Ep. 2261 - The Trump/Putin FACEOFF: Who’s Winning, Who’s Losing?

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All righty, folks, an enormous amount coming up on today's show.

We'll recap what happened on Friday in the meeting between President Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Plus, we'll preview what's about to happen today in the meeting between President Trump and and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

All the details on that plus were joined by the brother of one of the hostages still being held in the Hamas terror tunnels.

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Well, folks, an enormous weekend in diplomacy and a huge start to the week.

So today, Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is slated to arrive.

in Washington, D.C.

He's supposed to come in this morning.

And then at about 12, he is supposed to arrive at the White House.

And when he arrives, he's also supposed to be joined by a bunch of different European leaders.

That includes French President Emmanuel Macron, UK Prime Minister Kiera Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merse, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Italian Prime Minister George Maloney, NATO Secretary General Mark Rudy, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

So it is a cavalcade of European heads of state.

At 1 p.m., Zelensky is supposed to arrive.

and President Trump is supposed to greet him.

At 1.10, there's supposed to be an Oval Office press spray featuring President Trump and Zelensky ahead of a bilateral meeting between the two of them.

At 2.30, a family photo with Trump and European leaders.

And at 3 p.m., everybody is supposed to get together in the Eastroom.

So obviously the most fraught moment of that for Vladimir Zelensky is going to be that 1.10 Oval Office press spray.

Is it that last press spray with Zelensky that involved President Trump and J.D.

Vance?

And things went really sideways back in February.

Obviously, things have changed.

And all of this comes on the heels of a big meeting in Alaska between the president of the United States and Vladimir Putin.

And so the question becomes at this point: what is everyone's goal?

Why don't we start from there?

What is everybody's goal here?

So President Trump has two goals.

One goal is to get to the end of the war.

Obviously, this is something that he said over and over during the campaign.

He said, it's not my fault this war started.

If I'd been president, it never would have started.

He said, I want to stop the death.

There's too much carnage, which, of course, is true.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed on both sides.

The number of total dead is probably in excess of a million at this point, depending on the estimates that you are using.

Certainly dead and wounded is over a million.

You've seen vast flight of people from places like Ukraine, 7 million people from Ukraine have actually left the country during the ongoing conflict that's now been going for three years.

The president wants to get to the end of that.

But there may also be a larger geopolitical and geostrategic goal here, and that may be to do a sort of reverse Henry Kissinger.

So very famously, Henry Kissinger went to China and basically opened China along with Richard Nixon in an attempt to split off the USSR from the Chinese.

This is back in the early 1970s.

Well, it's quite possible that that is something that the president would like to do here, that what he would like to do is stop allowing for Russia to be predominantly used as a Chinese gas station.

Because obviously, if we are orienting ourselves at boxing in China, then having a Russian-Chinese very close alliance is a bad thing.

So the idea might be get to the end of the war, create a warmer relationship with Vladimir Putin, and somehow do a sort of quasi-détente with the Russians in an attempt to pry them out of the waiting arms of the Chinese.

Now, is that something that's going to happen?

I think rather unlikely.

The Chinese and the Russians have a lot of common interests.

Obviously, the Russians have a long-standing agenda, and this gets to what Vladimir Putin wants.

What Vladimir Putin wants is not only territorial expansion in Ukraine.

What he wants is the capacity to turn the rest of Eastern Europe, as well as at some point Western Europe, into a sort of anti-Atlanticist preserve.

This is something that's been pushed.

by his supposed brain Alexander Dugan, an author who we've talked about on the program before.

He and Putin use exactly the same language.

What Putin would like is for essentially Europe to become a Russian sphere of influence, because the goal of the Russians is not to be a sort of strategic

player in the world.

They want Russia to be an actual, honest to God, quasi-empire.

They would like for the Russian ability to influence events to spread far beyond.

its borders.

They see themselves as the sort of preservers of a deeper Russian ideology that should actually be spread.

And so this could be the first step towards something like that, gain a little bit more territory in Ukraine, stall for time, wait for the next president of the United States, and then go after the rest of Ukraine, or put additional pressure on Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, try to formally actually break NATO, try to get all of these countries, because they're afraid of the West basically abandoning them, to start treating them in friendlier fashion.

Something sort of similar to what's been happening with Taiwan, where Taiwan, every few years, when they have a presidential election, has to decide whether to pursue a closer policy with China, a friendlier policy with China in an attempt to prevent a Chinese invasion or whether to stand tall and independent of China.

So again, Vladimir Putin's goal here does not align with the goals of the president of the United States.

And obviously, when it comes to China, if Putin has to choose between siding with China against the United States and siding with the United States against China, The answer is probably the former rather than the latter.

And then there's the interests of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, the rest of Ukraine.

they just want to be an independent state.

They do not want to be under the Russian thumb.

They're not interested in becoming Belarus.

They're not interested in becoming a Russian proxy state.

They don't want to be Georgia.

They don't want to be completely dominated by the Russians.

And so they want their independence.

And meanwhile, the Europeans, they want to have a warmer economic relationship with Russia.

They had that before Vladimir Putin's repeat invasions of Ukraine.

But they would also very much like...

for Vladimir Putin's influence to stop at the borders of NATO.

So those are the various interests at play here.

And it's very hard to see a deal that gets made here that enshrines all of those interests and ensures all of those interests.

So, this is a very, very sticky situation for sure.

And the thing that makes it most sticky is that the history of Russia in conflict is mass casualties do not matter to the Russian regime.

They just do not.

The rest of the West sees mass casualties as a very, very bad thing.

Russia does not see mass casualties as a very bad thing.

The more people who die during World War II, the more they can claim Russian heroism during World War II.

Vladimir Putin's vast war output during this current conflict in Ukraine, which he thought he was going to win easily, has not diminished his standing in Russian circles by most available data at this point.

We'll get to more on the meeting between President Trump and Vladimir Putin and the upcoming meeting with Vladimir Zelensky in just one moment.

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So, how does all of this end?

Well, there are a couple of scenarios that are posited by the Wall Street Journal.

