Trump Press Sec Rages at Media as Putin Mess Sinks Him in Brutal Poll

THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

The New Republic

News, Politics

4.4 • 800 Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt seethed at the media for well over a minute for not acknowledging President Trump’s world historical peacemaking efforts or his smashing successes in the Russia-Ukraine talks, even though there haven’t been any such successes. And she offered a wildly absurd explanation for why European leaders rushed to Washington, D.C. (to prevent the U.S. from selling out Ukraine to Vladimir Putin). This comes as a new Reuters poll finds Trump’s approval rating down to a new low of 40 percent. That’s fueled partly by Russia-Ukraine: A striking 54 percent of Americans say Trump is too aligned with Putin. We talked to international relations expert Nicholas Grossman. He explains how Leavitt’s spin and European angst show that incredibly high stakes matters are now being dictated by an unnerving combination of Trumpian megalomania, his genuine desire for a future world marked by a weak western alliance and strong autocracies, and his utter indifference to the U.S. public’s apparent rejection of that vision. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.
0:16.5	I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
0:32.3	On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt's fawning over President Trump really went haywire,
0:37.9	and so did her anger at the media for not reporting sufficiently on his world historical greatness.
0:44.6	The topic was Trump's handling of Russia and Ukraine. Leavitt slammed the media for not reporting on Trump's smashing successes on this front, even though there haven't actually been real
0:49.7	successes. But behind all the absurdity here is something deadly serious.
0:57.0	Amid all these demands for adulation of Trump,
1:01.3	he, Leavitt, and the White House seem to be moving us towards a world that we very much should dread,
1:03.3	one of a weaker Western alliance and stronger autocracies,
1:06.9	and they never come clean about what that world will actually look like.
1:11.2	Today we're talking about all this with one of our favorite observers of global affairs,
1:15.2	Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois,
1:19.8	who recently wrote a good piece for the bulwark about Trump's megalomania as a major factor on all this.
1:26.1	Nick, good to have you on.
1:28.9	Hi, Greg. Great to be with you.
1:35.6	So over the last week, Trump has met with both Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Zelenskyy and with European leaders. He emerged from the meeting with Putin without a ceasefire and then turned
1:40.9	right around and said the push for peace should continue without any ceasefire,
1:45.3	essentially going along with Putin's wishes.
1:48.1	Then he offered Zelensky and European leaders only the vaguest of security guarantees for Ukraine
1:54.1	should some kind of peace deal be reached.
1:56.8	Nick, can you sum up where we are right now and what it means?
2:00.2	Where we are is basically where we've been all year, which is the Ukraine-Ukraine war raging.
	...

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