Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rebuffed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invitation for a summit in Moscow, saying Friday that the Kremlin leader “can come to” Kyiv instead. 

“He can come to Kyiv. I can’t go to Moscow when my country’s under missiles, under attack, each day,” Zelensky said in an interview with ABC News that was released Friday evening. “I can’t go to the capital of this terrorist.”

The Ukrainian leader said that Putin’s offer for a summit on his own turf was meant to “postpone the meeting” and he reiterated that he is ready to meet with the Russian president in “any kind of format.”

Still, Putin has questioned the need for a meeting as Russian officials have suggested direct peace talks in the more than three-year-long war are still a way off. On Wednesday, the Kremlin leader suggested Zelensky come to Moscow instead.

“We could do — I’ve never refused to do that if that leads to some positive outcomes,” Putin said of a potential huddle. “[President Trump] asked me if it was possible. I said, ‘Yes, it was possible.’ I said, ‘Let him come to Moscow.'”

As part of his quest to end the war in Eastern Europe, Trump has pushed for Zelensky and Putin to schedule an in-person meeting, particularly after meeting with both leaders in the U.S., separately, last month. 

Recently, the president cast doubt about the prospects of a summit, suggesting that “maybe they have to fight a little longer,” but expressed more confidence in a trilateral meeting between the three world leaders.

“A [trilateral] would happen. A [bilateral], I don’t know about, but a tri will happen. But, you know, sometimes people aren’t ready for it,” the president said in last week’s interview with The Daily Caller. 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz also suggested last week that it is “clear” that a meeting between Putin and Zelensky will not take place. 

Zelensky told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz in Friday’s interview that the Russian president is “playing games” with the U.S. 

“If a person doesn’t want to meet during the war, of course, he can propose something which can’t be acceptable by me or by others,” he said.

There is stepping into a lion’s den, and then there is the much more dangerous option: stepping into a congressional hearing before a pride of attention-seeking senators looking to rip a fellow human apart for a multitude of self-serving reasons.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chose the much more dangerous option this week, and has the rhetorical scars to prove it.

Kennedy appeared before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, and it went as expected for anyone with even a day of experience in Washington. Although he took some bipartisan heat, it was mostly Democratic senators who went out of their way to smear Kennedy, brow-beat him, interrupt him incessantly whenever he did try to answer their questions or defend himself, and preen before the cameras.

There is only one other person who brings out a greater unhinged reaction among Democrats and the far left: President Trump. Over the last decade or so, the rage directed at him has accurately been described as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Over the decades — and especially as president — Trump has been correct about multiple issues and has done great good. Most of the left will acknowledge none of it.

Much of that irrational hatred and denial of basic facts for partisan advantage has now seemingly been directed at Kennedy. Many who watched Democratic senators’ vicious and relentless attacks on Kennedy might surmise that some are now afflicted with “Kennedy Derangement Syndrome.”

Ironically, it is Kennedy himself who can offer them the cure for what ails them: a fair and reasoned discussion regarding the health of the American people, free of partisan histrionics.

Soon after hearing about the gauntlet Kennedy had to run, Trump defended his HHS secretary at a luncheon at the White House, saying, “he’s a very good person … He means very well … I guarantee a lot of the people at this table like RFK Jr., and I do … I heard he did very well today. It’s not your standard talk, I would say that, and that has to do with medical and vaccines. But if you look at what’s going on in the world with health and look at this country also with regard to health, I like the fact that he’s different.”

Trump may like “different,” because he and Kennedy share many of the same traits when it comes to a positive interpretation of that word. Three years ago, I authored a book, “The 56: Liberty Lessons From Those Who Risked All to Sign the Declaration of Independence.” I wrote it to defend those men from being smeared and “canceled” by leftists during the woke era, and also to inform readers of the immense courage, vision and sacrifice of those Founding Fathers.

While doing research, I learned that many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence would have been considered quite wealthy by today’s standards — just as I learned that the vast majority of the wealthy in 1776 chose to side with the tyrannical British crown rather than risk their money and status. Not so among the 56, who instead asked themselves the two most critically important questions of their lives: “If not now, when? If not me, who?”

Those Founding Fathers could have remained in the shadows, like so many of the wealthy of their time, enjoying the good life while remaining out of harm’s way.

