Russia Throws Cold Water All Over Trump’s Ability to End Ukraine War

The Kremlin is already shutting down Trump’s claim of military genius.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the president-elect said repeatedly that he could end Russia’s two-year-long invasion of Ukraine in just 24 hours. Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin’s press secretary, provided a more realistic assessment on Thursday. 

“Of course, it was a bit of an exaggeration when he said he would do it overnight,” Peskov said. However, the press secretary also admitted what we all already know: that Moscow is happy with a Trump presidency.  

“If the new administration seeks peace rather than continued conflict, it will be better than the previous one,” Peskov added.

On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented directly on Trump’s wild claim in his first comments following the election results. Speaking at a discussion club in Sochi, Putin first praised Trump for surviving his assassination attempt in July, calling him a “real man,” and then congratulated the president-elect. But the Russian president did not commit to anything regarding the war in Ukraine or ending it quickly, stating, “I do not know what is going to happen now. I have no clue.” 

Democratic Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey has been unseated by Republican challenger David McCormick in one of the country’s tightest and most expensive Senate races, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

McCormick won 48.9 percent of the vote, with 99 percent reporting, compared to Casey’s 48.5 percent.

Republicans have already secured control of the Senate, seizing 53 seats for a majority. Three races have yet to be called.

Pennsylvania’s Senate race was extremely tight, and hours after the Senate had been called Wednesday morning, the race was still too close to call, with McCormick leading by less than 1 percent, or approximately 52,000 votes.

As mail-in voting drew to a close late last month, McCormick joined Donald Trump in a lawsuit against Bucks County over long lines at polling stations as people tried to register for mail-in voting. A judge extended the deadline to sign up for mail-in voting in the county—a win for voting rights, but due to a request based on totally exaggerated claims. Bucks County supported President Joe Biden in 2020, topping Trump by more than 17,000 votes.

Ahead of Election Day, McCormick campaigned with failed presidential candidate Nikki Haley in the hopes of attracting the support of moderate voters.

Meanwhile, during a late-October rally for Kamala Harris in Philadelphia, former President Barack Obama lauded Casey. “All that guy cares about is doing the job and looking after the people he was elected to serve. That’s the kind of person we need to send back to Washington,” Obama said.

Last month, McCormick’s campaign was flooded with more than $108 million in donations from outside groups, absolutely dwarfing his own campaign’s previous $22.2 million in spending. McCormick has received $45.3 million from Keystone Renewal, a GOP-funding Pennsylvania-based super PAC underwritten by about 70 megadonors.

Casey’s campaign, including PAC donations, spent $110 million by the middle of October. Casey polled ahead of McCormick throughout the race, drawing stronger support from Democrats than McCormick drew from Republicans.

Donald Trump’s worthless stock just plunged again, all but wiping out the president-elect’s victory gains.  

Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, or DJT,  sank on Thursday, after briefly spiking in the hours following the announcement that he’d won the presidency. 

The stock gained nearly 6 percent Wednesday but dropped more than 20 percent in afternoon trading the following day, according to CNBC. This is likely due to profit-taking from investors looking to cash in on Trump’s postelection bump and well aware that without the election to drive Trump’s stock prices, there isn’t much more DJT has to offer. 

Trump Media is a particularly volatile stock because it is tied to a service that no one really uses: Truth Social, currently the epicenter of Trump’s online ravings and not much else. As such, DJT functioned as a meme stock, rising and falling in tandem with Trump’s election prospects. It seems that since the presidential race has finally come to an end, the stock has been rendered useless for now.

In a surprise filing Tuesday, Trump Media reported that it lost more than $19 million in its third quarter this year. The company had only $2.6 million in revenue, while racking up a net loss of $363 million for the first nine months of 2024. 

The same day, DJT’s stock value plummeted as investors furiously traded shares, and trading was temporarily halted five times. 

Trading had previously been frozen in mid-October after a wild trading session caused the stock price to plummet. Frenzied trading in October indicated that investors were looking to ride the stock to some easy gains following Trump’s election victory, and now they have. Any gains the stock saw with Trump’s victory have now been reduced back to nothing. 

California Governor Gavin Newsom has called a special session in the Golden State’s legislature to protect the state’s liberal policies from a Donald Trump presidency.

In a statement Thursday, Newsom warned, “The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack—and we won’t sit idle.

“California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond. We are prepared to fight in the courts, and we will do everything necessary to ensure Californians have the support and resources they need to thrive,” the statement read. Newsom’s office also told the Associated Press the governor and legislators were ready to “Trump-proof” California’s state laws.

Newsom’s statement asked the legislature to give more funding to the state attorney general’s office to fight any federal challenges when it meets in December. California has a lot to safeguard: The state has many laws in place to protect abortion access, including budgeting $20 million to pay for people in other states to come to California for an abortion. The state has also mandated that every new car, pickup truck, or SUV sold in California be electric, hydrogen-powered, or plug-in hybrid by 2035.

During Trump’s first term, the state filed more than 120 lawsuits, and Newsom is preparing for another four years of legal battles, especially with conservatives eyeing anti-climate and anti-abortion measures. Newsom is not alone: Other leaders in Democratic states are also taking measures to safeguard their laws.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she and Attorney General Letitia James will be meeting to discuss how to legally protect “key areas that are most likely to face threats from the Trump administration.” These include “reproductive rights, civil rights, immigration, gun safety, labor rights, LGBTQ rights, and our environmental justice.”

Newsom may have good intentions, but he also has bigger ambitions than California and may have eyes on the presidency after Trump’s term is up. Proving himself as a bulwark against the Trump White House would do a lot to improve his national standing. The question is whether Newsom is taking these actions for real or for show, and whether the state’s measures will be effective.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders’s scathing take on the Democratic Party’s election night losses seriously irked party leaders already licking their wounds.

In a statement Wednesday, the senator from Vermont offered his two cents on the sweeping defeat:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

Sanders cited inflation, historically low wages, artificial intelligence, exorbitant prescription drug prices, billions of dollars toward Israel’s “horrific” war on Palestine, and rampant corporate corruption all as issues that the Democratic Party did not adequately communicate to voters, or address at all.

Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison—previously an aide to Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and then a corporate lobbyist—called Sanders’s take “straight up BS.” 

“Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time—saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of [Kamala Harris’s] plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country,” Harrison tweeted Thursday morning.

“From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior health care in their homes. There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”

Regardless of the merits of Harrison’s defense, there is a clear disconnect between the Democratic Party and the huge swaths of working-class voters who soundly rejected their platform this election cycle. Does it really matter that President Biden stood on one picket line when 67 percent of voters nationwide said the economy has been bad for them under his leadership? 

Biden and Harris, even with policies that help working-class people, still had to defend a status quo that, economically, actually wasn’t great for working-class people regardless of race. That’s a difficult position to be in when your opponent is running on upending said status quo.

Members of Team Biden have anonymously spilled that they wish Vice President Kamala Harris had continued to campaign on the dangers of corporate greed and corruption to counteract her weaknesses on inflation and the economy. According to The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, a Biden aide told him that the vice president “steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer.” Harris mostly abandoned this angle and instead started campaigning more with billionaire Mark Cuban.  

Whether you think Sanders is right on this or not, it’s clear that it’s time for the Democratic Party to seriously reevaluate its messaging and win back the voters it used to always have.