You Won’t Believe Who Trump Blames for Russia Attacking Ukraine

Donald Trump went back to blaming basics Monday to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin, less than a day after Russia’s deadliest attack on Ukraine this year: He’s blaming the leader of the country that got bombed—and Joe Biden!

A Russian double-tap missile strike on Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine, Sunday reportedly killed 34 people, including two children, and injured 117 others.

In a post on Truth Social Monday morning, Trump presented his own spin on the deadly attack, and seemed particularly anxious to deflect blame from himself and Putin.

“The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine,” Trump wrote. “I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening. President Putin, and everyone else, respected your President! I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR, BUT AM WORKING DILIGENTLY TO GET THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO STOP.”

Trump has repeatedly attempted to wash his hands of his unwavering support for Putin during his first term in the White House and his lack of assistance for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after Russia seized Crimea in 2014, which emboldened Moscow and weakened Kyiv, making way for Russia to launch its deadly multiyear ground offensive in Ukraine in 2022.

Trump’s continued rhetoric now serves to normalize Russian aggression and put the onus on anyone else for the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In his post Monday, Trump blamed the president of the country that was attacked and his old standby, Biden.

“If the 2020 Presidential Election was not RIGGED, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible War would never have happened,” Trump continued. “President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to STOP, AND FAST. SO SAD!”

Trump continues to harp on the past, despite claiming to have actively seized the helm on negotiations on behalf of Russia and Ukraine. When asked about the deadly attack on civilians, on Air Force One Sunday, Trump claimed that he’d been told it was “a mistake.” Notably, Putin’s name did not appear in his post about the attack.

Crucially, Trump isn’t actually working to get the war to stop—he’s simply trying to make a buck. Trump’s so-called peace talks have splintered into a range of tangents in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Belgium. Meanwhile, in Washington, Ukrainian and U.S. officials have been working on a dense rare-earth minerals contract, which Trump has made clear is a necessary feature of any U.S.-brokered peace talks as a way of paying the U.S. back for military aid that he didn’t even approve.

Some critics posit that running multiple channels of negotiations is a tactic Moscow hopes will buy it more time—which they seem to believe is on their side, according to CNN.

The Department of Homeland Security had no evidence linking a Tufts University international student to terrorism or antisemitism—but ICE agents kidnapped her anyway.

A few days before Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student attending Tufts University, was detained by masked immigrations and customs enforcement agents last month, a memo from the State Department concluded that she had not engaged in antisemitic activities or made any statements in support of terrorism, The Washington Post reported Monday. 

Along with the lack of evidence against the 30-year-old Ph.D. student, the State Department noted that Öztürk’s name was not associated with any terrorism-related information across U.S. databases. The department recommended that her F-1 student visa not be revoked.

Öztürk was originally targeted by the Department of Homeland Security because she co-authored an op-ed last spring urging Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel. A memo from a DHS official obtained by the Post claims that Öztürk engaged in “anti-Israel activism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023.”

The DHS justified her detainment under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows for the deportation of any noncitizen who engages in activities that could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” like writing for the school paper, apparently.  

A video of Öztürk’s kidnapping outside her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, showed her being taken away by masked ICE agents and escorted into a gray SUV, a disturbing visual representative of Trump’s crackdown on legal immigrants’ civil liberties. Her arrest sparked outrage and criticism across the country, and is part of a larger assault from Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the rights of international students. Since Trump took office in January, more than 600 international students have had their visas revoked.

Öztürk has since been detained at a Louisiana detention facility, where she’s described the conditions as “unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane.” Despite the lack of evidence against her, she could still be deported solely under Rubio’s discretion, without the need for justification, under a different section of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Her federal court hearing is scheduled for Monday in Vermont.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick may have given up the game on Donald Trump’s tariffs, and members of the administration are seriously pissed.

On Friday, the Trump administration announced that smartphones, computers, and other tech devices would be exempt from the steep tariffs on Chinese products announced earlier this month that reached a whopping 145 percent.

During an appearance on ABC News’s This Week Sunday morning, Lutnick confirmed that tariffs on certain electronics had been suspended—but only temporarily.

“So you’re saying that the big tariffs on things like smartphones and laptops, iPhones—all those iPhones built in China—that those tariffs are temporarily off, but they’re going to be coming right back on in another form in a month or so?” asked host Jonathan Karl. “Or what—what are you saying?”

