• President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traded public barbs on Wednesday, one day after top White House and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia to discuss ways to end the war in Ukraine. Zelenskyy said Trump is living in a ‘web of disinformation,’ while Trump falsely accused Zelenskyy of being a ‘dictator without elections.’ With the three-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor coming up next week, the Trump administration’s decision to sideline Ukraine and Europe in favor of direct talks with Russia underscores the ways the president is throwing traditional U.S. alliances out the window. Julia Ioffe, Washington correspondent at Puck News and a long-time observer of Russian politics, explains what the U.S. selling out Ukraine could mean for the world order.
• And in headlines: A top DOJ officials defended the decision to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in court, Trump signed an executive order to expand his control over independent regulatory agencies, and Civil Rights groups sues the Trump Administration over its anti-DEI and anti-trans actions.

• Check out Julia’s work – puck.news/author/julia-ioffe/
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• Support victims of the fire – votesaveamerica.com/relief
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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Thursday, February 20th. I’m Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, the show that is thrilled President Donald Trump is coming up with brand new definitely never ever used ways to combat teen drug use. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Because we’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising how bad drugs are so that kids don’t use them, that they chew up your brain, they destroy your teeth, your skin, your everything. 

Jane Coaston: Yes. Let’s spend hundreds of millions of dollars on TV ads to tell kids how bad drugs are. This has never been tried before. What groundbreaking information we’re learning. [music break] On today’s show, New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case and political future are still uncertain. And Elon Musk wants to buy your favor. But let’s start with the war in Ukraine and President Donald Trump’s decision that the best way to end it is to make Russia happy while bashing Ukraine along the way. We’ve been talking on the show this week about Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s meetings with Russian diplomats in Saudi Arabia in an effort to end the war in Ukraine that Russia launched by invading the sovereign country in February 2022. Notably, Ukraine has not been invited to those meetings. And Trump has made it clear over the last few days why. He thinks the war is Ukraine and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s fault. On Tuesday, Trump said Ukraine should have, quote, “never started the war.” The one which you might recall, it didn’t start. Zelensky shot back Wednesday, saying Trump was in a web of disinformation and that the U.S. is doing Russia a favor. [clip of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking] He says there, I would like Trump’s team to have more truth. All of this definitely doesn’t have a positive impact on Ukraine. They are letting Putin out of isolation. And I think Putin and Russians are really happy. But Trump kept hammering the Ukrainian president Wednesday, writing on Truth Social in part, quote, “Europe has failed to bring peace and Zelensky probably wants to keep the gravy train going.” And he doubled down on his attacks on Zelensky during remarks he gave at a Saudi investment conference in Miami Beach. He skewered Zelensky before launching into his diatribe against Ukraine. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] The modestly successful comedian, President Zelensky talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion to go into a war that basically couldn’t be won. That never had to start. 

Jane Coaston: And he kept going. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] He refuses to have elections, is low in the real Ukrainian polls. I mean, how can you be high with every city is being demolished? It’s hard to be, somebody said, oh no, his polls are good. Give me a break. Every city is being demolished. They look like a demolition site, every single one of them. And the only thing he was really good at was playing Joe Biden like a fiddle. He played him like a fiddle. That’s an expression we use yes sir, to say that uh he’s pretty easy. Pretty easy. A dictator without elections. Zelensky better move faster or he’s not going to have a country left. 

Jane Coaston: But Russia, the country that started the war that’s killed thousands of people, the one doing the demolishing of all those cities Trump talked about. According to the Trump administration, they now get normalized diplomatic relations with the United States and priority in negotiations aimed at ending the war they started. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance seem to now view Russia as a partner and potential ally. But while they may talk about wanting a lasting peace between Russia and Ukraine with the borders established nearly a decade ago, NBC News reported Tuesday that intelligence shows Putin wants something else, all of Ukraine. This is part of an overall shift in American foreign policy away from our traditional allies and towards countries whose leaders espouse right wing cultural talking points and a belief in wielding power for power’s own sake. So I had to talk to Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News and a long time observer of Russian politics. Julia, welcome to What a Day. 

