Blessed are the Peacemakers (Trump and Putin)

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Welcome to Plot Save America.

I'm John Faffra.

I'm John Lovett.

Tom Vitor.

Welcome back, Tommy.

Thank you.

Good to be here.

We missed you.

I missed you guys.

Well, we've got a big show for today.

Republican governors are sending more troops to D.C.

ICE says the quiet part out loud.

Texas Democrats have gone home.

Newsom is out trolling Trump, and then Tommy talks to former U.S.

Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink about the Russia-Ukraine meetings over the last few days and why she decided to resign from the State Department after decades of service to run for Congress in Michigan.

But let's start with the big White House meeting Monday between Trump Zelensky and European leaders to discuss a possible deal that would end the war that began with Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

The talks were a follow-up to Trump's meeting with the Russian president in Alaska on Friday, where Trump quite literally rolled out the red carpet for Putin and invited him for a one-on-one ride in in the presidential limo, where they were all smiles.

Putin was even seen laughing.

So that's cool.

The meeting ended with no announcement of a ceasefire or Russian concessions or really much of anything.

They didn't even take questions from the press.

The Monday meeting with Zelensky and the Europeans seemed to go much better than the Ukrainian president's last trip to the White House, where he was kicked out early after Trump and J.D.

Vance lost their shit in the Oval Office.

Zelensky said this was the best meeting yet, and there's been vague talk about the U.S.

joining Europe and some kind of a security guarantee for Ukraine as part of any peace deal, though the Kremlin again rejected the presence of NATO troops in Ukraine.

Afterwards, Trump has also dropped his demand for a ceasefire before negotiations take place, which Ukraine and Europe very much want.

And he also seems quite bought into the idea that Putin's just a nice guy who genuinely wants peace.

He loves peace.

Just loves peace.

Peaceful dude.

Yeah, what are you going to do?

That's why you invade.

Here's some of what we heard from Trump on Monday.

The six or so wars that we stopped, we haven't had a ceasefire, and so I don't know that it's necessary.

You can do it through the war, but it would be I like the ceasefire from another standpoint.

You immediately stop the killing.

But I believe a peace agreement at the end of all of this is something that's very attainable, and it can be done in the near future.

President Putin agreed that Russia would accept security guarantees for Ukraine, and this is one of the key points that we need to consider, and uh we're going to be considering that at the table also, like who will do what, essentially.

I'm optimistic that collectively we can reach an agreement that would deter any future aggression against Ukraine, and I actually think there won't be.

I think that's even

overrated, largely overrated, but we're going to find out.

And I think that the European nations are going to take a lot of the burden.

We're going to help them and we're going to make it very secure.

I think he wants to make a deal

i think he wants to make a deal for me goes there as crazy as it sounds just sit down that last part was uh trump caught on a hot mic hot mic saying uh he really thinks putin wants to make a deal as crazy as it sounds for me uh

so for me for me for me yeah right before we started recording trump posted a truth saying i never know how to say it i what do we call them tim miller calls them bleats yeah i just i wonder where bleats came from i think it's just Tim's word for it.

There's an answer for all this.

We do not need to refer to where these posts are, where they're coming from.

He posted.

He has a statement.

He's a poster.

We can disaggregate it from the,

I know that, and I've been doing it, but it's like Trump posted a statement.

A statement seems so much more formal for what those are.

Whoa.

Yeah, he's posted.

He's a poster.

But you're right.

We are doing PR for him when we say truth.

So I know.

And I don't like to say truth.

And I don't like to say X.

I just, it was a post.

He tweeted.

He put it on the internet.

We all fucking saw it.

It's a statement.

It's just disgusting.

It's neither here nor there.

For sure.

But

he said he's arranging a meeting between Zelensky and Putin, a one-on-one.

And then after that, we'll hopefully get the tri-lat going with Zelensky, Putin, and Trump.

What the fuck?

Well,

that's when they go to the villa.

They both

go back and forth, and he makes this decision.

Tommy,

what'd you think of the meetings today?

Are you pro-peace as much as Trump is pro-peace and Putin is pro-peace?

I think I like peace.

I mean, Thorns and roses, thorns,

or no, roses first.

Yeah, as you said, they didn't scream at Zelensky for 45 minutes and kick him out of the White House.

So we exceeded that low bar.

It is good news that Trump is not ruling out a U.S.

role as part of a security guarantee.

I still don't know what that means in practice.

It might be just us selling the European stuff, but it's, you know, he's not ruling it out.

Zelensky's body language, I don't want to be that guy.

But it's like, it seemed like he thought things went okay.

Like, first, there was the first, the press conference was before the meeting with Trump, so you never never know how things are going to go.

But then they did the second pool spray with all the European leaders, and Zelensky seemed kind of happy.

Yeah.

So it wasn't bad.

But the bad news is, first, Trump, as you've mentioned, has abandoned the idea of getting a temporary ceasefire.

He's abandoned the idea of putting in place secondary sanctions on Russia to pressure them into a deal.

So that's bad.

And the demands that Putin laid out in Alaska were still quite maximalist.

I mean,

he wants Ukraine to fully cede control of territory in eastern Ukraine that they aren't even occupying.

So just like giving up more territory without military conflict in Donetsk.

Putin is still talking about like the, he calls it the root causes of the war, which is code for this laundry list of stuff that means Ukraine putting limits on their military, Ukraine giving up territory, barring Ukraine from NATO, and then even walking back NATO expansion that occurred in like 19, the late 90s.

And so psychologically speaking, Putin also knows that Trump is just so desperate for a deal, any deal, so he can again call the Prime Minister of Norway and demand the Nobel Peace Prize, even though that is not, sir, how this works.

It's like five academics who make this determination.

He's asking him to see the Nobel Peace Prize as manager.

Which is what he's doing.

And also, not the manager of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Putin just knows he can manipulate Trump with a little bit of flattery, a little bit of shitting on Joe Biden.

And so I just, we've conceded all our leverage in these talks.

It does seem like a win-win for Putin here, which is either he knows that Trump really wants the deal, and so either Trump pushes Zelensky to give Putin everything he wants, or Trump gets annoyed at Putin and annoyed at the whole thing and just throws his hands up and says, well, I'm done.

You guys figure it out, which is also a win for Putin because then he gets to do whatever he wants.

Pretty sweet.

Yeah, all the old terms of the debate are a win.

for Putin, even the fact that you're engaging in the idea that this is some sort of negotiated peace between two countries, the way Trump talks about it, like it's India and Pakistan, right?

These long simmering enemies, if there's only someone who could come to bring the end to this conflict between

these two warring parties, when it was a war of aggression that Putin started.

Yeah, I mean, we can get to the actual Putin meeting, but like what you're, what I notice today is it feels like European leaders have figured out what Putin figured out a long time ago, which is there's just no equity in open conflict, defiance, any kind of

disagreement.

So you have, like, and there was like a decade of this, right?

There was a decade of European leaders kind of, at first, they were in in denial.

They assumed that Trump was just posturing and so he would still maintain the U.S.'s role in the world order.

And then there was this sort of anger that's played out with a decade of weird handshakes between him and Macron and like all this alpha dogging.

And that was the meeting in February where Zelensky got too upset to not tell the truth in that setting, which cost him dearly.

And there's just no equity and pride with Donald Trump.

And so now all of these, Zelensky shows up, all these leaders have to fly in and they have to say things like, we all want peace.

And someone as smart and handsome and good as you, Mr.

Trump, wants peace more than anyone.

And this isn't.

And that's why I bought a bunch of Trump coins before I got there.

Of course.

Of course, here's my little crypto wallet.

But what it amounts to, right, is like diplomacy is about national interests.

But they all come here knowing that in order to pursue the collective interest of these countries and the interests of a democratic order, they have to appeal to Trump's ego.

And that's not diplomacy.

That's flirting.

They have to fly to America to flirt on behalf of the world.

Maybe word hand stuff.

Yeah, a little, yeah, yeah, under the table.

That's why, did you notice that Macron slid his chair a little bit closer?

So then all the two shots, it was just the two of them.

And it was like, it was like a tete tete between the two of them.

I don't know what's going on under there.

You know, and he's just

over.

Yeah, all right.

He's French.

And this is just a joke because I know that the Macron's are litigious.

But that was like, that was what I, it was like, it felt to me like what we're seeing now is the culmination of a decade of leaders trying to figure out what to do with Trump.

And they just, they can't be honest.

And so it just means that we watch these public displays and because Trump says everything to everyone and it depends on who he spoke with last and these leaders can't exactly tell the truth anymore in front of them we just have to wait right because the public stuff isn't nearly as important as it used to be what do you guys think of the uh the alaska summit trump called it a 10.

what do you what do you give it nine 9.5 maybe an alaska 10.

yeah it was an la five um i

sorry yeah like

we both did the same i was good tough tonight tough tonight

the point i wanted to make is just first first, think about the images of that red carpet and the chummy walking down it and getting in the beast and laughing and Trump applauding him.

