The fallout continues from Friday's trainwreck of an Oval Office meeting between Trump, JD Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Jon, Lovett, and Tommy break down whether things have improved or spiraled further since Friday's meeting—and whether we're witnessing the collapse of the postwar order. Plus, Trump vows that his tariffs on Mexico and Canada will go into effect, Elon Musk calls Social Security a "Ponzi scheme," and the White House announces a "Crypto Strategic Reserve" to stockpile five cryptocurrencies. Hmm, could it possibly be grift? For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.
Chapter 1: What sparked the Oval Office meeting fallout with Trump and Zelensky?
And then as Donald Trump prepares to give his big speech to Congress Tuesday night, we'll talk about the new debate on the left about how Democrats should be pushing on Trump and whether they should be pushing back at all. But first, guys, we got to talk about the absolute shit show of an Oval Office meeting on Friday where Trump and J.D.
Vance ganged up on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an ally whose country has been fighting off an invasion by Vladimir Putin, a brutal dictator who used to be our adversary. Hopefully you all got a chance to hear the bonus episode Tommy and Ben did about this over the weekend. A lot has happened since then. After Zelensky was basically kicked out of the White House because J.D.
Vance didn't think he was sufficiently grateful for U.S. support, didn't say thank you enough. Zelensky flew to London to meet with European leaders about negotiating a peace process that doesn't entail just giving Putin everything he wants. Meanwhile, the Russians could not be happier.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday that the Trump administration is, quote, rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision. Hard to argue with that after Axios reported that Trump was set to hold a meeting with J.D.
Chapter 2: How did Republicans react to the Ukraine meeting controversy?
Vance, Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz to talk about the idea of cutting off American aid to Ukraine altogether. Waltz told Fox News, quote, the American people's patience is not unlimited, their wallets are not unlimited, and our stockpiles and munitions are not unlimited.
If you're wondering how Republicans are feeling about all this, especially previously pro-Ukraine Republicans, here's a sample of their reaction to Friday's blowup.
Millions of American hearts swelled with overflowing pride today to watch President Trump put Zelensky in his place. Instead of showing gratitude, he interrupted and berated his hosts.
Am I embarrassed about Trump? I have never been more proud of the president. I was very proud of J.D. Vance.
It's going to be Putin and President Trump and the people on our side that will end up making this decision for the future of Ukraine.
This is one of the great moments in the history of American diplomacy. Jesus.
Did that start and end with Stephen Miller?
I think we know it swelled during that meeting, Stephen Miller.
Relax. These real housewives fucking... Luann wasn't grateful enough for the invitation.
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Chapter 3: Why is Trump's approach to Ukraine and Russia under scrutiny?
Love it. What was your take on the meeting? There's been a lot of speculation that Trump and Vance plan to ambush Zelensky. Maggie Haberman and other journalists who cover the White House are reporting that the Trump people are saying it was spontaneous. What do you think?
I have no idea. Like part of this is just like, none of this makes sense, right? Like none of the, none of like what they're saying aligns with what they're actually doing, right? Like I'm trying to like separate The meeting is disgusting, right? Like this is fucking disgusting. This is a guy flying from a war-torn country.
He basically saved his country in part by like sheer force of personality and personal bravery. He flies across the world to the United States, our ally up until three months ago. Now he's trying to grovel for his country's life to sign a mineral deal. That also doesn't make any sense. That doesn't include any security guarantees.
He's agreeing to do it because he's just trying to get through another day with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. He's sitting there. He's getting questions about why he's not wearing a fucking suit.
Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend.
Trump apparently said to the press corps, oh, this guy dressed up today.
Yeah. That was before. That was before the meeting. And so, like, he's in a waking nightmare. Like... The question I have is, OK, let's say all this played out behind the scenes, right? Like not in front of the cameras, like take away the aesthetics of it.
It's like, you know, in the morning, Marco Rubio thought signing this mineral deal and ostensibly becoming more entwined with Ukraine was a good idea. By the afternoon, it's no longer a good idea. And everything Trump is doing is making sense.
There's all these sort of like post hoc rationalizations for Donald Trump, like even in the days that have followed, like you go like try to read about this meeting and it's people saying, is Trump abandoning the World War II order for spheres of influence? Like, no, he's just a careening asshole. And there's this whole intellectual framework like evolving around him to justify what he's saying.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Trump's foreign policy vision?
And if you want to make this all a private discussion about the substance, don't have the fucking pool spray in there for 45 minutes.
Yeah, there's one moment where Zelensky calls him JD, and then JD calls him Mr. President. And so, like, you feel like it's quite personal, but, like, None of this should be personal, right? Like it's not just about Trump calling him a dictator. The United States sided with Putin a week earlier at the UN. Like these are supposed to be, it's all like Vance and even Rubio.
