The Daily Blast: Trump Humiliated as Viral Exchange with Journo on Iran Backfires Badly

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

“Donald Trump's attack on Iran is the most unpopular US war in the history of modern polling.”

The New York Times looked at polls on US wars going back to World War II and found Trump's war at the very bottom of the heap. This comes as new exchanges between reporters in the White House show that Trump's positions on the war are falling apart. In particular, one exchange with the reporter over the bombing of an Iranian school blew up

in Trump's face, rather spectacularly. We think it's significant that the public is not reflexively rallying to Trump's war. It says something fundamental about the American public during the Trump era. Paul Waldman has a good piece on his sub-stack, the cross-section, digging into why Trump's war is so unpopular, so we're talking to him about all this today.

Paul, good to see you, thanks for coming on. My pleasure, thanks a lot. So the Times looked at 10 wars going back to World War II and found that initial support for Trump's war is lower than at the outset of any other conflict. The Times put support for the Iran War at 41% other averages of polls have it even lower

at 38%. Paul, the key here is that there's no reflexive support for the quote unquote commander-in-chief. In fact, I wonder if it's the opposite. People are predisposed to see Trump's case for war as, you know, made up. Which it is.

What do you think? Yeah, I think we have this perception that there is what we often call the rally round the flag effect. Whenever there's a war, the public rallies round the flag and wants to defend the country and comes to the president's side.

“And the truth is that that's not necessarily true.”

It really is contingent on a lot of things. That has certainly happened on many occasions in the past. But if you look back at events like, even the beginning of the Vietnam War, you don't even have to go back to World War II or to Korea, or if you look at the Gulf War, the first Gulf War with George H. W. Bush, which was very popular or Afghanistan or even Iraq

in 2003, what you see is that in all of those cases, they were very different from this one. First of all, the presidents at those times were very popular to begin with. So you had a popular president who was coming in and trying to make this case for war.

The second, I think, most important thing, perhaps, is that in every one of those cases,

there was a real argument being made that America was under threat. And in some cases, it may have been exaggerated, but at least it was plausible. Now, in this case, not only is there no real reason to think that Iran is some kind of imminent threat to the US. The Trump administration barely attempted to convince the public that this was something

they had to do. There wasn't some kind of long propaganda campaign that led up to the war. The explanations for why we were doing it have shifted back and forth constantly. And it's happening within a president who's popularity ratings are in the 30s. So people are not predisposed to believe what he has to say to begin with, even if he

were making an effective case, which obviously he is not. As we all know, it's looking likely that the US bombed in Iranian elementary school, killing scores of children, reports show a tomahawk missile striking near the school, and that's our missile Trump has said implausibly that Iran might have gotten a tomahawk and done the bombing itself.

Now listen to this exchange between Trump and Times reporter Sean McCreech. You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a tomahawk and bombed its own elementary

school on the first day of the war.

But you're the only person in your government saying this, even your defense secretary wouldn't say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this? Because I just don't know enough about it.

“I think it's something that I was told is under investigation.”

But tomahawks are used by others, as you know, numerous other nations have tomahawks. They buy them from us. But I will certainly whatever the report shows, I'm willing to live with that report. Paul, that is utterly humiliating, also note that Trump admits to not knowing much about the situation, which accidentally undermines his case for claiming that Iran did the bombing.

I just blew up in his face so spectacularly. Trump is not incredibly engaged with the details in the best of times. And if you want to wage a propaganda campaign, then you have to have a clear message,

And the administration has been all over the place on all of this.

And you know, some days we're talking about how the Iranian people ought to rise up and we're really doing this as a favor to them. And then the next day, Trump will put something on truth social that threatens to rain down fire and fury on Iran and make sure that it can't become a country again for decades to come.

“We're also in the process of bombing things that are important to their country.”

That's something important to understand, too. It seems like we've almost run out of real military targets there.

I mean, obviously there are still missiles and drones and a lot of them are hidden and

the US is trying to find them and take them out. But at the same time, you know, Israel is bombing oil depots and we're attacking infrastructure in Iran. Presumably, if the country is going to want to rebuild after where those are things that they're going to need and the misery of the Iranian people and the short term is only

going to be exacerbated. So you would think the administration would be working extra hard to convince the world that we are actually on the side of the Iranian people and to convince the Iranian people that, you know, maybe they should rise up and overthrow their leadership. But right now we're not doing either of those things because this administration is consumed

by bloodlust and the people of Lake Hague's death and the rest of them can't even seem to get their story straight.

“Well, and I think that gets at another reason why support for this war is historically”

low. That exchange with that reporter really shows, I think, the media being far more aggressive and far more skeptical of the official line than we've seen the press be in the run up to other wars, the terrible nightmare was, of course, the run up to Iraq where the press was really, really too willing to take the administration's horseshit seriously on WMDs

and so forth. I think that it's a really encouraging thing to see the press sort of stand up and assert itself the way it has been, particularly given that Trump is essentially trying to, you know, use state power to punish any media organization that shows adversarial, you know, scrutiny. Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of coverage that is what the administration wants,

especially on TV news, you know, they release these sort of very exciting, kinetic videos of explosions and things like that through night vision, goggles, we see planes getting blown up and stuff like that and that is catnip for television news because they want those images and they reply them over and over and do the kind of play by play that you often see in war we've seen before.

