Trump goes all in on Vladimir Zelensky and his deal with the Russian president over the Ukraine conflict, but Ukraine is not present in the negotiations, which is causing some consternation in Ukraine. Alex Blumberg explains why.
00:00:20.000There is no good reason for Russia to attack Ukraine.
00:00:22.000Russia's goal in attacking Ukraine was to take over all of Ukraine up to and including Kiev and originally to kill Vladimir Zelensky and anyone else who was ruling in power and who was not going to act as a puppet of the Putin regime.
00:00:35.000That is all just the reality in February of 2022. Now, Ukraine did a masterful job of fending off that attack.
00:00:42.000And by summer of that year, it was very clear that basically a stalemate had set in.
00:00:48.000And despite all of the best attempts by the Europeans...
00:00:50.000And the half-hearted attempts by the Biden administration to provide Ukraine with additional arms, the lines just weren't moving that much.
00:00:56.000And so since summer of 2022, the lines have been pretty much set.
00:01:00.000The Donbass area has been occupied by Russia.
00:01:04.000And love nor money is not going to move Russia off of that particular land, not unless the Biden administration was willing to do much more, which they simply were not.
00:01:14.000It means that any sort of settlement between Russia and Ukraine was always going to have the following Basic outline.
00:01:21.000One, Russia was going to retain control over Donbass and Crimea because otherwise there was no off-ramp for Russia.
00:01:25.000Vladimir Putin was not going to lose face as the dictator of Russia and simply hand back territory that had originally been invaded in 2014 and has been held by Russia ever since.
00:01:36.000Ukraine was not going to win back that territory.
00:01:38.000It was a victory for Ukraine simply to continue existing in the face of the Russian bear.
00:01:42.000Number two, Ukraine was going to have to have some pretty significant security guarantees to make sure that Putin didn't just do this again.
00:01:48.000One of Putin's demands was that Ukraine essentially disarm.
00:01:51.000That was never going to be a going concern.
00:02:01.000That was always how this was going to look.
00:02:03.000It's been this way for almost three years at this point.
00:02:07.000Now, there's some other additional elements that President Trump, as the president, is throwing into the mix.
00:02:11.000One of those is that he believes the United States has spent an exorbitant amount of money in Ukraine and somehow Ukraine should repay all of that money forthwith.
00:02:21.000And so he's got a couple of proposals on the table for that.
00:02:24.000One of those proposals was a sort of economic proposal that was pretty punitive with regard to Ukraine's future industry.
00:02:30.000Now, the case in favor of that particular economic proposal, which, effectively speaking, forced The Ukrainian government to split pretty much all exportable material with the United States or at least profits from that exportable material with the United States.
00:02:45.000The good news for Ukraine in a deal like that was that it would have tied the United States into Ukrainian security for the future.
00:02:51.000Because if the United States and Ukraine had a big economic deal that was already in the offing and was already operating, then the United States would have a pretty significant interest in making sure that Ukraine was not then invaded once again by Vladimir Putin.
00:03:07.000The case against is that the amount that Trump was actually asking of Ukraine was extraordinarily burdensome, according to the at least leaked reports as to what exactly it was that was being asked.
00:03:16.000The New York Post, which obviously is a Trump-friendly newspaper, suggests that that offer that Trump was making to Vladimir Zelensky and the Ukrainians was far too burdensome for Ukraine to really undertake.
00:03:27.000Quote, the proposed contract, which reportedly hit Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky's desk last week, demands half the country's revenues for natural resources, ports, and infrastructure indefinitely as payback for U.S. military aid since the war began.
00:03:39.000So apparently that was met with a rather cold reception in Kyiv.
00:03:44.000And so that ticked off President Trump.
00:03:47.000Beyond that, Vladimir Zelensky has a way of getting on President Trump's nerves.
00:03:54.000This goes all the way back to the phone calls that they were having, the perfect phone calls that President Trump was having with Vladimir Zelensky during Trump term number one.
00:04:00.000And then, of course, Zelensky decided to make best friends with Joe Biden.
00:04:04.000Nothing ticks off President Trump more than that sort of nonsense.
00:04:07.000Then you recall, in the late stages of the election, Vladimir Zelensky actually came to Pennsylvania and for some odd reason was going around to munitions factories with Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, which was seen correctly by the Trump campaign as an attempt to warm up.
00:04:24.000And so, Trump didn't like that either.
00:04:27.000Then, Trump made some not particularly nice remarks about Vladimir Zelensky a couple of days ago, and Zelensky responded by suggesting that Trump was part of a disinformation echo chamber.
