Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman went through the contentious press conference that featured the President of the United States yelling at the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy when he had the nerve to ask for security guarantees against an aggressor (Putin) that doesn't honor cease fires. They point out some subtle things you may not have heard in the mainstream media, and why it was so disheartening to hear Donald Trump spout off absolute Russian propaganda. They move on to whether the US will remain in NATO, before discussing the grift that turning Crypto currency into a national reserve will be from our political leaders.
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Of course, we're going to be talking about what happened at the White House on Friday.
We have to talk about developments in geopolitics that are stemming from the collapse of the American world order, economic problems, you name it.
But Nick, before we get going, we got to address the elephant in the room.
We don't.
We have to.
We are...
We are accountable.
We need to call it like it is.
All right.
I didn't do the math right, whatever.
So I exoriated Trump for no reason.
He was right with the math.
Somebody gave him the right thing.
I had to ask ChatGPT to make sure, and I won't dispute it.
So yes, I didn't.
Didn't multiply properly.
Yeah, for anyone who didn't hear it, we both made a boo-boo when it came to math.
Nick got very upset about a calculation, and my English humanities brain just took over, and I was like, yes, numbers.
Yeah.
But just in case you're wondering, 10 million times 5 million is 50 trillion.
I'm going to take your word for it.
That's what, you know, because when you're doing the calculator on my phone, it gives you like 50E13 or something.
I was like, wait, what the heck is that?
So I had to have ChatGPT describe it for me.
Listen, I will say this.
When it comes to math, most of the time, don't come here.
We're not good on the math.
I taught math, Jared.
You did teach math.
I taught English.
You taught math.
Yeah, I taught English too, though.
So, I don't know.
Oh, man.
Okay, well, we are going to learn from our mistakes, is what's going to happen.
But now that we've had that, a couple of notes.
First things first.
You're going to be listening to this on Tuesday.
Uh, March 4th.
Uh, that is going to be the day of Trump's address to Congress, which is the stand-in for the State of the Union.
That's going to take place at 9 p.m.
Eastern.
We are going to go live with a live show for subscribers immediately after that, reacting to the speech, giving analysis and reaction, all that good stuff.
A reminder, everybody, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Support the show.
Keep us growing and editorially independent.
Nick, uh, let's talk about the big thing.
On Friday, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky visited the White House, where Donald Trump and J.D. Vance berated and insulted him in front of the entire world.
Eventually, Vladimir Zelensky left the White House without signing the Minerals deal, ended up going to Europe, which we'll talk more about as we go.
But I don't think it's an understatement to say that this is one of the most grotesque things that a president has done in terms of foreign policy and diplomacy that we've ever seen.
There's a lot to get into here.
But Nick, what was your initial reaction watching this disaster?
And by the way, maybe the key phrase is, that we've ever seen.
Because perhaps it's terrible behind closed doors and we don't know what people have said in various moments in diplomacy in our country.
But I had texted you saying it was the lowest point of American diplomacy in the history of the country.
You know, okay, there's some touch points that we can point to that could conceivably be lower.
I think the list I gave you was the War on Terror, the Mexican-American War, and the start of the Cold War.
The Cold War was a diplomatic failure as well.
Okay, fair enough.
Although, that's another podcast we can do about how that works and what if Afghanistan was a diplomatic failure versus just...
I would say the Iraq War was a diplomatic failure.
You say it would be?
Yeah.
Yeah, the Iraq War was.
I mean, okay, because you just make up the whole reason to go is diplomacy, I suppose, in the beginning.
But anyway, let's get back to the task at hand.
And yeah, you're watching this.
You're watching a guy coming from a war-torn country who's been dealing with assassination attempts and a huge army intent on destroying the entire country for three years.
And I think it was perfectly reasonable to lay out what he needed to lay out and make clear what was happening in his country.
And to sort of have this thing devolve into, you know, where he says, you know, we don't need to raise our voices.
This is what Zelensky said.
And then Trump raised his voice saying, we're not raising our voices.
It was like, I think maybe it was on purpose.
Maybe Zelensky knew that he had to expose what he was dealing with to everybody else out in the broad daylight.
Well, I'll say before we get into the nuts and bolts of this, we're going to listen to a couple of clips and then we're going to get into the larger picture.
I'll say, first of all, he came into this lacking any sort of security guarantees, which made this thing bristle from the very beginning.
But on top of that, what did Trump and Vance want from this?
What did the administration want?
They wanted him to come in and play nice and be grateful that they were going to steal half of the resources of Ukraine.
And the man went in there and...
They put him in a position where he had no choice but to go to Washington, D.C. in order to theoretically sign this agreement that was going to steal their resources.
He was supposed to grin and bear and take it and eat the shit and ask for a second helping.
And what did he do?
He could not sit there as Trump and Vance just hurled not just insults at him, but blatant Russian propaganda.
And so as a result...
In the place where he was, he had to stand up for himself.
He had to stand up for the country of Ukraine.
And quite frankly, I think really afforded himself really, really impressively.
I think he gave us a roadmap.
Of how you handle these assholes.
You can't just sit there as they lie and shill for Vladimir Putin and the authoritarian international movement.
You can't just sit there and do that.
You have to at least stand up for yourself.
And I have to tell you, they do not like it when you stand up for yourself.
Absolutely.
And they also don't like it when you kind of talk over them when they're trying to talk.
And after enough times of doing it, I had to imagine like that was part of his...
He knew he needs to continue to keep saying what he's going to say.
And again, obviously, he didn't want it to happen this way.
He didn't want it to involve this to Zelensky.
Or he wanted this to happen.
He needed to have everybody understand, and that would galvanize Europe behind it, maybe more so than they had been.
Because here's the thing.
