Trump Suddenly Changes His Tune on Putin-Zelenskiy Meeting

In a sudden about-face, Donald Trump now thinks it would be “better” if Russia and Ukraine met without him.

For the better part of this week, the U.S. leader has bragged that his recent meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy were “very successful”—in spite of the fact that the internationally controversial decision to invite his Russian counterpart to Alaska proved fruitless.

On Monday, Trump promised to coordinate a trilateral arrangement between himself, Putin, and Zelenskiy to solidify a peace deal. But just days later, the commander in chief changed his tune.

In an interview with conservative podcaster Mark Levin on Wednesday, Trump claimed the two warring countries should meet without his involvement.

“I had a very successful meeting with President Putin. I had a very successful meeting with President Zelenskiy. And now I thought it would be better if they met without me, just to see. I want to see what goes on. You know, they had a hard relationship, very bad, very bad relationship,” Trump said.

Putin has remained adamant that any peace deal would require “international legal recognition” of its 2014 annexation of Crimea, an internationally recognized portion of Ukraine, along with four regions it has claimed in the three years since it first invaded Ukraine. Ukraine, on the other hand, has remained just as adamant that those regions will remain within its borders.

Trump did suggest that the apparently just-for-fun meeting could be saved by his intervention, if needed.

“And now we’ll see how they do and, if necessary, and it probably would be, but if necessary, I’ll go and I’ll probably be able to get it close,” he continued.

Whether or not the U.S. president appreciates the gravity of negotiating over Ukraine’s occupied territories is unclear, considering he doesn’t seem to know where or how large they are. In the same interview with Levin, Trump wrongly asserted that Crimea was “the size of Texas” and that the Ukrainian peninsula was “in the middle of the ocean,” a faux pas that was not received well by Kyiv’s news media.

At least 13,883 civilians have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine. The monthly death toll reached 67 in July, with 209 injured, marking the highest monthly civilian death and injury count since the conflict began.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement apparently shares the president’s obsession with shiny objects.

After the Department of Homeland Security blinged out ICE vehicles for a vain rap video, the agency now plans to shell out millions more in taxpayer dollars on flashy new rides.

The video, posted on social media last week, showed two ICE vehicles, darkly wrapped with gold accents and emblazoned with the slogan “DEFEND THE HOMELAND,” cruising through Washington, D.C., to DaBaby’s 2019 hit, “Toes.”

The cars in that video reportedly cost over $380,000, but the agency seems ready to dish out millions more on vehicles in the same style.

The Washington Post on Wednesday revealed $2.4 million in planned ICE expenditures—the bulk of which will go toward 25 Chevrolet Tahoes, with about $174,000 covering the custom-wrapping of Tahoes, Ford Expeditions, and other vehicles.

The purchases were detailed in records that the government had to submit in order to forgo the typical competitive bidding process that’s in place to ensure best value for taxpayers.

The decorated cars are, according to the documents, “essential for officers to provide support and a law enforcement presence” in the nation’s capital, and “must be deployed to the streets immediately to provide a visible law enforcement presence, support public safety operations, and reinforce recruitment efforts.”

Beyond seeking cosmeticized cars to aid President Donald Trump’s D.C. crackdown, the agency is also dipping into its congressionally approved slush fund to the tune of hundreds of thousands for vehicles and car-wrapping services as part of recruitment efforts.

ICE is eschewing the open bidding process for these, too, on the grounds that “the need for the services is so urgent and compelling that providing full and open competition would result in unacceptable delays and seriously hinder the Government’s recruiting initiative.”

For example, Ford Mustangs included in this order—in “an immediate request” by the White House—are said to feature “eye-catching design[s]” that help “attract top talent by conveying a culture of excellence and forward momentum.”

Texas appears to have sparked a redistricting domino effect.

Republicans in the Lone Star State forced through their gerrymandered maps Wednesday night by locking state representatives inside the Capitol until they voted on a chart that would carve out five new GOP-favorable districts and erase Democratic areas. The brutal initiative followed weeks of counterefforts by state Democrats, who at one point fled Texas in order to avoid participating in the Donald Trump–directed vote.

Other areas of the country were watching the bedlam to ascertain just how far Texas would go to obey Trump’s command—and now, they’re acting.

Democratic governors on both coasts proclaimed redistricting war in the wake of the vote, announcing on social media that they would work to offset Texas’s maps, intended to help the GOP secure five more House seats in Washington.

“Game on,” wrote New York Governor Kathy Hochul, responding to news of the passed vote.

