Trump Has Bonkers Excuse for Why Putin Is Skipping Ukraine Peace Talks

The U.S. president is still caught in an awkward political dance with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

The world leaders engaged in a strange “will they, won’t they” on Wednesday, apparently goading one another to show up to a face-to-face meeting in Istanbul to discuss peace in Ukraine. The meeting was supposed to be the first between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to end the war that began in 2022.

But the encounter was further complicated by comments from Zelenskiy that he would only appear if Putin guaranteed his presence.

Trump’s explanation for Putin’s behavior, however, was nothing short of bizarre. At a press conference in Doha, Qatar, Trump said that he was not “disappointed” that the meeting fell apart.

“I actually said, why would he go if I’m not going?” Trump told a reporter about Putin. “Because I wasn’t going to go. I wasn’t planning to go. I would go, but I wasn’t planning to go.

“And I said, I don’t think he’s going to go if I don’t go. And that’s turned out to be right. But we have people there. Marco, as you know, is doing a fantastic job,” Trump said, referring to Marco Rubio, who is currently serving as both secretary of state and acting national security adviser.

“But I didn’t think it was possible for Putin to go if I’m not there,” Trump added.

Efforts to coordinate peace talks between the two warring nations have stalled in recent weeks.

Rising frustration over the ongoing conflict—and Putin and Zelenskiy’s deep hatred for one another—has flustered Trump.

By late April, the president had resorted to begging Putin to stop the violence. At a White House press conference that same day, Trump claimed that Russia had offered major concessions in a possible peace deal. Those “concessions,” however, practically rewarded Russia for sparking the conflict and amounted to “stopping taking” the entirety of Ukraine.

Senior officials in the Trump administration—including the president himself—have verbally recognized Crimea as a part of Russia, a remarkable reversal of long-standing U.S. policy that made Kremlin propagandists on state-sponsored television laugh at the downfall of American power.

Trump has since tried to backtrack his initial promises over the war. In a 100-day retrospective with Time magazine, Trump claimed that his pledge to end the war “on day one” was little more than a joke.

It turns out that Elon Musk failed to keep his promise to pay voters in swing states who signed his petition supporting Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election, according to a new lawsuit.

Plaintiffs in the national class action suit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania last week, say that Musk’s America PAC never paid them for signing the petition. The lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit are three people who lived in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia at the time, one of whom worked as a canvasser for the PAC in Michigan and Georgia.

Musk spent roughly $300 million on the 2024 election in support of Trump, and offered initial payments of $47 to signatories of a petition supporting his PAC, later boosting those payments to $100. If a signatory referred the petition to others, they were offered additional payments for each successful referral. 

At the time, the tech oligarch said that signing the petition demonstrated support for the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. The goal of the cash payments was to increase voter registration and turnout in battleground states. But according to the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, the whole thing was a bait-and-switch.

The lawsuit states that the plaintiffs are in contact “with numerous others who referred voters to sign the America PAC petition, who are likewise frustrated that they did not receive full payments for their referrals.” They expect “more than 100 Class Members” in the lawsuit who are owed more than $5 million. 

“This case is about a broken promise: Elon Musk promised supporters that they would be paid for signing a petition and referring others to do the same,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, a co-founder of the law firm Lichten & Liss-Riordan representing the plaintiffs, told CNBC. “Our clients relied on that promise because they believed in Elon, but unfortunately, that promise was not kept. It appears the promise was broken for many others as well.”

Musk’s election investment and promised payments gave him what he wanted in the end. Not only did Trump win the election, but Musk was handsomely rewarded with a powerful role in the administration “cutting costs” and gaining access to sensitive data within the government under his Department of Government Efficiency initiative. Meanwhile, he continues to rake in billions in government contracts. But just like his beneficiary Trump, Musk is allegedly stiffing the people he promised to pay and getting sued over it. 

RFK Jr. finally admitted that firing thousands of workers and cutting billions from the National Institutes of Health could impact the well-being of Americans.

The Department of Health and Human Services secretary testified in two separate meetings before Congress Wednesday and was grilled relentlessly by Democrats on his disastrous restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services.

