President Donald Trump on Sunday said he spoke with Russian leader Vladimir Putin ahead of a scheduled meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Bloomberg reports.

Trump will meet face-to-face with Zelensky Sunday afternoon in Florida. Sunday morning, according to Trump, he had a “good and very productive” phone call with the Russian leader. “Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed the Trump-Putin call, according to the Interfax news service,” Bloomberg reports.

“Trump has ramped up pressure on Ukraine to make concessions and dangled promises of economic cooperation at Russia,” according to Bloomberg. “While Zelensky has repeatedly declared his readiness for a ceasefire to allow space for peace negotiations, Putin has refused Trump’s calls for a truce without first having reached agreement on a deal.”

NewsNation editor Kevin Bohn reports “after Trump and Zelensky finish their one on one meeting, both leaders will call European leaders to brief them.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday called Europe “the main obstacle to peace," Bloomberg reports. Meanwhile, "Russia spent the weekend bombarding Ukraine, pounding Kyiv with hundreds of drones and missiles."

Former Rep. Joe Walsh, who served as a Republican representative from Illinois from 2011 to 2013, on Sunday slammed a former colleague’s lackluster defense of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

Walsh was responding to a clip of Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) during which the current congressman insisted Trump is “on the side of peace” in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Turner was speaking on the Russia-Ukraine war on ABC's "This Week."

“[Ukriane is] on the side of democracy, liberty, and Russia is on the side of authoritarianism and aggression,” Turner said.

“Which side is Trump on?” ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked.

Turner stammered in his response to Karl’s question.

“I-I, you know, clearly, uhm, you know, Trump is on the side of, of, peace. And he’s trying to balance these two forces which is very, very difficult,” Turner said.

Walsh, in a tweet, called that claim “bulls——.”

“I served in Congress with Mike Turner,” Walsh wrote. “He knows what side Trump is on. He knows Trump is on Putin’s side. He just doesn’t have the guts to say that publicly.”

Karl later pressed Turner on Trump's past statements appearing to blame Ukraine for the war — comments the Republican struggled to explain away.

“Trump has repeatedly said Ukraine never should have started this war, or words to that effect,” Karl noted. “... Ukraine didn’t start this war, they were invaded. So how does that affect his effort to try to broker a peace deal?”

“Clearly a war of aggression is started by Russia and it has been started by Russia,” Turner replied, before arguing the administration is “getting closer” to brokering a peace deal between the two countries.

Companies are “looking to stay lean into 2026” as a new “corporate playbook” reveals hiring freezes in major industries, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“You’re going to see a lot of wait and see,” chief executive of staffing company Kelly Services Chris Layden told the Journal. “Some of the looming uncertainty will mean that we’re going to continue to see an investment in capital over people.”

According to the report, “66 percent of leaders surveyed” at a recent gathering in Midtown Manhattan “said they planned to either fire workers or maintain the size of their existing teams next year. Only a third indicated they planned to hire.” This comes as the “unemployment rate those to 4.6 percent in November, its highest in four years.”

“We’re close to zero job growth. That’s not a healthy labor market,” Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller said at the gathering. “When I go around and talk to CEOs around the country, everybody’s telling me, ‘Look, we’re not hiring because we’re waiting to try to figure out what happens with AI. What jobs can we replace? What jobs do we don’t?’”

“Everybody’s afraid for their jobs. I’m dead serious,” said Waller.

Per the Journal, “some of the weakest industries for new job openings include those in well-paid fields such as data analytics, software development, marketing and entertainment, she said. Job postings are stronger in industries such as healthcare and construction.”

President Donald Trump on Friday touted a graph showing plummeting federal employment as “Big News for the USA!”

“The post cited jobs numbers from earlier this month showing federal employment at its lowest in more than a decade, down 271,000 jobs since he took office,” MS Now reports. “The Trump administration casts those numbers in a wholly positive light, as indicative of a strong private sector, even as the labor market stalls."

Read the full report at the Wall Street Journal.

Veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove on Saturday delivered a stark warning for President Donald Trump and the GOP as the 2026 midterm elections loom.

“The president will end this year at the lowest approval rating in modern times for a president … in the first year after his inauguration," Rove told Fox News. "He has got to get those numbers up."

“I am convinced a large part of it is going to be patiently explaining what it is he has done, explaining what is he wants to do particularly with regards to health care in a way that the American people can put their hand around it,” he added.

Rove urged the president to “lower the expectations, and over-deliver” in his messaging to the American public.

