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 is there a way to make all this matter in the midterms? We’re talking about all of it with international relations professor Nicholas Grossman, who’s written well on the Iran debacle. Nick, good to have you on.
Sargent: So with soaring diesel prices killing Republicans in the midterms, Trump tried to blame this on the Russia-Ukraine war and not Iran. And the other day he posted this on Truth Social: “Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian energy targets. Russia has agreed to do likewise.”
Grossman: Sure. So Russia and Ukraine are in a war stalemate at the line. I mean, they’re fighting a lot and killing a lot of people, but not moving dramatically in terms of land one way or the other. They’re both bombing each other long distance, bombing each other’s energy resources.
Sargent: Right. So they’re not really listening to Donald Trump on this, are they?
Sargent: Nick, just briefly, the Russia-Ukraine war has basically receded from the headlines and Trump’s basically stopped talking about it. But we should probably remind everybody that Trump said during the campaign that he would end this war on day one of his presidency, didn’t he?
But the other big change is that they’ve managed to really increase their strike program into Russia, and they’re hitting a lot of, in particular, refineries, which is contributing to the rise in gas prices. But it’s nowhere near as big as what Trump has done with the Iran war. It just compounds the problem.
Grossman: No, no. It’s a dramatic change. And it’s another example of how Trump has disrupted the international system by removing that bedrock idea of American credibility, that he has forfeited it in so many ways.
Saudi Arabia has had to deal now with the biggest attacks against it of the war so far, where an Iran-backed militia attacked its east-west pipeline, and they went and asked Trump for help. MBS reportedly called Trump twice and asked him to get involved in this Yemen conflict and clear it up. And both times the United States said no.
Sargent: Well, my foreign policy doctrine says that Donald Trump will screw anybody if he sees it in his own interests. Let’s go to Iran for a bit more. The House just passed another bill that directs Trump to end the war there or get congressional authorization for it. Seven Republicans defected from Trump this time. Trump’s been threatening to blow up the whole country again. Iran doesn’t seem to take that seriously.
Grossman: So they’re both blockading each other, occasionally bombing each other, but largely holding back from full-scale war. So nobody’s giving in, and nobody is letting ships go through. The U.S. under Trump has tried bombing a few more times, but it hasn’t really accomplished anything.
Which really the whole thing should not be necessary at all. The legal thing should be that the president is supposed to have congressional authorization to go to war, and then, under the War Powers Act, is supposed to withdraw if he doesn’t get authorization.
Sargent: Right. It never hurts to remind people that Trump is abusing his power in every conceivable way that he can. CBS News just published extraordinary photos of U.S. equipment and positions in the Middle East that have been badly damaged by the war. The pictures are powerful. There’s aircraft that’s been blown up, buildings reduced to rubble. It’s much worse than we knew.
Nick, Pete Hegseth’s propagandists suppressed this info about what’s happening to United States interests and assets, and it’s getting leaked right around them. Your thoughts on all this?
And while they’re doing this, because they can’t admit their own failure, they are then trying to cover up all this damage. Because instead of correcting the problem, or instead of addressing the problem in the first place, they are trying to just keep it from the public. And they can’t. It’s too big.
Sargent: You know, those photos really reminded me of Trump’s 2016 ads, in which he tried to demonstrate what he called “American carnage.” There were pictures of, you know, rusted-out factories through the Rust Belt. A lot of these pictures almost look like that. They’re like these American bases which are just have been bombed, they’re falling apart, their windows are broken, they’re deserted.
And the damage to the American bases—on top of that, there’s all the munition shortages, the fact that they used a lot of the best stuff without really thinking through a plan beyond that. And there’s all the damage, various injuries to troops, that keep on coming out, more than to U.S. allies and to U.S. interests. And we’re seeing this come into politics now more and more because it is increasingly unignorable.
Sargent: You can almost look at these images, which are really quite striking—I want to underscore how striking the imagery of these bombed-out American bases really looks. It’s haunting stuff. You can almost see it as kind of symbolic of American decline, in the same way Trump used rusting-out factories to symbolize his critique of American decline, right?
Even if you think of the images out of Vietnam, it’s the withdrawal, the helicopter on the roof of Saigon. It’s not these large military defeats in which there’s all sorts of damage.
