“The president’s lawyers asked a judge Friday to extend key deadlines on the multibillion lawsuit against his presidential administration, but hidden within the pages of the legal filing was a profound detail: that the president has been in talks with his own government staffers to ‘avoid protracted litigation,'” The New Republic reports.
News
‘Living in This Disinformation Space’: Zelenskyy Pummels Trump Over Ukraine Lie
President Donald Trump’s false claim, an attack on Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has ignited outrage from U.S. allies abroad and from his frequent critics at home — who branded him a “Russian asset” and a “traitor to the free world.” While Trump’s remarks are being described as “a watershed moment in the war,” the criticism that may carry the most weight and leave the longest-lasting impact came from the Ukrainian President himself.
In a stunning display echoing Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric, President Trump, speaking from his Florida resort and residence at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, falsely placed the blame for the Russian President’s full-scale illegal war on Ukraine squarely on President Zelenskyy.
Trump’s remarks appeared to be a direct response to Zelenskyy’s public criticism of a meeting in Saudi Arabia between Trump administration officials and members of the Putin regime — talks about ending Russia’s war and about Ukraine’s future, that excluded Zelenskyy and his administration.
RELATED: ‘Bloodbath by Design’: Trump’s Russia Negotiators Criticized for ‘Almost No Experience’
Instead of addressing those concerns, Trump launched a blistering attack on the Ukrainian leader.
“Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years — you should have never started it,” Trump said, talking about Zelenskyy. “You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land. Everything, almost all of the land. And no people would have been killed and no city would have been demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.”
Trump then went on to attack his predecessor.
Trump says Zelenskyy “should have never started” the war with Russia
(Putin started the war by invading Ukraine) pic.twitter.com/54EA21gjbu
— FactPost (@factpostnews) February 18, 2025
Responding to a reporter’s question about Russia’s call for elections in Ukraine as part of negotiations, Trump baselessly accused Zelenskyy of imposing martial law and falsely claimed his approval rating is in the single digits.
“Well, we have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine,” Trump said. “Well, we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at four percent approval rating and where a country has been blown to smithereens. You got most of the cities are laying on their sides.”
CBS News reported that Trump “appeared to shift three years — if not many decades — of U.S. foreign policy almost 180 degrees, issuing remarks that made his administration sound aligned more with Russian President Vladimir Putin than America’s European allies of the last eight decades.”
President Zelenskyy pushed back.
“We are seeing a lot of disinformation and that is coming from Russia,” Zelenskyy said Wednesday, CBS reported. “Unfortunately, President Trump, with all due respect… is living in this disinformation space.”
He also accused the American President of being trapped in a Russian “disinformation bubble.”
Zelenskyy also said he “would like Trump’s team to be more truthful,” in what the Associated Press characterized as “his first response to a series of striking claims the U.S. president made the previous day.”
The Ukrainian president also took issue with remarks Trump officials made at Tuesday’s talks in Saudi Arabia.
“Yesterday, there were signals of speaking with them as victims,” Zelenskyy said, according to The New York Times, which reported he was referring to “the Trump officials’ tone in discussing the Russian officials, whose government sparked the largest war in Europe since World War II, which has killed or wounded about a million people on both sides over three years.”
“That is something new,” Zelenskyy observed.
READ MORE: Stephen Miller Melts Down on Live TV: ‘I Will Be as Excited as I Want to Be!’
Indeed, as The Guardian reported, former UK defense secretary Ben Wallace “described Trump’s claims as being ‘straight out of the Kremlin talking points’.”
Trump’s remarks stretched around the globe. In the UK, former British prime minister Boris Johnson, a conservative, appeared to mock the American president.
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor,” Johnson said, according to The Independent.
Former British Army colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon told The Independent, “I agree with Boris – Trump is talking bollocks and being hoodwinked by Putin – he said he’d end the war in 24 hours. He’s living in some sort of fantasy land and doesn’t seem to realize people are dying out there as he ‘show boats’ – we with Europe need to step up our support to Ukraine.”
The Trump administration, perhaps sensing the damage the President did to America’s relationship with Ukraine and its allies, quickly dispatched Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, retired general Keith Kellogg, a longtime Trump aide, to Ukraine.
“Upon arriving, Kellogg, a retired three-star general, said it was nice to be visiting Kyiv ‘just a few days before the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,’ seemingly acknowledging which side had initiated the war,’ CBS noted.
US special envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg has arrived in Kyiv. He says he’ll be “listening” and taking what he hears back to Trump, who just last night blamed Ukraine for starting the war. “We understand the need for security guarantees,” Kellogg said.pic.twitter.com/IeGUh6TGgS
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) February 19, 2025
“Zelenskyy said he hoped Kellogg would walk through Kyiv and ‘ask (Ukrainians) if they trust their president? Do they trust Putin? Let him ask about Trump, what they think after the statements made by their president,’” the AP reported.
Meanwhile, in a fact-check, The Guardian took a look at several of Trump’s “misleading and outright false statements.”
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked and widely condemned by the international community as an act of aggression,” The Guardian reports. “In the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Zelenskyy repeatedly offered to meet his Russian counterpart. Five days before Russian troops rolled into Ukraine, Zelenskyy said: ‘We are ready to sit down and speak. Pick the platform that you like.'”
