Susan Glasser: Our Money-Grubbing President

Hello, welcome to the Bulldog podcast, I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is the second of July, 2026, so I'd welcome back to the show, staff writer at the New Yorker and host co-host of its political scene podcast for most recent book is The Divider,

“co-hosted with her husband, Peter Baker, it's Susan Glasser, what's going on, Susan?”

Hey, Ryan, so great to be with you, what a treat. Welcome back to the show, not much to talk about, not a lot of happening out there. Not a lot of embarrassment for America on the world stage or anything. It's hard to decide where to start, but I think I want to hit on corruption. This didn't have a time to get into it yesterday.

I think Maggie mentioned it briefly on the pod, but Trump had to file financial disclosures. I guess it's something that the financial disclosures are getting filed. I mean, these small victories this day and age, it revealed just an insane amount of graft and corruption.

He brought in at least $2.2 billion, which is compared to much, much less than that

from before he returned to the presidency. A lot of this money is from crypto, a lot of this money is from foreign countries,

“including the investment firm tied to the UAE, or to get into the cutter plane a little”

bit. I guess that's more government-grift, but it is pretty astonishing that he is just decided that he is going to make as much money from this as possible as if he is, you know, Vladimir Putin or the corrupt dictator of country that does not have a rule of law. Yeah.

He knows the figures. Maybe we are one of those countries. Never rule a lot. At least when it comes to the president of the United States. Well, I mean, actually, that is Donald Trump's theory of the case, which is that no laws

apply to him and the Supreme Court in some ways has gone along with that theory. There's the sort of you and what army are going to do anything about it, challenge to this, right?

“What accountability is there for a president who decides to shamelessly monetize the presidency,”

where he is increasing evidence that he is doing things like selling off-partens. This crypto business that Donald Trump and his sons have gotten into along with the sons, I should point out, of Steve Wittkov, his al-purpose, everything on-way, literally making billions of dollars, we know about the investment by the UAE, investment fund.

We do not have a list of the other investors who have put more than two billion dollars

in the pocket of Donald Trump. This is the guy who went literally like steam flowing out of his ears crazy over the idea that, you know, having forbidden Joe Biden's son had embarrassed the country by making money off of his father's name. And by the way, an embarrassment, let's be honest, that unemployed was trading off of his

father's name and the appearance that he might have access when he joined the board of Ukrainian Energy Company when Joe Biden was vice president. You know what that is? That's an embarrassment. We're talking though about maybe millions of dollars, add many, many, many zeros here

to the scale of corruption from Donald Trump. And from my perspective, you know, it's one of those things, are we so ignored to this that people just won't care or is corruption the issue that finally causes people to break with Donald Trump? I mean, to me, that is the question because it's where he's so profoundly different

than essentially any of his predecessors. And we've had some crooked presidents, but not this crooked. Not anything, and even the ballpark, this is due to include also the stock trading he's been doing, something that our past presidents weren't doing. I want to just focus in on the Middle East, I mentioned the UAE deal, which is I'm part

of the bulk of the money, frankly, which is this massive crypto deal that the UAE is involved in. But then he also has some smaller for Trump, you know, would be nice money for me, licensing

deals with that are happening in these countries, 14 million in licensing deals for hotels

and cutter and in Saudi Arabia, that ties to the other corruption story from this week, which is our new Air Force One, which was gifted from cutter. Trump took his first flight on that, the new plane that he feels is more appropriate to his status, which I mean, there should be no where they was kind of a hand-me down from cutter.

They wanted a fan to your plane for themselves, so that's where we are right now as a country, we're taking cutters hand me down. If you tie all this together, he's got a personal, so he's making personal money with

he's then going to use for his presidential library, all the while, like being involved in negotiations with an active war that involves cutter, I mean, Iran is attacking cutter as part of the kind of decrease fire that we're in right now, and so I don't know if he's

making decisions entirely based on that, you know, brown paper bag of 14 million or the

new fancy plane he's on, but it certainly is influencing and like this is why, you know, we have rules around this sort of thing, like the corruption, the money that he's making is tied directly to ongoing life or death policy, in fact, the American citizens.

