Transcript: Trump Iran Humiliation Worsens as Leaks Take Damning Turn

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

It’s a widespread assumption among political strategists that foreign policy rarely matters in U.S. elections. But what if Donald Trump’s failures on this front are so disastrous and destructive that he’s about to break this rule too? Trump’s Iran fiasco is getting worse, and newly leaked photos show dramatic damage to the U.S. abroad. On Russia and Ukraine, he buffoonishly proclaimed that he’d secured an agreement that neither would attack the other’s energy sources, but then that blew up in his face. And new polling shows him cratering on both fronts.

So is there a way to make all this matter in the midterms? We’re talking about all of it with international relations professor Nicholas Grossman, who’s written well on the Iran debacle. Nick, good to have you on.

Nicholas Grossman: Hi, great to be back.

Sargent: So with soaring diesel prices killing Republicans in the midterms, Trump tried to blame this on the Russia-Ukraine war and not Iran. And the other day he posted this on Truth Social: “Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian energy targets. Russia has agreed to do likewise.”

Trump then suggested this’ll hold down the world’s diesel prices, but then Russia and Ukraine both said, no, we didn’t really agree to that. Nick, can you bring us up to speed on that?

Grossman: Sure. So Russia and Ukraine are in a war stalemate at the line. I mean, they’re fighting a lot and killing a lot of people, but not moving dramatically in terms of land one way or the other. They’re both bombing each other long distance, bombing each other’s energy resources.

And Trump tried to interject himself, among a trip with both Kushner and Steve Witkoff, trying to once again make deals, and then tried to get this to stop by just claiming that it was Ukraine’s fault, not his Iran war, that actually made diesel prices rise. Which nobody bought. And so then, when nobody bought that, he tried to sell the lie by saying they’re going to stop right now—which they then did not do, as they kept on attacking each other.

Sargent: Right. So they’re not really listening to Donald Trump on this, are they?

Grossman: No, not at all. Just about nobody is anymore.

Sargent: Nick, just briefly, the Russia-Ukraine war has basically receded from the headlines and Trump’s basically stopped talking about it. But we should probably remind everybody that Trump said during the campaign that he would end this war on day one of his presidency, didn’t he?

Grossman: He did. He said he would end it on day one. And the big idea that he and his team have had is to try to pressure the Ukrainians to surrender to Russia. And that’s even what Kushner had just did, where he complained that the Ukrainians would not give up the land that Putin wanted, and therefore that he couldn’t make a deal. And of course, the Ukrainians aren’t doing that.

But the other big change is that they’ve managed to really increase their strike program into Russia, and they’re hitting a lot of, in particular, refineries, which is contributing to the rise in gas prices. But it’s nowhere near as big as what Trump has done with the Iran war. It just compounds the problem.

Sargent: It’s not a small thing for the president of the United States to go out there and say, I’ve secured a deal between two major nations that are at war not to attack each other’s assets in one way or another, and then for that just to be bullshit. That’s not a small thing, is it?

Grossman: No, no. It’s a dramatic change. And it’s another example of how Trump has disrupted the international system by removing that bedrock idea of American credibility, that he has forfeited it in so many ways.

And another—perhaps the biggest current example of Trump’s blown credibility—is the way that the United States has not been providing security to its Middle Eastern allies, to all these different Gulf Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has had to deal now with the biggest attacks against it of the war so far, where an Iran-backed militia attacked its east-west pipeline, and they went and asked Trump for help. MBS reportedly called Trump twice and asked him to get involved in this Yemen conflict and clear it up. And both times the United States said no.

And the Gulf Arab states are reportedly shocked by this, and it upends the entire Middle East architecture. And Trump just simply isn’t there, and also isn’t able to stop either the Houthis or the Iranians.

Sargent: Well, my foreign policy doctrine says that Donald Trump will screw anybody if he sees it in his own interests. Let’s go to Iran for a bit more. The House just passed another bill that directs Trump to end the war there or get congressional authorization for it. Seven Republicans defected from Trump this time. Trump’s been threatening to blow up the whole country again. Iran doesn’t seem to take that seriously.

