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March 5, 2025 - Straight White American Jesus
39:29
Bonus Episode: The Scary Truth About the Trump-Zelensky Press Conference
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That's BetterHelp.com slash SWA. Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, here with our bonus episode, and joined as always on these with my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, here to hang out, do a little extra.
Like the world, the world is so bad that we get like bonus content for like negative news, right?
That's where we are now with bonus episodes.
We do these every month.
If you're not a subscriber, the first bit here will be available, and then the entire episode will be available to Swatch Premium subscribers.
If you haven't done that yet, check it out in the show notes so you can get the entirety of the episode.
We're going to get a really funny story from Dan today.
Dan also answered three AMA questions from listeners, so we'll get that later.
But we're going to start by talking about the just absolutely disastrous We'll get to the State of the Union and other things from the week on the Weekly
Roundup, but for today...
The goal is really just to talk about this Oval Office meeting that I think was a kind of summation of the Trump 2.0 presidency so far.
I'll give you my thesis, Dan, and then I'll let you jump in and just with some initial thoughts.
I think this press conference with Zelensky showed the core of Trump's worldview.
And his understanding of the United States' relationships with other countries.
And I know some of you out there are like, does Trump have a worldview?
Isn't his worldview just selfishness and narcissism?
And in some sense, yes.
But I think there's a world where we can understand this coming, let me say it this way, being expressed in terms of governance and policy on a world stage because he is president through a kind of empire-focused, Diplomacy-canceling foreign policy.
So my thesis, sorry, I'm kind of full of words here.
My thesis is that this press conference revealed the inner core of Trump and Vance and how they see the world and the United States in the world.
And I think we can get to that.
So let me stop.
How do you see what happened here?
What's your initial reaction?
Where do you want to start?
Just go for it.
Yeah, so first, I don't know.
I'm not a presidential historian, but I don't know if this was the first dumpster fire ever held in the Oval Office.
But if people haven't watched, I don't know, say the key seven to eight minutes of this thing where it just really blew up, hit pause on us and go do that.
If you read about it, or you saw it, or you saw Vance sticking his hand up as if he's lectured, because he was, lecturing Zelensky or whatever, go actually watch it and listen to it.
And I think...
Things that stand out to me is, and I think I'm channeling some of where you're going with this, but number one, I think this was very intentional.
There were accusations that it was staged, and Trump and Vance, of course, said that it wasn't.
I think it clearly was.
I think it was done in front of the media.
And I think, to the point that maybe you're moving toward, I think it was done in order to try to bring Zelensky into line, to curb...
And Cal, like another world leader, and make him basically beg the U.S. for help.
Vance says over and over, how many times have you said thank you?
How many times do you think the U.S.? And CNN had an article like the next day or a few hours later, it was like 33 times as Alinsky as think the U.S. But that notion of the transactionalism of Trump, all of that, this notion of we have done so much for you.
You need to be here on your knees acknowledging us, acknowledging our superiority, acknowledging our money, acknowledging what we have done, and begging us to help you, including, by the way, signing away these mineral rights and so forth.
And when Zelensky just didn't do it, I think that was the cue.
Somewhere there was the cue for Vance to jump in and to do this and then to blow the whole thing up.
If Zelensky had come in...
You know, hat in hand, begging the U.S. for more, telling them, thank you so much for everything that you've done.
Sort of begging, you know, giving Trump what he wants, which is this notion that he is the savior.
I think maybe, you know, maybe this comes out.
And when he didn't do that, and he wasn't aggressive, he wasn't ungrateful, he wasn't rude until he was sort of pressed.
When he refused to do that, I think that was the signal to blow the thing up.
And to, you know, to try to put it on him.
So I think if you want to talk about worldview, it's that notion of really the world's benevolent dictator, the power broker, and wanting to be viewed as the power broker.
And when he wasn't seen that way by Zelensky or sufficiently, he just, everything went sideways.
So that's sort of my quick take on it.
And again, I think the things about the intentionality of it happening in front of the media were all very, very planned and scripted.
