The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 8 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The Washington Post is reporting that internal intelligence findings indicate that Iran can survive Donald Trump’s naval blockade for at least three more months before economic hardship really bites. That means the war could go on longer than we expect. If so, that’s a political catastrophe for Trump and the GOP. Trump’s advisors are reportedly worried right now that the political blowback over the war is worsening for them, and there are signs Trump’s allies are turning on him at this moment. Fox News hit Trump with a crushing graphic that demonstrated soaring gas prices, with one Fox anchor declaring that those prices are giving Americans heartburn. We think the political fallout from all this could last much longer than people expect. So we’re digging through all of it with New Republic staff writer Timothy Noah, who’s been writing well about how Trump’s policies are screwing working people. Tim, good to have you back on.
Tim Noah: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: Let’s start with this Fox News segment, which was flagged by the tireless Aaron Rupar. In huge numbers on the screen, it had the latest national average prices at $4.55 per gallon, showing that this is up from $3.15 a year ago. Now listen to this exchange between a Fox anchor and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
Reporter (voiceover): And what about people’s concern about gas prices? They’re seeing numbers that give them some heartburn and some heartache and it’s hard for a lot of people to figure out how they’re going to stomach this for much longer.
Chris Wright (voiceover): It is. And of course, it’s been tough for our administration as well. This is an administration—the first Trump term and the second Trump term—all about lowering energy prices and an incredibly successful record in doing that. So when President Trump looked at the tradeoffs of going into Iran right now, he knew—his sort of beautiful record of just constantly pushing down energy prices, gasoline headline prices as well. But Iran has roughly a thousand pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent.
Sargent: Tim, that stuff about Trump’s great energy record is just made up. But that aside, that’s terrible spin. Wright admits this is hard for people and says, well, Trump knew this would undo his great achievement. Your thoughts?
Noah: Yeah. I mean, this is, I think, the first time Donald Trump has called for sacrifice, and Republicans in general don’t do well with calls for sacrifice, particularly in the context of a war that’s already quite unpopular—was unpopular on the day it began. Yes, terrible politics, but they are caught between a rock and a hard place. They can’t win this war overnight on the one hand and they can’t endure an elevation of gas prices.
Sargent: We are going to be in a situation where these prices are going to persist in a major way for weeks, if not months, right?
Noah: Yes. I mean, once you’re talking about all sorts of shortages—you’re not just talking about auto fuel, you’re talking also about jet fuel. And suddenly the administration is very worried about that. You’re also talking about agricultural products. You’re talking about all sorts of things.
To undo the damage of that, it’s not going to happen overnight. And that’s going to be incredibly damaging to Trump. Remember that when Joe Biden was running for reelection, inflation came way down months before the election and inflation was still held against Biden in that election.
Sargent: Absolutely. That’s a major finding in political science as well, which is that it’s the direction of the economy months before election day that sticks in people’s minds. Now to switch—The Washington Post reports that a secret CIA analysis that’s been given to administration officials concludes that Iran can survive the American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz for at least three to four more months before facing serious economic difficulties.
One U.S. official tells The Post that the Iranian leadership has gotten increasingly confident that they can outlast U.S. political will. Now again, Tim, even if this war ends in five minutes, these leaks are damning in two senses. First, because they badly undercut Trump’s public spin about how close to collapse Iran is. And second, because they show that a lot of insiders want the public to know that what Trump is saying to the public isn’t true. What do you make of all that?
Noah: Well, to me, the most amazing thing about the Post report was that something like 75 percent of their missile launchers, they still have. I thought to myself, how could that possibly be? But they were obviously much better defended than we knew. So yes, they could continue for months. One index I find intriguing is the stock market.
The stock market seems to be the last entity in the United States to actually believe what Donald Trump says about the war being on the verge of being over. I don’t think anybody else believes him, but the stock market does. And it keeps surging every time there’s the vaguest hint that this war may end soon. Now, if it finally penetrates the stock market’s thick skull that this war isn’t going to end soon, we’re going to see the opposite reaction. We’re going to see stocks go down, and that always sends Trump into a panic—and the Iranians know that.
Sargent: The Iranians do know that, for sure. There’s another component to all this as well. Jet fuel prices are about to get much worse, driving up airfares. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump’s advisors are increasingly worried that the GOP will take a hit in the midterms from these rising fuel costs. And they really want the war to end in order to have time for prices to be coming down before the elections.
Tim, what would have to happen? What would the timeline have to be for prices—meaning both jet fuel and gasoline—to really come down before the elections to the degree that Republicans would need? Is that even possible?
Noah: I think it’s probably already too late. I don’t know precisely how many months it would take, but say it takes—let’s be maximally optimistic and say it takes four months. Well, this is May, that takes us into September, with the election just two months away. Say it takes two months—that’s still very close to the election. I think they are already screwed.
Sargent: Well, one analyst of gas prices is even more pessimistic about this, telling Axios that gas prices are going to remain high even if the war ends. This analyst says that he expects it to take one to three months for prices to come down one third of where they’ve risen to. And then he says the next third might take three to six months, and we’d finally in this analysis get back to pre-war prices by late 2026 or early 2027—after the midterms.
The problem seems to be that even if you end the war in a day or two or whatever, then the oil markets are still in serious turmoil for a long time and it all has to sort itself out. Can you talk about that?
Noah: This is literally a commodity that moves by ship. So it’s not like the internet, which is what we’re used to thinking of as commerce. Oil moves very slowly. It moves by ship, then it needs to be refined, and then it can be distributed as a final product. So that’s a process of months.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, I think it’s worth reminding everyone here that Trump constantly—and I mean constantly—says that once the war ends, prices will come right down. But if this does end up taking longer, as it does look like it’s going to, Trump will be on the hook for yet another broken promise. It seems like what they refer to as a wicked problem to him.
