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Unknown A
I asked some people close to Trump what this exact question, like, what is Trump going to do about these efforts by Netanyahu to continue to expand territory and also to looks like he's trying to blow up the ceasefire in Gaza. And they said, look, Wyckoff is very committed to making sure the ceasefire holds and that phase two is completed. But Trump is not focused on it. Trump is focused on Ukraine and getting and getting a deal there. Interesting. That's where his attention is. So let's talk about the progress toward that. We can put this next element up on screen for the New York Times. U.S. and Ukraine agree to minerals deal, officials say. And so to back up here, the treasury secretary went to Ukraine, offered this deal, like, hey, look, we will actually not. We're not going to promise that we're going to do anything, but we will invest in some kind of resource extraction.
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Unknown A
And in exchange for that, you give us $500 billion worth of rare earth minerals, plus basically control over oil and gas in your ports. And Zelenskyy then leaked that to the lawmakers who came to visit, slammed it in the press, said he wasn't going to do it. Trump responded by calling him a tin pot dictator and then saying that it was actually Ukraine that provoked the war and now siding in the UN With Russia against a resolution that condemned Russia for the invasion. Right. Basically adopting the argument that it was Ukraine's provocations, which were real, not Ukraine's provocations. That's actually kind of to back up. So they are mostly US Provocations and NATO provocations. There were Ukraine provocations, of course, like the Maidan coup in 2014, the far right seizing power there, banning the Russian language in the east. So then you get this civil war over in the east, you get Zelensky elected on a promise that he's going to reach a peace deal, Donetsk and the rest of eastern Ukraine.
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Unknown A
He comes under enormous pressure from the ultra right. And instead of that, he kind of ramps up the war in the east. And then Russia sends its actual troops instead of just its proxies into Ukraine. And so you can see how there's responsibility on both sides. But Trump very clearly angered by this rejection. It's like, actually, this is all Ukraine that started this war anyway. And so now Ukraine has come back and said, okay, we'll agree to the deal, but we're not doing this $500 billion thing. They said they'll create a pot where 50% of the revenues from the extracting of the rare earth minerals will go into a fund that will be used to redevelop Ukraine, but then we get all the rare earths. So that's the deal. What do you think?
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Unknown B
Well, I think it's actually pretty significant as a. If it holds, which it may or may not, because there's so much. There's still a lot of moving parts. But if it holds, I think it's a pretty significant notch in the Trump foreign policy wins column. Just because there was mass hysteria. First it was kicked off with the J.D. vance speech in Munich, but then Trump's various provocations towards Zelensky over the course of the last week, which he said, even, like, I had Victor Davis Hanson on my show yesterday, and he was saying. Or today, and he was saying, you know, some of this stuff is actually crazy. Like, some of what Trump is saying is it's wrong and it's counterintuitive to what he's actually said himself about Putin starting the war. Putin did invade, which is why it's very obviously hardball. It's very obviously part of his.
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Unknown A
Trump's whole argument is that Putin wouldn't have done it if Trump was there.
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Unknown B
Exactly.
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Unknown A
So implicit in that isn't Putin did it.
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Unknown B
Right? Yeah, exactly. So that's where, like, some of this. This hysteria, I feel like, from the media and European leaders has not been just. It lacks all of this context about how Donald Trump negotiates, which is that even some people in, like, America First MAGA world were concerned that he was talking so tough about Putin after he won the election. And they're like, great, Trump's been overcome by the neocons. And we should know by now that this is literally just how Donald Trump negotiates. Over and over again, he does the same thing. His position on Ukraine is actually one of the most interesting, which is that he would say all kinds of nice things about Vladimir Putin in 2016, 2017, 2018, whatever. And then he was the one who was arming Ukraine more than Obama. And so it's clearly what he does publicly, what he says in his conversations with other world leaders is always like, you can't connect it to the policy decisions that he's making or may make, because he's just doing the psychological.
