In This Episode
- Pre-order Julia’s book – https://tinyurl.com/2btnv3pk
- Call Congress – 202-224-3121
- Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8
- What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast
Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/
TRANSCRIPT
Jane Coaston: It’s Thursday, August 14th. I’m Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, the show that is standing with the good people of India who are reacting with outrage to a government advisory stating that samosas, the delicious fried treat stuffed with spicy potato, might not be very good for your health. Stand tall, India. Stand with tasty, tasty samosas. [music break] On today’s show, the chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, I mean, President Donald Trump, announces he’s going to host this year’s Kennedy Center Honors because ruining things is his favorite pastime, also musicals. And a federal appeals court panel clears the path for the Trump administration to terminate foreign aid spending. But let’s start with the war in Ukraine. Trump is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday in Anchorage, Alaska. Ahead of his big meeting, he spoke with European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Wednesday to come up with a collective game plan. Later that morning, during a press conference at the Kennedy Center, Trump reiterated his desire for Russia to agree to some kind of ceasefire. And he said if Putin didn’t agree to end the war, there would be quote, “very severe consequences of some kind.”
[clip of unnamed news reporter] Will Russia face any consequences if Vladimir Putin does not agree to stop the war after your meeting on Friday?
[clip of President Donald Trump] Yes, they will. Yeah.
[clip of unnamed news reporter] What will the consequences be?
[clip of President Donald Trump] There will be consequences.
[clip of unnamed news reporter] Sanctions? Tariffs?
[clip of President Donald Trump] There will be, I don’t have to say. There will be very severe consequences.
Jane Coaston: Sure. As we’ve mentioned on the show, this is a high-stakes meeting at every level. Russia continues to bombard Ukraine three years into the war, and Moscow is demanding more Ukrainian territory in exchange for peace, to which the Ukrainian government has said, no dice. In short, the Russia-Ukraine war is still at a stalemate, and our president is trying to figure out how to get them to agree by hosting Putin, the aggressor, and an international pariah who faces an arrest warrant on war crimes from the Hague right here on US soil. Fantastic. So to talk more about the Alaska Summit, I spoke with Julia Ioffe. She’s the co-founder of Puck News and a long time Russian politics expert. Julia, welcome back to What a Day.
Julia Ioffe: Ah, thanks for having me, Jane.
Jane Coaston: So to start, can you lay out the stakes for this meeting between Putin and Trump?
Julia Ioffe: Well, on one hand, the stakes are really high uh because this is the first meeting that Vladimir Putin will have with an American president since he launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, at which point the West united against him and put him into deep isolation. And uh this meeting could be the end of that isolation, and that’s what a lot of people in Moscow are hoping. On the other hand, I have a feeling that not much of anything will come of this meeting at all.
Jane Coaston: So what do you look at as the point of this meeting then?
Julia Ioffe: Well, I think one of the problems is that the two presidents have two different goals for this meeting. President Trump wants this meeting so that he can finally say that he ended the war in Ukraine. He’s been touting, resolving these kind of smaller conflicts like Armenia and Azerbaijan, um DRC and Rwanda. And he really wants the Nobel Peace Prize. To mix metaphors, he wants the feather in his cap. He wants the points on the board. He just wants this deal done. The Russian leader, on the other hand, wants a way out of the isolation. He wants to be back at the table with the big boys at the West, and not just on his terms, but to be recognized as the victor. Um. And a kind of like, you know, Vladimir, we’re so sorry. You were right all along.
Jane Coaston: How is this meeting being portrayed in Russia and by Russian media? Because Russian media has had this weird relationship with Trump for a long time, a relationship that has been shifting over the last couple of months as Trump has become more outwardly opposed to Putin. So what what have people been saying in Moscow?
Julia Ioffe: So first of all, they are noting correctly that Trump wants this more than Putin does, that Trump needs this meeting, wants this meeting so badly, whereas Putin doesn’t necessarily need it. He’s winning on the battlefield as far as they see it, but will go if Trump really wants it, right? Which is already kind of posturing from a position of strength. Like they basically see it as the West coming back and groveling.
Jane Coaston: I’m curious as to how that conflicts or doesn’t conflict with the Russian experience of the war. Because so many Russians have died in this conflict. That you know, there’s the metaphorical meat grinder. So you have, on the one hand, this idea that the West should come to Russia and grovel, but also so many people have died in this war, does that conflict? Is it confusing for people? You are shaking your head.
Julia Ioffe: I’m shaking my head because it doesn’t conflict, if anything, one reinforces the other. The fact that Russians don’t really care about the lives and the people they throw into the meat grinder, which is at this point, not really metaphorical. It’s quite literal. And like that is a point of pride for them. And that is seen as a strength that, you know, you [?] cowardly soft Westerners have these grand aims, but you will never sacrifice. You are not ready to sacrifice to actually achieve them. Whereas we will, we will out suffer you. We will out die you. And we will get what we want in the end and still be the most powerful country in the world that you’ll fear because we are just so ruthless and so um unafraid of death.
