The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 20 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.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s fawning over President Trump really went haywire, and so did her anger at the media for not reporting sufficiently on his world-historical greatness. The topic was Trump’s handling of Russia and Ukraine. Leavitt slammed the media for not reporting on Trump’s smashing successes on this front, even though there haven’t actually been real successes. But behind all the absurdity here is something deadly serious. Amid all these demands for adulation of Trump, he, Leavitt, and the White House seem to be moving us toward a world that we very much should dread—one of a weaker Western alliance and stronger autocracies—and they never come clean about what that world will actually look like. Today we’re talking about all this with one of our favorite observers of global affairs, Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois who recently wrote a good piece for The Bulwark about Trump’s megalomania as a major factor in all this. Nick, good to have you on.
Nicholas Grossman: Hi Greg, great to be with you.
Sargent: So over the last week, Trump has met with both Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Zelenskiy and with European leaders. He emerged from the meeting with Putin without a ceasefire and then turned right around and said the push for peace should continue without any ceasefire, essentially going along with Putin’s wishes. Then he offered Zelenskiy and European leaders only the vaguest of security guarantees for Ukraine should some kind of peace deal be reached. Nick, can you sum up where we are right now and what it means?
Grossman: Where we are is basically where we’ve been all year, which is the Ukraine war raging. The party is no closer to peace in particular because Russia started the war and the war will keep going until Russia changes that and decides to stop that, make some sort of deal. Trump had actually—and he’s gotten a lot of accolades from the media for this—somewhat shifted from a Putin sympathetic tone to parroting a lot of Russian propaganda to saying he was offended. He was angry and frustrated that Putin wasn’t making peace and [said] that there would be sanctions or other pressure. And then this meeting came out and there [are] no sanctions and he’s back to essentially parroting Russian propaganda.
So the Russian military is still advancing. The Ukrainians are still resisting them. Russians are still bombing Ukrainian cities. The Europeans are still supporting the Ukrainians, working harder to try to support them in the absence of some of the U.S. support that Trump has reduced. And the United States is floundering, is looking like it is hapless as opposed to being the essential leader in the world that is trying to establish peace. It is flitting back and forth between these two different parties and trying to just tell them what the other one is saying. [That] is pretty much the greatest achievement that the U.S. has claimed.
Sargent: That doesn’t sound too great, and it certainly contrasts rather sharply with what White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. She gave her own version of events. She’s very upset about the media coverage of Trump’s handling of the situation. Listen to this. It’s a bit long, but it’s worth it.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): However, one thing that has absolutely not changed is the media’s negative and downright false coverage of President Trump and his foreign policy accomplishments. From the beginning of this entire process, much of the left-wing media has been actively rooting against the president of the U.S. in the pursuit of peace. Initially, the media ridiculously claimed that President Trump was somehow beholden to Russia for even agreeing to have a face-to-face discussion with President Putin inside of the U.S. The media said President Trump was making a grave mistake by “legitimizing Putin.” They were aghast that President Trump would treat another world leader like a world leader. The media relentlessly attacked President Trump and claimed he suffered a “major defeat” for not immediately emerging with a final agreement, even though he said heading into that meeting, This was a meeting to listen and to understand how to move the ball forward.
All weekend following those historic U.S.–Russia bilateral talks, we listened to clueless pundits on television trying but failing to claim that the president had failed. The so-called experts in the foreign policy establishment whose record is nothing but endless wars, trillions of wasted taxpayer dollars, and dead Americans have the nerve to try and lecture President Trump, who has solved seven global conflicts in seven months, about peace.
Sargent: Nick, let’s divide this into two pieces. First, let’s start with the claim, which is now constant from Trump and Leavitt, that Trump is the greatest peacemaker in world history, having magically solved seven wars—although that number tends to shift. In some cases, there isn’t a lasting peace or the violence is continuing. And in others, his role is heavily disputed. It’s just a lot of nonsense. You want to give us the rundown on the claim?
Grossman: Sure. The short answer is that it’s bullshit. It reminds me of something from debate: a move called the Gish gallop where somebody just throws a whole bunch of bullshit at the wall and then their opponents end up getting caught up in disputing each one. And if anything, it would be a waste of time to dispute each one. There’s things like between Congo and Rwanda; the rebel group there is still fighting and they’re saying they’re going to escalate again. Or India and Pakistan where they’re saying, No, actually we did it on our own. They didn’t really do much. Other ones where it isn’t even a peace deal. They don’t even have relations. And so all of it is essentially bullshit.
What Trump has actually done in office is escalate various conflicts, destabilize various situations and generally make the world a less stable place by weakening support for U.S. allies and abandoning America’s role in the world. That is a much bigger impact than the rest of it that they’re lying because Trump’s top foreign policy priority has always been lying to the American people, to put on a show for Americans, not to do the hard work that actually makes this stuff accomplished in the world. The reason why people get, say, a Nobel Peace Prize or that’s an achievement is because peace is hard—and they haven’t done the work. They’ve mostly just tried to bullshit their way through it and claim credit for things that happened or just lied about things that didn’t actually happen.