“Yeah, I think that's such an important point, Tim. In fact, cutters which gifted Donald”

Trump in effect personally gifted him a $400 million plane, the American taxpayers had played an uncertain amount of hundreds of millions of dollars additionally to fit it up in order to have the communications and security gear required for the president to fly on it. So, you know, we've paid hundreds of millions of dollars for this gift that Donald Trump now proposes to take with him to his quote, "Presidential Library," but actually it

seems that he wants to keep using this plane personally. And, you know, where's the outrage to quote Bob Dull? Where's he out? But cutter is not only a key country that is affected by Donald Trump's decision to undertake this conflict in the Middle East against Iran. cutter is plays a key role as an intermediary and negotiate or both with Hamas where it has been the key broker of talks over the last few years as well as with the Iranians

intermittently. And, you know, it's that it's that welter of apparent conflicts of interest and the lack of transparency that was exactly what the entire framework of post-watergate laws was designed to combat, right? The idea that people had after Nixon's excesses and, you know, there were terrible scandals in that administration though the dollar figures were way modest compared with Donald Trump's, including Nixon's vice president, it's been literally taking

payoffs while he was in high office as a result of that, which Americans across the political spectrum viewed as a national embarrassment and humiliation. An entire framework of laws was passed in this country and it seems like Donald Trump's mission is to undo the final remaining shreds of these post-watergate laws and they were designed to have transparency and accountability that if people were contributing to our politicians, they should do so with strict limits,

they should do so with strict disclosure requirements. That's basically all gone now. It's

basically all gone. The world, as we know it growing up, I started out as a young reporter in Washington, it seems quaint. We would write these stories about like, you know, Tim Miller, Congressional candidate receives like $1,000, you know, like $1,000 pack contribution, you know,

“from an industry in which, you know, his family has an interest. Isn't this a scandal?”

This is the world that we came up in and it's a world that Donald Trump has served stood on its head. Yeah, we talked about this a little bit. They were French after the Supreme Court rulings this week about like the degree to which those post-watergate reforms have just been completely gutted. And it kind of informs a little bit the thinking about what Democrats might do if they ever get back into power, where at some level, I think that my instinct

in the instincts of, you know, Sarah really goes to them. Everyone's wrong. I go to a pro-democracy meet-up, you know, Sarah's usually handling that for the boy works, a little bit more in her wheel house, we all of our strengths. But you know, you go to these things and it's like, look, everybody's earnest. Everybody is thinking about like what reforms, you know, can Trump proof the presidency in the future. And then you look at the Supreme Court rulings and sort of radicalizes people.

You start to think maybe that you can't create rules, you know, because there will always be

“somebody that breaks rules. And and you have to look to different types of strategies, you know,”

for a cruelling power. And you know, then you end up in a race for the bottom. I don't know, it's a pretty depressing thing to to mall on our 250th anniversary, but it's extremely relevant this week. I don't know if you have any deep thoughts on that topic. Yeah, I was thinking about the timing of this. It's sort of this painful juxtaposition between the soaring aspirations that were meant to be celebrating of the founder and, you know, the sort of gritty, you know, cold, hard, grummy cash

reality of the American presidency right now. You know, it came up in your conversation with

kind of restrictions on not just contribution limits post-water game, but the idea that you

“couldn't have unlimited amounts of essentially unaccountable cash flowing in coordination”

to parties and candidates. And that's just basically gone now, which is why we've had this

age of the hyper and power. As far as the independent agency, that was the other thing that was this way. Yeah, well, exactly. Independent agencies, that predates watergate that goes all the way back to the new deal. You know, people call them conservatives. They're not. It's a far-right radical. Court Donald Trump is also a radical president, although interestingly, he doesn't necessarily share the same far-right ideology that the justices are imposing right now. You know, where they

overlap, the justices have upheld him, where they don't overlap. The justices have come in and nearly reproved Donald Trump on things like tariffs and outright overturning the Constitution's guarantee of birthright citizenship. But, you know, it seems to me that the combination of an executive that knows no boundaries and a Supreme Court that is asserting powers at the expense of Congress

that we've never seen before. That is something that really changes the balance of power in a way

that invites us to contemplate that on the 250th anniversary. I mean, I just think that the post-Trump

“presidency is going to test us still in entirely different ways. And I think our experience with the”

Joe Biden in a ragdum, I guess, is it will come to be known? Show us the Democrats. They have talked about an existential threat. They talked about, you know, trying to put the guardrails back on. But they actually did not do that even when they controlled the Senate and the House at the beginning of the Biden presidency. And they missed their window to do it, honestly. So that tells me they didn't make it as much of a priority as their rhetoric would have suggested. Yeah, this was kind of the HR1

conversation, right? Which ends up being this very big kind of grab bag, a lot of special interests. It's like liberal, special interest groups plans with varying degrees of, you know, merit to them.

