Hegseth Calls for 8 Percent Annual Defense Cut

One senior official said the cuts appeared likely to be part of an effort to focus Pentagon money on programs that the Trump administration favors, instead of actually cutting the Defense Department’s $850 billion annual budget.

For example, the Pentagon is already spending more money on the Trump administration’s efforts at the southern border, including on military flights that have taken migrants in the United States to countries as far away as India.

Mr. Hegseth has vowed to use thousands of active-duty U.S. troops to help stem the flow of migrants across the border, a top priority for President Trump. But illegal crossings, which reached record levels during the Biden administration, slowed significantly before Mr. Trump took office last month.

In a statement on Wednesday, Robert G. Salesses, the acting deputy defense secretary, said the president’s “charge to the department is clear: to achieve peace through strength.”

He added that the Pentagon was undertaking the budget cuts with an aim of bolstering other priorities. “To achieve our mandate from President Trump,” he said, “we are guided by his priorities, including securing our borders, building the Iron Dome for America and ending radical and wasteful government D.E.I. programs and preferencing.”

In the memo issued on Tuesday, which Bloomberg reported earlier, Mr. Hegseth repeated a phrase he uses often about the need for the military to focus on “the warrior ethos.” He called for a rejection of “excessive bureaucracy” and unnecessary spending.

Any cuts to the defense budget may face opposition in Congress, where lawmakers often focus on budget cuts that could affect their districts.

The Pentagon is also bracing for proposed cuts to its work force, and has already been asked to hand over to the Trump administration lists of probationary employees who could be laid off.

A senior military official said on Wednesday that Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency had expressed interest in moving full-time Pentagon employees to contract positions so that they would be easier to fire.

On social media on Tuesday, Mr. Hegseth shared a post from Mr. Musk’s team saying that it was looking forward to eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“DOGE the waste; Double-Down on warriors,” Mr. Hegseth wrote.

The appeals court, based in San Francisco, denied a request from the administration for an emergency stay lifting an injunction by a federal judge in Washington State that blocks the president’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution supports birthright citizenship.

The appeals court said the government had not made a compelling argument that its case was likely to succeed.

The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday night.

At least four federal judges have issued injunctions blocking the president’s executive order. Mr. Trump’s order instructed the government to stop recognizing as citizens any children who are born on U.S. soil to parents who are undocumented immigrants.

In issuing an injunction two weeks ago blocking the executive order, Judge John C. Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington wrote that the president “cannot change, limit or qualify this Constitutional right via an executive order.”

Undocumented immigrants are largely not eligible for federal benefits, with only some exceptions allowed for emergency situations, and many immigrant families are hesitant to enroll in programs they are eligible for, according to the National Immigration Law Center.

The order was the latest in a flurry of actions Mr. Trump has taken on immigration since the start of his second term, including directives to prevent people from crossing into the United States illegally and to crack down on undocumented migrants already in the country.

Mr. Trump’s latest order would ensure that federal funds are not used to “incentivize or support illegal immigration,” the White House said. It also directs departments and agencies to ensure that federal funds are not used to support “sanctuary” policies.

That label is usually applied to states, counties or cities that have some limits on their cooperation with the federal agencies that deport undocumented immigrants.

The White House said Wednesday, without providing details, that undocumented migrants have qualified for various federal welfare programs, and accused the Biden administration of spending billions on supporting people who have entered the country illegally.

Undocumented immigrants have also contributed tens of billions to the Social Security system, according to an analysis published last year by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning tax research group.

Trump suggested that the federal government “take over” Washington, D.C., where a sluggish office market has slowed the city’s pandemic recovery. The district has largely governed itself since the 1970s, although Congress can override its laws.

The president claimed that Washington has “too much crime,” but crime in the district has been falling.

