Trump Tells Fellow World Leaders He’s “the Only One That Matters”

At a meeting of world leaders Monday, President Donald Trump claimed he is “the only one that matters” while heaping praise on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“We love Viktor,” Trump said onstage at a Gaza “peace summit” in Egypt, where he told the prime minister, “You are fantastic, alright?”

“I know a lot of people don’t agree with me,” Trump went on, “but I’m the only one that matters when—. You are fantastic.”

Trump continued to honor the Hungarian prime minister, who has indeed earned his fair share of critics for striving to dismantle liberal democracy in his country. Since taking office in 2010, Orbán has seized control of independent governmental institutions, curtailed press freedoms, and targeted his political opponents, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people.

“He’s a great leader,” Trump said. “I endorsed him the last election he had, and he won by 28 points. So you’re going to do even better this time if you have another election,” he added, assuring him, “We’re behind you 100 percent.”

With parliamentary elections taking place next spring, Orbán’s ruling party, which has dominated Hungarian politics for 15 years, appears to be trailing a new opposition party in public opinion polls. As the Center for European Policy Analysis notes, this has raised concerns—which may ring familiar here in the U.S.—that if Orbán were to lose, he may refuse to accept defeat and instead challenge the integrity of the vote.

Donald Trump’s Cabinet has once again demonstrated that it is just as blindly devoted to the president’s cult of personality as his most ardent MAGA supporters are.

“It’s about transforming the region,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Egypt, right after stating that Trump’s Middle East Peace plan was bigger than “restoring” Gaza. “We have an incredible partner and a long alliance, a tremendous collection of leaders. This is clearly, in my mind—and I think in the mind of everyone in this room—probably one of the most important days for world peace in fifty years. And that’s not an exaggeration.”

“Only fifty?” Trump chimed in.

Rubio then proceeded to exaggerate.

“Maybe 100! Really since the end of World War II.”

Rubio responded to Trump’s comment like a dog would respond to its owner, and he isn’t the only one. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel, and countless other Cabinet members have turned positions that are historically aimed to be independent of the president into glorified sycophants.

Peace in Gaza is tenuous at best, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it abundantly clear that he would prefer to keep the conflict going indefinitely. This deal is not a switch to flip, it will take years to fully come into fruition—if it isn’t broken by Israel.

And peace for whom? Rubio’s comments come as Poland prepares its military for increased violence from Russia, as war rages on in Sudan, and as the National Guard tears through the streets of U.S. cities.

While President Trump continues to tout his supreme international peacemaking abilities, Europe prepares for all-out war. 

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Poland has increased its military spending to the point that it is 4.7 percent of its entire gross domestic product. For reference, military spending is around 3 percent of the U.S. GDP. 

This comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin ratchets up aggression against Poland and its neighbors to the west. Just last month, Russian drones were seen in Polish airspace, forcing the NATO ally to shut down four of its airports as it scrambled to ready its defense systems against the incursion. Poland’s leadership invoked Article Four of the NATO Treaty the next day, calling the ​​situation the “closest” that Poland had come to armed conflict “since the Second World War.” Three Russian fighter jets entered Estonian airspace just days after, in yet another significant display of aggression meant to test NATO’s cohesiveness. 

Now Poland is prepared to stop its former invader’s current one. 

“This is our war,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Warsaw Security Forum in September. “We decided to arm Poland and modernize the Polish army on a massive scale.”

Poland’s increased military spending has produced a situation where the nation now has more than 210,000 military personnel (trailing only the U.S. and Turkey in NATO); a large territorial defense force; and $50 billion of American-made weaponry, including Abrams tanks, and a Polish version of the U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS. Poland is also armed with multiple South Korean rocket launchers and had its soldiers participate in monthslong war games to test out the new equipment.

“In the case of war, Poland will be a very busy country because the military will mobilize, the economy will mobilize, but we would also have to prepare for NATO coming to—and through—Poland,” Armed Forces Operational Commander Lt. Gen. Maciej Klisz told the Journal. 

These developments paint a stark contrast to President Trump’s endless rhetoric in which he presents himself as the “President of Peace,” claiming to have ended six, seven, and sometimes even 10 wars. While that is obviously a severe exaggeration, the war preparations in Poland and the greater European NATO region only further weaken that tenuous claim.  

Last week, the White House bragged that a video of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blaming the ongoing government shutdown on Democrats is “currently playing at every public airport in America.”

But according to local reports, airports across the country—from Washington state to New York—have announced their refusal to subject travelers to the propaganda.

“It is TSA’s top priority to make sure that you have the most pleasant and efficient airport experience as possible while we keep you safe,” Noem says in the video, which is intended to be shown to people waiting in Transportation Security Administration lines. “However, Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this, many of our operations are impacted, and most of our TSA employees are working without pay.

