Ben Rhodes

He's just some guy who listened to some podcasts and tries to put nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that. Sorry about that. All of you people. This is YouTube. This is YouTube. Yeah, exactly. YouTube.

Yeah, but it felt like that J.D. Vance and Trump wanted some version of this outcome. They didn't want to go exactly like this, but they wanted to smack him around and say he was ungrateful and tell him to thank Mr. Trump. And again, what I find so. It's appalling about it, but it's interesting.

We have to understand this is that, you know, Trump's, you know, the headline in foreign policy is he's completely switched sides. And it's now the U.S. and Russia against Europe and Ukraine, the U.S. wanting to be in this alignment with big autocratic countries, Russia, China, the Gulf, etc., But it also mirrors, Tommy, what Trump does at home. He doesn't really pick on people his own size.

It's undocumented people. It's trans people. It's a country that's been invaded like Ukraine. It's people in Gaza that he's dunking on and posting weird videos about the Riviera that he's going to build. This guy is not tough. Tough people like would pick on Putin.

Tough people would like not be terrified of Putin and beating the shit out of Zelensky on television and then telling him it's his fault. And guess who sees that? The world sees that. Like MAGA base will, you know, be like, oh, this is great. Look at Trump. Own the libs because they think Zelensky sucks.

I mean, your point about Pennsylvania, it's not just – you gave up the game on that, but they also equate Ukraine with kind of libs or something, which is super weird, by the way, because it used to be the opposite.

That was the talking point forever. Now Obama looks a much different light compared to Trump. But I mean – The rest of the world doesn't live in the megaverse. The rest of the world lives in reality, and they're just seeing a bully picking on someone smaller to make himself look tough.

Not even close, yeah. This is unlike anything that has taken place in my entire lifetime. And, you know, I have to mind my brain. I mean, I assume there were some tough meetings, you know, in the Civil War. But, yeah, I never never we've never seen anything like it. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the whole purpose of this was to, again, further make Trump look tough. Like he got Ukraine to bend to his will and give us access to these rare earth materials that, as you said, take, you know, these would not be mined in Trump's presidency. And if and when they are, so what? What is it? What on earth does this have to do with ending the war?

It has nothing to do with ending the war. It's not a security guarantee to Ukraine to say that like there might be some joint ventures down the line to get some rare earth materials that Trump probably doesn't even know what they do. You know, I mean, so this always felt like this kind of weird facade. And I do just, you know, to put a point on it, like Waltz and Rubio.

For them to be going along with this charade like fucking Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister. These guys were talking tough about Ukraine like a year ago. This is what happens when you sell your soul to Donald Trump. And if there's one thing that Zelensky's visit achieved is it exposed the full truth of what he's dealing with.

No, it's a huge issue. But ironically, Tommy, I know a lot about this issue from the prism of climate change, because these are critical to battery technologies, to solar panels and the Chinese wind turbines. And the reality is, if you really cared about it, you wouldn't dismantle USAID because you'd be trying to be in Africa. where there's a ton of these critical minerals.

In South America, there are a ton of critical minerals in places that are not currently invaded by Russia. Like, you know, making agreements with Chile, which has a lot of these deposits, would be a lot more rational than saying we're going to solve our rare earth materials by getting mining rights in Ukraine, you know, that has currently been attacked. It's purely for show.

Well, first of all, the Real America News guy was probably slobbering over Elon Musk in the cabinet meeting yesterday when he was not wearing a suit, was wearing a T-shirt, was wearing a hat and was like amped up on God knows what, standing up, jumping up and down, being a fucking lunatic. Right.

So why is Elon Musk allowed to like, you know, in this guy's view, denigrate the White House, the Oval Office by not wearing a suit? I mean, like, can you imagine? Can you imagine? being Ukrainian and looking at this? I mean, Zelensky dresses like that in solidarity with people in his country.

You know, he wears military colored clothes to express solidarity with troops who are fighting the front line. You don't have to think that's a great sartorial choice. But to fucking just pick on him, what danger has that guy ever been under? Zelensky could have been assassinated in the early days of the war. Incredible reports are all kinds of bounties on his head.

And this kind of complete fucking loser from Real America News is picking on him to make himself look good in front of Mr. Trump and whoever his audience is. And then the Toss thing... Let's just be very clear here, like Russian state media, which I think was like sanctioned or designated. I know, I was trying to remember that.

They were definitely like a part of some, you know, one of the things the Biden administration rolled out. But Russian state media is allowed in the Oval Office and the Associated Press. The wire service for more American newspapers than anybody else is not because they won't call it the Gulf of America.

Like this is where we are, people like we are in a reality in which Russian state media and Russian propaganda is in the Oval Office berating a democratically elected leader of a country under attack, you know, who's being insulted for not wearing a suit. I mean, we just have to get our minds around this thing because we're only six weeks into it, you know.

Again, I think if there's any utility in this, you know, because you might say Zelensky should have just shut his mouth and taken it and then tried to sign his rare steel. And no, but actually, I think it's something useful and just surfacing this, you know, and just clarifying this is where we are. We've learned that Trump has flipped 180 degrees to the Russian side.

We've learned that his approach to peace is to bully Ukraine and ask nothing of Russia. We've learned that the Republican Party in the United States has completed the process of not having any spine and capitulating to Trump's foreign policy. And so what does it mean going forward?

If I'm Europe and Ukraine, I'm saying we need to develop a shared position for this war that is separate from the United States of America. And actually sees that this is the United States and Russia sitting on one side of the negotiating table and Europe and Ukraine sitting on the other. And as dark and as extreme as that sounds, I think that's where we are.

Because Ukrainians, by the way, don't have to stop fighting. There were reports early in the invasion when Russia thought they were going to roll over Kyiv, that they were going to have a guerrilla warfare type approach. So the Ukrainians don't have to agree to Trump's terms that he strikes with Moscow. I think the Ukrainians need to figure out with the Europeans, what are their positions?

What are they insisting on? They're going to have to give a bunch of stuff, including territory. But what can they insist on in terms of a credible ceasefire line, essentially? And then what is a peace force that has British and French troops? There was an interesting comment from Turkey that they might get involved with troops on the ground.

What is a credible European force that can provide some security guarantee and some presence there? And then how do you build a European defense and foreign policy that is totally separate from the United States? Because the United States has switched sides. And I wish that wasn't the case, but I think that's where we are.

And I don't know that just signing some dumb rare earth thing is going to make Trump be nicer to them. It's not. So figure out your own interests and act accordingly. It's what all of us are going to have to do in these Trump years.

Yeah, I think that, like, by any measure, like, tactically, you don't get into a fight with J.D. Vance in the Oval Office. You don't allow yourself to be humiliated by the President of the United States to that extent. Yeah. But I'm not saying this to give him credit because I don't think it was a strategy. I think the utility in it is we know what we're dealing with now. Right.

Like we have the Hegseth like laying down of terms without consulting Ukraine and Europe in which they surrender all their territory and can't be NATO. We have the J.D. Vann speech in Munich endorsing the European far right. We've got Trump calling Zelensky dictator. And now we have this.

And so there can be a new illusions that somehow some committee to save America is going to or Marco Rubio or whoever or Lindsey Graham's going to the Oval Office and convince Trump to suddenly get tough on the Russians. Like so I'm not saying that Zelenci was like playing some chess and, you know, outed this.

I'm saying he messed up by getting baited into this, but there may be something worthwhile that comes out of just clarifying, okay, this is actually where we are. And I can tell you from having been in Munich and different Europeans, this is what the Trump people are like behind closed doors too, from what I hear. They're not just performing for the cameras. This is who they are.

And so now he's got to go back. And I was thinking too, Tommy, like, You know, he made that comment about like, I will step down if it brings peace. Like he's got to be also thinking about that, you know, not stepping down now, but like, you know, like what is what like he's tired.

He's clearly a lightning rod to Trump because Trump wrongly, unfairly sees him as some guy who's like aligned with Trump. things that Trump doesn't like, like democracies and Europeans and internationalists in this country. And so I think he's got to stand up to Trump and try to get the best deal for his people and from the Europeans. And then, you know, that's his mission. And then he's done it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I'm him, I'm going to take a breath and I'm going to talk. I mean, I honestly, frankly, I guess you got to do the Brett Baer car wash, but he can't just go on there and grovel, you know, and Brett Baer will be an asshole. As a side note to Tommy, it's like, Do you remember, like, you know, people would go to finally just go to China.

Okay, stop.

They have to do CCTV, the state media like Fox News has become like the CCTV of the U.S. No doubt. That's pretty dark, too. You know, like that's not normal people. You know, like there's a lot of other people that you could do interviews with, but they know that they like have to talk to Brett Baier and Fox News because that's who Trump wants to talk to. Yeah.

So I will, you know, I'm sure he'll kind of recalibrate this a little bit, but he can't fold or capitulate. And that's also not in his character. And I think you go back, you talk to Macron, you talk to Starmer, you talk to Mertz and Schultz and the Germans. If you're Zelensky and you kind of go back to the drawing board, OK, like what? What's our position?

Our being Europe and Ukraine and this negotiation with the U.S. and Russia.

Historic day.

I thought we'd be talking about like a rare earths agreement.

Yeah, two things stand out to me about this. First, just so people know what Zelensky is talking about, he's talking about the Minsk agreement that was reached in the late Obama administration to essentially freeze the conflict and have some kind of process whereby the Ukrainians had autonomous regions in these places where the Russians had invaded in eastern Ukraine. And what he's saying is,

Putin broke the ceasefire. The last time someone tried to do what Trump's doing, you know, Putin is the one that violated the agreement and reinvaded the country and dramatically escalated. And that's just a fact. It's not an opinion. You know, so this is going to be a reoccurring theme here that Zelensky's saying facts and J.D. Vance and Trump are just basically offering excuses.

Kremlin talking points in response.