I want to take up...
What you just said.
You said benevolent dictator.
And that's kind of a paradox.
I'm not sure you can be a benevolent dictator.
Right.
Benevolent also in quotes, because that's very much by whoever's defining what they are in that role.
Well, and look, there is the genre of the benevolent king or ruler.
I mean, so many Disney movies you watch have the good king and the good princess.
And we all have read about Alexander the Great or Augustus or whatever.
Okay.
This is a really good starting point for how I interpreted this.
And I promised about a month ago that I'd come back to a book called The Light That Fails by Stephen Holmes and Yvonne Kroshtev.
And I want to use that book to analyze, I think, this whole phenomenon.
Benevolent dictator is how Trump sees the United States in relationship to others.
He's the one with the power and the money.
And you need to come in and bend the knee, and then maybe he will be nice to you, maybe he will help you, maybe he will provide you aid, whatever.
And he's going to want something in return, right?
A dictator, a mob boss, they're going to say, give me the minerals.
Hey, give me my kickback.
Hey, I'm the mob boss.
Give me 25% of what you just made through your business, whatever.
Okay.
That is a fundamental difference than how the United States has sold itself from the end of World War II. The end of World War II all the way to the end of the Cold War, 1945 to 1989. The United States was a moral exemplar of liberal democracy.
Set apart from and set over and against communism as emblematized by the Soviet Union.
We are the ones who provide human beings choice, human rights, the representation of their leaders through the vote.
We are the ones that provide people Dan, for better or for worse, for ways that you and I have critiqued for a long time, there was an American exceptionalism in the 20th century, the last half of the 20th century, that said we are the superpower that tries to spread liberal democracy across the world.
Now, some of you are already squirming in your seat and you're talking about Reagan and you're talking about Central America, you're talking about all the stuff.
Haiti, I mean, we can go back as far as you'd like.
The invasion of the Philippines, the stealing of Hawaii, the whole thing.
Okay.
Okay.
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What Trump doesn't do, and this is different than any Republican or Democrat before him in that time period, is he does not uphold the ideal of American exceptionalism.
He does not want to say to the world, we are different because we are more moral than you.
There's a speech that Putin gave, or excuse me, there's an op-ed that Putin wrote in 2013 where he basically critiques American exceptionalism.
And Trump's response in 2013 to that was, Putin is right.
We are not exceptional.
We are not different.
There's a moment from his first term with Morning Joe, where Morning Joe's, don't you think that we're different from Putin because we don't kill journalists and all this stuff?
And if some of you remember this, Trump says, I don't know, Joe.
I think we do that here, don't we?
We kill people.
We're no different.
And what he's doing there is something that I think for many people at the time was hard to read.
It was not legible.
He's basically saying, we're not different.
We're not going to pretend to be the missionary of democracy to the world.
We're not going to pretend to be the emissaries of liberalism to Central Europe, to Iraq, to Afghanistan.
Ivan Kroshtev and Stephen Holmes write on page 145 of The Light That Failed.
He consistently disregards the boundary between countries that respect and countries that violate human rights and democratic norms.
America has no mission and is nobody's model.
So when Zelensky walks in there, Dan, any other American president we're thinking is going to be like, hey, we're with you.
You know why we're with you, Ukraine?
Because you guys are trying to be a democracy.
You're trying to be a free, liberal state where people choose their leaders and have human rights.
You're being invaded by a country that doesn't respect those rights, that doesn't have that kind of government.
It has sham elections.
It has a dictator.
Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, whatever differences or no differences among them, they would have all seen Ukraine.
In addition to Mitt Romney, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Hillary Rodham Clinton, whoever you want to mention on either side of the aisle, they would have looked at Zelensky and said, we're with you because we are the missionaries of democracy to the world.
When Zelensky walks in there to Trump, he is, we are not a model, we are not a missionary, and we are not diplomats.
Give me something I want and bend the knee or get the F out of here.
It's your choice.
And that's what happened to me.
