This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the ...
I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
“As of this recording, Donald Trump has declared the war with Iran terminated.”
But it's unclear what's supposed to happen next. He's left the military in place there, yet he says he's unsatisfied with Iran's latest offer. Now what? We don't know.
During a newsmax interview, Trump made an accidentally revealing admission, one that seemed to indicate that he has no idea what's going on between his own negotiators and Iran. This comes as new polling shows the public really souring on the war and specifically on Trump's lack of clarity around it. MSNow's Steve Benin has a good piece arguing that Trump's inadvertent newsmax moment captures
a good deal about this situation, so we're talking to him about all this today. Steve, good to have you back on. Thank you, Greg. It's great to be here. All right, so Trump sent a letter to the hill declaring the war terminated.
He did this to circumvent the law that requires a congressional vote on hostilities after 60 days have passed. Yeah, Trump is now saying he's dissatisfied with Iran's latest offer, but won't say exactly why. There would appears to be partly that Iran won't renounce its nuclear program entirely.
“Steve, can you try to sum up where we are right now?”
I could try. I mean, I think what you just said is inaccurate and concise summary. We're in a situation in which Congress has supposed to step up, we're now in the third month of the war is now getting underway. Donald Trump and his team has decided that they have, quote-unquote, terminated the conflict.
We heard similar comments from Defense Secretary Pete Heggsett during his congressional testimony this week before the House and Senate committees. It's a situation in which they basically are saying that the 60-day window is effectively closed because they say so, because of a ceasefire that we're waiting to see whether or not it advances.
It's against that backdrop that Iran and the White House are presumably having some kind of diplomatic negotiations. We don't yet have a sense of the details, and we know that the president isn't satisfied with their offer, but we don't know what the offer is, and we don't know what the president finds unsatisfying about it.
So other than that, everything is crystal clear. Right. So Trump had this astonishing exchange with an interviewer on Newsmax. Here he's asked about something that is a negotiator, Steve Wittkov, apparently, offered to Iran.
Listen. Steve Wittkov told me on this show is that the United States offered Iran to give them
enriched uranium, so the pharmaceutical and powerful purposes free, if they would give
up their nuclear program, one cost them a dime, and they declined that, which to me suggested that they really didn't want to deal. Well, it maybe it wasn't a very serious offer, because I wouldn't have approved that. I wouldn't have. If I'm not given him anything, I wouldn't have approved that.
Do you agree to have a nuclear weapon or that not? Steve, let's break this up into pieces. First note that his interviewer brings up Wittkov's offer to Iran, which was of enriched uranium for medical purposes, I guess, in order to paint Iran as unreasonable as in Iran turned down this very generous offer from Trump.
That was like a set up for Trump to wallop it out of the park, but it flew right over Trump's head.
All he's able to say here is, "I would never give Iran anything like that because I'm
tough and strong and totally in control. You're thoughts on that?" Alright. I think that that context is highly relevant, because Wittkov and Session was clearly trying to set up the president for a good point to offer it in an important observation
about the nature of the negotiations and about Iran being unreasonable in the context of these diplomatic talks. But yet Trump didn't pick up on the queue. He was kind of, well, frankly, he was clueless about this, and because he was so eager to say that he was against the underlying idea that he was so reluctant to give an inch
to Tehran that he ends up saying he ends up saying something really important, which is that his own negotiator, the envoy that he sent on behalf of the White House, to represent the United States at the negotiating table, came up with an idea, and as far as Trump is concerned, he's against that idea. He's against what his own envoy offered Iran as part of these talks, and I find that
to be incredibly important, and he's never said before, he's never acknowledged this
to date, and yet he said it anyway.
“I think I was surprised that he said it because it's so important given the larger context.”
Well, I would also add that Trump appears unaware of what his negotiator would
Cough offered to Iran.
Now, obviously, Trump's not going to be aware of every single detail on these negotiations,
but here he's basically blurting out in the open that he has no idea what his own negotiating
team is offering to Iran in a larger sense. It's a very central thing in these discussions. This is not a small thing, Trump should know what his negotiators are offering to the country with which we're at war if Trump wants to negotiate a peace.
“I think that's an extraordinary admission, don't you?”
I do. I think a lot about what's going on when happened in 2015 around this time of decade ago, when Barack Obama deployed his own negotiators to the JCPO8 talks, the Iran nuclear deal talks, and of course, there's going to be granular details that come up to the course of negotiations, and that President isn't in a position in micro-manage from thousands
of miles away. But at the same time, obviously, the President is supposed to establish an agenda, establish a blueprint of priorities, and then deploy his team accordingly. So John Kerry goes to the negotiating table, for example, in 2015, with his international partners in Iran, it's not as if Barack Obama's clueless as to what Kerry's going to
offer. He's obviously going to be aware of what's going on because Obama's the one who sent him. And yet, what we have is a situation in which not only was Donald Trump clueless in this instance, we see a situation in which Donald Trump is clueless in practically all instances.