When asked about cuts to the NIH, which includes the nation’s largest hospital dedicated solely to clinical research, RFK Jr.’s front faltered.

“I think the cuts that are now proposed by NIH are gonna hurt,” he responded. It was a feeble (and obvious) admission given that minutes earlier he said he actually has no idea how many people were fired.

“Secretary Kennedy, how many staff have been cut from the NIH’s clinical center? I want a specific number.” Democratic Senator Patty Murray asked.

“I can’t tell you that now, Senator Murray,” he responded.

In March, RFK Jr. announced the firing of 1,200 NIH workers—6 percent of the institute’s workforce—as part of a larger effort to cut 10,000 jobs from HHS. In the first three months of 2025, the Trump administration also cut $2.7 billion in NIH funding for research, according to a new report from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Despite this, RFK Jr. refused to take blame for the state of public health in America, even as clinical research faces existential threats and the country experiences one of its deadliest measles outbreaks in history.

“You’re making medical decisions every day. You’re the secretary of HHS. You have tremendous power over health policy. Really horrified that you will not encourage families to vaccinate their children,” Democratic Representative Rosa DeLauro said to RFK Jr. earlier Wednesday, referring to his relentless spread of vaccine misinformation.

Kennedy gave a stunning response to another Democrat who questioned his unbacked vaccination claims.

“I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me,” the man in charge of America’s entire public health system said.

The Trump administration’s new policy of denying immigration benefits to people expressing antisemitic views apparently doesn’t apply to white South Africans.

One of the Afrikaner “refugees” who has taken up President Trump’s offer for white South Africans to immigrate to the United States to flee a nonexistent genocide has a history of posting antisemitic content on social media. Charl Kleinhaus, who claims to be a former farmer, has called Jewish people “untrustworthy” and “dangerous.”

Kleinhaus also responded to a post on X about clashes in Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israelis with a link to a video and the caption “Jews spitting on Christians!” But if one were to think that Kleinhaus opposes Israel, that would be a mistake. After Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, he made several posts praising the country and offering it his total support.

Kleinhaus’s claims to be a farmer are also suspect, as his X account mentions his ownership of a granite mine, which he put up for sale last month. The Bulwark points out that Kleinhaus’s X profile is otherwise full of pro-Christian, pro-Trump, and pro-MAGA content.

But the antisemitic posts seem to show a contradiction in the White House’s new policy, as outlined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, of denying immigrants with antisemitic views into the U.S. because their presence would undermine “U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States.”

That policy was used to detain Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and strip him of his permanent residency status in March. Why is Kleinhaus seemingly being held to a different standard? Is it because Khalil is of Palestinian origin, while Kleinhaus is a white South African? Or is it because despite openly expressing prejudice against Jewish people, Kleinhaus also professes love for Israel? Either way, there’s clearly racism at the root of it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson offered a baffling defense Wednesday for Donald Trump’s blatant corruption schemes, seeming to forget entirely about so-called congressional oversight.

During a press conference, Johnson was asked whether he was at all concerned about the Trump family’s foreign business dealings, in light of the president’s trip to Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week, where his family has made billions in investments, as well as Trump’s contentious plan to throw an “intimate dinner” for the top holders of his meme coin.

“Look, there are authorities that—police, executive branch, ethics rules—I’m not an expert in that. My expertise is in the House,” Johnson said.

“I’ll say that the reason many people refer to the Bidens as the ‘Biden crime family’ is because they were doing all this stuff behind curtains, but in the back rooms; they were trying to conceal it, and they repeatedly lied about it, and they set up shell companies, and the family was all engaged in getting all on the dole,” Johnson said. “Whatever the President Trump is doing is out in the open, they’re not trying to conceal anything.”

Setting aside the simple fact that in an expansive 300-page report released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee last year, the GOP failed to produce a single piece of irrefutable evidence demonstrating that Joe Biden had participated in or benefited from foreign deals made by his family, it’s nearly impossible to parse why someone would believe that engaging in corruption out in the open is any better than doing it in secret.

