The Bulwark Podcast - S2 Ep1043: Michael Weiss: All Bribes Accepted

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

American taxpayers may have flown Donald Trump to the Middle East, but he's not there to negotiate on behalf of our strategic or national interests—he's on the prowl for goodies from the people who get what makes him tick. Like, the new Syrian president offering a Trump Tower in Damascus: Zap, sanctions on Syria are over. Or the jumbo jet-giving Qataris requesting that Trump go 'easy' on Iran: 'Not a problem, no sirree.' Sorry to all the hawkish Trump voters out there who thought he'd deliver a maximum pressure campaign on Tehran. Plus, Russia's Potemkin peace talks with Ukraine, and another installment from ICE's cold-blooded deportation campaign. Michael Weiss joins join Tim Miller. show notes Details on Qatar's 747 that no one wanted and is now being 'gifted' to Trump NYT on Trump's expensive mini war vs. the Houthis that achieved nothing (gift)  Rep. Garcia confronting Kristi Noem about Andry, the gay makeup artist The Triad on the new Afrikaner refugee who has thoughts about Jews 

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Sarah Longwell and John Lovett, we are going to be hosting a live show, fundraiser and protest in support of freeing Andre. Andre is, all of you know, is the makeup artist that our government has disappeared to El Salvador. Robert Garcia was yesterday grilling, he's a congressman from California, was grilling Kristi Noem about whether we have proof of life for Andre, whether she who's gone to visit and done pinup pictures in front of the prisoners, we know is able to just guarantee that at least we know that these people that we've disappeared with no due process are still living. She refused to do that in a bout as grotesque a way as imaginable, though it's about what

you would expect from our Secretary of Homeland Security. So we want to make sure we're bringing attention to this, making sure that it is not lost, it's not forgotten. And we want to do it at a moment where there's going to be a lot of people in DC. So if you are a gay, if you're a DC resident, if you're a gay ally and want to come party with us, but also be righteous and passionate in our support for those we've wrongfully sent to El Salvador. We'd love to see you June 6th, Washington DC.

Tickets are going to be on sale maybe tomorrow, maybe Saturday. So check out the Bulwark site, check out Crooked Sites. And on Monday, I'll make sure to give you guys the details once it is fully live. Also, for some new listeners who want more of my backstory on being a Republican, I did Hassan Minaj's show. So we're going to include a link in the show notes to that today. I told you I've been a pod slot lately. I've been out there in these streets doing podcasts and Hassan wanted to, you know, kind of give me a little shit about my

past and I can take it. I enjoy that. And, you know, sometimes I get feedback from people who are new who don't, you know, the Bullock OGs have heard this a million times, but for newer folks who are interested in my trajectory, go check out that. I appreciate Hassan having me on. Also, we're getting into all foreign policy today. So if you just want some other political hot takes, me and Sarah and JVL were on one last night on TNL. So you can check out the next level as well. One last thing before we get to our guests on the immigration front.

I've been meaning to mention this. I want to see which day I tweeted this. It was Monday and I just, it's been, I haven't been able to get to it on the podcast. I believe I've mentioned on the show the story of Jimena Arias-Christobal. That's a young woman in Georgia, in Dalton, Georgia, who had just graduated high school, was brought to this country from Mexico when she was four. She was pulled over for initially the, what the allegation what the police told us was that She did not have her turn signal on when she made a right turn and then did not have her license on her They realized she is not documented

they shackled her and sent her to a detention center three hours away in Georgia as they process her for deportation to a country that she has not lived in since she was a very small child. If she'd come in a different year, she came a little after the time to qualify for DACA. You might be familiar with that. Folks, we tried to pass the DREAM Act several times, which would have given legal status to people who are brought to this country as children and to check certain metrics such as not doing crimes, going to school, learning English. Jimena had done all of that and we are, I guess, holding her in a cell for some reason.

I don't know what fear of flight. I don't understand cruelty, why we feel like we need to do that. And then we're going to send her back to our home country. The whole story is just sick as it is, that this is what is happening with the country, that there aren't other ways that we can't deal with this. Obviously, criminals should be jailed, should be sent back to their country. People that came here legally as grownups, you know, I'm going to have probably more liberal views on that than some others, but I understand that there can have to be rules and some of those folks are going to end up being deported and that's just the nature of our system.

But who's for this? Besides like Gollum, Stephen Miller and Tom Homan and a few other people replying to me on X who, you know, are trying to get off on other people's pain. Like the idea that we're going to send this young woman who's done nothing wrong back to a country she hasn't lived in because she didn't have her turn signal on is fucking outrageous and it is enraging. But if you're ready to be more enraged, she actually did have her turn signal on. Here's a press release that came out on Monday from the Dalton Police Department. After a review

of the dash cam video of the traffic stop, it was determined that Ms. Arias Christobal's vehicle was similar to the offending vehicle, but was not the vehicle that made the improper turn. City of Dalton administrator was notified by the police chief that a dismissal for the improper turn citation was in process after review of the dashcam. Great news, I guess. She's not going to get a traffic ticket any longer. Here's the problem.

