Susan Glasser: Giving Away the Store to Putin

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Speaker 3 Hey y'all, we've got a couple new things I want to point you to. First up, today, Tuesday, I am starting a new pod called FY Pod that is focused on Gen Z issues.

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Speaker 3 Up next, Susan Glasser.

Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I'm delighted to be back today with staff writer at the New Yorker, Susan Glasser.

Speaker 3 She's got a weekly column on life in Washington.

Speaker 3 She's also the co-author, most recently, of The Divider, a history of Donald Trump in the White House, which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker.

Speaker 3 And I got to hang out with her son Theo in Palm Springs a couple of weekends ago. That was just such a delight.
He's so great.

Speaker 4 Oh, man. You know, you know how to get right at a mom's heart here, right?

Speaker 4 By the way, the best title of all, I must say, is parent for sure.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, he was just such a delight to be around. Good hang, you know, annoyingly smart.
You know, I'm looking for flaws. I was, I didn't find any in Palm Springs.

Speaker 3 I'm sure there's, I'm sure some would emerge with longer, with a longer time. You know, we can't all be perfect.

Speaker 4 Ah, Tim, you know, you do do flattery well. You know,

Speaker 3 I don't actually. I do real talk.

Speaker 3 You can tell when I'm fake flattering, I promise.

Speaker 4 Well, you know, I mean, way to to lead off with the momentum.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 We've got to talk, I think, mostly today about the ongoing negotiations, if you want to call them negotiations, surrender between the United States and Russia that's happening in Saudi Arabia as we speak.

Speaker 3 We have some developments this morning. It's possible some new stuff will come up here in the hours between now and when it publishes.

Speaker 3 But just before we get into what's happening today, just for folks' background, like you spent four years as Washington Post bureau chief in Moscow.

Speaker 3 Your most recent article was about, your most recent column rather, was about how Trump has basically been giving away the store to Putin over the first, then it was 24 days.

Speaker 3 It's been about another week since then. So just kind of talk about your perspective, having been in Moscow, and then kind of the biggest picture of what you're seeing here.

Speaker 3 And then we'll kind of get into the details.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, look,

Speaker 4 it's two decades and more since Putin came to power in Russia.

Speaker 4 And of course, the biggest transformation is not only the return to dictatorship inside Russia, but the idea that the United States would come full circle and elect a president like Donald Trump, who rather than view Putin as an adversary is now seeking to welcoming him back into, you know, sort of the family of nations after the largest unprovoked land war in Europe since the end of World War II.

Speaker 4 We are talking, you know, a mass casualty event with extraordinary implications for American security as well as European security, not to mention the message that Putin's invasion has sent to Xi Jinping and to others who would seek to revise by force the international boundaries.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's just the act of lawlessness and murder, mayhem, that is being sort of condoned by Donald Trump

Speaker 4 is pretty extraordinary. And I think that, you know, it's another of those clarifying moments in which Donald Trump specializes, specializes, right?

Speaker 4 Tim, he loves to almost make a mockery of his apologists and enablers.

Speaker 4 And, you know, frankly, for months, I was hearing even before the election from the sort of more conventional Republican types here in Washington.

Speaker 4 every kind of BS and gaslighting and, you know, oh, don't worry, Donald Trump is going to piece through strength. He's not going to sell out Ukraine.

Speaker 4 He's going to, you know, he's actually going to give more weapons to Ukraine. He's actually going to shore up Ukraine.
He's going to show Putin how tough we are. You know,

Speaker 4 okay, fine. Donald Trump laughing at those people.
But I think you see why that kind of gaslighting is successful.

Speaker 4 Europeans were shocked and terrified to realize that all their sort of fantasy hopes of maybe it won't be so bad after Trump gets reelected, you know, dashed almost in an instant in the last few weeks.

Speaker 4 So we don't know yet what's going to happen in these talks specifically, but I think we understand now in a big picture sense where Trump is headed with this.

Speaker 3 I do wonder sometimes whether those types of Republicans are like gaslighting themselves or us or both. You know, I was in a debate, if you'll call it that, with Dan Crenshaw before the election.

Speaker 3 And this was the message that he was saying on that, you know, that I was delusional, that if you just actually look at the record from the first term, maybe you didn't like Trump's tweets, but he actually was very strong on, you know, countering Russia and much stronger than Biden even.

Speaker 3 And he was making the pitch as if Trump was going to get in there and

Speaker 3 send some nice tweets to Putin, but that the policy would all be

Speaker 3 something out of whatever, the Reagan administration. And that was just so obviously delusional at the time.

Speaker 3 I guess it doesn't really matter whether they're deluding themselves or not, but it is, that is a true observation, right?

Speaker 3 Like when you were around, you know, you're doing this, the circuit around Washington, many people thought that it was possible that that was what was going to happen rather than that he was going to do exactly what he told us he was going to do.

Speaker 4 Correct. And I actually think it does matter.

Speaker 4 I mean, you know, but to your point, I remember a debate I had over dinner at a very senior European ambassador's home with a Republican who just this morning I saw, you know, tweeting, it's the first critical tweet I've ever seen this Republican, who's very pro-Trump, make about Trump.

