Donald Trump made an eyebrow-raising remark about the potential to halt US elections as he sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss efforts to negotiate peace with Russia.
Monday’s historic meeting marked Zelensky’s first time back in the White House since Trump and Vice President JD Vance laid into him live on TV during a spectacular Oval Office blowout in February. This time around, things remained relatively calm as the pair appeared far more civil with each other.
But Trump still escalated the tension in the room with a controversial statement. It comes as Trump appears to relish idea of a violent clash in DC as the city takes steps to de-escalate.
At one point during their press conference, the US president suddenly interrupted Zelensky as the Ukrainian leader was responding to a question about his commitment to holding elections after the war with Russia is over.
“So you’re saying during the war you can’t have elections,” Trump said. The president hinted that before the 2028 presidential election, he could call off elections as he joked: “So, let me just say, three and a half years from now so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections. Oh, that’s good.”
Zelensky laughed before shaking his head as he responded: “You like this idea, no no no no.” Trump’s remarks, which have since gone viral on X, quickly saw him accused of spouting “dictator talk”.
Trump has previously called Zelensky a “dictator” and criticised him for halting elections during wartime in Ukraine. Critics raised the alarm, claiming there was a more sinister side to the joke.
One wrote: “You can practically see the dim little lightbulb flicker on above his head. ‘Wait a second… if my country is in a war… I don’t have to leave the White House… EVER?! THAT’S GOOD!’ It’s the giddy, amoral excitement of a child who has just discovered a brand new and fantastic way to cheat at the game. Except the game is the Constitution of the United States.”
A second warned: “His remark to Zelensky wasn’t just a slip of the tongue it’s a window into his authoritarian fantasies. If Trump thinks he can dodge elections by dragging us into some endless conflict, he’s not just dreaming; he’s planning. The question isn’t just ‘who’ we’re going to have a long war with it’s ‘how long’ before we wake up to the fact that this man will stop at nothing to cling to power.”
Trump’s comments to Zelensky aren’t the first time that he has hinted at plans to remain in the White House beyond his second term, something which is currently unconstitutional. In a phone interview with NBC news back in March, Trump said he’s “not joking” about running for a third term and insinuated that “there are methods” of bypassing the Constitution.
When asked to elaborate on those methods the following month, the president told TIME Magazine: “I’d rather not discuss that now, but as you know, there are some loopholes that have been discussed that are well known.”
“But I don’t believe in loopholes,” Trump added. “I don’t believe in using loopholes.” However, earlier this month the president appeared to back-peddle on talk about running for a third term.
Asked whether he would make another bid for president in 2028, Trump told CNBC: “No. Probably not. I’d like to run. I have the best poll numbers I’ve ever had. You know why? Because people love the tariffs.”
Despite this, Trump on Monday showed off his collection of MAGA hats to Zelensky, including one emblazoned with the phrase “4 More Years”.
https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/donald-trump-elections-zelensky-usa-1337245
Donald Trump just “poked the bear,” and now he’s “terrified,” according to a longtime thorn in the president’s side.
Adam Schiff, one of California’s two senators, the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial, and a January 6th Committee member, called Trump’s attacks on him a “badge of honor” in a message to supporters on Sunday.
“Unless you are part of the MAGA world, in which case you may recognize me from Trump’s frequent attacks and name calling like ‘sleazebag,’ ‘traitor,’ or more recently, ‘one of the true lowlifes in the history of politics in America,'” the senator wrote. “A true badge of honor.”
Schiff went on to call out Trump for purported attacks on democracy.
“Trump is at it again. But this time his attacks aren’t just against me, he’s going after our very democracy,” he wrote. “You see, Trump is terrified of losing his majority in the midterms. And his solution isn’t to end his pointless tariff wars, stop the indiscriminate masked ICE raids, or rethink his deeply unpopular Big Ugly Bill. It’s to demand Republicans in Texas redraw their Congressional maps.”
Schiff continued, saying, “It’s sad. It’s tragic. But if Texas acts, California must respond.”
“I was proud to stand with our Governor, Gavin Newsom, as he introduced California’s Election Rigging Response Act,” he then added. “The people of our state will vote this November. If we win, we’ll nullify anything Texas does. If we lose… then Trump may very well have two more years of unchecked power.”
The lawmaker concluded, “Donald Trump has poked the bear. It’s time to fight back.”
Wednesday evening on the MAGA cable channel OAN, as Defense Department spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson gushed to host Matt Gaetz about an alleged year-over-year increase in female military recruits, four images of women soldiers in combat fatigues were displayed on-screen.
All four images were AI fakes.
The images appear to have been generated using Elon Musk’s Grok, as small watermarks in the bottom corners seem to indicate.
