MAGA Meltdown Gets Worse as Trump Flips on Ukraine Aid
Donald Trump announced Monday that the U.S. will send more weapons to Ukraine to combat Russia—making a lot of MAGA world livid.
Seemingly shifting his stance from days earlier, when the president halted certain weapons shipments to Ukraine, Trump told reporters, “We’re going to send some more weapons. We have to. They have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard now. They’re getting hit very hard. We’re going to have to send more weapons. Yeah, defensive weapons, primarily. But they’re getting hit very, very hard.”
This was confirmed in a Pentagon statement, which read: “At President Trump’s direction, the Department of Defense is sending additional defensive weapons to Ukraine to ensure the Ukrainians can defend themselves while we work to secure a lasting peace and ensure the killing stops.”
To many MAGA Republicans who support Trump for his supposed “America First” foreign policy approach, the news was aggravating.
“I did not vote for this,” wrote Trump-pardoned January 6-er Derrick Evans. Natalie Danelishen, who works for a foundation that seeks to build upon Trump’s idea of “freedom cities,” echoed the sentiment, adding, “What the actual fuck?”
“Who in the hell is telling Trump that we need to send more weapons to Ukraine?” posted the conservative comedy and political commentary duo Keith and Kevin Hodge.
“So Trump just said we’re gonna support funding Ukraine’s proxy war now?” wrote “America First” influencer @TiffMoodNukes, who likened Trump’s behavior to a MAGA talking point alleging President Joe Biden was a puppet for the deep state.
For other Trump supporters, the decision was salt in a fresh wound, after a Trump Department of Justice memo published by Axios this weekend denied the existence of a much-anticipated “client list” maintained by Jeffrey Epstein, thereby deflating MAGA conspiracy theories—that Trump and his team had long entertained—about elites’ connections to the deceased sex trafficker and financier.
Many within MAGA world have been left feeling that either Trump had strung them along or, worse, that his administration is now in on the imagined cover-up.
Newsmax host Todd Starnes posted, “The White House just announced they are going to send more weapons to Ukraine.… And it turns out the Epstein files were just an urban legend. I did not vote for this.”
“Hey, you didn’t get the Epstein List, but at least Ukraine is getting weapons!” posted a “MAGA Activist” who goes by “Chief Trumpster.”
“There was a time when I was willing to entertain the idea of ‘trust the plan,’” posted Mike Adams, a right-wing health influencer known as “Health Ranger.” “But after the Epstein files have been memory holed … and the ‘peace president’ is sending more bombs to Israel and Ukraine, and we all realize we’ve been lied to about so many things, the idea that anyone could still trust the plan is truly idiotic.”
Donald Trump’s team must have been in quite a rush to send out the president’s copy-paste “tariff letters” Monday because they somehow missed a glaring issue.
A letter to Bosnia and Herzegovina announcing a 30 percent tariff rate starting on August 1 was mistakenly addressed to “Mr. President,” when the chairperson of the Balkan country’s presidency is a woman.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is led by a three-member governing body that collectively serves as head of state, and its chairperson since November 2024 has been Željka Cvijanović.
Team Trump eventually caught the mistake, and hours later, the president posted a new version on Truth Social that used the proper “Madam President.”
Within less than a day of disseminating 14 letters to various countries, Trump has already backed off the rates and deadlines, saying that basically everything in the letters is still subject to change—including the recipients, it seems. It sort of makes sense that the president wouldn’t put too much stock in his stationery, because they obviously didn’t require that much effort to put together in the first place.
Someone was using AI to impersonate the secretary of state.
A State Department cable obtained by The Washington Post detailed that an individual, yet to be publicly identified, was using AI to send voicemails and write text and Signal chats in the tone and manner of Marco Rubio. They named themselves “Marco.Rubio@state.gov” on Signal.
The cable, dated July 3, said that this person “contacted at least five non-Department individuals, including three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor, and a U.S. member of Congress” for about two weeks. The State Department declined to reveal whether any of the officials messaged by the impersonator had actually been duped.
The administration has had issues with AI-based espionage attempts before. In May, the FBI announced that there was an “ongoing malicious text and voice messaging campaign” against the Trump administration, using AI. And their issues with—and fondness for—the Signal app are now infamous.
“You just need 15 to 20 seconds of audio of the person, which is easy in Marco Rubio’s case. You upload it to any number of services, click a button that says ‘I have permission to use this person’s voice,’ and then you type what you want him to say,” Hany Farid, a digital forensics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told the Post.........© New Republic
