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This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network.
I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump doesn't understand why the world won't admit that he's won a world historical victory over Iran. In one of his angriest rants ever, he berated a reporter at great length for questioning his success, even accusing the reporter of treason. It's no accident that this eruption occurred on his flight home from China.
The media coverage has been quite harsh, brutally revealing that he failed to make any real headway with China on Iran among other things. We think there's a through-line connecting Trump's accelerating authoritarianism at home to his worsening quagmire abroad. He compensates for the latter with more of the former.
So we're talking today with political scientists David Ferris, because he's been writing
well for the nation on both those topics. David, good to have you on. Great to be on the show, Greg. Thanks for having me. So let's start with Trump's tirade.
He was on Air Force 1 on the way back from China and David Sanger of the New York Times asked him why all the bombing of Iran hasn't forced the political changes he wants. Listen to Trump. "I had a total military victory, but the fake news guys like you, right, interact the air of fake guy, guys like you, right about indirectly.
We had a total military victory. We've had a total victory, and except like people like you that don't write the truth, you should write, I actually think it's sort of treasonous what you're right, but you are the New York Times and CNN, I would say, are the worst."
“David, has Trump won the resounding victory he claims?”
I mean, obviously not, right, Greg, I mean, the Iran War has not gone at all the way that Trump and his allies thought it would. They were expecting a quick victory, decapitation of the regime, and then replacing it with somebody more compliant, you know, sort of the Venezuela scenario. In fact, it's they seem to have handed power to people who were even more hard-line than
the ones that they replaced, and despite, of course, like many decades of planning around the possible closure of the straight-up war moves, it doesn't seem like anybody in the Trump administration thought for five seconds about what might happen if the straight was indeed closed for some period of time. Trump is in this pickle.
He can't get the Iranians to capitulate, he can't change the regime without ground troops, and he can't reopen the straight without a massive escalation that has no guarantee of success anyway. So he's really between a rock and a hard place right now. Well, let's listen to a little more of Trump here.
He really turns up the heat on the trees and charge. David, a couple of things here, not how angry Trump got when this reporter dared to talk back to him, not how Trump raised his voice and calling the times of failing enterprise at that particular point. It looks to me like this is someone who's just desperate for his supporters to see him
dominating some enemy, any enemy he can find after his own submissiveness in China. The contrast is pretty jarring, your thoughts on that?
“Just for a jarring, I think there's a few things going on here, right?”
One is Trump has now become accustomed to speaking only to like, sick of fans and lick spittles, right, in the press briefing room, you know, it's like we've got, you know, like press credentials to the gateway, pundit, people like that, right? And so he's no longer really accustomed to fielding lots of hostile questions at once, or skeptical questions, or even questions that are just sort of like, can you please tell
Us what's going on?
This has all become something that he doesn't like, doesn't want to experience and refuses to countenance. And so sort of playing this role of trying to dominate journalists is something he's been doing the whole time that he's been in politics and then probably before he got into politics, but the specific threat of treason here is part and parcel of a larger authoritarian project
where you use the threat of investigations and prosecutions and just sort of throwing accusations
“of crime to get people to self-sensor, to ruin their lives, to upend their lives, right?”
And so, you know, leveling a threat of treason at a New York Times report is not going to be very effective because the New York Times has a large institutional apparatus backing it, right? But people who aren't part of the New York Times, right, journalists who don't want the IRS rifling through their tax records or something vindictively that's going to give them
pause, right? People have to think twice before they ask these questions. They have to think twice before they write the stories because they know that the president commands an apparatus that can make them pay for it. Trump wants China to magically prevail on Iran.
The media coverage has been pretty tough on Trump on this particular point. I'll read a few. Reuters said he won no tangible help from China on the straight-up or moves in Iran. The New York Times said China is unlikely to use its influence with the Iranians for free and that China hasn't named its price for this yet.
And the financial times said China conceded little to Trump with no clear breakthroughs.
“David, what did Trump want China to accomplish here and why did he fail?”
Is it just that what he was expecting is impossible? I mean, there's two reasons, okay, one, so Iran is a kind of a client state of China at this point. Right? They've been doing business, right?
Like China has helped Iran evade various sanctions for many years and has become a major destination of its oil and there's deals take place for arms and other forms of influence right? So Iran is essentially a Chinese client state.
