The Daily Blast: Trump Humiliated by Iran, Comey Flops as Aides Leak: He’s “Frustrated”

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

“Donald Trump is confronting the limits on his power and fresh ways, and it's rattling”

him badly. His inner circle is leaking word that he's frustrated at his inability to force Iran's hand. And he's seeing some of his most corrupt designs crash and burn on many fronts at once. Yet there's something sobering about it all.

Placing limits on Trump has required immense effort. And paradoxically, the more he's thwarted, the more dangerous he's becoming. And in constraining Trump, our institutions are still on a knife's edge, with the endgame still too murky to predict. We're trying to make sense of all these strange dynamics with talking points memo editor

at large David Kurtz, whose excellent newsletter delves into the stuff regularly.

David, always good to have you on.

"Hi, Greg, good to be with you." So let's start with a very visible and jarring failing. Trump's effort to jail former FBI director James Komi based on his social media posting of sea shells arranged to spell 86-47. We just learned that secret service agents who questioned Komi about this were ordered to quickly

send a summary of the interrogation to trump himself, which shows how intently and corruptly he's controlling DOJ.

“David, can you explain what happened here and why it's important?”

Sure, it's really a remarkable series of fileings in the Komi case last night where they're making a claim that this is the second vindictive prosecution of him, meaning that Trump

is directed DOJ to go after him because he's one of Trump's political foes.

And so this is the politicization, the weaponization of DOJ that we've all been covering for so long. And what makes this especially remarkable is how difficult it is to make a vindictive prosecution claim, but here you have so much evidence, right? It goes all the way to Trump aboard Air Force One, tracking the investigation in real

time, getting reports from secret service as he's returning to the US from Europe. You just don't get that kind of evidence in these sorts of cases. Komi's lawyers are trying to say, we have smoking on evidence that this prosecution is a vindictive one, and therefore should be thrown out, and the smoking on evidence is that Donald Trump is micro-managing the prosecution of Komi in real time, demanding to know exactly

what happened in these interrogations as they happen. I mean, we could do like a whole semester seminar on the many reasons that this is so messed up. And it really comes down to prosecutors have an obligation under the law to conduct prosecutions in the public interest and to interest of justice.

And that goes beyond even sort of complying with whatever the policy directives of particular present are. They can set broad policy parameters, but they're not supposed to be directing individual prosecutions, and they're certainly not supposed to be conjuring up prosecutions as bogus as this one out of thin air, or for any reason, frankly, in order to target political

foes, for any reason that goes to their personal interest, to their political interest, then isn't in the interest of justice. And I know that may sound in the year of our law, 2026, maybe a little pie in the sky, but up until this point in the 250 year history of the country, it has not been operated that way.

With a few rare exceptions, like Watergate, which are hugely scandalous, but frankly, don't come near how bad this is. Yeah, and it looks to me as if this revelation is yet another sign that this prosecution is likely to really fall apart. And on that front, on the front of Trump, becoming more and more aware of the limits on

his power, the Atlantic had this interesting report on his deliberations over Iran. A senior official says Trump is frustrated by his failure to get Iran to budge to the point of wanting to order a heavier attack on Iran, but he and his advisors decided against it because it could further deplete our weapons stockpiles. And David, get this Trump told advisors that he fears that an escalation could cause a global

economic meltdown and, quote, turn me into a Hoover, as Trump put it. That's a real admission. He doesn't have the power to force Iran's hand, and he's acknowledging that Iran has

“leverage over the global economy, and it's of course because of what he did, right?”

Yeah, it's because of what he did, and it's, and there's no clear way out of this box

it can play to keep him at bay, and, and I think what he's describing there is impart

acknowledging that, right, that there is a limit as to what he can do, and Iran has him in a box.

“And it, you know, I think what's interesting, Greg, is it's hard to look at all of these”

data points and see, like a single common thread, I think there's some things that are in this case. It's like a geopolitical limitation he's running to, and other instances, it's like the limits of the powers or the abilities of his people, and other cases he does run up against limits in the law.

But you're right, there's an increasing number of examples where he's, we see him bumping up against the limits of his powers, and, and it's, after a year and a half of, of feeling like where we were watching a road or renegade present, it's sort of, trample all limits, it's, it's good to see that there may be some limits to that that will hold, at least for, for a time.

And making this even more buffoonish on the Iran front, these revelations about Trump holding back because he knows he can't really force Iran's hand, come even as he just said to Fox News, the following quote, "We are going to beat the effing shit out of them, and we will be hitting them hard, they're going to get a beating," close quote. David Donald Trump has managed to degrade his own threats so badly through repetition, that

“Iran no longer seems to fear his mightiness, what do you make of that?”

