It seems foreign leaders would happily oblige.

At the same event Wednesday, Senegal’s president suggested Trump’s supposed foreign policy acumen stemmed from his prowess as a “tremendous golf player.” He even suggested the American president might invest in a golf course in Senegal, as Trump’s personal business has done in ethically dubious ways elsewhere.

Netanyahu was also effusive after Trump authorized US strikes on Iran. He repeatedly cast the strikes as history-altering, calling them a “pivot of history that can help lead the Middle East and beyond to a future of prosperity and peace.” Netanyahu added that the “forces of civilisation thank you.”

Perhaps even more remarkable recently has been NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s rhetoric, given Trump’s less-than-easy relationship with that alliance.

After the Iran strikes last month, Trump posted on Truth Social a personal message from Rutte that sounded as if it could have been written by the White House’s communications team. Rutte called the strikes “truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do.”

“Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win,” Rutte said, remarking on Trump’s push to get NATO members to spend more on defense.

“You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done,” he added.

Then at the NATO summit in The Hague, Rutte responded to a vulgarity Trump uttered by likening him to “daddy.” He said: “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.”

Rutte denied he was calling Trump NATO’s “daddy.” But his use of the word aligned with Trump allies’ well-cultivated image of him as a domineering “daddy” figure dispensing tough love. And the White House and Trump quickly seized upon the remark accordingly.

We might never know how intentional Rutte’s remark was. But it was a massive gift to the American president that cast NATO in a subservient position vis-à-vis Trump, just as he would prefer. And despite Rutte’s efforts to downplay it, Trump clearly isn’t about to let him.

And that’s really the point here. Praising Trump so effusively might seem harmless. Foreign leaders often heap praise on one another while conducting diplomacy, however disingenuously, because that’s what you do.

But while some level of that is to be expected, there are gradations. At some point, leaders may sacrifice their credibility and rhetorically transfer power to someone who might not always have their interests at heart.

You might recall how then-Vice President Mike Pence heaped praise on Trump; in 2017, he spent three straight minutes at a Cabinet meeting praising Trump an average of once every 12 seconds.

Fast forward to January 6, 2021, when Trump – appearing indifferent to Pence’s fate – criticized his vice president as rioters descended on the US Capitol. Pence has since expressed plenty of concern with the direction Trump has taken the conservative movement and his power grabs on issues like tariffs.

The effusive treatment of Trump also can’t help but reinforce the transactional nature of his second term. To the extent the flattery actually works on Trump, it’s in effect trading policy decisions for his own personal accolades.

Netanyahu seems to have calculated that this is a great way to keep Trump interested in a controversial policy that the Israeli leader supports: striking Iran.

Qatar’s leaders have clearly deduced that giving the aviation-enthusiast Trump a souped-up airplane is a great way to win his affections, even as some Republicans have worried about the strings that are attached and about Trump getting too cozy with a country that has been linked to terrorist groups.

But the calculation that you just give Trump what he wants and worry about the rest later is proliferating, as evidenced by the increasing number of institutions bowing to Trump’s transparent domestic power grabs.

Now, it appears to have resulted in a game of one-upmanship by foreign leaders.

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Employees at the United States Institute of Peace were terminated for a second time by the Trump administration, after a federal court ruling last month paved the way, according to multiple fired employees.

Liz Callihan, a now-former employee, said Department of Government Efficiency personnel installed at USIP notified the staff of the firings with a “few remaining employees retained to conduct close-out activities and wind down USIP.”

“These actions reflect a continued pattern of DOGE’s cruel indifference toward USIP’s dedicated workforce. Beyond the harm to these committed professionals, such reckless actions will immediately end the important training, education, facilitation, and research work that USIP does around the world in the field of conflict resolution,” Callihan, a former senior adviser for strategic engagement at USIP, said in a statement.

The administration has attempted to reimagine the role of the US abroad and dramatically dismantle key parts of the federal government through DOGE. In recent months, though, it has quietly backtracked in some cases as federal agencies have rehired and ordered back from leave some employees as a result of it scrambling to fill critical gaps.

CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.

Callihan, who has been with USIP since 2012, said it’s been “devastating” and emotional with the “constant change and flux and tumult.”

She was a part of the “landing team,” who were brought back to rebuild operations and programs after the first round of mass firings. Those employees began receiving their termination notice Friday afternoon. The rest of the USIP workforce, who had been furloughed, began receiving their letters in the evening.

