Trump’s NATO Ambassador Takes Unhinged Stance on “Russian Threat”

The Trump administration’s messaging on Russia’s recent incursions is loud and clear: It’s just not a big deal.

Speaking with Fox Business Friday, America’s NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker claimed that Russia’s threat was “a little overstated” and that the superpower was actually weaker than American and European media had portrayed.

“They have not had a lot of success. And to your point, Ukraine has actually taken back territory. And, you know, to me that points to a weakness in Russia,” Whitaker said. “As their economy continues to falter, I think their continuation of this war is going to be difficult.”

But European leaders do not feel the same way—particularly as Russia has escalated its position. Last week, Russian drones were spotted in Polish airspace, forcing the NATO ally to shut down four of its airports as it scrambled to fire up its defense systems against the incursion. Poland’s leadership invoked Article 4 of the NATO Treaty the following day, calling the ​​situation the “closest” that Poland had come to armed conflict “since the Second World War.”

Rather than de-escalate the brewing situation in Eastern Europe, Russia followed up the incursion by threatening Finland, another NATO ally. And on Friday, three Russian fighter jets flew into Estonian airspace.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s soft touch on Russia has been noted by both the Kremlin and America’s Western allies. Speaking inches away from Trump during a press conference in England Thursday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer insisted that the U.S. leader needed to “put extra pressure” on Russian President Vladimir Putin, underscoring that it’s only when the United States forces the Russian dictator’s hand that Moscow has “actually shown any inclination to move.”

Trump told reporters that he believed resolving the Ukraine-Russia conflict would be easy because of his “relationship” with Putin, but that the Russian leader had instead let him down. He also scolded European leaders for waylaying sanctions against Russia as they continue to consume the country’s oil, bolstering Russia’s economy in the process.

But overall, the U.S. president has little to show for the profound international recognition he’s offered the Kremlin over the last few months. Against the advice of world leaders, Trump invited Putin to Alaska in August—tasking U.S. soldiers to literally roll out the red carpet for the Russian dictator. It was the first time that Putin had stepped foot on U.S. soil in more than a decade.

Still, Russia has not agreed to peace terms in its ongoing war against Ukraine. The superpower has instead insisted on receiving “international legal recognition” of its 2014 annexation of Crimea, an internationally recognized portion of Ukraine, along with four regions it has claimed in the three years since it first invaded Ukraine.

Whitaker, however, is still holding out hope that his boss will make the best call.

“President Trump is going to continue to find the leverage and to find the conditions where he can bring both sides and mediate a resolution,” Whitaker told Fox Business.

The Senate has passed a “National Day of Remembrance” resolution to honor conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk after he was killed last week.

Introduced by Senator Rick Scott, the resolution praises Kirk as a “courageous American patriot” who sought to “elevate truth, foster understanding, and strengthen the Republic.”

It calls Kirk’s killing “a sobering reminder of the growing threat posed by political extremism and hatred in our society.” It does not mention the things Kirk said that were divisive, racist, and promoted the intense polarization to which Republicans credit his killing.

Since this is just a simple resolution passed by unanimous consent, it is not enshrined law and didn’t require a full Senate vote.

In June, the House passed a resolution to condemn the killing of Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hortman, but it did not create a national day of mourning in her honor.

Kirk’s day of remembrance will take place on his birthday, October 14.

In a twist of fate, that date also marks the birthday of another slain American father, one whom Kirk called a “scumbag,” and whose murder at the hands of police Kirk falsely suggested was really a drug overdose: George Floyd.

The majority of Republican voters now feel that the country is going in the wrong direction, a huge spike in negativity from the 29 percent who were saying that in June, according to a new poll of over 1,000 Americans from the Associated Press.

This spike in pessimism on the right is in some part linked to the killing of Charlie Kirk and the discourse around political violence that followed. And while polls aren’t everything, numbers like these in the midst of Trump’s second term may spell trouble for the party going into the midterms, as its base’s feelings might indicate that the GOP has overplayed its hand on issues like immigration, the economy, and free speech.