Jane Coaston: Trump seems so committed to the idea of a land swap between Russia and Ukraine. Putting aside that Ukraine doesn’t really have that much land to swap and exchange for their own, what would the trickle-down effects be of the president unilaterally sidelining Ukraine and handing over a swath of the country’s land to Putin?
Julia Ioffe: Well, I don’t think it’ll actually happen, is I think what I keep coming back to, I think, what’s gonna happen is more of the same, that they’ll have a crazy meeting, some crazy details will come out of it. Putin will keep fighting in Ukraine. I mean, the Russians are also making no secret of the fact that they don’t intend to end this war at this conference, at this meeting in Anchorage, that um they might agree to a ceasefire for maybe a few weeks or a few months, but that that won’t be the end of the war. They’re very clear about that, that they won’t stop until all of Ukraine is theirs. So I think um all this will do is postpone what Trump doesn’t wanna do anyway, which is impose a penalty on Russia for not giving him this win.
Jane Coaston: To your point, Trump said Wednesday, Russia will face, quote, “severe consequences,” if Putin doesn’t agree to stop the war after Friday’s summit. He didn’t elaborate, but realistically, what options does the Trump administration have to actually hurt Russia? Like we don’t do that much trade with Russia anyway. What do we have?
Julia Ioffe: That’s kind of the problem with sanctions when you’re no longer the only game in town. And the more that Trump sees that territory and says, you know, we need to turn inwards more, the less things like sanctions, which were not super effective when we were the only game in town, the less effective they become. Because Russia can turn to China, to India. Um. Trump slapped sanctions on India for buying Russian oil. But India is not going to do that. It’s, if anything, it’s just driving India further into the arms of the Chinese. Um. I think what the sanctions do is they just make things harder and slow things down because the Russian economy isn’t doing great. Like, inflation’s out of control, interest rates are above 20%, and despite all the money that the Kremlin is spending on this war, the economy is only growing at like 1.4-1.8%. Um. But look, Trump gave Putin a meeting, a bilateral meeting on US soil, Putin didn’t even have to promise anything. And that’s already a big win. So even if he slaps sanctions on him later, he already got a big win from this.
Jane Coaston: Now, I don’t mean to tell you how you’re feeling, but you seem a little skeptical of this whole meeting and its potential to change anything.
Julia Ioffe: Yeah.
Jane Coaston: And I think uh you know critics have warned that this meeting has the potential to turn into a 1938 Munich moment. Um you know that’s a reference to the Munich agreement, the one of the stupider moments in foreign policy in which the British and the French essentially just agreed to hand over the rump of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis to stop a wider war, which didn’t work. Before we leave, I wonder if you could reflect on the parallels you see to that historic error on the part of Western leaders in the buildup to World War II. And what’s happening now with someone who all Trump wants is to come out with a deal that does something, even if it doesn’t do anything at all.
Julia Ioffe: Right. And it’s funny that you mentioned Munich because I was watching Russian propaganda TV and they were talking about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Jane Coaston: Oh, you mean the pact that the Nazis broke and then invaded the Soviet Union and here we are?
Julia Ioffe: Yeah right, it was all these short-term deals with a fundamentally bad actor who wasn’t going to stop. And Trump is kind of the king of short-term thinking, right? He wants to juice the American economy by lowering interest rates. And if that fucks things up down the road, then whatever. But at least you’ll get this short- term boost and everyone will love him and we’ll get there when we get there. In some ways, Putin is like that as well. Yes, he wants to seize all of Ukraine. But then in the short term, he just knows that he has to get through this day, or this month, or this year, and then something else will shake out and he’ll and he’ll figure it out. Like he just has to outlast other people and something, some kind of force majeure will happen and get him through to the next to the next level of this game. And I think that’s what you’re seeing here, right? In the spring of 2022, it looked like um he had made a terrible error and his government was and economy were going to collapse. They didn’t. Then it looked like in the fall of ’22, that they were going to lose all this territory and they were on the verge of losing the war. And he just held on a little longer. And now look, he is the president of the United States is inviting him for a bilateral one-on-one meeting, not just on US soil, but on US soil that was once Russian soil, which again, Russian media has not tired of pointing out.
Jane Coaston: Julia, as always, thank you so much for joining me.
Julia Ioffe: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jane.
Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Julia Ioffe, a founding member of the online news site Puck News and a longtime Russian politics expert. And hey, Julia has a new book coming out. It’s called Motherland, a feminist history of modern Russia from revolution to autocracy. We’ll link to it in our show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today.
