Old Man Trump Confuses Where He’s Going for Big Putin Summit

Donald Trump on Monday seemed to forget the location of his upcoming summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin—once again raising concerns about the cognitive ability of the 79-year-old president.

The president had announced the summit, which will take place in Alaska, in a Truth Social post Friday. “The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as President of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska,” Trump wrote.

But on Monday, the president, twice, erroneously claimed the summit would take place in Russia. The mistake came during a press conference where Trump discussed a nonexistent crime wave in Washington, D.C. The fictitious scourge, he said, harms America’s reputation on the world stage.

“It’s embarrassing for me to be up here, you know,” the president said. “I’m going to see Putin. I’m going to Russia,” he continued, putting particular emphasis, amid otherwise soft-spoken and listless remarks, on the name of the incorrect country.

Trump repeated the error later, suggesting it wasn’t just a misstatement but a memory lapse. “It’s going to be a big thing,” the president said. “We’re going to Russia. It’s going to be a big deal.”

As Trump has grown older, he’s shown an increasing propensity for such gaffes, be that forgetting names of people, forgetting where is, or, recently, forgetting actions he took during his first term, such as appointing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell or signing a 2020 trade deal.

When Trump first announced his meeting with Putin in Alaska, critics spoke out against the choice of location, with some observing that hardline Russian nationalists have long called for Russia to retake Alaska, which the U.S. purchased in 1867.

Criticizing Trump last week for his perceived tendency to cave to Putin, commentator David Frum wrote on X, “Let’s all hope that Putin doesn’t ask to take Alaska home with him as a souvenir, or Trump might give that away too.” With Trump’s Monday slip-up, many on social media were quick to joke that the president had, in a way, accidentally done just that.

The Trump administration is deploying the National Guard to Washington over a supposed “public safety emergency”—but it can’t seem to iron out its reason for doing so.

Mere moments after the president claimed Monday that federalization of Washington’s law enforcement was warranted on the basis that the city was a crime-riddled hellscape, FBI Director Kash Patel said that wasn’t the case.

Instead, Patel boasted that the country’s homicide rate had hit an all-time low, effectively unraveling the administration’s rationale for forcing the Metropolitan Police Department and the D.C. National Guard to take over the nation’s capital.

“The murder rates are plummeting,” Patel said. “We are now able to report that the murder rate is on track to be the lowest in U.S. history.”

Violent crime has been on the decline in D.C. since 2023, funneling into a nationwide crime drop the following year that saw homicide rates plummet across the country, reported The Washington Post. In 2024, crime in the capital was down 35 percent, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.

But instead of relying on that data to inform whether to strip Washington of its autonomy, Trump referred Monday to outdated 2023 statistics, claiming that the city was crime-riddled and needed to be under the thumb of Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“If our capital is dirty our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us,” Trump said.

Trump also suggested that the same fate could befall other cities around the country, though he only specified liberal hubs.

“We have other cities also that are bad. Very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then, of course, you have Baltimore and Oakland. You don’t even mention them anymore, they’re so far gone,” Trump said, before promising that Washington would be cleaned up “very quick.”

Later, when asked explicitly if other cities were next on his list, Trump said, “We’re just going to see what happens. We’re going to have tremendous success with what we’re doing.”

But what is happening in Washington should serve as a dire warning to the rest of the country that the administration will advance its agenda with or without legitimate, fact-founded reason.

“Other cities are hopefully watching this … and maybe they’ll self-clean up and maybe they’ll self-do this and get rid of the cashless bail thing and all the things that caused the problem,” Trump said.

Donald Trump’s usurpation of law enforcement in the nation’s capital carried a warning for America’s liberal bastions.

Speaking at a White House press briefing Monday morning, Trump declared a “public safety emergency,” emphasizing Washington’s supposedly startling rise in crime while citing statistics from 2023 instead of 2025.

In reaction to the outdated numbers, he announced that his administration would deploy the Metropolitan Police Department and the D.C. National Guard, handing control of police over to Attorney General Pam Bondi and leveraging the D.C. Home Rule Act to federalize the district’s law enforcement.

“We will deploy officers across the district with an overwhelming presence, and you will have more police. And you will be so happy,” Trump said. “We will bring in the military if it’s needed, by the way.”

But Trump also suggested that cities far beyond Washington’s region could experience the same fate.

“We have other cities also that are bad. Very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then, of course, you have Baltimore and Oakland. You don’t even mention them anymore, they’re so far gone,” Trump said, before promising that Washington would be cleaned up “very quick.”

