The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 28 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.
President Donald Trump is extremely frustrated with Vladimir Putin right now. In a series of public remarks, Trump has lashed out at Putin for keeping up his attack on Ukraine, which the Russian leader has mysteriously not stopped doing, even though Trump says he wants him to. Trump has called Putin “crazy,” and he tweeted that Putin is “playing with fire!” What strikes us about all this, however, is that Trump only seems capable of understanding Putin’s continuing war making as an affront to him personally, which really underscores his unfitness for this moment and makes it very hard to understand what’s driving administration policy at this point or where it’s all going. So today we’re talking to Cathy Young, a staff writer at The Bulwark who’s done a lot of analysis of all these dynamics. Hopefully she’ll be able to help us understand it. Cathy, thanks for coming on.
Cathy Young: Thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure.
Sargent: Russia just carried out one of its worst drone and missile attacks on Ukraine since the invasion started. At least a dozen were killed. Large numbers were injured. Before we get into Trump’s madness, can you bring us up to date on what happened with that attack and what’s been going on with the U.S. efforts to negotiate a peace?
Young: Well, the attacks have been growing in intensity for, I think, the past month. It’s just been a series of relentless attacks, including on Kyiv, where for a period of time Russia was not attacking. I think part of it is that Russia has stepped up its drone capacities. They’re now able to strike targets at a long distance better than they were able to. It should also be noted, by the way, that while Ukraine is also making drone strikes in Russia, and and I think may still be somewhat ahead of drone capacity, Ukraine is striking military and military-related targets. Russia has been ... the most recent one is that they struck a bomb shelter, which is really unconscionable. They’re striking schools, they’re striking restaurants. Last month, I think they struck a playground, where a number of children were killed.
Sargent: Cathy, what’s been going on with U.S. efforts to negotiate a peace?
Young: It’s been this ridiculous two-step dance, really, where the pattern is that the U.S. makes a proposal, Russia basically shoots it down—no pun intended—and comes out with a very unsatisfactory counterproposal, which the U.S. actually acknowledges as unsatisfactory. After the initial conflicted relationship between Trump and Zelenskiy, Ukraine has actually gone along with the U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire. And then Russia has been essentially saying, Well, no, no, no, we don’t really want a ceasefire unless Ukraine also agrees to give us these four provinces that we annexed in September of 2022, most of which Russia doesn’t even control. This is territory that Ukraine actually sacrificed lives and spent a great deal of effort reconquering, and now Russia is saying, No, you’ve got to give it back to us as a condition for even talking about a ceasefire. Then the U.S. makes noises about how unsatisfactory Russian behavior is, and then it’s back to square one and then new attempts to negotiate.
Sargent: Well, speaking of that, I want to read Trump’s latest tweet on this. He said, “What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!” So Cathy, Trump may be crazy and incompetent, but he is privy to a lot of intelligence and other information about this war that you and I don’t get to see. So I’m really trying to get a sense of what he could mean here. What’s your best guess? What’s he talking about?
Young: I honestly don’t even think that this is a reflection of being privy to some sort of intelligence. Isn’t it basically the Trump M.O.? Like everything bad that happened during the years of the Biden administration happened because Trump wasn’t president. And then of course, everything that happens now, Well, if it weren’t for me, it would be a lot worse. So I don’t even know if it’s very productive to look for some factual underpinning to this. It’s just Trump being Trump, right? That’s my reading.
Sargent: Well, I think maybe what Trump is trying to say is that, If Democrats had won the election, they would have used—
Young: They would have sent more weapons to Ukraine. They would have … I don’t know, maybe sanctions would have been stepped up.
Sargent: Or he said “really bad,” right? I think he’s suggesting in some deranged way that maybe Biden would have used nukes on you.
Young: Nukes? Yeah, right. Right. Which makes a lot of sense. And I think a lot of this is really Trump trying to cover up the fact that he’s been completely ineffective when it comes to—well, many things, but with Russia-Ukraine, it’s especially stark. I was listening to a really colorful Russian expatriate commentator this morning, Alexander Nevzorov, and his comment was, Well, Trump, on his return to the White House, burst onto the scene boasting about the size of his manhood, and now he’s demonstrated that he’s actually completely impotent.
