'Trump officially adheres himself to Putin' | Simon Marks reacts

There is so much to talk about. There is. None of it's... Well, one thing is quite funny, but a lot of it is not funny. So let's start with the unfunny stuff. Trump basically reversing his, yet again, his own decisions, his own policy, an act of Congress that he for once championed only a month ago when it comes to sanctions on Russia. Absolutely. Absolutely extraordinary developments overnight. So this, of course, comes at the end of a week in which Donald Trump has completely betrayed Volodymyr Zelensky. And I think advanced to a point from which it is going to be very difficult to pull him back. I know the prime minister is talking about trying to repair the broken bridges between Kiev and Washington. I have absolutely no idea how they've been burnt to the ground. And as Donald Trump has seen the opportunity to adhere himself officially now to Vladimir Putin and do that diesel deal, which is a result of Vladimir Putin really playing Donald Trump like a violin again, because they haven't got all of that diesel that they've promised to flood into the market. And also they've got their own ban on diesel exports because diesel and petrol are being rationed inside Russia at the moment. So he's once again, Donald Trump adhered himself to Putin and revealed openly his hostility to Zelensky. But we talk about the extent to which he has betrayed Zelensky. We need also to talk about the extent to which he has betrayed his fellow Republicans, because last night what he did in essentially derailing the sanctions bill that was passed through Congress was betray the late Senator Lindsey Graham. And I think what we're seeing now is that he died just this summer, two days after visiting Kiev. And let's take a listen to what Lindsey Graham said at the end of that visit to Kiev on July the 12th. These were the last public comments that Lindsey Graham would ever make. and they really serve as a statement of his absolutely determined intent to drive a permanent wedge between Trump and Putin. This was July the 12th, Lindsey Graham in Kiev. I'm pleased to announce, as of about 30 minutes ago, we've reached agreement with the White House on a version of the Russian sanctions bill that they will support. It means it's going to become law. So when I get back to Washington, I'm going to go with Senator Blumenthal to the Republican, the Democratic leader to see if we can find time to move this Russian sanctions package that would give tools to President Trump to help end this war. I've not always been a fan of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, but listening to that makes my heart weep. And at the same time, he's got to be spinning in his grave. about this. So I just wonder, again, and I think we've talked about this before, I know we have, and I ask many people the same question. What is Trump up to here? Apart from the transactional thing that he wants the price of diesel to be lower, which of course is nonsense, it's not going to work out. Is this, you know, all people say, is there a compromise on him? Do the Russians have something? And we did a whole documentary about it on Channel 4 a few years ago. We couldn't find a thing, which doesn't say much, but we couldn't find anything. I wonder whether it comes down to the simple fact that Trump just quite likes the way Putin runs his country. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, Zelensky said as much this week in an interview with the Financial Times while he was here in London. We had the guy who did the interview on the program earlier today. Trump likes the big man. He likes the big, powerful man. And he sees Ukraine as an irritant. He sees Zelensky particularly as an irritant because he simply refuses to make peace. And what Donald Trump wants Zelensky to do is to hand over parcels of territory in eastern Ukraine and, of course, the Crimea to Russia and reward Russia for its aggression, because Donald Trump likes to define himself as one of the big men on the geopolitical stage alongside Vladimir Putin, alongside President Xi Jinping of China. These are the men that he aspires to join. But to put yourself in a situation where you are removing Russia from what Lindsey Graham defined there as the Russian sanctions bill, when you are propping Putin up, something that Lindsey Graham said he wanted to punish other countries for doing, you've not just betrayed Zelensky, you've also betrayed lots of your fellow Republicans, which is why Republicans in the House and the Senate, as soon as they heard about that diesel deal a week ago, said, we're going to pass legislation, new legislation to prevent the president from carving Russia out of diesel, out of the Russian sanctions regime, because Republicans themselves argued that what the United States is about to do is prop up and replenish Russia's war machine with the money that it pays for the diesel. And what we've heard in recent weeks from