James Carville and Michael Weiss: The Whole Country Could Go Under

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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is becoming a Mardi Gras tradition. I'm here today on this Mardi Gras morning with the raging Cajun himself, James Carville, former veteran democratic strategist, co-host of the Politics War Room podcast.
He's also a competitor competitor in the youtube space you've had some youtube videos going going mega viral lately man how you how you doing happy carnival well uh thank you uh of course you know we love carnival down here a lot of things that cracks me up is people think it's a tourist event where tim miller and james carlville go to carnival this 98 percent of the people are within a three-hour radius from New Orleans you know it's the most organic local thing that exists I gotta tell you there were there were things I didn't even know about till I moved here as a transplant and uh you know like there are whole parades and you know some of my favorite events are things that nobody even knows about so I guess you can dm me if you want to know the secret for next year. But, you know, there's politics in the way of kind of good fun, good spirited teasing of politicians that you have in during carnival season.
There's not a ton of politics, which is nice. It's a nice reason to be down here.
One thing that accidentally overlapped into politics last night, the Orpheus Parade, one of my favorites. I was there with my daughter until way too late last night.
Beautiful floats. Harry Connick Jr.
started it. Bianca Del Rio from Drag Race was the queen of the parade.
But they also had Cybertrucks. And every time one of those things came by, those guys were getting pelted with beads.
I felt so bad for the Cybertruck guys. They were getting booed and pelted with beads.
I don't know that Elon's popularity was too high down at Conn. I didn't realize that.
I just love Harry Conn and Jr. That parade is so good.
I'm so naive. I thought RuPaul's Drag Race was actually about drag racing.
You know, two guys lying up in a car.

My kids, my two daughters love drag. I mean, they go, they know, I went on some big drag person,

had a podcast. I could have been on, I don't know, Taylor Swift's podcast and they would not have been

any more impressed. But it was fun.
It was great. And that's what you love about Mardi Gras.
It was wonderful. We had a good time.
All right, we got to do a little politic. You've been pushing in some of your interviews recently the idea that Trump will collapse.
And for some people, it's like, okay, this is resistance nonsense. This is spin.
This is bullshit. But here we are,

just a few days after you're saying it. This morning as we tape, the market is down.
It looks like another 600 points. The Dow is down right now.
And we'll see what happens the rest of the day. It was down about 1.5% yesterday as well.
Very negative response to the tariffs. It's a shit show in Europe.
And I don't know. Things look pretty collapse adjacent, I guess.
Maybe we're not there yet. But how do you assess things? Well, I think it's happening.
If anything, it's happening somewhat quicker than I anticipated. But let me tell you a real faulty line of thinking.
And this is more true of Democrats and people on the left. Something must be done.
This is something. Ergo, let's do it.
OK, you just can't change. Are you sitting here? We just got to see it and tell you we got to do nothing.
All right. So we're going to do something.
Remember, when you studied the Bolshevik Revolution, it was what is to be done? Okay. Yeah, ruin the whole goddamn world.
But what I'm trying to do is the impulse against just charging ahead with a party brand that's frankly in decline. I would say it's in crisis.
You have a chance to build it up. And by the way, this is a war that's not going to be culminated in the short.
The first major battle is going to be the first Tuesday of November of 2026. So let's leave the light brigade in reserve right now.
I'm not saying we shouldn't use it. Okay.
That's my rationale is I just want to tell people, yeah, we got to do something, but we got to do something smart that we that has a long term plan. And that's the behind this.
All right. Let's talk.
Let's talk about it. I hate leading off the politics, the podcast with a little with maybe a slight disagreement.
We can ask you that. So you wrote the column and you wrote basically this with no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control control in any branch of government, it's time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party.
Roll over and play dead. Obviously, you're being a little cheeky there, a little with that phrase.
You don't literally mean that. But I mean, I guess my view is that isn't what Mitch McConnell did.
That isn't what Trump did. Like when Obama got in, Mitch McConnell immediately tried to make him a failed president.
When Biden got in, Trump immediately started calling him Dementia Joe and saying he was illegitimate and all that. I don't know why we couldn't learn a little bit from those guys.
This is a very different time. This is time, but literally no other, because we have a guy in the Oval Office that at best, the best interpretation of him, he's anti-American.
I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that he actually hates the country. It's the only thing that I, in my mind, that can explain what he's doing.
So March 14th, I think, is the debt limit deadline. I'm certainly not advocating playing positive.
But what I'm saying is let them, you know, like the Japanese did to us at Okinawa. They let us come in.
We eventually beat them, but God damn, what a hell of a price we paid. You know, what the czar or General Kutzenoff did in 1812.
Come on in, Napoleon. You'll enjoy yourself and then you won't enjoy yourself very much.
I mean, there's a long history of what I referred to in the piece, and I got this from General Ty Sebul, who's a former chairman of the History Department at the United States Military Academy at West Point, that it's called tactical pause. It's actually a smart move.
And I understand inclination. They didn't give Obama any quarter.
They didn't give Clinton any votes. They didn't give anything.
That's just like Democrats. You're being pussies.
You know, you're retreating. What I'm calling for in the last paragraph, I embraced Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope strategy.
Now, no one ever thought Muhammad Ali was a retreater, but he would just bounce around for the first five or six rounds. All right.
And then he'd come in and frankly knock you out. All right.
He didn't come out the first five or six rounds all right and then he'd come in and frankly knock you out all right he didn't come out the first round just blasting away i understand the the impulse for right now did you see the event with center shuman center warren in front of the treasury building oh that's going to scare scare you to death. I don't know what will.
And the time frame I'm talking about is very limited. But the only way you can start this discussion is to say, let's do nothing.
Let's play dead. You know what? I was just watching Morning Joe and like my dear friend Molly Joan Fast is like criticizing me too.
I don't give a shit. I like, I threw it out.
You know what? I hear you. what i hear you well let's talk let's talk about a process i mean i do think that there's a practical like my the main practical opposition i have to it i think is that the democratic voters are going to fucking revolt if the if they don't see something you know and like you do have to you do have to be responsive to your own voters they They're going to see something by the middle of March.

