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      Trump administration briefing: pro-Ukraine rallies across US as Trump officials fume at Zelenskyy

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      The disastrous meeting between US president Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Friday has catalysed a series of pro-Ukraine protests across the US.Protesters took to the streets in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, with hundreds gathering to express support for Ukraine and Zelenskyy.Hundreds of protesters also gathered in Waitsfield, Vermont, on Saturday to oppose vice-president JD Vance’s visit to the state for a ski trip with his family.The demonstration had been planned earlier in the week by the Mad River Valley chapter of Indivisible, a grassroots group, but additional protesters said they were motivated to join after watching Vance and Trump’s combative Oval Office meeting.Pro-Ukraine rallies in multiple US cities after chaotic White House meetingVideos posted on social networks showed hundreds of demonstrators gathered in New York’s Times Square, many carrying the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine on their backs. In Los Angeles county, a pro-Ukraine crowd rallied in front of a SpaceX’s facility, and protesters in Boston held an “emergency rally” for “fair peace” for Ukraine at Boston Common.Read the full storyTrump officials fume at Zelenskyy for disregarding advice before meetingInside the Trump White House, officials blamed Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, for the meltdown in the Oval Office on Friday, and expressed frustration that he pushed for security guarantees even though the US had made clear they wanted to negotiate that later, according to people familiar with the matter.Read the full storyFiring of watchdog agency chief illegal and would give ‘license to bully officials’, court rulesA US judge on Saturday declared Trump’s firing of the head of a federal watchdog agency illegal in an early test of the scope of presidential power likely to be decided at the US supreme court.Read the full storyKennedy Jr backtracks and says US measles outbreak is now a ‘top priority’Two days after initially downplaying the outbreak as “not unusual”, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, on Friday said he recognized the serious impact of the ongoing measles epidemic in Texas – in which a child died recently – and that the government was providing resources, including protective vaccines.Read the full storyAndrew Cuomo announces run for mayor of New York CityFormer New York state governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Saturday he would run for New York City mayor, an attempt to come back from a sexual harassment scandal that forced him to resign more than three years earlier.Read the full storyEmail shows Musk ally is moving to close office behind free tax-filing program at IRSAn Elon Musk ally installed in the US government said in a late-night email going into Saturday that the office behind a popular free online tax-filing option would be shuttered – and its employees would be let go.Read the full storyMedicaid recipients fear ‘buzzsaw cuts’ for Trump’s agendaRepublicans are considering a rollback of the federal social safety net, particularly Medicaid, which has nearly 80 million enrollees in all 50 states. The budget plan proposes an $880bn reduction in funding for the insurance over the next decade, an amount experts warn would hollow out the program.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Civil rights attorneys sued the Trump administration on Saturday to prevent it from transferring 10 undocumented immigrants detained in the US to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

      A FedEx cargo airplane caught on fire after striking a bird shortly after the plane’s departure from Newark, New Jersey, on Saturday morning, according to officials.

      A decision by regulators to extend the life of two of the oldest reactors in the US decades beyond their original permits has elevated the risk of a nuclear disaster in heavily populated south Florida, environmental groups are warning.

      Singer Angie Stone, known for her hit Wish I Didn’t Miss You, has died in a car crash at the age of 63. More

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      Pro-Ukraine protests erupt across US after Trump and Vance ‘ambush’ Zelenskyy

