Editor's Note: This article was updated to include a response from the White House.

President Donald Trump’s former White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, has an explanation for why the Republican has failed to end the Russia-Ukraine war as promised and is now pulling America out of NATO: He is compromised by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“If Trump is disavowing NATO and breaking an 80 year tradition — something’s wrong,” Scaramucci posted on X on Tuesday. “If Trump is praising Vladimir Putin, whose entire economy is slightly smaller than the state of Texas — something’s wrong. If Trump is disavowing the 1994 defense agreement where we told Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons and we’d protect them — the agreement that got him impeached in his first term — something is wrong.”

After noting that Trump frequently criticizes other world leaders but refrains from doing so about Putin, Scaramucci speculated that it is because Putin “owns” Trump.

“It’s hard to watch as an American but it’s obvious,” Scaramucci wrote. “Why does he own him? That’ll probably come out someday.” He then added that Russia also pays right-leaning podcasters, referring to the 2024 indictment proving that Russia had paid influencers including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, Benny Johnson, Tayler Hansen and Matt Christiansen.

“Republicans hanging out in Moscow, repeating the same lines,” Scaramucci concluded. “The question isn’t whether something exists. It’s what.”

In response to this article, White House spokesman Davis Ingle said that “Anthony Scaramucci lasted 11 short days in the White House. He makes lightweights look credible.”

Scaramucci is far from alone among critics alleging that Trump is compromised by Russia and that this is helping Putin’s agenda. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who served under a Democrat, President Bill Clinton) claimed that Trump’s pro-Putin rhetoric “is undermining democracies for the sake of separating them from the United States and from each other and it is a new form of using… It’s kind of weaponizing information, and what sometimes is called asymmetrical warfare, in terms of making sure that our alliances are weakened and that the democratic institutions in those countries are under pressure and threat. At the same time, I think that it does work also as a way of expanding Russia’s influence.”

Trump was also found in a report by special counsel Robert Mueller to have worked with Russian allies to spread disinformation about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, worked with accused Russia-tied sources like his then-campaign chair Paul Manafort and his top adviser Roger Stone and his open encouragement of Russia to dig up dirt on Clinton.

Yet Scaramucci’s criticisms of Trump are not limited to his ties to Russia. Earlier this month, he criticized Trump for engaging in business deals that have netted him more than $2 billion since taking office, the first president to so openly and lucratively profit from being in office. Scaramucci posted on X that “it smells terrible and it should be stopped. But we’ve lost our sense of shame. Trump said 2 things: 1. It’s peanuts and not that much money. 2. Nobody cares. That second one is the one that should keep you up at night.” He added, “Hopefully people actually do care. Hopefully they show up in November and send these guys a message.”

Meanwhile, in May Scaramucci bashed Trump’s handling of the economy.

“If Barack Obama had done half of what Trump is doing now, Fox News would have been calling for impeachment,” Scaramucci posted on X. “Trump has no economic philosophy. He spent $8.2 trillion in his first term and he's on pace for $9 to $10 trillion in this one. We're at 100 percent debt to GDP held by investors — 122 percent if you count the Fed's balance sheet.”

On a separate occasion in May, Scaramucci observed that "all my Wall Street buddies voted for him and now they’re regretting the fact," later clarifying that "most of the people are.”

Speaking with this author for Salon in 2018, Scaramucci attributed Trump’s political success to his ability to speak to the economic concerns of ordinary Americans.

“What I saw was in a generation we went from aspirational working class families, like the one I grew up in, to [desperate] working class families,” Scaramucci argued. “What I saw is a decline in wages causing some level of economic asphyxiation for a very large group of people. And so Trump being out there, going into those areas, explaining the policies that he’s going to put in place, and then executing on some of those policies. I mean it’s not me saying, it’s just go look at ‘The Wall Street Journal.’”

President Donald Trump rarely faces dissent from his Republican Party members in the House and Senate — but this is an election year, and Trump’s polls are doing big damage to his GOP buddies.

U.S. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) is one such Republican who does not represent a "safe" seat in a bruising 2026 midterm. Bacon holds a highly competitive swing seat in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes the urban area of Omaha. He managed to nab a narrow 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent victory in 2024 largely thanks to suburban support.

That razor-thin line may be one of the reasons Huffington Post writer Igor Bobic is posting Bacon’s Saturday takedown of Trump as an ally to Russian authoritarian Vladimir Putin.

“Speaking at the Sedona forum … Bacon says Trump is “totally failing” on confronting Russia right now,” Bobic posted to X. “It’s pretty clear the president and his team favor Putin over [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelenskyy.”

