od for some people and bad for others.

Well, the Ukraine negotiations, the meeting looks like it's going to be on Friday in Alaska and Trump is wisely making sure that his administration is talking to the Europeans because they were fearing being sidelined and left out of the deal and also talking to Zelenskyy and trying to make sure that they're somewhat on the same page. Now, I do agree that Trump should meet with Putin without them because if you add too many voices too soon, nothing good happens. I mean, the decision makers are Putin and probably Trump. Everybody else just has to be browbeat to get on board if they can come up with some kind of a deal. So it does make sense to me that Trump would have this conversation with just Putin. I feel like that moves the ball ahead a little bit. I don't think there's really any chance that they'll make a deal on this one meeting. Do you? I feel like there's not enough to work with. It might be important to the process of continuing to talk and working it out and maybe somebody will come up with the idea that works, but I doubt it.

Here's what I think is going to happen. Axios is reporting that insiders are saying that Trump is quote still pissed off at Putin for yanking him around all these times and not being serious about peace, which is kind of embarrassing for Trump because he made some promises that he could wrap up that war quickly and nothing like that is happening. But if it's true that Trump is pissed off at Putin, then I want this meeting to be between Trump and Putin because if we know anything about Trump, he's going to say something like this. This is also from Axios that there are more ways that basically Trump could close down the Russian economy. Now that would be a much bigger step than anything that's happened so far. But do you think that Trump will threaten it? There's no way that Trump is going to threaten nuclear war because that wouldn't sound believable and it'd be a bad idea. But we know that Trump likes to threaten and I doubt that he's going to have a personal conversation with Putin who he is pissed off at and not threaten him. There's going to be some threats. Now how he words the threats, there's a lot of variability. It might be offensive and it might be polite. We don't know. But I feel like Trump is going to sit in the room with Putin and he's going to say, here's the deal. You just made me look like a chump. No good. I'm going to have to destroy your whole economy unless you give me a peace deal because you made me, Putin, you made me look like an idiot. I promised I would wrap this war up and then you're working on the other side from that. I'm pissed off at you. You need to make this right. Otherwise if you and I are never right, say goodbye to your little economy. I'm going to find 10 new ways to squeeze you into dust because you with me.

Now, would he be able to say that if the room was full of Zelenskyy and European leaders? Not really. Not really. He wouldn't be able to say it as clearly as it needs to be said. But what I suspect is that Trump's leverage is his personal feeling about this. Let me say that again. Putin is working with lots of different variables. You know, there's the military, the economy, there's the personalities and all this. And most of those things he has some kind of advantage. There is one thing he does not have an advantage in, which is how Trump feels about the situation. If he leaves the meeting, Trump, and he's more pissed off at Putin, Putin loses. We don't know what he loses. We don't know if we'll be worse off than Russia will. There'll still be lots of questions. But if he pisses off Trump more than Trump is already pissed off, Trump is going to find a way to close down his whole economy. And he won't really have a choice because you can't let Putin grab you by the nads and swing you around in front of the entire public if you're the United States and certainly if you're Trump. So although I don't believe any of this was planned in a clever way, the situation is that if Putin doesn't give Trump something that Trump can take home and say, you know, we got some progress, there's going to be real trouble. And I think we're at the point where Trump can just squeeze the big Jesus out of what's left of their economy. And he can do it forever and he can just keep making money from Europe buying our weapons. So if Trump creates a situation where the US keeps profiting selling weapons and Putin is just losing stuff, you know, he's just spending money on the war and he's also having his economy squeezed in all the ways that we can squeeze it. Trump has some leverage. So the personal feeling of Trump is his biggest leverage right now. Putin cannot ignore that because Trump won't ignore it and I wouldn't want him to. So maybe something will happen but it will depend how well Trump threatens Putin whether Putin believes it.

Well, to that point, apparently overnight some Russian pipelines an