102. Has Trump Turned His Back on Israel?

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Welcome to the Rest is Politics US with me, Katie Kaye.

And I'm Atharis Chiaramucci.

Still in Sicily.

still in the White Lotus Hotel, still on holiday.

And for all of our viewers and listeners out there, I recommend the Godfather tour.

I took my wife this morning, Katie.

It was really a lot of fun.

Why does that not surprise me that that's what you did?

It was just fun.

Yeah, it's good.

It's good.

And you went to the bar, indeed.

Yes, the famous bar.

What are we talking about, girl?

What's going on today?

What's going on?

I'm going to drag you from the beach and remind you that there is a world out there.

I apologize.

But we we are going to unpack Donald Trump's comments on Gaza.

It's pretty clear that there is a gap growing between Washington and London.

We'll talk about the special relationship, the degree to which it still holds, whether Donald Trump might be persuaded by the images from Gaza.

And then we are going to look at Donald Trump giving Putin just 10 days to agree to a Ukraine ceasefire.

Is it real pressure?

Is it headlines?

And he has, as we are recording this on Wednesday afternoon in London, he has just announced that there will also be secondary tariffs, I guess they are, on

India for importing energy and arms from Russia because of the Ukraine situation.

So we can get to all of that.

But let's start on

on Gaza.

And

before we get to kind of how much pressure there is growing for Donald Trump in the states on on this, and I had a very interesting conversation with a senator, which we can get into, about how he believes there should be much more pressure and America should actually withdraw aid to Israel until children are no longer starving in Gaza.

You wanted Anthony to talk about the special relationship between the UK and the U.S.

So why don't you kick off with your thoughts on that following Donald Trump's visit to Scotland?

Well, the reason I want to talk about that is that it is alive and well.

And I think what's most interesting, had Joe Biden Biden been president, that relationship would have been alive and well.

And weirdly, I think the current president, President Trump, is more of an Anglophile than just about any president in the last 25 years.

And so the trade deal is an example of that.

It got done fairly quickly.

And it's at, let's face it, it's at a 33% discount to the EU.

But I wanted to get your reaction to this because it caught me as an American observing.

Here is Donald Trump at his Scottish golf course, and he's got, of course, a big mansion on the golf course, or what you guys call a manor house.

And he's greeting the UK prime minister.

And so he's greeting a head of state in his own country at his manor house.

So, I don't know, let's say Vladimir Putin bought a big countryside manor house in the U.S.

Would the American president go to him and visit him there and be his guest

and have Putin be his host?

Again, Putin's probably a bad example.

Let's use Macrone as an example.

Let's say he bought a chateau equivalent somewhere up the Potomac.

Would the president be traveling up there to visit him?

And I'm not sure of the answer to that, Caddy.

I would like to get your impression, but I think it speaks to the UK's need to want to be on side with America post-Brexit.

And I think it speaks to the notion that they realize that they have to do a lot of obsequious-like behavior with Donald Trump that, frankly, they're okay with.

What say you about this?

I mean, I don't think we need to say that we're not sure whether an American president would go and visit a French president who'd bought himself a kind of chateau pile down the Potomac.

There is no way an American president would be in that position, right?

Particularly Donald Trump.

So it was something that the British press caught up on, just like you have, and the American press too, that it was Donald Trump flexing and making Keir Starmer and Keir Starmer's wife come up, and he was the one hosting them effectively.

I mean, he was the one in that.

hour plus press conference that dominated the press conference,

called the shots.

That is unusual when you're visiting a foreign country.

Now, maybe the White House would say, well, Donald Trump is going to be the guest of the United Kingdom at the state visit in September.

This was Donald Trump at his golf course in Turnbury in Scotland.

And so the Prime Minister came to him.

Also, Ursula van der Leyen from the European Union, the head of the European Union, also came to him.

And again, in that situation, it very much looked, the optics were that Donald Trump was the one in charge.