In a piece by Marcus Walker, basically says there's two scenarios here.

One is partition with protection.

Quote, Ukraine's leadership has quietly come to accept.

It doesn't have the military strength to get its borders back in full.

Last week, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky indicated his willingness to negotiate about territory in video calls with President Trump and European leaders after a ceasefire that freezes the current front line.

So the goal there would be to essentially stop the forward momentum that Russia is attempting to pursue while the talks continue.

Kiev and European countries say they would never give legal recognition to Russia's gains, a step that would turn international law into an incentive for further conquest instead of a taboo against it.

But they are signaling they would live with the reality of de facto Russian control.

So what would that look like precisely?

Kind of unclear.

It wouldn't be a formal Russian recognition of annexation.

It would be saying, okay, well, we understand that we are not going to make any forward movements on those borders for the foreseeable future.

The best case scenario for Kiev and its European backers is probably to limit Russia to what its forces already occupy, equivalent to about one-fifth of Ukraine's land.

The Kremlin continues to insist Russia retreat from areas that it claims is Russian, but doesn't actually control.

That's particularly true in the Donetsk region, where Ukraine has a bunch of fortified cities that Russia has been unable to conquer.

And remember, any sort of territorial acquiescence by the Ukrainians will actually have to go through a referendum in Ukraine.

There's a constitutional provision in Ukraine that requires that the people vote if they're going to give up land to the Russians.

So what happens to the other 80% of Ukraine?

Well, Kiev and its European allies want to protect the future security and sovereignty of the remaining Rump with a combination of strong Ukrainian military defenses and Western security assistance.

A so-called coalition of the willing, led by the UK and France, wants to actually deploy some of its own troops to Ukraine as a sort of trigger force, the way the United States has a trigger force in South Korea to prevent against North Korean aggression.

So that is possibility number one, is that you get very, very strong security guarantees.

Ukraine makes some sort of territorial concessions, and this conflict comes to...

a sort of ceasefire, an end point without a full-scale peace agreement.

That is possibility number one and the most hopeful possibility.

Then there's possibility number two.

The Wall Street Journal calls it partition with subordination.

Russia's demands since its 2022 invasion have included shrinking the size of Ukraine's armed forces, limiting its weaponry and its supplies of Western armaments, and changing its political regime.

The greatest danger for Ukraine isn't just losing its east and south.

It's that what remains would not be able to resist a third Russian invasion.

And you can't imagine a situation in which Ukraine accepts that outcome.

Not after the second invasion of Ukraine inside of a decade.

There's just no way.

They are not going to accept full-scale subordination.

They're going going to say, we might as well fight this thing out and slug it out on the front lines if the idea is that we're supposed to diminish our military in some serious way.

Such an outcome would turn the surviving rump of Ukraine into a Russian protectorate.

The battlefield, again, remains the only way Putin could achieve such capitulation terms.

Russia's forces continue to make only limited gains in terms of square miles, but again, their goal is to basically outlast Ukraine.

So those are the stakes as all these meetings are taking place.

So just to review, last Friday afternoon, Vladimir Putin arrived in Alaska, which of course is very close to Russian territory.

And it was kind of a fascinating tete-a-tete between the president and Vladimir Putin.

So on the way to the actual meeting, President Trump was speaking to the press aboard Air Force One, and he said his goal was to get them to the table.

Are the territorial swaps on the table?

Will you be discussing them?

They'll be discussed, but I've got to let Ukraine make that decision.

And I think they'll make a proper decision.

But I'm not here to negotiate for Ukraine.

I'm here to get him at a table.

Now, did that actually change?

That's the big question coming out of those meetings.

Did Trump's position actually change?

Is he pre-negotiating on behalf of Ukraine what Ukraine should give up to Russia?

And it is worth saying here that the president has been very busy on Truth Social over the weekend, trying to now put pressure on Vladimir Zelensky to give up some territory.

Unclear what kind of territory he wants him to give up at this point.

Well, when Vladimir Putin arrived, President Trump did the ceremonial handshake.

There's a big red carpet that was out there.

And he shook his hand.

He kind of yanked him as he did so in a show of physical dominance.

The president taking a more dominating position physically there with people who like the body language reads on these sorts of situations.

The president is the one who seems to be much more in control.

Meanwhile, just to make things particularly clear to the Russians, the president ordered the B-2s fly overhead on Putin's arrival.

You can see in this footage, he's flanked by a bunch of F-35s and F-22s.

And then you can see a B-2 flyover happening, which honestly, I love.

I think that's great.

I think it's great.

I think that all nations that are adversarial to American interests should be forced to face the reality that America is a militarily dominant power, not only on planet Earth, but in human history.

I think it's a good thing.

Okay, well, Vladimir Putin, he is attempting to show the president that actually he is not enemy, but maybe friend.

And the last time, of course, the United States and the Russians were quasi-friends was World War II.

That would be in the very short period of World War II between when the Russians declared that they were actually on the Nazis' side and then flipped and they were on America's side for approximately four years.

And that was because of the Nazi invasion of Russia.

And then they flipped back and that was the Cold War.

There's a very short period of time where the U.S.

and Russia were on the same side, and it was only because of the Nazis.

So Vladimir Putin went to a a monument to honor the U.S.-Soviet alliance in World War II.

So you can see he's taking flowers.

Putin is

over to the monument.

Now, again, I'm not a big fan of this sort of propaganda that the U.S.

and Russia were ever true allies.

During World War II, they were best allies of convenience, obviously.

And the kind of notion that Russia was a positive force during World War II, well, if it had not been for Russia's manipulation in the prior to World War II era, then probably there is no World War II.

Great book by Sean McMeekin all about Stalin and how Stalin basically really, really wanted World War II to happen.

He was only shocked when Hitler turned on him.

He thought that Hitler was going to continue his battle with the West and basically leave him to pick up the scraps.

In any case,

the Putin-Trump meeting happened on Friday.

And then afterward, they had a bit of a presser.

Putin basically read from a paper.

And Putin's goal here was to sort of flatter President Trump over and over and over, to talk about how wonderful President Trump was.