He is a, when I refer to his president bystander, where he doesn't really seem to know what's going on around him, including within his own administration within his own White House. It happened also just earlier in the week when the Supreme Court got it, the voting rights act.
And he was, when he was asked about it at a White House event by a reporter, and the President had absolutely no idea what had happened, because he said in his own words that he'd been his, he'd spent the day working on what we're working with contractors on his ballroom vanity project. Well, you know, it's, it is, I realize that a president has a variety of responsibilities
over the course of a given day, but if you don't know what's going on in terms of withdrawing with the Supreme Court and your own teams in the, your own negotiations, well, then maybe
“you need to spend less time in the Gulf, of course, and it's one more time getting engaged”
in the, did it a governance? Right. He threw his own negotiator under the bus on national television, I mean, Trump is basically admitting here in a larger sense that there's some kind of major disconnect between what his negotiators think he has authorized them to offer and what Trump wants them to
offer. In a big sense, that's a striking admission, it suggests a level of disengagement that's, that's quite striking and quite unnerving, no? It is. And, you know, it, it, it, and in practical sense, it just can't work this way.
We can't have an environment, we can't have a policy dynamic in which a White House sends an envoy to high level, sensitive, national security talks, and then makes an offer on behalf of the United States government, and then has, and has his, then, his boss go on
national television and say, no, no, I would never support that, I'm against what my own
envoy said. Don't, don't listen to my negotiator listen to me, and I'm telling you that my negotiator is wrong. I mean, that, you know, we're laughing about it, but at the same time, it is a fundamental breakdown in how any functioning administration here or anywhere else on Earth can reasonably
expect to work. And, in fact, it doesn't work, and I think the consequences that will be significant, because now we run as fresh reason not to trust the United States or the Trump White House, and as these talks conceivably hopefully may be continuing some way.
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Thanks code DSR 26 at the DSR network.com/by. Thank you, and enjoy the show. Well with all that in mind, a new Pew Research poll has some striking findings, 62% of Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of the war, including 45% who strongly disapprove and credible number, only 36% approved, 59% of Americans say Trump's decision to attack was wrong.
A majority, 51% says the war is not going well, and a plurality of 48% says Trump's goals in Iran are not clear, only 24% I'm going to do the math for you, it's that's less than a quarter, say our goals are clear.
Steve, you can really see here that most Americans basically get the situation that
Trump is disengaged and doesn't know how to get out of this, your thoughts?
You know, it's not as if anyone could say it, the White House or anyone else ...
that this was somehow an outlier poll, or somehow a poll that's just with the data is
this literally unbelievable. On the contrary, it is exactly consistent with everything we see from the Washington Post, for example, Washington Post poll to the latest episodes poll and so on, and so put together what we see is a conflict that is clearly opposed by the clear majority, the overwhelming majority of the public, including many Republicans who are not standing by the White House
on this, and so the more headset and the White House and others pretend that somehow they have the public support, the more they're humiliated by the data that shows otherwise.
