Transcript: Trump Erupts at Journos over Iran—and Reveals a Weakness

Casten: Yeah. Look, I wish Rubio and Vance would treat Donald Trump like the president of the U.S. and not the Supreme Leader of the U.S. This is the same descent into autocracy. Those people should be better than that. I do just want to highlight, because I think one of the big concerns on the intelligence here is if you.… Let’s humor the thought that there was intelligence out there that Congress had not been briefed on because it was too dangerous or could be too many leaks. Let’s at least stipulate that that’s true. If that was the case, then this plan should have been prepared or at least on hot standby and not just triggered because Israel had just attacked Natanz and all of a sudden everybody was talking about the fact that Israel, who clearly wanted to take out Iran’s nuclear capacity, didn’t have the weapons systems to go into Fordo and only the United States did.

The timing of this is extremely suspicious that this was actually based on an imminent threat to the homeland. And it looks a lot more—and I’m not saying this is true, I’m just saying we should be open to what seems much more likely: that Netanyahu knew how to play Trump. You appeal to his ego, you tell him he’s a tough guy, you tell him, Everybody’s taunting you for the TACO trade—and [Netanyahu] knew how to bait him into doing this and said, Oh, by the way, you’ve got a big coalition of advocates for Israel in the U.S. and advocates for the evangelical rapture in the speaker’s office who would celebrate you if you took out the Iranian nuclear facility. And that looks to me like the Occam’s razor—the most plausible explanation—of what happened here. And if that’s not the case, I think the onus is on the White House to prove through the sequencing of these decisions and when the intel was prepared that that didn’t just follow the timing of a separate Israeli-Iranian kinetic conflict.

Sargent: And you’ll be able, presumably, or members of Congress will be able, presumably, to press intel officials and top Trump administration officials to show that to be the case. I just want to go to your point about the ease with which Trump is manipulated. Fox News played a big role in this. We have now seen twice reported in The New York Times, in some sense or other, that the relentless drumbeat for war, the portrayal of the initial Israeli strikes as “genius,” as “brilliant”—all that really worked on Trump. The reporting indicates that he got it into his head that he wanted some credit for what was going on. So he then went out and he said “we,” meaning the U.S. and Israel—all of a sudden “we”—and talked about it in those terms. How do you react to the fact that Fox News figures understood that they can manipulate the president by doing this?

Casten: Fox News already figured out that they could convince him to take someone who’d never gotten above the rank of major and never commanded more than 25 people and put him in charge of the entire Defense Department.

Sargent: Pete Hegseth. It’s clear.

Casten: Exactly. I can’t speak to Fox’s motivations, but I don’t think this was something that they only just figured out.

Sargent: Well, yeah. It’s pretty extraordinary that it worked so brilliantly, as Trump might put it, right?

Casten: Just as an aside, Greg, one of the things that you just find in this moment is I’m always amazed, as a member of Congress, at the amazing level of talent in the resumes who want to come and work in the White House, work on the Hill. It’s not because we have this great pay package. It’s not because we have a great lifestyle. You just get legitimately talented people. And there is something deeply troubling about the absurdly low level of talent that Trump has been able to attract and retain in the White House. These are not people in any agency who anybody knew about before [or] would have put on the short list for these roles. And these are now people who are handling our intel, looking out for the safety of our troops, trying to make sure that financial regulators are working. These are fourth-tier talents. It’s going to take a long time to repair that damage.