Julia Ioffe: Thanks for having me, Jane. 

Jane Coaston: So what did you make of the talks this week between U.S. officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia? What to you was the most notable thing that’s been coming out of them? 

Julia Ioffe: Well, the most notable thing has been the fact that this is it. This is the new American foreign policy that when we talk about American allies, etc., we’re not talking about the same parties anymore. We’re no longer talking about uh NATO. We’re not talking about the EU, Emmanuel Macron or the Christian Democrats in Germany. We’re talking about Vladimir Putin. Viktor Orban of Hungary, the AfD in Germany. Those are the new American allies because that is who ideologically aligns with the Trump Vance administration. Unfortunately, that means that our allies like Ukraine get tossed under the bus. Or rather, I mean, I think being tossed under the bus would be preferable at this point to what is happening. I think they’re going to be carved up and sold for parts. 

Jane Coaston: I keep thinking about like, what does the U.S. get out of sidelining Ukraine in favor of direct peace talks with Russia, the aggressor who invaded them? Like, what is the upside for us? Because I’m looking at the conversation and Putin still wants more. He still has more demands. 

Julia Ioffe: I also don’t know what we’d be getting, but the Russians did uh through the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund who was uh brought to the meeting. He presented a document to the American side that said, hey, American companies have lost over $300 billion by pulling out of Russia in the wake of the full scale invasion three years ago. And they could make a lot of money, especially the U.S. oil majors, if they were to come back into Russia. And, of course, that really comports with Putin’s view of Americans, which is that we’re soft, cowardly, fickle and motivated exclusively by money, that we don’t have this kind of soul the way Russians do for which we’re willing to die. 

Jane Coaston: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has compared what’s happening in Ukraine now to the way the Trump administration set the table to pull out of the war in Afghanistan by negotiating directly with the Taliban over the US backed government at the time. We saw what happened there. The Taliban now once again controls Afghanistan, which is bad. Can you tease out that analogy a little bit as it relates to Ukraine? What happens if Ukraine becomes Afghanistan 2.0, as Zelensky says? 

Julia Ioffe: Well uh, Ukraine has a history of guerrilla war, um of fighting powers they don’t agree with. You know, a few days ago, my grandmother passed away. She was 96, and she was from [?] In central Ukraine. And her older brother, who died a couple of years before her, was a doctor. And he was posted by the Soviet government to [?] in the far west of Ukraine in 1947, two years after the end of World War Two. And in the middle of the night, he was kidnapped by Ukrainian nationalist guerillas who were still fighting in the forests of western Ukraine because one of their commanders had broken his leg and they needed somebody to fix it. But basically, like they did this in Soviet times, they did this in Tsarist times. And the promise seems to be that we will do this to Putin as well, even if it’s in the form of guerilla warfare. And I think the Russians understand that because everywhere that they’ve occupied, they’ve had to use brutally repressive, basically counterinsurgency techniques to pacify the population uh if you recall, in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, when the Ukrainian forces liberated it, they found a uh torture chamber that was specifically for teenagers because they needed them to rat out their parents, their teachers, etc.. Um. Mass graves. They keep being found in parts of Ukraine that are retaken. Um. I think that’s also what awaits Ukraine if they are subjugated by Russia. 

Jane Coaston: Zelensky has been escalating his attacks on Trump, saying Wednesday that the president is caught in a web of disinformation. What risks do you think Zelensky is taking here by being more aggressive in confronting Trump this way? 

Julia Ioffe: Well, he got an immediate response from J.D. Vance, who told the Daily Mail from the West Wing that Zelensky risked a major blow up by bad, quote, “badmouthing Trump” and that this was despicable and that he was disrespecting the will of the American people. The thing is that he has a whole country to answer to. And if he were to just kind of roll over for Trump, I don’t know that the Ukrainian people would like that very much. Um. Ukrainians are rightly, incredibly offended and terrified by what has been coming out of Washington for the last week. 

