Trump Rants About His 2020 Election Conspiracy at Strangest Time

Donald Trump apparently can’t speak about Kyiv without making the Russia-Ukraine war all about himself.

When asked by Politico’s Dasha Burns Monday night if he believed Ukraine had lost its war with Russia, Trump said that the Eastern European nation had lost a lot of “very good land,” chuckling that he “wouldn’t say” Ukraine’s actions had amounted to “a victory.”

But then Trump chose to turn the spotlight back on himself, resurrecting his 2020 presidential election conspiracy while discussing the foreign country’s diplomatic options.

“You know, think of it, if our election wasn’t rigged ... there was a rigged election. Now everyone knows it. It’s gonna come out over the next couple of months too, loud and clear ’cause we have all the information and everything,” Trump said.

“But if the election wasn’t rigged and stolen, uh, you wouldn’t even be talking about Ukraine right now,” he added.

The Trump administration unveiled a 28-point peace plan last month that catered to some of Russia’s most outrageous demands, such as requiring Ukraine to swear off NATO membership and to hand Moscow Crimea and the eastern Donbas region. Those two details alone have reversed long-standing U.S. policy with regard to the area.

In the weeks since, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has drafted his own peace plan, refusing to relinquish his country’s territory.

Elsewhere in the interview, Trump claimed that Europe would “drop” if the continent’s leaders continued to support Ukraine, and that his son Donald Trump Jr. “wasn’t exactly wrong” to suggest that the president would “walk away” from supporting the war-sieged nation himself.

“But you know, at some point, size will win, generally,” Trump said, referring to Russia’s advantages. “And this is a massive size, uh—you—when you take a look at the numbers, I mean, the numbers are just crazy.”

There is some evidence that the White House’s peace plan may have come directly from the Kremlin: Several sentences in the document were passively formatted with clunky English phrases that make more sense when translated into Russian. It was speculated that the awkward sentences could have been the influence of Kirill Dmitriev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy, who worked on the project alongside Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff.

Trump has touted himself for months as a great peacemaker, pushing a narrative that he has—so far—solved at least eight foreign conflicts. Practically all of his war-solving braggadocio is demonstrably untrue, to the extent that several of the examples he often lists were never even at war. But despite repeated efforts, he has not made any meaningful headway on the Russia-Ukraine war.

More than 13,300 civilians have been killed and 31,700 injured in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to a United Nations report from June.

Donald Trump took offense at an innocuous question while discussing his health care plans during an interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns Monday, snapping when Burns segued into families’ rising costs for the holidays.

“So right now, people are buying their holiday presents, they’re planning for—” Burns began in a cheery tone, before Trump cut her off.

“Look, don’t be dramatic,” Trump said abruptly, as if Burns had insulted him. Burns continued on her point, saying, “They’re planning their budgets for next year, Mr. President.”

Trump continued on, trying to make the point that he wants “to give the money to the people to buy their own health care” and that Democrats are responsible for any increases in health care premiums for next year “because they’re corrupt people because they’re totally owned and bought by the insurance companies.”

It’s clear that Trump was offended at the question, and he’s in denial about the fact that health care premiums are going to shoot up next year thanks to the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies. It was the major issue in Congress’s budget negotiations for months, even leading to the record-long government shutdown.

Even though Republicans promised to hold a vote on extending the subsidies, Trump’s plan seems to be to just let them end, which would likely leave millions of Americans without health coverage. The president continues to spout the delusional idea that Democrats could simply agree to lower health care costs on their own, and Republicans in Congress don’t seem to care.

Not even Trump can bring himself to defend his Defense Department’s second strike on two men in the Caribbean Sea.

“Have you watched the video?” Politico’s Dasha Burns asked Trump in a Monday interview.

“I watch everything, yeah.… I see a lot of things,” Trump replied.

“And do you believe that that second strike was necessary?”

“Well it looked like they were trying to turn back over the boat,” Trump said, contradicting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s story.” “But I’m not involved in that, that’s up to them.”

Last week, the Defense Department alleged that the two men could have attempted to radio back to their cartel to continue their drug-trafficking mission. Lawmakers were informed in closed-door briefings that “it was judged that these two people were capable of returning to the fight.” But here, Trump echoes the Democrats’ story that the video shows the exact opposite.

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN last week. “You have two individuals [in] clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States.”

The fallout from this potential war crime has been an exercise in finger-pointing. First, Hegseth claimed the entire story was fabricated, then he made a point to blame the order for the second strike on Admiral Frank Bradley, who was heading the attack. Now Trump—who is above them both—implies that he doesn’t just disagree with the decision but that his Defense Department is lying about why they even struck twice at all.

Maybe Trump sees the writing on the wall and is just trying to absolve himself of any guilt before this goes any further. Or maybe he really is tired of Hegseth and his strike first, think later decision-making style. Either way, this saga seems far from over.

The Department of Justice has confirmed that President Donald Trump blocked the release of more than 4,100 documents related to the deadly riot on January 6.

In a court filing Monday night, lawyers for the DOJ revealed that Trump had stepped in to prevent the release of some material requested as part of a lawsuit brought by police officers injured by violent rioters at the U.S. Capitol. The materials were originally subpoenaed from the National Archives and Records Administration in February.

The filing included the December 1 memo signed by Trump, which claimed the subpoena had requested an “extremely broad set of materials” and blocked the release of 4,152 documents.

“I have determined that the following records are subject to a constitutionally based claim of executive privilege. This privilege helps respect the separation of powers enshrined in the United States Constitution and the need for the President of the United States to receive candid and confidential advice in decision making,” the memo stated.

Trump’s memo asserted that claiming executive privilege did not waive other privileges, such as that for presidential communications, deliberative process, and attorney-client.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson released a statement last week confirming that Trump had asserted executive privilege in response to “overly broad” discovery requests in this case, Politico reported at the time.

With this action, Trump is directly blocking a case alleging that he helped to fuel the riot. In a 2022 ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing the current case, found that there were indications Trump may have been aware that some of his supporters were armed and had discouraged security checks.

A federal judge opened the floodgates Tuesday, allowing the Justice Department to publicly release investigative materials related to a sex trafficking case brought against Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate and girlfriend of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The decision, made by Manhattan-based federal Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, could release hundreds or even thousands of previously unseen documents, reported the Associated Press. They will be released to the public in a searchable format in the next 10 days, as required by the recently passed Epstein Files Transparency Act.

The DOJ argued that the release was what Congress intended after the legislature passed the law last month. The latest document release will “encompass 18 categories of investigative materials” collected in the sex trafficking probe, including “search warrants, financial records, survivor interview notes, electronic device data and material from earlier Epstein investigations in Florida,” according to the AP.

Engelmayer is now the second judge to allow the DOJ to release previously secret Epstein documents, after a judge in Florida approved the release of transcripts from an abandoned federal grand jury investigation into the New York financier roughly two decades ago.

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in jail for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. Maxwell’s attorneys have pressed the White House for a pardon for several months now, and the British ex-socialite signaled in a court filing last week that she would ask a court to free her from her captivity.

In a statement issued prior to Engelmayer’s ruling, Maxwell’s attorneys claimed that the release of the documents “would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial.”

Engelmayer made headlines in August when he denied the president’s request to release grand jury transcripts related to Maxwell, claiming that the administration’s renewed focus on those specific documents was little more than a ruse to shake public frustration over lagging progress on the Epstein files. At the time, Engelmayer claimed that the content of the grand jury transcripts were already publicly available elsewhere and wouldn’t reveal anything new.