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      Protests against the Trump administration erupted across the US on Saturday following an unprecedented Oval Office clash, wherein Donald Trump and JD Vance escalated tensions with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Hundreds of protesters gathered in Waitsfield, Vermont, on Saturday morning to oppose the vice-president’s visit to the state for a ski trip with his family.The demonstration had been planned earlier in the week by the Mad River Valley chapter of Indivisible, a grassroots organizing group, but additional protesters said they were motivated to join after watching Vance and Trump’s combative White House meeting with Zelenskyy on Friday.Protesters held signs reading “Vermont stands with Ukraine” and “International embarrassment”, while many waved Ukrainian flags in solidarity. Fox aired video of the protesters, but blurred out signs displaying messages against Vance and in favor of Ukraine.“After what he did yesterday, he crossed the line,” protester Cori Giroux told Vermont Public Radio.On Thursday, the governor, Phil Scott, a Republican who refused to vote for Trump in any of his three runs for the White House, issued a statement calling on Vermonters to be respectful of Vance and his family during their visit.“Please join me in welcoming them to Vermont and hoping they have an opportunity to experience what makes our state, and Vermonters, so special,” he said.While Vance, who admitted Friday he has never been to Ukraine, fled to an undisclosed location to evade protesters, some commentators noted that Zelenskyy, who stayed in Ukraine during Russia’s invasion, was returning to a Kyiv still under attack.The protest followed a contentious confrontation in the Oval Office, where the US president told the Ukrainian leader to make a deal with Russia “or we’e out”. At one point, Trump accused Zelenskyy of not showing enough gratitude for US military and political aid, warning that he was “gambling with world war three”.Zelenskyy countered that he had repeatedly thanked the American people and their leaders for their support, that but Ukrainians did not want to accept a ceasefire with Russia without security guarantees, since Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, had repeatedly broken a previous ceasefire agreement.Following the exchange, European leaders, along with the prime ministers of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, posted messages of support for Ukraine.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLeading Democratic lawmakers also rallied to Zelenskyy’s side, with one, the senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, calling the Oval office meeting an “ambush” of the Ukrainian president by Trump and Vance.The aggressive meeting led to protests in cities and towns across the US, including New York, Los Angeles and Boston, where hundreds gathered to express their support for Ukraine and Zelenskyy.Videos posted on social networks showed hundreds of demonstrators gathered in New York’s Times Square, many carrying the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine on their backs. In Los Angeles county, a pro-Ukraine crowd rallied in front of a SpaceX’s facility, and protesters in Boston held an “emergency rally” for “fair peace” for Ukraine at Boston Common.“Ukraine wants fair peace. Ukraine wants the war to end,” the group Boston Supports Ukraine wrote on Facebook. “Ukraine wants all of this on fair terms with security guarantees.”For his part, Zelenskyy posted video of his warm reception in London on social networks, showing crowds of supporters lining the street outside Downing Street, where he was embraced by the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer. More

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      Trump officials fume at Zelenskyy for disregarding advice before meeting