And then imagine you're Ukrainian.

So they've lost nearly 12,000 civilians have been killed.

Tens of thousands of civilians have been wounded.

An estimated 60,000 to 100,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed.

Hundreds of thousands have been wounded or injured.

10 million Ukrainians are displaced, either in Ukraine or throughout Europe or whoever else.

And then tens of thousands of Ukrainian children were kidnapped, taken to Russia, or taken to Russian-occupied areas and put in re-education camps.

Hours, just in the hours before Zelensky, or when Zelensky arrived in Washington, Russian attacks killed 14 people and wounded dozens of others.

So just imagine like being in Kyiv and watching that.

It's like, it's not just that.

Trump invites him to the U.S.

for talks, but literally rolls out the red carpet.

Like, I'm, of course,

you do diplomacy with your enemies and you make peace deals with your enemies, but you didn't have to roll out the red carpet.

And like, he also just got completely steamrolled by Putin at his own press conference.

It was really weird that Putin talked first.

It was a U.S.-based press conference and they refused to take questions.

Like on the, on all the Barretts, it was a colossal failure.

Trump told, I think it was the in-house stenographer, right?

It was Brett Baer.

Yeah.

They did the interview on the plane on the way there.

He was like, well, I'll know in two to three minutes of a success because I get a ceasefire and I'll walk out.

And he didn't get a ceasefire and he didn't walk out.

But I like, it's just like the only reason the coverage was bad, but the only reason people weren't reacting even with like more direly is that the expectation was that Trump might just completely sell out Ukraine to Putin in that moment and kind of end things there.

Yeah, the whole thing was sick.

There were three different moments.

Sick, not like cool.

No, yeah.

It was dope.

Yeah.

It was cap.

For sure.

I can't even do them.

I like, I'm so old.

I just turned 43.

I can't do it.

Happy birthday.

Happy birthday.

Hey, thanks.

Thanks so much.

It's Leo's birthday today, too.

Yeah.

And that's great.

I love dogs' birthdays.

People love hearing about dogs' birthdays.

Sometimes I confuse yours and Leo's.

It's half.

Three different, your wife FaceTimed me.

She did.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I had a nice little FaceTime.

Three different moments.

What do we do?

Three very good boys.

You were saying about Vladimir Putin.

Yeah, back.

It's wild that everyone thinks they need to flatter Trump.

What kind of a character is that?

Listen, I understand the man.

I understand the man.

So there were three different moments where Trump and Putin were in earshot of reporters who were shouting questions, and they were about Putin murdering civilians, about whether he's trustworthy, about whether he underestimated Ukraine.

On the tarmac, he kind of does a little ear thing, like he's pretending not to hear.

There's another moment when they're sitting for the meeting, and then the final moment in the press conference where they don't take any questions at all.

And so you have an American president hosting a Russian autocrat who should want Putin to squirm, right?

Who should want Putin to face tough questions from American journalists

for his war crimes, for the kidnapping of these children, for the crushing of dissent, for all of it.

But that would require Trump caring about the democratic values that Putin doesn't.

And Trump respects power.

He respects

what autocracy represents.

And so he enjoys reporters not being able to get their questions answered.

And so the end result is Putin stands next to an American president lying about the causes of the war, throwing a sop to Trump's ego by saying if he were president in 2022, none of this would have happened.

All of it is just this,

it's Trump getting snowed, but it also means we're all getting snowed by this fucking guy because instead of Trump being on our side with Europe, with Zelensky for these basic democratic values, he's got an ally

because Putin figured out a decade ago what Europe just figured out this week, which is you just suck up to him, praise him, and you have him in the palm of your hands.

Well, but except the Europeans haven't gotten anything yet.

You know what I mean?

Like they're doing this sucking up, but I'm like,

the jury's out if it's effective.

Oh, yeah.

No, who fucking knows?

But what they've, they've, they've learned is they've gotten nothing

for being honest, for being direct,

for hoping that he would uphold

the basic American sort of position in Europe of defending NATO, of defending against Russian aggression.

I mean, it seems pretty clear that if Trump were given the choice between

a global international order that's sort of grounded in shared values of freedom and democracy and can be a little messy and you've got to go to the United Nations and and negotiate and all that stuff.

Or him and she and Putin and Netanyahu and Modi and both just carving up the world and then everyone ruling their own fiefdom with an iron fist,

he would pick the latter, right?

That's why he respects people who are authoritarian and who are strength.

It doesn't matter how

successful the country is.

It doesn't matter that the Russian economy is shit, that they weren't what they were when they were the Soviet Union.

None of that matters to Trump.

What matters to Trump is that he's a tough guy who, you know, who's an authoritarian and rules with an iron fist.

And so he respects that.

And he doesn't respect Zelensky because Zelensky is a president of a much smaller nation.

Aaron Trevor Brewer.

Yeah, there's also something like, there is just something so deeply psychological about it, right?

Because

Trump, like Trump is shameless.

And so to be in his orbit, you must be shameless.

But

there's sort of a corollary to that, which is like how much pride makes him uncomfortable, like how dignity makes him uncomfortable, because displays of pride and dignity are an insult to him in some way, like some fundamental way.

It makes him uncomfortable.

And so that's what Zelensky, I think, that's why there's such a kind of tension there with Zelensky, because Zelensky has pride and he has dignity on display.

And Putin doesn't really.

He has something else, kind of his power.

He has

whatever, fragile power of autocracy in him.

But he doesn't have pride or dignity.

And that works for Trump because he doesn't either.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The meeting on Monday was, it might have been a little late on substance, but it was heavy on men's fashion talk.

There were quite a few, and of course, in the Oval, Trump and Zelensky faced questions from just the most rigorous, tough press pool.

Let's listen.

President Zelensky, are you prepared to keep sending Ukrainian troops to their deaths for another couple years, or are you going to agree to redraw the maps?

A very touching letter from the First Lady, and the letter was hand-delivered to President Putin.

President Zelensky, you look fabulous in that suit.

I I said the same thing.

Yeah, look, you look good.

I said the same thing.

Yeah,

I said someone that attacked you last night.

I remember that.

I apologize to you.

You look wonderful.

It's just so fucking, I feel so bad for Zelensky.

It's like the guy is holding his country together by a thread.

They are like they've been invaded.

They've been in war for three years.

And like, you better dress up nice for Mr.

Trump so they don't, so that Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend doesn't yell at you.

Yeah, obviously the primary idiot here is Brian Glenn from Something, something, Real America's voice, some shit like that.

Like he's Marjorie Taylor Green's boyfriend, but like it wasn't just him.

All the MAGA people were tweeting about his outfit today.

Like this woman, Mary Margaret Olihan, the Daily Wire White House correspondent, tweeted, Zelensky appears to have done his best to not wear a suit today, along with the photo of Zelensky clearly wearing a suit.

It's like, ma'am, do you have a heist?

What are you talking about?

But that wasn't the extent of this stupidity.

Like Peter Ducey's question from Fox News, who actually I think has done like a pretty good job at some of these press avails in the past, was basically, Zelensky, are you going to continue to send soldiers to their deaths for years or agree to redraw the lines?

Is this a fucking redistricting?

Yeah, like Zelensky wants to be defending the borders of his country from invasion.

Like, this is good for him.

And none of them poke Trump or press him on this claim that he's ended a bunch of wars.

Six wars now.

It's good.

It's funny.

So Trump has completely abandoned the idea of demanding a ceasefire from Putin because he's weak and he got rolled in that meeting.

And now he's saying, like, ah, who needs a ceasefire?

What's even the point?

Well, the point is that people in Ukraine are under constant bombardment, right?

So they're getting killed.

So you want a ceasefire to save them in the near term.

And then longer term, the concern is that Putin is just going to drag out these talks and press his military advantage as much as he can and take more territory and just sort of play for time.

But also, like...

He didn't end any wars.

Like, this is what he posted about the India and Pakistan ceasefire.

Quote, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a full and immediate ceasefire because that's all it was.

They don't like each other now.

The countries, they aren't allies now.

They haven't abandoned their nuclear weapons and decided to like become buddies.

All he's gotten is ceasefires.

And yet he, like, no one, no one calls him out of it.

They get a ceasefire between Israel and Iran because we bombed Iran.

Yeah, they patch things up, right?

They're buddies now.

But it's also just like, it goes to the point, right?

Which is...

Everybody also knows that all Trump wants is to say that he did it.

Right.