Jane Coaston: If Trump does sell out Ukraine even more than he already has and Russia is able to claim the eastern parts of the Ukraine it’s currently occupying and also keep Crimea, which he took over in 2014. What would that signal to Putin? Because I’m guessing he’s not going to be like, oh I’m done now, we’re good. 

Julia Ioffe: Wow, Jane, you really got this guy. You have his number. I mean, that’s that’s the thing, right? That’s the that’s why there have been so many Munich comparisons floating around because Putin has never hidden his desire to dismantle Ukraine as a separate entity. And that is why he has been demanding new elections before any peace deal can be signed, because he needs a puppet regime, one that he can fully control in Kyiv. That’s what he wants. He wants a completely supplicant um colonized Ukraine. And the fact that Trump is echoing that is insane. But yeah, he’s not going to stop. There was an intelligence assessment that came out earlier this week or that was leaked earlier this week that Putin would never stop. But that is I mean, file that under no shit, Sherlock. 

Jane Coaston: And what would this mean for Europe more broadly? What would selling out Ukraine mean for the continent? 

Julia Ioffe: I think there are other echoes there. For example, of Syria, I think would mean another flood of refugees into Europe which would further destabilize the polittics of the continent and probably further empower far right parties and movements on the continent. I think that would be the end of NATO. I think that would be also the end of Europe as a kind of real political force. The other broader kind of even more global implication is that it would drive home a point that Putin has been making for years now, decades. Is that. Look, guys, America will be your ally. And then a year and a half later, they’ll have congressional elections or presidential elections. And the policy will flip because different people will come into office and you’ll be thrown under the bus. Whereas if you’re our ally, we will stick with you to the bitter end. This is why it was so important to stick by Bashar al-Assad until the very end. It was to show that this is how we treat our allies versus how the fickle Americans treat theirs. And I think that is a message that’s aimed over the heads of Europe and the West, more at the global South. 

Jane Coaston: Now, Trump being Trump, he’s now taken to calling Zelensky, not Putin, a dictator, because as you mentioned, Ukraine hasn’t had elections since Russia invaded three years ago. And you tweeted an, on Wednesday, quote, “If the kind of elections that Putin has are more legitimate and Trump says than the ones that put Zelensky in power, you can expect to start seeing many such elections here in the US. Mark my words.” Can you unpack what you’re saying there? 

Julia Ioffe: Well, you know, the joke kind of going around among liberals since Election Day was that that was our last election, that there won’t be elections. But if Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin have taught right wingers all over the world, one thing is that you don’t have to get rid of elections. You just have to engineer them very carefully. And that way you can maintain a patina of legitimacy. You know, for example, Putin had elections more recently than Zelensky. Of course, he ran against dummy candidates. Voting was rigged and election boxes were stuffed by election workers and no true opposition candidate ran. Nor have they had access to state controlled media for decades. So my point is why get rid of elections when you can just engineer them to go your way and say, look, the people elected me, this is it’s not it’s not me. I’m not forcing myself on the people. The people are asking me to do this. Um. And given how many American states are run entirely by the GOP, which is run entirely by Donald Trump, who’s to say? 

Jane Coaston: Julia, thank you so much for joining me today. 

Julia Ioffe: You’re so welcome. I hope I’ve improved your mood. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Julia Ioffe, a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe. Leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. Watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of people chanting] Adams, you suck. Adams, you suck.

