Cognitive Decline? Trump Uses Soviet-Era Name for Russian City

In 1991, Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy for the first time. He is said to have posed as his own publicist in a phone interview. He judged a “Look of the Year” modeling event, whose contestants reportedly included teenage girls as young as 14. His friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was still in bloom.

And the Soviet Union was on its last legs: 1991 was the year it would dissolve. It was also the last year the Russian city now known as St. Petersburg would be called Leningrad.

It was this time to which the president’s mind apparently strayed on Wednesday morning, when he accidentally referred to St. Petersburg by its former name in a social media post.

Trump had taken to Truth Social to disparage the media for covering criticisms of his impending summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The choice to hold the meeting in Alaska had drawn critics, among them Trump’s onetime national security adviser John Bolton, who told CNN: “The only better place for Putin than Alaska would be if the summit were being held in Moscow. So the initial setup, I think, is a great victory for Putin.”

The president reprimanded the press for reporting on this, and for “constantly quoting fired losers and really dumb people” like Bolton.

“Very unfair media is at work on my meeting with Putin,” Trump said. So unfair, he wrote, that, “if I got Moscow and Leningrad free, as part of the deal with Russia, the Fake News would say that I made a bad deal!”

It’s unclear what “freeing” those cities would mean, even in the context of this hyperbolic hypothetical.

Anyway, many observers were quick to note the “Leningrad” slip—which, to be sure, was still not as egregious as a gaffe, also regarding the upcoming summit, that the president had made two days earlier, when he incorrectly stated twice that it was taking place in Russia. (If the president’s Wednesday post was a 34-year throwback to 1991, his Monday remarks turned back the clock over a century and a half, to when Alaska was still Russian territory.)

Also in Wednesday morning’s Truth Social post, Trump wrote, “The Fake News is working overtime (No tax on overtime!)”—offering a written example of his (usually verbal) tendency to “weave,” as the 79-year-old president likes to call his free-association-style rambling.

Sudden federal takeovers of America’s cities will apparently be the new normal under the Trump administration.

Several government officials, including one senior administration official, told Rolling Stone Wednesday that it is now a priority to normalize military deployments to cities across the country.

Trump deployed 800 National Guard members to Washington Monday, federalizing the capital’s police department to combat what he described as a crime-riddled hellscape. To justify the government infringement, the country’s most powerful Republican pointed to rising crime rates, immigrant populations, and homelessness—though the figures he used were from 2023, before violent crime plummeted across the nation.

“He’s gonna do more of them,” one Trump administration official told Rolling Stone, referring to wielding the military against the nation’s metropolises. “He promised he would do this and now he’s following through on those promises.”

During a press conference Monday announcing the imminent takeover, Trump warned that several of America’s liberal bastions 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.”

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.”

Other members of the administration quickly picked up on the rhetoric. Speaking with Fox Business on Tuesday, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin claimed that the White House’s efforts to forcibly clean up what she described as a “plague of crime” could be a “blueprint” for more federal takeovers across the country.

Speaking with Fox News that same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to acknowledge a time limit on Trump’s capital takeover.

The timeline of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump’s friendship is not adding up.

Despite Trump’s doing everything within his power to distance himself from the pedophilic financier, interviews conducted prior to Epstein’s death suggest that the pair were close long after Trump claimed to have thrown Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for being a “creep.” A new timeline compiled by CNN reveals just how long the two men were entwined.

Their friendship spanned three decades, but in a 2019 interview, Epstein described Trump as his “closest friend for 10 years.” That would have been 15 years after they had a falling out over a bidding war on a Palm Springs oceanfront mansion, and 11 years after Epstein was first convicted on child sex offenses.

Three other individuals who knew the men have also described them as best buds. They include Maria Farmer, a visual artist hired by Epstein who provided the first criminal complaint of sex abuse to law enforcement; Stacey Williams, a model who referred to Trump as Epstein’s “wing man” after the Manhattan real estate mogul allegedly groped her; and Jack O’Donnell, the former president and chief operating officer of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, who recalled scolding Trump in the late 1980s after he arrived at the gambling floor with Epstein and three underage girls.

Trump has never been accused of wrongdoing by law enforcement with regard to the Epstein case, and has insisted that he had “no idea” that Epstein was abusing underage girls.

The White House claimed on July 23 that Trump and Epstein’s relationship ended after Trump kicked Epstein out of his Palm Springs resort for “being a creep.” But days later, Trump offered a different version of events to a crowd of reporters aboard Air Force One, revealing that he knew Epstein “stole” girls in his employ at Mar-a-Lago, and that Virginia Giuffre—one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers—was among them.

