Trump, Hegseth Signal Negotiations to End Ukraine War; The Nursing Home Patients Who Run DC: With Daniel Boguslaw
President Trump spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin about ending the Ukraine war, marking the first time a sitting president has talked to Putin since 2022. Plus: Pete Hegseth tells NATO allies that the US does not believe Ukraine's NATO membership is a realistic outcome of a peace agreement, signaling a massive shift in foreign policy. Finally: Journalist Daniel Boguslaw explains where the geriatric members of Congress are treated for their many ailments, and why they insist on remaining in power.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Pete Hegseth, Trump's new defense secretary, traveled today to the NATO summit in Brussels where he signaled that the U.S. would be realistic, finally, about the war in Ukraine and more so how it will have to end.
Meanwhile, President Trump actually spoke today to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the first time Russian and American leaders have spoken in years and began to outline a framework to diplomatically resolve the three-plus-year bloodbath war in Ukraine that NATO capitals have so mindlessly fueled.
The war is far from over.
Russia spilled a lot of blood and a lot of treasure to achieve its war aims and won't easily make concessions, but Trump obviously knows what he has been saying for a long time now.
That the U.S. cannot continue to fund proxy wars like this and that there is no reason to trifle with the risks of conflict between the world's two largest nuclear powers.
The reaction to all of this from America's warmongers and NATO worshipers and imperialists are predictable.
It's Chamberlain all over again.
Appeasement.
This will allow Hitler to march through Europe.
But it's long been clear that this war needs to end and evidently it will take Donald Trump to do it.
Mitch McConnell fell down twice this week.
An elderly gentleman who apparently is in Congress, nobody really seems to know who he is, appeared to have some sort of brain event while speaking on the House for a stroke of some kind.
When Democratic leaders gathered to try to show energy in opposing Trump, some of them shook their canes as they stood next to 86-year-old Maxine Waters, all while 74-year-old Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, young for Washington, pathetically chanted, we will win, we will not rest.
And, oh, 82-year-old Joe Biden's brain was frozen for long periods of time on national television when he debated Donald Trump as he tried to win a re-election and seek four more years in office.
For decades, Americans have mocked the Soviet Union for what we used to call their gerontocracy, meaning ruled by old men in their 70s.
Now, old men in their 70s are considered in Washington to be young guns.
The investigative journalist Dan Bogoslaw reports today for the American Prospect that Congress has actually created a taxpayer-funded clinic specifically for dementia and other age-related brain infirmities that members of Congress are now availing themselves of because of how old they are.
He'll be here tonight to discuss all of that.
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community for now welcome to a new episode of system update starting right now the war in Ukraine began for all intents and purposes in February of 2022 which is more than three full years now
And I remember very well when it started, and you could see the flood of propaganda that always emerges in the wake of a war that the United States wants to convince its population to pay for or be involved in, that we were going to end up being involved in this war.
And from the beginning, the question I always had, I had a lot of questions, but the primary question I had was, In which conceivable way does involvement in this war benefit the United States?
It was a war that was a border dispute between two countries that have a very long, complex history, a shared, complex history between one another.
They had actually been in a low-grade conflict since 2014, ever since the United States, led by Victoria Nuland, went to Kiev and incited a coup that overthrew the democratically elected President of Ukraine a year before his constitutional term was about to end and Russia in retaliation then annexed Crimea,
what had been a part of Ukraine but had been for centuries part of Russia, which is filled with people who are Russian-speaking, who are ethnic Russians, who identify as Russian, would far more want to be part of Russia than Ukraine.
And there has been an attempt ever since for that eight years to try and preserve the ability of the Russian-speaking and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and the Donbass and elsewhere to preserve their right to speak Russian, to preserve their culture, to be free of repression of the kind that was emanating from Kiev.
And there were all sorts of things that the United States knew that it could do, that it could provoke Russia to invade Ukraine.
There were memos floating all around Washington for years saying, These are the things that are the red lines for Moscow, not just for Putin, but for everybody in Moscow, including his opponents.
And these are the things that if we do, we will force them to essentially invade eastern Ukraine.
And the United States then proceeded to do all of them, seemingly wanting Russia to invade Ukraine.
And in February 2022, they did that.
And the United States immediately announced under the Biden administration that...
We were going to fund this war.
We were going to give Ukraine all the weapons and the money they needed in order to win.
NATO capitals did the same.
And the way in which victory was defined was almost guaranteed to ensure that this war would go on forever or that it would end and the United States and NATO would lose, humiliatingly.
The definition of victory was expelling every last Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including...
What Ukraine looked like prior to 2014, namely part of Crimea being part of Ukraine.
And that was never going to happen.
There was zero chance that the Russians, with the United States and NATO all throughout Ukraine exerting influence, manipulating elections, having installed a leader after a coup, was going to allow NATO to take back Crimea, a geostrategically crucial...
Piece of property, piece of territory, given its access to the Black Sea and its long history as part of Russia.
They would have used nuclear weapons before they permitted NATO to take back Crimea or even drive them out of eastern Ukraine, given the stakes that they have in that part of Ukraine.
And despite NATO doing everything, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, sending all kinds of advanced weapons, doing things it promised over and over it wouldn't do and then did, like sending tanks and fighter jets, The Russians evaded sanctions.
They fortified their military.
They spent huge amounts of money on the war.
They, in many ways, fortified their economy, and their country became stronger and stronger, and they were able to defeat the entire West by continuing their expansion into Russia, moving westward, holding onto Crimea.
The Ukrainian front line is collapsing.
And the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars, caused the loss of life of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, including many increasingly who did not want to go and fight and yet were forced to physically.
And it ended up being an absolute bloodbath, a complete waste of the kind that was very predictable.
And yet the position of the Democratic Party in the election under Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was, we're going to continue this war.
We don't care.
We're going to let Ukraine be destroyed.
We're going to keep killing huge numbers of people.
