The Dictatorship
The real reason Trump’s so publicly frustrated with Putin
President Donald Trump is reportedly frustrated with Russian leader Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine war and is considering new sanctions and indirect military support via sales to NATO countries. But in his half year back in office, U.S. policy, on balance, has still shifted in an anti-Ukraine, anti-democracy, anti-NATO, pro-authoritarian, Russia-favorable direction.
“We get a lot of bulls— thrown at us by Putin,” Trump told reporters at a White House meeting. “He’s very nice to us all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
But that’s always been the case. Ukraine supporters have said so since the beginning (it’s part of why they chose to support Ukraine).
So Trump is frustrated, but with what?
When Putin ordered that over three years ago, Trump gushed that it was “savvy” and “genius.”
Not that Russia aggressively invaded Ukraine. When Putin ordered that over three years ago, Trump gushed that it was “savvy” and “genius.” He has never denounced Russia’s attack as aggressive, illegal or wrong, nor expressed support for independence and sovereignty on principle. If anything, it’s been the opposite, as he threatens U.S. allies and partnerssaying he’ll take Greenland from Denmark or the canal from Panama, both in violation of signed treaties.
Nor is Trump frustrated that Russia frequently fires at civilian targets. Trump sometimes laments the war’s destructiveness, but always generically, without blaming Russia, like how people talk about natural disasters. To cite a recent example, Trump unspecifically said, “So many people are dying in that mess.” At a meeting in February at the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump and Vice President JD Vance echoed Russian propagandablaming Ukraine for the war and denigrating Zelenskyy’s efforts to highlight Ukrainians’ suffering.
If Trump actually cared about Russia killing civilians, he never would have blocked aid for air defense. When he was asked at the news conference where he expressed frustration with Putin who ordered the pause, Trump said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me.”
Support for Ukraine later resumed (for now), though that too seems primarily geared toward managing Trump’s image. His primary complaint is that Putin hasn’t dealt fairly with him, not that Russia’s war is illegitimate.
Most likely, what’s frustrating Trump is that events aren’t following his reality TV script, or Russia-sympathetic conspiracy theories. He promised he’d end the war on his first day back in office, using pressure on the Ukrainians and his personal rapport with Putin to stop the fighting, and get himself a Nobel Peace Prize. Now that self-aggrandizing fantasy is crashing into reality.
Trump put Putin above U.S. national interests, and Putin hasn’t returned the favor. Instead of prioritizing Trump’s image-crafting, Putin keeps prioritizing Russia’s national power. Putin wouldn’t even need to do much — he could just say this was all Joe Biden’s fault and give Trump something flimsy he can call a deal — but Putin won’t do even that. If anything, Putin seems to enjoy these displays of dominance, toying with Trump rather than giving him a fig leaf.
It may have finally been too much. Trump reportedly will authorize increased weapons sales to NATO countriesknowing they’re bound for Ukraine. If he follows through, it will improve Ukraine’s position, though even in that positive scenario it won’t undo the damage from six months of farcical negotiations.
At the end of May, Trump expressed frustration that talks hadn’t produced a deal and told reporters he might impose new sanctions on Russia. Then he didn’t, supposedly because doing so would hinder negotiations. But he had already eased sanctions enforcementreducing leverage over Russia before talks even began.
Congress is considering a new sanctions package, but Republicans won’t do it without Trump’s approval. Even if they pass it, enforcement could be lax and haphazard, and subject to the president’s moods.
Cultivating the president’s image is a different goal than ending the war.
Cultivating the president’s image is a different goal than ending the war. All it needs is something Trump can market as peace in the short term. In that way it’s similar to Trump’s trade wars, seeking to tout “deals” that the president “won,” rather than advance U.S. national interests.
Trump could impose economic penalties on Russia — currently one of the few countries exempt from his so-called reciprocal tariffs — but it will take work just to get back to the level of the pressure under Biden. In the short term, announcing more military sales to Europe might get Trump a diplomatic reaction, but won’t alter Russia’s core position, and, even with follow-through, will take time to impact conditions on the ground.
Occasionally pausing and overall reducing U.S. military aid to Ukraine made Russia less likely to negotiate, since battlefield gains improve their position in talks. That’s true even when some aid resumes, because the delays hinder Ukraine’s ability to fight, and make Russia think Ukraine will be weaker in the future. The only way to send a different message would be a big increase and credibly returning the American posture to unambiguously pro-Ukraine, with unqualified opposition to Russian aggression.
The fundamental truth of the Ukraine war today is the same it’s been since the beginning, no matter how many times Trump and others have denied it.
Putin attacked without provocation, for national and personal aggrandizement. He could stop it at any time, but chooses not to. That’s because he doesn’t want peacehe wants to dominate Ukraine, and thinks the death and destruction he’s causing is worth it.
