This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the ...
I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
“It's now becoming clear that Donald Trump's failed war in Iran will have far-reaching”
consequences for our country and geopolitically as well. We're only just beginning to get our heads around how disastrous this war and this presidency could very well prove over time. It's a deeply consequential moment, and Trump is spending his nights tweeting crazed demands for adulation, insisting that his war was a world-historical triumph, and seeping about
the prospects for finishing his ballroom. This gap between what Trump is doing to this country and the world on one side, and his megalomaniacal trivial obsessions on the other, is really jarring and unnerving to witness. Paul Crogman has been writing really well on his excellent sub-stack about both sides of this divide, so we're talking to him about how to make sense of it all.
Paul, nice to have you back on.
“Good to be back on, although I wish the times were better, but anyway, yeah.”
Exactly. So let's start with the easy stuff at 432 in the morning, Donald Trump posted this quote. These fools who think I haven't been tough enough on Iran, when the stock market just hit a record high and oil prices are tumbling down, are either jealous, bad people, or stupid.
Make America great again. Paul Trump is very angry that he's not getting more worshipful praise for the world
historical triumph that was his ceasefire with Iran, which basically just put a stop
to the disaster he created, so we might as well start here. What did you think of the quote unquote, "deal"? Obviously, it's horrible, the Iran one, it's a, the Iran is in a much stronger position and the U.S. in a much weaker position than before the war started, and of course, the deal is vastly inferior to the Obama, the JCPOA that Trump ripped up in his first term.
All of this at the cost of enormous outlays of money, depletion of weapons stocks, killed a lot of people, and basically we've just shown the whole world that we're maybe not quite a paper tiger, but a lot less of a power than we were supposed to be. So all of this is an enormous diminution of the United States, but I don't think there are hawks are saying, why is Trump giving in, why isn't he following up on his victory,
but it was no victory? This is actually the best you could do given how the war is gone. In fact, it should have made this deal about a weekend when it became clear that the whole premise of his enterprise was not going to work. He could have made a better deal before the war started.
Of course, he could have just done nothing. I mean, that would have been better, and he could have going back in time. He could have kept that Obama agreement, which was doing a much better job of containing Iran. So yeah, but it tells you something about where we are, that there are apparently a substantial number of, yeah, at least until recently, pro Trump people who really believe that we
were winning the war, or we had won the war, which just shows you how detached from reality they are. Well, they're all on the same information bubble, Trump did another misive that was
in all caps saying this quote, "Oil is flowing, Iran can never have a nuclear weapon,
the world will be safe, the stock markets are roaring, jobs are at records and prices are dropping. Probability, our country is strong, safe, and respected like never before. You're a welcome." Okay, Paul, he got nothing significant on Iran's nukes in our country as weaker, less
“safe and less respected, but I think we should step back.”
He's making a bigger argument there, isn't he? It's that in every way the nation is booming, strong, and leading decisively in the world. What do you make with that bigger argument? Okay, so, I mean, the stock market is up. There's no question about that.
Although the stock market rose a lot under Joe Biden, too, people Trump would like you to put that down the memory hole and stocks are up by the way around the world. There's a stock market boom. I haven't checked the numbers lately, but I believe that they're up substantially more. Outside the United States than the inside the United States, so this is a stuff that is
not really reflecting, reflecting US specific developments and certainly not Trump's specific
Developments.
You know, a president has to do not control the stock market, but the, so, you know, leaving that aside, well, the economy, it's not booming. We are basically have had slower job growth than we did in the Biden, the last two years of Biden, and basically flat on employment. So that's not great, it's not a catastrophe, it's not great.
Real wages are lower than they were when Trump took office because we've had a lot of inflation. By the way, one of the things with this corruption of how we do stuff, click on any, pretty much, any information site. I've been only looking at the ones to have to do with that kind of policy, but you know,
if federal government information sites, which are traditionally, they're just sort of, just the facts.
Here's what's happening, maybe discreetly touting administration policies, but you
click on any site and you got pop up that has a picture of Trump and says, "Welcome to the Golden Age," which is all part of this incredible, the kind of ding-backed cult of personality. He corrupts everything, it just seeps into every last corner of public life, basically.
