K.T. McFarland | Former Deputy National Security Advisor on Trump Playing Too Nice with Putin & More

But I wanna piggyback on what Bill O'Reilly was just talking about, 'cause you know this stuff better than anybody.

And he's trying to figure out why President Trump is kinda being nice to Putin, so am I, uh, this diesel deal, and he said, "Well, listen." Bill said, "Maybe it's because Trump thinks it will lead to cheaper energy around the world." I started thinking the other thing.

I started thinking maybe this will be the impetus for Vladimir Putin to stop killing innocent Ukrainians.

[laughs] Either way, there are reasons why we would want Putin to be happy and stop doing a whole bunch of stuff, but he hasn't proven, not even a little, if you do something in the past, he's not gonna stop doing what he wants to do anyway.

So with that said, why is Trump doing this?

Uh, well, he's got, look, he's got competing interests, right? On one hand, America first, he worries about the price of gasoline, especially American farmers, so diesel fuel is a big deal.

It's a major part of the budget of any farmer in America.

And so he wants to somehow try to figure out, well, what's...

There's a shortage of diesel fuel now.

It's gone up higher than even gas has percentage-wise, and so he wants to, how do we get more diesel fuel? How do we get it? How do we get, how to get it quickly? And that's why he did the, the conversation with the Russians, right? You release the diesel fuel, it'll help American farmers, and then let's go from there.

But on the other hand, the other competing interest is you give Russia more money, which you do by buying oil, and then Russia has more money to fight in Ukraine.

The irony and the thing that just makes me so mad is to listen to these Europeans who say, "Oh, this is so terrible.

Donald Trump, he's giving the Russians the money to fight on." You wanna know something? The Europeans still buy Russian oil.

They still buy Russian LNG.

What does that...

To what tune do they buy it? They buy, they give Russia more money in revenues from those sa- sales of energy than they give Ukraine in military and other assistance.

So don't talk to me about hypocrites.

The, the Europeans are paying for Russia to fight Ukraine.

100% true, and a very fair statement.

But just because they do it, why should we? Shouldn't we consider just completely strangling Putin? Because it's not only innocent Ukrainians he's killing, but you know that Russia, along with China, have their hand in, in Iran.

They're also friends with Iran.

I mean, there's nothing, there's nothing that Putin does, okay, [laughs] that says, "Eh, give him the benefit of the doubt." He's in bed with every one of our adversaries, enemies, and very, very, very bad people.

So why not just strangle him to death?

You know, if you don't have leverage, somebody, I forget who said it anciently, said, "Go out and get some." So what's your leverage over Russia? Well, you don't have a lot right now.

I mean, Pr- President Trump could, like, invite him into the world, uh, you know, ba- back into the, into the real world, but how do you do that? So one way to do it in a funny, roundabout way is you buy oil from Russia, and then you threaten to shut it off.