JD Vance Brags Trump Is Great Negotiator, After He Caved to Russia

Vice President JD Vance is asking the American public to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.

Speaking before the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday, the vice president insisted that Donald Trump still held all his cards in negotiations over Ukraine’s fate—just one week after his defense secretary told NATO they didn’t.

“I think President Trump—what makes him such an effective negotiator, I’ve seen this in private—is that he doesn’t take anything off the table,” Vance told CPAC host Mercedes Schlapp. “When he walks in a negotiation, he says, ‘Everything is on the table.’”

But Vance’s comments came barely a week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explicitly told the NATO conference that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had actually taken several bargaining chips “off the table.”

That included Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine. He also added that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its pre-war borders, effectively ceding land to Moscow.

The announcement came as a complete 180 on American and NATO policy regarding the eastern European country, and left U.S. allies and defense experts reeling. The deal, per Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, amounted to Russian propaganda and was practically “written in the Kremlin.”

Hegseth walked back the brazen settlement terms the following day, insisting that, despite having already shown the American hand, “everything is on the table” when it comes to arranging peace between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Trump denied telling Hegseth to walk back his comments during an Oval Office press conference, describing them as “pretty accurate.”

Hot heads and rocky promises have resulted in several days of tumult on a potential peace deal, including Trump branding Zelenskiy a “dictator.” But beyond the administration’s seismic hiccups, perhaps the most egregious error remains that Trump has continued to relegate Kyiv to the sidelines of a negotiation that will decide Ukraine’s future.

The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership. Critics excoriated the administration for doing so, but Vance did little more than brush off the global concern at CPAC.

“And of course that makes the heads explode in the American media, because they say, ‘Why are you talking to Russia?’” Vance told the conference. “Well, how are you going to end the war unless you’re talking to Russia? You’ve got to get everybody involved in the fighting if you actually want to bring it to a close, and I know the president does.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine.

Mitch McConnell has finally decided to call it quits.

The longest-serving Senate leader in history announced on Thursday that he will not run for reelection in 2026.

“Seven times, my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate,” McConnell said to the Associated Press. “Every day in between I’ve been humbled by the trust they’ve placed in me to do their business here. Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.”

This ends McConnell’s decades-long reign of conservative terror that upended years of liberal and progressive policy, cemented conservative courts across the nation, and saw the rise of Donald Trump—leading to McConnell’s own eventual dethroning.

McConnell spent his leadership tenure obstructing campaign finance reform and packing the federal courts with likeminded conservatives, providing fertile ground for Citizens United and the debilitating influx of corporate influence onto American politics. He also helped create the correct circumstances for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, as he held up Merrick Garland’s nomination under former President Barack Obama and then helped Trump confirm three justices to the high court.

McConnell unsuccessfully tried to thread the needle near the end, critiquing Trump’s brand of conservatism while protecting it and the power his proximity to it gave him. He backed the president for years, fighting against his impeachment and supporting his claims of a stolen election even after lambasting January 6 as a “violent insurrection.”

McConnell’s exit serves as a fitting end to the Republican Party’s rejection of traditional conservatism and full embrace of Trump’s MAGA movement.

This story has been updated.

Fear might be the driving motivator behind Republican lawmakers’ continual bend to Donald Trump.

The GOP caucus is reportedly “scared shitless” of not just Trump’s ire—but the personal vindictiveness and constant threat of political violence from his MAGA base across the country.

The final straw that reportedly flipped Senator Thom Tillis’s vote on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were “credible death threats” against the North Carolina lawmaker, according to sources that spoke with Vanity Fair. Tillis was the final Republican holdout on confirming the former Fox News star to lead the Pentagon.

“According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work,” Vanity Fair reported.

Trump’s violent rhetoric offers one obvious reason why Republicans are so wary of crossing him. The president has a bizarre relationship with the more reactive sectors of his base. During the first presidential debate of the 2020 cycle, Trump issued a direct missive to the Proud Boys, a militant white supremacist group, telling them to “stand back and stand by.” And the MAGA leader has also encouraged direct violence at his rallies, encouraging his supporters to “knock the crap out of” protesters who exercise their First Amendment rights against Trump’s agenda.

