This week, President Trump proposed two deals that would require allies to put his needs ahead of their own.Times’ Journalists Michael Barbaro, Catie Edmonson, Maggie Haberman, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs discuss how, in both cases, Trump got what he wanted.Guest: Catie Edmondson, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, covering President Trump and his administration.Background reading: Here’s what’s in the House Republican budget, and what comes next.What we know about the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: The New York Times. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What deals did President Trump propose this week?
From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. This week, the president proposed two deals, one at home, the other abroad, that would require allies to put his needs ahead of theirs. And in both cases, Trump got exactly what he wanted.
To understand why, I spoke with three of my colleagues, White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kano-Youngs, and congressional correspondent Katie Edmondson. It's Friday, February 28th. So friends... Welcome back, all three of you, to The Roundtable. Zolan and Katie, thank you for being in our Washington studio. Good to have you.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us, Michael.
Thank you, Michael.
Oh.
How presumptuous of me. There's an order to this all. The host says hello, and the guest, you can't just get ahead of it. You can't just circumvent it.
I hope you all keep this in.
That's the plan. You ready? Maggie, thank you very much for being here.
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Chapter 2: What is the controversy surrounding the congressional budget deal?
So this was a week, I would argue, of deal-making by President Trump. And we are going to spend time on two of those deals. And you've all been carefully selected because of your relationship to these deals. The first deal was with Congress, and there was a lot of drama surrounding this one, as there often is with Congress. Maggie, just to start, what was this?
Trump has been very focused and his aides have been very focused in the White House on trying to get through some kind of a bill through Congress that reflected what he campaigned on.
Not an executive action, which is pretty much to fine this president.
Correct. Trump has taken a number of executive actions. He's very proud of it. But you can't do everything that way. Spending has to get passed through Congress, at least in this form. So this House bill was sort of a half man, half horse of Trump's campaign promises.
That's a very intriguing metaphor. Katie, can you explain what this half-man, half-horse thing was that ends up before Congress?
Yeah, I mean, the campaign promises that Maggie highlighted are really tax cuts. It is extending the 2017 tax cuts that his administration passed the first time around. And there are a number of other taxes that on the campaign trail he said he wanted to eliminate. But for a lot of House Republicans, they don't want to just... cut taxes. They also want to cut spending, federal spending.
Right. That's a huge part of their message. It's a huge part of their brand. It's a huge part of the Republican Party identity for the last decade.
Absolutely. And so a number of these Republicans have said President Trump, we're very happy to extend your tax cuts to cut taxes more, but we also need to be able to cut federal spending. And that is what this budget resolution that they put to a vote on the House floor on Tuesday night laid out the parameters for. Okay.
And so what happens once this half-man, half-horse, I'm just going to keep saying that as many times as I can, reaches the House floor?
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Chapter 3: How did the congressional budget deal pass in the House?
And so you heard some concerns from those more centrist Republicans who are saying, look, I know this resolution we're about to vote on doesn't say that we're going to cut programs like Medicaid or Medicare. But we're looking at the way this bill has been written.
And it seems that almost certainly in order to get to the levels of spending cuts we're talking about, we're going to have to cut programs like Medicaid. And so you had some deep concerns from lawmakers who represent districts where a lot of their constituents rely on Medicaid. At the same time, you had these ultra conservatives say, actually, I think this bill doesn't cut spending enough.
And I'm not sure if I can bring myself to vote for this resolution if it, in fact, is going to increase the deficit.
I don't think we can let what you just said about Medicare and Medicaid fly by. That's a biggie in American politics. So whoever wants to take this on, what about this plan seems to many to require touching the third rail of American politics, which is potentially cutting these two huge health programs that millions and millions of Americans rely on?
Well, I don't want to get us into the weeds too much, but the way a budget resolution is structured, lawmakers aren't required to lay out the specific policy changes that they want to make in order to hit these spending targets.
But it does instruct individual committees and say, look, you need to go and find X number of dollars of cuts when we build this legislation that we're ultimately going to put to the floor for a vote. And so in this particular resolution, lawmakers have told the committee that oversees Medicaid and Medicare spending. We need you guys to find, in this case, $880 billion in cuts.
Over 10 years, right? Over 10. $880 billion over 10 years.
And there's only so many ways that you can actually reach those cuts. And for a program like Medicaid, right, and just as a reminder, this is the government program providing health insurance for low-income Americans. Bless you for explaining that. That's now a program that could be on the chopping block here in this saga.
Well, let's talk about how that, to use your word, Zolan saga unfolds in Congress when the president starts to ask questions. members of his party in Congress to pass this unwieldy thing that might require, as you all said, cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
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Chapter 4: How does Trump's budget impact U.S. debt and spending?
