JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Void by the belief, a belief held by him, but also others, that he brought peace to the Middle East, President Trump is trying yet again to end Russia's war on Ukraine.

But here at home, he's waging war on his domestic critics engaging in a prosecution campaign without precedent in American history, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

So, it's been one of those weeks, you lose track of the news for ten minutes, and Donald Trump has done something outrageous or unbelievable or remarkable, or something unbelievably, remarkably outrageous.

We'll talk tonight about his intensifying quest for a Nobel Peace Prize and whether he can bang heads together in Europe the way he just did in the Middle East.

And we'll talk about his administration's accelerating campaign at home to excoriate, indict and/or marginalize the president's, many enemies, real and imagined.

The Justice Department is no longer an autonomous agency but a weapon in Trump's arsenal and the Department of Defense, we won't be calling it the Department of War until Congress actually makes that change, has driven the free press out of the Pentagon.

Joining me tonight to discuss all this and more, Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, Steven Hayes is the editor of The Dispatch, Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent at The New York Times, Nancy Youssef remains a Pentagon correspondent at The Atlantic.

NANCY YOUSSEF, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Thank you.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Thank you, Nancy, for being here.

I know you're not at the Pentagon, but you're still covering the Defense Department rigorously, and we'll talk about that in, in a little while.

But, Anne, I want to start with you.

President Zelenskyy back in the White House, not a great meeting from his perspective, not a disaster, like an earlier meeting, but it seems as if we're on this rollercoaster with President Trump.

First, he was on Putin's side.

Then Putin alienated him and he announced a little while back, maybe Ukraine can take all of its territory back.

Now, he's back in this mode.

He just put this on Truth Social a little while ago.

The meeting with the President Zelenskyy was very interesting and cordial, but I told him, as I likewise strongly suggested to President Putin, that it is time to stop the killing and make a deal.

Enough blood has been shed with property lines being defined by war and guts, and then he goes on for a while.

Now, obviously if you're President Zelenskyy and you hear him say that it is time to stop the killing, in Zelenskyy mind, he is saying yes.

And the guy who started the killing probably should stop.

Give us a sense from your perspective of where we are in this drama.

Is he getting frustrated or just tired of thinking about Ukraine?

ANNE APPLEBAUM, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: So, let me step back a second and let's remember what it would really take to end this war, how would you really end it, none of the drama or imaginary solutions.

So, what takes to end the war is to persuade the Russians, President Putin, the Moscow elite, whoever, that it's not worth fighting anymore, and that they need to stop.

They need to bring their troops home, and they need to make a deal.

They're the ones who have to be persuaded.

And, unfortunately, almost everything that President Trump has done since taking office has pushed them in the opposite direction, has encouraged them to keep fighting.

So, by saying -- by attacking Zelenskyy back in February, by saying, we'll give them Tomahawks, we won't give them Tomahawks, by messing around with sanctions, we'll do sanctions, we won't do sanctions, all of these things are encouraging President Putin to say, right, I can break up the coalition that helps Ukraine, I can separate America from Europe, I can hold out longer than these Americans who can't make up their mind what they want and I can win.

And Putin has never said he wants to ceasefire.

He has never recognized legitimacy of Zelenskyy.

He has never said that Ukraine can survive as an independent sovereign state.

So, until he gives up those things, the war will continue.

And so what we're doing now is encouraging him to believe that he can fight.

And that's why I think there's a level of disaster here that's not immediately obvious from the optics.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Steve, put this in the context of what he just did in the Middle East, because he did bring the situation to a ceasefire and did force the release of the Israeli hostages.

Partially, he did that by bullying, to some degree, Netanyahu, his friend and ally, partially by threatening Hamas.

Are there lessons in that for Ukraine and Russia, or is Ukraine and Russia a whole other level of difficulty?

STEPHEN HAYES, Editor, The Dispatch: Yes, I think it's a whole other level of difficulty in their -- you know, as an alliance, an actual alliance between the U.S.

and Israel, that there really isn't between the U.S.

and Russia right now, even though Donald Trump wants to be on friendly terms with Vladimir Putin.

