The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 14 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.
Republicans are growing increasingly frustrated with Donald Trump’s war with Iran. Three GOP senators just voted with Democrats to stop the war, and numerous news accounts report that GOP cracks are growing. This comes as an extraordinary New York Times exposé shows that Trump’s war has been substantially less successful than he and Pete Hegseth have claimed. Meanwhile, Republicans are running away from Trump’s bizarre tirade yesterday, in which he admitted he isn’t concerned with how inflation from the war is impacting ordinary Americans. Here’s the bottom line: all signs are that this will get substantially worse politically for Trump and the Republicans.
So we’re checking in with Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations who has a new piece for MS Now, arguing that the economic fallout from the war is only just beginning. Thanks for coming on, Nick.
Nicholas Grossman: Hi, thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Sargent: So let’s start with the news from the U.S. Senate. Three Republicans joined with Democrats to support a resolution that would end the war in keeping with the War Powers Act, which requires a congressional vote after 60 days have passed. The three senators are Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul. As Politico reports, there’s new frustration and deepening divisions among Republicans over this. Nick, what’s your reaction to all that?
Grossman: I’m not surprised that some of them are starting to move away from it because the economic liabilities and associated political liabilities are rising. The senator who ended up making the vote fail was John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, which is unfortunate. So it was a 50-to-49 vote. If he had gone the other way, it would have passed.
But also, the War Powers Act—the way that they’re acting now is a sign of America’s democratic backsliding, of shifting power towards the executive branch. And this actually happened in Trump’s first term because the way the War Powers Act is supposed to work is the president is allowed to use force in an emergency or self-defense without Congress’s permission. And then if he doesn’t get congressional permission in 60 days, it automatically ends.
And what happened in Trump’s first term is when the U.S. was supporting Saudi Arabia’s campaign against Yemen, against the Houthis, and doing things like midair refueling—so actually directly involved, not just, say, sending weapons—the Senate passed a resolution saying that Trump had to stop that. He vetoed it, which is not supposed to be the way it goes. And then there were enough MAGA loyalists in Congress to prevent a veto override.
So already the War Powers Act is not really acting like it’s supposed to. But now, when we have Congress trying to assert itself, I think that would be a positive thing. More of this power is supposed to be in Congress and it would be positive if they can get a resolution saying that we assert our power under the War Powers Act. I don’t know if Trump would listen, but even so it would be a good step.
Sargent: Well, it would be a good thing, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon. Trump, meanwhile, is very rattled by any hint that the war isn’t going as well as he’s claimed. He erupted on Truth Social saying this: “When the fake news says that the Iranian enemy is doing well militarily against us, it’s virtual treason.”
Trump continued that the media is aiding and abetting the enemy. And he called the media “American cowards that are rooting against our country.” He called them losers, ingrates, and fools. You know, Nick, it’s going to be harder for Trump to continue claiming that anyone who questions his war is a traitor when even Republican senators are now doing so, right?
Grossman: It makes it more politically difficult. And also just the objective reality of it makes it really difficult, because Trump seems to be approaching the war as if the goal is to get the U.S. media to speak positively of it, or to successfully lie to the American people—as if lying to the American people is his most important foreign policy goal. Whereas the realities of the war are going to continue whether or not he gets the U.S. media to say differently.
So Iran has weapons. They are able to fire them to block the Strait of Hormuz. That is creating massive shortages in things like oil and gas and fertilizer and other essentials. Those will damage the economy. It doesn’t matter what Trump is able to bully the media into doing. And yet it seems like that’s his priority—as if he can somehow, “virtual treason” is such a great term for it, as if this is all a virtual reality, a reality show. Whereas it’s clearly not real treason. But if he can shape the narrative—it’s not going to make the situation better.
Sargent: Well, it’s a sign of political desperation. He knows it’s going badly and his only hope is for the media to stop informing the American people of it.
Grossman: Yeah, that shows a desperation about the politics because the facts of the war are just so bad.
Sargent: Not only that—the tweet looks even more ridiculous when you consider this New York Times report, which used leaks from senior officials to demonstrate that Iran has access to nearly all of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz. The Times reported also that Iran has 70 percent of its pre-war missile stockpile. Nick, this is a disaster.
I’ve made this point on here before, but in addition to the content of the leaks, which is bad enough, it’s also devastating for Trump that top officials are doing the leaking of this kind of thing, because it shows that there’s really serious dissent inside the administration about how this is all going. What do you make of all that?
Grossman: It’s not at all surprising that people inside the U.S. intelligence community and inside the U.S. military are leaking information to the American people because the war was a really bad idea in the first place. It was bad in ways that were widely foreseen—that have been foreseen for really years. In particular, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been advocating U.S. war on Iran since he was first prime minister in the late 1990s, and Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden all turned him down. It was only Trump that in this term was willing to do it. And in doing so was not really articulating any type of strategic goal.
