Name: Is This Ukraine’s Turning Point? | The Long Game
Uploaded: 2025-11-22T16:53:29.000Z
Duration: 59 min 7 s
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Adverbs of manner

To call it a peace plan is probably a misnomer.

Adverbs of degree

It's really basically a repackaging of Russia's demands that they have had since the start of the war.

You know, corruption in Ukraine is a major problem.

We wrestled with this problem day in, day out during the course of of our administration.

We are seeing in living color, out of the mouths of Trump administration officials, a cry, a raising of a red flag that says, hey, we're in trouble on the cyber front because we've sent all our people to work on the immigration front.

What we're talking about, bas, basically, is, I think, the largest overhaul of the national security bureaucracy that we have had since 9 11.

From the Vox Media podcast network, this is the long Game.

John, where are you coming to us from today?

Well, I happen to be in Singapore, and it's a strange feeling.

I can see just behind you looking out your window.

What looks like the New England countryside is where I grew up.

I'm in Concord, New Hampshire, a place you know well, since you are the product of Hanover High School and New Hampshire sports.

And this was the site of some of your great youthful glories.

happy that you've moved to New England, finally seen the light, and

adopted a worthwhile part of the country to be hanging out.

So when I look out my window right now, I see stick season.

The leaves are off the trees, but the snow hasn't fallen yet.

I now have a good sense of what stick season is, although I think he was talking about Vermont, not New Hampshire, but

Possible that he's the most famous graduate of my high school.

And that's not a bad one to have, actually.

Well, we now have two episodes under our belt.

We'll have an opportunity to do something we don't always get to do, which is check our own homework.

Last week, we previewed a bit Mohammed bin Salman's visit to Washington, which took place this week.

So we'll check in on how we did in setting that up and how the president and Mohammed bin Salman did in actually conducting that meeting and what came out of it.

We'll also talk a little bit about what could be a pretty consequential week, I think, in the Russia, Ukraine war, where you have a confluence of a couple of things.

An emerging corruption scandal in Ukraine and then an effort by the Trump administration to launch another attempt to make peace between the two parties.

And then we're gonna do a tabletop exercise that kind of serves as a snapshot of how the national security apparatus of the United States is dealing with the fact that the Trump administration has basically moved a huge amount of it to work on immigration enforcement, immigration roundups, rather than what their core jobs were in law enforcement or cybersecurity.

I'll jump in on the first topic here, which is MBS's visit, which, as you said, we previewed last week.

And I guess what I would start by saying is just to talk about the imagery there in the Oval Office.

You know, if you had shown me a photo 5, 10 years ago of the President and the putative leader of Saudi Arabia standing in front of this golden adorned backdrop, I would have said they were in Riyadh, not in Washington, D.C.

we have an extremely respected man in the Oval Office today and a friend of mine for a long time, a very good friend of mine, and

What he's done is incredible in terms of human rights and everything else.

But somehow President Trump has turned the Oval Office into quite the shiny place.

It looks almost unrecognizable from when we were there just a year ago.

And they stood there right in front of the press and President Trump held forth about how much he loves mbs, how much he loves Saudi Arabia.

And then there was this quite striking moment where a reporter asked about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

President Trump jumped in and basically said things happen, and

then went on to kind of berate the reporter.

Before we get into the substance and kind of a little bit grade our homework of how we set this up in the preview.

John, what do you make of just this spectacle in the Oval, the complexity of this relationship, the personal dealings between these two guys?

What was your reaction when you watched all this go down?

One is, in addition to the new adornments that the President has made to the Oval Office, there's another big difference about how they kind of conduct their business when they have foreign visitors, which is the traditional appearance in front of the press in the Oval Office is a pretty scripted, pretty rote, pretty simplistic affair where, you know, one side, the hosts, the President welcomes, the other, says how happy he is to have the visitor there.

The visitor expresses gratitude for being hosted, and they kind of get on with their lives.

Maybe there's a word or two about policy.

President Trump does this in a very different way.

These appearances in front of the cameras in the Oval Office before the meeting has even taken place can last an hour.

And often the biggest news of these visits comes out of this somewhat impromptu back and forth with the press.

And that was the case for this meeting, as you said.

There was this pretty heated exchange, by the way.

The president didn't just say things happen, he actually sort of blamed the victim.

You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial.

A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about.

Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it, and

You don't have to embarrass our guests by asking a question like that.

Quite something striking and I think, you know, just pretty appalling in a lot of ways.

But this relationship, as you said, is a super complicated one.

You know, we wrestled with it during the course of our administration.

I think ultimately got to a place where we could work constructively with Saudi Arabia, having taken some actions against them in the wake of this killing.

President Trump, as we said last week, has just had a fundamentally different approach, never really acknowledging that there was any wrongdoing on the part of the Saudis, let alone on the part of mbs.

And in this case, going one step further and actually saying, you know, the guy kind of had it coming, which is a wild statement from the President of the United States, you know, just to spend one more minute on what it's like preparing for these Oval Office meetings.

The press coming in, the president, the guests making comments, press going out.

It was the tradition through multiple administrations.

And that's how President Biden approached it as well.

This kind of freewheeling circus that Trump does.

It's gotta be especially hard for authoritarian leaders who are not actually used to facing the press.

I remember in our administration when Prime Minister Modi came, who's not an authoritarian, technically, is a democratically elected leader, but

with some authoritarian tendencies that he had not taken a question from the press in a press conference in several years.

And we had to have an extensive negotiation because after that, the back and forth in the Oval, there was going to be a formal press conference, and

it's hard to have a formal press conference if one of the two people in the press conference won't answer questions.

So we finally got the NDN delegation to agree that Prime Minister Modi would take a question from an American reporter.

But that took weeks of negotiating and was, as I mentioned, the first time he'd done it in a very long time.

And then I also remember when we were in Bali with Xi Jinping, in the summit between President Biden and President Xi, a reporter tried to shout.

That was one where each side just said their 30 seconds.

But at the end of it, a reporter tried to shout a, quote, question about human rights, and

actually got physically pulled back by a Chinese security person or a delegation member.

So the Chinese were just ready for the US Press to jump in, and

And there was reporting about that in the days that followed.

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Is This Ukraine’s Turning Point? | The Long Game

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