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      Inside the Trump White House, officials blamed the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for the meltdown in the Oval Office on Friday, and expressed frustration that he pushed for security guarantees even though the US had made clear they wanted to negotiate that later, according to people familiar with the matter.The officials had told their Ukrainian counterparts in advance of the meeting that Trump wanted to sign an economic partnership this week at a ministerial level, as aides worked on the details about security guarantees.Trump saw the minerals deal as the first phase of a broader economic partnership and told aides it showed the US was effectively making a commitment on security guarantees, because the agreement deal would mean the US had a vested interest in Ukraine’s economic prosperity.The officials believed that had all been communicated to Ukraine, as was the advice that senators gave Zelenskyy on Friday morning to praise Trump and not litigate the issue of wanting stronger security guarantees to his face.To Trump’s aides, Zelenskyy did not heed that advice when he expressed skepticism at JD Vance’s view of making peace with Russia and, in their view, lectured the US vice-president on the history of Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine that started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea.That set off a downward spiral in the Oval Office as Vance took issue with being questioned about his description of diplomacy, and clapped back at Zelenskyy: “I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.”Vance cut into Zelenskyy with opprobrium that would have been objectively harsh for an adversary, much less for a putative ally. He appeared to interpret Zelenskyy’s remarks to him as an insult to the US.But the fury with which Vance castigated Zelenskyy for being ungrateful appears to have been the moment when Vance and his team’s personal views about the Ukraine conflict came to the fore.On Thursday, when the prospect of completing the minerals deal was considered more of a probability, Trump had played down his comment calling Zelenskyy a dictator last week. “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that. Next question,” Trump told reporters.That brief moment of levity masked the reality that Trump had workshopped the “dictator” post on Truth Social with Vance before it was sent out last week, according to two people briefed on the matter.Vance had settled on the insult on the basis that Zelenskyy had suspended elections, the two people said, apparently ignoring the fact that Ukraine’s constitution decrees that elections cannot be held during a period of martial law, like the one Zelenskyy declared when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.While other US allies, such as the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, effusively praised Trump in the Oval Office this week, Zelenskyy took a different approach and perhaps unknowingly careened headfirst into Vance’s personal skepticism of him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump officials said privately on Saturday that Trump still wants to sign the minerals deal, but an immediate reset appeared unlikely with Trump scheduled to attend a fundraising dinner for the Maga Inc super political action committee in Palm Beach and Zelenskyy’s departure from the US for the UK.There had been one attempt by Ukraine to save the deal after the meeting blew up when Zelenskyy’s aides suggested that Trump meet with Zelenskyy one-on-one to calm tensions. But Trump officials declined the offer, according to two people familiar with the matter.Trump’s view immediately after the meeting was that it was unproductive to engage in further talks because, to him, Zelenskyy was unwilling to sign a peace agreement with Russia.In the end, Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, informed the members of the Ukrainian delegation, who were waiting in the Roosevelt Room, that they needed to leave. Minutes later, Zelenskyy stepped into a black SUV that drove off the White House grounds.Appearing on Fox News that evening, Zelenskyy referred to Ronald Reagan’s dictum that “peace is more than just an absence of war” and suggested that because Putin had broken dozens of ceasefire agreements already, more work was needed to reach “a just and lasting peace”. Trump appeared unimpressed when he boarded Marine One en route to Palm Beach, telling reporters that Zelenskyy needed to say publicly that he wanted to make peace and stop saying “negative things” about Putin. More