Off to you.
Yeah, so I agree with that.
So one thing I just want to sort of contextualize for people is we say that Trump denies American exceptionalism.
And I can see people say, wait, wait, wait, he says America first.
And if you don't know or recognize the difference between those, that could sound like the same thing, right?
The America first slogan.
So for Trump, when he says America first, he doesn't mean something like America out in front, America leading, America as the exemplar of the world.
He simply means what he understands as The self-interest of America above all else.
And for Trump, that primarily means money, right?
It means obeisance from others and so forth.
It doesn't mean leadership.
It doesn't mean, you know, global national security as envisioned, as you're talking about from the light that fails, you know, the sort of post-World War II period.
And so I think it's important for people to recognize that, that when you hear the Trump slogan, America first, it is not a reiteration.
Of this notion that we're calling American exceptionalism, of sort of the moral exemplarity of America.
And I think that's really important for people to recognize.
I think another piece of this is, no matter how cynical somebody is about the kind of moral mission of America, and you noted that, right?
Different presidents kind of come up with report cards about how much, you know, how consistent that was in supporting dictators all over the world during the Cold War and all of that.
But that was at least the broad understanding of what was put forward.
I think a lot of those people actually did believe that about America and thought that these were necessary means to an end and so forth.
Whatever.
But presidents have also hosted world leaders that they didn't agree with.
They brought people in to try to broker peace agreements that didn't work.
All of this.
And there's just also the open effort to humiliate another world leader.
Visibly and very viscerally in the Oval Office was just another telling point about this.
I guess what I'm getting at is, even a president who wasn't going to support Zelensky, even a president who was going to say, you know what, we're done giving funds to you for this.
It's time to broker a piece.
Whatever.
Whatever.
They're not on board with Zelensky.
I don't think it's ever happened publicly.
This kind of public effort to humiliate another world leader.
I think that that's another piece of this that marks the difference of this.
It's not just, we're not going to support Zelensky, we're not going to see what's happening in Ukraine as something that needs to be defended because it's part of defending a more democratic world or countering an expansionistic Putin or whatever.
It's not even just the real politic of it.
It is the, we are here to humiliate publicly.
And very visibly this world leader.
And I think that that's another telling point about that this has nothing to do with America leading.
This has nothing to do with America as a model.
This isn't even about an administration that has different policies from prior administrations.
There's something deeper and, to me, much sort of just nastier and darker at work here that was very much on display.
I think a lot of us have understood for a long time that for Donald Trump, All relationships are built on the idea of dominate or be dominated.
And I think that people have seen that personally.
And I think Marco Rubio is a really good example.
Marco Rubio was talking to Matt Taylor the other night, and we were talking about Marco Rubio, and he said, it seems like Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State, just so Trump can continue to humiliate him, as he did when they ran against each other in 2016, and he called him Little Marco.
His relationships with women, his relationships with business partners, anybody, is dominate or be dominated.
So when Zelensky walks in, once again, Dan, the goal is not, let's build a good relationship with a foreign leader.
We've talked about this analogy before, but think about you and I at a business function with other religion professors as grad students trying to come up through the ranks.
You're trying to build a network of people in your guild that you're like, hey, I'm like a good citizen of the guild.
Let's help each other out, whether that's with helping each other publish work or articles or essays or you want to come lecture in my class or I'm going to invite you to this conference.
And you kind of are in this economy of can I trust people?
Do I like that person?
Do they seem like they have goodwill?
Are they nice?
Are they kind?
Are they generous?
Will they help me if I need it?
Trump is not thinking that when he thinks about the United States in relationship to other countries.
He's thinking dominate or be dominated.
Okay.
But an additional point to this that I think I take from the Holmes and Krashtev book is Trump sees imitators not as flattering the United States, but as conning us, as stealing from us.
And here's what I mean by that.
I know that might sound strange at first blush.
Since 1989, since 1945, the United States...
Has been the moral exemplar, the missionary of liberal democracy, and the goal has been to get as many countries to emulate and imitate us as possible.
