The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Weiss: Trump’s Fee-Fees Are Hurt

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

Of course, SCOTUS struck down Trump’s stupid tariffs. Nearly every legal expert in America said they were unconstitutional, but we have had to live with them for more than a year. Now, he’s threatening war on Iran apparently because it’s not fair that Obama got a Nobel and he didn’t. Meanwhile, as we approach the fourth anniversary of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Putin still holds out hope he can seize all of the country. Plus, Marco is working on getting Cuba to be the next domino to fall, Trump’s Board of Peace is pushing a complete fantasy in Gaza, the battle against ICE in Minnesota is not over, and Gold Medal-winner Alysa Liu—a California lib, and a child of an immigrant—represents the shining city on a hill. She is America. Michael Weiss joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod.show notes Michael's Substack Alysa Liu's gold-winning performance The Gettysburg Address Tim's playlist Learn more and join using my link. Visit www.functionhealth.com/THEBULWARK and use gift code THEBULWARK25 for a $25 credit toward your membership. Get 15% off OneSkin with the code BULWARK at https://www.oneskin.co/BULWARK #oneskinpod

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted to be with you from Minneapolis this morning. We are going to get to our guest here in a minute, but I just wanted to talk to you a bit about our last couple days. We had two amazing live shows. We had a bunch of special guests, Governor Tim Walls, Tina Smith. You heard her yesterday. Minnesota Angry Man came out on the Thursday night show, and Sam interviewed Superintendent Zena Stenwick. and that one was gutting, hearing what these goons have been doing at schools around Minnesota. We're going to be releasing that and the next level podcast that we did,

a big supersized next level with Sam Stein last night, did some audience Q&A. You can be able to see all that. Just make sure you're subscribed this over on YouTube, subscribe to the board takes feed, the next level feed. You know, over the weekend, we'll be kind of rolling out elements from the shows. It was truly inspiring to be there with everybody from Minnesota and appreciated so much just their energy and enthusiasm and love and their stories,

hearing what they've been doing in their communities, volunteering. Before the shows, we had the opportunity to go out to the Whipple Building and talk to protesters out there and then to the pretty and good memorials. And my biggest takeaway about kind of what's happening on the ground here that's different than maybe what I expected, talking to folks at the Whipple building where, you know, which is basically ICE headquarters building up here, is that there's still a ton of activity, like a ton of cars coming in and out of there, 10 licensed EVP agents. A lot of people getting released, you know, who had been detained either inside Whipple or at Whipple and then sent to Texas and then brought back. and like one protester, I thought this was a relevant anecdote. She lived about 40 minutes away in Wisconsin in kind of a whatever ex-arbon-ish community

that's more spread out, more sparse. And so they had 10 ICBP agents in her community in the last week. And we're hearing that from a lot of people up here that maybe what Homan is doing and what the strategy is is to move some of these agents outside of, you know, the areas where, you know, there's organized resistance already in Minneapolis-St. Paul and instead push it out into areas that are less dense, where, you know, maybe there's less groups already together of constitutional watchers.

And so that's something I think we should keep monitoring. They have funding for all these guys. They're not just going to sit around eating donuts, put their thumb up their ass. All right. they're going to be out there doing something. And signs now are pointing to these agents using kind of different tactics, maybe not quite as aggressive tactics against the protesters, but different types of tactics to go abduct immigrants and that they're doing it

more outside of the main cities. So we'll keep monitoring that. I thought that was a somewhat dispiriting update, but, you know, it was, on the other hand, like pretty inspiring to see these people out there. the woman I was talking to from Wisconsin's like I'm out here every day three hours driving in 45 minutes it's cold as balls I only tell you my feet were freezing you know I didn't really pack for the weather I forgot my coat luckily I got a $9 one thanks to JVL at the department store but um it's amazing what folks are out there doing we went then to the Pretty Memorial and the good and Pretty

Memorial and it was really tough I had a tough time with it and uh you know the preface you want in particular, I think maybe just because I've seen the video so many times, it was just very easy to visualize, like standing there. Like my subconscious knew all the signposts. I've been watched the video so much. And so I was like visualizing them executing him in the street, walking through, and just getting very mad and emotional. And had to walk away for a little bit.

When I walked back, I took this guy, Jeff, who was there. who's been going there most days, help protect and clean up the memorial and just be a watcher, be a helper out there. And he said to me that he was doing it in the spirit of what Lincoln said in the Gettysburg address. And because I'm not Bill Crystal, I did, or Sarah, Sarah demonstrated yesterday to me that she is the Gettysburg address memorized. So shout out to them.

But I was like, I don't have it memorized. And I know the first sentence. But I wasn't exactly sure what he was talking about, but we kept chatting. you know, I just like I was chatting with a bunch of people there and just about their experiences what they're seeing. And I went back to the hotel room and pulled it up and I saw the section that he was talking about in the Gettysburg Address. I just, I do want to read it because I think that it kind of summarizes what we were trying to do here in Minnesota. It goes like this. We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hollow this ground. The brave man living

and dead who struggled here have consecrated, that far above our poor power to add or detract is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. And that unfinished work is what Jeff was talking about. You know, there's only so much you can do to memorialize and consecrate the ground

where these guys assassinated our fellow citizen for doing nothing, for trying to help someone for exercising the rights of the First and Second Amendment that are enshrined in our Constitution. You know, we can remember an honor. But what it's really our job to do is to continue the unfinished work. And I struggle with that, you know? It's just like we're not actually in the Civil War, right? There's a lot of elements of it.

