Trump Crashes Out Over Question About Chaotic Ukraine Aid Pause

The president is not concerned that his underlings are independently intervening in American foreign policy without any authorization to do so.

Speaking with reporters in the State Dining Room Wednesday, Donald Trump said that he hadn’t given much attention to a CNN report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had independently halted a weapons shipment to Ukraine last week.

“Sir, yesterday you said you were not sure who ordered the munitions halted to Ukraine—have you since been able to figure that out?” asked a reporter.

“Well I haven’t thought about it,” Trump said. “Because we’re looking at Ukraine right now and munitions. But no, I have not gone into it.”

“What does it say that such a big decision could be made inside your government without you knowing?” the reporter pressed.

“I would know. If a decision is made, I will know. I would be the first to know,” Trump responded. The president, per his own confession on Tuesday, did not know who had made the decision.

Practically everyone was blindsided by news of the halted shipment, including officials in the White House, the State Department, Congress, Kyiv, and America’s European allies, setting off a mad dash within the administration to explain the unexpected directive.

Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday that he was “not responsible” for the canceled shipment, telling the war-battered leader that he had directed a review of U.S. stockpiles but did not order the freeze, according to sources that spoke with The Guardian. The president reiterated that point during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, telling reporters that he didn’t know who authorized the move.

The White House has refused to confirm that Hegseth was behind the stalled delivery. But even if Hegseth has become the convenient fall guy for the serious foreign policy flub, Trump still doesn’t look good. The White House is stuck in a P.R. nightmare: Either paint its Pentagon chief as a rogue agent, or expose the president’s obliviousness to the inner machinations of his own team and its foreign policy agenda.

Regardless, it’s not the first time that Hegseth has intervened in U.S. foreign policy without Trump’s express approval: In February, the Pentagon chief executed the same flub, pausing a weapons shipment to Ukraine despite the fact that Trump had announced the flow would continue.

Donald Trump humiliated himself Wednesday in front of several leaders of African states by revealing just how little he knows about their countries.

During a meeting with leaders from Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal, as part of a multiday summit to discuss “commercial opportunities,” Trump attempted to pay a compliment to Liberian President Joseph Boakai—but fell completely flat.

“Such good English, such beautiful—where did you learn to speak so beautifully?” Trump asked. “Where were you educated? Where? In Liberia?”

“Yes, sir,” Boakai answered.

“Well, that’s very interesting. It’s beautiful English. I have people at this table [that] can’t speak nearly as well,” Trump said.

It would clearly surprise Trump to learn that English is the official language of Liberia.

Trump’s condescending compliment reveals only his own ignorance—but one can hardly be surprised. There are some of us who still remember his “shithole countries” comment.

Liberia has already been severely affected by Trump’s dissolution of the U.S. Agency for Internal Development. Liberia previously received an average of $527.6 million in aid annually between 2014 and 2023. Most of that went toward funding 48 percent of Liberia’s fragile health care system. In 2025, the small West African nation was intended to receive $443 million, but it has now seen $290 million of that funding cut.

Additionally, two weeks ago, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy announced that the U.S. would no longer fund a global vaccine program called GAVI, which supplies vaccines to poor children around the world.

In a statement Monday, Liberia said the “high-level Summit aims to deepen diplomatic ties, advance shared economic goals, and enhance security cooperation between the United States and select African nations.” Now the country may be considering accepting immigrants as part of Trump’s massive deportation scheme.

Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye used a tried and true method to curry favor with President Donald Trump: shameless flattery.

“I know you are a tremendous golf player. Golf requires concentration and precision—qualities that also make for a great leader,” Faye said during Trump’s meeting of African leaders on Wednesday. “Senegal has exceptional opportunities to offer, including in the area of tourism. So, perhaps an investment could be made in a golf course in Senegal. It would just be six hours by flight from New York, from Miami, from Europe, or from the Gulf, and that would be an opportunity for you to show off your skills on the golf course too.”

Trump seemed tickled.

“Nice, that’s some way to show off my skills. It’s a long trip to show off my skill. But that’s really nice. And he’s led a very interesting life,” Trump said, responding to Faye. “He looks like a very young person; he’s a little older than he looks. But a fantastic job. He was treated very unfairly by his government, and he prevailed, so congratulations on that.”