Trump also claimed that U.S. is not “being paid back” for the military and humanitarian aid given to Ukraine and repeated the false claim that the U.S. has provided considerably more aid to Ukraine than its European allies. In fact, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Europe has allocated $138 billion compared with $119 billion from the United States.

President Trump said Russia has “the cards” in peace negotiations with Ukraine because it has “taken a lot of territory” and said Russian officials are negotiating in good faith. “I think the Russians want to see the war end,” he said. “But I think they have the cards a little bit, because they’ve taken a lot of territory, so they have the cards.”

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump was referring to paying off consumer debt or paying off the national debt, which currently stands at $36 trillion, but his comments suggested that he may have been talking about both. In January before Mr. Trump was inaugurated, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who is leading DOGE, set expectations for cost cutting at $1 trillion.

Mr. Trump provided scant details on the potential taxpayer returns, including on whether the proposal was even feasible or if he would need congressional approval. A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump made his remarks during an international investment conference in Miami Beach, Fla., hosted by the Future Investment Initiative, a Saudi Arabian foundation that promotes the kingdom’s economy and cultural priorities through a variety of annual events.

The president spoke to a packed auditorium with an audience that featured Mr. Musk; Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi Arabian sovereign-wealth fund; Princess Reema Bandar al-Saud, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States; and Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body.

Mr. Trump praised the work that DOGE was doing, promising that the department would save “billions, hundreds of billions” of dollars in wasteful spending.

And he stressed the importance of paying down debt.

“If it were a real estate balance sheet, the debt is tiny, but we still want to pay it down,” he said.

He added: “We don’t look at it as a piece of real estate. It’s America.”

When Mr. Trump won in November, the Justice Department abandoned the two federal cases against him, and a judge in Manhattan issued an unconditional discharge in his hush money case.

Mr. Trump gave voice to something that his advisers had long said he had in the back of his mind as he campaigned. But he did not publicly acknowledge throughout 2024 that he was campaigning for his freedom as much as for the White House itself.

The president made the comments in response to a question about how he would spend a year if granted a sabbatical. Mr. Trump did not directly answer the question, saying he was honored to be president. But he said it took “a certain amount of courage” to run again because of the personal risks.

Mr. Trump also said he disagreed with historians’ assessment that Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated, were the two most mistreated presidents.

“Nobody was treated like me,” he said. “Nobody, and I will tell you, you learn a lot about yourself, but there’s nothing I’d rather do.”

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump faced dozens of criminal charges across four different cases. Jack Smith, who served as a special counsel, charged him in two different cases, one related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and another related to his handling of classified government documents after he left the White House in 2021. The documents case had been dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge, but Mr. Smith’s team was appealing it.

He also faced charges in Georgia over attempts to overturn his election loss in 2020, and he was found guilty on all counts in the hush-money case in New York, where he could have faced up to four years in prison.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Mr. Musk’s team has helped push through layoffs of thousands of workers across the government, including at the Transportation Department. But at the same time, the department’s secretary, Sean Duffy, has asked Mr. Musk, whose companies span the sectors of technology and transportation, to aid in addressing the agency’s aging air traffic control technology.

The firings come at a time when the F.A.A., the nation’s premier aviation safety agency, is dealing with several deadly plane crashes across the country, including a midair collision between an Army helicopter and American Airlines plane that killed 67 people on Jan. 27.

About 400 probationary workers — who were “hired less than a year ago” — were cut from the agency, according to Mr. Duffy, in a social media post on Monday responding to criticism from his Democratic predecessor, Pete Buttigieg.

“Zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go,” Mr. Duffy wrote.

The Transportation Department added in a statement that the agency was continuing to hire and train air traffic controllers and aviation safety workers. However, union representatives say that some of the fired employees served in important support roles.

The layoffs included about 300 workers represented by the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union. Afterward, Dave Spero, the union’s national president, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, called for the Trump administration to halt additional work force reductions at the agency.