I mean, JVL was talking about how. some of the parallels to the Underground Railroad that we see with the people that we were talking to, like Haven Watch, for example, this group that waits outside the Whipple Building and then helps people, clothes them, feeds them, and helps find them shelter, get them back to their family after they've been detained. It's those types of things is what we're able to do, right? I'm not suiting up to go into battle, but we are in a battle against a authoritarian government that is, that is, you know, trying to entrench power and trying to assault people's rights. And if what we can do with the bulwark is just shine a light on it, draw attention to it,

help people not get beaten down completely by it, help do so in a way that maybe persuades people or draws people in. You know, I joked last night, I was like, I guess if my role is to make fingering jokes on YouTube, I guess I will do that. I wish I could do more than that. that is what we ought to do here. I think that it would be an affront to the memory of Alex and Renee and the other people if we just kind of turn the page on this thing.

And I think that is like the main change in my perspective having been here. I was very much looking at this through a political perspective where I do think that the resistance, so to speak, won in Minnesota. And I still feel that way from like a political standpoint. but the broader battle is still here in Minnesota, and it's still most acutely, but it's still everywhere on the country. And we need to make sure that we are vigilant in that because the national news is going to move on

to whatever the next story is. And the battle is still ongoing here. All right, everybody, that's all I got for you up from Minnesota. I want to go now to our guest, one of our faves. He's a reporter at The Insider. He's also on Substack at the Foreign Office. It's Michael Weiss and his birdies. How you doing, Michael? No birdies today, my friend. They're all quiet. Not dead. Just there's the blankets over them, so they go to sleep, which I wish I could do that with my child, but it doesn't work. Yeah.

I wish we could do that with Trump, but unfortunately you can't just put a blanket over him. We got a bunch to get to. We scheduled us because this is the fourth anniversary of the Russia war in Ukraine. And so we will get to that eventually, but we've got a bunch of news. Just like literally right now, as we're taping, we have breaking news out of the Supreme Court. It's a six to three ruling. They have said that the Trump emergency tariffs are unconstitutional. The three dissents are Thomas Alito and Kavanaugh. And just a massive blow to him at the Supreme Court, the biggest blow of this second term.

Potentially they're doing him a favor on the economic side of things. things because, you know, the tariffs weren't, weren't doing this economy any good. But it'll be interesting to see, like, how he reacts, like, his temper tantrum. But I also think there's some geopolitical potential positive fallout here as, you know, his favorite tool for punishing, you know, foreign prime ministers who are mean to him at a meeting now seems to be out of his toolbox. Yeah. Although he was also using the tariff tool to punish enemies or perceived enemies, of the United States. I mean, one of the things that was interesting about the Graham Blumenthal bill, which is basically dead in Congress to impose secondary sanctions for countries that import

Russian oil and gas, petroleum products, and so on. A lot of Democrats didn't like it because it was basically tariffs, right, instead of actually just sanctioning institutions and entities in the Russian Federation. So it kind of cuts both ways. I mean, for some reason, Trump, alighted upon tariffs as his preferred lever for economically battering friends and foes and now I guess he can't do it or it can't do it as much I don't know

we'll have much more on this over the weekend and on Monday I don't know my initial reaction I have like you know I have my good wolf and my bad wolf inside of me and the bad wolf kind of like wants to let him fuck everything up I don't know I feel like in the first term there were a lot of bumpers around

Donald Trump's worst impulses and we're kind of here right now because people didn't feel the requisite pain from his like chaos and his misguided ideology. And I kind of feel like we're doing that again. On the other hand, you know, I mean, there were Americans who didn't do anything wrong who were being punished by this, particularly people in industries. You know, I was talking to some small business owners, like, for example, who, you know, the tariffs crushed their business. And so it's nice for them, that they're no longer victims of Donald Trump. So I don't know. That's where my fee fees are right now.

Yeah, you know, I mean, first they came for the soybean farmers, and I wasn't a soybean farmer, but I still voted for Trump. And then they came for the Epstein files, and now I'm very angry about that. And now, you know, I mean, his coalition is splintering and fracturing over a myriad of issues, including now possible war with Iran, which. I mean, you remember, this guy campaigned, and they were chanting at his rallies, no more wars. And he just seems to be starting wars all to live long day. And, you know, I mean, declassifying things to distract us from real problems in this country.

Like, you know, this season is the X-Files in America. Like, we're doing aliens and UFOs because Barack Obama made some stray remarks. So that's going to be the new bright, shiny object, so to speak, to be. chasing in the night sky. I mean, yeah, he's kind of all over the place. And his approval rating is what? In the 30s, which, you know, that's not how you make America great again, Tim. No, it isn't, Michael. Those are some George W. Bush numbers right there. Okay. All right. You know, you don't have to, you don't have to twist the knife. All right, everybody, wanted to talk to you about function health. You can't manage your heart health if you're missing half the info. Standard

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Learn more and join using my link, www.women, www.functionhealth.com slash the bulwark. And you use gift code, the bulwark 25 for a $25 buck credit towards your membership. Let's talk about Iran for a second. And there's just a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about. We have the Board of Peace and Ukraine. but I would like to hear your assessment, you know, of we're bringing a lot of firepower into the region, what the strategy is, what, you know, all of kind of the insider side of this. But before we get to that, I'm just, I don't understand why we're doing this. Like the people who are for the U.S. getting more entrenched in Israel's war with Iran, why?