He knows that Trump is patently against Ukraine.
that has no interest at all in what the country will look like, except for the fact that he wants to be able to get his bulldozers in there to get all the rare earth out of there and avoid getting blown up by any kind of Russian missiles that are having to be firing.
So if he can figure out any way to stop the missiles from being fired for a little while so they can go get all those minerals, great.
Like that's his only concern.
And so it's perfectly reasonable to have Zelensky come in there and say, listen, we can do a deal, you can get whatever you want on this, but you have to be able to guarantee that you will step in if he breaks a ceasefire.
And breaking ceasefires is something that Putin seems to really like doing.
No, I mean, absolutely.
And he's not going to respect anything like that.
And when you understand that the game is rigged and that your supposed ally is in league and in cahoots with the country that not only invaded you, but is attempted to destroy you, there's not a whole lot of wiggle room for a deal.
And we're going to get more into what happened here and the fallout from it, but let's go ahead and take a look and listen at a couple things.
Everybody was talking about how this thing was just going fine until it devolved and turned into a spectacle, but what we're getting ready to play here is an earlier back and forth that I think really set the table for eventually what we would see.
A lot of cities have been destroyed.
A lot of cities that are not recognizable.
There's not a building standing.
You have to come in to look.
No, no, no.
We have very good cities.
Yes, a lot of things have been destroyed, but mostly cities alive and people work and children go to school.
Sometimes it's very difficult.
Sometimes closer to frontline, children have to go to underground schools or online.
But we live.
Ukraine is fighting and Ukraine lives.
This is very important.
And maybe it's Putin is sharing this information that he destroyed us.
No, he lost 700,000 people.
700,000 soldiers he lost ever seen.
Yes.
I mean, right there, Nick, the pushback, and you'll notice before it really devolves, like it's still respectful.
It's inviting Donald Trump to come to Ukraine and saying, hey, we are not defeated, we are not destroyed.
I mean, and that is an important thing because as we will see as this devolves, Donald Trump was trying to communicate and bully Zelensky into believing that there was absolutely nothing for him to do except for to take this offer without any other type of considerations.
Absolutely.
It was really subtle, I thought, what Zelensky was doing in terms of sneaking in sort of the Russian influence on Trump, which is perfect.
It's like, you know, the only person you hear where Trump is getting information from is Russia.
We have another clip I think we ought to play again, because again, it doesn't necessarily mean that they were yelling and shouting at each other, but the subtlety of what Zelensky was doing leads me to believe that this is sort of what, you know, he probably necessarily didn't care if the deal got blown up right now because it wasn't worthy of a deal anyway.
So here's another clip here where Trump is trying to describe the amount of money Europe has been giving them during this war compared to the United States.
President Trump said that they made less support, but they are our friends and they are our very supportive partners.
They really gave a lot, Mr. President.
Really, they did.
They gave a lot, but they gave much less.
No.
Much less.
No.
At least.
No.
No.
Okay.
Okay.
And you can see, if you've watched the video of this, or if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see that Zelensky is still trying to sort of play this up.
They're trying to banter back and forth, but he's not going to put up with the misinformation that Trump is peddling.
And I want to point out, Nick, we've seen Democratic...
I'm putting heavy, heavy quotes around that.
They have been in these rooms with Donald Trump, and he just steamrolls them with lies.
And it happens so quickly that they're not willing to push back on any of them.
And it kind of goes in the record and in the discourse.
And Zelensky did not allow that to happen.
And basically, at this point, one of the only ways you can deal with these type of assholes is to say, hey, that is not correct.
Every time that they lie, every time they twist reality, you have to say, no, that simply isn't true.
And the reaction as they're realizing what's going on, right, as J.D. Vance and Trump are realizing, wait a minute, this is like getting out to the public here.
There's like a crack in the facade of what we were trying to build.
You can see how quickly they get revved up, right, and the agitard just sort of takes over.
And we get what we even, you know, what I think we have always sort of suspected is what Trump is really like, right, in these moments.
We've heard them in the books when they've written about and described it.
It's not the same as getting to see it viscerally.
And I just want to say before you play this, and I know a lot of the people who listen to this show, they stay away from any type of media and they rely on us to go ahead and relay to them what's going on because they want to limit their intake or whatever.
For anyone who is about to listen to this, if you in any way, shape, or form in your personal life, in the family you grew up in, in your workplace, whatever, if you have ever had to deal with petulant man-children...
Who dominate every conversation and anytime somebody pushes back, they bristle and then get more and more aggressive.
I want you to keep that in mind as you listen to this because it is an incredible artifact in terms of the people who are running this country at this point.
Absolutely.
And what they're counting on is that you get emotionally disassociated, right?
And you have a hard time then responding, and then it puts you in this corner where you don't respond, and they run over you.
That's what they rely on.
We start with this clip.
It's just before all the fireworks start where J.D. Vance is starting to weigh in.
Again, we need to talk about it when we're done.
J.D. fucking Vance, by the way.
Yeah, he's not there.
He shouldn't be there.
This is a very strange thing, which is a par for the course for Trump.
All sorts of strange, inappropriate stuff.
He really, you know, you don't normally have a vice president sitting in on a press spray like this.
And there's probably a real good reason why he was there.
We'll talk about it in a second.
Here's the first part of the clip.
I think it's disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media.
Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems.
You should be thanking the president for trying to bring it into this conflict.
Have you ever been to Ukraine that you say what problems we have?
I've actually watched and seen the stories, and I know what happens is you bring people, you bring them on a propaganda tour, Mr. President.
Do you disagree that you've had problems bringing people into your military?
And do you think that it's respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
A lot of questions.
I just want to say very quickly, Nick, and this is a reoccurring theme in our coverage of both Trump, MAGA, and the authoritarian right.