Jane Coaston: Catchy. A top Department of Justice official was in Manhattan court Wednesday to justify the decision to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Adams was also in the courtroom and protesters showed up outside the courthouse to boo him on his way in. Federal prosecutors charged Adams with bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and more back in September. But last week, Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, ordered prosecutors to drop the case entirely. He argued in the memo and in court Wednesday that Mayor Adams can’t do his job and enforce Trump’s immigration crackdown if he’s under criminal investigation. Several department prosecutors resigned in protest. Adams maintained his innocence in court on Wednesday, saying, quote, “I have not committed a crime.” But that argument could be moot if New York Governor Kathy Hochul uses her state constitutional power to remove Adams from office. She met with city officials to discuss the possibility on Tuesday after four of Adams’s deputies resigned over the scandal. U.S. District Judge Dale Ho, a Biden appointee, did not issue a ruling as of our recording time Wednesday night. He said that he needs more time to make a decision. Trump signed an executive order Tuesday intended to give the White House more control over independent regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission. White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf announced the order for Trump at a press conference Tuesday. 

[clip of Will Scharf] This executive order would establish important oversight functions in the Office of Management and Budget and its subsidiary office, OIRA, supervising independent agencies and many of their actions, and also reestablishes the longstanding norm that only the president or the Attorney general can speak for the United States when stating an opinion as to what the law is. 

Jane Coaston: Well, boy, that was boring. But the TLDR version of that wonky government speak is that the order gives Trump more power over agencies that Congress set up specifically to have some independence from the White House. The order requires independent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. It also gives the White House the power to block them from spending money on projects that don’t align with the president’s priorities. The order says, quote, “For the federal government to be truly accountable to the American people, officials who wield vast executive power must be supervised and controlled by the people’s elected president.” The order is expected to face legal challenges. Civil rights groups sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, arguing that some of the president’s executive orders discriminate against Black and transgender Americans. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Lambda Legal filed a joint federal lawsuit on behalf of three nonprofits that serve unhoused folks, people living with Aids and HIV and urban communities. The suit claims that the president has exceeded his authority by signing executive orders that target diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and establish a binary definition of gender as either male or female. The plaintiffs also argue that these executive orders violate their constitutional right to free speech and equal protection, as well as prevent them from providing essential services to marginalized communities. A White House spokesman said in a statement on Wednesday that lawsuits like this one are, quote, “nothing more than an extension of the left’s resistance” and that “the administration is ready to take them on in court.” 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Elon Musk, he’s been making a little news lately, hasn’t he, though? Very positive news. Stand up Elon, he’s a great guy. 

Jane Coaston: While Trump praised Elon Musk at his Miami Saudi Investor Conference Wednesday, a new poll showed a majority of adults in the U.S. aren’t super thrilled with the billionaire. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Just over half of American adults have an unfavorable view of Musk, the world’s richest man. Hmm. I wonder why. Even less popular is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The poll found two thirds of respondents have an unfavorable view of him. But would $5,000 change your opinion of Musk? He posted on Twitter Tuesday that he’ll, quote, “check with the president about sending out checks to Americans because his Department of Government Efficiency dudes are saving the government so much money with all the cuts they’re making.” The idea started with a tweet from James Fishback, a CEO of the investment firm Azoria. He suggested that tens of millions of households across the country should be eligible for a chunk of DOGE’s $2 trillion in targeted budget cuts or $5,000 for each household. Trump said the concept is under consideration. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] The numbers are incredible, Elon. So many billions of dollars. Billions, hundreds of billions. And we’re thinking about giving 20% back to the American citizens and 20% down to pay back debt. 

Jane Coaston: But before you start figuring out how you’re going to spend a magical check for $5,000, that just shows up. A few things to keep in mind. In an interview on Twitter earlier this year, Musk backed off from the goal of $2 trillion in budget cuts. He said that there’s a good shot of getting half of that. Also to get even close to cutting trillions of dollars. Musk would have to slash popular programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which Trump has said are off limits. And that’s the news. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave a review. Think about whether or not Delta offering you $30,000 would make it okay that your plane flipped over and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how yes, $30,000 is a fair amount of money, but also your plane flipped over like me. What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and Delta, get it together. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters and Julia Claire. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison. And our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. 

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