Trump's press conference at The Hague.

This is a great press conference. I've listened to it but don't have a transcript to quote yet.

ADDED: "Mark Rutte, the NATO Chief, he called you 'daddy' earlier.... Do you regard your NATO allies as kind of like children?"

🚨 LMAO! Marco Rubio absolutely LOST his composure in the background as Trump is asked about NATO Secretary General calling him "daddy." 🤣

REPORTER: "Mark Rutte, the NATO Chief, he called you 'daddy' earlier...Do you regard your NATO allies as children?"

RUBIO: 🤣🤣🤣

TRUMP:… pic.twitter.com/eJEtjQqjeL

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 25, 2025

“I just hate bailing out the Europeans again"/"I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC.”

Said JD Vance/Pete Hegseth, quoted in "Now Europe Knows What Trump’s Team Calls It Behind Its Back: 'Pathetic'/Trump officials have demanded more European military spending and questioned the continent’s values. Leaked messages show the depth of the rift" (NYT).

Wouldn't want that to get out, now, would you? 

"Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said Sunday that he would work with the leaders of Ukraine and France on a cease-fire plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine...."

"Mr. Starmer told the BBC on Sunday that he had spoken to President Trump by phone a day earlier. 'I’m clear in my mind he does want lasting peace, he does want an end to the fighting in Ukraine'.... The prime minister said that he, Mr. Zelensky and President Emmanuel Macron of France had agreed they 'would work on a plan for stopping the fighting and then discuss that plan with the U.S.' Any peace agreement 'is going to need a U.S. backstop,' Mr. Starmer added, saying that British and U.S. teams were discussing the idea.... Since Friday, European leaders have lined up behind Ukraine and lauded its embattled president. Mr. Zelensky is also set to meet King Charles III later on Sunday."

The NYT reports.

What will Zelensky wear for his audience with the King? He's met with the King twice before — February 8, 2023 and July 18, 2024 — and both times he wore those dark green "wartime" clothes and not a suit.  Zelensky has met with other European royalty —Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia (Sweden), King Harald V, Queen Sonja, Crown Prince Haakon, and Crown Princess Mette-Marit (Norway), King Philippe (Belgium) — and each time, he wore the "wartime" outfit that he was called out for wearing in the Oval Office.

Of course, royalty is a game played through outfits. But Trump has his outfits too. Indeed, questioned about his military getup, Zelensky said that after the war, he could wear a "costume," and by "costume," he meant a suit: "I will wear a costume after this war will finish. Maybe something like yours, maybe something better."

But enough about clothing, what do we think about Europe stepping up to make the peace deal? Who will give Trump credit for making that happen and for, more generally, requiring Europe to take charge of the defense of Europe? Whether the Europeans can close a peace deal is another matter, but they concede in advance that any peace agreement "is going to need a U.S. backstop." Could they, instead, just flow endless money into Ukraine? They've counted on our money for so long. 

"My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA."

"I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump's statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe."

Said Friedrich Merz* quoted in "Germany’s Merz vows ‘independence’ from Trump’s America, warning NATO may soon be dead/Election winner likens the Trump administration to Putin’s Russia as he bids to take Europe in a new direction" (Politico).

_____________________

* Suggested sobriquet: "The Landlord."

"In their generation, in their hour of trial, the Allied forces of D-Day did their duty. Now the question for us is, in our hour of trial, will we do ours?"

Said President Biden, quoted in "Biden, world leaders and veterans mark D-Day’s 80th anniversary in France/While the U.S. president’s speech was directed at a global audience, it comes against the backdrop of a fierce domestic political battle with his predecessor, Donald Trump" (WaP0).

Biden did not name Trump during his remarks, but he offered an unequivocal endorsement of the global order that the Republican front-runner has trashed, asserting that NATO and other alliances “make us strong.”... “Make no mistake, the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine; to see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked,” he said. “We cannot let that happen. To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable.”... 

Biden has pointed to his administration’s record of building alliances amid the war in Ukraine as a top selling point for his reelection as he seeks to draw a sharp contrast with Trump. In an interview with Time magazine, Biden said Trump “wanted to just abandon” U.S. alliances, and suggested that the former president would ultimately pull the country out of NATO if he returns to the White House.... 