What J.D. Vance is saying here is actually correct.
Ukraine is having trouble getting people to fight.
They have lowered their standards.
They've moved the age limit around.
On top of that, there are elements within Ukraine that are authoritarian, who are taking people off the street and making them fight.
That is an actual problem.
And for the record, this war does need to end.
It has been disastrous that it's been carried out the way that it has, both by the Biden administration and what's also happened with Putin.
It's not equivocating, but these are things that necessarily need to be brought up.
So what Vance is saying has a nugget of truth, which is what we always talk about.
That this does need to come to an end, but instead of it becoming a constructive conversation, it has to become an accusatory and offensive conversation, which basically wants him to come in and kiss the hand that is actually getting ready to steal all of the resources.
And primarily because what they're trying to tell him is, you've lost this war.
It's over.
You've lost.
And I said this last week or two weeks ago.
I don't think any war college professor would look at this and say that anyone has won this war.
This has been a stalemate.
And in fact, you might want to say, because of Ukraine's limited resources in smaller size, they're ahead in some weird way because they've been able to...
Yes, but Russia is...
Listen, the longer this thing goes on, Russia has gained an advantage and they have increased.
So they are going to lose this war if it were to continue the way that it's happening.
Like the losses are mounting and they're getting worse.
But that being said, what you just said is true, which is they have fought valiantly.
They have pushed back against one of the world's main powers.
And to sit here and basically say you've lost the war, you have no way to negotiate on this.
It's not just wrong.
It's a betrayal is what it is.
What we're literally watching right now is a betrayal.
And this is one democracy to another.
I wish that Zelensky had said something like that.
You know, he's like, we're a democracy just like you are.
They're the ones who are invading it as an autocracy.
Like, that's the line that's not being drawn quite clearly for me across the country here.
But, you know, anyway, let's keep going.
There's a little more of this, and then we'll have a lot more to talk about.
Let's start from the beginning.
Sure.
First of all, during the war, everybody has problems.
Even you, but you have nice ocean.
And don't feel now.
But you will feel it in the future.
God bless.
You don't know that.
God bless.
God bless.
You will not have a war.
Don't tell us what we're going to feel.
We're trying to solve a problem.
Don't tell us what we're going to feel.
I'm not telling you.
Because you're in no position to dictate that.
You're in no position to dictate what we're going to feel.
We're going to feel very good.
We're going to feel very good and very strong.
You're right now not in a very good position.
You've allowed yourself to be in a very bad position, and he happens to be right about it.
You're not in a good position.
You don't have the cards right now.
With us, you start having cards.
Right now, you don't have the cards.
You're playing cards.
You're gambling with the lives of millions of people.
You're gambling with World War III. You're gambling with World War III. And what you're doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country.
That's back to you.
Far more than a lot of people said they should have.
Should we break in here on this one?
Disrespectful is a big word that he likes to keep using over and over again.
Yeah, I mean, he wanted him to come in and play, you know, pet.
He wanted them to come in and grovel at their feet and thank them and give them a media victory, more or less.
And, you know, sort of a, hey, how are you doing sign over to Russia.
Look what we did to your boy.
Look what we did to your enemy.
He came over here and he groveled like a dog.
And the fact that he couldn't do that, you see from Trump, I mean...
I can't imagine how many people, Nick, have been across a table from this.
How many people in the real estate world, how many people in the media world, how many people in the political world have seen this behind closed doors?
But the fact that this has now come out into the open is one of the most disgraceful things that we've seen.
Oh, and just another point about the number of troops and how he doesn't have the lower standards.
I've seen compelling evidence recently that there are Chinese soldiers fighting.
We have no idea who's fighting in Ukraine.
Korea sent troops as well to them.
You don't do that unless you're having a lot of problems getting people to fight on your side, on the Russian side.
So again, that's how bad it's gotten for Russia, where they've depleted all of their resources as well to try and continue doing this.
It's not just like Afghanistan, I suppose, because of the terrain, but doesn't this reek of Afghanistan in 1979 all over again?
No, I disagree on that point.
That was a hopeless folly in terms of what was happening with the Soviet Union.
And actually, they started to fail as time went on, and there was no route to victory.
In this case, the Russian military has gotten stronger over time.
And they have been able to, they've basically adapted, and I said this on the last episode when we were talking about all this, they have gotten a ton of practice against NATO weapons and weapons systems and strategies at this point.
And really, the problem here, and I just want to say it again, this war should have been ended earlier.
It is like Ukraine has had a great advantage at multiple times.
The Biden administration, like, kept them on a leash and wasn't able to, you know, wasn't interested in escalating this thing.
Europe wanted to go forward with it.
And at this point, it is true that Zelensky does need this thing to end.
And the war does need to end.
These things are true.
But to see this happen in the way that it is, and it's a twisted, warped version of reality that's happening, that's the fight here.
The fight is that Trump and Vance and the Republican Party are filtering all of this through a prism that's advantageous to Putin and Russia at this point.
All right, well, let's hear the last little bit of this clip.
Thank you once this entire meeting.
No, in this entire meeting, have you said thank you?
You went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October.
Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who's trying to save your country.
Please, you think that if you will speak very loudly about the war...
He's not speaking loudly.
He's not speaking loudly.
Your country is in big trouble.
Can I answer?
No, no.
You've done a lot of talking.
Your country is in big trouble.
I know.
You're not winning.
You're not winning this.
You have a damn good chance of coming out okay because of us.
Mr. President, we are staying in our country, staying strong.
From the very beginning of the war, we've been alone.
And we are thankful.
I said thanks in this cabinet.
We gave you, through the stupid president, $350 billion.
We gave you military equipment.
And you men are brave, but they had to use our military.
