| This week, as the country reeled from deadly flash floods in Texas and talk turned to President Donald Trump’s cuts to weather reporting and disaster response, an impostor pretending to be Secretary of State Marco Rubio contacted foreign governments by using widely available artificial intelligence tools, Trump ramped up tariffs that economists warn could hurt a relatively stable economy and the Supreme Court opened the door to mass government layoffs that started Friday at the State Department. Here’s what else happened under Trump this week. Trump talks tough about Russia In both his presidencies so far, Trump has been broadly conciliatory toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. He’s echoed Russia’s propaganda about who started the war in Ukraine, siding with Russia in a recent United Nations vote about the war and berating Ukraine’s president in a televised Oval Office meeting. This week, though, the president had a significant change in tone. “We get a lot of bulls--- thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting. He also said the United States would send some weapons to Ukraine after pausing the shipments. It’s unclear if this rhetoric shift will change policy for Ukraine as Russia steps up its attacks, a national security expert told me. “It’s good the president has realized that Putin was just stringing him along,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe and Russia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But it’s sort of too late.” The number of weapons the U.S. will send is still lower than what Ukraine originally expected, Bergmann said, adding it’s one way Trump has signaled the U.S. isn’t that invested in helping Ukraine. “Russia thinks it has a big opening to win the war because the U.S. has indicated it has no interest in maintaining its current level for support for Ukraine,” Bergman said. “I think Russia sees the light at the end of the tunnel, and that light got brighter from actions in the Trump administration.” RFK Jr. is sued by major medical groups As the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filled a prominent federal panel with vaccine skeptics — which then voted to remove a safe ingredient found in some flu vaccines — and recommended that infants and pregnant women don’t need a coronavirus vaccine, despite evidence that coronavirus can cause preterm births or stillbirths. Some of the most prominent public health groups in the nation sued Kennedy this week for his coronavirus vaccine recommendation. “He’s actively undermining vaccine safety and efficacy and confidence in vaccines by everything he’s done,” Georges C. Benjamin, the leader of the American Public Health Association, one of the plaintiffs, told my colleagues at The Washington Post. Measles, easily prevented by a vaccine, has reached a 33-year high in the U.S., data revealed this week. Public health experts also worry Kennedy is making similar moves when it comes to preventive medicine. This week he postponed a regular meeting for a group that helps decide what procedures insurance should fully cover, like cancer screenings, Axios reported, worrying some that he will try to move the government away from scientific evidence on this, too. “In no world should experts be replaced with unqualified anti-science cronies of RFK Jr. who will make preventive health care more expensive and harder to get over baseless conspiracy theories or debunked disinformation,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), a senior member of the Senate’s health committee, said in a statement. Health experts have told me that Kennedy risks upending decades of established science that has kept Americans healthy from preventable diseases. “I’ve never seen such an anti-health agenda,” Alexandra Phelan, an expert in global health law at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, said in an interview earlier this year. “It’s an agenda that is intent on threatening the health of Americans.” Trump administration working to give farm workers amnesty Farms are one of the most obvious targets for Trump’s mass deportation effort, but his administration is making moves to protect these workers rather than deport them. The Post’s Natalie Allison reported this week that the Trump administration is working to streamline its visas for migrant farm workers. The agricultural industry is an influential member of the business community and has warned Trump of the potential for rotting fruit and empty grocery shelves if they lose their workers. As Natalie reports: “Trump is ‘realistic’ about the fact that native-born American workers are unlikely to fill all the agriculture jobs currently filled by immigrant laborers, a White House official said.” “What we’re doing is getting rid of criminals. But we are doing a work program,” Trump said this week. But to some of Trump’s most vocal and influential supporters, he’s appearing to renege on his core campaign promise, even as he cracks down on immigration in other ways, like trying to declare some dead under Social Security or blocking undocumented children from a well-known education program known as Head Start. Natalie reports that tension could get more difficult for Trump to manage. “It’s a tug of war between the donor class and his base,” a person involved in the MAGA pushback against the migrant worker carve-out, told her. “It’s an existential threat to the coalition. If you even float in any serious way amnesty, by that name or any other, the base will revolt.” | 