Speaker 4 And it was specifically in regards to Putin, you know, something like, gee, you know, you wouldn't want to invite Hannibal Lecter to dinner.

Speaker 4 And, you know, know, this is a guy who was literally in a knockdown, drag out argument with me to the point that it was clearly rude at this ambassador's home going on and on about, you know, we were just fantasizing.

Speaker 4 We were just absolutely, you know, victims of Trump derangement syndrome. And, you know, Donald Trump was actually going to be great for Ukraine and great for European security.

Speaker 4 And, you know, there was no issue, nothing to worry about for NATO. And, you know, the people at the dinner were like, what is this man talking about?

Speaker 4 But I think that lying to people over and over again, whether you really believe the lies or not, that's something I feel like you have to answer for your own character. But

Speaker 4 the net effect is that the lies.

Speaker 4 have consequences.

Speaker 4 And when you see the comments and you see the visible shock and dismay that were written all over the faces of Europe's leaders over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference, as they understood that they had both been lied to and also clearly lied to themselves about what was happening.

Speaker 4 And, you know, that has consequences. It certainly means at a minimum, Tim, that they were not prepared adequately for a scenario that they should have been very, very prepared for.

Speaker 3 Just tell me a little bit more about that. I mean, obviously, I guess you were having conversations with those folks from Europe.
I mean, how are they kind of processing all of this?

Speaker 3 Is it going to be total submission to whatever Trump and Putin decide?

Speaker 3 Is there European resistance to this emerging?

Speaker 3 I mean, obviously there's going to be long-term ramifications about that Europe no longer feeling like they can trust us or to be part of their security blanket. But what about the short term?

Speaker 4 Well, what's remarkable is that

Speaker 4 you saw some comments suggesting that

Speaker 4 Even from the first Trump term on, Europeans understood that the United States was not necessarily an unwavering partner that they could always count on, that, you know, we were having these sort of four-year wild oscillations in our policy that would affect them at a minimum because of our inconstancy, and that we might make a pledge now that we wouldn't be able to redeem for six years on.

Speaker 4 To take it from an unreliable ally to some of the comments saying the U.S. is now the adversary, that the U.S.
is now undermining, in an active sense, European security, that's something new.

Speaker 4 You saw, however, the continued,

Speaker 4 frankly, fecklessness of the response on the part of the Europeans.

Speaker 4 They have, in fact, relied upon American security guarantees, on American military leadership, on until recently, American diplomatic leadership. NATO has been established by the U.S.

Speaker 4 and led by the U.S. since its inception in the aftermath of World War II.
And it's hard to see what a NATO without the U.S. in the lead, or possibly what a NATO without the U.S.

Speaker 4 at all, would actually mean. And they called an emergency summit, President Macron did in France on Monday in the aftermath of Trump's phone call with Putin last week and the comments by J.D.

Speaker 4 Vance at the Munich Security Conference. I can't say that that summit came out with a resounding sense of how Europe is going to proceed going forward.

Speaker 4 And remember, there are multiple interlocking issues here. It's not just, well, gee, is Trump going to pull the plug on U.S.
assistance for Ukraine?

Speaker 4 Is Trump going to make a bad deal or a separate peace with Putin on Ukraine? But also, he may actively and almost certainly will actively undermine NATO. He might withdraw from it outright.

Speaker 4 As you know, he's pledged to do that before. Even if he doesn't, what if he pulls out U.S.
troops from their forward positions, defending the line essentially between NATO and Russia?

Speaker 4 You know, that's a very real possibility.

Speaker 3 It is. So let's talk about this.
Obviously, this is a developing story. And so I'm just going to read a couple of the reports about kind of what the contours of the deal, so to speak, are.

Speaker 3 I kind of hate even calling it that. Fox this morning says the plan includes a ceasefire and then forcing elections in Ukraine before signing a final agreement.

Speaker 3 The notion there, I think, is that Putin thinks that an election would yield a leader that is more amenable to him than Zelensky.

Speaker 3 You wrote about some of this in the New Yorker Telegraph wrote about this, which is the Trump demand that part of the deal includes $500 billion in payback from Ukraine, including the critical minerals, rare earth minerals, but also other stuff, and that maybe that would include some kind of security guarantee.

Speaker 3 And then what you just mentioned there is the FTU was reporting European officials think Trump, this part of the deal, could move troops out of the Baltics, which is something that obviously the Europeans would be concerned about.

Speaker 3 So that's just kind of developing, but just wondering your thoughts on kind of all those contours of what they're discussing.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, let's talk about that, you know, $500 billion extortion demand on Ukraine, that the United States essentially should be the owner of half of Ukraine's rare earth minerals.

Speaker 4 First of all, let's put on the table that the United States has given nothing like $500 billion to Ukraine. So the idea that it's payback is ridiculous.

Speaker 4 That's actually a straight out extortion blackmail demand. The U.S.

Speaker 4 has given tens of billions of dollars in military assistance and security aid to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion, a lot of which has gone to U.S.

Speaker 4 military suppliers who are then essentially the customers and sending weapons to Ukraine.

Speaker 4 Europe, by the way, despite Donald Trump's lies about it, is now in the position of having collectively provided more money to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion three years ago this month.

Speaker 4 So let's be clear: like under $100 billion in U.S.

