Marco Rubio Admits Trump Utterly Failed at Negotiating With Putin

You’ve heard of “concepts of a plan,” now get ready for “concepts” of a concession.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio faltered Sunday during an interview on CBS News’s Face The Nation when asked whether Donald Trump had won anything during last week’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We’re looking at Russian troops and strikes intensifying. Did you hear anything from Vladimir Putin that indicated he is willing to make a single concession?” host Margaret Brennan asked.

“Well, I think there are a couple—I mean, there were not enough for Ukraine, if not we would be announcing a peace deal this morning—but certainly there are some things we noticed, changes,” Rubio replied. “There are some changes that I think are possible. I think there’s some concepts discussed that could potentially lead to something.”

Here, Rubio does exceptional work demonstrating that adding a bunch of words to an answer doesn’t make it not “no.”

The secretary explained that there was a difference between what a leader promises versus what they deliver. Now, who does that remind you of?

“It isn’t real until it’s real,” Rubio added. If the secretary’s statements are anything to go by, it seems that Trump wasn’t able to secure anything from Putin—but he did cave to some of the Russian president’s major demands.

Ahead of his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other European leaders Monday, Trump claimed that Ukraine could end the invasion today for the small, small price of Crimea and the country’s long-awaited NATO membership.

Surprise, surprise: Donald Trump is ready to allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to block Ukraine from joining NATO—and to keep a slice of stolen land.

Ahead of his meeting with European leaders Monday, Trump put pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to end the invasion of his own country by handing over seized territory and dropping his dreams of belonging to the powerful military alliance.

“President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight. Remember how it started. No getting back Obama given Crimea (12 years ago, without a shot being fired!), and NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE. Some things never change!!!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Sunday night.

NATO had originally promised membership to Ukraine in 2008. After the bloc reupped its offer in 2021, Russia demanded that Ukraine be forbidden from becoming part of the military alliance. Also note Trump’s casual Russian propaganda in his post: At least two soldiers (one from each side) were killed as part of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea.

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN earlier Sunday that Putin had agreed that the U.S. could offer Ukraine an “Article Five-like protection” but not the real thing. Russia also agreed to implement a law not to “go after any other European countries and violate their sovereignty,” Witkoff said. “And there was plenty more.”

In a statement Sunday, Zelenskiy seemed less than convinced. “It is important that America agrees to work with Europe to provide security guarantees for Ukraine. But there are no details how it will work, and what America’s role will be, Europe’s role will be and what the EU can do, and this is our main task, we need security to work in practice like Article Five of NATO, and we consider EU accession to be part of the security guarantees,” he said.

Zelenskiy and other European leaders are expected to meet with Trump Monday afternoon. Once again, Trump has preempted peace negotiations by showing his entire hand.

But Trump’s likely been planning to fold to Russia for months. In April, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told U.S. allies that liberating all Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine was “an unrealistic objective” and pulled back from America’s push to have Ukraine join NATO, in compliance with a long-standing complaint from Putin. Hegseth later walked back his comments somewhat, but Trump still defended Hegseth’s initial words as “pretty accurate.”

Washington’s malcontent over the sudden federalization of its law enforcement has apparently come as a surprise to Donald Trump.

In a post on Truth Social Friday morning, the president claimed that the people protesting his decision to leverage hundreds of National Guards members to combat a seemingly unfounded rise in crime were actually paid Democratic agents.

“It’s just been found that the Democrats are buying protestors in order to fight my attack on crime,” Trump wrote. “These are criminals who support crime. They are unelectable!”

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 country. In 2024, crime in the nation’s capital was down 35 percent, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.

Trump turned his attention towards Washington’s crime after 19-year-old DOGE staffer Edward Coristine, better known as “Big Balls,” was attacked almost two weeks ago by a couple of 15-year-olds who stole his iPhone.

Large crowds protested law enforcement checkpoints set up around Washington throughout the week, booing and jeering at the increased police presence.

But the president’s efforts to discredit the protesters as partisan plants paves the way for a larger initiative: leveraging the National Guard to enact his will in cities across the country. On Wednesday, border czar Tom Homan spilled that he considered Washington’s sanctuary city status practically null and void in light of Trump’s directive, telling Fox News that “there is no sanctuary” for undocumented immigrants in D.C. (This is false: Trump’s directive does not override city laws.)

During a press conference Monday announcing the imminent takeover, Trump warned that several of America’s liberal bastions could experience the same fate, specifically calling out New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Oakland.

Vice President JD Vance’s quiet vacation to the English countryside is becoming a real disturbance.

The vice president appears to be making no friends in the Cotswolds: Staff at The Bull in Charlbury reportedly told management that they would refuse to serve Vance if his family’s reservation at the sixteenth-century pub was accepted, according to The Daily Beast.

Meanwhile, other members of America’s political class have breezed through the town without complaint. Vance’s predecessor—Vice President Kamala Harris—was practically feted when she dined at The Bull mere weeks ago to celebrate Steve Jobs’s daughter Eve ahead of her wedding.

“It’s been the talk of the village—it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened here for a very long time,” one local told The Sun at the time.