[sung] Headlines.
[clip of President Donald Trump] We’re gonna be asking for extensions on that, long-term extensions, because you can’t have 30 days. 30 days is, that’s by the time you do it. We’re going to have this in good shape.
Jane Coaston: It’s only been a few days since President Trump put the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under federal control, and already he’s floating the idea of extending his reign. The president’s remarks came at a press conference during a visit at the Kennedy Center Wednesday. In order to put D. C.’s police under federal control, Trump had to invoke something called the City’s Home Rule Act. That’s why he can do it in the nation’s capital, but not other U.S. cities. However, if he wants to extend that control to combat record-low crime beyond 30 days, he’ll need a joint resolution from Congress. At least, that’s what the law says. Trump said he’s in talks with congressional Republicans about passing an extension, but also suggested he won’t be bothered by the fine print of laws.
[clip of President Donald Trump] Well, if it’s a national emergency, we can do it without Congress. But we expect to be to Congress before Congress very quickly. And again, we think the Democrats will not do anything to stop crime, but we think the Republicans will do it almost unanimously.
Jane Coaston: Trump said he doesn’t want to call a national emergency in D.C. But said, quote, “If I have to, I will,” because of course he will. He loves national emergencies. Trump has also called in hundreds of National Guard troops to the city on top of federalizing the police force. The White House says federal officers will be out on the streets around the clock. A divided panel of appeals court judges Wednesday opened the door for the Trump administration to suspend or terminate billions of dollars of congressionally appropriated funding for foreign aid. As in, money that has already been budgeted. The money included nearly $4 billion for the U.S. Agency for International Development to spend on global health programs and more than $6 billion for HIV and AIDS programs, but I guess saving lives isn’t in line with President Trump’s policy goals. Let’s recall. In January, on day one of the return to this hell called the 47th presidency, Trump issued an executive order to pause foreign aid spending. Groups of grant recipients sued to challenge that directive. A judge then ordered the administration to release foreign assistance Congress had appropriated for the 2024 budget year. The appeals court’s majority Wednesday partially vacated that order. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a Twitter post the victory means Trump won’t have to quote, “spend hard-earned taxpayer dollars on wasteful foreign aid projects.” You know like saving babies from death.
[clip of President Donald Trump] I’ve been asked to host. I said, I’m the President of the United States. Are you fools asking me to do that? Sir, you’ll get much higher ratings. I said I don’t care. I’m president of the United States, I won’t do it. They said, please. And then Susie Wiles said to me, sir, I’d like you to host, I said okay, Susie, I’ll do it.
Jane Coaston: I don’t think that’s what Susie Wiles sounds like. In yet another unprecedented move, President and Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Chairman, remember how he did that earlier this year? Trump announced that he’ll host the Kennedy Center Honors and Present Awards because his chief of staff told him to. Trump made his hosting gig announcement on Wednesday along with a list of honorees, something that is typically reserved for a press release, but nothing is too flashy for this made for TV president. Trump will present his virtually hand-picked awards to actor Sylvester Stallone, rock band Kiss, singer Gloria Gaynor, country music star George Strait, and actor-singer Michael Crawford.
[clip of President Donald Trump] I wanted one, I was never able to get one. This year, it’s true actually. I would have taken it if they would have called me. I waited and waited and waited and I said, the hell with it, I’ll become chairman. And I’ll give myself an honor. Maybe I’m gonna honor, next year we’ll honor Trump, okay?
Jane Coaston: The way Trump continues to desecrate the Kennedy Center will never cease to amaze and horrify. And finally, fewer Americans are reporting that they drink alcohol, and those who do drink are drinking less. That’s according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday. One reason is the growing belief that even moderate alcohol consumption is a health risk. The survey was conducted in July and finds that 54% of U.S. adults say they drink alcohol. That’s the lowest in Gallup’s nearly 90-year run. Nearly 90 years! A record high 53% of adults say moderate drinking is bad for their health. That’s up from 28% in 2018. And it’s mostly young adults who are driving up those concerns, though older adults appear to be coming around to the same conclusions. We’ve all heard that a glass of red wine with dinner is good for your heart, but in recent years, health professionals have pointed to overwhelming evidence that alcohol can result in negative health outcomes and is a leading cause of cancer. And that’s the news. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate how we now face a new threat, rabbits with horns, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how cottontail rabbits with quote, “horn-like growths on their heads are showing up in Colorado as the result of a skin virus” like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/ubscribe. I’m Jane Coaston. And according to experts, the growths pose no risk to the rabbits, but a lot of risks to people who see a rabbit with horns and run away in terror. Because yeah. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Gina Pollock, and Laura Newcomb. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help with the headlines from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
