Transcript: GOP Senator’s Harsh Takedown of Trump Hits the Mark
Young: Well, yes. Musk, in particular, has been using Russian talking points for years, so his position on NATO isn’t really anything new. Vance has done the same thing. Vance did the same thing in his attacks on Zelenskiy in the Oval Office, and he was really interesting in that regard. When Zelenskiy pressed him about having never visited Ukraine, Vance made some comments about how he consults the internet and how that has informed his understanding of what’s going on in Ukraine. I’d say that he absolutely doesn’t understand based on that, and from the reception in the Oval Office made that clear.
For example, we have a wartime leader who was 73 percent approval rating—this is Zelenskiy—and who has clearly been invaded by a neighboring country. There have been war crimes; there have been huge losses of both civilian life, of Ukrainian soldiers who fought very bravely on behalf of their country; and [there are] children kidnapped and forcibly removed to Russia. There’s a litany of things that Vance doesn’t know about, and Musk doesn’t know about. Musk famously appeared, just a few weeks ago, at the conference of the AfD in Germany and has promoted far-right parties specifically, as has Vance. Vance met with Alice Weidel, the head of the AfD in Germany, when he was at the Munich security conference; [he] famously [did] not meeting with Olaf Scholz, who was the German chancellor at the time. So they seem to be coordinating with far-right parties in Europe in particular. What this leads to, and this galvanization of the global far right, is really transparent.
Sargent: Trump and Vance are never actually candid about what they want to happen in Russia and Ukraine. They don’t want peace on any terms that require Russia to make real concessions. We never hear them calling on Russia to end its invasion. Now it’s been reported that Britain and France will negotiate with Ukraine to produce some set of terms for a plausible ceasefire and then present this to the U.S. There’s a lot we don’t know about this, but for now, should we at least hope that this process puts a bit more pressure on Trump and Vance to say what they really mean when they say they want peace between Russia and Ukraine?