“Correct, that—that’s right. That’s right,” Lutnick replied. “Semiconductors and pharmaceuticals will have a tariff model in order to encourage them to re-shore, to be built in America.”

Lutnick added that those products would be “included in the semiconductor tariffs that are coming, and the pharmaceuticals are coming. Those two areas are coming in the next month or two.”

“So this is not like a permanent sort of exemption. [Trump is] just clarifying that these are not available to be negotiated away by countries. These are things that are national security, that we need to be made in America,” Lutnick said.

Just hours later, Fox News’s senior business correspondent Charles Gasparino reported that Lutnick’s apparent break with the White House had ruffled some feathers.

“There is significant division inside the @WhiteHouse over @howardlutnick’s comments on the temporary nature of the tariff exemptions, an apparent 180 from where the world thought the trade negotiations were going, sources tell me,” Gasparino wrote.

“Of course the only opinion that really matters in the president’s but I am told plenty of people really believe he is ‘off message’ of trying to create a trade regime that involves negotiations even with China and actions that don’t roil the markets including the all important bond market,” he added, noting that the story was still developing.

Lutnick was already one of the least well-liked members of Trump’s inner circle, having defeated Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in the ideas war to impose the president’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs. Those within the administration seriously doubt he believes everything he spouts about Trump’s maximalist tariff policy.

In a post later Sunday afternoon, Trump claimed that there were exemptions in his trade war. “There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket,’” he wrote on Truth Social.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller confirmed that electronics would still be subject to the 20 percent tariff that Trump had imposed on China, for failing to address fentanyl trafficking.

Trump’s apparent tariff rollback continued to roil the stock market Monday, as experts fretted over a trend of rapid de-dollarization in the market.

The European Commission is issuing burner phones to officials traveling to the United States amid fears of espionage in Trump’s America.

It’s the kind of security measure typically saved for trips to China or the Ukraine, where the fear of IT surveillance is high. But three European Commissioners will test out burner phones and basic laptops at International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington next week, sources told the Financial Times.

The move from the European Commission, the primary executive arm of the European Union, marks a new era of American-European relations, which have all but dissipated since Donald Trump took office in January. Last month, he slapped Europe with 20 percent tariffs, which he later reduced to 10 percent for 90 days. He has falsely claimed the EU was formed solely to “create a unified force against” the United States, he abandoned Ukraine in the face of Russia, and he threatened to withdraw American security guarantees to the continent altogether—single-handedly dismantling an alliance that has shaped the global order since Word War II, and simultaneously embracing Vladimir Putin’s alliance.

“The transatlantic alliance is over,” an EU official told the Financial Times.

The Commission did not confirm the issuing of burner phones to the Financial Times, but it did say that all EU officials traveling to the U.S. were told to turn off their phones and hide them in “special sleeves” at the border amid a rise in phone seizures from border agents in recent weeks. A number of tourists and visiting academics have been turned away for having criticism of the White House on their phone.

More than half of Europeans now consider Trump an “enemy of Europe,” according to a survey conducted across nine European countries last month. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they thought Trump “acted like a dictator,” and only one in 10 respondents believed they could rely on American security and defense if armed conflict arises in the near future, yet another indication of dwindling trust in Trump’s America.

Donald Trump worked himself into a frenzy after watching CBS’s 60 Minutes
on Sunday, calling for the network to be penalized in a Truth Social post. 

“They should lose their license! Hopefully, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as headed by its Highly Respected Chairman, Brendan Carr, will impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior,” Trump posted. “CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

It’s Trump’s latest complaint about CBS, which he is already suing in a $20 billion defamation suit, claiming that the network deceptively edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris to make her look better before last year’s election. The FCC is also investigating the network over Harris’s interview.

Trump’s latest tantrum is over two segments on the show Sunday. The first was an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which correspondent Scott Pelley traveled to the site of a Russian attack earlier this month that killed nine children. The second was a report from Greenland by correspondent Jon Wertheim on how people in the Danish territory are receiving Trump’s threats to take over the island.  