He knows that President Trump is sometimes susceptible to such matters.

Here is Putin doing this.

I'd like to remind you that in 2022, during the last contact with the previous administration, I tried to convince my previous American colleague

that

the situation should not be

brought to the point of no return when it would come to hostilities.

And I said it quite directly back then, that it's a big mistake.

Today, when President Trump is saying that if he was the president back then, there will be no war.

And I'm quite sure that it would indeed be so.

And I can confirm that.

President Trump, of course, is happy to hear those words.

And then he issued his own optimistic statement about the nature of the talks.

We had an extremely productive meeting, and many points were agreed to.

There are just a very few that are left.

Some are not that significant.

One is probably the most significant.

But we have a very good chance of getting there.

We didn't get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.

Okay, so again, general rule of negotiation.

If you're the person who keeps going out there and saying that you have a very good chance of getting there and that you're very, very close and the other guy is standing there silently, you're the person who is likely to move.

That is just a general rule of negotiation.

And so I think that is why Zelensky is pretty nervous.

It's why the Europeans are relatively nervous here.

President Trump put out a statement on truth socials and quote: a great and very successful day in Alaska.

The meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia went very well, as did a late-night phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine and various European leaders, including the highly respected Secretary General of NATO.

It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a peace agreement, which would end the war and not a mere ceasefire agreement, which oftentimes do not hold up.

President Zelensky will be coming to DC the Oval Office on Monday afternoon.

If all works out, we will then schedule a meeting with President Putin.

Potentially millions of people's lives will be saved.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

So he is saying that everybody basically agreed, we're not going to worry anymore about the ceasefire stuff.

We're going to go directly to some sort of peace agreement.

Now, remember, that is a change in President Trump's position.

He had said that he wanted an immediate ceasefire.

I had stopped the fighting fighting while we negotiate this thing.

And Putin says, I'm just going to keep grinding while we negotiate this thing.

So if the negotiations don't work out, then

I'm still grinding through Ukrainian bodies.

So let's just keep going.

So President Trump appears to have shifted his position on that.

And now he says that he's not going to mandate a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine before the negotiations can continue.

And Putin is treating that as a bit of a victory.

for sure.

Meanwhile, Melania Trump wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin that was delivered to him saying, Dear President Putin, every child shares the same quiet dreams in their heart, whether born randomly into a nation's rustic countryside or a magnificent city center.

A dream of love, possibility, and safety from danger.

As parents, it is our duty to nurture the next generation's hope.

As leaders, the responsibility to sustain our children extends beyond the comfort of a few.

Undeniably, we must strive to paint a dignity-filled world for all so that every soul may awake to peace and so that the future itself is perfectly guarded.

A simple yet profound concept, Mr.

Putin, as I am sure you agree, is that each generation's descendants begin their lives with the purity and innocence which stands above geography, government, and ideology?

Yet in today's world, some children are forced to carry a quiet laughter untouched by the darkness around them, a silent defiance against the forces that can potentially claim their future.

Mr.

Putin, you can single-handedly restore their melodic laughter in protecting the innocence of these children.

You will do more than serve Russia alone.

You serve humanity itself.

Such a bold idea transcends all human division, and you, Mr.

Putin, are fit to implement this vision with a stroke of the pen today.

It is time, sincerely, Melania Trump.

Now, I will point out here that Vladimir Putin does not give two craps about the laughter of children.

This is not his thing.

The idea that Vladimir Putin is sitting there there and his heart warms at the joy and laughter of the children.

There is zero record to demonstrate that this is the case at all about Vladimir Putin.

But of course, you have to admire the sentiment from Melania.

Now, Zelensky, for his part, he put out a tweet in which he retweeted a joint statement of the leaders of the Nordic Baltic 8 on Ukraine.

Quote, we remain steadfast in our support to Ukraine and to efforts, including by President Trump, to end the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

To achieve a just and lasting peace, the next step must be together with Ukraine.

Only Ukraine can make decisions concerning its future.

No decisions on Ukraine without Ukraine and no decisions on Europe without Europe.

Experience has shown Putin cannot be trusted.

Ultimately, it is Russia's responsibility, says this statement from, again, the leaders of the Nordic Baltic Gate, to end its blatant violations of international law.

Russia's aggression and imperialist ambitions are the root causes of this war.

Achieving a just and lasting peace requires a ceasefire and credible security guarantees for Ukraine.

A peace agreement needs firm and concrete commitments by transatlantic partners to safeguard Ukraine against any future aggression.

We welcome President Trump's statement that the U.S.

is prepared to participate in security guarantees.

No limitations should be placed on Ukraine's armed forces or on its cooperation with other countries.

Russia has no veto over Ukraine's pathway to the EU and NATO.

We demand that Russia urgently returns children who have been abducted from occupied territories, as well as prisoners of war and civilian prisoners.

We'll continue to arm Ukraine and enhance Europe's defenses to deter further Russian aggression.

As long as Russia continues its killing, we'll continue to strengthen sanctions and wider economic measures to put pressure on Russia's war economy.

We stand firm in our unwavering support for Ukraine's sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity.

So obviously the Baltic Gate, Gate, they are the most threatened.

If they are looking across their borders at Russia and they are seeing an aggressive Russian bear that may be winning its battle in Ukraine, this makes them quite upset.

Zelensky tweeted out that statement.

Then he said, quote, thank you for the support.

All the points mentioned are important to achieve a truly sustainable and reliable peace.

We see that Russia rebuffs numerous calls for a ceasefire and has not yet determined when it will stop the killing.

This complicates the situation.

If they lack the will to carry out a simple order to stop the strikes, it may take a lot of effort to get Russia to have the will to implement a far greater, peaceful coexistence with its neighbor for decades.

But together, we are working for peace and security.

Stopping the killing is a key element of stopping the war.

So translation there is Zelensky saying, I still want the ceasefire.

President Trump may have said he's going to put the ceasefire agreement to the side to pursue a broader peace agreement.

Zelensky's saying, listen, I was ready to do ceasefire like yesterday.

