Trump pauses aid to Ukraine | The Excerpt
On Tuesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: President Donald Trump pauses aid to Ukraine after his Oval Office clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Plus, a Putin spokesman says Trump's foreign policy 'largely coincides' with Russia's vision. Trump tariffs take effect on China, Mexico and Canada. Paste BN Congress Reporter Riley Beggin discusses a push from Democrats urging Trump to fire Elon Musk. Democratic governors recruit government workers laid off by President Trump. Paste BN Personal Finance Reporter Daniel de Visé explains why millennials are building wealth faster than other generations. Trump will address a joint session of Congress with a speech tonight. You can watch live on Paste BN's YouTube channel.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson. Today is Tuesday, March 4th, 2025. This is The Excerpt. Today, Trump pauses military aid to Ukraine as tensions rise, plus new tariffs begin, and how millennials are building wealth compared to other generations.
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President Donald Trump is pausing military aid to Ukraine, following last week's confrontation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The move further widens the division between the two countries over how to end the conflict with Russia. The administration wants to ensure military aid is contributing to a resolution to the conflict, and it will be reviewed with that goal in mind to White House officials, confirmed to Paste BN. Withholding aid is the latest sign that the relationship between the Trump administration and Ukrainian leadership has deteriorated. Trump has called for a ceasefire and pushed Zelenskyy to make a peace deal three years after Russia invaded the country. Trump and Vice President JD Vance clashed with Zelenskyy at the Oval Office last week after he complained about Russian president Vladimir Putin. The meeting sent a shockwave through global politics, and European leaders have rallied around Ukraine in recent days.
Trump has upended US policy on Ukraine and Russia since taking office, opening new talks with Moscow. Still, Trump suggested yesterday there could be agreement on a deal to open Ukraine's minerals to US investment. That was meant to be signed in Washington last week before the clash between Trump and Zelenskyy. Ukraine's leader had stated on Sunday he was still open to signing the agreement. Also, on Sunday, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin praised foreign policy under Trump, saying it largely coincides with Russia's vision.
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New 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada took effect earlier today, along with a doubling of duties on Chinese goods to 20%. The tariffs went live just after midnight with President Donald Trump arguing that all three countries have failed to do enough to stem the flow of fentanyl into the US. The tariff actions could upend trillions of dollars in trade, and Canada and Mexico are expected to retaliate. China has also vowed countermeasures. The extra 10% duty on Chinese goods adds to a 10% tariff imposed by Trump on the country last month. That 20% duty also comes on top of tariffs of up to 25% imposed by Trump during his first term. Some products saw tariffs increased sharply under then-President Joe Biden last year, including a doubling of duties on Chinese semiconductors and a quadrupling of tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. The 20% tariff will apply to several major US consumer electronics imports from China previously untouched by other duties including smartphones, laptops, and other devices.
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Elon Musk is back in the news this week. The world's richest person and an increasingly powerful advisor to President Donald Trump criticized Social Security in a Friday podcast interview with Joe Rogan, calling the program a Ponzi scheme. He also described the federal government as a whole as a pyramid scheme. Meanwhile, a group of democratic lawmakers is calling on Trump to fire Musk. I spoke with Paste BN Congress reporter Riley Beggin to learn more. Riley, thanks for hopping on. How are you today?
Riley Beggin:
I'm good. How are you?
Taylor Wilson:
Good. Thanks for making the time on this. So who are the Democrats involved here, Riley, and why do they urge Trump to fire Musk?
Riley Beggin:
This letter was led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Cory Booker, and the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Those are Reps. Gerry Connolly and Jamie Raskin. But there are several dozen Democrats on this letter asking President Trump to fire Elon Musk or force him to comply with ethics rules here. Their major complaint is that a lot of these firings that the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, has been undertaking these last six weeks has some big conflicts of interest with Musk's own companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink.
Taylor Wilson:
Will the Democrats have anyone's ear on this, Riley, in the Trump administration?
Riley Beggin:
This is unlikely to go anywhere. President Trump has really defended Musk here and said that the work that they're doing is important, is eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse, and has really backed him up.
Taylor Wilson:
We also know that Democrats are inviting some of the folks who were part of these widespread federal cuts to attend. Can you tell us about this?
Riley Beggin:
Yeah, this is part of Congressional Democrats figuring their way through the wilderness here, trying to find out what messaging is going to stick and help the American people understand their perspective on the Trump administration. So they have asked the rank and file to bring guests to the joint address this evening that have been negatively impacted by the first few weeks of the Trump administration. Among those guests are going to be people who have been fired from the federal workforce. So we have veterans who are working for the VA across the country. We have National Park Service rangers, Forest Service workers, folks who were working for USAID, which was shuttered in early February, and they're really trying to sort of highlight the human impact of these cuts.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Lots to keep an eye on ahead of tonight's speech. Riley Beggin covers Congress for Paste BN. Thank you, Riley.
