Title: Trump's Pivot Towards Putin

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. 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.

President Donald Trump: 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.

Brian Lehrer: Trump the other day. He has now also called President Zelenskyy of Ukraine a dictator, something he doesn't call Vladimir Putin, another Alice in Wonderland upside-down statement by just about any measure. 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 about himself that said, "Long live the king," and so Ukraine's President Zelenskyy has now issued this call for Europe to get ready to go it alone militarily. He doesn't often speak in English, but he did for this, "Go it alone militarily without the United States."

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Let's be honest, now we can't rule out the possibility that America might say "No" to Europe on issues that threaten it. Many leaders have talked about Europe that needs its own military, an army, an army of Europe-

[applause]

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: -and I really believe that time has come. The armed forces of Europe must be created.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. We'll talk about all this now with Richard Stengel, former Under Secretary of State in the Obama administration, former editor-in-chief of Time, political analyst for MSNBC, and author of the book, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do about It, which came out in 2021. Richard, very good of you to come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Richard Stengel: Thank you, Brian. Great to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start just with your reaction to the Trump's social media statement yesterday, which came in the context of his trying to cancel Manhattan's congestion pricing toll. Referring to himself, he wrote, "Long live the king." For you who follows global democracy and monarchies, among other things, could you believe your eyes?

Richard Stengel: Well, there's so much that's inconceivable that's happening before our eyes, Brian, and I'm glad you're describing it. The thing that-- Not to just leap to the most scary thing, but I think the thing that is most scary is that there is a certain percentage of Americans who want a king, who don't understand that our country was born in revolt against a king and revolt against hereditary leadership with the idea that human beings can govern themselves. That was a new idea in the 18th century.

Unfortunately, history seems to be more cyclical than progressive, and there's a certain yearning for that kind of leadership. Some of that has to do with the fact that we don't know our own history, we don't teach civics, we don't have a kind of a historical literacy. Some of it has to do with, honestly, that people don't feel like government is working for them, so they're looking for some other kind of system other than liberal democracy.

Brian Lehrer: You dropped a thought bubble in there that could prompt a whole two-hour special and maybe more than that. Is history cyclical or is there actually progress over time? Maybe we'll come back to that another day and do it in some depth, but they say, Richard, "Take Trump seriously, not literally." The second term has been much more literal to his rhetoric than the first, I think it's fair to say. Do you think we should take "Long live the king" as anything other than owning the libs and making the media talk about this like us, rather than the substance of his policies?

Richard Stengel: I think there's some of that kind of exaggeration that he does, his kind of limited vocabulary, but Brian, not to get too serious about it, but I mean, the difference between a king and what Trumpists and far-rightists call a kind of unitary executive leadership or unitary presidency isn't very far. I mean, they're essentially the same thing without a kind of hereditary leadership, which I hope certainly doesn't happen.

One of the things that we've seen with that executive order, I think on Tuesday, where all agencies have to filter their decisions through the presidency, through the executive, it's a kind of a monarchic leadership, an elected monarchic leadership, where all power flows through the executive, which, again, is very, very, very different than the checks and balances system, separation of power system that the framers created in order to avoid tyranny, in order to avoid a king. I think we have to take it seriously in terms of what they're trying to do to amass power in the executive and in the office of the presidency.

Brian Lehrer: Now to Trump, while kind of boasting about himself as a king, a dictator, if you want, accusing Zelenskyy of being one, here's that clip.

President Donald Trump: A dictator without elections, Zelenskyy better move fast, or he's not going to have a country left. Got to move, got to move fast because that war is going in the wrong direction. In the meantime, we're successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia.

Brian Lehrer: As the former editor of Time, can you do a fact check? Is Zelenskyy a dictator?

Richard Stengel: He was democratically elected. I mean, he has created martial law because his country was invaded, and that's something Abraham Lincoln did who suspended habeas corpus, so no, he's not a dictator. He's a popular leader. Again, Vladimir Putin is a dictator by any measure, other than the fact that he has these kind of sham elections. Again, I'm trying to put a possible positive construction on it, which is that he's trying to stake out a negotiating position in diplomacy. There's an old saw that all wars end in the same place at the negotiating table, and this one will as well. I think people knew some of the outlines of that agreement early on.

For example, when our new defense secretary said that Crimea will never be a part again of Ukraine, I think reasonable people on both sides think that Crimea is never going to come back to Ukraine. Some of these things have been outlined, and again, Ukraine has to be at the table, Europe should be at the table. One of the falsehoods, as you mentioned at the top, Brian, that Trump has uttered this idea that what Europe has given to Ukraine is much less than what America has given. It's about $80 billion that America has given to Ukraine and that Europe has as well.

