← The Tara Palmeri Show
The Tara Palmeri Show
Inside the GOP Panic Over Pete Hegseth and Trump’s War with Steve Schmidt
00:28:18
Loading summary
Transcript46 lines
- [00:00]
A
Take the exit, turn right into the drive thru.
- [00:03]
B
Nope, I'm making dinner tonight.
- [00:05]
A
You don't have time. Josh has practice. Oh, that's right. I'll just get a salad and fries.
- [00:10]
B
No, just the salad.
- [00:11]
A
But salad cancels. Fries.
- [00:13]
B
Salad only.
- [00:14]
A
Fries.
- [00:14]
B
Salad, fries.
- [00:15]
A
Food noise isn't fair, but Mochi Health is the affordable GLP one source that puts you on the road to successful weight loss.
- [00:22]
B
Hey, can I get the fries? Salad? Sorry.
- [00:25]
A
Learn more@joinmochi.com Mochi members have access to licensed physicians and nutritionists. Results may vary.
- [00:30]
C
Welcome to the Red letter meets the warning. Got Steve Schmidt on the line and me, Tara Palmeri, thanks so much for joining us. As we break down the news of the day and some of my latest reporting about Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon, everything seems to be revolving around him anyway, since we are in our third week in a war by now. But you know, I wanted to have Steve on the show because last time we had a really great chat and he offered a lot of perspective on this war compared to, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan. And of course, please leave your questions. We're going to try to get to them throughout the show. And Steve, thanks for coming on.
- [01:15]
B
Of course. Good to see you, Tara. How are you?
- [01:17]
C
I'm good, I'm good. I'm happy to be back with you a week later. I feel like we have to do these regularly, these check ins.
- [01:24]
B
Absolutely, anytime. It's good to be with you.
- [01:27]
C
Thanks. So, yeah, I had some reporting, exclusive reporting. I was calling around to my sources on Capitol Hill and the administration and K Street and just sort of trying to find out what Republicans are really saying about this war, especially since President Trump is asking for a $200 billion supplemental bill to pay for the war. So, you know, it's a bit of a put your money where your mouth is moment. Right. And what I kept hearing over and over again is that there is zero confidence in Pete Hegseth. They don't like his defensive, pugnacious style. One Senate source said to me, everyone regrets voting for him. There's more regret than their vote for rfk. And that is saying something. So there is, there are a lot of feelings on the Hill that he is not leading a country in the right direction as secretary of War. And you know, I, I find it a bit rich. Like we obviously remember when he was being confirmed about this time. Well, no, a few months earlier than that. But you know, last year and, and Joni Ernst had a lot of reservations about confirming him. He was saying he wanted women out of the military. She was the first combat bet on, on the ground. A sexual assault survivor. Obviously, he's got his long list of women who have accused him of sexual assault. And, you know, they spent millions of dollars in her backyard threatening primary challengers, trying to take her down so that she would vote to confirm him. But so many other senators just went along with it and voted for him, and now they're having regrets. When we are in the middle of a war, we've got a frat boy running the whole show. So. I don't know. I don't know. Steve, what do you think?
- [03:11]
B
He's the singularly most unfit cabinet secretary of my entire lifetime in the chain of command for the release of thermonuclear weapons and is preposterous. Every time he opens his mouth, he demonstrates that cartoons can come to life. And so you have this cartoon figure, belligerent, disrespectful, pugnacious, to say nothing of the religious Naderi, who is a principal architect of erasing standards in the Pentagon. And you have now a debacle unfolding in the Middle east, where the Strait of Hormuz is closed, gas prices are soaring, and the two chief beneficiaries of all the instability caused by this are China and Russia, which gets rich off of the oil, which is now spiked to ludicrously high prices. And, of course, there's reporting that we're, in essence, doing the bidding of the Saudis, who are asking Trump from behind the scenes to finish Iran off, while Jared Kushner is getting billions of dollars from the Saudis. The entirety of the corruption, the lack of planning, all of it is appalling. But nobody gets to say that the Pete Hagseth they voted for is somehow a different Pete Hagseth at the Pentagon. Every. Every one of these people who voted for Pete Hagseth knew what they were voting for, knew the danger to the country by voting for him, and did so anyway because they are obedient to Donald Trump. And that is one of the reasons we're in this crisis that we're in.