And then, Tommy, I said this to you, but for JD Vance to refer to visits that people make to Ukraine as propaganda tours was one of the most triggering things in many that were said today, because what people do when they go to Ukraine is they often visit Bucha, for instance, where there were war crimes committed, where innocent civilians were massacred, where children were killed.

And to call that a propaganda tour is so beyond the pale It's essentially him calling the truth propaganda. When people go to Ukraine, what they see is the reality of a country that's been invaded and bombarded and had tens of thousands of children kidnapped and tens of thousands of people killed. And J.D. Vance calls that the propaganda. And it's it's up is down. It's black is white.

It's just 180 degrees wrong. And I agree with you, Tommy. It felt like J.D. Vance was setting a trap, like he was getting trying to provoke Zelensky to say something that would piss off Trump. Yeah. Which is a pretty fucking dark role for him to be playing.

Yeah. And this context was entirely missing. They seem to be offended by Zelensky pointing out that his country was invaded by Putin. That seemed to offend Trump and J.D. Vance. And I think another piece of context here, Tommy, is Zelensky is a profoundly exhausted person. And you can see it on his face. You can see it on his face. I've heard this from some Europeans.

This guy probably barely sleeps at night. He has been besieged by the Trump administration, bullied into trying to sign this absurd deal for critical minerals. And he flies to Washington because he feels this thing slipping away from him, this thing being US support as kind of a Hail Mary.

And then he sits down and they bring the cameras in and he just starts getting insulted to his face by people who can demonstrate no degree of empathy. I mean, like they don't even, not even a perfunctory, you know, tribute to what the people of Ukraine have done. And they insulted not just Zelensky, this is important, They insulted the Ukrainian people.

He said the only people you can get to fight are conscripts that you force to the front line. So that's insulting the troops. That's insulting the Ukrainians that have been fighting and saying they don't want to be there. They're only there because Zelensky made them go there. When in fact, Putin is the one that conscripts people. Putin is the one that did the mobilization.

And so we can talk later about whether Zelensky erred tactically here, but I have a great deal of empathy for what he had to go through.

Yeah, there's a lot in that one, too, Tommy. I mean, first of all, boy, to say that Zelensky is the one that's gambling with World War Three when Putin is the one that invaded the country. I mean, the Ukrainians didn't want they don't want to be in this war.

Yeah. Yeah. Like what's so fucking bonkers about this is like the the. All the things that Trump and Van Say presuppose that Zelensky somehow wants this war and wanted this war when he was just invaded by Russia. They're the ones that raised the risks of World War III. Then to hear them lecture him about needing to thank Mr. Trump, you know.

first of all, Zelensky always thanks the United States repeatedly. He's done it, by the way, since Trump has been president, expressed gratitude for the support the United States supplies, even though, by the way, Donald Trump is not the one that provided that support. It was Joe Biden and the United States Congress on a bipartisan basis.

But they want Zelensky to behave like, you know, a Trump staffer there. Thank you, Mr. Trump, for being such a great president. And they don't do this

to other leaders you know they don't hector other leaders like this in the oval office they you know they they they they're picking on him they're like schoolyard boys picking on a small injured person to impress their friends and it's like three on one you can hear all of them like chiding him be like yes you were mean yes you did say that it literally sounds like a schoolyard taunting and he didn't insult when did he insult did you do you know what they're referring because he shouldn't insult the u.s he just explained facts facts are insulting to true

Yeah, and he needs everything to be about himself and not about like the reality of what is happening in the world, particularly a reality that is counter to his narrative and inconvenient to him in any way, shape or form. And Zelensky is this guy who's only trying to share facts, you know, and each time he does –

They act as if he has personally offended them and come down even harder on the guy. And by this point in the clip, they're just picking on him. And to say that because he's not kissing Trump's ass, he's insulting the whole country, just shows you what Donald Trump's view of this country is, that he is the only thing that matters.

He, the leader, he, Der Fuhrer, is the only guy, he's the symbol of the nation or something. It's... It's absolutely grotesque. And what we can see here is like little Marco Rubio on the couch, like shrinking deeper and deeper into his seat.

Yeah. And they're just, you know, like, what is he wrong about? You know, like, like nothing that Zelensky said. We can again, we'll talk later about like what his tactical decision making was, but like nothing he said was wrong. And J.D. Vance doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. He's not some expert on like Ukraine and Russia.

So like the night of the election, like every leader of the party is like in a joint interview. It's totally wild. I love it.

Yeah, yeah.

It's crazy. I loved it. I didn't know that either. I was totally nerding out on it. On the election result itself, look, it's bad. The AFD did well. I mean, I saw some people on social media being like, oh, look, they failed. Nobody thought they were going to win. But they got about 20%, which is about... It's a fifth of the population. Yeah, it's a fifth of the population. That's bad.

I'm two-thirds of the way through a three-volume history of the Third Reich, Tommy.

And it's about where they've been polling. The good news is the J.D. Vance, Elon Musk interventions did nothing to help them. So they were polling there before Elon started weighing in. So it is a bit of a rebuke to those guys because they were clearly trying to pump up the AFD. That didn't happen. So that's one takeaway. I think the second thing is now...

Mertz's victory, this moves into the coalition formation, and we'll just have to see if that goes okay. They did, as we talked about last week, move so far right on immigration and some other things that that might make it difficult, but I think in the end you would expect that the threat of the AFD somehow getting into the government will compel.

I hope so, because hopefully Mertz moves a little bit too to make that easier to happen. It's not like he has a massive mandate. He had under 30% of the vote. The only other things that stand out to me This left-wing surge is good. And notably, actually, the Libertarian Party that blew up the coalition didn't even make it to 5%. So, you know, nice, well played there, guys.

I will say, like, she proves that maybe standing up on principle, like, attracts some people your way because they got the late-breaking vote and messaged to people. It's not even like a left-wing.

I'm almost done with the Third Reich in power. It's excellent. It is a little too on the nose, I have to say. The capitulation of all aspects of German society to what they thought was a temporal threat of fascist government. But anyway, we could have like a Nazi book club because I've been doing some deep reading.

center thing it's just like speaking with some conviction appeals to people and i'm glad she's going to clearly be a voice and maybe she can be the oppositionist who can gather some intensity so it's not just afd so what you don't want is that there's a big coalition government and all the energy of opposition goes to the right right maybe she can capture some of that on the left that'd be good the last thing we should talk about though is that mertz in that interview

said some pretty radical things, right?

Okay, so let's go to that.

Yeah. Well, I thought that was an absolutely astonishing, albeit maybe not surprising, statement from him. First of all, this is a right-wing guy. I mean, right-wing for the CDU. And this is not a guy that seems enthusiastic about Elon Musk.

side note i hate that this guy who's a white south african guy is like the american that everybody's talking about but put that aside well you see tesla's down eight percent today because they had really weak sales in europe in part because of this yeah of course but he you know he's he this is not a victory for trump right uh trump's party there is the afd the republican party's sister party in germany is the afd let's be clear about that

So it's interesting to me that even a kind of right wing center right politician in Europe is like, you know, stay the fuck out. I mean, to compare Elon Musk to Russia interfering in German politics is a pretty powerful statement. And I think what this suggests is there is going to be a rapid realignment in Europe. Now, how that plays out, we don't know.

But he was indicating essentially that Europe needs its own defense capabilities. But in a meaningful way. He was talking almost about nuclear issues. Germany is obviously not a nuclear weapons power, but Britain and France are. Maybe some collective security arrangement could be made where they're not relying on the American nuclear security umbrella.

That's a huge conversation. And it would totally change geopolitics if essentially Europe says, we are not going to depend on the United States to be our security guarantee anymore. We're going to be our own security guarantee."

I still recommend Darkness Over Germany, which is a contemporaneous account by a British journalist of like how Germans were dealing with the onset of Nazi Germany. Then there's a book called A Town in the Third Reich that's similar vibes. It's like a reconstruction of how one town dealt with- Is it like The Town, the famous Boston movie? I don't know if there's a role for Affleck.

That's going to ultimately mean that not only do they have a stronger defense capability, and they're talking about plussing up defense spending across the continent, but they're going to have their own views on geopolitics, on whether it's Ukraine, but it could be other issues as well. So I think you should take Mertz's signal as, hey, I'm actually not going to get into bed with these AFD guys.

I want to pull together a German center, albeit in the rightward direction. That is also part of a European response to Trump and Putin and have a kind of a third way here in Europe, which is a pretty rational thing, but it's an indication of how fast the tectonic plates are moving underneath the globe.

And he is his vote sure seem to suffer because of it.

No, that is nice. And I mean, I think the challenge of immigration, again, is it's not that the Social Democrats are super pro-immigration these days. There's very little of that in Germany. It's whether or not immigration policy can remain consistent with EU law, essentially. I think that's a tricky thing he has to manage. And also, you talked about growth. Guess what's helpful to growth?

Immigration. So if you just totally shut the doors, you have aging populations in Europe. How are you going to get growth? One thing we do know, though, is we've got You know, barring something strange happening, the Trump term, you're going to have Mertz in Germany, you're going to have Starmer in the UK because his mandate runs that far.

You have Macron for the next, you know, two years, two years. And so we kind of know the players. Actually, hopefully we'll have a Democratic House at least by the time Macron is gone. So you kind of know, OK, it's Mertz, Starmer, Macron. That's that's not bad lineup. It's, you know, and it runs the gamut from center left to center right. And Macron, uber centrist, you know.

So that's what we're dealing with. And obviously Maloney and plenty of other leaders will be heard from as well.

No, I think the lesson for the center left of the left is is how do you put yourself back on the side of younger people? It's the same thing we're dealing with in this country. And it's not some shortcut like we need a German Joe Rogan or something. You need new messages, new leaders, new media strategies. They're in the same boat as we all are.

By the way, I should say, I mean, we're still waiting for the sequel to The Town. They're doing a sequel to The Town?