This idea of a kind of a European force or a more powerful European military union, that is NATO, is something that President Macron of France has been talking about for 10 years. I think Europe is going to have to spend more for its own defense. Ukraine is a part of Europe. It's the largest country in Europe, which people forget, so Europe will play a bigger hand in its own defense.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, anybody with ties to Europe want to continue this conversation from your point of view, should Europe develop a European army, as Zelenskyy was calling for in that clip? Should it maybe try to distance itself more from the United States economically, on sustainability, on military affairs as well, or anything else? 212-433- WNYC, or anything on how to end the Ukraine war, 212-433-9692, for Richard Stengel, former Under Secretary of State in the Obama administration, former editor of Time magazine, current MSNBC contributor. 212-433-9692.

When it comes to the US being so dominant in the affairs of Europe or any other part of the world, the critique from the right that helped get Trump elected is, "They're all getting over on us. We give all this foreign aid, we're spending more on defense than the countries of Europe to defend Europe," things like that. Then there's the critique from the left, which also wants the US to pull back, which says, "We're getting over on everybody else. The US has so much imperial power, and a lot of it is done in the name of profits for US corporations and standards of living for Americans." Where are you on that spectrum?

Richard Stengel: Well, that's a good question, Brian, and I'll tell you where I am in a second, but I just want to get the standards of the debate straight, which is what Trump has manipulated. There is no NATO force. There is no NATO uniform. There is no NATO military. NATO is a military alliance where everybody pledges to come to the aid of each other, which is called Article 5, and that everybody makes a good-faith effort to spend 2% of their GDP on the military.

This idea that the US is giving money to NATO, or giving money to European countries is completely false. It doesn't exist. Our military budget is about 2% of GDP, and because our GDP is bigger than anybody else's, we make a "larger contribution," but that's just what we spend on our own military. By the way, as you know, our military budget is 10 times the size of all of the next 10 countries combined, their military budget.

I mean, it just dwarfs everything. This idea that they're taking us for a ride or we're giving them money is false. It's just about 2% of GDP. Trump, by the way, has said that he now wants it to be 5% of GDP. By the way, if our military budget was 5% of our GDP, it would bankrupt the country, but all that [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: In fact, didn't Defense Secretary Hegseth just yesterday say that he's planning to cut $50 billion from the defense budget?

Richard Stengel: Well, I'm all for that. I mean, the defense budget is close to $1 trillion. As I said, we spend more than the next 10 countries combined.

Brian Lehrer: Right.

Richard Stengel: Efficiencies, waste, fraud, and abuse, which is the cliché that they use, that's been around since Reagan. I mean, you should be looking at the Defense Department budget in the military-industrial complex as Eisenhower put it, that's where the money is. That's a lot more money than what USAID is spending, which is a fraction of the military budget.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Again we get to kind of a right-left contradiction in what Trump says he wants, unless you can explain it in a way that is consistent. He says, "We have to build up our military. Biden and the Democrats weaken our military, and we have to do all this additional spending, really, on the military." Then with DOGE, they come in and say, "No, we're going to cut tens of billions of dollars from the military budget because it's woke or whatever." Is there any consistency there? Can they cut $50 billion from the Pentagon budget and also have the buildup that Trump campaigned on?

Richard Stengel: Yes. I mean, you could cut $50 billion from the defense budget, we'd still be larger than all these, the next nine countries combined. I don't think they should be cutting it because of "wokeism" in the military. By the way, anybody who has worked with the military knows it's a conservative entity. These are not kind of liberal woke people at all, so it just has always befuddled me that this is the kind of thing that they're worried about, but the idea, though, the primal idea here that we want to go back to is what is the defense mechanism for an aggressive, revanchist Russia, which we saw with the invasion of Ukraine, the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

You can put that in a larger context as conservatives do about the eastward expansion of NATO after promises that we wouldn't put different countries in. Yes, I can understand that Russia would get anxious about that, but to invade the largest country in Europe just because supposedly, we're talking about NATO membership for Ukraine, that's insane. That is a criminal action. It's the largest land invasion since the end of World War II. I mean, there's just no two ways about it.

Brian Lehrer: David in Inwood, you're on WNYC with former Under Secretary of State Richard Stengel. Hi, David. Do we have David? David, you're there? Maybe not. Let's try Jesse [unintelligible 00:14:49] New York. Jesse, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jesse: Hi, Brian. I wanted to first thank you guys for having this conversation because I think the way it's going about is how it needs to proceed. My comment was that Trump's comments, like any true narcissist, is all accusation is an admission. Every time they accuse someone, they're actually admitting to that behavior. I'll take my questions or answers,

whatever, off the air. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Jesse, we'll let that stand as an analysis and go to our next caller, Derek in Jersey City. Derek, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Derek: Hi, Brian. I have no dog in this fight. I find Putin terrible. I think Trump's comments about Zelenskyy are abhorrent, but the idea that there was no provocation from the US and NATO, I mean, you talk about not knowing history. The US has been involved in more regime change wars in the last 20 years than Russia, China, or any of these boogeymen we put out there combined. NATO is in many ways the US, we're the military power that backs it.