But, I mean, in both of those situations, the thing that struck me when we talk about kind of Gaza and the special relationship is that Kirstama tried to push back a couple of times in that encounter in front of the cameras against Donald Trump, once on Gaza, another time when Donald Trump was very weighed into British politics.

Again, unusual, right?

Wayed into British politics, criticizing the mayor of London.

And the prime minister jumped in and said, hold on a second, he's a friend of mine.

But both Ursula van der Leyen and Kirstama know that they have to be very careful and very judicious about the moments when they do publicly criticize the president because they need things out of him.

And I think that was made abundantly clear over the course of this visit that

the Europeans and the Brits, they got a better trade deal, but they're the supplicants in this relationship.

And this idea of a kind of G minus one world, as opposed to G7 or G20, it's G minus one that people are talking about, a world without the United States.

In a sense, that's just unrealistic.

I mean, the calculation was made in Europe, in Brussels, and the calculation was made in London and so far in almost every other country apart from Beijing, and we don't know the results of that, that you have to get on with Donald Trump.

And if that means being a supplicant, if that means you go and visit him on your home territory and you look like you're the guest, even though he is, then so be it.

And I I think what's interesting about the special relationship, yes, the special relationship is alive and well, and that's why Britain got to some extent, a better deal.

And Donald Trump talked about that.

But it's not an easy relationship, Anthony.

I mean, it's not as easy a relationship as it has been at times in the past.

I mean,

I'm remembering back to Tony Blair when he was called a poodle for going along with

George Bush at the beginning of the Iraq War.

It's not as fractious of that with the British people, but Kirstama had to tread a line between getting what he needs out of Donald Trump and not antagonizing him and also realizing that he has his domestic constituents who don't love Donald Trump, who don't frankly love the American government at the moment.

And that puts any leader in a slightly awkward position.

I mean, it's lovely to say the special relationship is the special relationship and it's all rosy, but it's not all rosy.

And I think it'd be kind of unrealistic to say it was.

I mean, I don't know what into the calculus of making the decision to go visit him.

I mean, he could have called and said that he was having his two front teeth drilled out by a dentist, like a marathon man.

He could have said that he was, you know, faked a cardiac arrest and been in the hospital.

I mean, I just, to me, I think it was a bad move to me.

Every time you meet with Trump, you're giving him an opportunity to humiliate you.

You're giving him an opportunity to degrade your standing in the world, even if he's praising you.

You know, he called Starmer hard left in November when he was elected.

Now he's saying he's a quote-unquote strong prime minister, and quote unquote, we have this unparalleled relationship.

But while he's doing this, it's sort of like Trump Tower.

And so I just want to remind people: when we did our 2016 election special for founding members, I described Trump's office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower.

He's sitting

six to twelve inches higher than normal in an executive chair, and you're down at least six to twelve inches.

So, there's a there's a two-foot separation with what's normal.

And I'm not a tall guy, as you know, and I'm sitting there literally peering up at him over the desk, and that's designed to get him in a power position

relative to you.

And so, to me, when world leaders are meeting with Donald Trump, and they don't need to meet with him, the trade deal is signed, they're giving him an an opportunity to perform his humiliation ritual.

And so even when he's praising Starmer, he's hurting Starmer.

That is my honest opinion.

Starmer started out great.

Him and Mandelson, he flattered the guy by getting him the state dinner.

He got the trade deal done.

Stay away from Trump.

Stay away from the orange virus, okay?

Because it's just going to cause you, you're not enhancing your relationship with him.

And it's just going to cost you your standing in the internal politics of your own country.

That's my opinion.

I just wanted to share that with you because I'm telling you, once again, Mark Carney pushed back.

Mark Carney is fighting for his country and will likely get a very good trade deal because the U.S., many of its industries are dependent on natural resources that are coming out of Canada.

That NAFTA deal, U.S.

MCA deal is 30-plus years old.

Very hard to unwind.

Okay.

Yes, the trade deal is done.

