Trump Admits One Thing He Won’t Ask Putin During Ukraine Meeting

For all his talk about Hillary Clinton and the Russia investigation, Donald Trump doesn’t seem to care that Russians hacked into sensitive government databases this year.

Answering questions outside the Kennedy Center Wednesday, the U.S. president appeared remarkably blasé about the foreign attack.

“There’s new reporting that the Russians have hacked into computer systems that manage U.S. federal court documents. I wonder if you’ve seen this report, and do you plan to bring it up with Putin when you see him later in the week?” asked one reporter.

“I guess I could. Are you surprised? Are you surprised? They hack in, that’s what they do,” Trump said. “They’re good at it, we’re good at it, we’re actually better at it.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that a Russian entity had accessed the court case document system, as well as “recently compromised sealed records,” as part of a yearslong effort.

“Some of the searches included mid-level criminal cases in the New York City area and several other jurisdictions, with some cases involving people with Russian and Eastern European surnames,” the Times reported.

But the president’s shocking reaction to the attack also undercuts Republican efforts to reframe the 2016 Trump-Russia scandal against Clinton and former President Barack Obama: If he doesn’t care about Russian meddling under the nose of his administration, why would he care so deeply about reframing the narrative around the foreign power’s intervention nine years ago?

Trump is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin Friday in Alaska to discuss a potential resolution to the war in Ukraine. It will be the first time that the Russian leader has stepped foot on U.S. soil in over a decade.

Laura Loomer’s deposition against HBO late-night host Bill Maher has offered absurd new insights into the woman unofficially tasked with federal staffing decisions.

The self-appointed “loyalty enforcer” has had enormous success influencing the Trump administration from the safety of her X account: An analysis by The Daily Beast found that at least 16 individuals were fired from the federal government after Loomer singled them out as covert Democratic agents.

But more than 200 pages of Loomer’s transcribed deposition in her defamation lawsuit against Maher shed light on the influencer’s beliefs and prerogatives—and illustrate her as a raving conspiracist rather than a fine-tuned firing machine.

In sprawling answers to completely unrelated questions, Loomer rants about George Stephanopolous, her lack of boyfriends, and her inability to get a White House press credential, in an interview that quickly flies off the handle.

In one particularly wild exchange, Loomer practically roasted Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene as someone who puts “roast beef in her pants.”

“What is your basis for saying she put Arby’s in her pants?” Maher’s legal counsel asked.

“She carries roast beef in her pockets,” Loomer responded.

“What is your basis for saying she puts roast beef in her pockets and in her pants?” the counsel pressed.

“Because I know she likes to eat at Arby’s,” Loomer said, further clarifying that she believes Greene puts the meat sandwiches in her pants and that she believed Greene would agree with that statement.

“Are you making a derogatory comment about her sex life by talking about Arby’s in her pants?” the counsel asked.

“No. I’m talking about Arby’s, the sandwiches. I’m talking about Arby’s. I would—I’m a very direct person,” Loomer said. “If I was making a derogatory comment, I would have said it.”

Immediately after the Arby’s exchange, Loomer offered another gem without provocation: She believed Senator Lindsey Graham is gay.

“Several of President Trump’s staff have told me in confidence that Lindsey Graham is gay,” Loomer said.

“Hold on, Ms. Loomer, there’s no question,” responded Maher’s attorney.

Loomer sued Maher and HBO in October after the late-night show host suggested that Loomer “might” be “fucking” Donald Trump. The far-right activist has since claimed that Maher’s joke tanked her odds at landing a White House gig.

Three days into his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., Trump said he plans to extend the crackdown beyond its month-long limit—with or without congressional approval.

The president on Wednesday was asked if he considers the 30-day timeframe during which he’s allowed, under the Home Rule Act, to control D.C.’s police before needing Congress’s OK as sufficient to address his imagined crime spike.

Before today, his administration’s answer to this question was seemingly yes; a White House official has said the operation is “expected to last 30 days.”

Now Trump is looking to extend it.

The president indicated Wednesday that his plan A is to put a “crime bill” before Congress “very quickly.” The bill, he said, will “pertain, initially, to D.C.” and ask “for extensions on that—long-term extensions, because you can’t have 30 days.” Trump noted that he expects unanimous Republican support for this (though, as Semafor reports, Senate Democrats seem able and committed to block an extension).

But Trump also expressed his willingness to bypass Congress to draw out the takeover. “Well, if it’s a national emergency, we can do it without Congress,” he said, adding that while he expects all Republicans to fall in line, “if I have to [call a national emergency], I will.”

Trump has flogged national emergency power more than any other recent president, exhibiting, per libertarian legal scholar Ilya Somin, “a dangerous pattern of invoking spurious emergencies to undermine the Constitution, threatening liberty and circumventing Congress.” So far during his second term, he’s declared a dozen such national emergencies—and is apparently ready to add to that list in order to impose his will, unchecked, on the American people.

The man at the head of President Trump’s cruel, indiscriminate immigration crackdown also has perplexingly bad taste in condiments, according to his wife.

Katie Miller, herself a former Trump aide, hosted Vice President JD Vance on her new self-titled podcast aimed toward right-wing women. The conversation turned to a classic icebreaker question.

“If you could only eat one condiment for the rest of your life what would it be?” Miller asked Vance.

“One condiment?” Vance asked.

“Yeah.”

“Does barbecue sauce count?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok. Barbecue sauce.”

“Not mayonnaise?” Miller asked, entirely unprompted.

“No,” Vance said, with a look of slight repulsion. “Mayonnaise is like … in low doses it’s good, but it’s kind of … like I had a buddy who used to eat french fries with mayonnaise. I thought that was disgusting.”

“It’s the only thing my husband eats,” Miller said plainly.

“With french fries, or like period?”

“Period.”

“OK, wow. Didn’t realize.”

“Yeah he’s only a mayonnaise guy.”

“Ok, I learned something new about Stephen I didn’t know.”

“Yeah it’s … whatever,” Miller replied, while Vance offered up a canned chuckle.

If this is the administration’s attempt to humanize Miller, Vance, and the various other Trump cronies who are carrying out this brutal, culturally based anti-immigration campaign, it isn’t working. And it should come as no surprise that someone who looks and acts as cartoonishly evil as Miller has his fries with a side of mayonnaise. That is disgusting.

Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise went on Fox Business to display his wild, willful ignorance regarding “public broadcasting.”

Scalise, who represents Louisiana, helped lead GOP efforts to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which will put hundreds of free, local stations and shows in jeopardy. His response? His constituents should just pay for it.

“Getting rid of the USAID, public broadcasting—look, if you wanna go watch public broadcasting you can pay for it,” Scalise told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “You know, people that wanna watch your show, and a lotta people do, they can pay good advertising dollars because it’s a popular show. If nobody’s watching your program—they’re too many options today in cable programming to have taxpayers funding to the tunes of tens of billions of dollars. We got rid of that wasteful spending, and it’s just the beginning.”

This is not how public broadcasting works, or any publicly funded service for that matter. American citizens already are paying for public broadcasting, and they were receiving worthwhile content in return, from emergency weather alerts to educational content like Ken Burns documentaries and Sesame Street. And even if they weren’t, Scalise’s argument would likely leave mostly poor Americans in rural areas he wants to take public broadcasting from paying even more.

This isn’t about waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s about Republicans and their yearslong war against Corporation for Public Broadcasting–funded institutions like PBS and NPR. For years, the networks have been targeted by conservatives, who frame them as deeply ideological propaganda rather than basic media. Only time will tell how their own constituents will be impacted.

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.”