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      Trump’s style of petty domination was in full display with Zelenskyy | Moira Donegan

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      The last time Donald Trump did this, it was in secret, and he got impeached over it. In 2019, Donald Trump, on a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded that the Ukrainian president produce – or fabricate – evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, the son of Trump’s eventual opponent in the 2020 election, in exchange for continued US military aide.At the time, Russia had already seized control of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and was funding violent insurgent groups in the country’s east; it was increasingly clear that a full-scale Russian invasion was coming, as it finally did in 2022. Since the end of second world war, it has been America that checks Russian expansionist ambitions in Europe – America that provided the backstop to the Nato alliance, America that secured the independence of eastern Europe. Trump wanted to condition that longstanding role on Zelenskyy doing him a personal political favor. The international order could be ended, he suggested, if those who depended on him didn’t do enough to indulge his vanity, self-interest and impulsive whims.Something similar was already afoot earlier this week, when Trump summoned Zelenskyy to Washington at the last minute to pressure him to sign a mineral rights deal. Trump wanted to make continued American support for Ukraine’s military effort contingent on American involvement in the country’s mineral industry. But the deal that was offered to Zelenskyy in fact contained no security guarantees: it offered something less like a bilateral agreement and more like a shakedown. Nevertheless Zelenskyy, who is leading a besieged people in danger of losing their country, seemed willing to take it – even after Trump called him a “dictator” last week.But things went downhill from there. Trump seemed determined to antagonize Zelenksyy, making a passive aggressive remark about what the Ukrainian president was wearing when he arrived at the White House. (Sources close to Trump leaked to Semafor that the administration was also displeased with Zelenskyy’s “body language”.) In a meeting in the Oval Office, with film crews and reporters present, the US vice-president, JD Vance, began berating Zelenskyy for what he alleged was the Ukrainian president’s disinterest in diplomacy, by which he seems to have meant a Ukrainian surrender on Russia’s terms.When Zelenskyy countered that Russia has not been a reliable partner, breaking promises to Ukraine repeatedly in past ceasefires, Vance began berating him that he was not grateful enough for US support. “I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” said Vance, who had initiated the confrontation with cameras in the room, in a practiced cadence. “Have you said thank you once?” Zelenskyy has in fact said “thank you” to the United States many times, including at the outset of the meeting. Both Trump and Vance began raising their voices, ignoring Zelenskyy’s attempts to speak and impugning both his leadership and his personal character. Zelenskyy was soon kicked out, and left the White House without signing the minerals agreement that Trump had nominally summoned him from Ukraine to conclude.It is clear that the post-second world war international order is over. It is clear that Europe will have to look elsewhere, and not to the United States, for its security, and that America will increasingly be isolated among nations, without allies to advance its interests abroad and without friends to share the benefits of science, culture and commerce. Few world leaders, after all, are willing to make deals with such a mercurial partner; fewer still are willing to try, if the attempt will be met with public humiliation in such brutish and bullying style.It is clear that other great powers, including those who do not share what were once America’s stated principles of justice, democracy and human dignity, will fill this vacuum, to America’s detriment. It is clear that Donald Trump does not intend to check Vladimir Putin’s expansionist ambitions – that he will force a deal in the Ukraine war on Russia’s terms, that Zelenskyy himself will likely be exiled or killed in the aftermath, and that other countries in Europe are in danger.In the hours after the meeting, many world leaders publicly voiced their support for Zelenskyy, including the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk. Like him, they stand on the edge of an uncertain future. Russia is on the march, indifferent to borders, laws and freedoms, and the United States will no longer stop them. As an American, I was embarrassed by the display. I am also, now, very scared.Because what Trump did to Zelenskyy on Friday is not a departure from his style: it is entirely typical of his domineering approach to politics – one in which violence or harm is threatened to extort his preferred outcomes, and in which good faith negotiation or even basic dignity is shrugged off in favor of petty displays of domination and cruelty.Trump and Vance, I now think, never really intended to have a conversation with Zelenskky: they intended, instead, to try to make themselves look tough on TV by humiliating him. Jake Paul, a boxer, influencer and alleged crypto scammer who has been a booster of Donald Trump, said of the televised shouting match against a head of state, “This isn’t attacking. This is called being a MAN.”Manliness seems to be all that Trump aspires to: and he defines it, almost exclusively as cruelty. Both on the international stage and on the domestic one, Trump and the crowd of racist, misogynist and endlessly immature idiots who surround him will stop at nothing to prove what men they are – no matter how much America suffers, or how many people die, in the process. At the meeting, when Zelenskky tried to persuade Trump to feel differently about the prospect of Russian expansion, Trump cut him off. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel,” he said. “We’re going to feel very good. We’re going to feel very good and very strong.” Maybe he does.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘Bewildering’: US media and politicians react to Trump’s televised attack on Zelenskyy

