Mar 17 2025 22 mins 56
On today's podcast:
1) President Donald Trump said he’ll speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday as the US presses for an end to fighting in Ukraine and European nations rush to bolster their support for Kyiv.
“We are doing pretty well I think with Russia,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. “We’ll see if we have something to announce maybe by Tuesday,” he said, adding that there is “a very good chance” for a deal.
The Trump administration has pushed for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine amid a flurry of renewed engagement between Washington and Moscow, three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion. Yet that effort has sparked angst among European leaders who worry Trump may concede too much on Ukraine’s behalf in a direct exchange with Putin and leave Kyiv without any longer-term security guarantees.
2) Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, said he’s not worried about the recent downturn that’s wiped trillions of dollars from the equities market as the US seeks to reshape its economic policies.
“I’ve been in the investment business for 35 years, and I can tell you that corrections are healthy, they are normal,” Bessent said Sunday on NBC’s Meet The Press. “I‘m not worried about the markets. Over the long term, if we put good tax policy in place, deregulation and energy security, the markets will do great.”
3) The Trump administration said it arrested and expelled hundreds of alleged members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador for imprisonment, even as a federal judge ordered a halt to some deportations.
“This weekend, at the President’s direction, the Department of Homeland Security successfully arrested nearly 300 Tren De Aragua terrorists, saving countless American lives,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Sunday in a statement. “These heinous monsters were extracted and removed to El Salvador where they will no longer be able to pose any threat to the American People.”
The US is paying El Salvador to hold the Venezuelans under an agreement Secretary of State Marco Rubio brokered with the Central American country’s president, Nayib Bukele. Some 238 members of the gang were transferred to a terrorism confinement center, Bukele said on X.
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