The notice of termination sent to employees said that they were being let go because “D.O.T. F.A.A. finds, that based on your performance you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the D.O.T. F.A.A. would be in the public interest,” according to an email an employee received.

Mr. Spero said he disagreed with the rationale for the firings. He said that although the laid-off workers did not include air traffic controllers and aviation safety inspectors, those who were let go were critical support and administrative staff who assisted safety personnel.

The workers who were dismissed included maintenance mechanics and aviation safety assistants, Mr. Spero said.

“They aren’t safety-of-flight people but the rest of us can’t do our jobs without them, and that’s the impact of losing these people,” he said.

Mr. Blumenthal sent a letter to Mr. Duffy on Wednesday calling for the firings to be reversed, saying they posed safety risks.

“A string of recent aviation incidents has shaken the public’s confidence in the safety of air travel and the trust placed in the agencies responsible for keeping our skies safe, the F.A.A. and Department of Transportation,” Mr. Blumenthal said in the letter.

In addition to the layoffs, anxiety grew in the aviation industry after employees from Mr. Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, visited the F.A.A.’s air-traffic command center in Warrenton, Va., on Monday as well as a facility that manages air traffic in and out of the nation’s capital.

Representatives for Mr. Musk’s team, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Duffy said in a social-media post on Sunday that the visit would allow the SpaceX team members to see the system firsthand so they could better understand the technology challenges that air traffic controllers face.

“America deserves safe, state-of-the-art air travel, and President Trump has ordered that I deliver a new, world-class air traffic control system that will be the envy of the world,” Mr. Duffy wrote. “To do that, I need advice from the brightest minds in America.”

A new Gallup poll shows President Trump’s approval rating at 45 percent, two points lower than it was in his first week of office, with 51 percent disapproving of his job so far. His approval rating is 15 points below the average for mid-February of all other elected presidents since 1953, but it is five points higher than it was in February 2017.

Some 42 percent of voters approved of President Trump’s handling of the economy, lower than his rating on the issue in February 2017 (48 percent) and his lowest ever in the poll.

A federal judge said today that the Trump administration had created a “mess” and “potential inconsistencies” in its directives for overseas workers left stranded by the attempt to all but dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development. Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had placed a temporary restraining order barring the Trump administration from placing U.S.A.I.D. workers on administrative leave and forcing those abroad to return within 30 days.

At today’s hearing, Judge Nichols asked the Trump administration to submit answers by noon Thursday clarifying its policies on the choices given to overseas employees, before the restraining order expires at midnight. “I am at a loss,” he said at one point, adding that he was struggling to understand “just what the current policy is or would be absent an injunction.”

“The Justice Department’s authority to freeze assets is a serious power that it should exercise only when supported by evidence that the assets can be traced to a crime,” Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and three other lawmakers wrote in a letter to the agency’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz.

“The reports that Ms. Cheung was pressured to circumvent this standard suggest a deliberate attempt to weaponize the Justice Department for political purposes,” they wrote.

The climate funding stems from a law former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, which aimed to invest billions of dollars in clean energy.

As part of the law, Congress directed the Environmental Protection Agency to grant money to states, local governments and nonprofit groups working to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

President Trump campaigned on a promise to claw back funding from the law, and called global warming a “scam.” When he came into office, he ordered agencies including the E.P.A. to freeze grants and loans, including those that had already been obligated by the government. According to the letter from lawmakers, the funding Ms. Cheung was asked to investigate came from initiatives aimed at helping communities put in place programs that would reduce climate pollution and deploy more wind, solar and other clean energy.

In a related move, Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, ordered an internal review of Biden-era funding. As proof of there being mishandling of funds by the previous administration, he cited a video produced last year by Project Veritas, a right-wing group known for trying to entrap political opponents with covert recordings.

In the video, an unidentified person who said he was an E.P.A. employee discussed a rush to spend money authorized by the law before the end of the Biden term. “It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing like gold bars off the edge,” he said in the video.