Sargent: Right. Well, this is one reason Trump is so angry. Let’s listen to another response from Trump. Let’s listen to this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Yeah, I’ll give you an update. I’m not happy with what Putin’s doing. He’s killing a lot of people, and I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin. I’ve known him a long time, always gotten along with him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all. OK? We’re in the middle of talking, and he’s shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities. I don’t like it at all.
Sargent: What I find striking about this is that Trump casts this as a function of their personal relationship. They’ve always gotten along, Trump says, so why is Putin doing this?
Young: Yeah.
Sargent: He seems to be incapable of grasping that Putin has a whole series of actual goals and a worldview that he cares about more than he cares about Trump’s feelings. Putin wants to eradicate the Ukrainian people completely, erase Ukraine as a country—
Young: Well, he wants to eradicate Ukrainian identity. I don’t know that he actually wants to kill every single—
Sargent: Right. He wants to eradicate the idea of a Ukrainian people, right?
Young: Yeah, and Putin and other high-level Russian officials are basically saying quite straightforwardly that they believe a sovereign and independent Ukraine is incompatible with Russian statehood as they see it. And they have this idea—it’s about rebuilding the empire in some sense.
Sargent: Right. I was going to say, Cathy, that Putin actually has a worldview. He’s animated by fantasies of a greater Russia rooted in deeply twisted readings of history and so forth. Trump is not capable of saying to himself, How does Vladimir Putin see the world?
Young: Right. There is a view, which I think is fairly convincing to me, that at least when Putin was starting out as the Russian leader, he didn’t necessarily have an ideology beyond self-enrichment and the magnification of his own power. But he’s been using this Russian imperial ideology as a cover for his actions because he has to justify his autocracy somehow. And I think it’s entirely possible … I can’t get inside his head—and it’s not a particularly pleasant place to be, I’m sure—but I think it’s entirely possible that he has gotten into the role to such an extent that he really is buying into [it himself]. Like, what’s the expression, huffing his own supply, right? That’s entirely possible. I think at this point, he really is serious about the ideology.
But whether he’s using the ideology as a cover or for the expansion of his power or sincerely believes it is really almost irrelevant, because the upshot of it is that, and I think that’s pretty clear, he needs the war at the moment as his raison d’être, politically. Because what else does he really have to offer the Russian population at this point? He’s whipping up this war hysteria, [which] unfortunately does seem to be working on a fairly large portion of the population, although in an autocracy it’s really difficult to say to what extent polls reflect the accurate state of public opinion. But I think there’s also a view that for him to end the war right now would actually be hazardous because he’d have a lot of disaffected soldiers coming home, basically saying, Well, wait a minute, what was all this for? What did our friends die for? So I think he may be in a “holding the tiger by the tail” position where even if he wanted to end the war, he knows that it would be very dangerous to him domestically.
Sargent: Well, we’ve got Republicans in Congress—a small group of them anyway—that are now pressing to escalate pressure on Russia, really breaking with Trump. Trump has made noises about maybe he’ll entertain sanctions, but it seems to me that Trump has basically always been either entirely indifferent to the fate of Ukraine or actively rooting for Russia to win. So how much longer can Trump disguise his actual position here? He’s got Republicans saying that it’s time to escalate the sanctions. Trump himself is admitting, without meaning to, that his efforts have failed. Russia’s doing what he has told them not to do, right? So Trump is failing, according to his own account. So how much longer can Trump sustain this position where he’s essentially admitting that he’s not getting his way but saying, I’m going to walk away, as his people are saying? Where does this go from here? Trump clearly doesn’t want to be seen failing. This is why he’s raging so furiously at Putin right now. Yet he also says, I’m going to walk away, which he thinks, I believe, that he could wash his hands of this and somehow not be perceived to have failed—but everybody would know that he failed. So where does this go? It just seems like a deeply contradictory position.
