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A Few GOP Senators Tell the Truth About Trump’s Iran Mess (Briefly) | Morning Shots Live
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- [00:04]
A
All right, I think we're live. Hello, everybody. Good Tuesday morning. Hope you all enjoyed your long Memorial Day weekend, that you are recovering. We're glad you're here with us. If you are in any state to stream Bulwark content on Tuesday morning, I'm Andrew Egger, White House correspondent for the Bulwark. This is our editor at large, Bill Kristol. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every Monday through Friday, Tuesday through Friday, this particular week in your inbox for free, coming to you live on Tuesday mornings to talk about what's going on in the news. The world did not have an extraordinarily restful Memorial Day weekend. There's a lot to talk about. There's a lot that we could talk about, like the sort of unceremonious resignation of DNI Tulsi Gabbard on Friday that we're not even going to talk about. We're not going to get to it at all. We're mostly going to focus today on the latest in the war in Iran, which it's this weirdest situation, Bill, because we have to keep talking about it, because there keeps being new stuff to talk about and because it's unbelievably important to everything that's going on in the world. And yet a lot of the stuff that there is to talk about, it just seems like we're spinning our wheels talking about it because the negotiators are spinning their wheels. And this morning, Sam Stein was editing your latest Morning Shots piece, or he thought he was editing your latest Morning Shots piece. He was, in fact, in a document from early April where a lot of the stuff about will the ceasefire hold and who can be trusted in all of this and what's America actually gonna get out of it all that analysis could have just as easily applied to where we are today. That's how sort of little progress there's been on a lot of this stuff. But we do have some new stuff to talk about, and it's mostly just about how Trump is going to try to get out of this with the minimum possible amount of political damage to him himself. We'll see whether that's even possible, even if that's his main goal. How achievable that actually is, just given the, the bind that he remains trapped in, having entered this war without a clear off ramp. But let's just start by setting the stage a little bit with where we're at in terms of public perceptions of the war. The short answer to that is not great. This is from Nate silveraging out Updating today, basically his average of where things are in public approval of the war and disapproval again. This is from today, immediately after the Iran war began. About 48% of Americans opposed the conflict, according to, according to the Silver Bulletin average that was already unpopular relative to past wars. But things have only gotten worse. Nearly 60% of Americans oppose the war today. In fact, I had to extend the Y axis of our polling average upward to accommodate the increasing unpopularity of the conflict. And now, Bill, you wrote today about the way that not only is this war unpopular, but the specific strategy Trump is pursuing to try to get us out of this unpopular war as quickly as possible is running into a surprising amount of resistance from Congressional Republicans on the Hill. So can you just kind of set the stage for folks what the genesis of that or the germ of that conflict is and where these guys are falling on this matter?
- [03:03]
B
Yeah, just a couple of points. I mean, I don't think actually. I mean, I'm older than you and I've seen a few of these peace negotiations. This is how it often is. Once the President decides at some point, this was true in Vietnam and Nixon, he going to get out. The other side wants to milk the maximum advantage, maximum advantage out of the President's desire to stop a war, or we want, sometimes if we're winning, we want to get the maximum advantage from a war. And so these negotiations go on and there's zigs and zags and promises that are half broken and half kept and mediators come in and go, I don't think any of this is very surprising. Trump has wanted to get out of this for quite a while. We know that from the ceasefire in April, all the threats to open the strait quickly changed to a blockade of the strait, sort of a blockade of the strait and then attempt to pressure the Iranians. Clearly that wasn't working. So I think there's been, in a way, as I said today, I think the war has been a failure for Trump. People are focusing a little bit too much almost on how the peace deal is a failure, but he doesn't. Once the war wasn't succeeding, he wasn't going to get a good peace deal. Once the Iranian regime