cism? Yeah, clearly. He’s actually said he loves the heat and it seems to be true. He seems to like the attention. So he shakes the box and gives us a situation we’ve never been in before.

Have we ever been in a situation where we’re doubting our own intel agencies, where we’re tweeting Putin as if he told the truth, while not a single person anywhere on the planet believes he’s telling the truth about everything? Let me say if there’s one thing I can promise you, I would take a bullet on this bet. I would say put a gun to my head and I’ll make a bet and if I’m wrong the bullet shoots and blows my brain out. Here’s the bet: President Trump doesn’t believe what Putin’s saying in public. There’s not even any chance he believes that. There’s not the slightest chance that he believes what Putin is saying.

Now not believing what Putin is saying, what are your two choices? You call him out as a liar and then you go back to the past before the box was shaken, to the path that absolutely wasn’t working. That was your only choice. Nobody has suggested another alternative. There was one choice: go to the path we know doesn’t work because we’ve been trying it, or you shake the hell out of this box and you say the past, I’m actually going to kind of ignore that.

If you looked at Chris Wallace’s interview there were a few things that I thought were insanely important that probably won’t get any light today. One of them was that Putin said that when he talked to Trump about North Korea, wait for this part, that Putin said he understood that for a full denuclearization of the peninsula, the Korean Peninsula, that Russia would have to be part of security guarantees for North Korea. How important is that? All right, if you don’t have Russia, China, the U.S. and South Korea signing up for security guarantees, there isn’t the slightest chance that North Korea is going to get rid of their nukes. Now you know there’s a big question about whether they really care or not, but without that there is no chance. Putin just signed up and announced it on TV. And why wouldn’t he? I mean it seems it’s in his best interest to give the United States what it needs more than anything in the world, which is help with North Korea. Compared to Russia as a risk, Russia is under control. They have zero interest in nuking the United States. But we don’t know about North Korea. We don’t know who they might sell stuff to. That’s a bigger problem. And we may have gotten closer to a solution because Putin on that question is willing to be on our team.

What was the other thing Putin said to Chris Wallace? He said that we also talked about Iran and the Iran question and he hoped, Putin said he hoped that he could be productive on that. Those are our two biggest issues and also basically the entire Syria situation if you consider that part of the Iran question. So these are our biggest international issues and Putin seems to be stepping up on them.

What did we give up? What did the president trade away? Here’s what the president traded away. He put Putin on the international stage, which is something he can take away. And if I’ve taught you nothing, you haven’t given somebody something, you haven’t given anything away if you have the right to take it back in a moment. All the president has to do is take it back. He can push him back off the stage in ten minutes. So Putin is only on the international stage, wait for it, with President Trump’s permission. If President Trump withdraws his permission, if you will, and pushes Putin back to the shadows, who is going to disagree with that? Our allies and around the world? Nobody. Putin is back to something that looks like big-time player on the same stage with Trump only because Trump is allowing it. Who has the leverage? It looks like Trump, because he created, as he always does, an asset that didn’t exist before. It’s the same thing he did with Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-un has something, a little bit of credibility with the world, that he did not have before. President Trump created that credibility out of nothing except persuasion. He just did the same thing in front of you for Putin. He created a version of Putin and a brand that allows Putin to stand on the stage next to the President of the United States. Is that a permanent thing? It is not. It is with permission.

What would happen if Putin says, “I’m not going to meet with you, Mr. President”? Would that diminish the United States? It would not. What happens if President Trump says, “I’m not going to meet with you anymore. You didn’t do your part of the agreement”? Would that diminish Russia and Putin? Yes it would. Putin has something to lose at least in terms of that status thing. Trump really doesn’t. So he’s created an asset out of nothing using persuasion alone.

So you have to look at Trump’s two statements together to understand that. Either one of them. One of his statements was with Russia we have to let go of the past. This is important because if you don’t keep that “let go of the past” thing, t