Putin Gives Trump Massive Middle Finger, Days After Warning on Ukraine

Less than a week after being elected to a second term, President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t appear to be the international strong-arm he claimed he’d be.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has already waltzed right past a pointed warning from the MAGA leader, sending tens of thousands of soldiers to the Ukrainian war front after Trump told him not to escalate the situation.

Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, told NBC News that Russian forces are “trying to dislodge our troops and advance deep into the territory we control” in Kursk, a city in southwestern Russia that borders Ukraine. Ukrainian forces “continue to hold back” a “nearly 50,000-strong enemy group” in the occupied region, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote in a Telegram post Monday.

Ukraine has warned of a looming counteroffensive in the embattled region for weeks. Among Russia’s allies on the front line include more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers—confirmed by the Pentagon—who are engaging in “combat against Ukrainian militaries,” according to Zelenskiy.

“There are losses; this is a fact,” he said.

“The importance of this operational area cannot be underestimated given the number of enemy troops concentrated there,” Syrskyi wrote on Telegram. “If it were not for the steadfastness of our soldiers, these tens of thousands of enemies from the best Russian assault units would have stormed our positions.”

Trump had spoken with Putin over the phone on Thursday, reportedly advising the foreign leader not to escalate the war, reminding Putin of America’s military capabilities in Europe, according to The Washington Post.

Russia immediately turned its back on the discussion, claiming that the report was “pure fiction.”

One of Trump’s biggest and boldest campaign promises was that he would immediately end the Russian invasion of Ukraine—though his philosophy on how to achieve that was suspiciously scant of details and, at times, veered toward solutions that would invariably aid Russia.

In June, Trump said he would be open to an increase in U.S. weapons aid to Ukraine so long as it shows up for peace talks with Russia, reported Reuters.

Trump’s advisers envisioned that the peace talks—which Trump promised to facilitate upon winning in November—would also quietly include Ukraine seceding part of the country that is currently occupied by Russian forces. The concept was drawn up by retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, both former chiefs of staff in Trump’s National Security Council.

And Trump’s ardent opposition to NATO—the Western military and trade alliance—has also raised eyebrows, even sparking condemnation from some of his former allies. In February, Trump claimed he told a European leader that he’d allow Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies if they didn’t “pay” their “bills.” And while Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton cast doubt on the incendiary story, he didn’t question the MAGA leader’s desire to nix the strategic alliance.

“Look, I was there when he almost withdrew, and he’s not negotiating,” Bolton said at the time. “His goal here is not to strengthen NATO, it’s to lay the groundwork to get out.”

Elise Stefanik is continuing her ascent through Trumpworld.

President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly tapped the House Republican Conference chair to serve as the next ambassador to the United Nations, a decision that could redefine America’s relationship with some of its longest allies.

“I am honored to nominate Chairwoman Elise Stefanik to serve in my Cabinet as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations,” Trump said in a statement obtained by CNN. “Elise is an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter.”

Stefanik, a longtime critic of the international organization, won reelection in New York’s 21st congressional district on Tuesday while campaigning as a staunch defender of Israel in its war on Gaza. That includes defending Israel’s decision to eliminate humanitarian aid from the region. In a statement last week, Stefanik heralded Israel’s decision to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, from operating in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, claiming that the 74-year-old aid program “instills antisemitic hate in Palestinians” and “houses weapons for terrorists.”

She also called on the United States to defund the refugee program, criticizing the Biden administration for issuing “$1 billion to UNRWA since 2021.” (The U.S. has received international condemnation for being the lone holdout on aid since Israel accused 19 UNRWA staff members of participating in the October 7, 2023, attack. An independent report published in April found no evidence and was supplied no evidence by the Israeli government supporting the allegations.)

Stefanik has called for a “complete reassessment of U.S. funding of the United Nations” after the Palestinian Authority attempted in October to expel Israel from the organization for alleged war crimes and human rights abuses.

At the time of her first win in 2014, she was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She’s since proved to be one of Trump’s staunchest defenders, making a name for herself in 2019 for her impassioned defenses of the MAGA leader during his first impeachment trial and later refusing to certify the 2020 election results, elevating lies that the Biden-Trump race had been stolen.