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Unknown B
It's his psychological attempt at manipulation, manipulating other world leaders into getting deals. He acts like a. He's in the middle of a business transaction. He's trying to get the property rights to someplace he wants to build up in Manhattan. He's just trying to flatter people or he's trying to piss people off. To bring them to the table. And in this case, it seems to have actually worked. It seems as though Zelensky and people who are pro Ukraine, who are saying Donald Trump is so awful, have actually come to the table. To have him saying the United States is backsliding into authoritarianism by siding with Putin. It's like, okay, you just cut a deal with it. Obviously, his leverage, his attempt to create leverage here was successful. So all of that is to say, the last couple of weeks of coverage of Donald Trump's negotiations in Ukraine, I think got the situation woefully wrong.
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Unknown B
And this is just proof that he was negotiating. But I think it was clear all along that he was negotiating well.
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Unknown A
So let's hear it from Trump himself, who is asked, you know, what does Ukraine get out of this? Roll this.
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Unknown C
What does Ukraine get in return, Mr. President?
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Unknown D
$350 billion and lots of equipment and military equipment and the right to fight on. And originally the right to fight. Look, Ukraine, I will say they're very brave and they're good soldiers, but without the United States and its money and its military equipment, this war would have been over in a very short period of time.
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Unknown A
Meanwhile, related to this, by the way, did you, did you see the news that Congo, which is facing this massive insurgency, Rwanda backed insurgency, reached out to the US and said, you like rare earths? We have tons. We'll give them to you if you will sanction Rwanda for supporting the M23 insurgents here, like taking us from the global police to the global mercenaries.
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Unknown B
Mercenaries, yes. And by the way, a fairly brilliant approach to negotiating with Donald Trump. That's. We were talking about the gold cards over there. Yeah, yeah, just like it's transactional. Naked mercenary in this sense, literally mercenary. But, you know, he is sort of like figuratively mercenary in many other senses. So Trump is not the only one capable of doing successful Trump negotiations. So we'll see how that goes.
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Unknown A
And so Steve Bannon was asked about Trump's minerals deal by our old friend Michael Tracy at cpac. Let's roll, Bannon.
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Unknown C
My advice is walk the fuck away. I want to walk away so hard. I'm even prepared to say, okay, maybe we don't even investigate, which I think we have to, but we have to walk away. I don't want their minerals. Okay, there's enough minerals in the rest of the world.
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Unknown E
What's the reasoning behind this proposal then? Like, why?
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Unknown C
I think President Trump looks at Iraq and looks at other places in Afghanistan, and I think as a deal guy, he's sitting there Going, look, remember in Iraq and Afghanistan, they didn't take the oil. The next president already didn't take the minerals in Afghanistan. The net present value of our expeditionary was $9 trillion. Think of what this country would be like that if in the last 20 years we spent $9 trillion in rebuilding America. The factories would have. What would Detroit be like? What would St. Louis be like? What would Baltimore be like? What would the great cities of the east be like? What would Detroit be like? If we spent $9 trillion on, on American citizens, on the soil of the United States of America, this would be a paradise. We didn't. We piss it away and let people steal it. And so many people dead and countries ruined and cultures ruined, and the Christians eviscerate it for $9 trillion.
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Unknown C
And I think it says on President Trump, he says, look, if these guys did it, what we should do is at least get something for it.
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Unknown E
I mean, that's the way he exchange for a security guarantee though, which could necessitate or require some kind of US military action. In fact, speaking of World War II, it reminds me of the British arguably very foolishly extending Poland a so called security guarantee that they didn't have the ability to even uphold. And then World War II gets declared once Hitler goes into Poland. Now that's a very extreme scenario, but a security guarantee, I mean, those don't have a great record throughout history.
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Unknown C
No, very few people understand that. The reason that World War II, which had been building in the same kind of way, this is triggered in September 1939, is because the Germans knew it. And the Germans also knew that the French and the British couldn't stand up to it. And that would give them every pretext to roll across Western Europe.
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Unknown B
Just two bros talking about World War II on the floor of CPAC. I saw Tracy walking into CPAC. I was interviewing someone outside of CPAC. I saw Tracy walk in and I.
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Unknown A
Was like, oh boy, gotta get some videos.
