JFK’s disappointing nephew is at it again, Zelensky is on his way to the White House and Eric Trump is glad daddy thinks he’s a good boy. All this and more
Trump reckons he’s on a roll. He’s “stopped” “eight wars”, culminating in a “ceasefire” in Gaza.
And now he reckons his hot hand is going to bring the war in Ukraine to an end.
And how is he going to do that? By going to sit down with Putin in Hungary, at a summit hosted by Viktor Orban. Two dictators and a wannabe sitting in a room together. What could go wrong?
Meanwhile, in Trump World:
- Zelensky heads to the White House to talk Tomahawks
- Putin tried to talk him out of giving Ukraine missiles
- RFK Jr went on a weird and entirely spurious rant about teenage boys sperm
- Then he ranted about the ‘fertility rate’, and was wrong about that too
- Mike Johnson called peaceful protesters terrorists, again
- John Bolton got indicted
- Eric is glad daddy says he’s a good boy
Here’s everything you need to know…and more.
Ukraine
1. Zelensky is on his way – after Trump had a long cosy chat with Vlad
Volodymyr Zelensky is en route to the White House for talks with the President this evening. It’s thought Ukraine’s war leader is hoping to get Trump to agree to supply Kyiv with long-range Tomahawk missiles – which Zelensky believes could turn the tide of the war.
But today’s meeting follows Trump having a lengthy, by all accounts quite cosy phone chat with Putin.
Following the call Trump appeared to downplay rhe prospect of supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles, a move which Putin has warned would put further strain on US relations with Russia.
“We need Tomahawks for the United States of America too,” Trump said. “We have a lot of them, but we need them. I mean we can’t deplete our country.”
2. He said Putin tried to talk him out of it
Asked if Putin had tried to dissuade him from selling Tomahalks to Ukraine, he said: “Well of course. Do you think he’s gonna say ‘please sell Tomahawks?'”
“Is he going to say ‘please sell those Tomahawks, I really appreciate it?’
“I did actually say, ‘would you mind if I gave a couple of thousand Tomahawks to your opposition?’ I did say it to him, I said it just that way.
“He didn’t like the idea.”
He went on to say the Tomahawk is a “vicious weapon” – and that “nobody wants them fired at them.”
3. Trump is going to meet Putin face to face…again
During the call Trump and Putin agreed to meet face to face in a couple of weeks, this time in Budapest…home of their far-right mutual friend Viktor Urban.
And after the roaring success of the Alaska summit, why not?
The meeting’s location holds symbolic significance, as Budapest was where the 1994 agreement on Ukraine’s sovereignty was signed.
RFK’s assault on science
4. RFK Jr went on a weird rant about teenage boys’ sperm
At a White House event, RFK Jr went on a weird rant about, and there’s no polite way to put this, teenage boys’ sperm.
“Today the average teenager in this country has 50% of the sperm count, 50% of the testosterone of a 65 year old man,” he said. Nobody asked, but go on.
“Our girls are hitting puberty 6 years early … our parents aren’t having children.”
There’s a lot of this to unpick, but almost all of it is nonsense. Young men do not have lower sperm counts than older men. Sperm counts decline with age.
Also there is almost zero actual data available on the sperm counts of teenage boys. I mean, good luck getting funding for that research, for a start.
A couple of papers in the last decade have suggested men’s overall sperm counts are lower now than they were generations ago. But others say there’s no convincing evidence of a trend and it’s really nothing to worry about.
I dunno. Maybe Bobby saw Children of Men and thought it was a documentary or something. Weird dude.
5. Then he banged on about fertility rates as if it were a medical thing rather than a social thing
“When my uncle was president, the fertility rate in this country was 3.5%,” RFK said. “Today, it is 1.6%. That is a national security threat. President Trump is addressing this by reducing endocrine disruptors.”
Again, let’s unpick. First of all, it’s not measured in per-cent. It’s a number. The average number of children born to women over their lifetime.
Second, it’s not 1.6 today, according to official data, the fertility rate in the US the last two years has been 1.79 – an increase compared to 1.62 in 2023.
When JFK was president in 1963 the rate was 3.32, not 3.5 – with the peak being 3.65 in 1960.
That figure was the top of a spike that had ben growing since the 1940s – and is popularly known as the “baby boom.”
It’s now a little lower than it was in 1935, before the war, when it was 2.17 – and the figure has been gradually declining since 1800 when it was a whopping 7.
Several factors are at play here.
The return to a normal trend after the spike can probably be put down to another thing that happened in 1960 – the introduction of the contraceptive pill.
And the general downward trend since 1800? That’s mostly due to awkward things like sex and health education, contraception in general and awkward things like women having jobs and equality and whatnot.
What it almost certainly is not is anything that would be fixed by “endocrine disruptors”.
America is having fewer babies because that’s what happens as technology and civilisation progress.
General authoritarianism
6. Mike Johnson was at it again, calling hundreds of thousands of Americans terrorists
Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House went on Real America’s Voice, which is not a real news channel, to brand the No Kings rally a “Hate America Rally”, with “all the marxists collected, all the Antifa people, the BLM remnants, the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party and they’re gonna be out here demonstrating and screaming and wailing.”
First of all, this chilling conflation of normal, peaceful protest and ‘Antifa’ – which despite not being a real thing, has been designated a domestic terror group – is a clear indication that they intend to crack down on even the most peaceful protests, either this weekend or in the future.
Second of all, Mike Johnson himself, just a few weeks ago, urged people not to refer to their political opponents as “fascists”, lest they be targeted for violence.
Hopefully tomorrow’s big protest in Washington will go smoothly, with no trouble. But remember what Mike Johnson said if it goes south.
7. ‘I’m not a king…’
The “No Kings” title of the wave of protests planned for this weekend is clearly getting to Trump. He went out of his way during an interview with (who else?) Fox News to point out that he is not, in fact, a king.
Which is factually correct…though the point is that people think he’s acting like one.
8. John Bolton arrives in court in another prosecution of Trump’s enemies
Ambassador John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security advisor and now one of his harshest critics, arrived at court on Friday to surrender on charges accusing him of storing top secret records at home and sharing with relatives diary-like notes that contained classified information.
Authorities have suggested that classified information was exposed when operatives believed to be linked to the Iranian government hacked Bolton’s email account and gained access to sensitive material he had shared.
A Bolton representative told the FBI in 2021 that his emails had been hacked, prosecutors say, but did not reveal that Bolton had shared classified information through the account or that the hackers had possession of government secrets.
And finally…
9. Eric is glad his father called him a good boy
Eric Trump was asked about the weird hot mic moment between the President and his counterpart from Indonesia over the weekend – during which Trump Sr described his son as a “good boy.”
Asked about the moment on CNN, he said he had not heard from his dad about investment projects in Indonesia, but added… “I’m glad he acknowledges that I’m a good boy. I am a good boy.”