Trump Announces ‘Deal' to Arm Ukraine via NATO
Sometimes Donald Trump says he didn't mean what he said. His repeated promises to end the Russia-Ukraine war on Day 1 of his second-term or sooner were an 'exaggeration' that he 'said in jest,' he told TIME in April. 'I said that figuratively.'
Other times, Trump has shown that he meant what he said. Despite noncommittal responses on the campaign trail when pressed about whether he'd halt U.S. military support to Ukraine, he insisted that 'Europe is not paying their fair share.' (Europe has allocated more total aid to Ukraine than the U.S. has since Russia's invasion in 2022 and surpassed the U.S. in total military assistance earlier this year, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy's Ukraine Support Tracker.)
On Thursday, Trump announced that he 'just made a deal' to make that happen, telling NBC News that the U.S. will be 'sending weapons to NATO, and NATO is paying for those weapons 100% … then NATO is going to be giving those weapons [to Ukraine].'
The arrangement was reportedly first floated during the recent North Atlantic Treaty Organization Summit, where NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte referred to Trump as Europe's 'daddy' and alliance member states agreed to an increase in defense spending.
Read More: The Man Who Wants to Save NATO
About the plan to use NATO as a middleman for U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine, a Trump Administration official told Axios that the U.S. is 'not sending weapons to Ukraine' but rather 'sending defensive weapons to NATO' and 'NATO can decide what to do with it.' Another source told Axios that the weapons sold to NATO could include offensive weaponry, not just air defense support.
Hours before Trump's interview with NBC News was published, Rutte posted on X: 'Russia's continued massive attacks against Ukrainian civilians are deplorable. Earlier today I urged leaders to go further so Ukraine has more ammunition & air defences. I've just spoken with President Trump & am now working closely with Allies to get Ukraine the help they need.'
The deal to allow European allies to act as an intermediary for U.S. weapons appears to have come at the suggestion of Ukraine, which Politico reported earlier this month had asked the Trump Administration about the potential for such an arrangement despite usual restrictions on the resale of U.S. weapons.
The request from Ukraine came amid a surprise halt by the Pentagon of direct military support to Ukraine, which apparently even blindsided Trump. The Trump Administration has since resumed sending some weapons to Ukraine directly, as Trump has increasingly expressed frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the war's continuation.
'I'm disappointed in Russia, but we'll see what happens over the next couple of weeks,' Trump told NBC News, teasing: 'I think I'll have a major statement to make on Russia on Monday.'
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who met with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov at a Southeast Asian diplomatic summit this week, told reporters: 'We need to see a roadmap moving forward about how this conflict can conclude.'
Contact us at letters@time.com.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNBC
32 minutes ago
- CNBC
New Senate report on Trump assassination attempt calls for more severe disciplinary action
A new Senate report on the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer has revealed "multiple, unacceptable failures" in the U.S. Secret Service's planning and response, and called for more severe disciplinary action. Trump, then a presidential candidate, was grazed by a bullet during the rally as 20-year-old gunman Thomas Crooks fired eight shots. One attendee, Corey Comperatore, was killed, and two others were injured. A sniper subsequently killed the gunman, but the attack prompted questions about how Crooks was able to avoid detection by the country's top protective agency for nearly 45 minutes. "What happened was inexcusable and the consequences imposed for the failures so far do not reflect the severity of the situation," stated the report released Sunday by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. Last December, a House task force investigating the incident made nearly a dozen recommendations for the Secret Service in a 180-page report that determined the shooting was "preventable." The latest report details a series of breakdowns that reveal "a disturbing pattern of communication failure and negligence that culminated in a preventable tragedy." It said the USSS became aware of a suspicious individual "nearly 45 minutes before shots were fired, and failed to act." Despite advance knowledge of line-of-sight vulnerabilities at the venue, officials did not address them, the report said, adding the agency assigned an inexperienced operator to oversee counter-unmanned aerial systems and that USSS headquarters "denied or left-unfulfilled at least 10 requests" by the Donald Trump Division for additional resources, including countersniper personnel. Last July, six Secret Service employees were suspended without pay, an agency official told NBC News last week. The suspensions ranged from 10 to 42 days without pay. It is unclear when the agents were formally suspended. Less than two weeks after the incident, Kimberly Cheatle stepped down as director of the Secret Service amid bipartisan calls for her resignation. At the time, she said she took "full responsibility for the security lapse." But the report also criticized the agency for "insufficient accountability" following the attack. "Not a single person has been fired," it said. "The Committee believes more than six individuals should have received disciplinary action as a result of their action (or inaction) on July 13, 2024. Those who were disciplined received penalties far too weak to match the severity of the failures." Investigators also found that the Secret Service "denied or left unfulfilled" multiple requests for additional staff, assets and resources to protect Trump. "This was not a single error. It was a cascade of preventable failures that nearly cost President Trump his life," it said. "The American people deserve better." On Saturday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released a separate Government Accountability Office report saying the USSS "failed to implement security measures that could have prevented the assassination attempt." "Prior to the July 13 rally, senior-level Secret Service officials became aware of a threat to then-former President Trump," the GAO report said. "This information was not specific to the July 13 rally or gunman. Nonetheless, due to the Secret Service's siloed practice for sharing classified threat information, Secret Service and local law enforcement personnel central to developing site security plans for the rally were unaware of the threat." In an interview with ABC News before she resigned, Cheatle said there was a "short period" of time between when the gunman was initially flagged as suspicious and when he began shooting. December's House investigation praised the response of the Secret Service to the second assassination attempt on Trump in September in West Palm Beach, Florida, crediting it for demonstrating "how properly executed protective measures can foil an attempted assassination."
