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Donald Trump faced tough questioning from reporters Tuesday about his worsening Iran debacle, and he quickly lost his temper. In the process, however, he revealed that the lines of questioning were correct. Trump simply does not know how to extricate himself from this mess. It's no accident that this comes as Republicans are reportedly sinking into a very bleak
realization about this situation. Trump's own allies now fear that he stuck in a quagmire that could continue right through the elections. We're trying to make sense of it all with Marie Harf, a former State Department official who was an advisor to the team that negotiated Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal.
Marie, nice to have you on. Thank you so much. I guess I would say I'm happy to be here, but with the news where it is, it's a strange time to be commenting on these things. It sure is.
It's a real disaster. So right now or up to at least 14 US troop deaths in Iran or in the Iran war and the Pentagon
is running out of money for it, the White House is demanding another $87 billion.
Meanwhile, Trump is stating categorically that he's won already, that he's won the war. If he ended it tomorrow would be a great triumph, but the Strait of Hormuz is still mostly closed. There's no end in sight.
“Marie, can you just sum up how we got to this point and where we are now?”
Well, where we are now is it seems like back in almost a full-scale war between the United States and Iran. Since President Trump did something no other US president had ever done, militarily attack Iran, realizing after he did that, that even if you could kill the leadership, even if you could damage their military that the regime would stay in power, they would shut down
the Strait of Hormuz, they would cripple the global economy, and they would continue attacking us in the region. President Trump knew he needed a way out, so he negotiated the ceasefire about a month ago that today is sitting in tatters. Because the Iranians know they have the upper hand, they have the leverage, they have survived
US military power, they have shown they can control the global economy and they can stay in power. Let's check out what Trump says when he's questioned by a reporter, note that when Trump says Iran might want to surrender, the reporter flatly points out that, well, Iran continues to attack our allies and Iran continues to kill American soldiers, and that sets Trump
off. Listen to this. The President, there are no signs that Iran is ready to stop fighting, so what is the plan?
“Is the plan to just keep bombing until they give up?”
There are no signs, why do you know something that I don't know? Do you know what the dialogue is behind the scenes that they want to meet desperately to try and end it because they're getting decimated? You don't get that when you listen to your fake station, but you don't know anything. You don't know anything.
What talks are up? Do you notice something that I don't know? Do you notice something I don't know? We'll tell you. I will tell you, they want to desperately meet, and until they're ready to meet in a meaningful
way, we have no interest in even.
So let's break this up into pieces first.
It's interesting that Trump says Iran desperately wants to meet, which is supposed to show that he's one glorious victory. But then, seconds later, he suggests that Iran doesn't want to meet in a meaningful way.
“So if they don't want to meet meaningfully, how has he won?”
Didn't Trump undercut himself there? I think this may be the issue where the fact that Trump is very divorced from reality is most noticeable, because I think we all know that his team doesn't give him good information on many subjects. They don't give him the actual truth.
And we have reports that he just gets every day video of the coolest bombs being dropped in Iran. I think he has absolutely no sense of what's actually happening here. I think that's absolutely right. It seems to me that he doesn't understand the situation on the most fundamental level.
The territory force exercise by the US is not enough to get Iran to agree to what Trump wants Iran to agree to. And so we're trapped in this weird Trumpian reality loop where he just keeps saying over and over that he's going to obliterate them or he's going to really hit them hard this time.
I mean, he already said he was going to obliterate their civilization entirely. And that didn't force Iran's hand. So now we're back to I'm going to ball them again, really hard this time, and that I think
There's a real disconnect there that you really put your finger on.
The Iranian regime has shown that they can withstand quite a bit of American military power
and stay in charge of the country, and it used to be that the threat of the US striking them was so great that you could convince them to do things not anymore. They realize they have the leverage. The Iranians are very astute followers of American politics. We learn this during the Iran negotiations under President Obama.
They can read polls as well as we can. They know that the American people do not support this war. They certainly do not support a return to an even broader conflict with Iran, and that President Trump is very cognizant of the time ticking towards the midterm. So look, the Iranians sure they're happy to talk, but sitting here right now, they know
that they have still missiles they can fire, they still have a nuclear program, they still have enriched nuclear material, and the President keeps making threats that he can't back up. Yeah. In fact, Trump said something else that really kind of illustrates this reality distortion
loop of his.
