I'm joined today by Tommy Viter, co-founder of Crooked Media, co-host of Pod Save America.

How are you? I'm good. How are you? I am doing well. So I want to start with some of the news of the week, and then we can go broader, talk about democratic politics and young men and that stuff. But let's start here. Ukraine is in the news because Trump is continuing weapons, defensive weapons shipments over there.

I want to know what you're reading is.

What's your read on Trump's inability to push back on Putin as a whole?

A lot of people in my audience think that Trump is bought and paid for.

But I subscribe to this theory that he uses Putin as a source of narcissistic supply in the sense that Trump gets sort of a head rush whenever he talks to somebody that's more powerful than him. So I'm always arguing with my audience. Like, this dude's not getting ACH transfers from Putin, but what's your read on his inability to push back? Yeah, I don't know that he's getting Venmos from from Vladimir. Look, I think it's a couple things. First of all, Trump is just kind of a dick and a

contrarian. So if everyone tells him he has to like Ukraine, I think he's going to like the Russians.

He's also clearly very mad about all the post-2016 claims of Russian interference, which

were factual and grounded, but it makes him feel sad and like his victory wasn't as complete as he

wanted it to be. I also think that Trump has genuine admiration for dictators in their systems.

Like he would love to be Xi Jinping. He would love to be Vladimir Putin. He would love to say jump

and people say how high. He says openly that that's how he feels so that that's a

piece of it um but his his flip flop on ukraine policy has been really it's it's tough to understand

um but i'm glad like he's moving in the right direction in the last few days but i I'm not confident that it'll stay that way. Yeah, it's like the bare minimum. It's like he removes weapons shipments and then he, or I guess Pete Heggseth removed weapons shipments. And then when he brings them back, we're all cheering. But, you know, it's interesting because he has a nickname for Gavin Newsom. He has a nickname for all of these Democrats for like he called Trudeau, Governor Trudeau,

but no nickname for Vladimir Putin, which further supports the theory that he just looks up to dictators.

Yeah.

Do you think that he'll be swayed over the next few months?

Because we've seen him give Vladimir Putin more leverage.

He's lost leverage for Ukraine by like removing intelligence

sharing for a bit, yelling at Zelensky in the Oval Office. Do you see him continuing to moderate

on Ukraine over the next few months? Yeah. I mean, he keeps telling us he's angry, uh, and how he'd consider

sanctions, but then he never actually does anything. So I've kind of lost hope

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