The president is trying to intimidate news networks that produce even the slightest bit of critical coverage against him, threatening lawsuits and FCC action. He has also threatened other news outlets, such as ABC and NBC, with ABC even capitulating with a legal settlement before Trump took office. In a presidential term already full of abuses of power, hopefully the free press in America continues to report critically of the Trump administration, otherwise they’ll be paving the way for autocracy.

Donald Trump’s administration has a new excuse for violating an order from the Supreme Court to return a man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

In a seven-page filing Sunday, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued that the federal courts did not have the authority to order the executive branch to “conduct foreign relations” with another country, by facilitating the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father in Maryland who was deported to El Salvador despite having received a protective order prohibiting his removal there.

The lawyers argued that the department could not be compelled to actually “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia because “reading ‘facilitate’ as requiring something more than domestic measures would not only flout the Supreme Court’s order but also violate the separation of powers. The federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations.”

Instead, the Justice Department was choosing to understand “facilitate” as “taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here.”

The government argued that the court could not compel it to make demands of El Salvador’s government, dispatch U.S. personnel, or send aircraft into foreign airspace.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis had ordered the government to report “what it can” about its ongoing efforts to return Abrego Garcia, and ordered the government to provide daily updates about its progress. In a separate filing, the government confirmed that Abrego Garcia was “alive and secure,” but in its filing Sunday, it argued it could not be compelled to report information on the case.

The government claimed Xinis’s request was “particularly inappropriate given that such discovery could interfere with ongoing diplomatic discussions—particularly in the context of President [Nayib] Bukele’s ongoing trip to the United States.”

Bukele, who struck a $6 million deal with Trump to house alleged gang members the U.S. government wishes to deport, arrived in the U.S. Sunday, according to the filing.

Last week, the DOJ presented another flimsy argument for not returning Abrego Garcia, ominously claiming that the government of El Salvador might have its own reasons for keeping him.

Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil will not be returning home to his nine-months’ pregnant wife.

Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Jamee Comans ruled Friday that Khalil, a legal permanent U.S. resident, can be deported out of the country. The 30-year-old—who has not been charged with a crime—can appeal the decision.

Khalil was detained in March, when several agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and took him into custody at his Columbia University–owned apartment. At the time, ICE claimed that they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. But when notified that Khalil was in the U.S. as a permanent resident with a green card, the agency told Khalil’s attorney that they would be revoking that instead.

He was initially held in detention at a New Jersey facility, before he was suddenly transferred to a remote ICE center in Louisiana, where the judge made her decision.

Comans’s decision sets up a confusing battle for Khalil. Last month, a judge in New Jersey offered a contrary ruling, temporarily barring Khalil’s deportation and ordering the case to be transferred back to the Garden State.

Khalil was targeted by the State Department for his participation in a pro-Palestinian demonstration that took place at the Ivy League university. The Trump administration claimed that Khalil’s participation in the protest made him a Hamas supporter, but the Syrian-born Palestinian refugee has counterargued that his arrest was a violation of his First Amendment right to free speech as he “advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”​​

In a letter penned from his detention facility last month, Khalil said that the threat of his removal from the country was part of a “broader strategy to suppress dissent.”

Under pressure to provide evidence supporting Khalil’s deportation, State Secretary Marco Rubio wrote in a memo earlier this week that although the immigrant’s actions were “otherwise lawful,” permitting his continued residency would undermine U.S. foreign policy to “combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States.”

“I have determined that the activities and presence of these aliens in the United States would have potential serious adverse foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest,” Rubio wrote, further arguing that Khalil’s actions had contributed to a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.”

Comans said Friday that the two-page memo had “established by clear and convincing evidence that he is removable.”

This story has been updated.

Thanks to a technical glitch, Donald Trump’s tariffs haven’t even been collected at U.S. ports.

On Friday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that an entry code in the U.S. system for American ships to use to have their freight exempted from tariffs isn’t working, and “the issue is being reviewed.” As a result, no tariffs are being collected by the U.S. government for the time being.

U.S. shippers told the news outlet that they have not been charged higher tariff rates on their containers as recently as Thursday, despite Trump’s claims that tariffs are in effect and are being collected. This latest snafu is on top of the fact that many companies and industry groups are still unsure of when tariffs will be collected, especially since Trump keeps changing the rates erratically in social media posts and executive orders, and making new threats almost daily.

