Speaker 0
[music] Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I’m Steve Hayes. On today’s roundtable, the latest on Iran, the blockade, the negotiations, the economy, and the politics of it all. And not worth your time, looking back on a week of absurdity. Joining me are my Dispatch colleagues, Mike Warren and David Drucker, along with Dispatch contributor and retired Army Special Forces officer, Mike Nelson. Let’s dive right in.
Speaker 0
[music] Welcome, gentlemen. A flurry of developments over the past several days on Iran. As of Friday, Strait of Hormuz was open. The US was running a blockade. There was a little back and forth between Iranian leaders and US leaders about whether the strait would remain open. We started seeing on social media late Friday some comments from Iran’s foreign minister and others accusing Donald Trump of lying. And in short order, the strait was closed. The United States appeared over the weekend to, for the first time, enforce the blockade. There’s discussion this week about renewed negotiations on a deal. J.D. Vance, vice president, is preparing to return to Islamabad, potentially. There have been conflicting reports about that, both about whether there will be negotiations, about whether J.D. Vance will participate in those negotiations. The Iranians at this point s- are seeming to indicate that they don’t want to negotiate anymore right now. There are credible reports from our friends at Iran International and elsewhere that there is infighting among the Iranian regime leaders. Some of them want to continue to pursue negotiations, others do not. Mike Warren, that was my attempt at summarizing a busy and chaotic weekend on Iran and the diplomacy surrounding the war there. What did I leave out, and what do you make of everything that I’ve shared? Where are we at this moment?
Speaker 1
Steve, uh, I mean, it was a pretty good survey, I would say.
Speaker 0
Damning with faint praise right away, right?
Speaker 1
[laughing]
Speaker 0
Pretty good. My dad was famous for saying, “Not bad.” That was sort of the high praise-
Speaker 0
… for the Hayes kids growing up, was, “Eh, not bad,” and we would take that and celebrate it. I’m gonna take your pretty, “Pretty good”
Speaker 1
[laughing]
Speaker 0
as the equivalent of not bad.
Speaker 1
Steve, nice work, nice work. No, the only thing I would add, I mean, uh, it was, uh, it was pretty much exactly how I would have laid it out, but just throw in the president’s own public posting about the seizure of that Iranian ship, and the seizure itself, plus the president’s posturing, essentially a- almost taunting the Iranians, seems to have reinforced the Iranian view that negotiations are not going to be reopened anytime soon. Again, we’ll see what happens. Things seem to be changing, like, every three, four, five hours, which reminds me a lot of the first Trump term and the way things would change. And the only other thing I would say, not a summary of what happened, but I would say we learned over the weekend from an excellent report in The Wall Street Journal from two of their top White House reporters, an in-depth look in how a lot of the decisions of the last few weeks have been made within the White House. And we learned things about the way that reportedly, and I think the reporting is– seems and sounds pretty solid and from reporters that I trust, that the president himself was left out of-
Speaker 1
… certain moments, certain operational discussions as they were happening, out of fear from members of his administration, from senior leaders in his national security team, that his sort of impulsive response to things that were happening might endanger certain missions or allow him to sort of take control, but yet be out of control. And in this report, we also learned that a little bit of the motivation behind some of these online posts where he’s taunting the Iranians, you know, we’ve talked about his Easter Sunday post. I can’t repeat it on a family podcast like this, some of the things that he said. And then the sort of the threat a couple days later to, you know, wipe out a civilization if the Iranians didn’t come negotiate. All of this in the Journal reporting seemed to suggest that the president’s approach to this was, “Let me sound crazy, and then the Iranians will know I mean business.” And look, w-when it comes to sort of negotiating and, you know, “I’m gonna be crazy like a fox,” and these sorts of things, the fact that this is all now known, you know, The Wall Street Journal’s reported this. We’ve all kind of had a sense that maybe he was kind of a crazy guy waving a gun around to try to induce the other people to sort of just, “Well, he’s crazy. We don’t know what he’s gonna do, so let’s come to the table and negotiate.” All of that’s kind of out in the open now, and I think the Iranians know all of this, and so they’re holding firm. They’re not going to reopen negotiations at the moment, and yet we sort of continue to be in this cycle of events happening and the president making threats and the Strait of Hormuz opening, closing, opening, closing. The war’s supposed to be over by now, according to the president, and yet here we are.
Speaker 0
Yeah. Mike Nelson, you know, one of the things that we saw over the weekend was the seizure of this ship, the US giving warnings. CENTCOM put out a video of this, giving warnings to the ship, telling them to vacate the engine room, and then firing on the ship and seizing the ship. This is an enforcement of the blockade. This was going to be a test. If the US was– had declared a blockade, at some point, something like this was likely to happen. How important is it that we made good on our promise to enforce the blockade? It seems to me that matters just as a basic principle of deterrence. And then what does that tell us about the wider dynamics, particularly on the strait today?