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      One television star turned president visits another far more powerful one on a stage set and attempts to introduce a plot twist of sorts. What could go wrong?The high-stakes White House showdown that unfolded on Friday after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded US security guarantees was deemed a damaging setback to Donald Trump’s goal of forging a peace deal – and a win for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin – by some US political commentators.And others in the US who are closely aligned with Trump cast the president’s meeting with Zelenskyy as a win for his “America first” realignment goals.“It is bewildering to see Mr Trump’s allies defending this debacle as some show of American strength,” the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial board said on Saturday, noting that US aims of limiting Russian expansionism without the use of US forces was now “harder to achieve”.The outlet warned that “turning Ukraine over to Mr Putin would be catastrophic for that country and Europe, but it would be a political calamity for Mr Trump too.“Friday’s spectacle won’t make [Putin] any more willing to stop his onslaught” after invading Ukraine in 2022.The New York Times assessed that the derailed Oval Office meeting pointed to Trump’s “determination to scrap America’s traditional sources of power – its alliances among like-minded democracies – and return the country to an era of raw great-power negotiations.”“The three-year wartime partnership between Washington and Kyiv was shattered,” the paper added.Some conservative political figures also hit out at their fellow Republicans Trump and Vance for their handling over the meeting. “I hate to say this … but the United States right now is not the good guys in this,” said Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman from Illinois who once served on a House committee that investigated Trump supporters’ attack on the US Capitol in early 2021.Whether diplomatic relations between Ukraine and the US can be repaired remained an open question Saturday. But the dispute points to the dangers of conducting diplomacy in public, despite the assessment from Trump – a former reality-TV host – that the clash with his Ukrainian counterpart, an ex-actor, made “great television”.“It is going to be incredibly hard to walk back from the kind of animosity we saw in that room today and to walk back some of those statements,” Republican strategist Karl Rove told Fox News. “It could have been done if cameras had not been running, but the only winner out of today is Vladimir Putin.”The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, revealed after the showdown that his meeting with Zelenskyy in Kviv days earlier resulted in a similar outburst. After Friday’s meltdown, Bessent called Zelenskyy’s approach “one of the great diplomatic own goals in history”.“Clearly it very difficult to do an economic deal with a leader that doesn’t want to do a peace deal,” Bessent told Bloomberg.“I’m not sure what he was thinking,” Bessent said of Zelenskyy, who was ultimately asked to leave the White House by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, after Ukrainian diplomatic aides texted that they were prepared to sign the agreed economic rare earth minerals deal.The White House deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, called out what he termed Zelenskyy’s “impertinence” and described the showdown as “one of the great moments in the history of American diplomacy”.“Millions of American hearts swelled with overflowing pride today to watch President Trump put Zelenskyy in his place,” Miller said, without elaborating on what public opinion information he had to justify that belief.Foreign Policy’s Ravi Agrawal wrote: “For a former comedian used to the cameras, it was strange that Zelensky got the script wrong.” Agawal noted that Trump had been testing the boundaries of press attention all week with “freewheeling” discussions in front of the world’s cameras.Such commentary came as Fox News host Bret Baier asked Zelenskyy whether he wanted to apologize to Trump, to which the Ukraine president said: “I’m not sure we did something bad.”“I respect [the] president and I respect [the] American people, and … I think that we have to be very open and very honest,” Zelenskyy told Baier.But arriving in London on Saturday ahead of a summit of British and European leaders, Zelenskyy thanked the US and its leadership while voicing hope for strong relations. “We want only strong relations with America, and I really hope we will have them,” he said.European leaders have stood behind Zelenskyy, with the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, saying he “would never have believed that we would one day have to protect Ukraine from the USA”.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said if someone is gambling with the third world war – as Trump accused Zelenskyy of doing on Friday – it was not Zelenskyy.“If anyone is gambling with World War III, his name is Vladimir Putin,” said Macron, after Trump complained that Zelenskyy had been overly negative about the Russian dictator. More

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      It might be a small consolation, but Elon Musk is getting poorer by the day | John Naughton

