Trump’s Putin Obsession Just Cost the U.S. a Major Deal

Rattling America’s longest-standing alliances is starting to cost the U.S. military industrial complex.

U.S. arms makers were shut out of the European Union’s enormous defense spending plan released Wednesday.

“We must buy more European. Because that means strengthening the European defense technological and industrial base,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The U.K. was similarly frozen out of the deal. Instead, the EU tapped South Korea and Japan to join the military program, which aims to spend more than $800 billion by 2030 as the bloc prepares for potential conflict with Russia.

“We need to see not only Russia as a threat, but also … more global geopolitical developments and where Americans will put their strategic attention,” said European Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius, according to Politico.

The sales pitch from American arms manufacturers simply isn’t as persuasive as it was under previous administrations. For decades, purchasing American fighter jets and weapons came with an added bonus of U.S. protection. But as global leaders have witnessed Donald Trump defy long-standing military treatises and aggress U.S. allies, that promise no longer feels like a guarantee.

Trump’s shocking hostility toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during critical peace negotiations, his nonsensical trade war, his threats to annex Greenland, his whiplash decisions to suspend and un-suspend military resources and intelligence with Kyiv, and his insistence on making Canada the nation’s fifty-first state have all called the reliability of American protection into question.

And European nations aren’t the only ones thinking of nixing their American contracts. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Wednesday that he was reviewing a $13.3 billion contract from 2023 for dozens of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters for “geopolitical” reasons, as well as “the possibility of having substantial production of alternative aircraft in Canada.” Portugal announced similar plans last week, apparently wobbling on whether it would replace its aging air force with American made products.

“An important factor in the purchase of the F-35 by European governments was the idea that European defense would be built on a transatlantic basis in terms of strategy, institutions, and capabilities,” Gesine Weber, a Paris-based fellow at the transatlantic think tank, German Marshall Fund, told Politico Wednesday. Weber further noted that Trump’s intention to overhaul NATO makes the purchase of American arms systems “no longer have any added value for Europeans.”

Other defense experts who spoke with the publication were more candid.

“If you keep punching your allies in the face, eventually they’re going to stop wanting to buy weapons from you,” an anonymous Western European defense official told Politico. “Right now we have limited options outside of U.S. platforms, but in the long run? That could change in the coming decades if this combativeness keeps up.”

Foreign sales are crucial to the U.S. arms industry. Historically, two-thirds of EU defense spending has gone to American contractors. Losing that could have ramifications for the U.S. economy.

But despite the Trump agenda, U.S. arms makers are still hoping that the looming threat of war will leave foreign nations with few other options than to buy their goods. Countries that surround Russia, including Poland and Romania, are still rushing to scoop up as many rockets, artillery, tanks, and warplanes into their arsenals as they can.

In December, NATO Chief Mark Rutte told the military alliance that it was time for Europe to “shift to a wartime mindset.”

“Russia is preparing for long-term confrontation, with Ukraine and with us,” Rutte said, urging NATO members to “turbocharge” defense production and spending. “We are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years.”

Donald Trump apparently took over the Kennedy Center to make his own stylistic changes. 

The New York Times reports that during the first meeting of the center’s board of directors on Monday, its new chairman, President Trump, said that structurally, the center is in “tremendous disrepair,” adding that “the whole place needs work” and that he plans to seek funds from Congress to “bring it back.”  

Trump mused about covering up its signature columns with marble or granite, a signature part of Trump’s own buildings. 

“They never covered the I-beam,” Trump said during the meeting, according to a recording obtained by the Times. “I think the I-beams should be covered with some incredible stone—probably marble, but marble’s a bad outdoor stone, but looks better than granite. But it should be covered. And we’ll do that. We’ll add that in. But it’s not a small job.”

Trump, who last month fired the center’s board, installed his own loyalists, and had himself voted as chairman, waxed on about a number of topics during the meeting. He reminisced about his time attending various Broadway shows, including Cats, as an example of the kind of shows that the center should be hosting. 

“I walked in, I saw all these bodies, and then I noticed those bodies were gorgeous,” Trump said, regarding his impression of Cats when he supposedly attended its premiere. 

“They had silk tights on, and they were all ballerinas, and women from Broadway. And men,” Trump continued, adding, regarding the men, “I didn’t find those particular bodies as attractive to be honest.”

Trump floated hosting the annual Kennedy Center Honors, where attendees have criticized him in the past, resulting in him boycotting the ceremonies. 

“Believe me, I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to do it,” Trump said to the rest of the board. “I have enough publicity.” 