And they can, and that just gives you so much leverage in dealing with this person whose motivations are so obvious and on the surface horny for that peace prize yes so yes

the other very revealing moment along these lines was when um some reporter asked about zelensky not being able to hold or when he's going to hold an election and zelensky's like look under my constitution i can't hold an election when we're at war like think about this practically because first of all like it'd be very hard to vote when you're under bombardment by drones and ballistic missiles.

Hundreds of thousands of troops are at the front.

And then again, 10 million people are displaced.

So how the hell do you hold an election?

Like it's practically very hard.

But Trump's like, hey, buddy, pretty sweet that you managed to avoid that re-elect by getting invaded.

Yeah, well,

he took it as a gun.

Yeah, well, as you say, even before you get how he joked about it for himself, which we'll get to,

no one's a Democratic leader.

Obviously, Putin's not, but neither is Zelensky.

It's no different than the way Trump has to accuse every one of his opponents as to having done what he has done.

Because it's not that, because Putin cannot prove he is a Democratic leader.

Trump cannot prove he is not corrupt, but he can try to make everybody look corrupt.

He can try to claim that Zelensky is not a democratic leader.

Just two autocrats going toe-to-toe in a war of attrition where both sides are to blame.

Even Putin in his speech to Trump describes it as a tragedy, right?

He constantly calls it a tragedy.

And it's like, well, okay.

Yeah.

How did this happen?

What do we do?

Yeah, well, Trump clearly seemed to admire.

The one thing he really admires about Zelensky is the suspending the election because he went on to talk about that.

And he also got

got some inspiration from Putin, apparently, on mail-in ballots.

Let's listen.

Vladimir Putin said something.

One of the most interesting things.

He said

your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.

He said mail-in voting every election.

He said, no country has mail-in voting.

It's impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.

And he said that to me.

It was very interesting because we talked about 2020.

He said, you won that election by so much.

We're going to end mail-in voting.

It's a fraud.

If you have mail-in voting, you're not going to have many Democrats get elected.

That's bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.

And the Republicans have to get smart.

So you say

during the war, you can't have elections.

So let me just say, three and a half years from now.

So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody,

no more elections.

Oh,

I wonder what the fake lines say.

Yeah, he's getting ideas.

Trump also posted on Truth Social that he'll, quote, lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines, which will begin with an executive order, which he then said was an executive order being drawn up right now by the best lawyers in the country.

He also said that states are, quote, merely an agent for the federal government in counting and tabulating the votes, and, quote, must do what the federal government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.

That is, of course, not what the Constitution says, not what the Supreme Court has said, not at all true with regard to fraud or America being the only country with mail-in voting.

Plenty of countries have mail-in voting.

Dozens.

But between that threat and Trump's joke about postponing elections during war, what's your level of concern on this one?

Is this just Trump being stupid or is this one that we should keep an eye on?

So

on this specific...

specific threat, the Constitution is explicit.

It's not just clear.

It is explicit.

It says that legislatures are in charge of running federal elections.

And actually, what Trump is saying here is in conflict with another crackpot right-wing legal theory, which is the independent legislature theory, which it says not only are legislatures responsible for the administration of federal elections, they can't be questioned by, or their laws can't be adjudicated by the courts, maybe even the Supreme Court.

Congress can.

Congress is the only legal.

Congress can, but that

courts ruling what those laws mean can't supersede what the legislature said.

That was their way of trying to

get around some votes in 2020, and they'll probably try it again.

But certainly the executive has no role.

No, it's not.

Congress can set certain rules

to regulate elections, but the president is not mentioned anywhere and legislatures run their elections.

But whatever the specifics of the order he was told about and is then describing, he's very bad at telephone.

It is like, it's...

Our level of concern should be very high to answer your question, because whatever he does here, he is going to try wherever he can, like a rapper testing the fences, to figure out the weaknesses that he can exploit before the midterms in 2026 and the general in 2028.

And because everything with Trump is either

these worries feel too early, and then our responses feel too late.

That is up to and including him finding some pretense to not leave office in 2028.

He is doing a lot of redecorating for a guy who is only supposed to be there for a short-term lease.

And so all all of this to me is sort of, these are red sirens,

the scariest color for sirens,

going off.

They're not blue.

They're not white.

And so, like, this, he's going to, you know, this plus he, you know, the tabulating of votes he's always attacking has to be done super quickly.

He wants paper ballots, fine, but but he's, but it's an agent of the federal government.

So now we have federal agents coming in, what, to monitor elections.

Like, you can see this playing out in a dozen of very bad ways, whatever he can't get away with on mail-in ballots.

I mean, Putin doesn't like mail-in ballots because it's just so much easier to physically stuff a ballot box or just bust people to multiple voting locations and have them vote a bunch of times or just like kill your opponents.

You know what I mean?

It's just an inefficient way to steal an election.

Yeah.

Mail-in ballots.

Kill your opponents is much easier.

You just got to kill them off.

Yeah, or just change the numbers after.

Right.

I mean, there's a lot of ways.

When you're Putin, there's a lot of ways to win an election.

You just get 100% in the regions where you want to get 100%, and then you're fine.

Yeah, I have the same reaction you did.

I'm like,

Trump rails against mail-in ballots until it's time for him to vote himself.

Then he does it.

His campaign is opposed to mail-in ballots until they see a political advantage, and then they whip votes that way or try to get people to vote that way.

But I'm more broadly...

worried like you are about Trump trying every way possible to take control over the voting process or just find ways to make it harder for Democrats to vote, especially in cities.

Like that's the end game, I think.

Yes.

I think there's intimidation that we should worry about around election time.

I think that post-election is still probably the more dangerous period because if Democrats are going to be able to do that,

yeah, right.

I don't know, a couple years ago.

And look, I think he can

try to convince Republican governors and Republican legislatures to get rid of mail-in voting in red states.

But like that, okay.

First of all, I don't think they're going to do that because the

Republican Party has realized that was the stupidest thing he tried to do in 2020, and that that's why in 2024 they all decided to push mail-in voting.

So I don't know if Republicans will want to do that, but even if they did, you know,

you need the electoral votes of the blue states.

And then, you know, he could try to get Republicans in Congress to introduce something, but that would run up against, you know, it would need 60 votes.

So then maybe, yeah, you'd have to have a scenario where they get rid of the filibuster to pass some, you know, elimination of mail-in voting and the tabulation machines, which he's mad about.

He wants watermarked paper ballots now, which is fucking ridiculous.

Sure, they're not going to give any states money for that kind of transition either.

So yeah, I mean, it's not likely, but there are plenty of other things that can go wrong.

Well,

like stepping back, one of our great protections from when Russia tried to figure out if it could get into sort of the voter rolls, one of our great protections from Trump in 2020 when he was trying to overturn the election is the fact that our electoral system is incredibly complex and it is disaggregated.

It is run, forget the state level, it's run at the county level, it's run locally.

And that makes stealing an election federally very, very difficult.

That is very, very good.

That is a really good thing.

And this is like fascism.

You look back on the terms they had for it.

I can't remember it off the top of my head.

There's a German word for it about a government that can flip like a switch.

That was a term for it.

And it was an exciting technological advance like electricity that you could just have a government where at the very top a person can flip the switch and change everything beneath it.

That is very appealing to Trump.

Forget the comparison.

That idea of a government that runs that way is very appealing to him, is very dangerous for a democracy.

And any way he can undermine that independence, that disaggregation, is dangerous.

And that is what he will try to do.

And he will probably, for the most part, fail, but only probably and only mostly.

And

that's what makes it so dangerous.

Yeah, he continues to try to go for the maximalist positions, and then he sees what he can get.

Sometimes he gets it, sometimes he doesn't.

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Let's turn to what our government is doing to help support fascism here at home.

The military occupation of our nation's capital could double in size thanks to Republican governors in West Virginia, Ohio, South Carolina, and late breaking, now Louisiana, deciding to deploy another 750 troops to join the 800 National Guard members currently patrolling the streets of D.C., and they may start carrying weapons because it's always good to have more guns on the streets.

The Wall Street Journal reports that people living in the D.C.

neighborhoods with the most crime are wondering why they're not seeing Trump's deployment fighting any crime on their streets, the streets that have the crime.

The journal says, quote, the most visible show of force has centered on the city's upscale corridors and tourist hubs and focused on arresting immigrants, the homeless, quote, seatbelt violations, and putting drunk revelers in Ubers.

Unnamed FBI agents.

That seems okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's just a nice grace.

Don't know if we need the National Guard for that.

That's right.

Unnamed FBI agents told the journal they are, quote, worried they're neglecting larger national security threats or their own cases.

Yeah.

Though per usual, the stars of the show seem to be armed, masked, unidentified ICE agents who were filmed over the weekend tackling and tasing a delivery driver, complaining about liberals ruining the country, and ripping down anti-ICE signs, a video which ICE proudly tweeted out.