Got it. Back then, Republicans touching the Affordable Care Act backfired for them. Democrats hope that if they touch Medicaid now, it will backfire once again.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Okay, so that was the congressional deal-making this week. When we come back, we're going to talk about the international deal that the president struck. We'll be right back. Welcome back, Solon, Katie, Maggie. We have talked on the show before around this very table about a theoretical deal that Trump had wanted to make with Ukraine that would require Ukraine to basically compensate the U.S.
for all the military assistance necessary that the U.S. has given Ukraine in its war against Russia. It started off as very theoretical and notional, but now it's becoming an actual reality, and Ukraine's leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, is now headed to Washington to make it official on Friday. Zolan, how did this all start and become what it now is?
So we've talked about how President Trump's approach to foreign policy can best be described as transactional. And we got some examples of that early on when after coming into office, you know, when it came to aid for Ukraine, it started out as sort of amusing over having an exchange of the natural resources in Ukraine for aid to Ukraine.
And that has really become a focus of the negotiations that we've now seen in recent days and in recent weeks. So a pivotal point in this is when Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Besson took a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, and presented an initial version of this deal. And the initial version, Ukraine balked at it. What was the initial version? First, the U.S.
basically wants back pay for the aid they already sent to Ukraine. Trump is basically saying, you have these critical earth minerals in Ukraine, and the U.S. is going to get a significant amount, half of the revenue from that up to $500 billion. That's a lot. The maybe even more significant thing is what's not important. that proposal.
And that's the assurance Zelensky wants of a long-term security guarantee. The concern for Ukraine is that any pause in fighting that U.S. and Russia agreed to, well, what if Russia uses that to build up its forces and then Ukraine is left without the assurance, the knowledge that the United States will come to their defense, that the United States will actually support Ukraine?
And it might be left without some rare earth minerals that would help it pay for its own defense if it were to accept this deal. Maggie, how should we understand this initial offer that on its face seems like a very good deal for the U.S. and not much of a deal at all for Ukraine?
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of potential Medicaid cuts?
Ukraine basically has no cards to play. Trump has rejected the idea of NATO membership for Ukraine, and Trump also does not want to provide NATO membership. security guarantees for Ukraine. He wants Europe to do it, and that is going to require a heave of the will by Europeans, and we'll see what that looks like.
So the new deal that is being negotiated... Because the first one kind of got rejected? The first one was rejected, and then other iterations of it were rejected, and then the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, jumped in and Yeah, how do we get to a deal? So what is now there, because of various forces, is a smaller deal in terms of what the U.S. will get. Trump keeps saying $350 billion.
My understanding is the actual number is smaller than that. But it still does not include a security piece. And that was clearly a red line for Trump. And Zelensky clearly realizes that and is taking what he can get.
But that doesn't seem like a deal the president of... Ukraine would sign, and yet, Zolan, he's about to arrive in Washington and sign it. So at some point, he decides that even though he's not really getting anything from it, it's still somehow worthwhile.
Why? Well, for one, I mean, a late version of a U.S. proposal did vaguely say that the U.S. would support Ukraine security. But then Trump came around the next day in a cabinet meeting and said, essentially, that was going to be the responsibility of European nations that are closer to Ukraine. Zelensky's in a really tight spot here. I mean, he knows Ukraine has been relying on a lot of U.S. aid.
And, you know, he's now put in a position where, like many other world leaders, he now needs to come to Washington and try to placate Trump, try to use old-fashioned diplomacy to try and secure any kind of assurance for Ukraine.
Katie, is this the death, like the official death, of anything resembling the conventional Republican approach to Russia and containing its territorial aggression and its previous mandate to protect Ukraine?
I mean, look, over the past seven years I've been up on the Hill, I've written a lot about sort of the two foreign policy wings of the Republican Party, sort of the traditional Mitch McConnell interventionist wing. And sort of the, at the time, ascendant sort of, they call themselves realists, restrainers, people who did not want to send sort of U.S. treasure, U.S. troops abroad.
And I think what we've seen over the past couple of weeks, at least when it comes to Republicans in Congress, is that that's not really a battle anymore. And that it's over. The anti-interventionists have won. They occupy positions of power in Republican leadership on the Hill. They occupy positions of power within the Pentagon. And so I think Zelensky knows that, right?
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Chapter 6: How did Trump's approach shape the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal?
Thanks, Michael. Thanks, everyone.
On Friday afternoon, President Zelensky traveled to the White House for a meeting with President Trump, where the two were expected to sign the mineral deal that's been negotiated over the past few days. But at the meeting in the Oval Office, Zelensky started to try to explain the history of the war and was interrupted by Vice President J.D. Vance.
You should be thanking the president for trying to bring it into this conflict.
In response, Zelensky seemed to warn Vance that before long, the United States itself could be threatened by Russian aggression.
Even you, but you have nice ocean and don't feel now, but you will feel it in the future.
The meeting then quickly devolved into a shouting match, with Trump and Vance berating Zelensky in front of live television cameras.
You're in no position to dictate what we're going to feel.
Trump then appeared to try to strong-arm Zelensky into making a peace deal with Russia on whatever terms the United States wants.
But you're either going to make a deal or we're out. And if we're out, you'll fight it out. I don't think it's going to be pretty.
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