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      Extreme wealth has always played a role in democracies. Money has always talked, especially in the US. Years ago, Lawrence Lessig, the great legal scholar, calculated that most of the campaign funding for members of Congress and aspiring politicians came from one-twentieth of the richest 1% of Americans – about 150,000 people. This is about the same number as those who are named “Lester” and explains the title of his book: The USA Is Lesterland.But that particular corruption of American politics only involved billionaires like the Koch brothers playing organ-grinders to congressional monkeys. The obscene wealth generated by the tech industry has catapulted a new organ-grinder into the heart of the machine. He was able to pay his way in with a spare quarter of a billion dollars that he happened to have lying around. And now the wretched citizens of the US find themselves living in Muskland.At the time he made the decision to ensure that Trump got elected, Musk was estimated to be worth $244bn. That didn’t mean, of course, that he had that amount of hard cash in his possession, just that he owned millions of shares in a number of companies that he had founded which were judged by investors to be valuable liquid assets that could be sold if necessary.Hold on to that thought: it may come in useful.How did Musk become so rich? It started, really, with PayPal, of which he was one of the founders, and from the sale of which he emerged with enough money ($175.8m) to become an early investor in Tesla and chair of its board. In 2002, he founded the rocket company SpaceX and, later, Starlink – which has launched thousands of low-orbit satellites for providing internet connectivity to remote regions. In 2015, he founded a solar power company, Tesla Energy, and Neuralink, a company aiming to integrate the human brain with AI the following year. In 2017, he founded The Boring Company, which did what it said on the tin, namely digging tunnels.And then in October 2022 he lost his mind, bought Twitter, and renamed it X. This last decision was a commercial disaster, but it gave him a huge megaphone which he deployed to support Trump’s campaign. It also got him a place right at the heart of the US government, with a mandate to dig deep into the machine, find out how it worked and – allegedly – to detect fraud and eliminate waste.As his goons were rooting through the innards of the federal payment system, one wonders if they came across some of the disbursements that the government has made to his companies. Payments from Nasa to SpaceX, for example, for launching stuff into orbit – or eventually bringing home astronauts from the International Space Station. Or subsidies and tax refunds to Tesla, whose early survival was ensured by government loans.There are some rich ironies to be found here. Could the Elon Musk who ranted that the US should “get rid of all subsidies” be the same Elon Musk who decided to build SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and Starlink in the US rather than in his native South Africa? For, as the tech pundit Scott Galloway puts it: “There would be no SpaceX without Nasa, its largest customer. Tesla built its Fremont factory with a $465m DoE loan in 2010, and its first 200,000 cars benefited from tax credit subsidies of up to $7,500. For years the company was able to report profits thanks to the ‘sale’ of emissions credits to other carmakers. All told, the company has accepted an estimated $2.5bn in government support.” And all of those subsidies went through the federal payments machine.At the moment, Musk looks unstoppable because he hasn’t yet triggered Trump’s narcissistic envy, and his wealth isolates from the consequences of his actions. But nothing lasts for ever and there are some encouraging straws in the wind. One is that Tesla is no longer looking as good as it once did. Sales of its cars are down 45% in Europe – at a time when EV sales there are generally up by 37%. And Muskwagens are losing ground to increasingly more attractive EVs from Kia and the Chinese challenger BYD.And then there’s what Tesla owners are ruefully calling “the Musk factor”. Owners of the company’s hideous Cybertruck, for example are finding red swastikas spray-painted on them in car parks. One sometimes sees Tesla saloons with embarrassed notices on their side windows saying “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy”. There’s even a poster showing Musk standing in a Tesla giving a Nazi salute with the caption “0 to 1939 in 3 Seconds”. And Tesla stock is now on a downward track, which means that Musk’s net worth is not what it was. Who knows, maybe one day Trump will be richer than him after he’s finished looting Ukraine.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat I’ve been readingTalking to ourselves
      A fine essay by Renée DiResta on what’s happened to democracies’ public sphere.Herd mentality
      A really sombre Substack post by Charles Arthur.How Europe was left in the cold
      Nicholas Colin is back online. This post shows why he was missed. More

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      ‘A bigger victory for Putin than any military battle’: Russia gleeful after Trump-Zelenskyy clash