If you didn't have our military equipment, if you didn't have our military equipment, This war would have been over in two weeks.
In three days.
I heard it from Putin.
In three days.
This is something new.
Maybe less.
In two weeks.
Of course, yes.
It's going to be a very hard thing to do business like this.
I'll tell you this.
Yep, yep.
So another example where he can show, you know, this war would have been over in two weeks, and he goes, you know, Putin has been saying that over three days.
Like, again, this is the propaganda.
And also the severe miscalculation that Putin made in the very beginning, because I think he believed that it would be over in two weeks.
And, you know, I remember we talked about this way before it ever happened, that, you know, the Ukrainians are really...
Tough fighters in that same way that Afghanistan sees the Mujahideen as being tough fighters.
So it wasn't going to end.
And here we are three years later.
And I mean, listen, I'm not going to argue.
You're right.
Like, it's just an overwhelming military power.
And at any moment, they could really probably, in the most inhumane way, end this war, too.
Which is weird to me, because if that happened, then, you know, does the U.S. get the minerals then?
If Russia takes over the entire Ukraine...
Do they get the minerals?
I mean, I suppose the answer would be yes, because somehow Putin and Trump will then make some other deal.
But that was weird to me.
It seems like there might be a little bit of an incentive for the U.S. to continue helping and support Ukraine so that they can rape the country the way they want to.
Well, and the question at this point is, and we'll talk about the geopolitical fallout of this, Vladimir Putin now knows that he can do anything he wants to do.
I mean, we've heard one time after another the idea of tactical nukes.
We've heard about chemical weapons, biological weapons, all of those things.
And what stayed the hand was the United States in concert with NATO, right?
The idea that they weren't going to put up with it and they at least had sort of soft security guarantees and red lines when it came to Ukraine.
Those things don't exist now.
Like, Vladimir Putin can literally do whatever he wants there, and the only thing that could possibly hold him back or restrict him is what will Europe do?
Will they react to it?
And now we have an additional question, Nick, which is if Europe reacts to it, what will the United States do?
And this moment in the Oval Office, along with years of statements and speeches and positions that Trump and the people around him have taken, I think it's pretty clear which side of this they're on.
And I want to say this without any sort of pomp or circumstance.
I want to make it very clear.
This was the moment that the U.S.-led world order ended.
There have been moments where people thought that maybe it happened.
Going back to the war on terror, that was a moment where it got a little bit wobbly, and all of a sudden the coalition got a little bit wobbly.
There have been years where people were looking at the United States of America to do more.
This moment will be remembered for a very long time as the moment that the post-World War II American-led order started to crumble.
And we can make arguments about whether or not that was a good thing and whether or not it was good in the whole of the history of humanity.
I have my problems with it.
But what we need to understand at this point is that this marked the end of a chapter.
And we are now moving on to something different, and we have no idea what that something different will necessarily look like.
Right.
And the reaction is like, if only Zelensky would have rolled over and played nice and didn't say anything, that they would have gotten the deal done.
Well, if only Trump would have given some sort of security guarantee.
Why would that have been so hard?
And he could have been like, and again, Zelensky makes a great point earlier on, which didn't become contentious, even though it could have, which was that...
Putin has violated ceasefires like 25 times, is what he was saying, throughout this whole history of while they've been fighting since Crimea was taken over.
So why would he continue to honor any other ceasefire now?
And, you know, Trump could have even just given, you know, lip service as some sort of security guarantee that, you know, he won't do it, and he'll just say, I'm good friends with Putin, and I'll tell him not to.
And then, you know, at least say that.
So I see it as much of a fault, or the fault goes on, you know, Trump and his inability to negotiate this properly.
They started out the negotiations in a terrible spot by saying no NATO and all those different things that gave them no leverage in this negotiation because they didn't care.
They didn't want leverage.
They already had they had they had a deal for money.
And that's all this is.
So in the wake of this and we'll get to the geopolitical context and what happened with Europe in the fallout.
But in domestic news with this Speaker of the House, Mike, Mike Johnson, Lindsey Graham, they have all now called for Zelensky to resign as president of Ukraine so that they can get a job.
Done.
A deal put in.
Elon Musk has said that he should resign and has also started signaling that he wants America out of the United Nations and NATO. On top of that, we've seen our media, including the new face of the Washington Post, we saw with an editorial from Mark A. Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute.
Thanks, guys.
You've done a bang-up job for decades at this point.
With an editorial that was titled, Zelensky must mend the breach with Trump or resign, which goes ahead and says, quote, Zelensky should have not litigated any disagreements with Trump in front of the media.
It should have been a back-slapping, feel-good meeting celebrating the Minerals deal.
So what are we seeing at this point from the conservative right-wing part of America?
Zelensky has to go in order for any sort of a deal to happen at this point.
We need to move away from any sort of foreign entanglements, including the American order that was created in that post-war environment.
Things are happening quick.
Lindsey Graham.
Lindsey Graham.
You know, I can't, I don't even want to say the phrase I'm thinking of.
That's something basically just, you know, shoot me in the head.
Because I can't believe, he was the one guy who was like the champion of Ukraine.
And understood how important it was in the terms of, now again, I don't want to get into like domino theory stuff.
Because remember how much that, you know, turned out to be false in Vietnam.
And I don't want to sit here like pulling the sand cord on that one and say, well, he's just going to go.
But like.
Zelensky makes a pretty compelling argument to me that he will not stop at Ukraine.
And certainly the notion that you need to have some backstop is important there.
And that's what Lindsey Graham understood until this weekend, right?
All of a sudden, in a crazy turn, now he's calling for Zelensky to be fired or to step down.
It's just we've gotten to that place.
It's upside down.
This is it.
There is nothing left.
There is nothing to stop Trump from doing any of these things.