And Donald Trump repeatedly vowed that he would end this war, and Americans voted for him on that basis.
And now he, with not even a month in office, is starting to take serious steps in order to try and end this war as promised.
One of the steps that he took was that he picked up the phone and called the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the first time American and Russian leaders have spoken in years.
It's mind-boggling.
During the Cold War, when they would have proxy wars all over the world, the American and Russian Soviet leaders would speak all the time because of fear that if they didn't, it would create a climate of misperception and conflict that could easily escalate to major war, including nuclear war, as almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which happened through miscommunication and misperception.
And yet, ever since Russiagate, Washington decided that They wouldn't speak to the Russians, that even speaking to the Russians is a crime.
Michael Flynn almost went to prison because when he was the incoming national security adviser in 2016, he did what he should have done, which is pick up the phone and called his counterparts in the foreign ministry of Russia and said, hey, we want to create a good relationship with you as we start our administration.
And the FBI decided that that was a crime.
And created a perjury trap for him by forcing him to come and answer questions about that call and when there were discrepancies between what they knew he said because they were eavesdropping on it and what he in fact said.
He said because it's what he remembered they tried to prosecute him.
So they created a climate where it was almost criminal for the two sides to speak to one another which is madness.
Trump wants to end this war, so we picked up the phone and called Vladimir Putin today, and here was his account of that conversation he posted earlier today on True Social.
Quote, I just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
We discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, energy, artificial intelligence, the power of the dollar, and various other subjects.
We both reflected on the great history of our nations.
And the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering that Russia lost tens of millions of people and we likewise lost so many.
We each talked about the strengths of our respective nations and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.
But first, as we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the war with Russia and Ukraine.
President Putin even used my very strong campaign motto of, quote, common sense.
Oh, this is a phrase that Donald Trump invented, common sense.
And he was very flattered because Vladimir Putin copied this incredibly innovative phrase, common sense, that Trump used and Putin used it as well.
He went on, quote, we both believe very strongly in it.
We agreed to work together.
Very closely, including visiting each other's nations.
We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiating immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelensky of Ukraine to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now.
I have asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of CIA John Ratcliffe, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, and Ambassador and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to lead the negotiations, which I feel strongly will be successful.
Millions of people have died in a war.
That would not have happened if I were president, but it did happen, so it must end.
No more lives should be lost.
I want to thank President Putin for his time and effort with respect to this call and for the release yesterday of Mark Fogel, a wonderful man that I personally greeted at the White House last night.
I believe this effort will lead to a successful conclusion, hopefully soon.
Obviously, I had my criticism of Donald Trump.
I shared them last night for...
45 minutes to an hour with respect to Gaza, and I've shared them with respect to other topics as well, including the attempt to target pro-Palestinian speech.
But in this case, he deserves nothing but credit.
In Washington, it has been a kind of mania, a psychosis, not to try and even end, not to even try to end this war, not to pick up the phone and negotiate.
Wanting the war to go on.
Despite how senseless it is, despite how destructive it is, despite how deadly it is.
This is what Joe Biden and whoever was acting in Joe Biden's name should have been doing for years had they had any intention of trying to end the war, but they don't and Trump does.
He then did in fact call Zelensky and he posted this report about what happened there.
Quote, I just spoke to President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine.
The conversation went very well.
He, like President Putin, wants to make peace.
We discussed a variety of topics having to do with the war, but mostly the meeting that is being set up on Friday in Munich where Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will lead the delegation.
I am hopeful that the results of that meeting will be positive.
It is time to stop this ridiculous war where there has been massive and totally unnecessary death and destruction.
God bless the people of Russia and Ukraine.
I've talked about this before, and I'm going to say it again because it is always so striking to me.
I've seen a good number of presidents in my lifetime, American presidents, and every single one of them, with the exception of Trump in the first term, has involved the United States in new wars.
So we talk about war all the time.
We're always debating which wars we're going to go fight, who we're going to go bomb.
Leader, not just president, but any major national figure, emphasizes the most important part of wars, which is that they kill huge numbers of people.
And when he talks about wanting to avoid war, he emphasizes his desire to avoid that mass death.
Now, that doesn't mean he's a pacifist.
If the war in Gaza restarts with his encouragement, there are a lot of people who will be ending up being killed in Gaza.
As a result of what Trump has been doing, so I'm not in any way suggesting that he's some sort of angelic figure when it comes to these conflicts.
But the reality is that he does think about and speak about in a very visceral way, in a very unusual way, the fact that wars, first and foremost, end huge numbers of lives.
And in both of those statements, he has emphasized the importance of ending them for that reason.
And the only way to end them would be for the American president to pick up the phone.
And call the president of Russia and then call the president of Ukraine and say he wants these wars to end and begin the process of negotiating how they can be diplomatically resolved.
Here is Trump speaking earlier today at the White House about some of this.
So we're getting security on our money.
We're going to have it secured by, they have raw earth and they have oil and gas and they have a lot of other things.
And we're asking for security in our money.
They've agreed to it.
Ukraine has agreed to it.
No, we are, but we want it secured, and the money is going to be secured.
Because if we didn't do that, then Putin would say he won.
We're the thing that's holding it.
So obviously Trump's not going to say we're going to abandon Ukraine starting today.
We're cutting them all off because there has to be a negotiation process to end the war.
And if Russia knew that the United States was no longer going to send any money to Ukraine, there'd be no negotiation.
Putin would have no reason to negotiate.
He would just roll over Ukraine because the United States would abandon them.
Trump's not going to do that.
But what he is saying is that in order for us to continue to send aid, not just for the war, but even afterwards, they're going to need all sorts of reconstruction and resources to rebuild.
He's saying we're not going to just give Ukraine money for free.
We want the rights to their minerals, which is part of Trump's worldview that the United States is not going to use its resources to continue to rebuild other countries to Construct and nation-build in other countries that he's only going to spend the resources of the United States if the United States gets something in return.
