Phone a Friend 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡

Summit Woes:  Trump’s meeting with Russia’s Putin met expectations in that Putin who got the full red-carpet treatment stuck to his guns, literally and figuratively, and starry-eyed Trump who had told Ukraine’s Zelenskyy and several European leaders that he would push for a ceasefire did not.  The meeting ended early and while the two leaders made statements after they ended their “summit” they did not take questions at was supposed to be a press conference.  Following the meeting, Trump gave an interview to his favorite Foxy, Sean Hannity, where he characterized the meeting as a “10,” blamed the war on Biden, said peace was up to Zelenskyy, while adding that he and Putin both agreed that the 2020 election that Biden won had been rigged by all that sketchy mail in voting.  Trump went on to say that his bestie Putin told him that no countries allow mail in ballots, a weird lie because many including Putin’s Russia do but the forever KGB agent has Trump’s number and knew exactly how to push his buttons to get what he wants so he did and since Putin wants as much of Ukraine as he can get, either through war or through a Trump supported “swap,” by the end of the weekend, Trump and several members of his “negotiating” team more than implied that they had shifted their position from supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty, calling for a ceasefire and imposing heavy sanctions if they couldn’t get one, to cozying up to Uncle Vlad’s demand for land concessions. Zelenskyy is due in Washington today for a follow-up meeting with Trump and like a stymied contestant on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” he’s opted to invoke all his lifelines.  He isn’t just phoning a friend, asking the audience for the answer, or doing any of the other things that the game show allows, he’s bringing along the who’s who of European leadership including France’s Emmanuel Macron, the UK’s Keir Starmer, Finland’s Alexander Stubb, Germany’s Friedrich Merz,  Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, and president of the European Union Ursula von der Leyen in the hope that the crowd will break Putin’s spell, getting Trump back to where he was before the Alaska meeting, or, at the very least, prevent Trump or his henchman/VP Vance from publicly chastising Zelenskyy for refusing to hand over Ukraine’s Donbas region which Putin wants to add to the regions of Ukraine that he’s already seized.  The supportive crowd is pushing to get Trump onboard for some security guarantees, something along the line of what NATO members give each other, ironic since NATO membership is one of those things that Putin insists has to stay permanently off the table, and both Biden and Trump have already more or less conceded.  Oh, and though the crowd in Alaska cancelled their lunch plans, via a sloppy, incompetent member of Trump’s travelling squad who left a trove of summit documents on a hotel printer, we know that they had planned to dine on filet mignon and halibut Olympia and that Trump planned on gifting “his excellency” Vlad with a bald eagle statuette.  More significantly everyone is now privy to the American team’s home contact information and a few other things that should not have been left on a printer.  

Shiny Objects: As one Twitter poster put it on Sunday: “The meeting with Putin was so disastrous for Trump he may have to bring up the Epstein files as a distraction.”  It’s not just the summit, the economy is starting to show the effects of his tariffs, polls indicate that the Big Ugly Bill has a lot of the electorate concerned about their personal “lifelines,” and even some immigration hardliners are finding the deportation and imprisonment of their migrant neighbors hard to stomach so Trump is back in full distraction mode. Last night he took to Truth Social to insist that MSNBC (which he calls MSDNC) fire Nicole Wallace, the former Bush communications director who hosts the daily Deadline White House show, likely due to a Fox News report that she “went on a tear” against him on the runup to the Alaska summit. It’s doubtful that Wallace will be fired anytime soon, although she might need some added protection, but there’s lots of other more troubling things going on.  Following Texas Governor Abbott’s lead, more Republican dominated states are looking into creating more Republican friendly districts, moves that are leading the few Democratic states who can, to do the same.  The desperate redistricting maneuver is a clear sign that the polls are going against Republicans and anyway why should voters get to decide who represents them when some politicians with sharpies can do so much better?  On the legal front,  Ed Martin, head of the DOJ’s Stalinesque Weaponization (😱) Working Group, who is so toxic that Trump pulled his nomination to serve as the US Attorney for Washington DC after it became clear that he couldn’t get enough Senate votes for confirmation for the role that ultimately went to the also toxic Jeanine Pirro, is moving forward with the Pam Bondi approved investigations into California Senator Adam Schiff and New York AG Tish James while also threatening to go after all of those who served on the January 6 committee. The occupation of Washington DC, or at least the most TV visible, low crime areas of Washington DC by federal forces continues, though at least for now due to the intervention of the courts, the DC police department remains under the control of the District’s Police Commissioner rather than flunky Bondi’s special appointee.  And if Trump is to be believed, more Democratically run cities in blue states are in his cross eyes. 1251 days to go.              

#BringThemAllHomeNow