Here's some sound from those incidents.

Yo, let's see some badge.

Let's see some badge work.

Boys, let's see some badge work.

Do I have to answer to you?

You gotta answer to somebody.

So, wait, so you guys are just masked?

We're just masked up.

You guys are ruining this country.

You know that, right?

Liberals already ruined it.

Oh,

there we go.

Okay.

Now, an NPR reporter did say that the residents of Mount Pleasant, where the sign was taken down, all saw that the sign was replaced afterwards with a dildo.

I don't know if you guys saw that.

It's been a lot of dildo action.

A lot of dildo actions.

Oh my gosh, a lot of dildos being thrown on the courts at WNBA games.

It's not like an old head thing, but there was a dildo thrown onto the end zone at a Bills game, I believe, a few years back.

Dildos are flying.

Tommy, I just want you to know that I think there's been a lot of dildo action in this country for some time.

If you're just coming around to dildos, you should know that they've been in the mix for a while.

There was a third dildo incident recently that wasn't seen.

Oh, another person who believed, damn it, who believes in the third dildo theory.

I wasn't at the WNBA games.

It was something else.

Anyway,

are you guys impressed with all the crime fighting that's been happening in D.C.?

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of D.C.

residents would say that there is a crime problem in D.C., but the issue is not the Lincoln Memorial getting carjacked.

You know, and I think you made the point that they're kind of giving up the game by sending troops to monuments.

You got

Pete Hegseff tweeting about how Union Station has got some big deployment.

It's like, are we protecting the Sparrow?

Like, what's happening?

Yeah, they're running down the people

taking the breadbasket from the diplomat.

I mean, I will say that the men's room at Union Station is a crime.

If somebody could do something about that fucking place, that place has been disgusting since we were there.

It remains so.

But obviously, I view this through the lens of you to two, the LA people who had our own fake troop deployment to solve a non-existent problem with non-existent protesters.

But when I kind of squinted this, I see it one of two ways.

The first is Trump is just doing whatever he can to highlight law and order as an issue and pick a fight with Democrats.

And the unique way that DC is governed allows him this ability to send in federal agents and just, you know, create a narrative.

And like, look, to be clear, he wants these fights.

Like, the sandwich guy throwing the sandwich at the Ice Agent, which is very, very funny.

That's a funny video.

Expensive sandwich.

That guy lost his job.

Yeah, I feel bad for that guy.

I don't think it wasn't.

Look, the funniest part of that is he outruns all those agents running like a

at a Barry's beginner speed.

I mean, just

not fast.

That's a 5-0.

That's a 5-0 jog.

Did you see DHS brought cameras and filmed going into his apartment

and arresting him, 20 agents?

Yes.

This is like, well, that's all their dream.

A deep state DOJ person

who threw a sandwich and was running away.

Like,

that's owning the libs.

That's what they're here for.

Stonewall.

But so that's like the good version of this, I think.

The bad version is like precedent for

a takeover of DC, if the time was right, like January 6, 2.0, or to deploy troops across the country in some sort of quasi-martial law.

And that's where all these governors kind of just being so thirsty to get in the game and send troops to Washington is really pretty weird.

And so I don't know.

Like the pretext here was, I think, I mean, I was off last week.

It was big balls.

This is all big balls.

God beaten up.

Look, to be clear, I don't want to see anyone manhandling Mr.

Balls in DuPont Circle.

That is not.

cool and not something I'm for, but I feel confident that the D.C.

police department could have handled that on their own.

This is big balls and dildos.

This is what we're happening in D.C.

What do you guys make of the response from a lot of elected Democrats over the weekend that Trump's deployment is a stunt and a distraction?

So

those are two different things.

It is absolutely a stunt.

We know it's a stunt.

He saw it on Fox News.

He saw it.

I'm going to do something about this.

They cobble together this plan.

They bring Pam Bondi out.

I always say Pom Bandi.

Pam Bondi out

to the teleprompter to the press conference to be like, crime is ending and it's ending now.

Like, of course, it's a stunt,

but that's how he, that's how Trump governs.

He governs with stunts.

Announcing tariffs on the whole world is a stunt.

He's very good at getting a lot of attention on the stories that he wants attention on.

But that doesn't make it a distraction, right?

It doesn't mean that's something that you should ignore.

Like, it's a big deal that he's doing it.

You have to meet him where the attention is.

He's gotten the attention.

You have to respond to it.

You have to have an argument about it.

So that's first.

Then you have to hold him accountable for the consequences of the stunt, whether it's the failure to deliver, because no, this will not solve crime in this country.

National Guard doing traffic stops outside a sweet green at the corner of 14th and R is not going to stop crime in D.C.

And then there's just like the

sort of the other consequences of this.

Trump today in the meeting with Zelensky made some point.

about how, or it was in answer to a question about how MTG and her boyfriend were able to go walk in the streets.

So Trump made it safe again.

And Trump then jumped out.

Oh, I'm hearing from all kinds of friends saying that they haven't gone out to dinner in D.C.

in years.

And now they're going out out and all the restaurants are full.

I was like, that's a strange thing for Donald Trump to say.

So I look, I was like, why is he saying that?

Well, he's saying that because Open Table reported that the restaurant reservations plummeted after this takeover because, as we all know, criminals and homeless people use Open Table to book their reservations.

But it's still hurting their businesses.

And then the third part of it is we have to.

figure out ways to elevate the stories that are dramatic and interesting enough to compete with the stunts, right?

That means pulling the moments where ICE is manhandling people for no reason.

It means telling the stories of immigrants or American citizens grabbed off the street for no reason.

We have to compete with Trump and his stunts with a level of drama and human interest that gets people's attention.

And the good news is that I do think on social media especially what spreads are these stories that make what Trump is doing feel real for people in the way we would hope that it does.

So like, yes, it's a stunt.

No, it's not a distraction.

I was wondering where all the distraction stuff came from because it's really, really been kicked up lately on a whole bunch of issues.

And then I saw some polling last week.

It was from Blue Rose Research.

They did like a bunch of message testing.

And they said, of the 16 Democratic messages tested about the Trump-DC takeover, just two tested above average.

The first one is called Pivot to Tariffs.

Trump's takeover of D.C.'s police is a stunt to distract from the pain his tariffs are causing families.

Trump's tariffs are driving up prices on groceries, cars, and everyday goods, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then the next one, of course, pivot to Medicaid.

While Donald Trump is sending troops into D.C.

in the name of safety, he just cut Medicaid for millions of Americans.

And then it goes on about the Medicaid cuts.

Okay.

So

I could see why when you read someone two statements that are mostly about tariffs and Medicaid cuts, they're like, oh yeah, that's pretty fucked up.

In real life, if someone was like, what's the deal with Trump's takeover of DC?

And you said, it's a distraction from the tariffs, you sound like a fucking moron.

And the person would think you sounds like a fucking moron.

It's kind of like the Swiss Army knife of pivots.

You know what I mean?

Like, that's what, that's all anyone's saying.

Trump is talking about this because he doesn't want you to talk about that.

And you can just insert anything you want.

And I think there were, there were, look, there was the two weeks of Epstein, there was certainly a series of attempts to distract from that narrative, right?

Like when you're hitting the

Obama did treason button over and over again, right?

That was

a clear example of distraction.

But I think like, I'm going to deploy the National Guard to D.C.

to drive a message about law and order is Trump like getting back to his core message and thing he wants to talk about.

Which is the talk about it.

Yeah, which is an authoritarian takeover of the country.

And like it's pretty clear.

The Epstein thing is very funny because if you guys remember, at the beginning of the Epstein scandal,

as many of us were talking about it, some elected Democrats were like, Epstein, this Epstein thing is just a distraction from the Medicaid cuts.

Now they're

all in on Epstein.

And now

authoritarian takeover is a distraction from the Epstein file.

And look, I think they'd be inside.

Just fucking say what you think.

Say what you think about what's going on.

The insurrection was a distraction from Medicare cuts as well, but still important and worth talking about.

Yeah, I just, the other thing about it, too, is like, forget sounding stupid to people.

This is a distraction.

Who are you telling that to?

Like, who is your, who is hearing that from you?

Is it someone watching MSNBC?

Is it someone already following you on on social media?

Like when you say into some lens that it is a distraction, who's on the other side?

Because it's not the person you're trying to reach with the most, with the, you're not getting the person who is the, the, the, the sort of the person you're hoping will receive the best poll-tested message.

You're reaching someone who's already very engaged on the topic, most likely.

And you're trying to figure out how to, how to combat what Donald Trump is doing by arming that audience and people beyond it with some sort of a story about why what he's doing is wrong.

Because otherwise what's out there is just Trump doing this and a bunch of Democrats saying, well, really, we should be talking about something else.