She still remains in ICE detention facing deportation. You just can't hate these people enough, honestly. That's just like this young woman has done nothing wrong, did nothing wrong, did not come to this country out of her own volition illegally. She was brought here. She went to school. She's following traffic laws apparently. And we are sending her out because we want the country to be more like China, I guess.

We want to be more like some authoritarian state. And we no longer want to be a place that welcomes folks from around the world who are looking for opportunity as we've been for the entire history of the country. That is, unless you're one of the 59 white Afrikaners who we're going to bring in, one of whom, you should check out JBL's triad from yesterday, has a lot of very nasty things to say about Jews. So I guess that's where we're at in this country right now when it comes to immigration. It's tough to, you know, with all the crazy stuff in the news to get to all these individual

cases, but this one was so outrageous. I wanted to make sure not to miss it and to highlight it. So up next, let's get our foreign policy PhD. We're welcoming back a favorite. He's the editor of the Insider, a Russia-focused media outlet, and he's a contributing editor at New Lines Magazine. He was an investigative reporter for CNN and the author of ISIS Inside the Army of Terror. It's Michael Weiss.

What's up, man? Hey, man. How's it going? Greetings from London. You had a boozy brunch? I had a boozy brunch. That's exciting. With an international man of mystery.

I love that. Other than myself, that is. I love that. Hopefully you can have some gossip for us for the podcast. I was watching the news this week, and I did have one big picture question before we started kind of getting into the details. I wondered if you, at any point this week,

have started to think to yourself, this is all too stupid. Maybe I shouldn't have been a foreign policy journalist. Maybe I should have just been a shepherd or something, you know, a pursuit of different passion. My alternate blue sky livelihood would have been raising Shetland sheepdogs in some English shire. Probably why I came back to London to escape the, what is it?

The Moronic Inferno? Was that Saul Bellows term for the United States? That's what we become. Yeah. Yeah. No, look, as much as everything is just incredibly stupid, it also makes sense in a weird way. I mean, I was thinking about this.

So Trump goes to the Middle East. Everyone he's meeting with has been in power forever, or will be in power forever. They've had eight years to take the measure of this guy, and they've realized, oh, okay, so he's not an American president like we're used to, where we have to barter about strategic and national interests, and there's some horse trading and all that. We just have to bribe him like we would anybody in our part of the world. It's very clever of the Qataris to give a 13-year-old jet worth $400 million, but which

will require years of refurbishing, which includes, by the way, cleaning out the spyware that I'm sure the Qataris and probably the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians have been placed in it, and then installing all the kit that the Americans will require for intelligence collection. That's going to cost a billion dollars. In other words, Donald Trump takes a bribe by a foreign power, which will cost the US taxpayers $600 million. It's pretty incredible, like a masterstroke of statecraft. And then you've got, you know, Ahmed al-Sharah, the jihadi president of Syria, former jihadi,

who says, well, why don't you just build a Trump Tower in Damascus? And lo and behold, sanctions are magically lifted. And Trump is not only posing with this guy, who is a top operative of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and then the Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's lieutenant who was dispatched into Syria to set up the ISIS franchise there or the ISI franchise there, which became ISIS. But it was on the US terrorism list up until very recently. And then Trump not only poses smiling with the guy, but says, oh, you know, he's quite attractive.

He's charismatic. He's a real fighter. You know, like he's just met like Muhammad Ali or something. It's just, you know, it's transactional. It's like so cosmically narcissistic. But I guess this is just the way the world works and everyone's figuring it out. Yeah. So this is the question about the way the world works. Just really quick, a quick aside of the cuttary plane, because I haven't had a chance to get to this, David from Plug

This. I didn't realize this. That plane's actually been for sale since 2020 and nobody would buy it. So it was also a nice and easy bribe. And the other thing I didn't realize is that the Royal Family also offloaded a jet to Turkey, to Erdogan in 2018, and that jet was even fancier. So we're getting sloppy seconds when it comes to the bribes. Though like the Winnie the Pooh and the Tuxedo MAGA guys have looked at this Trump trip and they've tried to like fashion onto it a much more sophisticated explanation for what's happening than what you just laid out that he's easy to bribe. And that is that the neocon neoliberal world order is over, where we care about values and we try to impute these values onto

these kind of sand dictators that will never do that. And instead, what we have is a new order that is based just totally on our interests, where we just horse trade with these guys. Because we're America and we understand capitalism, we do good deals. And that's actually a much more sophisticated thing to do than the naive previous regime where they cared about these things like democracy and women's rights and the lives of journalists and etc. What do you make of that? That this is, that there is a sophisticated foreign policy turn here rather than just

