Trump’s Putin Deal Is a Disgraceful Act of Betrayal

Hey, everyone. It's me, Sam Stein, managing out of the book. I'm joined by Catherine Rampel, author of the receipts and hosts of the receipts pod, which is now two times a week putting Catherine to work. You don't mind, do you? Not at all. It's always a pleasure, especially when I get to be involved with you, Sam. No one's going to believe that. All right, before we get into, we're going to be talking a lot about this insane deal that Trump has cut with Vladimir Putin to basically export Russian diesel to the United States. That's causing both incredible rifts internationally. Zelensky has already responded by attacking more Russian refineries. And on top of that is a real middle finger to Congress, which just a month ago passed an entirely big peace legislation designed to increase sanctions on Russia and Russian oil and people who are doing business of Russia, the irony, the insults so on and so forth. But before we do that, a quick couple of disclaimers, one, we have a fall tour. It is starting very, very soon. We have sold out the first two shows in Colombia and Charlotte, but we have one show left that hasn't sold out in Atlanta on October 20th. Folks, Atlanta, what gives? George is the epicenter of politics. You guys got to come to the show. I'm embarrassed for you by the tickets. Get there. It's going to be a great night. We have a lot of people from the Bullock that are going to be there. It's going to be a fun show. Get your tickets. Go to the bullock.com/events October 20th in Atlanta. Come on, Atlanta show up. And secondly, we have a deal currently going at the Bullwork. 30% off if you subscribe to our substack feed. You get 30% off for the year. The deal is still going on. Only a few more days left of it. So I would jump on it. It is such a steal. It's great content. You get to read all the stuff I'm gathering for free and a lot more. All right. Let's get into it. So yesterday Trump out of the blue puts up a bleat. Let's put it up on the screen if we can. It says this. I've just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to American and global marketplace and the 500,000 tons during the month of November and a million tons immediately thereafter, additionally based on the condition of their diesel refineries. Russia will then deliver within a short period of time three million tons of diesel fuel, who knows if these numbers are actually accurate, but we're going to get into that in second. I'm not going to read the rest of it because he just complains about the trade of farmers and so on and so forth. But Catherine, let's start with the Lindsey Graham Sanctions act in how hilarious and ridiculous this is that three weeks, literally three weeks after he signed that act into law, we get this. >> hilarious is not the adjective I would use. I would say traitorous, basically. I think he's a traitor here. The Congress passed this law, again in honor of Lindsey Graham, designed to encourage the president to ramp up sanctions on Russia and anyone who does business with Russia. The idea was that this would give Donald Trump the power to impose 100% tariffs on the biggest purchasers of Russian oil, Russian gas, and anyone who was facilitating the evasion of sanctions, right? So all of this was kind of ill-defined or undefined, I should say, meaning that it gave Donald Trump a lot of power to decide how to measure who was evading sanctions, or who was facilitating the evasion of sanctions, or even who was purchasing the most oil and gas. Well, guess what? The answer to that question, the person who is helping facilitate the evasion of the sanctions, or at least the nullification of the sanctions, as well as facilitate the purchase of Russian oil, is drumroll please the United States. That is because Donald Trump has decided to betray Ukraine, betray our allies, and the friend, Vladimir Putin. And I think it's really awful. I don't find it funny. I think that we have been, the United States has been for a very, very long time, sort of a moral leader around the world. Forget about the world's policeman and the actual deployment of weaponry around the world. We have been trying to rally much of the world to our side, to our values. And this undermines all of that. Instead, right now, what you have is countries like Australia saying, hell no, we're not going to buy Russian oil. You have a couple of other countries in Europe, I believe it was Germany and the UK have also come out and said, we are not going to buy Russian oil. You know why? Because they don't want to fund Vladimir Putin's war chest to help him destroy one of our crucial allies, Ukraine. So I don't know, I just think this whole thing is like basically evil. And you know, the whole reason he's doing it obviously is because we have the midterms coming up. And he needs the diesel on the market. He needs the diesel on the market, but you know why he needs the diesel on the market? Because he's the one who took the diesel off of the market. Right. Right. The reason why diesel is so expensive right now is predominantly because of the war in Iran. So yeah, you make a very compelling case. I take back the hilarious side, I was mostly, I was mostly laughing at members of Congress honestly. Fair, fair, laugh away. They should be ashamed, who basically spent a couple of weeks following Lindsey Graham's death touting how sincere and emotional this cause was for them, that they had to do this to honor the legacy of their fallen colleague and how this would be a very genuine effort to actually put the clamps down on Poon. And you wrote it at the time that there were huge escape hatches in the legislation that would basically empower Trump to just put sanctions on whatever country he wanted and not force him necessarily to sanction Russia. And within three weeks, you were proven accurate. And the morons up on the hill who insisted that they had to do this look like total fools. And I can't imagine a single one of them, maybe a handful coming out