Wednesday on CNN’s “The Lead,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) said President Donald Trump’s comments about Somalians were creating a dangerous situation because his followers have “exhibited violence.”

Today at the White House, Trump said, “These Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country. They’ve taken billions and billions of dollars. They have a representative, Ilhan Omar, who they say married her brother. She should be thrown the hell out of our country. And most of those people, they have destroyed Minnesota.”

Host Jake Tapper said, “What is the practical impact when a President of the United States demonizes an entire group of people based on ethnicity? And again, you can point to any ethnic group and find dozens of people in that ethnic group who are committing a particular crime. The Mafia comes to mind, right? But no one you don’t hear people saying that about Italians. They did 100 years ago, but they don’t do it today. What is the practical effect on the Somali community when the president says things like that?”

Omar said, “I mean, it creates fear. And there is a possible danger that a lot of the people who follow the president have exhibited violence in many cases, especially in my case, whenever he has said something about me that is derogatory or says I’m a threat to the country, I have gotten death threats. There are so many people that have been incarcerated over the years that have been encouraged by the president’s words. And so there is fear for Somalis, not just in Minnesota, but across the country, that some of these people might attack and harm them.”

Richard Gere Rages at Trump for ‘What He Has Done to This Country’

Actor Richard Gere is once again attacking President Donald Trump, this time lamenting about what Trump “has done to this country.”

The Pretty Woman star was speaking to Variety about his role as executive producer in Wisdom of Happiness, a film about the life of the current Dalai Lama, when he predictably went off on Trump.

Gere insists that the Dalai Lama project offers a “medicinal quality” for viewers because the times in which we live forces “a deep sickness” on humanity.

“We’re on a very wrong track here, and it’s gotten worse over the last years. Even a sense of basic kindness is lacking in the way people talk to each other,” Gere exclaimed. “Obviously, this comes from our leaders, especially the one we have now. How did that happen? We were responsible. We all have to take credit for that and responsibility for that.”

That led the actor, who sides with a political party that calls all its opponents “Nazis,” to attack Trump.

Gere added that he doesn’t think the sublimity of the Dalai Lama’s teaching would affect Trump. “I don’t know that it would touch him,” the actor spat.

“I would hope that it would,” Gere continued. “I would pray that it would. But boy, I don’t know how you explain what he has done to this country, what it feels like to be an American now, 10 or 11 months in. It’s just astonishing. It’s beyond what anyone could ever imagine.”

Gere didn’t seem to mention that the Dalai Lama has said the same things that Trump has in some instances. For example, in 2016, the Tibetan Buddhist leader insisted that Europe has allowed too many refugees to flood their borders. And he also warned Europe not to allow themselves to become Islamicized. In fact, he directly said that refugees should only be allowed into other countries “temporarily,” not permanently.

Still, the Dalai Lama has criticized Trump’s second presidency as having a “lack of moral principle,” even though in 2016 he said that he had no worries about Trump. The position that irks the Dalai Lama is Trump’s “America First” policies, something he says “is wrong.”

For his part, Gere has been a veritable fountain of attacks on Trump and Republicans.

Gere has called Trump and his voters a “dark presence” who have “almost destroyed this country” because they oppose the actor’s far-left ideals. He has blasted Trump as a “thug” and a “bully.” And he has criticized Trump’s strong stance on legal immigration policies.

“Across the continent, Trumpism is clearly considered a hostile force,” Dormagen said, adding that this perception was hardening, with fewer people than in December 2024 describing Trump as “neither friend nor foe” and more as definitely hostile.

However, Europeans still view the relationship with the US as strategically important: when asked what position the EU should adopt towards the US government, the most popular option (48%) was compromise.

The survey in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Croatia, Belgium and the Netherlands also found a relative majority (51%) felt the risk of open war with Russia in the coming years was high, and 18% considered it very high.

Dormagen said such a result “would have been unthinkable just a few years ago and signals the shift of European opinion toward a new geopolitical regime in which the possibility of direct conflict on the continent is now widely accepted”.

View varied strongly according to proximity to Russia, with 77% of respondents in Poland considering the risk of war to be high, compared with 54% in France, 51% in Germany, 39% in Portugal and 34% in Italy.

Confidence in national military capabilities was low everywhere, the survey found, with 69% of respondents across the nine countries saying they thought their country was “not really” or “not at all” capable of defending itself against Russian aggression.

French respondents were the most confident, but it remained a minority opinion at 44%. In Poland, which shares a border with Russia, 58% were not. Dormagen said: “We are entering an age of danger while feeling a persistent sense of national weakness.”

Feelings of vulnerability were widely shared, the survey found, with only 12% of respondents saying they did not feel particularly threatened by a raft of sources of insecurity ranging from technological and military to energy and food.

Although there were significant national differences, tech and digital security was the most frequently cited threat (28%), then military security (25%). There was strong demand for European help, with 69% of people saying the EU should play a protective role.

The vast majority of respondents across the nine countries backed EU membership: 74% said they wanted their country to stay in the bloc, with that sentiment highest in Portugal (90%) and Spain (89%) and lowest in Poland (68%) and France (61%).

Five years after Brexit, the UK’s decision to leave is overwhelmingly seen as a failure: 63% believed it had had a negative impact on Britain and just 19% thought it had been positive, including 5% who saw it as very positive.

