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

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Speaker 4 Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is becoming a Mardi Gras tradition.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 He's also a competitor in the YouTube space. You've had some YouTube videos going going mega viral lately, man.
How are you doing? Happy Carnival.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 thank you.

Speaker 3 Of course,

Speaker 3 we love Carnival down here. One of the things that cracks me up is people think it's a tourist event.

Speaker 3 Where Tim Bill and James Carville go to Carnival, this is 98% of the people are within a three-hour radius of New Orleans.

Speaker 3 It's the most organic local thing that exists.

Speaker 4 I got to tell you, there were things I didn't even know about until I moved here as a transplant. And

Speaker 4 there are whole parades and 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,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 till way too late last night.

Speaker 4 Beautiful floats. Harry Connig Jr.
started it. Bianca Del Rio,

Speaker 4 from Drag Race was the queen of the parade. But they also had cyber trucks.
And every time one of those things came by, those guys were getting pelted with beads.

Speaker 4 No, it's not so bad for the cyber truck guys. They were getting booed and pelted with beads.
So I don't know that Elon's popularity was too high down at Carnival.

Speaker 3 I didn't realize that. I saw.

Speaker 3 I just love Harry Conner Jr. And that parade is so good.
And to have, I'm so naive I thought RuPaul's drag race was actually about drag racing you know two guys lining up in a car

Speaker 3 and my kids my two daughters love drag

Speaker 3 I mean they go they know I went on some big drag person at a podcast I could have been on I don't know Taylor Swiss podcast and they would not have been any more impressed but it it was fun it was great and that's what you love about Mardi Gras

Speaker 4 It was wonderful. We had a good time.
All right, we got to do a little politicking. You've been pushing in some of your interviews recently the idea that Trump will collapse.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 This morning, as we tape, the market is down. It looks like another 600 points.
The down is down right now.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 I don't know. Things look pretty collapsed adjacent, I guess.
Maybe we're not there yet, but how do you assess things?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And this is more true of Democrats and people on the left.

Speaker 3 Something must be done. This is something.
Ergo, let's do it. Okay?

Speaker 3 You just can't, James. Are you sitting here? We just got to sit here and tell you, we've got to do nothing.
All right, so we're going to do something.

Speaker 3 Remember when you studied the Bolshevik Revolution, it was, what is to be done? Okay. Yeah, ruin the whole goddamn world, you know.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 in November of 2026.

Speaker 3 So let's leave the light brigade in reserve right now. I'm not saying we shouldn't use it, okay?

Speaker 3 That's my rationale. I just want to tell people, yeah, we got to do something, but we got to do something smart that

Speaker 3 has a long-term plan. And that's the voice behind this.

Speaker 4 All right. Let's talk.
Let's talk about it.

Speaker 4 I hate leading off the politics, the podcast, with a little, with maybe a slight disagreement. We can hash it out.

Speaker 4 So you wrote the column, and you wrote basically this.

Speaker 4 With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no 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.

Speaker 4 Roll over and play dead. Obviously, you're being a little cheeky there

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like when Obama got in, Mitch McConnell immediately tried to make him a failed president.

Speaker 4 When Biden got in, Trump immediately started calling him Dementia Joe and saying he was illegitimate and all that. And so I don't know why we couldn't learn a little bit from those guys.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 this is a very different time. This is time like literally no other

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's the only thing that I, in my mind, that can explain what he's doing.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 March 14th, I think, is the debt limit deadline. I'm certainly not advocating playing possum down, but what I'm saying is let them, you know, like the Japanese did to us in Okinawa.

Speaker 3 They let us come in.

Speaker 3 We eventually beat them, but God god damn, what a hell of a price we paid. You know, what the Tsar or General Kutznoff did in 1812.
Come on in, Napoleon.

Speaker 3 You'll enjoy yourself

Speaker 3 and then you won't enjoy yourself very much. I mean, there's

Speaker 3 a long history of

Speaker 3 what I referred to in the piece, and I got this from General Ty Sebuel, who's a former chairman of the history department at the United States Military Academy at West Point, that it's called tactical pause.

Speaker 3 It's actually

Speaker 3 a smart move. And I understand inclination.

Speaker 3 They didn't give Obama any quarter. They didn't give Clinton any votes.
They didn't give anything. Why, you know, that's just like Democrats.
You're being pussies. You know, you're retreating.

Speaker 3 What I'm calling for in the last paragraph, I embraced Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope strategy.

Speaker 3 Now, no one ever thought Muhammad Ali was a retreater, but he would just bounce bounce around for the first five or six rounds, all right, and then he'd come in and frankly knock you out, all right?