- [05:10]
C
Yeah, I think it is interesting to hear that they have regrets when they had a chance. Right. And I thought it was interesting you said that he is the worst cabinet secretary, and yet Kristi Noem has already lost her position. So that's. So that is saying something. And. And really, the way that he is pushing the narrative with the press, I mean, first of all, he tried to keep the press out of the Pentagon. He just lost that. A judge ruled against it, but now he's keeping them cordoned off. And then just his combative tone, it's not reassuring. In a time of war, you're supposed to have composure, strength, you're a leader. And he is so defensive, he is so on his back heel that it makes people feel unsettled. It's just not strong communication. Also, in a time of war, you can't just force feed people one narrative. And like you mentioned, actually I think this was last week you mentioned too, and something that I really hadn't thought thought about, that we haven't allowed any troops, we haven't allowed any journalists to follow our troops to cover this war properly. It's almost like Israel and how they blocked everyone from going into Gaza.
- [06:21]
B
We have no journalists embedded with US Forces. And that is completely unacceptable in a republic, in a democracy with an all volunteer force. The military is not Donald Trump's toy. The military belongs to the nation. It's made up of the nation's sons and daughters. And the journalists who cover the Pentagon can cover what's going on in the military without being in a room in the Pentagon. But certainly the idea that there are no reporters embedded with forces at war, contrary to how this has been done in the modern era, is completely, is completely unacceptable. And it's also the case that there are very ambiguous circumstances, to say the least, about the reason. The aircraft carrier Gerald Ford has retreated from the theater of operation to a Greek port. And there are some articles suggesting that there was a fire deliberately set by the crew aboard an aircraft carrier with two nuclear reactors aboard it while engaged in combat operations. And if that was the case, that would be a monumental story. But there ought to be journalists waiting for that ship wherever it gets to in Greece. And the American people have every right to know about what's happening in our name. And the truth is that Donald Trump has cornered himself with a lot of bad advice. And he has two options. He can either escalate or he can withdraw. He can go forward and escalate, or he can go backwards and leave. Those are the options. And so when you see these Marine deployments, the Talk of the 82nd Airborne Division ready Brigade being spun up, what it suggests is that Donald Trump is going to try to see some of these islands in the Gulf where there's a lot of Iranian oil production and refining capacity. And what it requires to protect the American troops that would land at those places is to seize the high ground and the coastal mountains along the length of the Strait of Hormuz where they would be vulnerable to artillery and to missile attack. So it's a major escalation. These US Forces would be in significant harm's way. And Donald Trump right now has stumbled into this without any notion around how it ends. And so right now he's improvising and in his improvisation he's come to the inflection point forward or backward. And we're at that place three weeks into this and it is not looking good for a lot of different reasons.
- [09:39]
C
So Texas Chris just chimed in, reports that part of 82nd Airborne has received orders to deploy to the Middle East. What could be accomplished with these paratroopers combined with the 2 Marine Meuse? What do you think, Steve?
- [09:54]
B
Well, a, a a the Division Ready Brigade of the 82nd Airborne is one of the elite military forces in the country and it's designed to be deployed, deployable within 24 hours to anywhere in the world. And so it's ready to go. It's on a constant war footing. And the 82nd Airborne, if it parachutes in, it's a light infantry division and it is designed to hold territory, to take it, to take territory, to hold territory for a brief time until it's relieved by a more potent unit. These Marine expeditionary units, about 2,500 men, are about the same size. They're smaller than a division, but they're self contained. They have their own air support, they have their own artillery. They are infantry units, they have amphibious capability, they have airlift capability. Again though, those Marine Expeditionary Units are not designed to advance onward without relief and they need to have supply. And so all of those things factor into this and what it requires is more and more and more and more troops as, as this goes on. And that's one consideration that for sure that they are having to look at.
- [11:29]
C
Yeah, I think that that was the follow up question from Texas, Chris, which is are there enough troops to accomplish anything of significance?
- [11:37]
B
No, there's not. And so the first instance of ground troops going in, you'll have an immediate cry of that there's not enough ground troops. We need more troops.
- [11:48]
C
Yeah. You know, Sarah Burr asked, how do members of the military feel about what's going on? Do they understand what this excursion is about? To use the word excursion in quotes, she's on substack, so we couldn't put it up on the screen. But what do you think, Steve? Do you get the feeling that they are on board?
- [12:09]
B
Well, military is going to follow their orders and they're going to complete their mission. And there's a, there's a Saying in the marine Corps, the seven Ps prior proper planning prevents piss poor performance. So in the military, they're going to recognize the lack of a plan, the improvisational political nature of this. They are living in real time, the reality of the mission. They're not watching it unfold on the Fox News happy hour. And so if you're forward and you're watching this and you think it's a farce, you're going to react to it the way you react to watching, watching a farce. So the military is going to do two things at once. They're going to see clearly what's being asked of them and to, they're going to do it. They're going to obey their, their lawful orders. And at the end of the day, Donald Trump needs to be restrained here not by the military saying no, but by, by the US Congress saying no. That's how, that's how our system of government works.