Ukrainians, quite reasonably, don’t want to bow down to a foreign tyrant. They weren’t somehow tricked or forced into resisting Russia’s invasion — they chose to fight for their freedom.
That leaves only two possible paths to end the war:
1. Russia defeats the Ukrainian military, dismantles the Zelenskyy government and crushes Ukrainian independence.
2. Russia stops trying to conquer Ukraine, whether from a collapse of the war effort or deciding it’s no longer worth the cost, and either withdraws unilaterally or makes enough concessions that Ukraine takes a deal.
Only the second is a just peace with a chance of lasting, rather than another temporary pause in Russian aggression, during which they reconsolidate forces before attacking again.
But changing Russia’s calculus is hard. It’ll take time and sacrifice. It will bother Putin fans in Trump’s coalition, who genuinely want Russia to win because they see it as a culture war champion. It requires admitting that the Biden administration and America’s NATO allies got this one right from the start. And none of that is primarily about putting on a show to glorify Donald Trump.
So you can see why he’s frustrated.
If we see a sustained net increase in American weapons shipments and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, stepped up economic pressure on Russia, and real, sustained solidarity with NATO and democratic Europeonly then will it be true that Trump has changed his Putin-sympathetic position.
But to get a real peace deal, U.S. pressure must be high and sustained enough that Putin comes to believe he’ll get more by compromising most of his war aims than by continuing to attack while playing on Trump’s combination of incompetence and susceptibility to manipulation. Given Trump’s long record with Putin, that’s a tough sell.
Nicholas Grossman is a political science professor at the University of Illinois, editor of Arc Digital and the author of “Drones and Terrorism.”
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Eight protesters accused by the Justice Department of having ties to antifawere sentenced Tuesday to decades in federal prison over a shooting outside a Texas immigration detention center that wounded a police officer. Prosecutors have called the shooting an act of terrorism.
One of the defendants, a former U.S. Marine Corps reservist convicted of opening fire during the July 4 demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas, was sentenced to 100 years in prison, the maximum punishment.
The lengthy sentences were condemned by family members and supporters in a news conference outside the federal courthouse in Fort Worth. Hope Song, whose son Benjamin Songreceived the heftiest sentence, disputed prosecutors’ claims that her son shot the officer and said he didn’t intend to hurt anyone.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, one of two judges overseeing the proceedings, said what happened wasn’t a protest but “an assault on democracy.”
“The need to deter this type of conduct is high,” O’Connor said.
The seven other protesters received prison terms ranging from 30 to 70 years.
Prosecutors said the eight are members of antifa, a decentralized anti-fascist organization and a targetof the Trump administration. Antifa is not a single organization but rather an umbrella term for far-left militant groups that confront or resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations.
President Donald Trump last fall signed an executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization, even though there is no domestic equivalent to the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations.
The defendants deny any affiliation with antifa and maintain they attended the demonstration in support of detained immigrants.
Prosecutor Frank Gatto urged the judge to impose stiff penalties.
“People with that kind of extremist beliefs need extra time in prison,” Gatto said. “They believe violence is justified.”
Phillip Hayes, Song’s attorney, said outside the courthouse that he takes issue with the idea that the protesters are extremists.
“This is a bunch of kids and young adults who really have a really big heart and really wanted their voice to be heard,” Hayes said. “It was never intended that anybody get hurt. It was never intended that any shots would be fired.”
Prosecutors said in court that Song had yelled “get to the rifles” and opened fire, striking a police officer who had just pulled up to the center.
Hayes argued that Song’s shots were “suppressive fire” and that a ricochet bullet hit the officer after he arrived on the scene and “aggressively” pulled out his firearm. He said his client will appeal the 100-year sentence.
“Song, aside from this day, has had an impeccable life. A former Marine. A good student,” Hayes said. “He had a lot of good qualities that were just ignored. The judge went ahead and gave as much as he could.”
Other defendants and their family members pleaded for leniency in court.
Autumn Hill said the gathering “seemed more like a party to me than anything else” and that she and others who participated “didn’t expect or want any violence or destruction of property to occur.”
Amber Lowrey told the judge that her sister, Savanna Batten, is a compassionate person with dreams of opening a bakery. She said Batten’s activism started with animal rights and evolved into anti-war and human rights advocacy.
“She’s the best person I know,” Lowrey said.
Hill and Batten both received 50-year sentences.
Other defendants previously pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorists rather than take their case to trial.
Critics warn the case could have a wide-reaching impact on protests given that organizations operating within the U.S. are supposed to be protected by First Amendment free-speech rights.
Last week, federal prosecutors charged 15 peoplewith impeding the Trump administration’s immigration crackdownin Minnesota. They claimed the demonstrators were members of antifa who conspired against the federal government to block arrests and deportations by setting up blockades around government buildings and throwing chunks of ice at federal vehicles, among other actions.