“These numbers are fantastic,” Wilson told Gaetz as the AI images scrolled on-screen. “Under the previous administration, we had about 16,000 female recruits last year; now we’ve got upwards of 24,000,” she continued. “It is a testament to Secretary Hegseth and President Trump’s leadership.” (The Pentagon has not officially released detailed data on female recruitment, but it told Fox News those same figures.)
A DOD spokesperson said the images were not provided by them, so CNN asked OAN whether its staff generated the photos and if the network has any policy regarding AI-generated content. The far-right network did not respond.
OAN, short for One America News, launched in 2013, and during Trump’s first administration, it quickly morphed into a conspiracy-heavy, MAGA-boosting outlet.
The little-watched cable channel has become best-known for promoting Trump’s 2020 election lies, and it has settled multiple defamation lawsuits resulting from those on-air claims. Last year, the network settled a lawsuit from voting technology company Smartmatic alleging the channel boosted the election lies in order to “increase viewership and revenue.”
The network also settled a defamation suit from a Dominion Voting Systems executive, but it still faces a separate defamation lawsuit from the company.
OAN’s viewership and revenue have dwindled since DirecTV dropped it in 2022. However, earlier this year, it received a PR boost when Kari Lake, Trump’s pick to run a hollowed-out Voice of America, claimed that OAN will provide “newsfeed services” to VOA and other US-funded international broadcasters.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/15/media/oan-gaetz-ai-images-women-military-kingsley-wilson
Far-right activist Laura Loomer has an ominous outlook about the state of the Republican Party once President Donald Trump finishes his second term.
In a post on X on Tuesday, Loomer — who has been dubbed as an “instrument” of the president — predicted that she doesn’t think the GOP is “going to survive post-Trump.”
“There’s too many conflicting personalities trying to jockey for the mantle to MAGA, and none of them have what it takes to be Trump’s successor,” Loomer wrote.
“We are witnessing the end of a future post-MAGA movement as we know it because everyone inside the ‘big tent’ the GOP forced on us realizes that hate each other,” she continued.
Loomer’s post comes as she finds herself at the center of a firestorm with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), another close ally of Trump.
The feud between the two erupted after Loomer criticized the Army for recognizing Medal of Honor recipient Florent Groberg, who saved the lives of fellow soldiers from a suicide bomber in Afghanistan, resulting in catastrophic injuries.
Loomer claimed that Groberg was a Democrat who has “campaigned against Trump,” and added that he was not a “US born soldier,” despite Groberg becoming a naturalized citizen in 2001. Greene shot back on Monday, calling her a “coward” and saying that she has “ZERO respect or reverence for even the most heroic people in America.”
The jabs, however, quickly became personal. Loomer went on to call Greene a “lying fake Christian wh—” and “probably the dumbest b—- in Congress” after the congresswoman said “she psychotically turns on everyone,” including Trump’s most ardent supporters.
“Like I said before, @RepMTG’s claims about me on X yesterday are completely unhinged, deceitful, and rooted in jealousy,” Loomer wrote on Tuesday, adding “She started to hate me as soon as I started being recognized for my work in support of Trump. That’s when she went from calling me her friend to calling me a foreign spy.”
Her prediction was met with mixed reactions on social media — with many floating Vice President JD Vance as a successor.
“I really hate seeing the infighting, bums me out, though I understand the passion on both sides,” one user replied, adding that Vance “has pleasantly surprised me more than anyone else in the Trump administration…”
Another user asked: “If anyone has it, it’s JD Vance. Do you disagree?”
“How about find 3 optimistic things to post about for every one negative post. All your negativity is exhausting!” a different user said.
Trump last week had described Vance as the next “most likely” GOP leader. Vance has been floated as a potential contender for the 2028 presidential election as numerous recent polls list him as the clear frontrunner in the Republican Party.
Since Trump took office, Loomer has used her prominence on social media to expose figures in Trump’s administration that she sees as disloyal, such as digging up their old social media posts and sifting through their past political donations. She has claimed credit for a number of firings, including a senior Customs and Border Protection official.
https://www.nj.com/politics/2025/08/trump-whisperer-makes-dire-prediction-about-future-of-gop.html
The worst crimes of Donald Trump and dangers to America from the unstable, monomaniacal, lying outlaw in the White House have yet to come. He is not satisfied with tearing apart our country’s social safety net for tens of millions of Americans (e.g., Medicaid and food program cuts); wrecking our scientific/medical systems, including warning people about pandemics. He is, by wrecking FEMA et al, failing to address the impact of mega-storms, wildfires, and droughts; and allowing cybersecurity threats to increase while giving harm-producing big corporations immunities from the law, more subsidies, and more tax escapes. Recall how he always adds to his attacks on powerless people that “This is just the beginning.”
He just took the next step in his march to madness and mayhem by announcing more concentration camps holding immigrants, arrested without due process, for deportation to foreign countries that want U.S. taxpayer cash for each deportee.