Now, after World War II, there's a clear reason why.
Hey, we don't want any more Hitlers.
We don't want any more Mussolinis.
So, why don't we all do liberal democracy?
You guys can copy us.
We'll help you.
We have all the money.
We have all the power as the United States.
The post-World War II landscape was great for us.
So we're going to not only help Europe, but we're going to help Germany, our former foe, like turn into this, like basically biggest economy in Europe, manufacturing cars everywhere, the whole thing.
Okay, I've talked about that before.
Dan, I think every other American president sees the imitation of the United States.
As a good thing.
When people imitate you, whether that is as a sports star, whether that is as a writer, whether that is as anything you do in life, it's flattering, right?
Hey, they're imitating us.
They want to be like us.
That feels good.
And we are the big fish.
So yeah, we'll help these fledgling folks try to be like us.
American exceptionalist, city on a hill.
That has been the attitude.
For 75 years.
For better, for worse.
The flaws, the hypocrisy, the brutality, I'm aware.
Trump sees that as a con.
We've got to uphold, like, a global free trade economy where we don't get any kickbacks.
We've got to be part of NATO and just sort of not get any kickback.
When Zelensky walks in, he's not thinking, hey, you from a fledgling young nation.
Imitating the liberal democracy that we have been the exemplar of for 75 years.
He's thinking, you need to give me something if you want my protection.
I don't care if you're trying to be a democracy or what you're trying over here, Mr. Zelensky.
Give me the minerals and show me respect.
I don't care if you imitate me.
I don't care if you want to be like me.
I don't care if you're trying to...
Be a liberal democracy rather than a dictatorship.
I don't care if you're trying to be capitalist and not communist.
I don't want your imitation.
I don't want to be the paternalistic big brother who everybody wants to be like in high school.
Nope.
I want you to give me stuff.
I want to dominate or be dominated.
And I'm no longer going to accept imitation as currency for all the protection I provide you.
That's the foreign policy view.
Right?
So when J.D. Vance says, have you said thank you even once?
That was a comment from the fringes of the American right six decades in the making.
Why are we providing the world with a kind of missionary model of spreading the good news of liberal democracy at the cost of ourselves?
Make America great again means make America first again, as you said, and everybody else screw everyone else.
They can go away.
How does that hit you?
I think that's exactly right.
I think, you know, all those pieces of this, you know, it's really, it's, to your point of not being emulated, to make America first is to make everybody else second, and a distant second, right?
Not to be the leader of a coalition of some sort, or, you know, the quote-unquote Western world, or the Euro-Atlantic, or the North Atlantic world, right?
The North Atlantic tree of NATO. None of that stuff.
Just America alone.
And, again, you know, it's maybe impossible with Trump, more than any president I know of, to disconnect the things like foreign policy from personal psychology, right?
Like, he is just what Trump is, is what the policy becomes.
And we could tie that in with all the unified executive stuff, everything.
Everything he thinks about ruling.
The stuff I've talked about, about, you know, the leader of the populist nation being the embodiment of the people, like, all that stuff could come in there.
The other thing that stuck out to illustrate this was, like, the snide remarks he makes about how Zelensky is dressed when he, like, walks in, right?
And Zelensky by now, this is part of, you know, we could be critical and say part of Zelensky's, like, sort of shtick, right?
He doesn't wear suits and ties and he's got this kind of thing that, you know, as long as we're at war, it's like he's going to be dressed for, you know, for...
For combat or for, you know, whatever.
He's not going to play the role of, you know, the dignitary.
But he's been doing that for years, right?
Since this has been going on.
But, you know, he walks in and throws, like, making comments about, like, nice outfit and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
But, I mean, it tells that same thing.
You didn't show me enough respect.
And, like, respect's not even a strong enough word here again, right?
It's like, you didn't show me...
Deference.
You didn't grovel before me.
If you were really serious, Zelensky, about doing that, you would at least dress the part, right?
So he's offended right from the beginning about everything about Zelensky.