00:04:37.000And this led to the big blow-up yesterday.
00:04:39.000So, President Trump first went on Truth Social, and he made a very lengthy statement.
00:05:15.000Or lend to Ukraine really is more of a gift because it's never going to be repaid.
00:05:18.000The United States, up through the end of last year, had committed somewhere in the arena of $120 billion to Ukraine.
00:05:26.000About $25 billion of that is basically coming back to the United States in the form of defense expenditures, somewhere around $100 billion that has been given to Ukraine.
00:05:35.000Now, to be fair, the result of that has been the complete evisceration of Russia's forward military power, which...
00:05:43.000As a bit of a bargain is not terrible if you see Russia as a geopolitical enemy, which, of course, it has been historically for the United States.
00:05:51.000President Trump continues, the United States has spent $200 billion more than Europe, and Europe's money is guaranteed while the United States will get nothing back.
00:05:58.000I see no evidence of this particular proposition.
00:06:01.000Europe apparently has actually spent slightly more money than the United States.
00:06:04.000When you aggregate all the European countries together, they spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $138 billion or committed that much money.
00:06:13.000And it's gone up again recently, so closer to $180 billion committed to Ukraine.
00:06:17.000So they actually have spent slightly more money than the United States in Ukraine.
00:06:20.000As to the idea that Europe's money is guaranteed, meaning Ukraine is going to pay it back, no, no shot.
00:06:27.000President Trump said, why didn't Sleepy Joe demand equalization?
00:06:30.000And that this war is far more important to Europe than it is to us.
00:06:33.000We have a big, beautiful ocean of separation.
00:06:34.000Now, this is the first point that Trump is making that is actually correct, which is, okay, why is the United States footing the bill for this war?
00:06:41.000And as we will see, Whether that is the intended effect of Trump's attacks on Vladimir Zelensky or whether that is the kind of positive byproduct of those attacks, Europe is going to have to step into the breach here.
00:06:59.000On top of this, Zelensky admits that half of the money we sent him is missing.
00:07:02.000He refuses to have elections, is very low in Ukrainian polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden like a fiddle.
00:07:08.000Okay, well, as far as refusing to have elections...
00:07:10.000Martial law is declared because you may have noticed there's a war on, a war that has currently cost at a minimum 43,000 dead between February 2022 and December 2024 in Ukraine.
00:07:21.000Large swaths of Ukrainian territory is currently occupied by Russia.
00:07:26.000Like, do those people get to vote in Donbass and Crimea in a Russian election?
00:07:29.000Millions of people are refugees from Ukraine because they've left since the war began, and you have hundreds of thousands of men in fighting positions.
00:07:35.000So it makes it kind of difficult, just on a logistical level, to actually have a workable election.
00:07:40.000As far as him being very low in Ukrainian polls, that's not particularly true either.
00:07:42.000Vladimir Zelensky is riding above 50% in the Ukrainian polls and going up in part because of the conflict with Trump.
00:07:50.000Trump says a dictator without elections, Zelensky better move faster.
00:07:52.000He is not going to have a country left.
00:07:54.000Now again, this may be just a tactic by Trump to put pressure on Zelensky to come to the table and recognize the obvious.
00:08:00.000But the truth is that he doesn't have to recognize the obvious.
00:08:03.000The United States can basically just sign his name on the dotted line.
00:08:06.000I have been suggesting just that since August of 2022, that the United States would have to basically go around Ukraine, cut a deal Ukraine doesn't like, and then cram it down on Ukraine.
00:08:15.000I still don't believe that that requires the moral blindness of suggesting that Zelensky is, in fact, a dictator, you know, as opposed to Vladimir Putin, who has not held a legitimate election in the country of Russia for a quarter century at this point.
00:08:32.000Zelensky was elected in 2019. His term expired at the end of 2024, and there will presumably be another election.
00:08:41.000By the way, we should point out at this point that these statements have resulted in Zelensky's opposition in Ukraine coming to Zelensky's defense.
00:08:48.000So the idea that he is a dictator who's quashing the opposition doesn't really explain why all the opposition parties are now coming to the defense of Vladimir Zelensky.
00:08:56.000President Trump says, In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia, something I'll admit only Trump and the Trump administration can do.
00:09:18.000Zelensky probably wants to keep the gravy train going.
00:09:20.000Again, that is a pretty nasty accusation, that Zelensky is willing to let tens of thousands of his own people be slaughtered in the streets simply so the money can keep flowing to Ukraine.
00:09:29.000I love Ukraine, says President Trump, but Zelensky has done a terrible job.
