I'm very consistent. I'm a very stable genius.

Hi, I'm Anna Marie Cox and welcome to With Friends Like These, where we talk about the differences between us without letting them divide us.

And today's episode is more on point than usual. My guest needs no introduction from regular listeners.

He is a never-trumper, a former practitioner of the dark arts, a dog lover, a hunter, and my good friend, Rick Wilson.

He has a new book coming out which I will now do a requisite plug. It is called Everything Trump Touches Dies, which is a much cleaner version than I would go for.

A Republican strategist gets real about the worst president ever.

So, coming up, we are going to stand for the founding fathers. We're going to talk about Putin, we're going to talk about NATO, and we're going to talk about Brett Kavanaugh.

And I think we're going to get somewhere that may surprise you. So, listen up.

So, let's just put it out there that we're taping this before the meeting between Trump and Putin.

So, I actually am a little worried. We might speak into existence things that otherwise would not happen.

But I am so curious because you've been a foreign policy, you know, watcher for so long, national security is kind of, you know, besides being a professor of the dark arts, you know, your specialty.

What do you think is going to happen?

Well, I think Vladimir Putin is going to treat him just like he treats any intelligence asset. He's going to walk in the room with him.

And he knows how to handle this guy. He looks at him like a case officer, not like a negotiator, and he's going to treat Trump exactly like that.

He's going to go in there and treat him as if he's an asset to be manipulated. And Trump is shown time and again. He is easy to manipulate.

He has a certain amount of flattery and a certain amount of asking, saying Donald Trump will say great things about the worst people in the world.

And Vladimir Putin knows that. And, you know, he and Trump has already said certain messages this week, you know, that he is full, you know, go into the NATO meeting and treat the allies as if they were, you know, something stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

And then today's what the first is press conference where he came out and basically queued the party line on Crimea. Well, there are Russian speakers and they have bridges to Russia.

If he was he's just too never single in the world he's going to come into this meeting, you know, like it's just quarterly employment, or not like it's the, you know, the principal of a great power speaking to the principal and other great power.

I think we're in a room for a bad bad outcome because you know, he doesn't go in there looking at Vladimir Putin with an eye of caution.

You know, I think something that might be difficult for some people to understand and I'll, you know what, not some people I'll bring this to myself, which is that when Trump says it's good to be friends.

It's good to talk to people, you know, and I'm I'm old enough to remember back when Obama said he would meet with who did he say he would meet with he said me with the leader of Iran, right, and that guy.

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