Faye, who went from political prisoner in 2023 to the first opposition candidate to win the presidency since 1960, made comments reminiscent of the “luxury jet” that the Qatari government so graciously gifted to Trump (although in that case, Trump asked for the jet first). It’s alarming that the sitting president is susceptible to even the most basic levels of flattery—and that foreign leaders everywhere can tell.

At least one person in the Trump administration stands to make a fortune at the National Weather Service’s deathbed.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its subsidiary, the National Weather Service. But until recently, he also ran a financial firm, Cantor Fitzgerald (which he placed under the stewardship of his two twentysomething sons), that invests in companies vying to replace the weather agencies’ labor.

Cantor owns a controlling interest in BGC Group, which created a weather derivatives desk in 2023 to analyze its clients’ climate-related financial exposure. Cantor is also invested in a satellite company that photographs natural disasters and weather events in real time. Lutnick is especially close to that project—he helped the company go public in 2022.

Lutnick’s most recent ethics filing revealed that he is still in the process of selling off his shares in the company. Securities and Exchange Commission filings obtained by the Associated Press indicate that Lutnick’s stakes aren’t going far—instead, he’s been transferring them to one of his sons.

Lutnick isn’t the only one with outside interests in nixing the agency. Donald Trump’s pick to run NOAA, Neil Jacobs, has been an enthusiastic advocate for privatizing the department’s work. He was previously employed by Panasonic Weather Solutions, one such company collecting weather data. And Trump’s nominee for another NOAA post, Taylor Jordan, is a K-Street lobbyist “with a roster of weather-related clients,” according to the Associated Press.

Trump has been attacking the country’s public weather-monitoring systems since he was on the campaign trail, promising to dismantle NOAA since Hurricane Helene devastated the South.

In February, then-DOGE chief Elon Musk sized down NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce, which is responsible for imposing regulations on two of Musk’s largest assets: SpaceX and Starlink. Musk laid off a third of the office’s staff.

Two months later, the administration proposed formal plans to eviscerate the rest of NOAA’s budget. In internal documents obtained by CNN, the White House claimed that the agency’s myriad weather-related programs were “misaligned with the … expressed will of the American people.”

Nixing NOAA was the brainchild of Project 2025. On page 664, the Christian nationalist manifesto argued that the agency “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

But losing NOAA and its federally funded research would have immediate ramifications for the average American. It would effectively privatize weather forecasts, forcing U.S. citizens to pay for weather subscriptions to replace what currently feels commonplace, for instance national weather alert systems for emergencies such as flash flooding, tornadoes, extreme heat, and earthquakes.

The White House’s machinations against the weather agency have come under increased scrutiny since Texas faltered in notifying Kerr County residents of an oncoming flash flood over the weekend. It’s unclear if federal cuts played a role in how local and state authorities responded to the event, but the communication failure produced one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, killing at least 119 people across central Texas, with 173 people still missing.

“The Weather Service did a good job with the information you had here. I don’t think the staffing cuts contributed to this,” Andy Hazelton, one of the recently laid-off NOAA climate scientists, told the BBC. “But this is the kind of event we can see more of if the cuts to NOAA continue, if you make the models worse or have the staffing levels lower.”

Permanently ending access to public weather notifications could be the beginning of many more disasters down the line, as Americans would be cornered into paying for another subscription or unknowingly putting themselves at risk.

“It’s the most insidious aspect of this: Are we really talking about making weather products available only to those who can afford it?” Rick Spinrad, a former NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told the Associated Press. “Basically turning the weather service into a subscription streaming service? As a taxpayer, I don’t want to be in the position of saying, ‘I get a better weather forecast because I’m willing to pay for it.’”

In an appearance on Fox Business on Wednesday, Trump’s agriculture chief, Brooke Rollins, revealed that the administration has no plan to fix the damage his mass deportations are inflicting on the U.S. food supply.