Now, the reason why I say all this is significant, obviously Trump can say whatever he wants, we're going to end the war, we're going to negotiate, is because Pete Hegseth went to the NATO headquarters in Brussels today and spoke with NATO defense ministers who for three years have been meeting and saying the same thing.
This war is not going to end until we win.
We're going to devote everything we have to in order to make sure that the Russians are expelled from every, et cetera, et cetera.
All the things that have led to the bloodshed and destruction of Ukraine and not even getting close to any sort of diplomatic resolution.
Pete Hegseth instead went and told these NATO countries, look, at least as far as we're concerned, you can do whatever you want, but as far as we're concerned, this war is Ukraine's not winning this war, and we have to accept that reality.
Here's what he told them.
Well, good afternoon, friends.
Thank you, Secretary Healy, for your leadership, both in hosting and now leading the UDCG. This is my first Ukraine defense contact group, and I'm honored to join all of you today.
And I appreciate the opportunity to share...
President Trump's approach to the war in Ukraine.
We are at, as you said, Mr. Secretary, a critical moment.
As the war approaches its third anniversary, our message is clear.
The bloodshed must stop and this war must end.
President Trump has been clear with the American people and with many of your leaders that stopping the fighting and reaching an enduring peace is a top priority.
He intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table.
And the U.S. Department of Defense will help achieve this goal.
We will only end this devastating war and establish a durable peace by coupling Allied strength with a realistic assessment of the battlefield.
I mean, that is something that Europe has not heard, that NATO has not heard for years.
Number one, that the goal is to end the war, not to continue it.
And number two, that you have to be realistic about the state of the war, the battlefield, which is extremely favorable for Russia and extremely unfavorable for Ukraine.
And if the war continues, it will only get more so because Ukraine is running out of soldiers, running out of people to send to the front line, whereas Russia is not.
To hear this, it's like music to one's ears.
This is the sort of thing that a lot of us have been saying for three years now.
And got called Russian agents and Kremlin assets, et cetera, et cetera.
Not because we were rooting for Russia, but because it's just the state of reality that you cannot deny.
There was never a way that Ukraine would win this war.
Ukraine would be destroyed.
Ukrainians would be killed.
And at the end of the day...
The longer the war went on, the more the Russians would have because the less concessions, the fewer concessions they'd want to make given how much they poured into the war.
So for Hegseth to go and say what he just said is quite remarkable.
Now, the next clip is Pete Hegseth speaking as well, and he essentially is trying to tell them that the The conditions that you told your populations that we would need in order to win the war and to stop the war are completely unrealistic.
Beginning with the fact that there's absolutely zero chance that Russia is ever going to give up Crimea and we have to accept that.
Here's what he said.
"I want, like you, a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine.
But we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.
Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering." It is an illusory goal.
This is what NATO has been doing for three years.
They've been chasing illusory goals, things that could never have been achieved.
Now, whether that's because they really thought they could achieve those goals and were just deceiving themselves, or whether they didn't care about those goals and just wanted to continue the war, who knows?
Probably a little bit of both.
But to hear the United States go and again say, we are not going back to 2014. Ukraine is not going to reconstitute its country as existed before 2014 when we entered the coup is something that Europe has needed to hear for a long time.
The United States has needed to hear that as well.
And it's good to hear that being said.
That's not all Pete Hegseth said.
The primary demand of the Russians prior to the war Was that NATO recognized, the United States acknowledged that Ukraine cannot enter NATO, that it is unacceptable to the Russians to bring NATO up to the Russian border, that part of the Russian border in particular.
And Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Kamala Harris.
Not only made continuous statements that that would never happen, that they would always leave the door open for Ukraine to join, they made all sorts of provocative statements that they were moving quickly toward a path for NATO membership for Ukraine.
Pete Hegseth had a much different message.
A durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again.
This must not be Minsk 3.0.
That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.
Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.
If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission, And they should not be covered under Article 5. There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact.
To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine.
I mean, that is an absolute declaration, not only that the United States will not send troops, but that the United States will not invoke Article 5 in defense of Ukraine, will not go to war with Russia.
In order to defend Ukraine.
A position in Washington that was once conventional and yet over the last four years has somehow been degraded into something that only Neville Chamberlain appeasers or Kremlin assets are willing to say.
That's Trump saying we're not getting involved in this war no matter what.
Already there are Ukrainians and All the Ukrainian fanatics throughout the West, including in the U.S., acting as though Trump has never chamberlain, just conceded and surrendered the war to Adolf Hitler, all this idiocy that has gotten us into these issues in the first place.
And this was signaled even before Trump was elected.
Here the Ukrainians, through their Kiev post, trying to create this framework where if Ukraine loses the war, which they were going to lose in all circumstances, that it would be Trump's fault if he wins and does a deal with Putin.
Hear from Nakia Press in September of 2024, so two months or a month and a half before the election, the headline was, quote, Ukraine is gone.
Before again calling for Ukraine to appease Putin, Trump runs through a series of verbatim Kremlin talking points, initially disparaging President Zelensky before moving on to the crown jewel of Russian disinformation narratives, namely that Ukraine doesn't exist.
At this point, shouldn't Americans be asking who Trump actually works for?
Those were the Ukrainians trying to interfere in America's election by trying to insinuate that Americans should believe Trump worked for the Kremlin because he wants this.
Completely senseless and extremely expensive in every sense war to be over.
And you can see the Ukrainians were obviously rooting for Kamala Harris and the Democrats for good reason, which is that they would have fed this war forever.
Here was the comments Trump made on September 25th, 2024 when he was talking about Ukraine and acknowledging unpleasant realities that no American leader or NATO leader Has been willing to accept.
I watched this poor guy yesterday at the United Nations.
He didn't know what he was saying.
They just don't know what to do.
They're locked into a situation.