In her resignation letter, Ms. Cheung said that officials in the Justice Department’s office of the deputy attorney general, headed by Emil Bove III, also cited that video as a reason to open a criminal probe.

Mr. Markey, in his letter, said that Ms. Cheung’s resignation followed a “troubling trend.” Three other senators — Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland; Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island; and Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont — signed the letter.

The Justice Department inspector general’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

He continued: “We need both Chambers to pass the House Budget.”

The president’s comments did little to end the monthslong debate on Capitol Hill about how best to roll out his sweeping legislative agenda, which includes enhanced border enforcement and a range of tax cuts.

Senate Republicans said they planned to continue with their tactic of advancing Mr. Trump’s agenda in pieces — by first moving a border-enforcement bill — and expressed skepticism that House Republicans, who have been riven by bitter infighting, would be able to reconcile their differences to produce a final product.

“He’s made it clear for a long time that he would prefer one big, beautiful bill, and we’re fine with that too,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, said after Mr. Trump’s post. “If the House can produce one big, beautiful bill, we’re prepared to work with them to get that across the finish line. But we believe that the president also likes optionality.”

Mr. Trump’s announcement came just hours after he gave conflicting directions to congressional Republicans on how they should proceed with regards to cuts to social safety net programs.

In an appearance Tuesday evening on Fox News, Mr. Trump was adamant that there should be no cuts to Medicaid, the health care program for America’s poor, or other entitlement programs.

“Social Security won’t be touched, other than this fraud or something we’re going to find,” he said. “It’s going to be strengthened, but won’t be touched. Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff is going to be touched.”

But by the next morning Mr. Trump was endorsing House Republicans’ budget bill, which has deep cuts to Medicaid on the table.

The apparent contradiction made one thing clear: The budget process is about to get increasingly messy.

“You have a lot of people who’ve been talking about fiscal responsibility and cutting spending forever, and then can’t point to anything they’re really comfortable doing,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which argues Congress needs to get serious about addressing the nation’s $36 trillion debt.

“Reducing spending and raising taxes isn’t popular,” she said. “Neither is exercise and eating healthy. We’re making some really shortsighted decisions in terms of continuing to run up the debt.”

Republicans are trying to perform a tricky tightrope walk in their effort to extend Mr. Trump’s $4 trillion in proposed tax cuts. But they want to do so without increasing American’s debt, which has risen to record levels. To close the gap, they will need to find deep cuts elsewhere in the budget.

So far, House Republicans have been eyeing a range of changes to Medicaid, including to limit the amount the federal government pays to states, which could save the federal government hundreds of millions.

Democrats have sought to focus public attention on the fact that the plan opens the door to cuts to Medicaid, a program polling shows is widely popular.

“The math doesn’t add up and the only way he’s going to be able to do it is to go after Medicaid,” Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, said Wednesday. “It’s really an appalling agenda.”

The House budget resolution lays out broad spending targets by committee, but doesn’t name specific cuts. The plan instructs the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid, to come up with at least $880 billion in cuts. A wish list circulated by the House Budget Committee contained numerous options to reshape Medicaid, which covers 72 million poor and disabled Americans. Many of its proposals focus on different ways to make state governments pay more.

Mr. Trump has never been the model of consistency. He has taken contradictory positions on a wide range of issues, including abortion, the Affordable Care Act, state and local tax deductions and key provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to name a few.

But the issue of whether to make changes to Medicaid to free up money for tax cuts is particularly thorny.

Speaker Mike Johnson has endorsed adding work requirements to Medicaid and cutting down on waste, but he argued that position isn’t inconsistent with the president’s view. Those moves, however, are likely to save only a small fraction of the money needed.

“Medicaid has never been on the chopping block,” Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said at a recent news conference, adding: “If you eliminate fraud, waste, abuse in Medicaid, you’ve got a huge amount of money that you can spend on real priorities for the country.”