But I think Anne is right.

I mean, if you go back and you look at things that Donald Trump has said these moments where he's feigned toughness toward Vladimir Putin, rhetorically, you know, you have 50 days, there has to be a ceasefire within 50 days.

Then he shifted it to 10 to 12 days.

Then he threatened very severe consequences shortly before Alaska if they didn't stop the fighting.

And at virtually every one of those moments, Vladimir Putin not only disregarded what the president was saying, he stepped up kinetic action in Ukraine, as if to say, I'm not listening to you.

What you say to me doesn't matter.

And, you know, there was a time when if you talk to people in sort of Trump world or Trump national security world, they would say that we were -- they thought there was a chance that Donald Trump would be humiliated by this, embarrassed by this, that Putin was so clearly not taking him seriously and perhaps actually change his posture.

But it seems, and I think today's meeting suggests that that is not in fact the case.

He had a warm call by all accounts with Putin yesterday, a friendly call and coming out of this meeting with Zelenskyy today, despite Zelenskyy's obsequiousness and flattery in their joint discussion in front of reporters.

It doesn't sound like the meeting went very well.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: One of the reporters, he had that moment of flattery was Tyler.

You were there.

Zelenskyy seems to have learned that flattery works better than honesty.

I don't know.

You tell us.

TYLER PAGER, White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Yes.

I mean, there is a clear difference in the way that Zelenskyy is presenting himself in front of Trump than when he did the first time in the Oval Office and he was basically dismissed.

And the relationship -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: J.D.

Vance went after him.

TYLER PAGER: Yes.

And the relationship just sort of blew up from there.

I mean, he is disappointed that he did not get the Tomahawks, and I think there was some whiplash there because it seemed prior to -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Explain that just a little bit.

TYLER PAGER: Yes.

Prior to you know, President Trump's call with Putin yesterday, there was an expectation that the U.S.

was going to give Ukraine Tomahawks, which it has desperately wanted to fire these long-range missiles into deeper targets in Russia.

Then President Trump has a call with Putin.

Unclear exactly what was said on that call, but, clearly, he persuaded him to a certain degree to not give Zelenskyy the Tomahawks, and Zelenskyy's leaving Washington without the Tomahawks.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

TYLER PAGER: But we did not see that.

Zelenskyy was measured and composed outside the White House after the meeting.

You know, he reiterated that he similarly liked the president said in this Truth Social you just read, he wants to end the war.

And, you know, he was very delicate and careful in his word choice because he knows that he needs to continue to remain on good terms with Trump if he wants any sort of leverage or progress in this.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Nancy, as a Pentagon correspondent, explain the importance of the Tomahawks.

That seems to be the asset test here.

If you give Ukraine the Tomahawks, they can do some serious damage.

But talk about that a little bit in the context of the situation on the ground.

NANCY YOUSSEF: So, the Tomahawks are cruise missiles that launch up to over a thousand miles, and they are harder to detect.

So, what they would give the Ukrainians is precision and distance.

You can launch them from ships, submarines, and more recently from land.

And so the idea tactically would be if they had Tomahawk missiles, they could do things like hit Moscow, hit air bases from which drones and some of these attack planes are flying over Ukraine and also hit some of the military depots that are in factories that are producing the weapons that are posing a threat to Ukraine.

Having said that, I think they all suppose -- they are there to -- as a form of leverage.

So, we think it -- there's what they offered to the potential battlefield, but also what they offer politically.

And I think as we think about the use of Tomahawks, we should think of them as the way that the president is trying to put pressure on Putin to potentially enter talks in Budapest down the road.

So, there's a military value to them but there's also a political one.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Anne, the Tomahawks would be actual proof that Trump wants Ukraine to win?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: They could be.

I mean, I don't think at this point in the war there's any single weapon that would be a real game changer.

I mean, in fact, the weapons or the weapons system that's made the biggest difference in the war are the ones that have been built by the Ukrainians themselves.

So, they have completely reinvented -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Their homemade drones.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: And homemade drones, if it sounds like they're making one with glue and tape, as we saw at the beginning of the war.