What is their rationale? Because it makes no sense politically. It's not a severe national security threat to the country. So why are we doing it? I wouldn't overthink it. I think it's sort of bound up with Donald Trump's own psychology and his own sense of his importance on the world stage, right? I mean, economy is doing poorly. Probably this is his last term. We haven't heard much about him being president for life in quite a while. So for him, what's his legacy? He didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize, which he wanted badly because Barack Obama got it. He solved eight, nine, ten, twelve, wars. except Ukraine, but that's imminent. Any day now, that's going to be resolved. If he can claim that he delivered the hammer blow to the Islamic Republic of Iran, whether by assassinating the Supreme Leader or taking out the upper echelon of the IRGC, or we already obliterated the nuclear program,

so I guess he could re-obliterate it, or, you know, more significantly than that, actually, would be destroying the missile capabilities of Iran. One of the reasons it's taken. in weeks and months to assemble the assets in place in the Gulf is to withstand the retaliation that would come in the form of short and mid-range ballistic missiles, which the Iranians have in excess, right? But for him, remember, Tim, this is not a guy who likes war properly speaking. He likes acts of war. He likes the spectacle of war, saying that he's dropped massive bombs and ordinance on something and then declaring victory. So why is he doing this? I think for the sake of doing it and saying that he's resolved, you know, a crisis, he's resolved a regional

and international security threat that no president since Jimmy Carter has been able to resolve. And even though that won't be true, unlike Venezuela, you don't do regime decapitation in Iran and expect to make all kinds of fun deals with whoever remains. The IRGC in many respects is the more hardline entity in the government. But he seems to think that there's something in place that he can do. And God knows what the intelligence community is feeding him on this. You know, who is the Delci Rodriguez of Iran? What's the state of play?

Like, what do we think that the strategy? Yeah, everything I'm hearing is that he is going to do it. I mean, assembling all your sort of pieces in place, that has its own momentum. And after a while, I mean, it's costing taxpayer money to keep now two aircraft carrier strike groups in the region to put all of these assets in place. I mean, people I know in the Air Force have been deployed and told, you know, you may be gone for as long as three to six months. Is this going to be a one-and-done kind of bombardment campaign or is it going to be a weeks-long campaign? I don't know.

But, you know, you mentioned the Israelis. They're very gung-ho for Trump to get involved in this because for them it is a much more immediate security threat for them to have the current Iranian regime in place. October 7th has changed their calculation across the board, which is why. why they not only went after Hamas and Gaza, but eviscerated Hezbollah in Lebanon, accidentally toppled Bashar al-Assad, even though there's some buyer's remorse there. So for them, this is this is just taking care of all family business. And the way they see it is they're never going to get a better guy in the White House than Donald Trump to go along with it.

That's for sure. I think it's coming. That's for sure. It's hard to even imagine anyone on the horizon who would be willing to go along with this. So it's coming. Right. Just as one little final point there, I think. the one thing that has dragged this out, you know, members of the Trump family, including Trump himself,

I guess it all devolves to the king at some point. But Kushner and Whitkoff, his two plenty potentiary special advisors or envoys, they've got a lot of money tied up in the region. I mean, they've made a fortune going around resolving these regional crises, assembling the peace board. Kushner, with the largest leverage buyout in history done with the Saudis to purchase a video game giant, the Whitkoff's getting money, $2 billion for world liberty, financial, whatever it's called, which Trump also is involved in from the Emirates. So they don't want war in Iran because all of the Gulf paymasters that have financed their operations don't want war in Iraq. But I think the contradiction here is the Iranians are not willing to do what Donald Trump

says. Forfeiture nuclear program, give up your missile program, and then eliminate all of the proxy groups or your patronage of all the proxies you spent the better part of 30 years assembling throughout the region. So, you know, hence a kinetic conclusion to this. Well, and if the Iranian regime is toppled and, you know, replaced by a freedom-loving democracy in the Middle East, then, you know, the Trump, Whitkoff, hotel, casino, and resort and Gaza will be a lot safer and potentially, who knows, they could maybe build one in Tehran. The one in Gaza, I mean, if you look at the deck or the slideshow that Jared put together. I mean, this goes beyond like Dubai and Palm Jamira. This is like Corrassant, the imperial capital of Star Wars. Most volatile piece of

real estate in the Middle East, which is saying a lot because it's the Middle East. And this dude is going to build like gleaming sci-fi skyscrapers, beachfront property. And it's all looks beautiful and peaceful. Everybody's out getting a nice tan, getting their shwarma on. Halal trucks, speedos. I mean, it's great. You know, Hey, they played November rain at the opening of the Board of Peace. What could possibly go wrong, Tim? A Guns and Rose's ballot about loss and heartache, where in the music video, the bride dies at her own fucking wedding. That's their Board of Peace anthem.

I mean, this is just, everything's coming up roses here. Come on. Don't be such a Debbie Downer. Yeah, I have a few more questions for you about Iran. Before we dive into the Board of Peace. does anyone actually think it's possible for the regime to be toppled without boots on the ground? Like, is that even a plausible outcome here? That's, I think, what they're trying to do, right?

Well, but no, I don't think that's what they're trying to do. I think the only thing that's on offer is find assets inside the regime that they can work with, that they find amenable. So it's the Venezuela playbook all over again. Who is the Delci Rodriguez in Iran? And I don't have an answer for you because every Iran expert I talked to says, again, the IRGC, you know, these are the ultras. These are the hardliners. So if you eliminate the clerics, you know, these are the guys who stand to inherit the throne. And they don't want to play nicely with the United States.

