Trump Asked Ukraine’s Zelenskiy Shocking Question in Private Call

As President Trump’s heart hardens against Russian President Vladimir Putin, he recently asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy whether he could strike the Russian capital if provided long-range weaponry by the United States, according to recent reports.

On Tuesday, The Financial Times reported that Trump, in a July 4 phone call, asked Zelenskiy, “Volodymyr, can you hit Moscow?” and also inquired as to whether he could hit St. Petersburg, the second-largest Russian city.

“Absolutely. We can if you give us the weapons,” Zelenskiy is said to have replied. Trump was apparently open to this, reportedly mentioning a strategy to “make them [Russians] feel the pain” to pressure Putin to negotiate a peace deal.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius seemingly reported on the same conversation on Monday, writing that Trump had reportedly asked why Zelenskiy “didn’t hit Moscow,” and urged Ukraine to “put more pressure” on the two Russian cities in order to get Putin to the table.

Ignatius also wrote that Trump’s recently announced batch of military aid to Ukraine could include permission to use American-made long-range ATACMS missiles Ukraine currently possesses, which would allow it to strike deeper into Russia—but not so far as to reach the two cities Trump reportedly mentioned in his phone call.

President Biden in November 2024, to the chagrin of some Trump allies, had allowed Ukraine to use ATACMS, leading the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. to accuse him of trying to “get World War Three going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives.”

Ignatius reports that Trump has also considered granting Ukraine’s request for Tomahawk cruise missiles, which would be able to reach Moscow and St. Petersburg, but these remain off the delivery list for the time being.

The president has toughened his stance on Russia in recent days. On Monday, Trump threatened to slap massive tariffs on countries that trade with Russia and announced that the U.S. would send Patriot air defense missiles to Ukraine.

Trump’s newly reported conversation with Zelenskiy provides the most recent—and perhaps most striking—evidence that he is beginning to sour on Putin, as he increasingly comes to grips with the notion that the Russian president might not be the good-faith actor he once took him to be.

House Republicans on Monday struck down a Democratic-led effort to release the Epstein files in their entirety. The Republican-majority House Rules committee voted 6-5 to block an amendment that would force the Department of Justice to make all files publicly accessible.

Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina was the only Republican to vote for their release.

“Whose side are you on? That’s really what this Epstein file issue has become,” Representative Ro Khanna, who introduced the amendment, told MSNBC on Monday. “It’s not just about knowing who’s being protected, the rich and the powerful, in terms of who had interaction with Jeffrey Epstein. It’s the sense that people have that the government is too beholden to certain interests, who have their thumb on the scale. And that they’re not working for ordinary people.... This is something that many Republicans believe should happen.”

This is perhaps the most intense test of allegiance that the MAGA movement has faced so far. Trump didn’t just break a major promise by closing the Epstein case; he did so with indignation, as if his supporters were crazy for still talking about it. And although many of his supporters are scapegoating Attorney General Pam Bondi rather than Trump, it doesn’t seem like this issue will just go away. After Monday’s vote, Khanna said he would try again to get the files released.

The Epstein files are especially likely to keep festering because the stars of the MAGA movement—like Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, Laura Loomer, and Marjorie Taylor Greene—are still genuinely upset by it. Whether other Republicans will move with the same compass as Representative Norman remains to be seen.

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia are suing Donald Trump’s administration for withholding $7 billion in federal funding for education, The Washington Post reported.

A lawsuit filed Monday against Trump, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and Office of Budgement Management Director Russell Vought claimed that the Trump administration had “caused chaos” for K-12 school districts by refusing to distribute funding to six long-standing grant programs.

Those grants provide funding for after-school care for children of working parents, English classes for non-native speakers, bullying and suicide prevention, and expanding science and arts curricula. The funding also goes toward recruitment and training for teachers, which is particularly crucial as 79 percent of public schools nationwide have reported difficulties with hiring in the last year.

When the funds were expected to roll in at the beginning of July, the Department of Education notified states that the money was under review for compliance with Trump’s agenda, and OMB stated that it was investigating if the funds had been used for a “radical leftwing agenda.”

