JD Vance Issues Ukraine Stark Ultimatum as Rubio Ditches Peace Talks

Vice President JD Vance admitted outright on Wednesday that the United States is prepared to completely abandon Ukraine. 

“We’ve issued a very explicit proposal to both the Russians and Ukrainians, and it’s time for them to either say yes, or for the U.S. to walk away from this process,” he said from India. “We’ve engaged in an extraordinary amount of diplomacy, of on-the-ground work.

“The current lines, somewhere close to them is where you’re ultimately, I think, going to draw the new lines in the conflict,” Vance added, making it clear that Ukraine would have to give up territory to Russia.

This comes as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff decided not to attend the planned meeting between the U.S., Ukraine, and other European leaders, due to what Rubio’s spokesperson called “logistical issues.” 

The U.S. has been unilaterally trying to strong-arm Ukraine into a ceasefire with Russia, while the Europeans try to support Ukraine’s attempts to fight off the Russian invasion. These talks were supposed to be an attempt to bridge the gap between the U.S. and Europe and to make Putin negotiate on more equitable terms that don’t see him retaining large chunks of Ukrainian territory. But Vance just gave the Kremlin yet another green light. 

Elon Musk’s far-right turn as the head of the Department of Efficiency has apparently tanked Tesla’s earnings.

In a humiliating first-quarter report published Tuesday, Tesla reported that profits had crashed by a whopping 71 percent, falling to a mere $409 million, compared with $1.39 billion from the same quarter last year.

The company vastly underperformed compared to Wall Street’s expectations for per-share profit, reporting an adjusted earnings per share of 27 cents, well below the expectations of 41 cents.

Sales slipped dramatically as well, dropping 13 percent from the same period last year. The electric vehicles have become controversial symbols of Donald Trump’s administration and Musk’s cost-cutting antics at DOGE, making them targets of widespread vandalism.

Musk was reportedly considering stepping back as DOGE czar when his special government employee status ends next month, which should come as no surprise. The Washington Post reported that the billionaire bureaucrat was tired of “attacks” from the left.

Dan Ives, a Wedbush Security financial analyst, wrote to clients on Sunday that Musk pulling back from DOGE is the only way that Tesla can recover, according to Bloomberg.

“Musk needs to leave the government, take a major step back on DOGE, and get back to being CEO of Tesla full-time,” Ives wrote. “Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla … and anyone that thinks the brand damage Musk has inflicted is not a real thing, spend some time speaking to car buyers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. You will think differently after those discussions.”

This latest earnings report may have been the wake-up call Musk needed. On a call with investors Tuesday, Musk reportedly said that he was planning to cut down on his time spent working with DOGE to two days a week starting in May.

Several employees in the Environmental Protection Agency spent their Earth Day learning that they needed to find new jobs.

Hundreds of staffers in the department’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were laid off as part of a reduction in force Tuesday, as were employees working on environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in regional offices.

In February, environmental justice staffers were placed on administrative leave and some of the agency’s probationary workers were fired. Now, 280 workers involved with environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion will be terminated, with 175 other EPA workers being assigned to new jobs. It’s all part of EPA chief Lee Zeldin’s pledge to drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.” According to an EPA memo obtained by NBC News, the reduction in force will take effect on July 31.

The EPA under Trump is ditching its mission of actually protecting the environment. The department rolled back environmental regulations last month along with parts of the Clean Air Act. In addition to the rollbacks and cuts, the agency also tried to cut grants to nonprofit organizations in an attack on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, set up by President Biden with the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. A federal judge temporarily nixed those plans last month.

The regulatory changes that Zeldin is pushing with Trump’s blessing will harm countless Americans, including Trump’s supporters. “It’s practically inevitable” that more people will get sick from reduced regulation and the loss of funding, one EPA staffer anonymously told TNR earlier this month.

It’s fitting that Tuesday’s layoff announcement fell on Earth Day because the Trump administration has shown that it cares little, if anything, about the earth. The new energy secretary, fracking executive Chris Wright, last month described climate change as the “side effect of building the modern world.”

The FBI has moved to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the EPA under the Biden administration, and Trump himself has claimed that climate change will provide more seafront property and is therefore better for real estate. The White House is celebrating Earth Day by making the planet worse.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has begun baselessly claiming that birthright citizenship has become a massive welfare scam.

During an appearance on Newsmax Monday evening, Miller ranted about Donald Trump’s executive order to upend birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court will weigh next month.

“Birthright citizenship is the biggest, costliest scam in financial history,” Miller ranted. “An illegal alien could come here nine months pregnant, or on a tourist visa nine months pregnant, have a baby. That baby is then declared an automatic citizen, which then entitles the entire family to come here and live here, and every one of them get welfare … unlimited welfare, applying as the custodian of this citizen—so-called—child.”

“The biggest financial rip-off of Americans in history, not to mention the fact that it is the number one magnet for illegal immigration and invasion,” Miller continued.

With his penchant for white nationalism, Miller is no stranger to making disgusting, racist generalizations about immigrants. Miller has previously endorsed a theory called “remigration” that, unlike deportation, refers to the forcible removal of non–ethnically European immigrants and their families, regardless of their actual citizenship.

In a particularly outrageous escalation, Miller also claimed, without providing evidence, that birthright citizenship was a “major national security threat” that had been “used by foreign governments to conduct espionage against the United States.”

Halfway through his outrageous claim Monday, he switched to a hypothetical. “Because now, you see we can keep out a foreign spy who has a visa, who’s trying to get permission to board an airplane—but what happens when a foreign government uses this ridiculous birthright scam in order to create automatic citizens to then grow up as assets of a foreign government?” he demanded.

Birthright citizenship was established in the Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Congress and the states ratified the amendment in 1869 to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which had held that people of African descent can never acquire American citizenship, and to provide a constitutional backstop for Black civil rights in the South during Reconstruction. Miller argued that the use of the birthright citizenship clause had strayed too far from its intended purpose.

The ghoulish white supremacist has also become one of the Trump administration’s strongest advocates for denying due process for undocumented immigrants it seeks to remove.

The Trump administration is not only refusing to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but it spelled “United States” wrong while explaining why.

In a response issued Monday evening, the Department of Justice failed to answer questions from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers submitted in a court-approved interrogatory. “Defendants object to Interrogatory No. 1 as based on the false premise that the United States can, or has been ordered to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody,” the DOJ’s response reads.

It then quotes the Supreme Court as having said, “Defendant should ‘take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United State.’” Misquoting the Supreme Court and a typo? It’s a great start from the Justice Department as it tries to defend deporting an innocent man it claims is part of a gang because of his knuckle tattoos.

After the Trump administration unlawfully deported 29-year-old Abrego Garcia to El Salvador due to an admitted “administrative error,” the Supreme Court ordered the government to “facilitate” his return, as did U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis. But the administration has since taken no steps to do so, and it maintains without evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.

Because of Trump’s inaction, Xinis allowed Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to submit an interrogatory in search of answers, of which they got none. Along with spelling the country’s name incorrectly, the DOJ refused to answer any questions from the father-of-three’s attorneys in its response. It instead maintained that any rulings ordering the facilitation of Abrego Garcia’s return are a “false premise”—a pathetic excuse for inaction given that’s exactly what they were ordered to do.