The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 5 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.
After the House voted this week to end Donald Trump’s war in Iran, Trump exploded in fury at the four Republicans who sided with Democrats against him. He called them grandstanders while simultaneously mocking the vote as meaningless. It’s not meaningless, of course. It shows that Republicans are now taking new steps to break with Trump. And importantly, it comes as the leaks are getting worse for him. We’re learning more about his blundering incompetence from insiders, which is itself another sign of his ongoing weakening.
So is there a path to forcing Trump to end this conflict and what’s likely to happen now in the war itself? We’re talking about it all with Emily Horne, a former veteran of the State Department and National Security Council. Emily, good to have you back on.
Emily Horne: Thanks, Greg, for having me.
Sargent: So the House passed a bill Wednesday directing Trump to end the conflict, with four Republicans breaking ranks. The Senate could pass this, and because it’s a certain type of resolution, it’s not subject to a veto, but Trump can probably not follow it. Still, this is significant, isn’t it, Emily? Can you tell us why?
Horne: The fact that you have Republicans that are willing to cross the aisle at this particular moment is really telling politically. This war has been wildly unpopular from day one, and the longer that it drags on—we’re entering month three when we were promised this would be a quick overnight operation—as costs to voters begin to mount, as energy prices continue to rise with no end in sight, as airline prices continue to soar, no pun intended, as we approach the summer travel season.
And unfortunately, terribly, tragically, as more American service members continue to die or be injured in conflict in the Middle East, the more this war expands regionally and the more innocent civilian lives are lost, the harder that it becomes for Republicans to defend this war when in fact many of them were running on the principle that Trump would not get Americans into open-ended foreign conflicts. That’s a lot harder to defend when we are at month three of an open-ended conflict.
Sargent: Trump exploded on Truth Social Thursday over this vote, raging that it’s meaningless. He said it was passed by “four bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats.” Trump also raged that this is happening, “right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the war with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Who would do such an unpatriotic thing?” And he even raged that Republicans are “grandstanders who should be ashamed of themselves.” Emily, what’s your reaction to that?
Horne: This vote is not happening as a coincidence. This vote is happening now because the 90-day deadline for a War Powers resolution has come and gone, and we are still in this war. And so this has not exactly been a Congress that has taken its oath of office to both the letter and the spirit of the law, but it’s nice to finally see some backbone and some acknowledgment that they do have a constitutional duty to do things like allow the president to declare war or not, that that is a pretty important part of their oath, in fact. So while procedurally this may not change anything, politically, again, I think this is a really important moment.
Sargent: I think it’s the worst of all worlds for Trump and Republicans in this way as well. Of the four Republicans who crossed over, only two of them are vulnerable this fall, which means all the other House Republicans who are top targets in the election were too frightened to distance themselves from Trump.
And now they’re on the hook for voting to continue the war, which means holding the House is going to be harder for Republicans because the war is just absolutely killing them. Republicans have done this to themselves even as Trump has also been delivered a rebuke. It’s just an all-around failure in every way for them, no?
Horne: Well, OK, we’re five months out from the election. I’m certainly not making any predictions about what is going to happen in the midterms, but there’s no question that this war is wildly unpopular across the political spectrum. And again, as costs continue to rise, as diplomacy continues to falter, and as the chaos continues to reign across the Middle East—not just in the Strait of Hormuz—with no end in sight, this is a war that is entirely of Trump’s making.
And going back even years and years ago to the first Trump administration, we had a diplomatic deal. He blew it up in 2018. He started us down this path a long time ago. And even then, he still had many chances to not wind up in this current situation. He still had multiple off-ramps where diplomacy was still a realistic option.
And every time he has had the opportunity to slow his roll or to make different choices about Iran in both of his administrations, he has always chosen the path of maximum conflict. So it’s not surprising that we are here. It’s not surprising that he’s blaming other people for being here, but he is the only person who is responsible for this war at this moment.
Sargent: In fact, he was told repeatedly that what is happening now would happen. He was told it by many top people. And we’re learning this because the leaking is getting worse for Trump.
The New York Times now reports that the U.S. government has been doing war games around Iran for years with tons and tons of military officials. The Times reports this: “Over and over, participants say, they concluded that Iran would respond to a major American attack by closing the Strait of Hormuz.” Trump just ignored it all.
