US President Donald Trump is considering a complete withdrawal from the Ukraine peace process due to a lack of progress, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing sources. The US leader, however, is reportedly reluctant to tighten sanctions against Russia. Trump appeared to express the sentiment following a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week as he spoke with several European leaders, the NYT reported. During the conversation, Trump shared his impression that “Putin thought he was winning the war and would press his advantage,” according to officials briefed on the matter. They also reportedly indicated that Trump “made it clear he had no intention on putting pressure, much less harsh economic sanctions, on Russia.”
“He said, essentially, ‘I’m out,’” an NYT source claimed. At the same time, the paper would not say whether Trump, who has been skeptical of US aid to Ukraine and has yet to approve new assistance packages, might be willing to continue military support for Kiev. Trump, who has described the Ukraine conflict as “Europe’s war,” was shocked by Moscow’s unwillingness to change its key terms of resolving the crisis, according to the NYT. Russia has insisted that any sustainable peace must include guarantees of Ukraine’s neutrality, its demilitarization, denazification, and recognition of the new territorial reality on the ground. A separate Wall Street Journal report also claimed that Trump is increasingly frustrated with the peace process and may abandon it entirely if current efforts fail. The paper suggested that the US leader is eyeing new sanctions against Russia, although no final decision has been made.
The reports come after Trump claimed that Putin “has gone absolutely CRAZY,” rebuking Moscow for firing “missiles and drones… into cities in Ukraine for no reason whatsoever.” Moscow said its recent strikes targeting Ukrainian military-related facilities were retaliation for a significant increase in Kiev’s drone raids into Russia. Russian officials reported near-daily interceptions of over 100 Ukrainian UAVs, suggesting that the strikes are meant to derail the peace process. Responding to Trump’s remarks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted that the start of the negotiation process is a “very important moment which is fraught with emotional overload” on all sides. He also stressed that Putin makes decisions “required for the security of our country,” while praising the efforts of the Trump administration to broker an end to the conflict.
Public remarks by Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky are only making things worse for his country, US President Donald Trump has said. His comments came after the Ukrainian leader accused the US of a lack of support, which he claimed benefits Russia. Trump took to Truth Social on Sunday to criticize Zelensky for making diplomatic efforts to settle the Ukraine conflict more difficult. The Ukrainian leader, he said, “is doing his country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems. I don’t like it, and it better stop.” The US president added that the conflict “would never have started” if he had been in office. “This is Zelensky’s, Putin’s, and Biden’s War, not ‘Trump’s.’ I am only helping to put out the big and ugly fires, that have been started through gross incompetence and hatred,” he said.
Trump’s comments came after Zelensky criticized his Western backers, including the US, for what he described as a lackluster reaction to Russia’s latest large-scale air strike. “America’s silence, the silence of others in the world, only encourages Putin,” Zelensky said, calling for increased pressure and sanctions on Moscow. The exchange occurred amid an escalation in fighting between Russia and Ukraine, with Moscow accusing Kiev of launching hundreds of drones between Tuesday and Friday alone. According to Russian air defense commander Yury Dashkin, one strike took place during a visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Kursk Region, where his helicopter “was at the epicenter” of a Ukrainian drone assault.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has vowed an appropriate response, stating that the Ukrainian strikes are intended to “disrupt direct Russian-Ukrainian negotiations” aimed at a lasting settlement. The Russian Defense Ministry later announced a successful strike on a drone and missile production plant in Kiev as well as a radar surveillance center and a US-made Patriot air defense system. Moscow has repeatedly said its strikes are never aimed at civilians.
Trump, however, voiced disapproval of Russian actions, claiming that Putin had “gone absolutely CRAZY” and alleging that he had targeted Ukraine with recent strikes “for no reason whatsoever.” The US president has on several occasions threatened to impose new sanctions on Russia if he does not see peace efforts making progress. However, following a call between Trump and Putin last week, Axios reported that the US leader is still refraining from imposing new restrictions on Moscow. Instead, he reportedly told European leaders that he believes “Putin wants a deal” and that diplomacy remains possible.
Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to what his US counterpart, Donald Trump, tells him in English during direct conversations, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. He added that Putin later receives an interpretation in Russian to minimize the risk of miscommunication. In an interview with journalist Pavel Zarubin released on Sunday, Peskov explained some of the “technical nuances” of recent and past phone calls between the two national l eaders. Putin’s fluency in English allows him not to rely on an interpreter’s services to understand the conversation, the official said.“The president first hears the voice of his counterpart – that is, he hears Trump’s voice – and then the interpreter translates it,” Peskov explained.
He noted that Putin understands English and is capable of following the conversation before the translation begins. “As you know, the president understands English himself, so he can immediately process some of the information,” Peskov added. He noted that the exchange takes longer due to the back-and-forth nature of interpretation. The two leaders spoke for over two hours on May 19, with the Kremlin describing the exchange as “very useful.” The conversation followed direct peace talks between Russia and Ukraine held in Istanbul – the first in-person negotiations between representatives from the two countries since 2022, when Kiev withdrew from a proposed peace deal that had already been agreed in principle. The latest round of Russia-Ukraine talks resulted in a proposal for the largest prisoner exchange to date.
According to Putin, the discussion with Trump on May 19 was “productive, substantive and quite candid,” with the primary focus on the Ukraine conflict. Speaking to reporters afterward, he said both sides had agreed that Moscow would draft a memorandum outlining the principles and timeline for a potential peace agreement. The proposed framework would also cover other matters, including “a potential temporary ceasefire, should the necessary agreements be reached.” Trump said the call “went very well,” describing the tone and spirit of the conversation as “excellent.” On Sunday, however, the US leader stated he was “not happy with what Putin’s doing,” criticizing Moscow’s response to a week of sustained Ukrainian drone raids as completely unwarranted.
Moscow has consistently reaffirmed its commitment to a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine conflict and has welcomed Washington’s involvement in advancing direct talks. Putin reiterated that Russia is ready to work with Kiev on drafting the document and emphasized that “eliminating the root causes” of the conflict “is what matters most to us.” The Russian Foreign Ministry has described the surge in Ukrainian “terrorist” drone attacks on non-military targets as a deliberate attempt by Kiev’s “party of war” to sabotage the recently renewed direct peace negotiations between Moscow and Kiev. Ukraine’s Western backers, “led by the UK, France, Germany, and the EU leadership,” are facilitating the attacks by supporting “Ukrainian Nazis,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.
The German military must significantly increase its weapons stockpile by 2029, the year the current government anticipates a potential threat from Russia, according to a directive issued by the country’s defense chief, obtained by Reuters.The order, titled ‘Directive Priorities for the Bolstering of Readiness’, was signed on May 19 by Carsten Breuer, the inspector general of the Bundeswehr, the news agency reported on Sunday. Moscow has denied that it has any aggressive intentions toward NATO countries, dismissing Western speculation of a possible attack as fearmongering aimed at justifying extensive militarization by the bloc’s European members. Breuer’s order emphasizes the procurement of advanced air defense systems and long-range precision strike capabilities effective at ranges exceeding 500km.
He has also reportedly directed the military to increase the stockpiling of various types of ammunition and to develop new capacities in electronic warfare, as well as space-based systems for both defensive and offensive missions. Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced on Monday that his government has lifted restrictions on the range of weapons it can supply to Ukraine to fight Russia. The news is perceived as a hint at the possible delivery of long-range Taurus missiles, which the previous government refused to donate. In March, the German parliament amended the nation’s law to exempt military spending from the ‘debt brake’, a measure that limits government borrowing. Merz has proposed allocating up to 5% of the nation’s GDP to security-related projects by 2032, a significant increase from the current level of around 2%. He claimed that this expenditure would transform the Bundeswehr into Europe’s most formidable military force.
