Trump’s View of the War

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Today, an inside look at how President Trump is thinking about the war in Iran. The stall negotiations to end it, and the political fallout for his party, as it heads into the midterm elections.

“I spoke with White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.”

It's Friday, April 24th. Maggie and Jonathan, welcome back. Thank you, Michael. It's good to be back. It's really good to have you back, and this is a really bigger than usual,

welcome back, because just to explain, you have both been on leave for a few months.

I joined, leave you left together, because you've been writing a book together about President Trump's second term.

And while we profoundly missed you, as guests on the show, when you were on this leave, we are now the beneficiaries of all this reporting that you did for the book and the insights that you gleaned. And what we want to talk to you about specifically is what you've uncovered in your reporting about how the President has been making decisions in the second term, his mindset, his process on a variety of fronts.

But most specifically, most urgently around Iran, so let us start there, we're at a really key moment when the original ceasefire has ended. New talks are being offered by the US, but kind of rejected by Iran.

“How is the President approaching these peace talks, which on the surface looked very precarious?”

Well, so we're recording this Thursday afternoon, and the reason I timestamp it

is because it's a very fluid situation, but as of now, as of this moment,

the Trump team is still waiting on a response from the Iranians to a proposal that was sent over to them, which outlined broad deal points, baseline points to start an negotiation, to start a more serious and detailed negotiation. Mostly focused on how do we prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and how do we get the highly enriched uranium out of Iran?

Those are the two main issues involved, and Trump is very frustrated right now, because nobody on his team, you've got JD Vance, the Vice President, you've got Jared Kushner, who's son-in-law, you've got Steve Wittkov, his special envoy, dealing with the Iranians through the Pakistanis as an intermediary, and it's very frustrating to Trump because he doesn't feel he can negotiate properly with the Iranians.

It's not clear that the Iranian negotiators are empowered to negotiate. It's very unclear the extent to which they're able to communicate in real time with the ayatollah, who we don't have a clear idea of his health, his well-being. It seems pretty clear that he's in a bad way, and that the negotiators are not able to get quick responsiveness from him.

So you're getting a lot of mixed messages, a lot of silence, and so we're in this very uncertain moment. Trump has extended the ceasefire seemingly indefinitely, but at the same time, they've kept enormous military force in the Middle East, and a poised to attack if this thing falls apart.

The other frustration for Trump is he's facing real constraints. Despite all the bravado that you hear from the President and from Pete Higgs-F, the Secretary of Defense, we have unlimited weapons, et cetera, et cetera, they don't have unlimited weapons, and they're very, very constrained when it comes to long-range strike weapons. So what that means is if they do do what Trump has threatened,

which is blow up every bridge and power plant inside Iran, they don't really have the long-range arsenal to do that. So that means flying planes in exposing your pilots to risk, potentially having, once again, exactly, potentially having more shoot-downs, and Trump has shown great appetite for risk during his presidency,

but when it comes to U.S. casualties, service member casualties, that's not an area where he's willing to push it.

And you know, Maggie and I talk about this all the time, and I are reporting,

he underestimated the Iranians.

“He thought this would be a fast war that they would calculate.”

He did not expect the staying power that they've shown and their ability to disrupt global commerce even as the U.S. and Israel have just been pounding them with these bombing campaigns. So just to be very clear, what's frustrating for Trump is that on the one hand, he can't tell for sure that the Iranians are really negotiating in good faith

that they have a system that's timely for getting word from the Ayatollah that they can do this kind of deal or that kind of deal. And on the other hand, the United States is not necessarily capable of expeditiously doing what it might need to do to force the Iranians to sign on to some sort of a peace deal.

That's exactly right.

And the ball is really in Iran's court right now.

And it's not necessarily by design. It is also because of fractures within their own structure. But that is where it is. And it is outside of his control. And they are essentially in a holding pattern in the White House

until they hear something back. Which would be frustrating. Correct, especially because the President has made very clear. He would like this to move on fast. Now, he just wants us to be done.