And his treatment of Zelensky was one of those dunks that they would consider just like you dunk on the libs and got people really riled up and happy and excited for this.
And that's a real problem.
Well, and I just want to say it's the fruition of a decade of the American right and right wing organizations around the world as the international authoritarian movement rolls on.
getting closer and closer to Vladimir Putin.
Because what are they interested in, Nick?
They want an oligarchical led illiberalism that gets rid of all democratic representations, protections and liberties so that, you know, countries can be absolutely destroyed by dictators and the oligarchs who serve them.
Well, Europe is recognizing this problem.
I have talked with people from some of the, how shall I say, like higher level European countries.
I've told you that they said that they didn't trust to share intelligence with Trump.
I've told you that they have said that they understand that NATO is falling apart and that they don't have an ally in the United States anymore.
We've talked about all these meetings that they've been having.
Zelensky immediately flew to Europe, where all the leaders pledged support at that point.
Emmanuel Macron called for hundreds of billions of euros to be spent, not just on Ukraine, but in a collective defense of Europe, basically creating their own alliance outside of the relationship with the United States.
Macron and Friedrich Merz, the incoming prime minister of Germany, Have said that they need to find, quote unquote, independence from the United States of America and that they can no longer rely on America for nuclear deterrence.
So what have we seen in just the few months that Donald Trump, the couple of months that Donald Trump has been president of the United States of America, Nick?
We have seen the unraveling of one of the most powerful alliances in the history of the modern world.
And it happened so quick that if you're not careful, I'll make your head spin.
So what you're saying is it's just a formality now that the United States will step out of the UN, or out of NATO, and the UN, the way this is going.
Well, I mean, so there's the question, right?
The question is whether or not the United States can do more damage to NATO within NATO or outside of it.
And so they might just stick around and muck it up and, you know, basically take away all the teeth out of it.
But I think here pretty soon we're going to see some sort of a European alignment.
I don't know if they'll do it behind the European Union or they'll come up with a different type of name and a different type of treaty name or whatever it is.
But Nick, what we're seeing from the European countries at this point, and a reminder.
The deal was made at the end of World War II. The United States would take the lead when it came to controlling capitalism within the world and also becoming basically a benevolent hegemon, which we screwed up over and over again.
Europe would spend less on all of the military, rely on the watchful eye of the United States.
They would become more or less sort of second-tier client states that would help.
They would trade.
They would do all these types of things.
And I want to remind people of something I said a few years ago.
And this was, Nick, you might remember this.
It was back when I was writing The Midnight Kingdom.
I said globalism is coming unraveled.
That's what's occurring.
The neoliberal global era is coming unraveled.
And for the record, the only reason that I knew that that was happening was because Alexander Dugan next to Vladimir Putin said that that was their plan.
We saw it happen with China.
We started to see the way that capitalism started flirting with all this stuff and really bringing it in.
And now we're getting ready to see And right before we started recording this, the tariffs for Canada and Mexico are getting ready to go into effect.
We are seeing the end of the free trade era and we're moving toward a multipolar block type situation in which on one side...
You have these, quote-unquote, Western democracies, which, by the way, authoritarians are nipping at their heels with every election and every election cycle.
So some of them are going to follow this as well.
And on the other side of the table are either authoritarian countries or authoritarian curious countries.
And unfortunately, the United States is on the wrong side of that table at this point.
Right.
And I suppose we're lucky that we don't have neighbors that are shifting directly on north or south of us.
Because it is.
It's a sweet siren call when it's that close to you.
So what I think that we're seeing is a hardening of borders, right?
Across Europe and across, you know, into Russia.
Well, can I make a quick point off what you just said real fast, Nick?
Because you just brought up something.
I want to point out.
So we're smack dab.
We're a sandwich between Canada and Mexico.
Pete Hegseth just sent thousands of more soldiers to Mexico, to the border, saying that they're not complying with what we demanded from them.
We're talking about taking over Canada as the 51st state.
The borders you just talked about, that's an important thing to understand.
The United States is on one side of the conflict.
Mexico and Canada are on the other side.
And what happens when that occurs?
You start seeing tensions going both ways.
This isn't a coincidence.
I'm glad you brought it up like that.
Yeah, and Canada is not happy about all this talk of a 51st state, and it makes them really nervous about what might happen.
Why wouldn't you be?
You know, they're not going to take that line down.
But what I also think is interesting about how, you know, how this mirrors across the world into this country would be, you know, as these agreements are getting fractured and then NATO becomes weaker and then individual countries that have to rely on themselves only to be of their own defense.
I kind of feel like that's going to happen in the United States.
I almost feel like the borders of states are going to become hardened as well as we fracture ourselves in terms of where we live based on what we feel like with our democracy and our government.
You know what I mean?
I almost feel like there will be oases and there will be places where you don't go.
And that's the real worry, right?
And then all of a sudden we don't have the United States anymore.
Well, I mean, it depends on how quickly they solidify power over the federal government and, you know, basically bring people to heel.
And I want to say before I add one more piece of analysis about what we're talking about and where these things are going, I want to say very quickly, geopolitics is overwhelming.
Like, I couldn't be in the room with Zelensky and Trump.
I can't go over here and take care of the BRICS situation.
This is not a fait accompli.
We can push against this, and we have seen where movements and coalitions stop this shit.
They stop it in its track, they change the paradigm.
More or less at this point, and Nick, you've seen enough movies, what happens when someone's being forced into a car to be taken to a second location?
It's fight or things are over.
We're being pushed in the car to be taken to the next location, and we really need to get on it.
Now, the analysis I was going to talk about very quickly.
The question that we have now, Nick, and outside the United States with Europe, the question is, what happens when the United States and Russia and China, authoritarian and authoritarian curious countries, as they start coming together to threaten places like Europe, right?