Nick, can you just very briefly bring us up to speed on what’s going on in Iran, who’s doing what, and why the situation’s stuck?

Grossman: So they’re both blockading each other, occasionally bombing each other, but largely holding back from full-scale war. So nobody’s giving in, and nobody is letting ships go through. The U.S. under Trump has tried bombing a few more times, but it hasn’t really accomplished anything.

And the Iranians aren’t giving in because their allies are on the march, like against Saudi Arabia—because while they’re feeling economic damage from this squeeze, they are also able to impose a lot of economic damage. And they can see the U.S. political calendar. They can see the midterms. If Democrats capture the House, they will be better able to try to assert Congress’s war powers.

Which really the whole thing should not be necessary at all. The legal thing should be that the president is supposed to have congressional authorization to go to war, and then, under the War Powers Act, is supposed to withdraw if he doesn’t get authorization.

And this is now multiple times that they’ve taken away authorization that he didn’t even have in the first place, just to underline it. So it’s this more authoritarian moment. But the Iranians can see this, and they can use this to their advantage, and neither can get one over on the other at the moment.

Sargent: Right. It never hurts to remind people that Trump is abusing his power in every conceivable way that he can. CBS News just published extraordinary photos of U.S. equipment and positions in the Middle East that have been badly damaged by the war. The pictures are powerful. There’s aircraft that’s been blown up, buildings reduced to rubble. It’s much worse than we knew.

But here’s the kicker: U.S. service members anonymously sent these pictures to CBS due to restrictions on communicating with the media. As one service member told CBS News: “This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public. We’re standing there with our eyes closed, getting punched in the face.”

Nick, Pete Hegseth’s propagandists suppressed this info about what’s happening to United States interests and assets, and it’s getting leaked right around them. Your thoughts on all this?

Grossman: Right. It’s really bad. And I think we’re going to keep finding out about additional damage that this did, because the Trump administration’s main foreign policy priority has been lying to the American people. And so when the war did not go well—which started, I mean, really before it started, but it was clear that it wasn’t going well within a few weeks—and they’ve been still stalling and flailing and trying different things the entire time.

And while they’re doing this, because they can’t admit their own failure, they are then trying to cover up all this damage. Because instead of correcting the problem, or instead of addressing the problem in the first place, they are trying to just keep it from the public. And they can’t. It’s too big.

It’s too many bases that are not being defended. This is too much money, too many people involved. And the way they’ve tried to keep it out of the media—we can see, especially in the internet age, that you can’t keep images from getting to the public.

Sargent: You know, those photos really reminded me of Trump’s 2016 ads, in which he tried to demonstrate what he called “American carnage.” There were pictures of, you know, rusted-out factories through the Rust Belt. A lot of these pictures almost look like that. They’re like these American bases which are just have been bombed, they’re falling apart, their windows are broken, they’re deserted.

Grossman: Yeah. The United States has bases all throughout the Middle East, and this is the big geopolitical architecture that is changing. Trump has lost the Gulf. He’s lost freedom of navigation. It seems like he’s losing Saudi Arabia and losing the Middle East. And it’s not clear where the chaos of it will go, but it’s clear that they do not have a handle on it at all.

And the damage to the American bases—on top of that, there’s all the munition shortages, the fact that they used a lot of the best stuff without really thinking through a plan beyond that. And there’s all the damage, various injuries to troops, that keep on coming out, more than to U.S. allies and to U.S. interests. And we’re seeing this come into politics now more and more because it is increasingly unignorable.

It’s something where they were never in control of the situation, but now they have really lost control of it, and it is spilling over in all directions.

Sargent: You can almost look at these images, which are really quite striking—I want to underscore how striking the imagery of these bombed-out American bases really looks. It’s haunting stuff. You can almost see it as kind of symbolic of American decline, in the same way Trump used rusting-out factories to symbolize his critique of American decline, right?

Grossman: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And now that you mention it, I’m trying to think of when the last time there were a bunch of American military bases damaged, and photos of, like, American aircraft in pieces and American facilities in rubble. That wasn’t something that happened during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was more the sort of thing that we would see at one isolated location from a terrorist attack.