was in place, once they'd shown the ability to close the strait and hike gas prices here and hike energy prices around the world, once they'd shown the ability to attack neighboring countries and not pay a decisive price for doing so, once they had muddied the waters on the nuclear program enough that it became clear they were going to resist Simply giving all the stuff over to us or inviting us in to take it. Once all that happened, and once we were unwilling to use ground troops and to really fight the war in a way that would have been, could have been decisive, but there would have been a whole different war, obviously, than Trump was willing to do. Once all that was set up, I think we're kind of where we are. So we're gonna, I think actually we're pretty close to something like a deal which itself will have a million or at least dozens of zigs and zags and broken promises and deal unraveling. And this part of the deal isn't what they said it is and stuff, but it's not a good deal for us. And one point I would make, which I think people haven't noticed enough, Iran will have more and more leverage. Think about it this way, Andrew. I mean, a month, two months, three months from now, we' pulled back from the Middle east, presumably. We've discussed all these. There are these memorandum of understanding, there are these stipulations. We're supposed to be working on this, we're supposed to be agreeing to that. Iran decides to push the envelope a little bit and no tolls, no tolls on the Strait of Hormuz. But maybe that environmental tax really does have to be paid. Or the. What was the other one they had the, the, yeah, the sort of navigation fee. So they help us the whole ships through and they privately tell some governments, you know, you want to get through earlier, you pass a little more, frankly, what are we going to do? I mean, are we really in a position at that point to come back in? So I think the degree to which they have the leverage or we don't is the key point. And part of that leverage is that the war is so unpopular in the US Deservedly so, I would say, given that Trump never explained it, never went to Congress for it, never tried to get bipartisan support for it. The way they conduct it was bound to alienate everyone who wasn't already on Team Trump, you know, the way hecseth spoke, et cetera. So I think that's, that's why we are where we are. And then the only other thing I'd add is the new news over the weekend that sort of pegged for my little morning shots piece was that on Saturday, Roger Wicker, the senator from Mississippi, the Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Ted Cruz, obviously senator from Texas, and Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, all for a moment told the truth. I mean, they're all In a non Trump world or in a pre Trump world, since they were all around before Trump, they were hawks, you know, they, they were the kind of people who really disliked the Iranian regime, were very open to military force to dislodge it, were open to using ground troops in the Middle east more broadly. And so they were kind of wanted to believe that Trump's war could become the kind of war they hoped it would become a successful one. They were all friends of Israel also, and for that reason, they also wanted it to succeed. And on Saturday, when it became clear, I'd say, what the outlines of the deal were going to be, I think it was clear already, as I've said, but they, they wanted to believe right there was that moment of shock and they all three denounced it or they made one last effort. Maybe a better way to say it is just sort of, surely the President's not going to accept this deal, his aides are misleading him. Right. All that stuff. But they told the truth. They said this kind of deal would be a very bad deal and a very bad outcome.
- [07:14]
A
They were right.
- [07:15]
B
Wicker and Cruz have been silent, I think, since Saturday. Lindsey Graham immediately reversed himself and is now pretending that this fake Trump nonsense about how actually we're just expanding the Abraham Accords, it's going to be great. Everyone's going to join the Abraham Accords, which is beyond ludicrous, is like that gives. Gave Lindsey Graham an excuse to go back, get back on Team Trump. So that's where we are. That's where we are. But I do think those Republican senators, I don't know, what do you think? It's a moment. I hate to overstate any moment of hope with any of these guys ever continuing to tell the truth or standing up to Trump, but I feel like it's a little bit of a moment for the future where people are gonna look back and say, you know, they said it was a bad outcome. And a few months from now, I'm afraid we're all gonna be saying they were right, it was a bad outcome.