00:09:32.000His country has shattered and millions have unnecessarily died, and so it continues.
00:09:36.000Now again, these are the sorts of words that presumably the Russian delegation is very happy to hear.
00:09:41.000We'll get to more on that in a moment.
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00:11:47.000And we should point out here that just in terms of the return to the United States on its investment here, the Russian military machine has been absolutely crippled by the war in Ukraine.
00:11:56.000According to one NATO official quoted today in the international press, Russia's overall dead and wounded in this war amounts to 837,000.
00:12:05.000That is a massive number, a huge number.
00:12:08.000At a minimum, you're talking about 90,000 to 100,000 Russian troops who have been killed in this war, a war in which Putin was supposed to stroll into Kiev.
00:12:15.000Now, as we can talk about and as we will talk about, Joe Biden was a signal failure in leading the world on this.
00:12:21.000And when it comes to practical policy, the policy that is likely to emerge from what Trump is doing here is likely to be a much better policy than anything Joe Biden was doing.
00:12:29.000However, Trump's statements about Zelensky, the attacks on him as a dictator, the suggestion that somehow Russia is the moral party here.
00:12:44.000Whether it is animus for Zelensky on a personal level or frustration with Zelensky or whether in a sort of Machiavellian way it's an attempt to pressure Zelensky, make Zelensky look bad so that he can cut a deal without Zelensky and then cram it down on Zelensky and he feels he needs the imprimatur of public opinion to do that.
00:13:11.000A modestly successful comedian, President Zelensky, talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion to go into a war that basically couldn't be won, that never had to start and never would have started if I was president.
00:13:34.000But a war that he, without the US and Trump, will never be able to settle.
00:13:39.000They'll never settle that war without our involvement.
00:13:42.000Now, Russia is attempting to make economic overtures to President Trump.
00:13:45.000This, of course, is one way to the Trump team's heart because President Trump has a very long-standing policy when it comes to foreign policy, which is that the United States should earn money.
00:13:54.000It's just that there are other countervailing interests that sometimes overcome those interests.
00:13:58.000You can earn a lot of money doing business with China.
00:14:00.000You can also completely undermine your manufacturing base, have all of your IP stolen, and pave the way to Chinese aggression all over the region.
00:14:07.000And so money is not the only consideration.
00:14:10.000According to the New York Times, the Russian government's top investment manager, who has Harvard and McKinsey credentials in fluent English, brought a simple printout to Tuesday's talks with the Trump administration in Saudi Arabia.
00:14:20.000Its message, by pulling out of Russia in outrage over the invasion of Ukraine, American companies had walked away from piles of cold hard cash.
00:14:27.000The document, which was handed over by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia's Sovereign Wealth Fund, showed to a New York Times reporter it said total losses $324 billion.
00:14:37.000And appealing to President Trump, the Kremlin has zeroed in on his desire to make a profit.
00:14:41.000President Putin on Wednesday praised the U.S. delegation in Riyadh for not criticizing Russia, as previous administrations had done.
00:14:46.000Now, again, you can make the case that the reason Trump's not doing that is what's the point?
00:14:49.000If he goes out there and he just shouts at Putin about being a dictator, then is he able to get to the actual end point that he wants?
00:14:56.000By the same token, is there a real politic rationale for attacking Zelensky in this way?
00:15:02.000If there is, you know, I'm hard-pressed to see it.
00:15:06.000And again, on a moral level, what he's saying is obviously not true.
00:15:10.000Vladimir Putin is, in fact, a quite murderous dictator who has no problem poisoning his enemies or throwing them off of the top's buildings and such.
00:15:19.000The predictable result of all of this, however, could be salutary in the end.
00:15:24.000And the reason I say that is, if you already knew how this war was going to end, which, once again, many of us have been asking for and demanding for nigh on three years at this point, perhaps it gets to an end faster because of the kind of activities that Trump is participating in.
00:15:37.000Now, it may not get there faster with the United States as part of a broad economic deal.
00:15:43.000That economic deal that was proposed by the Trump administration is almost certain to be refused by Ukraine because it wouldn't pencil out for them in any way, shape, or form.
00:15:52.000In all likelihood, what is going to happen here is the United States is going to try to cut some sort of deal with Russia, and then there will be a countervailing negotiation led by the Europeans and Ukraine on the other side.
00:16:02.000Europe is going to be forced to step up here, and that part is what Trump really does have right when it comes to Russia-Ukraine.