Speaker 2
Well, it’s funny, going back to what Mike Warren was just laying out, in many ways, we are largely exactly where we were two weeks ago. There’s a looming deadline after which we claim that we’re going to strike all the bridges and power facilities. There’s potential for conversations in Pakistan. Of course, like we said, we don’t even know who’s gonna attend or if there’s going to be earnest conversation. But the one thing that is different between now and two weeks ago is the US imposition of the reciprocal blockade, so to speak. And it is the one thing– as we talked about, the President’s hyperbolic language has probably had a reverse effect of what he’s intended. The more he’s gone over the top and then not delivered on any of these deadlines and found that his bluff is being called, it’s becoming less and less of a credible threat. So the one thing that we have done and demonstrated resolve in doing is the imposition of this blockade. So this was, as you said, this was the first credible test. The, as you said, six hours, this thing was under warning to comply with the instructions, and they obviously were– did not feel, I don’t know if they were under instructions or if that was the captain himself feeling he didn’t think it was a credible threat, and we demonstrated that it was. And it was done in a, you know, professional and humane way so as to not threaten civilian mariners, unlike what the Iranians were doing, where they fired on two Indian ships. But it is important, and it goes back to that same thing that we pointed out. The military side of this, what CENTCOM is doing to impose this, is being done credibly and professionally and with precision. So this is the one thing that’s different from two weeks ago, and I think that this test will largely help in the long-term effect of creating pressure on Iran with the blockade. But whether that’s gonna happen before, you know, the next forty-eight hours to have any effect in Pakistan, I think is unlikely.
Speaker 0
Yeah. David, I want to go back to something else Mike Warren said, because I think it’s really potentially an important moment. In this Wall Street Journal story over the weekend, they did report that Donald Trump has been deliberately excluded from some meetings. People are worried about him. They’re worried about his input. They’re worried out– about his temperament. And, you know, for as, as long as we’ve discussed the different dynamics, we’ve compared and contrasted the different dynamics in Trump world about the first term and the second term, I’d say the primary one was sort of guardrails are gone. Donald Trump is not being constrained by the people who are, you know, on his staff in the second term the way that he had been in his first term or the way that, that they’d attempted to in his first term. And Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is sort of the best example of this. But largely it’s been, “Mr. President, you wanna do it, we will stand and salute, and we’ll go to cabinet meetings and tell you how brilliant you are,” and nobody’s going to push back in any kind of a meaningful way. I mean, they’ve– it sounds like there have been disagreements. They’ve gone back and forth. You know, J.D. Vance and reportedly Marco Rubio both expressed concerns, reservations about using military force on Iran in the big picture. But now you have reporting that some of what we saw in the first term may be back in the second term. How significant is that? And do you expect that– I mean, you wrote, literally wrote a book about Trump and Republicans and the people who work for him. Do you expect that when Donald Trump sees that reporting,
Speaker 0
he will be angry about it? I don’t expect him to be happy about it.
Speaker 3
You know, that, that is what it struck me about the Journal piece, Steve. So I think we were thinking the same thing, that not just the fact that you now have senior administration officials sort of operating around Trump and trying to si– you know, not exclude him, but sort of pick and choose how to include him and what to tell him. But the leaks themselves, the fact that the Journal was able to get this reporting, the further we get into the war in Iran, the more th-this is beginning to feel like term one, where there was a sense that everything was operating from day to day and minute to minute, depending on the President’s mood. I mean, say whatever you want, and we’ve had a lot to say, and people have a lot to say about the first year from inauguration to January twentieth this year. But there were occasionally times where the President would backtrack. There was some good reporting about what was going on internally. But there was this sense that the President was doing, uh, exactly what he wanted to do, that his aides were carrying out direct orders, and that whatever information was coming out, it may have had to do with underlings and not with him, right? So this really has the feel of who the heck’s running things in there and what the heck is the plan, right? And, and particularly with the war, what we’re seeing now is, one, that the President has sort of gotten into his, uh, you know, I guess I’m not hesitant to use the analogy. I want to make clear, though, I’m not being flippant about this, but it’s like infrastructure week. I mean, every four or five days, the President says we’re on the verge of a deal with Iran. They’ve accepted everything. Everything’s great. And the most generous I can be is that he’s doing that to buoy financial markets, even though he knows that none of it’s true. Uh, but then you have to wonder if, given the way the President approaches these things, what he’s trying to do is impose his will, and that’s fine so far as it goes. But, you know, this is the first time in a foreign policy or military setting in which the President’s bluffs have been called and the fear of what he might do next hasn’t been enough to sort of cow the opposition into submission, right? I mean, it worked brilliantly with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in the first term. It worked to a degree with North Korea. Um, all Kim Jong Un wanted was to be legitimized by meeting with the President of the United States and be left alone to, you know, torture his own people and not be bothered.The Iranians are now in a place where they will survive at any cost from their perspective, and I don’t know if the president fully realizes that. And the longer this goes on, the more the president is gonna be bedeviled not just by international geopolitics, but by domestic politics. And, and you have to wonder where this thing goes next because he doesn’t seem to know.
Speaker 3
One last thing I wanna say about this. Obviously, with the hindsight of history, there’s been so much criticism and questioning about the Iraq war under George W. Bush. But one of the things we can look at with that administration’s handling of the war is that they had a strategy and a goal. The first military strategy didn’t work, and so they adjusted. There was an incredible cost in American lives because of all of the soldiers we lost and the treasure and the investment, w- but the goal was clear, they always communicated it, and they eventually achieved the goal. We all question whether it was worth it, whether it didn’t create follow-on consequences that were worth it, but what we don’t have here with Iran really is a clear strategy with a goal that shows us how where we end up is gonna be a better and different, if even if not better, a different place than where we started.
Speaker 0
Yeah, Mike Warren, let’s pick up on that. We’ve heard so many different things from the president over the course of this campaign, and, you know, for anybody who’s been following for the past decade, shame on you if you’re surprised by that. Of course we have.