But it was like never, like not really a serious efforts to get a pass. And I think they could have

had a more tailored anti-corruption democracy protecting bill that might have failed better. But, alas, here we are. I do also want to mention such as Trump that's breaking the corruption rules this week, speaking of cash. Cash Patel has FBI director also failed to probably just go to six figure purchase of stock in a Bitcoin-gealed business intelligence and mobile software company that's contracted with the Department of Justice. I guess the one

thing will be true, your colleagues at the New Yorker, the investigative reporters, the Jane mayors of the world and her successors. They're going to have work for a lifetime, following the administration. The jobs report is bad this morning, but it is a little bit of a make work for investigative reporters in 2020-29. And it's going to be like a lifetime employment clause. I mean, yeah, well, people are still doing investigative work and putting out books every year about

Richard Nixon. Okay, so again, add zeros and add decades to this work when it comes to Donald Trump. And that's one where I do think you listen to Trump's overheated claims. He went out to North Dakota this week to have the Teddy Roosevelt presidential library making these sort of just grotesquely historically inaccurate and inflated claims for his own grandeur and how it's somehow mirrors that of Teddy Roosevelt, which is making any one who knows the history of Teddy Roosevelt

role in their graves. You know, this sort of archetype of the progressive era, father of American conservationism and on you could go. But Donald Trump is what you might call a consequentialist and a maximalist in his desires to be seen as mattering. And I do think that his two terms in office marked some kind of a very definitive break with many of the norms traditions rules, laws, and history of the American presidency. We don't know where it's going to

“take us, but I think it's, that's one where I'm going to say Donald Trump is right that he is”

a consequential president who's who's changing the story of our republic. He's right up there with Mao, Stalin, all the other people that he said he wanted to be mentioned with. Did you see the video I'm taking us on the side track for a second, but you mentioned the Teddy Roosevelt library. Did you see the video of Trump talking to the AI Teddy Roosevelt? Yeah. It was extremely disorienting. The canal stands as one of my proudest battles. No question. But greatness is a strange thing.

America could achieve if we held steady and acted fast with a world drag and speak. That said,

“I measure my greatest work by the lives improved. Parked set aside, food and roads made safe.”

This way of view, give it to all, not just to a few. Still, when I stood in the mud watching those steam shovels, knowing ship would pass through, changing the world's map forever, I felt I've less than marked it with last. Okay, you did. Thank you. So your Trump is asking him about the Panama canal and then you have this kind of AI Teddy Roosevelt type. What would you even call it? What did they do at Coachella? Were they

kind of beamed in the dead artists? No, no, no. There's another word for it. I'm viking on. But we're getting close to the holiday. But yeah, it's kind of this Teddy Roosevelt visage. And it's like he's answering the questions. I don't know. I felt the stopia. I was getting very harsh, hard to stopia vibes from it. Yeah, dystopia, but also it was this revealing exchange

him. I thought it was incredibly amazing. Donald Trump is like, whoa, Teddy, what's your

greatest accomplishment? Is it the Panama canal? And Teddy Roosevelt is saying, oh no, my thing is about the number of people that I helped. And to me, that is the incredible difference. Again, Roosevelt, the icon of the American progressive era movement, the idea that government can constrain rampaging monopolists, rampaging gilded age businessmen, the Elon Musk and toxic

“billionaires of their era. That's what Roosevelt was about. Roosevelt was about national parks”

and conservation and the environment. He was about the idea that immigrants are teeming into our cities. We need to create an infrastructure to help them. This is the moment of the settlement

House movement. Teddy Roosevelt, by the way, an extremely not only sort of educated man, a writer,

a thinker. In fact, a prolific writer, a prolific reader. In so many ways, except for the narcissism. Right. You got to give him the, except for the narcissism. He's about the polar opposite of Donald Trump in particular because the progressive era was literally about the idea that government can do something and ought to do something to constrain and to work for the people of the country against the money to interest, which is the exact opposite literally of Donald Trump's sort of

kleptocratic oligarchic view of government. Also, in the category of personal bravery, you know, Donald Trump's not exactly a rough writer. He had the bone sparse. He had the bone sparse. He had it from war. There's the image of the little bald eagle that goes to like, and Trump gets really scared. He's in the office when he thinks the eagle's going to peck him. So, you know, a lot of differences. You haven't seen this video. It is so good.

It is my favorite Donald Trump clip. It's the thing that I go to when I need joy. Favorite Donald Trump clip? Yeah. It's a revealing something in this podcast, which is unfortunate. He's in Trump Tower. And I don't know. They're doing a photo shoot or something. We're trying to seem patriotic and there's a bald eagle and it's sitting next to him on his desk. And the eagle goes to like peck him and Trump trump hands.

The fucking bird is going to kill him. It's really good. I'm going to send it to you after. I actually don't know. Although I do know that Donald Trump does not like animals. And tell me, there you go. Teddy Roosevelt, a big dog guy in addition all sorts of pets.