00:16:09.000President Zelensky has pulled out of his trip that was planned to Saudi Arabia to avoid what he called coincidences following that meeting between the United States and Russian officials in Riyadh.
00:16:21.000Zelensky's announcement came as he met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for talks in Ankara, during which he said any Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations should not take place behind the backs of the parties involved.
00:16:30.000He said the Russian-American meeting in Saudi Arabia came as a surprise to us, just as it did to many others.
00:16:34.000When we saw the media coverage, I don't know who will stay, who will leave, where anyone is going.
00:16:39.000What matters to me is that our partners take time to think about us.
00:16:42.000So again, I think Zelensky is taking a rather unwise position vis-a-vis the Trump administration because...
00:16:47.000A position of personal animus with President Trump is a bad place to be if you're a foreign leader.
00:16:52.000However, the result of this is likely to be, again, what has been suggested for years.
00:16:57.000One, the Ukrainians are likely to rally around Zelensky because of Trump attacking him.
00:17:01.000So, oddly enough, you'll end up in a stronger domestic position because of Trump's attacks than he otherwise would.
00:17:06.000And again, the sort of bizarre parallel here is Joe Biden full on attacking Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and that making Bibi significantly more popular in Israel because they were in the middle of an existential war.
00:17:17.000And the slow walking of the aid was happening via Biden, who's attempting to oust the sitting prime minister.
00:17:21.000It seems like the same thing is happening with Zelensky.
00:17:23.000According to Politico, Yulia Timoshenko, former prime minister of Ukraine and leader of the oppositional motherland faction in the Ukrainian parliament, put out a statement backing Zelensky, quote, Ukraine is a sovereign state.
00:17:34.000Vladimir Zelensky is the president of Ukraine, legitimate until another is elected.
00:17:37.000Only Ukrainians can decide when and under what conditions they should change their government today.
00:17:42.000And again, this is coming not from Ukraine.
00:17:47.000Zelensky himself, or Zelensky's puppets.
00:17:49.000This is coming from people who legitimately oppose Vladimir Zelensky in Ukraine.
00:17:55.000So, for example, Member of Parliament Ivana Klimpush-Sinsadzi didn't defend Zelensky outright, but this person is the senior figure in Ukraine's European Solidarity Party.
00:18:07.000The leader of that party, Petro Poroshenko, is seen as one of the chief rivals to Zelensky.
00:18:12.000But this MP described at Trump's remarks as unacceptable.
00:18:16.000She's pushing for the president to form a unity government and to involve all political parties in the negotiation process as well.
00:18:23.000She put out a statement saying, quote, Yes, we heard completely unacceptable statements by the U.S. leader about who started the war, about resolving the conflict in Ukraine by completely satisfying Putin's wishes, about de facto potentially forcing Ukraine to surrender everything we've been fighting for for 11 years against aggressive dictatorial Russia.
00:18:37.000She said Zelensky should bury the acts of war with the opposition and unite the country.
00:18:42.000And again, pretty much all of the politicians...
00:18:44.000Right, left, and center in Ukraine are coming to Zelensky's defense because they don't like the characterization of the war by President Trump.
00:18:50.000So ironically, Zelensky gains in popularity domestically.
00:18:52.000Meanwhile, the Europeans are finally deciding that, hey, maybe if the United States isn't going to lead the way here, we ought to lead the way here.
00:19:00.000So, for example, Kemi Badnock, who's the leader of the Conservative Party in Great Britain and who's generally warm toward President Trump, put out a statement, quote, President Zelensky is not a dictator.
00:19:10.000He's the democratically elected leader of Ukraine who bravely stood up to Putin's illegal invasion.
00:19:14.000Under my leadership and under successive conservative prime ministers, we have and always will stand with Ukraine.
00:19:19.000President Trump is right that Europe needs to pull its weight, and that includes the UK. We need to get serious.
00:19:23.000The PM will have my support to increase defense spending.
00:19:25.000There is a fully funded plan to get to 2.5% sitting on his desk.
00:20:32.000That does not alleviate the sort of moral responsibility to say true things as opposed to false things about Vladimir Putin, but from a real politic sort of point of view...
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00:23:11.000Now, Democrats, of course, are sounding off in extraordinary ways about all this.
00:23:15.000And here, I'm sorry, I do not care what Chuck Schumer has to say about this.
00:23:28.000They could either increase the amount of aid to Ukraine sufficient to allow them to actually attempt to liberate Donbass and Crimea, or they could have found an off-ramp.
00:23:39.000And instead, they decided that they were going to slow walk aid such that Ukraine couldn't actually take back any of those areas despite heroic defense.