The plaintiffs, who sought relief for their own states, alleged that by freezing the funds, the Trump administration had overstepped Congress’s power of purse, violating the Impoundment Control Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

“The federal government cannot use our children’s classrooms to advance its assault on immigrant and working families,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a statement. “This illegal and unjustified funding freeze will be devastating for students and families nationwide, especially for those who rely on these programs for childcare or to learn English. Congress allocated these funds, and the law requires that they be delivered. We will not allow this administration to rewrite the rules to punish the communities it doesn’t like.”

The lawsuit was joined by attorneys general from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia, as well as the governors of Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

Andrew Cuomo just doesn’t know when to quit.

The former New York governor officially reupped his flailing bid for New York City mayor Monday, weeks after losing the Democratic primary by double-digits to New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

“Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that the Democratic primary did not go the way I had hoped,” Cuomo said in a video posted to social media, thanking the voters who’d ranked him and apologizing for his tremendous loss.

“But as my grandfather used to say: When you get knocked down, learn your lesson and pick yourself back up and get in the game,” he said. “And that is what I am going to do. The fight to save our city isn’t over.”

Cuomo’s video appeared eerily similar to many of Mamdani’s viral campaign videos, which show the young politician encountering New Yorkers around the city. But Cuomo failed to capture the voters’ excitement seen in Mamdani’s, performing a stilted stump speech over footage of him gladhanding people on the street, with no background music. One might say it lacked any Cuo-mentum.

Mamdani replied to Cuomo’s video by simply posting a link to contribute to his own campaign in the comments—which immediately ratio’d the original post. Mamdani’s link had 38,000 likes and 3,000 reposts within hours of the original post, while Cuomo’s video had 1,500 reposts and only 1,100 likes.

In another post, Mamdani joked that Cuomo’s video was a blatant attempt to copy him. “We got him making man on the street videos with a guy in carhartt. By next week, he’ll be sipping adeni chai and eating khaliat al nahl,” he wrote.

People online couldn’t help but notice how off-putting Cuomo’s video was.

“If you watch this, in 7 days you’ll start to cough,” New York City Councilperson Chi Ossé wrote on X. Ossé, who represents Bedford-Stuyvesant, has been a vocal critic of Cuomo’s mayoral run.

“Nothing more energizing than a video of a politician saying ‘I’m sorry I let you down’ in a voice that sounds like aphasic Christopher Walken,” wrote Erik Baker, senior editor at The Drift.

“No means no, Andrew,” wrote an X account for Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor, a group that had organized to prevent people from ranking Cuomo in the Democratic primary, referring to the more than a dozen women that Cuomo sexually harassed.

And many, many people remarked on the most obvious gaffe: that Cuomo still can’t seem to pronounce “Mamdani.”

Dan Bongino’s future as FBI deputy director is still up in the air on Monday after his no call no show on Friday, as the fallout from the Justice Department’s dismissal of the Epstein case continues into its second week.

Bongino has apparently iced out all communications with his DOH colleagues, not having spoken with anyone at the department since Wednesday, according to a CNN report. The feud between Bongino and Attorney General Pam Bondi has reportedly gotten so bad that Vice President JD Vance spent the weekend trying to mediate. Bongino, Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel have been the eye of the storm of incensed MAGA supporters who once viewed the trio as potential arbiters of the Epstein client list and the exposure of the greater deep state. All three made promises along those exact lines, Bongino particularly.

Sources told CNN Bongino’s future in the administration is basically untenable, and he is unlikely to stay in this role in the long-term.

“I think so. I spoke to him today,” Trump said when asked if Bongino was still FBI deputy director on Sunday. “Dan Bongino is a very good guy. I’ve known him a long time. I’ve done his show many, many times. And he sounded terrific, actually, no, I think he’s in good shape.”

Some MAGA supporters, like Laura Loomer, have called for Bondi’s firing, to no avail. Patel has denied any rumors of his resignation.

