Transcript: Trump Rages over His Iran Blunders as GOP Frets: “Screwed”

As Trump erupts amid fresh obstacles on multiple fronts, commentator Molly Jong-Fast discusses how much worse things can get in the final two-and-a-half years of Trump’s term.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 2 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 furious over the news that Iran has walked away from the talks with the U.S. over the war. He unleashed some angry and strange quotes to CNBC that suggest he has no idea what to do—none at all. It’s hard to escape the sense that we’re in a new place with Trump’s mental state. He seems caught in a loop and he appears unable to think his way out of it. All this comes as Republicans are mounting a genuine stand against Trump’s corrupt slush fund for insurrectionists because the politics of it are so terrible for them. As one plugged-in reporter put it, Republicans are “screwed.”

It’s very unnerving to imagine how we’re going to get through the next two and a half years of this. Molly Jong-Fast, the host of the Fast Politics podcast, has a great piece for The New Republic with editor Michael Tomasky on just this topic. So we’re talking to Molly about all of it today. Molly, really nice to have you on.

Molly Jong-Fast: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So on Monday, Iran announced that it was walking away from the talks with the U.S. over Israeli attacks in Lebanon. Trump has lurched wildly back and forth over this. First, he said he doesn’t care at all if the talks are on hold. Then he said he’s personally intervened to get Israel to stop and the talks are suddenly back on track, he says, and proceeding rapidly.

Molly, before we get into the details here, do you believe Trump when he says everything’s back on track?

Jong-Fast: No. I mean, I think that what’s happened is one of the functions of this second term of Trumpism is that Trump now has a world that fits whatever he wants. Surrounded by sycophants, people don’t tell him the truth. He also has people not telling him what’s actually happening.

I think about… we’ve been in this war for almost three months, more, and he doesn’t get a PDB the way a normal president would. He gets, supposedly, the reporting says, a video of things blowing up. So he doesn’t have a great sense of what’s happening on the ground. He’s like a Fox News grandpa, except that he’s running the country.

Sargent: Yeah, that’s not ideal when you put it that way. Let’s talk about what Trump is saying now. He talked to CNBC on Monday and he was plainly livid over Iran pulling out. Let’s go through some of these quotes. First, he says he doesn’t care if the talks are done, saying, “I don’t care if they’re over. Honestly, I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.”

Then he lurched into his usual stuff about how Iran can’t get a nuke. And he said this: “If they want to try and have a nuclear weapon, I will blow them up to kingdom come.”

Molly, he’s been saying for weeks and weeks and weeks that if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz on terms that are entirely favorable to him, on terms that he dictates entirely, then he will obliterate Iran, he’ll wipe it off the map, and now he’ll blow it to kingdom come.

It’s just over and over, right? It’s really hard to escape the sense he’s just caught in this kind of weird mental loop. He just seems stuck to me. What do you think?

Jong-Fast: Well, I mean, I think he’s stuck. Look, the Iranians are in a position that’s 10 times better than they were before this whole thing started, because there had been the fear of them closing the strait. But no one actually thought—we hadn’t seen how well it worked for them. And now we have. Gas prices are—Trump can’t get the genie back in the bottle.

So he wants gas prices to go down. He needs gas prices to go down. He has a midterm election spiraling towards him. He knows what happens when he loses the House because he had that experience before.

If you look at the polls, if the polls end up being right, he could lose the Senate too, by a........

© New Republic