This is not the case anymore.

These are very sophisticated factories.

I was there a month ago and saw some of them.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: A couple of years ago, Anne and I were in Ukraine and they were literally doing this in garages.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: This is now not like that at all anymore.

These are sophisticated.

The drones are the size of this table, they're -- or bigger, they're large little airplanes.

They can fly for seven hours.

They carry warheads.

They've taken out 20 percent of the Russian refinery industry already.

And so it's not so much the -- what's important about the Tomahawks isn't the weapon and what it can do.

I mean, I'm sure they'd be delighted to have them.

What's important is the symbolism, you know, the fact that the U.S.

is giving a sophisticated weapon to Ukraine and that would -- as I said, that would help bring about the end of the war because it would convince the Russians that, actually, Ukraine's allies are going to stick with it, and, actually, Ukraine has a lot of staying power.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

The president is very confident right now.

I want you to listen to what he said on Thursday.

DONALD TRUMP, U.S.

President: That's all I've done in my whole life.

I've made deals.

I know about deals.

I do it well.

I don't think any president's ever ended a war, frankly, one war.

I did eight of them.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, I want to show the viewers at home and you a partial list of wars ended by other presidents.

This is a very partial list.

You're familiar with many of these.

It includes -- you know, I would throw in the American Revolution as a war ended by George Washington successfully.

As this -- as you, you look at that list, Steve, you've studied President Trump for years.

Does he believe this, or is this part of his I will bend reality in order to get the Nobel Peace Prize?

Does he believe that he's the only president to ever stop a war?

STEPHEN HAYES: So I think he convinces himself that he's the only president, but he's not -- he doesn't stop and think, wow, wait, is this true?

If it's not true, I ought not say it.

And I don't think he's ever done that.

So, he says these things and, you know, the same breath, and he did this again with Zelenskyy today, he claimed what is the war count that he's ended now.

Eight, I think he says eight now, or working to nine.

TYLER PAGER: And sometimes he forgets which countries he's mediated.

STEPHEN HAYES: Which he's claiming, right?

Today, he said he saved millions and millions of lives.

He's ended eight wars.

No, I think -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is this advertising for the Nobel Committee?

STEPHEN HAYES: Well, I doubt it.

I mean, I think it's very clear that he's obsessed with winning the Nobel.

I mean, everybody who talks to him, everybody who knows him.

TYLER PAGER: Absolutely.

I mean, just to add onto that, he -- part of the reason he's obsessed is because Obama won the prize and he does not feel Obama deserved the prize and he thinks he deserved the prize.

This has been something he's been obsessed dating back to his first term.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

STEPHEN HAYES: Yes.

I mean, I think he might be right about Obama, if I can editorialize a little bit.

But, no, this is -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, Obama got it before he did anything.

STEPHEN HAYES: Right, exactly.

That was a gift from the -- STEPHEN HAYES: They effectively said, yes, probably not.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

STEPHEN HAYES: But what he's trying to do here I do think is Bend Reality, and he's seen this work for him again and again and again.

You have more than half of the Republican Party sort of shrugs off what happened on January 6th, or thinks that it was Antifa or thinks that it was the FBI or what have you.

He does this and it works.

Nancy, I want to ask you in the category of appropriate credit following the Middle East situation carefully.

He did do the thing in Gaza.

It's not peace, it's ceasefire.

It's very hard to make peace with -- for Israel to make peace with Hamas because Hamas doesn't believe that Israel should exist.

It's hard to negotiate your own existence, obviously, but he did achieve something there.

He banged Netanyahu's head together with dealing with Qatar and pushed and threatened Hamas.

I mean, do you give credit for this or any other?

NANCY YOUSSEF: I mean, it's hard to not give credit given the return on the hostages after two years.

And I think if you watch those images this week, it was really moving as well as the return of Palestinian prisoners.

However, that was phase one and phase two, three, four, five are the more complicated in terms of reaching an enduring peace in that region.

We still haven't answered the question of what disarming Hamas looks like, who's governing there, and the proof of, I think, how much Hamas is entrenched and still has power is within a day of this.