“I think they had more pets at the White House in the Roosevelt Presidency than in any other”

Presidency. So contemplate that for your 250 in. This episode is brought to you by the New York Times. It's kind of like the Ohio State University. You've got to say it with the these Susan and I just talked about all the corruption news coming from the Trump administration. But before we able to get our takes on these stories, some deals have to report them out. Some people report out the facts. The foundation

of news commentary is fact based reporting this show and all the other blah, blah, blah, blah podcasts. You listen to depend on people doing real, fact based reporting. I'm constantly consuming it for another place. It's a good in the air times. It's going to be AP, which touched about this podcast and they're great reporting on our just tragic missile attack on the girl's school in Manab. We also got some

fantastic beat reporters here at the bullwork. I got Jonathan Cohn, Lonegan, etc. Bringing work to you like the Times does and also should be supporting your local paper like I do here

deep dive in terms of new financial disclosures in the first and the second was the breaking news

report from the Times on Trump's first flight on the Atari gifted Air Force one. Just another example about how he's been brought by foreign governments. These stories are examples of the results of fact based reporting and now I get to blah about them and you get to decide what you think. So wherever you seek it out, nationally, locally support fact based reporting. Why we're laughing, the vice president's a jokester. I got a transition.

Speaking, yesterday, I was good as you're a cashed pound boss. I think the vice president was doing a little stand up bit yesterday in front of our soldiers. I'm not sure how well it landed. I pulled one clip of it for you. Let's give that a watch. Well, because I'm speaking to all of you are great patriots and service members, I've got the angel on my shoulder saying, "Jade, don't be partisan. We're going to make this

non-partisan." And then I've got the devil on my shoulder who wants to talk about every time the Joe Biden fell up or down the stairs and the media didn't care about that, but if I did it one time, if I did it one time, it would be a major, major story. I think it's a one smile there on the video. Did a couple of hit a couple other jokes, fell flat. I'm not gonna punish the audience with. Not really his strength. Or to call that a joke, isn't it? I mean, I'm not, you know, the best

judge of stand-up comedy, but my guess is that, you know, Jade has has appropriately steered away from that line of work. These guys are masters of the What aboutism. And when Donald Trump is now officially

“80 years old and he clutches that handrail, like, you know, it's the only thing between him and”

Armageddon. Trump's age, his temperament, his ability to do the job is ability even to stay awake in the course of a photo app is increasingly in question. And it's one of those ones where Jadee's gonna have a tougher time making this comparison when, you know, the argument to the American public is don't believe your own lying eyes when it comes to Donald Trump. And I will say that,

you know, it's, it's always posed to challenge to talk about a president and age no matter what.

We saw that with Biden. The difference with Trump is that there are so many pathologies to unpack an unravel. You know, what can we attribute to age related to ammunition versus just his general self? But Trump is aging before our eyes. That's very clear. I think we have gone for, like, literally, like, two weeks in row where every single day he was on camera falling asleep. And then he forces, you know, the people around him. One of my favorite clips recently was Marco Rubio

“up on Capitol Hill testifying. And remember, I think it was Ted Lou plays a clip for him of Donald”

Trump falling asleep while Rubio was extoling his brilliant leadership. And he says, like, "Mr. Secretary of State, what do you think about the president falling asleep?" And Marco Rubio

says, "How dare you say that the president has never fallen asleep in front of me?"

Then they play it again. And he says, "You know, do you like to change your testimony?" And he says, "No, how dare you say it?" You know, play that for Jadee Vance. That would be awesome. I would love to see what Jadee Vance's answer would be to that at a press conference. It also is such a weird thing to do from the troops. Like, we're in the 250 universities. You're supposed to be stirring the spirits, you know, trying to lift them up a little bit.

You know, we're in the middle of a conflex. And it's like, we're going to do Biden stairs jokes. That's just kind of, I don't know, man. It didn't really have it. I know you're not a Catholic season. But JBL is dealing with some family matters. And he's out this week. So I didn't get to kind of sit with him and rumenate over Jadee's interview with Laura Ingram. We're talking about his book Communion and a Catholic conversion. So we went about Laura Ingram.

I think that she has some traits that go against what I learned as a Catholic schoolboy growing up. But whatever, she's been a Catholic for a while. Talks about it a lot. They got together. And I do have to play for you how Jadee explains the administration's immigration policies in the context of his Catholic conversion. The other thing Laura, I'd say that my faith really

“motivates me towards is to remember that our economic policy, it doesn't exist for corporations,”

it doesn't exist for Wall Street. As much as we want everybody to be successful, it exists to support the dignity of human beings. We want every American to be able to raise a family, to be able to support themselves and comfort and indignity. That's why we're trying to bring investment in manufacturing back to the United States of America. That's why we don't like low-wage foreigners coming in and undercutting the wages of American workers. We want

normal Americans to be able to live a dignified life. And I think that's a very, very Christian concept.

great of Catholic, we don't say Christian concepts about our things. It's not what we say.