Donald Trump liking to get free gaudy stuff? Well, first of all, there's no stability or reliability to anything this guy does. So tomorrow he can decide, well, actually, I made a mistake. I'm going to reimpose sanctions on Syria. Right? Let's talk about the Neo-Con world order. Who's the biggest loser of this trip to the Gulf? Benjamin Netanyahu. Right? Donald Trump's bestie, Israeli Prime Minister, a man who made no mystery of the fact that he was, I mean, actively campaigning for Trump's reelection and then waiting for Trump's inauguration

to do all kinds of deals. Finish the war in Gaza per Netanyahu, which is, as soon as the war started, I thought the Israelis are never gonna leave. There's not going to be a withdrawal. They're not going to slot in the Palestinian authority, there. This is going to be full on permanent occupation. And it certainly looks like that's the way it's

tending. But also, let's get the Americans to now take out Iran's nuclear program by force, which is what's something the Israelis have been begging every administration since George W. Bush to do. Now it looks like both those things are not well, the permanent occupation of Gaza, I think Trump just said again today, let's make it a free zone, an American run free zone, beachfront property for all, et cetera, et cetera. We'll see where that goes.

But it certainly looks to me and to Middle East watchers like where things are headed with respect to Iran's nuclear file is JCPOA 2.0. So- Which is the Iran deal for the non-acronym listeners, Obama Iran deal. I can only imagine like the group therapy bills being sustained by AIPAC and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the guys have been like angling for maximum pressure. I got a good quote for you on this this morning before you go down this route, because I've been wondering when we're going to hear from Tom Cotton on this, because he's got

to be really upset. I'm sure we'll be hearing from him any minute. Here's what Trump said. Talk about Qatar. Nobody's going to break that relationship with Iran. Iran is lucky to have the emir of Qatar, because he's actually fighting for them. He doesn't want us to do a vicious blow to Iran. He says, you can make a deal. Iran should say a big thank you to Qatar.

So that's just Trump basically saying that because the Emir gave me this plane and because we're doing these deals, I'm just going to chill with Iran. Yeah. And the Iranians are dangling multi hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars of trade deals that could commence with the lifting of Iran sanctions, which they're hoping that will happen if they cut a deal. So, okay, I could see how optically people would say this is the end of the neocon world order. But let's look at the other side of the ledger.

It was Obama and the progressive realists who said, well, actually, you know, taking out Bashar al-Assad would be a major own goal. We don't have any strategic interest in Syria. We want to recalibrate with Iran, in other words, create a kind of equilibrium between the Shia hegemon in the region and the Sunni-led Gulf Arab states, principally Saudi Arabia. Obama was on record with Jeffrey Goldberg and others saying pretty much that, a strategic realignment of America's priorities in the region. But Syria was always kind of the obstacle to this, right? Like we kind of supported a Syrian insurgency, but didn't give them enough weapons and certainly didn't support them to overthrow the regime. We wanted to apply a sufficient amount

of pressure to get Bashar al-Assad to negotiate his removal, but really the fundamentals of his Ba'athist regime would stay in place. Up until the end of the Biden administration, Brett McGurk was the biggest, most vocal proponent of keeping Assad in place, lifting sanctions on Assad's regime. That was something he wanted to do because the Emiratis were pushing him and other Gulf Arab states. It looked like Assad was coming in from the cold There was going to be full rapprochement and what happened what we've discussed this on a previous program The Turks said we cannot do a deal with this man particularly about the Kurdish issue

which is the the principal overriding Turkish national security concern and HTS which has been in this sort of garrison concern. And HTS, which has been in this sort of garrison enclave in Idlib for eight years, building its own statelet with Turkish largesse and under a Turkish garrison rule, has been championing at the bit to do an offensive. They let them out. And the offensive was a catastrophic success, blew everybody's mind, not least of all the Turks. They didn't expect it to lead to regime change, but that's what happened. The mantra of the anti-Neocons and the realists forever was there is no military solution to Syria, only a diplomatic one.

Well, no. It turns out there was a military solution to Syria. Although the Turks didn't intervene directly, they certainly intervened indirectly, as Donald Trump himself was joking when he was sat next to Netanyahu in the Oval Office several weeks ago. You kind of have the United States now certifying what looks to be a pretty hawkish interventionist policy in one country in the Middle East by recognizing Al-Shara, lifting sanctions. I'm a little bit confused how people seem to come up with a coherent or sensible worldview here.

There's a little from column A, a little from column B. But again, we come back to the core issue, which is this is a man who is incredibly impressionable. Somebody has a line that I quite like. He's like a seat cushion. He bears the impression of the last ass to sit on him, right? Incredibly impressionable and just eminently bribeable. You know, it's not what's in it for my country,

it's what's in it for me. Ooh, you wanna give me a plane? Awesome. Who's going to give them a mega yacht next? You're going to build my casinos and my hotels in your countries? Amazing. That's how he does business. I think I don't fault these Gulf kleptocracies and autocracies from just figuring this out. I mean, they have their own interests to pursue

and to prosecute and good on them, I suppose. But yeah, it's a terrible state to be in in this country when, I mean, all of the crimes, all of the corruption, it's not hidden. It's not the kind of thing that the Washington Post has to spend two years investigating. It's happening under the Klee lights. It's happening on 24 hour, under the Klee lights. It's happening

on 24-hour cable news networks in plain sight. And we're all kind of like, oh, okay, I guess the new state is growing. Bill Kressel wrote about this this morning in our newsletter. People should check that out. But out in the openness of this is, like, they say it. They're like, look, this isn't, it's not a crime. It's not corruption. We're just doing it, right? And I think that that is part of the thing they use as a shield. I just look at it and think, isn't that kind of humiliating? I mean, Trump was touting, the White House was touting, let me pull this up here, the Trump effect, all caps, they'd secured 1.2 trillion in Qatari investment in the US.