Yeah, that's true. They're not going to vote until 20- There were two things I wanted to ask you about just like tactically, like where the rubber meets the road on this strategy.
So you're not saying that the Democrats should bail them out in the March budget. No.
What are you saying? First of all, I am convinced that the Democratic House leadership actually has a unified plan to deal with this, particularly on the debt ceiling.

And I'm trying to give these guys some cover. I'm trying to say, hey, Hakeem, take your time.
I got

your back. You know, I know you got a plan because any number of people have called and said, I think we got a pretty good thing.
I think the caucus is pretty unified on it. And a plan is a time to execute it.
And I'm just trying to give them cover that when they come out. But the reason that Democratic image is so low is, well, Republicans don't like it, but they never have.
I don't like my own party at last. Why does a political party exist? It exists to win a fucking election.
Well, when you lose it, I'm mad at you. And we can't pacify them.
They call me and people, they called me and people work for me or close friends.

I'll tell you,

you,

how can you say this?

This is ravening a white flag in front of treason.

And how can you do this to us?

And I don't know that I'm not saying go,

I'm saying,

but might be mid March before we really bring,

you know,

just get our artillery in peace and it's done fire.

Okay,

go ahead.

Yeah.

No,

the hockey thing.

I do.

It's interesting.

I don't,

they might have a plan.

Now I do think that there was some,

Thank you. artillery in peace and then start firing okay go ahead yeah no the hakim thing um i do think it's interesting i don't they might have a plan now i do think that there was some that they were thinking about negotiating and like there was discussions of a negotiation and a deal and then i think the elon stuff happened with doge and like all the insanity of the last two months i do think something's congealing i mean there's just news this morning that there was a private meeting where they were hakim was asking members if they were willing to you know stick with opposing doge and opposing this any republican budget all the way to a i want to interrupt this is some big on this never say doge say elon musk doge okay if you if you do a favorability do you feel favorable favorably toward the world? People say, oh, I don't know.
It's not how it's going. But once you put Musk's name on it, it drops 15, 20 points.
Hence the beads getting tossed at the skin chucked at the Cybertruck. Elon Musk's doge.
He was asking members, right? I had Moskowitz on to discuss this. And basically the point is, even if they wanted to negotiate on a budget, you can't do it as long as Elon Musk is illegally firing people and shutting down the Veterans Affairs Department, as we were reporting on this morning in the Bulwark and all that.

So you can't even negotiate with them until they agree that they would abide by whatever came out

of the negotiation. As such, the question is, will the caucus hold together and not vote on anything? And it seems like the answer is yes, which is encouraging, actually.
Look, I don't think anybody has to be convinced of the moment to end. What it might end up is just really short-term status quo.
Okay, we'll give you 30 days status quo, and then come back after 30 days. That's a real possibility to say, hey, given the perilous nature of the economy right now, I'll tell you a story.
Roger Altman is a close friend of mine. He had an Evercore, a big corporate consulting firm probably in the world.
He was deputy treasury secretary. He was talking about growth.
I said, actually, Atlanta Fed says we're going growth in the first quarter he said well i don't believe that he texted me back and said uh mark zandy says it's gonna be come in at 1.2 i said i'll take the under one for a state dinner in manhattan and he said i'm not taking that bet yeah but when you have what just seems to be a real possibility that by the middle of march we'll have a real crisis in this country certainly crisis in the markets and if you said well we can have this we can give them 30 days i i'd rather make a bad deal for a month than a pretty good deal for six months yeah oh i'm not interested in any six month deals but we'll we'll talk about we'll talk about once we see what comes right right all right we'll see what comes elevating my style used to mean breaking the bank but with quince i get high-end versatile pieces at prices that you can actually afford now you can upgrade your style by snagging killer luxury essentials that sync with your Vive and wallet. Quince has all the must-haves, like cashmere sweaters from $50, iconic 100% leather jackets, and comfortable pants for every occasion.
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Go to quince.com slash thebullwark for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash thebullwark to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash the bullwark i want to get back to the shitty economy but just one more tactical question on the democrats before we do because tonight is an example right there's this address to congress and uh this there were two notes i saw in the news this morning and one of them made me think, you know, maybe James is on to something, because it may be that James and AOC are on the same page on one thing.
AOC's view was, I think maybe I should just skip the speech tonight. Trump relies on spectacle, she said.
She feels uncomfortable legitimizing what he's doing. I'll just watch it on TV.
There's some other Democrats who told Axios they're planning to disrupt the speech using noisemakers and hand clappers and eggs and signs. And that was just imagining that image in my head made me think, you know, maybe I actually want them to do less.
Maybe AOC is on the right page here. Go home, tweet about it.
Let him make an ass of himself. Where are you? First of all, I think she's smart.
I've been going out of my way to say she has really good staff work. She's very well prepared in committee.
She's a very good communicator. I think that she's a savvy operator.
She has her own base. She has her own thing.
But as opposed to some of these people, I respect her talent. I respect her abilities.