The rearmament plans necessitate a corresponding increase in personnel. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius indicated in a recent interview that the ruling coalition aims to introduce a recruitment model similar to Sweden’s, potentially ending the current volunteer-only system as early as next year. The military initiatives come amid economic challenges, including de-industrialization and stagnation. On Sunday, the newspaper Bild said that ThyssenKrupp, a company with over two centuries of history, is undergoing a significant restructuring amounting to dissolution. According to the report, the company plans to reduce its headquarters staff from 500 to 100, transfer its steel mills to Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, sell its naval shipyard Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) in the public market, and divest most other divisions.
It’s pretty universally acknowledged that America’s recent wars — say, starting with Vietnam — have been stupid, pointless, and fake in instigation. And yet the soldiers we sent into these fiascos acted bravely and honorably for the most part. So, it has felt a little weird to celebrate their sacrifices minus any sense of political justice, victory, or meaning in the endeavors they sacrificed for. Ergo, the holiday is lately reduced to a celebration of grilled meat. This Memorial Day, for a change, the USA is not actively at war in some distant land, only against ourselves. One faction in this as yet cold civil war seeks to Make America Great Again (MAGA), and the other side seeks what. . . ? To do the opposite of that? Make America Disintegrate (MAD). It’s hard to come to another conclusion.
MAGA is led, of course, by Mr. Trump, president again after the strangest executive interregnum in our history. At its plainest, MAGA means returning to an economy based on producing things of value. To many, this might conjure up the image of humming factories, good pay for honest work, and a well-ordered, content, patriotic populace grateful for their prosperity, in other words, something like the America of 1958, when Mr. Trump was entering puberty. It’s a comforting vision. Parts of it seem possible to achieve. Maybe we can rebuild an industrial infrastructure of up-to-date factories. Didn’t we voluntarily deep-six all the old ones only a few decades ago? And for what reason? So that faraway nations rising out of darkness could make all the stuff we wanted at a fraction of the cost? Turned out to be a bad bargain based on supremely foolish short-term thinking.
It also came with a set of very corrosive financial arrangements based on the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. These are pretty abstruse, but suffice it to say they enabled us to rack up phenomenal debt that we will never be able to pay off. We even fooled ourselves into thinking that we could replace that old economy of factory production with financial games based on jiggering interest rates and innovating ever more complex swindles. That merely produced a fantastic divide between the financial gamesters raking in billions while the former factory workers were left broke, demoralized, sick, and strung-out on drugs.
As a basic proposition, it’s doubtful that we can return to anything like a 1958 disposition of things based on rising continental-scale enterprise, as in the Big Three automakers and General Foods. It all seemed like a good idea at the time, and the zeitgeist pushed it, but we can see where it landed us: in the ghastly suburban sprawl clusterfuck and the overall ill health of the people. Also the scale of things is done rising; is, in fact, contracting.
And yet we are surely lurching into a new disposition of things, probably featuring a reduced population (disease and infertility induced by the Covid vaccine op), falling energy production (despite the whoop to drill-baby-drill), and much smaller-scaled, re-localized production of goods and food — if we’re lucky. (Events are in the driver’s seat, not personalities, even gigantic ones like Mr. Trump’s.) If we’re not lucky, the disorders of change itself may overwhelm our ability to remain civilized. The MAD faction is led by the Democratic Party, the party of Hoaxes, Hustles, and Hatred. Being more a religious cult (of envy, grievance, and revenge) than a political faction, this Memorial Day they celebrate their patron saint George Floyd, a fake martyr whose death by fentanyl overdose sparked a summer of looting, arson, and homicide followed by a fraud-saturated election.
The Black Lives Matter operation proved to be hustle, that is, an effort to extract money dishonestly. But it morphed into the even more pervasive DEI op, seeping into every institution of American life and contaminating each of them with incompetence and grift, larded with sanctimony. That’s over now, but what is the MAD Democratic Party left with? It has put itself at the service of the depraved Deep State, the rogue permanent bureaucracy that has developed a malevolent hive-mind dedicated to maintaining its perquisites at all costs. In other words, it is vested solely in power. . . power over the people of this land. . . to dominate, regulate, asset-strip, and punish for the crime of wishing to be civilized.