But at the same time, you're right that there is a lot more skepticism from press core in general and, you know, this administration has built up a lot of ill will, you know,

let's not forget that they basically kicked out the entire Pentagon press core and replaced

them with a bunch of, you know, sick of fans from far right media and so those Pentagon reporters who have been kind of pushed out of the building, you know, they're not going to necessarily be so inclined to take the administration line after they've been treated this way and they've had to spend, you know, most of the last year cultivating sources that are not necessarily what, you know, what the the press secretary is saying at the Pentagon

and so they've had to go and be a little more entrepreneurial about how they can get information and that's going to push them toward more skeptical sources and just sort of put them in a position where they're not going to want to just, you know, accept it when Pete excess says that everything is going fantastic and, you know, we're just going, you know, amp up our lethality tomorrow and it's going to be even more lethal and isn't that awesome.

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time and the scale that I can't go further, I can't invest. For all of them, in Vax-tung. Now, let's test out Shopify.com. Well, that brings me to an exchange with Caroline Levitt. I want to highlight. Caroline Levitt was trying to explain Trump's position on the bombing of the Iranian school. She was pressed on why he's saying this stuff and then this happens. From the president has a right

to share his opinions with the American public, but he has said he'll accept the conclusion of that investigation. And frankly, we're not going to be harassed by the New York Times who's been putting out a lot of articles on this making claims that have just not been verified by the Department of War to quickly wrap up this investigation because the New York Times

is calling on us to do so. So that's just amazing. She faults the times for porting stuff

that hasn't been verified by the defense department. I mean, she's faulting them for doing independent adversarial report. And quite literally, the thing is she can't explain why Trump is pulling stuff out of his ass on such a serious matter. And the truth also is that adversarial reporting on this war really is terrible for them. She knows that. She revealed she knows that. Your thoughts on that? Yeah. And you know, this administration could actually get at least

somewhat better coverage if it wanted. If it wasn't so unremittingly hostile to reporters,

“asking even the most basic questions. Now, I don't want to say you should have some kind of”

sympathy for Caroline Levitt. But it certainly can't be easy. When Donald Trump is your boss and every time he opens his mouth, he's going to contradict what he said 10 minutes before. And tell and say something that is going to require you as his spokesperson to kind of turn summer salts in order to try to justify what he's saying. And because after all the the the line from the White

House is that Trump never miss speaks. He never makes a mistake. Everything that he says is perfect

and true. And so that's the the framework that they have to start from. But they also know that what he wants from them from the the people who deal with the press is to be antagonistic and hostile and abusive toward reporters. That's what he expects and he watches them on TV. And so they do that and then, you know, there there is a way to have a somewhat adversarial relationship with the media that still is respectful and can, you know, make it so that they they will hear you out when you

have a case to make. And there have been, you know, more and less skilled White House press shops at that. But the smart ones know that if you treat reporters like the professionals that they are and you don't lie to them, you can, you know, push back on them when you want to. And that might help you get your story out in a way that is is preferable. But if you're just berating them and abusing them all the time, you know, reporters are not going to take anything that you say seriously.

And in this case, they shouldn't because, you know, the the Trump administration is almost

never going to tell them the truth. Well, it's kind of funny because Trump keeps saying different

things and contradicting himself and offering different rationales. And yet the administrations propaganda is sort of required at all times to say that whatever Trump just said is perfect. So maybe I guess the way they think of it in their heads is whatever Trump is saying now is even more perfect than the thing he just said three days before, you know what I mean? Yeah, it's it can't be easy to keep up with. Well, yeah. And so that was actually captured really well in yet another exchange with

Caroline Levitt that I want to highlight. The reporter asked Levitt why Trump keeps shifting the goal posts on when he says Iran would have gotten the nuke if he hadn't undertaken this world

“historically important invasion. His latest is seven days Iran would have gotten the nuke in seven days”

complete horse shit. We know from New York Times reporting on on the internal debates that American officials say it's not so, but regardless, he keeps changing it. Levitt was asked about this and here's how she responded. This was a feeling the president had based on facts facts provided to him by his top negotiators who had been engaged with the Iranian regime and a good faith effort. The Iranian regime regime was lying deceiving the United States of America clearly trying to

continue their nuclear program to create a bomb that would of course threaten the United States of America. So I'm noticing this formulation more and more lately. Trump is basing things on a feeling which is based on facts. Now, I don't know if that's just Caroline Levitt trolling us because it's

that Trump is kind of basing things on the seat of his pants essentially. Yeah, he is extrapolating

