82. Trump Says No To Putin: Is He Serious?

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0:34Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay in Washington. And today we have a very special guest, former chairman of the Republican Committee, my friend Michael Steele, who is about to become not just a weekend television host, but a primetime evening host with The Weeknight on MSNBC starting on May the 5th every night. So look, I know you're super busy, Michael. I'm very glad you're here. Thank you for joining us. I've been looking forward to this conversation. You are you as you probably know, you get the vibe. You're one of my faves. And I just I love I love myself some caddy.

1:13And it's good to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you. And I'm sorry to everybody that Anthony is not here. He wants to apologize. He's drinking margaritas on a super yacht in the Mediterranean. You know, there you go. Someone has to do it. Someone has to do it. It is the price we pay in the age of Trump. Yeah, he's checking out what the Trump vies are. He did ask me to say that he's on assignment doing something very important. But hey. He actually told you that. We're between friends. So I think we can say the truth. Anyway, we're very glad to have Michael here. Michael, I thought what would be interesting in this half of the program would be to talk about the kind of week that things didn't go so well for the Trump administration.

1:54I mean, I think we're. The week. Well, it felt like there was a kind of culmination of almost breaks or roadblocks that the Trump administration has hit just in the last week or so. So we can run through some of those. And then in the second half of the program, I'd love you to talk about the GOP, your old Republican Party, and how much it would take for Chairman Steele to be able to wrangle back the Republican Party. I know you have some hot tips on that, that we can talk. It's a family friendly program, so we can talk about how much cannabis it would take. I'll keep that in mind in my answer.

2:30Let's start with Ukraine. I don't know if you had a chance to see it, Michael, over the weekend. I read this really good article in the FT by Yuval Hariri, who wrote Sapiens, the great writer. And he had this way of framing Trump's worldview in the context of what we're seeing with Ukraine this week, with Donald Trump angry as we're recording this on Thursday morning about the Russian strikes on Kiev, telling Vladimir Putin that he has to stop and that he's not happy with the Russian strikes, but basically not asking the Russians for anything as far as we can see in terms of concessions. I mean, this is not a negotiation.

3:11The administration is saying we're fed up of negotiation. You've got J.D. Vance in India saying, you know, we spent hours on diplomacy. I mean, diplomacy, my dad was a diplomat. My understanding of diplomacy was that it was a two-way street. This seems to be a one-way street. And Yuval Hariri says, listen, think of it like this. Donald Trump basically thinks there are weak countries and strong countries. And the sensible thing, perhaps even Trump's kind of thinking would be the smart, humane thing to do if you are a weak country, is just to give in to a strong country. It's zero sum. So actually, that's why he thinks this is Ukraine's fault.

3:49It is on so many different levels. The psychopathy involved in all things related to Trump, really just for so your audience has a better sense of where a lot of this comes from. It is this man has got daddy issues for days. He's got he's got family issues that has driven his entire behavior professionally and as president. And a lot of it centers around this idea at this rightly leveled up the weak versus the strong. His mother considered him weak. There's a famous quote of her talking about how weak he is as a man. So if your mama thinks you're weak. Yeah, that's bad. You're always going to be overperforming and trying to prove her wrong.

4:42If your daddy thinks you're weak and not competent, you're always going to be in a pressure cooker to prove them wrong. And so that drives a lot of this. Mary Trump, his niece, has written about this. She's a psychologist. She talks about the family dynamics. And so you begin to understand the framing of his worldview around what happened around the dinner table. And I think that that translation is one that you see right now of Donald Trump looking at the world the way his daddy and his mama looked at him. And so Ukraine is weak because it's small. Ukraine is the aggressor. Russia is not. So when you hear him going after Vladimir Putin, just know it's performative because there's nothing in his behavior towards Vladimir Putin, a very strong man.

5:40Right. That would show or prove to Donald Trump that they are the problem. And he's not going to go up against that's like going up against his daddy. Now, he's going to try to prove his daddy wrong, but he's not going to confront that that individual. He's not going to confront Putin. So I don't put a lot of stock when I hear him whining about what Russia is doing, because to the to your last point, he's done nothing about it at the at the diplomatic table. He's not put the pressure on them to conform their behavior to diplomatic norms, if you will. In other words, sit down and tell us what you're going to do and tell us what you want.

6:22uh ukraine do the same in the u.s acting as an arbiter he's just a bully for uh vladimir putin and in this instance his pushback putin knows it's coming and putin is like okay let's let him get that off his chest and we move on because nothing will change so he's takes like i mean every president that i've ever known i've had a certain psychology they brought into office right I started in this country covering Clinton. He certainly had his own psychologies that he brought into office. George W. Bush, maybe less so, oddly. Barack Obama certainly did. I mean, his sense that he was right and didn't really need to explain terribly much about healthcare because he was smart.