“Under-promise and over-deliver ought to be the goal of the next year,” Rove said.

“Americans are not feeling the economy is great. For him to stand up and say — as he did first in Pennsylvania, then in North Carolina — that ‘everything is great,’ it does not resonate with the felt experience of ordinary American families,” Rove told Fox News.

“Second-term midterms are never happy ones for the president except in 1998’s for Bill Clinton when the Republicans overplayed their hand. And the first term for George W. Bush, but those have been a rare moment midterm election has worked to the advantage of the party in power,” he noted.

Employees at the U.S. Department of State are hesitant “to give advice that the political appointees might not want to hear” as officials "become guarded about what they say" under President Donald Trump, multiple former State Department lawyers told HuffPost.

In an article published Saturday, HuffPost reports “a severe and unusual fear of being punished for doing their jobs has spread among staff at the State Department’s legal office, bolstering concerns about how the Trump administration is crafting foreign policy.”

According to the report, lawyers at the Office of the Legal Adviser at State (“L”), fear repercussions “if they suggest the administration’s plans could break domestic or international law.”

The president’s “drastic” international moves — including “strikes on accused drug boats in the waters around South America” — have drawn particular concern among former State Department employees, according to the report.

“It’s really difficult to imagine how any State Department lawyer could sign off on these strikes,” former “L” employee Charlie Trumbull told HuffPost. “That leads me to believe that the normal vetting process for vetting these things is not functioning as it did.”

Trumbull added there’s “much more hesitancy to give advice that the political appointees might not want to hear.”

“We’ve always had a culture where we speak frankly, challenge things and really push ideas to ensure they’re solidly supported,” a former lawyer told HuffPost.

“There’s an underlying fear of … providing advice that wasn’t well-received and then being cut out of a subject, being further and further removed from the job that you spent your career trying to do,” that lawyer added.

According to the report, “L” has experienced “a drastic and uncommon loss of staff since Trump’s second term began.”

Read the full report at HuffPost.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was not "fully looped in until late” on a “controversial 28-point plan dropped suddenly by the Trump administration to Ukraine,” Bloomberg reports.

According to the report, the “take-it-or-leave it proposition … was mostly the result of several weeks of negotiations behind the scenes between Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev that excluded not only Ukraine and its allies but even some key US officials.”

Bloomberg spoke with “several people familiar with the deliberations who spoke on condition of anonymity” to “reconstruct” the plan's origination. The framework has since been delivered as an “ultimatum” to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Per Bloomberg, Vice President JD Vance’s “close friend” US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, triggered the “alarm” for European officials after he “told their ambassadors and Ukraine officials in an urgent tone that U.S. President Donald Trump had run out of patience.”

“Before European leaders and Zelenskiy jumped into action, they needed to try and understand who was most responsible for the framework,” Bloomberg reports. “They had been entirely shut out and it wasn’t clear who had the most influence with Trump on the issue.”

As it turns out, “Witkoff and Dmitriev forged the plan during an October meeting in Miami that included Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law,” according to Bloomberg.

“Rubio hadn’t been fully looped in until late,” Bloomberg reports. “Trump also found out about it at the last minute, but he blessed it once he was briefed.”

Despite this, the U.S. State Department on Saturday pushed back on claims from U.S. senators that the plan originated with Russia.

After a phone call with the secretary of state, Senate Armed Services Committee member Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said Saturday the framework was “not our peace plan.”

Sen. Angus King (I-ME), who also sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters the plan is "essentially the wish list of the Russians.”

State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Tommy Pigott, in response, called King’s comment “blatantly false,” and Rubio has since insisted "the peace proposal was authored by the U.S.”

Still, no one has walked back Rounds’ assertion that Rubio told him and fellow senators the peace plan “is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.”

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, on Saturday lashed out the administration’s shifting position on the deal.

"Some people better get fired on Monday for the gross buffoonery we just witnessed over the last four days," he wrote on X.

Republicans in North Carolina fear voters will be left with a “real sour aftertaste” as President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown roils the state.
“Is the price of doing this worth it?” asked P Edwin Peacock III, a moderate Republican in Charlotte. “I don’t see this cloud moving away [from] what will be in the voters’ minds.”

As Politico reports, “Some North Carolina Republicans are worried President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown in the battleground state could backfire."

After focusing his immigration raids largely in blue states, the Trump administration recently turned to the Charlotte, NC area as “the first test for whether the White House’s strategy can hold up in a purple state,” Politico reports. And with next year’s North Carolina Senate race heating up, Republicans will likely face a key “tension at the center of the president’s immigration agenda.”

