Has Trump Reached His Limit with Putin?

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, July 08, 2025

 

He’s the greatest president ever . . . at least for today:

 

President Donald Trump said Monday that the United States would send more weapons to Ukraine to aid in its war against Russia, days after the White House announced that the Pentagon had halted deliveries of some key weapons to the country.

 

“We have to,” Trump said of the U.S. providing weapons to Ukraine, speaking to reporters at a dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “They have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard now.”

 

The shipment will include “defensive weapons, primarily,” Trump said, remarking that “so, so many people are dying in that mess.” Among the weapons paused were air defense missiles, precisely at the time Russia dramatically increased its overnight bombardments of Ukrainian cities.

 

Trump’s comments appeared to be an abrupt turnaround from last week, when White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said that the Defense Department had decided to halt some shipments to Ukraine after a review found American military stockpiles to be low.

 

Bravo, Mr. President!

 

A curious detail from the Wall Street Journal’s reporting:

 

Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a telephone call Friday that he wasn’t responsible for the halt in weapons shipments to Kyiv.

 

Trump said that he had directed a review of Pentagon munitions stockpiles after the U.S. struck Iran’s nuclear sites last month but hadn’t ordered the department to freeze the arms deliveries, according to people briefed on the conversation.

 

If that halt in weapons shipments to Ukraine wasn’t ordered by the president . . . who did order that change in policy?

 

We’re a long way from that Oval Office dressing-down of Zelensky alongside Vice President Vance, now, aren’t we? Everything can change in a New York minute, particularly with a New York mogul.

 

President Trump is bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities, bombing the Houthis and restoring freedom of the seas, getting NATO to dramatically increase defense spending . . . honestly, this guy is terrific — the best neocon president we’ve had in ages. That’s only about 35 percent tongue-in-cheek; President Trump is feeling his oats and sending an explicitly clear message to hostile foreign regimes, rogue states, and terrorist groups around the world. Second-term Trump doesn’t have any time or patience for your nonsense. Perhaps over the preceding four years, you saw U.S. forces leaving Afghanistan in chaos and got used to a doddering octogenarian muttering, “don’t . . . don’t . . .” as a warning.

 

Since January 20, the world has indeed grown more unpredictable and dangerous . . . for a lot of America’s enemies.

 

Zohran Mamdani and the Phenomenon of ‘Too Left to Fail’

 

On Independence Day — a day most Americans are paying attention to fireworks and cookouts, not the news — the New York Times revealed that New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani identified his race as “Asian” and “Black or African American” as a high school senior applying to college. Mamdani’s heritage is Indian, and he was born in Uganda.

 

When an outlandish street interviewer asked Mamdani in April, “Would you claim African American status, like Elon Musk?” Mamdani replied with a laugh, “No, I would not claim that status. . . . I’m proud to be Ugandan, but I think that that is misleading.”

 

Apparently, teenage Mamdani felt differently.

 

If you call the Mamdani campaign, is the on-hold music “Soul Man”?

 

You can ask whether a candidate’s college application — particularly to a school where he was rejected — matters much. (Depending on your age, this wasn’t that long ago; Mamdani applied to college after Barack Obama’s inauguration. But there is no way that the son of a Columbia professor and a successful Hollywood filmmaker did not know that he was increasing his odds of acceptance by telling the school he was “Black or African American,” and that he was misrepresenting his identity on some level.

 

Christopher Rufo wonders if Columbia University, where Mamdani’s father was a professor, recognized that the applicant did not meet the usual definition of “Black or African American”:

 

There is a possibility that Mamdani’s box-checking gambit backfired. The full application includes the name and contact information for his father, Mahmood Mamdani, and his mother, Mira Nair, both of whom are public figures and neither of whom is black. The application also included a flag noting that the elder Mamdani appeared to be “affiliated with Columbia” and another line noting the family’s address in an exclusive Manhattan neighborhood. With even cursory research, an admissions officer could have seen that Mr. Mamdani was neither black, nor underprivileged.

 

We all know schools have different standards for different ethnic groups. As of 2023, the average SAT score of an Asian student is 1219, the average SAT score of a white student is 1082, the average SAT score of a Hispanic student is 943 and the average SAT score of a black student 908.

