Trump Aides Desperately Want Him to Stop Blaming Biden All the Time

Donald Trump is blaming his predecessor, Joe Biden, too much, and his aides are trying to get him to stop.

Trump’s economic policies have caused food prices to go up and increased affordability issues, but the president remains in deep denial, calling affordability a Democratic hoax and “scam.” The president has chosen to respond to any bad news about the economy by complaining about a president who hasn’t been in office for almost a year, and his staff worries that this will backfire on the American people.

“Joe Biden is no longer a threat to them because he’s out of office, he’s never going to be in office again,” one adviser told CNN. “You’ve got to feel their pain. You’ve got to talk about it every day.”

But is the president willing to admit that costs have gone up for most Americans? In an interview with Politico Monday, Trump said if he were grading the economy, he would give it an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

If that were true, why did the president announce a $12 billion bailout for farmers on Monday? Trump told those farmers that it’s because “we inherited a total mess from the Biden administration.” But the public isn’t buying explanations like that. In a poll late last month, 49 percent of respondents said the president has done more to increase prices, while only 24 percent said he’s done more to lower prices. Trump is even losing Republican allies in Congress on the economy.

To try and fix the public perception, Trump is going to be making trips around the country, beginning with a Pennsylvania swing district on Tuesday. It may not be enough, especially in the likely event that Trump finds another excuse to blame Biden on the trip. That won’t convince working people, who can see prices shooting up with their own eyes.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rollout Tuesday of the U.S. military’s new AI platform just fell flat on its face.

“The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled A-I,” Hegseth said in a video on X, announcing GenAi.Mil, the new “American-made” AI platform that will allow military members to “conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed”—and all without using their brains.

Unfortunately for Hegseth, his post presented a slight problem.

The name GenAi.Mil automatically produced a link to an empty website. So X users thinking they were about to get a sneak peak at the military’s new chatbot were greeted by a message reading: “Upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection termination.” Predictably, the platform can’t actually be accessed from external networks, but the wonky rollout triggered eyerolls across the internet.

One popular post on R/Army, the Reddit forum dedicated to military matters, suggested that service members had all received surprise invitations to use the new platform on their work computers. But having never heard about it before receiving the invite, the user deemed that it looked “really suspicious.”

“Is it real and safe,” the user asked.

The invite features a logo and short link, but no indication of what the invitation is actually for. “Victory belongs to those who embrace real innovation not antiquated systems of a bygone era. It’s time to deliver efficient, decisive results for the warfighter,” the e-vite reads. “I want YOU to use AI.”

The platform will house Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, using a retrieval-augmented generation to connect the large language model chatbot to Google Search “to ensure outputs are reliable and dramatically [reduce] the risk of AI hallucinations.”

The Trump administration has been eager to embrace the AI industry, and in July, it awarded Google a massive $200 million contract to support AI solutions at the DOD.

After being President Trump and MAGA’s most boisterous supporter, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was on CNN Tuesday morning telling Wolf Blitzer how “sorry” she feels for the president. A lot can change in a year. 

“President Trump posted yesterday that you are … ‘not America First or MAGA’  and your ‘new views are those of a very dumb person’; that’s the president of the United States speaking about you,” Wolf Blitzter said to Greene. “What’s your response to these latest attacks?”

“Well actually Wolf, I feel very sorry for President Trump, I genuinely do,” Greene responded. “It has to be a hard place for someone that is constantly so hateful, and puts so much vitriol, name-calling, and really tells lies about people in order to try to get his way, or win some kind of fight. And I think that’s exactly what’s wrong in America today.… I personally think that that’s poor leadership from a president, it’s a very bad demeanor. And Americans are very tired of it.” 

While Greene’s comments are frustrating on some level given her own contributions to the hate and vitriol she decries, they also further reaffirm a Republican Party that is wavering ideologically, with the party pulling between the MAGA, America-first crowd and the more traditional neocons as a future without Trump looms. 

“It’s easy for me to say a prayer for him and forgive him. But the part that I have had a very hard time with is the fact that he called me a traitor, and because of his words, that brought serious threats against myself and my family,” Greene continued. 

This all comes as Greene and potentially more than 20 other Republicans plan to resign or retire ahead of the 2026 midterms. 

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.