You wanted it from me.

I gave it to you.

What happened to the ceasefire agreement?

He says, today, coordination with partners has been ongoing throughout the day.

Tomorrow calls are already scheduled.

We're preparing for Monday's meeting with President Trump.

I'm grateful for the invitation.

It is important that everyone agrees there needs to be a conversation at the level of leaders to clarify all the details and determine which steps are necessary and will work.

We in Ukraine welcomed the principled statement of the Nordic-Baltic partners and are grateful for their very significant assistance.

The unity of all strengthens each one.

So, again, there is a bit of a gap here.

There is a gap between the United States and Ukraine and Russia.

There are gaps.

And pretending that those gaps don't exist is not going to make them disappear.

Zelensky then said that it's not possible to just give up territory.

He said that at the EC

Russia is still unsuccessful in the Donetsk region.

Putin has been unable to take it for twelve years,

and the constitution of Ukraine makes it

impossible to give up territory or trade land.

Since the territorial issue is so important, it should be discussed only by the leaders of Ukraine and Russia at the trilateral Ukraine, United States, Russia.

So far, Russia gives no sign that trilateral will happen.

And if Russia refuses, then new sanctions must follow.

Well, in a moment, we'll get to President Trump's reaction to all of this.

What is the latest?

Plus, the left goes insane, of course.

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Okay, so meanwhile, President Trump was on Truth Social last night.

He tweeted, the fake news has been saying for three days that I suffered a major defeat by allowing President Vladimir Putin of Russia to have a major summit in the United States.

Actually, he would have loved doing a meeting anywhere else but the United States, and the fake news knows this.

It was a major point of contention.

If we had the summit elsewhere, the Democrat-run and controlled media would have said what a terrible thing that was.

These people are sick.

They want crime in D.C.

and other blue cities throughout our country, but don't worry, I won't let that happen.

He also made some statements about the actual content of the meeting with Vladimir Putin, suggesting that not only could the ceasefire be put to the side, but that there was actually some pressure on Vladimir Zelensky.

So late last night, the president of the United States put out a statement on truth social, quote, President Zelensky of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately if he wants to, or he can continue to fight.

Remember how it started?

No getting back Obama given Crimea 12 years ago without a shot being fired and no going into NATO by Ukraine.

Some things never change.

So, apparently, he wants some sort of commitment from Zelensky to not enter NATO, like ever, presumably, which is a key demand that the Russians have been making since the 1990s, because it's not that they're afraid.

I know there are a lot of Russian apologists who want to say they're afraid that NATO is going to launch offensive action against Russia.

That is not what Vladimir Putin is concerned about.

He believes that NATO is a defensive front against his sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

Alexander Dugan has made this clear over and over and over again.

So, Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister.

In any case, what comes next?

Well, that is unclear, certainly.

That's why today is extremely fraught.

We'll have to see what plays out in public and then also behind the scenes.

So, Marco Rubia, the Secretary of State, was in Alaska for a lot of these negotiations.

He was on ABC with Martha Raditz.

And Raditz, the rest of the media, were highly, highly critical of the entire meet.

Of course, they were.

I mean, by the way, I just want to point out.

that all of these Democrats, all these members of the media who are highly critical of the meet, it is so ridiculously hypocritical, so ridiculously hypocritical.

I want to flash back to 2009.

Here is Hillary Rodham Clinton, then Secretary of State under Barack Obama, meeting with Sergei Lavrov, who is the foreign minister, and handing him a red button that was supposed to say reset, but it actually just said overcharge.

Represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying, and that is

we want to reset our relationship.

So we will do it together.

Thank you very much.

You are very welcome.

We worked hard to get the right Russian word.

Do you think we got it?

You get it wrong.

I got it wrong.

It should be Perezagrushka.

And this says Peregruska, which means overcharge.

But we won't let you do that to us.

I promise.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, sir.

It actually said overcharge that button.

But look at the big warm smiles.

And that was supposed to be a glorious new era for American-Russian relations.

Well, it didn't work out.

Anyway, I'm also old enough to remember when it was Barack Obama who was paying homage to the Russians back in those 2012 presidential debates.

It was President Barack Obama saying to Mitt Romney that the 1980s called and want their foreign policy back.

And Mitt Romney was asked, what's the greatest geopolitical threat?

He said, Russia.

And Obama was like, no, Russia's great.

Governor Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that Al-Qaeda is a threat.

Because a few months ago, when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia.

Not Al-Qaeda.

You said Russia.

And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.

But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.

Ridiculous, ridiculous.

The fact that that man was president for two terms is just insane to me.

But that wasn't the extent of his capitulation, by the way.

You'll remember Barack Obama sitting with Dmitry Medvedev, who was then the stand-in for Putin, who's the pretend president of Russia at the time, and Obama being caught on hot mic, saying, this is my last election.

After that, I'll have flexibility.

Basically saying, please back off and I will give you things, which he proceeded to do.

He proceeded to give Russians control over Syria.

He proceeded to back off when Russia took Crimea and do literally nothing.

So, I mean, you want to talk about like an open quid pro quo, an open electoral quid pro quo.

Barack Obama, the fact that he has gotten away in American history with this idea that he was some sort of coherent moderate who was just beautifully mellifluous and genius in his worldview.

The guy was awful.

He was just awful.

This is my last election, I believe.

Yeah, and after my election, I have more talks about

it.

I translate this in my mission

Insane.

Insane.

By the way, the sort of bizarre

cowardice that the United States has shown almost my entire lifetime with regard to Russia since the end of the Cold War, this notion that we're going to look deep into the eyes of Vladimir Putin and find something different than the last guy found, it's always bizarre to me.

In any case, this is just to point out the insane criticism of the left.

The left is going nuts over all of this.

Let's just be clear.

If there were a Democrat who was president right now doing the exact same thing, they would be celebrating it.

Celebrating it to the ends of the earth.

Diplomacy above all.

In any case, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, he went on the Sunday shows to talk about these meetings.

And Martha Raditz said, you know, why exactly did you give him the red carpet treatment?