“I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about the worsening political discourse and, now, the disturbing assassinations,” 42-year-old Texas Republican Chris Bahr told the AP. “If you’d have talked to me two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have brought it up as a main concern but more of a gnawing feeling.… It’s something I’ve been thinking about. But now it’s violence, while before it was just this sense of animosity and division.”

The outlook is even worse for GOPers under 45, as 61 percent of them think this country is backsliding—a 30 percent increase since this June. And they have plenty of reasons to be. The cost of living is still high, inflation is not down, and the prices on everyday goods are likely to go up too. And nearly 75 percent of Republican women think they’ve lost their way, compared to 56 percent of Republican men. The conditions for a ballot box rebuke of the current GOP are fomenting.

“It’s like, you think you’re heading in the right direction with your career and your job, but everything around you is going up in price. It seems like you can’t catch a break,” 42-year-old truck driver Mustafa Robinson told AP. “But we are also supposed to be united as a country and coming together. And we are not. I’m so perplexed how we’re not on the same page about anything, so bad that these people are being shot.”

Overall, only about 25 percent of Americans think we’re headed in the right direction, whatever that may be to them. This is down from 40 percent just two months ago. The poll can be seen here.

The Republican-controlled House has passed another stopgap bill to keep the government chugging along until late November.

The final tally Friday morning was 217–212, with just one Democrat—Maine Representative Jared Golden—voting alongside all but two Republicans to pass it. Conservative Representatives Tim Burchett and Victoria Spartz sided with the rest of the Democrats in voting against the continuing resolution.

The measure now advances to the Senate, where Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has already promised to defeat it. In its stead, Democratic leadership in the upper chamber have proposed a separate funding plan—though that is also expected to be rejected on the Senate floor late Friday.

The House bill extends the current level of federal funding without making any changes to federal policy. It will keep the government up and running until November 21, which will likely cause another kerfuffle on the eve of Congress’s Thanksgiving recess.

The Democratic Senate bill, meanwhile, would initiate a series of policy changes, including extending Obamacare subsidies and nixing the “big, beautiful” bill’s Medicaid cuts. That plan would fund the government through October 31.

House Speaker Mike Johnson addressed Schumer shortly after the vote, informing the New York politico that the ball was now in his court.

“I hope he does the right thing,” Johnson told reporters. “I hope he does not choose to shut the government down and inflict pain, unnecessarily, on the American people. I hope that they will vote on this clean, short-term CR, so that we can continue the work to get our appropriations done.”

If Schumer’s recent actions are anything to go by, the senator is unlikely to force his caucus into a shutdown showdown. Months ago, when the party was unified in its opposition to Trump’s landmark legislation, Schumer argued that a government shutdown would have “consequences for America that are much, much worse” than the president’s $880 billion cut to social programs.

A shutdown would give the Trump administration “carte blanche to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now,” Schumer said at the time. “Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies programs and personnel nonessential, furloughing staff with no promise they would ever be rehired.”

The FBI is rearing up to target transgender people, according to a new report by independent national security journalist Ken Klippenstein.

Discussions are reportedly underway in the Trump administration to designate transgender people as “violent extremists” in the wake of last week’s shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Authorities say the roommate and apparent romantic partner of Tyler Robinson, the alleged gunman, is “transitioning from male to female.” Notably, Robinson’s partner had no prior knowledge of the attack and “has been very cooperative with authorities,” according to Utah Governor Spencer Cox. There “is not a solid understanding” as to whether Robinson’s relationship was connected to his alleged actions, a federal official told NBC.

And yet the attack is, per Klippenstein, being used to justify plans to go after trans individuals by labeling them “nihilistic violent extremists.” Klippenstein reports that “the new classification, sources say, gives Trump officials political (and media) cover.”