"It will also be a chance for her to prove herself on the world stage in an election year in which her running mate, President Biden, faces questions about his age."

"While no one in the White House would say this too openly, Ms. Harris’s challenge in the campaign is to demonstrate that she is up to the job so that voters will not worry about re-electing an 81-year-old president who would be 86 at the end of a second term."

From this NYT front-page piece:

 

I'd like to see her handle herself answering tough questions, not merely delivering the scripted platitude in the subheadline — "global partnerships are critical to U.S. security, not a burden to be lightly discarded."

"G.O.P. Officials, Once Critical, Stand by Trump After NATO Comments."

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan explain, in The New York Times. (free access at the link).

Key quotes:

Lindsey Graham: "Give me a break — I mean, it’s Trump. All I can say is while Trump was president nobody invaded anybody. I think the point here is to, in his way, to get people to pay."

Marco Rubio: "He told the story about how he used leverage to get people to step up to the plate and become more active in NATO... I have zero concern, because he’s been president before. I know exactly what he has done and will do with the NATO alliance. But there has to be an alliance. It’s not America’s defense with a bunch of small junior partners."

"It’s worth thinking about what the world would look like today if Mr. Putin had crushed Kyiv within days..."

"... as he and U.S. intelligence services expected. Russian forces would now control nearly all of Ukraine and man the border of Poland and other frontline NATO states. If an insurgency broke out in Ukraine, Mr. Putin would be blaming those countries for aiding the 'terrorists,' whether they did or not, and threatening retaliation. Moldova would have been next to fall to Russia, and one or more of the Baltic states would be in his sites [sic]. NATO would be divided over how to respond for fear of Mr. Putin’s wrath.... The cost of shoring up NATO, with Russian tanks on its doorstep, would arguably have been even greater in the long run. U.S. credibility also would have suffered another blow, compounding the damage from the Afghanistan retreat...."

Writes The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal.

"Why Zelenskyy made a Jewish joke in his Netflix interview with David Letterman."

The Jewish newspaper Forward explains.

We watched the Netflix show last night, and I didn't really see the point of making it a Jewish joke (other than I know that's a format for jokes, a format that has been out of favor in the U.S. for a long time):

“Two Jewish guys from Odesa meet up,” Zelenskyy said...  One Jew asks the other about “the situation,” and the other tells him that Russia is fighting NATO. Things are going badly for Russia. 70,000 dead Russian soldiers, depleted missile supplies, damaged equipment.

“What about NATO?” the Jew seeking news asks.

“‘What about NATO? NATO hasn’t even arrived yet!’”

A funny attack on the Russians, but why were the 2 Ukrainian men Jewish? 

"So the Russians are taking these losses and they are taking a hit from the Ukrainian Army with the best weaponry in the world, supplied by the West. But we are not in position to inflict any damage back on NATO."

Said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian intelligence bureaucracy, interviewed in "Putin’s Pivot to a 'Really Big War' in Ukraine/As his invasion enters its fourth month, the Russian leader is preparing for the long haul. Meanwhile, the military is chattering about its losses, and putting out calls for supplies on Telegram" (The New Yorker).

The Russian Army suffered some big, disastrous casualties, and, to be honest, I’ve been following how people reacted to that internally.... Pro-Russian military bloggers started talking about the losses and asking why nobody was held responsible for these losses.... 

Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I think we have some new factor here in that [the messaging app] Telegram is such a big thing in Russia, that it is probably the very first war where we have, if you can call it, some public opinion of the Russian military and some sort of discussion about the military....

"Finland is applying for NATO membership. A protected Finland is being born as part of a stable, strong and responsible Nordic region."

"We gain security and we also share it. It’s good to keep in mind that security isn’t a zero-sum game."

Said Finland’s president, Sauli Niinistö, quoted in "Finland formally confirms intention to join Nato/Nordic country that shares 800-mile border with Russia looks to end decades of non-alignment" (The Guardian).

"I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also."

"The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge. I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it."

Said Donald Trump, about the January 6th riot, quoted in "Trump deflects blame for Jan. 6 silence, says he wanted to march to Capitol/The former president struck a defiant posture and repeated false claims in an interview with The Washington Post" (WaPo).

