Transcript: Trump Failures Pile Up, and Aides Leak: He’s “Frustrated”

As Trump’s aides leak his frustrations on Iran and his push to jail James Comey flounders, a legal observer explains how Trump is confronting the limits of his powers on many fronts as once.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 30 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.

Donald Trump is confronting the limits on his power in fresh ways, and it’s rattling him badly. His inner circle is leaking word that he’s frustrated at his inability to force Iran’s hand, and he’s seeing some of his most corrupt designs crash and burn on many fronts at once.

Yet there’s something sobering about it all. Placing limits on Trump has required immense effort. Paradoxically, the more he’s thwarted, the more dangerous he’s becoming. And in constraining Trump, our institutions are still on a knife’s edge, with the endgame still too murky to predict.

We’re trying to make sense of all these strange dynamics with Talking Points Memo editor at large David Kurtz, whose excellent newsletter delves into this stuff regularly. David, always good to have you on.

David Kurtz: Hi, Greg, good to be with you.

Sargent: So let’s start with a very visible and jarring failing: Trump’s effort to jail former FBI director James Comey, based on his social media posting of seashells arranged to spell “86 47.” We just learned that Secret Service agents who questioned Comey about this were ordered to quickly send a summary of the interrogation to Trump himself, which shows how intently and corruptly he’s controlling DOJ. David, can you explain what happened here and why it’s important?

Kurtz: Sure. It’s really a remarkable series of filings in the Comey case last night, where they’re making a claim that this is the second vindictive prosecution of him—meaning that Trump has directed DOJ to go after him because he’s one of Trump’s political foes. And so this is the politicization, the weaponization of DOJ that we’ve all been covering for so long.

And what makes this especially remarkable is how difficult it is to make a vindictive prosecution claim. But here you have so much evidence, right? It goes all the way to Trump aboard Air Force One, tracking the investigation in real time, getting reports from Secret Service as he’s returning to the U.S. from Europe. You just don’t get that kind of evidence in these sorts of cases.

Sargent: So Comey’s lawyers are trying to say, we have smoking gun evidence that this prosecution is a vindictive one and therefore should be thrown out. And the smoking gun evidence is that Donald Trump is micromanaging the prosecution of Comey in real time, demanding to know exactly what happened in these interrogations as they happen.

Kurtz: I mean, we could do like a whole semester seminar on the many reasons that this is so messed up. And it really comes down to: prosecutors have an obligation under the law to conduct prosecutions in the public interest and in the interest of justice. And that goes beyond even sort of complying with whatever the policy directives of a particular president are.

They can set broad policy parameters, but they’re not supposed to be directing individual prosecutions. And they’re certainly not supposed to be conjuring up prosecutions as bogus as this one out of thin air—or for any reason, frankly, in order to target political foes for any reason that goes to their personal interest, to their political interest, and isn’t in the interest of justice.

And I know that may sound, in the year of our Lord 2026, maybe a little pie in the sky. But up until this point, in the 250-year history of the country, it has not operated that way, with a few rare exceptions like Watergate, which are hugely scandalous, but frankly which don’t come near to how bad this is.

Sargent: Yeah, and it looks to me as if this revelation is yet another sign that this prosecution is likely to really fall apart. And on that front—on the front of Trump becoming more and more aware of the limits on his power—The Atlantic had this interesting report on his deliberations over Iran.

A senior official says Trump is frustrated by his failure to get Iran to budge, to the point of wanting to order a heavier attack on Iran. But he and his advisors decided against it because it could further deplete our weapons stockpiles. And David, get this: Trump told advisors that he fears that an escalation could cause a global economic meltdown and, quote, “turn me into a Hoover,” as Trump put it.

That’s a real admission. He doesn’t have the power to force Iran’s hand, and........

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