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Unknown B
Here it goes. And so this was obviously Bannon. This was taped with Bannon. I wanna say this was Friday, Thursday or Friday. So way before the news came out, just in the last 12 or so hours that Trump had successfully negotiated this deal. So it'd be interesting to see what Bannon says now that Zelensky is giving apparently the mineral rise.
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Unknown A
Well, to say that it's successfully negotiated and it's like, we'll see, we'll see.
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Unknown B
But obviously he got him to agree.
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Unknown A
Getting passed back and forth.
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Unknown B
But even like in. Yes, but even in practice.
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Unknown A
And do they even have what they're saying they have is an open question. And. And to Bannon's point, there's minerals everywhere.
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Unknown B
In Russia, even as Putin. Well, in contested regions, as well as Putin talked about the Donbas recently. And your point about the Congo is a good one. But no, I mean, even in theory, getting Zelensky. I shouldn't even say in theory, but like, in practice, getting Zelensky to say, sure, after all the hemming and hawing of the last week looks like a big MAGA victory. And so does Steve Bannon say, great, like, this was well done by Trump, or does he say, I don't want the minerals? I think it's actually pretty interesting because it's a contrast with the USAID drawdown. And your point about us becoming the policeman of the world versus the mercenary of the world is a really interesting one because some people in the USAID debate, like, you actually sort of saw this play out when Benz went. Mike Benz went on Tucker Carlson show, and Benz was saying he was worried that a lot of MAGA world doesn't want to be precise and sort of take a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer to a lot of USAID in realizing that some of this is beneficial, like, the empire is beneficial.
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Unknown B
And Tucker Carlson's just sort of like, I don't know, I'm kind of done with all of it. And that's a pretty interesting tension that we see play out here. If you want the U.S. to stop, quote, economically colonizing the world, this mineral deal feels like an extension of economic colonization to it sort of feels like Burisma, as a matter of fact, except this was more nakedly transactional than Burisma, USAID and all of that. So I think that's one of the trend lines actually to watch over the next couple of years is how MAGA handles the question of economic colonization and empire.
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Unknown A
Right. And maybe they'll just eventually work their way right back to creating a new USAID soft power instrument.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
But just different.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And also one last point on that classic Steve Bannon riff.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Like, he's on Afghanistan. Like, I think, like, he's just. He's just nailing every piece of it. And then he throws in and all these Christians got killed. It's like, where did that come from? I thought the whole idea of Christianity was that we're all created by the Creator and, like, all equal in his eyes. So why does he have to emphasize that it's Christian? There were Christians that were killed to try to land the idea that people getting killed in war is a bad thing. Doesn't it also suck that when a Muslim gets killed?
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Unknown B
Yeah, of course.
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Unknown A
I mean, it's just like I always seeing that from Bannon. It's like, I agree, agree, agree, and then whoop. And yes, I don't like when Christians get killed either, but also don't like when atheists or Hindus or Jews or Muslims or anybody gets killed.
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Unknown B
No, there's a charitable reading of that, though, which is he's trying to appeal to conservatives who do see these regions as categorically like radical Islam, appealing to the baser instincts. I don't think it has to necessarily be xenophobic. I think it's. I think there is an instinct, like, especially after 9, 11, for people to say everyone there is like, radical.
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Unknown A
I guess a reverse version that the left would do is to say, hey, look, these Medicaid cuts are going to hurt trans indigenous. No, no, they're going to hurt poor white people. Trying to appeal to a MAGA person.
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Unknown B
Absolutely. Yeah.
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Unknown A
I mean, rather than making a more universal argument.
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Unknown B
Right, right. But I think the left also does it in its own way, because when.
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Unknown A
They'Re appealing to the left.
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Unknown B
Yeah, yeah. But I don't think it necessarily has to be xenophobic so much as. It's just. It could be. But I also think it could be, like, there are a lot of people who don't. I actually think a lot of people, like, for example, in the west bank, genuinely don't understand how significant those ancient Christian communities are.
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Unknown A
So, yeah, I mean, where's Jesus from?
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Unknown B
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Unknown A
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