The president also made his reciprocal loyalty to his base obvious from the first day of his second administration: after claiming for years that he would free the men and women who rioted through Congress in 2021—and forced the legislature to delay the certification of the presidential election result—Trump overrode internal debate amongst his administration hours after his inauguration to pardon some 1,500 January 6 offenders.

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration told Vanity Fair.

Trump’s decision to legally and unilaterally forgive his most aggressive supporters was, actually, wildly unpopular with the American public. A November Scripps News/Ipsos survey found that few Americans—just 30 percent—actually supported a legal reprieve for the Capitol rioters, versus an overwhelming 64 percent of the country that was against it. Just one percent of respondents believed that the pardons should be Trump’s first priority—let alone something that he issued a sweeping executive order for on his first day in office.

A former professional football player was carried off in handcuffs Tuesday after protesting the installation of a pro-Donald Trump plaque at his local library.

Former NFL player Chris Kluwe was arrested during a meeting of the Huntington Beach City Council, after he protested against the city’s decision to install a plaque at the public library featuring the acrostic poem, “Magical. Alluring. Galvanizing. Adventurous,” spelling out “MAGA.”

Kluwe, a 15-year resident of Huntington Beach, California, joined several other residents in speaking against the inclusion of Trump’s slogan on the plaque.

“As the community made clear at the library commission meeting last Tuesday, everyone is in favor of a plaque to celebrate the library,” Kluwe said. “But the vast, vast majority are against including a MAGA acrostic, OK?”

“Unfortunately it’s clear that this council does not listen, so I’m going to take my time to explain what MAGA has stood for these past three weeks,” he said.

“MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands for re-segregation and racism. MAGA stands for censorship and book bans,” Kluwe said.

“MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal. MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children.”

“MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and, most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is,” Kluwe said, as onlookers burst into shocked laughs and applause.

“I will now engage in the time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience,” Kluwe said. As onlookers cheered, Kluwe stepped past the podium, and a police officer could be seen hurrying after him.

The official video of the meeting posted by the City of Huntington Beach cuts away from Kluwe as he was tackled by police officers.

“Do not ask for decorum while you’re shredding the Constitution!” Kluwe can be heard yelling.

In a post on Bluesky Wednesday, Kluwe recapped what he had later told police officers.

The officer “asked for my account of what happened (told him I approached the dias, stopped and put my hands behind my back, then warned the officers I was going to the floor and they would have to carry me out). Asked if I struggled or fought back, I said no (as I’m pretty sure the video evidence would show),” Kluwe wrote.

Another video showed Kluwe was face down on the floor of the chamber while four police officers surrounded and handcuffed him. Kluwe was then carried out by the officers as onlookers cheered.

Police said that Kluwe was charged with disrupting a public assembly, which carries a fine of up to $1,000 or six months in jail, according to California State Penal Code.

During his time in the NFL, Kluwe was an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, and there was some speculation that his advocacy led to his release from the Minnesota Vikings in 2013.

The Huntington Beach City Council ultimately voted to approve installing the plaque, with the inclusion of the MAGA acrostic poem, according to KTLA.

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s billionaire buddy turned commerce secretary, has confirmed that the administration was simply lying to MAGA supporters about not touching Social Security and Medicare.

“Back in October … I flew down to Texas, got Elon Musk to [set up DOGE], and here was our agreement: that Elon was gonna cut a trillion dollars of waste fraud and abuse,” Lutnick told Jesse Waters of Fox News Wednesday night. “We have almost $4 trillion of entitlements, and no one’s ever looked at it before. You know Social Security is wrong, you know Medicaid and Medicare are wrong. So he’s gonna cut a trillion and we’re gonna get rid of all these tax scams that hammer against America and we’re gonna raise a trillion dollars of revenue.”

Just last week, President Trump promised that “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something. It’s going to be strengthened. Medicare, Medicaid—none of that stuff is going to be touched.”

Fast forward a week, and he endorsed House Republicans’ budget plan, which is expected to make an $880 billion cut to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

This is a long cry from the party that was telling its voters—many of whom are elderly conservatives on government benefits—that they wouldn’t lay a finger on the programs they need most.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s purge of federal government employees has apparently gone too far for one Fox News personality.

