Author name: moderat ereport

The World Witnessed A Declining President Trump’s meeting at the White House was supposed to be about aid to Ukraine. While NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte was able to keep the president focused on Ukraine, everything was okay. Trump announced that the US is providing more weapons to Ukraine through NATO, but it was when Trump was asked if he viewed providing more assistance to Ukraine as a path to peace that the floodgates opened. Video: The president said: I think this is a chance at getting peace or it’s just going to be the same thing. And I have to tell you, Europe has a lot of spirit for this war. A lot of people, you know, when I first got involved, I really didn’t think they did, but they do. And I saw that a month ago when you were there, most of you many of you were there. The level of esprit de corps spirit that they have is amazing. They really think it’s a very, very important thing to do or they wouldn’t be doing. Look, they’re agreeing to just, you know, they’re paying for everything. We’re not paying any more. We have an ocean separating us. I said, we have a problem. We have. We make the best stuff, but we can’t keep doing this. And Biden should have done this years ago. He should have done it from the beginning. But he didn’t. Read more

PoliticusUSA is independent news that you can depend on. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now House Republicans aren’t done cutting Medicaid, and they have added a new target to their hit list. By the end of the year, House Republicans are also planning to cut Medicare. Bloomberg reported: House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington in an interview with Bloomberg said Republicans will seek deeper cuts to Medicaid, new spending reductions in Medicare and fix any errors inserted into the US tax code by the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” “I think we will do one before the end of the year,” Arrington said. “It’s going to be a more targeted set of reforms.” The budget chairman said sees the follow-on legislation as a chance to secure Medicare spending cuts he sought but couldn’t win in the Trump tax and spending package. High among his goals, he said, is reducing reimbursements to hospitals through a site-neutral payment system that pays the same rate whether a procedure is done at a clinic or doctor’s office. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. By ‘reforms,’ Arrington means cuts in healthcare. If Medicare reimbursements get cut, that would be a death sentence for many rural hospitals. If you thought that the last reconciliation bill that Republicans passed and Trump signed into law was the worst of it, you were wrong. It is as if taking healthcare away from 17 million Americans wasn’t enough, so Republicans are moving on to attacking the remaining people on Medicaid and coming for Medicare. These cuts could cost Republicans their House majority, but these are ideologues who are on a mission to destroy the social safety net and seemingly won’t stop until all national wealth has been redistributed to the top 1%. What do you think about the House GOP plan to come for Medicaid next? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment

Donald Trump’s ham-fisted reversal on his promise to release a secret list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients has accomplished something long considered impossible by virtually everybody, including Trump himself: He has finally exceeded his followers’ credulity. The Epstein matter is so crucial to Trump’s base, and the excuse offered is so flimsy, that the about-face has raised questions within perhaps the most gullible movement in American history. Over the past decade, Trump’s hold on his fan base has been a mysterious and unchanging fact of American political life, the inspiration for innumerable journalistic diner safaris and the source of agonized self-reflection on the left. Trump understands that his most committed fans will believe almost anything he tells them. Any discomfiting fact is instantly dismissed as a lie coming from the “Radical Left” (Democrats), the “FAKE NEWS” (non-Republican-aligned media), the “Deep State” (any government statistic or official finding), or “RINOs” (whenever a Republican has the temerity to question him). [Kaitlyn Tiffany: Conspiracy theorists are turning on the president] Crucial to this cultlike epistemology is that Trump himself defines what is true, and can alter the nature of that reality at his whim. A journalist or politician may go from Well Respected to Failing Loser and back again as many times as needed. Extravagant promises (to give everybody “terrific” health care, to end the Russia-Ukraine war in a day, to bring down grocery prices) could be issued and then memory-holed. The MAGA-endorsed conspiracy theory that Epstein was blackmailing powerful people with tacit government support was not crazy. (Unproven, yes. Impossible, no.) The crazy part was that this theory had been assimilated into the pro-Trump worldview. Epstein had been Trump’s buddy. Trump had publicly acknowledged more than 20 years ago his awareness of Epstein’s preference for young girls. Epstein came into the custody of the Justice Department and died in prison in 2019, while Trump was president. Trump said “I wish her well” of Epstein’s lieutenant, Ghislaine Maxwell—an odd thing to say of an alleged child sex trafficker. In a rational world, the Epstein saga would have been an obsession of Trump’s enemies, not his supporters. And so Trump naturally must have assumed that his promises to release Epstein’s records would go the same way all his other promises had: straight into the memory hole. Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed in February that she had the fabled Epstein client list on her desk, and that she would release it. After the Department of Justice claimed that there was no client list at all,  Trump instructed his followers that the issue was now dead. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he scolded a reporter after the DOJ announcement. “This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking—we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.” When his supporters continued raising questions, Trump floated a new line on Truth Social: The files did exist, but they were anti-Trump disinformation created by the Democrats. “Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,’ and more?” he wrote. “They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files?” Not only did this new line blatantly contradict the repeated promises to release the files that Trump’s allies had made, but it was not even internally consistent. Barack Obama had concocted the Epstein files to smear Trump … but Democrats had refused to make them public, for some reason? And because the “Radical Left Lunatics” had kept them secret, Trump needed to do the same thing? [Read: We still don’t know what to do with the endless stream of Trump’s lies] But whatever. Trump’s lies often lack even the veneer of plausibility. His devotees have generally not made him work very hard to maintain their trust. You could almost picture Trump lazily mouthing the same tropes—“fake news,” “Russia, Russia, Russia”—expecting the same result. Except this time, Trump pushed the buttons, and nothing happened. Trump fans just grew angrier; how could Trump pretend that a pledge to uncover a sinister cabal had never mattered at all? Why, exactly, this reversal dismayed his followers when a thousand precious reversals had bounced right off them is hard to say precisely. One possible reason is that, compared with promises about normal policy issues, the Epstein saga is both easier to understand and generates unusually strong feelings; the sexual abuse of underage girls is more visceral than more abstract harms of, say, taking away peoples’ access to health insurance, and this subject is central to the QAnon movement. The Epstein saga also seems to hold a load-bearing place in the populist mythology, explaining why the “deep state” is out to get Trump. Casually retconning the narrative, so that the Epstein files cease to be the secret document that will expose Trump’s enemies but rather become a libel written by those enemies, is too wrenching a shift for even them to accept. It is probably too much to expect that Trump’s base will defect en masse. But we can be thankful for small victories. After years of complete impunity, Trump has finally discovered that his power to brainwash his idolaters is finite.

