The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 3 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
After Donald Trump and JD Vance ambushed Ukrainian President Zelenskiy in the Oval Office, one GOP senator stepped up and said the right thing. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska decried Trump not just for his appalling treatment of Zelenskiy but also for realigning the United States with the rising forces of Putinism around the world. Meanwhile, European leaders are now stepping up to negotiate some kind of ceasefire plan for the end to the Russia-Ukraine war. We’re hoping this could increase the pressure on Trump and Vance to show what they really want the outcome to look like—something they clearly don’t want to be candid about. We’re going to get into all of this today with Lauren Young, a lecturer on the global right and democratic erosion, at Yale University. Thanks for coming on, Lauren.
Lauren Young: Thank you very much for having me, Greg.
Sargent: By now everybody’s seen the video of Trump and Vance attacking Zelenskiy. They said Zelenskiy “doesn’t hold any cards right now” and that he hasn’t been sufficiently thankful to the U.S. for its support, which is appalling and complete fiction. And otherwise, they engaged in what was clearly a setup, an effort to show that under Trump and Vance, the support of the U.S. for Ukraine is in the process of getting withdrawn. Lauren, I just wanted to get your reaction to what we saw.
Young: This is a tectonic shift in American foreign policy that we’re seeing enacted in, to use Steve Bannon’s words, with “muzzle velocity.” This is all happening very quickly, and I can’t help but think about Frederick Douglass in 1867, who made a statement that’s quite prescient. I thought, after what happened in the Oval Office on Friday, [about what] he said: “We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.” What happened on Friday is a far more complex situation than the thuggery in the Oval Office meeting suggests. I think that while Trump voters might have broadly been in support of no longer funding a war in Ukraine, I don’t really think that the majority of voters necessarily support allying the U.S. with Russia.
Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. They don’t know that they were voting for this. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was perhaps the only Republican to really forcefully denounce what we all saw. She said this:
“This week started with administration officials refusing to acknowledge that Russia started the war in Ukraine. It ends with a tense, shocking conversation in the Oval Office and whispers from the White House that they may try to end all U.S. support for Ukraine. I am sick to my stomach. The administration appears to be walking away from our allies and embracing Putin, a threat to democracy and U.S. values around the world.”
Lauren, the key there is that Murkowski is calling out the broader reorientation of the U.S. Can you talk about that?
Young: Yes. I think what she’s referring to is the misinformation that was implicit in the meeting between Trump and Vance and Zelenskiy, and their tweets, and what this will do to embolden the right wing in other countries. What we’re seeing more specifically in Murkowski’s remarks is the failure here, and perhaps in other countries of the center right, to draw the line in the sand. And maybe this Zelenskiy meeting will be seen as the moment, when in Trump 2.0, the center right totally failed to stand up. I think she’s describing a path that charts the end of what we know of as the Atlantic Alliance—this idea that we have allies in Europe and around the world whose goal it is to promote and protect other Western liberal democracies of which Ukraine is one example.
Sargent: One thing that struck me about the ambush in the Oval Office is the audience for it. I’m not sure to what degree it was intended for an American audience. And if so, it was primarily aimed at core MAGA voters. That aside, it seems clear that one intended audience was the global far right or the global fascist movement, whichever you want to call it. How do you think this will be received by those rising forces around the world? What will they be seeing?
Young: Well, they see a few things. I think for sure they see the end of 80 years of what we commonly refer to as the Atlantic Charter. This meeting showed a clear contravention of those understandings that have brought peace and prosperity to the growth of democracy in the world.
Sargent: Well, Elon Musk, I think, saw it that way. Overnight, he endorsed a tweet calling for U.S. withdrawal from NATO. So Musk clearly sees that the Oval Office moment is a coming out party for the global far right. Your thoughts on that from Musk?
Young: Well, yes. Musk, in particular, has been using Russian talking points for years, so his position on NATO isn’t really anything new. Vance has done the same thing. Vance did the same thing in his attacks on Zelenskiy in the Oval Office, and he was really interesting in that regard. When Zelenskiy pressed him about having never visited Ukraine, Vance made some comments about how he consults the internet and how that has informed his understanding of what’s going on in Ukraine. I’d say that he absolutely doesn’t understand based on that, and from the reception in the Oval Office made that clear.
