Pledging Allegiance to Whom?
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Have you ever spotted McDonald's hot, crispy fries right as they're being scooped into the carton? And time just stands still. Hey folks, America's been sold out to Vladimir Putin.

Sold out by Pete Hexeth, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and the MAGA movement. That's today's elephant in the room, and it's not pretty. Hey, folks. Yesterday, America's honor in the world, our power, our position as a global leader, our strength, our reputation took a colossal hit, a staggering, colossal, apocalyptic hit, because Donald Trump...

And Pete Hegseth did what we all predicted they would do, what I warned you they would do a thousand times. And they have sold Ukraine out to Vladimir Putin. They have sold Ukraine out to Russia. Trump wouldn't even say yesterday that Russia invaded Ukraine. He said they started the war. They got in the war. No, motherfucker. When Russian tanks tried to roll into Kiev, the Russians started the war. When Russian forces invaded Kherson and the Donbass region, they started the war.

The Ukrainians have fought tenaciously. They have fought tirelessly. They have lost a generation of young men and women on the front lines. And it's not DEI, by the way, folks. That's because they know that women are great fighters too. Okay? And they've done it so Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump can be best buddies. They've done it so Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump can go and have sleepovers and paint each other's toenails. Trump has announced two visits to

with Putin, one in Moscow, one in D.C. He is inviting a war criminal, a man who has indiscriminately slaughtered Ukrainian civilians for almost three years, who has used ballistic missiles on hospitals, apartment buildings, schools, daycare centers, senior centers. He almost exclusively targets, for his crews in ballistic missile attacks, civilian targets. He almost exclusively targets the vulnerable.

This isn't because Vladimir Putin is a military genius of any kind. He's lost a million of his meat wave assault troops. He's lost the majority of his air force. He's lost the majority of their modern armored vehicles, their modern tanks. But Vladimir Putin had one super weapon in this fight from the start, is Donald Trump. One super weapon that he knew that if Trump won, he would get a chance to deploy. And he has.

Pete Hegseth is a mook and a drunk. He clearly was not -- was too steady on his feet getting on that plane the other day. But Hegseth announced yesterday at the NATO summit in Munich, oh, there's no chance of them joining NATO, and they must -- and they will never return to their 2014 borders for the prior Russian invasion. PETE HEGSETH, NATO Secretary General: But we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.

The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. You know, we talk a lot in history about Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister, tried to negotiate a last-minute peace deal to prevent World War II from fully exploding in Europe. A famous piece in our Times speech.

had become a symbol of weakness and fecklessness and an inability to see the world as it really is. He had become a symbol over generations, correctly, by the way. There's never really been a sort of Chamberlain retrospective where people go, yeah, that was the right call to appease Hitler. That worked out well. No one ever believed that because it's not true. It never could be. But what we have now, and of the trio of Trump enablers and Putin enablers,

Marco Rubio knows better. He knows better. He knows what he's a party to now. And you're going to see once again the power of ambition in the Trump era over principle. You're going to see once again the power of wanting to keep your job with Trump over principle. Nothing in the catalog of appeasements in this era could be more devastating to our reputation.

Donald Trump caving immediately, getting on the phone and Putin playing him like the intelligence officer he is. Oh, Donald, your common sense theory is so smart. And Trump, of course, runs with that and says, oh, Putin agrees with me. We're common sense guys. We're pals. Donald Trump believes that Putin is his friend. He believes Putin is his ally. He believes Putin is his buddy. I'll tell you why.

It's not because of a pee tape. I've never once believed that. I've never said it, you know, except jokingly. It's not because he paid Donald Trump money or the family makes a lot of money in Russia, which they did. It's because Donald Trump is jealous of Vladimir Putin because Vladimir Putin kills his opponents. Vladimir Putin throws his opponents out of windows. Vladimir Putin has his opponents poisoned. He has his opponents imprisoned and then poisoned. He has his opponents die in strange car accidents.

Vladimir Putin is the role model for Trumpish authoritarianism. And so to gain the approval of one of the most evil and corrupt human beings on the planet, Donald Trump has said to the Ukrainian people, let the Russian tanks roll into Kiev. That's essentially what he's saying. They've said to NATO,

We'll never accept them. We're going to veto. The only two people in NATO who believe that Ukraine should never enter NATO are Orban and Trump. I should tell you a lot. This is the Tucker Carlsonification of the Republican Party, because you know what? Republican foreign policy folks who absolutely know better in the Senate. Dead silent. Dead silent. This is the end for Ukraine. We're cutting them off.