I think she's right. This moment, I'm speaking to the House Democratic Caucus a week from Thursday.
If you view this like I do, this is not, I don't like the Iraq war, so I'm going to be against it. Okay.
This is a moment where the whole country could go under. Really, we had an infection point.
So what I'm going to suggest is treat it like that. No speeches in cadence, no groups of threes, no contrast in pairs, no if not us, who, if not now, when we stand on the precipice, you know, the depth of the abyss faces us.
Very, very determined and very serious. Rise to the moment.
And, of course, rising to the moment means that you fight effectively and cleverly. I'm not in the hoo-ha cock.
Oh, God damn it. Let's go.
We're doing. We're charging.
We're going to walk out. You know, we're going to come in with whoopee cushions and whatever else you can think of.
No, don't all right i want to go back to the whole country could collapse uh which is something you said which is like you feel crazy sometimes you feel like an alarmist when you're saying stuff like this you know but i just look across all the variables of what you're seeing with the tariffs and the trade wars what you're seeing with the corruption and the grift what you're seeing with the auster and the trade wars, what you're seeing with the corruption and the grift, what you're seeing with the austerity, the inflation, Trump maybe going to bully the Fed. Scott Besson's out this morning talking about how they need to lower rates, which is also inflationary.
And on top of that, we'll get to in segment two, all the Ukraine stuff. It does feel unbelievably tenuous, right? Like we're at the beginning stages of something that could go very, very bad.
Yes. Right? Of course.
Yeah, it is. And, you know, you have these tariffs of which, even if you just think about them, how could they be a good idea? You know, some people say, well, we had a tariff in the early 80s to save the American car industry.
It's pretty limited. You have the tariffs against Mexico.
Well, Mexico, if you want to send Ford symbols of plant in Mexico and they send wheels from, you know, the Dallas area plant, do they have to pay 20% for the steering wheel to cross the, I don't know. And then when it comes back, I have no idea if it explodes.
And then when you put on top of this the possible possibility of a default it's real dangerous now what i tell the would say about interest rates actually the yield on a 10-year treasury is going down but don't understand why that's happening investors have no confidence that the economy is going to grow in in in the next 10 years because of this so and one says you yeah you might you know what easiest way to kill inflation and to get low interest rates is start a goddamn depression okay yeah that'll handle the problem pretty quickly and effectively oh my god i mean think about it it's ugly it's really ugly it's hard being right james Well, in case you're wondering if we've got the best and brightest at the tiller here as we face these problems, nobody talks about Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins. So it's like maybe you wonder, oh, I know that eggs, that's a clown.
I know some of these other people are clowns. Maybe some of the other people I don't know are better.
Well, here's the Agriculture Secretary talking about how she thinks people should deal with high egg prices on Fox Business. I think the silver lining in all of this is how do we in our backyards, we've got chickens in our backyard.
How do we solve for something like this? And people are sort of looking around thinking, wow, well, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard. And it's awesome.
I agree. Yeah, I think everyone who isn't a farmer right now wants to be.
So you're in the right department, Brooke. Maybe everybody could just start growing a little farm in their backyard, a little chicken.
Oh, of course. Let me tell you how you can expand that program.
Okay. You get you some chickens and you can't afford healthcare, bring it as bought it to see your doctor says, hey, I'll give you 10 chickens if you take my blood pressure.
The possibilities of backyard chicken farming, they're boundless. They're unbelievable.
They actually said that. I'm so glad you picked that up.
I didn't hear the secretary back go just say well you could grow

chickens in your backyard she actually said it i mean yeah everybody should get them yeah we cut the medicaid you're right maybe some bartering i don't know if it helps short term for people on the egg prices right now and it's going to take a little while you think the agriculture secretary would have some thoughts about like you know the the chickens just don't start producing eggs, know immediately there are a lot of problems with it other people have jobs working people have jobs yeah the problem too is if everybody went out and bought a chicken at the same time the chicken become more expensive than the egg okay and that's something that we need to mull over okay because if you got to pay a lot for a chicken then the egg becomes more expensive because I don't think you can have an egg without a chicken. OK, people have been thinking about this since time immemorial.
What is it, the chicken or the egg? So if you want to have start, if everybody want to put chickens in the backyard, there'd be a tremendous demand for chickens, which would cause the price of chickens to go up. Now, you would have more eggs, which maybe would cause the price of eggs to go down.
If I was an economics teacher, I could give an exam on this. These guys don't seem to really adhere to the supply and demand ethos.
It's not your old school Republicans. This isn't Adam Smith here.
This is Donald Trump picking winners and losers. I mean, have you been following the crypto thing? They're going to buy a strategic reserve of Bitcoin and Ethereum with our money.

And what it's going to do is going to make the crypto go up for a short period of time in which they're all going to cash in.

And one of the reasons I would always ask people, look, I don't know what this shit is.

I ain't buying it.

But could it be like what the housing market did in 2008 could this thing bring the whole fucking thing down and people say no not really the risk is now we are assuming the risk okay so if you want to go buy something that worth the shit or you think it's worth a shit and I don't, I don't have a problem with that so much. But now you want me to know.
And people have to understand that. And if they're throwing fucking beads at Cybertruck, you can imagine where they're going to be in two months.
Maybe we need a strategic reserve of Mardi Gras beads. Maybe that's what we need a strategic reserve of.
We should be investing in kind of the rare, the glass beads, you know, the rare beads. The value might go up in the future.
I did a chart on the value of a cornmeal bead. So it's in your hand.
You're on the floor. Yeah.
It reaches its peak value as it reaches the top of the curve, right? In the air. The apex.
And once it gets in gets in your hand it's not worth a shit but and once it's on the ground it's trash okay but at one at one period when that corner will be is i i think you know it's apex i don't know what the right word is but it's right there it's values infinitely more it is when it eats but it's your hand or when it falls on the crowd because Because everyone's going to stoop down and pick one up. I think there's something to that.
And then maybe there's a parallel there to the crypto situation. I just, your point about the systemic risk, right? It was like one thing when this was all happening on the blockchain and people are putting money in it.
They're like, that's one thing. Once the once the big institutional banks you know start including it in their system and then and then once the fucking federal government starts investing in it i get becomes a massive structural risk it's really it's a really good point it's not my problem that they're loaning money to somebody makes nine dollars an hour and has six mortgages well Well, if you want to do that, you lose your money.

I don't give a shit.

But wait a minute.

I didn't realize that you had all of these CDOs and you had these tranches.

And oh, my God.

And then you bought the whole shit and the boodle down with you.

That's what they do.

Now they're putting this at a point of infection.

Now I have to be an economist to see how this could end up.

