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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the position the United States has in the world both diplomatically and militarily now that Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed to Trump's cabinet. They do a deep dive into the Press Conference of Infamy as Elon Musk appeared to be the president while his son whispered cruel epithets at the unwitting Donald Trump. They finish on a report that indicates the economic picture Biden and Harris tried to present during the campaign wasn't nearly as rosy as they depicted it.
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I literally, yeah, I just, yeah, you got me at the wrong time.
I was not expecting you to say that.
The week is not over, and these assholes do not rest.
Oh man, that was not good.
Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McRank Podcast.
Thanks everybody for your support.
A reminder, if you want to support the show, listen to the entire episode.
And folks, we got a whole thing.
We've got the betrayal of Ukraine and America.
We've got an absolutely surreal Oval Office appearance by Elon Musk.
We have so much to talk about today.
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At this time, we need your support more than ever, and we appreciate your support and your faith.
Nick, sometimes it's hard in this era figuring out where to start.
Most of the time, we would go ahead and start with Elon Musk holding court in the Oval Office and paying disrespect to Donald Trump, the President of the United States of America.
But we have watched in the past couple of days some truly historic and huge and repulsive things.
You know, it begins with Tulsi Gabbard getting confirmed as the Director of National Intelligence.
God knows who her allegiance lies with at this point.
It's been for sale for a very, very long time.
Went forward with Donald Trump calling Vladimir Putin, who last time I checked has been barred from all diplomatic talks with the quote-unquote West because of his genocidal attack on Ukraine.
And in a, quote, lengthy and highly productive conversation, he has begun what he is calling a peace process.
And so far, what we have heard is that more or less Ukraine is being abandoned.
And let's go ahead and hear...
What former Fox News host and completely unqualified asshole Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, had to say about, you know, conditions relating to any type of peace.
We 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.
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.
So Hegseth has just absolutely got out over his skis, has also gone on to say that, quote, stark realities prevent the United States from being the primary guarantor of security in Europe, and that China and the Pacific are now our main focuses, saying that there needs to be a, quote, division of labor with Europe when it comes to defense.
He's had to walk back some of these things, but you can't feel like he made them up whole cloth.
Nick, what we've seen here is the shift that we expected, which is the United States betraying Ukraine, siding with Vladimir Putin, giving him the terms more or less that he was demanding the entire time, and, I don't want to overstate this, a changing of the geopolitical world order as we have known it.
Well, that is what I was texting you earlier a couple days ago in terms of the fear we have of some sort of weird axis that's going to happen between, you know, China and Russia and North Korea.
And it turns out, I think we're going to be in this axis.
Maybe I haven't said that in the last pod.
And there's no notion of, like, negotiation.
You're just sort of capitulating to everything before you even sit down and talk.
I think the biggest weird thing about this whole thing is that they're icing out Ukraine.
Right?
Zelensky doesn't seem to be part of this peace process in this fashion here.
And it's the audacity that Trump will come out there and say, and he actually tried to characterize it as if Ukraine went into the war, that they decided to have this war, right?
When he phrased it like that, it was a bad idea on their part, something like that, paraphrasing.
It's almost like he's just parroting what Putin is telling him.
And that's the rationalization for them to say, well, we've got to end this now because they made a mistake.
And the only mistake they made was hoping and wishing, by throwing a couple pennies in the fountain, that maybe NATO would take pity on them and let them in the club at some point to protect them from, guess what, Russia invading their country.
Yeah, so there's a lot of stuff happening right here.
So forgive me for trying to get to all these different threads because this is actually very, very huge.
First things first, this is exactly what you and I saw coming a long time ago.
The moment the Republican Party started aligning itself with Vladimir Putin, getting more and more comfortable with him, basically starting to like him more than their Democratic rivals.
Coming along on the same white supremacist, misogynistic, authoritarian axis that we've seen around the world.
Second, everyone wants to think that somehow or another, if this World War III is to break out, that America is going to be on the right side.
We've talked about this.