He moved around so many times and eventually settled on something that was pretty small, which was degrading Iran’s missile program and degrading so that they would have fewer missiles. And even that is not any sort of strategic victory. All it would do, at absolute best, is set them back, where they would then have greater incentive to build up weapons and to possibly go for a nuclear weapon and to build up their missile stocks.
And now we find, not too surprisingly either, that it’s not true. And that’s because Iran has been—and I’m very frustrated by this—but Iran has been fighting a lot smarter than the United States. In the beginning, under the American and Israeli assault, they reduced the amount of launches that they were doing.
They more or less turtled and kept a lot of their capabilities in reserve so that they could do things like continue to block the Strait of Hormuz, as they did when the U.S. briefly tried that failed attempt that they called Project Freedom to get ships through it. And it’s not working.
That’s because Iran retains its military capabilities and because they prepared to fight the United States, where it looks like the Trump administration prepared to do something quick and easy and get praise for it. And that situation in Iran was always much more difficult than they appreciated.
Sargent: And you sort of see this same mistake being duplicated over and over by Donald Trump. It’s almost like he’s caught in this weird mental loop. He just keeps tweeting over and over, if Iran doesn’t do what I say, then the bombing will really start. And it’s a little hard to keep escalating that. We were sort of treated to the comic spectacle, I guess comic isn’t quite the right word, of Donald Trump threatening to obliterate Iranian civilization entirely, which would have killed 90 million people.
And then when that didn’t bully Iran into opening the Strait of Hormuz, he said, well, I’ll tell you what, the bombing is going to really start. Like, how can you actually top obliterating Iranian civilization? You can’t. And so you can sort of see that we’re trapped in this fun house where Donald Trump won’t learn the lesson that force by itself can’t solve the problem, right?
Grossman: It’s not even force by itself—it is threats that he’s trying to solve the problem with. One of the problems of this war is, while it was never a good idea in the first place, Trump did not deploy the type of force that would be necessary to accomplish it—they just thought bombing from afar. And the thing about bombing from afar is it has literally never won a war, ever. Bombing on its own—you can damage some stuff, but you can’t really win big concessions from a country.
And so the U.S. didn’t put things like the large invasion army that Bush did to invade Iraq. And Trump seems to be thinking that we’re in this cycle where he does these big, over-the-top threats and that doesn’t cow Iran. And then he quickly reverses course and lies that there’s been some great progress in talks and maybe jawbones the markets—gets stocks to rise, gets headlines saying that there is peace imminent or progress in talks or anything along those lines. And then those things collapse because the Iranian position has not changed. It is based on the hard realities of the war—what they control, the fact that they can block the Strait of Hormuz, and that the U.S. needs it open.
And so Trump is in the situation where his only two options are a humiliating surrender that leaves Iran decently stronger than it was before—getting to charge tolls for all these ships that used to be able to go through freely—or a military escalation. And he’s clearly afraid of that. And really he should be, because there is no good military option. More bombing won’t do it.
He’s already killed the Ayatollah’s family—his father and daughter and mother—killed a lot of the leadership, killed a lot of the people who were more pro-negotiation inside Iran. They have empowered Revolutionary Guard hardliners, and those hardliners can see that they have a strong military position and want to get something out of it. So bullying won’t do it.
And then even trying to do something like invade the ground around the Strait of Hormuz would be very militarily costly, difficult, risky, and has no end game.
Sargent: The problem of trying to do a regime-change war with boots on the ground looks even less appetizing now that we’ve learned that Iran still has a whole lot of its capability.
Grossman: And for a ground invasion, those capabilities would multiply, because then if there are U.S. troops on Iranian soil, there are a lot of different ways that Iran could get to them that they don’t currently.
It’s worth noting that with the Project Freedom idea, U.S. destroyers did shoot down the projectiles that Iran shot at them. So a big weapons platform is able to do that. But putting boots on the ground—they are a lot more vulnerable. It will definitely lead to American casualties if they do that. And that will not only most likely not resolve the war—in fact, it would probably end in a more costly humiliation—it also adds to the political liabilities, the domestic political liabilities.
Which, already given that the war is so unpopular—even at the start, it was the most unpopular war since we have been measuring these things, since World War II. More unpopular than Iraq at the start. More unpopular than Obama’s intervention in Libya, you name it. Then with the economic costs mounting, trying to sell the lie that this is already over and he’s already won and it was such a great job and the Iranians are giving him everything—you can’t sell that lie if you have to go and escalate to putting troops on the ground. So he really is stuck. He’s gotten the U.S. into a terrible position and there is no good way out.
Sargent: Republicans also have an additional problem here. On Monday, as everyone has heard by now, Trump admitted that he doesn’t think about the economic impact of his war on Americans at all when thinking about the situation. Let’s listen to how Republicans tried to spin their way out of this. Here’s JD Vance.