It's so personal to Trump, right?
Not just an affront to what he thinks America is, but what America is for him is Trump.
And so it is this projection of his personality into every aspect.
And of course, by now, he's rebuilt the GOP. So there are all these people that are willing to do that.
Marco Rubio, as you say, little Marco Rubio is kind of sitting there, kind of hanging out, doing his thing.
All the Trump acolytes afterward coming out and spinning this.
It's all Zelensky's fault.
You know, even Lindsey Graham, right?
For those who say this wasn't a setup, Lindsey Graham afterward says, I told him this morning, that is Zelensky, I told him, don't take the bait.
Don't let the media or anyone else get you a new and argument with President Trump.
What he's doing today is resetting the relationship.
You watch what happened.
Of course, it's not the media that got him into the bait at him.
It was Vance, right?
But the point is, Lindsey Graham is basically like, there's a trap waiting for you.
Trump is setting a trap.
Don't take the bait.
And then afterward, who does he blame?
He doesn't blame Trump.
He's not going to blame Vance.
He's going to blame Zelensky.
For responding to this provocation.
And again, so it's just Trump writ large.
It is, as you say, America first, everybody else just in second.
And what, quote unquote, America is, is this kind of embodiment of Donald Trump and his personality and his preferences and his pathologies.
The thing that really set Trump off, so there's this exchange, there's this remarkable exchange where Vance starts in.
And Vance starts in about, have you said thank you?
And Zelensky asks him, have you ever been to Ukraine?
Because Vance had just said, I think it's disrespect for you to come to the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media.
And he asks him, have you ever been to Ukraine?
And Vance says, I've been.
And Zelensky says, you've come once.
And Vance then goes to, yeah, but I've watched...
I've watched and seen the stories, but I've watched a lot of TV about Ukraine.
That's where Vance goes quickly.
And then Vance says, do you think it's respectful to come to the Oval Office and attack the administration that's trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
And Zelensky tries to explain that this war is bad for everybody.
And he says, during the war...
Everybody has problems, even you.
And to me, this is what set Trump off.
Because at that point, Trump says, you don't know that.
Don't tell us what we feel.
Don't tell us anything.
And he's basically telling him, nothing hurts me.
I'm the dominator.
Nothing affects me.
Nothing can get to me.
You don't tell me anything about how I feel.
This is the point in the confrontation.
Where somebody just loses it, and they start spewing nonsense about, like, you want to go?
You want to fight?
You don't know me.
You don't know nothing about me.
This and that, right?
And it just goes into, like, fight or flight.
To me, this is when Trump went into fight or flight, and he only fights.
He doesn't fight.
Well, at least in the most part.
And he's like, you don't know anything about us.
Don't talk to us.
You're in no position to dictate that, the whole thing.
I see an analogy that you use, right, the fight or flight, because the other piece of that...
Is the deep insecurity that Trump has?
Like, so when he's saying, don't tell us this, whatever, he also gets that thing about, you don't have any cards.
You have no cards to play.
You have no cards.
Zelensky's like, we're not playing cards.
Like, what are you talking about?
And Trump's saying that.
And I hear that.
I'm like, what Trump is insecure about is he's saying, you need to accept a deal on Putin's terms because I, Trump, have no answers if I'm not just taking what Putin wants.
Right?
I think that that's a big part.
Like, we've been talking about Putin and Trump for years.
But I think that Trump knows, like, he's the dealmaker or whatever.
We talked about this last roundup, that he's going to declare victory by just doing what Putin wants.
Putin has, to use that analogy, the stronger hand opposed to Ukraine.
Trump, I think, is just so insecure about Putin.
And so we talked about fight or flight.
I think the one person he wants to bow to, the one person whose respect he really wants, the one person that he kind of fears, or at least fears rejection from, Not the one, but a key one is Putin and other autocrats, right?
That's why he is always sort of himself sort of on his knees before them, trying to show them that he's one of them and that he respects them and so forth.