Speaker 0
He was never going to have sort of one line of messaging. He was never gonna stay true to the one arguments that he made at the outset. That’s just not how Donald Trump operates. But, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about negotiations that J.D. Vance led in Islamabad recently. We’re talking about new negotiations going forward. There’s a lot of discussion of a potential deal. Every day you open the newspapers, there are new terms being floated, cash for uranium, stopping enriching, not stopping enriching.
Speaker 0
All of these discussions about a deal. Let me actually read to you something that the president himself said over the weekend. “We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL.” Deal is in all caps here. “And I hope they take it. If they don’t, the United States is gonna knock out every single power plant and every single bridge in Iran.” And then all caps, “No more Mr. Nice Guy.” So it seems like, at least for a moment over the weekend, the president was really determined to get a deal. But you contrast that with what the president tweeted, for instance, on March sixth. “There will be no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender.”
Speaker 3
[chuckles]
Speaker 0
We haven’t heard much about unconditional surrender over the past six weeks, but we’ve heard a lot about deals. When the president says something like that, how do you react if you’re his advisors? How do you d- react if you’re Republican on the Hill? And most importantly, how do you react if you’re the Iranians? Does it even matter what the president says anymore other than, you know, occasionally on a short-term basis for the markets? Although even they seem to be not paying as careful attention as they had in the past.
Speaker 1
Let me take the last part first ’cause that’s the one I certainly know the least of, and I think we all would probably know the least about, which is what– how do the Iranians view this? Again, I think I’ve said this on this show before, that we sometimes assume that our enemies are, are omnipotent and omniscient, I should say, and that they sort of know and understand all the nuances of American politics and messaging, and I don’t think that’s always or even usually necessarily true. And so I think, as I said earlier, a few minutes ago, I do think the repeated issuing of threats that are then not acted upon, deadlines that pass, and then the president’s bluff is called, probably inform the Iranians’ view of all this. On Republicans in Congress, on aides around the president, look, I’ve been doing some reporting on the campaign trail for some important races, and when I ask candidates about this, and I think you get the same thing when you talk to senators, Republican senators, they take the explanation or the justification that they want and talk that up. You know, talk up the fact that, well, we can’t allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon or have the capabilities of producing a nuclear weapon, and that’s it. And so they’re holding on to that regardless of the fact that there are discussions to, you know, apparently plans, deals being potentially hashed out, I don’t even think they’re really doing that, that essentially provide, as you said, Steve, the Iranians with cash. And, you know, money is fungible, and you can do, [chuckles] you could do lots of things with that cash despite whatever promises are made in whatever deal ends up being negotiated. But I think Republicans just– they have a message. They have an idea of what a good version of this war is and what a good version of this president looks like negotiating this, and they’re sticking with it. And all of what you just described, the inconsistencies, the conflicts with what Donald Trump said five, six weeks ago, what he’s saying today, what he said yesterday and what he’s saying today, or what he said three days ago, like, none of that matters to these people. I, I think it actually matters in a real sense of what we know and, of course, what the Iranians, how the Iranians interpret these threats or these claims or these negotiating positions. But I, I do think in his party, y- you get a sense that people wanna put blinders on, and they just wanna keep repeating the best argument for this war, the best argument for taking this fight to the Iranians, and anything else is noise that they’re just gonna block out, kinda hope for the best. As a political strategy, I think it’s pretty poor, but
Speaker 3
This is sort of what they’ve been conditioned to do when it comes to dealing with Donald Trump and the sort of ad hoc way he approaches things.
Speaker 0
Mike Nelson, we’re approaching the end of this two-week ceasefire. Where are we militarily? Are there things that if the fighting resumes, the United States can do to press its advantage both on the battlefield and give it additional leverage for these negotiations should they resume?
Speaker 2
Well, I think that we talked before on, on this podcast about a couple of the additional options that the president might have entertained to increase some of the leverage. According to that Wall Street Journal reporting that we’ve all referenced here, it looked like the Karg Island course of action that he was leaning towards, that he has backed away from and is definitely concerned about the potential for casualties. So he seems to have shifted away from some of the land-based options that, that we’ve discussed before. Now, obviously, there are additional targets or types of targets that, that CENTCOM could continue to hit, you know, with– through some of the same mechanisms that they’ve been hitting some of the previous regime targets. Obviously, from the air and the sea, we still maintain a s- a certain amount of dominance and the ability to target, you know, at will what we desire. Obviously, the president has been somewhat overstated in his articulation of our ability to do this. A couple weeks ago when he was first threatening the original or the previous deadline, he said that within four hours, we could basically knock out every power facility and bridge within Iran. I think that’s overstating it, but there is obviously the ability to target some of the power infrastructure and the bridges that would have dual use, both have military capabilities that apply to the regime, so that they might limit some of that targeting away from some of the purely civilian infrastructure. I think that’s likely that we’ll see that. He seems to have fixated on that in his rhetoric. Obviously, he seems to really gravitate towards the targeting of the bridges and the power plant, so I think that’ll be the next round of things that we would see. But there are additional courses of action, obviously, that CENTCOM’s probably developing for the president, but I think this goes back to the original problem.