“and I guess it's when they're in a trap where he says something that is so obviously untrue”

that they have to come up with some kind of pretzel twist of a way to make it seem like it's sort of true or it's true if you feel that it's true and this is particularly difficult with

regard to Iran's nuclear program because first of all they claimed last summer that it had been

totally obliterated, which wasn't true at the time, but it was certainly the case that Iran was not in possession of any nuclear weapons and it would take them quite a bit of work to build one. But now Trump is coming out and saying, oh, well, you know, they were about to get one, which is utterly preposterous. So how do you explain that? Even Republicans, even Trump's allies haven't charged that they have the nuke and they're about to shoot at at us. But of course,

that's the kind of thing you need if you're going to claim that this isn't imminent threat. And this gets back to one of the places that we started about what an administration a president needs to convince people to go along with a war. They have to feel threatened. And so now you have Republicans out there saying, oh, well, you know, we've been a war with them for 47 years and that's the imminent threat. Of course, that is the opposite of what imminent means,

but Trump, I think, feels that. And so he has to say, oh, well, yeah, it was imminent because, you know, they were about to nuke us. And you know, this is the paradox that we saw in the Iraq War and before, you know, we're about to, and then we do attack a little country that is far far less

powerful than we are. And yet, they have to convince the public that this small country that we can

squash like a bug is actually about to wage war on us. And, you know, is about to show up in Koni Island with a submarine and a nuclear weapon attached to it or whatever. And so, you know, it's not enough to say, well, there are trouble maker in the region. And that's, that's a problem for a long-term

“security. You have to say that they're about to get you in your family. And, you know, Trump is”

unrestrained by any kind of tether to what's actually true. And then it's left to people like Caroline Levitt and the rest of the people in the White House take a clean-up after him and try to reframe what he said as something that actually has some connection to the truth. And that is no easy task. Right. And there's a kernel of truth to what Levitt said there in the sense that he really is basing this on feeling. The one thing that's false about what you said is those feelings

aren't based on facts. They're just based on feelings and who knows where those feelings are coming from. Yeah. And it gets to sort of the most profound unanswered question I think for the public in this is, why are we doing this? You know, like, if you asked the American on the street, why are we invading Iran? Why are we waging war on them? Most people would have a really hard time coming up with a clear answer because they haven't gotten one from the administration.

And it's not, you know, you can say a hundred different things about how, oh, you know, it's a bunch of bad guys. And it's a, it's a, a fundamentalist Islamic regime and they oppressed their people and they caused trouble in the region and they supported the terrorist groups. But why are

“we going to war right now against Iran? And the truth is that Donald Trump himself probably doesn't”

know if he knows he certainly has not communicated that clearly to any of us. So, you know, that is, that is the question that they, they haven't answered. And it's, it's so basic to this. We have to know why we're doing this. Why are Americans coming home in caskis? Why are our, you know, a thousand or more Iranians dying? Why are we bombing? Even if it was an innocent mistake, why are we bombing a girl school and killing 165 children? Why are we expanding something

like a billion dollars a day on this? Why are we doing this? Like, if they can't answer that

question, then, you know, the whole, the whole effort as, you know, a piece of communication is just a failure. And I think you really put your finger on the core of the issue here. When you said that Donald Trump doesn't know why we're doing this. This is the thing. The real reason I think or at least among the reasons that this war is so unpopular compared to other ones, is that everybody knows voters know that Trump doesn't know what the fuck he's doing, that he doesn't have any idea

why we're doing this. Voters know that voters see that the emperor has no clothes. I mean, this has just been Trump over the past year has been a kind of emperor getting naked moment in

why that moment with reporter Sean McCreech was so devastating and so humiliating. It just revealed

“so starkly that Trump has no clue why he says what he says, that he's just making it up on the”

fly there. He was essentially saying, oh, Iran bomb the school. And then when the reporter refraining that says, so Iran somehow got one of our missiles and bombed its own school, it just showed the utter absurdity of this man up there who has no fucking idea what he's talking about and the utter absurdity of letting him make these kinds of decisions. Yeah. And if he was showing himself to be competent in other areas, if the economy was going

“great and all kinds of other things were working out really well, I think that there would be a”

lot of Americans who would give him the benefit of the doubt. Who might say, you know, I'm not too sure about this, but he seems to know what he's doing. So for now, I don't want to object. But when so many other things are going so poorly, and it immediately you see all these ill effects, like especially gas prices, which you know is our unavoidable, everybody you see them on every corner.

“And that point, nobody is ready to get from the benefit of the doubt. People who are, you know,”

our diehard Trump supporters are with him, but you know, the rest of the public is basically saying,

you know, I need, I need a real, a really good attempt of persuasion. I really need a really good argument to know why this is something that I should be supportive of. And he certainly hasn't given him that and they don't have any reason to get from the benefit of the doubt. And it's hard to see that the support that he has now for this war, about 40% is going to get any higher. If anything, it's probably going to go down as time goes on. And it's really kind of down at 38, 37, and some

polls, and that's sort of his floor number that hard molten core of MAGA, that 37, 38%. And that's

what he's got right now. And this is just getting started. Paul Waldman always pleasure to talk to

you folks if you enjoy this conversation. Check out Paul Substack, the Cross section. Paul, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks a lot Greg. [MUSIC]