For example, we have a wartime leader who was 73 percent approval rating—this is Zelenskiy—and who has clearly been invaded by a neighboring country. There have been war crimes; there have been huge losses of both civilian life, of Ukrainian soldiers who fought very bravely on behalf of their country; and [there are] children kidnapped and forcibly removed to Russia. There’s a litany of things that Vance doesn’t know about, and Musk doesn’t know about. Musk famously appeared, just a few weeks ago, at the conference of the AfD in Germany and has promoted far-right parties specifically, as has Vance. Vance met with Alice Weidel, the head of the AfD in Germany, when he was at the Munich security conference; [he] famously [did] not meeting with Olaf Scholz, who was the German chancellor at the time. So they seem to be coordinating with far-right parties in Europe in particular. What this leads to, and this galvanization of the global far right, is really transparent.
Sargent: Trump and Vance are never actually candid about what they want to happen in Russia and Ukraine. They don’t want peace on any terms that require Russia to make real concessions. We never hear them calling on Russia to end its invasion. Now it’s been reported that Britain and France will negotiate with Ukraine to produce some set of terms for a plausible ceasefire and then present this to the U.S. There’s a lot we don’t know about this, but for now, should we at least hope that this process puts a bit more pressure on Trump and Vance to say what they really mean when they say they want peace between Russia and Ukraine?
Young: Trump and Vance are very transactional, and they want to deliver on a promise, which was the fighting has stopped. Since 2014, Putin has violated any number of agreements with regard to Ukraine, so there’s no reason to believe that the end of actual fighting in Ukraine will be respected as a red line by Putin, very clearly.
Sargent: Trump and Vance will take “peace” between Russia and Ukraine, even if it constitutes essentially giving Russia whatever it wants and Ukraine not getting any of its territory back simply because they can then say they stopped the fighting. I think there’s that, but there’s also a genuine ideological inclination on the part of Trump and Vance to want Russia to not have to make concessions. Can you talk about that?
Young: The idea that we live in a transactional world: I’ll take Greenland, you take Crimea. I’ll take Panama, you can have oil in the Arctic Circle, and then we’ll split the rare earths in the Ukraine, it’s only fair.... Everything’s for sale in this transactional world. America is first. Russia’s first. Hungary’s first. The world is going back to a world before the first world war where great power competition dominated, but it’s a flawed model. The past 80 years of Western liberal democracies has greatly benefited not only the U.S. but all the countries that have participated in it. This idea of ending the Western liberal alliances as we know it, which is really what we saw enacted in the Oval Office on Friday, puts us into a world that’s far more dangerous and less secure. And longer term, it doesn’t seem that this administration either appreciates that or possibly doesn’t understand the ramifications.
Sargent: Couldn’t agree more. One thing that is really dark about all this is how few Republicans said what Lisa Murkowski said. Lindsey Graham, who’s actually been very pro-Ukraine, claimed Zelenskiy had been disrespectful and said, “I don’t know if we can do business again.” That’s reprehensible. It’s nonsense. But the broader point here, it seems to me, is that any hopes for having a robust center right that might resist the Trump-Vance push to align the U.S. with global far-right forces is mostly gone. What does history tell us about the need for a center right that acts as a bulwark?
Young: It is essential without mincing words. And it’s funny. I’ve been teaching for the past 15 years or so, both in London at the London School of Economics and at Yale, and for the past 15 years, my favorite essay question for my brilliant future world leader students has been, What is the path back to the political center? And in 15 years in England and in America, not one future world leader has ever taken me up on taking that topic to task and writing an essay about it. So this is the magic question. Without some guardrails and some voices beyond the lone Lisa Murzkowski speaking out, we’re going to end up with policies that we’re seeing now that align the U.S. with Russia. It’s time to speak up. This is a pretty serious situation, I believe.
Sargent: It certainly is. And there is absolutely no indication that they are going to speak up. Lauren Young, thank you so much for talking to us today.
Young: Thank you, Greg.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.