But while the American people might not care about foreign policy often, they do when things go really bad. And, you know, you can think of the 2002–2004 elections, foreign policy was a serious issue. I might say in 2024, you know, it wasn’t the number one issue—things like inflation were—but certainly Middle East, Gaza, Israel-Palestine were issues in the election. And now that it is reaching out into economic damage to everybody, with no end in sight, and compounding other economic damage Trump is causing, politically it seems unignorable.
I mean, that’s just extraordinary stuff. It’s extraordinary failure, and an amazing repudiation of Trump’s handling of the commander in chief role, or whatever you want to call it. Donald Trump really campaigned as the guy who was just American military power personified. Trump’s strong, opponents weak. And he’s just falling apart across the board. It’s almost amazing to see, isn’t it?
Or I screw you over, I renege on the deal, and what can you do about it, version of it. And that is not how the world works. It never has been. It’s something I feel like I’ve been saying this the entire time, and now the bill is coming due. But that’s not what real strength is.
And it’s also amazing that they went for it, because that’s kind of what Russia has been failing with in Ukraine. They also had a, no, we’re taking on a “they/them” army. It’s just, like, transnational culture war where Putin’s manliness will overcome them. And that is just not how war works. It seems absurd to say that in the twenty-first century. I mean, with things like drones, you do not need to do pushups to pilot them. I mean, just, like, it doesn’t connect.
Sargent: I want to try to tease out a deeper point that I think you’re getting at here that concerns the way MAGA understands war. You look at Pete Hegseth strut up and down—in the early days of the Iran conflict, he thought he was on top of the world. He would essentially go out there and he would talk about how our precision machines were blowing this up and blowing that up, and the enemy was just absolutely decimated.
But that aside, what’s interesting here is that they conceived of war as a rejuvenating and revitalizing thing for American empire. We’d get rid of the wokeness, we’d get everyone to cut their hair and shave their beards and get into manly shape, and the nation would be rejuvenated after its decadence and decay and decline under liberals.
Grossman: Sure. First, I think a lot of the stuff you were just saying could be summarized as “fascist.” I mean, really fascist in a—especially like an Italian Mussolini way. Often too many people think of fascists as exactly what the Nazis did, and especially late Nazis, say in the ‘40s, exactly what they did. And so it’s a very Mussolini fascist style, especially with the strutting, and if you think of the picture of Mussolini with chest puffed out and the rest of it.
The working class is all distributed in things like, I don’t know, service jobs, for example, cleaning hotels and waiting tables and nurses and, I don’t know, many others that we could mention. And they have never connected to that.
It’s going to take a decent amount of more time to fully dislodge from power—let’s, you know, get through the midterms, then we deal with Trump in the presidency and bigger questions about that. But it does seem to be imploding in a way that a lot of fascist movements do. And I’m just thankful that it would be before the election, as opposed to doing a lot of this stupid stuff and economically damaging stuff after the election, when the public did not have a chance to react.
Grossman: Yep, very much so. And again, it still feels weird to me that we’re living through it, because it does sound like something out of 20th century fascism. But that’s a lot of what they’ve done, and Stephen Miller has done. Or there was a Department of Labor propaganda that they put out, all these AI images of strapping white blond guys working the fields. And it has not materialized that way at all.
Sargent: And by the way, the violence of the removal of nonwhite immigrants was also supposed to be rejuvenating. The ICE propaganda, ICE recruitment info, is very, very, very steeped in that basic imagery.
And we’re now looking at a possibility that one or both chambers will be under the possession of Democrats going forward. What can they actually reasonably, credibly do with the House to put real brakes on this?
What the Democrats can do if they take the House, and hopefully the Senate, but just the House would be enough for it—I think two of the biggest things would be funding. They should very seriously not fund various things, including relating to the military, that is just going to be burned up in the Iran war, to try to force congressional power—both power of the purse and also Congress’s war powers—to end the war.
Sargent: That’s right, Nick Grossman. They should defund the war, impeach Hegseth, and investigate the shit out of all of this. Nick, always really, really great to talk to you. This was really interesting stuff. Thanks so much for coming on.
Grossman: Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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