Recent immigrants are crucial to millions of small and large businesses. Consider who harvests our crops, cares for our children and the elderly, cleans up after us, and works the food processing plants and construction sites. Already, businesses are reducing or closing their enterprises – a political peril for Dangerous Donald.
If all immigrants to the U.S. from the last ten years, documented and undocumented, went on strike, our country would almost shut down. Yet Trump, who hired 500 undocumented workers for just one of his construction sites in New York, and had similar laborers at his New Jersey golf course, promises deportations of millions more.
Always bear in mind the self-defined characteristics of corporatist Trump’s feverish, hateful, outlaw mind: (1) He has declared he “can do whatever he wants as President,” proving his serial violations of law and illegal dictates every day; (2) He always doubles down when indicted, convicted, caught, or exposed, falsely accusing his accusers of the exact transgressions they are reliably charging him with; (3) He brags about lashing out at criticism with foul defamatory invectives; (4) He never admits his disastrous mistake; (5) He boasts that he knows more than leading experts in a dozen major areas of knowledge (see, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All”); and (6) He asserts that every action, policy, or program he launches is a spectacular success – the facts to the contrary are dismissed.He is gravely delusional, replaces realities with fantasies, breaks promises that are made to defer any reckoning or accountability, and, like an imaginary King, finds no problem with saying “I rule America and the world.”
His ego defines his reactions, which is why every foreign leader is advised to flatter him. Nobody flatters better than the cunning genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu, who at his last regal White House dinner, held up his nomination of convicted felon, woman abuser, Trump for the Nobel Prize. Netanyahu’s preening comes from a politician whose regime has dossiers on Trump regarding his past personal and business behavior. This helps explain why Trump is letting the Israeli government do whatever it wants in its Gaza Holocaust, the West Bank, and beyond with our tax dollars, family-killing weaponry, and political/diplomatic cover.
The approaching greater dangers from Trump will come when he pushes his lawless, dictatorial envelope so far, so furiously, so outrageously, that it turns his GOP valets in Congress and the GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court against him. Add plunging polls, a stagflation economy, and impeachment, and removal from office would become a political necessity for the GOP in 2026 and beyond. In 1974, the far lesser Watergate transgressions by President Richard Nixon resulted in Republican Senators’ demanding Tricky Dick’s resignation from office.
Further provocations are not far-fetched. Firing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, sinking the dollar, and angering the fearful, but very powerful bankers are all on the horizon. Will the sex-trafficking charges involving Jeffrey Epstein and vile abuses of young girls finally be too much for his evangelical base, as well as for many MAGA voters? This issue is already starting to fissure his MAGA base and the GOP iron curtain in Congress. Subpoenas have just been issued to the Justice Department by the GOP Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky – a close friend of Senator Mitch McConnell.
There is always SERENDIPITY. Trump, the mercurial egomaniac, offers old and new transgressions to stoke the calls for his impeachment. Does anyone believe that Trump would not start a military conflict, subjecting U.S. soldiers to harm, to distract attention from heavy media coverage of unravelling corruption investigations? Draft-dodging Donald has Pete Hegseth, his knee-jerk Secretary of Defense, waiting to do his lethal bidding, despite possible opposition from career military.
If Trump were to be impeached and removed from office, would he try to stay in office? Here is where a real constitutional explosion can occur. He would have to be escorted from the White House by U.S. Marshals who are under the direction of toady Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution grants “the sole Power” to try impeachments in the Senate and nowhere else. Thus, the courts would provide no remedy to a lawless president wanting to stay in power.
Then what? The country falls into extreme turmoil. The Defense Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security are in the Trump Dump. Tyrant Trump can declare a major national emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act, and hurl these armed forces and police state muscle against a defenseless Congress and populace. (Recall the January 6, 2021, assault on Congress.) The abyss would have been breached.
With our society in a catastrophic convulsion, the economy collapsing, what would be the next steps? Like the Pentagon that anticipates worst-case domestic scenarios on possible violent “blowbacks” against U.S. military actions abroad, Americans should start thinking about the unthinkable. Such foreshadowings may make us far more determined NOW to thwart, stop, and repeal the fascist dictatorship which Der Führer Donald Trump is rooting ever more deeply every day. Little restraint on lawless Trump from the Congress and the Supreme Court, and only feeble, cowardly responses by the flailing Democratic Party (and the Bar Associations for that matter) thus far, make for the specter of violent anarchy and terror.
Trump has fatalistic traits. Armageddon shapes his ultimate worldview. Ponder that for a dictator with his finger on more than the nuclear trigger.
Again, Aristotle got it right over 2300 years ago, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
https://www.alternet.org/trump-s-worst-crimes-and-destructions-haven-t-even-happened-yet