Trump's going to cut off the flow of weapons any time now. He'll say, we have to stop this war because it's too awful and millions of people are dying because Ukraine is fighting Russia. Donald, I know that you are the product of many generations of assertive inbreeding and lead paint consumption and head trauma, but Russia started this war. It is Russia's war of aggression.

So America is abandoning its role as a NATO leader, abandoning its role as a world leader, abandoning its role as a country that keeps its word to its close allies. Russia has been and remains a competitor and an enemy of this country. They have done things to corrupt our elections. They continue to disrupt countries around the world.

Not because they have some communist ideology anymore. That shit was never real to begin with. It was always about power. A little bit real in the beginning. But right now, you are seeing the global authoritarian movements, two key figures, come together in a way that should disgust Americans who believe that if we are going to lead in the world, we have to be respected in the world. If you're going to be respected in the world, you have to have hard power and soft power.

We've abandoned soft power by killing USAID. Bravo, Elon. Good work. And now we're abandoning our reputation for hard power because Trump has always seen NATO as a protection racket. And Hegseth was over there making the same protection racket argument. You know, pay me, bitch, is basically his message to his NATO allies.

And remember, folks, Article 5 in NATO, the thing that says all NATO members will come to the aid of other NATO members, has been invoked one time in history. That one time was when every country in NATO, all those European countries and Canada, came to help the United States after 9/11. Men and women from every European country, almost disproportionately so, came to fight by our sides.

in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in places around the world in the war on terror. Now those people are hearing a different message. They're hearing, fuck you, Putin's more important. They're hearing that Donald Trump has a new alliance, a new structure in his mind.

And that is, as I said, the Tucker Carlsonification of the GOP that Dugan inflected. If you look up Dugan, you'll know D-U-G-I-N. You'll be in a rabbit hole, but it's a real one. We'll be right back. Hello.

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And now, back to the show.

That collapse of American principle to adopt Russian principle is a stain we're not going to get rid of, guys. Who else do you think is having a great three weeks of Trump so far? It's China. We've abandoned our soft power, again, USAID. We've capitulated to Putin, a war in which China, Putin, and Iran are an alliance. They are an axis, if that sounds familiar.

That axis does not love America. They know Donald Trump is stupid. They know Donald Trump is easily manipulated. They know he is a child in a size 58 extra baggy suit. They know Elon Musk wants to do business in their countries, so President Musk will equally encourage Donald Trump to take the Russian position. The Ukrainians deserved a lot better than this.

They deserved, I'll be direct, better under Biden. Jake Sullivan had the wrong view of the war from the very beginning. He thought you could slow walk it and that if we escalated, Putin would be angry. That's dealing with rational actors. Putin's not. He's a super rational actor, and he knows how to manipulate American foreign policy types a lot of the time.

But now they want to be manipulated. They want to be played. They want Putin to make them bark like dogs. They want Putin to treat them like cattle. And they have, and he will, and he does. But now you look at the world. We're abandoning our allies in Europe. We're abandoning our allies in Asia because Trump and Elon and the rest of them, they want China so they can do business in China. China's price tag is, of course, Taiwan.

which destabilizes Japan, which destabilizes South Korea, which destabilizes the Philippines, and destabilizes Australia. I mean, so our allies around the world are looking at this situation and saying, can we trust these guys? And the answer is increasingly no, we can't. So Donald Trump believes we should fight a war for Gaza, which will lead to a generation of jihadis, which will lead to a wave of terror that will last, I kid you not, for 50 years or more.

but that we shouldn't provide weapons to people who want to fight a war against a Russian invasion on their own. The fix is in. The game is over now unless Europe steps up. And I have a feeling Europe will step up. I have a feeling Europe is going to understand now that NATO or the American participation in NATO while Donald Trump is in power is a dead issue. And that is a tragedy. NATO stabilized the world and kept the peace for almost 75 years. And because Trump

Needs the approval of a Russian dictator. We're throwing it all away. I'm going to tell you one other thing that's going to happen. A lot of nations are going to realize something very soon now, especially technically sophisticated nations. What did their alliance with America bring them over the years? Sure, military protection bases on their soil, but it also brought the presence of an American nuclear response to an attack on American forces at a certain scale. If you are Poland right now,

or Ukraine, or South Korea, or Australia, or even Japan, if you're Germany right now, somewhere in a room, there are some smart people saying, well, we're going to lose the American deterrent shield. Trump will never protect us. He'll never stand next to us. And Russia will roll us up in Europe. And China will roll us up in Asia. Because they've got nukes and we don't. I suspect we're about to see a

A lot of countries decide they're going to build a nuclear fuel cycle. Building the weapons is trivial, by the way. Any sophisticated country with advanced engineering and electronics and basic design skills can build a nuclear weapon. It's trivial. It's trivial. A good machine shop in Detroit could build the weapon, but the fuel is a different story. Plutonium is a very different story, and enriched uranium is a different story. Not many countries have a full fuel cycle ecosystem.