Even if you think of the images out of Vietnam, it’s the withdrawal, the helicopter on the roof of Saigon. It’s not these large military defeats in which there’s all sorts of damage.

So yeah, it looks like the United States is no longer that number one global power. I mean, still, of course, the U.S. has the biggest military, biggest economy, but is no longer acting like it, exercising the powers like it, the responsibilities and benefits of it—and being seen, I think definitely internationally, but increasingly domestically also, like this is a problem. There were a lot of advantages for the United States being the world’s premier power and being seen as such, and the responsibilities and benefits that go with it. And giving that away—I mean, it really was a choice, which really sucks.

But while the American people might not care about foreign policy often, they do when things go really bad. And, you know, you can think of the 2002–2004 elections, foreign policy was a serious issue. I might say in 2024, you know, it wasn’t the number one issue—things like inflation were—but certainly Middle East, Gaza, Israel-Palestine were issues in the election. And now that it is reaching out into economic damage to everybody, with no end in sight, and compounding other economic damage Trump is causing, politically it seems unignorable.

Sargent: Well, the polling here has become absolutely crippling and completely underscores your point. The latest Quinnipiac survey found that approval of Trump’s handling of foreign policy is 33 percent to 60 percent disapproving. That’s 27 points underwater. On Iran specifically, approval of Trump’s handling of it is 29 percent to 65 percent disapproving—36 points underwater. And on the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump clocks in at 28 percent to 61 percent, or 33 points underwater.

I mean, that’s just extraordinary stuff. It’s extraordinary failure, and an amazing repudiation of Trump’s handling of the commander in chief role, or whatever you want to call it. Donald Trump really campaigned as the guy who was just American military power personified. Trump’s strong, opponents weak. And he’s just falling apart across the board. It’s almost amazing to see, isn’t it?

Grossman: It is. I mean, in a really, I’d say negative way, but yeah. And he has always presented this, but he and Hegseth really dialed it up when it came to foreign policy and put it into practice. It was this very shallow conception of strength, this kind of blustery, and reality TV, I-yell-a-lot, I-act-like-an-asshole, I-insult-you conception of strength.

Or I screw you over, I renege on the deal, and what can you do about it, version of it. And that is not how the world works. It never has been. It’s something I feel like I’ve been saying this the entire time, and now the bill is coming due. But that’s not what real strength is.

The real strength comes from things like allies, and he has alienated at this point virtually all of them. It does not come from kissing up to authoritarians, like he’s tried with Russia or North Korea or China. And it certainly doesn’t come from things like, with Hegseth, of white men who are clean-shaven and look good on television, who disdain the laws of war as, like, woke and dumb, and commit war crimes. That’s how you win wars. And it sounds so stupid to say it out loud, but it’s real, it’s in practice now, and this is why it is failing terribly.

And it’s also amazing that they went for it, because that’s kind of what Russia has been failing with in Ukraine. They also had a, no, we’re taking on a “they/them” army. It’s just, like, transnational culture war where Putin’s manliness will overcome them. And that is just not how war works. It seems absurd to say that in the twenty-first century. I mean, with things like drones, you do not need to do pushups to pilot them. I mean, just, like, it doesn’t connect.

But it is a failure of that worldview, and with the most serious consequences. But I am cautiously optimistic that the midterms will create a degree of a vibe shift—of a rejection not only of the specific, say, Trump policies, but of that larger Trump worldview and the kind of Trump-Hegseth way of doing things.

Sargent: I want to try to tease out a deeper point that I think you’re getting at here that concerns the way MAGA understands war. You look at Pete Hegseth strut up and down—in the early days of the Iran conflict, he thought he was on top of the world. He would essentially go out there and he would talk about how our precision machines were blowing this up and blowing that up, and the enemy was just absolutely decimated.

And he even invoked God. He said God wasn’t answering the enemy, the Iranian enemy, and presumably is answering Pete Hegseth. He actually appealed directly to God for help with his violent conquest. I guess God’s not listening or something.

But that aside, what’s interesting here is that they conceived of war as a rejuvenating and revitalizing thing for American empire. We’d get rid of the wokeness, we’d get everyone to cut their hair and shave their beards and get into manly shape, and the nation would be rejuvenated after its decadence and decay and decline under liberals.