“It’s on, Texas,” posted California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Congressional maps are typically redrawn every 10 years, after new census data is released. But Texas’s decision to do so in the middle of the decade—at Trump’s direction—has raised alarms, with Democrats across the country labeling the effort a threat to democracy.

Between them, New York (26) and California (52)—two of the country’s most populous states—have 78 representatives, the bulk of whom are Democrats. Their share accounts for nearly 18 percent of the House’s membership. But as Texas worked to obey Trump’s midterm demands, the pair of Democratic strongholds warned that carving out more Democratic seats was well within their power.

“This is radical rigging of a midterm election,” Newsom told The Siren podcast earlier Wednesday. “Radical rigging of an election. Destroying, vandalizing this democracy, the rule of law. So, I’m sorry. I know some people’s sensibilities. I respect and appreciate that. But right now, with all due respect, we’re walking down a damn different path. We’re fighting fire with fire. And we’re gonna punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.”

When asked last month if he was concerned about California following suit in the redistricting department, Trump said that the White House would “fight them.”

“You know they’re so corrupt in California, you never know what’s going to happen,” Trump said at the time. “But we’ve done pretty well in the courts in California, you see. We’re batting about 1,000, ultimately.”

But the Republican stratagem is far from over. Trump issued similar demands of five other states: Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Florida.

Vice President JD Vance is so good at saying exactly what Moscow wants him to say that he’s earned a starring role in state propaganda.

During an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Wednesday night, Vance described his positive impression of Russia’s leader.

“So, I have never actually met [Vladimir] Putin. The president did that meeting. I have talked to him on the phone a number of times. You know, it’s interesting, he’s more soft-spoken than you would necessarily expect. You know, the American media has a particular image of him,” Vance said. “He’s soft spoken, in a certain way. He’s very deliberate. He’s very careful.

“And I think fundamentally he is a person who looks out for the interests, as he sees it, of Russia,” Vance continued. “And I think one of the reasons he respects the president of the United States is because he knows the president looks out for the interests of the American people.”

That soundbite of Vance’s interview was then shared on X by Russia Today, the Russian state-controlled television network that has been banned in the U.K., EU, and Canada. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in November 2022, RT suspended its activities in the U.S., as well.

Despite what Vance has claimed, Putin isn’t a gentle altruist—he’s a dictator who hopes to acquire Ukrainian territory by force—and Vance knows that. “The Ukrainians want security guarantees. The Russians want a certain amount of territory,” Vance told Ingraham. “The Russians want certain pieces of territory, most of which they’ve occupied, but some of which they haven’t.”

But the Kremlin also hopes to block Ukraine’s long-awaited NATO membership. President Donald Trump claimed earlier this week that if Ukraine could agree to give up Crimea and its dreams of joining the military bloc, then the war would immediately end.

During a meeting with European leaders Monday, Trump portrayed an unearned optimism about Putin making a deal “for him,” after dragging out negotiations for months. The White House then appeared to walk back claims that it had actually assured a bilateral meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Russia has yet to confirm any such agreement.

Lindsey Halligan, the White House official leading President Donald Trump’s overhaul of the Smithsonian, thinks its museums overemphasize slavery when they should be emphasizing “how far we’ve come since slavery.”

Halligan appeared on Fox News Wednesday to discuss her effort to make the Smithsonian’s content align with the president’s version of history ahead of the U.S. Semiquincentennial.

So far, it remains unclear which specific content will be targeted for removal and replacement, but a March executive order claimed that the Smithsonian is overrun by “a divisive, race-centered ideology,” citing an exhibit that described race as a social construct (rather than promoting the fringe notion that it is “a biological reality”). In a Tuesday Truth Social screed, Trump lamented that the museums focus too intently on “how bad Slavery was.”

Halligan expressed similar sentiments on Fox, saying the institution has become a “platform” for “ideological narratives,” whereas it should be a (presumably somehow nonideological) means of representing “our country in a positive way.”

Asked by Fox anchor John Roberts whether she believes America’s “checkered past” should be minimized in museums, Halligan replied that, while slavery was “awful,” she believes the museums exhibit “an overemphasis on slavery, and I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery.”

Espousing a feel-good version of history that would please Orwell’s Big Brother, Halligan continued, “We should be able to take our kids, our students through the Smithsonian and feel proud when we leave.”

American history, she concluded, is “both positive and negative, but we need to keep moving forward” and “focus on all the positive as we approach America’s 250th birthday.” It’s a suspicious credo for an official tasked with radically transforming the world’s largest museum system.