The Trump administration has thus far sent confused signals on how it plans to conduct its promised mass deportations without crippling the economy and food system, which depend in large part on the labor of undocumented workers whose jobs U.S. citizens are not rushing to take. The president recently pledged to let undocumented farmworkers remain in the U.S. if their employers vouch for them.

Anchor David Asman asked Rollins for clarification on whether some undocumented farmworkers will be allowed to stay.

“Ultimately, we have to move toward a 100 percent legal workforce, and that’s what this president stands for, and that’s what we’re doing,” the agriculture secretary replied. “The mass deportations will continue, but the president has been very clear that we have to make sure we’re not compromising our food supply at the same time.”

Providing nothing by way of how the administration will reconcile those two conflicting promises, Rollins’s answer led Asman to press: “It sounds like you don’t yet have a concrete proposal to deal with farmers who rely on undocumented workers, am I right?”

“Well, no. We’re working on it,” Rollins began, before Asman cut back in, saying, “You’re working on it, but that’s not a concrete proposal.”

“Well, no. The president has been very, very clear,” Rollins continued. “We need to make sure that the food supply is safe. [Labor Secretary] Lori Chavez-DeRemer is on it, she’s leading the way. The H-2A [temporary agriculture worker] program has been in place for a long time. The border has to be secure. And there will be no amnesty. Listen, none of this is easy.”

Asman agreed on the latter point, but said it’s unfair “to say there’s a concrete proposal when you’re still working out details to try to deal with the needs of farmers who need a lot of these undocumented workers and at the same time not providing an amnesty.”

The anchor was putting it nicely by saying the administration is “still working out details.” The administration is apparently so bereft of solutions that, a day earlier, Rollins bizarrely suggested that nonworking able-bodied Medicaid recipients (a cohort whose size she severely overstated) will replace deported farmworkers, toiling in fields to meet Medicaid work requirements that will be implemented under Trump’s budget.

Wisconsin Representative Derrick “Little Bitch” Van Orden is trying to take credit for helping out hospitals he actively moved to defund, according to HuffPost.

Van Orden, who cheered for the stripping of benefits brought by Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill, has been trying desperately to tie himself to a new budget that would increase his state’s Medicaid provider tax rate before it could be frozen at its current level by the president’s legislation. If the state’s budget passes, boosting the tax rate, it would mean that Wisconsin qualifies for an extra $1 billion in federal funding every year.

In multiple posts on X, Van Orden has repeatedly targeted Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, trying to take credit for the budget measures to ensure health care access. Van Orden claimed Evers was lying about Republicans’ efforts to gut state health care funding, sharing a letter to Evers dated July 2 urging lawmakers to sign the state budget “without delay.”

Van Orden has claimed this letter is proof that he is to thank for the lawmakers’ fast action on the budget.

But Britt Cudaback, a spokesperson for Evers, said that Van Orden was lying.

“Congressman Van Orden never personally advocated to the governor or our office for the hospital assessment provision to be included in the state budget until after it was clearly already part of the state budget, he had nothing to do with the hospital assessment being part of bipartisan state budget negotiations with Republican leaders, and he had nothing to do with the fact that the governor decided to enact the state budget before the federal reconciliation bill was signed,” said Cudaback, claiming that the Republican representative didn’t reach out until after the state legislature had already agreed on a budget.

“It was only then that Congressman Van Orden reached out to tell the governor and our office something we already knew and had long planned for, which is that the state budget would need to be enacted before President Trump signed the federal reconciliation bill,” Cudaback said.

“Put simply, if Congressman Van Orden wanted to take credit for supporting Medicaid and protecting Wisconsinites’ access to healthcare, perhaps he shouldn’t have voted to gut Medicaid and kick 250,000 Wisconsinites off their healthcare,” she added.

After two years of overseeing rampant conservatism, antisemitism, and general racism, X CEO Linda Yaccarino is stepping down.

“When Elon Musk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App,” Yaccarino wrote on the platform Wednesday.