USIP employees originally received termination letters on March 28, though a federal judge ruled in May that the Trump administration unlawfully removed the board of USIP and that subsequent actions taken by officials installed by DOGE to cripple the agency are therefore “null and void.” In late June, a federal appeals court stayed that ruling, leading to this week’s firings.

Hodei Sultan, another employee on the landing team who was fired on Friday, has been working with the institute since 2009 and oversaw operations and strategy within the Asia center. She said the personal impact of the recent firings is “really horrific.”

“Both on March 28 and on July 11, they have a tendency to do these mass firings at night,” she said. “We joked about it, but ‘Friday night massacre 1.0,’ and last night was ‘Friday massacre 2.0.’ So the intention is very much mental torture and emotional anguish, whether that’s inflicted on the partners and individuals in these conflict environments that so desperately need our help and support, but also the staff.”

“DOGE succeeded in getting a stay of the district court’s order,” Callihan said in her statement. “Having regained control of USIP, DOGE is renewing its mistreatment of USIP employees and its systematic dismantling of an institution authorized by Congress to promote peacebuilding efforts around the world.”

USIP is not a federal agency within the executive branch. It was created by Congress as a nonpartisan, independent body in 1984 that owns and manages its headquarters.

The institute, which was founded during the Reagan administration, “promotes research, policy analysis, education, and training on international peace and conflict resolution in an effort to prevent and resolve violent conflicts, and to promote post-conflict stability,” according to a description on usa.gov.

The Trump administration has had a series of significant wins in recent weeks, including in the Supreme Court, which, earlier this month backed Trump’s effort to carry out mass firings and reorganizations at federal agencies. It put on hold a lower court order that had temporarily blocked the president from taking those steps without approval from Congress.

The employees at USIP are the latest group of mass firings as part of the Trump administration’s broader efforts to shrink the federal government. The State Department also began firing more than 1,300 people on Friday as part of a dramatic overhaul of the agency.

The State Department firings will affect 1,107 civil service and 246 foreign service officers in Washington, DC, an internal notice seen by CNN said. Those fired on Friday worked on issues like countering violent extremism; helping Afghans who fled after the Taliban takeover; educational exchanges; and issues related to women’s rights, refugees and climate change.

Sultan pointed to the recent firings at the State Department and said the “US is very much losing its credence and credibility on the world stage.”

“We’re completely self-isolating from the world and pulling away on this vital livelihood foreign assistance, foreign aid programs that were more than just helping people in other countries. They really were about flexing our soft power approach and making sure that we were a credible partner on the world stage,” she said.

Trump’s mass deportation is backfiring

President Donald Trump and his administration continue to bet big on the issue that, more than any other, appeared to help him win him a second term in 2024: immigration.

The administration and its allies have gleefully played up standoffs between federal immigration agents and protesters, such as the one Thursday during a raid at a legal marijuana farm in Ventura County, California.

And as congressional Republicans were passing a very unpopular Trump agenda bill last month, Vice President JD Vance argued that its historic expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and new immigration enforcement provisions were so important that “everything else” was “immaterial.”

But this appears to be an increasingly bad bet for Trump and Co.

It’s looking more and more like Trump has botched an issue that, by all rights, should have been a great one for him. And ICE’s actions appear to be a big part of that.

The most recent polling on this comes from Gallup, where the findings are worse than those of any poll in Trump’s second term.

The nearly monthlong survey conducted in June found Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration by a wide margin: 62% to 35%. And more than twice as many Americans strongly disapproved (45%) as strongly approved (21%).

It also found nearly 7 in 10 independents disapproved.

These are Trump’s worst numbers on immigration yet. But the trend has clearly been downward – especially in high-quality polling like Gallup’s.

An NPR-PBS News-Marist College poll conducted late last month, for instance, showed 59% of independents disapproved of Trump on immigration. And a Quinnipiac University poll showed 66% of independents disapproved.

Trump has managed to become this unpopular on immigration despite historic lows in border crossings. And the data suggest that’s largely tied to deportations and ICE.

To wit:

• 59% overall and 66% of independents disapproved of Trump’s handling of deportations, according to the Quinnipiac poll.
• 56% overall and 64% of independents disapproved of the way ICE was doing its job, according to Quinnipiac.
• 54% overall and 59% of independents said ICE has “gone too far” in enforcing immigration law, per the Marist poll. (Even 1 in 5 Republicans agreed.)
• Americans disapproved 54-45% of ICE conducting more raids to find undocumented immigrants at workplaces, according to a Pew Research Center poll last month.