And Rubio was like, well, I mean, he is a world leader, and we do have to acknowledge that reality.

I mean, critics of President Trump are always going to find something to criticize.

You don't even pay attention to it anymore, but I will tell you this, Putin is already on the world stage.

He's already on the world stage.

The guy's conducting a full-scale war in Ukraine.

He's already on the world stage.

He has the world's largest tactical nuclear arsenal in the world and the second largest strategic nuclear arsenal in the world.

He's already on the world stage.

When I hear people say that, oh, it elevates him.

Well, all we do is talk about Putin all the time.

All the media has done is talk about Putin all the time for the last four or five years.

That doesn't mean he's right about the war.

That doesn't mean he's justified about the war.

Put all that aside.

It means you're not going to have a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine.

You're not going to end a war between Russia and Ukraine without dealing with Putin.

That's not, that's just common sense.

I shouldn't even have to say it.

Meanwhile, Rubio assured NBC's Kristen Welker that they're not reading minds.

They're looking at actions.

The goal here isn't to try and discern the soul of Vladimir Putin.

It's to actually take a look at the things that he's doing and then react to them.

Look, I wasn't playing any of those games about looking people in the eye and trying to read their minds.

I'm reading actions.

And that's what we're looking at is actions.

What will you agree to?

What will you commit to?

And what will you follow up on?

And in order for this war to end, Russia will have to take actions.

Ukraine will have to take actions.

Ukraine's partners and allies will have to take actions as well to enforce that peace in the long term.

That's what we're interested in.

So, you know, whether those steps are taken is an open question.

As Rubio says, he says, listen, I'm not saying we're on the verge of peace.

There's enough.

Movement to justify some of these meetings.

Look, our goal here is not to stage some production for the world to say, oh, how dramatic he walked out.

Our goal here is to have a peace agreement to end this war, okay?

And obviously, we felt, and I agreed, that there was enough progress, not a lot of progress, but enough progress made in those talks to allow us to move to the next phase.

If not, we wouldn't be having Zelensky flying all the way over here.

We wouldn't be having all the Europeans coming all the way over here.

Now, understand and take with a grain of salt, I'm not saying we're on the verge of a peace deal, but I am saying that we saw movement, enough movement to justify a follow-up meeting with Zelensky and the Europeans, enough movement for us to dedicate even more time to this.

Now, Rubio also pointed out with Martha Raditz that a lot of these conversations are going to have to be made in private, which is something I fully agree with.

Again, I think the most fraught moment of the day today is going to be when Zelensky is in the oval with members of the Trump administration.

Wouldn't be surprising to see the vice president try to repeat some of his performances from February, even though the times have changed and Vladimir Putin has demonstrated his complete intransigence.

Here's Rubio saying, listen, we're going to have to have some private discussions.

They're going to be very serious.

Both sides are going to have to make concessions.

So, of course, concessions were asked.

But what utility would there be of me going on a program and tell you, we've wagged our finger at Putin and told him, you must do this and you must do that?

It's only going to make it harder and less likely that they're going to agree to these things.

So these negotiations, as much as everyone would love it to be a live pay-per-view event, these discussions only work best when they are conducted privately, in

serious negotiations, in which people who have to go back and respond to constituencies,

because even totalitarian governments have constituencies they have to respond to, people have to go back and defend these agreements that they make.

And so and figure out a way to explain them to people.

So we need to create space for concessions to be made.

But of course, concessions were asked.

So, you know, again, I think that this is the exact right approach, is that it does have to be done behind closed doors.

I hope that that will be kept to today.

So Marco Rubio was also asked by Margaret Brennan over at CBS if the European leaders are showing up with Vladimir Zelensky as almost a protective Praetorian guard for Zelensky.

Like they're so afraid that Trump is going to bootstomp Zelensky that they're coming over here to provide a sort of phalanx of protection for the Ukrainian president.

And Rubio dismisses that out of hand.

But that's not true.

They're not coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied.

They're coming here tomorrow because we've been working with the Europeans.

We talked to them last week.

There were meetings in the UK over

the previous weekend.

And they said President Trump was going going to demand

as early as Thursday.

But you said that they're coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied.

They're not coming here tomorrow.

Oh, this is such a stupid media narrative that they're coming here tomorrow because

Trump is going to bully Zelensky into a bad deal.

We've been working with these people for weeks, for weeks on this stuff.

They're coming here tomorrow because they chose to come here tomorrow.

We invited them to come.

We invited them to come.

The president invited them to come.

Okay, and again, he is right about that.

So there has been some movement on the American side, we should point out here.

It's not just all empty verbiage.

According to the Washington Post, the United States is now prepared to maybe give some security guarantees.

So Steve Witkoff, the negotiator, special negotiator on this, on Gaza, on a bunch of other issues, Witkoff says that the goal here could be to offer Article 5-like language as a security guarantee, but without actual NATO protection.

So instead of Ukraine entering NATO, which is a big no-no for the Russians, instead, we'll kind of end around it by saying that there are European and American direct security guarantees that sort of acts as the equivalent of a NATO admittance for purposes of a Russian invasion.

We got to an agreement that the United States and other

European nations could effectively offer Article 5-like language to cover a security guarantee.

So Putin has said that a red flag is NATO admission.

And so what we were discussing was assuming that that held, assuming that

the Ukrainians could agree to that and could live with that, and everything

is going to be about what the Ukrainians can live with.

But assuming they could, we were able to win the following concession, that the United States could offer Article V-like protection.

Now that is a major move.

If President Trump does that, that is the single biggest thing that America could do to end the war.

Seriously, the single biggest thing America and the Europeans could do to end the war is short of formal NATO recognition of Ukraine and admittance of Ukraine, saying,

with real actual security commitments with UK forces on the ground in Ukraine, saying, listen, we know you're going to have to give up some strategic territory, but we are for the next 30 years going to have troops on the ground, not the United States, the UK.

But if there is a Russian war that starts, we are providing you overwhelming military materiel, whatever you need in order to stop Russian aggression and reverse it.