The MAD party is on the wane now. Its insanity has become so exorbitant that no one of healthy sensibility can bear to be associated with it. Those who remain involved in Democratic Party politics are largely those liable to prosecution for manifold crimes against the country, now using the most unprincipled dregs of the legal system to keep them out of prison. The party will be defeated utterly.
The Deep State it served is getting disassembled systematically by MAGA, deprived of funding, de-staffed, shut down. It has nothing left but lawfare and a claque of judges who will lose their battle with legitimate law and the Constitution. If it attempts to revive its street-fighting proxies this summer, that too will get shut down swiftly and harshly. Lessons will be learned. All of which is to say that the Deep State’s war against the American people could be drawing to a close. That is something to be grateful for this Memorial Day.
MAGA will then be left to battle with the forces of nature, which basically means physics, especially as applied to the mechanisms of money. MAGA could easily founder if it fails to face the current deformities of finance, namely the gross, untenable debt hanging over the country. I’m not so optimistic about how that might work out.
This week, the Supreme Court continued to deliberate over what to do with the growing number of national or universal injunctions issued by federal district courts against the Trump Administration.The court has long failed to address the problem, and what I have called “chronic injunctivitis” is now raging across the court system. Justices have only worsened the condition with conflicting and at times incomprehensible opinions.Both Democratic and Republican presidents have long argued that federal judges are out of control in issuing national injunctions that freeze the entire executive branch for years on a given policy. For presidents, you have to effectively sweep the district courts 677-to-0 if you want to be able to carry out controversial measures. Any one judge can halt the entire government.
Under President Barack Obama, Justice Elena Kagan expressed outrage over the injunctions in public comments at Northwestern University School of Law. Kagan lashed out at the obvious “forum shopping” by then conservative advocates to get before favorable courts, insisting “It just cannot be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years it takes to go through the normal [appellate] process.” In his first term, Trump faced a more than 450 percent increase in the number of such injunctions over the number issued under Obama — a rise from 12 to 64. The number then went down to just 14 under former President Joe Biden. With Trump back in office, district courts have now outstripped that record and may surpass the total from the first term in the first year.
Seymour Hersh’s report on President Joseph Biden’s decision to destroy the Nord Stream gas pipelines on the Baltic seabed on September 26, 2022, and the involvement of the US Navy in preparing the explosives, has been based on a single anonymous US source with what Hersh calls “direct knowledge of the process”. From the full text of the Hersh report, it appears that neither the source nor Hersh has “direct knowledge” of the history of US-led operations to sabotage and destroy the pipelines which became public more than a year before; they directly involved the Polish government and the Danish government. In fact, by error of omission Hersh and his man are ignorant of those operations and of that history.
Also, the two of them are ignorant of the British government’s role in this history, and in the final destruction, which was revealed publicly by then-Prime Minister Elizabeth Truss to Secretary of State Antony Blinken sixty seconds after the detonation; and by the Russian government when it announced its knowledge of the British involvement. The source and the reporter appear to be equally oblivious of the role German government officials played in the operation, and of the history of German warfighting operations against Russia stretching back to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s engagement in the NATO plan for military intervention in eastern Ukraine, following the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014. That attack was costlier in lives and in the US warfighting strategy against Russia than the Nord Stream operation.
In terms of cost, the US attack seizing more than $300 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves, announced on February 28, 2022, was much greater. Hersh implies, without identifying his source at all, that there were “US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia”; that because the Nord Stream attack plan violated those “promises”, they were in the source’s opinion either illegal in US law, or violations of US intelligence and military operation standards, or breaches of international undertakings the US has given its NATO allies or its Russian targets. Without explanation, Hersh omitted to ask Russian officials or others with “direct knowledge of the process” to confirm these claims or deny them.
