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From Russia with scorn

Outside of their canny ability to warp reality to their will, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump could not be more different.

The Russian president’s iron grip on power is somewhat understandable when you know that he came from the mud. The son of a factory worker and a Soviet navy conscript, he scratched, clawed and schemed his way to the top in an institution whose stock in trade was diverting the overly eager. Trump, by comparison, was gifted his lot in life… even if ending up in the Oval Office is taking advantage of his head start to an unimaginable degree.

The pair have been unlikely friends for much of Trump’s political career, with Putin seeing someone easy to flatter and Trump seeing the type of strongman he desperately wishes to be. That uneasy bromance came to an end this week, as Trump grew tired of the lack of movement toward a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire and lashed out at Putin.

“Something has happened to him,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He has gone absolutely CRAZY!”

Trump went on to accuse Putin of “playing with fire,” threatening that a “lot of really bad things” would have happened to Russia were it not for Trump’s intervention. The Kremlin and Russian state media responded with barely veiled mockery. The latter accused Trump of being “emotional” while RT poked fun at Trump’s short attention span, saying he’d post “the opposite tomorrow morning.”

What do you think? Will anything come of the soured relationship between Trump and Putin? Is the president more likely to throw in behind Volodymyr Zelenskyy? Let us know in the comments.

Make me smarter…

Trump is an "isolationist" who likes Russia and war crimes. What could go wrong?

Donald Trump’s peacenik persona has always been a bit of a put-on and the mask is likely to drop if the strongmen he admires carry on hurting his feelings. Read more.

They said what?

• "The swamp has won"

  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, throwing in behind Elon Musk after Congress ignored the hack-and-slash budget suggestions of the Department of Government Efficiency.

• “This is retaliatory, viewpoint-based discrimination”

  NPR CEO Katherine Maher, explaining why her organization filed a lawsuit against the administration of Donald Trump. The president signed an executive order earlier this month seeking to end all federal funding of NPR and PBS.

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Before you go …

Trump's distraction machine is working

Steve Bannon isn’t as welcome in the retinue of the president as he once was, but his tactic of “flooding the zone with s**t” continues to pay dividends for Trump. Read more.