But what you find out when you think about client states is they don't always do what
you ask them to do, right? China cannot wave a magic wand and force Iran to capitulate to America's terms, right? The basic problem here, aside from China, is that Trump's ask of Iran is beyond the sort of the bargaining window that he has, you know, like he's asking Iran to a seed to terms that Iran simply will not a seed to unless he literally overthrow the regime
and replace them with people that want to work with you. They're not going to get this done. They're not going to give up all of the enriched material and say we're never going to do any nuclear enrichment and then get nothing else in return. I don't think that they're going to agree even to a phased system where, you know, like
“this sanction is lifted and then this sanction is lifted, right?”
There's too much recent history of the Trump administration going back on its word or attacking Iran in the middle of negotiations. The demise of the Iran deal at Trump's hands eight years ago is, of course, how
we got here in first place.
There's just so much mistrust between Iran and the United States. It's not even entirely clear that the people who are negotiating and Islamabad are the people running the country because there's so much uncertainty about who's really running the show. We still haven't seen the ostensible Supreme Lear, right?
There's just a lot of things that we don't know and Trump wants China to use its influence with Iran, which is considerable, right? Trump wants China to use its influence with Iran to force them to accept America's terms or something very close to America's terms. And it's not possible to wave the one and do that to begin with the other problem.
Is the China, I think, very correctly, sees the predicament that the United States is in right now and wants to exploit it. You know, China's a major geopolitical rival, the relationship between the U.S. and China has deteriorated in large part because of a number of things that Trump himself has done. And they see this like golden opportunity, right?
Like America has gotten itself into this like massive disastrous economy-wrecking fiasco that is like for the entire world to see, proving the limits of our ability to just use our military to get what we want. What we're seeing is like we're seeing the limits of a strategy, a military strategy of like
having a military comprised entirely of like $15 million piece weapons that can be taken
out by a $7,000 round. So there's just all sorts of ways in which our geopolitical and upditude and incompetence and weakness is on display. And if you're China, are you going to go in and rescue Donald Trump from that situation
After all the things that he's done instead about China?
The trade wars, all of the rhetoric, remember during COVID, he kept calling it the
China virus over and over and over again, right? So there's reasons that the Chinese leadership would love nothing more than to see Donald Trump humiliated like at great length, very publicly for as long as possible, you know, up until the point where it might destroy China's economy too, and we're just not there yet.
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Thank you, and enjoy the show. You know, David, it occurs to me that both Iran and China. See a golden opportunity, with regard to the United States right now, unintentionally Trump has stumbled into a position where each of these powers has discovered this new leverage over the United States, and they're both going to use it, right?
Is that's the situation in essence? Yeah, why wouldn't they use it, right? I mean, like, if a new source of leverage has revealed itself to you, for you to achieve some sort of strategic aim, why would you leave that leverage on the table, especially in a circumstance where we're technically at war with Iran, or we pause the war, I don't even know anymore,
right?
But the reality is, like, the reason that Iran was putting the elements in place to pursue
and build a nuclear weapon was precisely to protect the regime from being overthrown by the United States. And what Trump has done inadvertently, is he has showed Tehran another way to avoid having the regime overthrown, right?
“And in some ways, they don't even need a nuclear weapon anymore, Greg, right?”
Like, the straight of hormones has become the nuclear weapon here, right? It has become the instrument by which the clerical regime in Iran, or the IRGC regime in Iran, whatever is actually going on there right now, we don't really know. But it has become the instrument by which the regime can preserve itself, right? It has become the point of leverage by which you can say, like, we have this magical survival
mechanism here. We thought it was a nuclear weapon, but it's actually just the straight of form moves. David, guess what, somebody gave Iran a nuclear weapon. It was Donald Trump. It Donald Trump gave Iran a nuclear weapon.
That's what happened. Right, right. I mean, after all these years of saying Iran can't have a nuclear weapon, they have something that isn't many ways much better than a nuclear weapon, right? Because, of course, using a nuclear weapon would invite mutually assured destruction
and would destroy Iranian society and whoever was targeted, closing the straight of form moves doesn't physically harm anyone, right? It just harms the global economy. So in many seconds, a nuclear weapon you can actually use. Exactly.