“I think it's worth pointing out that this incredible personalized cult of personality”
for Trump, while it's absolutely ludicrous level now, this actually started ways back. It was a fair bit of it under Reagan, and that's not for good George Bush on the flight suit, right? So this kind of, the president is a, is a comic book hero thing, is something that appears to go along with modern Republican governance, but of course it's reached in a level of
absurdity with Trump, both because of the extremeness of the cult of personality and because
the reality is that he's, there has to be a better, he's a fuck up, or basically nothing
at everything Trump touches turns to crud, and so it's really insane. Yeah, there are, like, a lot of dimensions to it, if you look at some of those late night tweets, the tweets we're talking about here, you kind of get hit by a real dose
“of somebody in very steep mental decline, I think, it's sort of too layered, right?”
On the one hand, it's the sheer nakedness of the demand for adulation, which is just completely crazy. Somebody who's sunsetting very plainly and plain sight, who knows he's on his way out, and is desperate to sort of have something that he can call a legacy, that's what we see there.
But at the same time, you also see him completely detached from the reality of what he's actually done to us. What he's done to you and me, to liberal America, to blue America, even to Red America, even to maga country. And so, yeah, some ways, it's fiercely to maga country, but yeah, right, two dimensions
“here of someone in steep mental decline, don't you think?”
Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, I'm not a psychologist, but I do, as my understanding is that when you're sundowning, when you're in this dissociation that does, I'm on other things tend to come with age, that you, in some ways become more like yourself, those, those aspects of your personality that were disagreeable and unpleasant and dysfunctional, but which you were able to, at least, police, when you were still more there, now just
come out, it's a little bit like, you know, it's something like getting drunk, but anyway,
there's a lack of complete lack of a filter now, even the, I mean, presumably Trump always
was a person who lived just for external regulation, I mean, and it must be awful to be him, there's this, I think there's no inside at all, but 10 years ago, he was canny enough to keep it, at least somewhat under wraps, and now he's just out of control, it, it all gets blurred it out at four in the morning, indeed, you had this video where you went very big picture kind of assessing where we really are right now, I want to try to summarize
your argument briefly, basically, it's that the United States is no longer seen by our allies and much of the world as an indispensable nation, our military can't do what we thought it could, can't force smaller countries like Iran to do our bidding or Trump's bidding, that due to Trump's tariff fiascoes, we have less leverage and trade wars than we thought, that China has unexpected leverage over supply chains and important goods and important
resources that impart due to our abandonment of Ukraine or one-time allies are looking past
Us to a post-American world, et cetera, et cetera, is that the basic argument?
Yeah, it's basically a argument with the, it is worth saying that even things that I find
“someone encouraging, like the fact that Ukraine is holding despite Trump having cut them”
off completely. You know, I say, it's just stops sending money and basically stop the flow of arms. We won't even allow the Europeans to buy arms for Ukraine, and yet Ukraine seems to be gaining the upper hand, which is telling you that they don't need us, the world doesn't need us.
And that's part of what's happened in Iran as well, turns out that if there was one thing we thought that America really had was, well, we had the world's greatest military, and we had the world's best weapons, and nobody else could manage without us, and we'll turn it out that we were completely flack-footed in the face of Iranian drones, and that Ukraine is holding its own without American weapons, and so who are we, we're becoming
bystanders, bystanders, or becoming bystanders in world events. America is a rogue power, it does crazy things, it can't even impose its will on a third rate military power like Iran, and we don't seem to actually be necessary for the defense of Europe. So what we're a kind of a shadow of our former selves on the world stage.
Is this inexorable decline, do you think, can it be turned around? Some of it is probably irreversible, and some of it would have happened anyway.
“The truth is, to a large extent, the America as it seemed to be, as Trump took office”
was an automotive vision, and I think we didn't fully understand that, but there was still a reflexive tendency, I'm much of the world, to think that, well, you have to accommodate, you have to give in, allow yourself to be bullied by an American president no matter what,
and that was all, the truth is the fundamentals had already shifted against United States
and like a sort of global power game. But then there's a lot that is obviously made much worse by Trump's screwups, and what the world now has to suspect, even when Trump is gone from this stage, is, well, who's the next guy, and how do we know that we won't have another Trump-like figure, doesn't agree with America mean anything, since we've just seen an American president rip up
every agreement that we had, does a threat from America mean anything, because we've just seen that same guy cave totally, and after all this guy was elected, sorry to say it was elected fairly by the American people, so what does that say about America, and we don't get that back, it took generations to build the reputation of America, and you don't get that back, you know, unless you give us three generations of good governance from here
on in. Well, I want to highlight another aspect of our self-inflicted wounds. You brought up Spain as an example of a country that weathered the energy shock from Iran well, because it's transitioning to renewables quickly. Here's another area where Trump has set back our country tremendously, on two fronts,
trying to strangle the transition to clean energy in every way he can, it's like a whole of government approach to strangling the clean energy transition, and at the same time he's delivering a big oil shock with the Iran War, I guess that'll lessen a bit, but it'll
“take time, but we have learned that being dependent on oil is a problem, right?”