00:23:47.000And they decided they were also not going to look for an off-ramp.
00:23:49.000They were going to simply allow this war to continue to percolate with tens of thousands of people dying on both sides.
00:23:58.000So I don't want to hear from you guys about Donald Trump and his mean words about Vladimir Zelensky.
00:24:02.000It was you who left Ukraine in the lurch while simultaneously promoting the continuation of a war to which you had no end point.
00:24:09.000Here is the Senate Minority Leader on this.
00:24:11.000In a Fox interview released last night, President Trump spoke about the war in Ukraine.
00:24:17.000And some of his comments sounded straight from a Russian propaganda playbook.
00:24:22.000Rather than speak the truth, rather than acknowledge Vladimir Putin's role in starting this war, President Trump amazingly blamed Ukraine for Putin's invasion.
00:24:35.000To quote the president, "'You should never have started it,' he said." He was saying that to President Zelensky.
00:24:47.000After how this man has fought so hard and so valiantly.
00:24:51.000Now again, the moral suasion argument from the same people who slow walked aid to Ukraine, who did not give them the jets that they needed, did not give them the weaponry that they needed, in the middle of a war that they then were encouraging them to run across into Donbass and get themselves killed.
00:25:07.000I'm not willing to hear that from Chuck Schumer.
00:25:12.000Again, I think that Trump is factually and morally wrong when he says that Zelensky started the war or when he labels Zelensky a dictator or when he suggests the true immoral power here is Ukraine.
00:25:22.000But I'm not willing to hear that from Chuck Schumer, who is largely responsible for the terrible Western policy toward Ukraine over the course of the last three years.
00:25:32.000Same thing coming from Senator Tammy Duckworth.
00:25:36.000I'm just not buying it from these folks.
00:25:39.000He is parroting Vladimir Putin's talking points.
00:25:43.000It's a complete betrayal of the Ukrainian people, of American leadership and our values.
00:25:49.000I never thought in the 23 years I served in the military that I would hear the commander-in-chief of the United States military parroting Russian talking points.
00:25:59.000And really, you know, it is astonishing to me.
00:26:05.000That he would also betray our allies in Europe in this way and pave the way for Putin.
00:26:10.000He essentially just surrendered to Putin, and that simply is not acceptable.
00:26:16.000Any deal here is going to end with security guarantees from the NATO powers to Ukraine to prevent a further invasion.
00:26:23.000It will end with that, because otherwise Ukraine won't be able to accept it, and the war will continue, no matter how much pressure President Trump puts on Vladimir Zelensky.
00:26:49.000And that's how they end up with Donald Trump as president.
00:26:51.000He's the one who's going to have to negotiate the deal.
00:26:53.000Meanwhile, the Trump administration is looking into overspending at the Department of Defense.
00:26:58.000And it is unclear to me what exactly the policy is.
00:27:01.000So if the policy here is to unleash Doge on the Department of Defense to find golden toilet seats, I'm all for it.
00:27:06.000If we're talking about getting rid of the sort of waste, fraud, and abuse that we've seen in pretty much every other department, I'm in favor of it.
00:27:11.000It's not clear that's what the policy is.
00:27:12.000Apparently, according to the Washington Post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has now ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post and officials familiar With the matter.
00:27:29.000That is a massive, massive reduction in military expenditure.
00:27:35.000Among the areas that the Trump administration wants exempted, operations at the U.S. southern border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense, and acquisition of some marines, one-way attack drones, and other munitions.
00:27:47.000Robert Salisas, a senior Pentagon official, said in a statement the money saved could be realigned to pay for new priorities in the Trump administration, including, for example, Iron Dome for America.
00:27:55.000So if what we're talking about is to save money in some areas to move toward new weapons systems, all in favor of it, that sounds great to me.
00:28:03.000Because obviously the money that's been allocated to many of the older weapons systems is money that is wasted.
00:28:07.000If the goal, however, is actual spending cuts that are not reallocated into growth of our military power around the globe, that to me is a large-scale mistake.
00:28:16.000The Pentagon budget for 2025 is about $850 billion, with broad consensus on Capitol Hill that extensive spending is necessary to deter both China and Russia.
00:28:24.000If adopted in full, the cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.
00:28:30.000Now, again, if the goal here is to simply cut that waste, fraud, and abuse, that's one thing.
00:28:34.000If the cuts are being identified by size and not by location, that is another thing.
00:28:40.000The argument that I'm making here is if you find a bad weapons program, you should cut it no matter how much it costs.