All right. I've got two more things for you.
One serious and one maybe serious. We'll see.
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The Virginia Govs race is coming up. It's not real.
It's coming up in November. We've got a few months ahead.
But I did notice in your New York Times piece, you called it one of the most important inflection points coming up. And so this is kind of your wheelhouse, right? So I just wanted to let you roll on it.
There's a site called Predict It where you can actually bet on the outcome of an election. I think limited in the size of it.
Whatever the odds are, take the Democrats in the Virginia governor's race. All right.
And if you can get over five or even over seven, take it. So, James, what do you say? Well, first of all, history

argues that the Virginia governor's race follows the presidential race, with the exception of

Terry in 2013. It always goes to the out point.
Secondly, let's try to estimate the turnout among

federal employees, their dependents, okay, the dry cleaner in Arlington, all right, the landscaper, all right, in Loudoun County, multiply all of that and try to figure out what that's going to mean. I'll tell you what it's going to mean.
High Democratic turnout, particularly in Northern in Virginia, like not high, astronomically high. We're not high astronomically high we're not gonna lose that we're not gonna lose it the last one you keep mentioning that you think donald trump has syphilis okay and uh we talked about it once and i just i gotta ask do you really think he has syphilis or do you think is this a is this a bit it's still 70 a bit okay 30 percent of possibility but there's something i i intentionally held this off in the hopes that you would ask me about on january the 17th 2017 keith schiller and two other goons broke into the office of Dr.
Bornstein, who was the GI specialist who was Trump's internist. I mean, I don't know what that means, and confiscated Trump's health records.
We have never seen those health records. Now, maybe there's something in there a little more significant than an enlarged prostate.
All right. I'm saying that causes me great suspicion.
Why would you send people in to confiscate your own health records? And Bornstein said, I felt violated. I mean, he actually, he's deceased now.
So if it's 30%, which I think it is, We know he has unprotected sex with people who have had other partners. That's pretty clear.
Okay. Gross to think about that people would want to do that with him.
But yeah. We do know that he had red splotches on his hand.
I've had 2.2 million hits in probably 26,000 comments. I must be 50 of them from doctors.
I mean, you're getting up there. Do you ever have any splotches on your hands? You ever getting any weird splotches? Well, they say if you masturbate too much, you can get hairs between your fingers.
I think I need a shot. I need a haircut.
I'm still clear. I'm still clear.
That's good news. All right.
Well, something's happening is what you're saying. You think something's happening and then some of it's a bit.
Something has to explain what happened. You know, and what I said in the piece, you know, you say, well, so-and-so dropped dead of a heart attack.
No one hit him. Generally, that's not the case.
Generally, you're disregarding something. What happened there was such a meltdown.
It was like a much more serious equivalent than what happened to President Biden on June 27th, 2024. This was a significant deterioration, even by Trump and standards.
So we ask ourselves, why? The fact that given everything about him, that there's some mental issue, some mental, physical issue that's driving this behavior, I don't think you can discount it. I really don't.
I don't either, James. He's always been crazy.
But this was like, this was on the other side of him, even if it had always been crazy.

I mean, he was shouting about shit in the White House like he was a deranged comment section monster.

It was a very strange behavior for a president.

James Carville, you know, is that a Mardi Gras unless you're talking to James Carville about masturbation and relative, relative bead value after the toss

and so I hope everybody enjoyed

it appreciate you very much James

thank you man I'll see you next Mardi Gras

go Tigers

go Tigers I'll see you Carvel to Michael Weiss, editor of of the insider a russia-focused independent media outlet and he's a contributing editor at new lines magazine he is back you've got a new piece out of new lines magazine can europe back ukraine's fight alone that's a pretty ominous headline for a for a piece uh i don't know that that it's something we're all worried about maybe when you were last on here, but things have changed dramatically. And it's kind of, I don't really know where to start with you.
We've got, I guess, Trump has paused military aid to Ukraine. They want Zelensky to apologize if they're going to do the rare earth minerals deal.
The rare earth minerals deal might not even bring arms delivery back.

They might do sanctions relief on Russia.

Lech Walesa's thrashing Trump.

Vance is on Hannity shitting on our European allies

for doing what he asked them to do.

How do you even begin with the state of play?

Well, as they said in the movie Quiz Show,

I'd like to take the last question first, please.