So that's the other piece of it is he comes out swinging against Zelensky, but it's out of such a place of insecurity because I think there's also this part of Trump that's like, I can't back you, even if we wanted to.
You have a weak position.
I can't make a deal.
I can't convince Putin.
I can't do any of the things that I say I can do.
And so you have this insecurity that I think is also on display in this kind of rage that he has towards Zelensky for just not playing the game, for not just, to stay with the metaphor, folding his hand, backing up from the table and saying, fine, like, you got it, you win, whatever.
And so I think that it's interesting because...
That, of course, is the other figure, like, hovering over all of this is Putin and Russian state media and all of that.
So I think that that's the interesting part.
When Trump goes into that, you don't have any cards to play.
You don't have any, like...
And he's like, he's angry about it, right?
It's like, he's...
It's not like, man, you got dealt a shitty hand or something.
It's like, he's, like, angry.
And if you look at it, and that's one of the things I'm always interested in, right?
When you get these, like, really visceral responses, you're like...
It's a weird metaphor to use if you're so pissed off.
And I think it's because he knows he can't back Zelensky because then he'd have to go up against Putin.
Then he would have to actually play a game of diplomacy and muscle flexing and whatever else you want to use.
And he just can't do it against Putin.
So I think you also have this deep insecurity aimed at Zelensky taking the form of rage to mask it.
And I think two final comments for me on this, and then we'll get some from you, and then we'll go to our funny light story and get away from this business.
But the notion you talked about there, Dan, is one that a lot of people discuss online.
There's all the memes of Trump bows to Putin.
He's been in Putin's pocket for how long?
And we can talk about it, and we have on this podcast, about...
What has Putin done to cultivate Trump as an asset?
How has he manipulated him over the years?
There's all the talk about the pee tape and the like, whatever.
Okay.
Is there compromise?
Is there this and that?
And that's fine.
There's another angle to me that goes like this.
Trump is trying to show Orban and Putin and Modi and Erdogan and others, hey, I'm playing your game now.
I want you to know that I'm no longer part of the soft, missionary, American, foreign diplomacy style.
I don't do that.
Those were soft, feminine, America-last approaches to American foreign policy.
We went around the world and gave people stuff.
We protected them for free.
We helped Europe thrive.
We helped Germany and Japan thrive, even though we fought a war against them.
Those imitators were con men.
They took stuff from us.
I'm not like some nice...
I'm not a charity.
I'm the president of the United States, and I'm a tough guy.
So I think the not bowing to Putin is not just like that he is enamored with him and that he is worried that Putin has something over him.
The bowing to Putin is, I want to show the tough guys that I'm also in the tough guy game.
So if I do try to enter into negotiations...
I've already taken myself out of the tough guy game because tough guys don't negotiate.
They just fight.
And whoever's bigger and whoever's badder wins and whoever isn't goes home and it's dominate or be dominated.
And he can't back Zelensky just to that same point.
He can't back him because he's not strong enough.
Yeah, Zelensky's not strong enough.
And also negotiating for peace itself.
For the good of the world itself, in Trump's view, is soft.
You only negotiate to get things, right?
So, again, I was talking to Matt Taylor about this, and one of the things we talked about is another way to frame the last 75 years has been, since World War II, the big, powerful democracy protects the smaller ones so that we don't have another world war.
World War I and World War II were so scarring and so traumatic.
The entire goal was, let's not do that again.
The last survivor of the Holocaust, Dan, just died.
And I think there's something so symbolic about that, that the memory of that trauma is going because there's no one among us who lived it.
There was a very clear reason to say to the fledgling democracies of the post-Soviet world, to the Central European country, to the Ukraine, to whoever, As the United States, we want to help cultivate a liberal democracy because we don't want any more world war.
Trump does not have that directive in any part of his DNA. He does not want to negotiate to avoid war.
He wants to negotiate to get stuff.
And if you negotiate for peace, if you negotiate for any other reason, you're weak.
You're part of this feminine Make America Last thing that he thinks.