Americans also appear to disagree with some of the more heavy-handed aspects of the deportation program:

• They disapproved 55-43% of significantly increasing the number of facilities to hold immigrants being processed for deportation, per Pew – even as the Trump administration celebrates Florida’s controversial new “Alligator Alcatraz.”
• They said by a nearly 2-to-1 margin that it’s “unacceptable” to deport an immigrant to a country other than their own, per Pew – another key part of the administration’s efforts.
• They also disapproved, 61-37%, of deporting undocumented immigrants to a prison in El Salvador – the place where the administration sent hundreds without due process, in some cases in error (such as with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has since been returned).

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There’s a real question in all of this whether people care that much. They might disapprove of some of the more controversial aspects of Trump’s deportations, but maybe it’s not that important to them – and they might even like the ultimate results.

That’s the bet Trump seems to be making: that he can push forward on something his base really wants and possibly even tempt his political opponents to overreach by appearing to defend people who are in the country illegally.

But at some point, the White House has got to look at these numbers and start worrying that its tactics are backfiring.

Gallup shows the percentage of Americans who favor deporting all undocumented immigrants dropping from 47% last year during the 2024 campaign down to 38% now that it’s a reality Trump is pursuing.

And all told, Trump’s second term has actually led to the most sympathy for migrants on record in the 21st century, per Gallup. Fully 79% of Americans now say immigration is a “good thing,” compared with 64% last year.

The writing has been on the wall that Americans’ support for mass deportation was subject to all kinds of caveats and provisos. But the administration appears to have ignored all that and run headlong into problems of its own creation.

Could Trump ‘run’ New York City?

President Donald Trump issued a provocative threat during a Cabinet meeting this week: If New York City elects a “communist” mayor, he might take the city over, just like he might take over Washington, DC.

“We have tremendous power at the White House to run places when we have to,” he said.

He was referring to the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee in New York’s upcoming mayoral race. Mamdani is not a communist, but rather a democratic socialist in the vein of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Building up Mamdani as a foil

The president clearly sees the would-be mayor as an A-list political enemy he’ll use to argue the Democratic Party has been overtaken by the “radical left.” His increasing use of the word “communist” harks back to the ugliness of the Red Scare.

Trump also trotted out some profanity in the Cabinet Room of the White House when he referred to Mamdani as “a man who’s not very capable, in my opinion, other than he’s got a good line of bullsh*t.”

It’s the latest in a string of increasingly charged accusations Trump has made, including that Mamdani, who is a naturalized citizen, might be in the US illegally, something for which there is no evidence. That kind of attack will sound familiar to anyone who remembers Trump’s incessant and false questioning of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Zohran Mamdani arrives for a news conference at Astoria Park in the Queens borough of New York on June 24.

Christian Monterrosa/Bloomberg/Getty Images

 

Trump can’t just ‘run’ New York

But the idea that Trump might try to “run” New York if Mamdani wins is something else — a warning to New York voters and a new threat to expand presidential power. Does that mean starving the city of federal funds or something more drastic?

It would also be pretty clearly unconstitutional for him to try to “run” the city, according to Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on presidential power at the Brennan Center for Justice.

When I asked her what presidential authority would allow him to do so, her answer was short.

“Not run a city,” she said, pointing to the 10th Amendment, which gives powers not enumerated in the Constitution back to the states.

“There’s no emergency power that allows the president to take over a city,” she said, and particularly not in retaliation for electing a mayor the president disagrees with.

Everything Trump says should be taken seriously

He has tested the Constitution repeatedly during his second term — trying to reinterpret the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship and reimagine the federal bureaucracy without passing any laws.

But Goitein pointed to key decisions, including a rejection of Trump’s attempt to use the Alien Enemies Act to more swiftly deport people without due process, to argue the courts remain a meaningful check on the administration.

Trump’s advisers, CNN has reported, considered using the Insurrection Act, another antiquated law from the early days of the republic, to broadly use federal troops for law enforcement in Los Angeles to help federal deportation agents. Instead, they ended up citing more recent law that allows the federal government to take control of a state’s National Guard, for which California is now suing the administration.

There’s no real precedent for a city takeover over an election

Goitein said the deployment of troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, by the Eisenhower administration was in the service of a Supreme Court Order.

“That’s very different from a city electing a mayor with whose policies the president opposes,” she said.

Martial law was declared in Hawaii during World War II, she said, but it was authorized by a law that no longer exists.

What about Washington, DC?

Trump also referred at the White House to the possibility that he could also take over Washington, DC, something that he has been talking about for years. There’s clear precedent for the federal government being in charge of the nation’s capital.