And she's super compelling and cool tats.

I'm just saying, I want to know what happened to Affleck. Wasn't he going down to the Florida Keys or something at the end?

Yes.

I guess that's usually the humorous banter.

And how awful people like you and me are.

But I guess that wasn't that funny. No, I thought it worked.

Yes, it is, Tommy. I have my Paz de the World mug full of Diet Coke here. We may need a second Paz de the World in Trump years that is after ours with, like,

Stronger stuff. I'm in. Because listeners of this podcast, world does that there. No, like we were pretty on the nose on some of these people. Like we've been monitoring the Kash Patel situation for years. I did not have this one game down. This is a real wild card for me too, man. I did not think Dan Bongino, I thought maybe he'd like get access to Trump, you know, as deputy director of the FBI.

It's a wild development.

a job. I mean, it's not, you know, but yes. And because first of all, I mean, you made this comment in our text thread and also on PSA, but this is like a pretty rapid, I don't know what else an American slide to autocracy would look like other than what we've seen. And if you look across the board, Patel, Bongino, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, like this is what it looks like.

This is a bunch of total loyalists, including, you know, some unhinged personalities in the most powerful positions in government. And just to get a little deeper into this deputy director of the FBI role, this person is basically in charge of managing, you know, not just kind of the vast enterprise of the FBI, incredibly sensitive investigations.

Yeah, like approving very sensitive... law enforcement decisions to go after certain targets or to not go after other targets. This person negotiates agreements. When I would interface with the deputy director of the FBI, I was often- Sean Joyce was the best.

Greatest Boston accent you've ever heard. And by the way, going out on a limb, Not a Democrat. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but like these are not.

Again, repeating the refrain, like the FBI, this idea that the libs love the FBI, that like wiretap Martin Luther King. This is crazy, right? And so he's going to be involved in negotiations with foreign governments. We talked on this program about like the deputies committee meeting. That's like the situation room meetings on sensitive matters.

The deputy FBI director would be there if it was a kind of counterterrorism issue, if it was anything with an international dimension. So this is not a job where, I don't know, he can like be a public figure.

This is a management job and management not just of like a bunch of thousands of FBI agents and it's sensitive investigations, it's foreign governments, it's the interagency process of the United States government. I don't even know what it looks like to have Dan Bongino in those rooms.

What does it look like? Can you imagine him rolling up in the Situation Room or flying to a foreign country to negotiate an information-sharing agreement or deciding whether or not to authorize going after a law enforcement target? This is not good.

Oh, he called me a fiction writer.

Fiction writer, van driver.

It also, it just suggests to, I mean, because this, I don't know if this was Kash Patel's idea or Donald Trump's idea. But Pam Bondi clearly doesn't care. And you know that Kash Patel, he works for Donald Trump. And Donald Trump thought it was a cool idea to put Dan Bongino in this job. He has to say yes. There is no scenario.

In which Kash Patel is going to say to Donald Trump, no, I can't do that for you.

Which every other FBI, I can tell you, in the Obama years, it was largely Bob Mueller. And then it was, God help us, Jim Comey. They didn't take direction from Barack Obama. I don't think you ever talked to them. I remember one time, and I don't know the exact circumstance, but I'm going to guess it was either the Boston Marathon bombing or... It was like the cartridge, printing cartridge.

Al-Qaeda tried to put a bomb in a printing cartridge. And Obama suggested to me, like, we needed someone to, like, talk about this on television. And maybe could I ask if, like, you know, Bob Mueller or whoever the FBI director is. I was like...

I think I raised it delicately, like, hey, would the director be, and the fact of the White House even broaching anything, as anodyne as a television interview, you would have thought I had just like, you know, torn a copy of the Constitution or something, right?

Meanwhile, these guys are like, if Donald Trump wants somebody to investigate, they're going to be investigated. If Donald Trump wants somebody harassed, they're going to be harassed. And as we've talked about before, even if they don't have the goods to put someone in prison, they can ruin somebody's lives with legal fees. They can cripple a business.

They can also look the other way at massive amounts of corruption by what they choose not to investigate.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's—first of all, we should talk about what happened to C.Q. Brown. And let's just say the Republican Party has tried to dine out on pay-ons to the U.S. military for my entire life in politics, and they're completely full of shit. Because if you refuse to stand up for C.Q. Brown— You're refusing to stand up for the U.S. military and how it operates.

And the idea that just because he is black and happens to have spoken eloquently about it once in a video disqualifies him from serving is a insult to every member of the U.S. military. Obviously, it's principally an insult to the.

many, many, many black and brown enlisted people that fight in this nation's wars, that carry out dangerous missions that people like Donald Trump would never go on, right? But spare me the tributes and the platitudes and the pablum about the U.S. military. If you're willing to run a bus over C.Q.

Brown on behalf of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump and their so-called anti-woke agenda, just sit out the next, you know, fucking Veterans and Memorial Day speeches about the U.S. military because you just insulted every member of the United States military, not just the black and brown people, the white people that serve alongside them. How are you going to have cohesion?

Yeah. I think this crypto beat is going to be an important sub-story. Not the A story, but it's right below it, I think. Yeah, it's where the money's going to move.

PDX may like to say diversity is not a strength. How are you going to have cohesion in the force when you're just sending a message that some people are less valuable than other people in the military?

Guess what? When you're in the fucking foxhole or whatever metaphor you want to use, it doesn't really matter what color you are. And you need to care as much about the person next to you, whether they're a woman or whether they're black or they're brown or whatever the hell they are. So I wish there had been more outrage about this.

Because this is not normal.

This never happens. The chairman of the joint chiefs always rolls over. It's not like you come in and you pick your own person. it's this worrisome thing. The FBI is worrisome enough. I mean, they've focused on the most powerful parts of government, you know, law enforcement and violence, the military. This is the most powerful institution in the world, the United States military.

It is 3 million people. And to just turn it over and to try to turn it into some MAGA militia, you know, governed by Pete Hegseth is really dangerous and something that people have to watch closely. I do think on the Dan Cain piece of this, Do you remember when Trump insisted on calling Jim Mattis Mad Dog?

Mattis is like, I don't like that. I don't know if Dan Cain likes to go by Raisin Cain. Trump's got this weird thing. He wants a general with a nickname and kind of central casting. So we'll see. But what worries me the most about this is Pete Hegseth, actually. Me too. This is the guy that's really in charge.

And, you know, I just I hope that the military can be insulated by some degree from political interference. We'll have to see.

A little blockchain.

It's an odd resume. What I found interesting about it, though, is for the last several years, he worked for our man, Bill Burns. Not exactly. It's confusing. It's the kind of resume that... I had a couple people that worked for me, Tommy, in our little unit of the NSC. I remember there was one guy, it was after you left, he came to work on kind of that... some of that global information space.

And he had like a 15 year gap in his resume. It was like, he signed up to serve and at the end, and then like the next year before, like point being is that he was up to some special forces type stuff, I'm sure. And, and there's a little bit of that in the Dan Cain resume, you know, which you could, I, Which you could argue is interesting, but we don't know what it was.

Well, I think here's the other thing. The reason they have those requirements about being a four-star is that they want you to have been like a service chief. Like usually the Joint Chiefs had run the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, because it's not just military advisor on like policy. It's also like managing the workforce, managing all these personnel, knowing how procurement is working, right?

And so that's what's missing from Dan Cain's resume is being in this position of kind of overseeing an entire force. And, you know, so who's... But that may be because Pete Hegseth thinks that his like woke books or anti-woke books qualify him. There's actually nobody that means that has experience, you know, like managing this huge enterprise of millions of people.

Yeah.

By the way, everybody should watch that speech.

Yeah, you know, loathe to recommend another podcast, it's not Dan Bongino, but the daily episode on this is really powerful. And, you know, you make a few important points. First is, you know, it's hard to, some countries won't take deportees back, right? So, you know, there are countries,

You know, like Nicaragua or other countries in Central America that that aren't exactly like lining up to to take back people who've been deported. But so powerful about that segment, though, it's people from China, people. This woman from Iran is a Christian, and that's why she doesn't go back. By the way, you know, what a bunch of where's Mike Pence?

Yeah, where's the evangelical Christians in the Republican Party that want to stand up for people like that? There's a human tragedy of just these people being deposited in the middle of nowhere in Panama. We talked on this podcast several times about the Tory government wanting this scheme to send people back to Rwanda. This is much, much, much worse.

Like, as grotesque as that Rwanda plan was, it was actually a plan. It was like, you know, sending them there. This seems like they're just dumping people off of planes in Panama, and Panama's so scared to say no because Trump might invade, take the Panama Canal back. But there's something more fundamental about this.

If you look at who these people are, this is not like people, you know, coming across the southern border. Some of these people are people who have very credible cases for political asylum. like a Iranian Christian who's worried that she's going to be killed or imprisoned for her religion.

Through all our ups and downs of immigration, one thing that's been pretty constant, the US has been a safe haven for people who have very credible fears of being killed or imprisoned for their political or religious beliefs. We are changing something fundamental about our identity as a country if those are the kinds of people that we're sending to the jungle in Panama.

This is, again, not securing the border. This is saying no to dissidents, to political asylum seekers with very, very credible claims. And we are no longer that country that has been so beyond enriched. So we got people like Einstein to come here, like by having people that had different political or religious views from the places that they're from. And I think we have to track this too.

Like, how are we changing as to who we are? And it's certainly going to change attitudes towards the United States. And those people are going to look to other places to go if they can find other places to go. And we're going to lose a lot as a country in the long run for it.

Well, this is to go back to our banter about Nazi reading. I mean, one thing that's been missing is Hitler came to power in part with the support of the SA, these brown shirts, tens of thousands of Germans that terrorize his political opponents, be they communist or Jews or trade unionists. That's one thing we didn't have yet. I mean, we did have Proud Boys and some kind of militia guys.