I mean, for them, I mean, the proxies and all of the things that are now being litigated, that was their power projection project for a quarter century. So I don't have an answer for you because I don't see. how you do this. I don't see how you do it in the utopian sense of, you know, topple the regime and then a democratic transition. That's not in the offing. And I also don't see how you do it with regime preservation plus decapitation, you know, assassinate key leadership. And then, you know, look, everything that this guy does, it's like the South Park episode with the underwear gnomes, you know, steal the underwear is step one, step three is profits. But step two is a question mark. Nobody has step two for anything. Anything. I mean, so your guess is as good as mine. Maybe the Israelis

have something a card up their sleeve. Maybe they've recruited some of assets. That's what I was going to say. The Israelis aren't stupid. What do they want then? They're just trying to get, you know, try to eliminate the missiles and make some progress on leaking them. They're not interested in democracy and human rights in Iran. I mean, they're, you know, Morsia Dian put it best, I think. He said, Israel doesn't have a foreign policy. It has a defense policy, right? And that that's pretty, much persisted, I think, for many decades. For them, all that would matter would be Iran no longer poses a threat to Israel's existence or to its security, whether through missiles, a nuclear weapon in the future, or again, these proxies and militias that have been assembled. This is sort of the

long tale of the post-October 7th era in the region. For them, this is still, you know, this is perhaps the last and final conflict to settle all accounts. And for them, the window of opportunity is, again, it's narrowing. Donald Trump is the only guy who would go to war alongside Israel in Iran, full stop. So by hook or by crook, they need to get this done. That's how they see. Y'all, I am in Minnesota and my skin is chapped. My lips are chapped. I'm feeling dry and clammy. It's uninhabitable. But what makes it a little bit better is my friends at one skin. With one skin, you know, when I'm up here in this cold winter, I was using all of it, all right? The face, the lip, the body moisturizer. I was double coating. And hopefully I'm looking

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That's 15% off, oneskin.com with code bulwark. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. The FT had an interesting piece this morning that was talking about the Iranian perspective, and their assessment was that people inside the regime now think that war is actually better than a deal because they think that they can exhaust the U.S. to the point that it totally abandons any pursuit of future aggression, and that the last time it was Donald Trump that wanted the ceasefire after the bombing, and that maybe the unrest in the country feels like a bank shot to me, but this is just what I'm not saying this is logical,

but this is what they're thinking. Maybe the unrest in the country would be tamped down because there would be a new enemy, the great American devil to focus on rather than the ways in which they're fucking up their own citizens. That's apparently what the FTA was reporting. What do you think about that? Is that possible that's what they're thinking? I mean, you know, that sounds like the sort of hubris of a sclerotic regime that realizes that it's not long for this world come what may. I mean, the protest movement

that was suppressed rather brutally by this regime really demonstrated the extent to which there is just utter contempt for, you know, the MOLOS, there is utter contempt for the IRGC for the besiege at the popular level in Iran. So there's a lot of human capital. And, you know, it's true. We have done things like we smuggled in Starlink communication devices so that the protesters could record what was happening. Again, there's a war and a covert side of things that we simply don't know because it is covert, right? And we'll only come to light later on.

maybe people have been recruited, maybe people, you know, inside the regime are making discreet, you know, outreach to the West and to the Israelis or whomever. You know, the other thing I would just caution is I just read a very long, deep dive bit of reporting in The Guardian by Sean Walker about the lead up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, how the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.K. knew that the war was coming and got that absolutely right, but then completely cocked up how the war was going to go. And why did they cock it up? Because they took the Russian military's estimation of itself at face value. We are a bright, shiny army that has been completely rehabilitated and reformed, and there is not a chance in health that this little country called Ukraine can put up a fight. Kiv and three, and then we're at the border with Poland in two weeks. And that just proved to be utterly catastrophically wrong, right? So I'm very, very leery of taking what a regime, a dictatorship, totalitarian dictatorship says at face value, right? Like they might believe their own propaganda, but we shouldn't. So is it the case that a confrontation with them would be kind of, you know, the death knell of American military?

No, it probably isn't. We would probably wipe the floor with them. But again, it's not about how much fire and fury can be rained down on Iran. It's about what happens next. How do you stop the regime from doing the sorts of things that brought you to this point in the first place? And I do not have an answer for that because I have been given no answer for that. I have not seen anything credible. And maybe it's out there.

That's not to say that there aren't these elaborate plans being cooked up, but I don't know what they are. I'd be remiss to try and guess. Speaking of totalitarian regimes, I want to take us back to the Board of Peace, which met yesterday was basically Dr. Evil's inner circle of henchmen with Donald Trump and. Jared and Susie, I don't really understand what they're doing with that either. Sarah Longwell thinks that it's Donald Trump's gold jacket. It's his exit plan, like that he doesn't want to be president for life. And he can go be chairman of the Board of Peace and feel like he's the head of the world.

It is, and I think too obvious probably to say that it's a bit ironic that, you know, the board drums are banging for Iran while the Board of Peace is meeting. And the members of the Board of Peace are like, you know, dictator Bonesaw in Saudi Arabia and the head of Belarus and Uzbekistan. It's the worst totalitarian leaders in the world besides Iran. Iran and North Korea are the only ones that weren't invited to the table, it seems like. Everyone is giving a billion. The U.S. said that they're giving 10 billion to this board.

Maybe the idea is that they're going to try to bribe everybody. Maybe they're bribing the Iranians. Maybe that's the plan for the Board of Peace. know, if everybody throws in a billy, just corrupt crypto deals for everybody, and we're going to keep the world safe by paying people off, like kind of a gang racket, or is there something else happening? No, I think, you know, it's the ornamentalism of saying we've assembled this collection of nations that are all committed to ensuring that Gaza doesn't devolve into some, you know,

Islamist hellhole and that, you know, IDF soldiers don't go in there. and start shooting people up again. I mean, the problem with this is it's contingent upon other Middle Eastern countries deploying troops to secure Gaza. And guess what? Other Middle Eastern countries do not want to do that because the last thing, you know, the Arabs or the Turks want to do is get into a shooting war with Palestinians. Right. I've been wondering that. So they also talked about there's going to be a military base.

