Vladimir Putin Is Playing Trump Like a Fiddle

In an unsurprising development, President Trump has failed to stop any of the death and destruction caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine—a conflict he promised to end “in 24 hours” on the campaign trail.

A report from The New York Times documents how Trump’s “embrace” of Putin and the Kremlin, previously unheard of from a Republican, has only resulted in Russia doubling down on its aggression. The only new developments are negative, as Trump verbalized his frustration with Putin’s continual refusal to commit to a ceasefire deal after Russia carried out its largest bombing campaign in Ukraine to date last weekend.

“What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday night. “He’s playing with fire!” Trump has even floated placing sanctions on Putin.

Trump would have you believe that he and Putin go way back. The 2016 Russian investigations seemed to give Trump the idea that he had a real connection with the Kremlin. After leaving office, he constantly heaped praise on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and when he returned to the White House, he eliminated the Justice Department office responsible for collecting evidence of Russian war crimes for international court prosecution. Now Putin is ignoring Trump and committing more war crimes.

“The president is the last one to figure out that Vladimir Putin doesn’t want a peace deal, that he’s playing for time, and he’s been playing the president, and it’s about time the president wakes up and understands that,” said New Hampshire Senator Jeanne, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Trump has been thoroughly outwitted and out-strongmanned here. The least he can do is continue to acknowledge that and provide Ukraine with the actual material and political support it needs, rather than berating its president like a child.

“It does sound like, from his various comments, that Trump is starting to understand what was clear from the beginning of all of this, which is Russia is the problem here,” the Center for a New American Security’s Richard Fontaine told the Times. “Russia is the obstacle, Russia is the reason this war started in the first place, not Ukraine.”

The Trump administration is escalating its war on international students by moving to cancel the visas of Chinese students in the U.S.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday night that the White House would work to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese nationals who are studying in “critical fields” or have ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Rubio also said that the State Department would “enhance scrutiny” of all visa applications from China, including Hong Kong.

The administration’s decision will likely escalate tensions between China and the U.S. and cause issues on university campuses, as students from China make up the second-largest nationality among international students in the country. In 2024, 20 percent of student visas to the United States were granted to Chinese nationals, and there are an estimated 275,000 Chinese students currently in the U.S.

Universities across the country depend on Chinese students in their research laboratories, and the fact that many pay full tuition is of great financial benefit. Chinese students electing to further their education in the U.S. are often the most academically talented students.

It’s not clear what Rubio meant by “critical fields,” although U.S. officials have been worried about Chinese researchers in the physical sciences, according to The New York Times. Rubio also didn’t elaborate on how the U.S. will determine affiliations and loyalties to the CCP, leaving open the possibility that authorities could draw such conclusions on individuals without evidence, as they have with Salvadoran and Venezuelan immigrants regarding gang membership.

The move is latest salvo on international students by the White House, which has sought to revoke visas and deport students from other countries on dubious grounds ranging from alleged antisemitism to allegedly smuggling embryos into the country that were actually brought for research purposes, and various minor infractions, including one case of a Japanese student who caught too many fish on a church trip.

Rubio’s announcement is also the latest provocation of China by President Trump, who inflamed ties with Beijing with his ill-planned tariffs before backtracking earlier this month. Will China retaliate against this attack on its students in the U.S., and will Trump stick to this decision or once again chicken out?

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller warned that the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests are about to grow exponentially.

The Trump administration’s ghoulish immigration politico said on Fox News Wednesday that he and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem were looking to set a goal of a “minimum 3,000 arrests for ICE every day” to reach a target of one million deportations a year.

“President Trump is gonna keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day so we can get all of the Biden illegals who were flooded into our country, out of our country,” he added.

Already, there has been a marked increase in deportations under Donald Trump. In the first 100 days of the Trump administration, ICE said it had removed a whopping 65,000 people. By comparison, ICE arrested 759 immigrants a day during the final stretch of the Biden administration.

Last week, ICE embarked on a nationwide sweep of arrests at immigration courts, dismissing immigrants’ legal cases just moments before taking them into custody.