“Our hope is that Democrats will soon recognize the importance of opening the government,” the homeland security secretary continues.

Travelers at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington will be spared the message. “The Port of Seattle will not play the video on its screens at SEA Airport, due to the political nature of the content,” a Sea–Tac spokesperson told local outlets.

Also in Washington, Spokane International Airport is refusing to play the video, due to the airport’s “First Amendment Policy,” which prohibits the display of political advertising content on airport-owned monitors in public spaces.

Oregon’s Portland International Airport won’t show it either, on the grounds that the video could violate the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from certain partisan political activities. “We believe the Hatch Act clearly prohibits using public assets for political purposes and messaging,” said a PDX spokesperson, who also cited state law prohibiting public employees from promoting or opposing “any political committee, party, or affiliation.”

In New York, the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, which oversees the Buffalo Niagara International Airport and the Niagara Falls International Airport, has declined as well, citing a “long-standing policy” against “partisan messaging.”

Ditto Westchester County Airport in New York. According to the Westchester County executive, the message was determined to be “inappropriate, unacceptable, and inconsistent with the values we expect from our nation’s top public officials,” as it “politicizes the impacts of a federal government shutdown on TSA Operations” and has an “unnecessarily alarmist” tone.

House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed Monday he had no idea that President Doanld Trump’s sweeping layoffs of federal workers had gutted the department overseeing special education. 

During a press conference, Johnson was asked if he was “comfortable” with cuts that had reportedly decimated special education services at the Department of Education. 

“I haven’t seen the specifics of that and I don’t know,” Johnson said. 

“I do know that each of the Cabinet secretaries were asked to assist OMB to determine what the most essential programs are, and what the priorities are for the policies and all of that. And I’ve been so busy on all this I’ve not had a chance to dig into the details of each division, and how it’s happened,” he said. 

But those so-called “details” Johnson overlooked are quickly coming to light—and they’re a huge problem.

Rachel Gittleman, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees released a statement Monday saying: “We believe that all remaining offices in Office of Special Education + Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), incl. the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) + the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA), have been eliminated.”

The Education Department laid off practically every employee responsible for administering funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which authorizes grants to states, schools, and nonprofit organizations, one agency staffer told USA Today. The Biden administration had requested $14.4 billion for these grants for FY2025, including $545 million for the Grants for Infants and Families program.

Secretary Linda McMahon, who presumably directed the cuts, has previously suggested that the office would be better positioned in the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently said he hopes to manufacture proof of his outlandish claims about the causes of autism. 

It’s still unclear how many positions were terminated within the special education office. The Education Department fired 466 employees as part of Trump’s broader reduction in force of some 4,200 jobs amid the ongoing government shutdown. 

Johnson seemed content Monday to defend Trump’s massive cuts, purportedly without even knowing what they are. He claimed that federal agencies were “in a triage situation” as a result of the government shutdown and blamed Democrats for the massive layoffs executed by the executive branch. 

But in past government shutdowns, including in the previous Trump administration, federal workers were furloughed, not laid off en masse. It seems clear that Trump is simply using the shutdown as an excuse to carry out a long-planned reduction in force and obliterate essential programs he doesn’t like.  

Throw out the history books—even settled modern American history is up for MAGA revisionism.

Despite the fact that he’s since won the 2024 presidential election and, presumably, has bigger fish to fry (see any rotating issue: the government shutdown, the rise in political violence, the stumbling economy, or escalating domestic and international tensions), Donald Trump once again took to social media Sunday to gripe about his impeachments. But this time, he opted to rebrand a little more history than usual by suggesting that Watergate was another supposed “hoax.”

“The Ukraine Impeachment (of me!) Scam was a far bigger Illegal Hoax than Watergate,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I sincerely hope the necessary authorities, including CONGRESS, are looking into this! Adam ‘Schiffty’ Schiff was sooo dishonest and corrupt.

“So many laws, and protocols, were violated, and just plain broken!!!” he wrote.

Rewriting the national recollection of Watergate will take more than one social media post. Nearly 50 years later, the involvement of President Richard Nixon’s aides in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters still lives on as one of the most seismic scandals to shake the office of the president—so much so that simply adding “gate” to the end of an event can suggest another political calamity.

Watergate, and Nixon’s forced resignation in the face of certain impeachment, resulted in the end of his political career. But in the last several months, Trump has taken some concrete steps to rewrite his own impeachment history.

Trump is the only U.S. president to be impeached twice, in 2019 and 2021. In August, the Smithsonian removed Trump from its exhibit on impeachments under direct pressure from the White House, in the wake of an art director’s ousting. That left the exhibit focusing on Presidents Nixon, Andrew Johnson, and Bill Clinton, effectively returning the exhibit to the way it looked in 2008. The “American Presidency” wing’s revised signage explained that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal” over the course of American history. The change was the result of a White House–initiated content review.