Trump, speaking Wednesday afternoon at his palatial beachfront club, said he did not regret urging the crowd to come to Washington with a tweet stating that it would “be wild!” He also stood by his incendiary and false rhetoric about the election at the Ellipse rally before the rioters stormed the Capitol. “I said peaceful and patriotic,” he said, omitting other comments that he made in a speech that day....

"The temptation of the West for Putin was, I think, chiefly that he saw it as instrumental to building a great Russia. He was always obsessed with the 25 million Russians trapped outside Mother Russia..."

"... by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again and again he raised this. That is why, for him, the end of the Soviet empire was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century."

Said Condoleezza Rice, quoted in "The Making of Vladimir Putin/The 22-year arc of the Russian president’s exercise of power is a study in audacity" by Roger Cohen (NYT). 

This is a very substantial article, and there are some excellent photographs — Putin scaring Angel Merkel with a dog, George W. Bush yukking it up with a smilingly sober Putin. 

I'll just add a bit:

"The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European."

"'Western' means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is. And that West, which we expanded in the nineties, in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and NATO, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected. If you assumed that the West was just going to fold, because it was in decline and ran from Afghanistan; if you assumed that the Ukrainian people were not for real, were not a nation; if you assumed that Zelensky was just a TV actor, a comedian, a Russian-speaking Jew from Eastern Ukraine—if you assumed all of that, then maybe you thought you could take Kyiv in two days or four days. But those assumptions were wrong."

Says Stephen Kotkin, a scholar of Russian history, in "The Weakness of the Despot/An expert on Stalin discusses Putin, Russia, and the West" (The New Yorker).

"One of the striking things about 'Western civilization' is that as an idea it is not particularly old."

“It came to the fore during World War I, when the fight against Germany and its allies — the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires — was conceived by Anglophone liberals as a war of Western civilization against Eastern despotism. John Maynard Keynes, a cosmopolitan liberal, was convinced there was a civilizational gulf even between Germans and Anglo-Saxons, while the Russians, though allied with the West, were well beyond the pale of Western modernity. In the wake of World War I, courses on 'Western Civilization' began to be taught at elite American universities. By the onset of the Cold War, the term 'Free World' supplanted 'the West' because American power demanded a more globally inclusive banner that could rally South Vietnamese, Indonesians and others in the war on Communist 'slave societies.' After the Cold War, however, conservative American thinkers, such as Samuel Huntington, revived the idea of 'Western civilization' as a way of dramatizing how a set of values was now under siege from new threats: migrants, terrorists and moral relativists."

From "Vladimir Putin Has Revived ‘The West.’ Is That a Good Thing?" by Thomas Meaney, who does not think it's a good thing.

"There is a longstanding tradition with the U.S. left as well as in Europe that NATO has played a role... in emphasizing militarized solutions when diplomacy could lead to more long-term stability."

"It feels a little bit absurd for people to be acting like it’s a political crime to criticize NATO."

Said Ashik Saddique, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Political Committee, quoted in "Socialists’ Response to War in Ukraine Has Put Some Democrats on Edge/The Democratic Socialists of America’s view that U.S. 'imperialist expansionism' through NATO fueled Russia’s invasion has created challenges for politicians aligned with the group" (NYT).

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the D.S.A. took the position that the United States should "withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict."

With a majority of Americans backing Ukraine as it struggles to repel a bloody, often live-streamed Russian invasion, the D.S.A.’s desire for a policy discussion about NATO appears to have sown unease in campaign circles: None of the nine New York City candidates the D.S.A. endorsed this year would consent to an interview on the topic, even as more centrist Democrats are now using the subject as a cudgel. 

"President Putin has ordered Russia’s nuclear deterrent forces to be on high alert as he condemned NATO’s 'aggressive statements' regarding his invasion of Ukraine...."

"The significant escalation of tensions came as Germany, Britain and other NATO countries said they were sending military aid to Ukraine and imposed hard-hitting financial sanctions against Russia, including the president himself. 'Western countries are taking not only unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere, I mean here illegitimate sanctions that everyone knows about. But the top officials of leading NATO countries are also allowing aggressive statements against our country,' he said, in a statement reported by the Russian news agency, Tass. 'Therefore, I order the minister of defence and the chief of the general staff to transfer the deterrent forces of the Russian army to a special mode of combat duty.' According to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which was updated in 2020, it can carry out first-strike attacks if it has 'reliable information' about the launch of ballistic missiles targeting its territory.... Speaking on Wednesday night, before the first dawn assaults by Russian airborne troops, tanks and cruise missiles, he warned that 'whoever tries to hinder us' would see consequences 'you have never seen in your history.'"

