It’s hardly a secret that President Donald Trump and his administration have several major issues with the establishment media.
They’ve fought with the media, they’ve bickered with the media, and they’ve fact-checked the media.
Despite that — or perhaps because of it — it seems the Trump administration has adopted a new strategy to deal with perpetually antagonistic reporters: “Your mom.”
HuffPost put out a piece on Thursday focusing on Trump’s forthcoming summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The meeting is set to take place in Budapest, Hungary, and that was a red flag for HuffPost.
As HuffPost described Budapest, it’s “the city where Russia promised not to invade Ukraine three decades ago if it gave up its nuclear weapons.”
Russia obviously did not keep that promise, and the clear implication from HuffPost is that Trump is wasting his time with this meeting, especially in Budapest.
“It is unclear whether Trump is aware of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity,” Huffpost noted. “Putin first violated that promise in 2014 when he invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, and again in 2022 with his full-scale invasion.”
But when HuffPost approached members of the Trump administration to spin this damnable tale, they were met with… something different.
Do you trust the establishment media?
HuffPost asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt whose idea it was to facilitate this meeting in Hungary.
Leavitt replied, “Your mom did.”
When White House Communications Director Steven Cheung was approached with the same question, he proffered the slightest of variations to Leavitt’s answer: “Your mom.”
Those responses did not sit well with outspoken Trump critic and far-left pundit Mehdi Hasan, who posted about the HuffPost article and the Trump team response, and added: “Everytime you think they can’t sink lower.”
Well, the official White House rapid response team made clear what they thought of Hasan’s consternation in a follow-up X post:
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) October 17, 2025
To be clear, not all of the more substantive answers HuffPost got were willing to rip the president’s decision, either.
HuffPost approached Jan Techau, a Berlin-based analyst for the Center for European Policy Analysis, and the analyst largely felt that this was nothing but a productive, positive move for the president.
“The visit there serves him well on many fronts,” Techau explained. “He can demonstrate his absolute willingness to broker peace, he can support his friend [Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban] and stick it to the rest of the Europeans in their own backyard, he can be both pro-Ukrainian and pro-Putin, he acknowledges the Central Europeans’ need for America’s presence and re-assurance, and he can once more show the ICC what he thinks of them.”
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