Transcript
A (0:00)
Three weeks now of the government shutdown having real impacts on people's lives, not getting paychecks. But you had the president yesterday now kind of gleefully talking about Russ Vogt, the OMB director. While this is going on, I'm having him cut projects to blue states, calling him Darth Vader, saying, this is. This is fun for us. We get to take things away from states that didn't vote for me. You know, the amazing thing about this is we are just nine months into the Trump presidency, and the level of exhaustion that he has provided each and every day is. Is just beyond belief. It's historical. You just can't imagine it. I mean, on this day in 1962, John F. Kennedy addressed the nation in.
B (0:37)
The Cuban Missile crisis.
A (0:38)
That was the highlight of his first.
B (0:40)
Year in the presidency, maybe the highlight of his first couple of years in the presidency.
A (0:45)
Now it's every day, multiple times a.
B (0:47)
Day, that we have to focus on.
A (0:49)
Something that happened, whether he's destroying the East Wing in the White House, whether.
B (0:52)
He'S on again, off again with Vladimir Putin.
A (0:54)
The blue states can form legal, interstate compacts, and they should come to a position, if you're a Democratic governor, that this moment of maximum abuse of power demands 100% of the time, in 100% of the instances, the maximum use of your legal power. If you hear, and there are way too many Democratic leaders in Washington who say this will all just go back to normal when Trump is gone, that person is a fool and deluded, and that person absolutely should not be in a position of responsibility in the opposition party. This is a moment of deep, deep, deep danger for the American republic. The amount of armaments being bought by ice. What Trump is declaring is, I'm king, I'm law. Why not 500 million? As he demolishes the White House in an act of corruption paid for by billionaire oligarchs and companies. Facebook demolished the White House. Google demolished the White House. Sam Altman demolished the White House. And the politics of this moment, as the American people face economic misery ahead, will demand not going back to something that's gone, but imagining something that's new, that prevents any of this from ever happening again in the United States of America. We owe that to our children, to heal our sick society from the sick and twisted presidency of the fascist Donald Trump. I think John Thune was hoping Democrats would fold in the first week or 10 days, but I think it was perhaps a conventional thought in Washington and hope that they could peel off six, seven more Democrats beyond the three That I think first. First voted to keep the government open, and it just hasn't happened. And so I think Thune is now basically wedded to the Trump Johnson theory of just trying to hold out, hold out. He has offered an olive branch, promising Democrats that will be almost simultaneous votes to reopen the government and then address the health care issue. But I think Thune is running up against something which is words we don't typically say, Democratic unity. And by the way, I think health care is the vehicle. But let's be honest, this is a general strike, and it's a general strike among Democrats against Donald Trump's abuse of power. It's the only leverage they have. Yeah, they don't control the House, Senator, White House. The one weapon they have in their arsenal politically is we can shut down the government because it takes 60 votes in the Senate to keep the government open. That's all they got. This is their way of registering their opposition to Donald Trump's conduct. What you're talking about day in, day out, health care is good politics at Poleswell. I understand that this is more a general. Half the country is up in arms about how this man is running America. And this is what we're going to do to say, you know what, half of America, we get it. We hear you, we're with you. We're pissed, too. Ed, what do you make of the calling off of the proposed meeting in Hungary? I just. If you look at the state that Russia is in right now, you would think that Trump has a pretty good, strong upper hand to push Putin into a corner, much like he did in the Middle east, where he was able to really pull things together and get a deal on the table. Why is it so hard for him with Vladimir Putin? Oh, you're right, Mika. I mean, Russia. The Economist did a sort of meta estimate of Russia's death toll this year. 100,000 Russians have died this, give or take, several hundred thousand since 2022. You know, that's almost as much as America lost in Korea and Vietnam combined over many, many, many years. This is in one year. So there is acute manpower pressure in Russia. There is also acute pressure on paying recruitment bonuses to get new soldiers, because Ukrainians are getting the ability with drones and with artillery and with their guided miss strike hundreds of miles deep inside Russia to strike Russia's oil refineries. And they could soon extend that to their pipelines, too. So the sort of spigot that is funding the ability to recruit Russian soldiers into this army with amazingly high casualties, that's being threatened, too. So a perfect time for the President of the United States to use real leverage on Putin to get him to the negotiating table. But it's leverage for one reason or another, and we can speculate probably fruitlessly about what that reason is. But it's leverage that Trump has still nine, 10 months into his administration not been prepared to use and shows no signs of being prepared to use it.