Democracy

There is a political backlash brewing over the administration’s assault on public health

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

September 2, 2025

In the early hours of Sunday morning, in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend, the Trump administration attempted to take children out of government custody and ship them alone to their country of origin, Guatemala.

On Friday, Priscilla Alvarez of CNN broke the story that the administration was planning to move up to 600 children from the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they are held according to law until they can be released to a relative or a guardian living in the U.S. who can take care of them while their case for asylum in the U.S. is being processed.

ORR is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Its mission, according to its website, is to promote the health, well-being, and stability of refugees, unaccompanied alien children, and other eligible individuals and families, through culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and strengths-based services. Our vision is for all new arrivals to be welcomed with equitable, high-quality services and resources so they can maximize their potential.”

Alvarez notes that unaccompanied migrant children are considered a vulnerable population and are covered by the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. That law gives them enhanced protections and care, making sure they are screened to see if they have been trafficked or are afraid of persecution in the country they come from. Congress has specified that such children can be removed from the country only under special circumstances.

Nonetheless, the administration appears to have removed about 76 of these children from the custody of ORR—the only agency with legal authority to hold them—where they were waiting to be released to a relative or guardian, and transferred them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Once they were in ICE custody, the administration planned “to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or even torture,” according to a U.S. court.

At about 1:00 in the morning, Eastern Time, on Sunday, August 31, advocates for the children filed a suit to prevent the administration from removing them. Shortly after 2:30 in the morning, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan got a phone call about the case, and by 4:00 she had issued an emergency order blocking the removal and scheduled a hearing for 3:00 that afternoon. She moved it up to 12:30 when she learned that the administration was already moving some children out of the country.

Legal analyst Anna Bower was on the call for the hearing and reported that Sooknanan said: “I got a call at 2:36 am because the government chose the wee hours of the morning on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend to execute a plan to move these children. That’s why we’re here. And I tried to reach the government. I have been up since then…and didn’t reach anyone from the government until later this morning. And the imminence that the plaintiff claimed proved true, because, in fact, those planes *were* loaded. One actually took off and was returned. And so, absent action and intervention by the court, all of those children would have been returned to Guatemala, potentially to extremely dangerous situations.”

Some of the children were actually in a plane to be removed while the hearing was underway. Sooknanan required the government to report to her when each child was back in ORR custody. By noon Monday, according to the government’s lawyers, all the children were back in ORR custody.

The rush to deport children in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, in apparent violation of the law, looked a great deal like the administration’s removal of undocumented immigrants from Venezuela to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March. At the time, President Donald J. Trump denied that he had signed the order invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act the administration used to justify the rendition of the men to El Salvador. “Other people handled it,” he said, even though his signature is on the document that appears in the Federal Register.

Trump’s apparent distance from that earlier removal comes to mind now because the other big story over Labor Day weekend was Trump’s relative disappearance from public view since last Tuesday. As Garrett Graff of Doomsday Scenario recorded, Trump, who normally talks to the press as often as possible, had no public appearances on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Coming on top of Vice President J.D. Vance’s odd comment in an interview with USA Today last week that he was ready to be president if needed—“I’ve gotten a lot of good on-the-job training over the past 200 days,” he said—rumors flew. Over the weekend, “Is Trump dead?” was one of Google’s top searches.

Although he posted “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE” on social media on Sunday, Trump continued to keep a long distance between himself and the press.

Trump appeared today in the Oval Office—an hour late—to announce he would move Space Force headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, apparently to put the rumors of his ill health to rest.

At the event, Trump referred to the recent court decision declaring many of his tariffs illegal, saying that “if you took away tariffs, we could end up being a third-world country.” In fact, the country’s economy has slowed significantly since Trump instituted his tariffs, and Trump’s agenda continues to take hits.

Yesterday, nine former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents reaching back to President Jimmy Carter, published an op-ed in the New York Times warning that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “is endangering every American’s health.”

William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle P. Walensky, and Mandy K. Cohen listed their concerns about Kennedy’s policies. He “has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more,” they wrote.

“Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage.”

Kennedy’s firing of CDC director Dr. Susan Monarez last Wednesday, a firing Trump approved, appears to have been the event that spurred the former directors to speak up as a group. They wrote that what Kennedy has done to the CDC and to public health in the U.S. since taking office is “unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.”

The former CDC directors warned that the health of every American is at risk. They urged Congress to exercise its authority over the Department of Health and Human Services, state and local governments and private philanthropy to cover the funding Kennedy has killed, and physicians to support their patients, and they called upon all Americans to “look out for one another.”