President Donald Trump speaks to members of the press during a Cabinet Meeting at the White House on July 8, in Washington, DC.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

It’s in the Constitution, after all, something that has always complicated efforts by progressives and Democrats to grant statehood to DC.

But Congress ceded self-governance to district residents back in 1973, with a law signed by President Richard Nixon, who described himself as “a longtime supporter of self-government for the District of Columbia.”

Nixon supported self-rule on principle

The CNN presidential historian Tim Naftali, a former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, told me Nixon did take the idea of self-governance seriously, including for DC residents.

Trump has described DC today as “a nightmare of murder and crime,” but back then it was literally reeling and still rebuilding after riots destroyed city blocks following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

Naftali pointed out that Nixon was close with the city’s mayor, Walter Washington, who advocated for the construction of the Metro subway system and installed the city’s first public defender.

“Nixon’s view of the District of Columbia was that the residents of the district could best govern themselves,” Naftali told me. “I do not believe that is Donald Trump’s view at all.”

The law Nixon signed allowed Washingtonians to vote for their first-ever popularly elected mayor in 1974. Conservatives in Congress today want to take that power back and have introduced a bill, the “BOWSER Act” (so named to troll DC Mayor Muriel Bowser), to repeal DC’s home rule and put the city more under federal control.

Campaign rhetoric vs. local change

Trump aligns with Bowser on one key DC issue: the reconstruction of RFK stadium as a home for the Washington Commanders, although the proposal is currently stalled before DC’s city council.

He promised to “renovate it, and rebuild our capital city,” but so far that has included the issuance of an executive order and creation of a committee focused on surging police into the streets and creating a beautification plan.

Trump said his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has been working with DC’s mayor. And Bowser has been notably uncritical of the Trump administration in his second term.

D’marco Dixon, left, attempts to catch a football beside his brother, Seanery Dixon, near Robert F. Kennedy Stadium on December 22, 2024 in Washington, DC. The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium Campus Revitalization Act passed the US Senate early December 21.

Tom Brenner/Getty Images

A form of disenfranchisement

Domingo Morel is an associate professor of political science and public service at New York University who has written about the ugly history of states taking over things like school boards or imposing their will on cities, frequently those with large Black and minority populations, and taking power from the local populations.

Trump is implying something similar here, Morel told me.

“He’s saying to New Yorkers, 5 million or so registered voters, ‘Whatever you say doesn’t matter; we’re going to take away your ability to govern because we don’t like the way you have decided to vote.’”

That’s assuming Mamdani wins, which is a big assumption, given the fact that current Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo will both be on the ballot on Election Day. Meanwhile, former New Yorker Trump will be chiming in with vague threats.

What will happen now that Trump has turned on Putin?

President Donald Trump seems to have learned the lesson painfully gleaned by all his 21st-century predecessors: You can’t reset US relations with Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s path from idolizing the Russian leader to berating him has been a melodrama of personalized geopolitics. But what happens next is far more important.

The president’s epiphany offers new possibilities for Ukraine, Putin’s critics in Congress and America’s browbeaten allies. But it also comes with risk — most notably of a test of wills between alpha males Trump and Putin, who control the world’s two top nuclear arsenals.

Trump always tries to up the ante with foreign friends and foes with rhetoric and tariffs. But now he’s up against a ruthless adversary who raises the stakes not with bluster, but with human lives, as intensifying drone blitzes on Kyiv — a clear message to the White House — show.

Such is Trump’s transactional nature that it’s fair to ask how long his hostility toward his erstwhile friend in the Kremlin will last. And even though he’s talking about helping Ukraine defend itself, it’s hard to see his transformation extending to match the tens of billions of dollars in military and financial aid sent to Kyiv by the US Congress during the Biden administration.

However, the president told NBC News on Thursday that he has secured a deal through NATO to send new Patriot anti-missile missiles to Kyiv that it badly needs to repel Russian attacks on civilian targets.

“We’re sending weapons to NATO, and NATO is paying for those weapons, a hundred percent,” the president said. “We’re going to be sending Patriots to NATO and then NATO will distribute that,” he added. The exact parameters of the deal were not immediately clear, and CNN has reached out to the alliance.

Trump seems to have reached a pivot point. He’s shifted from unfathomably blaming the victim of the war, Ukraine, to accusing the aggressor, Russia, of needlessly prolonging it.

The question is, how does this change US policy on the war and on Russia, as well as Trump’s own attempts to exert US leadership and the domestic politics around Ukraine?

