Trump Cripples Ukraine Even Further in War Against Russia

The White House has ordered a pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv, according to Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe. The move is expected to devastate Ukraine’s ability to target Russian forces in its ongoing fight with the dictator-led superpower.

The decision to leave Ukraine in the dark is all part of a larger U.S. withdrawal organized by Donald Trump in the wake of his disastrous meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. During the meeting Friday, Trump and Vice President JD Vance refused to let Zelenskiy speak, allowed a conservative reporter to mock Zelenskiy’s wartime attire, and effectively leveraged the critical meeting for measly political gain by defending Russian President Vladimir Putin at the cost of denigrating former American officials. In doing so, they challenged America’s strongest alliances while ceding the world stage to America’s adversaries.

The fallout has continued into this week: On Monday, Trump suspended military aid to the war-battered nation, in defiance of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the U.S. agreed to defend Ukraine’s borders, along with the U.K., in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of nuclear weapons.

A senior White House official who spoke with The Wall Street Journal claimed that the interruption would continue until the president is “satisfied” that Zelenskiy is working toward an end of the war.

Speaking with Fox Business on Wednesday, Ratcliffe purported that intelligence sharing could resume in the near future, thanks to a kowtowing letter penned by Zelenskiy, in which the Ukrainian leader wrote that he was ready to “work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts,” despite being practically thrown out of the White House last week.

“I think on the military front and the intelligence front, the pause that allowed that to happen, I think will go away, and I think we’ll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine as we have to push back on the aggression that’s there,” Ratcliffe said. “But to put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward again, President Trump is going to hold everyone accountable to drive peace around the world.”

Trump was reported to have discussed the restrictions during an impromptu meeting with several members of his Cabinet Monday, including Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, and special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, the last of whom met with Russian officials last month regarding a potential peace deal.

During a White House press conference earlier Monday, Trump repeatedly ducked reporters’ questions as to whether his administration’s actions had aligned U.S. policy with Moscow. Rather than saying “no,” Trump went on a breathy rant claiming that the war never would have happened if he was in office at the onset of the conflict.

“I wanna see it end fast. I don’t want to see this go on for years and years. Now, President Zelenskiy supposedly made a statement today in AP—I’m not a big fan of AP, so maybe it was an incorrect statement—but he said he thinks the war is gonna go on for a long time, uh, and he better not be right about that, that’s all I’m saying,” Trump said.

But negotiations have been remarkably lopsided. American officials have effectively folded Ukraine’s hand for them in peace negotiations, rescinding a 2008 promise to add the Eastern European nation to NATO, as well as the potential to return Ukraine to its prewar borders.

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. The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia last month, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership.

Several of Trump’s former advisers have criticized Trump’s approach to ending the war, including two of his first-term national security advisers, H.R. McMaster and John Bolton.

“Vladimir Putin couldn’t be happier,” McMaster told 60 Minutes on Sunday, sizing up the events of Trump’s explosive meeting with Zelenskiy “Because what he sees is all of the pressure on Zelenskiy, all of the pressure on Ukraine, and no pressure on him.”

McMaster then went on to describe Putin as a “master manipulator” who had successfully worked Trump to Russia’s advantage.

Bolton, meanwhile, has described the administration’s peace deal as Russian propaganda that was practically “written in the Kremlin.”

The MAGA faithful were not happy with how Democrats in Congress reacted to Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday night.

Democrats protested Trump in different ways, whether it was Representative Melanie Stansbury holding up a protest sign as Trump walked into the chamber (which was quickly snatched away), Representative Al Green shouting at the president that he does not have a mandate to cut Medicaid, before being kicked out, or others leaving the chamber mid-speech, wearing T-shirts reading, “No kings live here” and “RESIST.” This was too much for Trump’s devotees.

White House staffers were quick to show their support for Trump on X.

Others in conservative media also attacked Democrats.

It seems that Republicans have short memories. In the past, the GOP has shouted at Democratic presidents during their addresses to Congress, including Representative Joe Wilson shouting “You lie” at President Obama in 2009 or multiple Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, repeatedly interrupting President Biden in 2023. Since the GOP kowtows to Trump, they think everyone else should, as well.

Donald Trump’s laughable first address to Congress Tuesday night was his least popular ever, garnering one of the least enthusiastic reactions for a president’s first address to the chamber in the last two decades, according to a CNN poll,

Apparently, only 44 percent of viewers had a very positive reaction to the president’s address. Twenty-five percent had a somewhat positive reaction, and 31 percent had a negative reaction.