The same applies today to Trump and Kennedy. Both men knew that if they dared to step into the political arena to fight for their values, they would be mercilessly attacked by entrenched elites and special interests whose policies and grifts they threatened. And so they have been — Trump most of all.

Attacking Trump and Kennedy is great for fundraising and appeasing the radical left, but the name-calling, the smears, the lawfare, the partisan raids and denial of facts do the American people no good. This is especially so for those who may be sick or teetering on the edge of major health issues.

For decades, the chronic disease epidemic in our nation has mutated unchecked, costing millions of Americans their lives. To that greater point, during the hearing and after being harassed and insulted by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Kennedy decided he had enough and fired back. “Senator, you’ve sat in that chair how long?” he asked. “Twenty to 25 years while the chronic disease of our children went up to 76 percent. And you said nothing. You never asked the question why it’s happening. Why is this happening?”

Again, like Trump, Kennedy needed none of this. He could have been living the good life in peace. Instead, he shoulders ever-increasing insults and accusations each day because of his quest to “Make America Healthy Again.”

Like it or not, the government-created and government-run health agencies have become bloated, politicized, massively bureaucratic and wasters of trillions of tax-payers’ money.

Trump and Kennedy want to reverse that so those agencies can once again focus entirely on the mission of making Americans healthier. The people’s representatives need to climb out of the sandbox and help them achieve that desperately needed goal.

Cooperation instead of defamation. Just what the doctor ordered.

Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official.

Unless the Supreme Court rules otherwise, President Trump will soon require approval from Congress to keep in place the broad-based tariffs he has imposed, altering the nation’s social contract and increasing economic inequality.

Trump and his Cabinet have boasted that tariffs, now averaging almost 20 percent, will bring in tens or even hundreds of billions annually in new revenue into federal coffers. Alongside this narrative, administration officials claim that the tariff revenue can replace income taxes to fund government operations and pay interest on the national debt.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals underscored just before Labor Day that tariffs are taxes — and that only Congress has the power to raise taxes.

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act upon which Trump hinges most of his tariffs does not authorize the president to impose tariffs or any other tax, the court ruled. Trump’s unconstitutional use of these emergency powers is particularly poignant because his tariffs, which are expected to raise as much as $3.3 trillion over 10 years, affect a major part of the U.S. economy.

For most of our country’s early history, tariffs served as the federal government’s primary source of revenue. Congress set tariffs, not the president; income and other taxes were later added to cover the cost of major wars and expanding government services. “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” according to the majority opinion, “Congress began to delegate to the Executive limited authority to ‘activate or suspend’ tariff rates through international agreements,” as the U.S. became more engaged in global affairs.

Today, in their 7-4 ruling, the judges join a growing number of economists and business analysts who conceptualize tariffs as sales taxes passed along to the citizenry in the form of higher prices. This year’s historic spike in tariffs — coupled with the tax cuts just made permanent by Congress — make the U.S. tax system more regressive by shifting the tax burden toward the lower-income end of the scale.

“Heavy reliance on sales and excise taxes makes tax systems more regressive,” the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy states in its annual Who Pays? report. “A progressive, graduated rate income tax makes overall tax systems less regressive or more progressive.”

Federal tax policy analysts measuring the effects of suddenly higher and fast-changing tariffs are in a whole new territory. But they can look to states’ experience in weighing the impact and fairness of a variety of taxes, including those on sales, income and property.

At the state level, a proposal to impose a 20 percent sales tax and flatter income tax, as Trump and Congress have essentially just done, would be decried as unfair, because the burden would fall disproportionately on people with lower incomes.

By affirming the appeals court decision, the Supreme Court could provide an off-ramp with political cover for Trump’s administration to back away from tariffs increasingly perceived as harmful to Trump’s working-class base — and bring back the Constitution’s intent that lawmakers control the power of the purse.

To control the national debt, for example, Congress could replace Trump’s jumbled high tariffs with a smaller national sales tax covering both foreign and domestic products. It could also impose a value added tax, as many other countries do. Or national sales taxes could be set slightly higher for imports.

The important thing is that Congress needs to act — and a ruling to that effect could be a win-win if it preserves the separation of powers and gives Trump an escape route from a misguided tariff scheme.

Karl Polzer is founder of the Center on Capital and Social Equity.