Putin ignored all Trump’s entreaties

Trump’s declaration that he was fed up with Putin’s “bullsh*t” this week was a startling twist, albeit one characteristic of his sometimes-profane brand of statesmanship.

No one tried harder than Trump to persuade Putin to end the war in Ukraine, which started with an illegal invasion in 2022. He’s spent years praising the Russian leader’s smarts and strength.

Police officers examine debris on a street after a night of Russian strikes in Kyiv on July 10.

Tetiana Dzhafarova/AFP/Getty Images

But even as Trump turned on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after returning to office — including in a notorious Oval Office blow-up — Putin spurned all of the US president’s exceedingly generous terms for a ceasefire and an eventual peace agreement.

Putin’s motives are an important consideration here.

From a Western perspective, the Russian leader may be guilty of an extraordinary self-inflicted political gaffe. He could have had a US-backed peace deal that Ukraine’s allies in Europe feared would reward his aggression, that locked in the territorial gains of the invasion, and that would have set in stone that Ukraine would never have a path to NATO membership.

But imposing Western logic on Putin’s calculations has always been a mistake. (This was a factor in the Obama administration’s misreading of the Russian leader ahead of his first escapade in Ukraine — the annexation of Crimea in 2014.)

Putin made clear before the invasion that he sees the conflict as righting a historic wrong — both over Russia’s age-old claims to Ukraine and his wider grievances that date back to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he watched with dismay from his post as a KGB lieutenant colonel in communist East Germany. Putin talks of the “root causes” of the war. This is code for a number of Russian grievances that include the existence of a democratic government in Kyiv. It sometimes refers to Moscow’s claims that it is threatened by NATO expansion after the Cold War and to its desire to see alliance troops withdrawn from former communist states once in the Soviet Union’s orbit, such as Poland and Romania.

From this perspective, Putin may not have intended ever to end the war, and the calculations of Trump and his aides that he could be persuaded to do a “deal” — the central assumption of the president’s entire worldview — was misguided. And after hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties, the war may be existential to Putin for his political survival.

Countless US and European observers have tried to convince Trump of this view for years. In a way, it’s stunning that Trump took so long to reach this point. The president said this week of Putin, “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

Ukraine hawks hoping for a newly robust US policy on the war may want to temper their enthusiasm. Trump’s frustration with Putin does seem genuine this time. But several times in recent months, he’s criticized the Russian leader only to later caveat his anger.

But if the president has finally concluded that he can’t cajole Putin into peace talks, is he willing to try to coerce him into them?

“I think Trump gets it now,” Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations told John Vause on CNN International. “He’s got to put more pressure on Russia if he’s going to get a deal with Ukraine.”

Such pressure might include an increase in US arms and ammunition to Ukraine as European states who feared Trump might walk away from Kyiv also pledge to increase their aid. The difference if Washington is truly committed could be enormous and could confound Putin’s clear belief that he can outlast the West and can ultimately win the war.

The White House could also fully embrace a bipartisan bill imposing tough new sanctions on Russia — as well as China and India, which are bulk buyers of its oil.

What to watch as Trump mulls new Ukraine strategies

Trump has spoken in recent days about the terrible human toll inflicted on Ukrainians and the courage of their armed forces. But his willingness to stand with Zelensky’s government in the long haul may depend on whether he’s simply mad at Putin because he’s deprived Trump of a deal that would bolster his own aspirations to be a peacemaker and win a Nobel Prize, or whether he’s taking a strategic position on the war itself.

At times, Trump seemed to view the war in Ukraine as an unnecessary impediment to a better relationship between the US and Russia. He sounded a lot like former presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and a far more skeptical Joe Biden at the start of their presidencies.

“Getting along with Russia is a good thing,” Trump said in April. “I think I could have a very good relationship with Russia and with President Putin, and if I did, that would be a great thing.”

A rescue worker walks on a parking of car repair service destroyed by a Russian drone strike in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on June 18.

Kateryna Klochko/AP

Given Trump’s transactional nature, some analysts have speculated that if his hopes of a Ukraine peace deal faltered, he might simply compartmentalize the war and try to deal with Russia on other issues — especially economics and business. That would permit Putin to continue the conflict without US interference.

Trump might have had this in mind before the recent G7 summit when he showed up in Canada complaining that Putin wasn’t invited. Still, a partial thaw would not require Trump to get over what he seems to view as a personal slight from the Russian leader. And even though such a scenario would allow Russia to shed its pariah status and partially reenter world politics, it’s not clear its possibilities would pierce Putin’s siege mentality.