Speaker 4 military assistance, you can't exactly then demand half of the country's patrimony and rare earth minerals to the tune of $500 billion and say, oh, that's payback.

Speaker 4 It's very much in keeping with Trump's view of the United States, which he expressed even in his first term in office, right? There's nothing new with Donald Trump here.

Speaker 4 He often expressed this idea of the U.S. as essentially a mercenary force.
By the way, that offended many of his more conventional Republican advisors in his first term more than that.

Speaker 4 In fact, actually, it was... his references over and over again to U.S.

Speaker 4 soldiers as basically mercenaries that so offended Rex Tillerson, his ill-fated first Secretary of State, that it prompted the Rex Tillerson fucking moron outburst at the Pentagon in the summer of 2017.

Speaker 4 So in my role as Trump historian here, I need to point that out because it's a kind of a shocking view of American power as that we're essentially the mob heavies here and

Speaker 4 give us money with a gun pointed at your back or we won't do anything for you. It's a radically different view of American security.
So there's that we can talk about.

Speaker 4 But also to your point, I just think the undermining of NATO has already occurred, even short of formally pulling out.

Speaker 4 Our whole premise of NATO is essentially collective mutual defense, right?

Speaker 4 All for one, one for all. We're attacked on 9-11.
That's the only time NATO has ever invoked this principle of collective defense.

Speaker 4 Donald Trump, do you believe right now that Donald Trump would go to war to protect Estonia?

Speaker 4 Tim? Are you kidding me?

Speaker 3 How could anybody believe that? I mean, this is a part of the whole bluff, I think.

Speaker 3 I guess it's related, but just continue on that point, but also, even if they did agree to a security guarantee, I mean, like, who would believe that the Trump Vance administration would do anything to protect whatever part of Ukraine falls under that security guarantee or the Baltics, right?

Speaker 4 Well, the Baltics are covered by NATO. They are members of NATO.
We are legally obliged to defend NATO. And by the way, I know we're going to talk about Greenland later.
Yes. Okay.

Speaker 4 Just think about this. Wrap your mind around this insane situation that is an only in the Trump era situation.
Denmark, of course, you know, is the power over Greenland right now.

Speaker 4 It is a NATO member, an ally of the United States in good standing. If we militarily took over Greenland, we'd also be obliged to defend Greenland from our own takeover.

Speaker 4 You don't go to war with your allies, people.

Speaker 4 And again, it's just, it's really a remarkable thing. Trump, in that sense, has already made NATO's Article 5, the whole foundation of the treaty, a dead letter.

Speaker 4 Because you laughed out loud when I asked,

Speaker 4 would we defend Estonia? But that, in fact, is legally what we're obliged to do.

Speaker 3 Would anybody think that we would at this point? And I find it just very hard to, like, what would even be the case for the argument that, like, Trump would make to people?

Speaker 3 You know, I mean, like, he is rhetorically, even if he wanted to.

Speaker 4 The United States is legally obliged to do so.

Speaker 3 That's yeah, for sure. But I just mean to his own voters.
Like, I mean, like, his, his whole rationale has been that this is a waste. We're We're getting screwed by these people.

Speaker 3 We should focus on ourselves first. Like, the idea that Trump would send troops into Estonia, I think, is farcical.
Hopefully, we don't have to cross that bridge.

Speaker 4 Well, to be clear, by the way, we already have a U.S. military presence

Speaker 4 in

Speaker 3 combat troops.

Speaker 4 Exactly. And, you know, it just,

Speaker 4 it's a reminder that Putin has won in every possible respect already by the fact of Donald Trump's reelection. So now we're just learning the details.

Speaker 4 And it's not an accident that the Russian state media, Russian newspapers calling this Putin's success already.

Speaker 4 Getting Trump back to the table with Russia in and of itself is a victory for Putin after being isolated and marginalized.

Speaker 4 Trump has already spoken out loud and said that he would like to welcome Russia back into the G7 and turn it back into the G8, something that the other leading countries rejected out loud, laughed out loud when he proposed this in his first term in office.

Speaker 4 Now he's proposing this even after Putin has launched this war.

Speaker 4 Again, the guy has been consistent in his preference for Putin, in his preference for America's adversary and his attacks on America's allies.

Speaker 4 We're the chumps who somehow haven't really fully understood that Trump actually actually means to sell out the United States to Russia.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you mentioned the Russian newspapers. It was the one that you shared was dumbfounded Europe, need by America just below the belt is still struggling to get its breath back.

Speaker 3 It was a Russian, a columnist in the Russian paper.

Speaker 3 I mentioned it briefly at the beginning, but the election thing is interesting that Russia and all of kind of the leaks about what Russia wants out of this deal, like they do want elections.

Speaker 3 And I wonder if maybe that is partially, I don't know, maybe it's me not understanding, maybe it's Putin not understanding what the reality on the ground in Ukraine, but it does feel like they think that they might be able to win this war without actually firing more shots, that they might have an election and that the election might be won by some Russian puppet type and they can just, you know, do this takeover quasi-electorally.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, I think that was the original hope, frankly, of Putin.

Speaker 4 And he has a long history of manipulating Ukrainian elections and dominating the country through, you know, sort of political methods, disinformation methods.