If we literally – I'm not exaggerating. I mean – Eric Prince's proposal is essentially creating some brown shirts, you know, people roaming around American communities, vigilantes, empowered to seize people. Do you really trust those guys to like separate violent criminals from other people or frankly separate someone who looks different, who is a citizen of this country from somebody else?

If they have quotas, I mean, it's the same, you know, you don't like it when people have quotas to get parking tickets. If these guys have quotas to deport people, it's not going to be good.

I think Michael secretly is entertaining.

I think it's advisable to not be on ketamine while you're operating a chainsaw.

It's the usual suspects. Part of what's so frustrating about this political moment is on the one hand, I have to acknowledge that the very effective 10-year effort to construct this far-right international that they built. And there needs to be one on the center-left to the left. There needs to be our version of CPAC. We've needed it for a long time.

I wrote a whole book about this global international. But at the same time that I can see... how they've been investing in shared platforms like this, shared political strategies, shared funding sources. Most of them are so fucking mediocre.

That it drives me crazy. So I can see what's really smart about what they've done. And yet you've got a bunch of goobers like Liz Truss and Miele screaming at the top of his lungs. I will say Maloney's an astute politician. Yeah, she's done well for herself. That was actually the smartest clip. You know, hey, why can't we be, you know, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair started Global Progress.

By the way, I go to Global Progress Summits. Like, they're not quite what the energy is in that room. You know, like, maybe we need some chainsaws at the Global Progress Summits. But I, As much as we should laugh at this because there's an absurdity to it, more importantly, we have to reverse engineer it.

And have our own.

Yeah, they seem to not want to get to the more foundational issues, you know, about the future of Gaza, where there's just these bigger gaps. They've been better at being able to negotiate essentially prisoner exchanges because that's where we are now. There's a ceasefire and then these prisoner exchanges, Palestinians released and then hostages returned.

Yeah. Sure, it was fun after the pool left.

That's better than the alternative of kind of return to where we were before. But it does suggest that they can't really deal with these long-term questions. And so they may just try to get as many exchanges done without – while kicking the can.

I will say, like, this is a window into the fact that, you know, the current iteration of Hamas remains completely kind of nihilistic and lacking in any capacity for empathy in, you know, not just in what was done to the Bilbao's family, but the way in which they managed all this. I will also say, Tommy, like, as, you know...

Seeing the valuation of human life in the Israeli response to the treatment of this family, what about the tens of thousands of Palestinian children who have been killed? And, like, there is something kind of... I just wish you could extend... Gotta do both.

Gotta do both. I wish there could be empathy in both directions for children and civilians. The only other things I'd flag we have to come back to in more time, the West Bank, you know, is like, looks like Israel's ratcheting up there, but also Syria. Like, Israel's doing a lot of shit in southern Syria. Yeah.

Yeah, this is not small.

And it's, and we should spend more time in the Syria thing, we need more time. But like, there's, this is Syrian territory. It's like, why is these really- Just occupying. And nobody, the Syrian government, the new Syrian government has not said anything threatening Israel. They've actually said they don't honor all these agreements.

I don't think anybody thinks that the Syrian military is like preparing to roll into- Israel. In fact, these are the people, yes, they're Islamists, but I thought we didn't like Assad. I thought he was part of the axis of resistance.

And the one thing I'd say just globally to bring this home is this is what I'm worried about with Trump, is that the complete normalization of borders don't matter, annexations don't matter.

Ceasefires don't matter. It's going to encourage the more maximalist impulses of everybody. And In this case, the Israeli government in West Bank and Syria, Hamas, you know, in their nihilism and radicalism, which may grow in everybody else around the world. This is what a world with no rules might look like.

I think it's important, and we will try to do this every week, to kind of step back from all the strange back and forth day to day and just look at where we are, which is that all of the discussion right now is about... what Ukraine needs to give up.

And not Russia, the country that invaded Ukraine. Give up to us. Yeah, I know that's an obvious point. I know. But at no point in your winding, and this is through no fault of your own, it's because of Donald Trump, was there any discussion, what is Russia...

You know, even any bits of the territory that they're currently occupying or trying to annex or returning children that they've kidnapped or paying any reparation like that's all gone. And all we're talking about is what does Ukraine need to give to Russia in terms of territory? And what do they need to give to the U.S. in terms of these bizarre mineral rights? Right.

And this was manifest, by the way, in that U.N. General Assembly vote where. the U.S. voted with Russia and North Korea and Belarus, even Cuban Iran abstained against Europe. And it's to be clear, the first time since 1945 that the U.S. has voted with Russia and against Europe on any U.N. resolution. That's that's where we're at right on this mineral deal.

It's truly baffling that we're spending this much time thinking and talking about something that is clearly manufactured bullshit. You know, Trump needs to feel like he extracted something from the Ukrainians because of the support we've given them. Not only is that ghoulish, we talked about that last week. It's not real. This idea that if the U.S.

Thank you.

has some mineral rights in Ukraine, that's tantamount to a security guarantee. So Russia won't invade. That makes no sense. It just is a way for Trump to claim that he won something at the negotiating table from the Ukrainians. Let's be clear, if Ukraine is swallowed up by Russia, that doesn't matter.

If Ukraine is a kind of de facto squeezed borderline failed state because Russia's kind of strangling them, it's not like it's gonna be some minerals bonanza. It's not even clear, Trump hasn't even specified why we need these minerals. It's just pure showmanship. And the fact that Putin wants in on this, he wants in on it because he would like nothing more than the U.S.

to say, oh, sure, we will extract natural resources and minerals from the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. Because if the U.S. starts doing business in, like, Luhansk and Donetsk and Mariupol, that is not only recognizing the Russian occupation and annexation of those regions, that's kind of fully legitimizing, normalizing it. And, you know, suddenly we're doing business in those places.

So... I think Macron was trying his best and was worth the effort to just try to like moderate the U.S.

Yeah, he loves a diplomatic Hail Mary. He's trying to moderate like Trump's anti-Ukraine position, try to make a better deal on this minerals thing, try to probably just get past this hang up on minerals and return the conversation to security guarantees.

I'm sure he was there to talk about the potential European force, the French and British and potentially other nations force that would be in Ukraine on the back end and just try to you know, dampen his enthusiasm for butting up to Putin.

And we don't really know how that went because Macron can't come out and say if he achieved something because he doesn't want to antagonize Trump and, you know, wake up to a truth social tirade. But it seemed like it helped a little bit.

I don't know that the terms of this mineral deal are better than the ones that were offered that Zelensky rejected a couple weeks ago that were essentially just give us all these rights. Now it's at least a joint venture. So Macron does seem to move the goalpost a little bit on this.

Yeah, it's already been paralyzed at the Security Council level for a while now.

But the General Assembly, you know, I saw some people kind of laughing, rolling eyes about the General Assembly matters because it is like a barometer of how you're showing up in the world. It's a global roll call. Yeah, it's a global roll call. Where do you stand on these things? And it matters. It's one of these things where if it didn't matter, then people wouldn't care so much.

Us kind of showing up in the world by saying we're on the Russian side. Russia wasn't the aggressor. I mean, that's essential. We voted against the resolution that specified Russia as the aggressor. That matters because that tells the rest of the world you better adjust to that reality. And I think what people need to realize is

the outcome of that adjustment is not going to be seen tomorrow or two days from now. But two years from now, the world will have recalibrated to that, away from the United States. When Macron goes back to Europe, sure, he might have had to call dear Donald and say nice things to Trump in front of his face.

But I'm sure the Europeans are just getting together, and we'll talk about this, and how do we reorient away from the United States? And that's happening all over the world right now. The only other thing I'd say about the UN is, particularly with the destruction of USAID, Who is left to show up in post-conflict zones, to show up with foreign assistance, to manage refugee flows?

It's just the UN system and philanthropy, basically. And so the UN really still matters. I mean, who's left to fight a pandemic? who's dealing with bird flu now. The US is kind of totally evacuating that space. The UN system itself matters. And it's not just what Elise Stefanik might be voting. It's that I'm sure they'll also be choking off funds, as you said.

And so then it's like, who's paying for these problems that you should care about, again, on a human level, but on a stability level? Like if nobody is there to manage migration flows, guess what? There's going to be more migration. It's going to get worse. If nobody's there to stop pandemics, there's going to be more pandemics. So- this dysfunction is going to be manifested over time.

First of all, I know you have become like a very enthusiastic observer of German politics. Did you watch the post-election tradition where they have all the leaders on television? Yeah, it's weird, right?

And then maybe, you know, the Saudis, Emiratis, just because they have a lot of money. And that's the world that Trump likes. You know, he doesn't care about allies. He doesn't care about democracies. He fundamentally believes in a highly transactional world in which if he can get some oil licenses from Russia, he can literally run a bus over not just Ukraine, but all of Europe in the process.

And the only thing that might keep him from kind of running the bus back and forth over and over again is if Ukraine signs off all their mineral wealth to the United States. It's absolutely grotesque. And it's a recipe for for a complete unraveling of any kind of international order that has any regard for human life, for right and wrong, for alliances, for democracy.

And we all knew this was possibly coming. I will say the people that thought maybe the madman theory would work, this is not the madman theory. This is a guy that just doesn't give a shit.

Well, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, there's lots of booing, frustration.

Well, it's like the Cold War used to heighten the drama of like the U.S.-Soviet hockey games. It's weird that now that's Canada. Like Canada is standing for our geopolitical adversary.

Yeah, I mean, this is the challenge. You know, the U.S. is cutting Europe and Ukraine out of these negotiations. If Ukraine is not going to get NATO membership, the only thing that, you know, might make it worth it for them to say, OK, we've sacrificed all these lives, we've, you know... and been fighting off the Russians for three years, we need a security guarantee for somewhere.

Because what the Ukrainians are worried about is they give Russia all the land that Russia currently occupies, and Russia just waits and cannibalizes a few more hundred miles of Ukrainian territory in two years or three years.