Russia’s next moves could also influence Trump’s strategy.

There were some signs coming out of a meeting between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Malaysia on Thursday that US hopes of engaging Russia on the war are not dead. Rubio said he expressed Trump’s “disappointment and frustration” but also that Russia had come up with “a new and different approach.”

Does Putin now think he’s gone too far and needs to get Trump back on side, perhaps by handing the US president a symbolic “win”? Or is this just classic Russian obfuscation in prolonging a hopeless process of talking while its troops fight?

One thing to look for will be whether Trump’s chastening rebuff from Putin changes his approach to diplomacy more generally. The president has long boasted that his “great relationship” with the Russian leader and Chinese President Xi Jinping would yield victories for the United States that no other president could land. But as with North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un in Trump’s first term, the president’s supposed magnetism has produced very little of substance.

The geopolitical backdrop to the Ukraine issue has also shifted in recent weeks. Trump’s recent strikes on Iran might not have “obliterated” the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites, as he claims. But they were a demonstration of American military might and a success for the commander in chief who ordered them. For all his threats to democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law in the United States, Trump is clearly established as the world’s most powerful leader, whose daily moves send shockwaves around the globe. Could this shift the dynamics between him and Putin? Does Trump now view the Russian leader less as a strongman to be lionized than as the leader of an inferior power?

Risks rise with growing US-Russia tensions

One big risk of a period of tension between the White House and the Kremlin would be if Trump and Putin get locked into a cycle of escalation — potentially to defend the enormous credibility that they have both invested in the relationship.

There’s no evidence to suggest that Trump wants to get into a showdown with Putin. Parts of his MAGA base see ideological synergies with Putin: his criticism of “wokeness” and what they see as a decline of Western cultural values. Another GOP faction wants to turn away from Europe in order to devote US military resources to a building showdown with China.

Nothing in Putin’s behavior suggests that he wants a faceoff with Trump or the United States. But the Russian leader has frequently rattled nuclear sabers during the Ukraine conflict, apparently to scare Western populations. Trump’s frequently expressed horror about the cataclysmic results of any nuclear conflict means this is a card the Russian leader might play if tensions really escalate.

Ultimately, Trump might still return to this strategic assumption that has long haunted US policy towards Ukraine. “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” This was not another Ukraine-skeptical Trump quote. It was his nemesis, Obama, in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016.

But if nothing else, Trump’s spat with Putin might serve one purpose — dispelling his blind spot over the Russian leader’s true nature.

Trump’s government cuts and the catastrophe in Texas: Here’s what we know

President Donald Trump’s approach to the federal government has been to cut, cut, cut, which means when there is a disaster in which the government plays a role, he will have to expect questions about those cuts.

When there’s a plane crash, as there was days into his second term, the shortage of air traffic controllers will be scrutinized.

When the administration quietly backtracks on some layoffs and struggles to re-fill key positions, it will lead to concerns that cuts went too far.

When there’s a tragic flood that catches an area off-guard, the effect of his cuts on the National Weather Service and FEMA will become a line of inquiry.

The disaster in Texas continues

Flash floods killed at least 95 people over the July Fourth holiday, and many others are still missing. Rescue and recovery are still ongoing, so no one can say for sure that personnel cuts at the National Weather Service or open positions at forecasting offices in Texas amplified or even affected the flood’s tragic outcome.

There are many facts yet to be discovered, and a full investigation will certainly be conducted.

But Trump’s approach to weather and disasters is well-known

Recent reports about how staffing and budget cuts are affecting forecasting at the agency may ultimately be seen as an early warning.

“The National Weather Service is in worse shape than previously known, according to interviews with current and former meteorologists, due to a combination of layoffs, early retirements and preexisting vacancies,” CNN’s Andrew Freedman wrote back in May. The report also noted that a third of National Weather Service forecasting stations lacked a top meteorologist in charge.

There’s plenty more

CNN reported in April the Trump’s administration plans to close weather research laboratories and climate research programs meant to improve weather detection as the climate warms. That budget proposal was more recently submitted to Congress.

Project 2025, the conservative government blueprint that presaged many of the Trump administration’s decisions, called for much less federal spending on weather forecasting and more reliance on private companies.

FEMA’s future is in question

We also can’t say for sure that Trump’s hands-off approach to emergency management will affect recovery in Texas. In fact, Trump quickly declared the flood zone to be a major disaster area.

But he has also said he wants to shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency and for the federal government to play a much smaller role.

“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it back to the state level,” he said at the White House in June.