A post on Trump’s social media account yesterday morning seemed to try to blame “Drug Companies” for “let[ting] everyone rip themselves apart, including Bobby Kennedy Jr. and CDC,” suggesting that administration officials are aware that there is a political backlash brewing over the administration’s assault on public health.

The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, says the administration is deliberately “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Today, more than 85 scientists released a joint review of the U.S. Department of Energy’s new climate report, saying it was “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.”

Trump’s attempt to defend Russian president Vladimir Putin took another hit yesterday when Russia appeared to jam the GPS of an airplane carrying European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to Bulgaria. The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union, which has stood firm against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and continues to support Ukraine. Russia appears to have been jamming plane GPS in the airspace around the Baltic coast since it invaded Ukraine again in 2022 but denies it is doing so.

A source told the Financial Times that the pilots of the plane carrying von der Leyen had to land using paper maps.

Today, Judge Charles Breyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegesth, and the Department of Defense acted illegally when they used the Marines and the National Guard in Los Angeles, California. (As legal analyst Bower noted, whether their deployment of the military is legal is a separate case now pending before the Ninth Circuit.)

Judge Breyer noted that Congress had spoken clearly when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. “Nevertheless,” the judge wrote, “at Defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws.” Evidence at trial showed that armed soldiers set up protective perimeters and traffic blockages, engaged in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrated a military presence in and around Los Angeles. “In short,” he concluded, the “Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.”

Breyer noted that 300 troops still remain in Los Angeles, and he warned that Trump and Hegseth have “stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country…thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” The judge prohibited the defendants “from deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.” Breyer stayed the order until noon on September 12 to give the administration time to appeal.

Yesterday, Americans turned out across the country to protest Trump and the administration, and popular anger at government overreach may be showing in the legal system as well. Six times now, federal grand juries have declined to indict defendants picked up in connection with Trump’s deployment of troops in Washington, D.C. Although right-wing media is slamming Judge James Boasberg today for releasing Nathalie Rose Jones after she made threats against Trump, a grand jury refused to indict her.

More famously, a grand jury last week refused to indict Sean Dunn, the former Justice Department paralegal who threw a submarine sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer. The government charged Dunn with felony assault, for which he would have faced up to eight years in prison if convicted. Although officers tackled Dunn at the scene, the government later posted a dramatic video of heavily armed law enforcement officers going to Dunn’s apartment to arrest him.

As Liz Oyer, a former pardon attorney for the Department of Justice, said: “What’s so extraordinary about this is it shows that we the citizens are the last line of defense for our democracy…and we the citizens are standing strong.”

Trump searches for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

August 25, 2025

This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.

Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.

At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”

Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they’re saying you’re trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.

He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”

“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”

Pritzker noted that every major American city deals with crime, but that the rate of violent crime is actually higher in Republican-dominated states and cities than in those run by Democrats. Illinois, he said, had “hired more police and given them more funding. We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stops, and high-capacity magazines” and “invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs.” Those actions have cut violent crime down dramatically. Pritzker pointed out that “thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

If Trump were serious about combatting crime, Pritzker asked, why did he, along with congressional Republicans, cut more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants? “Trump,” Pritzker said, “is defunding the police.”

Then Pritzker turned to the larger national story. “To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president’s actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”

Pritzker continued: “Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”

The governor called out the president for his willingness to drag National Guard personnel from their homes and communities to be used as political props. They are not trained to serve as law enforcement, he said, and did not “sign up for the National Guard to fight crime.” “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.”

Pritzker said he hoped that Trump would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city’s sovereignty” and that “rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days.”

But if not, he urged Chicagoans to protest peacefully and to remember that most members of the military and the National Guard stationed in Chicago would be there unwillingly. He asked protesters to “remember that they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.” He suggested protesters should look to members of the faith community for guidance on how to mobilize.

Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”

He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”

“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.

“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn’t bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”

History is watching. And this time, it’s our names on the line

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By Oliver Kornetzke [ Repost from April 2025]

I’m not a historian. I’m not a Kremlinologist or a credentialed scholar on authoritarian regimes. I’m not a behavioral psychologist, and I don’t hold a PhD in fascism or kleptocracy—though frankly, given the state of the world, I’m starting to wonder if we all should. But I’ve lived in Russia for some time. I’ve spent time in Eastern Europe. I’ve read obsessively, listened carefully, and paid attention like my life depended on it—because, in a very real sense, it does. And while I’ll leave academic dissection to the ivory tower, what I can tell you from the ground is this:

What’s happening in this country isn’t just cruel—it’s methodical, strategic, and deeply familiar to anyone who’s studied or survived under regimes built on repression and rot.