Let me get to that in a minute.

I think you're right on the leaders, and it was sort of excruciating.

And I had the pleasure of being on the real Rest is Politics.

Did you know there's a grown-up REST is politics?

We're the kids.

They're the grown-ups.

I did.

And I was on with Alistair Campbell this week, and I think I mentioned it there.

Making me choke when I think of it.

You were with Alistair, and he was reminding you that he's superior to you and me.

I mean, you know, he can flex too.

That's okay.

He was the original.

He's the GOAT.

What I think I said on that program program is that both of them looked like they're sitting there, both Ursula van der Leyen and Keir Starmer, because of the experience of foreign leaders in the Oval Office, they are sitting there looking like they're a kind of

gazelle in the Kenyan bush, kind of on high alert for any predator or danger that may come that way.

I mean, that's what it felt like.

They are just watching intensely and listening intensely.

Is there something coming that is going to derail this meeting and derail this press conference?

Am I going to be undermined in front of my own people

by something that Donald Trump says or does?

And meanwhile, there is Donald Trump looking super relaxed and in control and just, you know, talking off the cuff about windmills and whatever else it is, the London mayor, whatever it else it is that he, he's not tense.

He's not nervous.

He's not the one looking out for signs of danger.

It is those other leaders.

And you're right that the trade deal is done.

But the reason that Kirstama and the Europeans,

who were obviously still negotiating their trade deal, can't afford to alienate Donald Trump is the whole host of other issues that they need to deal with.

I mean, it's abundantly clear that the real pressure on Israel, and let's talk about Gaza, over the situation in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis has to come from Donald Trump.

I interviewed the French foreign minister on Morning Joe this morning and I asked, is there much more more that France could do?

What else could France be doing?

He said, yes, yes, yes, there's lots of things we are doing.

We are preparing, you know, various resolutions and talking to the Israelis.

But the truth is, Europe is stuck when it comes to Israel without Donald Trump.

It'll be Donald Trump calling up Benjamin Netanyahu that will force the Israelis to let the aid trucks into Gaza.

And Kiostama knows that.

I don't know that not meeting with Donald Trump is an option.

I don't know that for any country, not dealing with the Americans is an option.

Yeah, ultimately, when he sat down and he put out the decision matrix, he said, listen, despite all of the gazelle-like risks that you're describing, I've got to go meet with the guy anyway.

We're going to transition into Gaza, and I think it's a good opportunity to do so.

But I just want to make one comment to you, Caddy.

If he ever calls you, if Trump is ever in a meeting, let's say I'm in a meeting with Trump and him and I are together, and he says, You know, Caddy Kay is a nasty woman, I'm going to say, and I quote, she's actually a friend of mine.

I mean, it was a very uncomfortable say.

And of course, I'm referring to Sadiq Khan.

Very uncomfortable.

Very uncomfortable.

But I promise you, Caddy, I'm going to come to your defense.

Thank you.

And I'm going to say she's actually a friend of mine.

Even if the lions are prowling on the savannah, you will be there defending me.

What I would do is say,

orange buffoon, why don't you knock it off?

You don't even know who Sadiq Khan is.

You don't know.

You had a little bit of a tussle with him on Twitter five years ago.

You know, he mentioned Starmer as hard left.

Prior to that, he said he was a small government tax cutter.

He has no idea who these politicians are.

And you remember, he was gaffing left and right on the internal politics of the UK in the meeting.

So I just think

it's bizarre.

But let's go to Palestine because they talked about Palestine.

And Starmer said that he's willing to potentially recognize it.

France has said that they will recognize a Palestinian state.

And where do you think Trump is on this?

And where do you think this is going?

So, Donald Trump obviously has made it clear that he has no intention.

And I can't see an American government that would recognize a Palestinian state anytime in the near future.

It might happen one day, but I don't think it's going to happen now.

But Donald Trump, on the flight back home again, said that he's not going to take a position, but he also said he doesn't mind Keir Starmer taking a position.