Sargent: What’s funny about that is that Leavitt really feels the heat from Trump’s actual desire for a Nobel. It’s very clear that that’s what’s going on with her. He’s really probably raging in private, Why haven’t they given me the Peace Prize yet? And she goes out at these briefings with the task of soothing Trump’s ego over this. And that’s why I think you’re seeing rant after rant from her both at the press and at the failure to award him a peace prize, which, by the way, she actually complained about the other day. She said it’s high time he gets granted one.
Grossman: It’s crazy to think that the priority of the president of the U.S. is to pretend and bluster his way to get a prize for himself, not to actually advance U.S. interests or do anything positive for the world. But if you take that as true, that that’s what they’re actually doing—that she really is getting up in front of the world with the primary goal of soothing his ego and trying to sell him to the Nobel Prize committee or a similar prize committee—then the actions make more sense. It’s not for national interest. And that is both very weird. We should not stop recognizing how just weird that is.
And also, it’s really bad for U.S. interests, for the world. The U.S. played an essential role, and various presidents with varying degrees of foreign policy—positive and negative—still all managed to play that role to some positive degree in parts of the world. And the Trump administration has abdicated it. And they’re floundering and trying to put on a show instead of actually doing it.
Sargent: Well said. Let’s go to the other piece of Leavitt’s claim, which is her long complaint about the media coverage. It seems to me the coverage has been more than appropriate here. First of all, as you pointed out earlier, and I thought it was a critical point, he actually got lots of praise when he got temporarily tough on Russia, though he dropped that rather quickly. But since then, he has bent over backward to align with Putin, and he has promised to get Putin to agree to peace but has failed to come through on that. And also, there’s absolutely no sense whatsoever of what Trump will demand in concessions from Russia in exchange for any peace or what sort of guarantee of Ukraine’s long-term security he’s willing to demand. That’s what the criticism has been, and those are valid criticisms. Am I being too harsh?
Grossman: No. In fact, not harsh enough. The security guarantee is a good place to start, because a real security guarantee is hard. It’s the sort of thing that requires real effort. You can’t just say, Don’t do it or I’ll attack you. You have to make them believe it. You have to make it credible. So with North Korea, for example, the U.S. has troops in South Korea. They do joint exercises. They have integrated command structures, integrated equipment and supply chains. If North Korea attacks, they will kill Americans. China knows they will kill Americans. And so that creates a type of trip wire that makes it where they don’t want to cross that and do it. NATO is similar with Russia. It takes an immense amount of effort to make it that Russia truly believes that the U.S. will go to war for, for example, Poland. And by that, it keeps Russia out of Poland.
So to make a real security guarantee that would keep Russia out of Ukraine—given that Russia has attacked not once but twice, breaking agreements each time in doing it, it stands to reason that Putin can’t be trusted, that he could easily decide to try for more again later, which means that there would need to be real boots on the ground that would be in the way. And part of the problem with the Trump administration is while they’re not even saying that they will do that—so not even putting the gestures toward the real thing that might create a stable peace—but even if they tried to, it would not be credible. Nobody, certainly not the Kremlin, believes that Trump would follow through with that. Even if maybe he thought it was a good idea for a moment, he’s shown that he’ll flip back and forth. He’s subjected to flattery, to manipulation, to moods, or just to general incompetence and lack of follow through.
And if you looked at Leavitt’s comments, when you cut through a lot of the bullshit, her whole defense was Trump’s achievement was he got meetings. He got Putin to have a meeting, and then he got the Europeans to have a meeting. And those are not achievements. Giving Putin a P.R. victory of a red carpet rollout on U.S. soil and then coming out with the president of the U.S. essentially repeating Russian propaganda and saying that he will not be putting on those sanctions—dropping the whole idea of sanctions—that is a success for Russia. Anybody could have done that. It was very easy to get Putin to come to the U.S. and dance around in front of the cameras and get a president to look at him positively. If a U.S. president wanted to do that, they just didn’t because it was bad for the U.S. She says, Why didn’t you treat him like a international leader? Why wouldn’t they? And the answer is because he’s an aggressive war criminal. So countries are treating him like an aggressive war criminal.
Sargent: So here’s some more from Karoline Leavitt. Listen to this.
Leavitt (audio voiceover): There was so much progress in the readout that was given to these European leaders immediately following his meeting with President Putin that every single one of them got on a plane 48 hours later and flew to the United States of America.
Sargent: Nick, that’s not what happened, is it?
Grossman: No. The Europeans scrambled to Washington in worry to try to urge the U.S. not to make a terrible mistake. And that is not an achievement. That is a sign of a terribly frayed alliance, of the U.S. being an unreliable partner, of chaos where there’s supposed to be this bedrock of reliability that provided security for the U.S. and its allies for so many years.
