President Donald Trump plans to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa on Wednesday while attending the NATO summit in Turkey, the White House said. Kyiv is trying to refocus Trump’s attention on the conflict with Moscow and Trump has publicly mused about Syria’s role in the Middle East.
The Trump administration will not seek new bids to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Interior Secretary
Doug Burgum said Sunday as he faced new questions about the troubled project and the taxpayer money involved. Like Trump, Burgum said he’s 100% sure vandals caused the damage.
And fallout continues after Trump intervened on behalf of star U.S. forward Folarin Balogun, whose red-card suspension was lifted, allowing him to play in a World Cup match against Belgium on Monday. FIFA’s extraordinary move to grant the U.S. an exception triggered outrage in Europe. Norway’s coach called it “bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.”
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Trump got what he wanted from NATO at last year’s summit: an alliance whose members had largely acceded to his demands to step up their defense spending.
This week, when he meets leaders in Turkey, his mission is to enforce that pledge.
The speed with which most NATO countries have tried to heed Trump’s call to spend 5% of their annual gross domestic product on defense over the next decade underscores how the U.S. president has reshaped the alliance and bent it to his will — even as he continues to spar with its members over the Iran war, his flirtation with annexing Greenland, and various personal tiffs.
Trump leaves Monday evening for the summit, and for days leading up to the trip has been airing grievances about how much the U.S. spends on defense compared with other countries. That’s despite efforts from Mark Rutte, the alliance’s secretary-general, who tried to feed the ego of the tempestuous U.S. leader in an Oval Office meeting last month.
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Trump on Sunday posted a falsified image of former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, waving before boarding an Air Force One that had been spray-painted with graffiti.
It came months after another racist post by the president that showed the couple as primates in a jungle. That one was deleted after stiff, bipartisan backlash.
The latest image shows the Obamas smiling and waving at the top of stairs alongside a baby blue and white presidential plane with graffiti painted on it that included the Democrat’s campaign slogan “Yes We Can,” “Obama” and “BLM,” short for Black Lives Matter. The post also shows graffiti in Arabic on the plane that says the phrase “alhamdulillah,” which means “praise be to God” or “thank God.”
Trump has a yearslong record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas, and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric. That includes everything from feeding the lie that Obama was not born in the United States to crude generalizations about majority-Black countries and posts that have sparked anger on his Truth Social website.
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Trump intervened on behalf of star U.S. forward Folarin Balogun, whose red-card suspension was lifted in a decision that allows him to play in a World Cup match against Belgium on Monday.
Balogun, the American leader with three goals in the tournament, received a red card for stepping awkwardly on the right ankle of Tarik Muharemović of Bosnia-Herzegovina in a 2-0 round of 32 win on Wednesday, triggering an automatic one-game suspension.
FIFA announced Sunday that the suspension had been lifted for the round of 16 match, an extraordinary move that triggered praise from Trump and outrage from Belgium’s team. It appeared to be the first time since 1962 that a red card during a World Cup didn’t result in a suspension.
Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino after the game asking FIFA review the red card, according to a person familiar with the call who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
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The Trump administration will not seek new bids to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Sunday as he faced new questions about the troubled project and the taxpayer money involved.
Like Trump, Burgum said he was 100% sure that vandals caused the damage to the century-old Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Trump has charged that a 350-foot gash was cut into the pool’s liner in the midst of recent renovations, while Burgum described it as multiple cuts adding up to that figure. He also said the pool would have to be at least partially drained in the coming week to finish the repairs.
The repairs will not be opened up to new contractors, he said.
“We’ll use the same company, because they did a fantastic job,” Burgum told CNN’s “State of the Union.” ”Thankfully, the vandalism was small. It was bad. I mean, it could cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair, so then it could fall into a felony ... just like damaging any other government property could. But the job that was done to fix the Reflecting Pool was done extremely well.”
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President Donald Trump plans to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa on Wednesday while attending the NATO summit in Turkey, the White House said. Those discussions will come as Kyiv tries to refocus Trump’s attention on the conflict with Moscow and as Trump has publicly mused about Syria’s role in the Middle East.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly confirmed the meetings in a call with reporters while previewing the upcoming summit in Ankara, where Trump also plans to meet with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday. Before returning to the United States on Wednesday, Trump is scheduled to have a news conference, Kelly said.
Trump’s meeting with Zelenskyy comes as Russia’s war in Ukraine is now in its fifth year. Both Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin held phone calls with Trump on Saturday, congratulating him on the July Fourth commemoration of the 250th anniversary of American independence.
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