Transcript: Trump Blurts Out Damning Iran Admission as GOP Panic Grows

I’m your host, Greg Sargent.As of this recording, Donald Trump has declared the war with Iran “terminated.” But it’s unclear what’s supposed to happen next. He’s left the military in place there, yet he says he’s unsatisfied with Iran’s latest offer. Now what? We don’t know. During a Newsmax interview, Trump made an accidentally revealing admission, one that seemed to indicate that he has no idea what’s going on between his own negotiators and Iran. This comes as new polling shows the public really souring on the war and specifically on Trump’s lack of clarity around it. MS NOW’s Steve Benen has a good piece arguing that Trump’s inadvertent Newsmax moment captures a good deal about this situation. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Steve, good to have you back on.Steve Benen: Thank you, Greg. It’s great to be here.Sargent: All right. So Trump sent a letter to the Hill declaring the war terminated. He did this to circumvent the law that requires a congressional vote on hostilities after 60 days have passed. Yet Trump is now saying he’s dissatisfied with Iran’s latest offer but won’t say exactly why, though it appears to be partly that Iran won’t renounce its nuclear program entirely. Steve, can you try to sum up where we are right now?Benen: I could try. I mean, I think what you just said was an accurate and concise summary. We’re in a situation in which Congress is supposed to step up, now in the third month of the war getting underway. Donald Trump and his team have decided that they have, quote-unquote, “terminated” the conflict. We heard similar comments from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during his congressional testimony this week before the House and Senate committees. It’s a situation in which they basically are saying that the 60-day window is effectively closed because they say so, because of a ceasefire that we’re waiting to see whether or not it advances. And it’s against that backdrop that Iran and the White House are presumably having some kind of diplomatic negotiations. We don’t yet have a sense of the details. And we know that the president isn’t satisfied with their offer, but we don’t know what the offer is and we don’t know what the president finds unsatisfying about it. So other than that, everything is crystal clear.Sargent: Right. Other than that. So Trump had this astonishing exchange with an interviewer on Newsmax. Here he’s asked about something that his negotiator Steve Witkoff apparently offered to Iran. Listen.Greta Van Susteren (voiceover): Steve Witkoff told me on this show that the United States offered Iran to give them enriched uranium for medical and powerful purposes free if they would give up their nuclear program. Wouldn’t cost them a dime. And they declined that—to me that suggested that they really didn’t want to deal.Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, and maybe it wasn’t a very serious offer because I wouldn’t have approved that. I wouldn’t have. I’m not giving them anything. I wouldn’t have approved that. They’re going to either have a nuclear weapon or they’re not.Sargent: Steve, let’s break this up into pieces. First, note that his interviewer brings up Witkoff’s offer to Iran—which was of enriched uranium for medical purposes, I guess—in order to paint Iran as unreasonable, as in Iran turned down this very generous offer from Trump. That was like a setup for Trump to wallop it out of the park, but it flew right over Trump’s head. All he’s able to say here is I would never give Iran anything like that because I’m tough and strong and totally in control. Your thoughts on that?Benen: All right. I mean, I think that context is highly relevant because Greta Van Susteren was clearly trying to set up the president for a good point, for an important observation about the nature of the negotiations and about Iran being unreasonable in the context of these diplomatic talks. But Trump didn’t pick up on the cue. He sort of just—frankly, he was clueless about this. And because he was so eager to say that he was against the underlying idea, that he was so reluctant to give an inch to Tehran, he ends up saying something really important, which is that his own negotiator—the envoy that he sent on behalf of the White House to represent the United States at the negotiating table—came up with an idea. And as far as Trump is concerned, he’s against that idea. He’s against what his own envoy offered Iran as part of these talks. And I find that to be incredibly important. It is something that he kind of blurted out, something that he’s never said before, never acknowledged to date. And yet he said it anyway. And I think I was surprised that he said it because it’s so important, given the larger context.Sargent: Well, I would also add that Trump appears unaware of what his negotiator, Witkoff, offered to Iran. Now, obviously, Trump’s not going to be aware of every single detail in these negotiations. But here he’s basically blurting out in the open that he has no idea what his own negotiating team is offering to Iran in a larger sense. It’s a very central thing in these discussions. This is not a small thing. Trump should know what his negotiators are offering to the country with which we’re at war. If Trump wants to negotiate a peace, I think that’s an extraordinary admission, don’t you?Benen: I do. I think a lot about what happened in 2015 around this time a decade ago when Barack Obama deployed his own negotiators to the JCPOA talks, the Iran nuclear deal talks. And of course, there are going to be granular details that come up through the course of negotiations, and a president isn’t in a position to micromanage from thousands of miles away. But at the same time, obviously, the president is supposed to establish an agenda, establish a blueprint of