Despite assurances from members of the Republican Party that Trump’s immigration crackdown would focus primarily on criminals, many of the individuals being detained have no criminal record. Some of them are U.S. citizens or legal residents and children. It’s clear that imposing such a high quota will lead to wrongful arrests on increasingly shaky legal grounds.

Boosting immigration enforcement will come with a hefty price tag: Congress’s latest budget bill has earmarked an additional $150 billion over five years to further the president’s immigration agenda. ICE has already begun to line the pockets of private prison companies to expand the government immigrant detention capacity with new facilities.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” report cites fabricated studies and draws the wrong conclusions.

The secretary of health and human services brags that the report, released last week, is based on “gold-standard” science drawn from over 500 studies and other sources. But in reality, NOTUS found, its citations are error-ridden, with missing links, incorrect conclusions, and sometimes even made-up studies.

In one case, the supposed author of a study on anxiety in adolescents, epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, was surprised to find she was cited in the report for a paper she didn’t even write.

“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told the publication in an email. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”

In fact, the study in question—“Changes in mental health and substance abuse among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic”—may not have been written by anyone. The link to it in the report doesn’t work, and the citation claims that it appeared in the twelfth issue of the 176th edition of the journal JAMA Pediatrics, which doesn’t contain a study with that title.

That isn’t the only study cited by the MAHA report that doesn’t seem to exist. Two studies cited in a section titled the “corporate capture of media” about how drug advertisements have led to more ADHD and antidepressant prescriptions being written for kids don’t show up in scientific journals, according to NOTUS. One of its listed authors told the publication that he never wrote such a paper, and another author may not exist—they don’t have a digital footprint.

In other parts of the MAHA report, conclusions are drawn from papers that don’t even touch on the topics or methods Kennedy’s report cites, and other researchers cited in the report claim their studies were mischaracterized. Kennedy doesn’t seem to be aware of the issues in the report, extolling how great it is on social media.

“Never in American history has the federal government taken a position on public health like this,” Kennedy said, according to a White House post on X.

Kennedy has a long history of pushing medical misinformation. A well-known anti-vaccine activist, his tenure as HHS secretary has been marked by questionable decisions and statements. Kennedy has stopped the department from recommending Covid vaccines for children and pregnant women, claimed that the measles vaccine contains aborted fetuses, and pushed for fluoride to be removed from state water supplies, among many other misguided decisions.

Earlier this week, Kennedy threatened to bar scientists in the National Institutes of Health from publishing their work in the world’s leading medical journals, claiming that the publications are “corrupt.” That was before he published his error-riddled report, though. Earlier this month, Kennedy did say something that is worth following: He said the public should not look to him for medical advice. Considering how much information in his signature report appears to be made up, that sounds like a good idea.

Elon Musk’s proximity to Donald Trump offered him unparalleled influence on the U.S. president—influence that he tried to weaponize.

The tech executive openly objected last month to a massive data-center deal in the works between OpenAI—one of Musk’s rival companies in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence—and the United Arab Emirates, according to White House sources that spoke with The New York Times. He complained to Trump’s AI adviser David Sacks, protested the deal to other White House officials, and claimed that the arrangement shouldn’t go to OpenAI, citing fairness toward other AI companies.

Meanwhile, Musk tried to shoehorn his own AI company, xAI, into the deal, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. He failed.

The problem arose when Musk learned that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman would be joining Trump on his tour of several Middle Eastern countries. News of the emerging deal made Musk angry, according to the Journal. So angry that he insisted on joining the trip, appearing beside the U.S. president in Saudi Arabia. Musk also threatened members of G42, an Emirati AI development firm controlled by the brother of UAE’s president, claiming that the deal would not move forward unless his company xAI was one of the startups involved.

Musk did manage to land himself a massive business deal during Trump’s trip. On the second day, Musk announced Saudi Arabia had approved the use of Starlink within the country.

