Look what happened. This is crazy. We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in the history. Make America great. How can you be against it? President Trump falsely called the leader of Ukraine a dictator, while Trump's own team was tweeting that Trump is a king.
Think about that for a minute. We are one month into the second Trump presidency, and Trump has managed to throw the future of Ukraine into uncertainty, slash and burn the federal workforce, and generally it sends some shockwaves around the world. Welcome to Sidebar from the Washington Post. I'm your host, Libby Casey, and I'm joined in the studio by J.M. Rieger, senior video journalist, Emily Davies, reporter covering the federal government. Hi, Emily. And Michael Birnbaum, White House correspondent with a knack for foreign policy. Hi, Michael. Michael, you've reported for the Post from more than 60 countries. Do I have that right? A lot, yes, yes. We'll talk more about that later. To start out, the two of you have huge breaking news. Like, even as we were preparing for this broadcast, you were talking about what's happening on your beats. Emily, what's the...
latest in the intersection of the federal workforce in Washington, D.C. that you cover? Well, Trump last night on Air Force One told reporters that he wants to see the federal government take over D.C., take over the governance of D.C. That's a really big deal because D.C. is technically right now governed by itself, but that is because of an act of Congress called the Home Rule. And Trump can, you know, with Congress really...
take over and decide to exact his own vision on the city. And Michael, what's the latest on your beat? I can't even handle it. It's just there's something crazy that happens every hour. And so the latest is that we're hearing that the Trump administration is blocking an effort, a fairly conventional effort by the group of seven countries that's big world powers that would call Russia the aggressor in the war in Ukraine. It would just be a pretty conventional statement to mark the third anniversary of the invasion. That's February 24th. Coming up.
And these are just things that would be normal under ordinary circumstances. But now that President Trump is blaming Ukraine for starting the war rather than Russia, which invaded Ukraine unprovoked three years ago, U.S. policy is making a tidal wave shift. It's just so fascinating to see what the semantics do, what it also means in terms of policy and then people's actual lives and the ripple effects. Emily, you've been covering what was called by a lot of people the St. Valentine's Day massacre of the federal workforce because last Friday was Valentine's Day. A lot of people were suddenly finding out much of their shock that they were out of a job and that's continued. Who's being targeted in these layoffs and who gets to decide who keeps their job? So the layoffs.
If you think about scale to start, the civilian federal workforce is about 2.3 million people. So it's just massive. So keeping track of every single person who's fired is really hard. So the way that we're trying to do it is looking in sort of buckets and trying to identify trends. A very clear first step for the Trump administration is firing in mass all probationary employees or most probationary employees. So the latest data has that about 200,000 people. We know at least 25,000 to 50,000 have been fired.
We're trying to get those numbers shored up. The White House has not released them. So I'm glad you mentioned the probationary period, folks, because I was sort of surprised by who falls into that. Who's in their probationary period at the federal government? Yeah, I think there's a sense that if you're in probation, either you're not doing a good job or you're super young. Both of those can sometimes be true, but actually don't, by definition, make somebody probationary. So you're probationary if you're a year or two into your job. Now, that can be a year or two into your first job at the federal government, or for some people, it's a year or two into their promotion or a new job. And so that...
category has swept up people who have served in the military for decades, swept up people who have been in the civil service in other ways for a number of years. So it's really quite broad. There must be Trump supporters and Trump voters who've been swept up in these mass layoffs. Have you talked to some of them? Yes. I actually personally am really interested in this subset of people. Again, if you just think about the numbers, the number of civilian federal workers and the number of people who voted for Trump, there are a lot of people who fall in both categories. So that means folks voted for him often.
at least in part because of the economy, wanting their lives to be better in terms of what they can afford for themselves and their families. And as a result of that decision, they have lost their job and are now completely strapped and scared. And so I'm fascinated by people who are sort of living with that choice and how they feel about it. Now, I've talked to, I've spent a lot of time with one person who is enraged and really regrets her decision. I've talked to others who feel like if he's finding fraud, it's worth the sacrifice. So I would say that opinions are varied, but I'm hearing a fair amount of regret right now from those folks. Tell us about how these Americans are finding out they've lost their job.