It said they just don't know what to do because Ukraine is gone.
It's not Ukraine anymore.
You can never replace those cities and towns and you can never replace.
The dead people, so many dead people.
Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now.
If they made a bad deal, it would have been much better.
They would have given up a little bit and everybody would be living and every building would be built and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years.
I mean, he was right then.
You may not like it.
You may wish it weren't true.
The reality was that Ukraine had already been losing, and everybody in Ukraine and everybody in NATO capitals knew that but were afraid to admit it.
And Trump did, and of course then Ukrainian media, which as we demonstrated the other night, 80% of which is funded by USAID to disseminate propaganda, immediately accused him of being a Kremlin asset, saying Americans should ask who he works for.
Here's Jen Stoltenberg, the longtime chief of NATO.
Here's the sort of thing that NATO was saying This is in May of 2022, so just three months after the war began, the kinds of things they were saying that ended up, you know, just being not just untrue, but ended up really embarrassing the West.
So, can I ask you whether you agree with the former Minister of Defence of Ukraine, who wrote an article just recently in Foreign Affairs?
I mean, it's really interesting.
He says, to win, Ukraine doesn't need a miracle.
It just needs the West to increase its supply of sophisticated weaponry.
Putin may respond by calling up additional soldiers, but poorly motivated forces can only delay a well-equipped Ukraine's eventual triumph.
Do you agree with that?
I agree that Ukraine can win this war.
And what we have seen over the last weeks is that the Ukrainian forces have made significant gains, been able to retake, to liberate territory.
And, of course, these victories belong to the brave Ukrainian soldiers.
But the support, the advanced equipment, the HIMARS, the weapons, the ammunition, the fuel that they have received from NATO allies and partners have enabled them and helped them to make these important gains.
And again, the U.S. has been in the lead position, but also European allies, Canada and many other partners around the world are now stepping up the support for Ukraine.
So that was the framework for so long.
Here is Biden himself in July of 2023, and he was asked about the relationship between The United States and NATO, and specifically Ukraine.
And here is what he said.
You said that Ukraine shouldn't enter NATO until after the war is over.
Are you concerned that all of those comments could motivate Putin to keep the war going or discourage him from entering peace negotiations?
And is there a serious risk that this war could drag on for years?
And do you see any path toward the war ending with Putin still in power?
First of all, No one can join NATO while a war is going on, where a NATO nation is being attacked.
Because that guarantees that we're in a war.
And we're in a third world war.
So that is not about whether or not they should or shouldn't join.
It's about when they can join.
And they will join NATO. The issue of whether or not this is going to keep Putin from continuing to fight.
The answer is Putin's already lost the war.
Putin has a real problem.
How does he move from here?
What does he do?
And so the idea that there's going to be what vehicle is used, he could end the war tomorrow.
He could just say, I'm out.
But what agreement is ultimately reached depends upon Putin and what he decides to do.
But there is no possibility of him winning the war in Ukraine.
He's already lost that war.
Imagine if even if anyway, he's already lost that war.
There's no statement from Joe Biden that is complete without him interrupting himself in the middle of a thought and preventing himself from continuing because he's afraid of what he's going to say.
But note there that he says two things.
One is Russia already lost the war.
That's apparently news to Russia.
It's apparently news to the West because the West is about to end the war by handing the Russians parts of Ukraine in control over it, which they did not previously possess, and agree that contrary to what Joe Biden said there, which is that Ukraine will enter NATO, Ukraine, in fact, will not enter NATO. And this is so predictable that this happens all the time.
It happened in Vietnam.
The U.S. fought in Vietnam for 10, 12, 13 years.
Kept saying we're on the verge of winning when the U.S. finally left with its tail between its legs.
The war proponents never said, oh, I guess we were wrong about our ability to win this war.
They blamed it on war opponents.
They blamed it on the people who tied one hand behind the back of the United States.
War opponents never admit they're wrong.
Same in Iraq.
Oh, wasn't that our idea of invading Iraq was wrong?
It just wasn't carried out the right way.
And this is the same thing they're going to say here.
They're going to say, oh, we were on the way to winning the war, but Trump surrendered to Putin.
The reality is that this war was lost, and it took Trump to admit it, to recognize it, and to end it.
You have Joe Biden in 2023 saying Russia already lost the war.
This is the kind of delusion.
That enabled this war to go on for so long so senselessly.
Just to give you a little bit of a taste for the discourse in the West over Ukraine, here is a montage put together by a good friend of the show, Matt Orfalia.
And here is what people in the West are now acknowledging, which is that the war is a stalemate, but what they had been saying all along about this war.
The Russia-Ukraine war is entering a stalemate.
The war has reached a stalemate.
A deadly stalemate.
In other words, neither side can win.
Because it's a stalemate.
Stalemate.
Those are the headlines tonight.
But are they behind?
Like yesterday's news is the real truth.
The Ukrainians are winning.
We know that Ukraine will win.
This is inevitable that Ukraine is going to defeat Russia.
Ukraine is winning this war.
Ukraine is winning this war.
Ukraine will win this war.
Ukraine is winning this war.
Ukraine will win this war.
Ukraine will win it.
Because I have been there, I have worked there.
I know.
He said Ukraine will win.
Winning the war is now not in question.
Ukraine will win and it will compromise very soon.
We can finish everything in weeks.
Victory will be in very short period.
They say Ukraine will win.
Ukrainians will win.
And I haven't met a single person yet who doesn't say Ukraine will win.
Russia is bad.
Ukraine is good.
What else do you need to know?
And it's a stalemate.
A stalemate which only brings death and suffering.
A true solution can only be found at the negotiating table.
YouTube bans RT.
There's no way the Ukrainian army would be able to win.
Fox fires Tucker.
This war cannot be won.
Banned.
Ultimately unwinnable.
Defunded.
Ukraine is not winning.
Banned.
But everyone you meet without exception still insists that Ukraine will win.