Musk’s exit from the government has been swift and complicated as key players across Trumpworld turned against the world’s richest man. In the few short months that Musk ran DOGE, reports emerged that practically everyone in the White House hated him. He had stomped on the toes of Trump’s Cabinet, failing to consult them before paring down federal agencies technically under their control. Earlier this week, Musk whined that DOGE had become a “whipping boy” for the administration’s failures. He told CBS that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” was actually a bad idea.

Musk was Trump’s top financial backer in the 2024 election, spending at least $250 million in the final months of the president’s campaign after Trump was shot in July. Musk had also promised to funnel funds toward other Republicans, declaring in the wake of the November election that his super PACs would “play a significant role in primaries.” In the following months, Musk threatened to use his money to fund primary challengers to Trump’s agenda and go after Democrats, and that he would be preparing “for the midterms and any intermediate elections, as well as looking at elections at the district attorney level.”

The week after Trump returned from the Middle East trip, however, Musk announced at the Qatar Economic Forum that he had “done enough” political spending.

“I think in terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” Musk said.

Representative Ashley Hinson told a town hall audience on Wednesday that God saved Trump’s life last July, when a would-be assassin narrowly missed him “for a reason.” She was met with an overwhelming chorus of boos.

Tuesday was Mike Flood’s turn. On Wednesday, Hinson started hearing it from her constituents during her prepared remarks, well before she opened up the floor to questions.

“We were seeing hardworking men and women in Iowa and our country feel like their voices were not heard. Families in Iowa have told me for the last four years that we wanna make sure we have safe streets, we have affordable groceries and gas,” Hinson said. “And that kids have the opportunity to live out the American dream. That is what President Trump is delivering for us. The president is, I believe, fighting for you and fighting for me—”

“NOOO!” the crowd roared in reaction to Hinson’s last claim.

Hinson dug in deeper.

“And I think God saved President Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, for a reason. I think that he is helping us to save and redirect the future of our country. He is helping deport criminal illegal aliens rather than letting them roam our streets freely—”

Another explosion of boos and angry jeers erupted, with one “You liar!” rising distinctly above the frustrated din of the crowd. Some members of the crowd started calling her a fraud.

It keeps happening when Republican representatives and senators are forced to reckon with the politically corrosive, corrupt actions of the Trump administration. They’re forced to reckon with their own actions too. The “big, beautiful” budget bill—which is expected to leave 13.7 million people without health insurance by 2034 while giving tax cuts to the wealthiest—is just the latest example.

FBI Director Kash Patel lost his cool when asked a simple question about his wildly overdue budget.

During an interview on Fox News Wednesday, Patel clumsily dodged a question when host Brett Baier asked whether he ever planned to provide a complete budget for the fiscal year 2026, after missing the deadline to turn one over.

“Do I have a budget at the FBI? Sure, of course I do. But the Office of Management Budget at the White House sets the budget for the United States government. And so, if they have a budget which we agree with, they need to roll that out. And they’re doing so on their one timeline, and working with Congress on that,” Patel said.

Patel continued, insisting that “we’re not the guys running around on private jets.”

“And somebody, maybe in Congress, should ask for how many flights on a private jet Director [James] Comey took or my predecessor, Director [Chistopher] Wray, took and how many personal trips they took,” Patel said.

“I know they want to take pot shots at me, but I have been working nonstop on this job, including pretty much every single weekend. And somebody should ask the tens of millions of dollars that were wasted on personal junkets by prior FBI directors before lecturing me on a budget for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he continued.

Patel’s rant about aircraft comes after he faced scrutiny from lawmakers over reports that he used government planes for his own personal use to travel from his home in Las Vegas, visit his girlfriend in Nashville, and attend sporting events.

Earlier this month, Patel testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee without the spending plan he was required by law to complete. When asked for a timeline on when he planned to have it done, Patel said he had no timeline.

Despite his failure to provide a detailed budget, Patel requested a whopping total of $10.1 billion in salaries and expenses to carry out the FBI’s mission—$1 billion more than the current budget. This presented a problem, as Donald Trump had planned to cut the agency’s budget by $1 billion.