They were executing opposition in Gaza City, Palestinians -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Other Palestinians.

NANCY YOUSSEF: That's right.

And so that is not a group that seems to be on its back heels.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And he shrugged that off.

NANCY YOUSSEF: Yes, because -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Which was very odd.

NANCY YOUSSEF: But until those enduring questions or answers, which, in some ways, are much more complicated than the initial one, I think it's hard to say that we're on the path to an enduring peace.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

And another example would be he claims to have brought peace to Pakistan and India.

I don't think anybody at this table would say that would bet that Pakistan and India are never going to have another armed confrontation again.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: No.

And, actually, I've been really bothered by the coverage of the Middle East story, because whatever credit he deserves for putting pressure on Netanyahu, the coverage has been so ecstatic, almost sort of echoing his own rhetoric.

It's as if we're influenced by his high opinion of what he's done.

And exactly the point that Nancy just made, you know, we haven't talked about who's going to govern Gaza.

We haven't talked about what the broader region looks like.

I mean, all these unanswered questions that normally they would be -- that would be the main thing we were discussing.

And somehow, as you know, Trump bends the story and he twists it.

And here we are talking about the Nobel Prize, as if that was what was important, not peace and Gaza.

TYLER PAGER: Well, it's really interesting you say that because my colleague and I did a story about Jared Kushner.

And in the conversation my colleague, Katie Rogers, had with him, he said, we're deals guys, and our job is to get to yes first and figure out the details later.

And, in fact, that's sort of what happened.

He got the hostages out, they got the yes to the release of the hostages, but the details remain exceedingly unclear.

And that's the important stuff.

That's the hard stuff.

That's how you get to some sort of lasting peace, if that's possible.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: And the Biden administration got hostages released.

It's not like there have been no hostages released in this war.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Let me change this subject.

I want to talk to Nancy for a minute about -- it's not an unrelated topic, but, you know, presidents from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and including Ronald Reagan.

Richard Nixon, have always believed that in a democratic country, there's a role for the press in covering military affairs, matters of war and peace.

The secretary of defense, the current secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, believes otherwise, it seems as does his president, presumably.

And so the ouster of the Pentagon Press Corps was just engineered this week.

There'd been press at the Defense Department for as long as there's been a Defense Department.

What was it like to be part of the last week of the Pentagon Press Corps in the Pentagon?

And what does it mean for coverage of these matters of life and death in the future?

NANCY YOUSSEF: I mean, frankly, it was sad because the Pentagon is such a heartbeat to cover, you often stay in a minimum for five years.

So, many of the -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You were there for?

NANCY YOUSSEF: 18.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: 18.

NANCY YOUSSEF: And so you had decades and decades and decades of experience walking out the door.

These are people that we've gotten to know, and I'm not just talking about the troops and the civilians, but the staff that work there, the people who will never have a story written about them but are such an intricate part of the running of the Pentagon.

And you felt sad journalistically because I think it's important that we have the ability to ask leaders questions, especially when they're in charge of a trillion of taxpayer dollars and have the tremendous responsibility of deploying as many as too many people into harm's way in addition to another million civilians.

Having said that, I also felt this week a tremendous sense of pride because in the time since we have been evicted, we had journalists do exceptional coverage just this week, including Tyler, about the Southcom commander being removed, about military lawyers being removed after raising questions, the CNN story.

Reuters broke the story that two narco-terrorists who were part of a strike were put onto -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Alleged narco-terrorists.

NANCY YOUSSEF: That's right.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And we have a hard time knowing what's going on.

NANCY YOUSSEF: That's right.

We're -- survived a military strike and moved onto a Navy ship.

Those are not stories that the Pentagon put out first.

Those are stories that journalists put out first.

And so in this bid to sort of limit our ability to do our jobs, I think we also saw a press corps this week that continued doing their job.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

I think it's important to say that the eviction of the press court from the physical premises doesn't mean that we're stopping to cover.

In fact, I've decided to hire more Pentagon press reporters.

I want to find more colleagues for Nancy and her colleagues because we have to work harder at this.