We know that Ukraine will win.
Ukraine is winning this war.
extraordinary moment from the foreign minister predicting how this war will end ukraine will win truths will prevail and ukraine will win and no matter what ukraine will uh ukraine will win ukrainians are winning ukraine will win this war and ukraine will ukraine will win there's no question in my mind no doubts that ukraine will ukraine will be successful for putin hey you could do this on every issue It is just amazing how much crap, how many lies, how much propaganda.
Our discourse is suffused with, and it's just an onslaught of people reading from the same script, having no idea what they're talking about.
Here was a column in The Telegraph, the British mainstream newspaper, by Ben Hodges in April of 2023. Ukraine can retake Crimea within months if we let it.
There is no need for a diplomatic solution.
Russia's war could soon be brought to a humiliating end.
Just over and over and over, things that were being said that were utter madness by people who report to be authoritative experts on a particular issue.
Here in January of this year, before he was inaugurated, Reuters reported Trump says he sympathizes with Russia's opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine.
Quote, a big part of the problem is Russia, for many, many years, long before Putin, you could never have NATO involved with Ukraine.
Now they've said that.
That's been, like, written in stone, Trump said.
And somewhere along the line, Biden said, no, they should be able to join you, NATO. Well, then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I can understand their feelings about that.
I don't know if you remember, but there was a time when Biden gave some sort of speech about foreign policy and one of his aides went on to Twitter and said, I know it's hard to believe that Biden doesn't have a PhD in foreign affairs or international relations, but yes, he is just that good.
And yet, look at the mess he made of the entire world.
Earlier today, Matthew Miller, the former spokesman of the Biden State Department who stood up every day and justified the U.S. Financing of the Israeli destruction of Gaza had the audacity to criticize the Trump administration for its approach to trying to end the war with Ukraine by saying, oh, you don't give away all your negotiating leverage ahead of time.
The Biden administration never got close in 15 months of Israel destroying Gaza to obtain a ceasefire.
That took Donald Trump's victory to do and Donald Trump's envoy Steve Whitcoff being sent to the Middle East to accomplish.
The Biden administration never got close in three years of funding the war in Ukraine to even getting close to a ceasefire that is going to obviously take Donald Trump.
And yet Matthew Miller has the audacity to dole out lectures on the best way to diplomatically resolve wars when the Biden administration not only couldn't do it, but got the U.S. involved in several new wars, including two extremely dangerous and costly ones.
And the reason the Biden administration deserves so much blame is because they were purposely saying things designed to provoke the Russians and fuel the war for as long as possible.
Here was Secretary of State Anthony Blinken speaking at NATO headquarters, the same place Pete Hegseth appeared today, yet he had a much different message in April of 2024. Ukraine, the determination of every country represented here at NATO remains rock solid.
We will do everything that we can.
Allies will do everything that they can to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs to continue to deal with Russia's ongoing aggression against Ukraine, an aggression that gets worse with every passing day.
Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership.
And to create a clear pathway for Ukraine moving forward.
Of course, we believe that Ukraine deserves to be a member of NATO and that this should happen sooner rather than later.
And you wonder why Putin viewed the West as threatening to Russia?
As Trump said, he fully understands why.
Putin would regard it as threatening to have a foreign adversarial military alliance of the West sitting right on his border.
And yet the West continued to provoke, continued to inflame.
Here from a NATO press release in April of 2024, Secretary General in Kiev says, quote, Ukraine is on a, quote, irreversible path to NATO and support will continue.
Apparently it wasn't irreversible.
Since the United States today in Brussels reversed it by saying Ukraine will not be part of NATO. As I alluded to earlier, as I said earlier, we've covered this before, it has been a known in Washington, Trump said this too in the statement we just showed you, that Moscow has always regarded NATO expansion to Ukraine, not just as threatening, but as gravely threatening as justifying a war.
And so leaders in...
Washington knew that if they really want to provoke a war with Russia, all they have to do is expand NATO to Ukraine.
At the time, the ambassador to Ukraine was William Burns, who became the director of the CIA under Joe Biden.
And in a State Department cable in February of 2008, which we only know about because WikiLeaks obtained and published it, he wrote a memo to The Bush administration.
It was the Bush administration that really began aggressively talking about Ukraine and NATO. The Clinton administration talked about it too.
But the reason the Bush administration was so aggressive about this was because at the time, Condoleezza Rice was the Secretary of State, the Russia expert who wanted to expand Ukraine up to NATO, and the U.S. ambassador to NATO was Victoria Nuland, who then began running Ukraine for the...
Obama and Biden administrations as well at the time she was running Ukraine for the Bush administration.
And those two were insistent on putting Ukraine on a path to NATO membership.
And Ambassador Burns wrote a memo explaining the insanity of that, which he entitled, NET means NET, Russia's NATO Enlargement Redlines.
Quote, following a muted first reaction to Ukraine's intent to seek a NATO membership action plan, At the Bucharest summit, Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat.
NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains a, quote, emotional and neurologic issue for Russia.
But strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership in Ukraine and Georgia.
In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, including to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.
Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.
Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and effects to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.
Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong division in Ukraine over NATO membership And the most important part of this memo,
which we don't have here for you, is that he said that for everybody in Moscow, not just Putin, but Putin's most devoted liberal opponents, NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line for everybody in Russia because Ukraine is obviously of such vital interest to Russia given its long history with Russia, the fact that Germany twice used Ukraine to attack Russia and invade it in the 20th century.
And so to have NATO right up on the Ukrainian border, we interviewed Sarah Wagenknecht, the German politician, and she talked about How traumatic it would be and must be for the Russians to see German troops yet again, German tanks rather, yet again rolling eastward toward Russia through Ukraine.
And yet this is what NATO has been doing for three years.
It's been utter madness.
And the idea that Ukraine is a vital interest to Russia but not to the United States used to be something that was common conventional wisdom in Washington.