Later, when asked explicitly if other cities were next on his list, Trump said, “We’re just going to see what happens. We’re going to have tremendous success with what we’re doing.

“Other cities are hopefully watching this … and maybe they’ll self-clean up and maybe they’ll self-do this and get rid of the cashless bail thing and all the things that caused the problem,” he continued.

“We’re going to look at New York in a little while. Let’s do this together.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Trump has stepped on states’ rights while deploying the National Guard. In June, while Los Angelenos protested the administration’s ICE raids, Trump ushered in 4,000 National Guard members, ignoring myriad objections by the state and local government.

The trial to determine whether the Trump administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law dating back to 1878 that forbids the government from using the military for law enforcement purposes, and the Tenth Amendment is scheduled to kick off Monday in a California courtroom.

This story has been updated.

President Trump on Monday announced plans to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., and invoke Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973, giving him temporary control over the nation’s capital.

“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, Bedlam and squalor and worse,” Trump told a packed room of reporters. “This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re gonna take our capital back. We’re taking it back. Under the authorities vested in me as the President of the United States, I’m officially invoking Section 740, of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, you know what that is, and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control, and you’ll be meeting the people that will be directly involved with that.”

This is an unprecedented  decision that may very well lead to even more extreme overreaches of police and executive power on behalf of the Trump administration. As a federal district and not a state, the Home Rule Act gives D.C. the right to elect a mayor, legislate and enforce local police, and approve the city’s budget. Trump’s decision Monday puts the local Metropolitan Police Department under federal control. Rule 740, initially designed to be used in case of an all out violent uprising, allows Trump himself to control the MPD for two days at a time. 

Meanwhile, Trump announced, 800 National Guard troops will also be sent to patrol the district.

This press conference was the culmination of days of statements from the president in which he expressed the kind of far-right takes on crime in D.C. that people tend to develop after watching hours of Fox News every night. From clearing out homeless encampments to trying 14-year-olds as adults, Trump has begun to initiate his authoritarian vision  on the grounds that crime is at an emergency level. 

“You don’t want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed. And you all know people and friends of yours that that happened.... You want to be able to leave your apartment or your house where you live and feel safe and go into a store to buy a newspaper or buy something, and you don’t have that now,” Trump said. “The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on earth. Much higher.” (In reality, violence crime in D.C. has been declining since 2023.) 

Trump also expressed deep, dogwhistle-laden disdain for the city’s Black and Latino youth, who he and his cast of press conference characters all threatened to clamp down on by increasing the level of force police can use and eliminating cashless bail. 

“We have slums here. We’re getting rid of them. I know it’s not politically correct. You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we get rid of the slums where they live. Caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets at all times of the day. They’re on ATVs, motorbikes. They travel pretty well,” Trump said. “They fight back, until you knock the hell out of them. Because it’s the only language they understand.”

D.C. residents should expect an increased police presence in popular areas like Dupont Circle and Malcolm X Park, as well as in triangle parks. Homeless people, immigrants, and young people of color, whom the administration sees as “young punks,” may likely face increased harassment.  

“This is just a list of some of the people … that were removed from the D.C. streets this weekend. They were rough, rough and tough. But we’re rougher and tougher,” Trump said, holding up a piece of paper with some unclear pictures on it. “Look at this. People here … they’re not going to be your local school teacher. This guy has killed people numerous times. They’re not going to be an asset. They will never be an asset to society. I don’t care.”

This story has been updated.

The president wants to federalize law enforcement in the nation’s capital—but his favorite mainstream media channel isn’t on board.

Fox News contributor Ted Williams, a criminal and civil trial attorney and former member of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, issued an acute fact check for Donald Trump Sunday. Williams informed the network that he found Trump’s plan “troubling” because “crime is not out of control in the District of Columbia.”

“Yes there is crime, and there will always be crime,” Williams said, identifying minors as some of the major perpetrators of robberies over the last several years. “In any major metropolitan city you’re going to have, unfortunately, juveniles committing crimes.”

Trump has turned his attention toward Washington’s crime since 19-year-old DOGE staffer Edward Coristine, better known as “Big Balls,” was attacked a week ago by a couple of 15-year-olds who stole his iPhone. On Sunday, Trump said he would force the homeless out of the city “IMMEDIATELY” and that his administration would imprison criminals “very fast.”