That would be something that could actually move Ukraine toward the table, because otherwise, Ukraine really doesn't have a lot of incentive to move toward the table at all.

And as Marco Rubio has said, listen, the minute we do sanctions, basically the negotiations are over.

So if you want the negotiations to actually end in something short of a continuation of the war, then they have to continue.

I don't think new sanctions on Russia are going to force them to accept a ceasefire.

They're already under very severe sanctions.

I think that should be, you could argue that that could be a consequence of refusing to agree to a ceasefire or the end of hostilities.

But there is no evidence that more sanctions, because sanctions take months and sometimes years to bite.

And we may very well wind up in that place.

I hope not, because that means that peace talks failed.

But we have to give every opportunity for peace a chance in this particular case.

And that's what we're trying to do here.

And so those those options remain to the president.

The minute he takes those steps, all talks stop.

The minute we take those steps, there is no one left in the world to go talk to the Russians and try to get them to the table to reach a peace agreement.

In a moment, we'll get to the latest on the Democratic side of the Al Gavin.

Newsom continues to posture.

Plus, we'll be talking with the brother of a man who's still being held hostage in Gaza by Hamas.

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Well, the bottom line to all of this is that it's unclear which direction these negotiations are going to go at this point.

But Democrats already know.

Democrats know no matter what President Trump does, it must be a very, very bad thing.

So you have Senator Chris Murphy, who for some reason thinks he's going to be a presidential candidate or something, the senator from Connecticut.

He says, well, you know, President Trump is afraid to offend his great friend Putin.

Again, listening to this sort of rhetoric coming from the Democrats who were massaging Vladimir Putin, like while he invaded Crimea in 2014 is insane to me.

This next set of sanctions could be much more impactful.

The problem is in the Senate, the Republican leader won't even bring up a vote, a debate on this bill, because Donald Trump doesn't even want a discussion about these sanctions because he's so worried that it might upset his great friend Vladimir Putin.

What is most impactful and what will be most impactful on this war are more weapons for Ukraine.

So, I mean, again, what basis does he have for suggesting he knows how these negotiations are going to end?

Meanwhile, Eric Swalwell, who when he's on farting on TV, allegedly, is saying silly things.

He said on MSNBC that President Trump is acting like a Russian asset, which is, again, a very weird take from somebody who was sleeping with a Chinese asset, but okay.

I was hoping to hear there'd be a ceasefire.

That didn't come out of this.

And I was hoping to at least hear about the territory that would be proposed or exchanged by both sides.

That didn't come out of this.

Look, Alicia, I don't know if Donald Trump is or is not a Russian asset.

I do know that at press conferences like this and like at Helsinki, he certainly acts like one.

And that is cold comfort for anyone in the United States, particularly in our military, that the commander-in-chief would be so flattering of and so charming to a ruthless dictator like Vladimir Putin.

Again, listening to this sort of talk from the Democrats, I can hear critiques of President Trump's take on these negotiations.

And in fact, depending on what the take on the negotiations is, we'll either be praiseworthy of them or critical of them, depending on the content.

But listening to Democrats go off about this stuff, not very credible.

Jake Sullivan, who is the former NSA under President Biden, he says, well, actually, it was a loss already because if there's no ceasefire, there are no consequences.

Dude, you had your shot.

You were in the seat for two years.

You had the ability.

to basically negotiate this off-ramp back in August of 2022 and you blew it.

You had the ability to forestall this war before February of 2022 and you blew it.

Listening to Jake Sullivan lecture people on foreign policy is like listening to Rosie O'Donnell lecture people on losing weight.

Like, what are we talking about here?

Basically, the bottom line is the way to judge in a very straightforward manner whether a summit was a success or a failure is did you achieve your stated goals?

And President Trump's stated goals were very simple.

Get an immediate ceasefire and in the absence of a ceasefire, impose what he called severe consequences.

Well, the summit has come and gone.

There is no ceasefire.

There are no consequences.

Well, I mean, it's a little bit early.

It's a little bit early.

That's sort of the point.

Maybe it goes there, but we're going to find out.

Meanwhile, President Trump, as always, has the unique ability to make his opponents take the wrong side of dumb arguments.

It's amazing to watch.

So the Republicans continue to send troops to Washington, D.C., in order to quell crime, according to the Washington Post, through Republican-led states responding to a Trump administration request, said on Saturday they'll send up 750 National Guard troops to join 800 already mobilized in Washington, D.C.

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster says he will deploy 200 troops to stand with President Trump as he works to restore law and order to our nation's capital.

Ohio Governor Mike Dewine says he's sending 150 military police from the state's National Guard.

Remember, Ohio Governor DeWine is not exactly like a red-blooded, hardcore, hard-edged Republican.

Meanwhile, Democrats just keep taking the wrong side of this thing.

Chris Van Holland, one of the dumber members of the United States Senate from Maryland, he says that, you know what, this is all just a diversion of resources.

I mean,

if you're talking about great stewards of the taxpayer dollar, Chris Van Hollen is definitely not on the list.

I would think that taxpayers all over the country, federal taxpayers, have to ask themselves how it is that we are using resources, national resources, the FBI, the DEA, folks who are supposed to be out and about protecting the country from from violent criminals, and now they're spending their time taking down tenths of homeless people in the District of Columbia.

I would think people all over the country would worry about that diversion of resources.

What a ridiculous person he is.

This is a dude who diverted his resources all the way down to El Salvador to hang out with a dude who is almost certainly a human trafficker.

So yeah, let's hear more about your resource allocation, Chris Van Hollen.

Meanwhile, the luxury beliefs crowd in Washington, D.C., was outside protesting over President Trump's intervention, intervention, and they were chanting, free D.C.

From what?

From what?

Does it feel super fascistic?

Like you're marching down the street shouting to free the city.

This doesn't feel like 1984.

Meanwhile, here's a black senior citizen in Washington, D.C.

talking to CNN.

You know, I kind of feel safer, as it turns out.

I think this is long overdue.

I've been one of the National Guards in this area for years.

I like it.

I love it.

I feel safe already.

