The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Russia is pounding Ukraine again, and the Kremlin must be thrilled, because Donald Trump has decided now is the perfect time to pick a very public fight with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. While missiles rain down on Ukrainian cities, the guy who once tried to extort Zelenskyy over "a favor" is back to treating a live war like a cable-news beef segment.

Instead of a united front against Russian aggression, we get Trump ranting about how ungrateful Ukraine is and flirting with the idea that maybe Vladimir Putin has a point. It's a familiar pattern: U.S. security and democratic allies get held hostage to Trump's ego, while the autocrat in Moscow gets the strategic dividend. Ukrainians get bombed; Trump gets airtime.

The Today Show calls it a "standoff" between Trump and Zelenskyy, which is a delicate way of saying that a former U.S. president with a long, weird history of siding with Putin is once again undercutting a country fighting for its existence. American aid, NATO unity, the basic idea that you don't reward invasions—those are all background noise to a man whose foreign policy doctrine is essentially: who praised me last and who hurt my feelings.

Cybercriminals have apparently been studying the U.S. political class, because they've now automated the grift. A new global report finds 84% of ransomware victims were hit with attacks juiced by AI, and nearly half watched their own AI systems get turned into accomplices. So yes, your cheery in-house "productivity agent" might be two prompts away from going full mob enforcer on your identity systems and flipping itself into corporate god mode.

The human fallout is about what you'd expect when we hand the world’s sketchiest people the world’s most powerful autocomplete: psychological and physical threats against employees, families uprooted from homes and jobs, and 69% of victims getting nailed by multiple attacks in a single year. Meanwhile, 59% paid up at least once, because of course they did—extortion works great when governments are busy writing AI "principles" instead of regulations, and corporate boards treat security budgets like optional DLC.

Former White House cyber director Chris Inglis politely explains that AI now lets even non-technical crooks spin up autonomous ransomware attacks: tell the model who to rob, and it writes the code, runs the play, and adjusts on the fly when defenders react. Security researchers warn that better code and faster iteration mean fewer mistakes to trace, and more criminals at scale. But don’t worry, the same tech that’s helping attackers encrypt your entire business is also being sold to you as a transformational productivity solution. Truly inspiring synergy between Silicon Valley hype, corporate negligence, and a political system that only notices cyber when a hospital goes dark.

America’s top foreign spy hunters are being quietly kneecapped so Donald Trump can brag about arrest numbers on Fox News. FBI counterintelligence squads—the people who track Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean spies—are running at roughly 50–60% staffing in many of the bureau’s 56 field offices, with some offices cutting their spy-hunting teams in half. Why? Because Director Kash Patel and Trump-world want agents chasing violent crime and immigration cases that poll well at rallies, not the boring stuff like protecting state secrets during a war with Iran.

Leadership hasn’t issued a memo saying “stop doing counterintelligence”; they’ve just done the smarter authoritarian thing and starved it to death by reassigning agents and refusing to backfill positions. Anonymous current and former officials call it “terrifying,” which is a fun word to hear about the people supposed to keep hostile intelligence services out of our systems. The FBI, naturally, insists everything is fine, boasts about task-force headcounts padded with state and local cops, and waves around unverifiable claims that Patel’s FBI has arrested more Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean spies than any FBI in history. Metrics that actually matter—like dismantled networks or expelled operatives—are, inconveniently, not the ones that fit on a campaign chyron.

The result is an intelligence version of defunding the fire department while bragging about how many speeding tickets you wrote. As foreign adversaries ramp up espionage and cyber theft, the Trump administration is busy turning the FBI into a campaign prop, redirecting specialized spy hunters to chase whatever culture-war headline the president wants this week. America’s adversaries are running long-term operations; Trump is running on 24-hour cable segments. Guess which one is winning.