Sargent: There was a new Reuters poll that found 54 percent of Americans say Trump is too closely aligned with Russia. I want to say that that’s actually really, really heartening to see. It’s not as big a number as I’d like, but it’s a pretty solid majority: 54 percent, well over 50. And given the roar of propaganda that’s come out from the White House, essentially trying to portray him as genuinely desiring peace between the two parties, it’s good to see that people are figuring out that at the core of this whole thing is that Trump is allied with Putin. That’s the essential fact that they can’t paper over no matter how hard they try. Trump has long, I think, wanted to see Russia win the war, maybe not for any particularly strong ideological reasons but because he’s simpatico with Putin. He thinks Putin and he get each other in some sense. They’re fellow autocrats. They’re sneered at by elites in a similar way. And I’ve got say, I’m glad to see that the public is figuring this out.
Grossman: Yeah, it’s nice to see a majority. And I think it’s fair to say that there’s a big chunk of the country that would respond to polls just by which answer says I side with Trump and then just say whatever that is. That creates a ceiling on what the disapproval would be. But the fact that this is 54 as opposed to, I don’t know, 42 or something where it’s just Democrats—it’s something that is overwhelming. It’s one of the, I’d say, key features about Trump in his public life that he is very positive about Vladimir Putin. He’s negative about so many people in so many different ways. We know what he sounds like when he wants to speak negatively of somebody. And he never does that of Putin. And he seems almost, and like he did in Alaska, like he was, I don’t know, fanboying—like he was a Star Wars fan meeting Mark Hamill or something. He seemed very excited. And I take it as not any secret meetings where they’re working on a nefarious plan but that Trump has always had admiration for Putin, is jealous of Putin, wants to be seen as a tough guy like that. Trump is personally a wuss, and Putin is personally a killer and is a hard man in a way that Trump is not and portrays himself well with good image creation.
And Trump, even at the start of the war, gushed that it was savvy and genius to attack Ukraine like that. Real quotes, savvy and genius was his reaction. A big part of it is also his worldview: that the strong should be able to push around weaker ones. He and a lot of his staff bathe in online right-wing propaganda that the Ukrainians—like the West are weak and woke and too gay to fight. And that has nothing to do with warfare, how it actually works. That’s culture-war nonsense. But they really are caught up in a lot of that. And so his worldview—a lot of their worldview—needs Russia to win, to have some success to validate it. And the type of actual response to Russia that would really get them to stop the strong, sustained military effort—that would make them realize either that their war effort would collapse or make them realize that it was futile and unlikely to succeed, not worth the effort, and that they should just take what they can get—that’s the only real path to peace. And Trump can’t do that because he simply—I don’t even think he’d be capable of it. But even if he were, he does not want it. He doesn’t really try for it. I, at the very least, think it’s safe to say, based on all his actions, he does not want to see Putin lose, actually lose. And therefore he can’t do what the Ukrainians and the Europeans need.
Sargent: Well, that brings me to the question I wanted to close out on. Just to go big picture, we keep being instructed to worship Trump as a great world-historical peacemaker. But at the end of the day, you put your finger on it there: Trump is setting us up for a world in which the alliance of Western liberal democracies is weaker and autocracies are stronger. It’s a world in which quasi-genocidal conflict and invasions like Putin’s are rewarded. Can you talk about where we’re going here and what that might look like, that world?
Grossman: Sure. I think that this is without exaggeration one of the biggest things that’s happened in modern history. Essentially, the world order from World War II on and especially from the end of the Cold War was based on the bedrock of American power. America is the champion of democracy, is the policeman of the world, is the head of the liberal world order, whatever euphemism you wanted to use for it of American hegemony. And Trump has abdicated that role. By Americans electing him once, a lot of other countries could say, Oh, it’s a fluke, but doing it again after seeing all the criminality, after seeing the first term of him in office has signaled to the world that the U.S. is not reliable.
We have at minimum a few years of the U.S. upending the global trade order that the U.S. built after World War II and after the Cold War that has made so much peace and prosperity. We’ve got him upending alliances at NATO; I mentioned credibility earlier. NATO depends on the widespread belief that the U.S. will be there for its allies. And that belief is not there—because who really trust Trump is going to do that? There’s Middle East destabilization. Nuclear proliferation is a big part of his legacy, both with normalizing North Korea’s nuclear weapons in his first term and with the Iran attack that he’s lying about because they did not actually destroy Iran’s nuclear program. And now Trump, because he’s trying to pretend that he did, effectively is giving cover for their additional nuclear development.
All of this adds up to a more dangerous, less stabilized world, something that in the grand scheme of things looks closer to multipolar before World War I international system rather than the more stable, unipolar, U.S.–led international system that lasted from the end of the Cold War until—I think really, when historians look back on it, they will mark it until November, 2024, or January, 2025, when he takes office.
Sargent: Yes. And to top all that off, he’s also collapsing American liberal democracy here at home. Nick Grossman, thanks for that rundown, man. That was really something. We really appreciate it.
Grossman: All right. Thanks for having me.