And I know other organizations are going to double down on covering this because that's what happens in a democracy.

Let me talk to Tyler just for one second about this.

You mentioned Southcom.

This is the combatant command that runs American operations in the Latin American sphere, very mysterious sudden departure of the guy who runs that, Four Star Admiral Alvin Holsey.

Do we know anything more about why he was removed?

This comes obviously at a time when we're blowing up Venezuelan boats.

TYLER PAGER: Yes.

So, after we reported this story, the Pentagon announced that he was retiring.

But based on, you know, the reporting I did with my colleague, Eric Schmidt, we have -- there's two interesting things here.

One, is that we know that the admiral had privately raised some concerns about the U.S.

's military operations in Venezuela and in the larger region.

This comes as the president has ramped up his sort of bellicose rhetoric about Maduro and Venezuela, and we've seen numerous attacks on ships in the region.

The president's saying this week he wanted to go on land next.

And also what's noteworthy here is that this is usually a three-year job and he left after basically one.

That's not normal.

And so the retirement announcement is definitely - - there's some questions there about it.

NANCY YOUSSEF: And if I could add quickly that there was no successor name.

This doesn't -- they're -- they have -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: This happened in a rush.

NANC YOUSSEF: That's right.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Let me talk about one more subject in a very, very busy week.

Let's listen to President Trump talk about some of the people he doesn't like very much.

DONALD TRUMP: A deranged Jack Smith, in my opinion, is a criminal.

And I noticed his interviewer was -- I think that was Weissmann.

And I hope they're going to look into Weissmann too.

Weissmann's a bad guy and he had somebody in Lisa who was his puppet worked in the office really as the top person.

And I think that she should be looked at very strongly.

I hope they're looking at Shifty Schiff.

I hope they're looking at all these people.

And I'm allowed to find out.

I'm allowed to -- you know, I'm, in theory, the chief law enforcement officer.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Steve, Anne, let me start with you, Anne, and then go to Steve.

I'll give him the last word.

You cover, Eastern European quasi authoritarian regimes.

You've covered authoritarianism around the world.

When a leader, a chief executive, deploys prosecutors to go after his political enemies, what do you call that?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: I call that it not rule of law, meaning the law is what it says is, but rule by law, meaning the law is what the leader or the political party in charge says it is.

In other words, it's an enormous, clear break with an American tradition that goes back many decades.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Have we ever seen this in America, Watergate, period?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: You could find people attempting to do it.

You can find it at the state level.

I don't think in modern times there's ever been this blatant attempt of the president.

By the way, he's not just using prosecutors, he's using different, using the IRS, he's using other kinds of American institutions that are supposed to belong to all of us that are supposed to be politically neutral.

He's using them to investigate, to do kind of fishing expeditions on his various enemies to find out if what they're -- whether they've made a mistake in their mortgage application.

I mean, this is stuff that -- you know, I hate to make these comparisons.

I mean, this is exactly what happened in Putin's Russia in the early 2000s.

You know, if Putin wanted to get rid of somebody, he didn't arrest them.

That was old fashioned way of doing it.

He would just have a tax investigation.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Steve, I'll give you the last word on this.

Is this a crisis, in your mind -- a democratic crisis, in your mind?

STEPHEN HAYES: Yes.

I mean, for a long time you heard people, including some Republicans, sort of wonder when we'd get to the point where this was an emergency, when this was a crisis, we're here.

This is it.

He campaigned on retribution at virtually every one of his public comments.

He talks about the people he wants to go after.

He's very clear.

He names them, as we just saw.

There's no question what he's doing here.

I think the only question is who and how can we stop him.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And Congress, is it possible that Republicans in Congress would think that's enough?

STEPHEN HAYES: I mean, you have some of the people in Congress who have said that they wanted to remain non-Trump.

People wanted to remain in Congress so that they could be there in a moment like this.

We'll see.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, we're going to have to leave it there.

I want to thank our guests for joining me.

And thank you at home for watching us.

You can read Nancy's story about the eviction of the press from the Pentagon theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goodnight from Washington.