Speaker 4 Remember that the invasion itself, for us Americans, we tend to date it back three years to February of 2022.

Speaker 4 But for Ukrainians, they date the beginning of this war to Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and the launching of the actual shooting war in the country's east.

Speaker 4 That followed on the revolution in the Maidan that began in December of 2013 and was all about, you know, when Russia's essentially hand-picked guy as the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych was forced or chose to flee the country.

Speaker 4 And Russia has subsequently called that an illegal coup.

Speaker 4 But, you know, the guy was a corrupt dictator who fired on his own people and had negotiated a power sharing arrangement and then overnight fled the country. And so

Speaker 4 Russia has dominated Ukraine before in this way that you're suggesting it might want to do again. Obviously, that's a lot less costly of Russian lives.
If through manipulation and

Speaker 4 dirty dealings, you can dominate a country in that kind of more soft power way.

Speaker 4 Then absolutely, I think Russia's always seen that as a possible outcome, that they wanted to gobble up as much territory as they could militarily, but then seek to continue to dominate essentially a weakened Ukraine politically as part of the aftermath.

Speaker 4 So yes, absolutely, they would seek to put a proxy leader in and replace Zelensky in any way that they could.

Speaker 3 One more thing on the negotiations in Saudi Arabia. So Zelensky was not included, of course.
Rubio this morning said, nobody's being sidelined here.

Speaker 3 The only thing President Trump's trying to do is bring about peace. It's what he campaigned on.
It's something the world should be thanking President Trump for.

Speaker 3 It's like North North Korean commentary there from the Secretary of State.

Speaker 3 Then the other news item, right, as we were starting to tape, is Zelensky was originally going to go to Saudi Arabia tomorrow.

Speaker 3 It was unclear what his plans were and whether that was going to be related to the negotiations at all, but he's postponed that trip, suggesting now he wants to avoid being linked at all to these talks.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, I don't know who they're trying to fool there with the no-one is being sidelined, but like clearly the kind of lip service that Trump and Rubio had been giving to including Zelensky in this seems to be dissipating.

Speaker 4 You know, I was struck by that comment too, Tim. You know, you can't sideline somebody that you haven't even let them to show up to the game.

Speaker 4 They're not in the game. You can't sideline somebody if they're not even allowed in the stadium.
You know, look, this is

Speaker 4 really remarkable.

Speaker 4 At this point, Zelensky's hope is that he can, you know, rally Europe to his side, that he can help, you know, work with them to come up with a united front and essentially to negotiate among the Allies.

Speaker 4 It's also interesting and notable that the Russians came out of these preliminary talks saying, Well, we're not sure when Putin and Trump are going to meet once again.

Speaker 4 It seems that Trump is the one who is always the eager suitor with Vladimir Putin, always begging to meet with him. And it's notable that Putin isn't rushing to the table here.

Speaker 4 This seems to be on Trump's timeline and that that he, as always, is the eager shooter with Vladimir Putin. I think that's very notable.

Speaker 3 Depressing there that you just, I don't know if you did it intentionally, but you were referencing the Allies there as Ukraine and Europe, not including us.

Speaker 3 That's kind of a just depressing realization.

Speaker 3 Bill Kristol is kind of writing about this this morning in the morning newsletter about how strange a feeling it is to be like basically rooting for the U.S.'s diplomatic efforts to fail.

Speaker 3 So anyway, such as life.

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Speaker 3 The other kind of gift to Russia lately in China has been the gutting of USAID. And that's all happened since we last spoke.

Speaker 3 The news yesterday, the latest horror on this, was that we've now, I guess, ended aid for victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Speaker 3 And I think obviously that will be a massive propaganda win for the Chinese in addition to just being totally wrong. And like, it's such a minor part of the budget.

Speaker 3 And Donald Trump is like driving around on at the Daytona 500. I mean, like the cost of the Daytona 500 and the Super Bowl trips for Trump would cover the Agent Orange victims for like another decade.

Speaker 3 But I'm wondering, you know, kind of what your thoughts are just broadly on the impact of the USAID gutter.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think you're really right to underscore that this isn't about cost cutting.

Speaker 4 And, you know, if you wanted to do what Elon Musk's stated purpose was of reviewing the government and looking for areas for efficiency and savings.

Speaker 4 The last agency that you would focus on is USAID, considering what a minuscule part of the American federal budget it was. We're talking under 1%.

Speaker 4 So you could eliminate every single program and it would make literally zero impact on the overall U.S. government spending.
So it's not about spending. Let's stipulate to that.

Speaker 4 Even ideologically, it seems very much at odds with what many Republicans, including the feckless Marco Rubio, were advocating for.

Speaker 4 They always wanted to spend more money on this kind of programs that were smartly extending American power in the world at a time when so much of our presence is militarized.

Speaker 4 You know, it's the leaders in the Pentagon who will tell you for decades that this was a much more effective method of promoting American power.

Speaker 4 And many of these programs, of course, were canceled so abruptly.

Speaker 4 It's Elon Musk literally sort of taking the knife to many of the poorest people in the world, themselves victims of, you know, previous efforts to protect American power.

Speaker 4 Like you mentioned, the American, the Agent Orange. And, you know, I just, I think it tells you very much about Trump's approach to the world, which is my way and everybody else be damned.