This is one of the parts of the story that is pretty staggering. I think a lot of people support downsizing the federal government. Again, even some federal workers look to their colleagues, think they're lazy, think they, you know, take too long at lunch and could do better at their jobs. But there's pretty widespread agreement that the way these firings are coming across is pretty. I don't want to use the word cruel, but it's close to that. I talked to one woman who woke up to check on her three-year-old daughter in her crib. She's six months pregnant. It was like the crack of dawn on Saturday. And that's when an email showed up in her inbox saying, hey, you're fired. So folks are finding out that way. This was also over the holiday weekend. Other people are finding out in group calls of like 100 people where their cameras are all forced to be turned off. The chats are disabled. And then there's a prerecorded video saying, hey, see ya. Like, here's the end of your...
career here. So it's pretty shocking. You and your colleagues wrote about some situations where emails were sent out firing people without their supervisor's knowledge. And the supervisors were trying to say, wait, wait, wait, you're actually, you're really a necessary employee. But they had no control over it. Yeah. I think supervisors have almost across the board been pretty floored. The supervisors I've talked to who do have some idea tends to come from the union or someone who's not directly above them or just frankly reading the news. So supervisors are really surprised. Another point I don't want to forget to make here is that only 15% roughly of the civilian workforce lives in the DC region. So actually a lot of these people have jobs that
I think people wouldn't expect to be like federal workforce jobs. Like I've been talking to folks in the Forest Service in Michigan who go out and mark trees to be cut down for local loggers. That's a federal job. James, tell us more about federal workers because Emily makes such an important point. It is part of Beltway culture and life, but federal workers are all over this country. All over the country. And I think it's important also to note.
who is being let go here we're not just talking about an agency here an agency there we're talking about folks who work on veterans issues talking about folks who worked on the world trade center health program for folks who were victims of that attack we're talking about park service folks over the weekend you and your colleagues and other folks at the post were reporting that entry times at the grand canyon had doubled because of folks who were let go so this is having real tangible impacts in areas where i think Where we're headed right now is folks are going to start to more tangibly feel the effects of this in the weeks and months ahead. What states have large chunks of federal workers? I mean, look at a state like Texas or California, right, where you have over 100,000 federal workers, respectively, in each of those states. And as Emily points out, you have a small fraction who are living directly in the DMV area. And this is.
I think a really common misperception about the federal workforce. I think a lot of folks in the country assume that you have an overwhelming majority of folks living in and around the D.C. area, and that's just not the case. One of those people who may have that misconception is Elon Musk, who, of course, has a lot of power right now. Let's listen to what he had to say recently about the relationship of Washington, D.C. in this whole doge purging effort. What we're really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we're finding is that there's an unelected bureaucracy, speaking of unelected.
There's a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and the cabinet. And you look at, say, D.C. voting, it's 92 percent Kamala. OK, so we're 92 percent Kamala. That's a lot. They don't like me here either. I think about that number a lot. I'm like 92 percent. That's basically almost everyone. That's Elon Musk speaking on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News. If you heard that voice saying they don't like me either, that was Hannity. This is a sit down. That was Trump, Musk and Hannity. Just really revealing in terms of the power dynamic happening right now. So, J.M., it's like he's mixing his notions of D.C. and federal workers.
as Elon Musk and his team have gone about this whole process, they have, there's been so much chaos and they've committed so many mistakes, honestly. And they've admitted that Elon Musk in the Oval Office the other week said, we're not going to get everything right. You should correct me on this, but. The risk here, I think, is that he is operating from a standpoint of falsehood, saying that he is conflating the number of federal workers and where they are and who they voted for politically, right? And saying that, well, 92% of the District of Columbia voted for Harris. That must also be like the retribution thing, right? Like that they're going after people or making some correlation between who you voted for and who should be targeted. And Emily, this brings us full circle to what you started the segment talking about, which was Trump threatening to go after D.C.'s home rule. So they definitely have D.C. in their sights. Yeah, I think D.C. is in some ways a very easy place to make an example of.
symbol of what Trump has described as the swamp. That is an issue that really animates his voters. A lot of people here like don't feel super relatable to folks across the country. We walk around in suits. I mean, people have more money than in a lot of places in the country. And we're like the decision makers here. And so I think part of DC, right. And so I think that the way that a lot of the country views.
the district is actually really important to recognize, even if it's not accurate, that perception really matters. And Trump is able to really capitalize on that and make it into a policy issue. But the reality is different. Like what Elon Musk said there is just, it's not a totally accurate description of what's going on. The places that I've spent time in across the country, like in this small, small town in rural Michigan, for example, the federal government actually is a lot more essential of an employer than it is here. Like there are a lot of options in the DC region. It's a metropolitan center. There's cities in Maryland, cities in Virginia. There are a lot of headquarters for corporations here. People with degrees can really...
shop around and choose what they want to do. But in some of these more rural places, especially these like Republican strongholds, the federal government is a really big deal. And I would not be surprised if polling starts to show pretty widespread anger or disapproval or concern about this from folks who tend to vote red. Stay with us when we come back. We'll talk to Michael Birnbaum looking at the big global picture of Trump's first month in office. Stay with us. Did you know you can play the Washington Post's games for free? Find the crossword, keyword, ridges, and on the record in the Washington Post app or at WashingtonPost.com slash games. No subscription required.