He added: “If you add work requirements into Medicaid, it makes sense to people. It’s common sense.”

President Trump began a speech at an investment conference in Miami Beach, Fla., by shouting out attendees from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the event’s host, a group that included Elon Musk; Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi’s Public Investment Fund; and Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, the Saudi ambassador. “The best and most successful investors on earth are now racing to invest in the United States,” Trump said.

Trump is arguing that there is no better time to invest in America than during his presidency. “If you want to build the future, push boundaries, unleash breakthroughs, transform industries and make a fortune — because you want to make a fortune,” he said. “There’s no better place on Earth than the current and future United States of America under a certain president named Donald J. Trump.”

It turns out Dr. Oz is also a sizable investor in the supplement company, according to filings released on Wednesday by the Office of Government Ethics.

Dr. Oz pledged to sell the vast majority of his multimillion-dollar holdings, which are varied and include investments in numerous health care companies and two artificial intelligence firms.

But the fate of his iHerb holding, one of the largest in his portfolio and valued at an unspecified figure in the range of $5 million to $25 million, is unclear, according to experts who reviewed his disclosure forms.

In one filing, Dr. Oz pledged to divest his iHerb holdings “as soon as practicable but not later than 90 days after confirmation” by the Senate to the government post.

In another government disclosure, he repeated that language but then held open the possibility that even once he is at the helm of the agency, he might retain some iHerb stock until the company goes public or is bought. Either of those events could cause the stocks to soar and result in a windfall for Dr. Oz.

Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics, said that the conflicting language in the disclosures left it vague as to whether he would sell his holdings. “It is poorly drafted and unclear,” she said, noting it even contained a typographical error.

Richard W. Painter, a former ethics official in the administration of George W. Bush, said the wording was ambiguous. “I cannot figure out if he is going to sell or not,” he said.

Dr. Oz, 64, also indicated in the filings that he would retain a financial interest in an entity called iHerb Oz Partners L.L.C., created in 2023 when he became the company’s pitchman. What the entity does is unknown, and so is whether it has a separate ownership stake in iHerb.

Christopher Krepich, a spokesman for Dr. Oz, declined to discuss the apparent discrepancy.

Dr. Oz, a heart surgeon who rose to fame as the host of a daytime television show that ran for 13 seasons, has frequently been criticized for supporting questionable medical treatments and for the promotion of products on his show. He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022.

His financial filings underscore how wealthy Dr. Oz and his family are, with a net worth somewhere in the neighborhood of roughly $90 million to $335 million. Lisa Oz, his wife, is among numerous heirs to one of the nation’s largest private companies, Asplundh Tree Expert, which provides tree-removal and related services for utilities and municipalities. It is impossible to pinpoint the couple’s net worth because the financial disclosure forms allow estimates of asset values to be listed under a wide range.

Dr. Oz is preparing for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, meeting with various lawmakers in Washington. The panel has not set a date for his testimony but it is expected to do so in the coming weeks now that his financial and ethics papers have been filed with the committee.

His investments in iHerb and in other health care companies are likely to be a focus for some lawmakers. As the country’s top Medicare official, he could press private plans that offer insurance under the federal program to increase their coverage of vitamins and supplements sold by iHerb and others.

Dr. Oz listed dozens of investments, including in health care companies that do business with the U.S. government, that he said he would end his associations with and would divest from. Among those holdings are UnitedHealth Group, the conglomerate that sells private insurance plans for older adults on Medicare, pharmaceutical giants like AbbVie and Eli Lilly, the for-profit hospital chain HCA Healthcare and the supplement company PanTheryx.

In the new filings, Dr. Oz also listed his role as an adviser to three health care companies: Eko Health, the maker of digital stethoscopes; Housey Pharma; and Cardiology Partners, a Florida cardiology practice. In the government ethics agreement, he said that if confirmed he would resign from his role at those companies and divest his holdings in them.