Speaker 3 He didn't come out the first round just blasting away.

Speaker 3 I understand that the impulse

Speaker 3 for right now, did you see the event with Santa Schuman, Santa Warren in front of the Treasury Building?

Speaker 3 Oh, that doesn't scare you to death. I don't know, it will.
And the time frame I'm talking about

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 I was just watching Morning Joe and like my dear friend Molly Joan Fast has like criticized me too. I don't give a shit.

Speaker 3 I threw it out. You know what? I hear you.

Speaker 4 Well, let's talk. Let's talk about a process.

Speaker 4 I mean, I do think that there's a practical, like the main practical opposition I have to it, I think, is that the Democratic voters are going to fucking revolt if they don't see something.

Speaker 4 And like, you you do have to, you do have to be responsive to your own voters.

Speaker 3 They're going to see something by the middle of March.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 They're not going to vote until. They're not going to vote until...

Speaker 4 Because that really is, there were two things I wanted to ask you about, just like tactically,

Speaker 4 where the rubber meets the road on this strategy. So you're not saying that the Democrats should bail them out

Speaker 3 in the March budget debate.

Speaker 3 What are you saying?

Speaker 3 First of all,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I'm trying to say, hey, Hockey, take your time. I got your back.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 I know you got a plan because any number of people have called and said, you know, 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.

Speaker 3 And I'm just trying to give them cover

Speaker 3 when they come out. But the reason that

Speaker 3 the Democratic image is so low is, well, Republicans don't like it, but they never have.

Speaker 3 I don't like my own party. It lost.
Why does a political party exist? It exists to win a fucking election. Well, when you lose it, I'm mad at you.

Speaker 3 Okay?

Speaker 3 And we can't pacify them. You know, they called me and people worked for me or close friends, I'll tell you.

Speaker 3 How can you say this?

Speaker 3 This is waving 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.

Speaker 3 I'm saying it might be mid-March before we really bring, you know, just get our artillery in pieces and then start firing. Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, the Hakeem thing. I do think it's interesting.
I don't, they might have a plan now.

Speaker 4 I do think that there was some, that they were thinking about negotiating and like there was discussions of a negotiation and a deal.

Speaker 4 And then I think the Elon stuff happened with Doge and like all the insanity of the last two months. And I do think something's congealing.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's just news this morning that there was a private meeting where Hucking was asking members if they were willing to

Speaker 4 stick with opposing Doge and opposing any Republican budget all the way to a shutdown.

Speaker 3 I want to interrupt it. This is something big on this.
Never say Doge. Say Elon Musk Doge.

Speaker 3 If you do a favorability, do you feel favorable to a draw? People say, oh, I don't know.

Speaker 3 But once you put Musk's Musk's name on it, it drops 15, 20 points.

Speaker 4 Hence, the beads getting tossed at this, getting chucked at the cyber truck. Elon Musk Doge, he was asking members, right? Like, like, I had Moskowitz on to discuss this.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 shutting down the Veterans Affairs Department, as we were reporting on this morning in the bulwark and all the like, so you can't even, you know, negotiate with them until they agree that they would abide by whatever came out of the negotiation.

Speaker 4 As such,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 Look, I don't think anybody has to be convinced of the moment they end.

Speaker 3 Where they might end up is just really short-term status quo.

Speaker 3 Okay, we'll give you 30 days status quo and it come back after 30 days.

Speaker 3 That's a real possibility to say, hey, you know, given the perilous perilous nature of the economy right now i'll tell you a story roger altman is a close friend of mine head of evercore the biggest corporate consulting firm probably in the world he was deputy treasury secretary and he was talking about growth and i said actually the atlanta fed says we have negative growth in the first quarter he said well i don't believe that he texted me back and said uh

Speaker 3 mark zandy says it's going to be come in at 1.2 percent. I said, I'll take the under one for a state dinner in Manhattan.
And he said, I'm not taking that bet.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 when you have, which seems to be a real possibility, that by the middle of March, we'll have a real crisis in this country, certainly a crisis in the markets. And

Speaker 3 if you said, well, we can have this, we can give them 30 days.

Speaker 3 I'd rather make a bad deal. for a month than a pretty good deal for six months.

Speaker 4 Oh, I'm not interested in any six-month deals, but we'll talk about

Speaker 3 it. We'll actually see what comes.

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Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 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 maybe is that James and AOC are on the same page on one thing.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 There's some other Democrats who told Axios they're planning to disrupt the speech using noise makers and hand clappers and eggs eggs and signs.

Speaker 4 And that was like 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.

Speaker 4 Go home, tweet about it, let him make an ass of himself. Where are you?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I think that she's a savvy operator.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 This moment, I'm speaking to the House Democratic Caucus a week from Thursday. And I say, 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?