This is Sidebar from The Washington Post, a reminder that you can listen to us on your favorite podcast app or you can watch along with us on YouTube. Just look for Washington Post. So, Michael, as Trump has returned to the world stage, has his stance on Ukraine and relationship with Vladimir Putin been like the biggest shock to the system? Well, Libby, there has been this evolution. I think that Trump was very clear on the campaign trail. He wanted to end the war in Ukraine. He said he could do it in less than 24 hours, and he said he was going to do it before even coming to office. And it wouldn't have started had he been in office. And it wouldn't have started had he been in office. I think that a lot of people, no one doubted he was interested in ending the war, but a lot of people thought that what he meant was ending the war with some sort of just peace, something that would be sustainable, something that would acknowledge that Russia was the one who attacked Ukraine.
You know, from my conversations with some of Trump's foreign policy advisors during the campaign, that was my impression, too. You know, those people had a, you know, certainly Trumpian view of the world, but they thought that Russia was the aggressor here. In the last week, what we've seen is a real shift and almost a full hearted embrace of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. Trump talked to Putin last Wednesday. They had a 90 minute conversation afterward. Trump came out and basically echoed a whole bunch of Kremlin talking points about the world, said that Ukraine should never be in NATO because it was unacceptable to Russia, you know, all these things. And so what we've seen in the last seven, eight days is a shift and a shock from a lot of world leaders who have been telling me, you know, they thought he, you know, they thought he was going to have one kind of approach to Ukraine, try to end.
the war with like a peace settlement. Now they think he's probably just going to walk away from Ukraine and let Putin kind of do what he wants. Some of what Donald Trump has marketed to the American people is being a dealmaker, right? On The Apprentice, like this real estate magnet in New York City, the whole thing. But that's not the effort he's making here. I mean, he's picking a side. That's right. And even Pete Hegseth, his defense secretary, publicly said the things you don't say out loud, like Ukraine will never become part of NATO. It's not going to get all its territory back. Those are the things that you, even if you believe it, you don't say it because you need to bargain with it.
It's like part of your toolkit that they just gave away. But some of what Trump's saying is just false. And so I want to play his latest tape from last night, how he was describing Volodymyr Zelensky, the leader of Ukraine. A dictator without elections. Zelensky better move faster. He's not going to have a country left. Got to move. Got to move fast because that war is going in the wrong direction. In the meantime, we're successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia.
That's Donald Trump talking about Zelensky as a dictator. Shocking language. OK, so Zelensky, he is the democratically elected president of Ukraine. He was elected in 2019. The person who is not a democratically elected leader of a country is Vladimir Putin, who has led Russia since December 31st, 1999. He's been through a bunch of elections, but he usually wins like 90 percent of the vote and he's killed or imprisoned most of his opponents. We don't hear that language coming from Trump. We're in topsy-turvy world here. I mean, so Trump had that statement last night. He also earlier yesterday posted a thing on Truth Social about Zelensky.
Every single point in it is factually incorrect. Modestly successful comedian Volodymyr Zelensky is actually pretty popular as a comedian before he was elected. Talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion. No, we're kind of around half that. To go into a war that couldn't be won, well, that never had to start. Well, Russia started the war, but a war that he without the US and Trump will never be able to settle. The United States has spent more than $200 billion, more than Europe. That's not true. Europe has spent more money on Ukraine than, well, anyway, I can just go, it just goes on.
