ICC arrest warrant for Putin limits where any summit with Trump could take place
The White House confirmed on Wednesday that Donald Trump could meet Vladimir Putin to try to broker an end to the Russian war on Ukraine as soon as next week, but finding a neutral venue to host the summit might not be easy, given that the Russian president was indicted for war crimes in 2023 by the international criminal court, and so is subject to arrest in 125 countries.
That rules out Helsinki, where Trump and Putin met in 2018, since Finland is one of the 125 state parties to the Rome statute authorizing the ICC, and so would be obliged to act on the court’s arrest warrant should Putin visit. Switzerland, Austria, Iceland, Malta, France, Spain and the United Kingdom, which all hosted cold war era summits between American and Soviet leaders, are also out, for the same reason.
Potsdam, where Truman met Stalin in 1945, is also impossible, since Germany is also a signatory to the ICC treaty.
Yalta, where FDR met Stalin and Churchill earlier the same year, would no doubt appeal to Trump’s sense of his own historic importance, but it is, inconveniently for the subject matter of these talks, in Crimea, which was the first part of Ukraine seized by Russia in 2014.
Trump is also unlikely to be welcome in Tehran, where FDR, Stalin and Churchill met in 1943, given the US air strikes on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities six weeks ago.
That could mean organizing a summit in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, where talks between Russia and Ukraine have already been held.
Another possibility is Hungary, given that its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is close to both Trump and Putin, and announced his government’s intention to leave the ICC in April, while welcoming Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Budapest, despite an ICC warrant against him for war crimes in Gaza.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office earlier today, Trump said: “We had some very good talks with president Putin today and there’s a very good chance that we could be ending the, ending the round — ending the end of that road. That road was long, and continues to be long, but there’s a good chance that there will be a meeting very soon”.
Key events
Trump avoids tough question on Gaza, welcomes easy ones from his supporters in the press corps
During an impromptu news conference in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Donald Trump was asked a tough question on Gaza by Nadia Bilbassy Charters, the Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya, a news channel owned by the Saudi government.
“You’ve said many times that you want to stop wars in the Middle East. Now prime minister Netanyahu is contemplating re-occupying Gaza entirely. Is he defying you, sir, or are you giving him a green light?” Bilbassy Charters, who grew up in Gaza, asked.
Trump avoided the thorny question of whether or not he supports the Israeli prime minister’s reported plan to forgo a peace deal with Hamas and opt for full-scale military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Instead, he pivoted to the boast that, “we have stopped wars in the Middle East, by stopping Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”
The president was far more comfortable with questions laced with praise from two correspondents from far-right news outlets the White House invited to be present.
One of them, Daniel Baldwin, the chief White House correspondent for the fringe, pro-Trump cable channel One America News, asked the president to talk about how the “manufacturing renaissance” he is bringing about “will positively impact the millions of Americans that trusted you with their vote”.
The other, Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, a network set up to host Steve Bannon’s podcast, told Trump he had “an entertainment-based question”.
“A few weeks ago, Stephen Colbert announced that he was leaving his show. Howard Stern announced that him and SiriusXM radio are parting ways. Do you think the ‘Hate Trump’ business model that’s been in the entertainment business is going out of business?” Glenn asked.
Stern has made no such announcement, although he is near the end of his contract with the satellite radio provider and there are rumors that the 71-year-old shock jock might end his show.
Trump, a ratings-obsessed, former game-show host, eagerly took the invitation to trash late-night comedians who have mocked him. “Colbert has no talent,” he said. “Fallon has no talent. Kimmel has no talent. They’re next, I hear they’re going to be going.”
As for Stern, who frequently hosted Trump on his show before the developer turned reality TV host entered politics, “I haven’t heard that name in a long time,” Trump said.
“You know when he went down?” Trump asked. “When he endorsed Hillary Clinton, he lost his audience.” That seems unlikely, given that SiriusXM increased Stern’s salary from $90m a year in 2020, four years after he endorsed Clinton. In December 2020, as Trump was frantically lying about his election loss to Joe Biden, SiriusXM offered Stern an improved five-year, $500m deal which he accepted.
ICC arrest warrant for Putin limits where any summit with Trump could take place
The White House confirmed on Wednesday that Donald Trump could meet Vladimir Putin to try to broker an end to the Russian war on Ukraine as soon as next week, but finding a neutral venue to host the summit might not be easy, given that the Russian president was indicted for war crimes in 2023 by the international criminal court, and so is subject to arrest in 125 countries.
