Trump’s Diplomacy, Intel Bailout, Fed Frustrations

The Politics Guys

Michael Baranowski

News, Politics

4.4 • 783 Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Justin and Sam open with Trump’s back-to-back meetings with Zelensky and Putin. Sam argues they could mark real progress, with Trump uniquely able to pressure leaders into a room. Justin doubts meaningful concessions are likely, pointing to Putin’s sunk costs and Ukraine’s moral high ground. Next, the guys examine Trump’s move to secure a $9B government stake in Intel. Sam frames it as a justified national-security safeguard given U.S. reliance on chips and China’s role in supply chains. Justin sees it as an overreach, with Trump strong-arming Intel’s CEO and reshaping the CHIPS Act process without clear authority. They close with a look at Trump’s attacks on Jerome Powell and Fed Governor Lisa Cook while pushing for rate cuts. Sam sympathizes with Trump’s frustration, stressing that Powell dodges accountability and ignores economic urgency. Justin sees it as part of Trump’s broader unitary executive impulse, defending Fed independence as a buffer against political overreach. The Politics Guys on Facebook | X Check out the excellent Sustainable Planet podcast. Listener support helps make The Politics Guys possible. You can support us or change your level of support at patreon.com/politicsguys or politicsguys.com/support. On Venmo, we’re @PoliticsGuys. The Politics Guys is part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Atheists, agnostics, long-haired widows, short-haired widows, vandal, hooligans.
0:05.2	I love the government, hug the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government.
0:12.0	Welcome to the politics, guys, a place for bipartisan, rational, and civil debate on American politics and policy.
0:18.9	I'm Justin Holmes, professor of political science, the University of
0:21.6	Northern Iowa, and I'm joined today by Sam Dewey, who is an attorney in D.C. Sam, how are you doing
0:27.0	this morning? I'm doing great. Great. Well, good to be with you. So we've got a lot of things we can talk
0:33.9	about. There's, there's a lot going on as per usual. So I think we'll jump
0:39.2	right in. So to start off, we've got some foreign policy stuff that was one of the top
0:46.2	stories of the week, at least earlier in the week, and that is Trump meeting with President
0:51.7	Zelensky of Ukraine.
1:06.0	This comes a week after meeting with Putin from Russia in an ongoing attempt to negotiate some kind of resolution of this ongoing conflict. Sam, what are your thoughts on this?
1:08.1	Kind of the Zelenskyy and the Putin kind of back to back here together?
1:12.9	Does this feel like progress?
1:15.0	Is it possible to make progress?
1:17.0	Can we solve this here in the next 20 minutes or so?
1:20.6	I don't think we're just solve in the next 20 minutes.
1:22.5	I do think progress is made, and I do think it's possible to continue making progress.
1:26.8	My view is that there was good progress in these meetings, that we may not have seen it,
1:33.3	but that there were high-level face-to-face, behind-the-scenes discussions,
1:38.3	and that we're going to see something from that down the road in terms of positioning,
1:42.3	or we're going to see if we don't get
1:45.1	where we need to be another another avenue of approach. So I think that yes, I got the sense
	...

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