Well, to return to Trump's tirade for a sec, this gives us an opening to do this, it occurs to me that it's unintentionally revealing the rant, I mean, every time Trump boasts about the tremendous victory he won over Iran by pointing to all the stuff he's blown up, you know, he's made things go boom, boom, boom, right? He actually shows that he has no idea why this isn't forcing Iran's hand on the straight
of form moves, and that shows that he fundamentally doesn't grasp the situation at the most basic level.
“That's what these tirades actually reveal.”
Is that too harsh? No, I mean, it's exactly right. I mean, that's what's been really obvious since the day that he went out and announced that we were blockading the straight of form moves, right?
And everybody said, you know, wait a second, if I call me crazy, I thought that the
blockade of the straight of form moves was the problem here that we are now trying to solve. And he's like, no, I'm going to make it worse. And I think really demonstrates his inability to grasp the basic disaster that he himself has unleashed by his own orders and his own actions.
He has brought the United States into this, it's not even, I don't even know ...
call it a quagmire, right? It's like, we have created this massive economic problem for ourselves and for the world that we lack the ability to solve without such an enormous escalation that it would actually make his political position worse, right? So there's no politically viable or feasible way for him to get out of this other than
accepting some sort of, you know, some demand from Iran that would have been unthinkable four months ago, right, such as like Iran putting a toll on the straight of form moves. There's just nothing but bad options for him all the way down here. And Iran probably sees finally a path to a place where they can maintain some semblance of a nuclear program.
Lift as many sanctions as they can get lifted by using this leverage that trumped us who to drop in their lap, you know?
And if the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, is probably all too happy to have
“have something weird assassinated, honestly, because then it's that you've got an internal”
power shift that they want it anyway. So it's like he has just delivered one thing after another to the Iranian regime that benefits this regime, which of course also doesn't care about his own people at all, right? Like, this has been a disaster and a growing disaster for the Iranian people. But for the regime, it's just, you know, it's like, it's like Christmas.
Another point about his declining approval, GLE, at Morris, the data analyst had some really good and interesting data on this. He looked at the net approval for Trump and other presidents like Nixon and George W. Bush. And he found that the net approval actually maps very closely to where George W. Bush was after Katrina and is approaching Richard Nixon during Watergate.
And I think maybe another way to think about this and another hidden problem for Trump is that we know that the Iranians and the Chinese are both looking pretty hard at these approval numbers. The lower Trump goes, the more likely they're going to be to hold out. Both are running China well aware that the United States is a democracy and they aren't,
right?
Like the Iranian regime, whoever's running it, they never really have to face the voters.
“You know, the Chinese government doesn't have to face the voters, right?”
These are authoritarian regimes and one of the benefits of authoritarianism from a kind of a cold, hard political standpoint is that you can make big sweeping decisions or you can inflict massive suffering on your own population and you don't have any elections to lose because of it. Like you have other fears, right, about being dislodged in other ways by other centers
of power in the country. But you don't have a midterm to worry about. Only we have a midterm to worry about. And Donald Trump decided to launch this war seven months before the midterm elections, in which his party was already facing a pretty significant reputation.
And now from the perspective of the Iranians and the Chinese, it's like the more damage you can inflict on Trump and these midterms, the better. The more leverage they will have, the more leverage they'll have going forward, right? Like the dispute, the relationship with China is not something that's going to be resolved
“by whatever happens with the straight-up armors, right?”
This is a long-term geopolitical competition that's happening here, right? The issue of Taiwan is coming into play here. And nobody could be happier to see the limitations of American power than China, right? I think it's become pretty clear over the course of the past three months that there's absolutely no way that we could defend Taiwan.
China now knows this, right? And yeah, they must be very happy that we're about to have an election that's for sure. Especially the basic dynamics of democracy is like, if you screw up, you're going to get tossed out of power. And lucky for Republicans is not a presidential election year if he did this in.
But when your approval ratings go down like this, it puts a whole and other set of seats in the house and play. It puts seats in the Senate and play. It wouldn't have been a play if he was in the low to mid 40s. And so they see this potential catastrophe coming, they want to exploit it, and I'm honestly
who can blame them, right? Well, I'll tell you the 50 plus one website, which does polling averages now has Trump's approval in the polling averages down to below 37%. And it's a disapproval of almost 60, so it's around a net disapprove of 23 points. That really gets into territory where you start to see that house map broadening out, right?