Let's start with J.D. Vance, who went on Hannity.
We actually have the audio. If you want to start there, since you're running the show, let's listen to J.D.
Vance on Hannity. If you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine.
That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years. Okay, so let's start with 20 to 30,000 troops from, quote, some random country that hasn't fought a war in 20 to 30 years.
The idea of sending European peacekeepers to Ukraine has come from two not-so-random countries, the United Kingdom and France, both of which, up until quite recently, were engaged in active combat in Afghanistan on behalf of the United States, because the only time in the history of NATO that Article 5 was invoked was after 9-11. So what's happened is now the UK press and UK parliamentarians and policymakers are seething.
They think J.D. Fance, as one pundit put it, is a vice president as aggressive as he is dumb.
It's one thing to have disagreements in foreign policy to have a cordial dispute with our cousins abroad it's another thing to piss on the graves of dead british soldiers and that's what vance is doing now he's trying furiously to wind this back saying oh i didn't mean the uk i didn't mean france i meant other countries well he followed up on twitter he's our first poster vice. It's really, it really hurts me as a poster for it to be JD Vance as the first representing us, but he wrote this, but let's be direct.
There are many countries who are volunteering support who have neither battlefield experience nor the military equipment to do anything meaningful. So it's him trying to back off saying he was talking about the UK and France.
Then he says, let's be direct. It's unclear who he's talking about.
So he's not being that direct. Well, let's be direct.
Which country does he refer to? Because every country that has even in principle considered being part of this Anglo-French peacekeeping force is either a NATO country and or has also fought in Afghanistan. And as far as military equipment, let's, for instance, take the Estonians, where I just was last week.
They have emptied their stocks of a certain kind of howitzer and given them all to Ukraine, which Ukraine is deeply grateful for. And they also suffered, I think, the highest per capita rate of casualties in Afghanistan.
It's a small country, 1.3 million people. But when they joined NATO in 2004, they were serious about it.
And they fought and bled and died on behalf of Americans. So I mean, this is a guy who is within the space of a few weeks, essentially trying to destroy the transatlantic relationship.
He goes to Munich and gives this speech, in effect endorsing alternative for Germany, the far right party that didn't do as well as people were fearing it might in the last German election, which is also considered or under suspicion as being an extremist group by Germans' own domestic security service, pissing off the Germans, including the now-incoming Chancellor Mertz, who has basically said America's intervention in German politics, meaning Vance and also Musk, who explicitly endorsed AFD, is tantamount to what the Russians do. This is no small thing for Germany's foremost Atlanticist to be saying that America is now engaged in hostile action against this country.
And now this deeply insulting, shambolic claim that the UK is Madagascar at the level of geopolitics and hasn't fought in active combat. It's just...
And then on top of, obviously, the West Wing meeting where that he blows up and, you know, insults Zelensky and says they don't... They're losing.
They don't have the cards. And, you know, I mean, dripping with contempt for Ukraine, telling Zelensky, you take journalists and policymakers on propaganda tours.
By that, I think he's referring to going to Bucha, an European site of Russian massacres, which has a deeply galvanizing effect on anybody who's been to these places, including European leaders. And one of the reasons that Europeans are so pro-Ukraine is they've seen the horrors of occupation and war firsthand.
I do not believe this line that's being peddled by MAGA and by including pro-Ukraine elements of MAGA that, oh, this was just a misunderstanding. And it was actually Zelensky's fault for fact-checking the president.
I think this was an ambush. I think Vance's presence there was designed to provoke this kind of reaction from Zelensky and also essentially act as a spoiler for this rather weak tea minerals deal, which, by the way, the Ukrainians first proposed to the United States as a way of getting security guarantees that are now absent from this memorandum of understanding that Trump is so desperate, apparently, to have him signed.
So all Zelensky did was say, quite rightly, look, you know, we're for peace, we're for ending this war, we've suffered the most, but we can't do it unless we know that there's something that's going to stop the Russians from coming back and doing it again. And, you know, Vance does not want to commit to anything concrete in that regard.
And keep in mind, Tim, the US intelligence, as of mid-February, assessed Putin himself is not serious about a meaningful peace. So when Zelensky says in an interview, this war is going to go on for a very long time, he's not saying that as an endorsement of that assessment.
He's just saying that that's just the state of play, as per America's own spies, right? And Donald Trump goes ballistic and says, that's not the, that's the worst kind of thing you could say at this moment. So I think that the real premise here is, and this is now being tacitly acknowledged by MAGA, our president is an emotional toddler.
He is so sensitive. His fifis are so important in any matter of statecraft that, you know, the slightest miscue, you don't wear a suit and tie, you kind of sit there with a scowl, you dare to contradict or correct him.
And he's basically willing to license genocide on European soil. So you better watch your step, everybody.
What are we talking about here? The problem is the man, not the fucking protocol and the engagement with him right and totally the europeans i think understand this now and this other thing that i can't think transitions also into what europeans are having to be forced to understand is even if you take the minerals deal at face value right like even if you take vance's argument to hannity at the beginning of that clip before he shits on the brits where he's like right actually it's better for ukraine if we do a minerals deal because we'll have economic skin in the game and that is more of a security guarantee than europe i after watching these guys blow up the entire western alliance over i guess like getting mad at zelensky for a personal slight who could possibly trust that they would actually put american troops in harm's way american troops in place to defend this country that they have such contempt for,

and to defend some, you know, whatever mine of minerals that they decided that they're going to get like, who would look at these guys and say these guys would go to the mat for the minerals, I just find it very, like, it's kind of silly on its face, really. Well, and there's also a very recent historical precedent for being deeply suspicious about America's resolve and commitment to saving Ukraine.
Let me read you a headline from the New York Times dated July 25, 2017. Headline, Trump finds reason for the US to remain in Afghanistan, colon, minerals.
Okay. By the way, you know who's profiting from Afghghans sizable rare earths and mineral deposits.
Now the Russians, the GRU, Russian military intelligence specifically, which is using it or was using it as a front for money laundering to pay the Taliban money to go after American and British and coalition soldiers. That was one of the recent investigations the insider did naming names of the entire Afghan Taliban network.
But leave that to one side. Absolutely.
Let's say the United States

signs some deal with the government of Ukraine to have the government of Ukraine allow access or

revenue generation to the United States based on its mineral deposits. What happens if the Russians

decide to take more territory, including the land where these deposits are located, right? What's to stop the United States, Trump in particular, and especially from going to Putin and saying, well, you control this terrain now, so I guess I have to do business with you. Where is the guarantee? That seems way more likely.
He's going to go to war with Putin over the minerals. No, he would just cut the deal with Putin.
Exactly. I mean, there are American lives in Ukraine, volunteers, diplomats, people who do go pretty close to the front line.
It hasn't stopped the Russians from dropping bombs. You know, I was in Kiev actually just before the war and then immediately after the liberation of the city.
And diplomats there were saying what a near run thing it was, those who actually remained. In fact, one of the diplomats I met in the weeks before the full scale invasion, I had to meet him in a cafe because there were bomb scares being called in to all the major embassies of NATO at that time.
And guess where the bomb scares were coming from? So security guarantees mean you have soldiers on the ground with kit, or you are prepared to protect the skies of Ukraine. You are prepared to do X, Y, and Z.
You are going to essentially go to war on behalf of this country if it's invaded again. That's what the Ukrainians are looking for not you know well we send some hedge fund guys to a mine in odessa and yeah there you go we're safe and secure now speaking of that the fact that the bombs are still dropping it's another kind of pointed the jd quote with hannity which is in the again in the most generous interpretation he's trying to say that putin wouldn't invade ukraine again i guess you'd mean invade new territory from whatever we give them but like correct they're actively invading ukraine now still right um bombs were dropping in kharkiv on sunday i'm sure other places but that was just what i was reading about what like what is your sense for like the state of play in the ongoing war war not the not the war of words well i would say this one of the and this is unfortunately being eclipsed by the the sort of inanity of the current news cycle but one of the tragic ironies of giving the russians this lifeline right i mean right now let's be clear The United States is negotiating with one party, Ukraine, not with Russia.