And no one answers the actual thing of why it is wrong for Donald Trump to deploy troops in D.C.

due to a kind of a manufactured crime wave.

I mean, it's always over-learning the lesson of the last election.

And in 2024, it was like, shouldn't talk about democracy, should talk about kitchen table issues, which voters cared about more.

And what these Democrats are saying by talking about distraction is the Medicaid cuts and the tariffs tariffs are more unpopular than Trump attempting to fight crime is unpopular, right?

That's what they're trying to say, but instead use this distraction language, which just doesn't make sense.

Yeah, I think it's a little different.

Like, I think it's more like Democrats not wanting to talk about immigration in the last election and pivoting to anything else.

It's like, no, this is a thing people care about.

It's happening in the world.

Talk about it.

Take it on.

Make an argument.

Like, first of all, put forward your case for how you'd make things better, but also make the point that like, if you're worried about crime, just deploying National Guard guys with no law enforcement training to hang out at the Lincoln Memorial is not going to do anything.

Yeah.

And again, I like my view on the various federal agents and troops that are all over DC now is like National Guard troops are like, why the fuck are we here?

That's what they were like in L.A.

And, you know, that's why they, you know who they are by their uniform and they don't wear masks and they're probably like, what are we, you know, they don't want to be there either.

They don't want to be there either.

The FBI agents that are running around are like, yeah, we have actual threats to go take care of.

We don't know why we're here.

But again, they're clearly identified as FBI.

You know who that.

This is all about fucking letting the secret police force, ICE, just go wild and do whatever they want.

Those are the people tackling people, tasing people, saying liberals ruin the country, just like fucking, I was going to say mask off, but not.

But just saying the quiet part out loud here, right?

That like they just don't like liberals.

They're politicized.

That you can't identify them.

The guy that, the people that tased the delivery driver on 14th Street, no one knew where they were coming from.

It just said police on them, but like no identification whatsoever.

I mean, that's what this is.

And that's fucking dangerous.

Yeah.

And ICE is dangerous.

And there is, I'm sure.

The problem, right, too, is that like for any individual politician talking about this, right?

Like they would rather be talking about healthcare, issues that they, first of all, maybe have more knowledge or care about.

That's why they're in politics, right?

And there is just less equity in talking about these issues where Trump has more purchase with the electorate on crime, on immigration, though he's lost a lot of ground there.

And you may not fight to a win.

You may not even fight to a draw on the issue.

But we have to be making an argument collectively against what Trump is doing.

You may not win there.

You may wish we were having a debate about health care and Medicaid cuts and all the rest.

I wish we were too, but we're not.

And when we cede those grounds completely,

we lose ground to Trump that we don't get back when we eventually do talk about the big, beautiful bill or whatever.

The guy's underwater on immigration, which was his best issue.

And the reason he is is because he, you know, took it to the extreme and then a bunch of Democrats finally made the argument instead of avoiding talking about immigration.

And now he's underwater on the issue.

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All right, let's talk about the latest in the redistricting wars.

On Monday, Texas Democrats ended their two-week walkout and returned to the state, clearing the way for Governor Abbott and Texas Republicans to pick up five Republican congressional seats at the request of President Trump.

Democrats said their conditions to return were met after California Democrats, led by Governor Newsom last week, announced a redistricting plan that would offset any gains made in Texas.

The California plan, which Newsom discussed with Dan in our last episode, would net Democrats five new House seats, but would only go into effect if other states redraw their maps first and only last for the 26, 28, and 30 election cycles before reverting to the nonpartisan redistricting commission.

And the plan would have to be approved by California voters this November.

Let's start with Texas.

Tommy, I think the first time we talked about this, you called that there was no way the Democrats would be able to stay out of Texas until December.

What do you make of them returning for this second session?

Mission accomplished?

I mean, I think their best and only card to play was to raise awareness about what was happening.

And so to the extent that,

I mean, they did a break a job, I think.

They got this on everyone's radar screen.

They did a lot of media.

This was just kind of like the Texas legislature.

It's a part-time gig.

Most of them have jobs.

They have families.

They have things they had to do in Texas.

So like just being on the lamb forever was not an option.

I'm like very glad that Gavin Newsom has taken this on and has made this a cause.

I think it's going to benefit him enormously politically, and I think it's really meaningful.

I think his hope was probably that there could be some sort of mutually assured destruction approach, whereas he told Texas, don't.

redistrict or else we will too.

So it just sort of stopped everyone.

It seems like that's not going to be the case here because Texas Republicans are shameless.

But yeah, it sucks.

It sucks.

What do you think?

Yeah, look,

they're putting the best face on

going back, having not been able to stop the gerrymander from happening.

But would California be doing this had Texas not fled?

I don't know.

I think so.

I think Newsom was talking about it before they ever left.

Well, regardless, I think it sort of ignited something, ignited a conversation.

Maybe it still would have had to get through the legislature, still would have had to go before voters.

I do think it brought to the fore gerrymandering.

Whether it would have happened regardless, I don't know.

Whether Texas Democrats could have held out longer, who knows?

Seems like no, because

they're going back now.

It means they thought, well, maybe we can hang on a little while longer, but not all the way to December.

So we might as well give up now.

When I talked to James Tallarico

and I asked, well, what's the plan to hold out?

They were saying they weren't going to think past this session.

And I was like, well, what's the hope?

And the hope is that Texas Democrats back down from pressure from other states.

Neither of those felt likely at the time.

But if we end up in a situation where now Democrats are doing redistricting in California, at least to partially stem the losses, I think that's a good outcome.

How do you guys feel about the prospect of

Newsom's Election Rigging Response Act getting approved by voters this November?

I mean, I'm going to vote for it.

We're going to have to fight.

I mean, hopefully, this is, you know, it's an off-year vote.

Hopefully, it'll be base turnout, a lot of Democrats who sort of understand what's happening here.

I mean, it's really important that people understand that he is responding to a massive overreach by Trump to redistrict in like in the middle of the the decade, in something that's completely unprecedented, and that he's doing so only as a response to Texas.

And it's not a permanent thing.

This is just a temporary fix to respond to what Texas is doing.

I think that that's, it's going to be challenging.

I mean, it's tough that the Schwarzeneggers out there are fighting this hard, but I think we have no other choice.

I think Democrats generally have no other choice to fight against.

gerrymandering like this.

Long term, it really sucks.

I think it really muddles any kind of semblance of a reform message from Democrats.

Or

in longer term, like more gerrymander districts make politics more polarized and more extreme, and they help people like Donald Trump.

Because when Trump has a bunch of Republicans in totally gerrymandered districts, he can fully control whoever represents that district because all they care about is a primary election and not a general election.

But we're going to have to fight for this.

I mean, I think, I don't know.

I've seen just that one political story in the one set of polling that wasn't exactly what Gavid is put forward.

Basically, they polled the approval in the state of getting rid of the independent commission, which is not at all what Gavin Newsom has proposed.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah.

Look, I think there's going to be a glut of ads that are going to be extremely deceptive about what this is.

That's going to claim, do you want to vote for partisan politics or for independence?

And in a way that I think appeals to maybe lower engaged voters or people that are going to kind of clock in right towards the end.

That's worrying.

I hope that because it is a midterm and because I think

people are going to be pretty fired up about this and explain why this is necessary, I hope it'll win the day.

It does say something about our politics that Arnold Schwarzenegger, who very powerfully spoke out about why Trump is such a danger, is sort of pumping iron and getting ready to fight here, but not in Texas or not anywhere else.

I mean, this is his state and it is his baby, but still just says something about also just about how redistricting has worked, right?

Colorado has independent redistricting.

We have independent redistricting.

It's been pursued by some of the biggest names in Democratic politics.

And now we've sort of caught on our asses because Republicans are willing to do this

make a decade.

And it talks about some of the ways in which our politics are asymmetrical.

But yeah, I'm glad we're doing it.

I hope we get it through.

Yeah, I think, you know, polarization sort of rules everything around us these days.

And I think you have a big Democratic voter registration in California.

And I think if you ask California Democrats, would you rather Republicans have a lock on the House of Representatives in the midterm so they can continue to rubber stamp Donald Trump's agenda?

Or do you care more about keeping independent redistricting and getting rid of gerrymandering?

They're going to say they care more about the midterms if it's communicated well.

I mean, it's still going to take some work.

It's going to take a lot of money.

And it's by no means a sure thing.

But I just, I feel like in this case, polarization is going to help us because it is a, it's pretty clear that if California doesn't do it, they're going to start with a five to 10 seat head start on the midterms.

Yeah.

And in terms of the long-term effect of what gerrymandering does, like I hear you, Tommy, on like the ways it makes a kind of, it draws people to the extremes in those districts.

But you look at where we're at now with where the Republic, with, with, with the vote on this big, beautiful bill, right?