From the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has expanded closer and closer despite promises that they wouldn't, getting closer to Russia and to the point where we were basically all tied up in Ukraine's government. We had the phone call between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt basically discussing who they wanted to install as the interim government. The idea that Russia didn't have any reason to want a buffer between the US and NATO, and NATO was toasting champagne when Russia invaded. This is exactly what they wanted.

If Russia, China, Brazil, Iran had a military alliance with a history of overthrowing governments in recent years, do we really think that the US--, and that was encroaching, oh, it started in Brazil and now it's in Honduras, now it's coming up to Mexico to the border, or it's in Canada, do we really think that the US would be fine with a hostile military alliance which was formed as a counter to the Soviet Union? Even though Russia wanted to join NATO, Clinton did everything he could to make sure it didn't happen.

This idea that there was no provocation, it's basically US propaganda, and it's ridiculous in the idea that Russia is somehow going to steamroll through Europe [audio breaks], it's ridiculous. They've always [audio breaks]. Again, Putin is a bad guy. That doesn't mean we can just deny reality.

Brian Lehrer: Derek, thank you very much. There is that critique from the left, if I can characterize it that way. Richard, right? The US has been the force for invasion and regime change around the world. What would we think if the Russian alliance was coming up through Latin America toward our border and things like that? You may want to fact-check some individual things that Derek said there in that call from Jersey City, but that is an argument. Do you give it any credence from your point of view?

Richard Stengel: Yes. I mentioned some aspects of that. I mean, I'm not sure what regime change he's talking about in the last 15 years, and I did mention the growth of NATO eastward, but these are all things that are negotiable and they're all reason. They're all things that happen because of real-world desires. I mean, the Baltic countries were desperate to get into NATO because they're incredibly threatened by their huge neighbor.

All of these countries, which I visited when I was Under Secretary of State, said, "You guys feel like you're just discovering Russian aggression and Russian disinformation. We've been living with it for a thousand years." Russian aggression, which I wish didn't exist, is something that is a reality for all those countries. That's why they want to be members of NATO, that we're not coercing them to be members of NATO. Sweden just became a member of NATO. They've been trying for decades, after being neutral for 500 years.

Well, the greatest thing that increased European payments to NATO, which happened, of course, under the Biden administration, was in fact the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's not something we were telling them to do during the Biden administration, although Trump was telling them to do that during his first administration and claims that he caused these great increases. I just think it's a skewed view of the world. It has some reality to it and some truth to it, but I think realists, which I would count myself as one, see it a little bit differently.

Brian Lehrer: A few more minutes on mostly Russia and Ukraine. I am going to ask former Under Secretary of State Richard Stengel to give us his take on USAID before we run out of time and maybe one or two other things, but I want to take a call from Mary Kay in Pompton Plains, who wants to react to something I said about Trump's "Long live the King" post, referring to himself. Mary Kay, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Mary Kay: Well, hi, Brian, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Okay.

Mary Kay: I appreciate this discussion about Russia and Ukraine, it's very important, but you said something about these texts and tweets from I call him the criminal. It seems to me that you were saying that it gets you needing to talk about all his different tweets. My question to you is why? I feel, during the 2024 and discussion about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, I'm not sure I heard very much about their campaign or about them.

I've listened to you a long time, and I was just disappointed that I didn't hear more about Kamala Harris and Walz, and it seems like every time I would turn your show on, the words out of your mouth is exactly what you just said talked about with getting excited about all those different tweets. I was just wondering, how are we going to change that and what is your response to my concern?

Brian Lehrer: Well, my response to the second part of your concern is that I don't know what show you were listening to because we did a lot of segments comparing the policies on the economy, on climate, on so many things between what Harris and Walz were running on and what Trump and Vance were running on, so I just reject the analysis. On talking about Trump's tweets, what I said at the top was I'm conflicted about it, and I am conflicted about it because we don't want to get distracted from most of what we do, which is policy-oriented discussions.

On the other hand, if one of the most important things to talk about right now is how much Trump is plundering democracy and trying to set himself up as an authoritarian strongman, and then he actually goes out and tweets "Long live the king," about himself, do we ignore it and just go back to policy, or do we try to include it as a potential warning signal, another warning signal, and analyze it to some degree and then go back to policy for the bulk of what we do? That's where I am.

