Team Trump Suddenly Backtracks on Key Campaign Promise

Donald Trump is backtracking on his big campaign promise to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, according to his special envoy to Ukraine. 

On Sunday, Keith Kellogg told Fox News that the Russia-Ukraine war would come to a “solvable solution in the near term.” 

“You know, I would like to set a goal on a personal level and professional level. I would say, let’s set it at 100 days and move it all the way back and figure a way we can do this in the near term to make sure that the solution is solid, it’s sustainable, and that this war ends,” Kellogg said.

A “near term” timeline is a marked difference from Trump’s bravado on the campaign trail, where he repeatedly bragged that he could end the war in a day or even sooner. Trump himself seems to realize this, telling Time magazine last month that “the Middle East is an easier problem to handle than what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine.” Vladimir Putin has also thrown cold water on Trump’s promises, ignoring the president-elect’s “warnings.”   

Trump is probably going to backtrack on many of his campaign promises, with his supporters in for a rude awakening. The question is whether anyone will call him on it—and if there will be any consequences. 

The incoming Trump administration is instituting loyalty tests for longtime bureaucrats.

Specialists at the National Security Council have been getting questioned by incoming Trump officials about who they voted for in November, who they’ve donated to, and what they’ve posted on social media, an official close to the situation told the Associated Press. These nonpolitical NSC employees were initially told they’d be asked to stay on with the new administration.  

Some of them have quit in response. This seems to be exactly what the Trump team wants.

“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Trump’s national security adviser nominee Mike Waltz told Breitbart News last week. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

Waltz continued, stating that “the folks that we’re bringing in are 100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”

A mass resignation of national security experts may not bode well for everyday operations at the National Security Council, especially as the new administration takes on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The Trump Organization has opened its doors for business—with foreign private companies.

In a departure from Donald Trump’s first term in office, the president-elect’s company released a new ethics agreement Friday that no longer prohibits deals with foreign companies while he is president. The Trump Organization has already reached development agreements for hotels and golf courses in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It’s looking to make even more with Israel, hoping to look at properties to build luxury hotels in the country when its brutal war in Gaza ends.

“The scale of corruption will be orders of magnitude greater than what we saw in the first Trump administration,” ethics professor Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis told the Associated Press.

Anyone who wants to be in Trump’s good graces can simply give his business lavish amounts of money. Trump is telling the international business world that he can indeed be bought. The Trump family is also trying to reclaim the lease to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a doubly corrupt institution in which six different governments spent more than $750,000 in his first term.

Donald Trump will face virtually no legal consequences related to his hush-money sentencing, but he will have to endure some undesirable, tangentially connected ramifications as a result.

Trump received an unconditional discharge in New York Friday, stripping the possibility that he would face any fines, court-appointed supervision, or incarceration related to his criminal conviction. But while the president-elect may not be facing the music in the Empire State, Trump is reportedly at risk of losing his liquor license in New Jersey due to Friday’s proceedings.

New Jersey law prohibits the distribution of licenses to anyone convicted of a crime “involving moral turpitude.” The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control issued a notice following Trump’s hearing that the agency “will proceed in determining whether President-elect Trump is qualified to continue to hold an interest in the licenses,” according to a statement obtained by Forbes.

Liquor licenses for two of Trump’s clubs in the Garden State expired in July while state officials weighed whether his criminal conviction would prevent him from ever renewing the beverage license again.

“The final judgment of conviction that raises the prospect of disqualifying Mr. Trump from an interest in a New Jersey liquor license due to the guilty verdict in New York will not be entered until after his sentencing,” a spokesman for the New Jersey attorney general’s office told The Hill at the time, adding that the burden of proof remains on the applicant to prove they meet the requirements for the license.

The Trump Organization pushed back on the New Jersey investigation, arguing that the conviction should be irrelevant to the clubs’ operation as Trump himself is not the holder of the liquor licenses.

Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, wants to get rid of all the nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials on the National Security Council, so that the president-elect will be surrounded by loyalists and face absolutely no accountability once he’s in the White House.

Waltz told Breitbart News Thursday that he hopes to oust career intelligence officials from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, among other agencies, from the NSC. These officials traditionally help the president make informed decisions about foreign and domestic affairs.

“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Waltz said in a phone interview with Breitbart. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

Why does Waltz want them out? Well, they aren’t all Trumpers, for one thing, so they’d be more likely to push back on the president-elect’s stupider impulses to, say, try to acquire Greenland or something. More crucially, these detailees have the tendency to report up the chain of command on the White House’s activities, a totally normal thing to do, unless you’re trying to get away with something you don’t want anyone to know about. Officials doing their jobs properly can become a huge problem when it comes time for them to testify about stuff later on.

That’s what happened with Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who joined the National Security Council as an expert on Ukraine in 2018. The next year, he testified about an “improper” phone call Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, pressuring the foreign leader to investigate Trump’s Democratic rivals.

According to Breitbart, “Waltz told Breitbart News that he is taking very serious steps to ensure that there are no more Vindmans.”

It’s not clear how serious Waltz’s threat is, but he shared the article in a post on X Friday, captioning it “Day 1.”

Vindman responded to Waltz’s comments in an X post of his own Friday, saying that ensuring only political loyalists could serve on the NSC set a “dangerous precedent.”

“Such an approach will have a chilling effect on senior policy staff across the government. Talented professionals, wary of being dismissed for principled stances or offering objective advice, will either self-censor or forgo service altogether,” Vindman said. “This undermines the very purpose of the NSC: to provide the president with the best possible advice as well as the coordinating team to advance U.S. national security interests.

“The implications of this loyalty-above-competence model are dire. By purging the NSC of apolitical, experienced professionals, Trump and Waltz are hollowing out the institutional expertise required to navigate complex global challenges,” Vindman wrote. “This will create a policy apparatus incapable of discerning sound policies from reckless impulses—or worse, one that actively disregards legal and ethical obligations to implement Trump’s personal whims.”