Speaker 4 And I think it's notable that many of the victims of this are the world's poorest and most vulnerable. I think that's similar in the approach to how they're carrying out the immigration thing.

Speaker 4 There was a piece today, which I definitely recommend to your listeners in the Times, seeking to talk to some of the victims of sort of the mass dragnet of deportations that are happening, apparently without regard to who's caught up in it.

Speaker 4 And they're now housing some of these people in hotels in Panama.

Speaker 4 They're shipping them to Panama, including this image that I'm going to have a hard time getting out of my mind, Tim, of a woman desperately trying to open the window and escape from this locked room in Panama where she had been taken.

Speaker 4 She sees reporters down below on the street. So she writes on a sign, Afghan, holds it up, and then pantomimes what appears to be an airplane and then her being killed.

Speaker 4 The point being that if she was sent back to Afghanistan, she would be killed. Remember, we fought in Afghanistan for two decades.
We broke our promises to these people.

Speaker 4 When they were evacuated, we said those who had helped the United States could come to our country to escape the Taliban. We're the ones who've broken our promises.

Speaker 4 And I just, that image of that woman is really going to stick with me.

Speaker 3 What a hurt. I haven't read that article yet.
We'll put it in the show notes for people. That is horrific.

Speaker 3 Another just horror story on this front and just talking about kind of how stupid this is and how inefficient it is and wrong. And it's not just the people that we're helping through USAID.

Speaker 3 It's people that work for USAID. There was a horror story.
Kyle Cheney over at Politico was reporting about this. A USAID employee's pregnant wife was hemorrhaging.
She's, I think, 31 weeks pregnant.

Speaker 3 And the doctor, whatever country they were in, it's redacted, said that they should be mede-vaced out to a place where there's better medical care. And there was a directive from Washington to not,

Speaker 3 you know, not fund any of these emergency health care issues taking place under USAID. The senator for this person, also name-redacted, tried to intervene, but it was too late.

Speaker 3 And it was like too dangerous now to move the woman. It's just an unbelievable story.

Speaker 3 There's no point to this and it's just capricious, you know?

Speaker 4 Well, that's right. There's no point.
It's capricious. And I, you know, I'll tell you, I mean, again, that's, that is a horror story that really resonates for me.

Speaker 4 When I was a correspondent in Moscow more than two decades ago, you mentioned it already, Tim. You know, the Washington Post paid for medical evacuation insurance for us.

Speaker 4 And by the way, I needed to use that. And in January of 2004, I was evacuated from Russia to London because I was hemorrhaging with what turned out to be a potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy.
Wow.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I mean, look, we're we're at war on women now in this country, along with all the many other shocking things that are occurring. And

Speaker 4 I can tell you, if it was men who faced the possibility of

Speaker 4 bleeding out and dying from ectopic pregnancies, then we wouldn't be talking about it like it was some optional

Speaker 4 abortion procedure, which it's not.

Speaker 4 That's the world that we're living in right now. So I appreciate you bringing it up, even though it's one example.
I think

Speaker 4 it speaks to a larger phenomenon that's happening in our society due to you know the the toxic politics that we have.

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Speaker 3 I have a couple more topics. They're not going to get any breezier.
We should move to the questions here at home.

Speaker 3 And I guess it's related to the USAID employees, but you shared an article from Larry Diamond over at Hoover about how the crisis of democracy is already here.

Speaker 3 Obviously, you're reporting from Washington and there is huge churn and uncertainty among people that work for the federal government.

Speaker 3 A lot of these kind of legal questions are up in the air about how protected each of these employees are.

Speaker 3 Just kind of wondering what you're hearing on this front and your thoughts on these extrajudicial attacks on the federal bureaucracy.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, I really, again, that is a piece that I highly recommend. Larry Diamond is one of the foremost scholars of democracy around the world scholar at Stanford University.

Speaker 4 And in this piece, he makes a distinction that I think is really important.

Speaker 4 Because Trump has operated on such a broad front, you know, you can conflate different things, but not all aspects of this crisis are equal.

Speaker 4 And, you know, while there are, let's put aside for a second, the many extreme far-right policies that he and his team are seeking to implement, many of which might be implemented by another Republican president.

Speaker 4 So, you know, even if you or I disagree with any aspect of it, you know, there are the policy disputes that are extreme but fall within the spectrum of of American political discourse.

Speaker 4 But then there's the frontal attack on the structures of American democracy.

Speaker 4 And, you know, his point, which again, I feel like it should be said again and again and again, what's dangerous is not that Donald Trump and Elon Musk don't like foreign aid to take the conversation we're just having about USAID.

Speaker 4 That's a policy fight in this country. The thing that makes it radical and scary is the unilateral assertion of authority.

Speaker 4 Congress has appropriated the money, has authorized the creation of this foreign aid agency, has appropriated the billions of dollars to carry out this strategy.

Speaker 4 If they don't like it, then they have to play by the rules of our system and negotiate with Congress and have a political fight that

Speaker 4 yields a different result.

Speaker 4 They control Congress also.

Speaker 4 Just do it. It's amazing because they don't have the votes to do what they're doing by executive fiat.