The lesson here is that making this transition is even more imperative, and at the same time we're lagging behind by choice, how bad is this self-inflicted wound, and what can be done about it? Well, yeah, I mean, that's a really, you know, on Wednesday the interior department announced
it was paying another $765 million to an energy company not to build wind farms, right?
We're actually not only refusing to follow pro-green energy policies, but actually spending taxpayer money to block it, the appendagon is is using spurious national security concerns
To block development of wind farms.
So this is a aggressively anti-remissible energy administration, and you know, we can talk, I
“will be talking shortly on the sub-stack about the motivations, but the fundamental level, again,”
this is one of these things where US influence was kind of faded to decline. In the US does have oil and gas in a way that other advanced countries do not, and so that
gave us something of a special position, but with the incredible progress and renewable
energy that matters a lot less than it used to, but then on top of that, you have both the US is, we are basically alone, everyone else is marching towards the energy transition and then we're trying to go back to coal, and to the extent that countries might have wanted to, well, rely on us a bit, it's actually even more than oil, it's lukified natural gas, and there was a possible future we'd seen to be heading for in which at least to a
certain extent the world would be relying on USLNG to, at least the transitional source of power on the way to the green revolution, but instead, if you were dependent on the United States for LNG, wouldn't you worry that Trump might get mad at you, because you won't hand over greenland or something like that and cut it off, and are you sure that America won't, again, be led by somebody like that, so the US is a, on top of everything else,
we're risky, we're not, we're not trustworthy, so nobody's going to rely on us for energy.
“Well, Trump's focused on the important things here at 251 AM, he went on a rampage about”
his ballroom, he insisted it's coming along brilliantly, and effectively demanded more adulation for how great it's going to be, you know, it's going to be outfitted with all this powerful military security, et cetera, then he raged about the legal tribals, he's still facing over this, even though he tore down the White House, the East Wing, you know that, hurly, and probably illegally. In another tweet, he celebrated the gilding of
some statues in a third, he posted a picture of himself on the cover of a magazine in India, as if we're, we're supposed to marvel at that in some way, look, Trump is the cover guy, I'm in magazine in India, what's striking to me here, and you wrote about this, it's just
“this kind of relentless, desecration and degradation of everything. He's desecrating the”
ways in which our capital, supposed to embody small art republicanism, he's turning it into a cross-imperial court, basically. Yeah, I mean, your Washington D.C. was designed very much with classical models in mind, they found in fathers, we're very much into ancient Roman history, but they were into the history of the Roman Republic, not the empire, they wanted it, and all of the, you know, we have all of this grand monumental architecture in, in D.C., but it's
all celebrating the people, the Republic, it's not personal glory. And certainly, you would never
exalt a currently living president that way. So, yeah, actually, I live in New York, not too far from there, there's a long riverside drive along the west and side of Manhattan, there's a series of monuments, there's grants to, there's the soldiers and sailors monument and so on, and they're all very impressive, they're kind of like Washington D.C. in a way, but notably, there's no personal clarification, even grants to, it's not a monumental statue grant, it's a celebration of defensive
of the Republic. The soldier's sailor's monument has the names of generals, but they're in plain type and their, and battles, which include the defeats as well as the victories, because this is, this is the Republic. We, we are stoic, we are modest, and now we have trump yielding everything, wanting to erect a gigantic arch of triumph in the, in the capital, and filling the reflecting pool with algae, which is just showing that the gods have a sense of humor. Yeah, that is perfect.