There was like one or two super right-wing holdouts.

There are no Republican moderates left.

There are a few Democratic moderates, but no matter how you draw the maps, there will still be swing districts all across the country.

Already, we're pretty polarized in Congress.

So I'm less worried about the effects on how we govern and more just the brute partisan impact of gerrymandering and the fact that if we do this, and this will be what we'll get to next,

what is the Republican reaction?

Because they have more arrows in their quiver than we do.

Yeah, also,

we spent a couple of years trying to pass a bill just a couple of years ago that would have outlawed gerrymandering all across the country.

So I think Democrats can very easily say, now we've gerrymandered, you've gerrymandered.

We'll give up our gerrymandering if you give up your gerrymandering.

And if they don't want to, then like, you know, I don't think they, I don't, I think the reform message is still strong then.

We can say that, but that just, it sounds kind of childish.

You know,

like I, you're right.

Of course, we're all supported that bill.

I just think it muddles it and it sucks.

It's like there are a lot of Democratic states that are gerrymandered to fuck already.

It's not like Democrats are out there leading the charge, complaining about Maryland.

You know, it's like...

No, but if we had passed the John Lewis voting rights bill, then Maryland, none of them would have passed.

We would support universal

redistricting reform for the country.

But

there's a lot of hypocrisy here that I think is challenging.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I think every single Democrat in the country voted for that bill, voted to get rid of gerrymandering, including the senators from Maryland and from every other Democratic country.

I know it's just a tough sell.

I think it's a tough sell.

New York Times published a great analysis over the weekend that quantified the party's Republican Party's redistricting advantage.

Just as Republicans have the potential to pick up seats in 15 different states, while Democrats only have the potential to pick up seats in three to four, if you include California after passage of its ballot measure.

So we basically knew this.

But after the California news, it does seem like a good reminder that Republicans can still rig the maps to start the midterms with a big advantage of the House.

Yeah.

Also, just part of the reason why Republicans are against independent redistricting is because it helps Democrats more than it helps Republicans because the maps are inherently less fair to Democrats because of where Democrats live and how we're distributed.

Our protection here, we talked about this a little bit, but some of this is kind of old school politics and there are natural breaks on gerrymandering.

One being that if you gerrymander too hard, you can lose your seats in a wave.

The other being what you do when you gerrymander is you take seats from a safe Republican district and you put it in another district to make it more safe.

But those are, you're taking Republicans, parts of, you're taking Republican neighborhoods from Republican politicians in a lot of states.

And they're going to be fighting behind the scenes, never in public, be like, hey, hey, that town of rich golfing assholes, they belong to me.

Those are my people.

Those are my people.

You're not giving them to this other freak.

Those are my people.

It is wild that the California Republicans and the New York Republicans and everywhere else, they're probably going to lose their seats or just sort of, you know, maybe they put out a statement

slightly, but it's like, you know, it's Donald Trump's party and he's the king and you don't piss him off.

And so, or whatever, I guess I'll just lose my job.

It's pathetic.

It's truly pathetic.

And just don't say anything.

Yeah.

Pretty fucking wild.

Pretty wild.

All right.

Before we jump to the interview,

we should talk now that we're on Newsom about his social media strategy.

If you're no longer on Twitter, you may have missed the rollout of Newsom's new press office account where the governor's team has been posting aggressive parodies of Trump's all-caps tweets and over-the-top memes like this one.

Let's check it out.

For those who are just listening, Lovett, can you describe what we're seeing here?

Yes, it's Gavin Newsom being supported by

the angel of Hulk Hogan and a living Kid Rock and a living Tucker Carlson, I believe, with his hands on his shoulders.

They're all laying hands on him.

Which is interesting that only Hulk Hogan is dead because normally it's the kind of, it's the spirits behind them.

Yeah, a couple.

But it's a beautiful moving AI portrait.

And I think speaks to the promise of AI itself and why we're all so excited about it.

Yeah, I wonder if they could have used other

MAGA stars who have passed, like Hulk Hulgan, Herman Kane.

Oh, that's a good idea.

I'm trying to think of the reason.

The Kaiser.

I don't know about the Kaiser.

I don't know where the Kaiser would have been out on MAGA.

What do you guys think about the social media thing?

I think it's great.

I'll tell you something.

I saw the first one, like the parody one, and it gave me a weird feeling at first.

It was like, oh, yeah, that's right.

You did say that.

And it hit me in a strange way.

But

I love two things about it.

One, I love the commitment to the bit.

And the bit has only gotten stronger with commitment.

And they are excellent.

They're not, they're not like resistance.

It's real humor.

It's not resistance lib version of a Trump tweet.

They really are doing a good job of getting the voice.

Yeah.

And so the fact that it's being done so well is working for me.

And it's annoying them.

The fact that it's getting a rise out of them is making me like it more.

It's breaking through.

It's getting attention.

People are talking about it.

Republicans are mad about it.

Democrats find it funny.

I admit, like, I, too, when I first saw saw the kind of all caps Trump parody

sad exclamation, like I just, I was like, oh boy, where is this going to go?

Because we've seen a lot of it done poorly.

Yeah, now this is done well.

And it's not just like Trump trolling.

Like, you know, the Libs of TikTok account tweeted an attack on Gavin Newsom.

So they replied with a photo of her holding up the Epstein files Phase 1 binder and said, great job, Chaya.

Right.

So they're just like going after tons of people.

And I think that pisses off the Republicans.

It gets you attention.

It also gets you some sort of like algorithmic juice, right?

Because you're engaging in fights and people are looking at it and they're sharing it and they're commenting.

And it's just like, you know, this,

the J.D.

Vance one of him, what was the name of the Australian breakdancer?

Oh,

fuck.

Skeet shoot.

Nope.

What?

Nope.

It was something.

You know what I mean?

What was it?

Skater 8, Gator Skater?

Ray Gun.

Ray Gun.

Close.

You're so close.

Almost there.

You know, it's funny.

I like it.

You know, the tweeting the video of J.D.

Vance jogging like an idiot.

Like, I like it.

It's fun.

It is wild to me.

I mean, it's not surprising, but it's still wild that so that the, you know, one of the deputy press secretaries in the White House was like, this is so lame and unserious that he's doing this.

And Dana Prino, just on the five, was like, where is Gavin Newsom's wife in all this?

How could she be letting him do this?

It's so unserious.

This is not what, how did he think this is going to be successful?

And I was like, I tweeted, I was like,

what do you think of Donald Trump's social media strategy?

Do you think that's a thing?

And she's like, well, I just, I think that I don't think it's going to work.

I don't think it's going to work.

Well, then everyone were down to, oh, it's not going to work.

Oh, this is a strategic impulse that you're feeding.

What I also appreciate about this, and what I appreciate about what Gavin Newsom has been doing with redistricting, with the way that he's doing press,

the way that he's sort of coming on our show is

we talked about how who's going to be the person that takes on MAGA.

Maybe it's Gavin, maybe it's not.

But the way we find out is by seeing how they take on, like, what the right person for who's going to take on whoever replaces Trump or is Trump in 2028.

How do we figure out who the right person is?

Well, let's see what they're doing right fucking now.

How are they fighting back against MAGA now?

How are they making news and taking attention now?

And so

I view this as a time where the people that are going to be the right people to lead this are going to be showing us what they want to do and how they're going to fight them.

And the people that are hanging back to wait for their moment to ride it on a white horse, I'm just less interested in.

Yeah, it's like shamelessness and commitment really gets you a long way.

Donald Trump has shown us that.

And somewhere, Gavin Newsome must have had a meeting where he was like, you know what?

I trust you guys.

Let Rip have fun with this.

And it's working.

And you could just watching Republicans flail in response has been very funny.

Like, I think it was over the weekend.

Some Republican account.

tweeted a photo of Gavin Newsom like 15 or 20 years ago, maybe at a wedding.

Oh, yeah.

Kind of looking, looking like, you know, it was like 11 to 12 to 1 a.m.

at a wedding next to a very attractive younger woman being like, you really could have gawking a little bit.

He's gawking at her, like judging by the angle of the photo or whatever.

I was like, do you think this makes him look bad?

It's like a young, attractive photo of this man next to an attractive person.

I thought you guys were the, yeah, I thought you were the Manosphere party.

Yeah, I thought you guys got what voters like.

This isn't a negative.

I thought you were, we used to be the ones for fucking and sucking.

Now you are.

That sucks.

What?

I'm just saying, we got Gen Z's not having sex.

We got a, we got a,

they're out there acting we gotta be listen America's gonna vote for fucking and second all right am I wrong are we sick are we he's having fun that's why they put a dildo there this is our lead-in to Bridget Brink

yeah she's gonna be really excited about her decision

you can't Ukraine's getting fucked okay okay

I I will just say that also like Gavin Newsom has separated himself just a little bit from the like it's not his tweets are also punchy and great but they're not the same parody voice as the account which I think is,

it keeps his stature and it's his doing his, and this press office is doing it.