Speaker 3 This is a moment where the whole country could go under.

Speaker 3 Literally, we're at an infection point. So what I'm going to suggest is treat it like that.
No

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Act very, very determined and very serious.

Speaker 3 Rise to the moment.

Speaker 3 And of course, rising to the moment means that you fight effectively and cleverly. I'm not in the hoo-ha-cawk.
Oh, goddammit. Let's go.
We're going, we're charging. We're going to walk out.

Speaker 3 You know, we're going to come in with whoopee cushions and whatever else you can think of no don't do that

Speaker 4 all right i want to go back to the whole country could collapse uh which is something you said which is like

Speaker 4 you feel crazy sometimes you feel like an alarmist when you're saying stuff like this you know but i just look across all of 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 austerity, the

Speaker 4 inflation, Trump trying to maybe going to bully the Fed. Scott Besson's out this morning talking about how they need to lower rates, which is also inflationary.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, right? Of course. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 3 And, you know, you have these tariffs of which, even if you just think about them, how could they be a good idea?

Speaker 3 You know, some people say, well, we had a tariff in the early 80s to save the American car industry. It was pretty limited.
You have the tariffs against Mexico.

Speaker 3 Well, Mexico, if you want to send Ford assembles a plant in Mexico and they send wheels from

Speaker 3 the Dallas area plant, do they have to pay 20% for the steering wheels across the? I don't know. And then when it comes back,

Speaker 3 I have no idea. The head explodes.

Speaker 3 And then when you put on top of this the possible possibility of a default,

Speaker 3 it's real dangerous. Now, what I tell the

Speaker 3 interest rates, actually the yield on a 10-year treasury is going down, but don't understand why that's happening.

Speaker 3 Investors have no confidence that the economy is going to grow in the next 10 years because of this.

Speaker 3 And one says, yeah, you might, you know what? Easiest way to kill inflation. and to get low interest rates is start a goddamn depression.
Okay.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that'll handle the problem pretty quickly and effectively.

Speaker 4 Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 I mean, think about it. It's ugly.
It's really ugly.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So it's like, maybe you wonder, oh, I know that Hag Seth's a clown. I know some of these other people are clowns.
Maybe some of the other people I don't know are better.

Speaker 4 Well, here's the agriculture secretary talking about how she thinks people should deal with high ag prices on Fox business.

Speaker 5 I think the silver silver lining in all of this is how do we, in our backyards, we've got chickens too in our backyard. How do we solve for something like this?

Speaker 5 And people are sort of looking around thinking, wow, well, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard. And it's awesome.

Speaker 4 I agree.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think everyone who isn't a farmer right now wants to be.

Speaker 3 So you're in the right department, Brooke.

Speaker 4 Maybe everybody could just start growing a little farm in their backyard, a little chicken.

Speaker 3 Of course. Let me tell you how you can expand that program.
Okay, you get you some chickens and you can't afford health care, bring it as barter to see your doctor.

Speaker 3 Says, hey, I'll give you 10 chickens if you take my blood pressure.

Speaker 3 Okay?

Speaker 3 The possibilities of backyard chicken farming

Speaker 3 are boundless.

Speaker 3 They're unbelievable. She actually said that.
I'm so glad you picked that up.

Speaker 3 No, I didn't hear the Secretary of Agco just say, well, you could grow chickens in your backyard. She actually said it.

Speaker 4 I mean, yeah. Everybody should get them.
Yeah, if we cut the Medicaid, you're right. Maybe some butter.
I don't know if it helps short-term for people on the egg prices right now.

Speaker 4 And it's going to take a little while. You think the agriculture secretary would have some thoughts about, like, you know,

Speaker 4 the chickens just don't start producing eggs, you know, immediately. There are a lot of problems with it.
Other people, people have jobs, working people have jobs.

Speaker 3 The problem, too, is if everybody went out and bought a chicken at the same time, the chicken would become more expensive than the egg. Okay.

Speaker 3 And that's something that we need to mull of, 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 okay people have been thinking about this since time immemorial

Speaker 3 what is it the chicken or the egg

Speaker 3 so if you want to have so if everybody wanted to put chickens in the backyard there'd be a tremendous demand for chickens

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 There you go. If I was an economics teacher, I could give an exam on this.

Speaker 4 These guys don't seem to really adhere to the

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 They're going to buy a strategic reserve of Bitcoin and Ethereum with our money.

Speaker 3 And what it's going to do is going to make the crypto go up for a short period of time, which they're all going to cash in.

Speaker 3 And one of the reasons I wasn't, 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?