Bacon may have additional insight into what he feels is Trump’s comparably robust friendship with the Russian strongman and accused assassin. Recently Bacon joined a bipartisan effort to introduce the Countering Russia’s War On Faith Act, complaining that Putin’s “brutal invasion of Ukraine is not only an attack on a country that seeks democracy, free markets, and alignment with the West, but also includes a deliberate campaign to suppress and persecute religious communities.”

“The Countering Russia’s War on Faith Act will ensure we fully document these abuses and hold those responsible accountable through sanctions. I’m pleased to join Rep. Wilson and my colleagues in this bipartisan effort to stand up for religious liberty and the Ukrainian people,” Bacon added.

Trump’s polling, meanwhile, is at his lowest of his two terms in office, and approval of his treatment of the U.S. economy is currently tipping beneath that of former president Jimmy Carter, who found himself the frequent butt of Trump’s jokes regarding popularity.

President Donald Trump has successfully garnered the favor of America’s wealthiest billionaires, from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Yet as a pair of scholars recently pointed out, when oligarchs make deals with would-be authoritarians, they ultimately get the worst end of the deal.

“The attendees at U.S. President Donald Trump’s second inauguration included a typical cast of government officials, legislators, and cabinet nominees,” wrote Christopher Hartwell and Tricia D. Olsen in the magazine Foreign Affairs on Tuesday. “What was not so typical was the crew of billionaires who also attended—and took center stage.” After ticking off the names of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pinchai and Musk, Hartwell and Olsen observed that alliances between an aspiring authoritarian and oligarchs aren’t just bad for the general public “but also for the business elites who make it.” Because the dictator at the top of a hierarchy does not want to seem weak or dependent on others, they eventually feel compelled to reassert power at the expense of the oligarchs.

“By stripping the post-Soviet oligarchs of their assets, Putin could refill state coffers and distribute the extra spoils among his own new ruling elite, thereby creating a new oligarchy that was wholly dependent on his whims and desires,” Hartwell and Olsen wrote. “After the 2012 presidential election, which was marred by widespread allegations of fraud and mass protests against the regime, this system became hypercentralized and even more dependent on Putin. Fealty to Putin, rather than managerial expertise, became and remains the key criterion for success. The consequences of failing to adhere to this compact can be deadly. There seems to be nothing as dangerous to a high-profile Russian business executive as an open window.”

Indeed, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, so many oligarchs began dying off that a Wikipedia page was written on the subject. Lukoil chair Ravil Maginov mysteriously fell to his death from a hospital window while the security cameras were not functioning; meat processing executive Pavel Antov fell from a hotel window in India; and overall “since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, dozens of members of Russia’s business elite have died under unusual circumstances.”

The good news for America, Hartwell and Olsen argued, is that the United States is still a democracy and not an autocracy like Russia or other oligarch-dominated countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The bad news is that America is “experiencing steady democratic backsliding, a process marked by steep political polarization, the expansive use of executive power, and challenges to speech and dissent. This trend manifests in part in what has come to be known in the United States as ‘lawfare,’ when leaders use legal prosecution as political punishment against particular individuals or institutions they see as disloyal. Although such practices have grown in the United States in the past two decades, they have exploded under Trump.”

They added, “The president has launched widespread attacks on his political opponents, business leaders, and media outlets that he sees as too critical of his administration. Trump has on various occasions since 2017 called the media ‘the enemy of the people.’ His first administration frequently attacked Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post; Les Moonves, who served as chair of CBS News until 2018; and Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC News, for news coverage perceived as unfair to Trump.”

For these reasons, while the Foreign Affairs writers acknowledged that there is “a charitable view” of billionaires aligning with Trump “to hedge their bets during a routine change of power,” they are complicit in his creation of an authoritarian state capitalism by continuing to support him now. If those moral considerations do not move them, though, naked self-interest might do so.

“There is no doubt that Trump appreciates the overtures of business leaders and may even reward them in meaningful ways,” they wrote. “But authoritarian state capitalists are more concerned with enriching themselves and their ruling clique than helping friendly oligarchs. Such leaders tolerate private enterprise only as long as it does not interfere with their efforts to amass and maintain their own political and economic power.”

Ultimately they urged Americans to pressure our nation’s business leaders to see it as being in their financial and personal interests to preserve America’s democracy and free enterprise system, rather than allow it to devolve into a society where proximity to power determines wealth and personal safety.

“Everyone has an interest in seeing business leaders commit to democratic practices and institutions, no matter which party is in power,” they wrote. “The alternative is a political environment in which everyone has fewer rights and less freedom—including, sooner or later, the oligarchs. This is the real lesson of Russia, where the oligarchs are gone but the deleterious effects of their choices to support an unjust system remain.”