The Atlantic interviewed Barack Obama in April of 2016, his last year in office, and the interview was conducted by Jeffrey Goldberg, now Editor-in-Chief, who's a hardcore neocon.
He was very upset that Obama didn't do more to confront Russia in places like Syria and Ukraine, and he confronted Obama in this interview about that.
The title was The Obama Doctrine.
The U.S. President talks through the hardest decisions about America's role in the world.
And this is what he said in summarizing Obama's view of Ukraine.
Quote, Obama's theory here is simple.
Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one.
So Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance.
Can you imagine if somebody stood up and said now Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one?
You would immediately be called a Kremlin asset and yet that was central to Barack Obama's foreign policy?
Quoting Obama, quote, the fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do, Obama said.
I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.
It's, quote, realistic, he said.
But this is an example where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.
And at the end of the day, there's always going to be some ambiguity.
He then went on to say, if there's anyone really in Washington that wants to stand up and say that we should go to war with Russia over Ukraine, I defy them to do it because the position is so intrinsically dangerous and reckless that nobody in Washington would say it.
That was only in 2016. And then Russiagate happens.
Democrats get convinced that the reason we have Trump as president is because of the Kremlin.
Suddenly, Russia becomes our existential enemy.
Threatening than they were even during the Cold War.
We cut off all communications with Russia and now we have a three-year war, a proxy war designed to weaken them even if it means sacrificing Ukraine and Ukrainians at the altar of our strategy, which is exactly what we did.
Back in 1997, someone named Joe Biden, then a senator, talked about NATO expansion when the Clinton administration was describing it and here's what he said.
Where do they go?
I had one interesting comment.
Our conversation was a gone off, which was repeated with Levin.
They talked about they don't want this NATO expansion.
They know it's not in their security interests and on and on and said, well, if you do that, we may have to look to China.
And I couldn't help using the colloquial expression from my state by saying to Zaganov, lots of luck in your senior year.
You know, good luck.
And if that doesn't work, try Iran.
And I'm serious.
I said that to them.
And they know, I knew, they knew, everybody knows that that is not an option.
And everybody knows, every one of those leaders acknowledges and needs, and they resent it.
But they need to look west.
And the question is whether this is designed to completely shut them out, but not in terms of whether or not it's a direct military security threat.
So here is a couple of reactions.
Here are a couple of reactions, predictable reactions to what Pete Hegsest said in Brussels today about the need to end this war.
Here is Alexander Vindman, who is Ukrainian, who became an American hero.
Because he ran to Congress saying, oh my God, Donald Trump is threatening to cut off arms to Ukraine if they don't root out corruption and investigate the Biden family.
He's become a fanatical warmonger when it comes to Ukraine.
Here's what he said today.
Quote, I think that whole formulation is quite funny.
Quietly he did it.
He went to the NATO... And then here is a former British defense minister, James Heapy.
Who said, make no mistake, this is a pivotal day in this century.
Pulling the plug on Ukraine, U.S. disinfesting in European security, and the big powers redrawing the boundaries of smaller ones.
A new reality faces Europe and it's going to require urgent investment in defense and security.
Exactly.
If Great Britain, that little country based in London, Wants to go to war over Ukraine, wants to go to war with Russia, wants to fund Ukraine, wants to send troops there, they should feel free to do it.
Why is it the United States that has to continuously get involved in all of these wars while European capitals build their welfare states and the Americans have to deconstruct and dismantle?
It's because of all this money that it's spending.
No one's stopping the Europeans from continuing to fund this war if they want to.
Here's Obama's former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, quote, Trump officials are signaling that Ukraine has to give up territory and not join NATO? So Putin will be rewarded for invading Ukraine?
Getting everything he wants?
Hope this proves not to be true.
Europe does not need a Munich 2.0 agreement, referring to Neville Chamberlain's attempt to appease the Nazis by giving them Czechoslovakia.
That's the only event that they understand and can see the world through.
Here is Pete Hexeth, just one last statement that he made, not only about Ukraine, but more generally about the U.S. relationship to NATO and to Europe more broadly.
Here's what he said.
We're also here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.
The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland.
We must, and we are, focusing on security of our own borders.
We also face a peer competitor in the Communist Chinese, with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific.
The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity.
And making the resourcing trade-offs to ensure deterrence does not fail.
Deterrence cannot fail for all of our sakes.
As the United States prioritizes its attention to these threats, European allies must lead from the front.
In other words, the dependency that Europe has fostered on the United States, its willingness to exist as vassal states to the United States in exchange for how the United States fight its wars and pay for its military and create this NATO shield over it is coming to an end.
And I have to say we've obviously delved into these topics many times before and you can debate them and you can question them and people have and will.
But I do think it is impressive that Donald Trump ran for two years for president.
He laid out a foreign policy image very, very clearly that radically deviated from Washington's consensus.
He won the election and, in part, based on it, people heard what he had to say about ending these wars, about questioning the viability of NATO and the importance of the United States, continuously putting NATO at the center of our relationship with the world.
He won the election and now he's in office and he's proceeding to follow through on those commitments.
And that deserves a lot of credit.
That ultimately is democracy.
And if the Trump administration does succeed in finally ending this war in Ukraine, regardless of the terms, it will deserve immense credit.
This war has been a tragedy on a human level that is hard to put into words.
It has destroyed all of Ukraine and at least two generations of men in Ukraine.
It has been an incredibly dangerous state of affairs for the United States and Russia to be on opposite sides of a proxy war while we have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at one another's cities.
No one in Washington or in Brussels has demonstrated any interest in ending this war.
Quite the contrary.
in if Trump comes in and actually follows through with what he's saying he's going to do and continues on this path of making clear that this will be the U.S. attitude toward Russia and Ukraine and Europe more broadly, then immense credit will be due.
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We have seen so many examples of that obviously culminating with Joe Biden nominally running the United States while not having a functioning brain.