Well, Greg, this all comes after, didn't we declare victory in this war like a month or two ago? I mean, we'll just set a point where I, I think one of the dynamics of the whole Iran Fiasco has been, it's revealed the perils of trying to narrate this kind of conflict through a president when the president is like a Donald Trump because every week, every day,

for for the six months this has been going on, there's a new line from the White House, a new declaration that pieces at hand or a new declaration that we're about to bomb them back to the Stone Age, and it, and it really feels like it is material and unpredictable as Trump's personality itself, and so I, you know, I think it's taking a long view on it, I think it's been an ongoing conflict this whole time, there's been ebs and flows to it,

but I don't think it really matches any way what we've heard from the White House in terms of an accurate description of reliable narration of what has happened. And so, you know, I hope we're at a point now where they, where they see some of those limits and take those into account, but I'm afraid, you know, that we're in just an ebb that could very well, you know, as you suggested a moment ago, that in some ways, he gets more dangerous

the more he gets boxed in, and you could see a lashing out, even if it has global economic consequences, even if it's not going to be effective in advancing US centers, which this has meant, even if he really can't knock around back on its heels and the straight

or form moves, like there's a million ways here in which this gets still go wrong.

And the way this has been so erratic and unpredictable and fits and starts the whole six

“months we've been engaged in this, I think it just represented love him and the underlying”

strategy that epitomizes him. It's an extension of this personality is what I'm trying to say. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I really have to tell you about our sub-stack. The DSR network of sub-stack is the absolute best way to follow deep state radio. The DSR daily words matter, need to know, silicaciousness, AI energy and climate, and

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Yeah, absolutely. I think to me the most representative thing is that it was only a few weeks ago, or maybe a month ago, that Trump threatened to obliterate Iranian civilization

entirely, meaning he threatened to eliminate Iran's 91 million people from the face of

this Earth, and that didn't force Iran's hand. So now he's saying, "I'm going to blow up a bridge," and so it's like, "Do you remember what you yourself said just a month ago, and how comically ridiculous it sounds for you to make this new threat now in relation to that one?" But still, I agree with you 100%, because when he talks about bombing all of Iran's

power plants, as he's been saying lately, that would be a threat of a massive war crime

Iran's hand, just in order to appear like he's doing something, and of course Iran will

just absorb the pain that is inflicted on its own people, and it won't do anything.

“Yeah, I think there's one way of looking at this, I think, is actually helpful.”

For Prism, is that it is one long ongoing negotiation, and if you see it as a negotiation, it which war is one of the negotiating techniques, which escalation, de-escalation of the violence is part of the negotiation, it all makes a little more sense, but the problem with Trump is that he sees negotiation as a zero-sum game, he's got a very limited understanding of it, you know, for the art of the deal guy, it's kind of remarkable, little he understands.

And so there's, you know, I mean, in part of it too, as you suggest, is that it is, you

know, it's not just Iranian interests versus US interests, it's like this triangulation

of Iranian interests, US interests, regional interests, Trump's own personal political interests, and, you know, and there's no way for him to sort of do a 3D chess, you know, move on any of it.

“I mean, this is beyond his capability, it's beyond his, it's beyond how he even thinks, right?”

Negotiation for him is a zero-sum game, and I think the longer Iran holds out, the harder it is for him to figure out how to make sense given the Prism he looks at this through. Absolutely. So here's another one, Trump's acting director of National Intelligence Bill Pultay, who's about to get replaced, spent his final time in his job tweeting, "Bostfully

about how he's fired huge numbers of intelligence officials and so forth." But as it turns

out, no one can figure out who exactly he fired, whether that's close to accurate. We should note that Pultay is the person who previously used his federal housing agency perched to fabricate pretexts to prosecute Trump critics like Adam Schiff and so forth. Those have all failed pretty badly, as I'm now as well. And now here we are with Pultay Bosting about taking on the deep state that, you know, in ways that might not even

“be real, talk about revealing the limits on Trump's power. Can you explain this one?”

Yeah, this, this is a few different layers to it. You know, we know that Pultay was put in place as acting D&I while they worked on getting J. Clayton confirmed. He was confirmed this week, so Pultay will soon be done. And, and Trump, I think both publicly and reported privately saying that he wanted Pultay to not care, it's why he was a D&I, right? Trump has generally been very skeptical of U.S. intel, he's been particularly skeptical

of D&I, and I think, you know, he sees it as a seat of the deep state, and so he wants to purge that. Now, there have been a fair amount of reporting that Pultay was doing that, but this most recent reporting suggests that part of it may be performative, which, you know, this speaks to what, like the incentives that Trump puts in place for people to do, the things that he wants them to do, or at least to pretend to do the things he wants

them to do, has a very emperor, you know, with no clothes on sort of vibe to it. And I think I saw in Pultay, that Pultay might be in line for a cabinet slot, so he's going to get rewarded for feeding grist to the mega circus, even if it's not real grist. Yeah, that's right. Well, and, and it's not out of character in the sense that none of the mortgage fraud cases were real mortgage fraud either, right, which is what he was drumming