You know, I do think these images

of

children and babies starving in Gaza that have been on the front pages of American papers have got through.

You now have Marjorie Taylor Greene coming out and saying that there is genocide in Gaza.

You have Steve Bannon defending Marjorie Taylor Green and saying she is just reflecting her constituents who are quite heavily evangelical Christians in her district in Georgia.

A lot of her voters are evangelical Christians.

So you've got something of a kind of pressure building clearly on the Democratic side, but now potentially even on the Republican side.

And it's going to be interesting to see how much pressure Donald Trump is prepared to put on Benjamin Netanyahu to open up the gates to the trucks, because he mentioned the airdrops.

That's not enough.

I mean, he clearly doesn't really understand the aid distribution process, but that's not the point.

He just needs to call up Benjamin Netanyahu and say, this has to end.

Food has to get in, nutritionists have to get in, nutrition and paste has to get in, you know, everything that is needed to stop babies starving needs to happen and it needs to happen right now.

And the question is, is he going to do that?

How upset about this situation is he and how much leverage is he prepared to use?

Well, listen, he's a ruthless guy, but even if you're a ruthless person watching those images, I do think he's impacted by those images.

And I think he's also signaling,

I think it's a good point our producers brought up prior to the show.

He's signaling to his MAGA base that the starvation facts are real.

He said publicly, you know, in Scotland, the exact quote was, this is something that you can't fake, Caddy.

And so I think he's trying to signal to people that, hey, there might be some people on Truth Social, there might be some people on X that are saying that these people are not starving.

But Trump is letting you know that he believes that they're starving.

And so hopefully he will do that.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, he could pick up the phone, call Netanyahu, and say, hey, 15 days, leave everybody alone.

I'll get these UN trucks, humanitarian aid, US aid into the area to try to feed people.

Now, listen, he's also saying, well, you know, we're giving money, but the Hamas political organization is taking the money, taking the food.

I don't know if that's true or not.

Some of it may be true.

But I guess the real thing is he's doing nothing

about Ukraine at this moment, and he's doing nothing about Gaza.

And so the question would then be: well, why is he doing that?

And I think the answer is the same.

He's got two very strong leaders, alpha male leaders that are flexing.

And Trump can hypermasculate all he wants, but he's actually a low conflict beta male, and he doesn't want to be tussling with those two guys.

And that's just the facts.

He can pretend otherwise.

It's all embedded in the taco situation where he chickens out or he changes his tune at the last minute.

He had Howard Luttnick on over the weekend and said there'd be no extension to the Chinese tariff deadline.

And then 12 hours later, they extended

the tariff deadline, which is why the market doesn't take them seriously.

But I think ultimately he's handling both of these leaders

in a very passive way, which is not to the image he's trying to project, right?

He's trying to project a different image, but there's an arbitrage between what his image is in terms of what he's trying to project and what he is actually willing to do.

And he doesn't want to cross either of those two leaders, despite the bellicosity of his rhetoric.

You understand the kind of

Christian voting base in the states well.

Do you think that

the need for humanitarian action and the dismay at the Israeli action that is causing this famine is

breaking through to Marjorie Taylor Greene's voters?

I had two really interesting conversations in the last couple of days.

One with Senator King of Maine, who has put out a very forceful statement.

It's worth people reading, saying that there should be no more aid to Israel from America while children are starving.

He told me that if America is giving aid to Israel at the moment, then effectively America is complicit in the starvation of those children.

He was very clear about the responsibility of the United States to do something and to do more.

And he also said that his constituents are very upset about this.

I also heard from a Democratic congresswoman who said her constituents are very upset about this and are making phone calls about this.

So do you think that evangelical Christians who voted for Donald Trump and who are tending to be Republican voters are now calling their Republican members of Congress during this summer recess and saying

you have to do something about Gaza?

Listen, I think that there are some.

Obviously, Marjorie Taylor Greene is out there on X saying that she denounces the famine that's going on.

