Transcript: Trump Iran Humiliation Worsens as Leaks Take Damning Turn

As jarring revelations make Trump’s handling of the Iran debacle look even worse, a foreign policy expert explains how the president’s deranged conception of “strength” is making us weaker.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 17 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.

It’s a widespread assumption among political strategists that foreign policy rarely matters in U.S. elections. But what if Donald Trump’s failures on this front are so disastrous and destructive that he’s about to break this rule too? Trump’s Iran fiasco is getting worse, and newly leaked photos show dramatic damage to the U.S. abroad. On Russia and Ukraine, he buffoonishly proclaimed that he’d secured an agreement that neither would attack the other’s energy sources, but then that blew up in his face. And new polling shows him cratering on both fronts.

So is there a way to make all this matter in the midterms? We’re talking about all of it with international relations professor Nicholas Grossman, who’s written well on the Iran debacle. Nick, good to have you on.

Nicholas Grossman: Hi, great to be back.

Sargent: So with soaring diesel prices killing Republicans in the midterms, Trump tried to blame this on the Russia-Ukraine war and not Iran. And the other day he posted this on Truth Social: “Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian energy targets. Russia has agreed to do likewise.”

Trump then suggested this’ll hold down the world’s diesel prices, but then Russia and Ukraine both said, no, we didn’t really agree to that. Nick, can you bring us up to speed on that?

Grossman: Sure. So Russia and Ukraine are in a war stalemate at the line. I mean, they’re fighting a lot and killing a lot of people, but not moving dramatically in terms of land one way or the other. They’re both bombing each other long distance, bombing each other’s energy resources.

And Trump tried to interject himself, among a trip with both Kushner and Steve Witkoff, trying to once again make deals, and then tried to get this to stop by just claiming that it was Ukraine’s fault, not his Iran war, that actually made diesel prices rise. Which nobody bought. And so then, when nobody bought that, he tried to sell the lie by saying they’re going to stop right now—which they then did not do, as they kept on attacking each other.

Sargent: Right. So they’re not really listening to Donald Trump on this, are they?

Grossman: No, not at all. Just about nobody is anymore.

Sargent: Nick, just briefly, the Russia-Ukraine war has basically receded from the headlines and Trump’s basically stopped talking about it. But we should probably remind everybody that Trump said during the campaign that he would end this war on day one of his presidency, didn’t he?

Grossman: He did. He said he would end it on day one. And the big idea that he and his team have had is to try to pressure the Ukrainians to surrender to Russia. And that’s even what Kushner had just did, where he complained that the Ukrainians would not give up the land that Putin wanted, and therefore that he couldn’t make a deal. And of course, the Ukrainians aren’t doing that.

But the other big change is that they’ve managed to really increase their strike program into Russia, and they’re hitting a lot of, in particular, refineries, which is contributing to the rise in gas prices. But it’s nowhere near as big as what Trump has done with the Iran war. It just compounds the problem.

Sargent: It’s not a small thing for the president of the United States to go out there and say, I’ve secured a deal between two major nations that are at war not to attack each other’s assets in one way or another, and then for that just to be bullshit. That’s not a small thing, is it?

Grossman: No, no. It’s a dramatic change. And it’s another example of how Trump has disrupted the international system by removing that bedrock idea of American credibility, that he has forfeited it in so many ways.

And another—perhaps the biggest current example of Trump’s blown credibility—is the way that the United States has not been providing security to its Middle Eastern allies, to all these different Gulf Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has had to deal now with the biggest attacks against it of the war so far, where an Iran-backed militia attacked its east-west pipeline, and they went and asked Trump for help. MBS reportedly called Trump twice and asked him to get involved in this Yemen conflict and clear it up. And both times the United States said no.

And the Gulf Arab states are reportedly shocked by this, and it upends the entire Middle East architecture. And Trump just simply isn’t there, and also isn’t able to stop either the Houthis or the Iranians.

Sargent: Well, my foreign policy doctrine says that Donald Trump will screw anybody if he sees it in his own interests. Let’s go to Iran for a bit more. The House just passed another bill that directs Trump to end the war there or get congressional authorization for it. Seven Republicans defected from Trump this time. Trump’s been threatening to blow up the whole country again. Iran........

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