Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Kate Aronoff: Nice to be back.
Aronoff: Yeah, I don’t want to be too kind about the history of American wars, particularly in the Middle East—but this is an exceptionally unpopular one. And they didn’t even have the dignity to haul out a Colin Powell type figure to hold the little vial up before a panel and tell us a lie about weapons of mass destruction. They just kind of went in, and there was no lead-up, there was no sort of attempt even to cultivate some sort of popular support or even a real sense that Iran posed a threat. What was it—Tom Cotton said that an imminent threat for 47 years from Iran?
Sargent: Well, I think that’s actually a reasonable supposition in some sense, because if Trump’s pollster is conducting surveys showing the war is very unpopular and Susie Wiles is telling Donald Trump, sir, whoever’s telling you that this is going well is lying to you and this is going to kill us in the midterms, then I think there actually is something of a chance that Trump looks for a quicker way out.
Sargent: Trump knows things are going very badly on many fronts. He just fired his attorney general, Bondi, and Politico now reports that he’s weighing firing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. One administration official tells Politico: “He’s very angry and he’s going to be moving people.”
Aronoff: Well, it wouldn’t open the Strait of Hormuz, for one. And that is ultimately what he’s trying to deal with, right? Is that he started a war of choice alongside Israel to provoke a country that can control the Strait of Hormuz. And somehow the Defense Department, whoever, did not think about that possibility—that you could close down 20 percent of the flow of crude oil for the entire world, along with a host of other very important commodities, by starting a very stupid and illegal war.
So someone has to be at fault, right? Other than him, somebody. So we’re in this weird place where Trump is tanking in the polls in part because his belief in his own omnipotence was so delusional. Kate, that seems less than ideal, right?
Sargent: Just as a quick aside, Trump’s rage at the Supreme Court was stoked earlier this week when there were oral arguments over his effort to end birthright citizenship. And it became clear very quickly that even the conservative justices were really, really skeptical of the arguments that the administration is offering. In fact, a lot of legal experts are now saying, look, this thing’s probably going to lose for Trump in some form.
Now, they’ve clearly rolled over too much for Trump. But here’s a case where if Trump is actually in the courtroom, in the chambers during this whole thing, it’s going to be much harder for them to side with him. And he just doesn’t seem to be able to think his way into other people’s minds. It’s a very puzzling problem, but there we are.
So, yeah, he can’t just throw his weight around and expect to get his way. That has happened a lot, unfortunately, but in this case, hopefully, that will not be the case.
Aronoff: Well, all his casinos went bankrupt there, so he couldn’t master it for too long. He had to sell them.
Aronoff: Yeah, in an amazingly unreconstructed way.
Aronoff: So I wrote this piece the other week after—you may have seen, as listeners may have seen—markets were expected to open really down. The price of oil was supposed to be very high. And before markets opened around 7 a.m., Trump tweets that we’re going to put off bombing Iranian energy infrastructure for another five days, aka until markets close again on Friday. They ended up extending that, but there is this sort of amazing thing that Trump has managed for a while to almost unilaterally control the paper price of oil.
And there is this real air of unreality, and something along the lines of what we’ve been talking about so far, where he thinks he can—the term is “jawbone”—jawbone the price of oil and just ignore the fact that there are real shortages. And then part of what is driving up the cost of oil is the fact that this very important passageway is closed.
Sargent: Well, just to tie this to the broader themes here, this really kind of indicates this very crude and really skin-deep understanding of power, which is odd. He’s president. He’s been elected president twice. So you’d think he’d have a more complicated sense of how power works. And yet here he is just sort of assuming that if he can kind of bluff the price here and there of oil down a little bit, that it will somehow solve the larger problem.
Aronoff: I think there is a real tendency among wealthy people not to acknowledge the consequences of their actions, often because they don’t feel them, right? Trump has not paid for gas—I don’t know how long, right? He is not getting out and putting his car to the machine and putting the nozzle up to his gas tank. This is not the world that he lives in. He doesn’t live in a material world.
He’s not actually having to go in and sort of negotiate things in a way that he might have done earlier in his career when he was sort of brokering between different power players, but he’s just lived in this bubble of his own creation for a very long time. And I think that makes it hard to just see anything beyond.
And all the machinations about him firing more people suggest that he does know the political situation is very dire for him and the GOP. So on some level, he knows that seat-of-the-pants stuff isn’t going to cut it.
Aronoff: Yeah, I wish I knew. I mean, I wish I knew where any of this was going. And I think that’s why things feel so strange and uncertain right now in oil markets—the things that I’ve been covering for the last couple of weeks—but also more generally, I mean, we are stuck in this sort of weird psychology of this very strange man and all of the sort of characters he’s surrounded himself with. I don’t want to put it all on Trump, right? I think this is a bigger problem in some ways than that.
Sargent: And look, there’s really only one way out of this, which is to organize and to vote in big enough numbers that it punctures that bubble and gives us more control over the situation. I think that’s really the bottom line. He can bluff all he wants and he can order the price of oil to drop and he can command the Strait of Hormuz to open itself magically. But we don’t ultimately have to remain in this bubble if we show up in large enough numbers—we can overwhelm it and take charge of the situation a little bit. And I really hope people will do that Kate.
Sargent: Well, we do have that power. We just have to exercise it in big enough numbers. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Kate’s work over at NewRepublic.com. She does great stuff on climate and on the politics of it. Kate Aronoff, really wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on.
Aronoff: Thanks for having me.
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