And those countries are stockpiling weapons.
They're building militaries.
And I've talked about this before.
The arms race has a tendency to lead us into warfare.
That's the way this stuff works.
Are we going to see reactions in those countries that are going to move away from the right-wing groups because they recognize that those are Putin and Trump-type groups?
Or is the fear of it going to lead to those people taking advantage of neoliberal mistakes and liberal incompetence?
We don't know yet.
There are a lot of dominoes that are still going to fall.
But what I do know is that today, we're recording this on Monday, March 3rd.
As of today, the United States of America and Americans and people around the world are in a lot more danger than they were before they were on Friday when this entire situation fell apart.
Oh, absolutely.
And here's the other thing about that is, you know, you could allow Ukraine into NATO tomorrow.
You could put them in NATO and guess what?
U.S. probably wouldn't engage.
They would not recognize Article 5 with the way Trump is going, right?
He simply said, nope, we're not doing it.
I don't care anymore.
And then that would get us out of NATO, basically.
They'd probably end up kicking us out.
And then the rest of NATO has to make a decision because without the United States, that's a really tough order for any other countries to band together to have enough firepower to fight back.
It wouldn't be World War III because the United States would be isolationist and not part of that, right?
But this is also part of the calculation.
I have to imagine that could be very well one of the versions of the matrix here we have to be very careful about because I think that would be the dissolution.
I don't see how NATO is able to stay together and strong enough to be an entity on the world stage.
Yeah, I don't know either.
And for the record, I think NATO... I think that we probably should have brought either the Soviet Union or Russia whenever the Soviet Union fell into that sphere and created new treaties.
I think that that was a misstep at the time.
And I think that NATO should have given way to something else.
I'm still very partial to the five policemen theory that was taking place with Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which the major powers would have created a detente and they would have helped each other and used spheres of influence and basically de-armed the population of the world and created a more peaceful world.
I think what we're dealing with now, and I want to be very clear about it because I can't give this enough import.
Nick, we are watching every mistake that the United States of America has made since the waning days of World War II when we started making, you know, entreaties with former Nazis and former fascists.
We started destroying leftists and labor unions and relying on tin-pot dictators and carrying out the Cold War so that we could dominate everything.
All of those missteps and all of those mistakes are now coming into full view.
There's no way around them.
The blowback from it is what we are dealing with, and it's going to take something monumentally different to get this thing back under control in any way, shape, or form.
Well, does the destruction of our economy at large have any kind of effect on all these things?
Yeah, I hate being right on a lot of this shit.
Okay, so let's get back to the economy because this is a pressing issue.
A couple of big notes that we need to get into in this show.
On Sunday, Trump announced five cryptocurrencies to make up the U.S. Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve.
This is an incredible opportunity for corruption, market manipulation, scams, you name it.
This is a mess.
And you can't talk about what's going on geopolitically with the decline of the American empire without talking about how crypto plays a part in all of it and all of the scams and grifts and authoritarian movements.
I agree.
And as the result of the announcement of making the cryptocurrency into a strategic reserve means...
That they discovered there was a couple of whales who made huge buys of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
It just happened to be the exact coins that were now included, the five they're going to include in this reserve.
And there seems to be evidence that it's probably Trump and Don Jr. who are doing that.
Because, you know, you can track addresses of who it is.
They might be obscured in terms of identities, but you can kind of figure it out based on the history of what they bought.
And, you know, again, this is the most – I think the biggest problem you have when you have really wealthy people running countries, they don't care at all about anybody else who's not rich.
So if the economy completely gets destroyed and if geopolitically it falls apart, they don't care anyway because they have their fiefdoms and they have their security and they're going to be fine.
And then it'll be a fire sale for them.
You know, that's why it's nice when you have someone, like, in the presidency that, like, has a background of, you know, having struggled in their lives and knowing what it's like.
You know, like, Clinton, it's not just a folksy story sometimes, right?
It actually is some version of empathy that they will then govern with that we're not seeing with Trump, who has no clue what any of that is about.
So when it comes to crypto, we have no idea who's buying this stuff up.
Basically, what we're talking about now is creating a parallel economy that isn't regulated whatsoever.
It could be being bought up not just by Trump and the people around him, who undoubtedly made a huge amount of money from this.
I would kill right now for an expose on the shadow, dark wealth of Donald Trump and the people around him.
But on top of that, Nick, who else has a bunch of money lying around?
Not just the Chinese, the Saudi Arabians, the Russians, you name it, which basically would give them control over what could potentially be the replacement economy when they go ahead and destroy the dollar, which they are doing at a breakneck pace.
And eventually, it also creates another opportunity, Nick, because it's multidimensional chess.
On one hand...
It can go ahead and help capitalism free itself from the control by the United States, which I've been screaming about forever.
On the other hand, Nick, it allows rug pulls.
So at any given point, if the people who are in this just want to make a quick buck and basically melt everything down, they could.
The third part is this.
It goes ahead and puts a backstop in this.
Because if crypto starts falling apart, Nick, it might be necessary for the United States of America to start using some tax dollars to go ahead and bail those people out by going ahead and bringing the stocks and the crypto shit back up to the top.
So it creates this multifaceted thing, and you'll notice what is capitalism good at, Nick?
Besides serving itself, it's really, really good at creating opportunities to scam people, opportunities to free itself and consolidate in a few hands, and also to go ahead and give itself a little bit of a bailout opportunity that if things fall apart, we'll make sure that the nation states are there to bail it out.
Right, and it's truly remarkable how they've been able to refine their corruption over time.
They're incredible at it, yes.
Because now it's not just like Trump Hotel down the street from the White House where they're buying a week's worth of rooms or whatever.
Isn't that quaint now, thinking about that?