“The White House’s message, since January, has tied illegal immigration to violent crime in U.S. cities,” Politico reports. “But immigration officials are simultaneously under sustained pressure from the White House to increase arrests and deportation numbers, an effort that requires targeting immigrants well beyond violent criminal offenders — potentially treacherous territory for swing-state Republicans.”

Former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory fears the optics of recent raids in Charlotte “may hurt the GOP on an issue it has long dominated,” according to Politico.

“Republicans had the upper hand on immigration, as long as they were going after the criminals and the gangs, but I think they’re losing the upper hand on that issue because of the apparent disjointed implementation of arrest,” McCrory said. “From a PR and political standpoint, for the first time, immigration is maybe having a negative impact on my party.”

North Carolina-based GOP pollster Patrick Sebastian warned the “narrative” of U.S. officials deporting working immigrants who are not breaking other laws "has gotten more play over the past week, and that could be a problem for Republicans.”

As Politico reports, “One GOP strategist working on races in North Carolina, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said there’s a risk that the picture of a citizen being separated from their family, rather than the arrests of unauthorized immigrants with criminal records, will stick.”

“You don’t know what the enduring image is going to be in voters’ minds,” the anonymous pollster said.

CNN is out with a new report Sunday detailing President Donald Trump’s hand in extensive makeovers throughout the White House complex, including the president’s input on small elements of the redesign including “the type of flagpoles on the North and South lawns.”

CNN’s Betsy Kline reports Trump “has been remarkably hands-on when it comes to remaking Washington's spending hours,” noting the president Saturday met with “golf legend turned golf course developer Jack Nicklaus.”

The pair took “aerial tours at Joint Base Andrews,” according to Kline.

“But the president is also paying very close attention to that White House ballroom renovation,” Kline said on CNN. “He leads weekly meetings at the white White House, where they discuss details as small as the size of windows to the placement of bathrooms to interior finishes.”

“And he's also been quizzing visiting foreign leaders and members of Congress on their opinions on design choices,” she explained. “We also know that the president has personally selected the limestone for the White House rose garden. He’s chosen new chandeliers for the palm room. He's chosen the type of flagpoles on the North and South lawns. And the president has really moved at remarkable speed to impose his style and tastes on the White House.”

Trump, Kine reports, “is hopeful that this will be complete by the end of his second term in office.”

- YouTube youtu.be

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Saturday handed out fake “checks” Saturday during a press conference at Harry Reid International Airport, the Daily Beast reports.

Noem was purportedly giving $10,000 bonuses to 29 TSA agents who worked without pay during the government shutdown. As the Beast reports, the TSA bonuses, “like the bonuses given to air traffic controllers … were only offered to certain employees.”

“Let’s hand out some checks, should we?” Noem asked before immediately clarifying she wasn’t handing out real checks.

“Now, I will say, this is a document that verifies it will be direct deposited into your accounts, OK?” She added.

“Noem also announced that the department will be giving bonus checks to many [transportation security officers] across the country for ‘doing their job with excellence,’ by not just showing up for their shifts during the government shutdown, but also taking extra shifts and extra responsibilities, as well as going above and beyond to serve those in their communities and help fellow employees,” CBS News reports.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, on Saturday demanded "some people ... get fired" over the fallout from a proposed peace plan to end the war in Ukraine.

Bacon was specifically referring to a statement from State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Tommy Pigott, who on Saturday refuted claims made by U.S. senators at a press conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

According to Sens. Angus King (I-ME) and Mike Rounds (R-SD), Secretary of State Marco Rubio distanced the United States from the proposed plan, telling senators the leaked 28-point plan "is not of the administration's position."

The senators cited a phone call from Rubio which "came at their request," Politico reports.

"Rubio, they said, agreed to walk them through the situation and gave the lawmakers permission to describe what he told them," according to Politico.

In a statement on X, King described the plan as "essentially the wish list of the Russians."

"This is blatantly false," Pigott wrote Saturday on X in response to King's tweet. "As Secretary Rubio and the entire administration has consistently maintained, this plan was authored by the United States, with input from both the Russians and Ukrainians."

Responding to Pigott's statement, Bacon called the peace plan fallout "gross buffoonery" and demanded accountability for the saga.

"Some people better get fired on Monday for the gross buffoonery we just witnessed over the last four days," he wrote on X.