priorities, and then deploy his team accordingly. So John Kerry goes to the negotiating table, for example, in 2015 with our international partners and Iran. It’s not as if Barack Obama is clueless as to what Kerry’s going to offer. He’s obviously going to be aware of what’s going on because Obama is the one who sent him.And yet what we have is a situation in which not only was Donald Trump clueless in this instance, we see a situation in which Donald Trump is clueless in practically all instances. He is what I refer to as a president bystander, where he doesn’t really seem to know what’s going on around him, including within his own administration, within his own White House. It happened also just earlier in the week when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. And he was asked about it at a White House event by a reporter. And the president had absolutely no idea what had happened, because he said in his own words that he’d spent the day working with contractors on his ballroom vanity project. Well, I realize that a president has a variety of responsibilities over the course of a given day. But if you don’t know what’s going on in terms of what’s going on with the Supreme Court and your own team’s Iran negotiations, well, then maybe you need to spend less time on the golf course and spend more time getting engaged in day-to-day governance.Sargent: Right. He threw his own negotiator under the bus on national television. I mean, Trump is basically admitting here in a larger sense that there is some kind of major disconnect between what his negotiators think he has authorized them to offer and what Trump wants them to offer in a big sense. That’s a striking admission. It suggests a level of disengagement that’s quite striking and quite unnerving, no?Benen: It is. In a practical sense, it just can’t work this way. We can’t have a policy dynamic in which a White House sends an envoy to high-level, sensitive national security talks and then makes an offer on behalf of the United States government, and then has his boss go on national television and say, no, no, no, I would never support that. I’m against what my own envoy said. Don’t listen to my negotiator. Listen to me. And I’m telling you that my negotiator is wrong. I mean, we’re laughing about it, but at the same time, it is a fundamental breakdown in how any functioning administration here or anywhere else on earth can reasonably expect to work. And in fact, it doesn’t work. And I think the consequences of that will be significant because now Iran has fresh reason not to trust the United States or the Trump White House. And as these talks conceivably, hopefully maybe continue in some way—Sargent: Well, with all that in mind, a new Pew Research poll has some striking findings. Sixty-two percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war, including 45 percent who strongly disapprove—an incredible number. Only 36 percent approve. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say Trump’s decision to attack was wrong. A majority, 51 percent, says the war is not going well. And a plurality of 48 percent says Trump’s goals in Iran are not clear. Only 24 percent—I’m going to do the math for you, that’s less than a quarter—say our goals are clear. Steve, you can really see here that most Americans basically get the situation, that Trump is disengaged and doesn’t know how to get out of this. Your thoughts?Benen: It’s not as if anyone at the White House or anyone else anywhere could say that this was somehow an outlier poll or somehow a poll where the data is just literally unbelievable. On the contrary, it is exactly consistent with everything we see from the Washington Post/Reason poll, to the latest Ipsos poll, and so on. And so put together, what we see is a conflict that is clearly opposed by the clear majority—the overwhelming majority—of the public, including many Republicans who are not standing by the White House on this. And so the more Hegseth and the White House and others pretend that somehow they have the public support, the more they’re humiliated by the data that shows otherwise.Sargent: Well, you wrote about the Washington Post poll and I think we should highlight that because it probed people’s views in a kind of larger context in a way that no other survey has done before. And here again, it was very illuminating. You want to talk about what the Post poll showed?Benen: Yeah, it really stood out for just that reason. The Post/ABC/Ipsos poll not only showed that there was roughly six in 10 Americans who think that the war was a bad idea, but then it provides this historical context. There was similar opposition to the war in Iraq under George W. Bush and under Vietnam during Nixon. But the key difference here is that it took three years for Americans to turn against the war in Iraq at this level. And then it took six years for Americans to turn against Vietnam at this level. And so it’s not just a question of whether or not Americans are against this. It’s that they’re against this in a historical way.Looking back over the last several decades, what we often see is that Americans rally around the flag at the beginning of a conflict and then sour on the war as it drags on and conflict continues and casualties rise and costs rise and so on. But in this case, the war started unpopular—in part because Donald Trump was so horrible in terms of presenting a rationale or any kind of explanation for it. It started unpopular and it remained unpopular and then it got even more unpopular. The floor is falling out from underneath the White House, I think, as all this data shows. And so I think this historical context is important because I think Donald Trump might have been under the impression that somehow Americans would rally behind him and his administration because there’s this new war. And in fact, he’s now realizing that if