Brett Bruin

DEI, yeah.

I mean, all of this is a very delicate, very fraught path for Irish companies who are increasingly investing in the U.S.

And what we're hearing from Irish firms is they're taking the long view, which I think is a smart strategy.

You know, a lot of these efforts, including by the Saudis yesterday, $1 trillion, supposedly.

By the way, their entire GDP is $1 trillion.

You know, these are made up numbers.

And if you look at last time when Trump supposedly got concessions from Beijing that they were going to buy $400 billion in U.S.

agricultural product, it never materialized.

And that's the key challenge Trump will have is he rolls out these numbers.

He and his team are not great when it comes to the actual implementation of these efforts.

So I think we should take it with a big bag of caution.

You know, I remember sitting in the Situation Room with Barack Obama and presenting him what at that time was an emerging threat.

They had just invaded Crimea, later Luhansk and Donetsk.

And they unleashed this modern information warfare against Ukraine.

There's a really good investigation that CNN did on our efforts, if folks are interested.

And I couldn't at that time, unfortunately, convince Obama that this was something that we needed to take with greater seriousness.

In fact, in his exit interview, he was asked, did you underestimate Putin?

And he said, I underestimated the power of propaganda, which, you know, there is unfortunately no prize for having been right in the situation room.

on an issue when the president came down on the wrong side of it.

What I think we're seeing now is, yes, Russia has been successful, and their objectives are to diminish confidence in our institutions, in our ideals, to divide us.