That's one of the things the border peace is doing is putting this military base in Gaza. And I'm like, who is in the base? Like, who are the humans? Is it just an AI robot base? Because I don't know who's going to want to be there. The only one who seems to credit this in journalistic circles is Barack Ravid because he's just spoon-fed heaping piles of horseship by Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner. I have to credit Steve Whitkoff in one respect. I mean, Barack Ravid was a, he worked in signals intelligence in Israel.

And usually you think Israeli spies are good at recruiting Americans. But here's a case of an American and real estate developer from the Bronx. It seems to have recruited an Israeli spy. Nobody I know thinks this has a chance of working. Like, nobody I know. Mark Palmeropoulos, who worked the Middle East for decades in CIA, just thinks this thing is a joke, right? It's all pageantry.

It's declaring victory, mission accomplished. Here's the Board of Peace. Gaza's all sorted. No, don't worry about it. It'll take care of itself. There aren't going to be, you know, Islamic jihadists. There aren't going to be Hamasnics. There's not going to be another October 7 style attack.

And it's true that the Israelis, I'm sure, are now putting in place better security protocols and have a much more capable intelligence apparatus to ensure that that's not going to happen. But the idea that this strip of territory is going to be built into something approaching, you know, what the UAE is or what Saudi Arabia is, I just think is utter fantasy. And, you know, it's true that there is some Palestinian enfranchisement baked into this proposal, this peace plan. But that presupposes that the Israelis are going to be on board for that. And when has Benjamin Netanyahu ever been on board with Palestinian statehood? And again, I've said this before on your show. You know, we like to pretend that the Israeli government

led by Netanyahu is the one that's completely against the idea of, you know, living side by side and coexistence. No, but I think since October 7th, the Israeli electorate as a whole, has been very coarsened and turned against the idea of sharing, you know, the neighborhood with, with Palestinians because they think October 7 would just happen again. So there are so many questions and coefficients here that nobody has answers to. But on paper, it all looks very nice, doesn't it? You know, you got you got Aliyah from Azerbaijan. You've got Lukashenko from Belarus in there. Putin was invited, although he, you know, he's otherwise indisposed, got other things. to do, couldn't make it to the Board of Peace.

Like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's this great assemblage of world leaders and yet I come back to the underwear notes, you know, profits, but what step too? You know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if anyone has caught a harder stray on this podcast ever than Barack Ravid did during that, during that rant. That was glorious. Well, I just, he's, he's done this on Ukraine, too. You know, the, the Kiddil Dimitri of 28 Point Plan, we had a copy of it at the Insider

six months ago. I mean, a rough draft, but basically the same thing. And then it's, you know, it's leaked to Axios as this, you know, co-authored thing by Whitkoff and Kushner in Miami. I mean, no, no. I mean, this was a Russian info op and it was laundered through a guy who, you know, seems to really take a shine to Steve Whitkoff and is one of the only few people I know in either media or policy circles who does. I mean, everyone else thinks Whitkoff is a bumbling moron. But no, Barack Reed, I mean, that's his guy. So, I mean, look, more power to him. He's got a source, you know.

It's just a source, I think, that's leading him wildly astray on many, many things. All right, raise your hand. Have you been putting off a dental cleaning, an annual checkup, or any kind of doctor's appointment? Yeah, that's me. I'm not going to out some of my family members who are really struggling on this front. And it's time to get those teeth checked. That's all I'm going to say. One way to fix this.

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was most of our Democratic allies and our friends in Europe. So this comes on the heels of Marco's Munich trip. And just I want to get into the kind of Marco's trip to the Hungary and Slovakia because I haven't talked about that as much as this speech. But if you're in the European, somewhere in the EU security state

and you're watching Marco's performance in Munich, And you're watching this Board of Peace meeting, and you're watching the, you know, the gathering of military equipment around Iran. Like, what are they thinking right now? Like, and they can't totally decouple from the United States right now. Like, how are they navigating all this? I mean, look, you know, our allies exist to be bullied and hectored and wrangled into submission. This has been the kind of the guiding force of Trump's term, too. our enemies exist to be courted and cultivated and perhaps incentivized to becoming our new friends, right?

So, you know, there's this whole thing with the UK, which refuses to allow its air bases to be used for any kind of war in Iran. Donald Trump tweets or truth socials wildly about that, and, you know, he was in favor of the handover Chegos. Now he's not. I think everyone is quite aware that they carry no weight with Trump in terms of trying to persuade him to do something that he has otherwise set his mind on doing. And everyone treads very, very lightly, right? You know, there's a lot of hatred and understandable in one sense, but I think also a little unfair in another toward the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Ruta. I have to understand, Mark Ruta's background is in HR. wife's background is an HR. And from an HR perspective, which is a line I hear very often in my

household, what Mark Ruta is trying to do, what Mark Rota is trying to do, his job is to keep NATO alive together, right? And he's bending the knee. He's talking about daddy. He's flattering and cajoling Trump as best he can because in the next three years, there is a credible risk with Donald Trump as president, that NATO would cease to exist in all but name. Article 5 could be tested by the Russians or by other actors, and if collective defense doesn't work because the United States refuses to send troops, that's the end of NATO, right? And I think this is a perspective that for the last year has obtained among a lot of European leadership, it's beginning to change now because Donald Trump has already essentially torn up the NATO charter by through the United

threatening to go to war with a NATO ally over sovereign NATO and European territory, right? He wants Greenland. He wants title, as he says. And he wants the Danes to either sell it. And if they don't sell it, he wants to send the troops it. Now, he seems to have been talked off that ledge a little bit, but he keeps mentioning Greenland. So we're not quite done with that portfolio yet. That issue, I think, more than even Ukraine or anything else, has persuaded quite a lot of Europeans that the parties over. I got to tell you, I'm happy that nobody brings up anything from an HR perspective in my household. I think I'd be in a lot of trouble. But the interesting thing I'd like your take on that relates to, you know, these conversations and NATO is like, Rubio, you'd think that a lot of these

guys would have thought Rubio would have been the one they could deal with, you know, in the administration. And, you know, there was a lot of focus as mentioned on his Munich speech. To me, the more interesting thing was he immediately goes to Hungary and Slovakia after. short. And we talked a little bit about Hungary, but why don't you just tell us a little bit about the significance of that and of both those stops? I think that Rubio doesn't believe half or even most of the shit that he says. I mean, I think a lot of it is just performative. It's catering to an audience of one. The word I heard from a source close to him is virtue signaling, which I didn't realize MAGA Republicans do now, but apparently they do. That was his whole performance.

