Don’t mess with him, suggests the big bully facing midterm blues
Donald Trump had a pretty bad case of midterm blues. What with his approvals hitting new lows and crowds thinning at his campaign rallies as ‘fake news’ would suggest, the POTUS needed a new trick.
Days after striking a deal with pal Putin to buy 1,80o,000 tons of diesel from Russia over three months to ease voters’ pain at the pump,Trump issued a fiat exempting Moscow from a new sanctions measure that Congress passed only last month.
Even as he faced a backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike for the diesel deal, he brazenly told the Congress about waiving the sanctions intended to target Russian officials, oligarchs and financial institutions “in the national interests of the United States” without providing any rationale.
But Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky had the temerity to defy Trump’s demand to stop striking Russian oil refineries. “The block [on attacking refineries] is out. We’re done,” he told the Financial Times, calling Putin a “real evil,” and wondering “How can Trump be friends with him?”
Feeling betrayed, Zelensky warned that easing sanctions could eventually lead to the normalization of relations with Moscow, despite Russia showing no readiness to agree to even a ceasefire in Ukraine. “There’s intuition, there’s intelligence, and there are various details,” Zelensky told reporters in Brussels.
Earlier when asked by Sky News if he’s a scapegoat for Trump’s domestic problems, Zelenskyy paused for 15 seconds, and then smiled before saying, “This is my answer.”
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Last week accusing Zelensky of choosing not to end the war with Russia even though he could have “many, many times,” Trump had suggested “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”
Back on the campaign trail, Trump proposed at a rally in Arizona that leakers should be shot, apparently referring to leaks surrounding U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025.
“Somebody leaked, some sleazebag. They ought to go to jail and be shot. For the rest of their life, they should be in jail,” Trump said, noting that Operation Midnight Hammer had to be delayed for two days.
Trump went on to compare reporters covering him to leakers, saying they were “almost as bad as a leaker.”
“They leak false information. That makes them a leaker,” he said, “Often times, without a source. I think they make up a lot of their sources.”
He did not suggest that they should be shot or jailed. But the Justice Department opened an investigation into five TV networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC. The five had briefly suspended their pooled coverage of the White House last month after Trump banned CNN from the White House. DOJ said the act potentially violated antitrust law.
Meanwhile, a federal judge issued an order blocking the Trump administration from banning CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House complex while the organizations’ lawsuit over access proceeds.
Another “furious” and “thoroughly unamused” federal judge sharply rebuked Trump officials for chopping down 430 trees from a golf course Trump wants to remake into a championship-level course.
Chiding the officials for giving less than a day’s notice before cutting down the trees because Trump “demands haste on his redesign,” the Biden appointed judge blocked removal of more trees. The National Park Service had claimed the trees were taken down because of a 2019 cultural-landscape report that recommended thinning vegetation.
But ignoring a deadline set by yet another federal judge to stop Trump’s taxpayer-funded campaign-style ads, the federal government ran two more controversial ads promoting him.
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Critics allege the ads violate a law that bans using tax dollars for “publicity or propaganda.” Trump finds nothing wrong with it, but said his super PAC would pay for the ads moving forward.
Back in Washington, Trump fired his new press secretary Katie Zacharia after just five days on the job, following a widely panned first press briefing and the revelation that she represented herself as a lawyer but did not pass her bar exam.
Earlier, Trump himself posted a fake quote of black actor Denzel Washington praising him purportedly saying he had “never met anyone braver, smarter, or who cares more about America” than Trump.
The Washington Post cited the president of the firm representing Washington as saying he has “no idea” where the quote came from. It has circulated online before, attributed to Matthew McConaughey and Mick Jagger.
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Meanwhile, ‘No Kings’ movement planned to hold more than 3,000 events across all 50 states and Washington DC Saturday to get people to the polls early for the midterm elections.
Organizers hoped to not only make Saturday the largest single day of early voting in U.S. history, but also build a volunteer network ready to defend the results of the Nov. 3 elections – should anyone choose to undermine them.
On his part, Trump posted a bizarre AI-generated video of himself chasing and playing with a tiger, amid a flurry of late-night Truth Social posts over the weekend.
The post came hours after he shared real footage of a fatal tiger attack on a man who entered the animal’s enclosure at a wildlife park in northern England, with the text “Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT.”
Made shortly before midnight, it featured an AI-generated video that appears to parody the U.K. tiger attack footage but instead Trump chasing away the big cat and playfully wrestling with it. The video ends with Trump embracing the tiger while the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background.
In a follow-up post, Trump shared another video — interspersed with shots of Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders —
comparing himself to a lion, which is shown fighting hyenas while a narrator declares it “the king of the jungle.”
But the big question is would the midterms tame the big bully of Washington?
(“Read Arun Kumar’s Trumpiana columns in his new book, Trumpiana: The Wrecking Machine, available on Amazon.)