The dream, the swamp guy is filling the reflecting pool with algae. I just want to try to pull this all together. I guess what really bothers me about this moment is that trump and JD bands don't feel like a shred of obligation to speak to the country with even minimal candor at all about
what just happened, right? Everything is all about false glorification of trump and it's always
Just about using the most cynical eyes they can to insulate him from any acco...
calamity. It's always all about him, no matter what. There's like no sense of obligation
on their part to function as real leaders or statesmen who care about the nation and its future and have a conception of of what's in the interests of the American people. How do you put all this
“together in your mind? Well, it's about them, but I think the real question is what has happened”
to us, or at least to the Republican Party, but I think it may be even broader than that, that this can happen. I remember there was a time when people used to think of Marco Rubio as a sort of reformist, the Republican, that reformer common, whatever. Now, here he is walking around and oversized shoes because Trump walked them for me. He's afraid to take them off and look and acting as a licks-biddle for all of this crazy ego demonstration. My god,
I think there's a whole, there will probably be many future books written about the downward spiral that everyone who deals with trump seems to go into, but
we always knew that there were people like Trump, but the idea that the world's, basically,
the world's oldest Republic, I think, you know, that the nation that invented Republican values
“and democratic norms puts up with it. That's what really shocks me. Well, let me just close out”
this way. It's my feeling a little bit that Democrats, while they're functioning more as an opposition, then maybe they were at the outset of Trump's second term when they were clearly snake-bidden just terrified and on some level Democrats had widely concluded that Trump had put his finger on some sort of real popular sentiment that everybody missed. I think that was never true.
He won by a point in a half and it was at a time of inflation and post-COVID shock and so forth,
but that's where Democrats were. Now, they're functioning more as an opposition, but still, I feel like there's a smallness to their politics, Paul, and you've been writing about the big problems here and sort of the desecration plus the decline, those two sides that I talked about,
“should Democrats be making a bigger argument? What might something like that look like?”
Some kind of argument, which essentially says, "Let's be real about what this guy is doing to us." Like, an argument that says, "Let's face reality about what this man and his movement have done to our country," and really setting forth a new direction. Is there some way to do that for Democrats? I think that at some level, the, I think the corruption is the theme and corruption of various kinds, but I think that all ties together. And if we want to talk about kitchen table
issues, you can make that part of it. The reason that you can't afford your electricity is because of the corruption, the reason that you can't afford health insurance is because of the corruption. And look, I mean, why the happiest things politically has happened in the world was the overturn of the urban regime in Hungary, which was, you know, very much, something that that mark a people viewed as a role model. This is how you someverted democracy, and it turns out
that, yeah, but with enough people mad enough, you can flood across all of the barriers they've created. And the central theme of the Muggar campaign was corruption. These guys are corrupt. There were there were Z-brows on the family, or by the family of state in the countryside, apparently. And Z-brows, stuff Z-brows became an image of the, for the opposition. Because it was all about corruption. That seems to me like, people may not think in terms of abstract. They certainly won't
think in terms of Republican norms, but to make it just, well, I can shave 15% off the price of gasoline, if you elect me. That is not how to stop this horrifying term to say this is a this, these people are utterly corrupt, self-centered, and you are paying the price. That sounds like a movement that can work. Yes, and I like the idea of using corruption to sort of open the door to an argument about moral corruption and degradation, which I think, I think people
sense that that's happening. You know, the reflecting pool on the algae and the tearing down of the White House East Wing and the replacement of it with a ballroom in the arch, those are things that really resonate for people. And I think it's because of what we're talking
About here, right?
a distraction, right? But it's clear that these things have profound resonance for people for
these reasons, that there's a sense that our common life or something like that is just being
“fundamentally degraded at a very profound level. And I think the corruption argument opens the door”
there, I'd point out, by the way, just to close out, that the Magiar campaign was also about
what this man, Orban, and his movement, Orbanism, did to us. What he did to us. And that seems like there's a, you know, you've been writing about what Donald Trump is doing to us, and it seems like
“some Democrats need to step up and grab that mantle in some way, I guess. Yeah, and I think fire”
are some of the consultants, but no, I mean, you know, and I would say, you know, I'm a numbers guy. I like to live, you know, I'm a lot of ways. I view the world through spreadsheets, but it's not
about the numbers. 300, if there's 300 million of taxpayer funds going to the ballroom, whatever,
in the scale of federal budget, that's not big, but it's a symbol of this horrible thing that's
“happening. And I think it's, and it's something people can relate to. Paul, Cragman, thank you”
so much for writing your sub stack. I learned from it all the time. Really, I'm not exaggerating. I've learned from it every day, and Paul, thanks for coming on with us. Well, thank you.