7:05And so if he just did it, people would get the message that it was the right thing. They'd get it. And if they didn't really, that wasn't his problem. I mean, to some extent, right? I mean, Obama did many great things, but I do think there was a certain arrogance around him and his team that they brought into office with them. Trump won, Joe Biden, but all of those people had people around them who were explaining the kind of chess version of the world, not just the Chequers version of the world. If you give in to Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump, then people in Venezuela, leaders in Venezuela will take that message.

7:38Autocrats in China will take that message. The message to the Baltic states will be that they are weak and Russia is strong. And anyway, how do we really determine who is weak and who is strong? America thought it was stronger than the North Vietnamese. It turned out not to be stronger than the North Vietnamese, right? ISIS in many ways did far more damage than America expected it to do in Iraq. So that's perhaps the difference is that every, of course, every president has a psychological profile, but they also surround themselves with people and with a party who is saying, here's the alternative position.

8:14Here's the complicated position. And I think that's what we're seeing at the moment now is that Trump just doesn't have that. He doesn't have it because a couple of things. One, it doesn't work around him because, number two, he doesn't want it. He wants people who agree. So while he loves the fight, and we'll talk about a couple of fights, a fight that occurred in the West Wing this week. Nice and calm place in the West Wing this week. Nice and calm place. But he loves that. He loves seeing people fight over him. You're so right. He loves seeing people fight for his attention. When you watch a cabinet meeting and they sit around and tell him how great he is, that's what that that's where that comes from.

9:01You're not at that table unless you're willing to say, Mr. President, you know, there's never been anyone who's seen this problem the way you have and have moved on it. But the way it is, I sit here, sir, just absolutely amazed by what you, in fact, I can't even finish the thought because it is so, I am so taken, I'm breathless. That for him? Oh, he just wet his pants at that table. Why do people never say that to us, Michael? We're on television sets all the time and I'm never getting that. I mean, what went wrong? I know. Oh, I wish if I. Oh, my gosh. I just want that influence with my wife.

9:45I just want I just want her to say, you know, baby, man, I'm so happy I married you. I did. She looks at me some days ago. Why? What was I thinking? You know what they say? If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Might the only person that ever looks at me. Forget my kids. The only person that ever looks like that is my little dog. But that's it. I mean, don't you think, Kat? I mean, when you're covering Washington and you're covering the White House and you're talking to these people, you can hear it in their voices when they talk about him, his people that are close to him, because they can't even afford to have it really drop when they're away from that table.

10:25Because they never know if that clip, that sound will get back to him. Right. So they're always these people are always in this vortex of pleasing him as a consequence for for diplomacy and dealing with our allies in Europe and Asia against the aggressors. It becomes that much more difficult because Donald Trump's psychopathy is a I'm I'm the strong man or I want to be a strong man. I'm going to do strong man things. I want to do strong man things. That's not the ethos nor the diplomatic stance of the United States. And it's certainly not the position that we've or posture we've taken with, you know, Great Britain or France or Germany.

11:11And yet you've got Marco Rubio as secretary of state supposedly negotiating. But because they don't like the position Ukraine has taken, first off, not even really inviting Ukraine to the table. How do you have a diplomatic resolution when the other party is not even invited into the room? But then walking away. Why? Because it's performative. That's what Trump wants. He wants to see that he's been instructed to do that. And so a lot of what you see happening from his national security team is his State Department team. the UN team, is that they are performing for the man, unlike in other presidencies, where the expectation was the president says, this is our policy.

12:00This is what we want. We've had this conversation with the prime minister of Great Britain. We've talked to the president of France, and here's where we are. Go make it happen. Let me know how it turns out. He lets his team go do what is in the long line since the end of World War II of diplomatic and international negotiations, et cetera. That's how this system, this world order complex has been held together because there's this kind of glue. He's come in and crack the glue that's holding it and now doing things that could further break that alliance. And a lot of it is because his people are imitating what he wants them to do.

12:46And it's not anchored towards that long line of diplomacy that the U.S. has followed with our allies, because there are times you know how it is. You know, the prime minister of Great Britain and the president of the United States will consider an approach together. When was the last time that happened, particularly with respect to Ukraine? And so it's, you know, it would be Biden, the Biden era. hasn't happened in this period because you have a president who is following the Putin playbook. And that's outside of what our diplomats and our State Department. It's not built for that. But you have the Secretary of State performing in a way that pleases Trump.