Vance, on the other hand, has been pissing his Cotswolds neighbors off since his arrival in the tranquil neighborhood. Earlier this week, police affiliated with the vice president’s Secret Service were accused of going door-to-door to obtain residents’ information.

“We have had the police knocking on every door. They wanted the names of everybody living there and details of their social media. I know several people refused,” an unidentified dog walker from the hamlet told The Observer.

Vance’s office and the local police have denied the claim, telling press that the only residents they interacted with were to ensure passage through a blockade for the vice president.

“[We] are supporting the United States during the Vice President’s visit to our area to ensure the safety of all involved,” a spokesperson for Thames Valley Police told the Daily Mail. “A restricted access area has been put in place in a small part of Dean as part of our operation. We spoke to affected residents to ensure we are able to facilitate movement within the restricted access area. Residents were under no obligation to answer any questions and were not asked about social media.”

Vance’s presence has brought helicopters and SUVs to the quaint town. Villagers also expressed their malcontent with Vance after his expanded security detail overcrowded a local supermarket, blocking several handicapped parking spaces with his Secret Service entourage.

When Donald Trump seized the Washington, D.C., police and announced the deployment of scores of federal agents and National Guardsmen to the nation’s capital, he said these forces had license to do “whatever the hell they want.” Reportedly, what some of them want is to take down signs protesting their presence and leave sex toys on the ground.

Alex Koma, a politics reporter at Washington’s NPR member station, reported Friday that, according to residents of D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, a gaggle of federal agents gathered around a pro-immigration banner for a photo, before tearing it down and leaving a dildo in its place.

Footage of the incident, from a Ring doorbell surveillance camera across the street, shows a handful of agents surrounding the poster (which stated “No deportations in Mount Pleasant. No a la migra [No to ICE]”), before one of them rips it from the fence to which it’d been affixed. (The alleged dildo placement isn’t clearly visible in the video.)

This instance of immature vandalism joins other noble deeds performed by the forces descending on the capital on Trump’s orders, along with ambling around the city’s safest neighborhoods, bothering residents smoking cigarettes on a stoop, and sending a reported 20 officers to arrest a man for throwing a Subway sandwich at an agent (despite the man having offered to turn himself in, per his lawyer).

Donald Trump’s loyalty test is stretching far beyond the confines of the White House.

The Trump administration has released a scorecard to rank the endeavors of some 553 companies and trade associations to advance the president’s agenda and his “big, beautiful bill.”

Organizations are ranked on the sheet as strong, moderate, or low, Axios reported Friday, with ratings built off social media posts, press releases, video testimonials, ads, White House event attendance, and other budget law–oriented efforts.

The data is being circulated among White House senior staff as a temperature gauge on how to interact with companies and open calls with K Street (a nickname for Washington’s business district).

Some of these “good partners” include Uber, DoorDash, United, Delta, AT&T, Cisco, Airlines for America, and the Steel Manufacturers Association, according to Axios.

The scoresheet “helps us see who really goes out and helps vs. those who just come in and pay lip service,” a senior White House official told the publication. But that doesn’t mean the project is done—instead, the administration plans to continue updating the list, considering it an evolving document as more corporate behavior plays out in relation to Trump’s agenda.

“If groups/companies want to start advocating more now for the tax bill or additional administration priorities, we will take that into account in our grading,” the official said.

Loyalty has been a chief internal priority for Trump and his team since before the election. That common denominator carried more weight than practically any other quality as the forty-seventh president selected dozens of nominees to lead different agencies, nearly all of whom had previously lent a hand to Trump in his criminal trials, donated money to his political campaign, or helped build out one of his presidential transition playbooks, such as Project 2025.

Senator Bill Hagerty is dusting off the Three-Fifths Compromise as precedent for his bill to exclude undocumented immigrants from the U.S. census.

Hagerty appeared on Fox Business Friday to support the legislation, which would end the practice of counting all residents of a state—regardless of citizenship status—in the decennial census, which is used to determine congressional apportionment.

“We should only be counting citizens,” he said, arguing that his proposal to abandon centuries of precedent would stop Democratic states from “backfilling with illegal aliens.”

Fox Business host Ashley Webster let out a concerned huff and then asked: “Is it constitutionally legal to do that?”

“There’s constitutional interpretation, I think, that has been misapplied,” Hagerty replied. “It goes back to slavery days and, you know, what portion of a person is going to be counted, et cetera.”

Here, of course, he was referring to the notorious Three-Fifths Compromise, reached between Northern and Southern states at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, under which only three-fifths of a state’s enslaved population counted for apportionment and taxation purposes (all enslaved individuals were still included in the federal census, even if in an “odious way,” as legal scholar Steve Vladeck put it).

Not done making ludicrous statements in support of his bill, Hagerty went on to claim it was “not the intent of Founding Fathers” to count undocumented immigrants.

But the Framers, even while including the Three-Fifths Compromise, conspicuously opted to use the term “persons,” rather than “citizens,” to describe who was to be counted. In 1866, when the Fourteenth Amendment did away with the compromise, members of Congress chose to include noncitizens as well, deciding that apportionment populations include “the whole number of persons in each State.”