We are not really having an argument with Russia at all. We are offering them concessions preemptively, right? So, you know, to say that, you know, that this is the proper time to do it, unfortunately, neglects the fact that at the front, on the level of the battlefield now, Ukraine is actually doing a lot better than it was several weeks, certainly several months ago.
In Toretsk, they are practically encircling Russian columns who have overextended themselves. The former head of Estonia's Foreign Intelligence Service does a daily brief, and the other day noted that about a third of Russia's glide bombs, so these are dumb bombs that become smart because of guidance systems that are in place, very devastating to Ukrainian defenders.
A third of the glide bombs are now being dropped in Kursk, which is Russia bombing Russia to expel the Ukrainians from the enclave that they took back in August, right? That's relieved some of the pressure. And also, the nature of this war has changed rather dramatically from 2022, 2023.
So, you know, I'm going to upset some artillery specialists, including a good friend of mine, when I say this, but artillery is not necessarily king any longer. What the Ukrainians are relying on increasingly are drones.
This is a proper revolution in modern technologically savvy warfare. So they have manufactured at scale these first person view drones, which are making up for their lack of air superiority and also their manpower shortages.
And you don't have to take my word for it. Look at what the Russians themselves are saying on Telegram.
The drones are absolutely wreaking havoc on Russian positions and forcing the Russians now to slow down in their advances in Donbass. So at a moment like this, where it's actually not that bad, much less catastrophic, as it seemed it was going to be several months ago, we are saying, well, whatever we can do to help the Russians and grant them all the terrain that they've taken and possibly even more in some negotiation seems to me ludicrous.
Right. You apply more pressure now.
You don't you don't relieve it on the adversary. But of course, we don't treat the Russians as adversaries.
We treat them as the best friend we just haven't made yet. Ukraine is our adversary.
Yes. Wenski is the adversary.
Yeah. Right.
Of course. The Russians, in those kind of telegram conversations and just kind of monitoring the reporting that you do, like, it's hard for me to tell based on the public comments, right? You know, you have Peskov kind of, like, rubbing our face in shit, being like, the Americans just totally agree with our worldview now, right? And so it's hard to tell for me, like how much of that is, is bragging is trying to humiliate Trump, how much of it is just like, they can't believe their luck.
Like, like, what do you kind of sense is the, as kind of the point of view from GRU types, Russian types, people around Putin? Well, if you look at the immediate reaction to Trump's election in November, it wasn't nearly as ecstatic and celebratory as it had been in 2016. And that's because the Russians understood that, well, wait a minute, we didn't get everything we wanted out of the first Trump administration, as he himself is fond of boasting, I provided javelins to the Ukrainians, I sanctioned Nord Stream 2.
His administration expelled more Russian spies from embassies and missions in the United States than at any point since the Cold War over the Scripolf poisoning. So they were very cautious.
Now, I think they are hugging themselves with glee because not only is there a strategic realignment in favor of Russia happening by the United States, but it is happening so precipitously and to their minds, and I think to the minds of a lot of Europeans, unexpectedly, that they almost can't keep up. They don't even know what to do to be the proper beneficiary of all this largesse and good graces coming from Washington.
And like, honestly, I mean, if I'm trying to put myself in their shoes, but you're kind of like, do nothing and just kind of see how it happens. Like, everything keeps coming up Milhouse for Putin.
And so, like, why try to, why do something that might screw it up? Exactly. I think that if I'm sitting in the Kremlin or the aquarium, which is the GRU headquarters, my main concern right now would be, and I don't mean to be giving the enemy advice, but I'm adjourned.
I don't know that we're a ton of Russian listeners. My main concern would be trying to stop Europe from playing the spoiler role that it has already begun to play and has in its capacity to play in a major key.
So my argument has been to the Europeans and especially to the Ukrainians, listen, don't assume that Trump has all the cards. It's always casino metaphors, right? He doesn't.
What he needs right now is, you know, Ukraine exists for him as one of two things. Either it is an opportunity to advance his pivot toward Russia, his embrace of Russia, his bringing Russia in from the cold, or it's an obstacle to that.
Right now he sees it as an obstacle. And that's a good thing because if Ukraine and Europe, by which I really mean the European Union, plus Britain, plus Norway, plus Canada, also plus Australia, and to some extent Japan, I mean, the West in the collective imagination, as it were, if they are a united front, if they form a real coalition at the diplomatic and rhetorical level even, and they say to the United States, you try to impose some Fugazi deal on this war, we're going to say no, and we will keep it going.
We will sustain it. We will finance it.
We will send weapons. And by the way, you know, you have an economic incentive not to punish Europe.
I mean, everyone's like, what is he going to do? Is it tariffs on Europe? Is he going to tell the US military industrial complex and the defense contractors that their biggest marketplace is now off limits because the French and the Brits might turn around and take attackums and, you know, Patriot batteries and just donate them to the Ukrainians. Good luck, babe.
I mean, look at the lobbying effort that is going to be put in in this country to stop him from doing that, right? So Trump needs to deliver something. He cannot give the Russians something and if not everything in exchange for nothing, because as much as he's okay with appearing a lickspittle to Putin, he doesn't want to look like a chump, right? This is the art of the deal guy.
Maybe too late for that, but yeah. Well, yeah, but you know, he needs to sell something, right? Right now he's desperately trying to sell his base on, I can bring peace.
Everyone else has brought war and destruction. There was peace when I was president.
Only I can bring peace again. If he does not bring peace, because the terms of his peace are terms of conditional surrender by Ukraine unnecessarily,

so then he's got nothing to show for it.

Yeah.

So this takes us back to your column.

Can Europe do it?

And by Europe, I guess the West broadly, including Canada, Australia, et cetera.

