After we recorded, The New York Times posted a piece disclosing more about GOP angst over the war, reporting that Republicans are beset by “increasing nervousness.”
As of this recording, Donald Trump has declared the war with Iran “terminated.” But it’s unclear what’s supposed to happen next. He’s left the military in place there, yet he says he’s unsatisfied with Iran’s latest offer. Now what? We don’t know. During a Newsmax interview, Trump made an accidentally revealing admission, one that seemed to indicate that he has no idea what’s going on between his own negotiators and Iran. This comes as new polling shows the public really souring on the war and specifically on Trump’s lack of clarity around it. MS NOW’s Steve Benen has a good piece arguing that Trump’s inadvertent Newsmax moment captures a good deal about this situation. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Steve, good to have you back on.
Sargent: All right. So Trump sent a letter to the Hill declaring the war terminated. He did this to circumvent the law that requires a congressional vote on hostilities after 60 days have passed. Yet Trump is now saying he’s dissatisfied with Iran’s latest offer but won’t say exactly why, though it appears to be partly that Iran won’t renounce its nuclear program entirely. Steve, can you try to sum up where we are right now?
It’s a situation in which they basically are saying that the 60-day window is effectively closed because they say so, because of a ceasefire that we’re waiting to see whether or not it advances. And it’s against that backdrop that Iran and the White House are presumably having some kind of diplomatic negotiations. We don’t yet have a sense of the details. And we know that the president isn’t satisfied with their offer, but we don’t know what the offer is and we don’t know what the president finds unsatisfying about it. So other than that, everything is crystal clear.
Greta Van Susteren (voiceover): Steve Witkoff told me on this show that the United States offered Iran to give them enriched uranium for medical and powerful purposes free if they would give up their nuclear program. Wouldn’t cost them a dime. And they declined that—to me that suggested that they really didn’t want to deal.
Sargent: Steve, let’s break this up into pieces. First, note that his interviewer brings up Witkoff’s offer to Iran—which was of enriched uranium for medical purposes, I guess—in order to paint Iran as unreasonable, as in Iran turned down this very generous offer from Trump. That was like a setup for Trump to wallop it out of the park, but it flew right over Trump’s head. All he’s able to say here is I would never give Iran anything like that because I’m tough and strong and totally in control. Your thoughts on that?
And because he was so eager to say that he was against the underlying idea, that he was so reluctant to give an inch to Tehran, he ends up saying something really important, which is that his own negotiator—the envoy that he sent on behalf of the White House to represent the United States at the negotiating table—came up with an idea. And as far as Trump is concerned, he’s against that idea. He’s against what his own envoy offered Iran as part of these talks. And I find that to be incredibly important. It is something that he kind of blurted out, something that he’s never said before, never acknowledged to date. And yet he said it anyway. And I think I was surprised that he said it because it’s so important, given the larger context.
This is not a small thing. Trump should know what his negotiators are offering to the country with which we’re at war. If Trump wants to negotiate a peace, I think that’s an extraordinary admission, don’t you?
So John Kerry goes to the negotiating table, for example, in 2015 with our international partners and Iran. It’s not as if Barack Obama is clueless as to what Kerry’s going to offer. He’s obviously going to be aware of what’s going on because Obama is the one who sent him.
Well, I realize that a president has a variety of responsibilities over the course of a given day. But if you don’t know what’s going on in terms of what’s going on with the Supreme Court and your own team’s Iran negotiations, well, then maybe you need to spend less time on the golf course and spend more time getting engaged in day-to-day governance.
Benen: It is. In a practical sense, it just can’t work this way. We can’t have a policy dynamic in which a White House sends an envoy to high-level, sensitive national security talks and then makes an offer on behalf of the United States government, and then has his boss go on national television and say, no, no, no, I would never support that. I’m against what my own envoy said. Don’t listen to my negotiator. Listen to me. And I’m telling you that my negotiator is wrong.