That rules out Helsinki, where Trump and Putin met in 2018, since Finland is one of the 125 state parties to the Rome statute authorizing the ICC, and so would be obliged to act on the court’s arrest warrant should Putin visit. Switzerland, Austria, Iceland, Malta, France, Spain and the United Kingdom, which all hosted cold war era summits between American and Soviet leaders, are also out, for the same reason.
Potsdam, where Truman met Stalin in 1945, is also impossible, since Germany is also a signatory to the ICC treaty.
Yalta, where FDR met Stalin and Churchill earlier the same year, would no doubt appeal to Trump’s sense of his own historic importance, but it is, inconveniently for the subject matter of these talks, in Crimea, which was the first part of Ukraine seized by Russia in 2014.
Trump is also unlikely to be welcome in Tehran, where FDR, Stalin and Churchill met in 1943, given the US air strikes on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities six weeks ago.
That could mean organizing a summit in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, where talks between Russia and Ukraine have already been held.
Another possibility is Hungary, given that its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is close to both Trump and Putin, and announced his government’s intention to leave the ICC in April, while welcoming Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Budapest, despite an ICC warrant against him for war crimes in Gaza.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office earlier today, Trump said: “We had some very good talks with president Putin today and there’s a very good chance that we could be ending the, ending the round — ending the end of that road. That road was long, and continues to be long, but there’s a good chance that there will be a meeting very soon”.
Trump says he could try to overturn DC home rule and deploy national guard troops
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Donald Trump said that White House lawyers “are already studying” the possibility of legislation to overturn the law granting the District of Columbia self-rule and imposing direct federal control of the capital. The president added that part of the plan would include “bringing in the national guard” to police the district’s streets.
The DC Home Rule Act, signed into law in 1973 by Richard Nixon, gives DC residents the right to elect the mayor, DC council members, and advisory neighborhood commissioners to run day-to-day affairs in the District.
Trump suggested that DC was unsafe based on the anecdotal evidence of one assault early Sunday in the district on Edward Coristine, a former member of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency who uses the nickname “Big Balls” online. Although Trump suggested that the incident was proof that the district was unable to police its streets, DC police said patrol officers had intervened to stop the assault and arrested two suspected attackers, both 15, on the spot. Emergency technicians then provided medical care to Coristine.
Trump says US will charge 100% tariff on imported semiconductor chips
During a White House event to announce new investments in manufacturing by Apple, Donald Trump said the United States will impose a tariff of about 100% on semiconductor chips imported into the country.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that the new tariff rate would apply to “all chips and semiconductors coming into the United States” but would not apply to companies that had made a commitment to manufacture in the United States.
“So 100% tariff on all chips and semiconductors coming into the United States”, Trump said. “But if you’ve made a commitment to build [in the US], or if you’re in the process of building, as many are, there is no tariff,” Trump said.
Trump-Putin meeting was Russian proposal, White House press secretary says
The White House has released a statement to reporters in which the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, suggests that the idea of a direct meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, was proposed by the Russians during Putin’s meeting with US special envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow on Wednesday.
“As President Trump said earlier today on TRUTH Social, great progress was made during Special Envoy Witkoff’s meeting with President Putin”, Leavitt said. “The Russians expressed their desire to meet with President Trump, and the President is open to meeting with both President Putin and President Zelensky. President Trump wants this brutal war to end.”
Sam Levine
I asked Trey Martinez Fischer, a Democrat who represents San Antonio in the Texas state legislature what it was like away from the cameras as he and his colleagues live out of a hotel room in Illinois with no idea of how long they’ll be there.
“It’s important to just have the right mental focus and to stick to routines”, he said. “We’re still, you know, we’re still parents, and we’re still spouses. And we’re still trying to run our business or explain to our boss why we’re not there. We try to live, you know, we try to live a normal life, and we will rely on each other”.
Texas’ part-time lawmakers earn just $600 a month, so many have other jobs and have been forced to work remotely from outside the state, if they can.
Martinez Fischer wanted to make sure people knew that he and his colleagues are still doing legislative work, even though they’re not in Austin. He mentioned that he filed two bills yesterday.
He said this was his fourth quorum break. He said he was a “one bag guy” and had packed some leisure wear to wear with polos and his best suit he could stretch out a few days. “I’m wearing some clothes today that I haven’t worn yet. So, you know, that’s a small success for me”.
“When we talk about the grand scheme of what we, what we’re doing here and why we’re here, I mean, there are people who have had it a whole lot worse than me”, he said.
He also said this quorum break feels different than the one in 2021, when Democrats fled the state for several weeks to try and stop a bill with sweeping new voting restrictions from going into effect.
