from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, February 20th.

We'll return now to the growing rift between the Trump administration's United States and our

usual allies in Europe, including

shockingly false statements. We just have to call them false statements when they're false statements

that Trump has been making this week about the war in Ukraine. Here's one of them, so you have a point

of reference, that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that started the war. And I think I have the power to end this war.

And I think it's going very well.

But today I heard, oh, well, we weren't invited.

Well, you've been there for three years.

You should have ended it three years.

You should have never started it.

You could have made a deal.

Trump the other day.

He's now also called President Zelensky of Ukraine a dictator, something he

doesn't call Vladimir Putin, another Alice in Wonderland upside down statement by just about any measure.

And this is part of the pattern that we discussed earlier in the week in which Vice President

Vance and Elon Musk have warned Europe not to be so

concerned about Russia or China as threats to their democracy, but the enemy within as threats

to democracy, by which they mean trying to marginalize Europe's far-right parties like the

AFD party in Germany. Germany has elections this weekend. AFD, which many consider

to have neo-Nazi leanings. It's the mainstream, not the far right, that threatens European

democracy in the Trump team's view, even as Trump writes that social media post yesterday

...