He also said he planned to divest his stock in several major technology companies, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. He owns Bitcoin valued at as much as $1 million. It was not among the assets listed in the filings that he would sell.

Mr. Trump’s revisionism sets the stage for a geopolitical about-face unlike any in generations as the president embarks on negotiations with Russia that Ukraine fears could come at its own expense. By vilifying Mr. Zelensky and shifting blame for the war from Moscow to Kyiv, Mr. Trump seems to be laying a predicate for withdrawing support for an ally under attack.

The sharp exchange of words between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky this week signaled how much has changed with the inauguration of a new president in Washington. Even for Mr. Trump, who has never been a fan of Ukraine and has long expressed admiration of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the vitriol expressed toward Mr. Zelensky drew gasps of surprise on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

A day after falsely declaring that Ukraine started the war, Mr. Trump doubled down on Wednesday with a remarkable broadside against the leader of an ally, built on a lie. “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.

It was a striking distortion of reality. Mr. Zelensky did not talk the United States into giving him money “to go into a war.” He and his country were attacked, and only then did the United States under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. respond with expansive financial assistance. And even then, it has been only about a third of what Mr. Trump claimed.

But Mr. Trump went on, characterizing Mr. Zelensky not as a defender of democracy but an enemy of it. “He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle,’” Mr. Trump wrote. “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”

While Ukraine has suspended elections during the war, Mr. Zelensky was in fact originally elected by a landslide in 2019 in a contest deemed free and fair by the international community — unlike Mr. Putin, an actual dictator who has stayed in power for a quarter-century through elections widely deemed to be farces. And Mr. Zelensky enjoys a 57 percent approval rating, according to a new poll, higher than Mr. Trump’s.

The president’s “dictator” jab came just hours before he referred to himself online regarding a domestic issue as “the king,” followed up by a White House official who posted an illustration of Mr. Trump in royal garb.

The president’s attack on Mr. Zelensky, while sparing any harsh words for Mr. Putin, provoked outrage among European leaders, Democrats in Washington and even a few Republicans who were willing to speak out.

“Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war,” Mike Pence, his former vice president, said online. “Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.”

Charles M. Kupperman, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term, compared the president’s actions to the British prime minister who tried to appease Adolf Hitler by agreeing to give him part of Czechoslovakia. “Trump’s name will be remembered in history as a surrender artist just like Neville Chamberlain,” Mr. Kupperman said in an interview.

Moscow, on the other hand, seemed delighted. Dmitri A. Medvedev, a senior adviser to Mr. Putin who served as caretaker president for four years, cited Mr. Trump’s comments about Mr. Zelensky being a dictator without elections. “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” he wrote online. Mr. Trump, he added, “is 200 percent right. Bankrupt clown.”

There is of course a long history of American presidents growing frustrated with the leaders of foreign allies they were trying to help during wartime. Franklin D. Roosevelt never liked Charles de Gaulle even as U.S. troops fought to liberate France. John F. Kennedy was so alienated by South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem that his government did not discourage a coup.

George W. Bush and Barack Obama both found Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq to be mercurial and unconstructive. Mr. Biden certainly grew angry with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel even as he backed his war on Hamas. For that matter, Mr. Biden’s relationship with Mr. Zelensky could be prickly at times.

But those presidents still supported the allies’ cause, while it is not clear that Mr. Trump does. And as with so many things, Mr. Trump goes much further than his predecessors in terms of public vitriol against an ally facing an existential threat, employing the kind of language that presidents rarely use about an ostensible friend.

Vice President JD Vance, who in 2022 said that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine,” went as far as to warn Mr. Zelensky not to fight back. After Mr. Zelensky complained on Wednesday that Mr. Trump was “caught in a web of disinformation,” Mr. Vance told The Daily Mail that such comments would only backfire.

“The idea that Zelensky is going to change the president’s mind by bad-mouthing him in public media,” he said, is “an atrocious way to deal with this administration.”

