You know, we used to go around the world. It was part of my job, part of our job in the previous administration, and say to countries, look, we're not asking you to sever your relations with China.

What we're telling you is a partnership with America is a better bet for you.

China will try to coerce you. They'll try to tell you to do things and punish you if you don't do them.

They will try to extract resources from you and not pay you a fair price for those resources and treat your labor population

badly and all of these things that we know China does around the world. And that argument

sometimes worked, sometimes didn't, but it was the best argument we had going for us. Now,

the country making that argument

about who is the bad partner and who is going to coerce you and treat you badly and who, you know,

you might wake up one morning and realize you have a 50% tariff on your trading relationship

is the United States. And I don't know how quickly we can recover from that, honestly.

They have introduced this uncertainty about the quality of the United

States as a friend and as a partner that countries will always have in the back of their mind,

I think, long after Trump has gone.

Hello, and welcome to the Politics Girl podcast. I'm your host Lee McGowan. Let's get into it.

So on Friday, August 15th, America hosted a summit in Alaska between President Putin and President Trump.

We still don't know what really went down that day, aside from the fact that America rolled out the red carpet for a war criminal, and Putin ended up looking like a dominant world leader at a time where he really should have been looking like a weak, murderous thug.

We don't have many, if any, real details about what happened that day. We know the closed door meeting was three hours long. We know the luncheon scheduled for after was canceled. We know that the Trump staff looked shaken and that no questions were taken from the press after formal statements by both

leaders. Finally, we know that three days later, every single European leader flew to D.C. to have a

meeting with Trump. And in the middle of that meeting, he left for a phone call with the Kremlin.

So something is up. And I don't

want to move forward without getting an expert in here to let us know what they think and to give

us some insight on what's really going on here. So today we're going to be joined by John Finer.

...