Trump signaling. Trump signaling, right. After his speech in Budapest in which he endorsed Trump's endorsement of Victor Orban, a sclerotic toad of a man who has overseen the complete ruin of Hungary's economy made it completely reliant on Russian oil and gas at a time when the EU, with American encouragement, and American insistence, by the way, is trying to cut off all ties to Russian energy, which is used as a weapon. of Russian foreign policy.

A man whose entire campaign platform is declaring Ukraine an enemy of Hungary and putting out all manner of AI slop about his opponent, who's a fellow conservative, Peter Magyar, including now apparently sexual compromise, which is coming down the pike. I mean, Orban is a busted flush of a prime minister, but Trump loves him. Does Marco Rubio like or love Victor Orban?

No, I don't think he does. And we know that he doesn't because in 2019, Rubio as senator, co-signed a letter in which he decried the erosion of democracy and media rights and an independent judiciary in Victor Orban's Hungary and called out Hungary a NATO ally for being, what, too close to Moscow? So the problem you have with Rubio is, you know, he's sort of this vizier type in the court of the tyrannical king. I'm not saying that he hasn't changed to stripes or that his political thinking hasn't evolved and probably evolved or devolved to a point that's a little

bit closer to Trump. But when it comes to things like Russia, Rubio's under no illusions about who and what Putin is, right? And he makes these little encoded gestures. He did it in his Munich speech, where he said the only mention of Ukraine was once in the substance of the speech that came later in the Q&A. But with respect to Ukraine, he brought it up in the context of, you know, the UN has failed and only Donald Trump is trying to bring these two parties to the table, but it's a, quote, still elusive peace. Still elusive peace from the lips of Marco Rubio means, don't pay much attention to this bullshit process that Whitkoff Kushner are engaged in with the Russians, and which now the Ukrainians are engaged in directly with the Russians. The U.S. intelligence assessment of Russia is that Putin maintains maximalist ambitions. He wants the entirety of the country, and he's basically using the peace process as a way to just kind of, prolong this whole thing, to keep sanctions at bay, to keep Trump from doing something provocative

or untoward that would do more damage to Russia. It's a pantomime. It's not serious diplomacy. Rubio gets this. The problem is he sold his soul to Donald Trump. He gets up and he is such the courtier. He so flatters Trump. He's almost indistinguishable from Vance in the effusive praise. He literally puts Donald Trump to sleep, right? Why is he doing this? Like, what is the grand design here? I had to make a guess, and some of this is a little bit educated from reporting I've done. The guess is these are, in his mind, necessary compromises, necessary compromises of his principles and his beliefs in order to get the things that he most wants done. What does he most want done?

Marco Rubio, the son of two Cuban emigres, one a bartender, the other housemaid, growing up in Miami, Florida, most wants the crowning achievement of his life in government would be toppling the Castro regime in Cuba. And it looks very, very likely that that is going to happen while Donald Trump is still president, because Axios news reports that Rubio is in direct conversation with Raul Castro's grandson, probably about some kind of transition. So Venezuela was first. That was the first domino to fall. Now we control the oil. Now there's an oil embargo on Cuba, which is descending faster and more comprehensively into failed statehood. They can't keep the lights on, the hospitals can't treat patients. There's no food. It's a disaster. For Rubio, Cuba would be

everything. And then when it comes to Ukraine and Russia, you know, recall, I brought up that 28-point Dimitri of Plan from November. It was Marco Rubio who basically intervened and stopped that thing from becoming codified U.S. policy. And how did he do that? He called up his friends from the Senate, who were then gathered at Halifax Security Conference in Nova Scotia and said, don't worry about this. This is a quote, Russian wish list, knowing that they would come out and say that. They came out and said that. He denied he made that call. He 100% absolutely made that call. I have that on very, very good authority. He made that call. But he basically, you know, use some of his capital and currency to stop a very, very bad pro-Russian deal from happening.

So if you talk to the Ukrainians, you talk to the Europeans, one European foreign minister of an EU-NATO country, I asked him, what do you think? Response. Rubio is a closet Reaganite, but he's doing what he has to do to stay in the game and to try and influence the system from with it. Now, this is a very dangerous wager, right? Because at some point, you don't become, you know, sort of the quiet, dissident voice of opposition inside the system. You become an accomplice to the system. You become a functionary of the worst MAGA instincts. And we're seeing that now.

I mean, for me, Budapest was worse than Munich. Munich, I could at least see some attempt to walk a knife edge between the traditional internationalist Republican line, the neocon line of the old Marco Ruby of the Senate, and a sort of MAGA, nativist, chauvinistic, civilizationalist concept of the world. You know, it's nothing to do with values and virtues and democracy and the rule of law and peaceful transitions of power. It's to do with what hemisphere you grew up in and indeed, you know, what ethnicity or race you might come from.

And he doesn't believe that shit. He's singing from that hymn sheet for a reason. And it may backfire on him. He may not be the heir apparent in 2028. He may not be able to revert to his former self. This is my understanding of where things are. Now, is it better that Rubio is in the game than not? I have to say, I think it still is.

