Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Paul Waldman has a good piece on his Substack, The Cross Section, digging into why Trump’s war is so unpopular. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Paul, good to see you. Thanks for coming on.
Sargent: So the Times looked at 10 wars going back to World War II and found that initial support for Trump’s war is lower than at the outset of any other conflict. The Times put support for the Iran war at 41 percent. Other averages of polls have it even lower, at 38 percent. Paul, the key here is that there’s no reflexive support for the commander in chief. In fact, I wonder if it’s the opposite—people are predisposed to see Trump’s case for war as, you know, made up. Which it is. What do you think?
First of all, the presidents at those times were very popular to begin with. So you had a popular president who was coming in and trying to make this case for war. The second, and I think most important thing, is that in every one of those cases, there was a real argument being made that America was under threat. And in some cases it may have been exaggerated, but at least it was plausible.
Sargent: As we all know, it’s looking likely that the U.S. bombed an Iranian elementary school, killing scores of children. Reports show a Tomahawk missile striking near the school, and that’s our missile. Trump has said, implausibly, that Iran might have gotten a Tomahawk and done the bombing itself. Now listen to this exchange between Trump and Times reporter Shawn McCreesh:
Donald Trump (voiceover): Because I just don’t know enough about it. I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation. But Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks — they buy them from us. But I will certainly, whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.
Waldman: Trump is not incredibly engaged with the details in the best of times. And if you want to wage a propaganda campaign, you have to have a clear message—you have to repeat it over and over. The administration has been all over the place on all of this. Some days we’re talking about how the Iranian people ought to rise up and we’re really doing this as a favor to them. And then the next day Trump will put something on Truth Social that threatens to rain down fire and fury on Iran and make sure that it can’t become a country again for decades to come.
So you would think the administration would be working extra hard to convince the world that we are actually on the side of the Iranian people, and to convince the Iranian people that maybe they should rise up and overthrow their leadership. But right now we’re not doing either of those things, because this administration is consumed by bloodlust, and people like Hegseth and the rest of them can’t even seem to get their story straight.
Waldman: Yeah, I think there’s a certain amount of coverage that is what the administration wants, especially on TV news — these sort of very exciting kinetic videos of explosions and things like that through night-vision goggles. We see planes getting blown up and stuff like that. And that is catnip for television news because they want those images, and they replay them over and over and do the kind of play-by-play that you often see in war coverage. But at the same time, you’re right that there is a lot more skepticism from the press corps in general. And this administration has built up a lot of ill will.
They’ve had to spend most of the last year cultivating sources that are not necessarily what the press secretary is saying at the Pentagon. And so they’ve had to go and be a little more entrepreneurial about how they can get information. And that’s going to push them toward more skeptical sources and just sort of put them in a position where they’re not going to want to just accept it when Pete Hegseth says that everything is going fantastically and we’re just going to amp up our lethality tomorrow and it’s going to be even more lethal. And isn’t that awesome?
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): And the president has a right to share his opinions with the American public, but he has said he’ll accept the conclusion of that investigation. And frankly, we’re not going to be harassed by the New York Times, who’s been putting out a lot of articles on this, making claims that have just not been verified by the Department of War, to quickly wrap up this investigation because the New York Times is calling on us to do so.
Waldman: Yeah. And this administration could actually get at least somewhat better coverage if it wanted to, if it wasn’t so unremittingly hostile to reporters asking even the most basic questions.
But they also know that what he wants from them—from the people who deal with the press—is to be antagonistic and hostile and abusive toward reporters. That’s what he expects, and he watches them on TV. And so they do that. And then there is a way to have a somewhat adversarial relationship with the media that is still respectful, and can make it so that they will hear you out when you have a case to make.
Sargent: Well, it’s kind of funny because Trump keeps saying different things and contradicting himself and offering different rationales, and yet the administration’s propagandists are required at all times to say that whatever Trump just said is perfect. So maybe the way they think of it in their heads is whatever Trump is saying now is even more perfect than the thing he said three days before. You know what I mean?
Sargent: Well, yeah. And that was actually captured really well in yet another exchange with Karoline Leavitt that I want to highlight. The reporter asked Leavitt why Trump keeps shifting the goalposts on when he says Iran would have gotten a nuke if he hadn’t undertaken this world-historically important invasion. His latest is seven days—Iran would have gotten a nuke in seven days. Complete horseshit. We know from New York Times reporting on the internal debates that American officials say it’s not so. But regardless, he keeps changing it. Leavitt was asked about this, and here’s how she responded.
Sargent: So I’m noticing this formulation more and more lately—Trump is basing things on a feeling which is based on facts. Now, I don’t know if that’s just Karoline Leavitt trolling us because it’s such a ludicrous formulation. But I think it’s pretty revealing that even Karoline Leavitt is saying that Trump is kind of basing things on the seat of his pants, essentially.
And this is particularly difficult with regard to Iran’s nuclear program, because first of all, they had claimed last summer that it had been totally obliterated, which wasn’t true at the time. But it was certainly the case that Iran was not in possession of any nuclear weapons, and it would take them quite a bit of work to build one. But now Trump is coming out and saying, well, you know, they were about to get one—which is utterly preposterous.
And so now you have Republicans out there saying, well, we’ve been at war with them for 47 years, and that’s the imminent threat. Of course, that is the opposite of what “imminent” means. But Trump, I think, feels that. And so he has to say, well, yeah, it was imminent because they were about to nuke us. And this is the paradox that we saw in the Iraq War and before—we’re about to, and then we do, attack a country that is far, far less powerful than we are. And yet they have to convince the public that this small country that we can squash like a bug is actually about to wage war on us and is about to show up in Coney Island with a submarine and a nuclear weapon attached to it, or whatever.
Sargent: Right. And there’s a kernel of truth to what Leavitt said there, in the sense that he really is basing this on feeling. The one thing that’s false about what she said is those feelings aren’t based on facts—they’re just based on feelings, and who knows where those feelings are coming from.
You can say a hundred different things about how it’s a bunch of bad guys and it’s a fundamentalist Islamic regime and they oppress their people and they cause trouble in the region and they support terrorist groups. But why are we going to war right now against Iran? And the truth is that Donald Trump himself probably doesn’t know—and if he knows, he certainly has not communicated that clearly to any of us.
Sargent: And I think you really put your finger on the core of the issue when you said that Donald Trump doesn’t know why we’re doing this. The real reason, I think—or at least among the reasons—that this war is so unpopular compared to other ones, is that everybody knows, voters know, that Trump doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, that he doesn’t have any idea why we’re doing this. Voters know that. Voters see that the emperor has no clothes.
There he was essentially saying Iran bombed the school. And then when the reporter reframed it—so Iran somehow got one of our missiles and bombed its own school—it just showed the utter absurdity of this man up there who has no fucking idea what he’s talking about, and the utter absurdity of letting him make these kinds of decisions.
But when so many other things are going so poorly, and immediately you see all these ill effects—especially gas prices, which are unavoidable, you see them on every corner—at that point, nobody is ready to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Sargent: It’s really kind of down at 38, 37 in some polls, and that’s sort of his floor number, that hard, molten core of MAGA—that 37, 38 percent. And that’s what he’s got right now. And this is just getting started.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
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