 

Schools lower their expectations and standards for certain ethnic groups and raise them for others. This is not an allegation or conspiracy theory, this is a proven fact:

 

Overall, Harvard’s policies roughly quadrupled the likelihood that an African American applicant would be accepted relative to a white student with similar academic qualifications, while multiplying the likelihood of admissions 2.4 times for Hispanics. For out-of-state applicants to UNC, the force of racial preferences multiplied African Americans from 1.5 percent of admitted students to 15.6 percent, a tenfold increase. Black applicants applying in-state to Chapel Hill gained a smaller advantage from affirmative action, becoming 70 percent likelier to win admission.

 

Colleges and universities contend that if you notice this, you are racist.

 

Just as there was no serious consequence for Senator Elizabeth Warren claiming Native American heritage based upon erroneous claims in family stories, there will be no serious consequence for Mamdani. Our society has a well-established precedent: You are allowed to lie about your race or heritage to benefit from affirmative action, as long as you are a progressive and the progressive movement needs you. Nobody needed anything from Rachel Dolezal and she couldn’t do favors for anyone, so she could be turned into a national punchline. By the time Warren’s false claims were discovered and widely reported in 2018, she was already a senator and a leader of the progressive movement —  she could hire people, blurb books, introduce legislation, speak at their events. Warren had allies who would defend her. This made her effectively untouchable.

 

It will probably not surprise you to learn that progressive commentators are coming out of the woodwork to insist that it is perfectly fine for a young man of Indian heritage to identify himself as black on college applications. The New York Times metro section ran a lengthy article asking whether the scoop by other reporters “should matter.” I look forward to tomorrow’s article, “why you shouldn’t read or trust what we reported a few days ago.”

 

In fact, some progressives contend, by reporting the story, the New York Times is pushing the message of white supremacists.

 

The report apparently has enraged younger and more progressive New York Times staffers, who apparently believe that the paper is violating its ethics by reporting news that makes their preferred candidate look bad. From Semafor:

 

The piece also seemed to divide staff, and reignited years-old internal tensions between some younger, more left-leaning members of staff and management.

 

“People are really upset,” one Times journalist told Semafor.

 

In a series of posts on Bluesky, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie said, “i think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi.” On Friday, he deleted his posts, saying they violated the Times’ social media guidelines. Bouie also deleted subsequent posts on Sunday that also seemed to express frustration at the Times’ decision to publish the story, and shared a post that said “NYT & many of its elite white readers are still obsessed with race-conscious college admissions.”

 

Look, man, you can’t publicly take shots at your colleagues and not expect some consequences. If I could hold my tongue about Taylor Lorenz while she was working at the Washington Post, you’ve got no excuse.

 

You’ve heard of “too big to fail.” Mamdani is “too left to fail.” The progressive movement needs a new icon. Bernie Sanders is older than Joe Biden. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her shock primary victory back in 2018. “The Squad” is smaller than it used to be, with Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush now former members of Congress after losing primaries. The left needs a new hero, and by virtue of being the odds-on favorite to be the next mayor, he’s the guy.

 

No scandal can be deemed important enough to count as a serious reason to oppose him. Every sin will be forgiven, every crime excused. The progressives need him to be their next Great Whi—er, their Great Hope of Undetermined Hue.

 

And let’s point out that Mamdani doesn’t exactly have a lengthy record in government to chew over and analyze. His former primary rival, Andrew Cuomo, sneered that Mamdani had been in government for “twenty minutes,” and while that’s an exaggeration, the 33-year-old Mamdani’s record is sparse.

 

He spent most of his younger years as a rapper under the name “Young Cardamom.” He was elected to public office by winning a state assembly race in 2020 and ran unopposed in 2022 and 2024. (The highest turnout in any of Mamdani’s state assembly races was 38,817 in 2020.) In his four years in the state assembly, three bills he introduced have become law; one of them was to allow liquor to be consumed at the Museum of the Moving Image in his district. He was the driving force behind a pilot program to phase out bus fares, but the program was not extended.