Because as I mentioned, you know, without him, at least the Ukrainian position is, Kiv would be fucked already. Because everyone else, I mean, Vance, the isolationist wing in the White House, would have forced Ukraine to, give up Donbos by now, simply by cutting all security assistance and all intelligence, which is still ongoing. So Rubio is sort of holding the line or seem to be holding the line there.

And I don't know how it's going to work out, but it's utterly, utterly abominable and humiliating to watch him, you know, inhabit this sort of Renfield mode to Trump's Dracula because he doesn't really believe most of this stuff. I want to close with Russia, but while we're just doing the Munich stuff, I have to ask you. I heard some feedback that maybe me and Bill Crystal were grading AOC a little too much on a curve with her performance in Munich. And, you know, look, when you're parched in the desert and there's someone out there saying, offering, you know, demonstrating that they have like the tiniest little bit of water for you, you know, you drink it. And I was just wondering what your thoughts were on AOC in Munich.

You know, she's not a foreign policy politician. She's trying to be, presumably because she also wants to run for president. I was unimpressed, to say the least, especially because I've, from media reports, she had prepared for months under the tutelage of Matt Duss, somebody I don't agree with, but I don't think he's a blithering idiot. And, you know, there's other things that happened while she was in Europe that weren't so well reported. You know, I mean, she said the right things about Ukraine and about Russian imperialism, but then

she meets with Dailinka, which is a German far-left political party, which is basically, the left-wing version of AFD when it comes to Moscow. I mean, they're a Putinist German party. Now, is she aware of that? Probably not. But she's like, oh, they're socialists like me. I mean, what's not to like? So there's a lot of, you know, a lot of education, I think, necessary if she wants to really

break out onto the international scene in that way. Hillary Clinton's comments at Munich, much more to my liking, because she has ample foreign policy experience. She got burnt by Russia and is not. needs no education on what it represents, both to the security of Europe and to the security of the United States. But, you know, that ship has sailed, I guess. Yeah. Well, and to Matt Iglesias's point, I think the traditionally in presidential politics, you know, the American people have not looked to somebody who's, you know, who has really in-depth white paper

thoughts on foreign policy. If you just look at our successful winners from Bush to Obama to Trump with maybe a Biden interregnum. So, you know, maybe there's something to be said for some populist, you know, McDonald's mid-level foreign policy takes on Ukraine just really quick. And I lie. I'm going to end with a tribute to Alyssa Liu. But on the fourth anniversary of the war, it's pretty depressing that we're here. It's also inspiring that the Ukrainians have fought it off for this long, but it's pretty depressing that that's still the state of play. It is. But again, you know, the adversary that they face doesn't want. want to stop the war for a variety of reasons. Putin, his economy, is now wholly dependent on keeping

this going. There's some very good analysis that's been produced by Russian economic experts that say, you know, the Russian economy is not going to collapse, but it is going to contract considerably and has begun to do so already. And, you know, all of the money that's going into the defense sector is money that's not going into basic civil services and, you know, things that would otherwise keep the economy growing. Added to which, you know, he is, he is a belligerent revanchist who wants to reconstitute as much of the former Soviet Union as possible. And Ukraine is the biggest prize in that objective, right? You know, there's sort of double bookkeeping on the Russian side here. On the one hand, he sees a mug and a dupe and an imbecile in Donald Trump, somebody who can be easily

manipulated and flattered and persuaded to do, at least to say the right things about Putin. On the other hand, and this is important because it gets lost in the noise of how we talk about Trump and Russia. On the other hand, there is an element within the Russian government, particularly what's known as the Siloviki, the security apparatus, the strong men, that will never, ever believe that the United States will be anything other than hostile to Russia. The U.S. remains the main adversary of Russia. That's not going to change with, it could be Hillary or Bush or Trump in the White House, the same thing.

And the evidence that they would produce to justify that is U.S. intelligence is, as one active intelligence officer told me, balls deep in Ukraine, to the point that how did we know within minutes that Putin was telling a lie when he said the Ukrainians tried to drone my house in Valdai? the CIA provides targeting packages to the Ukrainians, not just to target Russian positions in occupied Ukraine, but also to target Russian positions inside Russian territory, including and especially the energy infrastructure. So one thing Donald Trump is okay with, and this goes also to his psychology. He wants to make a deal with Putin. He wants rapprochement, if not strategic realignment, but not at the expense, not at the expense of America being top dog.

He likes to see the Russians bleed financially. So that's why we're going after the shadow fleet, right, seizing these ships that are transporting oil in violation of international sanctions. That's okay. Zolinsky doesn't matter in Putin and Trump's eyes. He's this disposable entity. Ukraine itself is just, it's part of a chessboard that is going to be decided between the great powers of the U.S. and Russia. But this puts the Ukrainians in a very difficult position, which is they are reliant on the United States for the intelligence and for certain bits of hardware such as Patriot long-range air defense systems, rocket artillery, such as attackums and gimlers that are shot by the high mars. We don't give that stuff to them anymore,

as Donald Trump is very keen to point out. We sell it to third parties, particularly NATO countries, but also now Australia and New Zealand and others. Japan, I think, is buying it too through this mechanism known as Pearl. So, you know, for Trump, he's okay with, even though he says he wants to wrap this thing up and the war has to come to an end, people are dying, he's not so keen on peace that he doesn't want to make a profit off of the war, right? And he always mentions, you notice this, whenever he beats up on Zelensky or he hates on Ukraine, he always brings up Pearl, his baby. So he's like, oh, the Europeans, they pay for everything and they pay in full. They pay in full for everything. The U.S. has reduced its support, security support for Ukraine

and financial and humanitarian support by 99% since Trump came to office, according to the Keele Institute of World Economy, a German think tank. The Europeans have stepped up upwards of 50% for the humanitarian financial and upwards of 60% on the military hardware. In spite of that, how come the Europeans aren't leading the diplomatic process? Why does Steve Whitkoff and Jernick, why do these two imbeciles get to decide the fate of millions when there's no skin in the game there, apart from what the CIA is doing, which they don't have any awareness of. This is the kind of paradox here. Trump wants, or he pretends to want to see Europe, spend more on defense, stand on its own two feet, you know, inherit the mantle of its own security architecture, and no more Pax Americana.