There are signs that at least some billionaires are speaking out against Trump. LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, for example, recently criticized Trump by saying “ the world is now in a pretty serious crisis in the Middle East. Either it’ll be a world catastrophe with very serious and very negative economic impact—in which case, who can say how 2026 will unfold—or it will be resolved more rapidly in some shape or form that we all hope for, even if it doesn’t seem to be easy, in which case, business will recover and resume their normal course.”

Writing for The Nation, writer Elizabeth Spiers pointed out the irony that these same billionaires, despite profiting from an information-based economy, have embraced a definitively anti-intellectual ethos.

“As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, a fierce anti-intellectual spirit has long animated American culture, but it has typically targeted the knowledge elite from below,” Spiers wrote. “What’s striking about today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is that it infuses the American knowledge elite; it stems from the bedrock conviction among tech oligarchs that they have mastered everything and have nothing left to learn. In this cloistered vision of tech-driven learning, they believe that deep intellectual work—the kind you do when you author a complex piece of music, for example—has little or no inherent value.”

Spiers concluded, “Their disdain for it has fueled their attacks on higher education, the humanities, and learning for its own sake, which they believe has no purpose beyond its inevitable digitization and monetization.”

Editor's Note: The story was updated on Tuesday to include a reply from the White House.

President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is benefiting Russian President Vladimir Putin, even though Putin in theory could and should do much more to protect his Iranian allies.

“Holding Moscow back are the Kremlin’s ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration to end the war in Ukraine,” wrote Foreign Affairs' Alexander Gabuev, Nicole Grajewski, Sergey Vakulenko on Monday. “The Russian leadership hopes to reap benefits from this performative process, at least in terms of limiting U.S. support for Ukraine and slowing the rollout of new sanctions targeting Russia.”

They added, “Under these circumstances, the Kremlin can’t afford to provide stronger, more visible support for Iran.”

This is not to say that Russia’s seeming impotence in the face of a US invasion of its ally is entirely due to Putin's attempts to manipulate Trump. Instead it is “in keeping with a familiar pattern: when Russia’s friends are in need, Moscow issues strongly worded statements and does little else.” They listed as examples Russia’s refusal to intervene in the Armenia-Azerbaijan war of 2023, its refusal to assist Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against rebels in 2024 and its refusal to interfere when the US abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2025. On each occasion, an ostensible Russian ally was left to hang out to dry.

At the same time, “the current war in Iran has unintended consequences that benefit Russia. As the war drags on, the price of energy will likely continue to rise, which will help Moscow earn additional revenue and address a ballooning budget deficit resulting from its war in Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs wrote. In terms of its relationship with the United States, “the war in Iran is yet another distraction for the United States, diverting precious resources and bandwidth that Washington might otherwise have allocated to its European partners and Ukraine. Russia may be unable to protect its partners, but it is still skillful in adapting to strategic failures and reaping important tactical gains from them.”

Additionally, even though Russia is not providing Iran with direct military assistance that could literally prove life-saving, it may be offering secretive assistance in other ways that fly under the radar of the US and do not in other ways disrupt Putin’s other geopolitical goals.

“To be sure, Russia may well be providing assistance that is harder to observe than a weapons shipment, such as offering access to space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance that could improve Iranian targeting,” Foreign Affairs wrote. “Such assistance leaves fewer visible traces than transfers of aircraft or missile batteries, which makes it harder to track and easier to deny, but it is still consequential. Some U.S. administration officials have concluded that Moscow is clandestinely engaged in these activities, as The Washington Post recently reported.”

They added, “The exact scale and depth of this effort is difficult to estimate at this point, but its impact surely pales in comparison to the multiyear, U.S.-led intelligence assistance program that enabled Ukrainian armed forces to kill thousands of Russian soldiers since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.”

In response to the Foreign Affairs article, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told AlterNet that “the American people and our allies will be the winners when the objectives of Operation Epic Fury are achieved. President Trump is ensuring that the world is safe again from Iranian terror, which will no longer be allowed to disrupt the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.”

This is not the only wrinkle in the longtime relationship between Trump and Putin. Earlier in March, Reuters reported “when President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, some Russian hardliners were cautiously optimistic, hoping his unpredictability and transactional nature might benefit Moscow on Ukraine. But his attack on Iran means many now see him as a growing threat to Russia itself and are questioning if Trump is the pragmatic, potentially pro-Moscow strongman ready to deal in realpolitik that they thought he was.”