Mr. Trump has never been particularly sympathetic to Ukraine even before the latest fighting. As far back as his first campaign for president in 2016, he signaled that he could accept Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and expressed admiration for Mr. Putin’s strength.

His disregard for Ukraine later grew into outright animosity as he became persuaded that Ukraine had intervened in the 2016 election against him, repeating a propaganda line pushed by Russia, which actually did intervene in the election on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, his ally and lawyer who was in touch with Ukrainian figures seeking influence, encouraged this line of thinking, so much so that Mr. Trump increasingly saw Ukraine as a personal adversary.

“Trump was driven in his first term by the intense desire to disprove any Russian collusion in the 2016 election,” Mr. Kupperman recalled. “He wanted to demonstrate he won without any outside influence or interference, and it gnawed at him when it came to allegations that he won because of Russian assistance. Ukraine became one path to demonstrate he won without any such assistance.”

That ultimately led to the famous phone call with Mr. Zelensky in 2019 pushing Ukraine to help tarnish Mr. Biden, then the leading Democratic candidate for president, by announcing a corruption investigation. Mr. Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine at the same time and only released it under pressure by advisers and Republican senators. Revelations about his actions led to his impeachment by the House later that year.

When Russia mounted its full-scale invasion in 2022, Mr. Trump offered little sympathy or support for Ukraine, even as blue-and-yellow flags went up around the United States in solidarity. In the days leading up to the attack, in fact, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Putin’s “genius” move in putting pressure on Ukraine.

In the years since, he has repeatedly questioned Mr. Biden’s decision to devote so much American money to defending Ukraine, much as the commentator Tucker Carlson and others on the far right of the Republican Party have, even while more mainstream party leaders were criticizing Mr. Biden for not doing more.

In response to Mr. Trump’s pressure, House Republicans blocked a new aid request for months, undercutting Ukrainian forces and giving Russian invaders time to regroup and stabilize their positions. Only after G.O.P. allies and foreign dignitaries lobbied him to relent did he permit House Republicans to let the aid go through.

But while many Americans might understandably oppose investing taxpayer dollars in someone else’s war, Mr. Trump goes further by questioning whether Ukraine is legitimately the injured party. Several times in recent days, he has expressed great distress over how many people have been killed and how much of the country has been destroyed.

Yet in doing so, he points to Mr. Zelensky, rather than Mr. Putin, as the author of all that carnage. “I love Ukraine,” he wrote on Wednesday, “but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died.”

On Wednesday, as representatives of the United States and Russia met for their most extensive conversation in years, to agree to work on a peace settlement without Ukraine’s presence and to discuss the possibility of American oil companies doing hundreds of billions of dollars in business in Russia, several Republican senators dismissed the talks as preliminary.

Here’s a look at some of their statements, then and now.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina

What he said: “If you’re worried about being too provocative about Russia, stop worrying. Stop worrying. You are not too provocative — we need to up our game when it comes to Russia.”

Mr. Graham made those remarks last June while introducing a bipartisan resolution to designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, a label currently reserved for North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Iran.

He has often called Mr. Putin a “thug,” and previously compared him to Hitler. Mr. Graham has also called for the Russian leader to be assassinated: “Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate leader; he is a war criminal that needs to be dealt with.”

What he is saying now: Last week at the Munich Security Conference, Mr. Graham praised Mr. Trump as a strong leader who could “get a good deal for Ukraine.”

He also voiced support for a deal Mr. Trump proposed that would grant the United States a 50 percent interest in all of Ukraine’s mineral resources in exchange for American support — the offer that Mr. Zelensky has rejected.

“I don’t care if they meet Putin in Cleveland,” he said of the Trump administration. “I don’t care if they talk, I don’t care if they go on vacation. It doesn’t matter to me what you do as long as you get it right.”