I mean, the Qataris have a $300 billion GDP. The 55th largest GDP in the world. Why are we just, why are we like bending the knee in front of like this tiny regional Middle East autocracy? For Donald Trump to be the last man in Washington, DC to be bought by the Qataris, I mean, that's worthy of a Joseph Heller novel or at least a Netflix limited series, right? I mean, that is the most hilarious thing in the world. The Wall Street Journal, everybody's writing pieces now about cuttary influence peddling

and how they purchased universities and institutions and massive lobbying campaign. And all they had to do is give this guy a jet, an old jet that nobody else wants to buy. It's utterly hilarious. Hey, I got to tell you about this game changing product I used before night out with drinks. It's called pre-alcohol. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, I don't bounce back the next day like I used to. And I never bounced back that well. I come from a long line of people with weak tummies. And as a result, I have to make a choice. I can either have a great night or a great next day.

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off I don't know I guess this is more my boat than yours, but, but I'm obsessed with it. It's like the whole notion of mega was this braggadocio. We're going to make America great again. America is this world leader. We don't need all these other countries. Like everybody else has been flying around the world getting taken advantage of. It's like, how do you combine that?

Oh, we have this liquid gold underneath our feet and all this. Why do we need, you know what I mean? To me, there's a little bit of a humiliating element to this that Trump just has to, he's lavishly just kind of tossing the MBS's salad yesterday and we're getting old leftovers from Qatar. It's like, why? I mean, we have natural gas, we got oil. What is the point of this?

I remember when Obama bowed, like Obama did a little, just a little kind of bow for like maybe this far wasn't really a bow and Fox was wall to wall on that. I mean, Trump is fully prostate on the ground. He is, and I mean, yeah, it's not a particularly original insight to say that this is a guy with a real penchant for strong men. And you know, one of my favorite anecdotes from sort of the Cold War, Soviet period, and the reason why so many Western intellectuals supported Stalin.

I think I've mentioned this on the show before Malcolm Muggeridge was talking about his friend Sidney and Butrus Webb, because he had just got back from Moscow in the 1930s, and the scales fell from his eyes. He saw what Stalinism really was, and he couldn't understand why are all his left-wing intellectual friends still supportive of this sort of wretched regime. And he said, oh, it's because, you know,

Stalin is doing to intellectuals over there what the webs would like to be doing to intellectuals in London, right? So don't discount the fact that what Donald Trump sees in these dictators and these these autocrats and these strongmen is Exactly what he would like to do in the United States Yeah He wants to turn the United States into a version of this right and his his his deepest frustration

Certainly from term one and he's made no secret of trying to eliminate anybody who might stand in the way of accomplishing this in term two, is that, you know, what he would call the deep state, but you and I would call just the normal petty bureaucracy and civil service fetters of any liberal democracy, he hates it, because it stops him in his tracks from just imposing his will. It's interesting to hear somebody like Steve Witkoff who very sort of nakedly says, oh, we'll get the Iranians to do a deal because Donald Trump can bend anyone by force of his

own personality. That is what you say of a totalitarian tyrant, right? That he is so charismatic and he embodies capital H history and he's in this place for a reason, almost a divinely anointed position. Everyone must submit, everyone must do his bidding. And one of the things we've also seen, and I keep telling my Ukrainian friends this,

is actually, no, Donald Trump can be resisted. He can be told no. He can be wrangled with and fought and he usually caves. Cause after a while he gets bored and frustrated and exasperated. Look at the Chinese. Look at the whole tariffs regime he's trying to put into place. I slipped there by saying that Trump got prostate in front of MBS. That was maybe a Freudian slip. Well, you did say that he was tossing MBS' salad.

So I think we know where the metaphoric language is here too. Yeah, prostrate is the word I was looking for there. You know, it's not just Trump that likes the accouterment of all that. It's a good insight. It's also his fans. You notice in social media, he's in the UAE this morning, the UAE, Sheikh Mohammed welcomed him and it's kind of this royal greeting. They've got the drums, they've got the drums and all of the, you know, just the kind of

shit we don't do here. It's a little gauche. But all of his super fans are posting about like, look how hard this goes, like Trump in the Middle East, you know? I mean, some of them, like Trump himself, some of them want the actual autocracy part of it. You know, they want to have total control and not want to give control away. They don't want liberal democracy. And some of them just, I think, although just kind of like the big daddy, kind of gaudy, you know, elements of this and feel like that is like what is strong, not, you know, the trappings of a liberal democracy.