Riley Beggin:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
As President Trump seeks to reduce the size of the federal workforce, some democratic governors are courting newly unemployed people to come to work for state governments instead. Yesterday, New York filed digital billboards in Washington's Union Station, encouraging former federal government employees to consider some of the state's 7,000 public sector job openings. Elsewhere, Hawaii is fast-tracking recruitment, and Maryland and New Mexico are making their pitches at job fairs as well. While Trump and others have argued there's too much government bloat, some Democrats now see an available talent pool of workers with specialized skills, many of whom are already based outside of Washington D.C.
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Millennials are building wealth faster than older generations. For a closer look at what's actually going on, I caught up with Paste BN personal finance reporter, Daniel de Visé. Hello, Daniel.
Daniel de Visé:
Hi. Good to see you.
Taylor Wilson:
Good to have you as always, Daniel. So let's just start with the basics. I mean, what have we found here about millennials building wealth compared to other generations over the past few years?
Daniel de Visé:
Just that it's been a really good decade for millennials. Millennials as a group are building wealth faster than the people older than them, faster than Gen X, faster than the boomers. My goodness, if you don't look at inflation, if you just look at raw numbers, I was just telling my editor, they have quadrupled their wealth in about five years. It's pretty amazing.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow. So I guess that begs the question, what are the factors at play here, Daniel?
Daniel de Visé:
It's everything. It's homeownership, and so home values, it's the value of their investments, it's the value of their assets, checking accounts, it's cars, it's everything. The obvious thing to say is that they started out without a lot of money. So like five, six years ago, all the millennials put together had about $4 trillion in wealth, which sounds like a lot until you consider that boomers five, six years ago had like $60 trillion in wealth, which is a lot more. So what's happened is, the millennials have grown their wealth to an amazing degree. They're up to about $16 trillion in wealth.
Taylor Wilson:
You're right about there being this idea of more time to recover from the Great Recession, right, Daniel?
Daniel de Visé:
Well, that's right. The Gen Xers and the youngest boomers, the ones who were born in the '60s, I call them Beatlemania boomers, that whole gang, if they were born in sort of the Beatles and Stones era, they were in a bad place in the Great Recession, because these are people who would've been in their 30s and in their 40s in 2008, 2009, 2010. That's the Great Recession years, which means they were potentially in their peak earning years and they weren't earning. A lot of them got sidelined, a lot of them got laid off, lost their jobs, and this was right at the peak when they should have been earning the most. Now, the millennials who are much younger, these are people who were born in the '80s and early '90s, were just a lot of them kind of starting out during the Great Recession. So it was much earlier in their career, and so they've had a lot more time to recover from that massive, massive downturn in the late 2000s.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. So if you're a millennial listening here, Daniel, I myself am a younger millennial, you're thinking, "All right, happy news, good news so far," but they're also going into debt, right?
Daniel de Visé:
Yeah. There's a bad side to this. First of all, there's massive wealth inequality in your generation, Taylor. There's Mark Zuckerberg at one end of the spectrum. He's a millennial. He was born in 1984. He has some money, but there's a lot of millennials who have barely any, and so there's a real have and have not quality to the millennials. One of the reports I read said that they're the most sort of unequal generation out there. And then the other thing is, yeah, we may have talked about this a week or two ago, millennials are going into debt. Just in the last couple of years, they're starting to show up at the doors of these nonprofit debt consolidation organizations like money management, and now millennials make up their biggest group of clients because they have card debt, they have loan debt, student loans. Yeah, so there's a dark side to this.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, interesting findings here. Daniel de Visé covers personal finance for Paste BN. Thanks, Daniel.
Daniel de Visé:
Thank you, sir.
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Taylor Wilson:
President Trump will address a joint session of Congress tonight. While the speech is not technically a State of the Union since he was sworn into office less than two months ago, he's expected to tackle a number of issues and use his speech to give a full throat defense of his first six weeks in office. And that has included a barrage of executive actions designed to overwhelm his opponents' actions to close the border to migrants, new tariffs, and an aggressive push to dismantle the federal government led by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump's approval ratings have been higher than at the beginning of his first term in 2017, but they continue to lag behind other presidents after their first month in office. In the most recent Gallup poll, 45% of those surveyed approved of the job he's doing as president and 51% disapproved. That's 15 percentage points below the average approval ratings for all elected presidents at this point in their terms since polling began in earnest with Dwight Eisenhower. Trump's address will begin at 9:00 PM Eastern Time, and you can watch Live on Paste BN's YouTube channel. We have a link in today's show notes.
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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.