Welcome to The Rest is Politics, US.

I'm Cathy Kay.

And I'm Anthony Scarmerjee.

Katty, did you get the ass-kissing red alert on your phone related to Tim Cook?

I don't know if you saw that, but the beep, beep, beep.

When the 24-carat gold iPad went over to Trump, I got the ass-kissing alert. I don't know. Did you get it? I got it. It was like an amber alert. Okay. I just want to make sure you got it. That was like the, I'm Tim Cook and I know how to suck up to Donald Trump give him a lot of money and announce that I'm going to spend a lot of money, which actually I'd already announced back in February, but hey, that doesn't matter. Let's not worry about the details. You mean that alert? Yeah, and the 24-carat gold. Oh, that was good. It was brutal. Brutal. Anyway, what are we talking about today? I just wanted to make sure your phone was working like mine. Beep, beep,

beep. It was the ass kissing alert. And I said, oh, okay, another, another CEO groveling in the

Oval Office. And hey, it's working for Tim Cook because what's 100 billion between friends, right?

Nothing. Hey, look, God bless him. He'll always be Tim Apple to me, but it's okay. We can sometimes call him Tim Cook.

Okay, today we are going to talk about the showdown in Texas, the flight in the night of the dozens of Democratic lawmakers who have fled the state of Texas in order to block a plan by the Republican Party in Texas to redraw the congressional map so that they can win more seats.

The FBI has now been asked to hunt down the rogue Democratic lawmakers who have hot-footed it up to Chicago, Illinois, a nice, safe, democratic safe haven. So we're going to

talk about that. It's a little in the weeds. Bear with us of gerrymandering, but actually this is

kind of fundamental to America and to American democracy and to why this country is so dysfunctional

and doesn't work and is so hard to govern and is becoming more politically extreme.

If you want to know why, listen to this podcast, because we'll get into it.

Then we will talk about the announcement that has just come in.

We've recording this on Thursday morning that came in that Donald Trump says that he is going

to meet Vladimir Putin, obviously a huge coup for Vladimir Putin if it happens because he's been

kind of isolated on the world stage.

So we'll get into that and what it means potentially for Ukraine as well.

But let's start, Anthony, I think we should start by explaining what is happening because

America draws up its congressional districts in a way that is different from every other

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