Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. As we are taping this right now, Donald Trump is about to give a press conference announcing some sort of federal takeover of Washington, D.C.

More troops in D.C. as a response to big balls as a 20-year-old staffer or whatever for Doge getting beat up by street tuffs.

So we will have some thoughts on that.

I'm going to save it to the end of the pod because I want to see if there's anything particularly outlandish that comes out of the White House today as we're talking about it. So in the meantime, it's Monday. So I'm here with the editor at large of the Bullock, Bill Crystal. We're getting to the other material. How you doing, Bill? Fine, Tim. How are you? I'm doing okay. All things considered.

I know, it's always a mistake to say, how are you? Some of the Monday's been a little harder. I'm okay, but the country's not great. Did I say this right as you once? That's my standard answer. Like everyone says, well, I'm fine. Family's fine, luckily, and thank God and all that. but someone chastised me, kind of earnest progressive type,

when I said, I'm fine, things are fine.

You can't be fine, Bill.

I said, I'm fine, things are fine. You can't be fine, Bill. I mean, when the country's in this kind of shape, really, you can't even, you can't personally be fine. You can't make that distinction anymore. But I think we should try to make the distinction, don't you think? We had the red dress run in New Orleans this weekend. So I put on a red dress and pranced around the French quarter. How can you not be fine as a man in a dress in the French quarter with 88 degrees outside working on a suntan? It was okay. I think if you want to discuss that for five, ten minutes, people would be very interested in more of a detailed account of that. We don't have that in McLean, I don't think, you know. You don't have a red dress runner McLean. You probably should think about the types of folks you get out there.

Dick Cheney in a dress, you know, you get a lot of, whatever, Boeing contractors out there.

I don't know.

Anyway, okay, let's move on.

Apparently, we're going to have a bilateral meeting between our president and Vladimir Putin, not a necessary distinction there,

in Alaska on Friday. They announced that over the weekend. There's currently no plans for

Vladimir Zelensky to be included in this, though there's some kind of discussion. Maybe

Zelensky gets invited, but it's in a different room. I don't know. They're going to work all that out. Kathy Young wrote

for the bulwark this morning about how they, that's essentially these two guys meeting about how to carve up

Ukraine. Zelensky put out a statement basically saying that Ukraine constitution requires a vote

on ceding any land and that he was not going to have to abide by whatever these two guys come up with.

So I've got a bunch on this, but what's your sort of top line on what we're hearing and what

we might expect this week.

I mean, Kathy Young's piece is really excellent that people should read that for a more detailed

account with interesting quotes from Russians, actually, and Ukrainians.

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