He wants us to be done. And he wants to move on to other things. And he wants to talk about different subjects. This is out of his control. And he is somebody who prizes control of his environment.

People in his orbit in the White House. Some of them, anyway, are much clearer that they're going to be several days of waiting here. On the other hand, they've also been pretty clear at some of them anyway that whatever came back, if they got something back that they consider

halfway decent as a response, they would like to move forward. Because again, to go back to the point, the President would like to be done with this. One of the other issues is, you know, you use the phrase "good faith."

“Well, the fact is from the Iranian perspective, they've been in two rounds of”

negotiations with the United States and have been bombed during both times. So there's not a huge amount of trust going on when your leadership keeps getting killed when you're in conversation. So there is no trust here. And the US has wiped out, you know, Trump himself said we had a few people in mind that

could have maybe taken over, but we killed them. Okay. The issue is when you haven't actually established a very clear objective or the objectives have shifted when Trump has, sometimes said Iranians rise up. It's regime change.

Well, in a certain sense, it is regime change because the eye toola was killed. It might actually be a more hard line regime. So it's very, very complicated. And everyone on Trump's team understands that. Trump is someone who is used to authoring his own reality, declaring reality,

bending events, bending people's minds through force of will, force of personality. And there are certain events that have happened during his presidencies that have defied that ability. COVID was a big one and this war is a big one. Iran gets a big vote in what happens next.

It's not something that Donald Trump can unilaterally define and determine. You just said that Trump's team understood just how complicated this war could be.

“And I think it's worth going back to how it all began.”

We've done that before on the show just to be clear, but you both put a particular focus in your reporting on the origins of this war. And I wonder how you've come to think about how those origins frame and influence how the president now views this moment when in theory it could be coming to an end. But it's coming to an end in this complicated fashion.

I'd phrase it slightly differently. I don't think that how they came to this war has fundamentally shifted how Trump is looking at this particular moment.

Actually, I think it's very consistent, which is Trump has always been more consistently

hard-line on Iran than his own team. And certainly, then a lot of his supporters want to believe he was. One to believe he was. And to be fair to them, meaning he said things that suggested that he was far more rich than he actually is, at least being generally speaking, but certainly in terms of Iran.

He did pull back strikes in 2019 against Iran because he was warned of casualty numbers for the last minute. And it was much to the shagran of Joseph's first time as his first term National Security Advisor, which, you know, added to why people thought Aussie he's against the Hawks. And then he authorized the strike against General Soleimani,

very early in 2020, which was a definitional moment for him. It is also part of why the Iranians had been looking to have a strike on Trump.

That was a strike that a lot of his own advisors were concerned about him taking.

“And so he has always marched more consistently against Iran.”

And it is something that it does harken back to, you know, sort of his formative years not putting him on the couch, but just being clear about something he's talked about. Actually, fairly consistently is Iran, especially the 1979 hostage crisis, especially how harmful it was to Jimmy Carter's presidency,

which was one of the first that Trump really paid close attention to as an adult.

And then you're saying a kind of formative experience for him in the political world, even when he was just a New York developer in real estate, was that he watched Iran take all of these American diplomats hostage, and he saw Jim Ricardo Struggle for something like 400 days to get them released, and made a mental note that would come to blossom much, much later when he's president.

This regime must be dealt with. It has been a through line for him. It's there if people were actually looking that this was not really surprising. And so the portrait of somebody who has been manipulated or twisted, either by Neocons who speak to him or the echo chamber of Lindsey Graham,

and conservative thinkers, anti-Aran thinkers, or BB Netanyahu, is not quite right in our reporting.

And so it isn't that President Trump did not go into this with eyes wide open about the risks.