 

Putin sends Trump’s messengers packing, with eyes on a geopolitical win

Vladimir Putin does not want a deal, and the sweetness of being begged to entertain one is something the Russian president relishes. Five hours of US President Donald Trump’s envoy and son-in-law meeting with the Kremlin head seemed to yield little publicly. It is helpful to step back and view the world and the Russian invasion through his eyes.

It is a war Putin started, hoping he could in a matter of days put Russia back on the map as the pre-eminent military force in Europe, capable of decisive action after the embarrassing departure by the United States from its longest war in Afghanistan. His hope for a swift win morphed into an ugly war of attrition. For a while, strategic defeat loomed, with US and NATO aid to plucky, tiny Ukraine allowing Kyiv to achieve victories unthinkable a year earlier.

But then came the gift of the Trump second term and its wobbly sympathy (or admiration) for Putin, and desire for peace, almost at any cost. Putin faces no election; the only likely limit on his term is that of his natural lifespan.

When he hears Trump say Ukraine is not his war, that he doesn’t want to waste money on it, and just wants it to end, he hears frailty and disinterest from the world’s biggest military power. This is the chance the former KGB spy had likely never imagined history would afford him: the US begging Russia to make peace. And the longer the process continues, the better the outcome likely afforded Moscow.

Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov emerged from Tuesday’s talks referring to a 27-point plan and four other documents. These details were likely designed to irk Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had most recently referred to a 20-point plan and must have hoped they had oversight of the contents of the other three documents.

Putin, presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev and foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov attended a meeting with US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner at the Kremlin Tuesday.

Kristina Kormilitsyna/Reuters

But the tail end of this diplomacy is occurring mostly in silence, with little reason for Zelensky to rejoice. His team will brief the Europeans and then meet the Americans again, and he is returning to Kyiv. Trump’s Thanksgiving deadline for an immediate deal is now a mirage, and ahead looms an inhospitable desert.

Ukraine has endured nearly four years of Russian invasion, but also now nearly 11 months at the mercy of of Truth Social. The impact of this unpredictability is often lost, as Trump vacillates from imposing some of the toughest sanctions on Russia yet and mulling sending Tomahawks, to the next moment reciting Russian talking points and putting the greatest pressure on his European allies and Zelensky himself.

The damage done to Ukrainian morale cannot be underestimated, and when the history of this episode is written, it will likely focus on Ukraine’s valiant and remarkable resistance against a larger foe, followed by the drastic undermining of their sacrifice by a White House obsessed with televised micro-moments of pleasing or pressuring whichever world leader fell into Trump’s attention span.

Trump is correct to seek as quick an end to this war as possible.
But this stems from a fatal misreading of Putin and his goals. Putin is a pragmatist, who adapts to each new opportunity or setback, but he retains a wider overarching dream. And that is to reset the balance of global security, and undo the ascendance of the US to its decades-long hegemony.

Putin is not all-powerful, has catastrophically misread his own henchmen in just the past two years – as we saw with the failed Wagner revolt in 2023 – and is facing clear manpower and budgetary pressures at home too. But he faces no anti-corruption probes, mid-term elections, or successors waiting in the wings. He has reset the Russian industrial complex to a ferocious war footing, and arguably must have as serious a plan to demobilize a now frail, over-stretched nation. In many ways, a continued war is Putin’s best shot at a continued reign.

So where does this leave Trump’s peace process? Ushakov said elements of the proposed deal were acceptable, others harshly criticized. It appeared possible that Zelensky had privately toyed with the idea of land swaps prior to the Kremlin meeting – softening a red line of the war. Yet the exact nature of any concessions from Kyiv was a closely guarded secret, presumably to not box Zelensky in to a new starting point for future talks. Yet whatever sweeteners Witkoff attached to the deal, Putin sent the dish back.

Russian strikes on Ukraine continue to inflict damage.

Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images

This is the dynamic of the months ahead, and it is not overwhelmingly hard to understand Russia’s hand. Putin is winning militarily – slowly, but undeniably – and he sees a Ukraine weak with manpower and funding issues, and in the grip of a domestic political crisis that keeps resurfacing.
Zelensky is hobbled at home, power cuts and frontline casualties blighting morale, and the repeat agony of loss, diplomatic deceit and pressure, coupled with ebbing aid, lead so many to question where this story ends without a growing Russian win?

Trump wants a peace above all else, and has shown in recent months that pressuring his allies to make concessions is a reflexive move. This is logical if you are a real estate tycoon squeezing your subcontractors to improve terms for a possible purchaser. But Putin is not looking to buy a hotel. Trump is rather trying to persuade an armed squatter to leave a property that they have set fire to, simply to show they are a force in the neighborhood again. This is not the sort of deal Trump is used to.

The fight and the slow win is the juice for Putin, and he sees more of both ahead. He can add to his delight the salacious sight of his opponent’s one-time main backer, the US, now beseeching him to make a deal, and using the US president’s son in law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff to do it. Moscow’s progress on the frontlines may be agonizingly and brutally slow, delivered at huge cost. But the wider spectacle is slowly becoming one of Putin’s geopolitical fever dreams, which likely puts a real, enduring peace far out of reach.

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