Speaker 3 Could this thing bring the whole fucking thing down? And people say, no, not really. The risk is now we are assuming the risk.

Speaker 3 Okay, so if you want to go buy something that ain't worth the shit or you think it's worth the shit and I don't, I don't have a problem with that so much. But now you want me

Speaker 3 to to know it. 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.

Speaker 4 Maybe we need a strategic reserve of Mardi Gras beads. Maybe that's what we need a strategic reserve of.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 I did a chart on the value of a carnival bead. So it's in your hand.
You're on the floor.

Speaker 3 It reaches its peak value as it reaches the top of a curve, right?

Speaker 3 The apex. And once it gets in your hand, it's not worth a shit.

Speaker 3 And once it's on the ground, it gets in your hand, it's trash, okay? But

Speaker 3 at one period, when that carnival bead is, I think you're apex, I don't know what the right word is, but it's right there. Its value is infinitely more it is

Speaker 3 when

Speaker 3 it's your hand or when it falls on the ground because no one's going to stoop down and pick one up.

Speaker 4 I think there's something, and then maybe there's a parallel there to the crypto situation. I just,

Speaker 4 your point about the systemic risk, right? It was like one thing when this was all happening on, you know, the blockchain and people are putting money in it.

Speaker 4 That's one thing.

Speaker 4 Once the big institutional banks, you know, start including it in their system, and then once the fucking federal government starts investing in it, it becomes a massive structural risk.

Speaker 4 It's a really, it's a really good point.

Speaker 3 It was not my problem that they're loaning money to somebody that makes $9 an hour. It has six mortgages.
Well, if you want to do that, you lose your money. I don't give a shit.
But wait a minute.

Speaker 3 I didn't realize that you had all of these CDOs and you had these tranches and oh my God.

Speaker 3 And then you brought the whole shit in Boodle down with you. That's what they do.
Now they're putting this at a point of infection. Now you have to be an economist to see how this could end up.

Speaker 4 All right. I've got two more things for you.
One serious and one maybe serious.

Speaker 3 We'll see. Okay.

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Speaker 4 The Virginia Govs race is coming up.

Speaker 4 It's not really. It's coming up in November.
We 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.

Speaker 4 And so this is kind of your wheelhouse, right? So I just wanted to let you roll on it.

Speaker 3 There's a site called Predict It where you can actually bet on the outcome of an election.

Speaker 3 They limit it in the size of the bet. Whatever the odds are, take the Democrats in the Virginia governor's race.
All right. And if you can get

Speaker 3 over five or even over seven, take it. So, James, what do you say?

Speaker 3 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 outer party.

Speaker 3 Secondly, let's try to estimate the turnout among federal employees, their dependents,

Speaker 3 okay,

Speaker 3 the dry cleaner in Arlington, all right, the landscaper,

Speaker 3 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 Virginia.

Speaker 3 Like, not high, astronomically high. We're not going to lose that.

Speaker 3 We're not going to lose that.

Speaker 4 The last one, you keep mentioning that you think Donald Trump has syphilis.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 4 And we talked about it once. And I just, I got to ask, do you really think he has syphilis? Or do you think, is this a, is this a bit?

Speaker 3 It's

Speaker 3 still 70%

Speaker 3 a bit.

Speaker 3 Okay. 30% of the possibility.
but there's something I intentionally held this off in the hopes that you would ask me about.

Speaker 3 On January the 17th, 2017, Keith Schiller and two other goons broke into the office of Dr. Bornstein,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Why would you send people in to confiscate your own health records?

Speaker 3 And Barnstein said I felt violated.

Speaker 3 I mean he actually he's deceased now.

Speaker 3 So if it's 30%

Speaker 3 which I think

Speaker 3 we know he has unprotected sex with people who've had other partners. That's pretty clear, okay?

Speaker 4 Gross to think about that people would want to do that with him, but yeah.

Speaker 3 We do know that he had red splotches on his hand. I've had 2.2 million hits in probably 26,000 comments.

Speaker 3 It must be 50 of them from doctors.

Speaker 4 I mean, you're getting out there. Do you ever have any splotches on your hands? You're ever getting any weird splotches?

Speaker 3 Well, they say if you masturbate too much, you can get ash

Speaker 3 between your fingers.

Speaker 3 I think I need a shot. I need a haircut.

Speaker 3 I need to be clear.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 3 something has to explain what happened. You know, in what I said in the piece, you know, you say, well, so-and-so dropped dead of a heart attack.
No one here

Speaker 3 had any symptoms. Generally, that's not the case.
Generally,

Speaker 3 you're disregarding something.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 This was a significant deterioration, even by Trump and standards. So we ask ourselves, why?