Jesse Watters begged Trump on The Five Wednesday to be “less callous” in his mass firings because his friend Chris, a military veteran for 20 years who “has killed a lot of bad guys” and “put his life on the line,” was among those set to be axed in cuts to the Department of Defense.

“He punched out after 20 years, and [is now] working for the Pentagon. And he’s only been there a few months, so he’s probationary, and he just found out he’s probably going to get laid off. He’s going to get DOGE’d,” Watters said, adding that he got a text message from the friend, who was upset.

“This guy is not a DEI consultant. This guy is not a climate consultant. This guy is a veteran. So when you’re talking about DOGE-ing people, veterans should get priority. Because if you’re going to go out there and kill enemies, and put your life on the line for this country, you should not be in the same category as people that are doing DEI,” Watters added.

Watters is only upset because someone he knows personally was affected by Trump and Musk’s mass firings. Otherwise, he’d continue to cheer on the arbitrary cuts across the federal workforce. What he and the rest of right-wing media don’t realize is that plenty of other federal workers like Chris have lost their jobs or will soon. Some are veterans, as are 30 percent of federal workers, and others were simply hired too recently.

The firings are taking place regardless of stellar personnel records, and have claimed workers vital to national security that the Trump administration has tried to walk back, such as people who work with the U.S. nuclear arsenal or whose expertise with bird flu is badly needed right now. Watters and his friends on the right ought to realize that Trump and Musk are simply gutting the federal government without any regard for the consequences.

If America was concerned about Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s relationship after their dual Oval Office press conference last week, the MAGA duo’s interview with Sean Hannity did nothing to assuage it.

Appearing side by side in the White House, the president of the United States was cut off and forced to defer to Musk’s language on the multi-billionaire’s missive to other ultra-wealthy people.

“I’d like to also just send a message—like, because, as the president said, like, this—there’s a lot of rich people out there,” Musk said. “They should be caring more about the country because—the reason they should be caring about—more about country is: America falls, what do you think is going to happen to your business?”  

“What do—what do you think—do you think you’re be going to be okay if—if the ship of America sinks? Of course not. Like, what—what I’m doing here, what the president is doing is it’s just long-term thinking. The ship of America must be strong.  The ship of America cannot sink.  If it sinks, we all sink with it.”

When Trump attempted to join in on the answer, Hannity seemed more eager to follow up on Musk’s response, explicitly cutting the president off.

“Sean, you’re a—” Trump started, pointing at the Fox News host.

“This is important,” Hannity responded to Trump, raising his hand to stop him.

Last week, Musk spent more time talking to reporters than Trump did during their joint press conference. The image to the rest of the world was clear: While Trump hunched over the Resolute Desk, the world’s richest man took the reins. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell measured the time spent talking by each administrative figurehead and found that Musk had spoken 3,666 words at the executive order signing, whereas Trump spoke 2,487 words.

Compare Musk’s constant presence to the role that Trump’s vice presidents play in his political realm: Former Vice President Mike Pence never spoke more than Trump did at a Trump-centric event during his first term, and Vice President JD Vance likely never will, either (in part because Vance has been conspicuously absent from many major events so far). That discrepancy calls into question what power Musk, who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign, really has in the administration.

Elsewhere in the duo’s Hannity interview, Musk described criticism of his efforts to strip federal agencies as a nonelected, special government employee, as the “thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.”

“We must be over the target or doing something right,” Musk told Hannity. 

“They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful,” he continued. “What we’re really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we’re finding is that there’s an unelected bureaucracy—speaking of unelected, there’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and the cabinet.”

Donald Trump called Elon Musk the head of the Department of Government Efficiency Wednesday, and while this may seem obvious to everyone, the White House has been pretending like it isn’t—and the truth could land them in legal trouble. 

During an appearance at the Future Investment Institute Summit in Miami, Trump told attendees at the Saudi investment fund event exactly what Musk’s real job is.

“I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency, and put a man named Elon Musk in charge,” Trump said. 

For an administration that loves to tout its own radical transparency, they sure seem to want to mislead Americans on who is really calling the shots at DOGE.

