The Daily Blast: Trumpworld Unnerved as Damning Leaks Expose His Worst War Blunders Yet

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I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

The Washington Post is reporting that internal intelligence findings indicate that Iran can survive Donald Trump's naval blockade for at least three more months before economic hardship really bites. That means the war could go on longer than we expect. If so, that's a political catastrophe for Trump and the GOP.

Trump's advisors are reportedly worried right now with the political blowback over the war as worsening for them. And there are signs Trump's allies are turning on him at this moment. Fox News hit Trump with a crushing graphic that demonstrated soaring gas prices with one Fox anchor declaring that those prices are giving

Americans heartburn. We think the political fallout from all this could last much longer than people expect. So we're digging through all of it with new Republic staff writer Timothy Noah who's been writing well about how Trump's policies are screwing working people. Tim, good to have you back on.

Thanks for having me, Greg. Let's start with this Fox News segment, which was flagged by the tireless Aaron Rupar, in huge numbers on the screen. It had the latest national average prices at 455 per gallon, showing that this is up from 3.15 a year ago.

Now listen to this exchange between a Fox anchor and energy secretary Chris Wright. And what about people's concern about gas prices? They're seeing numbers that you give them some heartburn and some heart ache. And it's hard for a lot of people to figure out how they're going to stomach this for much longer.

It is, of course, it's been tough for our administration as well.

This is an administration, the first Trump term in the second Trump term,

all about lowering energy prices and an incredibly successful record in doing that. So with President Trump looked at the trade-offs of going into Iran right now, he knew his sort of beautiful record of just constantly pushing down energy prices, gasoline, headline prices as well, but Iran has roughly a thousand pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent.

Tim, that's stuff about Trump's great energy record is just made up, but that aside, that's terrible, spin, right admits this is hard for people and says, "Well, Trump knew this would undo his great achievement. Your thoughts?"

“Yeah, I mean, this is, I think, the first time Donald Trump has called for sacrifice.”

And Republicans, in general, don't do well with calls for sacrifice. Particularly, when in the context of a war that's already quite unpopular, was unpopular on the day it began. Yes, terrible politics, but, you know, they are caught between a rock and a hard place. They can't win this war overnight on the one hand,

and they can't endure an elevation of gas prices. We are going to be in a situation where these prices are going to persist in a major way for weeks, if not months, right? Yes, I mean, you're talking about all sorts of shortages. You're not just talking about auto-fuel.

You're talking also about jet fuel, and suddenly the administration is very worried about that. You're also talking about agricultural products. You're talking about all sorts of things, and, you know, to undo the damage of that, it's not going to happen overnight. And that's going to be incredibly damaging to Trump.

“Remember that when Joe Biden was running for reelection,”

inflation came way down months before the election, and inflation was still held against Biden in that election. Absolutely, that's a major finding in political sciences well, which is that it's the direction of the economy months before election day that sticks in people's minds. Now, to switch, the Washington Post reports that a secret CIA analysis that's been given to administration

for at least three to four more months before facing serious economic difficulties. One U.S. official tells the post that the Iranian leadership has gotten increasingly confident that they can outlast U.S. political will. Now, again, Tim, even if this war ends in five minutes, these leaks are damning in two senses first because they badly undercut Trump's public spin about how close to collapse Iran is.

And second, because they show that a lot of insiders want the public to know

“that what Trump is saying to the public isn't true. What do you make of all that?”

Well, to me, the most amazing thing about the post report was that something like 75% of their

missile launchers, they still have, I thought to myself, how could that possibly be? But they were obviously much better defended than than we knew. So, yes, they could continue for months. And, you know, one index I find intriguing is the stock market. The stock market seems to be the last entity in the United States to actually believe what Donald Trump says about the war on the verge of being over. I don't think anybody else believes them, but the stock market does.

And it keeps surging every time there's the vaguest hint that this war may end soon. Now,

“if it finally penetrates the stock market's thick skull that this war isn't going to end soon,”

we're going to see the opposite reaction. We're going to see stock stocks go down.

And that always sends Trump into a panic. And the Iranians know that.

The Iranians do know that for sure. There's another component all this as well. Jet fuel prices are about to get much worse driving up airfare as the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump's advisors are increasingly worried that the GOP will take a hit in the mid-terms from these rising fuel costs. And they really want the war to end in order to have time for prices to be in coming down before the elections. Tim, what would have to happen? What would the

timeline have to be for prices, meaning both jet fuel and gasoline, to really come down before the elections to the degree that Republicans would need? Is that even possible? You know, I think it's probably already too late. I don't know precisely how many months it would take, but say it takes, let's be maximally optimistic and say it takes four months. Well, this is May that takes us into September with the election, you know, just two months away. Say it takes

two months. That's still very close to the election. I think they are already screwed.

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And it's a social media and an over-edered vision. That's the music for your own. Videos of the rest of vendors made Shopify, considered to have an extra help. Start your tests to hold a full-time promo on Shopify.com. Well, one analyst of gas prices is even more pessimistic about this telling axios that gas prices are going to remain high even if the war ends. This analyst

says that he expects it to take one to three months for prices to come down one-third of where

in this analysis get back to pre-war prices by late 2026 or early 2027 after the midterms.

The problem seems to be that even if you end the war in a day or two or whatever, then the oil markets are still in serious turmoil for a long time and it all has to sort itself out. Can you talk about that? This is literally a commodity that that moves by ship. So that is not. It's not like the internet, which is what we're used to thinking of as commerce. Oil moves very slowly. It moves by ship. Then it needs to be refined. And then it can be distributed

as a final product. But that's a process of months.

“Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, I think it's worth reminding everyone here that Trump constantly”

and I mean constantly says that once the war ends, prices will come right down. But if this

does end up taking longer as it does look like it's going to, Trump will be on the hook for yet another broken promise. It seems like what they refer to as a wicked problem, Tim. It's a trap that he walked right into. Everybody told him he was walking into a trap. They were saying, uh, his advisors were saying, if you start a war with a run, they will close the straight of hormones, analysts have been talking about this scenario for decades.

But he was, uh, he had this delusion that, um, he was able to win wars quickly from the air. And that was what he told himself about a ran, um, uh, everybody told him he was wrong. And, uh, but he, um, refused to believe them. He believes what he wants to believe. And now he really has, uh, uh, damaged seriously, uh, Republicans midterm chances.

“You know, I think I often think of Trump as a kind of, um, saboteur, uh, and he's, he's certainly”

been a saboteur of government. And now he seems to be bored with saboteur and government. And his instead sabotaging the Republican party itself. The comparison with Venezuela is really interesting because Donald Trump himself has said publicly that he expects the Iran situation to go the same way the quick in and out in Venezuela did. And, you know, that's just such a crazy way to think about the situation,

because Iran is a country of 90 million people and for all sorts of deep cultural reasons

and important geographic reasons, facts about geography that can't be just altered with Trump's magical lying powers. All these things were just going to inspire to make this much harder than Venezuela was. And he wouldn't hear of it. He just wouldn't. Yeah. And, and this is, this is a war that, you know, every president starting with Jimmy Carter has contemplated and they have all ruled it out due to essentially the same set of facts.

And one of those presidents actually painstakingly negotiated a very complicated p-steal

“that will actually prove I believe to be better than whatever Trump emerges with at the end of”

the day. I'm talking, of course, about the Obama nuclear deal. Right. Um, yes, that's going to be their next problem is they're going to have to justify this war based on whatever nuclear deal they get in the end, because they won't be able to say they achieved a regime change. They did not just as they did not in Venezuela. And, um, and they're going to, so they'll have to justify it based on the nuclear deal. And as you say at best, they're going to get what Obama got and

probably they will get less. In fact, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just said the other day that our aims have been achieved. The aims of the war have been achieved. It's just absolutely preposterous. Just nonstop bullshit from them in every way. They've just told us so many different versions of what their end game or their end goals were. And there's just no way that they actually achieved their war aims. There's no way to spend that. It's like you will probably remember I can't.

They who was the, the politician who during the Vietnam War recommended that we declare victory and go home. Now that's a serious policy. Absolutely. Well, just to take the larger view here,

constituencies. Let me just go through the list here. rural and ex-serven Americans drive more, so they're going to be paying more for gas. Farmers are getting hit by rising fertilizer prices and other higher costs. The tariffs hit a lot of lower income consumers, which means a whole lot of Trump voters. And you had a good piece on this new study finding that mass deportations aren't actually resulting in more jobs for native foreign workers. If anything, they're resulting in some

job losses for those American workers. Now you take it all together and it seems like a perfect storm of really bad and damaging policy for Donald Trump's America, not to mention the rest of us.

“Is that overstating it? No, I think that's stating it very well. The only caution I would advise”

is that Donald Trump ran in 2024, having served as president during a terrible, terrible public health crisis that he made considerably worse, arguably lost the 2020 election because of that.

And then in 2024, was health harmless for COVID. I have never been able to figure out

including in the press. Whenever there was a comparison of Trump's record with Biden's reporters were always saying, "Well, we must exclude the final year because of COVID." And I remember saying, "Why exclude the final year? COVID was really bad in large part because Trump handled it so badly." That's absolutely crazy. That was like one of the greatest public policy debacles ever, certainly one of the biggest ones in modern times.

“Yes, I mean, in terms of, in terms of body count, it's, I can't think of anything to compare it to.”

So Tim, just unspool this for us. Let's say the war ends. I don't know in a week or in a month, what happens over the next six months? Well, I recognize that the map is not friendly to Democrats in the midterms on the Senate side. But I also think that we have to take into account a Trump's own declining popularity. And it is only gone in one direction since an inauguration day. And that's been downward. But for a long time, it's going downward very slowly.

Now it's going downward a bit more quickly. And I just don't see how that doesn't make trouble for the Republicans if they have a Trump with a considerably lower approval rating than he has now. Well, also his approval on the economy is so in the shitter and there's so much economic distress out there, that's the sort of thing. If anything, that could get you to the point where Democrats can win in some of these very tough statewide races and pull out the Senate just by

one seat and kind of a miraculous outcome. But do you think even if the war ends in, I don't know,

“days or a week, you don't think he gets a bump? How do you see it playing out? I think it's bad.”

I think I think his approval rating goes down no matter what. First of all, the war isn't

his only problem. He's got 12 problems as bad as the war. And so there's the rule of law problem. There's the Fed problem. There's a number of problems. There's a personnel problem. At the moment, he's got an FBI director who who hands out bottles of bourbon as souvenirs. You know, he's going to have to get rid of a lot of his appointees and that's going to be embarrassing for him. Yeah, it looks to me like there's just such an enormous pile of problems that it's very

hard for him to get out from under all of it. The house looks like it's basically gone for Republicans unless they can gerrymandrel like 20 states, although I doubt that. But it does look to me like

the house is probably gone and the Senate is certainly in play. Tim Noah always great to talk to you.

Thanks for coming on. Thank you Greg. With the world-wide best in conversation. The legendary check-out from Shopify, for just the shop on your website, a bit to social media and over everything. That's the music for your oron. Videos are also brought to the end with Shopify. It can be to a real help.

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