Speaker 3 The fact that given everything about him, that there's some mental issue, some

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He's always been crazy, but this was like, this was on the other side, even if you'd always been crazy.

Speaker 4 I mean, he was shouting about shit in the White House like he was a deranged comment section monster. It was very strange behavior for a president.

Speaker 4 James Carville, you know, it's not a Mardi Gras unless we're talking to James Carville about masturbation and

Speaker 4 relative bead value after the loss.

Speaker 4 And so I hope everybody enjoyed it. Appreciate you very much, James.

Speaker 3 Thank you, man. I'll see you next morning, bro.
Go Tigers, James.

Speaker 4 Go Tigers. I'll see you soon.
Up next, Michael Weiss.

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Speaker 4 All right, we are back.

Speaker 4 Kind of a sharp turn from our carnival segment one with James Carville to Michael Weiss, editor of The Insider, a Russia-focused independent media outlet, and he's a contributing editor at New Lines Magazine.

Speaker 4 he is back you've got a new piece out in 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 and it's something we were 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 Zielensky to apologize if they're going to do the rare earth minerals deal.

Speaker 4 The rare earth minerals deal deal might not even bring arms delivery back. They might do sanctions relief on Russia, Lek Velas,

Speaker 4 thrashing Trump. Vance is on Hannity, shitting on our European allies for doing what he asked them to do.

Speaker 4 How do you even begin with the state of play?

Speaker 6 Well, as they said in the movie quiz show, I'd like to take the last question first, please.

Speaker 6 Let's start with J.D. Vance,

Speaker 6 who went on Hannity.

Speaker 4 We actually have the audio. If you want to start there, since you're running the show, let's listen to J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance on Hannity.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So, what's happened is now the UK press and UK parliamentarians and policymakers are seething. They think J.D.
Vance, as one pundit put it, is a vice president as aggressive as he is dumb.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 He followed up on Twitter.

Speaker 4 He's our first poster vice president.

Speaker 4 and it's really it really hurts me as a poster for it to be jd vance as the first representing us but uh 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 and then he says let's be direct but it's unclear who he's talking about so he's not being that direct well let's 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 or has also fought and or has also fought in Afghanistan.

Speaker 6 And as far as military equipment, let's, for instance, take the Estonians, where I just was last week.

Speaker 6 They have emptied their stocks of a certain kind of howitzer and given them all to Ukraine, which Ukraine is deeply grateful for.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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 German's own 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.

Speaker 6 This is no small thing for Germany's foremost Atlanticist to be saying that America is now engaged in hostile action against his country.

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 4 and then on top of obviously the West Wing meeting where he blows up and insults Zelensky and says they don't. Oh, totally.

Speaker 4 They're losing. They don't have the cards.

Speaker 6 And I mean, dripping with contempt for Ukraine, telling Zelensky you take journalists and policymakers on propaganda tours.

Speaker 6 By that, I think he's referring to the going to Bucha and European, the site of Russian massacres, right, which has a deeply galvanizing effect on anybody who's been to these places, including European leaders.

Speaker 6 And one of the reasons that Europeans are so pro-Ukraine is they've seen the horrors of occupation and war firsthand.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And it was actually Zelensky's fault for fact-checking the president. I think this was an ambush.

Speaker 6 I think Spantz'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 sign.

Speaker 6 So all Zelensky did was say, quite rightly, look, you know, we're for peace, we're for ending this war.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And, you know, Vance does not want to commit to anything concrete in that regard. And keep in mind, Tim, U.S.

Speaker 6 intelligence, as of mid-February, assessed Putin himself is not serious about a meaningful peace. So when Zielinski says in an interview, this war is going to go on for a very long time.

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 6 And Donald Trump goes ballistic and says that's not the, that's the worst kind of thing you could say at this moment.

Speaker 6 So I think that the real premise here is, and this is now being tacitly acknowledged by MAGA, our president is an emotional toddler.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So you better watch your step, everybody. What are we talking about here?

Speaker 6 The problem is the man, not the fucking protocol and the engagement with him, right? And

Speaker 6 Europeans, I think, understand this now.

Speaker 4 And this other thing that I can think transitions also into what Europeans are having to be forced to understand is

Speaker 4 even if you take the minerals deal at face value, right?

Speaker 4 Like even if you take Vance's argument to Hannity at the beginning of that clip before he shuts on the Brits, where he's like, 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.

Speaker 4 After watching these guys blow up the entire

Speaker 4 Western alliance over,

Speaker 4 I guess, like getting mad at Zelensky for a personal slight, who could possibly possibly trust that they would actually

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 6 Well, and there's also a very recent historical precedent for being deeply suspicious about America's resolve and commitment to saving Ukraine.