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Opinion: How the Trump tax cut law will hurt the working class
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said it was 'agonizing' to vote for the tax cut bill President Trump signed on July 4. As details of the legislation come into focus, it's obvious why it might cause heartburn even for Republicans who passed it, with no Democratic votes. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as the law is clumsily known, will literally make the rich better off and the poor worse off. Some conservatives who want to pare the 'welfare state' may not care. But imposing austerity on millions of working-class voters is a stunning political risk for a party that is supposedly following President Trump's populist instincts. The law has two main elements. The first is a sweeping series of tax cuts and tax cut extensions that will generally benefit everybody but add trillions of dollars to the national debt. The second is a set of benefit cuts that are meant to reduce the overall cost of the bill. Those will hit working-class Americans and make the net effect of the bill punishing to them. The biggest part of the OBBBA is an extension of the tax cuts Trump signed into law in 2017. Those were due to expire at the end of this year. The OBBBA makes the current individual income tax rates permanent. Those are not 'tax cuts' per se, since tax rates will be the same in future years as they are in 2025. But the law does prevent what would have been a de facto tax hike if the 2017 rates expired and the higher 2016 rates went back into effect. The law also includes some new tax breaks, such as the elimination of tax on income from tips and overtime pay, up to certain limits. There's also a new tax break for some seniors and a much higher cap for deducting state and local taxes, which will mostly benefit wealthy homeowners who itemize deductions on their tax returns. The tax provisions generally benefit everybody, but the wealthy will gain the most. The average savings for all taxpayers will be about $2,900, compared with what the tax bill would have been if current rates expired, according to the Tax Policy Center. Those with incomes above $1 million would save nearly $60,000 on average. But the savings for workers with incomes below $30,000 would be less than $200 per year. Those provisions, at least, do no harm to most taxpayers. But the harm arrives when factoring in cuts to Medicaid, subsidies for people to buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and food aid known as SNAP. The healthcare cutbacks will leave an additional 16 million people without coverage by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Cutbacks to the SNAP program could reduce or eliminate food aid going to 22 million families, according to the Urban Institute. Those changes will leave millions of Americans worse off. When accounting for the tax changes and benefit cuts combined, people in the lowest income quintile, with incomes below $13,500, will lose an average of $600 per year, according to the Yale Budget Lab. The next quintile will lose $65 per year. The healthcare and food aid cuts will have little impact on top earners, for obvious reasons. The top quintile will gain $6,500 in after-tax savings from all of the law's provisions, while the top 1% will net more than $30,000. This is what economists call a 'regressive' policy change because the economic burden falls more heavily on those with lower incomes. 'The bill has four overriding characteristics,' Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center wrote recently. 'It is regressive, expensive, complicated, and it treats people who make roughly the same amount of money in very different ways.'Tax cut defenders often point out that the wealthy typically get the biggest tax cuts because they pay the most taxes in the first place. That's generally true. But the wealthy are a distinct minority, which means a regressive law such as the OBBBA dis-serves millions of voters, and possibly a majority of them. The bottom two income quintiles, for instance, include roughly 92 million taxpaying units, whether singles, married couples, or other designations. There are only 26 million taxpaying units in the top quintile. Maybe that's what Murkowski found so agonizing. 'Do I like this bill? No,' she told a reporter on July 2. 'I know in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.' Trump can point to working-class provisions such as the elimination of taxes on tip income and overtime pay, with limitations based on the type of work and the amount of income. Some workers will in fact benefit from those carve-outs. But tax analysts argue that favoring certain types of work in that manner violates the principle of 'horizontal equity,' the idea that similar incomes should be taxed in similar ways. To use the example of a restaurant, a waiter earning tip income would get a tax break that a cook paid hourly would not. That distorts the tax code, creates incentives to cheat, and generates legitimate grievances among the unlucky workers not gifted a tax break. The OBBBA is already unpopular, with 64% of Americans disapproving and just 35% approving, in one poll. The real vote will come in the 2026 midterm elections, when Americans will express whether they feel better off or worse off under unified Republican control of government. Getting Americans to like this law might be a more agonizing ideal than passing it. Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Bluesky and X: @rickjnewman. Click here for political news related to business and money policies that will shape tomorrow's stock prices.
Fox News
37 minutes ago
- Fox News
LIVE LOOK: Scene of where Trump was almost killed one year later
All times eastern Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street FOX News Radio Live Channel Coverage LIVE LOOK: Scene of where Trump was almost killed one year later