The Trump administration filed a court declaration Monday asserting that Musk’s official title is “senior adviser to the president,” a position that holds “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.” It also claims that Musk isn’t a DOGE employee or its administrator, but an employee of the White House. 

The filing flies in the face of Trump’s original announcement naming Musk the head of DOGE, as well as everything we’ve seen from Musk since, as the unelected bureaucrat has taken aim at essential federal employees, sending agencies scrambling to hire them back. Most recently, he and his friends at DOGE pretended to save money by eliminating fictionalized government contracts. 

Monday’s filing came as Musk faces legal scrutiny in federal court this week. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ultimately declined to issue a temporary restraining order against Musk and DOGE Tuesday, saying that it wasn’t yet clear that their actions would cause irreparable harm. 

By obfuscating leadership, it seems that the Trump administration wants to avoid accountability for its actions. U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled last week that DOGE should be considered an “agency,” although Trump was “curiously” avoiding calling it that explicitly.  

“This appears to come from a desire to escape the obligations that accompany agencyhood—such as being subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act—while reaping only its benefits,” Bates wrote in his order.

Donald Trump’s gutting of the federal government is coming to the Department of Defense.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has told DOD and military leaders to make plans for cutting 8 percent of the defense budget for each of the next five years, The Washington Post reports, citing a department memo and unnamed officials.

Proposals for cuts are due back by February 24, the memo states, with the Trump administration including a list 17 exceptions from the chopping block. These include nuclear weapons and missile defenses, drones and other weapons, and military operations at the southern U.S. border.

“President Trump’s charge to DoD is clear: achieve Peace through Strength,” Hegseth wrote in the memo on Tuesday. “The time for preparation is over — we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and reestablish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit.”

So far, the massive DOD budget of $850 billion has been spared from the heavy-handed cuts elsewhere in the federal government led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, including the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development. This is despite the fact that the DOD has a long history of failing audits and funding bloated projects without facing any consequences.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Musk’s companies have hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in defense contracts. Until now, DOD employees were also spared from Trump and Musk’s mass purge of government employees, although that will soon change. The department has sent a list of all its probationary employees to the Trump administration, and many, if not most, of those employees will likely be sacked like those at other government agencies.

It remains to be seen how the coming budget cuts will affect national defense and national security. The Trump administration has already been forced to try and undo cuts at the Department of Energy after mistakenly firing critical employees who deal with nuclear weapons. The Department of Agriculture has also scrambled to rehire bird flu experts it says were “accidentally” fired. Will the Trump administration jump the gun again in the defense department?

Missouri Republicans are advancing an effort that would require pregnant people to register in a statewide database.

House Bill 807, called the “Save MO Babies Act,” is intended to target people “at risk for seeking abortion services” and to “reduce the number of preventable abortions.” If passed, the registry would start on July 1, 2026, and would be managed by the Maternal and Child Services division of the state’s Department of Social Services, according to the bill text. But the bill does not specify the scope and scale of such a registry, or exactly how “at risk” individuals would be identified.

Even the bill’s author, adoption attorney Gerard Harms, admitted that the bill was “very inartfully drafted” while making his case before the state House Children and Families Committee on Tuesday, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The effort was roundly condemned by both government-wary Republicans and pro-abortion Democrats.

“ARE YOU SERIOUS!?” House Democrats wrote in a post on Facebook, according to the paper.  

“We have to imagine even conservative Missourians would be horrified by this idea,” the Democrats said.

In November, Missouri voters narrowly approved a ballot measure that enshrined abortion access in their state constitution. 

The measure, called the Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative, solidified that the government has no role in a person’s “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions. It also undid the Show-Me State’s total abortion ban, which took effect one hour after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Still, that hasn’t stopped state lawmakers from fighting for stronger abortion restrictions. Last month, Missouri Representative Eric Burlison introduced the “Life at Conception Act” at the federal level, aiming to classify a fetus as a person under the 14th Amendment. Meanwhile, state Representative Brian Seitz introduced a bill—Joint Resolution 39—that would prevent abortion access after a fetal heartbeat is detected, allowing only narrow exceptions for medical emergencies.