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'Trump's false version of history': Simon Marks' American Week
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Aug 24, 2025
Donald Trump’s high-stakes Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin has ended without a deal... and the aftermath has Simon Marks concerned. Shortly after threatening Moscow with “very severe consequences,” President Trump appeared to fold under pressure, embracing Putin’s positions on Ukraine, NATO, and a ceasefire: 00:00 Trump’s underwhelming Alaska summit with Putin 03:16 Vladimir Putin's 'parrot' 04:36 Trump's 'false version of history' 07:23 Putin's American election 'interference' 09:08 The FBI raid John Bolton’s home 10:20 Trump's bizarre soliloquy about grass Watch Simon Marks' full breakdown of a remarkable week in American politics. Listen to the full show on the all-new LBC App: https://app.af.lbc.co.uk/btnc/thenewlbcapp #simonmarks #politics #LBC LBC is the home of live debate around news and current affairs in the UK. Join in the conversation and listen at https://www.lbc.co.uk/
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0:00
This time last week, Donald Trump was on his way to Alaska for his fateful summit
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with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Exactly one week ago, President Trump was still indicating
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that unless the Russian leader agreed to a ceasefire in Ukraine, or at the least evinced a clear willingness to begin the process of wrapping his war up
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the president would unleash very severe consequences on Moscow. Remember this bravado
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If I weren't president, in my opinion, he would much rather take off, take over all of Ukraine
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But I am president and he's not going to mess around with me. Well, guess what? He did mess around with him big time
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But only after President Trump clapped like a performing seal, welcoming the arrival of a fishy treat when Putin disembarked from his jet
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and set foot on US soil for the first time in a decade. and only after the US president allowed the Kremlin leader, smiling like the Cheshire cat
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to join him on the back seat of the Beast, Trump's armoured limo, as it conveyed both of them to the summit site
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From there, for Donald Trump, everything went downhill. As we surmised last week on American Week, the Russian president had seen his host coming
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and left Trump's staff reeling. If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe Jackie Heinrich, White House correspondent for Fox News
1:23
It was just very unusual, atypical, and I think we're all awaiting the readout
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because the way that it felt in the room was not good
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It did not seem like things went well and it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled
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got right into what he wanted to say. Who would ever have imagined Vladimir Putin steamrollering Donald Trump
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If only we'd had an inkling. NBC News reported that the president's entourage
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including Special Envoy Steve Whitcoff, looked ashen, as Trump conceded in uncharacteristically brief remarks to the press
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that he'd basically got nowhere. There were many, many points that we agreed on
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most of them I would say, a couple of big ones that we haven't quite gotten there, but we've made some headway
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So there's no deal until there's a deal. What followed next was exactly as Putin had anticipated
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Last Saturday, Trump played a round of golf with Steve Witkoff, the special envoy who has served very much as his Putin whisperer
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By the time it was over, Trump had abandoned all thought of those very severe consequences
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if Putin messed around with him. And instead, he repositioned himself, parroting Putin's positions
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indicating that yes Ukraine should surrender the entire eastern region of Donbass in negotiations that no Ukraine can never be a member of NATO and that the ceasefire he said he coveted
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going into last Friday's Alaska summit was no longer either on the agenda or even necessary
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I don't think you need a ceasefire. You know, if you look at the six deals that I settled this year
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they were all at war. I didn't do any ceasefires. And I know that it might be good to have
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but I can also understand strategically why, well, you know, one country or the other wouldn't want
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it. There is only one country that doesn't want a truce, and it's not the one headed by President
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Volodymyr Zelensky, who was sitting alongside President Trump there on Monday in the Oval
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Office as the US leader embraced Putin's positions. Just on the facts, Trump keeps claiming that he
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settled six wars this year without the need for any ceasefires. Well, that will come as news to
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among others, the Indians and the Pakistanis, as well as the Cambodians and the Thais
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all of whom recently agreed to ceasefires that President Trump at the time claimed he had
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brokered. He did not end wars between them. European leaders, including the Prime Minister
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who raced to Washington to try and flatter President Trump out of Vladimir Putin's orbit
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succeeded in protecting Zelensky from another Oval Office drubbing, but on other issues they made less headway
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Friedrich Mertz, the German Chancellor, did give it the old college try
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The way is open for complicated negotiations, and to be honest, we all would like to see a ceasefire
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the latest from the next meeting on. I can't imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire
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I will say, and again I say it, in the six wars that I've settled, I haven't had a ceasefire
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That is just one example of so many this week where the president concocted facts out of thin air
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And it should be deeply worrying in Kiev at number 10 and all over Europe
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that Ukraine and its allies are now dealing with an American president who cannot even stipulate to facts
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It's not a war that should have been started. You don't do that. You don't take on a nation that's ten times your size
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That was Trump this week falsely claiming yet again that Ukraine started the war
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And in that interview with Fox News, he went much further, revealing a version of history that is flatly incorrect