“Okay, it's converted. You need to convert to our morays. Okay, you're on your book tour.”

That's just not how we talk. And either way, it's not a Catholic or a Christian concept. I don't believe that you want to make sure you only help the normal Americans, and in order to help the

normal Americans, we need to punish low-wage foreigners. I've never heard of Pope talk like that.

I don't believe that's correct. Well, not only do Pope's not talk like that, but this Pope has proven to be the single most successful, I think, rebutter of J.D. Vance's warped and distorted not only theology, but, you know, view of the role of government in the world. And it's, you know, in a fight between the Pope and J.D. Vance over what constitutes Catholic interpretation of Jesus' teachings. I mean, you know, most people are going to go with the Pope every time.

And it just, it's so flagrantly trolling us, right, to talk about normal Americans and to use that

“phrase dignity. Actually, it was interesting. I hadn't seen the clip, so the word "dignity"”

repeated by J.D. Vance over and over again in the context of this dehumanizing, divisive, cool, policy. It's sort of hit me in the stomach there, you know, too. I mean, it's really to talk about human dignity in the same sentence, as the people who have imprisoned, immigrant who've done nothing wrong, except seek a better life in this country, throwing them in these ice prisons, you know, with no process with no, I mean, thousands and thousands of court decisions.

I've said, it's not my opinion that I'm offering here. Thousands, tens of thousands of court decisions, since Trump and Vance came in to office saying that what they are doing to immigrants is in abusive power that it's wrong, and it's a violation, not only of the rule of law, but of basic principles of human decency. They have dignity as well. I've got nothing to add to that. That's really good. Hallogram was, it's what came to me. It was a telly, it's not Hallogram. It came to me.

There we go. We've got a guilty Disney, and, you know, have revisit the hall of the president. It's so terrible. What it is, the hall of the president's I loved is a kid. Loved. Talk about being a nerdy elementary school student. You're at Disney World. You know, the other children wanted to go whatever. Meet Pluto or meet the princesses and, you know, ride on space mountain. I was like, I got it. We got to go to the Hall of Presidents. So as a dorky child, and I loved it.

There's something about the AI hologram that moves us into the uncanny valley in a way I don't like. You know, I don't know. It just feels unhuman. The hall of the president's it's so weird. I don't know. It's so trippy and like, it's scripted. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what it is. But there's some kind of line there between the hall of the president and the AI hologram. Teddy Roosevelt that falls to a place I don't, I don't enjoy.

I never really were taken back to fourth at the bowlwork.

miniature American flags for some abortions for others, bowlwork plus subscriptions for yet a third group to borrow from the Simpsons. We all run in our fourth July sale. Right now, it's happening this weekend. Do you get a full-year membership for everything we offer on our website for just 86 bucks, 14% off because of this holiday, this flag, this country of links to all of us, not one party, not one person. I got my fourth July playlist, epic. I'm given

that to you for free. All right, we're putting that in the show notes right here. $0 for the fourth July playlist, $86 a value. From that playlist and all the other reporting commentary we're doing here at the bowlwork and the sale runs all the way through this weekend. Come join us, the bowlwork.com/jlyfore. That's the bowlwork.com/jlyfore link in the show notes to the offer and the playlist. I wanted to just run through some foreign policy news. I guess it's kind of foreign policy. We'll

start with the trade policy. Trump administration decided not to renew the USMCA, which is pretty interesting because Donald Trump said that was the best agreement we've ever made, the best trade deal of all time.

“So I think it's strange that they would not renew the best trade deal of all time. I guess”

the best can always get better. They're now going to do yearly reviews or Trump shakes down

the leaders of Mexico and Canada. I guess it's the new plan. And that's not great. I mean, the farmers and one hit after another for the farmers seems like every Trump policy is like it's almost like an elaborate plot to see how much he can piss off the farmers and still run up the numbers in rural America. But I don't know if you have any thoughts on them backing off to you. Yeah, I mean, well, as far as the farmers go Donald Trump loves to provide evidence that, you know,

he backs away from policies that would support him, no matter how much he fails to deliver the

things that he said he would deliver. That's to Trump. That's like the ultimate sort of political own. And he loves that move. I also wouldn't underestimate the extent to which Donald Trump really has at this point an extremely vindictive view of our neighbors in particular of Canada. Anything he can do to screw Canada and Mark Carney, the prime minister who has, you know, made standing up to Donald Trump and creating an alternate pathway for the middle powers of the world