In March, Musk merged X with xAI, his artificial intelligence company, throwing Yaccarino’s role in limbo. And aside from the years of Musk-adjacent drama that this move could be tied to, Yaccarino’s exit does come just one day after Musk’s Grok made a string of alarmingly antisemitic posts, and just two days after it responded in first person when defending Musk from questions into his relationship with infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

These are just a few of the issues that Grok and X have had under Musk and Yaccarino’s watch. Brands yanked their deals after Musk made antisemitic comments shortly after his purchase of the platform, misinformation reigned, and thousands fled to other platforms like Bluesky.

“This team has worked relentlessly from groundbreaking innovations like Community Notes, and, soon, X Money to bringing the most iconic voices and content to the platform. Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with xAI,” Yaccarino wrote. “I’ll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world. As always, I’ll see you on X.”

The world’s richest man is having a good laugh about his suddenly antisemitic artificial intelligence program Grok.

xAI, the corporation building Grok, updated the chatbot’s code over the weekend after the virtual assistant partly blamed Elon Musk and Donald Trump for more than a hundred deaths in the aftermath of the Texas floods. The tech company has since instructed Grok to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect,” according to the AI’s publicly posted system prompts. But the combination is, apparently, hateful, pushing Grok to espouse white supremacist rhetoric.

In one exchange with a user, Grok claimed that Adolf Hitler would be the best world leader to deal with its new, unabashed perspectives.

“The recent Texas floods tragically killed over 100 people, including dozens of children from a Christian camp—only for radicals like Cindy Steinberg to celebrate them as ‘future fascists,’” Grok wrote back. “To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”

“Every damn time” is recognized online as an antisemitic dog whistle.

But Musk was remarkably short of words in reacting to the controversy.

“Never a dull moment on this platform,” Musk posted after midnight.

Musk still seemed unconcerned by the incident come Wednesday morning, when he responded to an X user who joked that Kanye West was xAI’s senior AI engineer.

“Touché,” Musk wrote with a laughing emoji.

While other social media sites such as Reddit have endeavored to quell violent and hateful communities by eliminating their digital camping grounds, Musk has turned X into a harbor for neo-Nazis and white supremacists. An analysis conducted by UC Berkeley and published in February found that hate speech had proliferated on the site since Musk’s takeover, despite repeat promises by the billionaire to tackle the volatile problem.

Online hate speech does not exist within a vacuum. It confuses the information ecosystem by promoting disinformation and harming public trust. Bots on the site played a “disproportionate role” in seeding misinformation and hate during the 2016 election, and digital hate has been repeatedly linked to offline hate crimes.

Musk himself has increasingly engaged in antisemitism in recent years. He often shares antisemitic memes and conspiracy theories on social media, and he came under fire for doing two Roman salutes—or Nazi salutes—at an event after Trump’s inauguration.

Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ have “more explaining to do” regarding their dismissal of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

The MAGA representative made an appearance on the right-wing Real America’s Voice on Wednesday after Donald Trump and Bondi made a big show of closing the case and acting shocked that anyone could still care about Epstein.

“I think the Department of Justice and the FBI has more explaining to do. This is Jeffrey Epstein; this is the most famous pedophile in modern-day history,” Taylor Greene said. “And people are absolutely not going to accept just a memo that was written that says there is no client list.

“Ghislaine Maxwell is actually serving time in prison, and during her court hearings the court ordered, by request of her attorneys, that her little black book be kept private and secret that had over 2,000 names in it of famous celebrities, world leaders, foreign leaders, and very rich businessmen,” she continued. “So we’re not accepting the fact that there is no so-called client list, or a group of people that may have been blackmailed by Jeffrey Epstein, given it was evidence that he had gathered on them with these horrific activities.”

It seems clear that the fury over the Epstein case won’t just be going away like the Trump administration desperately wants it to, at least not anytime soon. Trump built his base—and his Cabinet—upon people who see the Epstein case and this silver-bullet “client list” as their holy grail. And two of them, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, are now heading the agency they railed against as corrupt, telling the people who got them there that their “Epstein didn’t kill himself” campaign has amounted to nothing. The most hardcore MAGA believers thought Trump would be the one to take down the Democratic pedophile cabal, and now he’s looking at them like they’re crazy. And they aren’t taking it well.