and being like, no, this is not right. And you shouldn't do this. And this goes against the letter of the law. But frankly, what are they going to do? Right. Like they basically handed them a cudgel. And he just turned around and did the exact opposite of their intentions. Not even a cudgel. I think of the power that they gave this president as almost like the nuclear bomb of tariff authorities. Right. Because again, the name of this bill was like the Lindsey Graham Russia sanctions act. But it wasn't really about sanctioning Russia. What it did was it gave Donald Trump this unfettered power to impose 100% tariffs on other countries besides Russia because they were doing business with Russia in some fashion or I got a chair for herself now. Well, exactly. There's no, no other option except apparently the tariff ourselves. No, I think what's actually going to happen, what I fear is going to happen anyway, is that not only did Donald Trump undermine the spirit of the law by instead undoing sanctions on Russia, which is what he's done. I think he's probably still going to use those new tariff authorities that nuclear weapon of tariff authorities to tariff other countries. Regardless of again, what the the spirit of the law is on Russia. And regardless of the fact that like if anything, the law suggests that we should be tariffing ourselves, I would not be surprised if he turns around and says, aha, what you've given me Congress is the power to tariff China and the EU and Australia and Canada and anyone else I say has fulfilled the very, very vague criteria written out in this law. So it's just like not only did it not do the good stuff that was in the law or what was supposed to be cast as the good stuff, which was sanctioning Russia. I think it's going to empower him to do a lot of bad stuff beyond just aiding Vladimir Putin's war chest. >> So just to give people a sense of how outrageous it is, it was a year ago or December of 2025, maybe more than a year ago. No, not a year ago, not even a year ago, where we put sanctions on India for importing Russian oil. And now we're doing the exact same thing. Here's Trump. So Trump was asked about this and we're going to get into the geopolitics of it, I will just say that's not necessarily our bread and butter. We have the report on the spy guys coming on in a couple days to talk about this because this is blowing up on an international level. But I want to get into what Trump said when pressed on this and then we can talk about how big a deal it actually is from economic standpoint. So let's play the Thank You Putin clip. Russia, that is a big deal. That is massive amounts of oil coming into our country. And I want to thank President Putin to be honest with you. We have massive amounts of oil being coming into our country. >> So is it a massive amount of oil coming into our country from Russia? >> According to the Wall Street Journal, this is about three weeks worth of filling the current global gap in diesel available. So it's not nothing. I don't know how much it's actually going to move the needle on diesel prices. It'll probably help a little bit for a little bit of time, maybe just enough until the midterms. But I don't think it's going to provide the tremendous relief that Donald Trump claims that it will, in part because even if they actually do intend to fulfill those order flows, basically, again, to fill the gap for three weeks, I'm not sure that Russia can actually execute it because a lot of the refineries are offline, which we can talk about why that is. Thank you, Zelensky, but a lot of the refineries are offline. So it's not clear that they have the capacity to deliver this, even if they did. Like, I don't think it's going to help that much for that long, but maybe he thinks it's going to be just enough to get him over the line to the midterms. Now, just because it's not a big deal to the global market, doesn't mean it's not a big deal to Russia, right? Like, this is the piggy bank for Russia. This is the main way that they have to raise funds so that they can continue terrorizing Ukraine, which is selling their energy to the rest of the world. Yeah. So to your point about whether Russia can in fact supply what apparently Donald Trump says they promised to supply overnight, there was footage that came out of Russia, and you could see right there. This is vis-à-vis the Hormuz letter, which is one of those accounts has been closely monitoring what's happening in Russia and Ukraine. And what they say is that Ukraine in here has struck a oil products export terminal in Russia, set it ablaze hours after the U.S. Russia diesel deal in which Trump decided to live sanctions on Russia fuel exports. So Zelensky as well this morning put out a tweet where he explained why he's doing this. And I'll read from the tweet because, I mean, it makes a fairly persuasive case. He writes, "Today, Russia expressed its thanks for lifting the sanctions of diesel exports by dropping five glide bombs on residential buildings. As of now, I'm not going to try to pronounce the Ukrainian term in this album, Zapparija, thank you. I appreciate that. As of now, sadly, 12 people have been confirmed killed including three children. My condolences to all their families and loved ones and other 14 people have been injured. And two of them are in critical condition. I'll keep going down to the second graph last night. And from once again, that in Russia, they take any using a pressure to mean that they can keep fighting, to mean that they can keep dropping bombs. You can say these different signals are needed. Russia must understand that it needs to stop the war. And for that to happen, Russia must feel its losses. Right now, it's our long-range capabilities that are ensuring this. And we will respond to Russian strikes. I think everyone who is helping. So basically Zalinsky saying, if I'm summarizing correctly, Russia is financially benefiting from the sale of oil. They use the sale of oil and the money they get from that to purchase