The president is trying to overstep the judiciary in his quest to defang America’s newsrooms.

On Truth Social late Wednesday, Donald Trump claimed that his defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board had forced the journalism association to rescind an award they had given to The Washington Post and The New York Times in 2018 for investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race and its ties to Trump’s campaign.

But in reality, a Florida court had simply allowed the case to progress.

“BREAKING! In a major WIN in our powerful lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board regarding the illegal and defamatory ‘Award’ of their once highly respected ‘Prize,’ to fake, malicious stories on the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, by the Failing New York Times and the Washington Compost, the Florida Appellate Court viciously rejected the Defendants’ corrupt attempt to halt the case,” Trump wrote.

“They won a Pulitzer Prize for totally incorrect reporting about the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax,” he continued. “Now they admit it was a SCAM, never happened, and their reporting was totally wrong, in fact, the exact opposite of the TRUTH.

“They’ll have to give back their ‘Award.’ They were awarded for false reporting, and we can’t let that happen in the United States of America,” the president said. “We are holding the Fake News Media responsible for their LIES to the American People, so we can, together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

In 2021, Trump contacted the Pulitzer Board asking them to “strip” the country’s highest journalism honor from the teams that had investigated him. After a thorough and independent review of the stories, the board determined that the articles were verifiably accurate. It rejected Trump’s request on the basis that the “the separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”

But Trump took issue with that language. In reaction, he sued 20 members on the Pulitzer Board, claiming that the statement defending the award amounted to defamation.

Three years later, in a seven-page opinion issued Wednesday, Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal ruled that the case could move forward—despite protestations from the defendants that this would violate due process and that Trump’s expanded presidential immunity prohibited such a suit. In the opinion, the appeals court wrote that “such privileges are afforded to the President alone, not to his litigation adversaries,” noting that only Trump could assert his immunity privileges and that he had not done so in this case.

“Allowing any president to pursue civil claims against private citizens in state court while simultaneously claiming that private citizens cannot pursue civil claims against him in the same exact court is extremely troubling and should raise concerns for all Americans. The Pulitzer Board is evaluating next steps and remains committed to continuing our defense of journalism,” a spokesperson for the board said in a statement in March, when the same court rejected their request to pause the case until Trump leaves office.

A Harvard University scientist detained by immigration authorities for over three months was granted bail by a federal judge Wednesday in a rebuke to the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge Christina Reiss ruled that Kseniia Petrova’s detention and the revocation of her J-1 visa for failing to declare frog embryos at Boston’s Logan Airport in February should not have happened, and raised serious legal concerns.

“There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions,” Reiss said in her ruling, adding that the samples Petrova brought into the U.S. were “wholly non-hazardous, non-toxic, non-living, and posed a threat to no one.”

“Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” Reiss added, which the Trump administration has said it plans to do. Petrova has said that she fears returning to the country due to her protests against the war in Ukraine.

Over three months ago, Petrova arrived back in the U.S. from a vacation in France with frog embryo samples, which she agreed to bring from a laboratory affiliated with her own at the request of her supervisor at Harvard Medical School. When her bags were inspected at the airport, a customs official immediately canceled her visa and began deportation proceedings.

“What happened in this case was extraordinary and novel,” Reiss said. If she did not take action in Petrova’s case, Reiss said that “there will be no determination” if Petrova’s constitutional rights were violated.

Petrova was recruited from Russia in 2023 to work at Harvard’s Kirschner Lab, studying the earliest stages of cell development as part of the lab’s work to find ways to repair cell damage that leads to diseases such as cancer. She has admitted to failing to declare the embryo samples, and her lawyer says that this would normally be punished with a minor fine.

Petrova still may not be released, as she also faces felony charges in Massachusetts for allegedly smuggling the embryos into the U.S., and is currently in federal custody in Louisiana. For now, though, Reiss’s ruling is another rebuke to an administration that is trying to fast-track mass deportations of immigrants while ignoring the law.