His remarks partially corroborated Giuffre’s account of being abducted in 2000 by Epstein’s longtime associate and girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, at Mar-a-Lago, where Giuffre worked at the time as a pool attendant.

The admission shocked Giuffre’s family, who have since questioned what else Trump may have remained tight-lipped about regarding his long friendship with the sex trafficker.

President Trump’s vaguely positive views on marijuana use and legalization have opened up yet another schism within the MAGA movement, as some hard-liners are reverting back to war on drugs–adjacent rhetoric to express their opposition to perhaps the most popular plant in America.

Last Friday it was reported that Trump told donors at an event that he is considering reclassifying marijuana from its current Schedule I level. It was the first time he’d made any real mention of the substance since he was on the campaign trail in September, where he also expressed support for rescheduling. Moving weed away from Schedule I would essentially make it easier to buy, sell, possess, and tax. It’s worth noting that Kim Rivers, CEO of the massive marijuana company Trulieve, was in attendance.

This news quickly sowed trouble on the right, as both the “western civilization is eroding” guys and the more traditional “just say no” crowd shared their grievances with marijuana.

“Our society thrived when everyone was smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey,” wrote Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh, completely ignoring the countless, well-documented, negative impacts (violence and death) of those two American vices. “We became the most powerful nation in the world with liquor and nicotine. No country of potheads has ever thrived, or ever achieved anything at all. Every city that legalized it became an even bigger shithole basically overnight. The entire history of western civilization tells us that marijuana is far, far worse for society.”

Far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec called people smoking weed outside a “huge factor” in violent crime in Washington, D.C. “States with legal weed you can just smell it all over in public,” he continued. “Can’t take kids anywhere.”

“Not that I trust CNN’s reporting, but on the off chance this is true, I’d encourage the White House to nix it,” conservative Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles wrote on X. “Liberalizing the law around Haitian oregano gives big Kim Kardashian energy—not the sort of thing people voted for in November!”

Not everyone on the MAGA right shares the same antiquated, Nancy Reagan–level mythmaking around marijuana.

“You know who doesn’t want marijuana moved from Schedule I -> III? Big Pharma— they lose $$ on pain pills & sleeping meds. Big Alcohol—lower revenue. Big Prison—fewer inmates & lower revenue,” wrote Rogan O’Handley, a.k.a. DC Draino, one of the MAGA influencers who got one of those phony “Epstein Files Phase One” binders months ago. “You know who wants it rescheduled? Veterans with PTSD & sleeping issues who don’t want to keep taking pills. Rescheduling marijuana doesn’t legalize it, but it does allow for more medical research.” The weed for veterans angle is very popular within the movement’s pro-rescheduling wing.

This news underscores the evolving politics of marijuana on the right. To some Trump loyalists it’s a symbol of indolence, a sign of trashiness. To others it’s a drug safer than opioids and alcohol that is long overdue for a societal update. Their fearless leader has waffled hard on the issue for years now.

Far-right provocateur Laura Loomer has, in recent weeks, further solidified her status as a de facto personnel director in Trump’s White House. Over a dozen recent firings have been attributable to her pressure campaigns, and the self-described pro–white nationalist even created a tip line to help purge hundreds of supposedly disloyal Trump administration staff.

But her latest target, per Politico Playbook, is Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—or, more realistically, Kennedy’s deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, who was formerly the press secretary for Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign.

“I’m not naive enough to think that the president is going to get rid of RFK,” Loomer told Politico, but she said “there are concerns about some of the staffing decisions over at [the Department of Health and Human Services].”

She also claimed, citing “sources in HHS,” that “there’s a clear intention by Stefanie Spear to utilize her position to try to lay the groundwork for a 2028 RFK presidential run.” An unnamed Trump administration official told Politico they “would not be surprised” if Kennedy is contemplating such a bid but said it’s not considered “a real threat.”

Politico’s report comes days after Loomer’s successful campaign against top Food and Drug Administration official Vinay Prasad unraveled before her eyes.

Prasad was ousted after Loomer alleged he was a “progressive leftist saboteur” due to his past criticisms of Trump and support for progressive politicians. His return was a victory for RFK Jr., who’d opposed his removal. Loomer called it “egregious” and pledged to ramp up her “exposés of officials within HHS and FDA.”

Loomer has, for months, railed publicly against Kennedy and Spear, as she has against other Trump officials she deems suspect.

In May, she wrote on X that there’s a “vetting crisis” under RFK Jr., pointing to Spear’s past environmental activism and role in founding the environmental news site EcoWatch. Days later, Loomer called Kennedy “Marxist,” and accused him of appointing “full throttled Marxists and Trump haters to work under him at HHS,” such as Spear.

Since then, she’s repeatedly cast aspersions on Kennedy’s deputy chief of staff as a “Marxist” and “National Security Threat.”