I mean, oops,

unfortunate for Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to suggest that the president of the United States is, of course, an authoritarian for what he is doing with Washington, D.C., among other things.

So Gavin Newsom.

who is desperately running for that 2028 nomination for the Democrats.

He says that the president should really really worry about Shreveport, Louisiana and Speaker Mike Johnson's district and all the rest instead of worrying about the big cities.

I think he should start with Shreveport, Louisiana and Speaker Johnson's district that has six plus times the per capita murder rate of Nancy Pelosi, San Francisco.

What about the carnage, Mr.

President, in Shreveport?

Why aren't you protecting the folks there?

Eight of the top 10 murder states in this country, red states.

What?

And everyone knows it.

Everybody knows it.

Again, it's acts of authoritarianism.

It's acts of power on a person that is trying to use his moral, his formal authority, and it's depleting.

And it's weak.

It's increasingly weak and it's increasingly desperate.

And that's why it's important for us at this moment to meet him head-on, not just rhetorically, but through substantive counteractions.

And that's what we're doing in California with this ballot initiative.

Wow.

What an amazing.

He's standing up to authoritarianism, you see, by standing up for higher crime and saying we really shouldn't stand up against high crime in TC.

We should do it in Shreveport, Louisiana.

So I asked our friends and sponsors over at Comedy Project of Perplexity to list the mayors of Shreveport, Louisiana, as well as their parties since 1980.

And as it turns out, well, not tons of Republicans in that list.

There are Republicans who are the mayors of Shreveport, Louisiana between 1990 and 1998, and then nothing from 1998 all the way till 2022.

That was all Democrat dominance.

So great job, Democrats.

Meanwhile, Joy Reed is out there claiming that President Trump is the embodiment of all of America's sins.

All of them.

Was he a slaveholder or something?

Weird.

Donald Trump, in some ways, people try to say God put him in the White House.

I don't believe God is that cruel.

But in a way, I'm thinking the way you could justify saying that, Donald Trump is the physical embodiment of all of America's sins.

Yeah, I agree completely.

Right?

He's sloppy.

He's unkempt.

Everything about him is false.

His hair is a pretense of non-baldness.

He's old, but his followers try to pretend that he looks like Superman.

He's a terrible businessman and a failure who gets to fake success because he's white.

So banks keep lending him money even when he's failing.

And by the way, Joy Reid also has some takes on the nature of white people.

She says white people didn't invent anything, pretty much.

They steal everything.

They can't fix the history they did.

Their ancestors made this country into a slave, a slave hell.

But they can clean it up now because they got the Smithsonian, they can get rid of all the slavery stuff.

They got Prager U that can lie about the history to the children.

They can't originally invent anything more than they ever were able to invent good music.

We black folk gave y'all country music, hip-hop, RB, jazz, rock and roll.

They couldn't even invent that, but they have to call a white man the king because they couldn't make rock and roll.

So they have to stamp the king on a man whose main song was stolen from an overweight black woman.

So because Elvis took black tropes and used them in music, that means white people have never invented anything, like anything at all, like at all?

I have some all of human history that would like to quibble with the thing that Joy Reed is saying, right?

This is your Democratic Party.

They've deposited that President Trump, everybody is a fascist, authoritarian, and all the rest.

There is, however, a weird undercurrent that has already begun.

And I think you're going to see this grow.

And I'd like to point this out.

And that is that Democrats are already moving beyond President Trump already.

And what I mean by that is that every Republican president is the worst person in the world until precisely the moment there's going to be a Republican who replaces that president, and which person he becomes a delightful moderate if only all Republicans were like that.

Democrats said that Mitt Romney was the worst person in human history, just awful.

I mean, George W.

Bush is a real moderate, but Mitt Romney, he was crazy.

Then Mitt Romney lost, and it became Donald Trump is the worst Republican in human history.

That Mitt Romney, wasn't he a nice guy?

Wasn't he just delightful?

And so you're about to see that same thing happen.

And you can see the groundwork being paved for that right now.

So suddenly, Hillary Clinton is saying some, you know, relatively moderate words about Donald Trump.

This is the beginning of the movement movement toward President Trump was actually not as crazy as you think he was.

Yeah, he was crazy and all.

But the one who comes next, Marco Rubio, J.D.

Vance, Ted, whoever that, so much worse, so much worse.

Here we go.

If he could end it without putting Ukraine in a position where it had to concede its territory to the aggressor, had to, in a way,

validate Putin's

vision of greater Russia, but instead could really stand up to Putin, something we haven't seen, but maybe this is the opportunity, to make it clear that there must be a ceasefire, there will be no exchange of territory, and that over a period of time, Putin should be actually withdrawing from the territory he seized in order to demonstrate his

good faith efforts, let us say, not to threaten European security.

If we could pull that off, if President Trump were the architect of that, I'd nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Okay, well, I mean, if you could also do magic.

I mean, that's not a thing that's going to happen, but you'll notice how suddenly she's treating President Trump as a quasi-moderate.

Watch.

It's going to happen over the course of the next couple of years.

You will see as Democrats morph into the party of, yeah, Donald Trump, who's bad and authoritarian, but man, what's coming next is going to be so much worse, so much worse.

Okay, meanwhile, the latest on the Gaza Strip.

So Israel is still making a decision as to what it wishes to do next.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he wants essentially a deal that only allows for the release of all hostages, not some hostages, all of them, no more partial deals, no more waiting around.

And if that doesn't happen, there will be a full military takeover of the entirety of the Gaza Strip and Hamas will be completely extirpated and destroyed.

There are meetings that are happening in Egypt right now in which a bunch of Arab nations are trying to push Hamas into making some sort of deal, any sort of deal.

President Trump, for his part, taking the most moral position.

President Trump has been been excellent on this.

He says the hostages in Gaza will only be freed, quote, when Hamas is confronted and destroyed.

He said, we'll only see the return of the remaining hostages when Hamas is confronted and destroyed.

The sooner this takes place, the better the chances of success will be.

Remember, I was the one who negotiated and got hundreds of hostages freed and released into Israel and America.

