Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
So we’re talking today with political scientist David Faris, because he’s been writing well for The Nation on both those topics. David, good to have you on.
Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s tirade. He was on Air Force One on the way back from China. And David Sanger of the New York Times asked him why all the bombing of Iran hasn’t forced the political changes he wants. Listen to Trump.
Sargent: David, has Trump won the resounding victory he claims?
And despite many decades of planning around the possible closure of the Strait of Hormuz, it doesn’t seem like anybody in the Trump administration thought for five seconds about what might happen if the strait was indeed closed for some period of time. Trump is in this pickle. He can’t get the Iranians to capitulate. He can’t change the regime without ground troops. And he can’t reopen the strait without a massive escalation that has no guarantee of success anyway. So he’s really between a rock and a hard place right now.
Donald Trump (voiceover): I actually think it’s treason. When you write like they’re doing well militarily and they have no Navy, no Air Force, no anti-anything. Then I read the New York Times and they act like they’re doing well. Everybody knows that—that’s why your subscribers are way down. You know, the Times’ subscribers are way down because it’s—
Faris: Well, it’s very telling. I think there are a few things going on here. One is Trump has now become accustomed to speaking only to sycophants and lickspittles in the press briefing room. I mean, we’ve got press credentials going to the Gateway Pundit, people like that. And so he’s no longer really accustomed to fielding lots of hostile questions at once—or skeptical questions, or even questions that are just sort of like, can you please tell us what’s going on?
But the specific threat of treason here is part and parcel of a larger authoritarian project where you use the threat of investigations and prosecutions—and just throwing accusations of crime—to get people to self-censor, to ruin their lives, to upend their lives. Leveling a threat of treason at a New York Times reporter is not going to be very effective because the New York Times has a large institutional apparatus backing it.
Sargent: Trump wants China to magically prevail on Iran. The media coverage has been pretty tough on Trump on this particular point. I’ll read a few. Reuters said he won no tangible help from China on the Strait of Hormuz and Iran. The New York Times said China is unlikely to use its influence with the Iranians for free and that China hasn’t named its price for this yet. And the Financial Times said China conceded little to Trump with no clear breakthroughs. David, what did Trump want China to accomplish here and why did he fail? Is it just that what he was expecting is impossible?
The basic problem here, aside from China, is that Trump’s ask of Iran is beyond the bargaining window that he has. He’s asking Iran to accede to terms that Iran simply will not accede to unless you literally overthrow the regime and replace them with people that want to work with you. They’re not going to give up all of the enriched material and say we’re never going to do any nuclear enrichment and then get nothing else in return. I don’t think that they’re going to agree even to a phased system where this sanction is lifted and then this sanction is lifted.
It’s not even entirely clear that the people who are negotiating in Islamabad are the people running the country, because there’s so much uncertainty about who’s really running the show. We still haven’t seen the ostensible supreme leader, right? There’s a lot of things that we don’t know.
China’s a major geopolitical rival. The relationship between the U.S. and China has deteriorated, in large part because of a number of things that Trump himself has done. And they see this golden opportunity—like, America has gotten itself into this massive, disastrous, economy-wrecking fiasco that is, for the entire world to see, proving the limits of our ability to just use our military to get what we want.
The trade wars, all of the rhetoric—remember during COVID, he kept calling it the “China virus” over and over again. There are reasons that the Chinese leadership would love nothing more than to see Donald Trump humiliated, at great length, very publicly, for as long as possible—up until the point where it might destroy China’s economy too. And we’re just not there yet.
Faris: Yeah, why wouldn’t they use it? I mean, if a new source of leverage has revealed itself to you—for you to achieve some sort of strategic aim—why would you leave that leverage on the table? Especially in a circumstance where we’re technically at war with Iran, or we paused the war—I don’t even know anymore. But the reality is the reason that Iran was putting the elements in place to pursue and build a nuclear weapon was precisely to protect the regime from being overthrown by the United States.
It has become the instrument by which the clerical regime in Iran—or the IRGC regime in Iran, whatever is actually going on there right now, we don’t really know—but it has become the instrument by which the regime can preserve itself. It has become the point of leverage by which you can say, we have this magical survival mechanism here. We thought it was a nuclear weapon, but it’s actually just the Strait of Hormuz.