Speaker 4 And the great fear right now that Larry points out and others do as well is that we're hurtling toward a situation where with so many of these actions being challenged in court, that Trump might become really the first president of the post-American Civil War era.

Speaker 4 Literally, you know, there's this line in that piece that says, no one has found any examples since 1865.

Speaker 4 of a president refusing to carry out a judicial decree.

Speaker 4 And that's the fear right now that is animating many of the legal experts and that is animating many of those who study democracy, because that could be the way in which he breaks the back of this thing.

Speaker 3 It's like a sword of Damocles that's hanging over us, right? Like we just don't know exactly how he's going to handle all that.

Speaker 3 I think that there's a lot of people kind of discussing this that I see in the democracy space that

Speaker 3 are acting as if there's going to be this one big showdown, right? That the Supreme Court says no, and that, you know, as J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance says, he does the apocryphal Andrew Jackson quote and is like, John Roberts, send your army after me. And it's like, that isn't probably how it's going to go, right? Like, it's going to be slow.

Speaker 3 And they'll like pick a few examples where maybe a district court judge gets way out over their skis and they just don't really follow it.

Speaker 3 And they don't, you know, and they're like, wait as it goes through the courts, but they still, you know, prevent people from coming to the office or whatever the firing is, prevent people from access to certain, you know, government, you know to their emails or to you know whatever their government business is and then you know who knows like maybe back down once i right like that there's a lot of ways this can go where they can sort of slowly undermine the judicial process and try to break everything you know before you get to kind of a big stand down and and i think that is something that kind of concerns me that i'm not sure that people have really wrapped their head around I agree that that's consistent with Trump's approach always, which is the blizzard of legal approaches.

Speaker 4 And then they'll just make an argument, even if it's completely spurious. Because frankly, that's what January 6th was.
It was insane.

Speaker 4 It was, you know, there was no lawyer who thought that you could turn January 6th from a ceremonial, ministerial, essentially rubber stamping of the electoral certificates the states had already approved, that you could turn that into an event, you know, with consequences.

Speaker 4 And yet they find one lawyer to make a kind of crazy argument. That was John Eastman.

Speaker 4 So that's the approach that I have thought they would take to undermining the sanctity of some of these judicial rulings. They'll just say, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 Well, when the judge said we weren't allowed to spend the money, he didn't mean this money, blah, blah, blah. And then it'll spawn its own series of lawsuits.

Speaker 4 And again, we only have one four-year term. Look at how successfully Trump tied up all of the lawsuits and criminal cases against him, even when he was out of office.

Speaker 4 So I would see it as more of a sort of a rolling ball of legal uncertainty that has the effect of undermining any of the checks and balances and accountability that the court rulings are supposed to impose upon a rogue executive.

Speaker 4 So I think that scenario that you float is one that I've been bracing for as well.

Speaker 3 One other specific example in the news, CBS News confirmed that Michelle King, the top Social Security Administration official, was acting commissioner, was replaced in her role.

Speaker 3 King then chose to resign, according to the White House. This is part of the fight over Elon Musk and Doge getting access to people's social security data.

Speaker 3 Musk was tweeting insanely, as always, about all of the fraudulent social security actions, why he needs this data, because there's a lot of old people, people that are over 100 years old, that are still getting social security.

Speaker 3 Experts who've actually looked at this, because people have looked at this before, have said that there is some example of social security numbers being abused, but it's usually the opposite of what Musk is saying.

Speaker 3 It's illegal immigrants that are using dead people's social security numbers and then paying payroll tax, right?

Speaker 3 You're using a security number to get a job. So they're actually paying into Social Security.
So it's probably on net gaining us money rather than costing us money, but that's neither here nor there.

Speaker 3 I wanted to play for you the

Speaker 3 press secretary, Carolyn, and her comments last night on Hannity about this.

Speaker 7 I've been fighting fake news reporters all day long here in the Washington, D.C.

Speaker 7 swamp, who are trying to fearmonger the American people into believing that this administration is going after their hard-earned tax dollars and their hard-earned social security checks.

Speaker 7 So I want to set the record straight on your show tonight, Sean, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to do so.

Speaker 7 President Trump has directed Elon Musk and the Doge team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration.

Speaker 7 They haven't dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent social security payments.

Speaker 3 First, I was at real life. That just feels like it's from a movie.
Tens of millions of people.

Speaker 4 Deceased people. Deceased people.

Speaker 3 There are only 70 million people on Social Security. They think that one in three of them are actually deceased and it's part of a fraud.
I mean, the whole thing is just farcical.

Speaker 3 But anyway, I'm wondering your thoughts on that and the Elon kind of activities more broadly.

Speaker 4 If you haven't, we're in the laugh or cry stage of the podcast here, too.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 We are. Laugh or cry.
Laugh or cry. I mean, you know, it would be laughable if it weren't so serious to have vested so much power in people who could say absurd things like this.
You know, it's

Speaker 4 Hannity is state media and, you know, this press secretary, that's frankly an Orwellian misnomer for someone whose job seems to be to undermine and dismantle the free press.

Speaker 4 And, you know, until she brings the Associated Press back into the press pool, I don't want to talk about Caroline Levin.

Speaker 4 I want to talk about how she's dismantling freedom of speech and the First Amendment in this country, period.

