The Trump administration\u2019s efforts to broker a peace negotiation ending the war in Ukraine came to a halt Friday following a testy exchange between President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The encounter ultimately led to a canceled press conference, Trump requesting Zelenskyy to leave the White House, and the failure to sign a rare-earth minerals deal between the U.S. and Ukraine that would have allowed the U.S. access to Ukraine\u2019s minerals.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tensions escalated in the Oval Office after Zelenskyy challenged Vance, who said that the path forward was through diplomacy. Instead, Zelenskyy issued a caution and noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin has broken other agreements in the past.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about?\u2019 Zelenskyy said. \u2018What do you mean?\u2019<\/p>\n
In response, Vance said: \u2018I\u2019m talking about the kind of diplomacy that\u2019s going to end the destruction of your country.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Mr. President, with respect, I think it\u2019s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media,\u2019 Vance told Zelenskyy. \u2018Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for bringing it, to bring it into this country.\u2019<\/p>\n
Trump also snapped at Zelenskyy and warned him that Ukraine was in \u2018big trouble\u2019 and was \u2018gambling with World War III.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
Following the encounter, Trump announced a pause to peace negotiations and said that Zelenskyy could return to the White House when he was \u2018ready for Peace.\u2019 Additionally, Zelenskyy left the White House without signing the minerals deal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations,\u2019 Trump said in a Truth Social post Friday. \u2018I don\u2019t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.\u2019<\/p>\n
Zelenskyy also followed up with a social media post on X expressing gratitude to the U.S. for its support.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit,\u2019 Zelenskyy said. \u2018Thank you @POTUS, Congress, and the American people. Ukraine needs just and lasting peace, and we are working exactly for that.\u2019<\/p>\n
Despite the fallout from the meeting, Zelenskyy told Fox News\u2019 Bret Baier on Friday that the relationship between Ukraine and the U.S. could be salvaged.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what else happened at the White House this week:<\/p>\n
The Trump administration also\u00a0sent a memo instructing agencies across the federal government to launch plans for \u2018large-scale reductions in force\u2019 and construct reorganization plans by mid-March.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The White House\u2019s Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management sent a memo on Wednesday ordering agencies to prepare to cut staffers and share reorganization plans by March 13.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt,\u2019 the memo said. \u2018At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public.\u2019<\/p>\n
Several federal government roles are exempt from the order, including those \u2018necessary to meet law enforcement, border security, national security, immigration enforcement, or public safety responsibilities,\u2019 according to the memo.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Trump held his second administration\u2019s first meeting with Cabinet members Wednesday, where he shared plans to massively cut the Environmental Protection Agency and seek to retrieve military equipment left in Afghanistan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Trump revealed that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is eyeing cutting 65% of federal employees from the agency.<\/p>\n
\u2018I spoke with Lee Zeldin, and he thinks he\u2019s going to be cutting 65 or so percent of the people from Environmental, and we\u2019re going to speed up the process too at the same time,\u2019 Trump said. \u2018He had a lot of people that weren\u2019t doing their job, they were just obstructionists, and a lot of people that didn\u2019t exist.\u2019<\/p>\n
Trump also shared that he wanted back the military equipment U.S. troops left behind when withdrawing from Afghanistan, but didn\u2019t share plans on how the U.S. would retrieve the equipment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018We left billions, tens of billions of dollars worth of equipment behind, brand new trucks,\u2019 Trump said Wednesday. \u2018You see them display it every year, or their little roadway, someplace where they have a road and they drive the, you know, waving the flag and talking about America \u2026 that\u2019s all the top of the line stuff. I think we should get a lot of that equipment back.\u2019<\/p>\n
The Taliban seized most of the more than $7 billion worth of equipment U.S. troops left in Afghanistan at the time of the withdrawal in August 2021, according to a Department of Defense report released in 2022.<\/p>\n
Trump\u00a0signed an executive order Friday mandating English as the official language of the U.S. The order eradicates a previous mandate from President Bill Clinton in 2000 requiring federal agencies and recipients of federal funding to issue language assistance to those who don\u2019t speak English.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The executive order allows each federal agency to determine whether it will offer services in languages besides English.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The U.S. is an anomaly in that it has never had an official language, whereas roughly 180 countries out of the 195 countries in the world have official languages, a White House official told Fox News Digital.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fox News\u2019 Emma Colton and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
The Trump administration\u2019s efforts to broker a peace negotiation ending the war in Ukraine came to a halt Friday following a testy exchange between President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.\u00a0 The encounter ultimately led to a canceled press conference, Trump requesting Zelenskyy to leave the White House, and the <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":36955,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36954","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}