“I would like to ask Mr. Trump,” Williams said. “Where were you last month when a three-year-old child, Honesty Cheadle, was shot and killed as the result of crime in the District of Columbia?”

“Don’t use this as a pretext to actually eradicate home rule,” he continued. “And that seemed to be what Mr. Trump is interested in.”

Trump also posted an ominous warning to Washington’s denizens early Monday, claiming that the city would be “liberated” the same day.

“Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I will, MAKE OUR CAPITAL GREAT AGAIN! The days of ruthlessly killing, or hurting, innocent people, are OVER! I quickly fixed the Border (ZERO ILLEGALS in last 3 months!), D.C. is next!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT.”

Last month, President Trump announced a bid to unseal grand jury transcripts from the criminal trials of notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted associate Ghislaine Maxwell—apparently to quell outrage over his administration’s perceived lack of transparency on Epstein.

On Monday, a federal judge in Manhattan denied Trump’s request to unseal such records related to Maxwell. Unsparingly, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer described the administration’s attempt as a ruse, noting that unsealing the materials would reveal nothing new to the public.

The administration’s argument that the material “would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes,” Engelmayer wrote, “is demonstrably false.”

Someone “deeply interested and concerned about the Epstein matter” who “reviewed these materials expecting, based on the Government’s representations, to learn new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes and the investigation into them, would come away feeling disappointed and misled,” he continued. “There is no ‘there’ there.”

Thus, Trump’s bid is “a far cry from every reported case” in which the court has previously been petitioned to unseal such records due to “special circumstances.”

Engelmawyer noted that he actually did consider unsealing the documents, but only because doing so “would expose as disingenuous” the administration’s explanations for seeking to do so. If the records were unsealed, he wrote, “A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such.”

Moreover, Engelmayer said the administration’s motion was “weakened” by a number of “irregularities.” Curiously, it was filed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche alone. Made “under circumstances suggestive of haste rather than reflective deliberation,” it was also brief—all of three-and-a-half pages, with “no purporting materials”—and filed without notifying victims of Epstein and Maxwell in advance.

This is the latest hiccup for Trump as the Epstein fiasco continues to plague his administration. Last month, a federal judge in Florida denied a request to unseal Epstein grand jury materials, in an opinion that observed the government itself had, in its petition, explicitly acknowledged that its argument was insufficient. A request before another Manhattan federal judge to unseal Epstein grand jury transcripts is still pending.

This story has been updated.

Disregarding the Constitution’s export clause, the Trump administration has struck an unprecedented arrangement to take a 15 percent cut of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices’ chip sales to China.

Under the deal, first reported on Sunday, the companies will pay the U.S. government for sales of chips used for artificial intelligence—Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips—in China in order to obtain export licenses to the country, despite national security restrictions.

According to the Financial Times, the arrangement is unprecedented, as “no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licences.” Several media reports have called it “unusual.”

“Unconstitutional” would evidently work just as well. As Peter Harrell, a former Biden administration official and current fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as many other observers, noted, the move disregards the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on export taxes. The export clause states: “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.”

The administration can be expected to characterize the arrangement as something other than a tax. It may ultimately be up to the courts, if the move faces legal challenges, to tell this like it is.

Constitutional concerns aside, this development represents the latest in an ongoing saga of Trump flip-flopping on chips, as the administration previously reportedly planned to ban the export of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, before having a change of heart in April after the company’s CEO paid $1 million to dine with the president at Mar-a-Lago.

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance and the Trump administration tried and failed to shift the accountability for the Epstein files onto Democrats, only reinvigorating calls for their release. 

“I laugh at the Democrats who are now all of a sudden so interested in the Epstein files. For four years, Joe Biden and the Democrats did nothing about this story,” Vance told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires, and now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this, and yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him, and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years.” 

Vance’s line of argument is willfully obtuse. Epstein killed himself in prison while Trump was president. He had plenty of time to start a “transparent” investigation, and arguably had even more reason to do so then, given the circumstances of Epstein’s death.   

And Trump has been anything but transparent on this. Attorney General Pam Bondi essentially lied to the entire country about the “Epstein list,” initially claiming she had it on her desk and then later stating no such list existed. Trump himself has called the entire process “bullshit,” questioned his biggest supporters for still caring about it, and has had Republicans pussyfoot around the issue in Congress. This is simply not how a transparent inquiry into this–or any issue of this gravity—should look.  