00:28:47.000If the goal is to cut 8% and you're just spotting places to cut to hit that 8%, that is a bigger problem because you could be cutting This particular chart,
00:29:16.000you can see that during wartime, it spiked.
00:29:21.000It was all the way up at near 15% in 1953, and then it's been steadily declining since the end of the Cold War.
00:29:27.000By the end of the Cold War, the United States was spending north of 6% of GDP. Today, we are spending approximately 3.6% of our GDP on defense.
00:29:35.000And that's in the face of a very aggressive China.
00:29:50.000A guy named Admiral Sam Paparo, he said, quote, we're very close to the point where on a daily basis the fig leaf of an exercise could very well hide operational warning, meaning China doing these sort of military exercises around Taiwan.
00:30:02.000Their aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan right now are not exercises, they call them, they're rehearsals.
00:30:05.000They're rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland.
00:30:10.000Paparo said, our magazines run low, our maintenance backlogs grow longer each month.
00:30:14.000We operate on an increasingly thin margin of error.
00:30:17.000Our opponents see these gaps and they're moving aggressively to exploit them.
00:30:23.000And when it comes to, for example, Chinese military spending, the reality is that China, while the claim is that China's only spending like 1 point something percent, 1.6 percent of their GDP on defense, that's not actually true.
00:30:36.000Other estimates suggest they're not spending $280 billion on their military every year.
00:30:40.000They're spending close to $700 billion on their military every year and hiding it in order to...
00:30:56.000Obviously, it's an aggressive foreign policy willing to use economic power in order to leverage change in places like Colombia or in Mexico.
00:31:04.000President Trump is willing to think outside the box in the Middle East in, I think, new and amazing ways.
00:31:09.000And President Trump obviously wants to get to a solution in Ukraine.
00:31:12.000If, however, the goal is to cut defense, If the goal is a sort of generalized American retreat from the world, the sort of neo-isolationist position that if the United States retreats from the world, that nothing fills the gap, that is just not true.
00:31:27.000Something will fill the gap, and the thing that fills the gap will not be friendly to the United States.
00:31:31.000Now, maybe you make the calculation somehow, somehow, that the turning of the Far East into a giant Chinese pond is somehow not all that damaging to the United States, or at least...
00:31:42.000You know, if we save a couple hundred billion dollars here or there around the military, somehow that outweighs the amount of cost to China taking over the South China Sea.
00:31:51.000I fail to see how that pencils out precisely.
00:31:54.000Because what we're talking about here in ramping up American military capacity is deterrence.
00:31:59.000The goal is to never have to go to war.
00:32:00.000That is what peace through strength is all about, to push people off the line.
00:32:04.000Something, by the way, that Trump is very familiar with and that he's been very successful at in the past.
00:32:08.000That credible threat of use of force has been President Trump's friend.
00:32:11.000Historically speaking, withdrawing from areas all over the globe in the sort of hackneyed belief that the rest of the world will then become a friendly place, that a multipolar world will be constructed similarly to the current world order, that allies that we have across the world won't simply reorient toward China, which is much more ambitious and willing to expend capital and willing to expend military force where it wants.
00:32:42.000These are countries that have been long-time American allies.
00:32:46.000If the United States were to abandon its footing in the Far East, what do Japan and Australia do?
00:32:51.000Well, either they arm up, in which case you have arms races in the Far East, which raises the prospect of serious conflict, or you have these countries trying to make some sort of accommodation with China, which of course strengthens China at the expense of the United States.
00:33:03.000Economics is not a zero-sum game, because if two sides trade, both sides get richer.
00:33:14.000The United States is, in fact, the guarantor of, say, freedom of the seas.
00:33:18.000The United States is the force that is keeping North Korea from walking across the border in South Korea.
00:33:23.000It's our trigger force in South Korea.
00:33:26.000It is, in fact, American presence in places like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in the Baltic states that does prevent further Russian aggression in those states.
00:33:33.000It is not the ground threat of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia's.
00:33:41.000Preventative power, it's always very easy to do the counterfactual.
00:33:45.000And the counterfactual is like, well, you know, if we just withdrew from these areas, if we didn't have military power, if we cut the defense budget, then probably everything would be okay because that's an imaginary world.
00:33:53.000The costs right now are real, but the success of the counterfactual is imaginary.
00:34:01.000We have to keep soldiers in a lot of places and spend a lot of money.
00:34:04.000And do we really want to be doing that?
00:34:06.000The counterfactual, however, fails to acknowledge the reality of life, which is that America has aggressive enemies, all of which have their own interests in mind.