Republican congressmen and senators, it's not an overarching roar but it's beginning to be audible is that sense of protest against the man that they've been following slavishly and a feeling somewhere in their backs and it's a hard thing it's called a spy. Yes but this is why I think Ed Luce in the Financial Times recently was absolutely right to describe Trump as serenely indifferent to the outcome of these midterm elections in two and a half weeks time because he hasn't had much use for Congress in the first place He can see Republicans now beginning to develop a bit of spine, beginning to be prepared to stand up to him. And in a way, if and when, as seems highly likely, Democrats possibly take control of both houses of Congress, they're certainly on the brink of taking control of the House of Representatives, and the Senate looks increasingly propitious for them. Well, how big of a problem is that for Donald Trump? He's going to face opposition from Republicans, and in a way, it will be easier for him to spend the next two years... engaged in scorched earth policy against the Democrats because then he'll have a new target to go after. And of course, it wouldn't be the first time that a president who got a shellacking as Bush called it in the midterm elections will spend the next two years doing stuff on the foreign stage. God help us all. Final one, Katie Zacharia, not a household name, but maybe she maybe she had the shortest time ever to become a household name because she only survived for five days. And I love this. The first statement from the White House is that Katie Zachariah, the ill-fated press spokeswoman, was transitioning. Yes. Right. Can you imagine Trump saying, not you're fired, but you're transitioned? Well, of course, what we now know, thanks to the overnight reporting of The Wall Street Journal, who had a reporter in the White House interviewing Katie Zachariah at the moment when there was a knock on the door from Jason Miller, White House presidential adviser to Donald Trump, saying, And I've got to interrupt you. J.D. Vance would like a word with both of us. Can we go and have a chat with J.D. Vance? So it was J.D. Vance who fired her. And J.D. Vance fired her while Donald Trump was on the White House driveway about to depart on the lawn, telling reporters that Katie was reconsidering her position. He told her that she should ask herself, does she really want to do this? And when he was asked, how long are you going to give her? He said, well, I'll talk to her when I come back from the campaign rally that I'm going off to. So he left it to J.D. Vance to fire her. And he's promised her some sort of position, you know, further down the line. This was never going to work, Matt. Why was she hired in the first place? Because Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, pretty much the final, vaguely restraining influence on Donald Trump was not around. And so he turned on the advice of hard right figures, including Rick Grenell, for whom Katie Zakaria had previously worked. Remember Rick Grenell, the man that he put in charge of the Kennedy Center when he renamed it? Who's having his own fight with someone in the White House. It's all falling apart, isn't it? Absolutely. And so he selected this QAnon conspiracy theory believing far right individual without any great communication skills. And certainly none of the intellectual heft you need for the job. Whatever you think of Caroline Leavitt, whatever you think of Caroline Leavitt, she was a great communicator. She had the gift of the gab and she understood how to see the position of the president's opponents and push back against it. Katie Zakaria was never, ever going to be the person who could do that job. The minute she was appointed, I knew we were going to end up here. I didn't think we'd end up here quite this rapidly. Half a mooch. Yeah. Or a tenth of a truss. Just very quickly, Caroline Leavitt, who I agree was incredibly effective and sometimes aggressively so. Why do you think she resigned? Was it because she just had a kid and Trump didn't put her on the train that was going to save his life and she had to be on the plane with all the other journalists? Yeah, I'm not sure the plane... Well, actually, she wasn't on the plane, so I'm not sure the plane played into it. I think that the reality was that she just had a second child. She found that he was unbelievably communicative during her maternity leave. Kept phoning her up, kept demanding her time, often on social hours. And, you know, I think she felt like she'd done the job. I also think, by the way, that her departure was not catastrophic for him because to have her on CNN now as a contributor, I think that helps him. Gets one of his great communicators and backers out there. But he needed to find a replacement who was going to be up to the task. And in Zachariah, he completely failed. The search goes on. The job is yours, Simon, if you want it. It's bound to knock on your door.