The Dictatorship
Tulsi Gabbard and Senate GOP face difficult new questions over influence of her ‘guru’
About a month into Donald Trump’s second term, Senate Republicans weighed whether to confirm one of the president’s worst nominees. Indeed, the list of reasons to reject Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for director of national intelligence was not short.
The former congresswoman lacked the requisite experience in intelligence matters. She had an indefensible habit of echoing Russian propaganda. She struggled to explain her record of defending Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. Senators heard from former national security officials who issued unsubtle warnings about elevating Gabbard to an important and influential position.
But in case that weren’t quite enough, let’s also not overlook the fact that Gabbard was a member of a secretive Hare Krishna offshoot religious sect that is considered by many of its former members to be an abusive cult.
Gabbard, who wrapped up her tenure as DNI last week, has long insisted that any suggestion that she was somehow enthralled to or controlled by this sect or its leader, whom she has referred to as her “guru,” is just bigotry against her faith.
But it’s against this backdrop that The Washington Post obtained hundreds of secret memos prepared for Gabbard during her congressional tenure, which were put together by members of the alleged cult and which included thousands of pages of specific directives to her on policy and politics.
After careful analysis of thousands of these documents, which have not been independently verified by MS NOW, the Post determined that they likely came from Gabbard’s secretive guru, a man named Chris Butler.
The memos, starting in 2013, when the Hawaiian first arrived on Capitol Hill, reflect a dynamic in which Gabbard didn’t just take direction from the materials, but essentially took dictation from the alleged cult leader: Memos told Gabbard what she should do as a member of Congress, and she often did exactly that, sometimes word for word.
The Post’s Jon Swaine spent months trying to get Gabbard to respond to questions, but to no avail. Her spokeswoman reportedly encouraged Swaine to drop the story, saying, “I cannot imagine WaPo’s readers would be interested in yet another uncredible, bigoted attack on the DNI’s faith.”
On May 20, Swaine nevertheless alerted the DNI and top members of her staff to the fact that the Post was prepared to publish his reporting anyway on her association with Butler.
On May 22, Fox News reported that Gabbard was leaving the administration, ostensibly because of a health issue involving her husband.
This week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke on the Senate floor and commented on the reporting:
There are reports that Tulsi Gabbard was receiving instructions from a so-called guru and repeating them word for word. That ought to concern all of us if it’s true. No one knows who this guru really is, what his connections are, and where the instructions came from. … We need answers.
The New York Democrat’s comments made sense, though it’s worth considering who, exactly, “we need answers” from.
It stands to reason, for example, that Gabbard has some explaining to do, but I’m also interested in the answers from those who elevated her to an influential intelligence office in the first place.
In February 2025, confronted with an avalanche of reasons to reject Gabbard’s nomination, 52 Senate Republicans — every GOP member except Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — shrugged off every red flag and voted to confirm her as the nation’s DNI, including so-called “moderates” such as Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski.
The question for these 52 senators seems obvious: Do you regret that confirmation vote and now recognize it as a mistake? Or do you still think it was a good idea to put Gabbard in this influential intelligence position?
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
In the lead-up to the Iran war, President Donald Trump dismissed the possibility that Tehran would close the Strait of Hormuz despite warnings from his top military adviser, authors of a new book told MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday.
In their first televised interview about “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan said Trump also disregarded warnings from Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the potential effects on American weaponry and about casualties.
The initial closure of the strait, a narrow passageway through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes, led to a spike in gas and oil prices. According to Swan, Trump thought Iran would have limited time to take action because the war would be over quickly — a claim he has made repeatedly during the nearly four-month-long war.
“He felt that this regime was a paper tiger, that this was going to be a fast war,” Swan said on “The Last Word.” “He just said he felt that that was going to be the case, that they were going to collapse very quickly.”
“It’s a form of magical thinking, actually, is what it all boils down to,” he added.
The revelation is just one of several in the book — which is based on more than 1,000 interviews — that illustrate how Trump repeatedly bases geopolitical decisions on his own whims rather than experts’ assessments.
Another example of such thinking was when Trump floated a plan to expel 2 million Palestinians from Gaza so he could turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Haberman and Swan wrote in the book that one senior aide characterized the idea as “legitimately nutso … but very on-brand.”
Haberman also spoke about “how scared” people were inside the White House ahead of last year’s so-called Liberation Daywhen Trump unveiled sweeping global tariffs. (The Supreme Court struck down those tariffs in February.)
“They were scared at how close the bond markets came to just completely melting down seven days later, which was finally what got him [Trump] off of it, but again, it was the willingness to just go straight to the brink” that was jarring, Haberman said.
Despite such fear among Trump’s staff, Haberman added, the White House makes up “a group of people who genuinely want to see him succeed.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
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