Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Rosa Brooks: Good to be here, Greg.
Brooks: It’s not even clear that the Strait of Hormuz is in fact open. It sounds as though two ships have gone through as of the time we’re recording this podcast, but that then it reclosed again. So it’s not even clear we have a ceasefire and already there are disputes. The Israelis are continuing to attack targets inside of Lebanon. The Iranians are saying, then we’re closing the strait again because that wasn’t the deal—you’re supposed to stop. The Israelis are saying, no, no, attacking Lebanon wasn’t part of the deal. So this may be collapsing as we speak. It’s a little hard to know.
Sargent: Right. The entire rationale for the war was bullshit.
Sargent: Right. Exactly. So, okay. Let’s recall that Trump threatened to wipe out all of Iranian civilization. He threatened to destroy a nation of 93 million people, which would have of course killed tens of millions of civilians. He threatened to bomb all of Iran’s power plants and bridges—all of this would have constituted massive war crimes. Rosa, can you explain why it’s bad to simply make these threats, nevermind acting on them? The simple act of making the threats is bad. Can you explain why?
I think that just the shock of having the former so-called leader of the free world saying essentially, we’re going to be kind of like the Nazis, we have no problem with that, we’re willing to wipe out an entire civilization, an entire people, to accomplish our rather unclear objectives—I don’t know if it’s possible to sort of overstate how shocking that is.
It’s one thing to add a level of strategic uncertainty into your negotiations to keep your adversaries on their toes, but when you just become this erratic actor who, might have a temper tantrum, you might be in a happy, happy, happy, happy mode, and no one has any idea what will put you in which state or keep you in that state—we become a threat to the entire world, frankly.
Reporter (voiceover): How can the president claim that America can ever have the moral high ground if he’s threatening to destroy civilizations and not casting wars as fights against other governments?”
Sargent: What’s really insulting here is this garbage answer from Leavitt. Rosa, note how she simply elides the part of the question about Trump’s threat to attack the Iranian people as if that didn’t happen and just pretends that Trump was only talking about the regime. It’s just disgusting. What did you make of it?
The nicest thing you could say about him is maybe he didn’t actually mean it. Maybe what he meant was regime, but he certainly said entire civilization. That is what he said. And the ridiculousness of Leavitt acting as though this is so offensive and so mean-spirited to raise any questions about lovely President Trump’s words is just bizarre in this context. We’ve got one person who threatened a civilization and her feelings are hurt.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): The insinuation by anyone in this room that Iran somehow has the moral high ground over the United States of America is insulting, considering the atrocities that they have committed against our people and our military over the past five decades.
Brooks: Yeah, I mean, and of course that’s not what the question was. The question wasn’t who’s more horrible, the Iranian regime or Donald Trump, which is, that’s a really tough one, frankly. But that wasn’t the question. The question was about U.S. leadership and U.S. moral standing in the world and in general. Iran does not have any ability to be a global leader or have any influence whatsoever or have any moral standing precisely because the Iranian regime has done terrible things, including to its own people over many decades. It’s not clear to me why we would want to join them in that exclusive club of asshole nations, frankly.
And there is a sort of basic reciprocity in international affairs, which is that—you keep your promises, I’ll keep my promises more or less most of the time. Doesn’t have to be, you know, people cheat on the edges and so on. You know, you don’t obliterate my population, I won’t obliterate your population. And that’s the way the world keeps itself from blowing itself up and destroying humanity itself. And Trump seems to have sort of missed this fairly basic lesson of human history, which is that you go in that direction and all hell breaks loose.
Sargent: Well, there’s a lot to say about Pete Hegseth’s theology in this. Hegseth also offered his own spin, by the way, on the threat to annihilate Iranian civilization. He said Trump’s threat is what got Iran to the table to negotiate. He said, “That type of threat is what brought them to the place where they effectively said we want to cut this deal.” Rosa, that’s just bullshit as well. Iran was negotiating with Trump before the war. There are other problems with this nonsense. Can you explain what’s wrong with that line?
And I think one of the problems with the strategy we’ve had of, like, let’s continue to kill every layer of Iranian leaders is that you run out of people to negotiate with and the people who are left may or may not have any authority to do much of anything. So you end up getting contradictory mixed messages. And we’ve certainly seen that from the Iranians. So it’s not particularly clear what, if anything, they had been willing to agree to or offer, or what, if anything, they then did agree to offer. There’s not a lot of transparency on any of this and there’s no particular evidence that Trump’s latest craziness did this.
Sargent: Well, there’s no doubt about it. I want to switch gears here. Some of Trump’s biggest allies are not happy with the outcome that Trump achieved here. Fox News host Mark Levin said the Iranian regime is “still surviving.” MAGA personality Laura Loomer said this: “The negotiation is a negative for our country. We didn’t really get anything out of it and the terrorists in Iran are celebrating. I don’t know why people are acting like this is a win.” And Lindsey Graham, who’s a very staunch Trump ally, was clearly not happy with how things turned out. He put out a very long tweet in which he essentially said about the Iranian proposal to end the war—which seems to be the basis for these talks—he said, I’m going to review it at the appropriate time. He certainly wasn’t willing to say that it was a positive.
Brooks: You know, they’re—for once, this is the broken clocks. Even broken clocks are right twice a day—theory of life, like every now and then Laura Loomer is going to say something sensible. Tucker Carlson and so forth. I mean, no, they’re, they’re appropriately highlighting the fact that, as we’ve discussed, this isn’t a win for anybody. I mean, the U.S. is now worse off than we were before this began and Iran is now worse off than they were before this began. You know, which of us is more worse off than the other is a question that I think we may not know the answer to for years to come.
Brooks: I think there’s a very real possibility that Trump, if he can find something that he really feels like he can call a victory, that he declares victory and says, okay, we won, we’re going home. And that clearly would be best for the world. Not a great outcome, but a better-than-the-alternative outcome.
Sargent: I think the big takeaway from that is that his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization, which is basically a threat to kill millions, is absolutely very much alive right now. Rosa Brooks, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Brooks: My pleasure.
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