Another thing Vance fails to understand is that to normal Americans outside of the MAGA/Qanon spectrum, the Epstein case is still about the victims he abused, not about playing politics or revealing some liberal cabal. Epstein has been connected to prominent leftists like Fidel Castro and Noam Chomsky, as well as liberals like former President Bill Clinton, and conservatives like Donald Trump. What does it matter?  It isn’t some gotcha if the point here is justice, which it obviously isn’t for Trump and Vance. 

“Fine. Release all the files. With victims and survivors’ names and PII redacted,” conservative Bulwark editor Bill Kriston wrote on X. “But no redactions of clients, enablers, and see-no-evil associates.” 

Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau also chimed in. 

“Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files and @JDVance has been plotting with the AG and FBI Director to cover it up. Release the names! Democrats, Republicans, billionaires, or not,” he wrote. “What are you afraid of, @JDVance?”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is once again openly touting the far-right, Christian nationalist views of his favorite pastor, Doug Wilson.

“All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth wrote Friday in a post sharing an interview that Wilson did with CNN the day prior. In the video, Wilson proceeds to describe his theocratic, patriarchal vision for America, which has clearly had a significant influence on Hegseth.

“I’d like to see the town be a Christian town, I’d like to see the state be a Christian state, I’d like to see the nation be a Christian nation, and I’d like to see the world be a Christian world,” the Moscow, Idaho, pastor said. “Every society is theocratic. The only question is who’s ‘Theo’? In a secular democracy, it would be Demos, the people. In a Christian republic, it’d be Christ.”

Wilson also bans women from leadership roles in his church and believes that they should not have the right to vote, arguing they should only be mothers and homemakers.

“Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” he told CNN’s Pamela Brown in the clip shared by Hegseth.

“So you just think they’re meant to have babies, that’s it? They’re just a vessel?” Brown responded.

“No, it doesn’t take any talent to simply reproduce biologically. The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three, or four, or five eternal souls.”

“I’m here as a working journalist and I’m a mom of three—”

“Good for you.”

“Is that an issue for you?”

“No, it’s not automatically an issue.”

Wilson holds some of the extreme views on gender on the Christian right. In the past, he’s written that men have a sexual right to women and that unsubmissive women are at fault for any sexual violence committed against them. “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.… A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” He also posits that God created women “to make the sandwiches” and thinks that giving women the right to vote led to “a long, sustained war on the family.” This is the man the U.S. defense secretary is enthusiastically platforming.

And this isn’t the first time. Hegseth and Wilson go way back. The defense secretary has attended Wilson’s services, posted in support of his private Christian schools, praised Wilson for not masking during the pandemic, and went on Wilson’s Association of Classical Christian Schools–affiliated CrossPolitic podcast shortly after his nomination. Wilson is a mouthpiece of a militantly regressive wing of Christianity with a very specific agenda, and the man leading the U.S. military continues to be one of his strongest advocates. Only time will tell just how much influence Wilson will continue to levy over the next three years.

Donald Trump is replacing Billy Long as IRS commissioner, after just two months on the job.

Long was confirmed to the role in June, but his near future will no longer involve fronting the tax agency. Instead, he is expected to be nominated to an ambassador position, reported The New York Times.

There is no clear permanent replacement for Long yet, though Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will double time as acting commissioner until one is in place, according to a senior administration official who spoke with the Times.

Long, a former congressman from Missouri, had been an unexpected choice for the revenue service, with no background in tax policy. As a lawmaker, he sponsored legislation to completely axe the IRS. Long was confirmed by the Senate in June by a 53-44 vote amid an agency-wide staffing purge, with all Democrats voting against his appointment.

He was the subject of an inquiry by Senate Democrats in December—when his name was first floated as an option to front the IRS—over his support for a “fraud-ridden” pandemic-era tax credit that cost Americans “hundreds of billions of dollars,” according to a memo from the Senate Finance Committee.

The 69-year-old was the fifth individual to run the IRS this year after the rapid-fire turnover of several interim chiefs, including Doug O’Donnell, Melanie Krause, Gary Shapley, and Michael Faulkender.

Despite its shrunken workforce, the IRS has been tasked by Trump to diversify its focus to advance the White House’s agenda, asking the tax agency to help it identify and deport immigrants as well as scrutinize universities.

Trump’s downsizing at the IRS has been a complete 180 for the agency, which saw funding boons and new hiring efforts under the Biden administration to expand revenue collection services and to investigate potential tax cheats.

This story has been updated.