Speaker 3 What do you think about this question about whether other media outlets should be standing in solidarity?

Speaker 3 I think this is so tough because in the Obama administration, you'll remember there was this kerfuffle over Fox. You know, Obama, they didn't want to include him, I think, in a pool or something.

Speaker 3 I can't remember the exact specifics. And the other, the mainstream outlets, ABC, CBS, et cetera, said, we're going to boycott if Fox isn't included, right? Like everyone should have access.

Speaker 3 The problem with that is that doesn't really work this time. Like my guess is if ABC, NBC, CBS said that they were going to boycott over AP, Carolyn Levitt would be like, peace out, you know?

Speaker 3 So I don't exactly know what they're supposed to do.

Speaker 3 Do you have any thoughts about that?

Speaker 4 I think they should go to court, number one. And I think they should all sign on to the lawsuit.

Speaker 4 And I imagine they will go to court, but I also imagine that they won't all sign on to the lawsuit and you know i i get it i get it because it seems pretty clear that the goal is to have an actual

Speaker 4 what I'm calling a Kremlin press pool as opposed to a real press pool by the end of the year, if not much, much sooner in the Trump White House.

Speaker 4 I think that, you know, is a part of their agenda that I definitely anticipate, offering Americans the facsimile and the appearance of Trump being surrounded by reporters when, in fact, they're not, you know, truly independent reporters, but handpicked for their loyalty to the regime.

Speaker 4 Certainly it would be very consistent with the playbook of authoritarianism that he's following in every other respect. So to me, this looks like an early testing, you know, probing fight.

Speaker 4 And by the way,

Speaker 4 when somebody who's seeking to undermine democracy and our constitutional principles goes after such a straightforward one, where is the uproar?

Speaker 4 You know, I can't say tactically speaking what's the right course, but I can tell you that for me personally, this is a line that is crossed that is serious.

Speaker 4 And I would say to all your listeners, like, it's no joke when the president of the United States is trying to, you know, put his emperor hat on and tell the Associated Press, the backbone of independent neutral news in this country that goes out to all of the, you know, papers in all of middle America, when he attacks the backbone of our free press and says

Speaker 4 i am so all-powerful that if you don't adopt my language and call the gulf of mexico the gulf of america then i will ban you that is literally what our first amendment was designed for and yes if you allow it to pass without complaining then you are part of the problem and i hope that the bulwark will stand up for uh the associated press and i hope that all of the people listening will too because yes it matters absolutely totally agree I'm glad that it wasn't on my list.

Speaker 3 So, this is why we needed your, I needed your passion on this one because it is, there is this parade of horribles. I said this at the beginning of the year.

Speaker 3 I was like, one thing that I want to do on the podcast is, is just focus on things that I feel genuinely passionate about and that I want people to know about and have guests on to do the same, right?

Speaker 3 Because there is so much, like we could just, I guess, run a 24-hour running podcast that just live, live posts, the parade of horribles. Maybe we could do that.
But you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Like, it's hard, right, to sort of determine what is important.

Speaker 3 And I think that your perspective, having been there in the press corps, like is important on this about, because I could understand why people might look at this and be like, okay, well, whatever.

Speaker 3 I mean, NDC's still in there, so that's fine. But it is

Speaker 3 like, it is a very dangerous place that we're going if you're starting to ban people over not using the, you know, the correct truth speak, the patriot speak that they're demanding.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, that's right, Tim. And look, you know, the goal here is to overwhelm us with outrages such that we're kind of soporific and unable to respond effectively to any one of them.

Speaker 4 But, you know, I hated the post-election, you know, kind of democratic chest beating and media chest beating over woe is us.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, we can't have a resistance this time because it wasn't effective. Like, I will tell you, I've saw this happen in Russia.

Speaker 4 I've seen it happen in other countries that have lost their democracies as fragile and imperfect as they were. You know,

Speaker 4 you have to object when lines are crossed because you have at a minimum the ability to slow it down, to obstruct, to gain allies. And, you know, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, they're not going to stop.

Speaker 4 because you give them just this one little thing. They're going to keep going and take something else.
You are playing a game against the clock here.

Speaker 4 And absolutely, you know, it's not our job to predict the future or what's effective or what's not. We're not partisans.
You know, the Democratic Party, they screwed things up.

Speaker 4 They're going to have to have their own reckoning. But we're civil society.
That's what it means. And

Speaker 4 we have to be able to call it out in a clear, grounded, and

Speaker 4 unequivocal way.

Speaker 3 Amen. All right.
Last thing in the laugh or cry portion, as you alluded to earlier. You're maybe partially at fault for the purchase of Greenland.
I don't know.

Speaker 3 But the idea of buying Greenland initially came to Trump from Ron Lauder. That was first reported.

Speaker 3 I guess it's Ron Lauder, but that was first reported in your book that we mentioned earlier, The Divider.

Speaker 3 And so you're doing this Donald Trump historian stuff where all these like crazy examples, like the thing you mentioned with Tillerson earlier, it's sort of hard to know

Speaker 3 what then

Speaker 3 blossoms and becomes something bigger in the future. That's why it's important to document all this stuff.