He was told by his team about the risks. And granted, this all happened very quickly in terms of a briefing that Netanyahu gave Trump and some of his team on February 11th in the situation room of the White House, which we reported a few weeks ago. But nonetheless, Trump was warned by his team,

particularly that the regime changed scenarios that Netanyahu had described and his team had described were in the words of the CIA director John Radcliffe, Farsicle, and in the words of Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State National Security Advisor Bullshit. Right, you seem to be saying, Maggie, by the time, BB Netanyahu comes to the White House to pitch President Trump on war against Iran,

which a lot of people have focused on. I mean, we even did an episode. The question being did Israel pushed the U.S. into this war. By that moment, it sounds like Trump might not have needed all that much convincing based on some decades of pretty deeply rooted

disdain for Iran. As deep as it gets, yes. But also the fact that it had been many years now of around personally threatening him, which is something that he actually said,

“as almost, I think, in passing remark to John Carl of ABC.”

But yes, he was far more receptive than a lot of people want to believe. So Trump very much owns this decision to go to war. And a pretty singular, maybe even unique way. And that naturally, I have to think in forms how he proceeds in these peace talks, in these negotiations.

He's going to want to have a big set of his fingerprints on how the war ends. So what are you learning? Are his red lines, his yellow lines? How he's thinking about what becomes an acceptable way to end this conflict, assuming, of course, that these talks proceed,

which, of course, inevitably they will. Yeah. It's easier to define it by what he doesn't want Michael than by what he does. And that's also, well, hey, that's generally his approach to most dealmaking. He usually has a sense either.

If the one thing he wants or the things he doesn't more often, he does not want something that is going to be very easy to describe as similar to the JCPLA. The Obama nuclear deal with Iran from 2015, that Republicans have been deriding for years and years and years for a variety of reasons. Right.

And just to summarize what the JCPLA does, because I was prepared for this conversation. Thank you. In short, it capped Iran's ability to enrich uranium. It forced him to give up a lot of the centrifuges that would be required to enrich it. And it involved giving up some sanctions that have been on Iran for a long time.

“But it foresaw a, I think, 15-year period where Iran would make no progress toward becoming nuclear.”

Correct. Or obtaining a nuclear weapon to be more specific. And there is a difference between civil and restraint and weaponized weapon. In some people's minds, this was a very good deal. In some people's minds, it was a very good deal.

In a lot of Democrats' minds, it was a very good deal. It has been a Republican focal point. And if you look at Republican primary discussions across the country for the last decade, the JCPLA has been a repeated refrain. And it was often talked about by Donald Trump, candidate, then president.

And so one of the first things he did was tear this deal up.

He was very proud of that.

And he has talked about why he thought it was a very bad deal. And throughout these conversations that Steve Whitkoff is main-mittiest. An envoy, but an introlocutor for lack of a better way of putting it, except for his son and lawyer, a cushioner. But Whitkoff was the one in the room for these conversations with the Iranians,

or at least the intermediaries over the course of the last year. And there were various points where the levels, at one point publicly, were going to be the same as what was in the JCPLA. And that caused all kinds of alarms for Republicans on Capitol Hill, and for people close to the White House.

“And so that's what the president knows he wants to avoid.”

John, then is there a very real possibility that the best deal Trump's ever going to get from Iran?

He might not like it, but it's just maybe always going to get.

Is a deal that's going to look a heck of a lot like the deal he hates that Obama got? There's definitely a risk of that. There are two areas where he wants to distinguish himself from Obama. The sun sets, when does this deal expire, when do restrictions get lifted on Iran's ability to enrich? And the other one is, which Trump really obsessed over with Obama,

was the so-called pallets of cash, part of the Iran deal that Obama struck with Iran, involved releasing large sums of cash to the Iranian regime. And it came, in some cases, in the form of physical cash. And that was something that captured Trump's imagination. And that he's talked about aggressively on the campaign trail.

And it's something that he wants to avoid himself having to do with Iran. So that's a big red line for him. But they're going to have to give a little, because they didn't have a complete victory in this war. And Iran showed that they had leverage that with very little technology, as the US was absolutely pounding them with bombing campaigns,

they were able to shut down the straight-of-all moves. And now they're in negotiations, and they've got some cards. So there's going to have to be some given take.