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      Russian officials and Moscow’s media outlets reacted with predictable glee to the dramatic clash between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump at the White House on Friday.Posting on social media, Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s deputy on the security council and former president, called the exchange “a brutal dressing-down in the Oval Office”.He wrote: “Trump told the … clown [Zelenskyy] the truth to his face: the Kyiv regime is playing with the third world war … This is useful. But it’s not enough – we need to stop military support [to Ukraine].”In recent days, concern grew in Moscow as Trump seemed to lean toward a more Zelenskyy-friendly position following visits to Washington by the leaders of Poland, France and Britain, who urged support for Ukraine. Trump had indicated a willingness to back European peacekeepers in Ukraine – a move Kyiv and European governments saw as essential to preventing Moscow from reigniting the war, as it had after previous ceasefires.But any worries the Kremlin may have had faded when Zelenskyy found himself ambushed by Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance.“How Trump and Vance held back from hitting that scumbag is a miracle of restraint,” wrote Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, on Telegram.There has been no comment so far from Putin, who has instead taken a backseat, likely watching the fallout unfold with satisfaction. “Putin doesn’t have to say much right now,” said a source familiar with the Kremlin’s thinking.“It’s clear that he enjoyed the show and now believes he can push for even greater demands in Ukraine. That meeting was a bigger victory for Putin than any of his military battles since the start of the war.”The source predicted that Putin is likely to call Trump in the coming days to argue that Zelenskyy is not someone who can be reasoned with and must be replaced – a sentiment already echoed by some in Moscow as well as Washington.“The White House will now start looking more closely at other candidates for Ukraine’s presidency,” wrote Alexey Pushkov, a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament, on Telegram.View image in fullscreenRegime change in Ukraine has long been a goal for Putin, who has never hidden his desire to install a new leadership in Kyiv which is friendly to Moscow. On Telegram – the primary platform for political discourse in Russia – many influential pro-war bloggers echoed the rhetoric of Trump’s inner circle that portrayed Zelenskyy as an ungrateful child.“Overall, the meeting in the Oval Office once again revealed the true face of Zelenskyy: ungrateful, arrogant, brazen, and boundless,” wrote Rybar, a popular account with links to the Russian defence ministry.For Kremlin insiders, the incident also signified a fundamental shift in the global order, with a White House no longer seen as an enemy but rather as a partner to Moscow – one with whom business and politics can be conducted.“Volodymyr Zelenskyy underestimated the scale of the shift that took place in American politics after Donald Trump’s arrival,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent Russian foreign-policy analyst who heads a council that advises the Kremlin.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLukyanov highlighted Friday’s moment when Trump declared that he was not on Ukraine’s side but viewed himself as a mediator in the conflict. “This is a fundamental shift,” Lukyanov added.But there were also warnings in Moscow that, given Trump’s unpredictable nature, it was too early to declare victory.“In the short term, this tragicomic exchange will undoubtedly weaken Zelenskyy’s position within Ukraine and give Russian diplomacy additional leverage in its dealings with the US,” said Anton Grishanov, a researcher at a thinktank affiliated with Russia’s foreign ministry.“That said, Moscow and Washington still have divergent views on the settlement process, and Trump’s unpredictable temperament could bring plenty of surprises on the path to ending the conflict,” he added.As the dust settles, it’s clear that Friday’s meeting delivered a major blow to Trump’s efforts to negotiate a peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow, while Russia prepares to escalate its offensive against a Ukraine on the verge of losing its most vital military support.“The war continues,” Lukyanov concluded. More

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      Trump’s ‘bald power grab’ could set US on path to dictatorship, critics fear