But she hasn’t always sided with the MAGA leader. In 2017, Stefanik voted against Trump’s tax plan, one of his signature legislative victories.

Donald Trump named his new border czar in the middle of the night to carry out his dreadful mass deportation plans.

“I am pleased to announce that the Former ICE Director, and stalwart on Border Control, Tom Homan, will be joining the Trump Administration, in charge of our Nation’s Borders (‘The Border Czar’), including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform late Sunday night. “I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders.”

Homan is best known for crafting and then overseeing Trump’s ruthless 2017 “zero tolerance” family separation policy that resulted in almost 2,000 children being ripped from their families after being detained at the southern border. This policy resulted in traumatic, inhumane mistreatment of migrants and their children. It was widely criticized and put on hold in 2018, around the time that Homan stepped down as ICE director.

Homan has been bullish about his role in the process, telling the Republican National Convention crowd this summer that he had a message for the millions of migrants coming to this country for a better opportunity for themselves and their children: “You better start packing now. You’re damn right. Cause you’re going home.”

Homan doubled down on his hard-line stance on 60 Minutes last month. When asked by Cecilia Vega if there was a way to carry out Trump’s mass deportation dreams without separating families, Homan responded, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”

The Harris campaign’s tent may have indeed been too big.

Rolling Stone has reported that several Democratic aides warned Vice President Harris against campaigning so closely with former Representative Liz Cheney. Cheney may have voted to impeach Trump, but she’s also still the daughter of notoriously hawkish Iraq War orchestrator Dick Cheney, which most of America is far more familiar with.

“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” one anonymous campaign source told Rolling Stone in regard to Dick Cheney. But their warnings went unheeded, as a Harris staffer told them it’s not their place to question the campaign’s decisions.

The Harris campaign ran hard with Cheney in the last days of the campaign, appearing with her at rallies and on television appearances, as they urged women to vote in “secret” from the conservative men in their lives.

One Democratic strategist noted that campaigning with Cheney—and reaching out toward Republicans so enthusiastically in general—risked alienating the liberal base and wouldn’t even convince that many swing voters, if any. Donors and state party chairs also tried to convey this message to the Harris campaign, but to no avail. “We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” they told Rolling Stone.

Campaigning with Cheney is just one of Harris’s many strategies that Democrats everywhere are questioning as the shock wears off.

Now that Kamala Harris lost an election by larger numbers than polls indicated, some liberals are questioning the election results and alleging fraud.

While nearly every Democrat and liberal was shocked by the election results coming on Tuesday and Wednesday, on social media, some people went overboard and sounded like upset Trump supporters in 2020. Mueller, She Wrote emerged as one of the more prominent liberal X (formerly Twitter) accounts critical of Trump during his first term, and initially expressed doubt over the results.

Other users on X saw potential nefarious activity in the vote count.

At one point, the hashtag #DoNotConcedeKamala trended on X.

One person who wanted Harris to contest the results referenced previous Democratic losses.

Many of these conspiracies are still continuing days later. Much of the objection appears to have to do with what Harris supporters perceived as less voter turnout, although this is somewhat unfounded, as turnout was up in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that were the deciding factors in both 2020 and 2024. In all, 12 states exceeded previous records of turnout.

The next four years may go by very slowly if Harris supporters spend it contesting election results like many right-wingers did after Trump’s loss in 2020. Many of the right’s objections culminated in half-baked schemes and even vote tampering. And then there’s the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, where Trump’s MAGA diehards stormed the Capitol and attempted to halt the certification of the 2020 election.

Ultimately, that effort failed, resulting in more than 1,500 criminal charges and the deaths of some of the rioters. Hopefully, liberals and Harris supporters will come to their senses before any similar attempt. Besides, it will probably end up looking like this.

Montanans voted this week to send more Democrats to the state legislature, smashing a Republican supermajority in Big Sky Country.

Democrats gained nine more seats in the state’s House of Representatives, and two more in the state Senate, even as Montanans voted for conservative lawmakers to represent them in Washington.