Noah: It’s a trap that he walked right into. Everybody told him he was walking into a trap. His advisors were saying, If you start a war with Iran, they will close the Strait of Hormuz. Analysts have been talking about this scenario for decades. But he had this delusion that he was able to win wars quickly from the air. And that was what he told himself about Iran. Everybody told him he was wrong. But he refused to believe them. He believes what he wants to believe. And now he really has seriously damaged Republicans’ midterm chances.
I often think of Trump as a kind of saboteur. And he’s certainly been a saboteur of government. And now he seems to be bored with sabotaging government and is instead sabotaging the Republican Party itself.
Sargent: The comparison with Venezuela is really interesting because Donald Trump himself has said publicly that he expects the Iran situation to go the same way the quick in-and-out in Venezuela did. And, you know, that’s just such a crazy way to think about the situation because Iran is a country of 90 million people, and for all sorts of deep cultural reasons and important geographic facts about geography that can’t be just altered with Trump’s magical lying powers—all these things were just going to conspire to make this much harder than Venezuela was. And he wouldn’t hear of it. He just wouldn’t.
Noah: Yeah, and this is a war that every president, starting with Jimmy Carter, has contemplated, and they have all ruled it out due to essentially the same set of facts.
Sargent: And one of those presidents actually painstakingly negotiated a very complicated peace deal that will actually prove, I believe, to be better than whatever Trump emerges with at the end of the day. I’m talking, of course, about the Obama nuclear deal.
Noah: Right. Yes, that’s going to be their next problem—they’re going to have to justify this war based on whatever nuclear deal they get in the end, because they won’t be able to say they achieved regime change. They did not, just as they did not in Venezuela. So they’ll have to justify it based on the nuclear deal. And as you say, at best, they’re going to get what Obama got, and probably they will get less.
Sargent: In fact, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just said the other day that our aims have been achieved, the aims of the war have been achieved. It’s just absolutely preposterous, just nonstop bullshit from them in every way. They’ve just told us so many different versions of what their end game or their end goals were. And there’s just no way that they actually achieved their war aims. There’s no way to spin that.
Noah: It’s like—you will probably remember, I can’t—who was the politician who during the Vietnam War recommended that we declare victory and go home? Now that’s a serious policy.
Sargent: Absolutely. Well, just to take the larger view here, it seems like a lot of what we’re seeing is really structurally going to screw over Trump’s own constituencies. Let me just go through the list here. Rural and exurban Americans drive more, so they’re going to be paying more for gas. Farmers are getting hit by rising fertilizer prices and other higher costs. The tariffs hit a lot of lower-income consumers, which means a whole lot of Trump voters.
And you had a good piece on this new study finding that mass deportations aren’t actually resulting in more jobs for native-born workers—if anything, they’re resulting in some job losses for those American workers. Now you take it all together and it seems like a perfect storm of really bad and damaging policy for Donald Trump’s America, not to mention the rest of us. Is that overstating it?
Noah: No, I think that’s stating it very well. The only caution I would advise is that Donald Trump ran in 2024 having served as president during a terrible, terrible public health crisis that he made considerably worse, arguably lost the 2020 election because of that. And then in 2024 was held harmless for COVID.
I have never been able to figure out—including in the press, whenever there was a comparison of Trump’s record with Biden’s, reporters were always saying, well, we must exclude the final year because of COVID. And I remember saying, why exclude the final year? COVID was really bad in large part because Trump handled it so badly.
Sargent: That’s absolutely crazy. That was one of the greatest public policy debacles ever—certainly one of the biggest ones in modern times.
Noah: Yes. I mean, in terms of body count, I can’t think of anything to compare it to.
Sargent: So, Tim, just unspool this for us. Let’s say the war ends, I don’t know, in a week or in a month. What happens over the next six months?
Noah: Well, I recognize that the map is not friendly to Democrats in the midterms on the Senate side. But I also think that we have to take into account Trump’s own declining popularity. And it has only gone in one direction since Inauguration Day, and that’s been downward.
But for a long time, it was going downward very slowly. Now it’s going downward a bit more quickly. And I just don’t see how that doesn’t make trouble for the Republicans if they have Trump with a considerably lower approval rating than he has now.
Sargent: Well, also his approval on the economy is so in the shitter and there’s so much economic distress out there. That’s the sort of thing that, if anything, could get you to the point where Democrats can win in some of these very tough statewide races and pull out the Senate just by one seat—kind of a miraculous outcome.
But do you think, even if the war ends in, I don’t know, days or a week, you don’t think he gets a bump? How do you see it playing out?
Noah: I think it’s bad. I think his approval rating goes down no matter what. First of all, the war isn’t his only problem. I mean, he’s got 12 problems as bad as the war. There’s the rule of law problem. There’s the Fed problem. There’s a number of problems. There’s a personnel problem. At the moment, he’s got an FBI director who hands out bottles of bourbon as souvenirs. He’s going to have to get rid of a lot of his appointees, and that’s going to be embarrassing for him.
Sargent: Yeah, it looks to me like there is just such an enormous pileup of problems that it’s very hard for him to get out from under all of it. The House looks like it’s basically gone for Republicans unless they can gerrymander like 20 states, although I doubt that.
But it does look to me like the House is probably gone and the Senate is certainly in play. Tim Noah, always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Noah: Thank you, Greg.
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