“They’ll say, ‘Trump wants to be the host.’ I don’t want to. But I want this thing to be successful,” the president continued, complaining that previous hosts were “always terrible” and calling himself “the king of ratings.” 

Trump also suggested honoring posthumous figures outside of the Kennedy Center’s usual domain of arts and culture, mentioning people from sports, politics, and business, such as Luciano Pavarotti, Elvis Presley, and Babe Ruth, instead of “radical left lunatics.” In a blatant nod to one of his backers, he suggested honoring Steve Wynn, a Republican donor and casino executive whose wife was named to the center’s board by Trump. 

“You could do entrepreneurs; you could do people that, you know, that were really in charge of show business,” Trump said. “I would say you could do politicians, you could do sports stars.”

In all, it seems that Trump took over the center to remake it in his own image: honoring the shows and people he likes, particularly from the era that he enjoyed the most: the 1980s. His decision to honor deceased figures probably stems from the fact that today’s stars dislike him and have often criticized him at various awards ceremonies, including at the center.

If Trump wasn’t president, wasn’t going to use taxpayer funds, and hadn’t unilaterally taken over a center that should belong to the American people, this would be fine. Instead, Trump appears to be transforming the Kennedy Center into his own personal cultural center, where he can honor and enjoy the entertainment he likes, set up the decor the way he wants it, and escape criticism while being feted and honored to boost his ego.

Even Bill O’Reilly thinks that a third term under Donald Trump would be little more than a pipe dream.

“That’s a fantasy, and I don’t really consider those kinds of things,” the longtime conservative commentator told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo Tuesday night. “It’s not gonna happen, never will happen. It’s not worth my time or your time.”

Trump has repeatedly pitched the idea that he could stay in office after 2028, but the likelihood of that actually happening is near zero.

As outlined in Article 5 of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.

A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a constitutional convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Beyond that, the MAGA leader would be 82 years old in 2028—the same age that President Joe Biden was when he left office—and that’s unlikely to play well with an American public that is increasingly tired of being led by the elderly.

Still, that hasn’t kept conservatives from trying to keep Trump in power. Republican lawmakers have already started to pave the way for the unconstitutional takeover. In January, Representative Andy Ogles filed a joint resolution to amend the Constitution’s Twenty-Second Amendment so that the executive branch leader could serve “for up to but no more than three terms.”

But O’Reilly had a different vision for the MAGA movement’s future.

“Donald Trump will serve out his second term, hopefully he’ll be successful, and then JD Vance will run for president in ’28 unless something happens. That’s what’s gonna happen,” O’Reilly said.

The idea that Trump could follow in Roosevelt’s footsteps came back to the forefront earlier in Cuomo’s show after Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon said he’s “working on it.”

“Chris, as you know, I’ve had greater long shots than this,” Bannon told Cuomo. “We’ve had greater long shots than Trump 2028, and we’ve got a lot of stuff we’re working on there. We’re not prepared to talk about it publicly, but in a couple months I think we will be.”

Bannon then proceeded to dodge a direct question on whether or not that meant a “revolution” or overthrowing the government. When pressed again, Bannon said that he “firmly” believes “in the revolution you’re seeing going on now: the revolution of common sense to deconstruct the administrative state.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tore into Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over his backing of Republicans’ government spending bill last week.

In scathing remarks during a Tuesday news conference at a children’s hospital in San Francisco, Pelosi said she believed that Senate Democrats should have negotiated harder for Republicans to make concessions.

“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Pelosi said. “I think that’s what happened the other day.”

Pelosi said that Democrats could have offered “a third way” forward, one that avoided a government shutdown while also allowing Democrats to abstain from co-signing the bill, staving off a complete government closure while negotiations continued.

“They may not have agreed to it, but at least the public would have seen they’re not agreeing to it—and that then they would have been shutting [the] government down,” Pelosi said.

The spending bill approved by a total of nine Senate Democrats and one House Democrat may serve as a sort of blank check for the Trump administration, which has already announced its intention to withhold funds allocated to programs it doesn’t support. While the bill will keep the lights on until September, it will also slash funding for health care and boost spending on mass deportations.

Ultimately, Pelosi said she supported Schumer’s leadership of the party—but not everyone feels that way. Widespread outrage has led to many calling for Schumer to be removed and replaced with someone willing to fight Trump’s agenda, such as New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

But Senator Bernie Sanders said it wasn’t as simple as replacing Schumer. During an interview on CNN Tuesday night, the Vermont independent said that the issue demonstrated by Schumer’s surrender went beyond just him and was a structural problem within the Democratic Party.

