Trump Wants Ukraine’s Zelenskiy to Say Sorry for That Shouting Match

In a move to further castigate the Ukrainian president, Trump reportedly wants Volodymyr Zelenskiy to formally apologize for his behavior before any rare earths deal goes forward.

“I have been told by a senior official here that nothing’s gonna happen with this minerals deal until Zelenskiy goes in front of cameras and makes an explicit public apology for the way that he behaved himself in the Oval Office,” said Fox’s Peter Doocy on Monday.

This is more fallout from the disastrous meeting that Zelenskiy, Trump, and Vice President JD Vance had on Friday, in which the president and his sidekick berated the weary Zelenskiy to his face, chiding the Ukrainian president for not respecting them enough and not appearing gracious enough while he deals with Russia’s unprompted assault—which Trump also blames him for. Trump later kicked him out.

Trump has been particularly obsessed with these minerals in the past weeks, making a deal a prerequisite for any further aid to Ukraine. Now it’s looking like the U.S. will waltz in and seize control—with the Kremlin’s help.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is once again reorganizing its wall of hunting trophies from supposedly slain government contracts. This time, it has quietly removed five of its seven largest kills from last week, erasing $4 billion in supposed savings.

The New York Times reported Monday that the night before, DOGE erased or altered 1,000 claimed savings, or roughly 40 percent of entries into its “wall of receipts,” which has previously proven to be exaggerated or fraudulent. That appears to have been the case with the contracts that were removed Sunday.

The removals included the site’s biggest trophy, a canceled contract with Centennial Technologies for technical support for the IRS, which was supposedly worth $1.9 billion. Although DOGE had bragged about the “incredible job” the U.S. Treasury had done in identifying the waste, the Times reported earlier last month that the contract had actually been canceled in November, during the Biden administration. On Sunday, it disappeared from the wall.

Another vanished entry claimed $133 million in savings from canceling a contract between USAID and development firm Chemonics International in Libya, but a LinkedIn post revealed that the contract had ended last year.

In some cases, it seems that DOGE didn’t even earn its biggest hunting trophies. Other entries were removed due to obvious accounting mistakes that appeared to be the product of human error.

One claimed $149 million in savings from a canceled contract to provide administrative support to the Department of Health and Human Services. But DOGE’s website linked to the wrong contract, which didn’t list the correct company, purpose, or value.

Even after the latest round of deletions, errors still persisted on the site. DOGE still claimed that it had saved $106 million by canceling two contracts for administrative support to the U.S. Coast Guard—but in reality, those contracts were completed during the Bush administration.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened. DOGE’s website, which was once meant to showcase the organization’s major victories, has turned into a hall of humiliation, subject to constant reorganization and worthy of extreme doubt. The latest massive deletion has yet to be acknowledged by DOGE.

Just last week, DOGE deleted the top five highest savings from its website, after various news outlets documented the multiple errors in its accounting, including a $232 million cut to the Social Security Administration that was actually only $560,000, an $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was worth about $8 million, and three supposedly $655 million cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development that amounted to only $18 million.

Despite the rescission of some of the group’s largest cuts, the website now boasts to have saved $105 billion, as a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

The Department of Government Efficiency’s wide-ranging and haphazard cuts to the federal government have reached the nation’s nuclear safety programs.

Just before Valentine’s Day, at the direction of Elon Musk, the Trump administration nixed 17 percent of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s workforce despite the objections of senior officials, The Washington Post reported Monday.

“The president said workers critical to national security would be exempt from the firings. But then there was an active decision to say these positions are not critical to national security,” one unidentified official at the agency told the Post. “It is so absurd I don’t even know what to say.”

Previous reporting had revealed that the staff reductions at the nuclear agency were part of a larger layoff by DOGE directed at the Department of Energy that sought to ax up to 2,000 employees. DOGE pledged that the mass firing only affected noncritical employees who “held primarily administrative and clerical roles,” but that was little more than a bold-faced lie.

One of the staffers forced out of his position included acting Chief of Defense Nuclear Safety James Todd, a senior executive official and the “top authority for all nuclear-safety matters in the agency,” The Bulwark reported last month.

Other critical employees dismissed in the purge included staffers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is responsible for maintaining and minimizing radiation and potential damage from accidents at the nuclear site. The cut workers included an emergency preparedness manager, a radiation protection manager, the security manager, the fire protection engineer, and two facility representatives.