The Smithsonian has since re-added Trump to the impeachment exhibit, but with some changes to how the proceedings against him are described, most notably regarding his actions during the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Federal agents terrorized Chicago citizens over the weekend, as part of “Operation Midway Blitz,” President Donald Trump’s law enforcement crackdown on a major Democratic city.

On Friday, Border Patrol agents violently arrested Deborah Brockman, a producer for Chicago television station WGN-TV. Two agents held down Brockman while zip-tying her hands, before multiple agents shoved her into an unmarked van. Her arrest seemingly violated a temporary restraining order made the day before barring agents from detaining journalists. 

DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin alleged in a statement that Brockman had thrown objects at the agents’ vehicle and was “placed under arrest for assault on a federal law enforcement officer.” Brockman was later released, and WGN told Newsweek that no charges were brought against her. 

As the vehicle carrying Brockman drove away, it slammed into a seemingly stationary vehicle before continuing on. 

McLaughlin claimed that “several violent agitators” had attempted to block the vehicle from leaving. “In fear of public & law enforcement safety, officers used their service vehicle to strike a suspect’s vehicle and create an opening,” McLaughlin said in a statement, adding that the incident “reflects a growing and dangerous trend of illegal aliens violently resisting arrest and agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers.”

In a video of the incident, multiple bystanders berated the officers, but none appeared to approach them or their vehicle. 

DropSite News’s Ryan Grim said that McLaughlin’s justification was “Orwellian.” 

“To explain why ICE rammed its car into another vehicle, the spokeswoman says it ‘reflects a growing and dangerous trend of … agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers,’” he wrote in a post on X. “Um, the opposite happened. Clearly. So weird.”

On Saturday, at least 15 people were arrested while protesting at an ICE processing center in Broadview, a neighborhood of Chicago. Detainees reportedly face charges ranging from criminal damage to government property to disobeying police orders. 

One of the individuals arrested was Elias Cepeda, an organizer and martial arts instructor who has reportedly been on the lookout for ICE agents in his neighborhood since the beginning of the school year. He and other advocates hoped to warn residents of Pilsen, where many Mexicans reside, about ICE activities so that they could avoid arrest or violence. 

DHS claimed Cepeda, who was armed at the time of arrest, was a “violent rioter” with “suspected ties to antifa and previous social media posts calling ICE Nazis.”

In a viral video posted Saturday by Joshua Reed Eakle, an executive director at Project Liberal Action, four law enforcement vehicles swarmed a car on a suburban Chicago street. An agent pulled the driver from her car as she pleaded with officers that she was only 15 years old. The arresting officer then threw her to the ground and appeared to put his knee on her neck as he restrained her hands behind her back. Block Club Chicago reported the arrest took place in Hoffman Estates.

Meanwhile, roughly 400 protesters gathered in Rogers Park Saturday after a tamale vendor and at least three others were arrested nearby earlier in the week, Block Club Chicago reported.   

And on Sunday, federal agents released tear gas on residents responding to a violent arrest during a protest in Albany Park, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. 

Attorney Samay Gheewala said he was among many residents forcefully pushed to the ground by federal officers, after he’d approached to do “usual lawyer stuff” on behalf of people being arrested. Federal agents reportedly gave no warning before administering tear gas canisters, despite a temporary restraining order issued last week that required officers to issue two warnings before using riot control weapons.

Alderman Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez and state Senator Graciela Guzmán came running with a group of rapid responders, but by the time they arrived, one man had already been taken.

“This is part of the chaos they like to bring to our communities,” Guzmán said. 

Rodriguez-Sanchez told the Sun-Times that one person “was saved due to the efforts of our communities, but unfortunately, somebody was [still] kidnapped from our neighborhood today.”

Ghislaine Maxwell—currently serving hard time for helping deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein abuse minors—has been taking secret meetings and receiving special treatment at her new Camp Bryan prison in Texas, only further stoking fears that she is working with the Trump administration to receive a pardon. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that in August, Maxwell, who is serving time for sex trafficking and conspiracy until at least 2037, had the prison locked down while she met with unnamed visitors in the prison chapel. A fellow inmate reported that Maxwell returned from the meeting smiling, and said that it had gone “really well.” 

Additionally, Maxwell has been treated like more of a celebrity than a convicted sex trafficker and child abuser since she’s been transferred from her more serious facility in Florida to the grassy, minimum-security Camp Bryan. Her fellow inmates include Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Jen Shah. Shah and Holmes are in Camp Bryan for fraud. And while other inmates have taken to harassing Maxwell for being a “chomo” or sex predator, the prison warden essentially rolled out the red carpet for her visitors. 