Johnson had fully supported the lengthy, and ultimately fruitless, impeachment inquiry into Biden but condemned Democrats who sought impeachment of Trump in 2019. It seems the issue is not the act but the man at the center.

The reporter reminded Johnson that there were shady things happening behind closed doors in the Trump administration too, such as allowing more than 200 wealthy individuals to anonymously buy access to the White House by lining the president’s pockets.

“I don’t know anything about the meme coin thing. I don’t know, I can just tell you, I mean President Trump has had nothing to hide; he’s very upfront about it. There are people who watch all the ethics of that, but I mean I’ve got to be concerned with running the House of Representatives—” Johnson said.

The reporter interrupted him to gently remind the speaker that oversight was a congressional responsibility.

“Congress has an oversight responsibility, but I think, so far as I know the ethics are all being followed,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s defense of Trump boiled down to, “Yeah, he may be breaking the rules, but he’s doing it where I can see it. So who cares?”

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are both refusing to confirm whether they will be in Istanbul on Thursday to attend what could be the first direct peace talks between Russia and Ukraine since the start of the war. Instead, they seem stuck in some kind of weird standoff in the hopes of embarrassing one another.

When asked Wednesday what he will do if Putin doesn’t show up, Trump seemed to hint he may not be there, either. 

“I don’t know if he’s showing up, I know he would like me to be there,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “That’s a possibility.… I don’t know that he would be there if I’m not there. We’re going to find out,” the president continued, hinting that he may not be at the talks, despite previously saying he would fly to Istanbul if necessary. 

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov also told reporters Wednesday that a Russian delegation will be at the meetings but would not clarify who exactly until Putin gives “relevant instructions.”

The consequential peace talks were proposed by Putin on Sunday and quickly backed by Trump, though some analysts warn the proposal could be a Russian attempt to stall carrying out the 30-day ceasefire European leaders are demanding, The Washington Post reported. 

“He thinks he may end up with a better set of cards in his hands, but it can of course get worse, and that is the risk for him,” Russian political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov told the Post.  “His reasoning is that he is not convinced Trump will continue military aid to Ukraine.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said he will attend the talks in Istanbul only if Putin himself shows up, complicating the absurd Trump-Putin standoff even further.

The Trump administration is banning all government agencies from doing any work on the upcoming G20 conference, essentially pulling out of a forum of the world’s largest economies, according to two sources who spoke with The Washington Post.

President Trump appears to be following up on threats to boycott the conference, hosted by South Africa in Johannesburg this year, over his outlandish claims that the country is discriminating against white South Africans by taking away their land under a government expropriation law meant to undo years of racial inequality caused by apartheid.

A White House official referred the Post to Trump’s comments Monday accusing South Africa of carrying out a “genocide” against the country’s white citizens and saying that he would not attend the G20 unless the “situation is taken care of.”

“How could we be expected to go to South Africa for the very important G-20 Meeting when Land Confiscation and Genocide is the primary topic of conversation?” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last month. “They are taking the land of white Farmers, and then killing them and their families.”

This week, the White House took the brazenly racist step of accepting white South Africans into the United States as refugees while freezing all other refugee admissions, including ending temporary protected status for refugees fleeing from Afghanistan after the Taliban’s takeover of the country.

The South African government, as well as many white South Africans themselves, have denied Trump’s accusations. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that the Trump administration has “got the wrong end of the stick here.”

“We’ll continue talking to them,” Ramaphosa said of U.S.–South African relations.

The G20 summit is scheduled to take place in November with the theme “Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability,” which undoubtedly rankles Trump and the other conservatives in his administration, who have sought to purge such ideas from the U.S. government.

The move also cedes credibility and economic arguments to China at a conference the U.S. helped create, according to a third unnamed official who spoke to The Washington Post.

“It completely cedes the floor to China,” they said, noting that the Chinese government comes to such events with detailed plans. “Beijing is so organized at these multilateral engagements. This will guarantee they don’t have to face us, which basically leaves the Europeans to uphold Western values on their own.”

The U.S. president’s sudden about-face on Chinese tariffs didn’t happen because he thought it was a strong economic idea but rather because it would hurt “Trump’s people.”