President Donald Trump is finally taking the fight to Vladimir Putin. Sort of. For now. Trump’s deference to Russia’s authoritarian leader has been one of the most enduring geopolitical subplots of the past decade. But his frustration with Putin has grown. Last week, the president said the United States was taking “a lot of bullshit” from Putin. Today, he authorized a significant shipment of U.S. defensive weapons to Ukraine via NATO and threatened Russia with new tariffs if the war does not end in 50 days. The change, though, is not reflective of Trump adopting a new strategic worldview, two White House officials and two outside advisers to the president told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Trump did not develop a new fondness for Ukraine or its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He did not abruptly become a believer in the traditional transatlantic alliances prized by his predecessors as a counterweight to Moscow. Rather, Trump got insulted. By ignoring Trump’s pleas to end the war and instead ratcheting up the fighting, Putin has made Trump look like the junior partner in the relationship. The Russian leader has “really overplayed his hand,” one of the officials told me. “The president has given him chance after chance, but enough is enough.” Trump came into office believing that he could deliver a lasting truce between Ukraine and Russia within 24 hours, banking on his relationship with Putin, which he considered good. For months, he largely sided with Moscow in its war against Ukraine, absolving Russia for having started the conflict and threatening to abandon Kyiv as it mounted a desperate defense. He upbraided Zelensky in the Oval Office in February and briefly stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine. He believed that he could, in addition to working with his Russian counterpart to end the war, reset relations and forge new economic ties between the two countries. He even envisioned a grand summit to announce a peace deal. But Putin rejected repeated American calls to stop his attacks. Russia’s talks with Trump’s emissary, Steve Witkoff, went nowhere. Trump pulled back diplomatic efforts. In recent weeks, Trump has grown angrier with Putin and ended a brief pause by the Pentagon in sending weapons to Ukraine. Zelensky, meanwhile, has worked on repairing his relationship with Trump and agreed to a U.S. cease-fire proposal. In Trump’s own words, Putin began “tapping him along” by spurning that same deal while unleashing some of the biggest bombardments of the war. Trump and Putin have spoken a half dozen times in the past six months, and Trump has grown steadily more frustrated, the four people told me. He told advisers this spring that he was beginning to think Putin didn’t want the war to end, an assessment that U.S. intelligence agencies reached more than a year ago. [Read: Trump hands Putin another victory] When Trump recently intensified his calls for a cease-fire—at one point writing on social media, “Vladimir, STOP!”—Putin chose to defy him by escalating attacks on Ukraine yet again. The president was disturbed by his most recent call with Putin, held earlier this month, in which the Russian leader reiterated his goal to “liberate” Ukrainian territory that he believes belongs to Russia, one of the White House officials told me. The conflict’s front line remains largely frozen, but U.S. and European officials believe that Putin is planning a summer offensive and will launch more attacks on civilians in Ukraine’s cities. With Putin continuing to ignore his pleas for a deal, Trump has felt humiliated, fearing that he appears weak, one of the officials and one of the outside advisers told me. “I speak to him a lot about getting this thing done. And then I hang up and say, ‘That was a nice phone call,’ and the missiles are launched into Kyiv or some other city,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office today, referring to Putin. “And then after that happens three or four times, you say the talk doesn’t mean anything.” Trump announced today that he would authorize a number of American weapons to be sent to the battlefield, including as many as 17 Patriot missile batteries, which will dramatically bolster Ukraine’s ability to shoot down incoming Russian missiles and drones (and were long sought by Zelensky). Seventeen would be a tall order; so far, the United States has provided two such batteries in three years of war. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, after meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon today, told reporters that Germany would engage in talks with the United States to purchase two Patriot missile batteries to pass on to Ukraine. But Ukraine would likely not receive the systems for months, Pistorius said. The measures announced today will likely not alter the overall trajectory of the war, and they fall short of what some hoped Trump would authorize. But they could blunt Russia’s momentum in the conflict and, in turn, its desire to prolong the war. The moves also offered reassurances to Ukraine and Europe that Washington could still be a partner in their fight; NATO allies will finance the purchase of the American-made weapons, Trump said while sitting next to the alliance’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, in the Oval Office. “It’s not my war, and I’m trying to get you out of it. We want to see an end to it,” Trump said to Rutte. “I’m disappointed in President Putin because I thought we would have had a deal two months ago, but it doesn’t seem to get there.” Axios reported that Trump might also send some offensive, long-range weapons to Ukraine, but the president made no mention of that today. Since Inauguration Day, two competing camps have pressured Trump on Ukraine and Russia. Isolationists such as Vice President J. D. Vance and Steve Bannon, Trump’s longtime adviser, have pushed the president to walk away from Kyiv; more traditional Republicans, including the Trump-whispering Senator Lindsey Graham and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, have pushed