She wants the Israeli government to take action to stop the famine.

But I don't see this as a groundswell.

I don't see evangelical leaders,

because I'm looking for it, looking for evangelical leaders in the Bible belt to get to the podium on a Sunday and saying, this is an atrocity, what's going on in this area, and you need to call your congressmen.

If they had that happen, there would be a tsunami of phone calls hitting Washington, and then you would see some sugar pulling by the Republicans.

But I don't see that.

And I'm going to tell people this, which they either understand or they don't understand.

But I've traveled through the entire country, and I've said this to you, Caddy, many times.

There's America, and then there's America.

And America is a very different place.

And America is a place where Israel is number one.

Israel is the Holy Land.

It is the land of Jesus.

There's a literal interpretation of the Bible.

And the Orthodox Christians in this country believe that in order for a second coming to happen, the Israelis, the Jews, need to be controlling that area.

We can call it Israel.

We can call it Palestine, whatever you want to go, Zion, whatever you want to call it.

The Orthodox

Christians in this country believe that you need to have Jews controlling that area.

And so they're turning a blind eye to a lot of the stuff that's going on now.

And while the Israeli government doesn't allow foreign journalists in there, of course, we're not getting ⁇ it's even harder to get the full picture of what is happening.

They're hurting, but let me tell you, you know, look, I know we got to take a break, but they are hurting their brand.

And if they want to listen to sycophants in their court telling you that they're not hurting their brand, I'm telling you, the optics for the Israeli government is really bad.

And

it's changing, and it's changing public opinion from secularists that are looking at the situation.

And that's not to take anything away from the tragedy that took place on October 7th.

I'm just talking about proportionate and asymmetrical responses and just living in the real world, the real practical world, what they're doing right now is really hurting their brand.

And for those who haven't followed American politics and the relationship with Israel as closely, it is striking to have a senator want to speak to me, to call me up, to say this response is disproportionate and America should cut off aid while we have children starving in Gaza.

That doesn't happen very often.

It may not lead to anything, unlikely to lead to any cut-off of aid, but it is a difference that marks a change in the body politic.

Okay, we're going to take a break and come back and talk about Ukraine.

I'm David Ulashoga.

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Welcome back to the Rest is Politics U.S.

I'm Anthony Scaramucci.

I'm Katty Kay.

So, Catty, we're going to talk about the revised ceasefire deal.

So, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, said he's going to give 50 days for Vladimir Putin to figure this out.

And, of course, he also said that every time he goes home now, he says, I spoke into Vladimir today.

And the first lady looks at him and he says, geez, I had a wonderful conversation.

And the first lady says, oh, really?

Another city was hit.

So the president has grown frustrated about this.

And he's saying he's truncating the 50 days.

And he's moving to what he's calling secondary sanctions and potentially some punishment for countries that are dealing.

with Russia.

He's announced 25% tariffs on India today, but he's also talking about potentially some punitive sanctions to go on top of the tariffs because the government of India and the Indian economy, they're buying energy from Russia.

So tighter deadline coming.

He's setting a target for around August 9th, ceasefire or else.

Does he mean it, Caddy Kay?

Or is this another one of those situations where we'll get to August 9th and all of a sudden the accordion will come out and we'll stretch it again?

So what he says is that there is no reason in waiting.

He doesn't see any progress being made, is what he said, and that he's not interested in talking anymore with Vladimir Putin.

The consequences potentially for Russia if this deadline is missed are strong tariffs, secondary sanctions.

So that would be sanctions against countries that import, a bit like he's just announced for India, Russian energy, which would be catastrophic for Russia, but potentially also would drive up energy prices.

So let's see whether that actually happens.

It's hard for him now, having set this short deadline.

A short deadline is harder to roll through than a long deadline, but there are a lot of economic reasons for the United States where he might be nervous about putting those secondary sanctions on.