“Well, you wrote about the Washington Post poll, and I think we should highlight that because”
it probed people's views in a kind of larger context in a way that no other survey has done before, and here again, it was very illuminating, you want to talk about what the Post poll showed? Yeah, it really stood out for just that reason, the post ABC episodes poll not only showed that there is roughly six in ten Americans who think that the war was in that bad idea, but then it provides a historical context. There was similar opposition
to the war in Iraq under George W. Bush, and under an Vietnam during Nixon, but the key difference here is that it took three years for Americans to turn against the war in Iraq at this level, and then it took six years for Americans to turn against the Vietnam at this level, and so it's not just a question of whether or not Americans are against this. It's that there are against this in a historical way. You know, looking back over the last several decades,
what we often see is that Americans rally around the flag at the beginning of a conflict, and then sour on the war as a drag zone and conflict continues and casualties rise in cost rise and so on. But in this case, the war started on popular, in part because Donald Trump was so horrible in terms of presenting a rationale or any kind of explanation for it. It started on popular, and it remained on popular, and then it got even more on popular. The floor is falling out from
underneath the White House. I think as all this data shows, and so I think this historical
“context is important because I think Donald Trump might have been under the impression”
that somehow Americans would rally behind him and his administration because there was this new war. In fact, he's now realizing that if he did assume that he's with spectacularly wrong. Well, in fact, we're actually seeing some more Republican angst about the war. Senator Susan Collins voted with Democrats to stop at saying that Congress simply must authorize it if it's going to continue. Senator John Curtis of Utah said he won't support any more funding for the war
without Congress voting on it. As political put it, GOP unity has started to crack and Trump could soon face far more resistance. Steve, what's your reading of that? How much longer do you think Republicans will put up with this? What's your sense? You know, it's frustrating in a way because we've been seeing reports for weeks about how they're going to be Republicans who are anxious about this, who work. And certain about this, they see the same polls, the rest of us do when they're
thinking he had to the midterms, and they keep kind of sending signals, oh, wait a minute, we're not on board, hold on, watch your step. They're a limit here, and yet we haven't really
“seen any follow-through. And so the question I think for all of us is when will we cease to follow”
through, when will they step up? Now, I think this week we saw Susan Collins flip that's the first
that's a step in the right direction. She joined with Rand Paul, so now that there are two, we mentioned John Curtis, and of course in there's Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, who is also expressed in reservations. It doesn't appear that maximal military force can give Trump the outcome he wants, and he doesn't seem to know that. Let's listen to Trump talk about this a bit. You have a bit of commander coming here at the S today. What's he briefing you on a different approach
options? What kind of options? How would it look to bring options? I mean, do we want to go and just blast the hell out of them and finish him forever? Or do we want to try and make a deal? And then those are the options. Do you want to go blast the hell out of them? I can't really burn either. On a human basis that prefer not, but that's the option. Do we want to go in there heavy and just blast them away? Or do we want to do something? So there you have Trump saying he's going
to blast the hell out of Iran if Iran doesn't give him exactly what he wants, which is essentially he's retaking his previous threat to a race Iranian civilization. In other words, he's retaking his threat to commit massive war crimes. But here again, the basic situation, the logic of it seems unforgiving, military force alone won't force Iran to give Trump what he wants. Trump doesn't seem able to process that thought. Where do we go from here? I don't understand it.
Well, you know, the many things you said you don't understand. I think the more accurate way of putting it is that Donald Trump doesn't understand it. I mean, what he should have learned from
that initial month, really the first six weeks of the conflict, is that he can't bomb his way to success.
He can bomb and cause enormous damage and he can kill a lot of people and he can cause a lot of
Destruction in Iran.
where Iran will just simply give him everything that he wants and allow him to walk away smiling. And so he has, because he has not yet learned that lesson, we find ourselves where we are today, which is some saying either give me a deal or argue back to bombing you. But if going back to bombing, you will not give me a deal, then what is the point? And so the fact that he's so frustrated
“by that is palpable. So when we look ahead, what is the endgame here? How do we get out of it?”
The answer is we don't know because I don't Trump does that. No, there is no plan. There's no strategy.
And so it is, it is, it is, exacerbating to watch us unfold because, well, frankly, it's a, it's a quagmire and it's, that is only getting worse with no end insight. And also, it sucks to be an American right now and watch your president threaten war crimes. I don't want my president to threaten war crimes. Here his threats are going off the rails one more time. And we just have to sit here and wait and everybody has to sort of
dance around pretend that this guy has any idea what he's doing. It's just on so many levels. That's an on ideal situation Steve. I agree. And when we watch him and there's most recent comments that you just played the clip of, I was struck by the fact that he was talking about the prospect for a deal. And one of the things that occurs to me that is, is especially exacerbating is that whatever happened to the art of the deal, whatever happened to the fact that
Donald Trump billed himself to voters as this world class negotiator, world class deal maker, who can sit, who can settle any resolution, who can resolve any conflict because of his
“masterful world class skills and striking agreements. Well, where is that? Where are those talents?”
Why hasn't he put them to use? Well, I mean, I think the answer is because it was always a lie
that it was always a shame that he was never, he has never really earned the role of the rights to call himself a great deal maker. His own book on negotiating was ghost written by someone else. And so what we're seeing is a collapse of this myth. We're seeing this, this, this image that he created for himself of this, of this, of this world class negotiator world class deal maker, collapsing down because he clearly doesn't have those skills that he pretended to have.
And if he, because if he did, we would see them on display and we don't. Yeah, and making that all the worse, it just seems like Donald Trump isn't capable of any kind of level of shame that might force him to try and find a better way out of this. So we're
“really stuck, I think. We may be stuck for a while. Steve Bennett, God help us, man.”
Always good to talk to you. Always a pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much.