The U.S. Defense Department is sharing AI-generated images of female soldiers to make it seem like the government’s recruitment efforts are actually working.

In a propaganda segment on One America News’s The Matt Gaetz Show Thursday, Defense Department press secretary Kingsley Wilson lauded the department’s “incredible success” in recruiting women.

“These numbers are fantastic. Under the previous administration we had about 16,000 female recruits last year. Now we’ve got upwards of 24,000,” Wilson said. While the Pentagon has not officially released these numbers, it gave the same ones to Fox News earlier this week.

The broadcast showed several “photographs” of strikingly beautiful and notably diverse female officers. But lo and behold, a Grok AI watermark was distinctly visible in the corner of each image, revealing that the military’s newest recruits were nothing but ghosts in the machine.

A DOD spokesperson told CNN that they had not provided the phony images. Later, during Thursday evening’s show, Gaetz apologized for showing AI-generated images. “The DOD didn’t give us these images; Grok did. And we’ll use better judgment going forward,” he said.

But the DOD doesn’t seem to care either way. The clip—and the fake photographs—were shared by the Department of Defense Rapid Response account on X, touting the military’s success in hitting its recruitment goals early. The Army also said that it met its yearly recruitment goal of 61,000 new soldiers in June, but recruitment numbers were reportedly rising even before Donald Trump’s reelection. That didn’t stop Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from claiming a so-called “Trump Bump.”

One might recall just several months ago when Hegseth specifically said that women were not fit for combat roles. “It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” he explained. “Our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally—not traditionally, over history—men in those positions are more capable.”

Now his agency is desperate to welcome female service members—or, at least, make it look like it does.

As Washington, D.C., sues the Trump administration for attempting to install DEA Administrator Terrance Cole as the Metropolitan Police Department’s “emergency police commissioner,” D.C. police chief Pamela Smith on Friday filed a scathing rebuke of the move with the court.

On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued the now-challenged order, which states—among other directives—that MPD officials would need Cole’s approval “before issuing any further directives.”

As Smith’s statement lays out, this would create chaos at the MPD.

“If effectuated, the Bondi Order would upend the command structure of MPD, endangering the safety of the public and law enforcement officers alike,” Smith said. “In my nearly three decades in law enforcement, I have never seen a single government action that would cause a greater threat to law and order than this dangerous directive.”

Requiring MPD leadership to receive Cole’s approval for all their directives would upset the department’s “deeply familiar” and effective command structure, Smith said.

“Imposing a new command structure ‘effective immediately’ will wreak operational havoc within MPD and create tremendous risk for the public,” stated the police chief. This would sow confusion among the thousands of officers lawfully required to report to her—and, she said, “There is no greater risk to public safety in a paramilitary organization than to not know who is in command.”

Smith also railed against the delays that the new emergency commissioner, who would be unfamiliar with “MPD procedures” and “the communities in which we police,” would create.

Manifold MPD leaders are constantly issuing directives, she noted—“from routine paperwork and personnel assignments to responding to domestic violence calls to crowd management to the execution of high-risk warrants.” The cumbersome demand that they all pass through Cole “would effectively freeze public safety operations,” Smith said, creating “confusion and delays [that] will endanger public safety, placing the lives of MPD officers and District residents at grave risk.”

This would be all the more disruptive, she added, at a time when hundreds of federal agents and National Guard members—all “unfamiliar with MPD procedures”—are descending on the city’s streets on Trump’s orders.

The White House has authorized the Pentagon to use military force against Latin American drug cartels—but the sweeping directive also appears to violate the sovereignty of America’s southern neighbor.

Sources working in or with the Trump administration told Rolling Stone Thursday that the president is serious about attacking Mexico unless the nation gives Donald Trump “what he wants.” U.S. government officials just had one stipulation: Don’t refer to the intimidation campaign as an “invasion.”

“It’s not a negotiating tactic,” a senior administration official told the magazine. “It’s not Art of the Deal. The president has been clear that a strike … is coming unless we see some big, major changes.”

Trump and Republican leaders have long embraced the idea of invading Mexico, citing rising fentanyl rates and drug trafficking as sound reasons to put American boots on the ground. In January, Trump told reporters that the possibility of sending U.S. special ops across the border “could happen.”

Mexico’s compliance with Trump’s agenda has been complicated. Last week, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to send troops across the border, though days later, the Mexican government extradited 26 alleged cartel members, including leaders from major gangs, to the U.S.

Attorney General Pam Bondi hailed the moves as “historic efforts to dismantle cartels and foreign terrorist organizations.”

Cartel monitors who spoke with Rolling Stone claimed that Mexico’s compliance is an effort to “stave off” U.S. military intervention and “preserve ongoing trade negotiations.”

Mexico has not finalized its trade deal with the Trump administration. Late last month, Trump and Sheinbaum agreed to postpone a potential 30 percent tariff rate for another 90 days, but just how long it will take for the two countries to reach an agreement remains to be seen.

Historically, it takes U.S. officials roughly 18 months to negotiate a new trade agreement with another country. That boils down to exhaustive reviews of the country’s prior trade, sorting through thousands of line items of products, and analyzing the complex minutiae of local import and export laws.