That's like just a quaint memory.
I want to pat that on the head because there's reports on CNN that were talking about a Chinese crypto mogul bought $75 million worth of a Trump coin, and then guess what happened?
His pending civil fraud case was halted by the SEC. Can you imagine the tying of that?
That's incredible.
What a coincidence.
They didn't even have to wait like, you know, I think back in the day, you'd have to wait like six months before you did something like that, right?
But they wait like a couple days.
So it is so out in the open now.
And again, this won't sway anybody that fucking voted for the guy.
Like that's the whole thing here, right?
We're talking about politics.
Politics used to be, okay, this is a terrible behavior.
We all understand it.
I can't vote for that guy anymore.
No more.
That's not it anymore.
That doesn't do it anymore.
And again, we have to kind of figure out what will because somebody, well, we're pretty smart, but I hope that somebody else can figure some things out here because what they're trying to do right now is the Democratic Party is being stomped.
Curb stomped?
Is that the right term?
They're being stomped all over the yard.
Yes, they are.
And I'll say this, Nick.
You know when they're going to figure it out, when they're going to connect the dots?
When the economy has absolutely collapsed and we're in smoldering ruins.
Like, look back at 2008. They figured out real fast that derivatives and algorithmic investment was a problem.
And they figured out it was a problem long enough to just go ahead and make everybody whole and then...
Throw some more kerosene on it.
Speaking of economic collapses, which we've been talking about recently because it's a huge deal, the Atlanta Fed has shown a bottom dropping out of all of this.
All of the economic indicators are blinking red, screaming red, as I've been talking about.
But good news, Nick, because you were talking about whether or not it would affect the people who support Donald Trump.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Sunday...
They are studying ways that they are going to separate government spending from the gross domestic product and reports.
And in case anybody is wondering what that means, it means that the recession that is coming up and the possible depression that's coming up, they're going to go ahead and cook the books.
So that you won't be able to see it, and if it's there, and if you're feeling it, you won't be able to trace it back to government layoffs, suspension of payments and funds, and all that good stuff, so the people who actually caused it are not going to get any type of blame.
And you'll just tell people, hey, it's not raining.
What are you talking about?
Yeah, you're wet.
What are we talking about here?
I mean, unbelievably, there had been some level of transparency in our government for a lot of years about what they're doing for spending.
And like a doge bullshit, I can't believe we got there almost at the end of the show without mentioning the guy.
I hate that word.
I hate that word.
I hate it.
But, you know, so many of the things that they supposedly are uncovering are just way out in the open, transparent in all the different reports that you can get online by going to the websites from the different government agencies.
You know, and it's also the same argument you have when, you know, like unemployment has always been, it's manipulated.
They always try and make it seem better than it always is.
We've also saw reports that maybe the inflation was a lot worse than it was and the Biden administration tried to hide it for the campaign.
So this is all just, you know, part of the same idea here.
But again, it's a...
Carve out a massive section of what we use to measure the economy like this and just turn it on its head.
Cooking the books is the only term I can think of to describe this accurately.
The only thing I have to worry about out of this, though, is that it becomes not transparent at all, completely opaque.
Not at all.
Not even a little bit.
Nick, I want to remind people, we talked about this.
I think it was right after the election.
We started talking about the plans to go ahead and defund meteorology and weather.
Weather studies and what they were going to do there.
And I said, you know, the hurricanes are going to get worse.
The flooding is going to get worse.
The droughts are going to get worse.
Climate change is going to get worse.
What are they going to say?
They're just going to hide it.
That's the entire point of it.
It's mystification.
And so we're looking at now, like, recession might be the best case scenario at this point.
We might literally be looking at a situation where a harsh recession is the best possible landing point from all of this.
I don't think you're going to bounce up from it very quickly.
I don't think that this thing is just going to figure itself out.
Every member of the wealth class right now is freaking the hell out with the indicators that are out there.
The economy is more or less in a tailspin, and we're just waiting at this point.
Not for the March reports.
Those will be tough.
The April reports are going to be disastrous.
And after that, who even knows where it goes?
And they basically, they're just going to cover it up, and they're going to tell people.
You know, like, people are saying the economy is the best we've ever seen it.
It's just an open lie, and the people who are a part of the cult, they'll believe it.
Even as their houses are being foreclosed on, even as they're being evicted, even as they're having to pick between food and medicine, the diehards are going to believe what they're saying, and the rest of us are going to be trying to pick up the pieces, and we're not even necessarily going to have the data that's going to be necessary.
We're going to have to look at investment and look at the returns that people are getting to even get some sort of an idea of what's happening with the economy.
They're just going to cover the entire thing up.
So does that mean that, I mean, it sounds like recession is the good news here versus a depression, which could happen, which could last a decade.
Does the government step in at that point, having railed against outrageous expenditures and putting this on all those things?
Are they going to step in and help people the way they would need to to avoid that, like we've done recently with the pandemic?
Because I suppose that's not clear either.
I guess to say, well, it's going to be tough for a little while.
You have to deal with it.
I'm glad you brought up the pandemic because I think we can learn from that.
What did they do during the pandemic?
They denied it for as long as they possibly could.
And then when it came to helping people, who did they help?
They helped the so-called red states.
Right?
And then they sort of blamed the so-called blue states and said that their leaders were failing and kept them from getting light.
That was like one of the things that has really been forgotten from that first term, was how much bullshit they played with the pandemic.
And on top of that, how they played red state, blue state politics with it.
I think that's what we'll look at.
And we're even seeing Donald Trump is sending out signals right now.
There's like, we're going to put these tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
And on top of that, they're going to respond with their own tariffs.
A reminder, what was NAFTA? What was the entire purpose of that besides offloading labor and deindustrializing?