Indeed, nationalist oligarch and Kremlin insider Konstantin Malofeyev told Reuters that “the unprincipled United States is a threat to the entire world. This is the United States we are trying to negotiate with regarding Ukraine. Yes, it wants a weak Europe. But it also wants a weak Russia."

Similarly, The Atlantic published a February article in which senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Thomas Graham and former Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal Allan Cullison wrote that with Trump “dismantling the order that Putin had so long abhorred,” he believed he would benefit. “Putin had thought he could rise to the top of such a system, in which raw economic and military might outweigh diplomacy and alliances. But he was mistaken: The norms and institutions of the post-War order actually masked Russia's vulnerabilities. Putin has gotten the world he wished for — and it's threatening to crush him."

In March, Scottish journalist Andrew Neil — known for being a staunch conservative — expressed his frustration with U.S. President Donald Trump's foreign policy when he lamented, "I think, in some ways, he regards (Russian President Vladimir) Putin as more of an ally than he regards the United Kingdom or any of his European NATO allies."

Neil complained, "He slapped tariffs on all of his allies. He didn't put tariffs on Russia. And he's helped to bail out Russia now with what he's done on the price of oil."

Neil isn't the only one who views Trump as more favorable to Putin than to longtime North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies of the United States. MS NOW host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, lamented, during an April 7 rant, that "the Republicans I grew up with" who "believed in a strong west" have "vanished" and been replaced by admirers of Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In an essay/opinion column published on April 7, the New York Times' Thomas B. Edsall laments that Trump's fondness for Putin hasn't gone away.

"Events over two days last month — Friday, March 6, and Saturday, March 7 — demonstrated President Trump's willingness to sacrifice American interests in subservience to President Vladimir Putin of Russia," Edsall argues. "On that Friday, the Washington Post reporters Noah Robertson, Ellen Nakashima and Warren P. Strobel revealed that 'Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to attack American forces in the Middle East.' The next day, Trump attended the transfer at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware of the flag-draped coffins of six U.S. members of the Army Reserve killed by a kamikaze drone strike at the Shuaiba port in Kuwait. An inevitable, but unanswerable, question: Was the drone strike guided by information Russia provided to Iran?"

Edsall notes that the Trump White House staff "followed orders to tow Trump's line" on Putin and Iran.

"His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that the Russia-Iran intelligence sharing 'is not making any difference with respect to the military operations in Iran,'" Edsall explains. "She declined to say whether Trump has discussed the issue with Putin or whether the administration would pursue repercussions…. Trump's deference not just to Putin' but to other authoritarian leaders' has repeatedly and profoundly corrupted American foreign policy."

In an interview, Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland, told Edsall, "Trump does seem attracted to Putin as a strongman ruler. He seems more comfortable with — and gives more credence to — Putin than with leaders of America's democratic allies or with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine."

Former National Security Council (NSC) official Fiona Hill is also frustrated by Trump's affinity for Putin.

Hill recently told the BBC, "Well, I think the first thing to disavow everybody of is the idea that there is a relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. I think that's part of the problem, because Trump would like a relationship with Putin, and that's exactly why he doesn't criticize him. It's a kind of unrequited love of some description. You know, everyone keeps talking about bromance. He hasn't even got there. And you know, Putin is very good at playing hard to get, incredibly hard to get. And this drives Trump mad, because he never gets what he wants off Putin, which is really adulation, respect."

Donald Trump suddenly popped on TV screens this week, giving his most extensive remarks on the war in Iran and taking questions from the press.

Trump had previously given no public speech to the American people upon the initiation of this war—unlike every American president taking the country to war. His communication to the American public was mostly in the form of videos or speaking by phone to select reporters, offering wildly shifting rationales for the war and its goals.

Then, however, he finally came before the White House press corps and repeated what he’d said earlier in the day to CBS, that the war is “very complete.” But he also said it would go on, even though it would end “soon,” and that Pete Hegseth, who earlier said the war is “just the beginning,” is correct, even though Trump said that it’s “complete.”

What?

He’s trying to have it all ways in a war that had no planning or an endgame.

The crazy presser perhaps is explained by two things that happened in the hours before it: Trump spoke at length to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Trump saw oil prices surge to $120 a barrel on Sunday, tanking markets around the world and in the US on Monday morning.

Let’s take the latter first. We learned from the tariff upheaval that Trump cannot stomach the markets crashing and particularly the bond market starting to teeter. It’s the only thing that stops him. Corporate America and his billionaire friends and GOP donors wind up shrieking. And average Americans—in this case looking at the price of gasoline—become very attuned to the economy and high prices.