Speaker 3 So I'm just, I'm curious if you had any other color from those early conversations with our cosmetic oligarch that has decided that he wants to purchase

Speaker 3 another country because he's pals with Trump.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 Tim, this one is, I'm glad you brought it up because when Peter and I were reporting the divider after Trump left office the first term,

Speaker 4 we weren't really focused on, well, we should do some reporting about the whole Greenland incident.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, like many people, it was treated as a laugh line when he brought it up first in August of 2019 and it became public.

Speaker 4 And it was really kind of treated like a laugh line, you know, Trump and his grandiose ways. And obviously, that's not going to happen.
Ha ha ha. He's really kind of crazy.

Speaker 4 That was the summer of 2019. Well, then we started doing the reporting after Trump left office.

Speaker 4 And a number of his former White House officials, including a very senior economic official, actually, not national security official, mentioned to us, hey, you know, he was really serious about that Greenland thing.

Speaker 4 And actually, it wasn't a laugh line. And he had brought it up a lot.
And I had even had a decision memo that was circulating in the White House and we were really intrigued by that.

Speaker 4 So then when we were doing the reporting for the book, we started asking, you know, everyone we could think of, hey, wait, you know, is it true?

Speaker 4 Like that he was really interested in this Greenland thing. And we eventually

Speaker 4 pulled on the thread and discovered that in fact, it never became public. But Trump was obsessed for years in his first term with purchasing Greenland.

Speaker 4 Privately, he was bringing it up at cabinet meetings. We talked to one of his former cabinet secretaries who said they literally were were like, oh my God, this is crazy.
What is he talking about?

Speaker 4 And this was years before it became public. Then when John Bolton, his third national security advisor, comes in in March of 2018.

Speaker 4 So again, really a long time before we ever heard about it, at one of his first private meetings with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Trump tells him, hey, there's this really interesting idea that's come up, you know, from a friend of mine that we should purchase Greenland.

Speaker 4 And, you know, you'll be hearing from him. And you need to get on this.
And sure enough, the phone rings, and it's this cosmetics gazillionaire, Ron Lauder, who's been a friend of Trump's for decades.

Speaker 4 In fact, they went to the University of Pennsylvania together. I kid you not.

Speaker 4 And he calls up the National Security Advisor and he says, Yeah, I would like to volunteer myself as a secret private envoy to Denmark and negotiate the purchase of Greenland.

Speaker 4 Well, Bolton demurs on having Ron Lauder as our secret envoy to Denmark, but he has to sort of placate Trump and he orders some of his national security aides to begin working up various options for Greenland.

Speaker 4 And by the way, Bolton is one of a number of national security types who believes that Greenland is a very important strategic place, you know, not so much because of the minerals, which initially attracted Donald Trump, but because of its strategic location, the competition with Russia and China over the north and the like.

Speaker 4 And so he recognized that publicly talking about purchasing Greenland would be very antithetical to the goal of achieving more cooperation with Greenland because it would mean exactly what we've seen, which is that Denmark gets its backup, which is that everybody is polarized and divided by Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 At any rate, so that's the backstory.

Speaker 4 And so I wasn't surprised at all when Greenland came right back up after Trump won re-election, even though I think for most people, they were like, what the hell is this all about? Great example.

Speaker 4 Like, there's nothing new with Donald Trump. He thinks what he thinks.

Speaker 3 Well, some tragically relevant reporting from you, but thank you. Do we know is Ron Lauder doing the Trump makeup too?

Speaker 3 Is he a key player in the different tone? Because he's been darkening his makeup.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm not even clear on what terms those two are actually on these days. You know, he was supporting Trump, then he was falling out like a lot of these gazillionaires.

Speaker 4 And then many of them, of course, went back to sucking up to Trump. But I haven't heard much about him lately.
And, you know, Trump obviously has his own very strong views on the makeup front.

Speaker 3 He does. All right.
Well, one more note on this from producer Katie. She wants me to know that there's a new detail here.

Speaker 3 In June, United will be running direct flights from Newark to Nuuk, Greenland, home to a new international airport. So, I don't know.
Maybe United and Ron Lauder, everybody's in on it.

Speaker 3 Who knows what could be happening in Nuke. We'll have to keep our eye on it.
Susan Glasser, I appreciate you very much. Thanks for coming back on the pod.

Speaker 4 Tim, thank you. I'm hoping that you don't move into 24-hour a day podcasting mode.

Speaker 4 You might have to.

Speaker 3 You might have to. What else am I going to do? All right.
Thanks to Susan Glasser.

Speaker 3 Everybody else, we will be back, not for 24 hours, but in 24 hours tomorrow for another edition of the Bloorg Podcast. We'll see you all then.

Speaker 4 Peace.

Speaker 4 you

Speaker 4 I'm not a living

Speaker 4 of my

Speaker 4 own

Speaker 4 I surrender

Speaker 4 I surrender

Speaker 4 I surrender

Speaker 4 I

Speaker 4 fight with you.

Speaker 4 Before you,

Speaker 4 I surrender.

Speaker 4 I surrender.

Speaker 4 Surrender.

Speaker 4 I surrender.

Speaker 4 I surrender.

Speaker 4 I surrender.

Speaker 4 Surrender.

Speaker 3 The Bullworth Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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