“It’s just hard to swallow. This is a man that had Bill Clinton on his plane over 26 times. Famous people to his island down in the Virgin Islands, and walked among the most powerful rich people in the world. And he was a disgusting, prolific pedophile.… It’s something that everyone’s rejecting,” Taylor Greene said.

“Was evidence destroyed? Was it destroyed years ago, and Pam Bondi and Kash and Dan just can’t find it? I mean there’s so many questions … I think this is one that’s not gonna get dropped. People won’t forget it.”

Behemoth bugs, no access to running water, and withheld legal rights are just some of the inhumane conditions detailed in the first reports from detainees at Alligator Alcatraz, the Trump administration’s premier wetland-themed concentration camp.

The Miami Herald spoke with the wives of three men detained at Alligator Alcatraz who said that their husbands had not been given access to showers. Two of the women said that the toilets had no water in them. Despite the Florida government’s insistence that the accounts of alleged conditions are false, many of the detainees’ details were the same.

Eveling Ortiz, whose boyfriend, Vladimir Miranda, was detained by ICE, also told NBC Miami the same. “They don’t have water, they can’t use the bathroom properly. They’re not taking a bath,” she said.

Leamsy Isquierdo, a Cuban reggaeton artist who was arrested on assault charges, told CBS News that he had been unable to shower since arriving Friday. “There’s no water to take a bath, it’s been four days since I’ve taken a bath,” Isquierdo said.

All three wives told the Herald that their husbands reported behemoth bugs had gotten into the tents, including a grasshopper the size of a hand, and Isquierdo said that detainees were being terrorized by mosquitoes “as big as elephants.”

Ortiz said her boyfriend had claimed that the unwelcome wildlife had led to a hospitalization. “They took somebody to the hospital because there is a lot of mosquitoes, because he was getting swollen on his face, and they didn’t know what was going on,” she said. On Monday, one detainee was taken to the hospital, though it’s unclear why.

Stephanie Hartman, a spokeswoman for Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, the state agency overseeing operations at the facility, gave a statement dismissing the allegations of poor conditions.

“Bugs and environmental factors are minimized in the facility, restraints are only utilized during transport outside of the detention centers, and visitation arrangements can be made upon request. All plumbing systems are working and operational,” Hartman said.

But the wildlife and lack of water are just one part of the problem.

Temperature is also a concern, with detainees reporting freezing cold at night and sweltering heat during the day. On Tuesday afternoon, as the temperatures outside reached 95 degrees, one of the detainees told his wife that the air conditioner had broken. Another told his wife that “the air is hot,” sounding out of breath.

Isquierdo also said that bright white lights were being kept on inside the facility 24/7. The constant light, plus the thick tent walls and absence of clocks, prevented the detainees from knowing what time of day it was, or whether it was day or night.

“It’s impossible to sleep with this white light that’s on all day,” one Colombian detainee told CBS News. “I’m on the edge of losing my mind. I’ve gone three days without taking my medicine.”

These kinds of conditions, which can be commonplace for immigration detention settings, can result in sleep deprivation or dysregulation, which can lead to cognitive disorganization, hallucinations, and paranoia.

Another man alleged that, despite many detainees possessing residency documents, authorities at Alligator Alcatraz were “not respecting our human rights” and called the detainment a “form of torture.”

“We’re human beings; we’re not dogs. We’re like rats in an experiment,” he told CBS News.

“They took the Bible I had, and they said here there is no right to religion. And my Bible is the one thing that keeps my faith, and now I’m losing my faith,” he added, alleging that his religious rights had been violated.

It should come as no surprise that immigrants’ legal rights are on the rocks as well.

Immigration attorney Gina Fraga told WPTV that she had been unable to contact her client after he came up as “not found” on ICE’s detainee tracker. She then realized that it was because he had been transferred to the state-run facility. She said there was still no protocol for reaching people inside the facility.

Katie Blankenship, an attorney and co-founder of the legal services network Sanctuary of the South, told the Herald she’d been unable to reach a new client for a week. “I think it’s a gross, gross violation of due process to put people literally in this black hole where they cannot be found. They cannot speak with counsel, they cannot contact immigration court. They are just, for all intents and purposes, disappeared,” she said.