Trump’s earlier statement in the day to CBS, while the markets were open, that the war is “very complete” was meant to calm the markets. ‘I think the war is very complete, pretty much,’ Trump told CBS. “They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no Air Force ... Wrapping up is all in my mind.”

And the intended effect worked. The price of oil came down and had been from earlier when Trump promised insurance and military escorts for companies. None of that may actually happen. It’s risky for American military vessels to escort ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which has essentially been brought to a standstill, stranding 20% of the world’s oil supply. But the market operates on hope and fear.

Trump knows that. The real economy operates on facts—real data as well as on experiences on the ground by Americans in their jobs and in their consumer spending—but the market operates on hope and fear until that real economy catches up. The market can be temporarily lifted, and Trump lent it a helping hand.

But later, in the presser, after the markets had closed, Trump gave much more mixed signals—The New York Times called it a “zigzag”—saying the war may go on for a while. He even responded to a question about Hegseth saying it’s “just the beginning” by saying that “both” could be true.

Clearly, Trump still wanted to convey that he had massive leverage over Iran, and that the bombing will continue—which it has today. That’s because, in essence, this was all a capitulation to the Iranian regime, which knew the US wouldn’t have the stomach to go on for long.

Trump had only on Friday called for an “unconditional surrender” from Iran and said he’d need a say in who would be its leader, promoting his most extensive thoughts on regime change yet. And Trump absolutely rejected the idea that the son of the former Supreme Leader could be the new Supreme Leader.

But Iran indeed installed as Supreme Leader the son of 86-year-old Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a U.S. strike along with a few dozen other leaders, some of whom were viewed as more moderate by U.S. intelligence and as leaders with whom the U.S. could work. As national security analyst Joe Cirincione, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me on my SiriusXM program yesterday, that strike was a strategic blunder—spurred on by Israel—as the U.S. now had no top leaders with whom it could negotiate.

The son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is much more hardline than his father and is only 56 years old. So Trump killed the old man who could likely have been replaced when he died by one among several moderates—all of whom Trump also killed—and now the hardline, young son will be there for a long time.

Iran’s regime defied Trump’s demand—there would be no surrender—and they chose their more extreme leader. And then the markets tanked as oil was cut off. And Trump caved.

So Trump’s bluster at the presser yesterday was his way of trying to make Iran’s brutal government feel afraid of him. But why should they feel afraid? He’d, after all, just melted away. Trump also completely sidestepped a question from a reporter about how the Iranian people—the vast majority of whom support democracy—could feel betrayed by him? Trump had promised them he’d save them, only to now cave and hand them over to a new ayatollah.

Trump’s move to declare victory wasn’t just a response to the market and the billionaire overlords. He’d had a long conversation with Putin earlier in the day as well. We learned in recent days that Putin was continuing to supply Iran with intelligence, which is outrageous since Iran was targeting American soldiers using intelligence from Russia. And yet, both Trump and Hegseth dismissed that, as usual tiptoeing around Putin. And now Trump had a long conversation with Putin.

The conservation, which Trump said was a “good” one, is pretty much shrouded in mystery. But we can put together how it went. Putin had earlier said that the attack would trigger an oil crisis and said oil transport would stop in the Strait of Hormuz. He was, of course, right.

Putin also said that Russia—whose economy is collapsing under sanctions but which is the second-largest oil exporter in the world and has the biggest reserve of natural gas—was happy to once again sell Europe its oil and gas. Europe had stopped importing Russian energy after the Ukraine invasion began.

Putin wanted a long-term deal again. And Trump, we’ve learned, is now considering pulling back on oil sanctions against Russia. He’d already announced a few days ago that he was allowing India to buy oil from Russia, dropping the threatened tariffs if India bought Russian oil, because of the shortage of oil coming from the Gulf.

“We’re also waiving certain oil-related sanctions to reduce prices,” Trump said at the presser yesterday. “So we have sanctions on some countries. We’re going to take those sanctions off until this straightens out.”

So Trump capitulated not only to Iran but to Russia.

Putin now had more leverage on Trump, able to help Trump out in the oil crisis he started. Putin is getting Trump to actually help sell Russian oil, and lift Putin’s devastated economy. The invasion of Ukraine be damned.

Trump may be trying to claim the U.S. has won, but the only winners so far are Putin and, to the extent that they survive even if their military capability is damaged for now, the Iranian regime.

The Iranian people are still living under a horrific, murderous theocracy. Thousands have been killed in Iran and the region, including hundreds of Iranian children killed in a school that analysts have determined was caused by an American Tomahawk missile. Seven American service members lost their lives. And the American people are paying higher gas prices, as the oil shock will last a while.