“The question for Trump is, how can the gifts that we give be portrayed as superior to what Obama and co-gave away in the JCV away?”

I mean, if it was up to Trump, he would be the president, the first one, to deal with this problem in a permanent way, to completely eliminate the program, have a new regime in that's more friendly to United States. But none of those things seem likely right now. So they're looking for what can we do in those two areas that will be seen as superior to what Obama managed to do? And they might be on the margins?

Well, they might not only be on the margins, but the reality is that the closer that we get to a midterm cycle followed by a presidential cycle,

where there's going to be an open seat, because Trump is term-limited, and people will be vying to replace him. You are going to see more and more Republican senators want to look for some separation from this White House. And particularly for the more hawkish senators who have long been anti-arand and very vocal about it, and anti-the Obama nuclear deal, think you're going to see more people be critical if there is an effort to essentially, you know, gusty up a version of the JCPO.

There'll be Republicans willing to say that was insufficient. But inside the White House, the administration already claims this is a total victory. Now that might be rhetorical, and that might be essentially propaganda.

“Is that their actual belief that they have won this war already?”

Who says that beyond the President and Caroline Levitt? I don't think that inside the White House, they believe that at all. Based on the people that we speak with, that was the question. Yeah, I mean, there are no illusions about how this is going. And there are no illusions about the ongoing risks, both militarily, and both fiscally, and both in terms of domestic policy, and what things look like going forward.

The person who is so far, and it doesn't mean it won't change, but who is so far, the least interested in thinking about the midterms, and what that could mean for his presidency is President Trump. Well, Maggie, that was very helpful because we are going to talk about the implications of this war for the midterms. And all the things that the President is doing or not doing, that seem to be setting up his party for potential trouble, right after the break.

We'll be right back. Hey, it's Lauren Dragon from Wirecutter. The Product Recommendation Service from the New York Times, and I test headphones. So what is actually conductive because of the saline content in it?

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So Megan Jonathan, here at home those midterm elections that you just refer to before the break are, and I just checked, six months away, that's all. And the president keeps doing things that seemed to make his party's prospects in that

election harder and harder.

There's the war itself, the increased gas prices that have resulted from it. And the reality he still doesn't really want to talk about affordability. He's been pursuing immigration crackdown that broadly speaking voters remain pretty sour on. He has personally decided to insult the leader of the Catholic Church.

The Pope, why does Trump not seem to care in this moment about the political risks that all of these pose or does he care? Jonathan points off into something that Trump said about some, I think it was a special election or about another election, so I can maybe last year, that he was very honored that Republicans didn't do well when his name wasn't on the ballot.

Because that is generally how he looks at it. He's not on the ballot, and so therefore this isn't really about him. The midterm elections may not matter, because Trump is not the person people are voting for technically.

“In terms of how he's looking at it, that doesn't mean that that's how his advisors are looking”

at it, but that has generally been here. Because he still is the president who has to deal with the repercussions of the better. Indeed, but he tends to look at things through different prison. It doesn't mean that he'll only look at it that way forever, but that has been how it is up until this point in terms of a lack of focus.

What is clear, Michael, in every single poll that we have had described to us in our reporting is that the war has damaged Trump's numbers universally, and just again, it doesn't mean he won't come back from it maybe, depending on how this ends. But the longer it goes, Republicans who have been generally in lockstep with Trump, because they've really been afraid of incurring his wrath, are going to face a choice

about how closely to align with him in the fall. And Jonathan Maggie invoked you, which means in terms of debate stage rules. No, it's your turn, but what I want to ask you is, is it actually true that the president really doesn't think of himself as being on the ballot? Because I can remember a couple months back, the president goes,

speaks in front of congressional Republicans.

“And he says to them, you need to win these midterms, because if you don't, I get impeached.”

There's no question he doesn't want to get impeached again. The Democrats can draw the house, right? Just don't want Republicans to hold the house, of course he does. But what Maggie is saying, which is actually a real source of frustration among some of his advisors, is he just doesn't actually care that much?