And so the question is, and this is why NATO membership mattered, if Ukraine is going to lose 20% of its territory, they need to know that they're viable and secure on the back end of that. Now the U.S. is totally out of that. NATO is totally out of that. So then the question becomes, can the Europeans provide a troop presence in Ukraine that can make a security guarantee credible?

On paper, it's like, okay, well, if the Europeans are talking about putting troops in that, that's a good thing. Well, first of all, it's kind of weird that they're not even at the table. If they're going to be a fundamental part of how an agreement can stick, they're not there. The other problem, though, is in a world in which the U.S. was actually committed to NATO and committed to Europe,

Yeah, number one, you might be able to make a force like that stick because the United States would be supplying it. The United States would be providing intelligence to it. The United States, you know, Europe command for NATO would have some role in drawing up plans. If you remove the U.S.

from the equation and the Europeans are just doing the most significant military mission in decades by Europeans without any U.S. participation, they're flying a little blind there. There's also the question of if it's French and Germans, and then maybe they get some Poles and some Baltic countries to put troops in. I think Poland rolled it out. So you get whoever you can in a pickup team.

Who's in charge of this force? If the Russians actually invade Ukraine, who is the commander on the ground going to call?

Emmanuel Macron. Exactly. Well, that's the thing. Is Emmanuel Macron in charge of British troops?

Is Keir Starmer in charge of French troops? Where is the political leadership that would make decisions about what this force does and when it responds? On paper, tripwire force sounds great. Right. But in practice, there's like a billion questions, particularly if the U.S. isn't involved. And so this thing is moving really fast.

The Ukrainians can say, no, we're not going to participate in negotiations. But if the U.S. withdraws support and Trump is hammering Wade Zelensky and Putin is grinding away at the front line, boy, that could be an even darker outcome where the Ukrainians kind of start to collapse on that front line because they have they're not getting the support from the U.S.

Yeah, it's interesting times.

The political support is evaporating. Putin feels emboldened. I mean, this could go wrong in a lot of ways.

This is a historic pot save the world. Everybody should stick around to the end of this one.

I've never experienced something like it. I really haven't. There's no hyperbole this week because This is a conference that's all predicated on there being a transatlantic alliance, on there being differences between the US and Europe, that you kind of come together in Munich and you talk about them because you kind of agree that you're trying to get to the same place.

And without getting into individual conversations, I actually arrived at the venue right as J.D. Vance was leaving from the speech, but I had been kind of following it. I didn't need to be there for that. Over the course of the next day or two, I was in rooms with, European prime ministers, foreign ministers, like, you know, senior people, they looked like they had seen a ghost.

I mean, it was like nothing I'd ever experienced in that. Not only... had the U.S. done this rug pull on Russia and Ukraine, which was destabilizing enough because Europe is just trying to figure out, wait a second, how can we continue to support Ukraine, which is our own security because they see Ukraine as an extension of European security.

It's this kind of bulwark, buffer between them and Russia. But then... For JD Vance to come, and let's be very clear, the AFD are the legacies of German neo-Nazis. This is the German far right. This isn't even like the National Front in France or National Rally in France, which we don't like either, and is also Putin-backed. These are German Nazis.

been dubbed extremist groups by Germans themselves. And for J.D. Vance to go there and take his anti-woke ideologies and apply them to the entire continent of Europe to back the far right, to refuse to meet the sitting chancellor of one of the most important countries in the world is insane enough.

I will tell you that I was sitting at a dinner with some of these people when the news broke that he'd actually met with the AFD leader. And these people are like looking at their phones like, And it was literally like just not knowing what the world is anymore. You know, up is down, down is up like this.

This suddenly the United States is aligned with far right movements in their countries against them at the same time that the United States is aligned with Vladimir Putin and his ambitions in Ukraine against them and the Ukrainians. Just think of the whiplash. This is not to say Europe is perfect. It is to say that it's good if the far right is not in charge in fucking Germany.

OK, it's good if Vladimir Putin can't run roughshod over Ukraine and they don't know what to do. I mean, they clearly they need to band together. Clearly, they need more of a pan-European policy. That's hard when European has this kind of fractious politics to begin with. So there's the immediate term question like you raised in German politics itself.

You know, Wurtz, Friedrich Wurtz, the CDU leader.

Well, I'm just back from Munich, right?

He's poised to win. He's moving way right. This is not under Merkel, right?

He's talking about sealing borders.

And what this could do is it could just break that consensus against the AFD inside of Germany because, you know, if he moves so far right, he can't form a coalition with the Social Democrats, for instance. Well, then all of a sudden you might be looking at the AFD being in the German government and having this kind of right, far right government in Germany, right? With a French election coming up

you know, in the next couple of years that could bring the far right to power in France. And then what kind of world are we living in? You know, this is starting to feel like the 30s a little bit and not in, well, there is no good way it could be like the 30s. So J.D. Vance, he has this kind of smarmy note. The guy's 40 fucking years old, right? I know, I know.

And he's sitting over, he has no experience in foreign policy, really. And he's just going to go pull a pin out of a grenade and throw it in the middle of Europe?

Yeah, for longtime worldos, you might remember Max Sedin, who is the Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, not currently in Moscow for obvious reasons. Max was on a bunch at the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine.

Yeah, yeah. This is just, I don't, words fail, you know?

Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, we're talking a lot about Nazis in this podcast. But part of what's also dangerous is this historical revisionism, right? Yep. So first, you mentioned the Brussels bureaucrats or the commissars as if they're like Stalinist because they have regulation in Brussels. But let's go back to the Elon Musk thing.

When he did the dialogue with the AFD leader and they basically called the Nazis socialists and communists. I just I'm shocked I have to do this, but I've been doing some deep reading on the Nazis just to kind of get ready for what's coming maybe here. And and let's bear in mind that Adolf Hitler literally came to power by forming a right wing alliance.

So we had him on to talk about how the Russians are digesting this swing in American foreign policy, how they're seeing things, what the domestic political environment is in Russia, how Russia might have further ambitions in Europe or in the former Soviet space in this new world of carved up spheres of influence with the United States.

And the way he was able to pull the conservatives in to his, you know. becoming chancellor, was to kind of mobilize a right wing front against the Social Democrats and the communists. And then after the Reichstag fire, what he did is he basically killed all the leadership of the communists and the Social Democrats.

The night of the long night, which you may have heard of, was literally the roundup and killing and imprisonment and concentration camps ending of the Social Democrats. Right. This is not the fucking left. OK, this is the far right. And I hope this isn't working in Germany. I hope that maybe there's some good nationalism in the sense of like, hey, stay out of our politics, J.D.

Vance and Elon Musk. But what I worry about is this kind of erosion of just historical memory, because the whole reason we have all these alliances and organizations and conferences is to not do that again. And J.D. Vance seems to be he's playing with the worst kind of fire in the worst kind of places.

Yeah. And I mean, the only thing I'd add is if Russia's at the casino and they're pulling the slots, like they're coming up triples every time. Right. I mean, this could not be better for them. And I'm not trying to see everything through that prism because it's bigger than that. It's for the health of European democracies, too.

They are. They're straight up pro-Russia parties. And so this is just going to completely scramble the geopolitical deck. And in the end, what it's going to do is make Europe much, much weaker, because if Europe is divided between center left and far right and different flavors in between and pro-Russian and...

If you're not pro-Russian, if you're what used to be pro-American and there's no America to be, what are you? What is Emmanuel Macron or Keir Starmer? They have to have their own European identity now. So this is just going to be an incredibly bumpy ride as an understatement in European politics.

Yeah, it felt a little weird, didn't it? It wasn't like I remember.

So as usual, Max gives a very smart take on just what the Russian side of all this is. So everything we're about to talk about, Max, as an expert and a reporter, was able to kind of fill in. Here's how Putin might be seeing things here, how the Russians are seeing things. So people should definitely check it out.

Basically, yeah. Max's head was spinning as I was talking to him. It's hard to get your mind around what's happening right now.

Nothing.

Doesn't exist in the physical world, guys. I hate to break it to you.

This is all play money.

Great if you're Marc Andreessen.

Yeah. You can kind of play with fake money more easily if you're like Donald Trump and you have the whole US government and Elon Musk behind you. I think we should just note, watch this crypto space again and again. It's the quickest way to make the grift pay off quickly.

If you have all this inside information, you're making money off fees like the Trump people do, or you're tipped off on the rug pull like Others may be in different transactions like this.

And I think what people need to wake up to around the world in this country, in Argentina, everywhere else is like, there's this kind of weird, these guys are disruptors and they're shaking things up and they're breaking the establishment. They don't give a shit about you. They're just trying to get rich.

I mean, like if the worst case scenario is there's some like Russian hand mine and everything, it could be quite simpler, which is like, these are just a bunch of corrupt plutocrats enriching themselves at everybody else's expense and laughing at us, just like laughing, mainly at their own followers, right?

Like the people they had the least respect for, because I'm not buying the fucking meme coin Libra or Melania.

And they're just screwing their own people over and over and over again with these grifts and getting really, really rich. And, you know, Melee has been down at Mar-a-Lago. I mean, it shows you that they're just circulating these ideas and they're repeating these ideas. And it's just – it's one of the most –

Rampant forms of like looting and corruption that that we've seen that these leaders are getting elected on kind of this weird masculine libertarian populism and then just relentlessly screwing the people that voted for fucking the people vote.

That was his on-the-record quote. I've heard this kind of garbage from him for a while. When are people going to stop falling for this?

You've been running this country for a while now. These people are in charge of everything. I mean, this is a common theme on this podcast since Trump got elected. You're in charge of everything and you're grifting your way left, right and center. And then whenever you get caught with the grift, you attack politicians who have no power. Like you're fucking president.

You know, stop talking to me about politicians. You are the politician. I know you are the president of this country.