It won’t be enough to break the Republican trifecta in Montana, but it will be enough to allow Democrats to block conservative bills and negotiate with Governor Greg Gianforte on issues that splinter the state’s conservatives, reported the Montana Free Press. Tuesday’s results, which were made possible in large part thanks to recently redrawn legislative maps, mean that Montana Democrats will hold 41 of 100 House seats as well as 18 out of 50 Senate seats in the 2025 Legislature.

State Representative Zooey Zephyr celebrated her re-election, writing in a statement that the win marked “historic gains” for Democrats in the traditionally red state.

“Despite a national election cycle that saw a 2-3 point shift towards Republicans, Montanans voted to send an additional nine Democrats to the state House of Representatives,” Zephyr wrote. “This is the largest gain for Democrats in over 30 years and represents a clear repudiation of the Republican’s extreme and undemocratic policies.”

Zephyr, the first and only openly transgender individual to be elected to Montana’s legislature, was censured and barred from the state House floor by the conservative caucus in 2023 for declaring that Republicans had “blood” on their hands for advancing an anti-trans bill.

“By shattering the Republican supermajority, Montanans have taken steps towards restoring accountability and genuine representation in our state government, and have shown that when Democrats are unwavering in our values, we are rewarded at the ballot box,” Zephyr added in her statement Friday.

The re-election of Donald Trump—a court-described rapist who famously said he could do anything he wants to women, including “grab ‘em by the pussy”—to the White House is having immediate ramifications for gender relations across the country, with young boys and men alike weaponizing the misogynistic rhetoric of the country’s soon-to-be 47th president against their female counterparts.

Across social media, young men are parroting white supremacist, Hitler fan, and far-right political pundit Nick Fuentes, who wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “Your body, my choice. Forever,” hours before the election was even called in Trump’s favor.

But the language has seemingly spilled from the digital ecosphere into daily life, as well, with parents reporting that young boys were caught leveraging the overtly objectifying language against girls in school.

School officials Minnesota issued a notice to parents on Friday that they were aware of “misogynistic… transphobic, and homophobic memes and messages” directed toward students in nearby school districts, including the phrase “your body, my choice.”

“Our country is facing a period of significant division, and the recent election has stirred a range of emotions. Although Hopkins Public Schools is nonpartisan, we recognize that the outcome of the election has and will continue to spark instances of racism, homophobia, and sexism in school communities across the nation and state, including here in Hopkins,” wrote Dr. Rhoda Mhiripiri-Reed, superintendent of the Hopkins Public Schools system, in a letter that encouraged parents to reach out to local authorities if their children received such messages.

Social media is awash with similar but unverified anecdotes of boys throwing the horrific threat around their school hallways.

The election results have seemingly created a safe space for misogynists to crawl out of the woodwork. In Texas, activists celebrating Trump’s win overtook Texas State University’s San Marcos Campus, raising signs that read “women are property,” “homo sex is sin,” and lists that designated women and slaves as “types of property.”

At best, the comments are unsavory rage bait being regurgitated by people who are unaware of the ramifications or depth of the hyper-conservative, misogynistic belief. But they have the double sided effect of making women—who have had their reproductive rights systematically stripped away from them on a state-by-state basis since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022—feel incredibly unsafe on the precipice of an overwhelmingly far-right administration.

Pennsylvania Democrats will keep their majority in the state House, eking out an improbable victory after Kamala Harris failed to win the state (and most of the country).

Incumbent Democratic state Representative Frank Burns defeated Republican challenger Amy Bradley on Friday, allowing the Pennsylvania Democratic Party to maintain a slim, one-vote majority in the state House: 102 seats to 101. Burns was able to do this in Cambria County, a district that President-elect Donald Trump has won by at least 30 percent for the last three elections. In 2024, Trump beat Harris in the county by 46 points.

Burns, a conservative anti-abortion Democrat, has drawn the ire of the Pennsylvania GOP for some time now, as his seat was viewed as a vulnerable blue dot in a sea of red. But he was able to maintain his seat thanks to an influx of cash ($3.4 million from the Pennsylvania House Democratic Campaign Committee) and a potent advertising blitz to keep Democrats in control of the state House.

One ad the Burns campaign ran capitalized on his conservative views, stoking anti-immigration based fear and casting Bradley as against Trump’s draconian immigration plans. “President Trump supports secure borders and putting America first. But Amy Bradley doesn’t,” the ad stated menacingly. It was a successful tactic for Burns in his otherwise deep red district.