"This hurt our country and undermined our alliances, and encouraged our adversaries," Bacon added.

Bacon had previously spoken out against the leaked plan, which Politico reports sparked alarm among lawmakers as "global leaders railed] against it."

"President Trump’s plan to force Ukraine to give up more territory, to cut its Army by more than half, to never join NATO nor let foreign troops in its territory is an abomination," Bacon wrote Friday on X. "Freedom loving Americans must tell the President that we reject the worst appeasement seen since 1938. ... What makes President [Donald] Trump think we can now trust [Russian President Vladimir] Putin? This agreement weakens Ukraine and leaves them vulnerable to new Russian invasions in the years to come."

A three-judge appeals court panel in Birmingham, Alabama on Tuesday “gave a chilly reception to President Donald Trump’s bid to revive a sprawling racketeering lawsuit accusing his perceived political foes,” — and “made clear” they believe the lawsuit “violated federal court rules by vaguely linking too many defendants and too many legal claims,” Politico reports.

William Pryor Jr., a George W. Bush appointee and the chief judge in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals called the lawsuit “a classic shotgun complaint.”

The suit involves Trump’s accusation that foes including Hillary Clinton and James Comey “[conspired] to tar him with false allegations that he collaborated with Russia,” Politico reports.

The panel is “also heard arguments over a nearly $1 million penalty a court imposed on Trump and his then-attorney Alina Habba for filing and persisting in the lawsuit a judge determined in 2023 to be frivolous,” according to the report.

Read the full report at Politico.

Washington D.C. correspondent David Gardner on Wednesday revealed which member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet will be first to go, telling podcast host Joanna Coles to “watch out for January and Pete Hegeseth."

Noting Trump’s penchant for rapid turnover during his first term, Gardner explained he was “told early on that Trump did not want a repeat of his first administration, where it was kind of chaos.”

“He was firing people, hiring people, it was a lot of unrest within the administration,” Gardner noted of Trump's first administration.

According to Gardner, he was “ told [Trump] was going to give most of his leading Cabinet members a year, so there wasn’t this kind of constant departure thing.”

“So my guess is, watch out for January and Pete Hegseth, because I don’t think he’s going to last much longer than that first year,” Gardner said.

Trump’s so-called “Secretary of War" is “taking very much a back step” to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Gardner said.

“So he’s bottom of the list in terms of efficiency and top of the list in terms of suck ups,” the correspondent added.

Per the Daily Beast:

“I don’t think he’s trusting him,” [Gardener] said of Trump and Hegseth. “I seem to remember the last meeting in the Middle East, he was put on a separate plane from the others, Hegseth. Again, sending a message perhaps.”

CNN host Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday cornered Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) with specific examples of how President Donald Trump’s policies are hurting his home state — and appeared to stump the Republican senator on several occasions.

Asked about the ongoing partial government shutdown, Sheehy gave a lengthy reply about the appropriations process before tearing into the “stupid [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer shutdown.”

Collins told Sheehy that Trump’s approach to this shutdown — chiefly, “cutting programs and laying off federal workers — “[has] literally never happened before in the last 14” government shutdowns, and pressed the senator on the president’s “unprecedented step.” The CNN host specifically called out Trump’s cut to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund, a fund Sheehy himself had “signed a letter in support of earlier this year.”

“The president says they're only cutting programs and Democrat stuff,” Collins said. “Is that a Democrat fund that you supported?”

Sheehy insisted Trump will use “every tool in his toolbox” and argued “there have to be consequences for bad behavior” before launching into another monologue about the "Schumer shutdown."

Later in the segment, Collins pushed back on Sheehy’s claim that the Democrats want to fund "healthcare for non citizens, illegal immigrants”— and called out the Republican senator for “getting off [the] topic” of Trump’s cancelled programs.

“[Healthcare] is not for people who are here illegally,” Collins said. “It's people who have different legal status, people who are seeking asylum, refugees … But I ask on the program's part because—“

“Yeah, but saying non citizens is accurate, though,” Sheehy insisted.

“You said people who are here illegally,” Collins explained. “But those are different things. I mean, maybe you don't like Temporary Protected Status, but you're an immigrant with legal status.”

Sheehy tried to stop Collins from moving on, arguing “you can't just pave over that because a lot of people come under asylum, claim asylum, which are not actually asylum seekers."

“That's a legal process,” Collins replied. “You can change the law if you don't like it.”

As Sheehy continued to complain that people falsely claim asylum status, Collins told him he’s “getting off topic.”