It was taking American farms and circulating what they had around this continent.
So what is he saying at this point?
Hey, farmers, don't worry.
We've got your back.
And he might actually help some of those farmers, particularly if they're in the red states.
But we are going to see, I think, probably a balkanization of any type of aid.
And it's going to make the disaster that much worse because I don't even think they're going to step in all that much for the people who are loyal for them.
They'll just give them sort of, you know, a grain of sand, more or less.
Now it's the cynical politics time where you're thinking, well, can we delay this recession a little bit longer so it's closer to the midterms?
But by the way, maybe it won't even matter because those elections won't even be free and fair anyway.
I don't have a lot of faith that the midterms or the 2028 election are going to be free and fair at this point.
I don't have a lot of faith on that.
So that's the issue of the thing, because in theory, they should lose the House and the Senate in the midterms.
That's just what's happened every cycle after the...
White House flips, right?
It's supposed to be that way.
And man, I don't know.
And there's no, believe me, there'd be plenty of reasons to vote against the Republicans by the time that happens for the midterms.
I mean, overwhelming.
And we've already seen that the, at least with Democrats and independents, the polling is, you know, wildly against Trump.
You know, it's not even close.
Like, there's no way he was going to run in 2026, for instance, he'd ever win, according to what these numbers look like even early.
So, but again, I don't know what's going to matter.
And that's, you know what, that's really where I'm starting to think, you know, what do you do about living in this country?
Well, I'll say a couple things.
We haven't even had the Trump presidency for two full months.
Any type of honeymoon data and polling that could have been there from the beginning, and we saw it spike up for a second because he was, quote unquote, doing things.
Already evaporated.
It's not just low 40s.
We're looking at the possibility of this thing dipping into the 30s.
And I'm talking about that within probably the first three or four months, particularly if we see the economic reports that we're expecting.
But with that, Nick, I have to say we can't keep looking at the midterms in the next election.
At this point, and it goes back to what we're talking about geopolitically with this alignment with these authoritarians.
I'm talking about the economy.
I'm talking about this oligarchical coup.
We have to get out there and protest.
We have to start setting the ground for collective action, whether or not it's walking out of workplaces, whether or not it strikes, whatever it is, it has to start.
The Democratic Party does not have a strategy for this.
All they're going to do is they're going to play possum like James Carville is advising them to do, or they're going to move towards the right and blame the quote-unquote left, which doesn't exist.
And they are not going to put up a fight at this point.
I don't have faith that they're going to have a message, even if there were free and fair elections in 2026 or 2028. Like, we have to stop waiting on them to take care of us, and we have to take care of ourselves.
And I do think that there needs to be a politician, whether it's the House or the Senate, that has to stand up to Trump to his face in a very widely covered scene, you know what I mean, where they call him out on this shit.
I think they really need to have a moment like that where they would think, oh, it's the quorum, it's the president.
No, we've got to see something like what Zelensky did, but much more forceful and in his presence.
Well, just a reminder again, on Tuesday when you get this podcast, we're going to be doing a live episode following Trump's address of Congress.
It starts at 9 p.m.
Eastern.
We'll go live immediately after that.
Nick, I would love to look in the future right now and tell you that a member of the Democratic Party will somehow or another do some type of protest.
I don't know that they will.
I don't have a lot of faith in this party.
They are absolutely dedicated to decorum and not being seen as extreme.
My hope is that some...
Somebody does something at this that at least signals that there's some type of resistance.
It should be a chant of shame by the entire chamber of the Democratic side to drown him out for X amount of time.
That would be something.
You know what I mean?
We need to have something that's dramatic in his presence that he can have to react to, to galvanize, I think.
And I don't want to make it seem like we're just talking about showboat politics or something like that, but something needs to be done that's much more of a dramatic moment.
Yeah, we're not talking about performative shit at this point.
We're talking about people actually taking a second.
Because we've seen that bullshit with Marjorie Taylor Greene and whatever.
Oh, we've seen it for years.
We've seen it for years.
No, this has to be something more coordinated and more thought out and more powerful in that respect.
I think that would do something.
Even like that picture of Nancy Pelosi who stood up at the table.
Oh, I hated that.
Why?
Because what did it matter?
She tore up the speech?
What did Nancy Pelosi ever do to get in the way of Donald Trump or anything that was happening?
Like, it was performative.
It's the same thing as her kneeling in a kentacloth.
Well, you're talking about after the State of the Union with short stories.
Yeah, or even the clapping or whatever it is.
You want to talk about performative.
That's who Nancy Pelosi has been.
Well, fair enough.
But there's a meeting in the cabinet meeting where it's only a still image where she's up and she's pointing across the table at him.
But...
What lacked the power is that it wasn't video.
We don't know what was being done or said or whatever, but we need someone else in much more of an earnest situation to do that and mean it.
And I think that that would propel them in the Democratic Party as well.
And so that would be something that someone needs to do.
And what else would it do, Nick?
It would send a signal to the populace that something's wrong, which is not at all what the Democratic Party is doing at this point.
There are plenty of people who are hearing that something's going wrong and they're like, well, there's not.
Really, a crisis happening.
Everything's just kind of happening.
If it was so bad, wouldn't somebody be doing something?
Wouldn't somebody be making a raucous about it?
So I hope that something like that could happen, but again, I'm not going to put my faith in the Democratic Party unless they give me a reason to.
All right, a reminder, we will be going live on Tuesday, March 4th, following Trump's address of Congress.
Go over to patreon.com slash muckraigpodcast, support the show, come to the live show, watch us react to it, give our analysis, and also gain access to the Weekender Edition on Fridays.
All right, everybody, that's going to do it for now.
In the meantime, you can find Nick over at Blue Sky and Nick Halsman.