Asked if Trump is reconsidering that position in light of the horrible Texas floods, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this:

CNN’s Gabe Cohen recently reported that disaster decisions were being made directly at the White House, bypassing FEMA and the well-trod process by which states seek help. It also raises concerns that White House political allies could get more attention than political enemies, although a Department of Homeland Security spokesman denied that idea to Cohen.

A test for Trump’s smaller government

Wanting the federal government to do less has been a theme of the Trump administration so far. States will either have to pony up more of their own money for Medicaid and food aid or watch citizens fall off assistance as a result of the sweeping new policy bill he signed Friday.

We also can’t directly blame this or any one storm on climate change. But Republicans are currently bragging about killing the previous administration’s climate agenda, which Trump and his allies call the “Green New Scam.”

In terms of specifics about the Texas floods, local residents and officials, still in shock during TV interviews, said they were caught off-guard by the floods.

That may not ultimately be a forecasting issue.

“The weather service did their job,” Rick Spinrad, who was National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator during the Biden administration, told CNN’s Boris Sanchez on Monday, referring to the issuance of watches, warnings and “WEAs,” the Wireless Emergency Alert system.

But Spinrad admitted there could have been a breakdown in connectivity between the forecasters and emergency services in the morning.

“On first blush, the communications breakdown happened at that last mile,” he said. The San Antonio National Weather Service office was missing a key coordinator who Spinrad said “is critical in that last mile of communications.”

That position has been vacant since April, when a longtime employee took the Trump administration’s buyout offer.

Asked about that unfilled position, Leavitt said, “The offices were fully staffed with forecasters.”

Kerrville, Texas, Mayor Joe Herring Jr., told CNN’s Pamela Brown on Monday that he lost friends in the floods and that local officials had not gotten word about the severity of the forecast.

“We didn’t even have a warning. We did not know,” he said, fighting back tears.

CNN’s Brown, who reported from Texas, has a personal connection to the story: As a child, she attended Camp Mystic, the girls’ camp where the flood claimed the lives of 27, including campers and staffers.

“I do think it’s important to have patience and humility that those (answers on what happened) may not come as quickly as perhaps we want,” she said.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime flood,” she added. Residents knew the river could flood, but people she spoke to are referring to this as “an act of God.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday drew a hard line against quickly blaming the government in the midst of a tragedy – in this case, the deadly floods in Texas.

“Many Democrat elected officials are trying to turn this into a political game; it is not,” Leavitt said, amid suggestions linking the tragedy to Trump’s cuts to the National Weather Service.

She added: “I just do think those comments are depraved and despicable, especially when so many Americans are mourning the loss of their children.”

Members of the media raise their hands to ask questions, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt holds a briefing at the White House in Washington, DC, on Monday.

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Less than 24 hours before Leavitt’s comments, though, it was her boss, Trump, who was levying blame – not on the incumbent government, but the previous one.

“If you look at that water situation, that was really the Biden setup,” Trump said.

Trump quickly clarified that he wasn’t actually blaming Biden – he cited the historic nature of the floods – but there is no question he was attempting to shift potential responsibility for any government missteps to his predecessor.

And indeed, this has become Trump’s M.O. When something bad happens – including tragedy – Trump’s reflex has been to blame his predecessor. And often, despite Leavitt’s admonishment, he casts blame very quickly.

Airplane crashes and air traffic control problems

Recovery teams lift the mangled remains of a military helicopter that crashed midair with an American Airlines commercial airplane from the Potomac river in Arlington, Virginia, on February 6.

Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

After a tragic crash in the Potomac River near Washington, DC, in late January that killed 67 people, Trump blamed the Biden administration and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies – despite no evidence forming anything close to such a link. He did so even as bodies were being pulled from the river.

In May, after more crashes and technical problems that in some cases traumatized air traffic controllers, Trump added that “Biden didn’t do a thing for four years.”

And just last week, Trump suggested air traffic controllers would have had better equipment, but “then Biden canceled the order when he came in.” The comment echoed previous ones from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

It’s not clear what Trump was referring to. Administrations have for decades declined to proactively modernize air traffic control. That included Trump proposals that were never enacted, the New York Times reported.

An antisemitic attack in Colorado

Police cordon off Pearl Street on June 1, in Boulder, Colorado.

Chet Strange/Getty Images North America/Getty Images

After an antisemitic firebomb attack in Boulder, Colorado last month that led to dozens of injuries and eventually a death, Trump the next day blamed “Biden’s ridiculous Open Border Policy.”

