heir territorial zone, but it is a hot war. It's a hot war. If you fly your military assets in and around a hot war, somebody's going to mess with it.

So I don't know. I think that's just two countries bumping chests. I didn't see much there for a story. You see, neither side once wants it to escalate, so it won't. You would need at least one side to be willing to escalate, and neither side wants to escalate into some direct confrontation. So I don't even have a problem with Russia knocking that drone down. I guess I had some technique where they tried to fly their jets over it and dump their fuel on it. I'd never heard of that. Is that something they invented on the spot or is that an actual thing, dumping your fuel on the drone? But I guess that didn't work. Then somehow they actually clipped the propeller or something. They clipped something and it went down.

But did they intentionally do it? Do you think they intentionally put their jets so close to it that it clipped it and it hurt the drone more than it hurt the jet? You say yes. I can't imagine being brave enough to knock down a drone with my plane and hope that I would get back okay. And that doesn't sound right to me. It sounds like maybe they were getting close to do something else and maybe hit it accidentally. I don't know. Or maybe the drone closed the gap and it wasn't the jet. It's possible the drone went after the jet, which would be dumb. But maybe they thought, well, let's just bump this jet and see what happens. I don't know. None of it I think will become anything big.

You see the New York Times was talking about how DeSantis is now saying he's not crazy about defending Ukraine and then it's a territorial dispute. Now this would put DeSantis in the same bucket as Trump. Trump was already there being not crazy about this war. And as the New York Times put it, if you put the support of Trump plus DeSantis together, 75 percent of Republicans, at least the leaders of 75 percent of Republicans — given that people like different leaders — out of Ukraine, 75 percent.

But here's what's missing in the conversation. I don't think Trump or DeSantis can describe what it looks like if we leave. And without that, it's not a real opinion. It's just a political opinion. Sounds good, sounds good to the base. But what would it look like? How in the world would you not expect the Ukrainian people to be crushed by Russia? You've got to be able to say that out loud. See, if you can't say that out loud, you don't belong in the conversation.

I like the Willie Brown statement on that. Yeah, if you're not willing to say we should get out of there and I fully understand that Ukraine and the Ukrainian people will be crushed by this and I fully understand that it would look like America is backing away from a fight and I fully understand that it could embolden Russia — but we don't know, we don't know, but it could embolden them — that would be a greater risk. And it might give them a recovery time to get their energy dominance back over Europe because you can imagine the Europeans would start signing deals again. Am I wrong? Yeah, they would just start signing deals again as soon as the war was over.

So we'd have to understand that getting out of Ukraine means giving everything back, crushing Ukraine, having wasted our money, wasted a reputation, wasted all those lives. Now, it still might be the best idea. It sounded like I said to you, so don't do it. I didn't say that because I don't know what the best idea is. But I know that I don't want to follow a leader who can't describe it. Just describe your plan.

Here's my plan. We pull out in six months. Russia will definitely wipe out Ukraine. You know, they'll fight boldly but lose in the long run. Then the Ukrainians will maybe be starved like the Holodomor and certainly the older leaders will be executed that we've had over here. And you know, we're pretty happy with Zelenskyy, but he'd obviously be tortured and executed. And just describe it. Now if you can say that directly to the American people and then say, and we should still do it, we should still do it because the alternative is even worse, that's somebody I would believe. That's somebody I could follow. That would be a real leader. Tell us the truth and I can handle the hard truth. I can handle that. I can't handle half a truth. I can't handle an obvious lie. But if DeSantis or Trump could give us the actual truth — here's what it looks like and it's really, really gonna suck for these people but we need to do it — I'll listen to that. I'm not preconvinced, but I'm going to listen to that.

But I'm not going to listen to, oh, we shouldn't be there. Oh, we shouldn't be there is just that's for public consumption. That has nothing to do with policy. That's just for — do you think that if DeSantis became president tomorrow he could actually pull the trigger and start pulling people out? No, it would take about a minute and a half for the what he called the military-industrial complex to own him. Take about a minute and then he'd be like, oh, well, we definitely want to phase out but not so quickly. You know, we have to do it right. So it might take two years, which coincidentally is exactly the amount of time the war would have taken on its own. So I think it would instantly turn into we got to do what we're already doing because it's too late to turn back. I think that's the truth. I think it's too late to turn back. Might be, but we'll see