Because he dozed the country. Like he got rid of all social services. And so great, there's no deficit, but there's no food on the table.

That worked so well. Yeah.

I mean, the problem that we're facing is we also have this movement to designate as foreign terrorist organizations, all these cartels. They sent a list over to Congress, like a bunch of them. And by the way, that list isn't just cartels. It's also like Venezuelan gangs and stuff.

And so you have the infrastructure, like drones, of the war on terror moving to this hemisphere. But you also have the legal architecture, right? These terrorist designations And what I wonder about is how much is the Mexican government on board with this? Because this is a left wing Mexican government.

So I can't see like the Shane Baum administration having like that high comfort level with a growing CIA footprint. I mean, these are literally Latin American leftists. And so what happens when inevitably the US government captures more and more intelligence and there's all this drone footage and we're finding different places, I don't think that the Mexican government's going to sign off.

So what happens if the U.S. starts taking drone shots and stuff over the objections of Mexico? I mean, this is another thing that we have to entertain as a possibility.

And look, for people who might say, well, at least then maybe he'll get at the fentanyl problem, just look at the record of the war on terror over, or sorry, the war on drugs. Both. Both. The number of jihadists went up exponentially under the war on terror, and the amount of drug trafficking has gone up exponentially in the time of war on drugs.

Whatever short-term benefit you might get by picking off a cartel leader or a fentanyl lab, If people in this country want to buy fentanyl, they'll find a way to buy it. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to disrupt it and stop it.

But the idea that there's some discrete strikes and operations that can solve this problem in Mexico, there's like a 50-year history of drug policy that suggests that that's not the case.

Well, exactly, which we never talk about. Yeah, yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Well, also the Middle East envoy being in the Russia talks is interesting because to show how arbitrary the Trump foreign policy team is going to be in terms of who does what role.

We talked about that with Max a bit, but the key point is that the Russians didn't want Kellogg in the talks because Kellogg had been pretty hawkish. We talked about it on this podcast. Kellogg was giving Fox News interviews, which Trump surely saw, about the need to escalate, ramp up weapons to Ukraine to put them in a stronger position heading into negotiations.

Well, that's I mean, first of all. for all the efforts that are going to happen and continue to happen from the Elon Musk's and Doge Bros, Doge bags, whatever you call them, to highlight, you know, one opera in Ireland and make all of USAID that this is the vast majority of what USAID does.

And people are dying because of Elon Musk and Doge and Donald Trump and their fucking supporters who think that this is like a big joke and a cool thing that Elon's doing. And so just on a human level, many people will die. And I think what people have to understand, and you're hearing that in the clips, USAID fills spaces where there's nobody else to backfill them. That's why they're there.

They're not in places where there's a redundancy of hospitals. They're in a place like the Thai-Myanmar border or some part of Africa where there's not health infrastructure. And so if you remove it, there's literally nothing else that can take its place. And that should concern you on a human level.

If you are not a human being that has feelings for other human beings, if you're essentially a sociopath like Elon Musk, can you imagine how these people are going to feel about the United States for the rest of their lives? The rest of their lives. And these quote unquote strategic, you know, Africa, Southeast Asia, we are pissing off

much of the world in ways that I don't know how we ever come back from it. I mean, I hate to be, I mean, we can try and I hope we do end up trying in a few years, but this is, this is not an American news cycle issue. You know, this is like a moral issue that will stick to this country forever.

Yeah, yeah. For what reason? So Elon can do what he did at Twitter?

Well, there's that too.

The Russians were like, we don't like that guy. The Russians kind of selected who they want to negotiate with, which is never what you want in a situation like that. And, you know, sent Kellogg to what is literally the kids table to Trump, which is Europe and Ukraine. So I don't think Keith Kellogg is going to be calling the shots here.

Yeah, it's good that this didn't get derailed. It's good that phase one is still moving forward. I just think this gets exponentially harder at each juncture. And so long as the operating plan is the Riviera in Gaza, we're not going to get there.

So the thing to watch is how the phase two negotiations go forward, how people start talking about actual reconstruction, who's responsible for administering security in Gaza, whether there's still an ethnic cleansing plan on the table or not. But this does show there seems to be a real mutual interest between, believe it or not, the Israeli government and Hamas to not see the phase one go away.

And that's good. And hopefully that can be a basis for getting to those more difficult issues. And hopefully they can kind of I don't know. I just don't think the U.S. I mean, Witkoff seems to have played like a constructive role here. You kind of want Trump to to to not be that focused on it because, you know, the the Riviera plan is not going to be one that sells.

Yeah, Brett McGurk, we should just name this. This Brett McGurk op-ed in the Washington Post is totally bonkers, alternative reality stuff. Like, you know, Israel did nothing wrong.

This is just not what anybody was reporting at the time. And notably, nobody else in the Biden administration is even making that exact case. So... Not helpful, but.

No, and look, people should be able to think enough. And we've been plenty critical of the Biden-Gaza policy. But there's a difference between floating different ideas in private diplomatic channels and giving a press conference, standing next to the prime minister of Israel, and calling for ethnic cleansing and the construction of real estate hotels in Gaza. It's just not the same thing.

We can be critical of the Biden policy without turning into a Trump cartoon.

I mean, it could be one of two things. Either it's people that are, you know, in the U.S. intelligence community who are worried about Israel doing this and are just trying to kind of get this out there to spark some debate about it. Or, yeah, or it could be people that want Trump to kind of prioritize this issue and do something or else, you know, which is what it always was with us.

I will say, like, Trump himself does not seem to be that inclined for the Iran war. I mean, you know, it seems lower probability than Greenland, you know, at this point, which doesn't mean it couldn't ever happen. But he seems to always have been a little careful about, you know, getting into another Middle Eastern war.

So the question to me becomes would Israel actually bomb Iran's nuclear facilities kind of over Trump's objections? And stranger things have happened. But I don't know. This feels like posturing. Everybody knows Trump is going to possibly explore diplomacy or he might not and go the pressure route. And I think this leaking is part of kind of the alignment of pieces to –

To kind of just try to accelerate the timeline in which something is done here. But given the nature of the global environment, what I've always been worried about with Trump is that there's so much chaos. It's just like, well, let's go now because people's attentions are in nine different places. But the problem is if they do that, then the Iranians could hit the Gulf and all bets are off. Yeah.

Yes, yeah. Weirdly, Trump has resisted that to date, but he can change on a dime.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's true.

All right. I'm very pleased to be joined by Max Sedin, an OG guest on Pod Save the World from the early days of the Ukraine war when he helped us figure out what was going on. He's the Moscow bureau chief of the Financial Times, currently based in Berlin, given how difficult it is to be the Moscow bureau chief. Max, welcome back to the podcast.

So I just wanted you to really help us unpack this. There's been so much focus on how the Europeans are responding to the recent developments between Russia and the United States. I was in Munich and got an earful about that. Obviously, a lot of focus on American politics. But I really want you to help us understand how the Russians might be looking at this.

And just from your reporting and your analysis over the years, how do you think that Putin and the Russian government are – digesting this call from Trump, this upcoming meeting in Riyadh, this blowback from the Europeans and Ukrainians to Trump's policies. Just generally speaking, how would you characterize your understanding of the Russian reaction to these events?

Yeah, I mean, I'm curious. I mean, you mentioned the changes. I mean, Hegseth basically concedes that Ukraine is not going to be a NATO, that Ukraine is going to have to give up territory, kind of de facto acknowledging Russia's annexation of large swaths of Ukrainian territory. instead of the Biden approach of nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine, this is literally the opposite.

It's everything about Ukraine without Ukraine. You look at the Russian press, the Russian media, which is a pretty good window into kind of what the Kremlin wants out there. What has been the nature of the reaction to this, like as you just kind of look at Russian media and what might that say about how the Kremlin's looking at things?

Yeah. I mean, when it gets into the – I definitely felt that in Munich. More was done to kind of sever the U.S.-European alliance in the last week than anything I can remember in recent times. On the Ukraine piece itself, if essentially if you read what Hegsath said and how you can kind of read between the lines of what is being indicated – It does sound like the U.S.

might be okay with Russia essentially de facto controlling the parts of Ukraine that they're currently in, the U.S. taking NATO membership off the table. Those are two pretty huge... Russian positions. But is that enough? I mean, because you could also look at it and say, well, Putin has the advantage on the battlefield now.

Why not try to grind this out for another year, accumulate some more territory, solidify control of the parts of Ukraine that Russia has tried to claim as annexed?

Do you think that Russia might drive a harder bargain or do you think that they could accept essentially a frozen conflict on their terms that leaves them in control and kind of, you know, diminishes the standing of the Ukrainians and, you know, fractures the Europeans? Is that enough or do you think Putin might want more?

Agreed to with Russia. I mean, just think about that.

The U.S. and Russia agreeing that Ukraine has to hold an election without talking to Ukrainians about it.

So there are two other ways in which Russia could potentially flex its muscles or interfere in European security that I want to put to you and just get your assessment of what we should be looking at, worried about. One is politics. And so if I look at the J.D.

Vance speech in Munich about traditional Western values and the need to kind of embrace the AFDs of the world, the far-right parties in Europe, Sounded a lot like what Putin's been saying for years. You know, there are these traditional Western values that are kind of separate from democracy and they're kind of nationalist in nature and their traditional Christian cultural values.

So the first question is. You know, how concerned should we be or how much of an opening is there for Putin to kind of come in behind? You know, he's supported some of these far right parties in the past. Obviously, he has relationships with people like Orban that are better than other Europeans. And then the other is just the near abroad of Russia.

If there are spheres of influence, if I'm in Georgia right now, if I'm in Moldova right now, perhaps even in the Baltics right now. I suddenly am kind of concerned that Russia may feel like they have a carte blanche in the United States to have a sphere of influence.

I mean, where do you look for the potential for further Russian interference, aggression, flexing in these kind of political spaces in this new reality?