And then he said, I was the one who ended six years in just six months, six wars in just six months.

I was the one who obliterated Iran's nuclear facilities, played to win or don't play at all.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J.

Trump.

And of course, he is totally right about that.

Joining us online to discuss the latest on all of this is Eli David.

He's the brother of Evyatar David.

You'll recognize Eviatar from that horrifying video that was put out by Hamas, the propaganda video showing Evyatar David looking essentially like a Holocaust victim, emaciated, digging his own grave.

Eli, thanks so much for taking the time.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

So why don't we begin with what happened to your brother in the first place?

And what do you know about his current status at this point?

Evyatar,

he was at the Nova Music Festival with his friends on October the 7th.

He was 22 back then, but I was already 24.

He was kidnapped that day along with his friend, his childhood friend, Guy Gilbert Alal.

They were both brutally kidnapped, thrown into the pickup trucks all the way to Gaza.

We saw them on videos that Hamas posted that day on October 7th.

We had a very long time of not knowing what is going on, where is he exactly, if he is okay or not.

I mean, we were terrified from not knowing what is going on.

And after a year and four months

during release of other hostages, they took out a Vitalian guy from the tunnel.

They forced them to watch other hostages being released.

Then they were sent back into the tunnel.

And we thought, I mean, it was a sign of life, of course, but it was very cruel to watch.

It was like,

I mean, we felt it's the peak of cruelty to do this, this emotional torture to those beautiful, kind souls like my brother.

It was terrible.

And

almost half a year later, two weeks ago, Hamas published another video.

As you said, Veta looked like a human skeleton.

We knew that he's being stabbed.

We knew that.

It wasn't the first time

we acknowledged that.

We heard the testimonies of

hostages that stayed with him.

So we knew that he's in a very bad place.

We were told about the tunnel,

this horrible tunnel.

It's the same place where he lived for the last year and even more than that.

And we understood that he was deliberately being stabbed as part of Hamas

Sikh propaganda.

So, Eli, obviously, the media treatment of that video was far out of proportion to the media treatment of victims of supposed Israeli blockades with regard to nutrition.

It appears that Hamas have been stealing a lot of the food, obviously.

And so, Israel's been using the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to ship in tons of aid, something like 3,800 calories per day per person in the Gaza Strip.

Obviously, Hamas is not starving.

Hamas has been stealing the aid, shooting aid workers.

And the media have instead decided to publish on the front page photos of kids who are suffering from genetic problems, people who are suffering from things like cystic fibrosis, pretending that that was an effect of starvation.

Meanwhile, your brother, who's legitimately being starved to death, that did not make the front page of any newspaper, I believe, in the world, except for maybe the New York Post.

What do you make of the disparity?

Yeah,

I find it sad.

I see that Hamas is using his own people

as part of his

campaign as much as my brother.

And he is using, I mean, who's ever Hamas in

Gaza Strip is

well-fed.

Who's ever not Hamas, who's never not a supporter,

is poor and he's starving.

And that's the thing, you have to be Hamas if you are in the Gaza Strip or else you're going to be very miserable.

Hamas will make sure that you will be very miserable.

And

in this condition of my brother,

we heard the testimonies, and it leaves no place for any doubt.

The terrorists live on the next door.

There is an iron door separating between Evyatar, his friend Guy, which is also there on the same conditions, and the terrorists.

And they have plenty of food.

They have plenty of humanitarian aid which they stole, and they even bragged.

about stealing humanitarian aid to the captivity survivors that testified.

And they were even enjoying the food loudly, only to make the hostages feel worse.

And that's the peak of cruelty.

They are starving Eviatar, they are starving guide, they are starving the other hostages deliberately, cynically, and they are using him and their own people, the Gazans, as political tools, which is cruel, inhumane, and also

it's forbidden in their own religion, in Islam which is sick

and that's the sad part Hamas they are the one to blame they are the one

to blame for for hunger and Gaza they are the one who decide who lives and who dies in the street

right now Eviatar is on the verge of death Evetar and Guy and the only thing I want from leaders around the world and nations around the world to make sure that they survive.

And I'm not talking about an agreement and a ceasefire.

I'm talking about making sure that they will get food, that they will get water and bread and

proper medical care.

Because right now, where they are, they may die at any moment.

And the only reason they didn't die is because they still have faith.

And we saw it in Avatar's eyes.

We saw it in his eyes.

that he is still himself, that

he still has that faith that he's going to be okay.

So, Eli, how have you and your family been able to deal with all this?

Obviously, it's the worst situation that you can possibly imagine.

Have you been able to cope with that throughout the course of the last couple of years?

So

I kind of feel that we have no choice.

We know

that Eviatan survives.

and he didn't give up.

And if he's not giving up, we are not allowed to give up.

Me, his brother, I cannot give up.

My parents cannot give up.

We are manifesting the moment of his return.

We are manifesting the moment that we hug again.

I see him in my mind hugging my parents.

Every time I go to sleep, I'm thinking about him.

We used to play music together every week.

It was a tradition.

of ours.

He plays the guitar.

He's a brilliant guitar player.

And we used to play music every week together at my parents

and sing

and that's what I'm dreaming of and I know that he is hoping for the same things he is thinking about those simple things hugging my parents giving them a good good night kiss

playing music with me

he he

thinking about the things that he wanted to do prior of his kidnapping.

He was so passionate about traveling the world and studying music production.

And I believe that he will come back and achieve those dreams and even become greater than before.

But right now he suffers every second there.

He suffers a very great deal, him and Guy and all the other hostages.

And we have to be together.

That's the only thing we have right now.

We have family.

We have friends and we have to hold to each other and remember that eventually Evatar comes back home.

Well, Eli, thank you so much for joining us and explaining what's going on with your brother Evyatar David, who's still being held hostage in the tunnels.

Obviously, our thoughts and prayers go out to you and your family.

We're all praying for the hostages to come home.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.

James Comey, remember the former head of the FBI?

That dude is just weird.

He's a weirdo, like a giant, giant weirdo.

I have more video proof of him being.

you know, a giant weirdo.

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