Last month, she said Kennedy “is one of the worst Trump Cabinet picks,” and, presaging her claims published in Politico Wednesday, ominously added, “People will fully understand why in 2028.”

Two-time Paralympic gold medalist and Iowa State Representative Josh Turek used current Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s infamous “Well, we’re all going to die” comment against her in a new ad announcing his candidacy for her Senate seat.

Turek uses a wheelchair full-time after his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War caused him to develop spina bifida, forcing him to get 21 surgeries before the age of 12. He received gold medals in wheelchair basketball in 2016 and 2020.

“I wouldn’t have gotten that far without VA health coverage for my dad’s service, free summer lunch programs when my parents were struggling, and the local AEA that made sure that I had access to a good education. When I was a kid, it was a Senator from Iowa that made sure that the doors were open for kids like me,” Turek said. “Now the senator from Iowa is just closing doors, taking away health care, making it harder for parents to feed their kids—all just to give tax breaks to billionaires. And her explanation? ‘Well, we are all going to die.’”

The clip cuts to footage of the town hall in which Ernst made her cruel, fateful comments.

“I’m tired of Iowans being taken for granted. I wasn’t supposed to be able to win a state House seat that Trump won twice, but I campaigned just like I played basketball: outworking everyone,” Turek continued. “A whole lotta folks are gonna look at a guy like me and say, ‘Man, that is a real long shot.’ Well, in Iowa, we love an underdog. So if you are ready to push for change, join me.”

Ernst’s comments have seriously tainted her political reputation, and while she’s yet to confirm or deny her 2026 reelection campaign, a slew of challengers have already arisen from both sides of the aisle (for what it’s worth, Ernst has hired a campaign manager). Republican Jim Carlin and former Libertarian presidential candidate Joshua Smith have already declared, while Ernst and Iowa Congresswoman Ashley Hinson are still deliberating. Meanwhile Turek joins a crowded Democratic primary field including state Senator Zach Wahls, state Representative J.D. Scholten, Des Moines school board chair Jackie Norris, and local radio station market director Nathan Sage.

Turek’s online platform is sparse but mentions support for public education, environmentalism, health care access, and disability rights. But at this point in his campaign, his principal position is his opposition to Ernst and what she stands for, particularly her support for cuts to Medicaid.

Iowa will start its primaries on June 2, 2026.

The Trump administration appears to be inching away from the responsibility of issuing a monthly jobs report.

Speaking with reporters at a White House press briefing Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt failed to promise that the economic updates would continue, instead downgrading their existence to a “hope” while further undermining the credibility of the data the reports are built upon.

“Will the Bureau of Labor Statistics continue to put out monthly jobs reports?” asked a reporter.

“Well, look, what I’ll tell you about the Bureau of Labor Statistics—I believe that is the plan and that’s the hope, and that these monthly reports will be data that the American people can trust,” Leavitt said. “As you know, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has made massive revisions after the last several points reports that they have put out.

“And there has certainly been a decline in the quality and reliability of data coming from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and there’s been an increase in revisions,” Leavitt continued. “And this president and the administration is finally tackling this problem that so many have talked about. The president is actually doing something about it.”

Donald Trump’s new nominee for BLS commissioner, E.J. Antoni, told Fox Business Tuesday that “BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports” and instead only rely on quarterly data. Prior to entering the fold of the Trump administration, Antoni worked as the Heritage Foundation’s chief economist and helped develop Project 2025.

Trump abruptly fired BLS’s last commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, hours after the release of the last jobs report, claiming that the Biden-era appointee’s work analyzing the granular data of America’s economy was “faked” and could not be trusted.

Revisions to the monthly jobs report are far from out of the ordinary. Instead, it’s fairly normal for the reports to tell a different picture month-to-month, as more data is collected over time from late-submitting survey participants. The report has been published on a monthly basis since 1916, but there hasn’t been an issue with it until Trump 2.0.

At the core of Trump’s gripe with the July report was its revision of figures from the preceding months, which moved the three-month growth average to 35,000. A lag like that hasn’t emerged since 2010, and it made Trump’s first six months in office—and his controversial tariff overhaul—look particularly bad. The report’s downsizing also suggested that while some sectors, such as health care and social assistance, gained jobs, the vast majority of the market lost employment.

The absence of a monthly report would be yet another infringement on transparency and accountability between the federal government and the people it’s supposed to represent.

“We need to look at the means and the methods of how the United States is acquiring this very important data,” Leavitt said Tuesday. “The goal, of course, is to provide honest and good data for the American people to make very important economic decisions on.”