But the opposite has happened. We’ve seen an extraordinary amount of decay and decline because of that worldview and because of Trump’s implementing of it. Can you talk about that?

Grossman: Sure. First, I think a lot of the stuff you were just saying could be summarized as “fascist.” I mean, really fascist in a—especially like an Italian Mussolini way. Often too many people think of fascists as exactly what the Nazis did, and especially late Nazis, say in the ‘40s, exactly what they did. And so it’s a very Mussolini fascist style, especially with the strutting, and if you think of the picture of Mussolini with chest puffed out and the rest of it.

But yeah, it is failing in so many ways. And I mean, we can connect this to domestic stuff with manufacturing, or the idea that the working class are large white men doing, particularly—and it’s, I mean, always racialized—doing a particular type of factory work. And whereas what is actually the working class in numbers—I mean, obviously there’s some people who work in manufacturing, but most of manufacturing at this point is robots.

The working class is all distributed in things like, I don’t know, service jobs, for example, cleaning hotels and waiting tables and nurses and, I don’t know, many others that we could mention. And they have never connected to that.

There is a degree of denial inherent in fascism, in that the past that they are trying to recapture is fake. It never was real, it was sort of imagined nostalgia, and so it can’t be recaptured. And yet they force it to a point where it usually then consumes itself, where it falls in upon itself. And I think we’re witnessing that now. I hope we’re witnessing that now, that I’m reading it right.

It’s going to take a decent amount of more time to fully dislodge from power—let’s, you know, get through the midterms, then we deal with Trump in the presidency and bigger questions about that. But it does seem to be imploding in a way that a lot of fascist movements do. And I’m just thankful that it would be before the election, as opposed to doing a lot of this stupid stuff and economically damaging stuff after the election, when the public did not have a chance to react.

Sargent: Another piece of this is immigration. You get rid of all the nonwhite unskilled workers, and then the yeoman American working class will get more jobs as a result. The men will be more attractive to women, they’ll have more babies, and they’ll solve the fertility problem without having to let in more dark people. It’s part of the same story.

Grossman: Yep, very much so. And again, it still feels weird to me that we’re living through it, because it does sound like something out of 20th century fascism. But that’s a lot of what they’ve done, and Stephen Miller has done. Or there was a Department of Labor propaganda that they put out, all these AI images of strapping white blond guys working the fields. And it has not materialized that way at all.

You notice they have done a lot of the immigration crackdown that they’ve promised. It’s been, you know, violence in the mass deportation. They’ve gotten a lot of people out of the country, or made it that people don’t come. And yet there aren’t all of these great jobs that have suddenly flowered in response to that, because that was always nonsense.

Sargent: And by the way, the violence of the removal of nonwhite immigrants was also supposed to be rejuvenating. The ICE propaganda, ICE recruitment info, is very, very, very steeped in that basic imagery.

Let’s just wrap this up. Donald Trump is essentially becoming a global laughingstock, isn’t he, Nick? I mean, that’s the opposite story of the fascist warmongering rejuvenating story that they think they’re telling.

And we’re now looking at a possibility that one or both chambers will be under the possession of Democrats going forward. What can they actually reasonably, credibly do with the House to put real brakes on this?

Grossman: What he really doesn’t like—and this is of that type, but really doesn’t like—is sort of being ignored, being shrugged at, not taken seriously, which is happening with a lot of the countries.

What the Democrats can do if they take the House, and hopefully the Senate, but just the House would be enough for it—I think two of the biggest things would be funding. They should very seriously not fund various things, including relating to the military, that is just going to be burned up in the Iran war, to try to force congressional power—both power of the purse and also Congress’s war powers—to end the war.

And also to do investigations, and to impeach Pete Hegseth. Start with that. Funding and investigations. So those are two biggest tools, and they should use them to the max.

Sargent: That’s right, Nick Grossman. They should defund the war, impeach Hegseth, and investigate the shit out of all of this. Nick, always really, really great to talk to you. This was really interesting stuff. Thanks so much for coming on.

Grossman: Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Source link