World wars come from developing tensions, and you have to decide what is in your interest or the interest of your country or your allies.
Getting Donald Trump elected a second time started to change that paradigm in a very large way.
We eventually came into ideological cohesion with Russia.
If you were going to be charitable and try and give this some sort of an intellectual or strategic spin, I'm sure some people would claim that America is trying to triangulate Russia against China.
A la, you know, what Richard Nixon did with China in the Soviet Union back in the 1970s.
That's not what these assholes are doing.
They're not trying to sort of move the players around the board.
There is a larger thing beyond nation states at this point.
There are authoritarian oligarchs who are all on the same page.
And as I've said...
About a potential World War III, I do not think it would look like a World War I or World War II, much like they didn't look like one another.
It would be weird, asymmetrical, all over the place, grabbing of resources, possibly even an oligarchical-led, corporate-type war-type conflict.
At this point, what we're watching, Nick, is literally the breakdown of the American geopolitical order that began in 1948 with the Marshall Plan.
Which, when America took the baton as the preeminent empire in the world from Great Britain and also took control of capitalism as an economic force, we went ahead and basically said to Europe, we're going to help you out.
We'll also protect you.
That's one of the reasons why NATO was created in the first place.
And as I've said over and over, when empire reaches decline, you start getting letters that say, hey, I know that we've come to your aid before.
Best of luck.
Right?
And that's essentially what we've watched here.
Everything that we expected is now coming into fruition.
The question now is whether or not it's going to be permanent and what it's going to look like if this type of conflict actually comes to pass.
For sure.
And it's easy for Trump to cut out Zelensky and all this because he can simply stop sending aid.
But then that pits the United States against the European Union, who I think is still pledging to give aid.
And when you look at the maps, I was kind of studying this yesterday to figure out, well, how much ground has Russia really taken?
Because it's a little bit not so clear in my mind, having read all about it all these months and years.
And it's not a lot.
It's like the eastern edge of the country, right?
But they still maintain...
90% of the country that they had before Russia incurred into the country.
So this is what's so worrisome.
It's like, well, then they can say, ah, we'll just give it to them.
Give them a little bit.
What do they get?
They didn't get too much, whatever.
People died.
Let's get this all cleaned up or whatever.
And then they'll have Crimea, no problem.
And then we can get back to doing all the grifting we want to do and get rid of all these sanctions that are probably not even in place anyway.
But, again...
You know, you hear people from, like, the leader of Poland speaking out and being really concerned for a big reason, right?
Because they're next, right?
Or Moldova is next.
Like, that's the thing here that's going to happen with what Putin is going to do if you don't stop them now.
But it's also an indictment of their capabilities militarily that that's all they've been able to do was, you know, take maybe the 10% that they got on the edges on the eastern edge of the country.
Well, Nick, on that note, speaking of Europe and our allies, I assume you probably remember, maybe our listeners remember, back whenever we were going through Trump's nominations following the election, I talked about Tulsi Gabbard.
And I said, the moment that she is confirmed...
The American alliance, the entire sort of, like, situation that's been created, I said the first thing that's going to happen is the other members of Five Eyes, which are the allies that share intelligence and strategy, they're going to cut off ties, more or less.
And anything they give the United States from that point on is going to be guarded, and it's also going to be skewed because they understand.
One of our listeners happens to be from Europe and is involved in these type of things.
They said to me immediately after that, they said, yeah, we're already prepared for that.
The moment that Tulsi Gabbard got confirmed, I got a message.
And do you know what that message said, Nick?
What?
Well, well, well, well.
Period.
Right?
And so what has already happened?
Is that the signals have already been sent.
Europe understands at this point.
There's a reason why over the past couple of years they have been raising their defense spending.
And they know that...
That if Donald Trump came to power, if the Republican Party kept going towards Putinism, that eventually they were going to be cut off and they were going to be looking at a war.
And what does European intelligence show now, Nick?
It shows that Vladimir Putin is remobilizing.
He's turned Russia into a complete war economy.