But he doesn't want them to do so to the degree that they say to the United States, we don't want to buy your weapons anymore. And oh, by the way, your seat as chairman of of the board, the peace board for Ukraine. That's now forfeit. We're taking it over. So he's trying to have it every which way. And I think the Europeans are getting, they're getting religion on the fact that he shouldn't. Maybe that's being too optimistic because the Europeans have let me down before. But I'm trying to keep them very much on that page. I do feel like it's, it's Groundhog Day, Palm Springs, when we talk about this topic. But that is, that remains a state of play. Did you watch the figure skating? Did you watch Alyssa Lou?

Did you see? Have you seen her skate? Are you a figure skating? I have not watched any of the Olympics. No. It's because you're not a patriot or? What's Patriot? Oh, okay, because it's an American team. Yeah, okay, that's nice. No, but there was a figure skater in the Olympics called Michael Weiss who fell on his ass. So I think that's... How do you do?

Well, he very badly. Apparently, you fall on your ass, you know, you win the Olympics or get a gold medal. So I think subconsciously I've treated that as a reason not to watch. these sports competitions. Hopefully it doesn't foreshadow something for you in your life. Maybe I'll persuade you. Let me try to persuade you on this. I didn't get to watch it live, unfortunately, because we're live at the theater here in Minnesota for our live show.

But when I came back, I watched it in bed and got very moved. The young woman's from the Bay Area, Alyssa Liu. She won Olympic Gold in figure skating, free skate. She joins Sarah Hughes, Sarah Lipinski, Christy Yamaguchi, Dorothy Hamill. It's a very elite list. Her father, Arthur Liu, was born in a small mountain village in Sichuan province in China. He fled China after becoming a wanted man because of his involvement in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989. He comes here, has a daughter, ends up having to single parent her, comes a citizen.

That daughter, Alyssa, is a woke California lib. She's repin Mac Dre. She's got dyed hair. Her father is a refugee, and she's achieving glory with her. American flag. Like, that's fucking America. That is America. I was a little perturbed

when after I watched it to go on to social media and see a lot of MAGIS celebrating her online. And I was thinking to myself, these people are trying to deport, detain, and deny the next Alyssa Lou right now. And I feel like we should be

highlighting this and pointing it out and honoring her and reminding people. I feel like a lot of Americans have forgotten why we liked the Reaganite shining city on the Hill version of people wanting to come here to flee communism. And these fuckers have been taking the people fleeing communism in Venezuela and putting them in detention centers and sending them to El Salvador.

And, you know, maybe one of those, maybe the child of one of those Venezuelans is our next figure skating great or whatever, baseball or soccer or anything, engineering tech. And, you know, this is the American story. And she is charming. It is. I loved it. And you should, you should embrace it. I do embrace it. You know, to bring it full circle, you know, this is one element of the Rubio speech that kind of resonated. You know, he talked about we're children of Europe and he mentioned his Spanish ancestry going back 250 years and, you know, the Scots-Irish who built the Midwest and the Germans and so on and so forth. But yes, it extends beyond Europe now, doesn't it? I mean, there are plenty of people from Latin America. There are plenty of people from Asia Pacific who come to the United States and, you know, raise from Europe.

families who, you know, their children go on to get university degrees and to become civil servants and politicians and doctors and so on. And yes, that should be celebrated. And it's interesting that Maga chooses to celebrate that probably only in sort of contrast to other countries of the world doing well. Again, this comes to this sort of Trumpian notion of we like to, you know, work with our enemies and berate our friends, but always, always, always, always, we're number one, never at our own expense. So I guess we can celebrate immigrants when they make America great again, but not when they actually live here and try to make a life for themselves.

Then they get thrown into Csot or whatever it's called in El Salvador. Yeah, I mean, I do think you hear about it. It's stereotyped. You know, the dyed hair, California lib girl with the nose ring. You know, this is what Mago was fighting against, or there she was. That is America, baby. This is America. It's Alyssa Liu. It's also Michael Weiss. You can be an American and not watch the Olympics. How do I stay abreast of all of the pressing topics of geopolitics and foreign affairs so I can be on the bulwark if I'm busy watching the fucking Olympics, Tim?

I mean, it doesn't, I'm only one person, you know, I don't have the time in the day. But by the way, I wanted to say dyed hair, nose rings. I see a lot of right-wing maga-types who dress like, you know, Janine Garofalo and Jen Exeter's did. in the 90s. I mean, Mar-a-Lago face, there ain't nothing like wholesome Norman Rockwell about that either. So I don't know, man. Your physical sort of stereotypes

need to shift a little bit here. They got update their stereotypes, right? It's all part of the patchwork. Beautiful country. Alyssa Lou Gold, what a win. Thank you all for being here with us on this show. And man, just once again, it was such a joy to see everybody in

Minneapolis. It was good for the soul. everybody have a wonderful weekend. I'm going to be on Sunday live with Bill Crystal on Substack. He has a Sunday deal. So we're going to flip it where he gets to interview me. And we might have a sub for him on Monday. So I'll see you all Sunday or Monday. Have a great weekend.

Peace. The board podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brough.