Yes, he prefers that they win the midterms. But based on everything that we're being told by people who are around him, it's his team that's very focused on the midterms and affordability. What can we do? There's nothing Donald Trump would less rather talk about the number four.

Really, not sure. Maybe, maybe health care policy. But what Donald Trump is focused on in this term, what he has been focused on, is making himself a capital G, great figure of history. Great manifestory.

Yeah, a great man of history. The amount of time he's spending on domestic politics, pausing comparison to him, taking really bold, aggressive moves in foreign policy and also putting his physical imprint on the world on Washington DC, designing monuments to himself, renaming institutions,

ensuring that he achieved some level of immortality, building a grand ballroom, calling it the Donald J Trump Institute of Peace.

That's a huge part of his mindset in this second term.

None of these things are winning issues when it comes to swing voters and independent voters, that have massively sound on Trump. But it's not really a pie on his hierarchy of concerns. He's thinking it at just a different level than a lot of his advisors. Which is to say, when you start to subscribe to the great man of history,

theory, then elections, they're temporary. And they don't really mean all that much. A midterm election. Next to regime change in Venezuela and what he's doing in Iran. Well, it's even more than that.

Donald Trump has won his great victory. Exactly. His great victory was the 2024 election that against all reason and odds coming back from January 6.

You know, I talked to one of his advisors and they were saying,

“how much do you think he really deeply cares about the 2028 Republican at the top of the ticket and what happens?”

The next presidential, right? Exactly. You know, if that person loses, well, only Donald J Trump can win. Okay. So there's that. But there's another thing. He's changed the American presidency in very profound ways.

As we discussed with you both, and Charlie's average endlessly. Endlessly, but his use of power here at home is like nothing we've seen in our lifetimes. So again, when he comes to his mind, share and things that he's thinking of, his team has to really pick their moments for when they show him polling or anything negative. He just, he kind of just doesn't want to hear it.

These are the things that just small ball compared to what he's doing.

Maggie, one potential counterpoint. But maybe you're about to tell me I shouldn't view it as a counterpoint. Seems to be Trump firing cabinet members three in the past.

“I think month or so alone, which wouldn't theory suggest that he does recognize that he has some domestic political problems.”

Am I reading that wrong? Maybe over thinking that under a standard frame Michael a simple to you call me. What I think Michael is number one. This is not a cabinet that was put together based on the idea of extensive resumes in the subject areas. Loyalty was number one two.

Loyalty was number one two three. But loyalty doesn't necessarily translate to. I praise you so much Mr. President. I think you're wonderful, Mr. President. It's do what I want.

And so in fact, I would argue that he is behaving like somebody who thinks that this changeover is probably going to happen anyway. He's kind of ambivalent about it in terms of control of the house. Maybe the Senate.

“And so that only gives him six months to get done the things he cares about.”

What does he care about? He cares about and he's very open about it. The Fed investigation, the investigation of the construction project. At the Fed renovation, he doesn't like Jay Powell as he has said repeatedly. The Fed chairman who he's trying to replace right now.

He was open with Pam Bondi now. The former attorney general back in September that she wasn't moving fast enough to prosecute certain people. And in that case, it was James Comey. He has been talking to allies about how prosecutions can move quicker. You are seeing Todd Blanche now work with the acting attorney general.

These are people who the president believes are going to do what he wants and what he wants is to see certain people indicted. He wants to see certain institutions discredited. That is what he has focused on. In other words, the reason why he's replacing people in the cabinet is not because he's worried about the political appeal of them in the midterms. But because he may already accept that he might lose the house and might lose control of Congress.

He needs to get a bunch of stuff done fast, including replacing cabinet members. Obviously, the firing of the attorney general had nothing to do with the midterm elections. We all know why he fired her. He made it very clear to his advisors. He was frustrated because the Department of Justice under Pam Bondi was not prosecuting his enemies quickly enough.