Speaker 2
What is it that are the levers? And, you know, w- we’ve talked about our inability to see what the Iranians are thinking versus their ability to see what we’re thinking. The president is clearly communicating, kind of, the– he is demonstrating his desire for a deal and his eagerness for a deal in some of his rhetoric, and we have not been able to properly predict what their levers are that cause pain to them. I again think that the economic impact of a blockade of the strait on them will eventually have some kind of effect where they might need to come to the table, but that’s not an overnight thing. One of the things, you know, also in the Wall Street Journal reporting, the president looked at this as a transformative historic event, that this would transform the region if he could do this once and for all, which is very different from Midnight Hammer, the limited strikes to target their nuclear capability, or some of the lim- other limited operations, which have been very successful but limited, that he’s ordered in the past. And this was not too dissimilar in some of the grandiose ideas of a historic change in the Middle East as Iraqi freedom was back in two thousand and three. One of the key distinctions is leading up to Iraqi freedom, all of that Iraqi oil had been sanctioned. It was not on the international markets. So at the end, for all the mistakes that we made along the way, at the end of the Iraq War, we created more oil supplies on the international market that had been unavailable previously. This is having the opposite effect, both internationally and on Iran. So I think that eventually the economic costs are going to bring Iran to the table in some way, shape, or form. But again, as we saw, the deal at the end might look a lot like us paying them a lot of money for things that we could have negotiated otherwise.
Speaker 0
Yeah. On that pressure, the economic pressure on Iran, it’s true, and, you know, depending on the expert you listen to or you talk to, you know, that could happen within a matter of days, weeks, or as long as two months, longer perhaps. Donald Trump is getting his own domestic pressure here with the release of s- a spate of polling over the weekend suggesting that this war is very unpopular. An NBC News poll found that only a third of Americans support the war, heavily tilted toward Republicans. But even Republicans are, you know, asking questions about the war, whether it’s worth it, how long it will go on, and support among Republicans on the war and also more broadly for Donald Trump, the– both the amount, the number of Republicans who approve of Donald Trump and his handling of his job, and the intensity with which these Republicans approve of Donald Trump and his handling of the job ha- are slipping, and in some cases, slipping in notable ways. David Drucker, you’ve been out covering races in Indiana and elsewhere. What are you hearing from Republicans about Iran specifically? And if this war remains as unpopular as it is and if gas prices continue to be elevated the way that they are, in some cases double what they were at the outset, what does that do, and how long do you expect Trump to be able to withstand his own domestic political pressure?
Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, this is a real problem for the president. Part of the reason he’s in this fix is that he didn’t ask the American people, any segment of the American people, of the American voter, uh, for support for the war. He didn’t build a case for the war. He didn’t ask for support. He didn’t go to Congress and involve them, right? So he’s a lone wolf on this from the very beginning. The day we, or the evening we launched the war, I mean, the very next day, I started talking, in particular to Republican strategists, because I, you know, we know where Democrats are gonna fall on this, and the president is already underwater by a large measure with independents. So particularly the way the president has marketed himself over the years as the guy who wasn’t gonna get us into more, you know, so-called endless wars in the Middle East.I wanted to know what Republican strategists thought about, uh, the GOP electorate. And what they were telling me is that initially there would be plenty of support from Republicans ab- uh, for the war because Republicans for, you know, a, a few generations now have been supportive of hawkish military action. They’ve been supportive of projecting American power, and particularly to go after the Iranians and the threat of nuclear weapons capabilities that they’ve posed. And because of all the things that we have discussed about, you know, the way they’ve treated the US and Israel and all of that. But what they warned me or, you know, were sort of warning themselves was if this thing drags on, and it just drags on with seemingly no end in sight, the president was going to run into trouble. One of the things they said would be particularly problematic that hasn’t happened yet is they said, “Look, if there are boots on the ground, and we’re putting up temporary bases in the Iranian desert, that’s a real problem for the president.” But, you know, the idea of this being a limited operation that accomplishes identifiable goals is where the president keeps his party on board. Where this thing appears to just drag on with no end in sight, that’s where the problems begin, and I think that’s where in the last couple of weeks we’ve begun to get into. Obviously, with this president, things could end as we speak. We get off the air, and we find out it’s over. But I think w- the numbers we’re seeing from over the weekend reflect the fact that a lot of people are beginning to have doubts, and the gas prices, the, the oil prices are causing a problem because it’s making everything more expensive. It’s not just, you know, filling up your car at the pump. It’s jet fuel. I mean, Steve, I’m very grateful for the Dispatch’s travel budget so we can cover the campaign. I’ve been seeing it in airline tickets when I’m booking flights for us. That means Americans are seeing that. The cost of fertilizer, the cost to ship goods, so everything is elevated. Inflation was already a problem that voters didn’t think he had fixed, and so now that’s exacerbated. And if you talk to economists, they will tell you that what history shows is that a geopolitical shock sends oil prices rising really quickly. But even if you fix that shock, it comes down very slowly, and so we’re likely to be dealing with this in the heart of the midterm campaign. When I’ve been on the road talking to Republican voters, there’s still a lot of faith, uh, and deference to Trump and a belief that he knows what he’s doing. He’s doing what he believes is in the best interest of the country. So even if they quibble with him around the edges, they give him latitude. But there are all sorts of Republican voters, right? There’s the very committed self-identified MAGA voters, where the numbers are strong. I’ve seen the polling, recent polling. But then as you get out to the outer bands of the twenty twenty-four coalition and the GOP electorate, there’s more questioning and less support, and that’s where the president and his party have a real problem looming in the upcoming election this year.