I think the tariff thing is interesting because to me,

something interesting about what he did with India and potentially if he does do it with Russia is that it's a sign that Donald Trump wants to control foreign policy, right?

He's not not going through Congress at this point.

This is, maybe Donald Trump wants to control all policy in the White House and have his hands on everything, but he's using tariffs as a kind of weapon of foreign policy that might often be the kind of thing that would have to go through Congress if it was these types of sanctions.

There's a lot of flexibility in what he's doing with Russia.

I mean, what,

let's say

Russia dials down the drone attacks on Kyiv and other cities between now and 12 12 days, does that give Donald Trump the excuse to say,

oh, actually, the Russians have done enough.

We're going to extend the deadline?

I don't think that's impossible.

I mean, I don't see the Russians agreeing to a major peace deal within the next nine to 12 days,

which is what he wanted in that 50-day deadline.

So

how does he get out of this one?

I spent a lot of time researching this.

Let's go to both sides for a second.

So let's talk about Putin and his cabinet for a second.

The propaganda is the economy strong.

The propaganda is a wartime economy.

And even though they kicked the Westerners left or they kicked out the Westerners, they've been taken off of the SWIFT banking system.

And $300 billion has been frozen of their assets.

They're doing beautifully

and they're growing.

You mean those assets are growing, not the Russian economy?

Well, no, the economy's growing.

No, they're messaging.

Remember, the GRU, these guys are very good at creating propaganda.

They've got buddies like Tucker Carlson that are on their payroll that are chanting how safe and how clean Russia is, and how great the supermarkets look in Moscow, and all this sort of nonsense that they chant.

But then there's the chant, and then there's the reality, okay?

And so the reality is 30% inflation.

The reality is an upside-down economy, an evacuation of men.

Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives in this.

Many more have been wounded.

You've got the underlying tension that they stole anywhere from 15 to 20,000 children from the sovereign country of Ukraine, brought them back into Russia.

Don't get me wrong, there's some bad karmic things that go on with things like that in your economy.

And so you're sitting there, what's truth, what's fiction?

You're Vladimir Putin.

You don't really have a lot of things to do.

How are you going to give up on this war right now?

Tell me how, because if you give up on the war, you're going to 100% lose power.

I don't know any Russian leader since 1917 that has looked weak or has lost face in the eyes of the global community, or certainly in the eyes of the battle between the East and the West that has stayed in power.

You could ask Khrushchev, you could ask any of these leaders.

They get toppled at the moment that there's a sign of weakness.

And so he doesn't have a lot of choices, I don't think.

And so that's the Russian piece of it.

Let's go to the Trump piece of it.

The Trump piece of it is he doesn't want a problem with Putin.

He just doesn't.

We can say anything.

We can have hand signals going, flares, pinwheels, winds blowing in different directions.

It really doesn't matter.

Donald Trump does not want to have a problem with Vladimir Putin.

But Putin is now hurting him and making him look bad in his own country, the United States, and making him look bad in the Western Alliance.

So when I look at those two circles, Caddy, I don't see either of those two circles meeting anytime soon.

So more sanctions may hurt the Russian economy.

I don't see it toppling the Russian economy.

The sanctions would have toppled it earlier, frankly.

It's three plus years into the war, unless you tell me otherwise.

There's some atom-bomb sanction they're going to drop now that's going to to topple the Russian economy.

I don't believe that.

I mean, these are very tough people.

They'll eat snow in the winter to survive.

So I see this going

for the full term through 2028, despite the rhetoric.

What do you say?

Look, I think the real thing that, obviously, that the Ukrainians need and that they have said, whilst they welcomed the new deadline, and we had that

from top officials in Kyiv welcoming that, the reality is that the fighting is continuing, even since Donald Trump announced this 10 to 12 day deadline.

The Russians have launched airstrikes.

They say that they have still downed Ukrainian drones, so both sides are still attacking each other.

And what would make the quantifiable difference at this point is not necessarily tariffs against Russia.

