It's hard to keep track of the developments in the Trump administration and questions about Russian connections and disclosures loom.

We devote our entire podcast today to the administration and Russia and try to view the developing situation through nuanced lens.

This is Sarah from the left and Beth from the right.

You're listening to Pansley Politics.

No shouting, no insults, plenty of nuance.

So we're going to go a little freeform today.

We're going to abandon the heels, which is supposed to be a short segment, it's exceedingly and increasingly longer than the pearls or the suits.

So we're going to just skip both of those today because it's been a week.

It's been a week and a lot has happened and we are just living in such unusual times right now that we thought we would pretty methodically go through the situation with the Trump administration and Russia.

And to get us started because you know I'm the exciting one of the bunch.

I thought that it would be good to do just like a mini primer on Russia itself.

I think for a lot of us, we hear things like KGB and Cold War and it sounds bad, but we don't have a whole lot of context.

So bear with me super quickly.

Russia is a lot larger than the United States in terms of land mass.

It's not quite two times, but the United States population is about two times the population of Russia.

So population density here in the United States is much greater.

There's a huge difference in our nominal GDPs.

So the United States has almost 17 times the GDP of Russia on a nominal basis.

The point of that is our economy is a lot stronger.

Russia has less debt as a country than the United States though and the Russian military is very well armed.

Russia has more known nuclear warheads both active and in total than the United States.

Feeling good so far, Sarah?

...