Other top administration officials echoed that line, with White House adviser Stephen Miller calling the suspect an “illegal alien” who benefited from the Biden’s “suicidal immigration” policies.

The reality was more complex, as the Atlantic reported. The Egyptian man had arrived in 2022 during the Biden administration, but he didn’t cross the border illegally. He instead arrived on a tourist visa that Trump’s first administration had frequently awarded, and then applied for asylum – a process that allows one to temporarily stay in the country. That application was still pending when the attacks occurred.

The failure of the Gaza ceasefire

Palestinians inspect the site of Thursday’s Israeli strike that damaged and destroyed residential buildings at Shati refugee camp, in Gaza City, on Friday, July 4.

Mahmoud Issa/Reuters

Trump came into office hailing his role in securing a ceasefire in Gaza.

After it fell apart in March, Trump was asked about a UNICEF report that more than 300 children had been killed and more than 600 had been injured in Gaza following the breakdown of ceasefire talks.

Asked who he blamed, Trump didn’t name Hamas or Israel, but instead Biden.

“I would say that the blame for that is Biden more than anybody else, because I had – as you know, Iran was broke, and he allowed them to become rich,” Trump told Time magazine.

When asked about blaming Hamas instead, Trump plowed forward.

“I blame the Biden administration, because they allowed Iran to get back into the game without working a deal,” he said.

The lack of a peace deal in Ukraine

A man carrying a dog walks past the wreckage of cars following mass Russian drone and missile strikes on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, on Friday, July 4.

Oleksii Filippov/AFP/Getty Images

Trump promised to end the war between Ukraine and Russia instantly upon taking office. And when repeatedly questioned about the lack of results months into his second term, he will often fall back on calling it “Biden’s war.”

“This is Biden. This isn’t me,” Trump said Friday. “This is Biden’s war.”

When asked in April about recognizing Russian control of Crimea as part of a peace deal – a controversial part of the proposal that Ukraine publicly rejected – Trump said: “Crimea was given away by Barack Hussein Obama and by Biden.” Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, during former President Obama’s second term.

“You can blame the man that was sitting in this seat, Biden,” Trump said earlier in the month, adding: “I’m not blaming him, but what I am saying is that I wouldn’t say he’s done the greatest job.”

Economic pains

Trump’s blame-Biden refrain perhaps comes up most frequently regarding the economy, where Trump’s numbers have suffered. Trump returned to this line when the stock market sunk amid his tariff threats, when jobs numbers have come in low and when the gross domestic product had a bad quarter.

“We came in on January 20th, so this is Biden,” Trump said in late April. “And you could even say the next quarter is sort of Biden because it doesn’t just happen on a daily or an hourly basis.”

“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” he said on Truth Social the same day. “I didn’t take over until January 20th.”

Trump had said just three months prior that a stock market increase at the time was due to the “Trump effect.”

By early May, Trump had removed any subtext from when he planned to blame Biden.

“I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy,” Trump told NBC News, “because he’s done a terrible job.”

(Polling suggests this has not worked. Apparently because of Trump’s economy-rocking tariff threats, Americans quickly tied the economy to his policies – more quickly than for other recent presidents.)

Egg prices

Eggs sit stacked in a cold storage at Sunrise Farms on February 18 in Petaluma, California.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Perhaps no product has gotten more attention when it comes to inflation as the price of eggs. And when prices shot up early in Trump’s presidency, he blamed Biden.

“Under Biden, they soared like double, triple, quadruple. You couldn’t even get them,” Trump said in early April. “They were not available.”

He added in late April: “And when I took over, you remember the big thing with eggs? They hit me the first week, ‘Eggs, eggs, eggs,’ like it was my fault. I said, ‘I didn’t cause this problem. This problem was caused by Biden,” Trump said, adding: “Well, eggs are down 87% since I got involved.”

Egg prices are down, but not 87% as Trump claimed.

And there is a very logical culprit for the rise in egg prices: a bird flu outbreak. But Trump chose instead to blame Biden.

Signal-gate

One of Trump’s most puzzling efforts to blame Biden came amid one of the biggest scandals of his administration: Signal-gate.

While talking about his officials discussing highly sensitive military attack information on an unclassified messaging app back in March, Trump suggested some blame lie with Biden – for not launching the attack earlier.

“Joe Biden should have done this attack on Yemen, which is basically a certain group within Yemen, the Houthis, and this should have been done by Joe Biden and it wasn’t,” Trump said. “And that’s caused this world a lot of damage and a lot of problems.”