If you want to be like Putin and Modi and Erdogan and Orban and Bolsonaro, who's gone now in some sense, you have to not negotiate, not compromise.
You just dominate or be dominated.
So I think that's it.
Final thoughts on this, and we'll take a break and go to something more fun.
I guess the last point that we kind of talked about, but just to throw out there, is this thing where...
The spectacle of it?
You know, we've been talking about all this, but I think, just to put out there, that the visibility of this was not accidental.
It was not unintentional, right?
This was never something that was supposed to happen behind closed doors.
And you get all the doublespeak, right?
You get Vance, who's like, this has to have a diplomatic solution, and maybe you ought to try that.
And you're like, are you kidding me?
And that was part of what provoked.
Further escalation in this argument, too, is Alinsky basically says that.
He's like, well, we've done that, Van.
Thank you.
But then when Van says that thing about, like, how dare you litigate this in front of the press?
And you're like, really?
Like, JD? Because you're the one who just, like, started this.
Like, kind of threw this grenade into the conversation to make sure that it happened in front of the press.
But I think that that's part of it.
Trump needed the world to see this.
The list of people you have, right?
The tough guys that Trump wants to join, Putin at the head of the list, he needed them to see this.
He needed MAGA nation that sees nothing in this but the prototypical alpha male.
This is what alpha males do.
They dominate and they find lesser opponents, weak people, and they make sure that they know that they're weak.
All of that.
I just I think that the spectacle of this was an intentional political spectacle that happened there.
And I keep reading analyses of like, you know, this shock that this happened.
I'm like, why are we shocked?
That is what Trump wants the world to see.
There was nothing accidental about this.
There was nothing overstated for all the reasons we're talking about.
But none of them have the force they do if it's not on every news network, you know, in America and globally.
And I think that that was another key component.
So real quick, one, J.D. Vance and Open Water, it's really hard for me to imagine somebody more grating than J.D. Vance.
I'm sorry.
I just don't get it.
I don't get it.
Because he is like the embodiment of the 39-year-old guy who is so convinced.
He knows everything.
I feel like J.D. Vance, if you say anything to him at home, at work, you say, Hey, J.D., this...
The first words out of his mouth instinctually are, well, actually, it just feels like that's the only way he can start a sentence.
Well, actually, he always knows.
I mean, the word mansplaining, whatever it may be, but there's just...
I know there are politicians out there who I despise, who I also recognize their charisma and aura, and JD, when you just see videos of this guy, you're like, you're the most...
Suck up.
Whatever.
I'm done on JD. I do want to make this...
According to some of your terms, it's like bandsplaining or something.
It's his very own annoying form of that to anybody about anything.
The only other comment I want to make is that the reporter who asked Zelensky about his dress is like Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend, just so everybody knows.
And he was a plant, and they made him...
I mean, he was very clearly set up to ask this.
And Zelensky's response is, maybe after the war, I will wear a costume like you.
And there was this really beautiful double entendre there, because in some sense he was calling a suit a kind of costume for a game, for a dress-up.
But in other languages, the word for suit is costume, like French for suit is costume.
And so he was kind of playing on the, maybe I'll wear a costume, like a suit someday.
What I'm really telling you is you're a clown.
He's going to get on a plane after this and go fight a war.
And this Mr. Tough Guy president who's trying to humiliate me is going to go get on a plane and play golf.
There's something like really in that exchange to me about who's actually doing something as a leader.
One guy's going to go play golf.
The other guy's going to go fly back to a war zone to protect his country.
All right.
Anything else, Dan, on this before we go to break and wrap it up?
Anything else?
No, just other than that costume thing, I thought the same thing.
I like to think it was intentional, right?
It's the kind of thing you could always play off and be like, maybe my English isn't so great, or I know some other languages and things, and I mixed it up.
But if you're Trump sitting there, you're being called a clown, an imposter, somebody who's playing a world leader, somebody who's playing a president.
I thought that was a brilliant rhetorical move as well.
All right, y'all.
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