Like you go look, we'll talk about Rubio more in a minute. These guys were all like the end of America's namby-pamby, soft, emotional foreign policy is over. We're doing hard-nosed decisions based on pure rationality. And it's like, if that's the case, a fit of pique in a meeting shouldn't matter. It shouldn't matter at all. They are allowing this to be 100% personality-driven.
I liked David Sanger's piece on this, which is he's basically arguing that the overall goal here is that Trump wants to normalize relations with Russia, and Ukraine is standing in the way of that. Zelensky's standing in the way of that.
So with that larger context, any meeting, it could have gone better in terms of the theatrics of it, but it was always going to be Trump being like, this guy is an impediment to normalization with Russia, which is what I want.
And it's like, why do we want to normalize things with Russia so much? It's a broken economy. It's like a wartime economy now. They just make artillery shells that they use to kill Ukrainians. But one sort of under-discussed bizarre part of Trump's rant, because you also have to think about the original impeachment and how Zelensky was involved, right?
Because Trump called Zelensky and was trying to held up military into Ukraine in order to get dirt on Joe Biden. But an under-discussed part of when Trump gets really mad is he starts ranting about the Mueller investigation. And he says, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. And then he said, and it came out of Hunter Biden's bathroom.
So none of this makes sense, but he was talking about how he and Vlad endured something terrible together Like somehow it was bad for Putin to have been perceived by the world as having handpicked the American president? Like they're blood brothers.
It's actually really, really strange. It's kind of like a Stockholm syndrome. Like this is like, you're saying like, why would the U.S. want to normalize relations with Russia? And again, this is why like this is none of this makes sense. And like all these sort of pathetic weasels around Trump trying to make it make sense are obviously part of the problem. It's like, no, of course not.
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Chapter 5: Is Social Security truly a Ponzi scheme as Elon Musk claims?
the yeah the again it's like i sound like a broken record but like you know before social security the poorest people in the country were old people and social security changed that forever we live in a world that is different because social security uh lifted millions of people out of grinding poverty and like you play with that for you play with that for a week and they show people's ability to feed themselves to take care of themselves and they showed their gratitude by voting for donald trump yeah wow
At least the first time.
But part of what you're making is just a basic government competence argument. And if suddenly a bunch of Social Security checks don't go out, that shatters people's confidence in the U.S. government in a way that I think is really hard to recover from. Again, the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare.gov rollout, was more than just a website being broken for a while.
It just fundamentally undercut people's faith in the administration to roll out and administer their healthcare, which is a very personal thing.
Social Security field offices are not the driver of our national debt or deficit. These are tiny, tiny costs that provide basic services. It's all fake. It's all bullshit.
We're going to take a quick break, but one announcement before we do that. The first State of the Union address of Trump's second term. No, it's technically an address to a joint session of Congress.
But whatever.
It's tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern. We used to believe in things, have grammar and stuff.
6 p.m pacific one hour before that at 8 eastern 5 pacific the three of us and dan dan is back here again this week we make dan fly down all the time we'll be live streaming a preview of the speech on the pod save america youtube channel we'll be talking about what we can expect from trump and how democrats should respond and talking to democratic members who are there we'll also be taking questions from friends of the pod subscribers it's going to be fun it's going to be a great time then at 9 eastern 6 pacific
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Chapter 6: What is Trump's proposed 'Crypto Strategic Reserve'?
Oh, my God.
If you're previously holding these these shares because a bunch of crypto news sites reported on someone making a 50 times levered bet on Bitcoin and Ethereum on Saturday, only to cash it out for a $6.8 million profit on Sunday. So, must be nice. What do you think, guys? Clean out Fort Knox, fill it with thumb drafts?
Well, I was going to say, what are we stockpiling? Well, this is the thing that's so fucking stupid. It's not gold.
It's not a, like, what are we, it's not a, we're going to run out. Like, yeah, we have a strategic reserve of oil. We're going to run out of the fake money. Yeah, look, if the government ran out of crypto, what happens? What happens? Nothing. Nothing happens.
We're going to go stockpile some grass. Yeah, it's...
It's so outrageous on its face. Also, I know it's almost quaint now, something that should probably take an act of fucking Congress. I think it would require one, yeah. And even just the announcing of the specific currencies, again, if there was an actual strategic crypto reserve is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard of. It's not strategic. It's not a reserve.
It's just a bank account that we'll be owning that we just put U.S. dollars into, I guess, hoping that... And then one of the other rationales you'll hear is like, well, it will benefit taxpayers because taxpayers would then own a share of cryptocurrency as it rises. And like, you know, I hate to be a small-c conservative here.
There's a great way for taxpayers to benefit from cryptocurrency if they'd like. They can buy cryptocurrency with their own fucking dollars.
Yeah, take the money in treasury that you're going to put in the reserve... And hand out some tax cuts. I don't know.
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