JD Vance Warns Ukraine’s Zelenskiy to Shut up and Obey Trump

Vice President JD Vance issued a stark warning to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday, cautioning the war-battered leader against “badmouthing” Donald Trump even as the U.S. pushes forward with handing over Ukrainian land to Russia in lopsided peace talks.

“The idea that Zelenskiy is going to change the president’s mind by badmouthing him in public media,” Vance told the Daily Mail, “Everyone who knows the president will tell you that is an atrocious way to deal with this administration.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine.

The U.S. and Russia opened discussions Tuesday aimed at ending the three-year war in a meeting that excluded Ukrainian leadership. Hours after the meeting ended, Trump suggested that Kyiv had started the conflict—a Russian talking point that drew Zelenskiy’s ire.

“I would like to see more truth from the Trump team,” Zelenskiy told reporters in a sandbagged presidential palace Wednesday, adding that the MAGA leader lives in a “disinformation space.”

But Trump did not respond well to Zelenskiy’s words. In a lengthy and venomous post on Truth Social Wednesday, the U.S. president wrongly accused the democratically-elected Ukrainian leader of being a “dictator.”

“Zelenskiy admits that half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING,’” Trump wrote, incorrectly asserting that the U.S. had provided $350 billion to Ukraine. In actuality, the U.S. has allocated $119 billion in Ukraine aid, according to the Kiel Institute, which has been tracking international financial assistance for Ukraine.

“He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle,’” Trump continued.

“A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskiy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only ‘TRUMP,’ and the Trump Administration, can do,” he added.

Not even other members of Republican leadership could give a full-throttled defense of Trump deriding Zelenskiy as a dictator.

“The president speaks for himself,” Senate Majority leader John Thune said Wednesday afternoon.

Vance met with Zelenskiy on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference last week as Russia navigated through Trump to organize a deal that defense experts have warned will overwhelmingly benefit Russian interests.

Earlier that week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the NATO conference in Munich that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had taken several chips “off the table,” including Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine. He also added that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its pre-war borders, effectively ceding land to Moscow.

Donald Trump called himself “THE KING” on Wednesday, and the rest of the White House was overjoyed to see the president was dropping the pretense of democracy. 

Trump announced in a post on Truth Social that his administration would challenge New York City’s recent policy installing congestion pricing, with an added rhetorical twist. 

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” Trump wrote.

While not exactly surprising given Trump’s previous references to himself as the savior of the country, and his penchant for trolling, the president dubbing himself a “king” should theoretically rub everyone the wrong way—but not the fascists who work for him.  

Alas, the right-wing shills that run Trump’s communications basked in the wash of his declaration of unchecked power. 

Taylor Budowich, the White House deputy chief of staff posted an AI-generated picture of Trump wearing a jeweled crown and fur-trimmed cape on X. 

Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt also boosted the president’s disturbing missive on social media. 

It’s worth noting that Republicans weren’t always like this. Flashback to 2014, and Senator Rand Paul was tossing barbs at former President Barack Obama for being a “president who thinks he’s a king.”

Republicans’ sycophantic support demonstrates that Trump’s autocratic (or monarchic) ranting isn’t merely him going rogue; it’s a distinct rhetorical feature of his entire administration, which has already set to work uprooting the checks and balances that underpin American democracy, and replacing it with something wholly different. 

On Tuesday night, Elon Musk claimed that “if the will of the president is not implemented, and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented. And that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.” 

It’s not a bureaucracy Americans need fear, but a monarchy. 

Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that he has ended New York’s congestion pricing , boasting in all caps that he “SAVED” the city in a Truth Social post that ended with the declaration “LONG LIVE THE KING!”

Six weeks ago, the city of New York launched a program to enact tolls on cars in the central business district of Manhattan south of 60th Street. On Wednesday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sent a letter to New York Governor Kathy Hochul overturning the Federal Highway Administration’s approval of the program.

During his presidential campaign, former New York resident Trump promised to end the program, and at one point, even Hochul wasn’t in favor of it. But in November, the governor revived the plan, and after it went into effect this year, the program got positive reviews. Traffic was reduced, public transportation received a boost, and greenhouse gas emissions and pollution went down. 