Speaker 0
Mike Warren, let me read the lead of an article from Politico published on Sunday. There’s a growing anxiety gnawing at battleground Republicans. Maybe their Senate majority isn’t as safe as they once thought. Democrats still face steep odds in their bid to flip the chamber, but interviews with nearly two dozen GOP operatives, party chairs, and strategists across the country’s battlegrounds found a persistent concern that the longer the Iran war drags on and the economy sputters, the more it could complicate their path to keeping the majority in November. Look, I think for those of us who have looked ahead to November and thought we could be talking about a tr- traditional wave election, what that would mean would be all sorts of seats that are not u- under normal circumstances potentially competitive become competitive very quickly. It is, in talking to some of the Republican strategists I talk to, they think that we’re either there or very close to that, where talking about the Senate, a very favorable Senate landscape for Republicans. It was the case six months ago if you talked about Democrats potentially taking the Senate, you’re kind of laughed out of polite company in Washington. Now, people are saying that this is a possibility, even if it’s still not the likeliest scenario.
Speaker 1
Yeah. If I can take a point of personal privilege and say that myself and David Drucker and you, Steve, like, we have sort of, I think in our conversations, have talked about this being a real possibility. But when they were laughing at us, when they were laughing at us-
Speaker 1
We were saying this could happen. So I guess a victory lap for that. I don’t know. We’ll have to see in November. But just if you look very strictly at where the possibilities are, it certainly seems more likely now than it did just a few months ago. North Carolina, there was a retiring Republican senator, Thom Tillis. Pretty good possibility that Roy Cooper, the former governor, Democratic governor, could win that seat. There’s one Republican seat flipped right there. Iowa, Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa, is retiring. Open seat in Iowa. That remains to be seen who the Democrats nominate in that race, but I think there is a good chance. We’re talking about Iowa. I mean, Iowa is Trump country defined. That is a state that went from being a swing state to being a solidly red Republican state since Trump was elected in twenty sixteen. The fact that that is seen as a bubble to maybe not even a bubble race, depending on how things go, tells you the story of how this could be a wave election against the Republican Party. And I do think that while it’s important to sort of think about how Republican-based voters are thinking through this, are they going away from Donald Trump, or is MAGA abandoning Donald Trump, or will they abandon Donald Trump on the Iran war eventually at some point? That’s important. But what Drucker said about those outer bands of the twenty twenty-four Republican coalition, that is everything when it comes to determining the majority in the House to potentially de-determining the majority in the Senate. Where are those voters going? And thisThe war is throw it on the pile of things that voters consistently tell pollsters they don’t like about the way that the choices that Donald Trump has made, whether it’s the, the Liberation Day tariffs or the sort of pursuit of aggressive immigration enforcement. They love– these voters love stopping i-illegal immigrants from crossing the border. They might even like sending people back who have their visas expired or are here illegally, are captured because they are engaging in criminal activity. But the aggressive enforcement of that immigration in places like Minneapolis, those voters, those swing voters, those voters that made the winning coalition, the winning part of the coalition for Donald Trump in twenty twenty-four, they don’t like that. And throw the Iran war on top of it, not just because it wasn’t sold to the American public, but because of all of these follow-on economic problems. It is a cumulative effect, and it is not working for Donald Trump, and it’s not working for, most importantly for the midterms, for the Republican brand. It’s just a huge problem. It’s, it seems intractable, especially when you have a pursuit of this war in the way that it’s going. It’s in the headlines every single day, and it does not reflect well on the party.
Speaker 0
Mike Nelson, speaking of political pressure, one of our closest allies in general and in particular in this conflict is, of course, Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, is under political pressure at home and has been from the outset. There’s been rather united Israeli opinion, I would say, on taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities, on the broader objectives of this kind of a campaign. But he also is facing some internal domestic political pressure. And over the weekend, President Trump, I think, made that a bit more challenging for Netanyahu when he tweeted saying, “Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are,” all caps, “PROHIBITED from doing so by the USA. Enough is enough.” One of the things that Netanyahu has had to grapple with is that he has become sort of the Robin to Donald Trump’s Batman and is not really in charge of his own war campaign. Rhetoric like this would seem to reinforce that in a pretty significant way. You’ve written for us about the delicate balance between allies in a campaign like this and pointed out, I think very helpfully, that, look, of course, there are gonna be different interests. Of course, there are gonna be different objectives. That is not anything new, and to a certain extent, some of the reporting on that has exaggerated these breaches. This appears to be a pretty significant one when the President of the United States is claiming he can prohibit Israel from doing the things that Israel has to this point thought it needed to do to protect its own national security.
Speaker 2
Well, there was a lot of ambiguity when the ceasefire was originally announced as far as what applied to the ceasefire and what did not. The Iranians claimed that Lebanon was part of the total ceasefire, that targeting of Hezbollah would not be allowed. And Caroline Lovett came out and said, “No, it was never part of the original agreement.” So there w– it didn’t seem to be established definitively whether Israel could continue its campaign targeting Hezbollah or not as part of the terms of the ceasefire. Regardless, Iran had used it as a pretext for why they didn’t need to comply with their portions of the ceasefire in terms of the blockade. I think what we saw over the weekend was the president’s frustration with the multifactorial complexity of this, that when you increase pressure in one place, it decreases in another, and vice versa, that he’s trying to get the Iranians to come to the table for a deal. They are pointing the fingers at his Israeli allies. The Israelis have not been told, you know, privately to knock it off, so to speak, and he’s getting frustrated by this. So rather than to have this conversation in private about, as a coalition, how we see the end of this coming together, why that’s advantageous to the United States and to Israel, he, I think, is letting his frustration come out in multiple directions. And it’s not a good move, I think, to do it in public unless attempts had been made in private to, to talk to the Israelis and they had not complied. I don’t think that’s likely that the Is– We’ve talked about it before, that Israel is the, has the ability to be so effective under the umbrella of working cooperatively with the United States. And if that comes to an end, then they would be able to s– they would cease their operations. So I don’t think it’s likely that Israel was ignoring our instructions or advice about ceasing targeting in, against Hezbollah. But the fact that this is coming out in public probably for the first time, I think, is more an expression of the president’s frustration than anything that had been negotiated in the past between us and Israel. I think g-going back to the point about some of the diminishing popularity of the war, some of the White House’s frustration with why they think it should be going well or perceived to be going well is it’s only been six weeks long. We’ve only taken thirteen– And I, I don’t mean to say that dismissively, but, like, in, in the course of the history of conflict, we’ve taken thirteen casualties compared to the scores of casualties we’ve inflicted on the Iranians. It’s not clear to them why this overwhelming military success is not perceived as more successful. And it goes to David’s point that, you know, this would become unpopular if it were seen as dragging on. But the Iraq War was more popular well into it despite some early stumbles. But it goes back to the original point that because it was never established what we were trying to accomplish, how, what we were asking of the American people, what it would take to accomplish it, it is perceived as dragging on longer. And now that we’re in it and we don’t seem to have a way out of it, and there are these fractures between us and Israel, it’s becoming, it’s looking like the keyword that everyone likes to use, a little bit of a quagmire.