13:28Yeah. So the institutions are all revolving around Trump. I was struck by what you said about the infighting in his team and how he likes to pitch people about it. Actually, Kellyanne Conway said this to me just a couple of weeks ago about how he likes to have, she describes it as scorpions in a bottle. That's how she sees them. She loves this idea that they all fight it out with each other, ideally in his presence. And then he makes the decision. He is the decider. And it is a sort of slight power play. I mean, yes, you do want your cabinet members ideally to be giving you different points of view.

14:00But the way she described this is it's sort of slightly gladiatorial. And he is the emperor who is there making the decision. I guess another little snafu from the White House this week was we saw one of these fights play out and it leaked out into the press pretty damn quickly. First of all, which is interesting because Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, came in saying no more leaking from this White House. Second is interesting because you have Scott Bessent. Good luck with that. This is Washington. You have Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, getting into literally a shouting match in earshot of President Trump.

14:36And if ever you've been in, obviously, into the West Wing of the White House, I should explain to people who haven't, it's not glamorous. It's tiny little corridors where if somebody moves past you, you hear everything from if you're sitting in the Oval Office, you can hear everything happening down the corridor. And Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, and Elon Musk got into a massive fighting match that emerged over something super arcane about who's going to be the head of the IRS. Besant wanted one person. Elon Musk wanted another person, possibly to give himself more leverage over the tax services.

15:15That is always a possibility. You didn't hear it from me. And at one point, apparently in this argument, Scott Besson, who seems to me like a pretty mild mannered guy, right? I mean, not a yeller, starts yelling and says to Musk, fuck you. And Musk replies, say it louder. So he hasn't got the day one Ukraine deal he wanted. He now has fighting amongst his advisors happening in a way that I don't think we thought this administration was planning for things to turn out. Well, you know, the administration wasn't planning for this, but the rest of us knew it was coming. There was no tell that this term would be different from the first in that regard.

15:58I thought it might be. I thought this. Did you really think that? I thought because the first month, maybe I was so short term, the first month or two did feel a little different than the first month or two. For a start, Mooch was not fired after 11 days. So that was already looking good, right? We didn't have any major firings in the space of the first month. There was a little less chaos, maybe. There was a little less chaos. And I think the difference in why you kind of got lulled, I think a lot of folks got lulled into that, was they had a Project 2025 strategy. So they knew from the inauguration moments for at least that first couple of weeks, they had what was going to happen.

16:42So they roll out these executive orders. And so there wasn't there wasn't, oh, let's figure out what we can do. They'd already figured it out. So when you write what the fights you're seeing now are not on the, oh, let's figure out what we're going to do. It is on the implementation of what they've already agreed to do. It's on the execution side. It's on, OK, who are we going to put in this department? Are we going to fire all these people? Or do we have to bring some of these people back? So it's now on the other side of having made the decision. Now the tensions are around the power that results from the execution.

17:22That's what the best at must fight is about. Musk wants control of the IRS. That's SOB wants to put his tentacles inside one of the largest pieces of infrastructure in the federal government so that he has access to data about every living human being in America. Right. And he can do with that. I still believe he's already created back doors to many of the systems in our government. The next president will have to do one of the biggest tech enemas on the planet to clean that crap out of the system. I'm just telling you that tech enema is going to be the order of the next Democratic administration because you what you think you run in the government.

18:12No, everything you're doing is going to be siphoned through back doors that Musk has already put into the system. That's why you put a 19 year old in the Department of Health and in national security for what? So I think that's what you're seeing. But how do you ask you this? We're all kind of focused in here. And I, you know, I've done work in the diplomatic space. So I am also cognizant of the other side of the script. What are our allies say? What are you hearing from the folks in parliament in the diplomatic space? Guys and gals in the pub I mean they've got to be sitting here Going what the hell is happening To these people as they're about to celebrate Their 250th anniversary from breaking up For a told you I shouldn't have gone anywhere How is that going for you?

19:01How well is that going? That Little spat we had over a bunch of tea In Boston And you guys can't even make tea I'm sorry you cannot even make a proper Cup of tea in this country That's how bad things have got Well, you throw it all into the harbor. That should tell you everything you need to know about tea. Without boiling the water in the harbor first and warming the harbor and then putting. Yeah, no, it's you. I mean, you're right. This is causing a huge amount of confusion and concern. And I think there is a very real and we started with Ukraine and now it's people are starting to ask about the competence of this administration and who is really in charge.