“He said, quote, honestly, they haven't seen anything yet.”
We've been nice, we've been nice, close quote. You've been inside this beast before. What is he being told exactly? This is a very different beast. I think then any of us are used to.
I think that they can fuse tactical military success with strategic victory. We can do a lot of damage to Iran's military and civilians and infrastructure. We've seen all of that damage being done, none of that has, or I would argue, will lead to a stronger position for the United States. Anyone who is ever followed this topic would have told you that if the United States attacked,
the first thing any rational country would do is close the straight of hormones, it's their
Trump card. I don't think that the Iranians are particularly scared that President Trump is going to rain some military firepower down on them that they haven't already seen. And so I don't think that they take his threats seriously.
“I think that he's become kind of a joke in these negotiations.”
And I don't say that, you know, lightly, the damage we are doing, including civilians in Iran is quite serious. But I do not think that his threats hold any weight in these negotiations. I really wonder if he's intimating that he's prepared to use nuclear weapons. Do you think that's what he's doing?
That's the nightmare scenario that I think we're, we are all afraid of. I think he likes flirting with the idea. But I think he, and you we see this from Pete Hegsev, who's up on Capitol Hill this week trying to get more money and support for this incredibly unpopular war. There's this obsession with using this strongest toughest, most bellocose language they can
come up with, like, somehow that makes them tougher, more manly, more scary. And the Iranians throughout their history have fought wars for decades to stalemates, including with Iraq, like they are not scared of Trump tweeting at 3AM. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I really have to tell you about our sub-stack. The DSR Network sub-stack is the absolute best way to follow deep state radio.
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“Yeah, I think the basic situation is that he just doesn't know how to get out of it.”
That's really the bottom line.
Politico has this really striking new report, which suggests that Republicans are realizing this. It says GOP mid-term anxiety is growing precisely because they see that Trump is stuck. One White House ally says, quote, "This is what a quagmire looks like." Marie, you now have Trump saying every American death will be avenged many times over
by a much higher number of Iranian deaths. Is that tantamount to saying we're now in an open-ended conflict? Where are we, aren't I? It seems that way, this feels like a new forever war, because there's no clearly defined
Objective that we can meet or not meet.
He has no way to get out of this, and the reason I say that is because there are two conflicting
“principles in Republican orthodoxy budding up against each other right now.”
This hawkish line that you never give anything to Iran, Republicans hated his ceasefire
deal with Iran because it was so it gave Iran everything and got nothing for the United States coming up against a bad global economy, rising oil prices, and instability in a mid-term year. Those are two fundamental principles that Republicans have claimed to care deeply about, which one do you pick?
Yes, and in fact, political reports something that really bears out what you're saying. It says this quote, "Republicans close to the White House are distressed about the war's economic impact on everyday Americans in an election that is expected to hinge on cost of living issues." Just to underscore your point a little more, the two conflicting forces are one, you
never given to Iran at all because we're strong in their week, but two, if you continue
“this war, we're going to get crushed in the mid-terms, right?”
Exactly right. And we should not lose sight of the fact that President Trump chose to go to war. This was a war of choice, and it was one that is real and others really, you know, for decades had won in us to undertake, and President Trump was the first one to do it, but the problem is he did it without a plan, and he did it without considering any of the consequences.
And all those Republicans who used to make fun of us in the Obama administration for saying, think about the second and third and fourth order consequences if we have to take military action, which we were willing to do. They all made fun of us. Now they're coming up against those, and they are realizing that you cannot just drop
a bunch of bombs and do a bunch of tough talk on Twitter that does not lead to a strategic victory for the United States against an enemy with a huge country, so many resources, geographic superiority in many ways. It's just, I don't know, to your earlier question, I don't know what information he's getting, but this is the consequence of putting people like Pete Heggseth in charge of
the United States military that are not serious people that just like to beat their chests and try and prove that the United States is still the strongest military in the world with absolutely no plan for how to win wars. I want to highlight one other thing from the political story because it's sort of amazing. It goes on to say that all this is casting a grim shadow over the campaign season for
the GOP. One Republican is quoted saying this, "The war has become a persistent dark cloud that is souring the national mood, which typically depresses the base of the party in power and motivates supporters of the opposition." That's quite a quote from that Republican there.