This win gives Democrats in Pennsylvania and beyond at least one thing to smile about in a despair-filled election cycle. The rest of the state was dominated by Republicans, as Trump won nationally, incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey lost to Republican Dave McCormick, and two blue congressional seats were also lost.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went full scorched earth on Friday, blaming Vice President Kamala Harris’s stunning loss on Joe Biden’s late exit from the presidential race.

In an interview with The New York Times, Pelosi suggested that Biden had crippled the Democratic Party’s chances at keeping Donald Trump out of the White House.

“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said. “And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened.”

Pelosi also blamed Biden for not making way in time for an open primary, which could have created momentum around a new candidate who would have performed better with the Democratic base.

“And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time,” Pelosi said. “If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

Pelosi’s public comments about Biden’s candidacy played a critical role in his decision to step away from his presidential campaign. Pelosi had refused to combat the many calls for Biden to drop out after his disastrous debate with Trump, and cryptically said the decision to drop out was up to him (even after he’d already supposedly decided not to do it).

The California representative also suggested that the Democrats’ loss of working-class support was the result of cultural forces, not economic ones.

“Guns, God and gays—that’s the way they say it,” she said. “Guns, that’s an issue; gays, that’s an issue, and now they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities; and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose.”

American Muslims broadly rejected Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, according to a new exit poll.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations released the results of its national election poll of 1,575 verified American Muslim voters, and they do not reflect well on the efforts of the Harris campaign to hold onto what had been a solid Democratic constituency. The poll shows that Green Party candidate Jill Stein received 53 percent of votes, followed by Donald Trump with 21 percent, and Harris with 20 percent.

In a Michigan-specific poll of 502 registered Muslim voters, Stein got 59 percent support, followed by Trump at 22 percent, and Harris with a tiny 14 percent of the vote. The results show a significant backlash to the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, which has killed at least 43,508 Palestinians, including more than 16,765 children, as well as how the Harris campaign chose to tackle the issue.

“Our final exit poll of American Muslim voters confirms that opposition to the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza played a crucial role,” said CAIR National Government Affairs Director Robert S. McCaw in a statement. The poll was conducted by Molitico Consulting LLC through text messages, with a margin error of 2.47 percent.

CAIR’s exit poll from 2020 was less extensive, only polling 844 registered Muslim voters, but had 69 percent of respondents saying that they voted for Joe Biden, with 17 percent choosing Trump, showing a big drop-off during this election. Another 2020 poll estimated even more Muslims backed Biden, a whopping 86 percent.

CAIR’s findings are different from the results in Dearborn, Michigan, the country’s largest majority Arab American city, where 42 percent of voters chose Trump, 36 percent went for Harris, and 18 percent went for Stein. But in CAIR’s poll as well as Dearborn’s results, the common factor was that Harris was rejected and that Stein received a much bigger portion of the vote than in the national results.

The Harris campaign refused to have an Arab or Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention in August, and last week, the Democrats’ messaging to Muslims and Arab American voters included Bill Clinton saying Israel was “forced” by Hamas to kill civilians in Gaza at a rally in Michigan, which drew a large backlash.

Trump sought to capitalize on Democrats’ missteps, visiting Dearborn in the week before the election and attacking Harris for campaigning with Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan do not think highly of the elder Cheney’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, but they also remember his daughter’s reputation for supporting torture and anti-Muslim bigotry.

Trump likely drew votes from Muslim and Arab American voters for this reason and picked up endorsements from metro Detroit Muslim and Arab politicians. Likewise, Stein’s support of an arms embargo against Israel, her support for a cease-fire in Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and the fact that she held a campaign event in Dearborn in September helped her gain Muslim and Arab American voters in Michigan and the U.S. overall.

These survey results show that the Democratic Party will have to seriously reevaluate its policy stances in order to win back Muslim and Arab American voters. At the very least, they seem to have cost Harris valuable votes in the state of Michigan, which she needed to win. In the future, Democrats can’t neglect or ignore the issues that Arab American and Muslim voters care about like they did this year.