: That's not getting answered today. There's an angle in it though, and I could have it sold on by Thursday, enormously so.

The BBC, which is what they have here, has it that the president 'temporarily ends many restrictions on Moscow recently passed by Congress' over 'national security' concerns. Le Monde quotes Zelensky arriving in Brussels 'weakened by what he called the betrayal of Donald Trump.' At home it is a waiver.

You will be looking for the vote that undid Congress's law. There is none; a national security determination is what the vote is instead of, handled with no debate attached. Zelensky put the number at over 320 drones, missiles and munitions aimed at the power stations that determination left unprotected, and at the Brussels summit on the sixteenth he asked allied leaders for seventy billion euros to carry Ukraine through 2027. RTÉ records the shorter verdict from the same man: the waiver, he said, merely 'rewards' Putin.

The seventy billion euros Zelensky asked Brussels for on the sixteenth has not yet been found.

CLIVE: Found. I've found four more lines and nowhere to put them, which is, I'm told, also Brussels's trouble this week.

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