Trump Touts Peace While Poland Prepares for War

While President Trump continues to tout his supreme international peacemaking abilities, Europe prepares for all-out war. 

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Poland has increased its military spending to the point that it is 4.7 percent of its entire gross domestic product. For reference, military spending is around 3 percent of the U.S. GDP. 

This comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin ratchets up aggression against Poland and its neighbors to the west. Just last month, Russian drones were seen in Polish airspace, forcing the NATO ally to shut down four of its airports as it scrambled to ready its defense systems against the incursion. Poland’s leadership invoked Article Four of the NATO Treaty the next day, calling the ​​situation the “closest” that Poland had come to armed conflict “since the Second World War.” Three Russian fighter jets entered Estonian airspace just days after, in yet another significant display of aggression meant to test NATO’s cohesiveness. 

Now Poland is prepared to stop its former invader’s current one. 

“This is our war,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Warsaw Security Forum in September. “We decided to arm Poland and modernize the Polish army on a massive scale.”

Poland’s increased military spending has produced a situation where the nation now has more than 210,000 military personnel (trailing only the U.S. and Turkey in NATO); a large territorial defense force; and $50 billion of American-made weaponry, including Abrams tanks, and a Polish version of the U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS. Poland is also armed with multiple South Korean rocket launchers and had its soldiers participate in monthslong war games to test out the new equipment.

“In the case of war, Poland will be a very busy country because the military will mobilize, the economy will mobilize, but we would also have to prepare for NATO coming to—and through—Poland,” Armed Forces Operational Commander Lt. Gen. Maciej Klisz told the Journal. 

These developments paint a stark contrast to President Trump’s endless rhetoric in which he presents himself as the “President of Peace,” claiming to have ended six, seven, and sometimes even 10 wars. While that is obviously a severe exaggeration, the war preparations in Poland and the greater European NATO region only further weaken that tenuous claim.  

Last week, the White House bragged that a video of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blaming the ongoing government shutdown on Democrats is “currently playing at every public airport in America.”

But according to local reports, airports across the country—from Washington state to New York—have announced their refusal to subject travelers to the propaganda.

“It is TSA’s top priority to make sure that you have the most pleasant and efficient airport experience as possible while we keep you safe,” Noem says in the video, which is intended to be shown to people waiting in Transportation Security Administration lines. “However, Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this, many of our operations are impacted, and most of our TSA employees are working without pay.

“Our hope is that Democrats will soon recognize the importance of opening the government,” the homeland security secretary continues.

Travelers at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington will be spared the message. “The Port of Seattle will not play the video on its screens at SEA Airport, due to the political nature of the content,” a Sea–Tac spokesperson told local outlets.

Also in Washington, Spokane International Airport is refusing to play the video, due to the airport’s “First Amendment Policy,” which prohibits the display of political advertising content on airport-owned monitors in public spaces.

Oregon’s Portland International Airport won’t show it either, on the grounds that the video could violate the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from certain partisan political activities. “We believe the Hatch Act clearly prohibits using public assets for political purposes and messaging,” said a PDX spokesperson, who also cited state law prohibiting public employees from promoting or opposing “any political committee, party, or affiliation.”

In New York, the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, which oversees the Buffalo Niagara International Airport and the Niagara Falls International Airport, has declined as well, citing a “long-standing policy” against “partisan messaging.”

Ditto Westchester County Airport in New York. According to the Westchester County executive, the message was determined to be “inappropriate, unacceptable, and inconsistent with the values we expect from our nation’s top public officials,” as it “politicizes the impacts of a federal government shutdown on TSA Operations” and has an “unnecessarily alarmist” tone.

House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed Monday he had no idea that President Doanld Trump’s sweeping layoffs of federal workers had gutted the department overseeing special education. 

During a press conference, Johnson was asked if he was “comfortable” with cuts that had reportedly decimated special education services at the Department of Education. 

“I haven’t seen the specifics of that and I don’t know,” Johnson said. 

“I do know that each of the Cabinet secretaries were asked to assist OMB to determine what the most essential programs are, and what the priorities are for the policies and all of that. And I’ve been so busy on all this I’ve not had a chance to dig into the details of each division, and how it’s happened,” he said. 

But those so-called “details” Johnson overlooked are quickly coming to light—and they’re a huge problem.

Rachel Gittleman, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees released a statement Monday saying: “We believe that all remaining offices in Office of Special Education + Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), incl. the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) + the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA), have been eliminated.”

The Education Department laid off practically every employee responsible for administering funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which authorizes grants to states, schools, and nonprofit organizations, one agency staffer told USA Today. The Biden administration had requested $14.4 billion for these grants for FY2025, including $545 million for the Grants for Infants and Families program.

Secretary Linda McMahon, who presumably directed the cuts, has previously suggested that the office would be better positioned in the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently said he hopes to manufacture proof of his outlandish claims about the causes of autism. 

It’s still unclear how many positions were terminated within the special education office. The Education Department fired 466 employees as part of Trump’s broader reduction in force of some 4,200 jobs amid the ongoing government shutdown. 

Johnson seemed content Monday to defend Trump’s massive cuts, purportedly without even knowing what they are. He claimed that federal agencies were “in a triage situation” as a result of the government shutdown and blamed Democrats for the massive layoffs executed by the executive branch. 

But in past government shutdowns, including in the previous Trump administration, federal workers were furloughed, not laid off en masse. It seems clear that Trump is simply using the shutdown as an excuse to carry out a long-planned reduction in force and obliterate essential programs he doesn’t like.  