Emily, you’ve been in the belly of the national security beast in the past. In addition to how damning the facts are here, what does it mean that we’re getting leaks like this?
Horne: Well, so two things. When I was in government—and I left in 2022—I participated in a lot of tabletop exercises and red-teaming exercises to try to predict what would happen should wars break out, should pandemics break out, in the event of terrorist attacks, et cetera. And those were classified, so I can’t talk about them in detail, but I can tell you that I agree with everything that was said in The New York Times article that you referenced.
None of what we are seeing right now is remotely surprising to me. And all of this has been predicted before, with the possible exception that drone technology has just advanced so much in the last several years. And that’s an element that anybody who was seriously watching what was happening in Ukraine could easily have predicted—and many did predict—would be an important tool that we would see in future wars, including this one. That’s been the topic of much discussion in national security circles in the last several years.
But to your question about what do these leaks mean—the leaking is wild right now. I think we’re seeing, if I can be a little undiplomatic, a lot of ass-covering right now. And a lot of people who are defending this war with their outside voice and then in their inside voice rushing to every reporter in their Rolodex to say, I swear, I thought this was a terrible idea. I tried to tell him this was a terrible idea. When this is all said and done, don’t blame me. I tried.
Sargent: Right. And they’re in some sense trying to also insulate the national security establishment from blame for this, aren’t they? They’re really just trying to foist the entire thing onto Trump. And in some respects that might actually be justified.
Horne: So there’s a couple of things here that I think it’s useful to parse out. Who actually gets the president’s ear is always a real issue of power and access in any administration, but especially in this one. We all know that Trump is a president who listens a lot to the last person who he talked to. And so whoever gets to talk to him, whoever shapes his opinion is often just the person that he heard from most recently.
And so I have no doubt that the national security workforce—who are civilian, who serve apolitically, who are military, who serve apolitically—are doing what they always do. They’re collecting the intelligence, they’re preparing the assessments, they’re preparing the battlefield scenarios and the plans, and they’re bringing them up. The question is, is any of it getting through?
And one of the things that’s really clear is that Trump has weeded out anyone who has access to him who is capable of telling him, sir, that’s not a good idea. Or, sir, if you do that, here are the five bad things that could happen because of that. He does not want to hear it. And to survive in Trump’s royal court, you have to be a yes man or a sycophant. There is no one who can speak truth to power left in this White House.
Sargent: The leaks get even worse than this, believe it or not. The Atlantic reports that Trump has told advisors repeatedly that he wants a deal that’s bigger than Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Also, The Atlantic reports that Trump has become “irritated by comparisons between his emerging framework and Obama’s deal.”
According to officials, Trump repeatedly complained that his framework is being cast as weaker than Obama’s. And then there’s this real doozy. Trump wants “a way to argue that Iran had accepted terms from him that Obama never managed to extract.”
Emily, is that how the process is supposed to be working here?
Horne: So it’s not surprising to me that he chafes at comparisons to the JCPOA, Obama’s Iran deal. He has always resented the idea that Obama was able to do something that he could not—get this huge diplomatic deal over the finish line. And Trump is very spiteful. He’s motivated by rage and enmity as much as he is anything else. And so he blew up the Iran deal in part because it wasn’t his and he couldn’t claim credit for it.
And that sounds really simple, but sometimes with Trump, the simplest explanation is the truest one. It was someone else’s triumph, not his. And that meant that he resented it. It was not about what was objectively a good diplomatic deal or in the interest of American national security. That much was obvious.
But because people don’t like to believe that of our leader—we’d like to believe that we as American people are capable of electing someone with more sophisticated thinking than that—we invent all of these frameworks that, if we just did these 18 other things, or if you look at it through this realist lens or whatever. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the truest one. And with Trump, we’ve just had to learn that lesson over and over and over again.
But what’s wild to me about this latest Atlantic article is it’s fairly common knowledge—you don’t have to be a national security expert to know that Trump resented Obama’s Iran deal. What’s wild to me is that they found so many sources within the Trump administration to say that to a bunch of Atlantic reporters for attribution. That people are talking about this with their outside voices now.
And that says to me that there’s a real consternation and frustration within the administration with the way that things are going. And people are thinking about lifeboats for after this is all over. How are they going to look when whatever is going to happen has happened? And they want to preserve their access. They want to preserve their Washington clout and their reputations. That’s a big part of what’s happening here with these leaks.
