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Tonight, President Trump campaigned repeatedly on denouncing Joe Biden's policy of arming Ukraine in its war with Russia and vowing to end the war as soon as he got into office. Like so many of his promises, none of this happened, and now Trump, rather than ending Biden's war policy, is doubling down on it. With the NATO chief in the White House today, the supreme militarist Mark Rutte, Trump announced a new plan to arm Ukraine by sending the weapons through NATO, which he claims will pay for them. We'll see. A report in the Financial Times today also says Trump told Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy to try to use missiles to strike the key Russian cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Imagine if Russia had told a proxy of theirs, “We'll give you weapons, and we want you to strike New York, Los Angeles, and Washington.” This came after Joe Biden and his transition out of the White House for the first time authorized Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. Trump's policies are wrong and dangerous for the exact same reasons Biden's policy was in Ukraine, as we went over many times when he was president, and it's crucial to examine why that is and what Trump is doing.
Also, when Trump first addressed the anger among his own supporters for having announced that he was closing the Epstein investigation with zero disclosures forthcoming, he did so by waving his hand and instructing everyone that this topic was far too trivial and insignificant to merit any attention, and he thus directed everyone to move on and simply stop talking about it. Some obeyed Trump, of course, but many did not, and he was thus compelled to return several times to address the obvious 180 his administration has done with regard to whether the various issues in this case would be investigated and whether the documents suitable for publication would be disclosed.
But each time Trump has tried to calm his angry base with additional statements, he has only made things worse. How long can this charade go on? We'll examine the latest.
One of the most significant policies of the Biden administration was the decision unanimously supported by every single member of the Democratic Congress, but also a majority of members of the establishment Republicans as well, to arm and fund the war in Ukraine. There were a lot of reasons why people objected to that, especially people on the right-wing populist faction who were supporting Trump. One of them was a cost issue, but another was just how dangerous it was.
Why was Russia our enemy? Why are we making them our enemy? Why are they claiming that the war in Ukraine, which is about who governs the various provinces in the east of Ukraine, has anything to do with the lives of American citizens? And also, Russia is a nuclear power, which has made clear that they regard this war as existential to their national security. Something that the CIA has long said all the way back to the Bush administration, when Victoria Nuland and Condoleezza Rice wanted to put Ukraine in NATO. The head of the CIA under Obama, Bill Burns, who was in the Bush administration as well, wrote a memo that ended up being leaked by WikiLeaks, which basically said, Ukraine and NATO is a red line for Russia, not just for Putin and his supporters, but for even liberal anti-Putin critics, everyone in the entire political spectrum in Russia regards any NATO influence or presence in this country on the other side of its border – that was twice used to invade Russia in the 20th century, killing tens of millions of Russians in two world wars – obviously a very sensitive part of their border that they consider it existential, whereas the West does not.
Putin was asking that the U.S. and NATO agree that Ukraine will never be a NATO member and the U.S. under Biden refused. And that was at least part of the reason why Putin then went into Ukraine. There were others. We've been over these many times, but Donald Trump had been steadfast in his opposition to Biden's policy of arming the war in Ukraine and promising repeatedly that as soon as he got into office, he would just tell each of them to cut it out, would threaten each or hold sanctions over their heads or whatever he had to do and the war would end very, very quickly. None of that has happened. Trump has increasingly come to blame Vladimir Putin principally for that, despite the flamboyant conflict he had in the White House with Zelenskyy.
He's now done a 180 on the question of Ukraine as well. He is now announcing a massive influx of weapons from the United States to Ukraine that he intends to put through NATO, claiming that NATO countries are going to buy it from the U.S. through some unknown mechanism. NATO countries are already saying, “We're not going to wait for these weapons to get here. We're just going to send them to Ukraine, knowing that the U.S. is going to replenish our stockpile.”
For all the talk about how Trump was splitting with Western Europe and questioning the value of NATO, here is the NATO chief, Mark Rutte, in the White House today. He's one of those EU maniacs who just want war in every way. When Trump went to the NATO summit a couple of weeks ago, Mark Rutte was so grateful that Trump had signaled that he was going to start funding and arming Ukraine again that he actually sat there and flattered Trump in the way that Trump loves them most. He actually called him daddy – you're kind of like a daddy. Sometimes, if the two sides aren't doing what you want, the daddy has to come and impose discipline, calling Trump daddy in front of the cameras. But of course, knowing that, although pretty embarrassing, that's how you can flatter and ingratiate yourself and then start influencing Trump.
Today, the NATO chief was at the White House next to Trump and that's when Trump announced this new policy. Here it is.
Video. Donald Trump, Mark Rutte, White House. July 14, 2025.
This claim that NATO agreed to 5% is through accounting smoke and mirrors. All they did was expand the definition of what “defense spending” includes. So it includes, in large part, the amount of money they've been pouring into the war in Russia, that they've been sending to Ukraine, but it also includes things like they can build infrastructure and, as long as they can demonstrate it has some connection to the military, that gets counted as military spending.