- [08:03]
A
Yeah. Let's take just a second to kind of walk through some of these specific posts that were made that you're gesturing toward here. Here's Roger Wicker, very, very prominent, armed services focused Republican congressman. He tweets out on Friday, we are at a moment that will define President Trump's legacy. And his instincts have been to finish the job he started in Iran. But he is being ill advised to pursue a deal that would not be worth the paper it's written on. Our commander in chief needs to allow America's skilled armed forces to finish the destruction of Iran's conventional military capabilities and reopen the strait. Further pursuit of an agreement with Iran's Islamist regime risks a perception of weakness. We must finish what we started. It's past time for action. And then here's Wicker. One day later on Saturday, the rumored 60 day ceasefire with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for not. So a couple things about this one. It is not sort of lily livered, you know, you catch more flies with honey type criticism. That's pretty striking. It would be a disaster to strike a ceasefire like this. It would completely cancel out any gains from Operation Epic Fury. At the same time, you get that classic move in that first post of, you know, if Trump would just listen to his heart of hearts, I'm really confident he would agree with me. But alas, it's all these viziers, it's the, it's the advisors. There's not a lot of reason to believe this is the case. Right? I mean, President Trump rolled the dice with going into this war in the first place, plainly hoping and believing that it would be another decapitation strike, another sort of replication of what he did in Iran last year, a replication of what he did in Venezuela last year. Quick, easy win, not a lot of downside, no risk of like this, this forever war entanglement that we would decapitate the regime, get better new leaders in there who would be willing to cut a deal to stop the bombing. And when that didn't happen, and maybe he just got unlucky. You know, maybe there was some reason to believe if I'm going to steal, man, this thing, maybe there was a reason to roll the dice on that. I don't know. It doesn't seem like that to me. But you can at least see on the front end why maybe he hoped that was the case. The problem for Trump is he's not the kind of guy who can basically say, look, we rolled the dice on this. We did not achieve the outcome that we wanted to. You know, sometimes you get unlucky in these games and now we need to find a negotiated settlement to get things as close to back to cut our losses, take the small wins we've gotten and get things as close to back to normal as we can. He can't admit ever that things didn't really go according to plan on the one hand. And he can't admit ever that he's really settling, on the other hand. And so it's this weird sort of constant situation where, where this, this sort of deal to end all deals, like getting Iran to join the Abraham Accords is actually right around the corner. Right. And we're going to get there. I don't know. Let's move on real quick to a couple.
- [10:52]
B
Let me just add one thing to what you're saying. I mean, I mean, look, it's their real world. It's not just Trump psychology, though, that's a large part of it. There's real world consequences to what he's done. If the war had ended four or five weeks after it begun, which is entirely possible, indeed perfectly reasonable, since nothing has. We've made no progress since then. And it would have been a better outcome for Trump, right? Gas prices wouldn't have gone up as much. Energy wouldn't have been as disrupted as much. The cost would have gone down for us. The humiliation, in a sense, of us continuing to say, oh, no, we're going to prevail would have gone down. So his psychological inability to cut his losses really caused him more damage. It's sort of like being in poker, right? You fold early, you lose less than if you fold later. The other point I'll just make is we mentioned Trump's war. And, you know, it is amazing how much this is Trump's war, right? I mean, it's not just that he went to war without having Congress on board, without consulting allies, all the things that I could say normal presidents would have done, but also even within the administration, this was so much, I have to think, Trump's war, he was the one who thought loved Venezuela. It went to his head. He talked to Netanyahu. Netanyahu told him we could bump off the leadership of Iran. He said, yes. I'm sure Hegseth was on board. I guess Rubio was on board. Pretty clear Vance wasn't really on board. But, I mean, I've been in administrations went to war, and I in the first Bush administration, you know, there's usually a lot of discussion, a lot of layers of people chiming in. It becomes a kind. The president obviously shapes it ultimately, but it becomes kind of a, you know, a consensus decision within the administration, you might say, of how to do it. And therefore, you have a lot of people who have thought it through and have their own angles on it, and then their meetings. And then someone says, I don't know, like in the first Gulf War with Bush, maybe we shouldn't go to Baghdad. There was a debate about that. Should we end it early? But there were people who had been involved in the very beginning and had thought through the different alternatives. With Trump, it's so much, I guess it's true of his administration as a whole. Right. I mean, it's so much just his own head that's driving everything. So I think it does. When Nate Silver shows Trump's approval, the approval for the war going down, and at the same time, the approval for Trump going down, I think he's particularly vulnerable in a sense, because it's so much his personal gambit.