Yeah, no, that makes sense. So definitely watch the Baltics, but do so with the caveat that it's mainly about undermining the West. Well, one last question I want to ask you. In Russia itself, we're not just three years into the full-scale war in Ukraine. It's been a year since Alexei Navalny died, and there was a ceremony or event marking Navalny's death in Berlin. What is your sense of... Yeah.

How would you characterize the state of internal Russian politics at this moment related to kind of Putin's control and in the absence of an opposition or the potential for there to be, if not opposition, at least dissatisfaction with how things are going there?

Yeah. I mean, we'll get to the European piece of this and some of my experience in Munich, but this is not just a change from three years of US foreign policy. It's a change from 75 years of US foreign policy. This is the United States, like overnight, like we've been talking about rug pulls, Tommy, in the crypto context.

This is a rug pull underneath Ukraine and the entire continent of Europe, which is- Yeah, we're just accustomed to the United States being a guarantor of European security. That was founded for two purposes. One, to defeat the Nazis. And now we're for the Nazis. We'll get to that with JD Vance. And two was to kind of fortify Europe against the Soviet Union and then Russia.

All right. Well, as usual, you really helped illuminate what is a pretty shitty situation. But we appreciate it. We definitely are cursed to live in interesting times. But Max, thanks so much for joining us. And people should follow your reporting in the Financial Times and online because you're, as usual, among the most astute observers of this dynamic.

So thanks again and have a good night in Berlin. All right. Thanks so much.

We'll see what happens next week. Probably a lot of shit.

Yeah. Come on, guys. Like, that's a big rally for the center to the left here.

And that appears to be gone. You cannot overstate what a dramatic shift this is in the US position. It's absolutely absurd to think that you're negotiating the end of a war with only one of the parties of the war. The Ukrainians have lost tens of thousands of people, many more injured, many more displaced over the last three years.

And they were the ones invaded, and they don't get to be at the talks. And the Europeans are the ones that have been supplying the weapons with us in larger numbers, if you add up the total number of weapons.

So we're just essentially saying our allies, our friends and the people that were invaded are not allowed to participate in the peace talks that we're having with Russia that when you listen to the talks seem to also be about like oil and natural resources and Rubio's talking about China. It's absolutely an insane.

I mean, I would have expected some kind of talks, obviously, given what Trump said. But I actually would have assumed that the Ukrainians might be invited to the talks, you know. Right. So to cut them out.

For optics alone, to cut them out entirely is so extreme and so punitive to the Ukrainians who did nothing wrong here. They're the ones invaded that it's hard to even get your mind around that. That's the first thing.

I really don't want to go full 2017, Tommy, but the reality is that if you were sitting in the basement of the Kremlin like a year ago and you're like, what is the absolute best case scenario?

It would be a president of the United States echoing Russian misinformation that it's somehow Ukraine's fault that the war started, that they missed all these opportunities to avoid the war when they were just repeatedly invaded. And what sovereign country is going to say, we're going to preemptively give up a bunch of territory to stop you from invading us? It makes no sense.

So this is to a T what the Russians would want. If you look at the Hegseth comments, the key elements of the negotiation, the key things that Ukraine would have to concede are territory that Russia currently holds and no NATO membership. Some people may say, well, inevitably the negotiation is going to end up there. Well, you don't publicly concede those things at the beginning of the negotiation.

And so everything I heard in Munich was essentially this was the most catastrophic NATO meeting anybody could remember because they didn't preview that with anybody. They didn't say, hey, we're just going to go right for the end of the negotiation by making the concessions up front. They didn't talk to the Ukrainians about it, who will have to agree, by the way.

I mean, the Ukrainians don't have to. They're a warring party. And so at some point, actually, the danger is that you're not bringing along the Ukrainians.

Yeah, exactly. This idea of Zelensky being at 4%, that's nonsense. There's never been a poll that shows that. I mean, his approval rating may be slipping a bit, but he's nowhere near what Trump says. The Russians have every interest in wanting some totally destabilizing election that polarizes Ukrainian politics. Even Zelensky's opponents-

like Poroshenko, the previous president, has said, I don't think there can be an election in this context. So this is a Russian play to further destabilize Ukraine, maybe try to get some Russian backed candidate to kind of be a disruptive force in the election itself. Everything about this makes no sense. And then even if you look at that table, like Sergey Lavrov,

has been the Russian foreign minister my whole fucking life. He's been there forever. You got Mike Waltz, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2016. This guy is in over his head. Let's just name it. Marco Rubio, if any other Democratic president was doing anything like this, he'd be lighting himself on fire on the Senate floor. He's Mr. Russia hawk.

Now, all of a sudden, he's telling us all we should be thanking Trump.

How is anybody going to take this guy seriously? If you sell your soul that hard that you do a complete 180 degree shift on the most important geopolitical issue in the world, arguably, You're just not, like, Sergey Lavrov is gonna, like, look at that guy as if he's tiny little Marco.

He's just totally disposable. He's totally afraid of Trump. He believes nothing.

I didn't. I heard many good things about it and I heard we won.

For being invaded.

And so we're basically telling a country that we've been helping stay alive after being invaded that they have to give us all of their wealth to what? To be invited to the negotiating table on how they're going to have their country dismembered and never have a security guarantee from the United States. I mean, this is cruel stuff.

And I think to understand it, to pull back the lens here, and you and I were talking about this earlier, You know, what Putin believes in is that there are certain big powers that matter in the world that have kind of spheres of influence where they can do whatever the fuck they want. And those powers, by the way, don't include Europe. It's the United States and Russia and China, basically.

Yeah, but it felt like that J.D. Vance and Trump wanted some version of this outcome. They didn't want to go exactly like this, but they wanted to smack him around and say he was ungrateful and tell him to thank Mr. Trump. And again, what I find so.

What's appalling about it, but it's interesting, we have to understand this, is that, you know, Trump's, you know, the headline in foreign policy is he's completely switched sides. And it's now the U.S. and Russia against Europe and Ukraine, the U.S. wanting to be in this alignment with big autocratic countries, Russia, China, the Gulf, etc.,

But it also mirrors, Tommy, like what Trump does at home. Like he doesn't really pick on people's own size. You know, it's it's it's undocumented people. It's trans people. You know, it's a country that's been invaded like Ukraine. It's people in Gaza that he's dunking on and posting weird videos about, you know, the Riviera that he's going to build like Ukraine. This guy is not tough.

Not even close, yeah. This is unlike anything that has taken place in my entire lifetime. And, you know... I'd have to mine my brain. I mean, I assume there were some tough meetings, you know, in the Civil War. But yeah, never, never. We've never seen anything like it. Yeah.

Tough people like would pick on Putin. Tough people would like not be terrified of Putin and beating the shit out of Zelensky on television and then telling him it's his fault. And guess who sees that? The world sees that. Like MAGA base will, you know, be like, oh, this is great. Look at Trump. Own the libs because they think Zelensky sucks.

I mean, your point about Pennsylvania, it's not just that you gave up the game on that, but they also equate like Ukraine with kind of libs or something, which is super weird, by the way, because it used to be the opposite.

That was the talking point forever. Now Obama looks like a much different light compared to Trump. But I mean – The rest of the world doesn't live in the megaverse. The rest of the world lives in reality, and they're just seeing a bully picking on someone smaller to make himself look tough.

Yeah. The whole purpose of this was to, again, further make Trump look tough. He got Ukraine to bend to his will and give us access to these rare earth materials that, as you said, these would not be mined in Trump's presidency. If and when they are, so what? What on earth does this have to do with ending the war? It has nothing to do with ending the war.

It's not a security guarantee to Ukraine to say that like there might be some joint ventures down the line to get some rare earth materials that Trump probably doesn't even know what they do. You know, I mean, so this always felt like this kind of weird facade. And I do just, you know, to put a point on it, like Waltz and Rubio.

For them to be going along with this charade like fucking Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister. These guys were talking tough about Ukraine like a year ago. This is what happens when you sell your soul to Donald Trump. And if there's one thing that Zelensky's visit achieved is it exposed the full truth of what he's dealing with.

No, it's a huge issue. But ironically, Tommy, I know a lot about this issue from the prism of climate change, because these are critical to battery technologies, to solar panels and the Chinese wind turbines. And the reality is, if you really cared about it, you wouldn't dismantle USAID because you'd be trying to be in Africa. where there's a ton of these critical minerals.

In South America, there are a ton of critical minerals in places that are not currently invaded by Russia. Like, you know, making agreements with Chile, which has a lot of these deposits, would be a lot more rational than saying we're going to solve our rare earth materials by getting mining rights in Ukraine, you know, that has currently been attacked. It's purely for show for Trump.

Well, first of all, the Real America News guy was probably slobbering over Elon Musk in the cabinet meeting yesterday when he was not wearing a suit, was wearing a t-shirt, was wearing a hat and was like amped up on God knows what, standing up, jumping up and down, being a fucking lunatic, right?

So why is Elon Musk allowed to like, you know, in this guy's view, denigrate the White House, the Oval Office by not wearing a suit? I mean, like, can you imagine, can you imagine being Ukrainian and looking at this? I mean, Zelensky dresses like that in solidarity with people in his country.

You know, he wears military colored clothes to express solidarity with troops who are fighting the frontline. You don't have to think that's a great sartorial choice. But to fucking just pick on him, what danger has that guy ever been under? Zelensky could have been assassinated in the early days of the war. Incredible reports are all kinds of bounties on his head.

And this kind of complete fucking loser from Real America News is picking on him to make himself look good in front of Mr. Trump and whoever his audience is. And then the Toss thing... Let's just be very clear here, like Russian state media, which I think was like sanctioned or designated. I know, I was trying to remember that.

They were definitely like a part of some, you know, one of the things the Biden administration rolled out. But Russian state media is allowed in the Oval Office and the Associated Press. The wire service for more American newspapers than anybody else is not because they won't call it the Gulf of America. Like this is where we are, people.