Like, do they have the equipment, manpower, resources to do it? They have the GDP to do it very easily. The question is, it's one of will, right? So the equipment shortages, the shortfall in manufacturing, all of these things can be made up for if they do what now they are beginning to make noises about having to do.
Increase of GDP on defense spending you know this is this is another thing that we should discuss for now going back almost a decade MAGA has been banging on about Europe as the welfare queen of NATO bunch of freeloaders don't they don't spend their fair share we have to do everything for them suddenly faced with this sort of existential crisis this upending of 80 years of the post-war American-led security architecture, they say, we're all going to spend more. Maybe they're not spending enough more, but they're moving in the right direction.
And what happens? Rick Grinnell takes to Twitter, they're a bunch of anti-American warmongers. No, they're doing exactly what you've been saying as ambassador to Germany, among other things, that they ought to be doing, right? They're just doing it in contravention of the broader policy that you have, which is, again, make nice with Moscow.
Same as the J.D. Vance thing.
It's like, do more, pay more, pay more, put more money into defense, and then they say they're going to do it, then it's like, oh, wait, no, you guys can't do it. You're weak.
Absolutely. And so here's an interesting statistic.
I'm actually going to give two versions of it because it's a little bit ambiguous. But the one version that was cited in the Wall Street Journal recently is even more optimistic for the argument I'm making.
But let me use a version that came from a Ukrainian security official that we quoted in our piece. According to him, what Ukraine relies on militarily is 40% manufactured domestically in Ukraine, right? 30% comes from the United States, another 30% comes from Europe.
And according to him, even if the United States cuts us off completely, it'll be bad, and there'll be things that we can't source so easily, but it ain't the end of the world, right? The Russians might take more territory a little more quickly, but we're not looking at a collapse of Kiev in two weeks or a month or even necessarily six months, right? Which would buy time for the Europeans to try and source these things. The most important thing would be, of course, air defense systems, including Patriot missile batteries.
That's what they need to shoot the missiles down that are raining down on the capitals and cities that the Russians don't already occupy. But as I mentioned earlier, there's a drone revolution in ukraine which is keeping the russians at bay at the front line that's that's just raw materials that's stuff that can be bought on commercial markets or just invest investing in in you know ukraine's own manufacturing capability which is growing exponentially all the time right so that's that's the first set of statistics the wall street journal had a piece cited, and they didn't give a source for it, but they said, actually, it's 55% is coming from inside Ukraine already.
And then the remainder comes from the Europeans and the Americans. So just to put things in perspective, and this is another lie that MAGA likes to tell, that we have given more than the Europeans.
No, we haven't. Not only have we not given more than Europeans, they have outspent us, especially in the last year when we had our supplemental freeze for six to eight months.
But the Ukrainians themselves are standing up on their own two feet. I mean, remember, in the Soviet period, this was the industrial hub of the Soviet Union where all the components for their ICBMs and their tanks and everything came from Ukraine.
So this is not a country that lacks for engineers or technical know-how they need money and they need of course the security to continue to build and in fact one of the more interesting quotes in our piece comes from the ceo of ryan mattall which by the way if you look at the stocks of european defense companies they have gone straight through the roof in the last few weeks, because again, you know, American betrayal is good for business abroad. The CEO of Ryan Mattel said, you know, our problem isn't manufacturing more stuff here in Germany.
Ironically, it's Ukrainian bureaucracy has kept us from opening new plants and factories on sovereign Ukrainian soil. So everybody's kind of in Europe rubbing their hands seeing opportunities.
It's about lifting some of these breaks and these obstacles in place, which are all political and bureaucratic, and allowing this production to commence. So the short answer to your question is I do think that Europe has a lot more capability than perhaps it itself would like to claim it does.
How tempting is it to Zelensky at this point to just try to make that pivot? I don't, you know, I mean, at some level, it seems like the conventional wisdom is that he's going to have to, whatever, apologize and like rub Trump's belly and say, I'm sorry, sir. But like, is he going to have to? I mean, I guess.
I don't know. I think his instinct instinct is correct which is he kind of sees the writing on the wall i mean i spoke to a high level source in ukrainian intelligence just this morning to get us what he's like look you guys are you're pivoting to russia full stop they're very clear-eyed about this it's still such a wild sentence i i guess just it's like fucking i can't even yeah i mean they can't afford to rationalize and have sort of on air you know back and forths and trump is playing you know four-dimensional chess and and he's doing business no no you're moving to russia right and i think zelinski's instinct is to say we have lost the united states we have to consolidate our friends who are in Europe.