he did assume that, he was spectacularly wrong.Sargent: Well, in fact, we’re actually seeing some more Republican angst about the war. Senator Susan Collins voted with Democrats to stop it, saying that Congress simply must authorize it if it’s going to continue. Senator John Curtis of Utah said he won’t support any more funding for the war without Congress voting on it. As Politico put it, GOP unity has “started to crack” and Trump could “soon face far more resistance.” Steve, what’s your reading of that? How much longer do you think Republicans will put up with this? What’s your sense?Benen: It’s frustrating in a way because we’ve been seeing reports for weeks about how there are going to be Republicans who are anxious about this, who are concerned about this. They see the same polls the rest of us do when they’re thinking ahead to the midterms, and they keep kind of sending signals—oh, wait a minute, we’re not on board, hold on, watch your step, there are limits here—and yet we haven’t really seen any follow-through. And so the question I think for all of us is when will we see follow-through? When will they step up?Now, I think this week we saw Susan Collins flip. That’s a step in the right direction. She joined with Rand Paul. So now there are two. We mentioned John Curtis, and of course there’s Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who has also expressed some reservations. Sargent: It doesn’t appear that maximal military force can give Trump the outcome he wants. And he doesn’t seem to know that. Let’s listen to Trump talk about this a bit.Reporter (voiceover): You have a commander come in here yesterday. Was he briefing you on different approach options? What kind of options? How would it look?Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, there are options. I mean, do we wanna go and just blast the hell out of them and finish them forever, or do we wanna try and make a deal? I mean, those are the options.Reporter (voiceover): Do you wanna go blast the hell out of them and finish them forever?Donald Trump (voiceover): I’d prefer not. On a human basis, I’d prefer not, but that’s the option. Do we wanna go in there heavy and just blast them away, or do we wanna do something—Sargent: So there you have Trump saying he’s going to blast the hell out of Iran if Iran doesn’t give him exactly what he wants—which is essentially him retaking his previous threat to erase Iranian civilization. In other words, he’s retaking his threat to commit massive war crimes. But here again, the basic situation, the logic of it, seems unforgiving. Military force alone won’t force Iran to give Trump what he wants. Trump doesn’t seem able to process that thought. Where do we go from here? I don’t understand it.Benen: Well, the funny thing is you said you don’t understand it. I think the more accurate way of putting it is that Donald Trump doesn’t understand it. I mean, what he should have learned from that initial month—really the first six weeks of the conflict—is that he can’t bomb his way to success. He can bomb while causing enormous damage, and he can kill a lot of people and he can cause a lot of destruction in Iran. But what he can’t do is bomb his way into a deal that makes him happy, where Iran will just simply give him everything that he wants and allow him to walk away smiling. And so because he has not yet learned that lesson, we find ourselves where we are today, which is him saying either give me a deal or I go back to bombing you. But if going back to bombing you will not give me a deal, then what is the point? And so the fact that he’s so frustrated by that is palpable. So when we look ahead, what is the end game here? How do we get out of it?The answer is we don’t know because Donald Trump doesn’t know. There is no plan. There’s no strategy. And so it is exasperating to watch this unfold because, well, frankly, it’s a quagmire that is only getting worse with no end in sight.Sargent: And also it sucks to be an American right now and watch your president threaten war crimes. I don’t want my president to threaten war crimes. His threats are going off the rails one more time. And we just have to sit here and wait, and everybody has to sort of dance around and pretend that this guy has any idea what he’s doing. It’s just, on so many levels, it’s an unideal situation, Steve.Benen: I agree. And watching his most recent comments that you just played the clip of, I was struck by the fact that he was talking about the prospect for a deal. And one of the things that occurs to me that is especially exasperating is—whatever happened to the Art of the Deal? Whatever happened to the fact that Donald Trump billed himself to voters as this world-class negotiator, world-class deal-maker who can settle any resolution, who can resolve any conflict because of his masterful world-class skills in striking agreements? Well, where is that? Where are those talents? Why hasn’t he put them to use?Well, I mean, I think the answer is because it was always a lie, it was always a sham, that he was never—he’s never really earned the role or the rights to call himself a great deal-maker. His own book on negotiating was ghostwritten by someone else. And so what we’re seeing is a collapse of this myth. We’re seeing this image that he created for himself, of this world-class negotiator, world-class deal-maker, collapsing down because he clearly doesn’t have those skills that he pretended to have. And if he did, we would see them on display. And we don’t.Sargent: Yeah, and making that all the worse, it just seems like Donald Trump isn’t capable of any kind of level of shame that might force him to try and find a better way out of this. So we’re really stuck. I think we may be stuck for a while. Steve Benen, God help us, man. Always good to talk to you.Benen: Always a pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much.