But we've seen it in all sorts of other ways in other people, including...
And members of Congress who just keep running for re-election and winning re-election into their 70s and 80s and 90s despite being cognitively and increasingly physically...
Incapacitated.
Dan Bogoslaw is a freelance investigative reporter.
He was at The Intercept where he did some of their best work and broke a lot of their stories.
He is the author of Deeper State on Substack as well.
He's written for many other outlets.
And he has a new article in the American Prospect today about this problem of aging members of Congress and specifically previously secret programs that they have implemented in order to enable them to stay in power even as their brains...
Daniel, it's great to see you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us tonight.
Hey, Glenn.
Thanks for having me on.
It took a while, but I finally made it.
Here you are.
I'm thrilled to have you.
All right, let's start with the program that you uncovered and revealed in your article today.
I don't think it's been a secret.
People have been noticing that There are tons of members of Congress and people filling Washington power positions who are obviously way too old even to function, let alone make decisions of that magnitude, and yet they seem to be recognizing that as well based on the programs they've created for themselves that you've been able to uncover.
What is it that you have found?
Sure.
Well, I'll start by saying As you mentioned, we had Nancy Pelosi falling and breaking her hip in Germany last month.
We have Jerry Connolly, who's currently leading Democrats' oversight efforts in the House of Representatives, disclosing that he has near-terminal esophageal.
We have Kay Granger, the Texas rep who's recently discovered to be living in a senior citizen's home with a dementia wing.
We had Mitch McConnell having several falls and what appear to be several strokes.
The list goes on and on.
So I just wanted to ask, you know, what type of treatment are these people getting that's allowing them to even walk and talk at the reduced level that they're doing?
And I discovered that there's a very old, almost 100-year-old Medical wing housed inside of Capitol Hill.
It's called the Office of the Attending Physician.
It was started in 1929 after multiple members of Congress had had life-threatening falls, in some cases just died on Capitol Hill.
And Congress decided they needed to have some kind of doctor, you know, on location.
To address these types of incidents.
But since 1929, this has really grown into a boutique health clinic for members of Congress for around $50 a month.
They're able to get primary care, physical therapy.
They're able to get referrals to the military hospitals, which are also paid for by tax dollars all across D.C. And, you know, I wanted to understand more about how this...
Secret of office functions.
Like I said, it's been around for almost 100 years.
I couldn't find a lot of information open source on it, so I wrote to every member of the committee that oversees this office.
I asked over a dozen different elected officials, can you tell me who pays in for this program?
Can you tell me how much they're paying?
And I didn't get a response from a single one.
Yeah, it's amazing how little transparency they're willing to provide.
You know, I'm wondering...
A lot of people who work end up looking forward to retirement.
It's an opportunity to kind of recalibrate your priorities.
People like to spend time with their family as they're getting older.
There's actually a lot of interesting psychological research where they question people who are in the end stage of their life about What regrets do they have?
What do they wish they did more and less of?
And almost nobody says, oh, I wish I had worked longer.
I wish I had worked harder.
Almost everybody says, oh, I wish I had spent more time with my kids or my grandkids or whatever.
People fight to get retirement benefits earlier so that they can retire earlier.
And yet these people seem really almost desperate to cling to power, not to give it up, even when they're so infirm.
It must be difficult for them even just to get dressed in the morning and like wheeled around and have to read these statements.
Why do you think that Washington fosters this level of desperation?
Well, I think it's twofold.
I think on the one hand, you're completely right.
I mean, a lot of these people came up in a different political era.
They are, in a sense, addicted to the job.
They're used to flying back and forth from— They're home district in Washington, D.C. They like getting recognized at the cafe.
But also, you look at someone like Nancy Pelosi, and she's just structured her entire life around this job.
When she's not on Capitol Hill, she's fundraising.
It's 24-7.
I want to make clear that the problem with the gerontocracy issue is not an ageism complaint.
There are people who can go into their 70s, their 80s, and be coherent.
I just saw this evening Bernie Sanders came out and said he was going to stump across America.
He was going to go to red districts.
And, you know, try to talk directly to voters who voted for Trump to make his case to the American people in the heartland.
Meanwhile, you compare that rhetoric and that tactic with what Democratic leadership has been doing, which is holding rallies, which are laughable even to their moderate centrist base.
And you realize that those Democrats are not invested in the job they were elected to do.
You know, they're used to being able to play.
That Trump is a Nazi card.
They're used to being able to basically not have to create any sort of positive platform or program and basically sit back and claim that Republicans are devastating the country and that there's nothing they can do about it.
Obviously, age becomes a problem for a lot of these representatives and a lot of these senators.
You can see it by the myriad health failures that they have in public when they're trying to do their job.
But the point isn't that old people shouldn't serve in government.
The point is that the American public can see with their own eyes what is happening and that special interests, whether they're...
Corporate lobbyists, whether they're foreign lobbyists, have an incentive to maintain the relationships with these politicians, to give their campaign coffers more money.
And not only that, but their staffers also have an incentive to keep them in power.
I mean, I used to work on Capitol Hill, okay?
I would talk to representatives.
I would talk to senators.
And one of my favorite pranks to pull, which I then write up at The Intercept, was to ask...
A representative or a senator, if they supported a position, which it seemed likely they would, and then watch as their They would go on the record with me.
And then I would watch as their staffers, who had been with them for years, who had tried to craft for their own outlook, for their own being the staffers, their own perspective, what they thought the elected official should do.
And of course, the comms directors, they tell you, oh, he didn't mean that.
Oh, that was taken out of context.
But I would always publish the article before they could make a dent.
And it goes to show that the people who are supposed to be doing the job, the people who individual Americans voted for, for a specific set of platforms, for a specific set of policies, aren't really in control.
And how can you be when you're completely out to lunch and you're 85 and you've got a broken hip?
Yeah, look, I take your point.
