Welcome back to the To the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. A lot of things to talk about today. I did want to talk about the weird cabinet meeting where Donald Trump fell asleep, but also managed to engage in this dehumanizing racist rant about Somalians, whether or not that is a new low. We'll also want to talk about the latest spin about the extraditional murders that are going on in the Caribbean.

We don't call them double taps because, in fact, they are either war crimes or they are premeditated murder.

Also, the possibility of regime change in Venezuela.

And this is, I think, very interesting. The decision that Europe has to make over the next

few days about whether or not to seize the Russian assets and turn them over to Ukraine it

might be one of those moments that changes the geopolitical weather.

I'm wearing black because I'm in kind of a black mood yesterday.

As I wrote in my newsletter yesterday, you could describe, you're tempted to describe Donald Trump's performance at the open cabinet meeting this week where he went off on the rant

on Somalians as a new low, but it's not a new low.

I mean, we've been here so many times before again and again.

And of course, we have the continuing spin, the attempt to throw the military end of the bus involving the extraditional murders in the Caribbean.

And, of course, we're waiting on the fate of Ukraine.

Who better to talk about all of this than our guest today, Ed Luce, the U.S. national editor for the Financial Times. Ed, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Charlie, it's always a pleasure. Well, I want to start. There's so many other things I want to talk about, but I do want to start with what the president said the other day. Because in many ways, as I said, you think it's a new low when he's describing people as garbage and saying we don't want a certain group here.

But the fact is, this has been, you know, a light motif for Donald Trump for years.

He's attacked Mexicans. He's attacked Muslims. He's attacked Afghans.

He's attacked anyone who's a migrant from a what he used to call a shithole countries would you probably still call

shithole countries and you know the funny thing was the other day I was speaking to an international

travel group in Washington DC and I gave him the kind of the blunt message that they needed

to understand the reality of how much hostility there was to foreigners in this country

but I also said but that's not totally

true. It's not all foreigners. It's just foreigners of a certain color, of a certain type, from

certain locations. And it's not from the average American. The hostility doesn't come from

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