JEFFREY GOLDBERG: There's too much to discuss this week, war in Europe, a federal workforce besieged, regulatory agencies gutted, and a Democratic mayor of New York feeling very warm feelings about Trump's Justice Department.

Joining me tonight at the table to discuss all of this, Eugene Daniels is chief playbook and White House correspondent at Politico, Stephen Hayes is the editor of The Dispatch, Teddy Schleifer is a reporter for The New York Times, and Nancy Youssef is National Security Correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.

Welcome all of you, especially you first timers.

I hope I said your name right.

TEDDY SCHLEIFER, Reporter, The New York Times: You did.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Oh, that's great.

We're starting off on a good note.

Let's keep moving.

Let's keep going with the momentum.

Nancy, we want to talk about DOGE, and we want to talk about this very strange week, and for federal workers, a very fraught week.

But I want to talk about Ukraine first.

It's been obviously the preoccupation of the international community at the Munich Security Conference.

Donald Trump and his secretary of defense signaled in many different ways how they really feel about the Ukraine issue.

But then J.D.

Vance came in and said something kind of different.

I want you to, if you can, in two minutes, make sense of the Trump administration's current view of where negotiations should.

NANCY YOUSSEF, National Security Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal: So let's go through each one of those.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let's do that.

NANCY YOUSSEF: With Hegseth, right?

He's in Brussels and he says -- basically shows the cards of the administration in terms of what they would bring to the negotiating table and in doing so sort of took away the things that were the most important to the Ukrainians.

No NATO membership for now, the prospects of going back to a 2014 border, not good, and that there be no U.S. force presence.

Then Trump followed up and started conversations with Putin and sort of showed his proclivity to side with Putin and signaled that any talks would be between him and Putin reversing the U.S. position that any talks about Ukraine would involve Ukraine and that Europe wouldn't necessarily be involved, that these would be more bilateral rather than a negotiated scenario.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Russia and the U.S. in a sense would carve up Ukraine however they saw fit.

NANCY YOUSSEF: That's right.

So, then Vance at the end of the week comes back and this was someone who was one of the staunchest opponents of supporting Ukraine when he was on Capitol Hill and he put troops back on the table and sort of tried to bring the position back amid a week of pressure from Zelenskyy, from European allies.

And so we ended the week basically with not a clear path yet towards a negotiated settlement, but a Putin who went from being a pariah three years ago when this war started to being sort of broadened by Trump and given sort of a high stature and possible talks.

And we saw it reflected in the Russian stock market, which went up, which I think reflected the advantages that Russia got this week from those talks.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Steve, what does it all mean?

STEPHEN HAYES, Editor, The Dispatch: I mean, I think Nancy did a very good job of laying out sort of the chaos of the week and sort of head snapping back and forth.

But I think we've seen the pivot, right?

This is the beginning of the pivot.

We've seen the move towards an accommodationist position on Russia from Donald Trump.

If you look at the kinds of things that he talked about Russia, the G7, talked about how he trusts Vladimir Putin, or at least believes that Vladimir Putin wants peace as a person who invaded Ukraine, who ordered the invasion of Ukraine three years ago, Donald Trump is saying he wants peace.

I think we've seen Donald Trump make his pivot.

He clearly wants to work with Vladimir Putin.

He respects strongmen.

He has made no, I think, bones about the fact that he doesn't like, or doesn't respect Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

And J.D.

Vance I think is hard to understand because it was sort of the dissonant note in what otherwise was a pretty clear -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And Vance was the quasi isolationist in the group.

STEPHEN HAYES: He literally said he doesn't care what happens to Ukraine.

It felt like maybe they were trying to claw back, after you make these major concessions preemptively.

Maybe he's trying to claw back something.

Because Donald Trump, remember, this is the art of the deal, right?

He's the guy who knows how to use leverage, and then you give it all away from the outset.

EUGENE DANIELS, White House Correspondent, POLITICO: I think the thing that's has been most obvious for a long time and is definitely this week and all of what Nancy laid out was that the words like isolationist globalists for Donald Trump don't work right.

When he thinks about foreign policy, he's thinking transactionally, right?

He thinks of it in the art of the deal in any other way that he talks about, you know, these people whether -- whatever country, whether it's NATO, any kind of allies, they have been taking advantage of us, what are you going to give to my country for assistance.

And I think he sees that with Ukraine.

I don't think he sees Ukraine as a major player, like a big boy or big girl on the scene, but he does see Russia in that way, right?

And so he is seemingly made very clear that he wants to have a cozier relationship, the United States have a cozier relationship with Russia at the expense, it seems, of Ukraine.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, one more question, you're in the White House all the time, is the dissonance that we see Hegseth is going this direction, Vance is going that direction, is that just kind of par of the course in a Trump administration, but ultimately Trump sets the tone, or are there factions that are actually fighting in a meaningful way, Rubio also for that matter, are they fighting for a primacy in how this goes, how this is directed?

EUGENE DANIELS: They're not fighting just yet.

I also think like they don't really fully understand themselves what the United States stance is anymore on a lot of these places.

And so when we're hearing what Donald Trump thinks about Ukraine, often they are hearing it for the first time as well, and it shows both Hegseth and Vance what it's like to be on the world stage and have to speak for the United States when you don't have clear and concise language from the leadership, which is Donald Trump, and you just follow what he says.

NANCY YOUSSEF: Can I add really quickly, these were not ad hoc statements.

That's what made it so interesting.

Hegseth was reading from a sheet of paper.

It was sort of watching real time editing of policy on a public stage.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: This is why it's so exciting.