And they have more of a vested interest because this is happening on their doorstep. The problem is, you know, the old order is disappearing and vanishing.
We quote Alexander Hertzson's greatest Russian philosopher who says, you know, when the old order dies, it leaves not an heir but a pregnant widow. And I think Europe now finds itself in this state of both being severely traumatized in the last weeks and also accidentally knocked up.
And what is it about to give birth to here? Its own security, autonomy, or strategic autonomy, as Macron puts it. I think Zelensky is inclined to say that's the direction we need to go.
But Starmer, Macron, Maloney, these people are saying, no, no, you have to make nice with Trump, if only just to kind of buy some breathing space and time. And so what does he do? He tweets just now, and read this carefully.
He does not apologize. He says, it is regrettable what happened in the Oval Office, emphasizing the importance of the Ukrainian-American relationship.
And then he says, what we are prepared to do is a truce in the sky and at sea as a preliminary for a ceasefire, a proper, you know, ceasefire at the front, meaning guns go down, you know, on land. This idea comes from the Brits and the French.
So I read this as Zelensky's counter offer to Trump, rather than his capitulation to Trump, which is interesting, because I think what Trump and MAGA want is this guy to get down on all fours and just bow down and say, yes, master, whatever you want, because then he's cowed, and the Russians will see he's cowed, and the Russians will just simply do a deal with Washington. He's not prepared to do that, and I think he's being smart.
Just while we're on Zelensky really quick, I guess I feel obligated to mention this since he is maybe the most influential person in the world. Elon Musk tweeted, as distasteful as it is, Zelensky should be offered some kind of amnesty in a neutral country in exchange for a peaceful transition back to democracy in Ukraine.
So that's an interesting negotiating position this is what you say about a dictator whose regime you've just toppled right we're prepared to offer you amnesty or safe haven in some i mean it's it's insane musk again and it's hard to say these words and it's much harder for people to fathom the implications of it. But our partners, our friends, our allies are now to be treated as adversaries and enemies.
Right. And it didn't just start with Ukraine.
You know, we were we were flirting with going to war with Denmark over Greenland. You know, Canada, we're going to annex Canada.
We're going to diminish the prime minister right now. Yeah.
Of a NATO ally and a Five Eyes member and refer to him as governor. It's like locker room abasement, humiliation.
For nothing, actually. For harm.
For nothing. It's not even like we're getting a good deal out of it.
Right. We're in a market crash.
Musk has now, I think he agreed or retweeted somebody who said we should get out of NATO. You begin to see the writing on the wall here.
The transatlantic relationship is dead. And, you know, whatever Trump says tonight, I don't think there's a country in this alliance, which is the greatest defensive alliance ever constructed in the history of mankind.
There's not a country in this alliance who believes that if they were invaded tomorrow, American troops would come to the rescue under this president. I think Article 5 is dead, at least for the time being.
To that point, I mentioned at the top, like Valesa, just cook on this. It was just an unbelievable letter from the Polish dissident who became the first elected president of Poland after the fall of communism.
He said he reacted with horror and disgust at Trump's Oval Office meeting. He said, gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world.
We do not understand how the leader of a country that is a symbol of the free world cannot see this. He also has some pretty dark comparisons for Trump.
What did you make of it? I spoke also to my friend Dan Fried, ambassador to Poland, institution at the State Department, architect of sanctions, knows on a first name basis every signatory of that letter. And I said, you know, the most impressive thing about that letter was for Walesa to draw moral equivalents between the president of the United States and the Polish secret police under communism.
He said, yeah, that struck me as kind of arresting as well. That's not something that's glibly or lightly done by the leader of solidarity.
Yeah. In fact, I don't like it when Americans say, you know, well, this is like Stalinism, man.
No. But when a poll who basically, you know, led his country out from under the yoke of Soviet totalitarianism or domination says this, you have to sit back and wonder.
And this, I see this as a double blasted shotgun firing to the face of any remaining Reaganites in the Republican Party.

Whether or not they're in Perda or they're living in some underground, I don't know.

But they can't have missed this. You would think that the Lech Walesa letter would make Marco Rubio look in the mirror and ask if he's the baddies.
But I don't know. We haven't seen a lot of evidence of it.
Lil Marco needs to find his big boy pants at some point or resign. If he's just going to go along with this, he doesn't believe a word of what he's saying.
You know, I mean, the look of him, he's like, he was like sinking so far into that couch. It was like that episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where Danny DeVito like literally pops out of the couch fabric.
I mean, it was it was humiliating for him. And now he has to get up on cable news and say the same nonsense.
Me and Bill Crystal were talking about this yesterday. The CNN story about, you know, how we are going to stop whatever offensive cyber operations against Russia was pretty vague.
And we're like, we were trying to parse through like what it actually meant. And I was wondering if you had anything to enlighten us on that.
Well, I mean, I'm not read into exactly what we're doing at the offensive cyber level against Russia. I would hope it'd be quite a lot given what they're doing to us.
But you know, one of the key components of this program is, as I said, espionage, which is very important. I mean, you do that even when you're in a mode of detente, or you're trying to make nice because you want to know what the other side's thinking.
Right. It worries me, assuming this reporting is accurate, that we're basically choosing to become blind and deaf to what our adversary is thinking.
I'm also hearing very alarming things from CIA, FBI that, you know, whilst we might still collect on Russia, we're not necessarily going to do analysis on that collection. Just recently, the FBI sack in the New York field office was forced to retire.
Now, this guy is a counterintelligence specialist, which if you're based in New York means you focus mostly on Russia.

The Russians have a huge outsized presence here in New York because of the United Nations and because of the consulate. And Riverdale is, you know, they do their own signals, intelligence collections from, you know, that part of the Bronx.
And they have spies running around going to fancy restaurants and meeting with their agents and all that. So suddenly, it seems don't want to know what the russians are doing to us which is highly suspicious to say the least yeah i'm glad you mentioned that fbi that fbi forced retirement the firing right and and that's that that is gratuitous if you know like if you want to if you want to have some kind of deal or some kind of grand bargain with the Russians, you still don't do that.
I mean, we didn't stop spying on the Iranians when we entered into the nuclear deal. In fact, we probably escalated our espionage to figure out what it is that they were thinking so we could better negotiate with them.
This is bizarre and very, very scary. And I can't emphasize that point enough.

I mean, it's one thing if you're not particularly concerned about what's happening in Europe, although I would suggest you should be. It's another to not care what's happening on your own home turf with a hostile intelligence act.
I mean, the largest cyber attack in history was perpetrated by the GRU, Russian military intelligence. It was called not Petia.
It was a piece of malware first uploaded to computer servers in Ukraine, but it spread like wildfire around the world, cost billions of dollars in damages to global commerce, and also affected hospital computers in Pennsylvania, where patients awaiting life-saving surgeries had their records deleted or frozen. So this is what the Russians do to us all the time.
And suddenly we're like, yeah, it'll be all right. Don't worry.
We don't need to check in on this. Well, that's a nice place to leave it.
I'm sad we didn't have your birds this time to at least give us some, you know, cheery chirping in the background. I told my wife I was coming on and she put the curtain over the birds.
She's had to put the curtain over my heads just so I'll go to sleep in the last few days. So she's got a lot of practice keeping things quiet.
Thank you for coming on, Michael. I really appreciate your insight.
And unfortunately, I feel like your expertise will be much needed in the months ahead. So we'll be talking to you soon.
Anytime.

All right.

Thanks again.

Also to James Carvel.

Happy Mardi Gras, everybody.

We'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the Borg podcast.

Peace.

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