> A personal hero of mine, Russian patriot and dissident Alexei Navalny. <

We’re watching a script play out—one that was written in the blood and bureaucracy of Putin’s Russia, refined in the dungeons of Chechnya, perfected through decades of oligarchic decay, secret police intimidation, and mafia-state theatrics. And now it’s being re-staged here in America, rebranded with flags and lapel pins and the tired language of “law and order.”

The Trump regime—this carnival of third-rate strongmen, grifters, sycophants, and sadists—isn’t innovating anything. It’s copying. It’s importing the authoritarian model wholesale. They’ve read the Putin playbook, dog-eared the best parts, and now they’re running it in real time. And the cruelty? That’s not a flaw in the system. That is the system.

Because cruelty serves a dual purpose: it distracts and it paralyzes. It shocks the conscience just long enough to make you forget about the theft happening in broad daylight. It freezes resistance by making you wonder who’s next. It’s not just about dehumanizing the target—it’s about disarming the observer. You see a 52-year-old seamstress abducted by masked agents in broad daylight, and your mind stops. That’s the point. While you’re frozen, they’re looting the vault.

Putin’s critics—brave dissidents like Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Alexei Navalny—laid it out plainly: behind the thuggish repression, there’s no grand ideology. There’s only theft. Power is just a means to steal more, protect the stolen, and destroy anyone who threatens the racket. Navalny made that crystal clear. Putin’s state isn’t built on belief—it’s built on plunder. And everything else—beatings, censorship, propaganda, disappearances—is just set dressing for the heist.

Trump, a failed businessman and serial conman, didn’t stumble into power because he had a vision. He stumbled into it like a raccoon into a jewelry store: overwhelmed, opportunistic, and desperate to grab everything shiny before the lights come on. He brought with him a gang of similarly hollow, self-serving goons—parasites in flag pins—who recognized that brute force and spectacle could serve as a perfect cover for mass-scale corruption. All they needed was enough boots, enough masks, and enough Americans too scared or too exhausted to resist.

That’s what ICE is now—a terror squad designed not just to punish the “other,” but to frighten the rest into submission. They don’t need to knock on your door. They just need you to see what happens when they knock on hers. They want you disoriented, enraged, heartbroken, and above all—silent.

It’s not about immigration. It’s about domination.

But here’s the part they never count on: you can only keep people paralyzed for so long. Fear calcifies. Shock fades. And eventually, rage focuses.

So let’s speak plainly: this is not normal, it’s not American, and it’s not sustainable. It’s a kleptocratic death cult wearing the face of democracy. It’s an authoritarian racket hiding behind courtrooms and uniforms. And it will fall—just like every regime before it that mistook violence for invincibility and corruption for competence.

What can we do? First, resist the paralysis. Rage, yes—but don’t retreat. Pay attention. Speak out. If something feels wrong, say it’s wrong. Refuse to play along with their language, their framing, their euphemisms. They are not “removing undocumented immigrants.” They are disappearing people. They are not “restoring law and order.” They are weaponizing the state.

And just as importantly: take care of yourself. Joy, community, love, rest—these are not luxuries in a time of repression. They are acts of defiance. They are the fuel for the long fight ahead. Because this will be a long fight. There will be distractions, casualties, betrayals. But there will also be courage. And solidarity. And moments that remind us exactly why we fight.

Because we don’t do it for the flag. We don’t do it for politicians. We do it for every seamstress dragged from her car. Every family torn apart. Every dissident silenced. Every protestor jailed. We do it to honor the civil rights marchers, the freedom riders, the Stonewall rebels, the water protectors, the labor organizers—the defiant, the bold, the brave.

And we do it for the Americans who laid down their lives to crush fascism in Europe. For the soldiers who stormed beaches to fight against tyranny, not wave it in through the front door. For those who fought in the jungles and the deserts and the streets—not for conquest, but for freedom. For those who knew that authoritarianism doesn’t need to speak a foreign language to be a threat.

And we do it because we must. Because history is watching. And this time, it’s our names on the line.

Let’s make sure they’re remembered for the right reasons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny

Trump summit appears to have produced nothing but a favorable photo op for Putin

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

August 16, 2025

Yesterday, military personnel from the United States of America literally rolled out a red carpet for a dictator who invaded a sovereign country and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes including the stealing of children. Apparently coached by his team, Trump stood to let Russia’s president Vladimir Putin walk toward him after Putin arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, putting Trump in a dominant position, but he clapped as Putin walked toward him. The two men greeted each other warmly.