Young: Yeah. You got me. I’m not a … I don’t have a crystal ball. Given that one of Trump’s chief concerns is to project an image of his own strength and not to be seen as impotent, basically, you would think that he would get on board with the tough sanctions that the Republicans are proposing. He’s also got the idea that he can work out some kind of deal with Putin, no matter how he rails at him. I think he still believes that it can be fixed and that he and Putin can have this alliance of sorts. He also understands that he cannot afford to just completely throw Ukraine under the bus and just say, OK, Putin, go ahead and take whatever you want, because that really is not going to make him look great. And he did sign this agreement with Ukraine. Remember the rare minerals deal where we’re supposed to be in a partnership?
So I think he’s in a bit of a bind there. And part of the reason he’s raging, I think, is that he’s flailing, trying to decide which course of action is going to make him look least inept and least weak, really, because that’s really his preoccupation. So I think it’s possible—it also depends on who is going to be influencing him, because Trump is, and I’m sure we all know this, susceptible to the last person he spoke to to a remarkable degree. Remember after he played golf with the Finnish president, he suddenly came out with this tough talk about Putin and then there was more backsliding two days later? I’ve joked that maybe the best option for Ukraine is for Zelenskiy to learn how to play golf. Spend a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago, and maybe then everything would be fine. So I don’t know, maybe someone can talk him into getting behind the Republican sanctions.
Can he just completely walk away? I don’t know, because I think that is going to make him look bad—and I think he understands that. So it’s possible that there will be this drawn-out period of more attempts to set up some sort of negotiations. I don’t even know what for because Russia has really made its position pretty clear there. And Putin right now thinks—and I think he thinks erroneously—that he’s winning. I think he’s wildly overoptimistic. They seize two small villages whose population was evacuated months ago, and then he’s like, Oh yes, we’re taking more land. We’re winning. So I think the Russians really believe that they can achieve some breakthrough in the summer, which I don’t think is going to happen. Ukraine is really still doing quite well, and I don’t think the Ukrainian population is being terrorized into clamoring for surrender. That’s one of the purposes of these strikes at civilians. The Russians really—or Putin and the Kremlin keep thinking that if they can just inflict enough misery on Ukrainians, there’s going to be this mass outcry for Zelenskiy to end the war. I think it’s having the opposite effect, really, so far.
Sargent: So where do we see this ultimately going? You don’t think Putin is really winning to the degree he thinks he is. It doesn’t look like Ukrainians are being terrorized by the attacks on civilians. Do you have a general sense of what we may see over the next year or two, and where does Trump fit into all this?
Young: Well, I think we’re going to see more war. It’s a classic war of attrition. At the moment, it’s pretty clear that neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians have enough strength to achieve a breakthrough that would really majorly shift the momentum one way or another. So I think we’re going to see more snail-paced progress on one side or the other. The Ukrainians, by the way, have not really been kicked out of the Russian border regions that Putin announced with great fanfare had been liberated. The Ukrainians are still in Kursk region. They’ve also made incursions into another province—the Bryansk province. So I think that’s going to still be happening.
I think the Russian forces really cannot achieve any breakthrough unless they hugely increase their manpower. And I think Putin is actually afraid to do another large-scale mobilization because the last time he did that, which was really almost two years ago, there really was a lot of discontent, especially when it starts affecting the population in the large urban centers. So far, the conduct of this war has been really to use primarily people who are either marginal like convicts, or people from small towns where poverty is so high that people are willing to risk their lives for the higher pay that is offered by the army, or the places populated by ethnic minorities, which also tend to be very poor. They’re not mobilizing people in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other larger urban centers like that. So if it gets to the point where the average Russian starts feeling affected by the war, which he or she is already, to some extent … you have drone attacks on Moscow airports. I think people really are feeling the pinch, so to speak. And I think there is growing discontent.
So all of this is a roundabout way of saying that I don’t think Putin is going to do anything that has a chance to increase popular discontent. I think this is going to continue limping along horribly with a lot of casualties. I think it’s likely that Trump will try to walk away. He’s already signaled that a few times. He may be deterred from doing that completely if he realizes, [or] if it’s made clear to him, that it’s making him look bad.
Sargent: Well, unfortunately, Trump’s motives and his understanding of strategy are really impossible to read. I’m not sure if he knows what he thinks about all this. Cathy Young, thanks so much for coming on with us today.
Young: Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me. And I’m sure we’ll meet again to talk about the same topic. And the wheel will keep spinning.
Sargent: Absolutely.