“who still believe in quaint concepts like liberal democracy. You know, this is, I think,”

pretty personal for Trump in ways that we may be understating. And then, I think the important thing is the thing that you pointed out, Tim, which is that it's a way of aggrandizing his power. And the more that we don't have predictable, take it to the bank, treat these deals rules, but everything depends upon the magnificence of the Tsar. That's Donald Trump's preferred method of not just policy-making but economic governance. And he sees the economy in ways that

it is very antithetical to traditional free market republican capitalism. It's much more a monarchical view of the right of the board to intervene and control the economy to take stakes in companies to create national champions and to have all deals flow through him in some way. And when all deals flow through you, you know, what happens? Some of it sticks the shelf with it. It's a good point on the personal relationships because it's not just Carnegie Chinebaum too

in Mexico. I've really like shown backbone a number of times. It's interesting. I got two closest neighbors at times have shown more willingness to stand up to Trump's ridiculousness. I guess the nice thing you can say about it than some of our other allies. This is kind of one of these we all know those stories, but I think it just bears mentioning, you know, the AP, this big breakdown of what happened with the missile that we shot into the girl's school on Iran. And, you know,

they basically reconstruct the strike on the school in Manab. And they have a former Pentagon

official telling the AP that the bombing came as result of changes by the administration to reduce staff for mitigating civilian harm. They're these no strike lists that they're doing work on that had been stopped. Meanwhile, the Pentagon still has released its findings, hates death just this week said that they'll do so when the time is right. Trump last week said, I don't know if they're ever going to solve this fault at what their missiles flying everywhere. So, you know, the administration

just refuses to do the obvious here and wants us to not believe a lie in eyes when it comes to

“this missile attack on the school in Iran. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think it's really important”

in a conflict, the difference between, you know, a democratic military and something like Vladimir Putin's Russia is not only not engaged in the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure or civilian sites like a school, but when those things happen and they do happen in more to investigate them to be transparent to make a men's to try to understand what happened and to do what you can to mitigate that, you know, it actually has a long experience because of all

the post-9/11 wars that it fought in Afghanistan, Iraq and trying to mitigate civilian harm. And a lot of what happened when Donald Trump and Pete Hexeth came in talking about liberating the war fighters to do their war fighting was essentially saying, we don't want to have those backgrounds. We don't want to have those constraints that the Pentagon even under a Republican President George W. Bush worked to create ways of minimizing civilian casualties. You know,

Pete Hexeth literally got his job by his on-air advocacy on Fox News in the first term to make

sure that service members who have been accused of atrocities against civilians, in Iraq would

“not be held accountable. That's how he got his job. Donald Trump liked what he had to say on TV”

and Trump actually overruled his own military chain of command, you know, largely at the behest of Pete Hexeth. That tells you a lot about Pete Hexeth and what his attitude toward civilian casualties is unfortunately. Are we still at war with Iran? Do you know what's happening? What the status is? I assume that we're coming up on the weekend. It'll probably do some shooting back and forth again once the markets are closed for the holiday. Yeah, I mean, you know, the usual

dribble of propaganda and, you know, sort of, there was one that really caught my attention this week. You know, one outlet calling it Donald Trump's landmark memorandum of understanding. It's an interim ceasefire agreement that actually hasn't even proven effective at being a ceasefire

actually be called a meaningful ceasefire. More importantly, you know, there's no sign of any meaningful progress in the following talks that we're supposed to be occurring in the course of the 60 days allocated in the ceasefire in which the United States and Iran were supposed to talk about the disposition of its nuclear program supposed to talk about new arrangements for the straight of foreign moves. If anything, what we've seen over the week since this memorandum of understanding

is that Iran's understanding of the memorandum is that the straight of foreign moves is still under its control and essentially a spigot to be turned on and off at will in order to gain leverage in the negotiations in order to show Donald Trump who's still in control, perhaps in order to raise

revenue ultimately. But that is definitely not what Marco Rubio and others told us about the

memorandum of understanding. And I would be very skeptical, Tim, that there will be any long-term peace deal that comes out of this. They may not start a full fled shooting war again in the short

“term, but I think it's very, very unlikely that there's going to be a long-term stable piece”

between the United States and Iran. Yeah, so we move over to what's happening in Ukraine, obviously kind of the same. The stuff starts to just continue and I don't ever like to lose sight of it. What happened yesterday last night in Kiev was awful. Another just full force attack from Russia on to civilian population of Kiev. My guy, Cameron Robertson, who is there and doing just

really critical reporting on the ground, was taking some video last night to this one of the

place for folks. The right behind me is a hotel on fire bang on in the center of Kiev. This is a major city of millions of people living here. You can hear ballistic missiles exploding in the sky right now. I'm going to go inside. And this is obviously a deliberate attack on civilians. It's a residential buildings. He's a residential buildings. Bang on in a city center of millions of people here in Europe. And this is evidence. This is evidence not just a donation that is deeply disturbed, but a nation