Reporter (voiceover): Do you agree with the president’s position that Americans’ financial situations should not be a consideration in that decision-making process?
JD Vance (voiceover): Well, I don’t think the president said that. I think that’s a misrepresentation of what the president said. But look, I agree with the president that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.
Here’s Mike Johnson.
Mike Johnson (voiceover): I don’t know the context in which he made that comment, but I can tell you the president thinks about the American financial situation. I talked to him on average twice a day, sometimes three or four times a day.
Here’s Senator Roger Marshall.
Roger Marshall (voiceover): I would have to find out the context of it. I’m sorry.
Here’s Senator Cynthia Lummis.
Cynthia Lummis (voiceover): Did he say that? Yeah, I don’t have a comment about that. Mostly because I think he actually does care.
Sargent: Nick, I’ve got to say, a lot of them are claiming they don’t know the context, but the context is not exonerating in the least, is it?
Grossman: No. And it’s a very typical Republican move to pretend that they haven’t heard what he said or that they don’t understand the context as a way to try to duck being tied to it or some responsibility for it. But the weird thing about this one is—while I think it is almost certain that Trump personally does not care about the finances of the American people except in a way that it might be a political liability for him, which of course he thinks he could lie his way through and just say it’s great and that it’s not an issue—I think that one’s actually tied up in his understanding of and misunderstanding of negotiations, and why he was berating the media.
Iran’s leverage over the United States comes from the economic damage that it’s causing. And when asked, effectively, so does Iran have leverage over you because of all this economic damage, he very quickly defaults to, no, no, no, I don’t think about that, I don’t care about it. But in the process, it’s probably revealing some of his personal beliefs and looking absolutely terrible politically, given that prices are rising in various ways.
Gas prices—this is one of the only times in history where the gas price rise is directly the fault of the president and is very easy to understand as the fault of the president. And that statement from Trump seems like it is tailor-made for Democratic ads.
Sargent: Okay, Nick. So what do you predict is going to happen in the end here? It sure looks like Donald Trump is going to have to accept something soon enough. We’re stuck in this dynamic where he’s only willing to accept something that looks like he’s pulled off this world-historically stupendous accomplishment. And yet at the same time, he can’t actually get such an accomplishment out of the situation.
So he just keeps lying his way through it and bluffing his way through it. But at some point, he’s going to have to accept some sort of deal with Iran, right? What does that look like potentially? And how bad does the economic situation get in the United States in the long run after that?
Grossman: So he’ll probably have to accept something at some point, although he always could try for a military gamble to attack them, or to either follow through on some of these threats, or who knows, escalate all the way to a ground invasion. I find it almost impossible to try to predict which one of those he’s going to do.
But what I can tell you is that the pressure is mounting. So this is a hard calendar. It is not something you can lie your way through. It can’t be bullshitted away. The ships that came out of the Strait of Hormuz have reached their destinations. They have unloaded.
The result now is kind of like a shell game where companies and countries are drawing down on their reserves. And they’re able to keep the price of oil from spiking and to keep some of the commodities flowing. But that is going to run out.
And in not that long—a lot of the oil analysts I read seem to think it is probably sometime in June where those resources are being depleted, that they’re being drained, the storage at the fastest rate in history. And all of this adds up to an oil shock that is larger than the one in 1973, when OPEC put the United States under an oil embargo in response to the U.S. supporting Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
And that set off a recession that lasted over a year. It saw big stock market declines, although interestingly, the stock market didn’t really decline until after that embargo was lifted. And so what that suggests is that a lot of these things are being strung along for now.
And even one crazy one—I saw this line from JPMorgan that their latest guidance on the oil market is that they expect this to be solved by June, kind of because it would be stupid if it weren’t. And the problem is that the people running the United States are not acting smartly. They’re acting quite stupidly in this.
And so the pressure will continuously mount on Trump. And he’s going to have to either do something that is so clearly a surrender to Iran that gives Iran some sort of concessions, and gets maybe a fig leaf of Iran kind of promising to restrict their nuclear program in ways that are less than the JCPOA—the nuclear deal that Obama negotiated and that Trump tore up without cause and let Iran out of nuclear restrictions in exchange for nothing, which set us on this path to war or nuclear Iran.
So yeah, I mean, I really wish that there was a way I could say, this is the way it’s going to end up, but it’s just a terrible position. There’s no way out. And he doesn’t seem like somebody who is willing to accept something that will be so widely acknowledged as a loss that cannot be spun away.
Sargent: You know, Nick, it just seems like the built-in dynamics of this situation are really formidable and terrible in every conceivable way. The only way out is going to be the midterm elections. And even that might not help that much. Unfortunately. Nick Grossman, awesome to talk to you as always. Thanks for coming on.
Grossman: Thanks so much for having me.
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