There's a deep irony to this as well, which is that Republicans created this situation for themselves. This sent a very strong signal at the outside of this that they would not use their congressional power to constrain Trump, to exercise oversight on what he was doing and to essentially vote on whether to go to war or not.
They essentially said, "Mr. President, you have a blank check." And now they're screwed. That's what happened. You're exactly right, look 28% of Americans, only 28% in recent polls said that the Iran war was worth it.
We are, how many months in, right, not that long into this war. It's now as unpopular as the Iraq war was after three years during the height of the insurgency. This is a problem of Republicans on making, and I've said this about Iran for a long time when they constantly fear-mongered and put out all these hawkish statements and policies
about how Iran was a country we could never negotiate with.
Iran was the ultimate threat to the United States. Iran does a lot of bad things, but it's not an existential threat to the United States. This is the consequence of all of those decades of rhetoric that they pushed a president who is deeply erratic to undertake a war of choice that has had disastrous consequences in the region and in the United States for the global economy, that we warned what happened
if they did it, and now they have no way to get out of it.
“And they are led by a man who I think has zero concept of the actual reality on the ground.”
How does this resolve itself? The president clearly will not end this unless there's an ending that he can describe as a world historical triumph that out did what Barack Obama did in the Iran nuclear deal that you were a part of. And so that's not going to happen, right?
Iran's not going to give him those things.
So what happens? How do we get out of this? Iran is not going to give him those things. That ship has sailed. The day Donald Trump ripped up the previous Iran nuclear agreement.
“I think if we can get to a place where there is some sort of agreement on the straight”
of Hormuz that will probably end with Iran making money. It will be open, but Iran will probably charge a toll, which is money in their pockets. If we can get to a place where somehow the existing enriched nuclear material is secured,
if we can get to a place where Iran is not sending missiles into the region, basically
sort of a ceasefire plus. If we can get to that, I think that is the best they can hope for, because as long as Donald Trump is president, the Iranians, I think, feel like they have quite a bit of leverage. And anytime America or Israel, they blame us for everything Israel does too, fairly or unfairly.
Perhaps out of line, they can close the straight in, what, 24 hours. So that's the best I think we can hope for. This disastrous policy will have consequences that last for a generation.
And there is no easy Iran deal to be had now.
There is no magic wand that we are going to be able to wave in the best case scenario. And this is far from the best case scenario.
“And it seems that maybe the only way out of this other than the one you've outlined, which”
is a tough road, would be that Democrats take back the house and possibly the Senate and use their power to grind this thing to a halt. And defund it, if necessary. Now, I don't know if Democrats will do that, but they certainly should. How do you see that piece of this playing out, is that a possibility?
I think if Democrats can take the house in the Senate, it would be very helpful.
I have no faith or confidence that this administration would actually end the war if Congress did something to try to stop it. I think the administration, this will be very interesting if Democrats take Congress subpoenas, investigations, defunding ice. There's a whole bunch of priorities that I think the Trump administration right now is figuring
out how to circumvent if Democrats take the house in the Senate. But I think that we have to try because Americans are dying. We are spending trillions of dollars, and we are less safe today, and our friends and allies are less safe today because of this. I think it will take a new president, quite frankly, to really end this era of American military
adventureism, whether it's in Venezuela or Iran or elsewhere. Well, that sounds like it's the size of it, I guess we shouldn't have elected a madman, huh? No, this is what happens when you elect a madman who is drunk on power. You get a paramilitary roaming American cities, killing American citizens, and you get this
hyper-hocchish US military going around the world looking for places to intervene, because
“they think that's how you advance American power.”
At the end of a gun, and it's like all of these people who fought in Iraq and who now are in the Trump administration learned nothing from the Iraq war, because we are in an even bigger mess today with no way out of it, and this is what happens. This is the consequence of Republicans not taking him seriously enough and using him for their own aims.
You can't control him, it turned out. Well, the Iran nuclear deal that was negotiated by Barack Obama told the opposite story that negotiation and patience is what's required, and that's the real exercise of American power, but since that was done by Obama, Donald Trump had to rip it up, and we're here. Marie Harf, thanks so much for coming on, that was bracing stuff.
Thank you.