He's brought in North Korea as reinforcements.
He now is on a five-year plan to...
Further his invasions and also possibly start declaring war on NATO countries.
We're in that type of a window now.
Also, Nick, the very fact the President of the United States of America called Putin signals we're probably going to look at sanctions being pulled off.
We're going to see a bunch of bank accounts opened up.
That means they're going to rebuild all of their money and all their structures.
On top of that, they already had the bypass option with China.
They already had a situation where they had enough blood money going through the system that wasn't cut off.
So for people who say, well, Russia couldn't even conquer Ukraine, we're about to watch a new thing take off.
And now the United States of America is not going to be holding them back.
They're not going to be trying to contain them.
God knows where this thing's going, and Europe now knows they're on their own.
They're well aware of it.
And what happens from there?
Destabilization, the buildup of weapons, and things become much, much more possible.
Right.
Well, you know those what-if scenarios everyone likes to play, like Risk and all those kind of games?
It's like, this would be the one where you replay World War II, but this time Russia is sort of the Nazis.
Right?
And they're the ones with a much bigger resource than army that can now sweep through.
I mean, this is basically Hitler not betraying Russia and the United States of America not getting hit by Pearl Harbor.
Exactly.
Well, you know what?
I almost feel like, well, yeah, because you couldn't say it's like the U.S. getting hit by Pearl Harbor and then deciding not to get involved.
Right.
If Charles Lindbergh is behind the desk.
Yes.
Right, right.
Because it's like, you know, hitting Ukraine the way this is and then us pulling back is not exactly like Pearl Harbor, but it's like we are going to make a decision to not get involved in this at all and pull back in some sort of isolationist when it really is just a deal and a grift.
It's not great and it's hard and we're going to have to continue to figure out how people, including ourselves, with our mental states because I can guarantee you a month from now we're going to be doing a show that's going to be talking about worse things.
Well, I mean, it is going to escalate, and I want to say this very clearly, and I'm glad you brought it up the way that you did.
The reason we're talking about this is because the probabilities of everything that we're discussing just went up.
It doesn't mean it's inevitable.
It doesn't mean that it's game over.
It doesn't mean that you might as well put on the armband and march down Main Street with these assholes.
The entire point is that...
Things can change and things do move around, but I think it's really time for the people who listen to this, including people in positions of power.
And by the way, I know there are Democratic operatives and members who listen to this show.
Get off your ass.
Get off your ass and get off your ass in a big way.
And the entire point of me saying this is we need to start wrapping our heads around the fact that not only are we in conflict right now.
This conflict is going to continue to heat up.
We have entered into a new era, and things are going to continue to escalate at this point.
There's no other way to see it.
Yeah, and in a similar way of him sweeping all the swing states in what we thought was a surprise at the time, he's going to sweep all of his appointments into the cabinet as well, save for...
By the way, doesn't Gates look stupid now?
Gates could have absolutely gotten confirmed.
There's no way possible to look at it now and think that he wouldn't have been confirmed, except for maybe he would have been blackballed because, you know.
Someone call Al Franken and tell him not to resign.
But at any rate, yeah, he's going to sweep all these people in.
And, you know, we are now sitting upon RFK Jr. also getting affirmed with one Republican voting against him.
Not even someone who's a doctor in the Senate.
Two of them would recognize this quack for who he is.
So, yeah.
And you know what's an extremely powerful argument for them is that they're claiming mandate.
And you can't, you know, you can say, oh.
It's not a mandate he won by a point and a half or whatever, right?
But it doesn't matter.
They can just say it.
And they can say that they won the popular vote.
And that's some weird, powerful thing.
And it's leading to better approval ratings.
And more and more people are joining the song.
And that's really what's concerning about all of this.
And the more people that join, the less people there are to resist.
And the more people who are just going to hide in their homes and not say anything.
The good news in all of this, there is way more of us than there are of them.
And if we actually come online and actually do what we need to do, we'll win this fight.
It's way more important than ever.
We'd really appreciate it if you could give it a try.