From "Putin puts nuclear deterrent forces on high alert" (London Times).

"We appreciate any help, but everyone should understand that these are not charitable contributions that Ukraine should ask for or remind of."

"These are not noble gestures for which Ukraine should bow low. This is your contribution to the security of Europe and the world. Where Ukraine has been a reliable shield for eight years. And for eight years it has been rebuffing one of the world’s biggest armies. Which stands along our borders, not the borders of the EU.... And I hope no one thinks of Ukraine as a convenient and eternal buffer zone between the West and Russia. This will never happen. Nobody will allow that. Otherwise – who’s next? Will NATO countries have to defend each other?... I thank all the states that supported Ukraine today. In words, in declarations, in concrete help. Those who are on our side today. On the side of truth and international law. I’m not calling you by name – I don’t want some other countries to be ashamed. But this is their business, this is their karma."

Said Volodymyr Zelenskiy, quoted in "Ukrainian President Makes Historic Speech in Munich (English Translation)" (Kyiv Post).

"I am hoping that Vladimir Putin understands that he is — short of a full-blown nuclear war, he’s not in a very good position to dominate the world."

Did Biden inadvertently — obliquely — advise Putin to use nuclear weapons? 

From the transcript: 

I’m very concerned that this could end up being — look, the only war that’s worse than one that’s intended is one that’s unintended. And what I’m concerned about is this could get out of hand — very easily get out of hand because of what you said: the borders of the — of Ukraine and what Russia may or may not do. I am hoping that Vladimir Putin understands that he is — short of a full-blown nuclear war, he’s not in a very good position to dominate the world. And so, I don’t think he thinks that, but it is a concern. And that’s why we have to be very careful about how we move forward and make it clear to him that there are prices to pay that could, in fact, cost his country an awful lot. But I — of course, you have to be concerned when you have, you know, a nuclear power invade — this has — if he invades — it hasn’t happened since World War Two. This will be the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world, in terms of war and peace, since World War Two.

What hasn't happened since World War II? That a nuclear power has invaded? (Is that true, and, if it's true, how did you have to interpret "invade" to get it to be true?) Or was he saying the thing that hasn't happened since WWII is the use of nuclear weapons? 

"What stands in front of us, what could be weeks away, is the first peer-on-peer, industrialised, digitised, top-tier army against top-tier army war that’s been on this continent for generations."

"Tens of thousands of people could die. This is not something that people in Moscow should believe to be bloodless. This is not something that the rest of the world should stand by and ignore. It’s right that all diplomatic avenues are being exhausted, I just hope that as we’re on the brink, people in Moscow start to reflect that thousands of people are going to die and that is not something that anybody should be remotely relaxed about."

Said James Heappey, the U.K. armed forces minister, quoted in "Britain fears tens of thousands dead if Russia invades Ukraine/Diplomats told to prepare for ‘crisis mode’ as UK sends thousands of anti-tank missiles" (London Times). 

Note that Heappey was trying to strike fear into the Russians to deter them, but the headline writers put the fear in the British, who, like the Americans, are not even considering fighting for Ukraine. 

Heappey told Times Radio it was not “remotely realistic” that British troops would engage in combat with the Russian military if there was an invasion, but he said that the Ukrainians were “ready to fight for every inch of their country.” He revealed that Britain had given thousands of light anti-tank missiles to Ukraine for use in the event of an invasion....

If you search the front page over at the NYT, you can find an article about the U.S. response to the Russians. It's way down, under things about the possible illegality of Donald Trump's business practices, a very old French clown, whether it's better to exercise in the morning or the evening, the distribution of free N95 masks, and whether the presidential election was stolen... in 1960.

The NYT article is "Blinken Will Meet With Russia as U.S. Pushes for More Diplomacy/Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will meet with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia in Geneva on Friday as the United States warns that Russia could soon attack Ukraine."