I'm acknowledging that I'm conflicted about that, and we're always reaching for the right balance, and I hope we come close to striking it. Richard, for you as journalist, where are you on that? What are you thinking, listening to Mary Kay, kind of the overarching complaint or the conflict there?

Richard Stengel: What is that overarching complaint or conflict?

Brian Lehrer: Well, that the media covers Trump's tweets too much and not the policies, especially the policies of the Democrats.

Richard Stengel: Look, in some ways, I'm really a former journalist, so I'm relieved to not have to deal with this, but I do think we have to do all of the above. I mean, we can't ignore tweets that play into a pattern, that's a very, very dangerous pattern. The truth about how democracies die is democracies democratically elect leaders who then get rid of their democracy. When he says something like "Long live the king," that's a tell in terms of what he's thinking. I think we have to cover the policies. We have to cover those actions.

I think we have to be a little more dispassionate about it than we were during his first term and just say, "Here's the effect on voters. Here's why what he's doing is a contradiction to what he proposed. Here is the price of eggs, which is greater even than when he's elected." The much quoted Steve Bannon line about you flood the zone with bull-- because the media doesn't know how to cover it. I mean, there's a lot of truth to that. We do get distracted. There's the relentless presentism of the media that Ezra Klein talks about. I mean, we have to do better, but we have to try to do all of those things at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: On USAID, do you have any data yet? We've had really passionate and anguished testimonials on our air from people who say that people in all kinds of countries are starving and they're getting sick and maybe dying. I don't know if it's measurable yet from suddenly being cut off from food aid or medical care that USAID was providing. One of my colleagues who traveled abroad recently brought back a photo of a canister of food that said on it, "A Gift from the American People." Maybe you've seen those, and those were distributed from USAID, and those aren't being distributed anymore. Can you measure the human toll yet?

Richard Stengel: I think people are measuring it. There are food containers and medical containers that are rotting on docks around the world where people need them. Brian, I had the great good fortune to travel around the world as a representative of the United States. I saw those USAID crates and packages and containers all over the world, and they all say with the red, white, and blue USAID motto underneath that, it says, "From the American People."

USAID is one of these great post-war institutions that is a tribute to American generosity that grew up at the same time as the Marshall Plan, where American foreign aid was helping people around the world using, by the way, US crops, US food that benefited US farmers. That's still the case. I think USAID has been distorted by the Trump folks who misread some of the statistics.

Way more than 90% of USAID money goes to supporting people on the ground, both humanitarian and development aid. That doesn't mean you shouldn't look at where the funding is going and what is most efficient and what is most effective, but canceling it all out just seems like a really radical notion that just hurts hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people abroad.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that these arguments that we're hearing that USAID is in the US national interest, most Americans don't think about it very much. Honestly, I don't think most Americans ever heard of the agency until Trump started to try to cancel it. The pushback that it seems to me that we hear mostly is USAID is an expression of America's soft power.

If we don't want China, if we don't want Russia to have more power all over the world than we do in ways that would come back to hurt the United States, this is something that needs to be kept in place in one way or another for that reason, but then there's also this argument that I wonder if you think isn't getting enough play that says this is just our responsibility as the richest country in the history of the world. Yes, we have inequality in this country that needs to be addressed as well economically, but we're doing this because it's our responsibility to help the struggling people of the world because we can and we uniquely can. I wonder if you think anything about that.

Richard Stengel: I do, Brian. I think the macro answer is we can do both. We can be both at the same time. We are an incredibly wealthy country. What people don't realize too, is that the US foreign aid budget is about 6/10ths of 1% of the federal budget. It's tiny, and yet at the same time, it's the largest amount of foreign aid that any single country gives. It's something like 40% of all the foreign aid. We can do both. We can feed people in this country, we can help people abroad with less than 1% of our budget.

I would argue it is soft power, but it's at the very hard end of soft power because what that money does is it prevents diseases from coming to the US, that USAID funding helped halt the Ebola outbreak a number of years ago. There's another one now. It's helping to halt the bird flu outbreak. Obviously, immigration was a big issue in the last election. Well, dealing with people who are undergoing famine and helping them prevents illegal immigration, and it also prevents the rise of terrorism in those places. It's hard to kind of say like these are the exact things that it's done, but it's at the harder end of soft power, and it's preventing a lot of negative situations that allow Americans to sleep peacefully at night.

Brian Lehrer: Richard Stengel, former Under Secretary of State in the Obama administration, former editor-in-chief of Time magazine, political analyst for MSNBC, and author of the book, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do about It. Richard, thank you so much for coming on today.

Richard Stengel: A pleasure, Brian. Thank you.

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