19:44and will the American system hold? That we thought America had a system that was built into the laws and infrastructure of the country that made this a reliable partner. And there's now a realization that in that kind of forever balance in democracies between laws and norms and customs, actually the ratio of norms and customs was a lot higher than people thought. and they can be smashed. And actually, when you take away the norms and customs and you have a president who is prepared to say, screw the norms and customs, actually, he can do a heck of a lot. And what you said just now about the reason, and this is the reason that Besant and Musk have always had this beef, was that Musk wanted to go into treasury at the beginning and get all of our data, right?

20:38All of our social security numbers, all of our addresses, all of our tax returns, he wants to know everything about us because we're living in the era that data is the most important commodity in the world. And he could see that he could get all that. And Besant, actually, to his credit, I've spoken to people who are very close to Besant. Besant said no. Besant really pushed back and realized how bad that was because that is one of the firewalls of democracies that the government cannot know everything about you and hand it over to some private guy who in about, you know, whatever it is, 120 days is going to be out of government anyway, but still have access to your data.

21:18And I think that's what's really surprised America's allies in particular. And guess what? You know, you have Xi Jinping flying around Asia, talking to the Europeans saying, who's the reliable superpower now? You may not like our system, but we're not going to shaft you like this. And he's doing a pretty good job of it. So that then I think kind of begs the question again, because the next part of this relationship between us and the rest of the world, but particularly with respect to our allies. And, you know, at the end of the day, there's nothing stronger than the relationship between the US and Great Britain, period.

22:00That's just for the for the reasons you alluded to. I'm so glad you're bringing up the special relationship. It really special. It is. It is on so many levels for a lot of reasons that are inked in history. And so it just kind of when you're looking at the diplomatic piece in dealing with boorish and ugly and brutal behavior of Vladimir Putin and how the U.S. and Great Britain would order the world around dealing with that versus now Trump throwing, you know, tariffs around like they're, you know, bits of candy. Right. Very sour candy to our allies and our friends. And then now the attack on Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, where he noted Powell's termination cannot come fast enough for him.

22:56The economic piece is also another big part of this relationship between us and our allies, imposing indiscriminate tariffs on them of crazy numbers. 10 percent. Oh, now it's going to be 50. Back to 15. Let's make it 10. How does that rattle the halls of economic power, the markets in Europe and Great Britain? Now, Great Britain is in a unique space because it's outside of the EU. So it has it has, you know, those conversations, I guess, a few weeks ago, Caddy, about trade agreements or, you know, some type of mutual negotiation between the U.S. and Great Britain on some economic issues. What does that look like?

23:40Because from our perspective here in the U.S., it's all a crap show. We're harming everybody. And we know that at some point there's a downstream negative effect from all of this. How is it playing overseas and particularly with the leadership of Great Britain? I mean, the prime minister, Starmer is, you know, he's still getting his sea legs in the job in many respects. And he's got this roguery going on from his ally who's behaving like a 10 year old. I don't know. I think crap show is the technical term they teach you in second year of economy majors. Right. The reason I kind of were trying to frame these things in the context of the week things didn't go so well, or the week the Trump administration hit roadblocks, because Ukraine we were meant to do in a day, that clearly isn't happening.

24:36There is no negotiation. He's just rolling over. The rows with Elon Musk and Besant are an indication of the fact that I think Musk is on his way out, as he said, that there's little tolerance for that form. And there's a big fight in the administration. But the tariff thing, we've seen it again. The markets are roaring back. And Obviously, every single country is trying to figure out how they can deal with their own tariff regime with the United States. So they are having conversations. But I'm not seeing a deal on the table with anybody. All we had this week was J.D. Vance in India saying, we've agreed to start negotiating.

25:16I mean, don't confuse that with a trade negotiation, which can take, if you look at NAFTA, that took about four years to negotiate. So good luck with coming up in the next. How long have we got? We had 90 days pause. We've got like 60 days more of pause. There is not a single trade deal on the table. So I think allies are also watching. So they're watching how that's not really happening. They're watching how Donald Trump this week basically caved on China. Scott Bessent speaking to a bunch of Wall Street people saying, oh, please don't leak this. And they leak it, obviously, two minutes later, basically saying this is unsustainable.

25:53And Trump has already said to the Chinese, of course, we're not going to keep the tariffs this high. What's rule one of negotiating in the Trump playbook, the art of the deal is you never concede anything, right? He's conceded. He's put America's cards on the table. So I think for the rest of the world, the chinks in the White House's tariff weakness have kind of emerged this week in a way that they hadn't done before. And that is ceding a certain amount of power. That's an excellent point. And the backstory to a lot of that concession is going back to what we were saying earlier about the people around Donald Trump who's whispering in his ear and trying to get him to understand is what he's hearing now is from everyday folks out there through their representatives.

26:37Republicans don't want to do town hall meetings because they get their ass blowed up. Hold that thought, Michael Steele. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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