Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller, delighted to welcome back.

One of our faves, a reporter for The Insider, which is a Russia-focused media outlet.

He also writes on Substack at Foreign Office, co-author of a book called Isis. And supposedly he has another book coming out about the GRU, but I don't know. That's been in works for a while. It's Michael Weiss. You might be too busy podcasting to be bookwriting. It's like a Robert Caro S thing, you know. Another five years here, another six years there. Eventually we'll make it, though. Volume one. I look forward to that very much. Are the birds with us today, or what do we think? Is it just going to be you and me? So I haven't slept very much in the last week for reasons I'm sure we'll get into on the show, but I was about to say the birds have been silenced, but that sounds way more menacing than I meant.

I just meant that I closed the door to my daughter's room. Well, we get mixed reviews on the birds. So some people will be sad. Others will be, others will be joyish. I guess it just depends on how sensitive their audio is. We're going to spend, I think, probably the entire podcast on the crazy developments that are continuing every hour in the Russia-Ukraine negotiations, if you want to call them that.

We had our newsletter that came out this morning from Bill Crystal and Andrew Eggar, our morning shots that I just feel compelled to mention to everybody because we're going into the holiday.

We can people need

a little joy in their life. The subhead says this. The White House is in free fall. How long will

last? And I do think in some ways this relates to our topic of the day on Russia, Ukraine,

which is, like, Trump has really lost the rope on a lot of things domestically. And like there are a handful of

things that he still feels like he has control over. I think the ICE operations and the CBP

operations being one of them and this self-delusion that he is a negotiator, a negotiator

extraordinary with foreign countries as the other.

And in some ways, I think there's a little bit of relation between the series of elves that the White

House has taken domestically and this rush to some Thanksgiving deal with Ukraine and Russia.

So I want to get to the details first.

What do you make about the of Trump's political standing right now? Yeah, I think he's he's very weak. He's vulnerable. He's abstracted from a lot

of things that you would expect the president to be well across, not really a details oriented

guy to begin with, but even now more kind of checked out. The fact that he lost a fight with his own party for the

first time, really, over the Epstein stuff, I think is interesting because that directly impacts

him. I mean, I was going to say, and his credibility, but he has no credibility. It just,

it's something he didn't want to see come out there, right? Because it's embarrassing and compromising.

But he sort of rolled over on it.

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