America doesn't import anything from Russia at the moment.

Let's see if the secondary sanctions make a big difference to the Russian economy.

That will take time.

What would make a big difference would be arms?

And what the Ukrainians need right now is more defensive and offensive weaponry if they're going to push back this long summer offensive, which the Russians are mounting.

And Donald Trump has said he's going to give some of that, but not the offensive weapons that the Ukrainians would like.

But the Ukrainians need more of that.

I mean, that's the game changer here.

It's not what Donald Trump announces about tariffs against russia that's pretty meaningless secondary sanctions might have an impact but it it would be the weapons and you think he's going to give the weapons no i don't think he's going to i mean i mean he's he's has rode back once right on the patriot systems so

that he has agreed to but the

Ukrainians need a lot more weapons and they need them soon.

And I don't see any

desire in the US Congress or in in the White House to have another big package of the type that Ukraine would really like to have, which leaves the Ukrainians in a very difficult position.

Why do you think Donald Trump announced even this change in the deadline from 50 days to 10 to 12 days when he did?

What do you think precipitated that?

He's got a lot of pressure on him.

He's, you know, underlying everything is the Epstein situation here in the United States, which is still boiling.

He knows he's got to keep the lid on that.

He doesn't want any more bad news to come out related to him or how he met his wife,

where he was with her, with Epstein, all of that stuff.

He wants under wraps.

If there's something more nefarious that hasn't come out, he certainly wants to suppress that.

And so he's got pressure on him from these senators.

Senators are coming to him.

You don't think he also doesn't like the fact that I feel like he is sort of waking up, whether he can do anything about it or not.

He's kind of waking up the idea that the perception is that he is being played by Putin, that Putin might say these nice things to him, but doesn't actually mean it.

Caddy, let me just ask you the following question.

A U.S.

president,

about President Harris, President Biden, President Bush, are there steps and measures that they could take right now that could put Ukraine in a very strong position and potentially repel and push back the the Russian army.

And the short answer to that is yes.

There's technology, there's armaments, and there's all of these different things.

We both know that.

And they could have Congress with them if they wanted to.

100%.

And an American president could say, okay,

we gave Mr.

Putin, President Putin, an ultimatum.

He doesn't want to listen.

And so we've had other presidents that have drawn red lines in the sand and they didn't take it seriously.

But I actually have the Congress with me.

Remember, Obama did not have the Congress with him to missile strike Syria.

They voted against it, and he put the vote to the Congress.

But the Congress is with Trump

or with a president that wanted to be in greater support of Zelensky and Ukraine.

And so he could do that, but he's not doing that.

And you don't, again, you don't have to be a rocket scientist.

You don't have to sit there and run a Rubik's cube for two hours to figure out why he's not doing that.

He's worried about him.

He does not want to be on the wrong side of Vladimir Putin.

And so it's just really that simple.

You think that when he announces this change in the deadline from 50 days to 10 to 12 days, it's kind of meaningless.

It's a ruse.

Because what's happened to Trump is he gets painted into the corner.

People think he's painted into the corner, but he always finds a way out.

And he's a great compartmentalizer.

Like if he sat down and said, whoa,

I've got to deal with Putin and I'm afraid of him.

Whoa, I've got this situation going on with Epstein and it could blow me to smithereens.

I've got a situation going on with Rupert Murdoch where they have information related to me.

The lawsuit is to try to suppress further information.

That lawsuit, of course, will be lost by Donald Trump, and that lawsuit will, of course, end.

He'll end up dropping the lawsuit.

But the lawsuit is a $10 billion speed bump to delay more information coming out.

And so every time you think Trump is painted painted into the corner, he's compressing like a diamond.

He can take the pressure, more pressure than the average person, and he can compartmentalize each one of these things, and he can spin people in a way which gives him more time.

And he's making the bet that the news will turn, something will happen to take everybody's attention away from the Epstein crisis.

Something will happen that will take everybody's attention away from the Putin situation.