“I know, everyone’s beating up on Chuck [Schumer], and I strongly disagree with him. Strongly. No one is in the caucus more critical of Schumer than I am. But it’s not Schumer, it’s the caucus, it’s not the caucus, it’s the Democratic Party,” Sanders said.

Sanders said that the Democratic Party had been taken over by billionaires and guided into the ground by consultants.

Schumer has continued to defend his choice, and his seat, saying that he is still the best person to lead the Senate and the best at winning Senate seats.

Trump is freezing $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania in an effort to further vilify transgender athletes.

“Promises made, promises kept,” the White House said in an X post on Wednesday, sharing a Fox Business report on the news.

“President Trump has promised to protect female athletes. He has threatened to rip federal funding away from any university that defies his executive order banning biological males from infiltrating women’s sports, and he is doing it,” a Fox Business contributor said. “We are the first to report that President Trump has paused $175 million in federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania over its controversial policies.”

A senior Trump official told Fox Business that “this is just a taste of what could be coming down the pipe for Penn.”

Trump’s Education Department opened up a Title IX investigation into Penn earlier this month because Penn had a trans woman, Lia Thomas, on its swim team in 2021. The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced its trans ban shortly afterward. Three of Thomas’s former teammates also filed a separate lawsuit citing Title IX violations.

The Trump administration also recently cut $400 million in funding from Columbia University over allegations of antisemitism.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks that the bird flu should be allowed to spread unchecked to identify birds that could be immune.

Kennedy said in a recent Fox News interview that farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds that are immune to it,” an idea that experts say would be dangerous and hurt the poultry industry.

“That’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told The New York Times.

Every new infection of the H5N1 virus is a chance that it will mutate and become more powerful and spread further, although it still hasn’t been proven to spread between people. But if it were allowed to spread through millions of birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen said.

While Kennedy’s department doesn’t have any regulatory powers over farms, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins agrees.

“There are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity,” Rollins said on Fox News in February.

If this plan actually goes into effect, the virus would spread among a larger number of birds, putting more people and other animals at risk of infection. Right now, if a poultry farm has a positive test for the virus, it is reimbursed for culling its flocks to prevent its spread.

If the virus were allowed to spread on purpose, bird flu “infections would cause very painful deaths in nearly 100 percent of the chickens and turkeys,” Dr. David Swayne, a poultry veterinarian and former USDA employee, told the Times, adding that it would be “inhumane, resulting in an unacceptable animal welfare crisis.”

Kennedy isn’t even operating on the right information: He claimed in one interview that the virus didn’t seem to affect wild birds, but there are many documented cases of wild birds dying from H5N1. Kennedy also theorizes that some chickens and turkeys may be immune, but scientists say that poultry lacks the genes needed to resist the virus.

It seems that Kennedy’s pseudoscience is spreading unchecked as well. He’s already been putting his anti-vaccine beliefs into practice at HHS by curtailing multiple vaccine research projects and directing resources toward researching the debunked conspiracy that vaccines cause autism. His latest idea on the bird flu is dangerous and could end up having disastrous consequences for public health and U.S. agriculture.

Donald Trump is planning to nominate troves of loyalist judges to the federal judiciary, and their confirmations will likely go off without a hitch, according to Politico.

Trump is likely to unveil his first round of judicial nominations in the coming weeks, four people familiar with the conversations told Politico Tuesday. During Trump’s first administration, a whopping 234 judges were confirmed, some of whom proved to be fierce loyalists willing to upend Trump’s legal battles—such as Judge Aileen Cannon, who has since been floated for a potential seat on the Supreme Court.

This time, Trump is looking for more judges willing to demonstrate their fealty, according to Mike Davis, who served as the former chief counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley.

“They’re going to be looking for even more bold and fearless judges,” said Davis, who assisted Trump’s first administration in taking fights to the Supreme Court. “Judges who have been battle-tested.”

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that he expected this round of nominees to be more “ideologically extreme.”

“They will be MAGAs, basically. Given the trend of the end of the last Trump term, we’re heading over a cliff in terms of fringe right wing views. They will have a litmus test on steroids,” Blumenthal warned.

Trump’s plan to reshape the judiciary comes as federal judges have become one of the last stoppages for the administration’s onslaught of unlawful legislation and executive actions.

Trump saw a double whammy of losses on Tuesday, when a federal judge blocked the implementation of his policy that would effectively bar transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. Another federal judge ordered a pause on cuts to the United States Agency for International Development, arguing that Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s shuttering of the agency was likely unconstitutional because it had sidestepped congressional authority.