Point by point by point, he is deeply sympathetic to Putin, utterly unsympathetic to Ukraine, and really freaking out the Ukrainians, freaking out Europe, because this feels like a really monumental shift. This isn't about making a deal. It's about reorienting the role of the United States in the world, flipping sides to the Russian side, which is different from where the United States has been ever since the end of World War II. Something really monumental is at work right now. We're talking about a shift of an 80-year legacy, J.M. Yeah, and there's a transactional nature to this whole thing as well. And one part in that...
forum in that where trump spoke last night he talked about this deal that he had made that wasn't really a deal for these rare earth minerals right in ukraine which is what he wants to get out of any sort of agreement This is whether we're talking about Gaza, whether we're talking about the tariff issue or whether we're talking about Ukraine. Trump is taking an approach of tangibly. What can you do to benefit, especially in his in his mind, what benefits the U.S.? Because a lot of foreign policy experts would argue that a lot of these things that we're talking about, there have been benefits for the U.S., but maybe not as tangible or forefront as what Trump has in mind. And JM, you know, we look at potential conflict of interest on a personal level. Those comments that we just heard from Donald Trump are actually at this Saudi led investor conference. I think Trump's conflicts of interest sort of shade everything that we're talking about, both at home and abroad. He has not divested.
from anything. He's speaking yesterday, that clip we just played at a Saudi-led investment conference in Miami. Trump has investment deals for the Trump Organization and also through his partnership with Live Golf, which is the Saudi-led Golf League at his golf clubs. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has a private equity fund, which takes in transaction fees from the Saudis. He launched a cryptocurrency coin a few months before taking over the presidency, has enacted some stuff to ease regulations on that front. And on top of all this, we're a month in and out to the Trump presidency. Trump has spent half of his days.
at Trump properties, at Secret Service agents there, that's members of Congress going down to Florida for the House retreat a few weeks ago. All of these things shade and color the actions that he's taking on the domestic front and on the international front. So if we go back to what he's doing vis-a-vis Ukraine and Russia, he ostensibly said he does want to get some of these rare earth minerals out of a deal with Ukraine, and that would be for the United States. But Michael, is he presenting something that Ukraine would ever accept? So I was hanging out with a bunch of senior Ukrainian officials over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference, and they had just been presented with this.
essentially demand from the United States that they hand over 50% of their mineral wealth to the United States, not in exchange for like future security guarantees, but actually just kind of like back payment for US support, which doesn't total up nearly to the theoretical value of those resources. It also wasn't part of the deal. I mean, it wasn't like they didn't come with strings attached, right? No, I mean, you know, but they, the number of Ukrainians were shocked, Europeans were shocked. They portrayed it to me, or one person mentioned that it felt a little bit like Belgian King Leopold in the 19th century.
you know, sucking all the resources out of the Belgian Congo. I mean, this is a really rapacious approach, just dividing up the mineral wealth of an imperial possession, a colony. So Ukraine's a little freaked out about that, but they do need U.S. support. They're not rejecting it. And they were actually really careful to say, well, we're not ruling this out of hand, but we need security guarantees. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, talked about this publicly in Munich. They need security guarantees.
They're trying to come up with a counterproposal. They want to make a deal with the United States. They're not even at the table. We have to remember that they're not even at the table because the negotiations between the Americans and the Russians. Right. Yeah. So, yeah. So there's a peace deal negotiation to which they are not invited, even though they are the.
the subject of the discussions and then there's this mineral deal where they're trying to come up with something that would be satisfactory to trump and the minerals are all a lot of them are in parts of the country currently controlled by russia well that is fascinating i mean like that part actually like okay you know you want to like hand over like okay that is a legitimate unorthodox uh approach to trying to get the u.s involved to um protect and reclaim parts of ukrainian territory i mean so that is true Nevertheless, I mean, that isn't what the terms were of the idea that the Americans brought to the Ukrainians. And so it is it is very messy. But yes, the Ukraine peace talks that are happening don't involve Ukraine right now. Emily, if people want to reach out to you, if they've got stories, if they're people who've been affected by the layoffs and things like that, how should they find you on Signal?
That's a great question. Thank you. I've loved hearing from people. And a lot of our stories have come from folks willing to reach out. Signal, for those of you who don't know, is an encrypted messaging app. You can download it at the App Store. It's really easy. And it really does protect folks' identity. And I will always ask before publishing anything that anybody sends to me. So you can use my direct number. It is 202-412-9091. Say it one more time. 202-412-9091. All right. Thank you.
Michael, Emily, Jam, thank you so much to all three of you. We'll see you in a month or so and see how far we've come by then. We'll get you more coffee. I'm Libby Casey. Thanks for tuning in to Sidebar. We'll see you next week. Did you know you can play the Washington Post's games for free? Find the crossword, keyword, ridges, and on the record in the Washington Post app or at washingtonpost.com slash games. No subscription required.