up around Adam Schiff and with Tisha James and others. So it is consistent with his remote to this point. Okay, and here's yet another one. He's seeing his schemes collapse on other fronts as well. Huge numbers of ice arrests of protesters are not ending with convictions. That's an area where Trump is abusing his power most flagrantly perhaps. You've written on this. Can you

talk about this one? Yeah, so there have been a number of examples in LA in Chicago, in Minnesota, where it seemed clear that the White House was directing sort of a maximal response to protesters who were protesting ice in their cities, either at raise themselves or at ice facilities within those metro areas. And the charges that DOJ brought were in some cases way over the top.

In other cases, utterly unsupported by the evidence. And in a few cases, we're brought on the basis of either mistatements or outright falsehoods by agents who were bringing the charges. So there's like a whole array of things happening there. But those have slowly melted away. Sometimes charges were reduced from felonies. The misdemeanors, other times, they were dropped out right. In some cases, both.

So let's tie all this together. Trump is running the most imperial, most corrupt presidency in modern memory, and it's not even close. No president has abused his powers the way

about it. But that, again, paradoxically, means the areas where he wields less-fettered

powers are ones we really need to worry about. What's your overall reading here? Are

“we holding him back or not? I think it is a very tenuous moment where in some areas, I”

think we've seen some modest success. I think how things go in the November elections will really dictate how much more he's able to run a mock over the last two years of this term. At the same time, Greg, I am really cognizant that we only know what we know, and that this administration has done myriad things to reduce transparency and accountability and ready access into what they're doing and how they're doing. And I'm thinking about things

like the high C's, strikes on drugs, muggling boats. I'm thinking you talk about areas with

unfettered power. I'm thinking special operations, activities around the globe. I'm thinking other military actions or activities we might not know about. And I'm not suggesting some dark hidden conspiracy. I just mean we don't know. And so while we are trying to gauge how well things are going, I suspect that we may be spending the next several decades on everything things that happened during this period that we just didn't know about. And at

the same time, Greg, and I think this is kind of what you were getting at. In the example for instance of these vindictive prosecutions, in a lot of ways the damage has already been

done. You know, let's say Colmy succeeds again in making this one go away. You know, he's had to

come up now. And there's other people who have been subjected to this. I break over our C is case has succeeded. You don't have been dictated prosecution claim in Tennessee. But the turmoil,

“the emotional cost, the financial cost to people of this. And and I think this is really key, Greg.”

The sense that it creates a fear in the populace of fear and other officials and fear in people who would oppose Trump. That's real damage, right? And it's real damage. It's done to the institutions of government that are being abused. It's going to take his decades to recover from. So in a lot of ways what we're seeing or him bumping up against limits, but around like his feet, if we're going to visualize this, it is the litter of institutions that he's kicked over

and of people that he's trampled and of sort of basic civil liberties that we've long valued as sort of fundamental to who we are. And all of that, I think he has weighed ways to to one degree or another in a way that will take some time to recover from. I just want to try to salvage one optimistic note from all this while acknowledging everything you just said is right there. I can't help but feel like there's a pattern of resilience that we're seeing. The backlash to ice

that we saw in places like Minnesota and Chicago, huge numbers of people banded together in really creative and unexpected ways to defend immigrants against armed, heavily armed, paramilitary goons at great risk to themselves. Lower court judges are doing tremendous fact finding work. I know you agree with this one and they're really putting a real record out there for us a factual record of what this administration is doing on front after front after front.

People are not being dissuaded by these the foolish efforts to prosecute ice protesters, people are going out there at great risk to themselves, putting their necks out there to try

“and defend the country. And I think nobody's going to be dissuaded by Trump's efforts to persuade”

everybody that voting can't work. Nobody's going to be persuaded by that. I think we're going to see tremendous turnout in the midterms. We've seen this in two dozen special elections, huge outpouring of political energy. I really hate to sound polyanish, but it seems like there's a pattern of resistance and resilience that's worth talking about. Now I agree Greg and I think you probably seen the same thing I have, which is that sort of in the depths of things a year ago,

I think people started to feel a sense of hopelessness and a sense of, you know, that he was kind of running the table. And what I've noticed is that each setback, each reversal, each time he's been at least halted, if not outright stopped, it has energized folks. I think it's given people a sense that there are avenues here towards protest, towards resistance, towards pushing back and just sort of living our civic lives in a full way that makes a difference

in that and people feed on that. And so I think it can build on itself as well. I agree 100% with that David really well said, folks, stay in the game. We can win this. We really can. I promise you.

make sure to check out his daily newsletter over at taughtinpointsmemble.com. David, great to have you on. Great, thank you, Greg.