Faris: Right, right. I mean, after all these years of saying Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, they have something that is in many ways much better than a nuclear weapon, right? Because of course using a nuclear weapon would invite mutually assured destruction—would destroy Iranian society and whoever was targeted. Closing the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t physically harm anyone. It just harms the global economy. So in many ways it’s like a nuclear weapon you can actually use.
Faris: No, I mean, it’s exactly right. That’s what’s been really obvious since the day that he went out and announced that we were blockading the Strait of Hormuz. And everybody’s like, wait a second—call me crazy, I thought that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz was the problem here that we are now trying to solve. And he’s like, no, I’m going to make it worse. And I think it really demonstrates his inability to grasp the basic disaster that he himself has unleashed by his own orders and his own actions.
So there’s no politically viable or feasible way for him to get out of this other than accepting some demand from Iran that would have been unthinkable four months ago—such as Iran putting a toll on the Strait of Hormuz. There’s just nothing but bad options for him all the way down here.
So it’s like he has just delivered one thing after another to the Iranian regime—that benefits this regime, which of course also doesn’t care about its own people at all. This has been a disaster and a growing disaster for the Iranian people. But for the regime, it’s just Christmas.
And I think maybe another way to think about this—and another hidden problem for Trump—is that we know that the Iranians and the Chinese are both looking pretty hard at these approval numbers. The lower Trump goes, the more likely they’re going to be to hold out.
And one of the benefits of authoritarianism from a kind of cold, hard political standpoint is that you can make big, sweeping decisions or you can inflict massive suffering on your own population and you don’t have any elections to lose because of it. You have other fears about being dislodged in other ways by other centers of power in the country, but you don’t have a midterm to worry about. Only we have a midterm to worry about.
The issue of Taiwan is coming into play here. And nobody could be happier to see the limitations of American power than China. I think it’s become pretty clear over the course of the past three months that there’s absolutely no way that we could defend Taiwan. China now knows this. And yeah, they must be very happy that we’re about to have an election, that’s for sure. Because the basic dynamics of democracy are: if you screw up, you’re going to get tossed out of power.
Sargent: Right. Well, I’ll tell you—the 50PlusOne website, which does polling averages, now has Trump’s approval in the polling averages down to below 37 percent, and his disapproval at almost 60. So it’s around a net disapproval of 23 points. That really gets into territory where you start to see that House map broadening out, right?
A lot of the softer supporters in 2024 have drifted away because they don’t like what’s happening. This is not what they voted for. If they’d been paying closer attention, they would have known that this was in fact what they were voting for. But from their perspective, they were electing someone to bring prices down. And not only has he not done that, he’s made the problem much worse. And there’s just no political upside there whatsoever.
Sargent: There’s a way to tie all this together to close this out, which is—Trump is facing an election. China and Iran are watching this very closely. But the truth is Donald Trump really has kind of a case of dictator envy, right?
But in all seriousness, Donald Trump would like to respond to his failures abroad with more authoritarianism at home. And I think rants like that one at the reporter David Sanger really show that. But here again, he can’t, because he is in a democracy and he’s done a ton of damage to it, David, and you’d probably be the first to talk about that. But he cannot do what Xi and the Iranian clerics can do. Right. Or can he?
Because fundamentally, he wants to be these people. He wants to be able to order someone to be jailed. He wants to be able to order people to be executed. He wants to be able to make decisions without ever having to face the consequences of those decisions. He hates democracy, right? Loathes and despises democracy.
Faris: And that’s a personal thing—this is one very special boy who has never been held accountable for anything in his entire life. And here along comes a problem of his own making that could be his undoing. I’m sure that he knows that on some level, even though he’s created this information bubble around himself with only quislings allowed in the room.
And the only thing that he really can command is his own repressive apparatus. He can still go out and order more investigations of opponents. He can make the lives of journalists hell. He can launch investigations. He can’t necessarily get the outcome that he wants. But the fact that he can do that is concerning.
Sargent: I think I know who that’s supposed to be. It’s the voters in the midterms, David.
Sargent: Yes, we’re all working toward that right now. You are, I am, everybody is. David Faris, really awesome to talk to you, folks. If you enjoyed this, check out David’s work over at The Nation. He’s a great political scientist who actually was quite prescient way back in the day. He said that we had to fight a lot dirtier against Republicans, and boy was he right about that. David, great to have you on.
Faris: Great to be on the show, Greg. Thanks so much for having me.
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