And so, like, he, he's having fun.

He likes it.

He's enjoying it.

But, like, when he's given interviews, he's not doing the voice.

He's not doing the voice.

You know what I mean?

It's just like, hey, like,

there was, there was a moment in 2024.

It was called, I don't know if you remember it, Brett Summer.

And there was like a brief, it was, there was like a refreshing moment where people were just having fun and the team on the social media accounts were having fun and it was exciting and it was generating enthusiasm and did it work yes

no i do think there's no no but i just think it's like great to have like there they were like there's some fun in it it was okay it was good it was i'm joking of course it was awesome that that was happening it was exciting there is like we do let's just define what success is like because i saw some like self-serious chod tweet like liberals think this is how you convince swing voters to like no this is not about swing voters this is about the base and getting attention and breaking through the clutter and the crap on social media so people know about you and what you're talking about and you're just making noise.

That's all this is.

Also, like,

so many people in my life who are not political junkies have reached out to me like, I don't even know that much about Newsom, but these are really funny.

I've noticed these.

Like, attention is the most important currency.

Yeah.

The way that I think about it, too, is like, we don't get attention anymore.

You have to take it.

You take attention.

And this is taking attention.

That's great.

Yeah.

I think it's a distraction from Gavin's other problems.

Yeah.

It's a distraction from the Epstein files from the takeover of DC from the Medicaid cuts.

She's like, make some Epstein and her mant.

All right.

In a moment, you'll hear Tommy's conversation with former United States Ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink.

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Joining me now is the former U.S.

Ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink.

She is now running to represent Michigan's 7th Congressional District.

Ambassador, thank you so much for joining the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Tommy.

So we all saw this press conference today between Ukrainian President Vlodymir Zelensky and President Trump.

The good news is it was not nearly as bad as the one we all watched in February.

The bad news is I feel like a lot of the big kind of ticket issues are not resolved.

What were your takeaways from what we saw and what you've read since?

Well, first of all, I think it's very good that it was better than the meeting in February, that's for sure.

I think there were some critical things that needed to come out of it, and I think it's yet to be seen if they did.

And I think first and foremost, it's security for Ukraine.

The starting point to ending this war is focusing on how do Ukrainians have security?

And if that problem can be solved, the other pieces, whether it's territory, whether it's assistance, whether it's other things, those can all follow.

But the starting point is security.

And it does sound like that was a topic of conversation both in the bilateral meeting, but also critically in the meeting with European leaders.

Yeah, so there has been a lot of focus on this question of what a security guarantee for Ukraine could look like if the war were to end.

The contours of the kind of broader deal could be Ukraine gives up a lot of territory to Russia.

Putin agrees to end the war and not evade again.

I guess we kind of pretend to believe him because he's a liar and we should not believe him on the front.

But that pledge is also backed up by a European and potentially U.S.

Ukrainian security guarantee, maybe some sort of force in Ukraine that says, you know, if Putin does this again, we'll protect you.

President Trump didn't rule out the U.S.

playing a role in like whatever this security force might look like, but I'm a little skeptical that you might see U.S.

troops on the ground in Ukraine.

But what kind of security guarantee do you think could actually deter Putin?

Well, I think first and foremost, any diplomatic negotiation needs to, with Russia, certainly with Vladimir Putin, needs to do two things.

And this is where I think we need to start.

Number one has to make sure that we don't give away things in advance.

And that's already happened.

Whether that is a meeting, which for someone maybe not in diplomacy doesn't sound like a big deal, but that is a very big deal to have a meeting with the President of the United States, or

maybe even more fundamentally, NATO membership.

That is a decision for the members of NATO and those members alone.

Those things have already been,

well, the meeting has happened, and NATO membership has at least, or in earlier conversations, been taken off the table.

That's one thing that I think is problematic in the way this is being approached.

The second, though, is trust but verify.

I mean, this is something that has to be done with a leader like Vladimir Putin, who, as you said, he lies.

He agrees to things and then violates those agreements over and over and over again.

So we can't trust anything that he is going to agree to.

Instead, what we need to do and what Europe needs to do is come together with Ukraine on an agreement of what would make Ukrainians feel secure.

Secure so people come home and they can contribute to their own economy.

Secure so that the U.S.

and Europeans can work together with Ukraine to invest for the benefit of both the countries.

And that would happen only with maybe one option is NATO membership.

It's not clear that this is something NATO members are yet ready to do.

I actually think this would be a smart option.

But if not NATO, it could be something else.

It could be a coalition of the willing that provides some kind of security guarantee so that essentially, if Putin violates the agreement, there will be a consequence.

And that consequence will be not just Ukraine responding, it will be Ukraine plus other democratic partners responding.

Trump and Zelensky were joined today, as you mentioned, by a collection of European heads of state and officials, leaders from France, Germany, Italy, Finland, the UK, EU, NATO.

Obviously, these countries, these entities have a huge interest in the outcome from today's talks.

But what did you make of the strategy of having them all in Washington with Zelensky at the same time as sort of part of this bilateral meeting?

Well, I would have preferred that it happened before a meeting with Vladimir Putin, but I think it's a good idea.

I think and believe that our allies and partners are part of what increases U.S.

power, and that we should, first and foremost, be close with countries that align with our values.

And that's democracy, that's rule of law, that's protection of human rights.

And all of those countries that came to Washington represent that.

So I think it's a great thing.

I think that it's good if we're working together.

It also shares the burden with Europe that we should do.

And Europe is stepping up in a way that I think is very positive, including buying U.S.

weapons that will then be given to Ukraine.

But I think working with partners and allies is vitally important, and it's a change, and I think it should continue.

Last week, Putin and Trump met in Alaska for this, whatever you want to call it, historic mess.

They failed to broker a ceasefire.

Trump kind of tried to yada, yada, yada away the value and importance of a ceasefire today.

But going into that meeting, he said basically that that was the line of success or failure.

You also heard Putin continue to outline pretty maximalist views.

He kind of codes it as dealing with the root causes of the conflict, which I'd love for you to explain to our listeners.

But what was your takeaway from this summit, such as it was in Alaska, and what maybe was achieved or not?

Well, I mean, I thought it was a win for Putin.

And this is exactly why I resigned from my position as U.S.

ambassador, because I could see this also back in April when I left my position and also left the State Department.

That the instinct of President Trump and the administration is to appease Putin and to take what Putin says at face value and respond on his terms, not on our terms.

And I believe we should be using the levers of American power to achieve a result, not just that's good for Ukraine, because it matters for Ukraine, obviously, but it also really deeply matters for Europe and it matters for the United States.

And that result needs to be one that, again, starts with security, puts more sanctions on Russia.

The economy is already hurting.

There's more that can be done and we should be doing it.

And third, that gets the Russian sovereign assets that are in Europe.

It's about $300 billion.

Those can be used to buy weapons in America and potentially in Europe and in Ukraine so that Ukraine can defend itself.

There are many ways we can do this without an endless amount of American taxpayer money flowing to Ukraine, but that secure our interests.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Do you really think that any kind of security guarantee that doesn't include the backing of NATO or the United States can deter Putin?

I mean, imagine we're talking about giving up.

The Russians are demanding that the Ukrainians give up parts of the Donetsk province that are the most heavily fortified.

Obviously, the U.S.

is sort of the biggest military force within NATO.

If we are not part of a security guarantee that is Article 5-like that says, you know, an attack on Ukraine will be responded to militarily by the U.S., will that deter Putin?

Well, my belief is that NATO has already deterred Putin.

So I believe that that optimally would be an option we should go down.

conditions-based for Ukraine, but to make clear that Putin has no business and no right and no ability to stop NATO from deciding as NATO which countries will be a part of this alliance.

It's a defensive alliance.

it's an offensive alliance, and we should not accept any of Putin's historical

justifications for why he started this war in Ukraine in a sovereign country.

So, yes, ideally, it would be something as ironclad as NATO, but it could be something lesser than that.

If that's not an immediate possibility, which I actually don't think it is immediately, then the question would be, what would?

And I think that's a question that the Ukrainians can answer.

And I'm confident that between us and the Europeans, and I believe we would need to be a part of it, we could answer that question.

But again, because the promise that President Trump made to end this war is not happening, this is exactly the problem.

We're six months into this administration.

And the claim that

the war, as as I hear many times, would never have started under President Trump.

I mean, the fact of the matter is the war has escalated since President Trump has taken office.

Just in in July, more civilians have been killed in that month than any month since May of 2022.

That's when I first arrived in Kyiv.