This summit between the president of the United States and the president of Russia came together fast, in the midst of the outcry in the U.S. over Trump’s inclusion in the Epstein files and the administration’s refusal to release those files.

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.

Quickly, though, it became clear that Witkoff’s description of Putin’s offer was wrong, either because Putin had misled him or because he had misunderstood: Witkoff does not speak Russian and, according to former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, does not use a notetaker from the U.S. embassy. Nonetheless, on Friday, August 8, Trump announced on social media that he would meet personally with Putin in Alaska, without Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

That the president of the United States offered a meeting to Putin on U.S. soil, ground that once belonged to Russia and that Russian nationalists fantasize about taking back, was itself a win for Putin.

As Jonathan Lemire noted yesterday in The Atlantic, in the week before the meeting, leaders in Ukraine and Europe worried that Trump would agree to Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over Crimea and most of its four eastern oblasts, a demand that Russian operatives made initially in 2016 when they offered to help Trump win the White House—the so-called Mariupol Plan—and then pressure Ukraine to accept the deal.

In the end, that did not happen. The summit appears to have produced nothing but a favorable photo op for Putin.

That is no small thing, for Russia, which is weak and struggling, managed to break the political isolation it’s lived in since invading Ukraine again in 2022. Further, the choreography of the summit suggested that Russia is equal to the United States. But those important optics were less than Russia wanted.

It appeared that Russia was trying to set the scene for a major powers summit of the past, one in which the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union, were the dominant players, with the USSR dominating the U.S. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up to Alaska in a sweatshirt with the Russian initials for USSR, a sign that Russia intends to absorb Ukraine as well as other former Soviet republics and recreate itself as a dominant world power.

As Lemire notes, Putin indicated he was interested in broadening the conversation to reach beyond Ukraine into economic relations between the two countries, including a discussion of the Arctic, and a nuclear arms agreement. The U.S. seemed to be following suit. It sent a high-ranking delegation that included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Special Envoy Witkoff, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Exactly what the White House expected from the summit was unclear. Trump warned that if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire there would be “very severe consequences,” but the White House also had seemed to be walking back any expectations of a deal at the summit, downgrading the meeting to a “listening exercise.”

After Trump and Putin met on the tarmac, Trump ushered the Russian president to the presidential limousine, known as The Beast, giving them time to speak privately despite the apparent efforts of the U.S. delegation to keep that from happening. When the summit began, Rubio and Witkoff joined Trump to make up the U.S. delegation, while Putin, his longtime foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, and Lavrov made up the Russian delegation. The principals emerged after a three-hour meeting with little to say.

At the news conference after their meeting, Putin took the podium first—an odd development, since he was on U.S. soil—and spoke for about eight minutes. Then Trump spoke for three minutes, telling reporters the parties had not agreed to a ceasefire but that he and Putin had made “great progress” in their talks. Both men appeared subdued. They declined to take reporters’ questions.

A Fox News Channel reporter said: “The way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. It seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president, then left.” But while Putin got his photo op, he did not get the larger superpower dialogue he evidently wanted. Neither did he get the open support of the United States to end the war on his terms, something he needs as his war against Ukraine drags on.

The two and a half hour working lunch that was scheduled did not take place. Both men left Alaska within an hour.

Speaking with European leaders in a phone call from Air Force One on his way home from the summit, Trump said that Putin rejected the idea of a ceasefire and insisted that Ukraine cede territory to Russia. He also suggested that a coalition of the willing, including the U.S., would be required to provide security guarantees to Ukraine. But within hours, Trump had dropped his demand for a ceasefire and instead echoed Putin’s position that negotiations for a peace agreement should begin without one.

In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity after the meeting, Trump said he would not impose further sanctions on Russia because the meeting with Putin had gone “very well.” “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about that now,” Trump told Hannity. “I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”

Trump also suggested he was backing away from trying to end the war and instead dumping the burden on Ukraine’s president. He told Hannity that “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”

Today Chiara Eisner of NPR reported that officials from the Trump administration left eight pages of information produced by the U.S. State Department in a public printer at the business center of an Alaskan hotel. The pages revealed potentially sensitive information about the August 15 meetings, including the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members and thirteen U.S. and Russian state leaders.

The pages also contained the information that Trump intended to give Putin an “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue,” and the menu for the cancelled lunch, which specified that the luncheon was “in honor of his excellency, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.”