Separately, two federal judges have ruled that DOGE’s blanket dismissal of probationary federal employees was also illegal, setting the Trump administration scurrying to reinstate roughly 24,000 wrongfully terminated employees.

Over the weekend, Judge James Boasberg ordered a pause on Trump’s massive deportations under the Alien Enemies Act—but the administration continued undeterred, sending planefuls of people who the government claimed were gang members out of the country. When Boasberg accused Trump of defying a court order, the president called for him to be impeached. In a rare statement, Chief Justice John Roberts scolded Trump, saying that threatening to impeach judges wasn’t an “appropriate” response to disagreeing with a ruling.

But Trump has already begun to set the stage for outright ignoring the orders of any judges who rule against him, claiming that they must be biased. During an interview on Fox News Tuesday, Trump claimed he didn’t defy anything.

“I never did that, however we have bad judges. We have very bad judges. And these are judges that shouldn’t be allowed,” Trump said. The president claimed that Boasberg was a “lunatic” in any case that involved him.

Trump clearly hopes to flush out the judges who are willing to stand up to his legally dubious activity, while supplying more and more MAGAs to rubber-stamp his every whim.

A federal judge on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, stopping it from eliminating three nonprofit grant agreements made under the Biden administration and seizing back the funding.

EPA head Lee Zeldin tried to eliminate the programs as part of his attack on Biden’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which Congress established in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Zeldin posited that the program, like every other one the Trump administration doesn’t like, was a source of waste and fraud. But Judge Tanya Chutkan viewed these claims as “vague and unsubstantiated assertions,” according to Reuters.

The ruling affects $13.97 million of grant funding awarded to Climate United, Coalition for Green Capital, and Power Forward Communities. Chutkan’s temporary restraining order prevents Citibank from transferring the grant money out of their accounts, despite the EPA order.

While this certainly isn’t over, Chutkan’s ruling offers the environmental nonprofits temporary respite.

Donald Trump is planning to ramp up his ill-advised tariffs and place them on “trillions” of dollars in imports.

The Washington Post reports that most U.S. imports will get hit with the new fees on April 2, on a day Trump is calling “Liberation Day.” The news is causing shock waves among congressional Republicans and economists. Even White House officials are concerned, with discussions taking place involving Vice President JD Vance, aide Peter Navarro, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

“We don’t know exactly what they’re going to do, but from what they’re saying, it sounds functionally like new tariffs on all U.S. imports,” Joseph Politano, an economic policy analyst, told the Post.

The past few weeks of tariffs have upended the U.S. economy, hurting businesses and sending the stock market plunging. This new round of tariffs “seriously could make all of that look like a tempest in a teapot,” Politano said.

“It’s a liberation day for our country because we’re going to be getting back a lot of the wealth that we so foolishly gave up to other countries, including friend and foe,” Trump said on Monday.

Trump has pressed ahead with his tariffs despite criticism from the right, including his normal cheering section at Fox News. The network’s Maria Bartiromo snapped at Bessent in an interview on Tuesday, pointing out how businesses are upset with Trump’s economic decisions. Even Republican Senator Rand Paul has been trying to rally the rest of his party to come out against the tariffs. But none of that seems to be convincing the president, which means the worst is still yet to come for America’s economy.

Nebraska Representative Mike Flood was excoriated by the crowd at his own town hall on Tuesday for basically every position he took. When he told his constituents he supported Elon Musk, he was booed mercilessly.

“What makes Elon Musk a better person to audit our government for waste, fraud, and abuse than the inspectors general that Donald Trump fired?” one constituent asked Flood. “Elon Musk gets $40 billion a year in funding from the federal government. What makes you think he has no conflict of interest? … Do you think he would cut that before he would cut our Medicare, or our Social Security, or our jobs?”

“I support Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency,” Flood replied with a shrug before being overpowered by the voices of his enraged constituents. 

Flood also took serious heat for the GOP’s 180 on Ukraine, cozying up to Russia in a historic role reversal. 

“I do wanna say: shame,” one woman said to Flood. “Shame for your comment … that you said ‘President Zelenskiy’s approach today was disrespectful to President Trump and undermines the goal of bringing peace.’ … Shame on that.” The crowd roared in support. 

“I do believe that that White House meeting was a disaster, and I believe that President Zelenskiy should have signed that agreement,” Flood replied, to immediate boos.

The deep-red state crowd also began chanting, “Tax the rich.”

This is yet another installment in the string of tense, confrontational town halls that have occurred as Republicans have to answer for the actions of Trump and DOGE—actions that are directly hurting the people who put them in office.