Michael Weiss

And then Lavrov, you know, he had this call with Putin and said, oh, let's maybe do round two in Budapest.

But before that, now knowing he didn't want to go into a situation where he would be embarrassed again, he dispatched Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor,

to meet with Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, since 1483.

I mean, this guy's like, you know, Nosferatu.

But in a kind of orc-like way, right?

Like not preserved well.

He's preserved badly.

Right.

So basically they came together to kind of hammer out sort of the framework of going into another summit.

Right.

And Rubio, he read the room.

He's like, the Russians are still – they don't want to stop the war.

They have maximalist demands.

It's not just about Ukraine.

It's about what they refer to as the root causes of the war, which is to say 40 years of NATO expansion and Pax Americana or as they would put it, American hegemony.

They want to end that.

They want to relitigate everything from 1991 on.

And we're not prepared to do that.

Or at least Marco Rubio isn't prepared to do that because there's still vestiges of the kind of internationalist traditional Republican in him.

So he went back and told Trump, there's no reason to go to Budapest and abase yourself again.