You know, I mean, what do these regimes do to lure people, particularly the prototypical MAGA acolyte, sort of either low tier or middle tier, is the failed political operative or the wannabe journalist who started a blog which said that January 6 never happened or it was an FBI conspiracy. Now they're running important agencies in the state. They're all losers and failures who have made the show. One of the reasons they made the show is exactly this type of regime or this type of political

element, usually foreign powers, and it's not just in the Middle East. Look at Hungary, look at Russia, look at these other countries where populist or even pre-populist dictatorships have formed. They cater to their every need and whim. They see the vulnerability, they see the shortcoming in these types of psychological archetypes and they just say, oh, we'll fly you first class. We'll put you up at a five-star hotel You like girls will get you girls. You could never get back home because they wouldn't talk to you You know, we'll give you caviar. We'll give you champagne We'll treat you like a potentate even though you have no right to be well, here's Donald Trump who is

Essentially a potentate himself or an oligarch an American oligarch, but everyone's looking at him and saying, look at the way he's being treated. Yeah, that's exactly it. That's what we all want. And he can bring that to all of us. That's his magic power in the United States. He will lift up sort of the losers and the burnouts and the dregs and give them security clearances and give them government portfolios and give them the power to take revenge on those who denied them all of these things all of these luxuries and all of these privileges right i mean it's it's the mission percent tomorrow like that's that's what what is really the kind of i think that rock ideology of this movement And he plays it brilliantly. I will be the first to say, I think Trump is a political genius without any exceptions. I mean, I don't like the political genius. I don't like what he's managed to achieve with it. But he has managed to do almost the impossible, come back from multiple criminal convictions.

I mean, I was just chatting today with somebody, okay, where's the compromise on Trump that maybe the Russians have or the Chinese have? What compromise? What could you possibly have on this guy that hasn't already been ventilated in public or adjudicated in a court of law? I mean, sex crimes? Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.

Financial impropriety? He was awaiting sentencing, I think, and then he got elected president. You know, everybody always wants to pee tape, but the problem is, is he's a germaphobe. So even if there were a pee tape, it'd probably be other people peeing on each other, which I don't think would probably hurt him that much. Yes. But as I remind everyone, urine is sterile. So you can be a germaphobe and not necessarily a versatile.

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As much as I enjoy doing psychoanalysis of the Trump bootlickers with you, we had to do a little bit on the actual, well, are they actual negotiations? The fake, the Temkin negotiations that are happening in Turkey. So Zelensky arrived in Turkey today a little before we got on. He said Ukraine brought the highest level delegation. Trump had yesterday been suggesting that a breakthrough might be coming and there was buzz that he'd go to Turkey to meet with Putin and Zelensky. But then the Kremlin pulled the football out from underneath them again. Putin's not coming. Some lowlevel flunkies are going. Trump earlier today says, well, why would Putin have gone if I didn't go? So talk to us about the state of play of the negotiations here.

Well, I mean, the first thing you have to realize is that Putin wants to reactivate this Istanbul, quote unquote, peace process, which was inaugurated in 2022 at the start of the full-scale invasion when Russian tanks were literally ring-fencing the city of Kiev. Ukraine was in a quite vulnerable position. What these talks amounted to wasn't how to stop the war, it was how to get at the, quote, root causes of the war. In other words, they want to do regime change in Ukraine, which means Zelensky out. They want to install a pro-Russian satrap to run the country.

They want Ukraine completely demilitarized. They want Ukraine nowhere near NATO, even though various presidents, including the last one, had said that Ukraine is not going to join NATO in the near future. They want to really re-litigate the post-Cold War European security architecture. They want US troops out of NATO's eastern flank. They want a whole kit and caboodle of things here, which doesn't just stop at Ukraine's borders. To go to Istanbul now in 2025, when Russia has a million soldiers either dead or wounded much of its army has been hollowed out through attritional

Warfare over the last three years, you know international sanctions regime on Russia still in place Russia does not control nearly, you know as much territory as it did in 2022 and basically act as if Russia is still in that position of power is Ludicrous. I think Zelensky quite rightly saw what this was about and called both Trump and Putin's bluff and said, oh, okay, great. I'll go to Istanbul, but I expect to negotiate with my direct peer, which is Vladimir Putin. The Russians say Zelensky is illegitimate, so Putin cannot sit across from Zelensky and

treat him as a peer without completely undermining his own position. So they send, you know, Medinsky, former culture minister, propagandist, very low-level, flunky, doesn't have a lot of wasta. They're sending the same team, basically, that they sent in 2022. So it's just a reboot of what they tried and failed to do back then. Now the danger here is, you know, Zelensky has a real, a proper team in place. He's got a foreign minister there. He's got significant, you know, high level government officials, not least of all himself.