“There has been some confusion on what President Trump has said in social media posts on when the tariff starts and what is written in the executive order,” Jarred Varanelli, vice president of U.S. sales at logistics firm Savino Del Bene, told CNBC. “Social media posts are not law on the pause and increase in tariffs. With the constant changes to the regulations, all customs brokers in our industry have a difficult task ahead of them.”

If there were doubts about the tariffs being a wise policy, those have increased several times over the fact that U.S. authorities can’t even implement them.

“Whether you agree or disagree with the policy, you have to ask, do we have the ability to do it this rapidly?” Dewardric McNeal, managing director and senior policy analyst at consulting firm Longview Global, said to CNBC. “This glitch may be an indication we need more time. It seems odd this is the time it happens. This adds policy chaos for the implementer.”

For now, CBP is telling shippers to pay duties and tariffs within 10 days of their cargo’s release, in which time it expects the glitch to be resolved. But the whole mess is just further evidence of a complete lack of strategy, planning, or direction with Trump’s tariffs. It doesn’t inspire confidence from the markets, hedge funds, manufacturing workers, or anyone outside of MAGAworld.

While President Donald Trump threw the economy into mayhem this week with his tumultuous back-and-forth tariff scheme, plenty of chaos ensued in other realms.

Here are five news stories you may have missed amid the tariff fiasco:

1. The total number of international students who have had their visas revoked has reached 600 since Trump took office, according to new data released by Inside Higher Ed. That’s more than double the estimate provided by Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month. Some students lost their visas for their connections to pro-Palestinian activism, while others had theirs revoked for minor crimes, like Felipe Zapata Velázquez, a University of Florida student from Colombia who was deported after being stopped by immigration agents at a traffic stop.

2. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration fired hundreds of workers—again. Hundreds of probationary NOAA employees were laid off in February, then reinstated following a court order. On Thursday, the probationary employees received an email informing them of their re-termination. Their firing is to be part of a larger attack on climate and weather research from the Trump administration, as it moves forward with plans to gut NOAA’s budget entirely, CNN reported Friday.

3. The Supreme Court unanimously ordered Trump to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to his birth country of El Salvador last month due to an “administrative error.” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis previously ordered the White House to “effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States by April 7, but Chief Justice Roberts paused Xinis’s order.

While the high court ruled the Trump administration had “no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador, or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison,” it did not require Abrego Garcia’s return, nor did it provide a deadline for the lower court’s order.

4. Measles cases reached new heights. As of Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded more than 700 cases across 25 states, marking the third-largest measles outbreak of the twenty-first century. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s cases have been recorded in Texas, which has seen 541 cases alone, the majority of which were among unvaccinated people.

After the death of an 8-year-old girl, the second measles death of an unvaccinated Texas minor, longtime vaccine skeptic and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. finally admitted the measles vaccine is necessary to stop the spread.

5. Israeli Defense Forces murdered an American teenager in the West Bank. The family of 14-year-old Amir Rabee was outraged to learn of the death of their son, who was killed after Israeli soldiers opened fire at three people “who were endangering drivers by hurling rocks at a highway in the village of Turmus Ayya,” NPR reported. Rabee’s family wants answers.

The White House is trying to use semantics to dodge the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that it has to help return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States from El Salvador.

At a press conference Friday, Newsmax’s Mike Carter asked press secretary Karoline Leavitt about Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s coming visit to the White House on Monday and whether Trump wanted Bukele to bring Abrego Garcia with him. Leavitt’s response was not encouraging.

“The Supreme Court made their ruling last night very clear that it’s the administration’s responsibility to facilitate the return, not to effectuate the return,” Leavitt replied.

It’s true that the high court ruled the Trump administration must abide by a lower court ruling to “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia. But focusing on this language ignores the bigger point that both courts ruled against the administration.

The government was barred from returning Abrego Garcia to his native El Salvador due to his life being in danger from gangs, before ICE chose to deport him anyway. Administration officials continue to insist that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang member but failed to provide any evidence to that effect, as earlier court rulings had found. Abrego Garcia does not have a criminal record and is married to a U.S. citizen and the father of a child with autism.

But none of this matters to the Trump administration, which refuses to acknowledge that the legal system can do anything about its mass deportation efforts. They continue to drag their feet even in the face of the country’s highest court, controlled by conservatives that Trump himself appointed. Can anything compel this White House to respect and follow the law?