Falling short of condemnation, President Donald Trump is acting completely clueless about the more than a dozen Russian drones that entered Polish airspace.

Writing on Truth Social Wednesday morning, Trump didn’t attempt to conceal his confusion. 

“What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!” he wrote.

But Trump is going to need to come up with a better response to Russia’s latest incursion than, “Huh?” Poland has invoked Article 4 of the NATO treaty, meaning that the alliance—including the United States—must consult about the latest security threat.  

For the first time in NATO’s history, alliance fighter jets engaged enemy targets in allied airspace, as forces scrambled to shoot down the foreign drones, according to The New York Times. The drones were part of a larger-scale attack across the border in Ukraine.

Trump refused to answer a question about what Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called a “large-scale provocation” Tuesday night, after a disastrous foray to a restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C. 

The president has previously used social media to create the impression that he is criticizing world leaders that he privately cozies up to, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But Trump’s latest statement falls short of public condemnation, portraying ignorance—and for once, it’s seemingly on purpose!

Russia’s latest move has reignited long-held concerns that Trump’s toothless approach to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has emboldened Moscow to expand its efforts to other neighboring states. 

Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina is dead set against the prospect of federal agents being deployed in Charlotte.

Due to the fatal stabbing of a Ukrainian refugee in the city last month, Charlotte has garnered increased attention in recent days, particularly among conservatives who blame the incident on supposedly soft-on-crime Democratic officials.

In remarks published online Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump decried the incident, tying it to a purported scourge of blue-city crime, which he’s cited in his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., and his musings over sending National Guard troops elsewhere.

“It’s time to stop this madness,” the president said. “The people of our country need to insist on protection, safety, law, and order. We have proven that it can be done, because we did it right here in D.C.”

Asked by NOTUS on Tuesday about the possibility of the Trump administration sending troops to Charlotte, Tillis said that other cities are in greater need of attention. “I hope that people don’t amplify this into something.”

Tillis said he hasn’t heard that Trump will target Charlotte, and noted, “If they do, it’ll be a problem for me.”

The senator has previously been critical of Trump’s D.C. crackdown, telling CBS last month that the Trump administration “is micromanaging local governments, and I don’t know how any limited-government conservative can reconcile supporting that with a limited-government ideology.”

On Tuesday, another North Carolina Republican came out against a federal takeover of Charlotte, as Charlotte City Council member Edwin Peacock III observed on Fox News that crime is actually “statistically down” there—though he claimed there is a “growing” crime problem. To Newsweek, Peacock expressed confidence in local police leadership “and the partnerships we already have with federal agencies.”

But not all elected Republicans in the Tar Heel State are against stationing troops in its largest city.

MAGA Senator Ted Budd told NOTUS that he’s in favor of “whatever it takes” to address crime there, apparently including federal intervention.

One MAGA lawmaker has had enough of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s “stonewalling” requests for funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Speaking with CNN’s Ted Barrett Tuesday, Republican Senator Ted Budd slammed Noem for slowing the disbursement of FEMA funding to North Carolina residents still suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Congress had appropriated an estimated $5.95 billion to North Carolina for Helene recovery in December 2024, through the American Relief Act of 2025.

“But now here we are, nine months later, we still haven’t seen the reimbursements,” Budd said. As of June, his state was still waiting on $4.2 billion, according to a report from the governor’s office.

Budd specifically pointed to a policy Noem instituted that required her to personally sign off on all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000. “I know that in each county, every item almost is over $100,000,” Budd explained. “That’s every single thing that runs through a rather significant agency.”

Last week, local officials in western North Carolina also sounded the alarm on the funding “bottleneck” Noem had created.

Noem has been widely criticised for the pitifully delayed response to the deadly flooding in Texas earlier this summer, when her policy slowed the deployment of Urban Search and Rescue Squads and left emergency call centers empty. Noem dismissed the reporting as “fake news,” even as her disastrous disaster management led the head of FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue Branch to resign.

Budd said he intended to play ball. “We’ve let leadership know we’re going to place holds on all DHS........

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