Right, I mean, if the only people left in your corner is like the one third of the country
that has become sort of hardened mega cultists, that's not enough to win the house, that's not enough to keep the Senate, that's not enough to win a presidential election, right? A lot of the softer supporters in 2024 have drifted away because they don't like what's happening. This is not what they voted for.
They've been paying closer attention, they would have done this, this was in fact what
They were voting for, but from their perspective, right, they were electing s...
to bring prices down, and not only has he not done that, he's made a problem much worse,
right? And there's just no political upside there whatsoever. It's not even like if he got the victory that he wants, it's really not going to benefit him with that much because people didn't care about this to begin with. You know what I mean?
It's like he stakes his entire presidency on an issue about which most Americans do not care, and in fact by losing that confrontation, it's like it's really the worst of all possible worlds for him. There's a way to tie all this together to close this out, which is Trump is facing an election.
“China and Iran are watching this very closely, but the truth is, Donald Trump really”
has kind of a case of dictator envy, right? You know, I don't know if you saw this, but he tweeted, I think it was in the early morning, he tweeted out something about China has a ballroom, so the US should have a ballroom too, and then in another tweet he tweeted about his big golden statue, you know, clearly he's looking at Xi and looking at the stuff in China and setting to himself, man, there's
a lot of pomp here. They really know how to treat a dictator here. Why can't I get that? So, let me just remind everybody about my golden statue, you know? But in all seriousness, Donald Trump would like to respond to his failures abroad with more
authoritarianism at home, and I think rants like that one at the reporter David Sanger really show that, but here again, he can't because he is in a democracy, and he's done a ton of damage to it.
David, and you'd probably be the first to talk about that, but he cannot do what Xi and the
Iranian clerics can do, right? Or can he? No, he can't. Not right now, right? I mean, he can't just roll tanks through the street, right?
That's not going to work. And throughout his entire career, he has made it very clear that he envies the power, the unaccountable power of dictators, all over the world, right? There's a reason that he took one of the signature authoritarian spectacles, which is a massive military parade through the Capitol, and appropriated it for himself on his birthday last
year, because he, like fundamentally, he wants to be these people, right? He wants to be able to order someone to be jailed, he wants to be able to order people to be executed, he wants to be able to make decisions without ever having to face the consequences of those decisions. He hates democracy, right?
Low and despises democracy. And he hates accountability, I think, is the real crux of it, too. Right, and that's like a personal thing, right?
This is one very special boy who has never been held accountable for anything in his entire
life, right? And here, along comes a problem of his own making that could be his undoing, right? I'm sure that he knows that on some level, right? Even though he has created this information bubble around himself with the, you know, only whistlings are allowed in the room, yet this must be breaking through to him, right?
That is approval ratings are slipping, but Republicans, political prospects are slipping.
“And the only thing that he really can command is his own repressive apparatus, right?”
He can still, he can go out and order more investigations of opponents. He can make the lives of journalists, hell, you know, he can launch investigations. He can't necessarily get the outcome that he wants, but the fact that he can do that is concerning, I think the worst things get for him, I think we can expect that the abuse is coming out of the DOG and the FBI are only going to get worse until someone or something
is able to really hold an accountable domestically, and we're not, we're not really there yet. I think I know who that's supposed to be. It's the voters in the midterm state, but that would be nice, wouldn't it? If the notice properly understood the assignment this time, I would be very happy. Yes, we're all working toward that right now, you are, I am, everybody is.
David Ferris really awesome to talk to you folks. If you enjoyed this check out David's work over at the nation, he's a great political scientist who actually was quite pressy and way back in the day, he said that we had to fight a lot dirty against Republicans and boy was he right about that. David, great to have you on now.
Great to be on the show, great, thanks so much for having me. Now there's cheese. A new newscaster has already made the most possible news.
“Now there's a few people in the middle of the show, the best way to test a great test.”
He wants to have the cheese cheese. Cheese. Now on the great test. The number of 18 years, the government and the government have been in the union for 30 years. But as long as the government has three, the government has the power of the government and the cheese minus action.