- [13:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. Let me, let me get into one of these other posts. We can probably skip Lindsey Graham. Everyone knows he is both a hawk and a total sick fan. But let's talk about Ted Cruz for just one second here, because again, this is another one that is really pretty astonishing in how strong the rhetoric here. He does the same thing right at the top. I'm deeply concerned about what we're hearing about an Iran deal being pushed by some voices in the administration. It's not the president. It's some voices. But here we go. President Trump's decision to strike Iran was the most consequential decision of his second term. You can say that again. He was right to do so much more questionable. And we achieved extraordinary military results, including destroying all of their missiles and drones and sinking their entire navy. If the result of all that is to be an Iranian regime still run by Islamists who chant death to America, now receiving billions of dollars, being able to enrich uranium and develop nuclear weapons and, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, then that outcome would be a disastrous mistake. So, again, really, really striking prediction for the direction that Trump seems to be leaning right now. And the thing I wanted to ask you, Bill, I think there was this conventional wisdom that kind of developed in the early days of the war, right? Like Trump launches this war and Joe Kent goes out and guys like Tucker Carlson are, have their hair on fire about how bad this all is. And, you know, there's this sort of perception that there's this sort of MAGA revolt from the MAGA isolationists. But this conventional wisdom then quickly forms that that's all overblown. And in reality, Trump's base is still the Republican base. They're still very anti Iran. They still love to see America flex its muscles abroad, and that Trump has much more buy in from his people on this stuff than Tucker Carlson or Joe Kent would give him credit for. Now, the question is, how durable, how sustainable do you think that support is just given these sort of mounting strategic futility and the possibility of what would at least under any other administration would code to a lot of these voters and a lot of these lawmakers as basically American surrender here?
- [15:11]
B
I think it's really a good question and it's an important one to keep an eye on going forward. And I'm going to throw it back to you in the minute. I'm curious for your thoughts on this. I mean, this is a real interesting question. Does it spill over to other issues? Does it erode his automatic support for all these Republican senators that he's had on so many issues, including on repeated votes on this war Powers resolution? Now, I think he was about to lose that majority in the House and maybe in the Senate, he sort of did last week temporarily. So, you know, is this a precursor of things to come? Is this kind of a one off? We go back to business beforehand where there are 51 votes for, you know, ice and for everything else he cares about. And the Republicans have been willing to go along with or sometimes have believed it. But you know, one thing, if we can, maybe we can pull up that Ted Cruz thing one more time. I hadn't really noticed this one, even though I quoted it in in morning shots. How about this thing including the first epic, we achieved extraordinary military results, including destroying all of their missiles and drones. That's just not true. I mean, it's like literally, obviously not true because they are literally shooting missiles and drones, firing missiles and drones at us as we speak. And there have been different CIA studies, I guess, that had 70% of their, 30% of their missiles still there or whatever, however many drones, it's kind of unbelievable that they still, even if you're cruise and you're objecting to Trump, you sort of have to. It's a different way of bowing deeply. Right? Well, the military part was great. It's these creepy civilian advisors, I suppose, who are leading you astray. They can't admit that the war, even militarily, was not as much a success as Hexeth claimed. And honestly, it's the military claimed. And that's another way in which I think this kind of gets down to your real question. Your question, how much does it erode confidence if you're a Republican senator and you're slightly concerned about the budget deficit and you're slightly just concerned about spending and about priorities and there's a $1.5 trillion Defense Department request, I don't know, maybe you don't say anything. Maybe you're all in on Trump. And plus, you're sort of hawkish anyway in defense. But maybe you also think, I don't know, I mean, do we have 100% confidence that ptacs department, defense department's gonna spend all that money brilliantly? Maybe a little more of a gradual buildup would be good. That's. That's what I really don't know. I mean, part of me thinks, come on, these guys, this will, they'll be back in the fold by the time they return to town a week from now. We're talking a week from today. But part of me thinks, I don't know. That leaves a. This leaves a mark. What do you think?