Like we are in a reality in which Russian state media and Russian propaganda is in the Oval Office berating a democratically elected leader of a country under attack, you know, who's being insulted for not wearing a suit. I mean, we just have to get our minds around this thing because we're only six weeks into it, you know.

Again, I think if there's any utility in this, you know, because you might say Zelensky should have just shut his mouth and taken it and then tried to sign his rare steel. And, you know, but actually, I think it's something useful and just surfacing this, you know, and just clarifying this is where we are. We've learned that Trump is flipped 180 degrees to the Russian side.

We've learned that his approach to peace is to bully Ukraine and ask nothing of Russia. We've learned that the Republican Party in the United States has completed the process of not having any spine and capitulating to Trump's foreign policy. And so what does it mean going forward?

If I'm Europe and Ukraine, I'm saying we need to develop a shared position for this war that is separate from the United States of America. And actually sees that this is the United States and Russia sitting on one side of the negotiating table and Europe and Ukraine sitting on the other. And as dark and as extreme as that sounds, I think that's where we are.

Because Ukrainians, by the way, don't have to stop fighting. There were reports early in the invasion when Russia thought they were going to roll over Kyiv, that they were going to have a guerrilla warfare type approach. So the Ukrainians don't have to agree to Trump's terms that he strikes with Moscow. I think the Ukrainians need to figure out with the Europeans, what are their positions?

What are they insisting on? They're going to have to give a bunch of stuff, including territory. But what can they insist on in terms of a credible ceasefire line, essentially? And then what is a peace force that has British and French troops? There was an interesting comment from Turkey that they might get involved with troops on the ground.

What is a credible European force that can provide some security guarantee and some presence there? And then how do you build a European defense and foreign policy that is totally separate from the United States? Because the United States has switched sides. And I wish that wasn't the case, but I think that's where we are.

And I don't know that just signing some dumb rare earth thing is going to make Trump be nicer to them. It's not. So figure out your own interests and act accordingly. It's what all of us are going to have to do in these Trump years.

Yeah, I think that like like by any measure, like. Tactically, you don't get into a fight with J.D. Vance in the Oval Office. You don't allow yourself to be humiliated by the President of the United States to that extent. But I'm not saying this to give him credit because I don't think it was a strategy. I think the utility in it is we know what we're dealing with now, right?

Like we have the Hegseth like laying down of terms without consulting Ukraine and Europe in which they surrender all their territory and can't be NATO. We have the JD Van speech in Munich endorsing the European far right. We've got Trump calling Zelensky dictator. And now we have this.

And so there can be a new illusions that somehow some committee to save America is going to or Marco Rubio or whoever or Lindsey Graham's going to the Oval Office and convince Trump to suddenly get tough on the Russians. Like, so I'm not saying that Zelensky was like playing some chess and, you know, outed this.

OK, stop.

I'm saying he messed up by getting baited into this, but there may be something worthwhile that comes out of just clarifying, okay, this is actually where we are. And I can tell you from having been in Munich and different Europeans, this is what the Trump people are like behind closed doors too, from what I hear. They're not just performing for the cameras. This is who they are.

And so now he's got to go back. And I was thinking too, Tommy, like, You know, he made that comment about like, I will step down if it brings peace. Like he's got to be also thinking about that, you know, not stepping down now, but like, you know, like what is what like he's tired.

He's clearly a lightning rod to Trump because Trump wrongly, unfairly sees him as some guy who's like aligned with Trump. Things that Trump doesn't like, like democracies and Europeans and and internationalists in this country. And and so I think he's got to stand up to Trump and try to get the best deal for his people and from the Europeans. And then, you know, that's that's his mission.

And then he's done.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if I'm him, I'm going to take a breath. And I mean, I honestly, frankly, I guess you got to do the Brett Baier car wash, but he can't just go on there and grovel, you know, and Brett Baier will be an asshole.

As a side note to Tommy, it's like, do you remember, like, you know, people would go to finally just go to China, they have to do CCTV, the state media, like Fox News has become like the CCTV of the US. No doubt. That's pretty dark, too. You know, like that's not normal people.

You know, like there's a lot of other people that you could do interviews with, but they know that they like have to talk to Brett Baier and Fox News because that's who Trump wants to talk to. Yeah.

So I will, you know, I'm sure he'll kind of recalibrate this a little bit, but he can't.

fold or capitulate and that's also not in his character and i think you go back you talk to macron you talk to starmer you talk to mertz and schultz and the germans if you're zelensky and you kind of go back to the drawing board okay like what what's our position our being europe and ukraine and this negotiation with the u.s and russia yeah um

Historic day.

I thought we'd be talking about like a rare earths agreement.

Yeah, two things stand out to me about this. First, just so people know what Zelensky is talking about, he's talking about the Minsk agreement that was reached in the late Obama administration to essentially freeze the conflict and have some kind of process whereby the Ukrainians had autonomous regions in these places where the Russians had invaded in eastern Ukraine. And what he's saying is,

Putin broke the ceasefire. The last time someone tried to do what Trump's doing, you know, Putin is the one that violated the agreement and reinvaded the country and dramatically escalated. And that's just a fact. It's not an opinion. You know, so this is going to be a reoccurring theme here that Zelensky is saying facts and J.D.

Vance and Trump are just basically offering Kremlin talking points in response. And then, Tommy, I said this to you, but for J.D.

Vance to refer to visits that people make to Ukraine as propaganda tours was one of the most triggering things and many that were said today, because what people do when they go to Ukraine is they they often visit Bucha, for instance, where there were war crimes committed, where innocent civilians were massacred, where children were killed. And to call that a propaganda tour is so beyond the pale.

It's essentially him calling the truth propaganda. When people go to Ukraine, what they see is the reality of a country that's been invaded and bombarded and had tens of thousands of children kidnapped and tens of thousands of people killed. And J.D. Vance calls that the propaganda. And it's it's up is down. It's black is white. It's just 180 degrees wrong. And I agree with you, Tommy.

It felt like J.D. Vance was setting a trap like he was getting trying to provoke Zelensky to say something that would piss off Trump. Yeah. Which is a pretty fucking dark role for him to be playing.

Yeah, and this context was entirely missing. They seemed to be offended by Zelensky pointing out that his country was invaded by Putin. That seemed to offend Trump and J.D. Vance. And I think another piece of context here, Tommy, is – Zelensky is a profoundly exhausted person. And you can see it on his face. You can see it on his face. I've heard this from some Europeans.

This guy probably barely sleeps at night. He has been besieged by the Trump administration, bullied into trying to sign this absurd deal for – critical minerals. And he flies to Washington because he feels this thing slipping away from him, this thing being U.S. support as kind of a Hail Mary.

And then he sits down and they bring the cameras in and he just starts getting insulted to his face by people who can demonstrate no degree of empathy. I mean, like they don't even, not even a perfunctory, you know, tribute to what the people of Ukraine have done. And they insulted not just Zelensky, this is important, They insulted the Ukrainian people.

He said the only people you can get to fight are conscripts that you force to the front line. So that's insulting the troops. That's insulting the Ukrainians that have been fighting and saying they don't want to be there. They're only there because Zelensky made them go there. When in fact, Putin is the one that conscripts people. Putin is the one that did the mobilization.

And so we can talk later about whether Zelensky erred tactically here, but I have a great deal of empathy for what he had to go through.

Yeah, there's a lot in that one, too, Tommy. I mean, first of all, boy, to say that Zelensky is the one that's gambling with World War Three when Putin is the one that invaded the country. I mean, the Ukrainians didn't want they don't want to be in this war.

Yeah. Yeah. Like what's so fucking bonkers about this is like the the. all the things that Trump and Van Say presuppose that Zelensky somehow wants this war and wanted this war when he was just invaded by Russia. They're the ones that raised the risks of World War III. Then to hear them lecture him about needing to thank Mr. Trump, you know,

first of all, Zelensky always thanks the United States repeatedly. He's done it, by the way, since Trump has been president, expressed gratitude for the support the United States supplies. Even though, by the way, Donald Trump is not the one that provided that support. It was Joe Biden and the United States Congress on a bipartisan basis.

But they want Zelensky to behave like a Trump staffer there. Thank you, Mr. Trump, for being such a great president. And they don't do this

to other leaders you know they don't hector other leaders like this in the oval office they you know they they they they're picking on him they're like schoolyard bullies picking on a small injured person to impress their friends and it's like three on one you can hear all of them like chiding him be like yes you were mean yes you did say that it literally sounds like a schoolyard taunting and he didn't insult when did he insult did you do you know what they're referring because he shouldn't insult the u.s he just explained facts facts are insulting to true

Yeah. And he needs everything to be about himself and not about like the reality of what is happening in the world, particularly a reality that is counter to his narrative and inconvenient to him in any way, shape or form. And Zelensky's this guy who's only trying to share facts, you know? And each time he does, they act as if he has personally offended them and come down even harder on the guy.

And by this point in the clip, they're just picking on him, like... And to say that because, you know, he's not kissing Trump's ass, he's insulting the whole country, just shows you what Donald Trump's view of this country is, that he is the only thing that matters. He, the leader, you know, he, Der Fuhrer, is the only guy, he's the symbol of the nation or something. It's...

it's absolutely grotesque. And what we can see here is like little Marco Rubio on the couch, like shrinking deeper and deeper into his seat.

Yeah. And they're just, you know, like, what is he wrong about? You know, like like nothing that Zelensky said. We can again we'll talk later about like what his tactical decision making was. But like nothing he said was wrong. And J.D. Vance doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. He's not some expert on like Ukraine and Russia.

He's just some guy who listened to some podcasts and tries to put nothing wrong with that. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that. Sorry about that. All of you people. This is YouTube. This is YouTube. Yeah, exactly. YouTube.