The losses were considered so ill-advised and extreme that the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration reversed course on the hatchet job, welcoming the affected employees back to their jobs. The White House also walked back the decision after it received a “stream of panicked calls” from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who demanded the immediate reinstatement of some 314 nuclear staff workers, including engineers, technicians, and managers, according to the Post.

“These are jobs directly tied to keeping bad things from happening at facilities in places like Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Kansas City, Missouri,” another anonymous official who recently left their job told the newspaper. “A lot of them are in red states. These lawmakers are not thrilled by the potential for bad things happening in their communities.”

But the process wasn’t as simple as an invite back to the office. Instead, dejected and “shell shocked” employees at the NNSA are considering early retirement or looking for work in more stable sectors, unsure of if or when the Trump administration might try to dismiss them again, according to The Bulwark.

Musk’s rapid-fire cuts at the NNSA serve as another monstrous example that Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” philosophy can’t be easily adopted or translated into a federal bureaucracy providing critical services. The tech billionaire has similarly had to walk back cuts that his juvenile team made to the nation’s disease-prevention programs, as well as Food and Drug Administration teams responsible for reviewing AI-assisted surgery protocols and food safety, among other layoffs.

Further still, DOGE has not lived up to its promises. The organization has had to rescind claims that it saved the government billions of dollars, deleting details from the group’s “wall of receipts” after journalists fact-checked that the programs they slashed never actually tallied up to the bold savings.

Trump issued an ominous message to American farmers as he announced his planned kneecapping of their most profitable market: foreign exports.

“To the Great Farmers of the United States: Get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “Tariffs will go on external product on April 2nd. Have fun!”

This will have a massive, direct impact on how much money farmers—many of whom are still reeling from the tariffs (and subsequent bailout) from Trump’s first term—will make from the products they grow. Agricultural exports like soybeans, grains, fruit, vegetables, and livestock products provided U.S. farmers with about $180 billion in annual revenue in the 2023 fiscal year.

It’s unlikely that the farmers will see the “fun” in having to radically readjust their processes for less revenue. This coincides with Trump’s tariff war, as he plans to levy massive 25 percent tariffs on imported goods from Canada and Mexico and 10 percent on goods from China. Chinese state media over the weekend reported that China planned to retaliate with tariffs on U.S. agriculture—perhaps leading Trump to decide to destroy American farmers himself.

Donald Trump is celebrating his administration’s move to ignore a law that targeted money laundering.

On Sunday, the Treasury Department announced that it would stop enforcing “any penalties or fines associated with the beneficial ownership information reporting rule under the existing regulatory deadlines, but it will further not enforce any penalties or fines against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies or their beneficial owners after the forthcoming rule changes take effect either.”

In effect, the government will no longer require shell companies to disclose their owners and beneficiaries, allowing wealthy corporations and individuals to hide their profits from the public. The rule was part of the Corporate Transparency Act, or CTA, passed in 2021, which required some businesses to report information on people who own or control a company, indirectly or directly, to the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Trump quickly took to Truth Social after the Treasury announcement, posting, “Exciting News!”

“This Biden rule has been an absolute disaster for Small Businesses Nationwide,” Trump’s post read. “Furthermore, the Treasury is now finalizing an Emergency Regulation to formally suspend this rule for American businesses. The economic menace of [Beneficial Ownership Information] reporting will soon be no more.”

Republicans have long opposed the CTA, claiming that the requirements are too steep for small businesses and companies to fulfill. The rule on beneficial ownership was supposed to go into effect in January, but a federal court order froze enforcement of the rule. The CTA was passed by the Biden administration to tackle tax evasion and corporate cronyism, which, unsurprisingly, is at odds with the Trump administration.

Since his inauguration, Trump has gone after financial regulation as well as government agencies that seek to curb corporate power, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Earlier this month, the president also issued an executive order freezing enforcement of the 48-year-old Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits any person or company tied to the United States from paying money or offering gifts to foreign officials to help their business.

It seems that Trump wants his friends in the corporate world, as well as his own businesses, to be able to rake in profits with much less restrictions, and if they so choose, hide them from the public. It will now be easier for a business with unpopular practices, or a president with shady business interests, to avoid scrutiny.