- [17:35]
A
Yeah, I, I genuinely don't know. I genuinely don't know which way this is going to go. I am also going to be extremely interested in seeing. It's not as though this is the only thing that the Republican Senate has been sort of feeling more confident about crossing Trump on lately. Right. There's been a number of these things, in part because we are now, basically through primary season, right. Trump's immediate ability to hit back against any of these people. Obviously, a lot of these senators aren't running for reelection this year anyway, but we're kind of getting through the moment in the cycle where Trump has these specific pain points and we're seeing more defections from these lawmakers on things like his ballroom or things like his horrible slush fund for J6ers, the Anti Weaponization fund, where these guys seem to be discovering some kind of backbone that would have been sort of shocking a year ago where everybody just kind of had this idea in their minds that Trump's going to do whatever he wants and Republicans in Congress will be utterly supine about it. So as far as the lawmakers are concerned, it will be interesting to see. I mean, they're all kind of leaving themselves some outs here, right? Not all of them. I guess Cruz is basically saying this is going to be a disaster, but they're trying to win Trump back over now. And if Trump soldiers ahead with this stuff anyway and does sort of pull out, that does not necessarily imply that they will continue to sort of clang the bell in retrospect about how bad it was, in the same way that they are right now clanging about how bad it will be. On the question of, you know, not lawmakers, but the base of the voters. I will be interested to see again how this one plays out, too, because it is often sort of bandied about that voters don't really care about Foreign policy. And I guess that's maybe true when it comes to, like, who they're deciding to vote for in any given, in any given election. You know, they're not going in there. Like, this guy's posture toward Ukraine is this way and that guy's posture toward Venezuela is the other way. But I do think, I mean, if you look back at the Biden administration, the moment that, that he started to kind of go off a cliff, popularity wise, was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I do think that there are moments when America is sort of shown to look weak or feeble or clumsy on the world stage, that even if people don't have really strong foreign policy views, ideologically, they just don't like that. They don't like feeling like the President got pantsed by some little country halfway around the world because it makes America look bad. It makes America look weak. And I think that this is sort of what Trump is really striving. I mean, that's kind of his main. He basically has two main agendas right now. One is avoiding that, and the other is putting the economic picture back together to whatever extent is possible. And the question's gonna be, does he even have cards to play on either one of these things? Right. So we'll see. There is a sort of unstoppable force meets immovable object element to this when it comes to his base in particular, because, again, these people are pretty hawkish. They do want to see us beat Iran and not the other way around. They were willing to take Trump's word for a number of weeks that that was the final destination of all of this. And that's why they should be willing to accept all of the economic pain. And if that doesn't pan out, then what's all the economic pain been for? But on the other hand, you know, there's the unstoppable force that is Trump's usual typical, just sort of full across the board messaging dominance when it comes to just sort of telling these people the way it is and having them believe it. So we're going to find out. That will be interesting to watch in the public polling as well. I wanted to dwell on the other variable. Sorry, go ahead.
- [21:06]
B
Just obvious point. The variable also will just be energy prices and gas prices. I mean, if they go all the way back down to $3 on Labor Day, then I think you can imagine it going pretty far into the rearview mirror, the whole thing. And kind of a, you know, it didn't work out great, but you understand what he was trying to do. Maybe he'll have done Cuba in the meantime. If gas prices are halfway between where they are today and where they were before the war, but still really elevated, if we're having an economic slowdown partly as a result, if inflation is up partly as a result, again, I think that reality gets much harder to overcome. So that's obviously important thing to watch as well.
- [21:46]
A
Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned Cuba. I want to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Let me just say real quick, for people who have joined us since we started, I'm Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. That's Bill Kristol with the Bulwark. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every weekday morning, and we come live on Tuesday mornings on the Bulwarks channels to talk about what's going on in the news. We have been discussing the perpetual war in Iran, the endless war, the forever war that's going on in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump's attempts, increasingly strident attempts to get us back out of it, to the chagrin of, of some in the Republican Party, to the, you know, leaving enormous questions about what the, what the new status quo is going to be, whether Iran has been weakened by this at all or whether they're in fact.