“that's willing to commit terrorism on a daily basis. And honestly that's why it's so important to see”

these images as like this as well. Because this, oh my god. So it looks like the attack is over. And I just got out of the shelter. And Dawn is starting to break over the city. And the entire city is filled with smoke. That was last night. Yeah. I mean, you know, look, Trump, I mean, Putin's energy for four years has been to target the population of Ukraine itself. It's, it's a war in many ways of extermination of the Ukrainian state, the very idea that this is an independent nation. And he's

making more on the people of Ukraine. What's interesting is that this massive attack on the capital is a response to Ukraine's increase pressure inside of Russia itself. It's had targeted attacks very different than Donald, and then Putin, I got to stop doing that. Ukraine has targeted oil refineries in Moscow, has targeted targets in St. Petersburg during the St. Petersburg economic forum. The pressure they've managed to put on Russia has meant, you know, days long lines for gas.

They've been increasingly cutting off the Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. You know, they're, you can't find not only fuel right now, but food or other supplies are running out.

“So it's this increasing pressure on Putin's government inside of Russia. I think that prompted”

this attack on civilian population. But what's so notable is the asymmetry of it. You know, you have one country that's fighting for its existence that's trying to target military targets.

This is trying to shut down the Russian economy, and then you have basically random violence against

individual Ukrainian citizens. Yeah, I'm discriminated bombing. There's a report this week about just like the life expectancy of people that Russia is bringing to the front as like down existent, basically. And so Putin is just like using humans for fuel, essentially, and just like sending more and more, you know, men to the front to get killed in order to extend this. One of the questions about, you know, the thinking in the Crimean and Newsponsored Time

there is whether we're kind of back to a possible instability. There are two kind of news stories that jumped out of it this week. One is, this is kind of like the telly Roosevelt AI. It's a very

dollar bet that Putin would be out this year, which is like the kind of thing that was happening with a sort of like, you know, the Israel war and our war where people were like, oh, hey, like there's this big bet that came in on Venezuela that happened before the Venezuela attack. So that's something to watch. And then you did have a Russian former Russian defense ministers, Sergei Ivanov on Putin's closest allies died that could have been natural causes or, you know,

who knows what's happening in Russia. But do you have any thoughts or I'm it's hard to get kind of reporting on what's happening inside the Crimean at this point that's just curious what your perspective is? Yeah. Well, it is fascinating. By the way, Sergei Ivanov was a former KGB official

like Vladimir Putin although he was a high-ranking general, unlike Putin you never made it past

Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB. And Ivanov, interestingly, was initially pegged as potentially

“Putin's successor. And I think the world would have been a different place had Putin gone for him”

instead of Demetri Medvedev, this sort of insignificant loyalist that he chose essentially as a placeholder. And then remember he returned to the presidency after sitting out a term under Medvedev. Ivanov was a much stronger potential figure than Medvedev. And it's interesting that Putin chose, you know, not to have him be there. It's one of the many, many paths not taken. And it's a reminder that it's not all inevitable. Vladimir Putin was a very unlikely person when Peter and I were there

in Moscow. And in the first few years of Putin's tenure, if you had said to anyone that this guy,

this unknown 40-something obscure former mid-ranking KGB guy, is going to be the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin going to unleash the deadliest war in Europe since World War II. By the way, it's now surpassed in terms of casualties, even the Napoleonic wars for Russia. The only deadlier wars in Russia's history were World War I and World War II. It's a catastrophe for the human capital and that society going back to your question about what does it mean for the

stability of Putin's government, for the possibility of Russia fighting onwards. There is inherent

“instability in this level of murderousness. I believe the latest estimates, I saw where that Russia”

has suffered 1.4 million casualties. So that's deaths in various injuries in the course of this

conflict. That is a staggering total. The reckless disregard for the Russian people itself is, of course, the great tragedy here. Vladimir Putin could have pursued a very different path. He led the nation down this path of catastrophe, war, death, and disaster. But he's done so by reinstating a kind of 21st century version of a suffocating dictatorship. He has eliminated most forms of civil society. There is not a meaningful liberal opposition, I would say, that is functioning

inside of Russia today. So the alternative might be even worse. Hardliners, you believe, Putin isn't prosecuting the war enough. And so it's bad to worse the scenarios that we contemplate for Russia right now. I want to close the America 250 stuff coming up this weekend. You won't be attending. You don't have any plans. Donald Trump said yesterday North Dakota that he's planning an extremely long speech to prove his vigor. It's going to be really hot

in DC. I assume that the orange paint on the face will be melting. I was hostile to the idea that someone even turned on the speech on the 4th of July and ruined my piece on Saturday. But I do have my interest is a little bit peat by old man and a hundred and seven degree weather. I don't think you can watch it on video tape, but I don't know if you have any thoughts on the America 250 celebration that is turned into a mega rally.