00:34:23.000And those agendas do not align with the agenda of the United States.
00:34:27.000Again, I don't think that that is what President Trump is looking for.
00:34:30.000I think what President Trump is looking for here is a peace-through-strength policy.
00:34:33.000I think that because he told me that on this show.
00:34:37.000And that is why I think it's important to see who gets staffed up in, for example, the Defense Department.
00:34:42.000There's a bubbling battle over a potential Defense Department nominee named Elbridge Colby.
00:34:47.000And there's a lot of controversy over exactly what Elbridge Colby thinks.
00:34:51.000Very good piece over at Tablet Magazine by Lee Smith talking about Elbridge Colby.
00:34:56.000But the bizarre thing about Elbridge Colby, who, again, is being pushed by some segments of sort of the MAGA right.
00:35:01.000The bizarre thing about Elbridge Colby is that his actual history is working in Democratic circles.
00:35:07.000He began his career working for the Center for a New American Security, which is a think tank founded by Clinton officials and allies, with the purpose of turning military officers into loyal Democrats.
00:35:17.000He then worked at West Exec Advisors, founded in 2017 by two former Barack Obama officials, Anthony Blinken and Michelle Flournoy.
00:35:25.000Avril Haines, the West Exec consultant, went on to become Biden's Director of National Intelligence.
00:35:29.000Blinken, of course, went on to be Secretary of State.
00:35:31.000And Florida was theoretically going to lead the Pentagon, where supposedly she was going to actually hire Elbridge Colby.
00:35:37.000Instead, Colby ended up working in the first Trump administration under James Mattis, who, of course, was not a friend to the Trump foreign policy.
00:35:45.000He's advised a bunch of people in the GOP, including, for example, Jeb Bush.
00:35:50.000So Colby's foreign policy doesn't truly align particularly well with many of the things that President Trump has said.
00:35:56.000Colby's argument historically has been.
00:35:58.000That we need to reorient American interests away from, say, Europe and the Middle East and toward China, which is a fair enough argument if what you mean to do is actually then ramp up your capacity around Taiwan.
00:36:09.000But, as Lee Smith points out, many of the people who are being put into place in the Defense Department don't even want to confront China.
00:36:17.000Michael Domino, who's named as the Pentagon's principal Middle East policy advisor, and Andrew Byers, who's tapped for a South and Southeast Asia job, both of those people...
00:36:27.000Our fellows at Defense Priorities, which is a Koch-funded think tank, the Koch brothers are quite isolationist on foreign policy.
00:36:33.000Byers believes the United States should abandon belligerent military initiatives targeted at China because the two are, quote, more geopolitical rivals than full-fledged adversaries.
00:36:42.000Meanwhile, Colby himself, he says we ought to orient, again, toward China.
00:36:48.000But, he says, quote, it is true that Taiwan is a very important strategic interest to the United States.
00:36:52.000It is not, however, an existential interest.
00:36:54.000America has a strong interest in defending Taiwan, but Americans could survive without it.
00:36:58.000And then he posted, And then he suggested that the only logical and coherent position was to raise the alarm that we are heading to a situation in which defending Taiwan won't make sense and may not even be possible.
00:37:18.000So, in other words, swivel attention from the Middle East to China and then ignore China, which is a very, very weird policy.
00:37:24.000And certainly not one that seems to align with the Trump foreign policy.
00:37:27.000But the Trump foreign policy remains in the early stages here.
00:37:29.000We'll have to see how all of this shakes out.
00:37:31.000We'll have to see how this ends up defining itself over time.
00:37:37.000Suffice it to say that America that abandons a leadership interest in the world is going to watch its interests get wrested away by opponents of the United States.
00:37:46.000Because again, those opponents don't stop existing just because you wish they would.
00:37:50.000And then you start unilaterally cutting defense.
00:37:52.000Or divesting from certain parts of the globe.
00:37:54.000It doesn't mean every intervention everywhere is a good idea, obviously, clearly.
00:37:59.000It doesn't mean that we ought to expend money in stupid places.
00:38:02.000It doesn't mean we ought to expend money on bad weapons systems.
00:38:05.000It does mean, however, that pretending away America's enemies and pretending that there will be no cost to the United States if those enemies gain regional power is whistling past the graveyard.
00:38:15.000Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the latest with regard to Doge.
00:38:18.000First, if you're with us for election night or the inauguration, you already know.
00:38:22.000The Daily Wire doesn't just show up, we take over, and now we are headed back to D.C. to do just that at CPAC. Join me, along with Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, and Jeremy Boring, all on stage, live, tonight, February 20th.