One inmate told the Journal that the prison notified them that “someone important was coming to do a walk-through” and did a deep clean of the entire facility before Maxwell arrived. The warden even called a “town meeting” warning other inmates not to harm Maxwell. Since then she has been allowed to eat alone in her dormitory, has a security escort for when she wants to work out, and is allowed to shower well after other inmates are supposed to be in their bunks.  

This is all yet another strange wrinkle in a fairly obvious effort from the Trump administration and the GOP to tie up loose ends and absolve the president (who was quite close with Epstein and appears multiple times in his “files”) while simultaneously attempting to satiate their base’s deep desire for the truth about the Epstein files. 

Just last week President Trump indicated that a pardon for Maxwell was still on the table. 

“Her only chance for getting out of prison is a pardon from you. Is that something—”  CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said before Trump interrupted to ask who was being discussed. “Ghislaine Maxwell,” Collins clarified.

“You know, I haven’t heard the name in so long,” Trump said. “I can say this: that I’d have to take a look at it. I’d have to take a look.”

President Trump—a man regarded by some as the most corrupt president in U.S. history and a flagrant abuser of the presidential pardon power—on Monday called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be pardoned for corruption charges.

During a speech before Israel’s Knesset, Trump strayed from his prepared remarks to lobby Israeli President Isaac Herzog for such a pardon.

“I have an idea. Mr. President,” Trump said. “Why don’t you give him a pardon? Give him a pardon. By the way, that was not in the speech, as you probably know, but I happen to like this gentleman right over here [Netanyahu], and it just seems to make so much sense.”

He went on to call the Israeli prime minister “one of the greatest wartime presidents,” asking, “Cigars and champagne, who the hell cares about that?”

Netanyahu has been on trial since 2020 for three cases involving bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. In one, he allegedly granted regulatory favors, to the tune of $500 million, to a telecommunications billionaire in exchange for positive news coverage.

In another, he is accused of accepting nearly $300,000 in gifts—including cigars and champagne, as Trump mentioned while underplaying the allegations—from billionaires including film producer Arnon Milchan, in exchange for actions advancing Milchan’s business interests.

The third case involves the prime minister allegedly negotiating a deal with the owner of an Israeli newspaper, under which Netanyahu would receive positive coverage and enact legislation to weaken a competitor publication.

As Trump has during his own legal battles, Netanyahu dismisses the accusations as a political “witch hunt” and “attempted coup” by his liberal enemies in the judicial system and media.

Trump in June called the charges against Netanyahu “politically motivated”—and the trial a “ridiculous Witch Hunt,” “Horror Show,” and “TRAVESTY OF ‘JUSTICE’”—on Truth Social. “Bibi Netanyahu’s trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero,” he wrote.

Netanyahu also faces active arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, to which the Trump administration responded with sanctions on ICC personnel.

The White House’s government shutdown blame game isn’t turning out to be a very effective cross-topic strategy.

Speaking with CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance couldn’t muster an answer as to why more than a thousand staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been mistakenly laid off just days prior without lazily pointing the finger at congressional Democrats.

“Some of them were involved with the federal measles response. Some of them were involved with the response on Ebola,” said host Margaret Brennan. “How does a mistake like this happen? Did the White House even talk to the CDC?”

“So, you ask, how does this mistake happen? It happened because Chuck Schumer shut down the government, and we’re trying to make sure that essential services still function in the face of that shutdown,” Vance said in a sprawling answer that both blamed Democrats for the critical bipartisan failure and suggested that the layoff error was little more than water under the bridge.

“But that was a White House decision to lay off these individuals,” Brennan pressed.

“You heard the president talking about that. That—that wasn’t Chuck Schumer’s decision. I understand your broader point on the negotiations, but the layoffs came from the president and the White House.”

“But my point is, Margaret, that we have to do layoffs because we have to preserve necessary resources to do the most critical things that the government does,” Vance said.

“All these conversations about whether it’s a temporary layoff or a permanent layoff, we are dealing with a terrible, chaotic situation because Chuck Schumer and a few far-left Democrats decided to shut down the government.”

Roughly 10 percent of the CDC received layoff notices Friday amid a wave of some 4,100 government firings under the cover of the government shutdown. Once the news became public on Saturday, a federal health official indicated that some of the CDC’s pink slip recipients had been mistakenly let go, including members of the agency’s infectious disease outbreak team as well as its science and health data analysis team.

Approximately 700 employees were reinstated that day, according to their union, the American Federation of Government Employees.

So far, the government has been shut down for more than 12 days. The federal closure is the result of a boiling disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, leftover from the spring, about how to fund Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget.

Republicans want to pass a “clean” continuing resolution, which would provide the executive branch with unfettered funds to advance the president’s agenda as outlined in his July legislation. That would include ruinous cuts to Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid, a position that Democrats have demonstrated for months is a nonstarter.