- [13:30]
C
Yeah, you know, that's the other thing, too. I mean, is the military sold on it? I guess they don't really, they don't really have much of a say.
- [13:38]
B
They don't get a vote.
- [13:39]
C
Yeah, but we all get a vote, right?
- [13:41]
B
We certainly do.
- [13:43]
C
Yeah. And that was another thing that a source brought up to me, that there's a feeling that President Trump could be doing more to sell the American people on this. Obviously, we all woke up one morning and found out that we were bombing Iran, we were in the middle of another war. And, you know, a lot of people say, you know, been three weeks and we still haven't even gotten an Oval Office address. You've been, you know, in the Bush administration, you know how much they work to sell the war con to Congress. They went to the U.N. they really tried to sell the war. Do you think that this has been just coming from the perspective as someone who worked in the comms department for, or Bush, like, do you think that President Trump should be doing that? Do you think he should be trying.
- [14:27]
B
Listen, any, any. John McCain talked about this all, all the, all the time. And there's a, there's a great excerpt in a speech by Admiral Stockdale speaking to Marine officers about the fact when wars are started for fraudulent reasons, that the men who start them are often the first to run, turn tail and quit. And it's not so easy if you're the person who is assigned to fight the war. He's a very famous prisoner, prisoner of war on, you know, for instance, on this. But I, but, but what McCain talked about is that Maga doesn't lose a war, the United States loses a war. The Republican Party doesn't go to war, the United States goes to war. And this has been as sloppily planned a war as any adult has ever seen in our lifetime. There's shifting reasons, there's shifting rationales, and there's an utter lack of communication. It's just Donald Trump or some minion yelling at the country, a demand for obedience around what we can see to not be true. And in the, in, in the case of, in, in the case of this war, public opinion, as Lincoln pointed out, it's everything. He said that with it, you can do anything in America. Without it, nothing. And overwhelmingly, like 92% of the country has qualms about what's going on here, and a vast majority is outright opposed to it. And so Donald Trump cannot sustain a war opposed by the American people. And it's one more in a long laundry list of things that he's done he's going to pay a big price for in these elections coming up.
- [16:29]
C
I have to say I am shocked though, when I see these polls that show that a lot of Republicans are behind him, the maga, more libertarian end of the party. They're not the Megyn Kelly's, the Tucker Carlson, but there, but you know, a lot of Republicans are with him on this war. And when I wrote this piece, you know, I spoke to the White House press secretary who pointed to a political poll that showed that 43% overall of all the respondents were in favor of the war and the strikes in Iran. Now that was against 33% who disagreed with it. So they see that as, you know, indication that on the right track, I think 43% is below what is underwater. And, but regardless, it is, it is surprising. Do you think that, that this, that there's going to be war fatigue soon? Gas prices? What, what are you thinking?
- [17:23]
B
I mean, so one of the, one of them said that there was 100% support inside the Republican Party for this. And so if that's true against what the numbers are, it means that he has 17% approval amongst everybody else. And so the independents, all the Democrats, the majority making middle of the country, is just simply not with him on any of this. And when you look at numbers, and even if I say, okay, I think that number is high, what's true about all of those numbers is that this early on in a war for them to be so low is in and of itself historic, is that when wars begin, they usually begin with a lot of consensus around the wisdom of the war, and that was certainly the case around the Iraq war. The country sours on it. The political union around it falls apart over time, but not three weeks into it. And that's where we are with this. He's taken the country to war without there being a consensus for it, without there being a plan, and without there being any, any plan to end the war that makes any sense, any achievable, knowable definition of victory of how this ends beyond Trump's whim, him simply saying, I'll let you know when it ends. It's my instinct that will, that will tell us. That's, that's where we are with this.
- [19:07]
C
Right. And already he's saying that he's having conversations with the ayatollah, which they deny. What did you make of that?