Over the course of April, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and other senior aides impressed on Donald Trump that MAGA supporters across the country would be “in danger” if the tariffs didn’t decrease, reported The Washington Post Wednesday. That was enough of a window to allow Bessent to negotiate with the Chinese government.

“The key argument was that this was beginning to hurt Trump’s supporters—Trump’s people,” an unidentified source briefed on the talks told the Post. “It gave Susie a key window.”

Bessent announced early Monday that U.S. tariffs on China would temporarily decrease from 145 percent to 30 percent for the next 90 days. The suspension followed a multiday meeting in Geneva where Bessent and other U.S. officials met with their Chinese counterparts and temporarily put aside some of their differences. On the flip side, China said it would lower its import tariff on American products to 10 percent from 125 percent.

Both nations agreed to maintain a reciprocal tariff rate of 10 percent, according to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who called the arrangement a “deal.” The extra 20 percent on China is punishment for the country supposedly not doing enough to stop fentanyl from entering the U.S.

It was a stark reversal of what Trump had believed just days prior, when he posted on Truth Social that an “80 percent Tariff on China seems right!”

Markets have been in an anxious state of flux since Trump first announced his sweeping tariff plan, in early April. But not all of the tariffs have stuck around: Duties on Colombian trade, for instance, didn’t last more than a week, while other tariffs were rolled back in less than a day. And when it comes to America’s three biggest trading partners—China, Canada, and Mexico—the White House has reversed course more than half a dozen times.

That rapid change is happening because Trump is simultaneously attempting to fundamentally alter America’s international trade arrangements while trying to skirt any negative repercussions that could stem from the massive overhaul.

“The reason why the tariffs go up and come back down is businesses or markets are pressuring him to back off,” Dartmouth College economist Douglas Irwin told the Post. “The volatility is just reflecting the difficulty of achieving the objectives in a very short span of time.”

And that volatility is hurting the economy.

Droves of financial and economic experts have insisted that tariffs on other nations will only serve to harm America and its markets, making products more expensive stateside and making American consumers less likely to spend their money (something that Trump doesn’t seem to have any problem with, actually). The Harvard Kennedy Business School even floated in April that America’s trade deficit basically doesn’t matter, writing that “Americans earn more from, or earn just about as much from, their total investments abroad as foreigners earn in the United States.”

MAGA is freaking out because the House Republicans’ X account posted in Spanish.

“House Republicans believe in every American’s potential to thrive by embracing the power of work,” the post reads, before repeating the message in Spanish. “Los Republicanos en la Cámara creemos en que cada ciudadano americano tiene el potencial de prosperar y beneficiarse de las oportunidades de trabajo.”

Within minutes, X exploded with comments slamming the GOP account. Many users pointed to Donald Trump’s recent executive order that made English the official language of the United States and ended a Clinton-era mandate that requires federal agencies to provide language assistance to non–English speakers.

“Why is the House GOP tweeting in Spanish? This is America. We speak English here,” MAGA influencer Laura Loomer wrote. “President Trump has literally signed English language executive orders. What the hell is the GOP doing?”

Representative Brandon Gill, who has filed articles of impeachment against a judge who tried to block Trump’s unlawful deportation efforts, slammed his own party’s post. “Is this a joke, @HouseGOP? We’re in America. We represent Americans,” he wrote. “We don’t pander in foreign languages. Speak English.”

One post apparently wasn’t enough for the 31-year-old xenophobic lawmaker. “‘Press 2 for English’ is a losing message, @HouseGOP,” he posted minutes later.

Others called for the swift firing of whoever was responsible for the post.

“Whoever is operating this account should be fired immediately,” wrote Auron McIntyre, host of the far-right news site The Blaze.

“I have it on good authority that it is being run by Gus Walz, the son of Gov. Tim Walz,” Dane Scalise, a county commissioner in North Carolina responded sarcastically to McIntyre.

The post is a rare display of bilingualism from Trump’s Republican Party, which dismantled the White House’s official Spanish language website almost immediately upon taking office.