“2021, we spent more time trying to convince the country that there was an issue, right? This time, you know, there is no tutorial necessary and everybody is laser focused on the issue before us”, he said. “We don’t have to debate somebody on the merits of this walkout. I mean, they know the implications”.
Sam Levine
I just got off the phone with Trey Martinez Fischer, a Democrat who represents San Antonio in the Texas state legislature, and is one of dozens in his party who fled the state to try and stop Republicans from passing new Congressional maps.
I asked Martinez Fischer if he could lend any insight into how long Democrats would hold out before returning. He declined to say.
“These quorum checks and the strategies and end games are kind of best left undiscussed”, he said. “It’s a very fluid, it’s a very fluid dynamic. The idea that we had on Sunday may be different next Sunday”.
Martinez Fischer said he’s not really concerned about the $500 per day fines lawmakers are accruing under state legislature rules enacted in 2023. “Not concerned about it at all”, he said. “We’ve had rules set aside before, and courts don’t have to interpret the rules the way Republicans want them to be interpreted”.
He said he also wasn’t fazed by threats from top Texas Republicans to ask courts to remove Democratic lawmakers from office. Abbott filed a long-shot legal bid to do so against Gene Wu, the chair of the Democratic caucus, on Tuesday evening.
“I think he recognizes that he’s on the losing side of this narrative”, Martinez Fischer said. “I think that the theories by which the governor is trying to remove people from office has a much more structured procedure than just filing some papers with the supreme court. So I don’t think that that kind of stuff happens overnight”.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Texas Democrats are still hunkering down in blue states across the country. It comes after they broke quorum for two consecutive days this week, in protest of a new GOP-drawn congressional map. It’s now evolved into a nationwide redistricting battle.
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Former Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke has emerged as a top funder, covering the costs of the lawmakers’ exodus through his political group ‘Powered by People’. In an interview with CNN earlier he said that state reps can “stay out long enough to stop this deal in Texas”.
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Meanwhile, many of the Texas legislators who decamped to Illinois were forced to evacuate from their hotel today when they experienced a bomb threat. The area was secured as bomb squad units conducted their investigation. No device was found according to local police. Illinois governor JB Pritzker said he was aware of the threats, in a post on X. “Threats of violence will be investigated and those responsible will be held accountable,” he added.
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In a post on Truth Social, the president said that “great progress” was made at a “highly productive” three-hour meeting today between special envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian president Vladimir Putin. This comes just two days ahead of a deadline Trump set for Russia to reach a peace deal in the war with Ukraine, or face fresh sanctions.
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The New York Times also reports that Donald Trump plans to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin as early as next week. Trump will then organise a follow-up for Putin, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and himself, sources tell the Times.
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Trump also followed through on his threats to increase tariffs on India. Earlier he issued an executive order today imposing an additional 25% on goods from India, saying the country directly or indirectly imported Russian oil. It brings the total levies against India to 50%.
Trump to meet with Putin and Zelenskyy as early as next week – report
The president plans to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin as early as next week, according to reporting from the New York Times.
Sources tell the Times that Trump plans to follow up with a meeting between himself, Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The newspaper reports that Trump disclosed the details on a call with European leaders. Although, the meeting with Trump, Putin and Zelenskyy will not include any European counterparts, two people familiar with the plan tell the Times.
This comes after a three-hour meeting today between special envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin, which Trump described as “highly productive” in a post on Truth Social.
George Chidi
Facing images of violent white mobs defending racial segregation, the condemnation of the world and of its own citizens, Congress in 1965 passed the Voting Rights Act, a law meant to end the hypocrisy of a democratic country that denied Black people the power of their vote.
Sixty years later, race remains at the center of American politics. Cases before the US supreme court, and a platoon of Texas legislators fleeing the state to prevent redistricting, demonstrate how the Voting Rights Act – and its erosion – remains on the frontline of the political battlefield.
“Democracy is at stake,” said Todd Cox, associate director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Even as voting rights advocates use the act to win additional congressional representation in Alabama and press cases in Louisiana and North Carolina, a conservative supreme court makes gains precarious, he said.
Read more about how the Voting Rights Act is confronting its biggest threats in the 60 years since its passage.
President briefed on Georgia army base shooting
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, in a post on X, that Donald Trump has been briefed on the shooting at Fort Stewart in Georgia, and the White House is monitoring the situation.
Five soldiers were shot and wounded today on the military base in south-east Georgia, before the shooter was taken into custody.
Parts of the base had been locked down earlier on Wednesday after a shooter was reported on the sprawling army post, a spokesperson said.
