Transcript: Trump Iran Rants Get So Crazy that Adviser Visibly Rattled

As Trump’s threats and rants about the war get more unhinged, a former Defense Department official explains why Trump seems so stuck—and why it’s a fiasco for the rest of us.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 11 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’s latest claims about the Iran war are lurching wildly in different directions. He just claimed that he loves the inflation it’s creating for reasons that remain impenetrable. He also insisted that he’s about to attack Iran again as retaliation for them shooting down a U.S. helicopter while simultaneously claiming Iran has been totally defeated. It’s all gotten so absurd that his own advisors are struggling to defend his stances, as one extraordinary exchange in Congress with Energy Secretary Chris Wright reveals.

The situation’s moving rapidly and Trump is dramatically confusing matters with his unchecked derangement. So we’re trying to pin down what’s really happening with Ariane Tabatabai, a former Defense Department official under Joe Biden, who’s now at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Ari, nice to have you on.

Ariane Tabatabai: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s quickly summarize. Earlier this week, Trump was saying a deal with Iran was imminent, within a day or two. Then a U.S. helicopter was shot down. Trump said Iran did it. He launched limited strikes to retaliate. He’s now also said Iran is taking too long and that it will pay the price.

And then on Wednesday, he vowed to escalate hostilities again, saying, “We’re going to hit them hard again today.” By the time you all listen to this, he may well have attacked again—or not. Ari, can you recap where we are here?

Tabatabai: I mean, that’s the perfect summary of where we are. We’ve had two parallel tracks that have been ongoing. One is on the diplomatic front, where the United States and Iran have been negotiating on how to sustainably end this conflict and then kind of pave the way for further negotiations on other issues of interest, including Iran’s nuclear program, which is one of the main reasons why we’re in this conflict to begin with. We can come back to this.

Then there’s a second track, the military track, where we’ve had ebbs and flows in this conflict over the past even just the past week, as you described. The most recent thing that happened that seems to have led to this latest round of escalation is that the Iranians evidently shot down an Apache helicopter. And after that happened, the president had this Truth Social post and said that he was going to be targeting Iran again. He did.

There’s been reporting over the past 24 hours that we even may have struck some Iranian water supplies, which I should also pause here and let folks know—this is a country that has deeply struggled with water shortages and droughts, and they’re about to enter very, very hot months over there. So if that is actually the case—and it seems like U.S. Central Command has neither said yes or no—that would be pretty troubling, in addition to some of the other things we’ve seen over the past few months in this conflict.

But nonetheless, we’re in this new round of escalation that is not only leading to a tit for tat between the U.S. and Iran, but is also again spilling over into other places in the region, including Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain, all of which house U.S. forces on their soil.

Sargent: Just to clarify for people, once again, Trump is very clearly saying that he’s going to escalate now. And by the time people listen to this, that may have happened or it may not have happened.

So it’s in this context that Trump told reporters that he loves inflation. The new inflation numbers just came out. They’re devastating for Trump. It’s over 4 percent now. He was asked about this, and he segued to saying that the U.S. has secretly been removing millions of barrels of oil from Iran. We’ll get to what that means in a second. But first, let’s listen to Trump.

Donald Trump (voiceover): You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over—you know, I can say it now. Something you didn’t know. Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil? Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran—until right now.

Sargent: Now, why Trump said the part about loving inflation is a little hard to understand, but with the secret removal of millions of barrels of oil, he seems to mean the U.S. is escorting ships carrying oil out of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran is keeping closed. Ari, can you shed any light on this?

Tabatabai: Yeah, I mean, it’s really hard, as you know, to try to make sense of what the president might be trying to say here. He does have a tendency to kind of use verbs for other verbs. And so it’s really hard for me to say exactly what he meant. I think there’s a few different ways to read the statement.

Yours seems like the right one to me, which is that what is in essence happening is that the U.S. Navy is conducting........

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