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and heavily influenced by Putin and his Kremlin talking points. Here he is claiming that Ukraine started the war
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in order to get Crimea back from the Russians who seized it in 2014
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They went in they said we want you you know we want to get Crimea back This was at the beginning Now Putin in all fairness to him he made a good deal He got it from Obama
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All because Barack Hussein Obama gave it away in one of the dumbest real estate deals I've ever seen
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Now, that is completely untrue. You can certainly fault Barack Obama for not taking stronger action to liberate Crimea from Russian annexation
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But he never gave it away in some kind of real estate deal
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to the point where even Trump's government, his own administration, still recognizes Crimea as sovereign Ukrainian territory
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and rejects Russia's claims to it outright. Also in that interview, he spoke palpable nonsense
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again straight from the Kremlin's talking points, about NATO, Ukraine's desire to be a member of it
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and the expansion of the alliance. Long before Putin, it was a no-no by Russia or the Soviet Union
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or anything you want to call it. Sort of a similar thing as it gets larger, but very similar
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But it was always a no, no, you could not. Russia said we don't want the so-called opponent or the enemy
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let's use that term, we don't want them on our border. And they were right
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Again, everything about that is wrong. As far back as 1991, long before Putin
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Russian President Boris Yeltsin indicated that he was interested in NATO membership
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And then a decade later, in 2001, Vladimir Putin told President Bill Clinton that he too fancied the idea of Russia joining NATO
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And it was not the positioning of NATO forces on Russia's borders that led to the war on Ukraine
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It was the other way round. The Kremlin's decision to invade its neighbour led to the repositioning of NATO forces
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And all of this matters because it demonstrates that Putin's newspeak has now colonized Trump's mind
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And not only, it turns out, on international affairs. Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things
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He said your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. He said mail-in voting every election
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He said no country has mail-in voting. It's impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections
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And he said that to me. It was very interesting because we talked about 2020. He said, you won that election by so much. And that's how he got it
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He said, and if you would have won, we wouldn't have had a war. You'd have all these millions of people alive now instead of dead
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That's the president talking in Alaska to Sean Hannity on Fox News
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revealing publicly that Vladimir Putin engaged only last Friday in direct interference in the next American election
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He told Trump exactly what he knew the American president wanted to hear and essentially instructed him to undermine democracy further by making it more complicated for Americans to vote On Monday as if by magic
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Mail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in
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ballots. And we, as a Republican party, are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in
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ballots. We're going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best
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lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they're corrupt. And you know that we're
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the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the
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world that uses them. He is wrong. You want to know another country that uses them? Russia
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Turns out a bloke called Vladimir Putin signed a law permitting postal voting in 2020. It was a
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funny old year. But then, so's this one. We're back with the Fox News alert. We're just learning
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learning the FBI agents have raided the Maryland home of former Trump National Security Advisor
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John Bolton. It happened at 7 a.m. this morning. Shortly after the raid began, FBI Director
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Kash Patel posting on X, quote, no one is above the law. FBI agents on a mission. And I'm sure
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it's a complete coincidence that a batch of documents possibly damaging to Donald Trump
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pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein is due to be delivered today to a House of Representatives committee
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John Bolton, of course, a former top Trump official, has become one of the president's most persistent critics
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The FBI raid is the latest indication that we're now living under authoritarianism here
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Another sign of that was Trump's claim this week that the Smithsonian Institution's museums in Washington
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focused too much on how bad slavery was and insufficiently on the brightness of America
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Brightness, you say? Well, here's the president last night talking to some of the federal agents
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that he's deployed on the streets of Washington to deal with a largely concocted crime wave in the city
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And he had exciting news for all of us. One of the things we're going to be redoing is your parks
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I'm very good at grass because I have a lot of golf courses all over the place. I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world
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We're going to have all brand new, beautiful grass. You know, like everything else, grass has a life
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Do you know that? Grass has a life. You know, we have a life and grass has a life
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And the grass here died about 40 years ago. Grass has a life
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Indeed, it does. But at the end of a week in which Vladimir Putin firmly kicked Donald Trump's Ukrainian ball into the long grass
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you could argue that maybe the Russian leader knows more about how to play the green stuff
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than his opposite number in the White House
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