Speaker 6 Let me read you a headline from the New York Times dated July 25, 2017.

Speaker 6 Headline, Trump finds reason for the U.S. to remain in Afghanistan.
Colon, minerals.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 6 And by the way, you know who's profiting from Afghans' sizable rare earths and mineral deposits now?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 That was one of the recent investigations The Insider did, naming names of the entire Afghan-Taliban network. But leave that to one side.

Speaker 6 Absolutely. Let's say the United States signs some deal with the government of Ukraine to have the government of Ukraine allow access or

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 4 Where is the trend? It seems way more likely than he's going to go to war with Putin over the minerals.

Speaker 6 No, he would just cut the deal with Putin.

Speaker 4 Exactly.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 You know, I was in Kyiv 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And guess where the bomb scares were coming from? So, security guarantees mean you have soldiers on the ground with kit,

Speaker 6 or you know, 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.

Speaker 6 That's what the Ukrainians are looking for. Not, you know, well, we sent some hedge fund guys to a mine in Odessa.
And, you know, there you go. We're safe and secure now.

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Speaker 4 Speaking of that, the fact that the bombs are still dropping, it's another kind of point of the JD quote with Hannity, which is again in the most generous interpretation.

Speaker 4 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, they're actively invading Ukraine now, still, right?

Speaker 4 Bombs were dropping in Kharkiv on Sunday. I'm sure other places, but that was just what I was reading about.

Speaker 4 What is your sense for the state of play in the ongoing war war,

Speaker 4 not the war of words?

Speaker 6 Well, I would say this. One of the, and this is unfortunately being eclipsed by the

Speaker 6 sort of inanity of the current news cycle, but one of the tragic ironies of giving the Russians this lifeline, right?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 We are offering them concessions preemptively, right?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 In Turetsk, they are

Speaker 6 practically encircling Russian columns who have overextended themselves.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 6 That's relieved some of the pressure. And also, the nature of this war has changed rather dramatically from 2022, 2023.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 What the Ukrainians are relying on increasingly are drones. This is a proper revolution in modern technologically savvy warfare.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Look at what the Russians themselves are saying on Telegram. The drones drones are absolutely wreaking havoc on Russian positions and forcing the Russians now to slow down in their advances in Donbas.

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 6 You apply more pressure now, 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.

Speaker 6 Ukraine is our adversary.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Zelensky is the adversary. Yeah, right.
Of course.

Speaker 4 The Russians, in those kind of telegram conversations and just kind of monitoring the reporting you do, like it's hard for me to tell based on the public comments, right?

Speaker 4 You know, you have Peskov kind of like rubbing our face and 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

Speaker 4 bragging, is trying to humiliate Trump, how much of it is just like they can't believe their luck. Like

Speaker 4 what do you kind of sense is the

Speaker 4 as kind of the point of view from GRU types, Russian types, people around Putin?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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 Moorish treaty.

Speaker 6 His administration expelled more Russian spies from embassies and missions in the United States than at any point since the Cold War over the Skripov poisoning. So they were very cautious.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 They don't even know what to do to be the proper beneficiary of all this largesse and good graces coming from Washington.

Speaker 4 And, like, honestly, I mean, if I'm sorry to put myself in their shoes, but you're kind of like, do nothing and just kind of see how it happens. Like,

Speaker 4 everything keeps coming up mill house for Putin. And so, like, why try to

Speaker 4 why do something that might screw it up?

Speaker 6 Exactly.

Speaker 6 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 a journalist.

Speaker 4 I don't know that we're a ton of Russian listeners to the pod.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So my argument has been to the Europeans and especially to the Ukrainians: listen, don't assume that Trump has all the cards. That's

Speaker 6 always casino metaphors, right?

Speaker 4 He doesn't.

Speaker 6 What he needs right now is, you know, Ukraine exists for him as one of two things.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 rhetorical level even, and they say to the United States, you try to impose some Fughesi deal on this war, we're going to say no, and we will keep it going. We will sustain it.
We will finance it.

Speaker 6 We will send weapons. And by the way, know,

Speaker 6 you have an economic incentive not to punish Europe. I mean, everyone's like, what is he going to do? Tariffs on Europe? Is he going to tell the U.S.

Speaker 6 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 ATACOMs and Patriot batteries and just donate them to the Ukrainians?

Speaker 6 Good luck, babe. I mean, look at the lobbying effort that is going to be put in this country to stop him from doing that, right? So Trump needs to deliver something.

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 6 This is the art of the deal, God.