The Supreme Court has cleared the way for Trump to destroy the Department of Education.

Until Monday, a lower court’s injunction had barred the administration from firing about half of the department’s roughly 4,000 employees—halting a move that Education Secretary Linda McMahon called “the first step in a total shutdown” of the department—while the layoffs were challenged in court.

On Monday, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority granted the administration’s emergency request to lift the injunction, greenlighting Trump’s effort to demolish the agency.

While the majority provided no explanation for its order, Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a dissent and was joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Sotomayor called the majority’s decision “indefensible,” and railed against her conservative colleagues for being either “naive” or “willfully blind to the implications of [their] ruling.”

“When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” Sotomayor wrote. While lower courts “rose to the occasion” in pausing the firings, she said, the Supreme Court has made itself complicit in Trump’s lawlessness.

Trump’s moves regarding the Department of Education, she continued, boil down to an attempt to assert “the power to repeal federal law by way of mass terminations,” thereby encroaching on congressional powers and flouting the president’s constitutional responsibility to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Any “pocketbook harm” the government claims it incurred by paying the fired DOE employees, Sotomayor wrote, pales in comparison to “the harm to this Nation’s education system and individual students” incurred by dismantling the agency.

“Lifting the District Court’s injunction,” she continued:

will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended. The majority apparently deems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues.

Instead of taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, Trump has “set out to dismantle them” and ridden roughshod over “our Constitution’s separation of powers,” Sotomayor wrote. “Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief. Because I cannot condone such abuse of our equitable authority, I respectfully dissent.”

This story has been updated.

Over the weekend, right-wing media figure Charlie Kirk hosted the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, where the young conservatives in attendance were up in arms about President Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein affair.

Now, after a phone call from the president himself, Kirk is backing off of the issue.

“Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being,” Kirk said on the Monday episode of his talk show. “I’m going to trust my friends in the administration. I’m going to trust my friends in the government to do what needs to be done. Solve it. Ball’s in their hands. I’ve said plenty this last weekend.”

Attendees of Kirk’s conference were vocal about their disapproval of the Trump administration closing the Epstein case after entertaining—and promising to substantiate—conspiracy theories about the deceased financier and sex criminal.

On Friday, Kirk asked the crowd, “How many of you, raise your hand, think this is a big deal, the Epstein thing?” Hands shot up across the room, and Kirk observed, “Every hand has gone up.”

Another Friday speaker, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, asked the audience, “How many of you are satisfied … with the results of the Epstein investigation?” Boos resounded.

Many in MAGA, blaming Attorney General Pam Bondi for the Epstein fiasco, called for her firing, leading Trump on Saturday to attempt to dispel his base’s outrage on Truth Social. “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’” he posted, defending Bondi and calling the Epstein files a concoction of MAGA adversaries that “nobody cares about.”

Kirk, whose conference was clear evidence to the contrary, nonetheless announced on Monday that he’ll devote no more airtime to the matter, instead deferring to his administration “friends” Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Pam Bondi, and Todd Blanche.

A new CNN report may explain Kirk’s decision to turn away from the Epstein issue. In doing damage control over the weekend, Trump reportedly made phone calls to Bondi’s “most vocal critics” in order “to stem the bleeding over the Epstein files.” Trump is said to have called Kirk on Saturday.

It remains unknown which other conservative figures the president phoned in hopes of quelling dissent over the Epstein case, but it might be worth keeping an eye on who in MAGA world suddenly, inexplicably changes their tune.

The Department of Defense will start using Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot to “develop agentic AI workflows.”

Trump’s DoD awarded Musk’s xAI a $200 million federal contract to install “Grok for Government” into the national defense apparatus.

“Announcing Grok for Government - a suite of products that make our frontier models available to United States Government customers. We are especially excited about two new partnerships for our US Government partners,” xAI announced from its X account on Monday. “1) a new contract from the US Department of Defense 2) our products being available to purchase via the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule. This allows every federal government department, agency, or office, to purchase xAI products. We’re hiring mission driven engineers who want to join the cause.”