A few do. A few more will. This is going to make the world a much less stable place. It is going to make the world much more dangerous for America. It's going to make the world much more dangerous for all of our allies. But at least we will have the satisfaction under the great Trump-Putin regime that our allies are people who routinely murder their political opponents, that our allies are people who routinely use poison

on their political opponents. Our allies are people who don't believe in any kind of free media whatsoever. Our allies are people for whom human life is trivial. That our allies are people who believe in a medieval version of the world, of serfs and peasants. That our allies are people who have, in front of the entire world, waged a campaign against the people of Ukraine,

and committed war crimes at a scale we have not seen since the Second World War. We'll be right back.

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And now, back to the show. It's a bad day for another reason, and I could go on for a lot longer, but JFK, the Secretary of Polio, has now been approved. Kash Patel, while I'm recording this, will be approved shortly. The rest of the clown show are all getting approved. The Senate, except for Mitch McConnell, Mitch McConnell, the one voice. I know a lot of you folks watching this today hate Mitch McConnell with a fire of a thousand suns.

And I blame him for this position we're in right now. I do. But I have to say, today, on this day, he cast an honorable vote against RFK Jr. because Mitch McConnell is a survivor of childhood polio, a disease we are about to see returned in this country. Polio, measles, mumps, things that are easily vaccinated against. We're going to see them come back. Again, it's a longer discussion. Yesterday, Tulsi Gabbard,

Russian fangirl. If you're an intelligence officer in this country right now, you are trying to tell your sources and your assets out in the field, don't worry, I'll never bust you. I'll never tell you, I'll never say your name because Tulsi Gabbard believes Edward Snowden was innocent. Because Tulsi Gabbard believes that, believed that Bashar Assad was a good guy who, Tulsi Gabbard is a person who routinely repeats Russian propaganda. But Trump has his people now. And I

It's the fault of Republican moderates who were too afraid to cast a vote because they don't want to get a primary. Tom Tillis, Susan Collins. And it's the fault of a few Democrats who thought we'd do the high-low strategy. We'll let the normies in without a fight, and then we'll fight them to the death on the bad ones. Didn't work that way, did it? You have to wage war against evil all the time. You have to wage war against evil relentlessly because evil is relentless.

And if you do not believe that RFK is evil, you're going to just have to wait about a year before kids start dying at scale. If you don't believe Tulsi Gabbard is evil, watch what happens when she starts having bilateral meetings with her Russian counterparts, and you don't know what's going on behind closed doors. The Director of National Intelligence. Watch what happens when Marco Rubio, because he so desperately wants to be president and keep his job as Secretary of State,

goes around the world knowing better and mouths the pro-Putin line over and over again. That's evil. Sorry, Marco. You know it is. You know in your heart that it is. You know now, Marco, that you are serving people who are worse than Fidel Castro ever was because they know better and you know better. Folks, it's a rough, rough week. It is not going to get easier soon, but you've got to stay strong.

The legal cases are moving forward across the board. We are going to have, it's going to get worse before it gets better, but we need to stay together. You stay in a strong shield wall against evil because you know what? Call it what it is. It's not the difference in politics anymore. It's a difference between good and evil, between right and wrong, between light and dark. That's the elephant in the room. I'm Rick Wilson.

The Lincoln Project podcast is a Lincoln Project production. Executive produced by Whitney Hayes, Ben Howe, and Joey Wartner Cheney. Produced by Whitney Hayes. Edited by Riley Mayne. Hey folks, if you want to support the Lincoln Project's work against Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and this MAGA craziness, go to action.lincolnproject.us slash help

Help LP. If you'd like to get in touch or have suggestions for a guest or a show topic, or just want to say hi, our email is podcast at LincolnProject.us. For our MAGA friends, please, no more nudes. Thanks so much, and we'll talk to you again next time. Good night, and good luck.