But what the Russians are trying to do is do this sort of Potemkin theater and then say, well, we had our direct talks. The Ukrainians are intransigent, they will not come to the table, they will not make concessions, and then basically cajole Donald Trump into applying even more pressure on the Ukrainians, which he's very susceptible of doing, right?

He does not extract anything from the Russians. He signed off on this European led initiative, which said, you have until this past Monday to do a 30 day ceasefire. If you don't, we will impose crippling new sanctions. Well, it's now Thursday. How the sanctions coming? Where are the sanctions?

Right. And so the Europeans, unfortunately, look a bit weak and humiliated by not sticking to their own guns on this. They wrote the Americans, they wrote Trump into this. And then just with a bright, shiny new object that Putin threw out there, Trump said, amazing, the potential for peace in our time and completely through his own plan

or a plan to which he was a party to under the bus in favor of a Russian active measure. So there's not gonna be a breakthrough here. The question is, where does Trump come out on all of this? And if history is our guide, he's going to say, well, it's the Ukrainians now that are being obnoxious and they should really, they need to look reality in the face here and they're not going to get back all of their territory. We're not sending our troops.

They're not going to be in NATO. They need to bend the knee. We'll see. Other people are suggesting that, well, actually he's become more exasperated and angry at the Russians because he sees them as the spoiler. So the US ambassador to NATO was suggesting as much recently. I mean, look, I will say this, as I play devil's advocate with myself, right? There are certain things Trump has not done yet that he could have done on day one.

He could have ended all security assistance and all intelligence sharing. And I don't mean that temporary moratorium that he did as a way to punish the Ukrainians needlessly. He could have ended all that he hasn't. He could have not agreed to do direct arm sales to Ukraine. He has he could have tried to scupper an F 16 spare parts deal with the Ukrainians. He hasn't done that either. Most important, because this is what Ukraine needs the most right now, the Germans are

providing the Ukrainians, as of last week, 100 Patriot missiles, 125 rockets for rocket artillery, gimlers, and probably also attack them. The only way the Germans are able to do that is with America's authorization because of the end user agreement on weapons systems. My argument is this. Let's say Trump continues to say, well, I've got to wash my hands of this now. These two rascally combatants don't like each other. I'm done.

I'm tired. I got my jet from Qatar. I'm now in the Middle East, baby. I'm through. I got my jet from Qatar. I'm now in the Middle East, baby. I'm through with Europe." Well, okay, if that's what you do, but then the status quo is maintained, especially if you allow the Europeans to donate weapons that they buy from the United States to Ukraine, then we're not in such a terrible state. The worst case scenario is, he says, I'm going all after the Ukrainians. I am tearing up everything Intel

sharing. I will not allow Lockheed and Raytheon kit that we sell to Germany and France and the UK to be donated to Ukraine. That would be a real escalation in favor of the Russia. And if he does that though, Tim, in the absence of any grand bargain, there's going to be resistance, not just from the Europeans and not just from ourselves and people who support Ukraine and the United States. You notice there are sort of cracks in the GOP MAGA coalition here. Ben Shapiro goes to Kyiv, sort of has taken with Zelensky, does his podcast and says, actually, there's all pressure on the Ukrainians, not on the Russians.

The New York Post, their entire team, editorially, is very pro-Ukraine. They will push against this. Fox News hits every once in a while. Jack Keane and others will get on air and say, this is ridiculous. We're just gifting the Russians everything in exchange for nothing. It's going to be a little problematic. That's not to say he won't do it because he's a sociopathic narcissist and he just does whatever the hell he wants, but there are institutional things in place that are going to make it a little more complicated for him to do that. That's the best case scenario I can envisage for Ukraine, that we continue to arm either directly or indirectly and it becomes a back of the New York Times story, which would benefit

all. It's off the front page, right? Well, I think that there is a potential, petulant Trump element to this, that he's annoyed that Putin didn't give him what he wants, because I can imagine that they were friends and expected that Putin was going to give him an easy way. Exactly. What's the status of the war just like militarily? As much change since we last talked?

No, it's not. I mean, it's very static. I was just meeting with Valeriy Zoluzhny, the former commander in chief. He's now the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK. I was meeting with one of his advisors and I said, well, what is the ambassador? He's convinced there's a 15 kilometer sort of buffer along the contact line, which is just, it's a no man's land of drones on both sides.

It makes it impossible for either side to have a major breakthrough. I mean, what the Russians are doing is they're actually, they're not using heavy armor. They're putting soldiers on motorbikes and kind of raiding Ukrainian positions across the line. And that can be kind of tactically a little bit dangerous for the Ukrainians, but by and large, things have remained the same. I mean, the Russians are struggling to move forward. Now, there's all this scuttlebutt, including from the Ukrainian side, about a potentially

massive Russian offensive that could be waged in the summer using fresh meat from the recruits that are being 30,000 to 40,000 a month. They're being called up by the Russians and paid fairly well. fresh meat from the recruits that are being 30 to 40,000 a month. They're being called up by the Russians and paid fairly well. We'll see. I mean, I've seen this story play out before. The Russians are really gearing up to do something massive, and then the time comes and it's rather anticlimactic.