Grok has accrued quite a few lowlights since it has overtaken the X timeline, which makes the DoD’s strong commitment to it feel a bit troubling. A week ago, Grok referred to itself as “MechaHitler” multiple times while going on antisemitic rants. The chatbot has also pushed debunked claims of white genocide in South Africa, something its creator believes in, and has often blurred the lines between serving as an objective source of information or just another way for Musk to assert his own views on his “free speech” app.

“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Chief Digital and AI Officer Dr. Doug Matty said in a press release. “Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems.”

Donald Trump unveiled his latest move to apply pressure to Russia—and surprise, surprise, it’s more tariffs.

While speaking to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office Monday, Trump set a 50-day deadline for Russia to end its invasion of Ukraine. The president said he plans to levy “secondary tariffs” of 100 percent on Moscow, should it fail to resolve the conflict.

“I’m disappointed in President Putin because I thought we woulda had a deal two months ago, but it doesn’t seem to get there,” Trump said. “So based on that, we’re gonna be doing secondary tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days, it’s very simple. And they’ll be at 100 percent.”

It’s notable that Trump would describe the tariffs on Russia as “secondary” considering that the country was specifically exempt from his initial round of sweeping “reciprocal tariffs.” Russian President Vladimir Putin certainly wasn’t among the paltry list of world leaders who received one of Trump’s copy-paste trade deal letters last week.

Crucially, Trump’s ever-fluctuating tariffs have proven to be a wildly ineffective tactic for settling deals. In the more than 90 days since Trump first announced his vast slate of tariffs, only three rough trade deals have actually materialized. Last week, the Trump administration once again extended its deadline to produce trade deals, but then Trump clarified that the offers they produced would only be “more or less final.”

Thus, Trump’s newest tariff threat can be considered similarly unlikely to perform on-schedule, or produce any actual resolution.

Trump also said the U.S. would no longer send military aid to Ukraine, but rather sell weapons to NATO countries that would then distribute the arms to Ukraine.

“We’ve made a deal today where we are going to be sending them weapons and they are going to be paying for ‘em,” Trump said.

“The United States will not be having any payment made. We’re not buying it, but we will manufacture it, and they’re gonna be paying for it,” he continued, barely coherent.

Trump had already announced this development last week, as reports spread that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had unilaterally paused weapons shipments to Ukraine, before Trump stepped in to resume them.

Donald Trump claimed that “Alligator Alcataraz” would hold the “most vicious people on the planet.” But in reality, it’s holding hundreds of people with no criminal record at all, according to records obtained by The Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times.

More than 250 of the nearly 750 people currently being held at the Trump administration’s premiere wetland-themed concentration camp have no criminal conviction or pending criminal charges. Only a third of detainees have had criminal convictions in the United States, ranging from attempted murder to traffic violations.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin gave a statement to the Herald/Times attempting to justify the Trump administration’s blatant targeting of innocent people. 

“Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.,” McLaughlin told the Herald/Times. “Further, every single one of these individuals committed a crime when they came into this country illegally. It is not an accurate description to say they are ‘non-criminals.’”

But many inside the hastily constructed facility aren’t undocumented. 

Some, like Denis Alcides Solis Morales, came to the United States under a humanitarian parole program, which has since been canceled by the Trump administration. The 56-year-old Nicaraguan man was taken to Alligator Alcatraz following a traffic stop and has a pending asylum case.

Another detainee, Leamsy Izquierdo, who detailed the horrific conditions at the site, is a green card-holder and permanent U.S. resident.  

Already, Alligator Alcatraz has revealed itself to be a massive humanitarian disaster. Reports have alleged that detainees lack access to clean water, safe food, and showers, are attacked by massive bugs, and kept awake at all hours by bright lights. Last week, attorneys claimed that they have no way to reach their clients inside, and families said that their loved ones have disappeared from ICE’s registry upon entering the state-run facility. 

It seems that under the Trump administration, being undocumented—or just being from another country—is enough to justify your torture pending removal from the United States.