00:39:03.000They're streaming live at Daily Wire Plus, and we are taking your questions.
00:39:05.000Don't just watch CPAC, be a part of it.
00:39:07.000Live tonight, February 20th, at Daily Wire Plus.
00:39:10.000Meanwhile, controversy continues over Doge.
00:39:13.000President Trump announced yesterday, in a piece of interesting news, that he is considering a Doge dividend, which would essentially take a per capita payment saved by Doge and then pass it back to the American people in the form of a check or a tax cut.
00:39:28.000Now, there's a case to be made that we actually should use that money to pay down the national debt because, of course, that is one of the reasons that you're cutting the spending.
00:39:33.000However, I'd rather the taxpayers have back their money than that that money be blown on random turning the kids gay in Guatemala nonsense.
00:39:42.000There's even under consideration a new concept where we give 20 percent of the Doge savings to American citizens and 20 percent goes to paying down debt because the numbers are incredible.
00:39:54.000Elon, so many billions of dollars, billions, hundreds of billions.
00:39:58.000And we're thinking about giving 20 percent back to the American citizens and 20 percent down to pay back debt and pay down debt.
00:40:07.000So, again, I think that I'm not a bad idea.
00:40:11.000How much is Doge actually cutting is sort of one of the open questions at this point.
00:40:14.000Because Doge is working so fast, and because they are citing a bunch of different things they're cutting, it's sort of hard to get a handle on what exactly is being cut.
00:41:04.000And herein lies the problem that I've noted for a while.
00:41:08.000Doge is doing great work, and I love what they're doing.
00:41:10.000And I love the idea of naming all these programs because the American people need to be made aware of how much of their money is being wasted.
00:41:16.000But the reality is the big drivers of America's debt are, of course, the giant entitlement programs.
00:42:42.000By the way, there's tons of fat that needs to be cut.
00:42:44.000A Washington Free Beacon report now says that the Biden EPA actually awarded a group linked to Stacey Abrams with no real track record, a $2 billion environmental grant in 2024, which looks very much like just a money laundering attempt to left-wing causes, which of course is what so much of the spending actually is.
00:43:01.000And Democrats are trying to fight back against this, and they are doing so unsuccessfully.
00:44:00.000Actually, the meat axe is a good thing.
00:44:01.000And good for Trump and good for Musk for taking the initiative on all of this.
00:44:06.000And angle number two Democrats are trying is to find single incidents of cuts that really tug it to heart.
00:44:12.000And they're having a problem here because it turns out that government employees are not the most sympathetic victims.
00:44:17.000So, for example, here you have Chelsea Milbourne, a former federal employee fired from the Education Department, brought on to CNN to cry about it.
00:44:25.000I was excited to continue serving in this capacity.
00:44:30.000And they not only tore that out from under my feet, but couldn't even just grant me a layoff and instead place the blame on me that it was my performance.
00:44:41.000And I've gotten nothing but positive reviews on that situation.
00:44:44.000So I feel very much like the message is that my service is valued.
00:44:52.000They don't care about how this impacts me or people like me.
00:45:21.000The more Donald Trump and Doge indiscriminately hack away at public agencies, the greater harm to Americans' well-being and even their safety.
00:45:33.000Just weeks after the deadliest plane crash in a long time, and just as we see more incidents around the country, President Trump has fired hundreds of FAA workers, including air safety personnel.
00:45:50.000Firing people whose very job it is to keep air travel safe is nothing short of reckless.
00:45:57.000Okay, but there's only one problem, which is they've yet to connect any of the cuts to any of the airplane crashes.
00:46:02.000This is what Delta's CEO was saying to Gayle King, who tried the same exact routine yesterday.
00:46:08.000The Trump administration recently fired many employees of the FAA administration.
00:46:13.000Do those cuts worry you, and do you think that impacts the safety?
00:46:17.000I know you just said it's the safest way to travel, but after looking at all these mishaps, a lot of people are very nervous.
00:46:26.000I've been in close communication with the Secretary of Transportation.
00:46:30.000I understand that the cuts at this time are something that are raising questions, but the reality is there's over 50,000 people that work at the FAA, and the cuts, I understand, were 300 people, and they were in non-critical safety functions.
00:46:45.000So, no, actually, it is not President Trump at all.
00:46:49.000They're having some real trouble, some real trouble out there.
00:46:52.000Okay, in just one second, we're going to get to Democrats who are trying to vie now for leadership of a failing Democratic Party.
00:46:57.000The Democratic Party ratings, by the way, are absolutely in the toilet.
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