This is not only a low watermark when compared with the first addresses to Congress delivered by previous presidents, whose speeches are typically a victory lap to lay out their agenda, but it’s also a poor showing when compared to Trump’s previous addresses to Congress in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Former President Joe Biden received a very positive response from 51 percent of viewers on his first address to Congress, while Barack Obama received 68 percent, and George W. Brush received 66 percent.

Trump’s first address during his first administration received a very positive reaction from 57 percent of viewers—a whopping 13 points higher than his very positive reactions now.

And it wasn’t just Democrats who were saying this. CNN’s sample group of viewers was weighted to reflect that more people who agreed with Trump would likely be watching, and was made up of 21 percent Democrats, 44 percent Republicans, and 35 percent independents.

Roughly seven in 10 speech watchers said they had a positive reaction to Trump’s address, according to the CNN poll.

That number is slightly more in line with a CBS poll that Trump shared on Truth Social Wednesday morning, which found that 76 percent of viewers approved of Trump’s address, while 23 percent disapproved.

Non-MAGA Americans have been clamoring for a legitimate resistance to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s haphazard dismantling of the federal government. So when Democrats appeared before the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night wearing fuschia and waving auction paddles in a mode of protest against the MAGA takeover, the public was a little disappointed.

MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend torched liberal lawmakers for silently flipping paddles that read missives directed at Trump while the president prattled on about endless falsehoods: “False,” “Musk Steals,” “Save Medicaid,” the signs read.

“They are not taking back the House with these visuals,” Sanders-Townsend posted on X.

But the visuals were hardly there. Viewers watching live at home would never have known that Democrats were silently paddling their way through the speech, or that a handful of them had stood up and walked out of the chamber in protest, as TV cameras never bothered to pan to their mute, undisruptive spectacle.

In a letter issued Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urged his party to make a “strong” and “dignified” presence at Trump’s speech, rather than run away. During Trump’s address, a large collection of Democratic women on the left side of the aisle were seen wearing pink, while men wore blue and yellow ties in quiet opposition to Trump’s agenda.

“Democratic leadership did not do their members any favors by stifling their desires to speak out,” Sanders-Townsend wrote in another post.

Meanwhile, the meaningless show became instant fodder for late-night comedians, who were all too eager to point out that the Republican trifecta in Washington would not be slowed down by some bright attire.

“He barked out one appalling claim after another, but don’t you worry: Democrats are getting ready to fight back with their little paddles,” said The Late Show host Stephen Colbert.

“That is how you save democracy: by quietly dissenting,” he continued. “Or bidding on an antique tea set. It was hard to tell what was going on.”

Colbert then brought out his own paddle, which urged Democrats to “Try Doing Something.”

At least one spontaneous protest by a Democratic lawmaker was more profound. Texas Representative Al Green made waves from the onset of Trump’s opening remarks, interrupting the president by yelling, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!”

That got Green ousted by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called on the sergeant of arms to remove the 77-year-old from the chamber against a backdrop of jeers from Republicans.

“Some people have questioned why so much muscle was needed to remove one old man with a cane. But it turns out it was for a serious reason: When security searched him, they found that he had smuggled in a spine,” Colbert quipped.

Democrats spent days deciding how to protest Trump’s address. A small faction decided not to attend. That included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Patty Murray, the latter of whom said Monday that the true state of the union saw Trump “spitting in the face of the law.”

The Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s emergency bid to cancel nearly $2 billion in government funding to the United States Agency for International Development.

In a 5–4 vote, the court on Wednesday rejected Trump’s attempt last month to freeze funding to USAID already approved by Congress.

Conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals to shut down the Trump move.

The court did not immediately say when the funding must be released, and the debate will now move back to lower courts.

Upon taking office, Trump and Elon Musk launched an assault on USAID, the largest global provider of foreign aid, gutting funding to the agency, firing thousands of workers, and refusing to pay contractors for work that was already completed.

On February 25, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered the government to pay “all invoices and letter of credit drawdown requests” for work done at USAID prior to February 13, enforcing a temporary restraining order he issued earlier in February. The Trump administration was given a deadline of midnight on Wednesday to fulfill his request.

The president then filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

“Given that the deadline in the challenged order has now passed … the District Court should clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order,” the high court’s ruling reads.

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh dissented the decision.

“The District court has made plain its frustrations with the Government, and respondents raise serious concerns about nonpayment for completed work,” Alito wrote in his dissent. But the relief ordered, is quite simply too extreme a response.”

The decision is among the first of many Supreme Court rulings to come as Trump’s attack on the Constitution continues to unfold.

This story has been updated.