Aloha and namaste everyone and welcome to In Politics with John Heilman, a puck and

Odyssey Joint featuring lively, in-depth conversations with the people who roam the quarters

of power and influence in America, weaving the warped and wharf and wept of our politics and

culture. It was just a little more than a week ago

back on February 19th, first in a post on true social, and then in a speech at a Saudi-backed

investment meeting that Donald Trump stated the counterfactual slander that Ukrainian President

Zelensky was, quote, a dictator without elections.

In the nine days since then, Trump and his senior foreign policy aides have repeatedly

refused to acknowledge that Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 started

the war that has raged in that country for the past three years.

They have sided with North Korea, Belarus,

and a handful of other Kremlin-friendly countries in voting against a UN resolution condemning Russia

for its unprovoked aggression

in demanding that Russia withdraw its troops

and return to Ukrainian territory

that the country has seized during the conflict. They have repeatedly,

dramatically, and falsely inflated the total amount of military aid that the U.S. has provided to Ukraine

and just as falsely claimed that the U.S. has contributed far more to that effort than Europe has.

And they have sought to negotiate a deal

with Zelensky, whereby Ukrainians, will fork over a vast and vastly valuable cash of

rare earth minerals to the United States in exchange for, well, it's not clear what they're

getting an exchange, really. but according to President Trump,

...