But I have to be honest, it's not that bad for the Ukrainians right now. It's not great, but it's not that bad for the Ukrainians right now. You know, it's not great, but it's not catastrophic. And it could be a lot better for them if we sort of, you know, saw the facts as they are and saw the weak position that Russia is in and just made it even weaker. But we choose not to do that or our president chooses, of course, not to do that. Everyone's got a pro. Need tires? I've got a pro. Car making a weird sound? I've got a pro. The president chooses, of course, not to do. on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find your pro at your local Tread Experts. From tires to auto repair, we're always there.

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I want to update you on just two other things really quick that have been hard for me to follow because there's so much happening in the news. The first is on the hooties. I just kind of want to frame up our conversation with the hooties. Our secretary of defense who, you know, is in my business a couple of months ago, he gave a speech in front of any of his soldiers here this morning. I just want to play a little clip from it. We're restoring the warrior ethos. No more political correctness,

gender pronouns, DEI, CRT, or climate change. We're in the business of war fighting, accountabilities, standards, warriors, and lethality. Lethality. War fighting sounds good. On the hooties though, there was a New York Times story. By the way, he sounds like he's announcing WrestleMania. Are you sure that's what it sounds like? We are warfighting against those Hooties. We are warfighting. Here's the result of our warfighting so far under Hegseth. We spent about a billion dollars for nothing in the campaign against the Hooties. We had two planes fall into the sea. Houthi air defenses nearly struck an F-16 and F-35 fighter.

They did shoot down seven MQ Reaper drones and Donald Trump decided we're just going to kind of chill. So that didn't sound like a huge upgrade in war fighting from what we saw under previous administrations, but I don't know, maybe I'm interpreting that wrong. What do you think? No, and not only that, but withdrew from this campaign without informing the Israelis he was doing it. I mean, coming back to our original discussion of who he's willing to throw under the bus, including his closest, quote unquote, allies and friends. Yeah, look, I mean, it's not a bad thing to stop a terrorist organization from badly

disrupting international commerce. I don't know the intricacies of this campaign, why it failed. From what I understand, without actual boots on the ground, without a real intelligence capability in Yemen, which the Israelis haven't got to the degree that the United States has, it's going to be a very heavy lift for the Israelis to do alone what we were doing on their behalf or in concert with them.

But it's interesting too. I mean, you know, I think of that series of emojis that I guess Hegseth put into the signal chat. Jeffrey Goldberg was two fists and a big kaboom and an American flag. American flag fire. You know, now it's kind of like the wah-wah emoji, you know, where's this gone? Like the big eyes, bottom emoji. And notice Trump's response that, oh, the Houthis, they're tough hombres, they're quite brave. Bravery, I think, was the

word he chose, that they withstood this merciless campaign against them. Yeah, I mean, look, I see a man who does not want long term or any kind of strategic confrontation in that part of the world. Tactically, he's willing to do certain things. Took out Qasem Soleimani in 2020, had wide lasting repercussions.

We are still seeing the repercussions of that play out to this day, I would argue, including and especially in Syria, but this is not a guy who wants to go to war, right? And he certainly doesn't want to be lured or dragged into a war as second party to an ally in the region that may start one or finds itself in that position. So, you know, what do you see?

You see a kind of American recessional... You saw this with India-Pakistan too, which we're not talking about. Just like the whole JD Vance one day says, this is none of our business. Then the next day it's like, holy shit. It's very on brand for this administration to have a vice president who's probably his entire policy framework for India-Pakistan is, Jesus Christ, what can I do not to get my in-laws to move in with me?

So I got to put out the flames of this thing real quick. You know, I mean, like, is this a permanent ceasefire too? Or what happens if things flare up again over Kashmir or something else? I mean, is Donald Trump your man to put a lid on that? I don't know. I have my opinion. I just think it just shows the weakness that it's just like, look, I'm not, I'm not saying that we should be intervening in India, Pakistan.

It's just, I chose the shallowness of this switch that we were talking about earlier, right? That's like one day it's like, oh, well, this is none of our business. Like they're going to default to this is none of our business. And then it's like, oh, wait, well, sometimes events intervene. It has to be our business because we have a nuclear issue there or sometimes we get a bribe. So it's our business again now It's not coherent back to your point earlier. It's a feeling that we should not be involved

Until events intervene. Yes, all the MAGA guys made a big big hue and cry about you know, we go to pivot to China We go to deter the Chinese and does anyone realistically think that if China invaded Taiwan tomorrow Donald Trump is coming to the rescue here? No. No. I mean, the Chinese, funnily enough, are in favor of a 30-day ceasefire for Ukraine. They're more pro-Ukraine than the President of the United States, at least in terms of

where this coalition or this sort of aligned interests- And more capitalist than the President. And more capitalist. Something we discussed yesterday. Exactly. So, yeah, no, I mean, it's all, it's, it's, it's ad hoc, but it's also kind of predictable. You know, whatever he feels is his own bottom line. Whatever he feels is going to flatter him and enrich himself and his family. That's the play.

