Transcript: Trump Rages Wildly at Journo—and Exposes Big Iran Blunder

As Trump’s tirade reveals his biggest Iran mistake of all, a political scientist explains how his pathologies undermine him abroad—and why his international failures are producing worsening autocracy at home.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 18 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 doesn’t understand why the world won’t admit that he’s won a world-historical victory over Iran. In one of his angriest rants ever, he berated a reporter at great length for questioning his success, even accusing the reporter of treason. It’s no accident that this eruption occurred on his flight home from China. The media coverage has been quite harsh, brutally revealing that he failed to make any real headway with China on Iran, among other things. We think there’s a through line connecting Trump’s accelerating authoritarianism at home to his worsening quagmire abroad—he compensates for the latter with more of the former.

So we’re talking today with political scientist David Faris, because he’s been writing well for The Nation on both those topics. David, good to have you on.

David Faris: Great to be on the show, Greg. Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s tirade. He was on Air Force One on the way back from China. And David Sanger of the New York Times asked him why all the bombing of Iran hasn’t forced the political changes he wants. Listen to Trump.

Donald Trump (voiceover): I had a total military victory, but the fake news, guys like you, write incorrectly. You’re a fake guy. Guys like you write about it incorrectly. We had a total military victory. We’ve had a total victory, except by people like you that don’t write the truth. You know, you should write—I actually think it’s sort of treasonous what you write. You and the New York Times and CNN I would say are the worst.

Sargent: David, has Trump won the resounding victory he claims?

Faris: I mean, obviously not. Right, Greg? The Iran war has not gone at all the way that Trump and his allies thought it would. They were expecting a quick victory, decapitation of the regime, and then replacing it with somebody more compliant—sort of the Venezuela scenario. In fact, they seem to have handed power to people who are even more hardline than the ones that they replaced.

And despite many decades of planning around the possible closure of the Strait of Hormuz, it doesn’t seem like anybody in the Trump administration thought for five seconds about what might happen if the strait was indeed closed for some period of time. Trump is in this pickle. He can’t get the Iranians to capitulate. He can’t change the regime without ground troops. And he can’t reopen the strait without a massive escalation that has no guarantee of success anyway. So he’s really between a rock and a hard place right now.

Sargent: Well, let’s listen to a little more of Trump. Here, he really turns up the heat on the treason charge.

Donald Trump (voiceover): I actually think it’s treason. When you write like they’re doing well militarily and they have no Navy, no Air Force, no anti-anything. Then I read the New York Times and they act like they’re doing well. Everybody knows that—that’s why your subscribers are way down. You know, the Times’ subscribers are way down because it’s—

Sargent: David, a couple things here. Note how angry Trump got when this reporter dared to talk back to him. Note how Trump raised his voice in calling the Times a failing enterprise at that particular point. It looks to me like this is someone who’s just desperate for his supporters to see him dominating some enemy, any enemy he can find. After his own submissiveness in China, the contrast is pretty jarring. Your thoughts on that?

Faris: Well, it’s very telling. I think there are a few things going on here. One is Trump has now become accustomed to speaking only to sycophants and lickspittles in the press briefing room. I mean, we’ve got press credentials going to the Gateway Pundit, people like that. And so he’s no longer really accustomed to fielding lots of hostile questions at once—or skeptical questions, or even questions that are just sort of like, can you please tell us what’s going on?

This has all become something that he doesn’t like, doesn’t want to experience, and refuses to countenance. And so playing this role of trying to dominate journalists is something he’s been doing the whole time that he’s been in politics and probably before he got into politics.

But the specific threat of treason here is part and parcel of a larger authoritarian project where you use the threat of investigations and prosecutions—and just throwing accusations of crime—to get people to self-censor, to ruin their lives, to upend their lives. Leveling a threat of treason at a New York Times reporter is not going to be very effective because the New York Times has a large institutional apparatus backing it.

But people who aren’t part of the New York Times—journalists who don’t want the IRS rifling through their tax records or something vindictively—that’s going to give them pause, right? People have to think twice before they ask these questions. They have to think twice before they write the stories because they know that the president commands an apparatus that can make........

© New Republic