Throw out the history books—even settled modern American history is up for MAGA revisionism.

Despite the fact that he’s since won the 2024 presidential election and, presumably, has bigger fish to fry (see any rotating issue: the government shutdown, the rise in political violence, the stumbling economy, or escalating domestic and international tensions), Donald Trump once again took to social media Sunday to gripe about his impeachments. But this time, he opted to rebrand a little more history than usual by suggesting that Watergate was another supposed “hoax.”

“The Ukraine Impeachment (of me!) Scam was a far bigger Illegal Hoax than Watergate,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I sincerely hope the necessary authorities, including CONGRESS, are looking into this! Adam ‘Schiffty’ Schiff was sooo dishonest and corrupt.

“So many laws, and protocols, were violated, and just plain broken!!!” he wrote.

Rewriting the national recollection of Watergate will take more than one social media post. Nearly 50 years later, the involvement of President Richard Nixon’s aides in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters still lives on as one of the most seismic scandals to shake the office of the president—so much so that simply adding “gate” to the end of an event can suggest another political calamity.

Watergate, and Nixon’s forced resignation in the face of certain impeachment, resulted in the end of his political career. But in the last several months, Trump has taken some concrete steps to rewrite his own impeachment history.

Trump is the only U.S. president to be impeached twice, in 2019 and 2021. In August, the Smithsonian removed Trump from its exhibit on impeachments under direct pressure from the White House, in the wake of an art director’s ousting. That left the exhibit focusing on Presidents Nixon, Andrew Johnson, and Bill Clinton, effectively returning the exhibit to the way it looked in 2008. The “American Presidency” wing’s revised signage explained that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal” over the course of American history. The change was the result of a White House–initiated content review.

The Smithsonian has since re-added Trump to the impeachment exhibit, but with some changes to how the proceedings against him are described, most notably regarding his actions during the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Federal agents terrorized Chicago citizens over the weekend, as part of “Operation Midway Blitz,” President Donald Trump’s law enforcement crackdown on a major Democratic city.

On Friday, Border Patrol agents violently arrested Deborah Brockman, a producer for Chicago television station WGN-TV. Two agents held down Brockman while zip-tying her hands, before multiple agents shoved her into an unmarked van. Her arrest seemingly violated a temporary restraining order made the day before barring agents from detaining journalists. 

DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin alleged in a statement that Brockman had thrown objects at the agents’ vehicle and was “placed under arrest for assault on a federal law enforcement officer.” Brockman was later released, and WGN told Newsweek that no charges were brought against her. 

As the vehicle carrying Brockman drove away, it slammed into a seemingly stationary vehicle before continuing on. 

McLaughlin claimed that “several violent agitators” had attempted to block the vehicle from leaving. “In fear of public & law enforcement safety, officers used their service vehicle to strike a suspect’s vehicle and create an opening,” McLaughlin said in a statement, adding that the incident “reflects a growing and dangerous trend of illegal aliens violently resisting arrest and agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers.”

In a video of the incident, multiple bystanders berated the officers, but none appeared to approach them or their vehicle. 

DropSite News’s Ryan Grim said that McLaughlin’s justification was “Orwellian.” 

“To explain why ICE rammed its car into another vehicle, the spokeswoman says it ‘reflects a growing and dangerous trend of … agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers,’” he wrote in a post on X. “Um, the opposite happened. Clearly. So weird.”

On Saturday, at least 15 people were arrested while protesting at an ICE processing center in Broadview, a neighborhood of Chicago. Detainees reportedly face charges ranging from criminal damage to government property to disobeying police orders. 

One of the individuals arrested was Elias Cepeda, an organizer and martial arts instructor who has reportedly been on the lookout for ICE agents in his neighborhood since the beginning of the school year. He and other advocates hoped to warn residents of Pilsen, where many Mexicans reside, about ICE activities so that they could avoid arrest or violence. 

DHS claimed Cepeda, who was armed at the time of arrest, was a “violent rioter” with “suspected ties to antifa and previous social media posts calling ICE Nazis.”

In a viral video posted Saturday by Joshua Reed Eakle, an executive director at Project Liberal Action, four law enforcement vehicles swarmed a car on a suburban Chicago street. An agent pulled the driver from her car as she pleaded with officers that she was only 15 years old. The arresting officer then threw her to the ground and appeared to put his knee on her neck as he restrained her hands behind her back. Block Club Chicago reported the arrest took place in Hoffman Estates.

Meanwhile, roughly 400 protesters gathered in Rogers Park Saturday after a tamale vendor and at least three others were arrested nearby earlier in the week, Block Club Chicago reported.   

And on Sunday, federal agents released tear gas on residents responding to a violent arrest during a protest in Albany Park, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. 

Attorney Samay Gheewala said he was among many residents forcefully pushed to the ground by federal officers, after he’d approached to do “usual lawyer stuff” on behalf of people being arrested. Federal agents reportedly gave no warning before administering tear gas canisters, despite a temporary restraining order issued last week that required officers to issue two warnings before using riot control weapons.

Alderman Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez and state Senator Graciela Guzmán came running with a group of rapid responders, but by the time they arrived, one man had already been taken.

“This is part of the chaos they like to bring to our communities,” Guzmán said. 

Rodriguez-Sanchez told the Sun-Times that one person “was saved due to the efforts of our communities, but unfortunately, somebody was [still] kidnapped from our neighborhood today.”