And that's what he's hoping.

And he's had, and you and I both know this, we have to recognize this.

He's, you know, I disagree with the tariffs.

I think they hurt America long term.

I think they've hurt America's standing, but they haven't hurt the economic data yet.

And they haven't hurt the stock market yet.

And so for those things, he's got a pillar to run on.

He's got a piece of political good news up against this maelstrom that we're talking about.

But I predict we'll be sitting here at the end of August, you and me.

Not even.

It's in what, whatever it is, in a week's time.

So we'll see.

I want to be wrong, though, Caddy.

I want to be wrong.

I want to be telling you, geez, I got that completely wrong.

He delivered new HIMARS, he delivered new Patriot batteries.

He gave him permission to launch intercontinental missile strikes into Russia using European or American missile technology, a result of which is devastating the Russian economy, devastating the Russians politically, and is causing the Russians to accept the terms of a ceasefire.

I would love that to happen, but I don't see that happening, giving what I know of the guy.

And the Russians have responded, by the way, kind of saying that anything that Donald Trump does is an escalation and a threat to war.

Each new ultimatum,

Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson, said, is a threat and a step towards war, warning that Russia isn't Israel or even Iran.

I don't think that

America takes those threats necessarily seriously.

We don't think that Russia is about to launch another war against somebody else.

But for his own reasons, Donald Trump clearly doesn't want to get too far on the wrong side of Vladimir Putin.

Okay, we'll see.

We'll watch that deadline and see what happens.

It will come up very soon.

I think that's it, except you have a very exciting announcement, Anthony, for this week's founding members edition on Sunday.

So our bonus members only episode this week, we are going to be talking to Dominic Sandbrook Sandbrook from The Resus History about American presidents.

So, this is from FDR to Trump.

And you know what to do.

You just sign up for the Ressis PoliticsUS.com to listen in.

We're going to be talking about how FDR went up against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis while battling polio.

We're going to get into the decision by Harry Truman to use, deploy the first atomic bomb 80 years ago, Caddy, August 9th, 1945, August 6th, the morning of August 6th in Tokyo, the first deployment of an atomic bomb, two bombs dropped by Harry Truman at his decision.

Do you ever feel any guilt about it?

Of course, Dominic knows the answers to all this.

And last but not least, and I did this with Dominic at the Jury Lane Theater, we're going to be debating a very heated topic, which we disagree on, me and Dominic,

which is the Kennedy assassination, who actually killed John F.

Kennedy.

And so we'll be in a spirited debate there.

You can sign up for TheRestisPoliticsUS.com to listen to that.

And the link will be in our episode description.

And for everybody else, we'll see you next week.

I think it's going to be a great listen.

Sign up at the restispoliticsus.com to get both Anthony and Dominic.

It's a double whammy.

It's like Christmas in July.

Have fun.

Goodbye, everyone.

Thanks so much for listening.

We'll see you again next week.

It's David Ulishoger from Journey Through Time.

Here's that clip that we mentioned earlier.

If you look at all of the accounts of the fire at this point, as we get to the end of Sunday the second, the first day, this fire is not behaving in any way the way fires traditionally did in London.

And there are some people who've argued that it was becoming a firestorm, that the heat and the wind and the movement of air caused by the fire was feeding it, was becoming self-sustaining, as it were.

John Eveling, who's a great writer and a diarist of this moment, he talks about the sound of the fire.

He said it was like thousands of chariots driving over cobblestones.

There are descriptions in Pepys and elsewhere of this great arc of fire in the sky.

I mean, imagine that everything around you is coloured by the flames, yellows and oranges, and above you is this thick black smoke.

This is a city you know, these are streets streets you walk.

This is a place that's deeply familiar to you.

And it looks completely otherworldly.

It looks like another, like a sort of landscape you've never seen before.

People describe the fire almost as if it's supernatural.

If you want to hear the full episode, listen to Journey Through Time, wherever you get your podcasts.