“They are cynically targeting trans people because the shooter’s lover was trans,” said a senior intelligence official, one of two national security personnel to tell Klippenstein of the FBI’s plan. “The administration has convinced itself that the Charlie Kirk murder exposes some dark conspiracy.”

Klippenstein’s report offers yet another example of the Trump administration and broader MAGA right seizing on Kirk’s death as a flimsy pretext to crack down on purported undesirables.

Donald Trump’s quest to dig up more dirt on New York Attorney General Letiita James has not gone according to plan—and now the man put in charge of the operation could be on the outs.

Trump is reportedly considering axing the attorney tasked with finding evidence that James committed mortgage fraud. Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has already been informed that the president intends to fire him, reported ABC News Thursday night. Siebert’s last day on the job is expected to be Friday.

Federal prosecutors were unable to find incriminating evidence that James had knowingly committed fraud when she purchased a home in Virginia in 2023. But the lack of proof apparently didn’t matter to the Trump administration, which had ordered Siebert to bring criminal charges against her.

While Trump only nominated Siebert for the job in May, the decision to give him the boot a few short months later “could throw into crisis one of the most prominent U.S. attorney’s offices, which handles a bulk of the country’s espionage and terrorism cases, and heighten concerns about Trump’s alleged use of the DOJ to target his political adversaries,” according to ABC News.

Trump administration officials intend to replace Siebert with someone who they believe will be even harder on James, sources familiar with the matter told ABC.

New York’s top cop has become one of the president’s chief legal adversaries since she bested him in his bank fraud case in 2024. Trump’s revenge began to take form in April, when his administration launched an investigation into James’s personal finances, accusing her of lying on her bank statements in order to obtain better mortgage rates.

At the time, Trump referred to James as a “totally corrupt politician,” a “wacky crook,” and accused James—the first woman of color to hold statewide office in New York—of being “racist.”

James has since been a star of Trump’s political retribution tour, as she has repeatedly promised to hold him to account, regardless of his presidential status. Since Trump returned to the White House in January, James has filed 32 lawsuits against his administration. They range from legal rejections of Trump’s tariffs to fighting his “big, beautiful bill’s” attempt to strip Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood clinics.

Despite the apparent illegality of forcing Jimmy Kimmel out of late night, the Trump administration is moving full steam ahead on its media hit list.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr violated the First Amendment and one of Donald Trump’s executive orders Wednesday when he threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of the networks still airing the late-night comedian. Kimmel supposedly made controversial comments about the political affiliation of Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin. (Kimmel said that MAGA was rushing to claim that Tyler Robinson was “anything other than one of them”—which is technically true.)

The successive blocks to fall involved Nexstar, one of the largest owners of ABC stations in the country, pulling the plug on Jimmy Kimmel Live! mere hours after Carr’s comments. In the background of the whiplash decision, Nexstar is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar acquisition that requires the FCC’s approval—a nearly identical series of events to the ones that led to Stephen Colbert’s cancellation by Paramount in July.

Public backlash against Carr’s decision was not a deterrent. In an appearance on Scott Jennings’s radio show Thursday, Carr suggested that the popular daytime talk show The View could be the next target of the Trump administration. He questioned whether it should be considered a ​“​bona fide news show” and therefore if it was subject to the “equal time” broadcast rule, which requires news broadcasters to literally dole out equal time to both political parties.

“I would assume you can make the argument that The View is a bona fide news show, but I’m not so sure about that,” Carr said. “And I think it’s worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of these other programs that you have still qualify as bona fide news programs, and therefore exempt from the equal opportunity regime that Congress has put in place.”

What exactly makes The View worthy of being the next focus of the Trump administration’s censorship campaign is not clear, though the president has a long and nasty history with one of the show’s most famous co-hosts, Rosie O’Donnell. The current hosts include Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as spokeswoman for the Department of Defense during Trump’s first term. She and many of her co-hosts are outspoken Trump critics.

Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner on Thursday seemingly defended the censorship of anti-Trump talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel: “We want an open market for speech,” she said. “But speech comes with more than responsibility, more than accountability. It comes with the expectation that we’ll have integrity when we use our speech.”

A glaring issue with Faulkner’s statement is that her standard, “integrity,” is in the eye of the beholder. And it’s particularly rich given that the Fox host’s own statements—and those of guests on her shows—don’t exactly use speech in such righteous ways, as Media Matters has thoroughly documented.

Earlier this month, for example, Faulkner suggested that people rightly questioning the legality of President Trump’s September 2 attack on a Venezuelan boat (which the president claims was “drug-carrying”) are “working against America and for the drug cartels.” In April, she asked a guest whether former President Barack Obama and “others in his political camp” are antisemitic for supporting Harvard University amid the Trump administration’s incursions. In February, she defended deporting pregnant women and children.

In November 2024, Faulkner proposed that Representative Rashida Tlaib is a “terrorist.” (“If you support terrorists, aren’t you a terrorist?” she asked rhetorically, equating the Palestinian American congresswoman’s pro-Palestinian advocacy with support for Hamas.) In January 2024, she accused Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s homeland security secretary, of treason.

Guests on Faulkner’s shows—to say nothing of other Fox hosts and guests—also say plenty of noxious things, such as that drag queens reading to children normalize pedophilia, that Biden’s border policies “poison[ed] the bloodline in this country,” and that the woman at the center of Trump’s hush-money trial (and ultimately, felony conviction) was a “liar” and a “whore.”

Our math whiz commander in chief is once again promising to lower drug prices by 1,000 percent in the next year and a half—something that is virtually impossible.

“Now the drug companies agree that I’m right, and the countries … if they don’t agree, I’ll use tariffs to get them to agree. You understand?” Trump said in an interview on Fox News.

“We’re gonna be reducing drug costs over the next year, year and a half, by—not fifty or sixty percent—by a thousand percent. Because if you think, a $10 pill going so.… It’ll be raised up from $10 to $20 because it’s the world versus us,” Trump rambled. “So it’ll go from $10 to $20, from $10 to $50 or $60 for them. Which is bearable. And it’ll go from $10 to $20 for us.”

Incredibly, the interviewer did not request any immediate clarification.

This is not the first time Trump has tried to sell this particular strain of snake oil. Last month, Trump also claimed to have already cut drug costs by 1,000 percent. In reality, he hasn’t moved prices at all and has only sent a slurry of strongly worded letters to pharmaceutical companies demanding that they just lower their costs for Americans. And his tariff option, like most recklessly levied tariffs, might just raise the costs of prescription drugs even more.

“I find it really difficult to translate those numbers into some actual estimates that patients would see at the pharmacy counter,” Johns Hopkins University health policy professor Mariana Socal told the Associated Press last month, adding that Trump’s numbers were “really hard to follow.”

A month later, and they still aren’t making any sense.

Donald Trump is apparently intent on punishing media figures deemed guilty of lèse-majesté against him. The day after Jimmy Kimmel was censored at the behest of the Federal Communications Commission, the president told reporters that networks are “not allowed” to excessively bash him.

“When you have a network, and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do—if you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative one in years, or something.… When you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that,” Trump said Thursday aboard Air Force One.

On Wednesday, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group dropped the show. The affair was set in motion by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who threatened media companies that platform Kimmel after the comedian displayed the “sickest conduct possible,” Carr said. (In reality, Kimmel delivered a monologue in which he mocked Trump’s and MAGA’s ridiculous behavior in the wake of the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.)

Trump warned of the move against Kimmel back in July. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next,” he wrote on Truth Social after CBS announced the cancellation of anti-Trump comedian Stephen Colbert’s late-night show (which many saw as a capitulation to the president). After Kimmel’s ouster Wednesday, Trump similarly called his next shots, urging NBC to suspend the shows of Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.