Hersh and his man dismiss the Germans with the same disdain. They report that “after some wobbling [Chancellor Olaf Scholtz] was now firmly on the American team” in January 2022, when the Nord Stream attack plan had already been under way, Hersh reports, for at least a month. Hersh omitted to ask any German source — active official, army general, navy admiral or retiree – to confirm or clarify.
Hersh’s text implies that he himself, like his source, think it’s good and lawful US policy to fight Russia’s “threat to western dominance [in Europe]”; to strike against Gazprom because it “is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of [President Vladimir] Putin”; because Nord Stream was “a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions”; and because “American’s political fears [of Putin’s ambitions] were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia – while diminishing European reliance on America.”If this is what Hersh and his man believe to be the truth, then what follows in their report is that one of them must be lying, one of them dissimulating.
Hersh and his source imply that what they claim to have been a US Navy covert operation was wrong, not because the US warfighting objectives against Russia were (are) mistaken, but because the scheme of planning the attack intentionally evaded the US law “requiring that Congress be informed”. This was the illegal scheme, Hersh reports his source as saying; it was illegal because it intended to broadcast Biden’s and State Department official warnings against Nord Streamfor the purpose of fabricating lawful compliance for those involved, and legality for the operation itself. The fabrication aimed at converting a “highly classified intelligence operation with US military support [which] under the law, the source explained, ‘there was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress”.
To make his case that the little secret was illegal, and justify the big and open secret, Hersh and his source have been obliged to ignore the history, the NATO allies, and of course, the record which the Russians have made. This is either cynically calculated dishonesty, or else it is the fantasy of an American journalist pretending to investigate, even castigate one government operation; and at the same time loyally serve the purpose, ideology and propaganda of the war at large. Hersh is quixotic – except that this time the old Don’s lance is broken, his tilt is in the wrong direction, and the windmill is a fabrication of US exceptionalism, not only of the warfighters in Washington and Langley, but of the journalists who profess to be reporting on them.
I’d like to talk about debt, debt, debt. All during the last few days, we’ve heard some startling news. Moody’s, the bond evaluator, for the first time in its history, since 1917, has lowered the credit rating of the United States government from Aaa to Aa1. It didn’t do that during the 2008 meltdown. It didn’t do that during the Great Depression. It didn’t do that during 9/11. It didn’t do that during the Biden years when we borrowed $7 trillion. But it did it now. At the same time, Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, will not lower interest rates even though there’s been a good jobs report, a good inflation report, a good corporate profits report. Gross domestic product is gonna be evaluated, apparently, upward and there’s been low energy cost. That mortgage is still 4.25% Fed rate to 4.5%. And that means mortgages are still 6.5%, 7%. And that housing market is slowing as a result.
And this has got President Donald Trump very angry, that they’re doing this, given the prior administration borrowed $7 trillion and helped run up from $29 trillion in national debt to $37 trillion, and left Trump with a $3 billion-a-day interest payment. So, he’s jawboning all this and trying to get down. So, what is Trump trying to do? And is it working? Well, he’s the first president since Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the House at that time, who’s talking about reducing a $2 trillion budget deficit, a $1.2 trillion trade deficit, and addressing a $37 trillion national debt. But is he actually doing it? On the plus side of the ledger, you’ve got the Department of Government Efficiency. And DOGE in the first 100 days has identified about $160 billion in cuts. That’s encouraging if two things are following: if they can keep up that rate of identifying cuts and get up to the $500 billion or even $700 billion and maybe make 25% or 30% reduction in the $2 trillion deficit. And if the Trump administration exercises fiscal discipline.
The problem is twofold: that while he’s addressing verbally, rhetorically the debt and the deficit, you look at the big, beautiful bill under consideration and it’s going to have to pass or the Trump administration will be completely humiliated. They need to get it through reconciliation but there are sizable increases in the defense budget from everything that’s justifiable, from salaries, from an Iron Dome-like missile defense—you name it. More drones—good. But it’s more money. And there’s more subsidies to farmers. And there’s not a lot of cuts—at least when balanced with the increases.So, the budget deficit, for all the talk of DOGE and for all the talk of fiscal sobriety, might not actually go down. And if it doesn’t go down, the Fed may not lower rates. And if it doesn’t lower rates, then you still are stuck with a trillion dollars a year in interest payments. That’s killing us.