- [19:14]
B
Well, I, again, it's an incredible thing that as you adjudicate those two sources for information, it's not, it's not a, it's not a calculus excuse, not a calculus equation. Right. It's, it's a, it's a very simple puzzle to unravel. You got, you got the Iranian government saying something, you got the American government and Trump saying something. And you have to decide who's telling you the truth there. And in that instance, like a lot of Americans, for the first time in my life, well, I'm going with the Iranian government. I believe they're telling the truth. I don't believe there's been any contact between Donald Trump and the Iranian government. And I think the Iranian government is telling the truth about that, is that Trump is not talking to the ayatollah. He is completely making it up, which again raises this question of his fitness at the most elementary level is that there are Americans in harm's way in combat. And Trump is making up conversations in his head, either on purpose or he is delusional enough that he doesn't know that he's not talking to the ayatollah. But, but either way, he has these made up conversations that he's relating to, to the country. And it's not, it's not real. So it's a, it's a big problem when the country's at war. And again, you can either go forward and escalate or get out. And Trump is not getting out. It seems like he's escalating when we look at the troop movements.
- [21:07]
C
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, obviously some intermediaries, like Egypt, Turkey, they're trying to create a line between the US and, and Iran. Right now. I Saw that there was some reporting sources saying that the US Would like to see the head of the Parliament run the country of Iran. What do you think of that?
- [21:34]
A
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [22:01]
B
Well, I don't think we're in a position to demand that the Iranian Parliament speaker become the new Ayatollah. I think the Ayatollahs have named their new ayatollah. And what we've achieved is we replaced the Ayatollah Khomeini with a new Ayatollah Khomeini. And the new Ayatollah Khomeini, according to some reports, was viewed as unfit for the business of being a good ayatollah by his very own father, the dead Ayatollah. So maybe we have a version of Eric Trump as the new, as the new Iranian, as the new Iranian Ayatollah. But, but, but the government seems likely to be more extreme. And if it remains in power, wouldn't one of the immediate priorities be to develop as quickly as possible and to demonstrate the ability to use a nuclear weapon? And so there are 460kg of enriched uranium that nobody knows where it is. Trump said the program was obliterated. Then he said it needed to be re obliterated and re obliterated again. So nobody really knows. And Donald Trump, and this can't be erased three weeks ago set out on this adventure saying we're going to remove this regime from power. And the regime is not been removed from power. The regime has absorbed the blows and it has stayed in power and it controls a vital waterway. And all of America's power can't seem to reopen that waterway by threat alone. And that's why we're at this point of either escalation or withdrawal. And withdrawal will give a clear victory to Iran. And so what Donald Trump, who promised not to start wars, will have done is start a war and quickly lose a war to the Islamic Republic, which will be quite a feat and he'll pay a very high price for that politically.
- [24:14]
C
So Rick G. Says it seems that Trump's actions are being dictated by Israel. What do you think about that?
- [24:21]
B
Well, I think that it's, I don't like it when it's talked about in terms that Israel is somehow dictating, as in the Jews are manipulating at all. But Marco Rubio said, yeah, I mean,
- [24:40]
C
I was going to say that the
- [24:42]
B
reason we're at war is because Israel had decided to attack Iran, and therefore Iran would turn around and attack American targets. And ergo, if that were to be the case, and we need to attack first. And what that means is that Benjamin Netanyahu is the person who determines what an imminent threat is regarding American forces, not the President of the United States. And that should never be the case. And two, it is a clear statement about what our interests were. And our interests have nothing to do with our security. And that's for the record books. But it's not just the Israelis that have manipulated Team Trump. It's the Saudis who have done it. It's the Emiratis have done it. It's all the Gulf Arab states and they play a double game as well as any people on earth. And it's constantly played against the United States. And it is being played right now where the Saudis, out of one side of their mouth are saying, we want this to stop, but out of the other side are saying to Trump, you gotta finish them off.
- [26:04]
C
And so they haven't actually done it.
- [26:07]
B
They haven't launched any attackers and they haven't launched anything. You have, you have dead Americans and you have American forces functioning as their Hessians, as their mercenaries, is completely unacceptable. So I don't, I don't ever want to see American forces used as mercenaries for the Israelis and for the NETANYAHU Government, for MbS, in the Saudi government, for whatever shake in the Emirates at all. And so these are all going to be very, I think, vibrant campaign issues in the, in the 2728 presidential season, to say the least.
- [26:50]
C
Steve, thank you so much for joining the show and thanks to everyone who sent in questions. This was a great episode. You can support both of us and independent journalism by hitting that subscribe button and, you know, by becoming paid subscribers. The warning and the red letter, you keep us going. And we really appreciate, appreciate all of you because we couldn't do this without you and really appreciate all your questions. They were very smart and there were some that I didn't get to. So hopefully we will reconvene next week and I hope with better news.
- [27:29]
A
This is worth knowing. TikTok shop helps you discover good value products and surprise deals fast. No endless searching, just Smart finds. Download TikTok now.