Watch the videos above or at this link.
READ MORE: ‘Ridiculous’: Federal Judge Scorches Trump DOJ Lawyer Over Military ‘Pronoun Use’
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President Donald Trump is now in “discussions” with his own government to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, a federal agency he exercises limited influence over, after a contractor released 15 years of his tax returns in 2019, which were published by The New York Times two months before the 2020 election.
“Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation,” Trump’s lawyers argued, TNR notes. “This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”
TNR also repots that legal experts “have questioned whether a president can sue his own administration to pocket taxpayer money, and have expressed doubts about whether Trump’s Justice Department can appropriately defend the financial institutions.”
Critics allege a conflict of interest in the case.
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
“Right out in the open, Donald Trump is suing his own IRS to try to steal $10 BILLION taxpayer dollars,” charged U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who notes she has introduced legislation to prevent “this theft.”
Political scientist Brendan Nyhan described the situation as Trump “Negotiating with himself to loot the US Treasury.”
“Nothing beats reaching into the taxpayers’ pocket and helping oneself to $10 billion,” wrote Richard Field, the Director of the Institute for Financial Transparency.
“Trump is suing the federal government and cashing in. Who approves these settlements? HE DOES of course. There is no bottom to his shamelessness. Meanwhile American families suffer,” wrote U.S. Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL).
“Trump is just stealing $10 billion from taxpayers! That’s very MAGA,” charged Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
MAGA has made a deal with Donald Trump, and the deal is that “the humiliation is the point,” argues Republican former U.S. Congressman Adam Kinzinger. In short, he says, “humiliating the MAGA faithful only binds them more tightly to Trump.”
Kinzinger, a never-Trump Republican who acknowledged last year that his politics are now probably closer to the Democrats, says that to “understand what Trump is doing, you have to stop thinking about each outrage as a separate event and start seeing them as a sequence.”
He walks through a timeline of humiliations.
Trump asked MAGA to believe the 2020 election was stolen, so they did, “including many who knew better.”
Trump asked MAGA to excuse the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a mere tourist visit, and they did.
“He asked them to accept that his 91 criminal indictments were a political witch hunt — and they did, turning his mugshot into a fundraising image,” he writes. “Each ask was larger than the last. Each capitulation required more of them — more willingness to contradict their own eyes, their own values, their own stated beliefs.”
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
Kinzinger reveals the psychology of what he believes is actually happening here.
“Every time MAGA accepts something they previously would have considered unacceptable, Trump’s hold on them gets stronger, not weaker. Because now they’ve paid a price. They’ve told their neighbors, their families, their coworkers, that they believe this. Walking it back would mean admitting they were wrong. And the movement doesn’t allow that.”
What does this mean for the future?
“Don’t expect a wholesale collapse in Trump’s support,” he predicts. “Some will leave, others have tied their conscience to his success. Those will double down, again and again.”
Kinzinger expects that MAGA is not breaking apart. “I don’t think there’s some dramatic rupture coming where the movement looks in the mirror and decides enough is enough. That’s not how this works,” he writes. Because Trump has trained his movement to accept humiliation as “proof of loyalty.”
“The more outrageous the thing he asks them to believe, the more committed they become,” he explains, “because disbelief now would mean admitting everything they’ve already accepted was wrong. It’s a trap that gets harder to escape the longer you’re in it.”
But, he says, “the humiliation ritual works until the day it doesn’t.”
“Until the day enough people decide that the price of belonging is higher than the price of leaving. We’re not there yet,” he explains. “But we’re closer than Trump wants you to think.”
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
The Trump regime has an “erratic” and “theologically incomprehensible” preferred religion, a “bellicose, nationalist Christianity,” that is organized along various “fiefdoms,” argues Sarah Posner at Talking Points Memo. Those spheres of control and influence are “aimed at protecting, and even justifying, the regime’s impunity.”
Posner writes that the “goal of the Christian nationalist project is to subvert democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”
She posits that during Trump’s second term, the White House and federal agencies “have been bludgeoning federal employees, the press, and the public with religious pronouncements of moral superiority to perceived enemies.”
On Easter Sunday, several administration agencies posted social media messages “heralding Christ’s resurrection,” the Associated Press reported.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote: “The tomb is empty. The promise is fulfilled. Through His sacrifice, we are redeemed. We stand firm in faith, courage, and truth.”
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
“He is risen,” was the message from both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
The Department of Justice went even further.
“Today, as millions of Christians gather in their churches across the nation to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, this Department —- is proud to protect and defend religious liberty,” the message read.
Posner argues how various administration officials use religion.
JD Vance “starts fights with the pope over his anti-war statements (even as Vance leaks to the press, with an eye to 2028, that he was against the war).”
Through his prayer meetings and press conferences, Secretary Hegseth “aims to compel Americans to embrace his Christian nationalist bloodlust and war crimes, and this week compared reporters to Pharisees for insufficiently cheerleading for the military.”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer “has promoted her Catholicism in prayer meetings modeled on the ones Hegseth hosts at the Pentagon.”
“All these moves,” Posner writes, “are designed to crush dissent, marginalize other Christianities and religions, and empower government officials to violate the law. The fiefdoms, in different ways, prop up the would-be king’s corruption, and that of his allies.”
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
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