I just need to go to Michael White's school really quick. So I saw the news item come across about the Kurds, BKK, and they've like stopped fighting. Yeah, that's a big deal. I don't know. I have no idea what's happening. My note here is ask Michael Weiss what is happening with the Kurds. So that's my final question for you. So I think a lot of this also has to do again, you know, the Sultan Erdogan has played a

blinder in recent days. I mean, Syria, Libya, clearly his relationship with Trump, also his relationship with Zelensky and the Ukrainians, which doesn't really get much attention, although I've tried to put a spotlight on that. The Turks are actually much more pro-Ukraine than they appear, even though they get on okay with the Russians. But look, when I explained like why the Turks allowed HTS to go on the offensive is because they could not get Assad to do what they wanted with respect to the Kurdistan Workers' Party or its Syrian affiliate, which goes by the name of the YPG, or if you are CENTCOM-orientated, you call them the Syrian Democratic Forces.

We like to make a big show that actually it's very integrated and you've got lots of ethnicities and there's Arab. The PKK runs, it's the upper echelon of the SDF. In fact, a lot of the guys in the Syrian Democratic Forces are not even Kurds from Syria. They come from the Kandil Mountains. Turkey has been at war with the PKK for over 40 years. It's been a pretty nasty insurgency and counterinsurgency. A lot of bloodshed on both sides.

PKK used to blow up police stations and do motorcycle bombings in southeastern Turkey, and the Turks would just bomb the shit out of them, as Donald Trump might say. Also, not only in the Kandil, but now increasingly, we've seen them go on the offensive against them in Syria. What's happened is, well, the Syrians have a new government, that government has made an offer to the PKK Kurds of Syria, knowing that the United States is going to leave. And if the United States leaves, and there is not some kind of rapprochement there, that the

Turks will pour in and just put everyone to the sword. Right? So I think the PKK has sort of seen the writing on the wall and said, our interests are now political more than they are military, and we have to do a deal. If this sticks, I mean, it's the Middle East after all. What happens on Monday is undone on Tuesday. But if it sticks, it is a kind of momentous event.

I mean, it's one of the longest, most kind of, you know, broiling conflicts in the region. It doesn't get much attention in the West, but certainly in Turkey, it's everything. And if it comes to an end, then that's a good thing. It doesn't make Erdogan any less of an authoritarian or any cuddlier. I mean, he's still throwing journalists in prison. He still cracks down on political opponents, et cetera, et cetera. But that's a net positive.

By the way, nothing to do really with us, the United States. You know, I mean, honestly, some of the best things that have happened in the Middle East recently are almost as a direct result of benign neglect by Washington, not any kind of intervention. So I guess, you know, your Winnie the Pooh Maggots friends who say, oh, you know, America stay out. Well, there's a, there's a little bit of legitimacy there.

When we do less, more tends to occur, at least under the current political establishment. I'm for less. I'm for less too. Look, I'm for less too. I mean, I, you know, I'm my hawkish former Republican tendencies at times, but I'm for, there's certainly certain occasions where I'm for less. It's just the whole, the notion that we are going to rearrange the world and it's no longer

going to be in line with our values, but instead it's going to be aligned with like brown paper bag passing. I'm pretty skeptical. I'm pretty skeptical about that new world order, where we're like the Mexican president trying to get the cartels to come to the table by buying them off. I'm not sure that's going to play out well in the long term. Right. I mean, the Syrians, they never asked for Iraq-style occupation and nation building.

They just wanted the assistance to get rid of the dictator, and now he's gone. We're probably the last beneficiaries of this because we were so late to the table, but they're very pleased with how this is shaken out. You have quite a lot of pro-Trump Syrian Americans who were pro-Trump before because they saw that things were tending in this direction, if only because of his relationship with Erdogan and his belief that America should just leave and sort of let the region sort itself out. Also, Iran is on the back foot, right?

They're in a very weakened pro-straight position, not prostate position at the moment, which is probably why they want to come to the table and do a nuclear deal. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm not necessarily averse to some of the things that are happening in that part of the world, but the real tragedy here, Tim, is that we have a country that does share our values, a natural ally, the strongest army in Europe by orders of magnitude, all they're asking for, no American lives to be sacrificed or put in harm's way, all they're asking for is just give us the tools to finish what we didn't even start, but our enemy and your enemy started. And we treat them like the help. What have you done for us lately? You owe us, you know.

You thanked us. That's a good place to leave it. Michael Weiss, never prostrate. Appreciate your brief. As always, getting me smarter on this stuff. My long-winded brief, you mean to say. No, it was good. It was a brief. It was good. A tight 40 for us today. A tight 40. We'll see you again soon. All right? Have a safe flight. Sounds good, man. Thanks. All right. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullock

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