Sargent: Well, with all that in mind, a new Pew Research poll has some striking findings. Sixty-two percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war, including 45 percent who strongly disapprove—an incredible number. Only 36 percent approve. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say Trump’s decision to attack was wrong. A majority, 51 percent, says the war is not going well. And a plurality of 48 percent says Trump’s goals in Iran are not clear. Only 24 percent—I’m going to do the math for you, that’s less than a quarter—say our goals are clear.
Benen: It’s not as if anyone at the White House or anyone else anywhere could say that this was somehow an outlier poll or somehow a poll where the data is just literally unbelievable. On the contrary, it is exactly consistent with everything we see from the Washington Post/Reason poll, to the latest Ipsos poll, and so on. And so put together, what we see is a conflict that is clearly opposed by the clear majority—the overwhelming majority—of the public, including many Republicans who are not standing by the White House on this. And so the more Hegseth and the White House and others pretend that somehow they have the public support, the more they’re humiliated by the data that shows otherwise.
Benen: Yeah, it really stood out for just that reason. The Post/ABC/Ipsos poll not only showed that there was roughly six in 10 Americans who think that the war was a bad idea, but then it provides this historical context. There was similar opposition to the war in Iraq under George W. Bush and under Vietnam during Nixon.
Looking back over the last several decades, what we often see is that Americans rally around the flag at the beginning of a conflict and then sour on the war as it drags on and conflict continues and casualties rise and costs rise and so on. But in this case, the war started unpopular—in part because Donald Trump was so horrible in terms of presenting a rationale or any kind of explanation for it. It started unpopular and it remained unpopular and then it got even more unpopular.
Sargent: Well, in fact, we’re actually seeing some more Republican angst about the war. Senator Susan Collins voted with Democrats to stop it, saying that Congress simply must authorize it if it’s going to continue. Senator John Curtis of Utah said he won’t support any more funding for the war without Congress voting on it. As Politico put it, GOP unity has “started to crack” and Trump could “soon face far more resistance.” Steve, what’s your reading of that? How much longer do you think Republicans will put up with this? What’s your sense?
Now, I think this week we saw Susan Collins flip. That’s a step in the right direction. She joined with Rand Paul. So now there are two. We mentioned John Curtis, and of course there’s Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who has also expressed some reservations.
Reporter (voiceover): You have a commander come in here yesterday. Was he briefing you on different approach options? What kind of options? How would it look?
Reporter (voiceover): Do you wanna go blast the hell out of them and finish them forever?
Sargent: So there you have Trump saying he’s going to blast the hell out of Iran if Iran doesn’t give him exactly what he wants—which is essentially him retaking his previous threat to erase Iranian civilization. In other words, he’s retaking his threat to commit massive war crimes. But here again, the basic situation, the logic of it, seems unforgiving. Military force alone won’t force Iran to give Trump what he wants. Trump doesn’t seem able to process that thought. Where do we go from here? I don’t understand it.
And so because he has not yet learned that lesson, we find ourselves where we are today, which is him saying either give me a deal or I go back to bombing you. But if going back to bombing you will not give me a deal, then what is the point? And so the fact that he’s so frustrated by that is palpable. So when we look ahead, what is the end game here? How do we get out of it?
Sargent: And also it sucks to be an American right now and watch your president threaten war crimes. I don’t want my president to threaten war crimes. His threats are going off the rails one more time. And we just have to sit here and wait, and everybody has to sort of dance around and pretend that this guy has any idea what he’s doing. It’s just, on so many levels, it’s an unideal situation, Steve.
Well, I mean, I think the answer is because it was always a lie, it was always a sham, that he was never—he’s never really earned the role or the rights to call himself a great deal-maker. His own book on negotiating was ghostwritten by someone else. And so what we’re seeing is a collapse of this myth. We’re seeing this image that he created for himself, of this world-class negotiator, world-class deal-maker, collapsing down because he clearly doesn’t have those skills that he pretended to have. And if he did, we would see them on display. And we don’t.
Benen: Always a pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much.
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