Speaker 0
Yeah, I mean, that’s such a great point, the perception of this. I mean, and we’ve talked about this here before with you, Mike. I mean, if you look at the actual military success of the campaign from the campaign’s earliest days, it has been a stunning success, not quite the victory that Donald Trump has claimed it has been. The war is over, the fighting is over. I mean, he said this repeatedly, and quite plainly, it’s not. But it has been that kind of a success. But in this case, I think the perception, because of the sort of chaotic back and forth maelstrom of claims and counterclaims and objectives and different objectives and new objectives, make it very difficult for people to sort of wrap their heads around. I want to spend a moment before we get to Not Worth Your Time today, and I’m deliberately gonna leave very little time for Not Worth Your Time today. I want to spend a moment on something related to the point that you just made, Mike, and I’ll start with you, David Drucker. You know, as I was thinking about this conflict over the weekend and reporting on it and reading everything I could get my hands on, from think tank analyses to newspaper stories,
Speaker 0
one of the things that I think hasn’t been adequately s- discussed is the polluted information environment that we are operating in right now. I mean, I think if you look back at, you know, Donald Trump’s ten-year history of just saying things that aren’t true, sometimes they’re on matters of huge significance, and other times they’re on matters of no significance whatsoever. But you can’t sort of believe– There’s no presumption that what Donald Trump is saying is true at any given moment. I would say that’s true to a certain extent when you try to do some reporting by calling White House aides, calling National Security Council, calling others. There is no sort of presumption that these people are telling the truth, that you’re gonna ask them a question, you’re gonna press them to get as much information as you are. You can take what you learned from one person and ask it to another to learn more and to get to the point where you have greater overall information. And then, you know, the same is true with the Iranians, with the Iranian regime. I’m not sure if you look, maybe with the exception of the North Koreans, if there’s another regime in the past twenty-five years that has such a long track record of saying things that just aren’t true again and again and again and again. How do you report in this kind of environment? How do you trust people when you make calls, whether it’s about Iran and, and this conflict or just in general, when we’ve moved from a period where I think, you know, there was lots of spin and exaggeration and people, you know, shifting stories and shaping stories to their own advantage, to an information environment in which lies are really sometimes the real currency. Drucker.
Speaker 3
Yeah, it’s very difficult, Steve. It’s incredibly difficult. I mean, let’s take the president’s comments just before the weekend where he said, “We have a deal with the Iranians. They’ve agreed to everything.” I think CBS News was the first to report it. They’re very– Look, the, the reporters at CBS News, and we know them personally, I know them personally, they’re very good reporters here in Washington, and they spoke to the president. We have a deal. What’s been agreed to? Everything. The Iranians have agreed to everything. And I remember going into our Slack where I, where I vent often, and I said, “This sounds great, and I don’t wanna be the analys- the analyst that immediately assumes the president’s wrong and poke holes in it, but let’s see what happens.” And of course, you know, by the time we got into the weekend, it was clear the Iranians had not agreed to anything, and we didn’t have a deal.
Speaker 0
In fact, immediately after that statement came out from the White House, Iran’s foreign minister took to Twitter himself and said something, I’m paraphrasing by memory here, but something to the effect of, you know, all seven of the things that the president just said are lies.
Speaker 0
So you see this playing out in, in real time.
Speaker 3
Yeah. And look, I mean, I wouldn’t take what the Iranian foreign minister said.
Speaker 3
And I mean, I, I wouldn’t trust it. I mean, I don’t trust the Iranians. They’re liars.
Speaker 3
But I also couldn’t trust the President of the United States because sometimes, you know, as Eli Lake says, he’s a, he’s a, sometimes he’s just a BS artist, and he’s trying to create the reality he wants and see if he can get everybody else to buy in. But other times he’s just saying what he needs to say to, like, get by from day to day. And so, you know, that has been the issue over the past decade or so, particularly over the last year and a half, is that you try to get from the administration an accurate picture of what is happening insofar as what they’re willing to say, right? And you understand as a reporter that politicians are gonna withhold information because there are things they don’t want you to know. They’re, they’re too sensitive. They haven’t worked it out yet. But, you know, the things they give you are within a parameter of, okay, it gives us a picture. They’re not being dishonest. And we’re just in a place now where more and more of the administration reflects the principle. And Republicans in Congress often don’t know that much themselves, but what they are going to tell you, if they’re gonna talk to you, is something that does not get them on the wrong end of a Truth Social post.
