Ukraine Offers Firefighters to L.A. After Nonsensical Trump Jr. Post

Ukraine is offering to send firefighters to Southern California after Donald Trump Jr. accused the Los Angeles Fire Department of donating supplies to the country during its war with Russia. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that the country is ready to send 150 firefighters for relief efforts after Trump Jr. complained last week on X about supplies being sent to Ukraine. 

On Sunday, Zelenskiy responded with an X post of his own, saying in a video that he “instructed Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs and our diplomats to prepare for the possible participation of our rescuers in combating the wildfires in California.”

Ukraine isn’t the only country to offer its support to fight wildfires in Southern California. Canada, despite being repeatedly criticized and trolled by President-elect Donald Trump, has sent firefighters and firefighting equipment to the region. Mexico, another target of Trump, has also sent firefighters and equipment to Southern California, even as Trump searches for reasons to shut down the southern U.S. border.

It might be surprising that Southern California is receiving foreign aid. But these wildfires are among the worst in American history, and at the federal level, Republicans are reluctant to send more aid.

Republican congressmen have threatened to condition federal aid on the Democratic-run state changing its policies, perhaps forgetting that Democrats under President Biden did not make any such demand on the red states of South Carolina and Florida during Hurricanes Helene and Milton last year. Republicans have also proposed making dangerous government cuts that would severely hurt relief efforts.  

Trump and his right-wing benefactor Elon Musk are using the wildfires to score cheap political points against Democrats, specifically California Governor Gavin Newsom. The right has refused to acknowledge that climate change has anything to do with the disaster, instead coming up with racist explanations for the fire. Meanwhile, Southern California has to take aid from whoever is offering, including countries at war.

Wannabe crusader, accused sexual predator, and rampant misogynist Pete Hegseth is also a Confederate apologist.

Trump’s pick for defense secretary called the removal of Confederate names on military bases a “sham,” “garbage,” and “crap” in media engagements from 2021 to 2024, according to CNN. He continued this rhetoric in his War on Warriors book tour last year.

“We should change it back, by the way,” he said of North Carolina’s Fort Liberty—which used to be Fort Bragg—on the Everyday Warrior podcast last summer. “We should change it back. We should change it back. We should change it back, because legacy matters. My uncle served at Bragg. I served at Bragg. It breaks a generational link.” 

The fort’s namesake, Braxton Bragg, was an often-defeated Confederate civil war general who enslaved 105 Black Americans on his sugar plantation in Louisiana.

Hegseth could lobby to change Fort Liberty and other fort names back to their old Confederate ones if appointed defense secretary, although he’d need congressional support to do it. 

This is one of many reasons that Hegseth thinks the military is too “woke.” In The War on Warriors, he complains that the military is anti-white and suffering from a “long-term infection of radical left wing social justice policies.”

 Hegseth’s confirmation hearings begin on Tuesday.

Donald Trump is backtracking on his big campaign promise to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, according to his special envoy to Ukraine. 

On Sunday, Keith Kellogg told Fox News that the Russia-Ukraine war would come to a “solvable solution in the near term.” 

“You know, I would like to set a goal on a personal level and professional level. I would say, let’s set it at 100 days and move it all the way back and figure a way we can do this in the near term to make sure that the solution is solid, it’s sustainable, and that this war ends,” Kellogg said.

A “near term” timeline is a marked difference from Trump’s bravado on the campaign trail, where he repeatedly bragged that he could end the war in a day or even sooner. Trump himself seems to realize this, telling Time magazine last month that “the Middle East is an easier problem to handle than what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine.” Vladimir Putin has also thrown cold water on Trump’s promises, ignoring the president-elect’s “warnings.”   

Trump is probably going to backtrack on many of his campaign promises, with his supporters in for a rude awakening. The question is whether anyone will call him on it—and if there will be any consequences. 

The incoming Trump administration is instituting loyalty tests for longtime bureaucrats.

Specialists at the National Security Council have been getting questioned by incoming Trump officials about who they voted for in November, who they’ve donated to, and what they’ve posted on social media, an official close to the situation told the Associated Press. These nonpolitical NSC employees were initially told they’d be asked to stay on with the new administration.  

Some of them have quit in response. This seems to be exactly what the Trump team wants.

“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Trump’s national security adviser nominee Mike Waltz told Breitbart News last week. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

Waltz continued, stating that “the folks that we’re bringing in are 100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”

A mass resignation of national security experts may not bode well for everyday operations at the National Security Council, especially as the new administration takes on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The Trump Organization has opened its doors for business—with foreign private companies.

In a departure from Donald Trump’s first term in office, the president-elect’s company released a new ethics agreement Friday that no longer prohibits deals with foreign companies while he is president. The Trump Organization has already reached development agreements for hotels and golf courses in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It’s looking to make even more with Israel, hoping to look at properties to build luxury hotels in the country when its brutal war in Gaza ends.

“The scale of corruption will be orders of magnitude greater than what we saw in the first Trump administration,” ethics professor Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis told the Associated Press.

Anyone who wants to be in Trump’s good graces can simply give his business lavish amounts of money. Trump is telling the international business world that he can indeed be bought. The Trump family is also trying to reclaim the lease to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a doubly corrupt institution in which six different governments spent more than $750,000 in his first term.