That has nothing to do with the results in any battleground state in the midterm elections. The other two cabinet secretary's who are fired were getting lots and lots of bad headlines for the Trump administration. And of course he doesn't like that. And again, I don't want to overstate what we've been saying. Donald Trump wants to hold the house in the midterm elections.

Of course he does. I'm just saying it's not at the top of his hierarchy of things that he's concerned about. Okay, understandable. You both keep returning to this idea that the president is very singularly focused on himself, on avenging himself, on finding his appropriate place in history.

Whether that's in Iran or here at home. But quite clearly at the moment that doesn't seem to be a viable position for the rest of the Republican party. And I wonder how many of the leaders of the Republican party are willing. They don't have a long history of doing it. Of telling him that we're starting to see some ruptures in the seams in the Republican influencer.

We're just at this very interesting moment because the coalition that Trump assembled in 2024 was sort of a political miracle.

I mean, it was really an incredible coalition.

People who just don't typically vote young men, disaffected people coming together independent. You know, none of the real fights on the rise were actually resolved in the Republican primaries in 2024. The only thing that was resolved is we love Donald Trump.

So that's how you have a party which can contain people who absolutely despise each other who have fundamental

“worldview differences have all been sort of put under the umbrella of Magga.”

And because of Donald Trump as this figure of historic charisma and force of personality and an ability to rally a mass movement, Trump papered over all of these disagreements and problems because he was Donald Trump. And now we're starting to see the first glimpses of what opposed Trump Republican party looks like. So what you then get is the disagreements, the fights and all of these fractures. You get a bunch of people who voted for Donald Trump because he thought he was going to keep him out of foreign wars who are now in foreign wars.

Angerally disaffected.

And so now we're seeing the fight that never really happened in the 2024 Republican primaries.

And we just don't know how it's going to play out. And just to elucidate this fight. Marjorie Taylor Green former Georgia Republican is now saying what Trump is doing and saying in Iran is insanity. Candace Owens the far right podcaster calling Trump a genocidal lunatic. You have Tucker Carlson saying, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry for leading you to Trump. I regret it. I feel implicated.

You've got Alex Jones saying Trump sounds like his brain's not doing too hot.

And let's not go too crazy.

“You know, he's still popular among Republicans, right?”

But he has lost meaningful support among Republicans and where he's really lost support profoundly is among independence. So that coalition, that miraculous coalition that he pulled together has unmistakably fractured. But I do think people are overstating the extent of bleeding from the Republican side. And it's important to note that Trump has another two and a half years left of this term. And he does still remain the central figure of this party.

And so Marco Rubio, Judy Vance.

Every congressional Republican.

Most of the center Republicans, influencers who have made their livings on the fact that Donald Trump is president. They are starting to see their interests diverge some from him. Where has it been in total alignment until now? They can't really get away from him for another two and a half years. They are all stuck with him.

And if there is anything that we know about Donald Trump, not just during his political career. But over the last 50 years is that he is not someone who is going to enthusiastically or willingly or quietly see the spotlight to anybody else. Right. Great ministry. Never leave the stage.

Correct. Okay, well Maggie and Jonathan, so great to have you back. Let's do it again soon. Let's do it. Thank you, Michael.

Thanks, Michael. We'll do it back.

“Here's what else you need to nerdy. On Thursday, the Trump administration said it had loosened legal restrictions for medical marijuana,”

allowing it to be used for more research and more treatments. The change treats FDA approved and state regulated medical marijuana less like heroin, which is heavily restricted in more like ketamine. The change, however, has no impact on federal restrictions over marijuana's recreational use. And in the latest sign of how rapidly artificial intelligence is changing the workplace,

meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said it plans to cut 8,000 workers or about 10% of its staff. The company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he expects much of the work now done in tech to eventually be overtaken by AI. Today's episode was produced by Lexi Dia, Olivia Nad and Alex Stern. It was edited by Rachel Questor and N.J. Davis-Lin. Contains music by Mary Elizano and Alicia Baetu. Our theme music is by Wonderley.

This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for Daily. I'm Michael Baboro. See you on Sunday.