Speaker 3
I am often paralyzed in this way. I am not gonna get caught up in writing stories or reporting stories that says everything the administration does is wrong or not true. But I’m certainly not gonna report out a story that relies on the information actually being true. And the last thing I’ll say about this is the president will often say different things to different audiences that conflict if you put them together. And I refuse to also be boxed into picking the one that is most advantageous to him. If he says both, then I think he deserves credit for both.
Speaker 0
Mike, Warren, the president has a long history of, I would say, using his mendacity to shape perceptions in such a way that heHe thinks it’s to his advantage. The most obvious example, I would say, were his claims in twenty twenty of a stolen election. Widely debunked, he lost sixty-one of sixty-two court cases, and yet through sort of the persistence of the argument he made, the election was stolen, the election was stolen, you saw majorities of Republicans say the twenty twenty election was stolen, creating sort of his new reality in which he can operate. Gas prices don’t let you do that. He can’t say gas prices are low when people go to the pump and, you know, go to get gas and they’re not. Is there any way in which the president can use his sort of willingness to say these things that aren’t true to his advantage in this context?
Speaker 1
No. And to go back to the twenty twenty election example, at the time, at the moment, he couldn’t do that to m-remake his reality when it even came to public opinion from Republicans. In that moment, right after the election, everybody knew that he had lost. Yes, okay, the most loyal toadies of the president were insisting otherwise, but I think his ability to reshape that reality and the– and, and public opinion, at least when it came to his own party, was helped by the fact that the twenty twenty election was in the rearview mirror, and it was sort of old and fuzzy. I mean, we know there have been studies where people don’t even remember who they voted for in an election that happened just a couple of years ago. So you’re right. The tangible ways in which these lies, these sort of misshapen [chuckles] sta– you know, trying to reshape reality through his statements, it’s impossible for him to manipulate public opinion on a grand scale that way. And I think that is so much of what he’s running into in as these poll results that I was talking about earlier, i-is that he does not have that ability any longer. And I think in the first year or so of this second term,
Speaker 1
he had been in, in some ways insulated from that. You know, he was, I think in a lot of ways able to say, and I think people around him were able to say, “Look, the economy’s not going great at this moment because we’re still dealing with the– all the problems that the Biden administration, you know, allowed to happen on our economy.” And I think that reality is being punctured. To go back to the conversation at the very beginning of this podcast here, I do think there is a limit to what certain people, not everybody, but certain people around him are willing to kind of tolerate in insulating him from those realities. At a certain point, we’re talking about life and death and the price of oil. There is a moment at which even those loyalists have to say, “You know, the best thing we can do now is help the President stay out of his own way.” I find all of that very chilling and uncomfortable [chuckles] as we go into these last two years of his term.
Speaker 0
Yeah. Last question on this to you, Mike Nelson. You know, how much does this polluted information environment and these big volleys back and forth from the Iranians to the president and the president back and the things that people are saying that just may or may not be true, I mean, so much of what we see, I would say, in this information environment isn’t true. How much of that matters to you as a war fighter, whether you’re going sort of house to house in Ramadi or you are, uh, you’re making strategic decisions at the strategic level a-as a senior military official? Does this stuff penetrate? Do you pay attention to this? Should you pay attention to this? And, you know, do they face the same problems that, you know, journalists face where we– our job is to go and find out what’s true and what’s not true here and share it to the extent that we can with our members and our readers. How much does that matter to the war fighters?
Speaker 2
Well, at the strategic level, a great deal, and this is why. You know, a-as– going back to the metrics that the president and Secretary Hegseth like to point to, and a lot of people have used them in previous conflicts, we are winning overwhelmingly in the kinetic fight, just as we won overwhelmingly in the kinetic fight against the NVA and the kinetic fight against the Taliban, yet we lost both those wars against the Vietnamese and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Speaker 2
At the end of the day, one of the things that can eat away at our ability to accomplish our goals is support of the people. If the United States is not on board with the war that the United States is fighting, then they will seek to have us withdraw from that war. Now, I’m not buying into the narrative that we were stabbed in the back by politicians in Afghanistan or Vietnam. We made a lot of military mistakes there as well, but popular support was eroded from that. And going to the point that was made earlier, we are not very effective, it appears, at not only targeting the regime with our messaging that we’re trying to do to influence them, but with the Iranian people. We’re not seeking to influence the Iranian people in a way that might be advantageous to us. Meanwhile, Iran are– You know, they’ve not only through their official messaging and their statements that they put out on social media from their various embassies that have targeted some of the fractures in the United States, including the president’s use of the– depicting himself as Jesus, but they’ve made these, like, very creative Lego animation videos that have made their way across social media and seem to target some of the risks, claiming that this is all to cover up for the Epstein files or that we’re doing this on behalf of Israel. They’re targeting those fractures that, that are taking place on the fringes of MAGA to try to receive some of the support. So I do think that while we expect the Iranians to lie, there are conspiratorially minded people here in the United States who are buying into some of their lies, and that is eating away at some of the limited support that the president has within his own coalition. Going back to the dishonesty thing, though, I just wanna point one thing out. It’s not just a dishonesty problem. There’s also an incompetence problem, I think, in that the administration is not fully aligned with what they’re trying to accomplish, and we could see that playing out, I think, over the course of just an hour and a half from Mike Waltz telling Jon Karl that-J.D. Vance would be leading the negotiations to the president calling Jon Karl and saying J.D. Vance was not going to then Karoline Leavitt saying J.D. Vance is going.
