Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted to be here today with Tom Malinowski, Representative Jersey's 7th Congressional District from 2019 to 2023. He was assistant secretary of state during the Obama administration, concentrating on

democracy and human rights. And he wrote for us last week, five things Dems must do to fight Trump

now want to talk about all of it. So welcome to the pod. How you doing, Congressman?

I'm great. Everything's so wonderful. Is that right? What do you go by as a former congressman?

You just want to be Tom. Do you want to be Sir? Do you want to do Sir?

Your Excellency? Your Excellency? Just Tom's fine, yeah. We'll try out a couple different ones and see

see how it goes. You know, I don't know that we're going to be doing democracy and human rights anymore at the State Department. So we're going to get to that and we're going to get to your recommendations. But Donald Trump did an interview last night on Fox. There was a lot of typical nonsense about,

you know, election fraud and Greenland and whatever. But there was a substantive policy exchange

that I wanted to get your take on. Here's Trump talking about his plans for what's happening in Ukraine.

I want to have our money secured because we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

And, you know, they may make a deal, they may not make a deal, they may be Russian someday or they may not be

Russian someday, but we're going to have all this money in there. And I say, I want it back. And I told them that I want the equivalent, like $500 billion worth of rare

earth, and they've essentially agreed to do that. They might be Russian someday. It's an interesting

thing to say about an ally. What'd you think about that? Yeah, I don't know where to start.

There's so much shitty stuff going on right now.

I actually think I'm less depressed about Ukraine than I am about a lot of other things.

Okay.

Because do we have to rank?

Yeah, well, it's a low bar.

I mean, what he just said was insane on about five different levels, but like we can work with it.

Zelensky and the Ukrainians are smart.

I think they've made the best of this situation.

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