weapons that they then use to bomb Ukraine. Ergo, we have to stop the sale of Russian oil. And it doesn't matter if the United States is the one who's buying it. So that's where we're at, where Trump by doing this has basically, and maybe deliberately, pitted himself against Zalinsky. Yeah, there's been reporting and a bunch of different outlets. I saw it, I think, in the journal on the FT, that there were these meetings between the U.S. and Ukraine in Miami in which it was conveyed that Trump really wanted the Ukrainians to stop bombing oil refineries. Again, because there are these domestic political considerations regarding the cost of diesel and gasoline in the United States. And the Ukrainians were like, no, that's our best weapon that we have. Putin, I mean, this is my side commentary, but Putin doesn't seem to care how many of his own citizens he throws into the meat grinder. They've sustained tons and tons of losses, personnel losses and other human costs. But Putin does seem to care about the actual economic damage here and his ability to continue waging this war. So, like, of course, the Ukrainians are going to hit him where it hurts. If it's not actual human casualties, it's going to be refinery casualties, and then they all will say, even went further with another post at roughly 8 a.m. this morning. Here we go. What allowing Russia to sell oil products means was heard most clearly and keep just now when after repeated tax on energy facilities with jet-power Shaheeds, Russia launched a ballistic missile attack as well. Some of the missiles were intercepted. This one's can clearly demonstrate Russia's true intentions. They cannot prolong or terrorizing ordinary people and destroying infrastructure. Every additional billion dollars they can earn from exports will be spent on nothing but sourcing and importing critical components and equipment to manufacture weapons. I'll keep going. Unfortunately, the signals Russia received yesterday were entirely different. That's a direct reference to Trump. Signals suggesting that he could simply keep attacking, and this needs to be corrected. Strong signals are needed from the United States, Europe, and other partners. Signals in support of Ukraine and to restrict Russia's ability to wage war and terrorize people. So, yeah, he's not hiding his point here. He's going to keep attacking. And to your point that you mentioned the FT article, there's a piece in Axios, which is certainly plugged in with the Trump National Security Apparatus, where they noted that Trump decided to make this deal. After Zelensky, what they said, ignored half a dozen years requested to stop attacking Russian oil refineries. A U.S. official direct knowledge told Axios. And then they quote the official saying, Zelensky is misreading the room by continuing to hit refineries, eroding the goodwill that he has built with Trump over the last six months, which now it's my time to get saying to Monies about this. That's outrageous. Yeah. It's outrageous, quote. They're basically saying that they, I mean, if that's not siding with the Russians, I'm not quite sure how else you can read it. Well, it's also bizarre that this is phrased as he's, you know, for whatever it was, frittering away his goodwill with Donald Trump. The whole point of the goodwill with Donald Trump, the whole reason to cultivate goodwill with Donald Trump is so that Donald Trump could help Ukraine defeat Russia, right? What's the point of keeping the goodwill if you can't use it for the main thing that they want, which is their existential threat facing their country? Yes. And similarly, there was a story. I think it was in the FT that said that the, the American side basically told Ukraine, well, if you keep striking Russia, we're not going to continue sharing intelligence with you. And again, what's the point of receiving the intelligence if you can't act on it? Right? Like, why would you care about having access to this information? I mean, I guess maybe there's some defensive purposes that the, the intelligence might be useful for our colleagues over on the reporter in the spy can talk about that. But it's like, you're going to take away the information that you're saying we can't use anyway. What's the point there? What's the point of cultivating goodwill? What's the point of, of wanting access to this intelligence, presumably critical intelligence from the United States? If then you cannot use it for your own survival or your own ability to attack Russia where it hurts. So it's just like, I feel like there are parallels to a lot of the other kinds of things that Donald Trump has done throughout government, where he basically says like, you know, I read a lot about the Fed, right? It's like the Fed, you can stay independent as long as you do what I want, right? All of these people in Congress, you can continue to be unprimaryed as long as you like do what I want. And, you know, it's like, it, when you take away someone's agency on condition of, of, of your help to them, like what, what's even the point? Well, there's no, yeah, there's no agency after that. Yeah, exactly. Well, we'll stay on top of this. Like we mentioned, reporter spy guys are going to get into it a lot. It is a live wire. So to speak this morning is got a number of breaking developments that suggest a, I mean, there's really no other way to read it. A real sort of showdown moment between Zelensky and Trump and potentially a real rupture here between the U.S. Ukraine relations because Trump needs oil on the market plan and simple. Again, because he's the one who took it off the market. It's important to note that every time we bring it up. All right. That's Catherine Impell. I'm Sam Stein Atlanta. I'm watching you. I'm watching those ticket sales like a hawk purchasing tickets for us October 20th in Atlanta. Go to the book to come slash events. And again, we were 30% off sale currently for the book on sub-stack. So check that out as well. Catherine, have a great rest of your weekend. Okay. Thanks, Sam.