I mean, I just want about about how a lot of people who are very advanced age seem very energetic and very coherent.
Bernie is obviously an example.
I watched a hearing—I forget whether it was the Tulsi Gabbard hearing or the RFK hearing recently—where Chuck Grassley was running the hearing or was one of the top Republicans.
He's 86. And he's remarkably, you know, cogent and obviously very aware of what he's doing and what he's saying and not reading from a piece of paper that his staff has written for him.
And I know there was an attempt to try and imply that Trump was, you know, disabled by age.
He's almost 80, but you look at him and I think that's clearly not the case.
So you are right that just because you are in your late 70s or 80s or whatever doesn't mean that you're necessarily incapacitated or even slowed down.
There's a lot of people who are.
But nonetheless, I do think there is something about what we might call a gerontocracy where you still lose something by having a government filled with largely, you know, people in their 70s and 80s.
I remember when the internet first emerged and I was working as a lawyer, I was in my mid-20s, I remember there were a lot of older lawyers, partners and the like who their whole lives had been dictating, you know, letters and documents by speaking to one of those dictaphones and giving it to their secretary and she would type it up.
And then as the internet started evolving, they just refused to learn the computer.
They didn't have a computer.
They didn't want a computer.
They didn't want the internet.
And I always remember thinking, wow, that's, you know, terrible.
I want to make sure that that doesn't happen to me.
As I get older, I lose sight of...
And, you know, now...
When I want to watch something on television, I have to call my kids.
The reality is that as you get older, you do get a little bit set in your ways.
There are certain things you aren't quite paying as much attention to.
It does seem like even if they were physically and mentally sharp, which a lot of them aren't, that you do get kind of ossified as a political system by having a government led by people who are all in their advanced age.
Absolutely, yeah.
And I mean, they don't know how to use Twitter.
They don't know how to use TikTok.
They are not plugged in to the will of not just Zoomers and teenagers, but normal Americans who are using these platforms to communicate and share their sentiments.
And the proof in the pudding on that is when you look at...
The videos that have gone up since Trump's inauguration where Democrats have a fire under their ass and all of a sudden they're realizing that they've eaten it on socials and on reaching this writhing, seething base that is now completely enraged by their incompetence.
And they try to get their staffers to put up videos.
They try to do these things.
But it's a total abject failure.
And to bring it back to the article, I mean...
I think it's the same issue here.
I think either party could take a stand and say, you know, it really is obscene that taxpayers to the tune of four or five million dollars a year are subsidizing our health care when, you know, we have federal officials, whether it's Trump, whether it's Mitch McConnell, whether it's Elon Musk saying we're going to scale back Medicare, we're going to scale back Medicaid, we're going to overturn Obamacare.
You know, this is an incredible tool.
You know, this is an incredible rhetorical point to say, like, yeah, you know what?
It is obscene that this system has existed for, you know, almost 100 years where we have the access basically to the best healthcare in the world.
And, you know, obviously not a single representative wanted to stick their neck out and say, you know, yeah, this is a mistake.
This is a problem.
So, I think just at every level, at every policy decision where there's a fork in the road, at every opportunity to try to bring young people to bring, and not just young people, but anyone who's tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, anyone who's willing to experiment with new forms of communication anyone who's willing to experiment with new forms of communication into the fold, even when there's some flicker of recognition that that is something that should be tried, Democrats completely faceplant because they are so resistant to change.
They're so resistant to surrendering that power that they've accrued over.
Over decades and re-elections.
And that's really the problem with the gerontocracy.
You know, it's not only an inability to be up to speed.
It's not only an ability to function at the highest level, but it's also a bone-deep resistance to change.
Exactly.
I mean, they get set in their ways.
They don't have any ability to understand that the world's different than it was when they were 40 and developing their views then that haven't changed.
This is the last question, though.
I used to struggle a lot on the question of term limits.
Because on the one hand, the benefit obviously is that you prevent people from clinging to power the way Dianne Feinstein did, you know, until she's like 90 and not even able to know where she is and all the other examples that you've identified.
On the other hand, it's a deprivation of choice on the part of voters that, you know, if you like your member of Congress and as you said, people can go into their 70s and 80s and still be incredibly active and energized, why shouldn't you get to vote for them?
And I saw, I think it was Matt Stoller the other day said something like, Someone said, oh, we should have cognitive tests for our members of Congress.
And I think it was Matt Stoller who said something like, yeah, we do.
They're called elections.
And that used to be what I thought, was that we don't need term limits.
Why can't people just vote for who they want for as long as they want?
The problem is, is that we have these reelection rates that make the Politburo, like under Leonid Brezhnev, look vibrant and democratic.
These people don't lose elections.
And it doesn't matter.
They don't even know who they are.
They just keep winning.
What is it about our system that produces that kind of automatic re-election for all these people who have no business being anywhere near power because of their health?
I mean, look, you want to reference Matt Stoller.
Let's take the Stoller answer to the question, which is that when you have mega corporations and mega monopolies that are able to spend whatever they want.
However much they want, whenever they want on elections, you create hyper-consolidated Donor bases that are basically a fortress around anyone moving in.
And it's not just corporations.
It's also foreign governments.
I mean, you look at the 100 mil that APAC dropped, they picked their target, and they say, you know, you're not going to win re-election.
So, I mean, that's a bigger problem.
That's a harder problem to solve.
It's not as neat and tied in a bow as something like term limits are or cognitive tests.
But I think time and time again, you know...
Log on to OpenSecrets.com and take a look.
Almost every time, the biggest spender wins the election.
I think that's the core problem.
And the longer you're in office, the more connections you can make, the more favors you can hand out, and the more money you've got in your war chest.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a very illusory democracy.
All right.
Well, congratulations on the story, Dan.
It's great to finally have you on our show.
As you said, we've been talking about it for a while.
As you know, I am an admirer of your work.
I encourage people to follow you wherever you can be found.