Senator John Thune of South Dakota

What he said: “America cannot retreat from the world stage. American leadership is desperately needed now more than I think any time in recent history, and we need to make sure that Ukraine has the weaponry and the resources that it needs to defeat the Russians.”

Last March, Mr. Thune pushed for the passage of a Ukraine aid bill and stressed that if the United States did not arm Ukraine that Russia would cinch a victory in Ukraine and “roll into a NATO country,” igniting a conflict that could involve American troops.

“We’re going to be sending American sons and daughters,” he said in an interview on PBS News Hour.

What he is saying now: This week, Mr. Thune, now the majority leader, told reporters that the conflict has “dragged on” and that the United States needed to “bring an end to the war.”

Of Ukraine, he said, “at some point, they’ve got to be part of that conversation.”

“This thing’s dragged on for three years now. We need to bring an end to the war, and at some point they’ve got to be part of that conversation. So hopefully they’ll figure out a path forward that brings the war to an end, that maintains a sovereign Ukraine, and prevents the further incursion of Russia in that region, the world, in Europe.”

Senator Jim Risch of Idaho

What he said: “Putin is not going to stop with Ukraine” if he wins the war. “If we end up in war with Russia, what we’re spending here is a drop in the bucket by comparison. I deal with this every day and it’s on my mind every day.”

Mr. Risch, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has called the Russian invasion of Ukraine a “challenge” confronting the United States and said that the nation should “deny Russia a victory.” Ahead of a vote on an aid package to Ukraine in 2023, Mr. Risch gave a full-throated defense of funding aid and arms to the nation.

He also blamed President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for not being able to articulate the need for aiding Ukraine.

What he is saying now: Mr. Risch has called the peace talks “a work in progress” and said he would give the Trump administration “space” to figure out how to negotiate.

“But obviously, the Ukrainians have to be there — and the Europeans for that matter, too.”

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa

What she has said: “The United States, Ukraine and the free world have the will and the means to stop Vladimir Putin’s tyranny.”

Ms. Ernst spoke on the Senate floor in 2022 after joining a bipartisan delegation to Europe less than one month after Russia invaded Ukraine, and declared that Mr. Putin’s “best days are behind him.”

She criticized the Biden administration, for its actions early in the war, as attempting to appease Mr. Putin.

“Letting an adversary define the military’s rules of engagement, letting an aggressor dictate the boundaries of our response is not just a folly — it’s suicidal. The administration crossed their fingers and hoped Putin would play nice.”

Ms. Ernst added that the nation’s “unshakable commitment to allies and partners keeps Americans prosperous and our families safe.”

What she is saying now: Ms. Ernst told reporters on Tuesday that she was glad Russia was at the negotiating table and brushed off any concern over Ukraine’s lack of representation. “Obviously I’m a huge supporter of Ukraine, but it’s just the beginning.”

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas

What he has said: “It’s not just Vladimir Putin and Europe that’s watching; the rest of the world is watching and most particularly Xi Jinping is watching what happens in Ukraine,” Mr. Cotton said in March 2022 on Fox News Radio, referring to China’s leader.

He suggested the United States would look weak to Mr. Xi if it did not stand up to Russia. “If he sees the United States and the West faltering and pressing Ukraine to sue for peace while Russian troops are still on Ukraine soil, he is much more likely to go for the jugular in Taiwan.”

In an interview on CNN during the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Cotton shrugged off concerns that Mr. Trump would not stand by Ukraine in the conflict with Russia.

“President Trump has always been strong in defense of Ukraine,” Mr. Cotton said, and he praised Mr. Trump for sending weapons during his first term.

What he is saying now: On Tuesday, while promoting a new book on China during an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Cotton called for “getting creative” to try to reach a truce and echoed Mr. Graham’s support for making a deal with Ukraine on its mineral resources.

On CNN later that day, he defended Mr. Trump’s establishing “diplomatic channels” with Russia and accused Mr. Biden of “tempting” Russia to invade.