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      Unusually for him, Donald Trump made no great fuss as he signed one drily worded executive order last Tuesday.Public attention was distracted that day – by the headline-grabbing drama of Elon Musk bludgeoning his way through the federal bureaucracy, by immigrants deported to Guantánamo Bay, and by the torrent of other directives Trump has issued since his inauguration last month.But Trump’s 69th executive order of his second presidency, under the deceptive title of “Ensuring accountability for all agencies”, has been denounced as a “bald power grab” that advances a political doctrine intended to make a dictator of the president.The order, wedged between the signing of a directive to end Covid vaccine mandates in schools and another expanding access to in vitro fertilisation, also contains a single paragraph that permits the president to decide the law and who should obey it.The paragraph has alarmed even some constitutional conservatives who otherwise agree with many of Trump’s actions. Other critics characterise it as another step toward an American brand of despotism.Frank Bowman, a law professor and former federal prosecutor who authored High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump, described the executive order as “breathtaking”.“The essence of it is that Donald Trump is trying, quite consciously, to make himself an elected dictator,” he said.“It has big implications. The order basically says, ‘The law is determined by my will, period, and anyone who disagrees either has to fall in line or, by implication, we can fire you because you’re not permitted to express opinions about the law contrary to mine.’ So welcome to either monarchy or dictatorship.”The order ostensibly seeks to enhance transparency and accountability within those federal agencies that act with a degree of independence, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, by bringing them under more direct oversight by the White House.“Previous administrations have allowed so-called ‘independent regulatory agencies’ to operate with minimal presidential supervision. These regulatory agencies currently exercise substantial executive authority without sufficient accountability to the president, and through him, to the American people. Moreover, these regulatory agencies have been permitted to promulgate significant regulations without review by the president,” the order said.But the detail of the order gives the president powers far beyond mere oversight.Joe Morelle, the top congressional Democrat on the committee on house administration, wrote to Trump on Wednesday denouncing the order as “an unprecedented violation of American rule of law” that “opens the floodgates to political corruption and immeasurable money in politics”.View image in fullscreenIf the order stands, it potentially opens the way for Trump to serve his political and business interests by favouring funders and allies, such as Musk – for example, by ruling that they are not bound by financial regulations, or that immigration judge rulings are invalid.But critics have further warned that, taken with other measures, the directive poses a more fundamental threat to democracy as it advances the Republican right’s “unitary executive theory”, which casts aside the constitution’s checks and balances in favour of a claim that the president’s authority is paramount.The executive order seeks to exploit the complexities of modern government. In the 1930s, Congress delegated the setting of detailed regulations for agencies that require particular expertise – such as finance and technology – to officials with specialist knowledge. The legislature still set broad parameters, but officials were charged with deciding the detail of administrative law.Congress made these regulatory agencies a step removed from the presidency to protect their independence. It only permitted the president to dismiss those leading the agencies under specified circumstances.Although most modern governments have similar systems, Trump has characterised the process as a usurpation of presidential powers and therefore unconstitutional.Trump’s executive order stripped agencies of their independence by making them directly accountable to a part of the presidency: the office of management and budget (OMB). The OMB is led by Russell Vought, founder of the rightwing Center for Renewing America (CRA) thinktank and one of the primary authors of the Project 2025 plan for an authoritarian takeover of government.Vought is behind other measures to enhance Trump’s control on the basis of unitary executive theory, including a move to allow the president to override Congress’s spending decisions by blocking or reallocating funds, a dramatic shift in power if it is allowed to stand. Vought has also spoken about driving civil servants out of work by so traumatising them that they do “not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains”.Bowman said the true intent of the order was revealed by the president’s decision to exempt some actions of the Federal Reserve from OMB oversight.“The reason plainly is that he is afraid that if he were to simply declare that the Federal Reserve is no longer independent, that would drive the markets crazy and risk a financial panic,” he said.“But it puts the lie to the notion that this is some sort of constitutionally based declaration, because if independent agencies are in their nature unconstitutional then, if you’re the president, you don’t get to pick and choose which ones you’re going to leave independent. Either it’s constitutional to have independent agencies, or it’s not.”Even some conservatives who support some of Trump’s measures are alarmed by a provision in the executive order that declares that the president, or the attorney general under the president’s control, shall make the final interpretation of the law for the executive branch in everything from issuing regulations to positions on litigation.Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the conservative Society for the Rule of Law which has been strongly critical of some of Trump’s actions, said the president had a point about the constitutional legality of the independent agencies, even if he questioned his motives in wanting to take control of them.But Nunziata is disturbed by “the increasing suggestions from the White House that the law is what the president says it is”.“The law is what Congress passes and the supreme court interprets, and the president has an obligation to obey the law. He has an obligation to hire lawyers who make a good faith efforts to interpret what the law requires, not to hire lawyers who are going to be writing him permission slips to do whatever he might like,” he said.Bowman said the section amounted to a declaration that the president’s opinion on the law overrides everyone else in government.“That’s just crazy stuff because, in essence, what it’s saying is if the president wakes up one morning and says, ‘I think all these statutes that criminalise bribery really shouldn’t apply to me, my family, my friends or executive branch officials at all, and that’s my legal opinion,’ the justice department would have to adopt an interpretation of federal bribery laws that is completely at odds with their obvious meaning,” he said.Yet again, Trump’s actions raise the question of whether the executive order will stand. Bowman is not confident that the other pillars of the US’s system of checks and balances will do their job to protect democracy.He said conservatives on the supreme court have already demonstrated their sympathy for the unitary executive theory by ruling that the president has immunity for acts in his official capacity.“The principal check against executive overreach is the power of Congress, but right now he has utterly squelched Republicans in Congress. They have a plethora of tools they could use to stop this but, at present, they are utterly terrified of using them,” he said.“The normal checks against dictatorial actions have already been suppressed or are in the process of being so.” More