Trump Suddenly Turns on Putin With Nonsense Threat

Donald Trump unveiled his latest move to apply pressure to Russia—and surprise, surprise, it’s more tariffs.

While speaking to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office Monday, Trump set a 50-day deadline for Russia to end its invasion of Ukraine. The president said he plans to levy “secondary tariffs” of 100 percent on Moscow, should it fail to resolve the conflict.

“I’m disappointed in President Putin because I thought we woulda had a deal two months ago, but it doesn’t seem to get there,” Trump said. “So based on that, we’re gonna be doing secondary tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days, it’s very simple. And they’ll be at 100 percent.”

It’s notable that Trump would describe the tariffs on Russia as “secondary” considering that the country was specifically exempt from his initial round of sweeping “reciprocal tariffs.” Russian President Vladimir Putin certainly wasn’t among the paltry list of world leaders who received one of Trump’s copy-paste trade deal letters last week.

Crucially, Trump’s ever-fluctuating tariffs have proven to be a wildly ineffective tactic for settling deals. In the more than 90 days since Trump first announced his vast slate of tariffs, only three rough trade deals have actually materialized. Last week, the Trump administration once again extended its deadline to produce trade deals, but then Trump clarified that the offers they produced would only be “more or less final.”

Thus, Trump’s newest tariff threat can be considered similarly unlikely to perform on-schedule, or produce any actual resolution.

Trump also said the U.S. would no longer send military aid to Ukraine, but rather sell weapons to NATO countries that would then distribute the arms to Ukraine.

“We’ve made a deal today where we are going to be sending them weapons and they are going to be paying for ‘em,” Trump said.

“The United States will not be having any payment made. We’re not buying it, but we will manufacture it, and they’re gonna be paying for it,” he continued, barely coherent.

Trump had already announced this development last week, as reports spread that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had unilaterally paused weapons shipments to Ukraine, before Trump stepped in to resume them.

Donald Trump claimed that “Alligator Alcataraz” would hold the “most vicious people on the planet.” But in reality, it’s holding hundreds of people with no criminal record at all, according to records obtained by The Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times.

More than 250 of the nearly 750 people currently being held at the Trump administration’s premiere wetland-themed concentration camp have no criminal conviction or pending criminal charges. Only a third of detainees have had criminal convictions in the United States, ranging from attempted murder to traffic violations.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin gave a statement to the Herald/Times attempting to justify the Trump administration’s blatant targeting of innocent people. 

“Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.,” McLaughlin told the Herald/Times. “Further, every single one of these individuals committed a crime when they came into this country illegally. It is not an accurate description to say they are ‘non-criminals.’”

But many inside the hastily constructed facility aren’t undocumented. 

Some, like Denis Alcides Solis Morales, came to the United States under a humanitarian parole program, which has since been canceled by the Trump administration. The 56-year-old Nicaraguan man was taken to Alligator Alcatraz following a traffic stop and has a pending asylum case.

Another detainee, Leamsy Izquierdo, who detailed the horrific conditions at the site, is a green card-holder and permanent U.S. resident.  

Already, Alligator Alcatraz has revealed itself to be a massive humanitarian disaster. Reports have alleged that detainees lack access to clean water, safe food, and showers, are attacked by massive bugs, and kept awake at all hours by bright lights. Last week, attorneys claimed that they have no way to reach their clients inside, and families said that their loved ones have disappeared from ICE’s registry upon entering the state-run facility. 

It seems that under the Trump administration, being undocumented—or just being from another country—is enough to justify your torture pending removal from the United States. 

Border czar Tom Homan’s speech at this weekend’s Turning Point USA convention was interrupted by a heckler who seemed to draw attention to the administration’s spurious efforts to justify its deportation campaign.

“Are you an MS-13 member?” a man shouted from the audience.

Sporting a T-shirt that read, “I IDENTIFY AS ULTRA MAGA,” and a Trump 2024 campaign hat, the heckler brandished a large poster depicting Homan with “MS-13” digitally added onto his knuckles—seemingly a reference to the Trump administration’s dubious attempts to frame Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador, as a leader of the criminal gang.

During the Trump administration’s scramble to tie Abrego Garcia to MS-13, one purported piece of evidence it invoked was an image of four tattooed symbols on the man’s fingers.

The Trump administration took the questionable position that the four symbols represented “M,” “S,” “1,” and “3,” and the White House accordingly published an image in which the tattoos were digitally annotated with text reading “MS-13.” Trump, however—in a moment revealing either his characteristic penchant for lying or his digital illiteracy—insisted that plainly photoshopped characters were the actual tattoos themselves.

At the summit on Saturday, Homan laid into the heckler, who also was jeered by conservative convention-goers as he was escorted out.

“Why don’t you come up here and hand me that picture?” Homan asked, before beginning a “USA” chant with the crowd.

“They got morons like this all over the country,” Homan continued. “This guy wouldn’t know what it’s like to serve this nation. This guy ain’t got the balls to be an ICE officer. He hasn’t got the balls to be a border patrol agent.”

“If you’re such a badass, meet me off stage in 13 minutes and 50 seconds,” Homan said, as well as hurling a number of insults (“I guarantee you he sits down to pee,” “This guy lives in his mother’s basement,” and “The only thing that surprises me is you don’t have purple hair and a nose ring.”)

After the brief interruption, Homan continued to tout the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. The border czar’s other recent defenses include a Friday appearance on Fox News, in which he seemed to advocate for Immigration and Customs Enforcement practicing racial profiling.

The Texas Newsroom requested records of all correspondence between Governor Greg Abbott and billionaire Elon Musk from their legislative session this year. After initially approving the request and charging the newsroom $244 for the records, Abbott’s office refused to share any documents, stating that the exchanges between Musk and Abbott were too “intimate and embarrassing” to be released.

“Section 552.101 encompasses the doctrine of common-law privacy, which protects information that is … highly intimate or embarrassing, the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person and not of legitimate concern to the public,” a letter from Abbott’s counsel read.

“Embarrassment” is a ludicrous reason to block the public release of messages between one of the country’s most powerful Republican governors and the richest man in the world, who has plenty of his own political motivations. And as ProPublica notes, that “common law privacy” doctrine is usually only levied in situations that involve highly personal information, health data, or children, not to very wealthy, public, and powerful men.

Were Musk and Abbott chatting about bringing a Grok data center to Texas? Were they planning a trip to Mars? Were they flirting? What could be so embarrassing and intimate about these messages?

We’ll likely never know, as a recent ruling from the Texas Supreme Court has granted more protections to public officials who are asked to divulge public records. Abbott’s office has yet to elaborate.

Donald Trump is still just becoming wise to the notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin might not be a good-faith actor on the international stage.

On Sunday, the president announced plans to send an unspecified number of Patriot air defense missiles to Ukraine, and all but admitted that Putin has hitherto charmed and strung him along.

“We will send them Patriots, which they desperately need, because Putin really surprised a lot of people,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews. “He talks nice, and then he bombs everybody in the evening. So there’s a little bit of a problem there. I don’t like it.”

With his promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours now broken by almost 175 days, Trump is slowly becoming disabused of his perception of the Russian president as a reliable partner.

In April, in response to the notion that Russia may be intentionally stalling negotiations with Ukraine to end the war, Trump insisted, “Nobody’s playing me.”

But later that month, when Putin conducted deadly strikes on Kyiv, the president posted exasperatedly on Truth Social, “Vladimir, STOP!” and, the following week, Trump wrote that “there was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days. It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along.”

At a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump vented in a similar tenor to his Sunday remarks, saying, “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth. He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”