Sargent: Is there a way for Trump to get a better deal, extract a better deal from Iran than Obama got? It seems to me that it’s fundamental to the situation that it actually isn’t possible. And what I really question is whether he is capable of grasping that fundamental aspect of the situation or not. What do you think?
Horne: So I think two things. One, I think it is highly unlikely, if not probably impossible, that he would get a better deal than the JCPOA, because the situation is so much more complicated now than it was in 2015 or 2018, whatever endpoint you want to assign to when the JCPOA was concluded. The knowledge that the Iranians have about how to use the Strait of Hormuz for leverage is something that they can’t unlearn.
And The New York Times piece that you mentioned earlier pointed out that in 2011, when Obama communicated privately to the Iranian regime that the Strait of Hormuz was a red line for him, the understanding that the regime had was that they would be in existential risk—that essentially the Obama administration would take out the regime were Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz the way that it is essentially doing now. The problem is that Trump did take out the Iranian regime.
And so when you remove that particular leverage point and you do the bad thing anyway, it’s logical for the Iranians to think, well, OK, the worst has already happened. We know this is existential for us as the next generation of IRGC and new leaders of Iran. So why would we gamble away what leverage we have right now?
People operate logically within the situations and frameworks in which they find themselves. That is a logical position for the regime to take at this stage. And it is hard to imagine how Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are going to get them to trade away that leverage that is now squarely in their court, especially at a moment where, again, I cannot stress enough, this war is spectacularly unpopular and a real political albatross around Trump’s neck.
Sargent: And by the way, just to link this back to the topic we were talking about before—the more Republicans turn against Trump, the more congressional votes go against him, the more the Iranians say to themselves, aha, the midterms are approaching, aha, it’s getting a lot harder for Republicans to stick with this.
And so he’s almost caught in this kind of loop, right? This kind of Gordian knot of a situation where the more time that passes and the more he loses the support of Republicans on this, the more likely it is that Iranians will hold out and not give him what he wants.
Horne: Exactly. And look, the IRGC plays the long game. They are watching American politics and realizing that this could end for Trump in five months. This could end for Trump in two and a half years. But one way or the other, it will end. And again, this is existential for the IRGC.
We are talking about people who are only in power because their family members have been killed with Israeli and American missile strikes. We are talking about people who have staked their entire lives and entire reason for being on the outcome of this war. Those are not the stakes for Donald Trump, and everyone involved knows it.
Sargent: So if Donald Trump’s primary goal in life is to emerge from this with something that he can call better than Obama’s, stronger than Obama’s, bigger than Obama’s—if his primary goal in life is to emerge with something that he can call a world-historical triumph, something that the people on the television will praise as better than the bombings—how do we get out of this?
Horne: It’s a great question. And in different contexts, some partners and allies have figured out how to do things like rebrand economic deals that are already going to happen or previously concluded agreements that they paint over in fake gold leaf and they call it a Trump economic incentive or something. And the marketing carries the day and you’re able to move on. That’s not really possible with a war. And that’s not really possible in this situation.
So it is hard to imagine how this ends and who is going to give on the branding and the marketing, for lack of a better term, because you’re right. At the end of the day, I think that’s what he actually cares about. He certainly cares about getting credit for a win more than he cares about what Americans are paying for gas or how many American soldiers have died or how many civilians across the Middle East are living under rocket and missile and drone attacks every day.
Or for that matter, how American troops are going through munitions at an insane clip and depleting our stocks—that is worth thinking about, or should be thinking about, for the worst of the future. He doesn’t care about any of that. What he cares about is his headlines.
Sargent: Right. And just to put a finer point on it, not only does he want to win, he wants to be able to look at his TV and see people on the TV saying that he succeeded where Obama failed, saying that he did something bigger and better and more world-historical than Obama did.
Horne: Greg, it sounds like you’re suggesting that we just need to create a closed-circuit broadcast with a feed that only he will see that will have Bret Baier talking about this as a huge win. And then maybe everyone else can just get back to—not normal life, because there is no going back—but maybe to not an active war dragging into its fourth, fifth, or sixth month.
Sargent: Emily, I think really that might be the only way we get out of this thing. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Emily Horne’s Substack. It’s called Spin Class. Emily, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Horne: Thanks, Greg.
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