Yeah, you know, there is also the great algae conspiracy that Donald Trump has recently

“promoted because of course. Yeah, it was yesterday North Dakota. It's like who put the algae in?”

Who put the algae in? You know, one of the great questions of our times when they when they have the America 250 time capsule and you know, somebody opens it up. Let's open America 350. They're going to be what in the holy hell is this algae reflecting poll situation? Or maybe they'll say this is the beginning. You know, now we're in a dystopian future and the algae has expanded to such a degree that it has ensconced the entire monument. Who knows?

You know, I feel like I watched that movie later. It says a kid growing up. Donald Trump at a 950 p.m. start time July 4th speech, I don't like to make predictions normally to

conspiracy theories that Donald Trump will be promoting forever because I really genuinely, who in the hell is going to actually physically be present for this speech? Even if they paid

“to bus in thousands of magas supporters, I mean, how much would you have to pay somebody”

to be there in a 140 degree heat while in the mall? You're not even allowed to have a chair. I don't even know if you're allowed to bring in like water to drink. I mean, it's hard to imagine

that even a really genuine big America first patriot Trump fan is going to sign up for that one.

So it seems to me. You can watch it on your own TV while you do sparklers outside in the backyard. Yes. You have had air conditioning. The crowd size issue, frankly. I mean, I feel like Donald Trump has already prewritten the true social in all caps and will teach complaints that the double crowds of, you know, sub-how wide about the greatest crowd in the history of crowds and Martin Luther King is nothing on this crowd. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that you will not

be surprised if the crowd size grievance is one that we're litigating for a while. There's nobody there a week. I'm like our guys Jared and Brendan back at Boycage Q. I did a video with them because they've been walking down there and it's, it's really sad. I mean, there's, so I mean, that's a lie that we're masturbating Uncle Sam got caught masturbating because there's nobody else around. You know, you're so easy to see it. You didn't know about that season.

There was an Uncle Guy dressed up in Uncle Sam costume that got arrested on live stream for doing some personal business in front of the acrobatics tent at the Great American State Fair. Donald Trump's America man. You know, somebody said to me the other day and it's crazy because I just was thinking of this myself, but I guess I'm not the only person to have thought that we're really living in like, Mr. Potter's America, you know, like forget about Bedford Falls, like we're

in Potter'sville. Donald Trump is Potter'sville. And, you know, the sort of caricature of the over-the-top celebration of all the things that we might think of as the inversion of the American Dream.

“I mean, for me, that's what makes it hard. You know, you, you ask a young person in particular today”

what could make them proud to be an American. And I know Gallet found that those numbers have plummeted in the last decade since Trump took the presidency. Only I think it's like 53 percent of Americans even can summon any notion of being proud to be an American on the occasion of the 250th anniversary. And, you know, I have a hard time making that case to a young person right now, you know, about what it is supposed to be except the idea that giving in isn't the answer

either. And I think that's really important. And that if somebody can change the meaning of that history, sporadically as Trump is done, then also somebody can change it back as well. And I just

think that, you know, it's never too late to show up for the ideals that you claim to have. And

even if you have sort of lost them along the way over the last decade, you know, it's still possible to sort of show back up and say, hey, this isn't who we are. And it isn't who we want to be. It isn't who we want to be. Yeah, I never Clint Smith on tomorrow for show to kind of talk about this talk about America. And because he had this great book called How The Word is Past, it kind of looks about the history of slavery and how we process it and how we've learned about it,

and how we update it. He's good about talking about being real about what America is, we're going back to the themes of Dr. King and of Lincoln, et cetera about, you know, the problem sorry note, part of America. And it's it's a little bit of a tough pitch to 13 year olds, but it's the best we got. And, you know, he's he's out there doing, it's how look forward to that conversation tomorrow. Susan Glasser, should we end with the laugh? You already rocked me a little bit with the eagle,

I'm the Uncle Sam. We've got the eagle. Producer Jason has the eagle video. I want to show you live. I want to experience it together. Let's pull it up. Let's do this Trump. With the eagle, if you're just listening, the eagle's on his arm now. It's nice. His hair is getting must. Now, the eagle goes to pick her back. You can see why I enjoy that so much. You know,

“really scared. This bird is serious. Okay. This is a video podcast for people. If you want to”

really experience the full joy of the Bulldog podcast on July 2nd, 2026, you can visit us on

Substecker YouTube. Add that as Susan Glasser, I always appreciate your insight and your wisdom

you. All right. Enjoy your independence day. Everybody else will be back tomorrow with as mentioned Clint Smith.

“It's going to be a good one. We'll see you all then.”

The board podcast is brought to you. Thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper,

associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Loots and audio engineering

and editing by Jason Brown.