Speaker 2
That tells me they probably don’t know or they did not know at that time, or they weren’t aligned in the message. So if they’re not aligned in what they’re doing and communicating that outward, they’re probably not aligned internally in what they’re trying to accomplish and who’s leading it and how they’re doing it. So it’s a little bit of both.
Speaker 1
It’s a great point.
Speaker 0
So Mike, you mentioned Trump and the AI Jesus memes that came out last week, and I wanna spend just a moment, not worth your time, looking back at what really was a week of the absurd last week. When I was preparing to do Washington Week on PBS on Friday night, you know, I was– had been keeping up on a lot of these issues. I’d been studying, I was reading. We were gonna talk about the, some of the big news of the week. And in order to make sure that I was fully prepared, I had to google RFK Jr. raccoon penis.
Speaker 0
We didn’t end up having to talk about it-
Speaker 0
… but there was a story that was tr-
Speaker 0
being reported about a new book that had some revelations about something that RFK Jr. had done apparently back in two thousand and one, or was alleged to have done back in two thousand and one. I wanna give you all a choice and ask you briefly to, to pick what was the most absurd news story of last week. We had these pictures where Donald Trump tweeted out himself as Jesus. He later claimed it was just a doctor with glowing hands and white and red robes. We had Pete Hegseth sort of deliberately quoting a Pulp Fiction adaptation of the Bible. We had J.D. Vance at a Turning Point USA event lecturing the Pope on just war theory and suggesting the Pope ought to be really careful when he speaks about theology and telling the Pope that your claims have to be anchored in the truth, as J.D. Vance always does. And then we had this bizarre RFK story. Mike Nelson, which of those four stories was sort of the most absurd, or do you have another entry for us?
Speaker 2
Well, I think the RFK one is the most absurd in that it is the least damaging. It’s kind of, you know, we all know that this weirdo is in charge of our health policy-
Speaker 2
… and it’s just another indication after he, you know, decapitated a whale corpse and left a bear corpse to be found by the police, and he seems to have a real thing with animal corpses that he finds. But the other three, I think y- y- are less absurd and more concerning in that they demonstrate kind of a unified theory that regardless of whether it’s Catholicism, evangelicalism, or something else, that MAGA uses religion for whatever purpose they think it serves, and it’s their own interpretation, or they can, some of the leaders of the MAGA movement. So the RFK one is just fun and amusing. The other three, I think, are more concerning.
Speaker 3
Yeah, you know, the difference between the first term and the second term is in the first term, stories like this would circulate. It would turn out not to be true, and the, you know, the things about Trump that he actually did do, those were sort of absurd enough, but they were within the realm of normal. And so these things come around once every week or once every couple weeks. I’m like, “Hold on a minute. I, I’m sure this is a parody.” Nope, it’s not a parody. Why RFK Jr. insists on talking about these things as opposed to just doing them and keeping to themselves, I do not know. But what I found to be the most absurd, the one that I really questioned, was Secretary Hegseth’s quoting of
Speaker 3
a Bible verse thing-ish, if you will, that was from Pulp Fiction. I just was like, “No, th-this can’t be true.” And of course, it was true, and, uh, you know, what do you, what do you do with that?
Speaker 0
Yeah. And look, there’s some dispute about whether he did this knowingly and, and he meant to do it, and he was quoting the way that it was adapted by others.
Speaker 3
By the way, Steve, you just say, “Look, I wanna borrow a line from a famou-
Speaker 3
… from a well-known movie.”
Speaker 0
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3
And, you know, some of you might think, but here’s why, and you just say it.
Speaker 3
But the way he conducts himself, I don’t think he deserves the benefit of the doubt there.
Speaker 0
Yeah. Mike Warren, last word to you. I mean, to Drucker’s point, it is the case that a lot of these things start with something that’s come out of, uh, the mouth of an administration official. I mean, just a few weeks ago, RFK Jr. was defending himself on one matter or another by acknowledging that he used to snort cocaine off toilet seats.
Speaker 0
The most absurd story of last week, Mike.
Speaker 1
[sighs] You know, when you asked this, I was glad you came to me last because I had to remember, like, what happened last week-
Speaker 1
… and, and keep track. Was that– Did that occur? You know, the Jesus meme thing, like, oh, w-wait, no, that was, like, two weeks ago, but then the debates. I will agree with all of your options as probably being more absurd, but one that we could also throw into the mix is the decline and fall of Eric Swalwell’s political career and just the details that we have learned about h-his absolute grossness. And I will say this, it is absurd that two things, one, that apparently in Democratic circles, some of his, you know, proclivities and activities were well known. I certainly didn’t know about them. I had not been aware that he was such an aggressive creep. But it’s also absurd that he decided to run for governor, ran for president a few years ago, and didn’t think that this sort of stuff would come out eventually, and I think it just speaks to the absurd way in which members of Congress, they’re not sending their best, I’ll say that, to-
Speaker 1
… to Capitol Hill.
Speaker 0
Yeah. Absolutely. Absurd and horrifying. Thank you all for joining us today. We will be back later this week. [upbeat music] Finally, if you like what we’re doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. As always, if you’ve got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable@thedispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from people who don’t know what we were talking about with RFK Jr. and raccoons. Don’t Google it. That’s gonna do it for today’s show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.
Speaker 0
[upbeat music]