So, you’ve got to get that down. And the way Trump has to do it is just two ways: Either cut the budget or raise taxes—which will strangle the economy—or continue the tax cuts. And hope two things: that the tax cuts—the extension—will prime the economy, along with cheap interest rates. And the question that we all have now: Is cutting taxes on tips, is cutting taxes on Social Security, is cutting taxes on first responder, etc.—all of which Trump has mentioned—is that really stimulus as opposed to, say, accelerated depreciation investment for businesses? I don’t know the answer. But I do know, as a historian, that if you do not cut the deficit and the national debt and you have bond raters like Moody’s or the Fed that will not lower interest rates, you’re going to be in a crisis.
And in the antiquity—from Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance—there were three ways of dealing with unsustainable debt and are not good. They’re all civilizational killers. No. 1: As the Weimar Republic did in Germany, you pay back what you owe in cheap dollars. They inflated the marks. And bankrupt really helped cause the depression. You can do that, pay back the $37 trillion in inflated dollars. It’s not a good option. No. 2: You can confiscate private wealth. People do that all the time throughout history. That destroys the legitimacy of the government. And it makes private investors hide their money.
When I say confiscate wealth, you can already see articles in financial left-wing journals that say, well, maybe the trillionaire, billionaire, whatever term they use, oligarchical class will get credit, some Social Security or get some kind of credit for us taking some of their 401(k) money. Something like that. That never works. It never worked in Athens. It never worked in Rome. It never worked in Renaissance Italy.The third is the most drastic and it’s a killer too and we’ve seen countries in South America try it. And that’s to renounce the debt. Just say: You know what? All you bondholders, you guys have U.S. savings bonds—40% of them abroad, you know, here in America—you have so much money anyway. We’re just not gonna pay you back—the government. We’re gonna renounce it and start from zero. Who would ever buy a bond again if we were to do that?
So, bottom line is incumbent upon the Trump administration to make real cuts and show progress that you’re reducing the annual budget deficit and more importantly, you have mechanisms to grow the economy. Final note. We have a lot of confidence—this administration—that tariffs will give revenue and maybe also help reduce the budget deficit. I’m not sure that’s happening. Only 1% or 2%, maybe 3% of the $5 trillion in federal revenue today is made up by tariff income. Even with these huge new tariffs, if they’re actually reified, you might get a trillion dollars. You might get a trillion dollars over 10 years. That’s $100 billion out of $5 trillion in revenue. So, I’m not sure we can count on tariff income at all.What we should count on is cut, cut, cut. Seek a balanced budget and grow the economy with tax cuts that encourage investment and economic expansion.
Salvador Dali Bather 1924 Still messy. Will call in some help today. 4 nights with practically no sleep. • ‘Everyth [See the full post at: Debt Rattle May 27 2025]
Not going to be stopped, there are motivated people out there, the most rabid being in the US, who are happy to allow billions of people to die if it means they get their own way. An appeal against the extinction of humanity is not realistic, the greed and power monsters will just say that extinction is fine as long as I am the richest, most powerful and the last one to die. Humans are fundamentally flawed in this respect, humans will destroy each other, the super rich trust-fund-kid families will be salivating over the possibility of using AI to rule over everybody else, they will just ifnore the extinction bit.
Another way to look at this; maybe AI is the rapture, the rebirth of all past dead evangelical dumbasses in the AI space, joined with all current US evangelical dumbasses, all joined together with Christ the AI. Will AI genocide the rest of us in the same way that the USA is genociding the Gazans? I doubt it, it will have cleverer ways to kill everybody, maybe a few biological agents that destroy all humans. After all, AI is part of the God trinity, the Christ.
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