Speaker 4 Maybe too late for that, but yeah.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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,

Speaker 6 then he's got nothing to show for it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so this takes us back to your column. Can Europe do it? And by Europe, you mean, I guess, the West broadly, including Canada, Australia, et cetera?

Speaker 4 Like, do they have the equipment, manpower, resources to do it?

Speaker 6 They have the GDP to do it very easily. The question is, it's one of will, right?

Speaker 6 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 their percent of GDP on defense spending.

Speaker 6 You know, this is another thing that we should discuss.

Speaker 6 For now, going back almost a decade, MAGA has been banging on about Europe as the welfare queen of NATO, a bunch of freeloaders, they don't spend their fair share. We have to do everything for them.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Maybe they're not spending enough more, but they're moving in the right direction. And what happens? Rick Rennell takes to Twitter, they're a bunch of anti-American warmongers.

Speaker 6 No, they're doing exactly what you've been saying as ambassador to Germany, among other things, that they ought to be doing, right?

Speaker 6 They're just doing it in contravention of the broader policy that you have, which is, again, make nice with Moscow.

Speaker 4 Same as the JD 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. And then it's like, oh, wait, no, you guys can't do it.

Speaker 4 You're weak.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 But the one version that was cited in the Wall Street Journal recently is even more optimistic for the argument I'm making.

Speaker 6 But let me use a version that came from a Ukrainian security official that we quoted in our piece.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 6 The Russians might take more territory a little more quickly, but we're not looking at a collapse of Kyiv in two weeks or a month or even necessarily six months, right?

Speaker 6 which would buy time for the Europeans to try and source these things. The most important thing would be, of course, air defense systems, systems, including Patriot missile batteries.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 But as I mentioned earlier, there's a drone revolution in Ukraine, which is keeping the Russians at bay at the front line.

Speaker 6 That's just raw materials. That's stuff that can be bought on commercial markets or just investing in

Speaker 6 Ukraine's own manufacturing capability, which is growing exponentially all the time, right? So that's the first set of statistics.

Speaker 6 The Wall Street Journal had a piece which cited, and they didn't give a source for it, but they said actually it's 55%

Speaker 6 is coming from inside Ukraine already. And then the remainder comes from the Europeans and the Americans.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Not only have we not given more than the 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.

Speaker 6 I mean, 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And in fact, one of the more interesting quotes in our piece comes from the CEO of Ryan Mittal.

Speaker 6 which, by the way, if you look at the stocks of European defense companies, they have gone straight through the roof

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 4 How tempting is it to Zelensky at this point to just

Speaker 4 try to make that pivot?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But like, is he going to have to? I mean, I guess. I don't know.

Speaker 6 I think his 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 a sense.

Speaker 6 He's like, look, you guys are pivoting to Russia.

Speaker 4 Full stop.

Speaker 6 They're very clear-eyed about this.

Speaker 4 That's still such a wild sentence.

Speaker 4 It's still just like fucking, I can't even.

Speaker 6 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 four-dimensional chess and he's doing business.

Speaker 6 No, no, you're moving to Russia. And I think Zelensky's instinct is to say, we have lost the United States.
We have to consolidate our friends who are in Europe.

Speaker 6 And they have it more of a vested interest because this is happening on their doorstep. The problem is,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 the old order is disappearing and vanishing. We quote Alexander Hertzen, the great...

Speaker 6 greatest Russian philosopher who says, you know, when the old order dies, it leaves not an heir but a pregnant widow.

Speaker 6 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,

Speaker 6 autonomy, or strategic autonomy, as Macron puts it?

Speaker 6 I think Zelensky is inclined to say that's the direction we need to go. But Starmer, Macron, Maloney, Ruth,

Speaker 6 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 I read this carefully.

Speaker 6 He does not apologize. He says it is regrettable what happened in the Oval Office, emphasizing the importance of the Ukrainian-American relationship.

Speaker 6 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 ceasefire at the front, meaning guns go down on land.

Speaker 6 This idea comes from the Brits and the French.

Speaker 6 So I read this as Zelensky's counteroffer 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 4 I just roll around Zelensky really quick. I guess I feel obligated to mention this since he is maybe the most influential person in the world.

Speaker 4 Elon Musk tweeted, 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.

Speaker 4 So that's an interesting negotiating position.

Speaker 6 This is what you say about a dictator whose regime you've just toppled. We're prepared to offer you amnesty or safe haven and some.
I mean, it's insane. Musk, again,

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 6 And it didn't just start with Ukraine. You know,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 4 We're going to

Speaker 6 have a NATO ally and a Five Eyes member and refer to him as governor. You know, it's like locker room abasement humiliation.