Additionally, more missiles and drones have been sent to Ukraine from Putin and Russia in July than any time since the beginning of the war.

Over 6,000.

I mean, imagine that.

Imagine if that was America.

I know this because I lived under these night after night.

I know exactly what it's like for the people of Ukraine.

And we should not be okay with this.

And we should be very clear to Putin and not welcoming him back with red carpet in Alaska so that we can hear out his rationale for starting the biggest land war in Europe since World War II.

In my mind, this is crazy.

And this is not what we want to be representing.

This is not using American power in a way that advances our values, advances our interests.

Yeah, I mean, two-part question.

I mean, can you sort of tell us what you've heard from folks you still talk to back in Ukraine about how they felt about seeing Trump literally roll out the red carpet for Putin?

And then, second, I mean, you were, I believe, in the State Department for nearly 30 years.

We actually overlapped at one point during the Obama administration when you were detailed to the NSC.

I mean, back in my day, staffers like you,

I was a little lower level than you, but like worked really, really hard to get all the details done in advance of the meeting so that the leaders could agree to it and have a big thing to announce.

It seemed like this was just thrown together and the the whole point of the Trump-Putin meeting was just kind of the optics of the Putin meeting.

I sort of wondered what you made of that kind of slapdash method.

Yeah, well, you're exactly right.

So it's great to see you again.

But the

meetings like this, summit meetings, are

ordinarily prepared weeks, if not months, in advance.

And so the outcomes of the meeting, and they're always outcome focused.

So we only agree to such a meeting after many meetings before happen and after we know what will come out of that meeting.

And as you know, during the time when we were both in the White House under President Obama, these were just incredibly

detailed and stage managed in a way so that the outcome met our needs and our interests.

And in this case, I actually think it's more about a distraction.

It's a distraction from,

well, most importantly, I think what's going on at home and promises not kept with regard to the economy.

So promises to lower prices prices and make life more affordable are not, it's not happening.

And I can tell you that from Michigan, where I am now, because I talk to people all over my district and they are very frustrated because prices are going up,

their insurance costs are going up.

Their kids can't afford to buy their own houses.

This is happening today in America.

And we see this with the indicators that came out in just the last couple of weeks.

The jobs report, the inflation report.

I think this is more about distracting attention to something, and as you can see, everyone's paying close attention to in a slapdash way so that

the main issue that people are unhappy about is no longer the focus in the media.

And I think we have to be really clear about this and show when promises that have been made by President Trump are not being kept.

And I can tell you from Michigan that this is happening right here and right now.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Including the promise to end this war in 24 hours.

Exactly.

Zelensky's last Oval Office meeting was an unmitigated disaster.

And on some level, like this was better than that.

So I think there was a sigh of relief.

But then we saw, you know, Trump and J.D.

Dance stressing down Zelensky.

There were random reporters insulting Zelensky based on the clothing he was wearing.

What was the reaction like in Ukraine after that meeting?

And what do you think Zelensky learned from it?

And how did he adjust going forward?

I think the reaction in Ukraine about the whole positioning of the United States after that meeting, but also during a number of key moments in the last few months, has been one of just shock and incomprehension.

People don't understand what happened.

I mean, I had a meeting with the foreign minister, one of my last meetings, and there's just not an understanding there.

All he could say is, you know,

what happened?

You know, you were our closest ally.

And I think the challenge we have in this instance is that we have turned our positioning 180 degrees, which,

you know, any new administration gets to make the policy.

And of course, that goes to the president.

But in this case, it doesn't meet our interest.

It does not meet U.S.

interests.

And as you said, it also isn't achieving the promise that was made, end the war in 24 hours or end the war in 100 days.

I mean, in either case, we're well past that point.

And as I said, it's gotten worse.

So, what I think people feel is just they don't understand, and it's hard to believe

not just that the position has changed, but that instead there's an appeasing or a

capitulation to the demands of the aggressor, of Putin, who essentially changing the borders of Europe at a time when

this has not happened in 80 years.

After 80 years of peace on the European continent, we are now facing the biggest threat to European security since that time, since World War II.

Now, why should we care about it?

We should care about it because Europe is our biggest trading partner.

It's the home of some of our most important allies who are working with us on any number of issues and problems and crises around the world.

So it makes no sense for us to

side with the aggressor.

on a moral on a moral plane.

But even more than that, in terms of our interests and our values, it makes no sense.

And the danger we have is that China's stepping in, our adversaries are stepping in because we are stepping back and siding with dictators and siding with autocrats.

It's unthinkable.

And it's, again, the reason why I spent my entire almost 30 years in the parts of Europe that are contested space, the young democracies of Europe.

And the reason that I left the State Department, the reason that I left that job that I love so much and that I had done since I was in my 20s was that I saw us becoming what some of these young countries are, which are weaker democracies.

And I couldn't believe that that could be the situation with the United States.

And the only way I thought to change it, I could not change it from the inside, was to step out and try to change it in a different way.

And so, just, you know, so people know where I'm coming from, I'm running for Congress in mid-Michigan for the 7th District to try to help flip a critical seat and and also to help flip the house.

Because I think we need to have principled leaders in Washington who are solely focused on American interests, solely focused on delivering for the people of, well, for me, my district, but also our state and our country in a way that helps make America the strongest country in the world, which I believe deeply, that's our tradition.

And we need to keep building on it, not destroying it.

And this is what I see is happening right now.

Yeah, I mean, look,

you were, you know, you're an ambassador.

You had very senior jobs throughout the State Department, an extraordinary tenure of service, and you resigned because you couldn't, in good conscience, carry out this administration's foreign policy.

And I think you could be,

I would understand if you decided to take some time off or, you know, go into the private sector or write white papers for a think tank, but instead you decided to run for Congress.

Why?

And what do you hope to accomplish in this next iteration of public service?

Like, why did, why was it this running for this seat the thing that inspired you to be your next step?

Yeah, well, thanks.

I mean, I felt compelled to do something because I had spent my life, you know, trying to build up the young democracies on the fringes of Europe and create better partners, stronger partners and allies for the United States and fighting essentially for freedom and democracy.

That's what I spent almost 30 years doing and very proud to do it.

I was proud every single day that I represented our country working for five presidents presidents and

over a lifetime and a career.

But it just seemed that I needed to find a way to do that.

I feel like it's such a critical moment for us because the problems that I saw overseas in terms of broken promises or doing things that did not reflect or advance our interests is exactly what I see happening at home.

I'm a really proud Michigander.

My family goes back in Michigan for six generations, and I decided to come home with my family.

I have a husband and two kids, and to run for Congress.

And I think that that is a way to change the situation and change it in a way that advances U.S.

interests, that actually helps to do what we promise to do.

And in my district, it's all about the economy.

It's all about how do you help make life more affordable.

And what Trump is doing right now

with regard to the reckless tariffs, it's making everything more expensive.

With regard to the big ugly bill, it's threatening to take away health insurance from 25,000 people in my district, but also will increase the cost of life insurance for everybody else.

So the actions that are being taken

on the domestic front are also equally bad for the people of Michigan, the people of my district.

And so I feel like we need truthfulness, we need correct facts, we need to make policy based on

what actually is true and happening and ensure that we deliver.

We need government to deliver so that people feel that government

and have confidence in their political leadership, which must also be held accountable, no matter who it is, whether it's the President of the United States,

the House leadership for any district or local representation.

Everyone needs to be accountable for how they deal with taxpayer money and how they deliver.

Well, Ambassador Brink, thank you for your decades of service in the State Department.

Thank you for joining us today and providing insight on this cluster of a policy towards Ukraine.

And best of luck in your campaign.

We really appreciate you doing the show.

Thank you.

You can find me on bridgetbrink.com.

Thanks a lot, Tommy.

It's great to see you.

Thanks for having me on.

That's our show for today.

Thanks to Bridget Brink for coming on.

Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday.

We can even talk about the Melania letter.

I think she's a force for good in this.

I really do.

I also didn't read.

I think ChatGPT is a force for good in this.

I think ChatGPT wrote the letter, but I think Melania is pushing Trump in a good direction on you.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I'm not going to end them.

We also forgot to talk about the flyover, but that's fine.

Which part?

Oh,

the B2 bomber and how that was just a massive show.

Yeah, there were MAGA dudes just like, like, losing their minds, just rock hard over seeing that video.

I was like, guys, do you think Putin's intimidated by that?

They're fucking kicking over that.

Yeah, they were.

Do you guys think Putin thinks that Trump's going to bomb him and kill himself?

Got to be the party of the world.

It's such a great code up.

We should should just listen.com slash friends or subscribe on Apple Podcasts directly from the Pod Save America feed.

Also, please consider leaving us a review to help boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked.

Pod Save America is a crooked media production.

Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Illick Frank, and Saul Rubin.

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