“I think it's very much the topic,” Sheehy shot back.

Collins then got to her main point: The Department of Energy’s decision to cancel a $1 billion project that Montana’s own governor said would have created good paying Montana jobs and boost American-made energy.

“They just yanked $1 billion from that,” Collins noted. “So is that taking away good paying jobs in Montana?”

"Of course it is, we want the government to be open,” Sheehy said.

Collins asked Sheehy to clarify if he thought the Trump administration’s decision to pull funding “is hurting [his] state.”

As Sheehy argued the shutdown as a whole is hurting his state, Collins noted “the Trump administration didn't have to make” the decision to pull “billion dollars from your state.”

"Well, I think the reality is we wouldn't be here if the government was still open,” Sheehy said. “And now we're going on week three of a pretty unnecessary shutdown."

Collins noted the U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright "actually" told her “they would have [shut down the project] even if the government wasn't shut down.”

“That was months in the making, even before the government shut down,” Collins said Wright told her.

“Well, that's unfortunate we're still shut down,” Sheehy replied. “We shouldn't be.”

The United States Supreme Court conservative supermajority has been “unrelenting” in it’s “abuse of its shadow docket” — and is leaving “lower courts scrambling to figure out what, exactly, is ‘law’ on any given day,” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reports.

“Time and again, the conservative supermajority has altered or overturned precedent — usually in Donald Trump’s favor — without bothering to explain why," Stern writes. But, as the Slate Supreme Court journalist and attorney Madiba K. Dennie explain, one district judge is standing up to the Supreme Court.

According to Stern, “U.S. District Judge Myong Joun issued a really interesting order in the ongoing battle over Trump’s unlawful assault on the Education Department. … In May, Joun issued a preliminary injunction barring the Trump administration from destroying the department by firing so many of its employees that it couldn’t function anymore. The Supreme Court then froze that injunction without explaining why.”

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“But Joun also issued a different injunction in a related case that specifically barred the government from dismantling the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and protected its employees from termination,” Stern adds.

As Stern reports, “after SCOTUS set aside the first injunction, the Justice Department asked Joun to halt his second injunction as well. On Wednesday, he refused, writing that the court’s ‘unreasoned stay order issued on its emergency docket does not make or signal any change in controlling law.’”

“So he saw no reason to undo his own injunction,” Stern notes.

According to Dennie, “Shadow docket stays are not supposed to have any precedential value.” The attorney wants district judges to “think a little bit creatively” if the Supreme Court "is going to take such liberties with the law.”

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To Stern, Joun was clearly “calling out the conservative justices here for disrupting lower-court decisions without any justification.”

Dennie calls Juan’s approach “a brilliant way of flipping the burden.”

“It brings to mind this concept of malicious compliance, where you’re technically doing what you’re supposed to, but in a way that actually thwarts the goals of the powers that be,” she says. “It also reminds me of uncivil disobedience—getting in the way, but using perfectly lawful tools.”

Read the full interview at Slate.

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Former Republican and founder of The Lincoln Project Rick Wilson on Sunday delivered a stark warning for Democrats as Texas Republicans work to change the state’s congressional map to provide President Donald Trump with more reliably red districts.

“Republicans are looking for a cheat code for the 2026 election,” Wilson explained on MSNBC. “They recognize already they're in deep trouble in a lot of these House districts across the country that are contested seats. They are now looking for a way to cheat on this.”

“As a former Republican, I will tell you, the ‘Just Win, Baby’ rule is the first and only rule," he continued. "If the Democrats do not go into this and think, ‘We’re going to have to have a countervailing amount of new seats in other states,’ they're insane They will get their heads handed to them."

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“Play the game the way they're playing it, because this is the game we are in,” Wilson urged Democrats.

Journalist Molly Jong-Fast agreed with Wilson, warning Democrats are in “an existential fight.”

“If [Republicans] have control of the House in 2026, I don't think they'll certify a Democrat in 2028, no matter who it is,” Jong-Fast explained.

Wilson later slammed Texas Republicans for kowtowing to the Trump administration.

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“The whole image that Texas Republicans had of themselves were, you know, ‘We're the libertarian independent cowboys. We don't need that that federal government telling us what to do,’” Wilson said. “And now it's like, ‘Yes, master, i'll go sit in the c——— chair.’ These people have lowered themselves so far into Donald Trump's obedient little errand boys that none of this fits with the so-called character that they play on TV. They're not independent. they're doing what Trump wants.”

Watch the clip below or at this link.

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