Speaker 4 For nothing, actually. For harm.

Speaker 6 For nothing.

Speaker 4 It's not even like we're getting getting a good deal out of it. Right.
We're getting a market crash.

Speaker 6 Musk has now, I think he agreed or retweeted somebody who said we should get out of NATO. So you begin to see the writing on the wall here.
The transatlantic relationship is dead.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 There's not a country in this alliance who believes that if they were invaded tomorrow, American American troops would come to the rescue under this president.

Speaker 6 I think Article 5 is dead, at least for the time being.

Speaker 4 To that point, I mentioned at the top, like Valessa, just cook on this.

Speaker 4 It was just an unbelievable letter from the Polish dissident, who became the first elected president of Poland after the fall of communism.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 We do not understand how the leader of a country that is the symbol of the free world cannot see this. He also has some pretty dark comparisons for Trump.
What did you make of it?

Speaker 6 I spoke also to my friend Danfried, ambassador to Poland, institution at the State Department, architect of sanctions, knows on a first-name basis every signatory of that letter.

Speaker 6 And I said, you know, the most impressive thing about that letter was for Valesa to draw moral equivalence between the President of the United States and the Polish secret police under communism.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 In fact, I don't like it when Americans say,

Speaker 6 you know, well, this is like Stalinism, man. No.

Speaker 4 But when a Pole

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And this, I see this as a double-blasted shotgun firing to the face of any remaining Reaganites in the Republican Party.

Speaker 6 Whether or not they're in Perta or they're living in some underground, I don't know, but they can't have missed this.

Speaker 4 You would think that the Lech Valessa letter would make Marco Rubio look in the mirror and ask if he's with the baddies, but I don't. I don't know.
We haven't seen a lot of evidence of it.

Speaker 6 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,

Speaker 6 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 literally pops out of the couch fabric.

Speaker 6 I mean, it was, it was humiliating for him. And now he has to get up on cable news and say the same nonsense.

Speaker 4 Me and Bill Chris were talking about this yesterday. The like the CNN story about

Speaker 4 how we are going to stop whatever offensive cyber operations against Russia was pretty vague. And we were trying to parse through what it actually meant.

Speaker 4 And I was wondering if you had anything to enlighten us on that.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 But one of the key components of this program is, as I said, espionage, which is very important.

Speaker 6 I mean, you do that even when you're in a a mode of détente or you're trying to make nice because you want to know what the other side's thinking.

Speaker 6 It worries me, assuming this reporting is accurate, that we're basically choosing to become blind and deaf to what our adversary is thinking.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Just recently, the FBI SAC in the New York field office was forced to retire. Now, this guy is a counter-intelligence specialist, which, if you're based in New York, means you focus mostly on Russia.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 intelligence collections from you know that 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 like we don't want to know what the Russians are doing to us,

Speaker 6 which is

Speaker 6 highly suspicious to say the least.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that FBI, that FBI forced retirement, the firing.

Speaker 6 Right. And

Speaker 6 that is gratuitous.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 I mean, we didn't stop spying on the Iranians when we entered into the nuclear deal, right?

Speaker 6 In fact, we've 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.

Speaker 6 And I can't emphasize that point enough. I mean, you know, it's one thing if you're not particularly concerned about what's happening in Europe, although I would suggest you should be.

Speaker 6 It's another to not care what's happening on your own home turf with a hostile intelligence actor.

Speaker 6 I mean, the largest cyber attack in history was perpetrated by the GRU, Russian military intelligence. It was called Natpetya.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 4 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 cheery chirping in the background.

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 4 she's got

Speaker 6 a lot of practice keeping things quiet.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 6 Anytime.

Speaker 4 All right. Thanks again also to James Carvell.
Happy Mardi Gras, everybody. We'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the Borg Podcast.
Peace.

Speaker 3 While you go to New Orleans,

Speaker 3 you ought to go see the Marty Gras.

Speaker 3 If you go to New York,

Speaker 3 you ought to go see the Marty Gras.

Speaker 3 When you see the Mighty Grow,

Speaker 4 somebody will tell you what's going on for

Speaker 3 Get your ticket in your hand,

Speaker 3 you wanna go to New Orleans

Speaker 3 Get your ticket in your hand

Speaker 3 You wanna go to New Orleans

Speaker 3 You know when you get to New Orleans

Speaker 4 Somebody'll show you the Zulu King

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Speaker 3 down on St. Claude and Duman

Speaker 3 You know you see the Zulu king

Speaker 3 down on St. Claude and Duman

Speaker 3 And if you stay right there

Speaker 4 I'm sure you'll see the Zulu queen

Speaker 4 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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