The first night of Donald Trump’s takeover of the nation’s capital is in the books. As Trump would have us believe, he has begun to “liberate” Washington, D.C., from a crime surge (that actually does not exist). Troops have started clearing the streets of what he describes as a scourge of “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”

Night one’s results are (to an extent) in: “As part of the president’s massive law enforcement surge,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday, “last night, approximately 850 officers and agents were surged across the city. They made a total of 23 arrests.”

For some perspective, according to the Police Scorecard, the D.C. police, between 2013 and 2023, made roughly 58.7 arrests on average each day.

Leavitt also provided a laundry list of the charges—ranging from fare dodging to homicide—that, without the raw information on individual cases, is pretty unhelpful in gauging the effectiveness of the effort: “Homicide, firearms offenses, possession with intent to distribute narcotics, fare evasion, lewd acts, stalking, possession of a high-capacity magazine, fleeing to elude in a vehicle, no permits, driving under the influence, reckless driving, and a bench warrant.”

Nonetheless, as Leavitt continued, “This is only the beginning.”

Trump’s D.C. takeover is planned to continue over the next 30 days or so—and with more cities to come, he says. And the troops he’s deploying have an apparent green light to abuse citizens at will: Now, the president says, they are “allowed to do whatever the hell they want.” According to social media dispatches from last night, this apparently includes bothering random D.C. residents simply going about their business. But who’s to say how extreme things will get?

The Department of Homeland Security is once again using their social media account to post blatant callbacks to white nationalist propaganda.

On Tuesday the DHS posted a picture of an animated Uncle Sam standing at a crossroads with multiple direction signs. The sign in his hand reads “Law and Order,” while the signs pointing every which way read “Cultural Decline,” “Homeland,” “Service,” “Invasion,” “Oppurtunity.” The image is a direct copy paste of an old 1936 cartoon referencing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the original, the sign Uncle Sam holds reads “Prosperity,” while the others read “New Deal,” “Liberty,” “Depression,” “Inflation,” and “Opportunity.”

What’s most alarming is the DHS’s caption. They write “Which way, American Man?” a direct reference to the book “Which Way, Western Man?” written by infamous white supremacist William Gayley Simpson and published by neo-Nazi and National Alliance founder William Luther Pierce.

Simpson’s book is deeply racist and antisemitic, containing chapters titled “The Necessity of Eugenics,” “The Everlasting Truth About Race,” and “The Doctrine of the Thoroughbred,” among others.

“In the case of a country like the United States, if the original stock and its values are to survive, then all aliens, such as Negroes, Jews, and Orientals, will have to be put out and kept out. Immigration will have to be strictly limited to stocks most closely related, by blood and by tradition, to the stocks by which the country was originally founded,” Simpson writes in one chapter of his magnum opus of racism.

“The point is to reveal organized Jewry as a world power entrenched in every country of the White man’s world, operating freely across every nation’s frontiers, and engaged in a ruthless war for the destruction of them all,” he writes in another chapter. “Let me preface what I am about to say by declaring frankly that I am prepared to accept violence on the part of our people. The Jews’ hold on our throat is not going to be relaxed until we break their grip. Hitler felt that he had to take to the streets. All normal approach to his people was barred. Today, we are confronted with much the same situation here.”

In the latest instance of President Trump seeking to bend American cultural institutions to his will, the White House is set to overhaul the content and operations of the Smithsonian’s museums in anticipation of the United States Semiquincentennial.

A letter by administration officials Lindsey Halligan, Vince Haley, and Russ Vought—which was reported Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal—informed the Smithsonian Institute of a White House initiative to ensure its museums’ “alignment” with a history-whitewashing executive order that Trump signed in March.

The review, set to conclude at the beginning of 2026, will seek “to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions” by focusing on eight museums—including, among others, the Museums of American History, Natural History, African American History and Culture, and the National Museum of the American Indian.

Eventually, as part of this process, a team of Trump officials will be dispatched to the museums for “observational visits and walk-throughs … to document themes and messaging,” reports the WSJ.

The news suggests that Smithsonian exhibits or content that paint American history in anything but the rosiest light, or otherwise runs afoul of the MAGA worldview, could be in jeopardy.

Trump’s March executive order, for example, specifically targeted a Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit titled “The Shape of Power” as evidence of the Smithsonian having been captured by “a divisive, race-centered ideology.” How so? Rather than supporting the scientific racist perspective that race is “a biological reality,” the exhibit claimed race is a social construct.

Not only will the Trump White House seek to root out certain content, it also plans to replace such “divisive or ideologically driven” material with that which is supposedly “unifying” and “historically accurate.” This, one can presume, means content that either whitewashes American history, or—given Trump’s recent moves to celebrate Confederates at U.S. institutions—perhaps portrays the ugliest aspects of it approvingly.