But that didn’t have any effect on the Trump administration. Duffy wrote in his letter that he  shares “the President’s concerns about the impacts to working class Americans who now have an additional financial burden,” and said the highway administration would work with the program’s sponsors “to discuss the orderly cessation of toll operations under this terminated pilot program.”

Hochul replied swiftly with a statement of her own posted to her X account, saying, “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king.”

“We’ll see you in court,” Hochul added, announcing that the Metropolitan Transit Authority had initiated legal action to save the program.

Trump’s action seems to be an attempt to stir up the right-wing’s blind support of car culture, as well as a vindictive effort aimed at his hometown and former place of residence, which has spurned him ever since he entered politics. It remains to be seen how the fight over congestion pricing will play out in court, but only a president as petty as Trump would try to dictate a city’s traffic laws. 

Washington D.C.’s interim MAGA U.S. attorney is coming after Chuck Schumer for supposedly leading an “attack” on Supreme Court justices.

In a weirdly aggressive officewide email Wednesday, U.S. attorney Ed Martin cast Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the greater Trump administration as potential victims of violence specifically due to the rhetoric of Schumer (which has been mild at best compared to anything the president has ever said).

“One of the most abhorrent examples was when Senator Charles Schumer led a rally to attack US Supreme Court Justices,” Martin wrote in the email, referencing a tiff that Schumer and the conservative justices had over Roe v. Wade. “Schumer said, reading from notes in his hand: ‘I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released a whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.’” 

Martin then posited that these remarks, which Schumer walked back shortly after he made them five years ago, led directly to the alleged attacks at Justice Kavanaugh’s home, in which a man was arrested near Kavanaugh’s house with a knife, firearm, and zip ties.

Meanwhile, it’s obvious that revenge has been on the minds of the Trump administration from the moment he was defeated in 2020.

“We are the DC U.S. Attorney’s office; we are the guardians of federal workers,” Martin continued in the email, striking a clear “us versus them” chord, with “them” being anyone who doesn’t align perfectly with MAGA. “You and I must do whatever possible to assure government work is safe for all involved. We must protect our cops, our prosecutors, our DOGE employees, the President, and all other government employees.”

Schumer has yet to comment.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency may be trying to inflate the numbers of its spending cuts.

DOGE published an itemized list of canceled government contracts Monday accounting for an alleged $16 billion in spending. Almost half of those savings were attributed to a hefty $8 billion contract for D&G Support Services to provide “program and technical support services” to the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights at the the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

There was just one problem: The DOGE website included a screenshot of the award, which showed that it was only worth $8 million, not $8 billion, as was the amount listed directly below the image.

The New York Times reported on the discrepancy Tuesday, and determined that the original contract—which started September 30, 2022—had initially been listed at a value of $8 billion in the Federal Procurement Data System. On January 22, 2025, the number was updated to $8 million. The contract said it had been signed January 30, 2025, and terminated the same day.

Now, it looks like DOGE is trying desperately to cover the mistake.

A visit to DOGE’s wall of receipts reflected the award’s actual $8 million value, but when clicking through to the D&G contract, a familiar inflated number appeared: $8 billion, plus a different signing date and a termination date pushed up to 2027. DOGE had linked to the original inaccurate contract, which supports its claim of massive savings. Meanwhile, its list reflects the accurate price.

In a statement to MeidasTouch, D&G Support Services “acknowledges that the previously reported contract value of $8 billion was incorrect.”

“The discrepancy appears to have resulted from a clerical error in the original government filing upon contract reward. The contract value had a ceiling of $8 million,” the statement said.

To add insult to injury, USASpending.com revealed that of that ceiling, only $2.5 had actually been spent, meaning that DOGE’s savings weren’t even $8 million, but more like $5.5 million.

The DOGE website boasted a total of $55 billion in cuts, which remained unchanged between Tuesday and Wednesday, despite the correction to DOGE’s accounting. It’s unclear how many more errors reside in DOGE’s buggy list of savings.