Why MAGA is all in on Iran

0:02Marcus King:WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

0:07Marcus King:We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough.

0:12Colin Dueck:Kind of gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, there are no winners in war.

0:26Colin Dueck:It's Tuesday, March 10th, and this is Here and Now, anytime from NPR and WDR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:35Colin Dueck:Today on the show, why are some America First voters suddenly okay with military adventurism?

0:42Marcus King:This is the sort of the use of force that Trump supporters can accept and even support, particularly because it's him. In other words, they trust his instincts, they trust his judgment, and so they're willing to back him, at least for now.

0:55Colin Dueck:Also, traders and politicians have been fretting over the rising cost of oil. But the war in the Middle East has also targeted infrastructure for an even more precious resource, water.

1:08Phil Mudd:Some Gulf countries actually rely on desalination for 70 to 90 percent of their drinking water.

1:14Colin Dueck:That story coming up in about 10 minutes. But first, the U.S. and Israel's decision to attack Iran has set off a regional conflict involving several countries and roiled the global economy. It's fair for some Americans to worry about the possibility for an attack on U.S. soil. But how concerned should they be? We asked Phil Mudd, a former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and the FBI's National Security Branch. He spoke to Robin Young.

1:45Marcus King:Just go there. What are your concerns? Well, I'm watching a couple of things. Number one is we're already seeing signs of radicalization of people who don't necessarily have connections with a known terrorist, but might simply be radicalized because they saw something, maybe a civilian casualty online. So, for example, the attack on the Mamdani residence in New York the other day. that. That's a red flag. So that's one piece. The other thing I'm watching is time. The pace of radicalization that I witnessed when I was at the FBI is rapid. You're talking about the space of weeks for somebody who's a young person who sees images online and then believes they have to do something about those images to go attack a target.

2:23Marcus King:So as days and weeks pass, the combination of people who are self-radicalized with the combination of weeks going into maybe three weeks or a month tells me that we will see more of this over time. Yeah. And you mentioned the attack on the home of New York City Mayor Zoran Mandami, and the two suspects have been arrested, and police say that the suspects told them that they were inspired by ISIS. So frightening there. But we also saw the shooting at a bar in Austin that left four people dead, including the suspect, who officials say wore a shirt with Iranian symbolism on it. Now, there's a lot we don't know about that attack.

3:00Marcus King:The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating, along with local officials. We know you are not part of that investigation. But what did you think when you first heard about that? The first you look at is inevitable, not because the security practices of the government aren't good, but because if you multiply risk across 330 million people over the course of a conflict, you have to assume that a very small percentage of those people will be sympathetic to the opposition. And, you know, in the age of terrorism, the age of homegrown terrorism, someone some of them will say, I have to take matters into my own hands.

3:32Marcus King:So if I'm sitting around a task force or around a threat briefing, I'm saying I'm concerned about sponsorship of terrorism from Iran, but I'm far more concerned that someone is sitting in a basement watching a video saying, I want to get an automatic weapon or build a device and do something tomorrow, because you cannot stop that kind of violence in an open society. If someone decides they want to do something and their radicalization pace is very short, very little you can do about that. Yeah. Well, you know, but you can try. And if you try, you need people to do it. The New York Times is reporting that after a year of firings and resignations at the Department of Justice, elite counterterrorism and counterintelligence units are stretched thin.

4:18I mean, we know Doge, you know, went through, you know, with a machete.

4:22Marcus King:And, you know, this, the lack of counterterrorism and counterintelligence units and them being stretched thin is according to unnamed current and former officials. Is this what you're hearing? Yes. You hear about this, and you hear not just about the numbers, but about the expertise. If you're doing a high-end case, that is a case that maybe is at the top 1 % of FBI cases, you're not just talking about following a person around. You're talking about rotating surveillance teams. You're talking about looking at money trails. You're talking about looking at communication trails. You're talking about coordination with DHS to determine if someone has traveled overseas for travel.

4:59Marcus King:You're talking to foreign partners about whether your people in the United States are talking to their bad guys overseas. And then you're walking across the street from the FBI to the Department of Justice saying, is what we're doing in compliance with our regulations in the U.S. law? And can we go to a court and get a court approval to listen to someone's phone or follow their email? I just spent 30 seconds laying out 25 years of experience. You eliminate a lot of people with that experience. That is really hard to replace, especially if you're dealing with a lot of cases. Time Magazine's Eric Cordelosa asked President Trump, and this was in the early days, whether Americans should be worried about retaliatory strikes at home.

5:36Marcus King:And President Trump said the two words many people took away were the first two of his answer, which were, I guess. He went on to say, but I think they're worried about that all the time, meaning U.S. citizens. And then we think about it all the time. I think he meant meaning the government. We planned for it. You know, when I heard the president say that, I guess, you know, there will be retaliatory strikes at home. But I think there, you know, people like me are worried about all the time. I was not till that moment, you know, your sense of what that meant. You know, how did you hear that? What the president might think about retaliatory strikes at home?

6:18Marcus King:I was a little surprised. I mean, my answer is a professional, believe it or not. despite the past five minutes. I would not worry much simply because of the numbers game, the likelihood this will happen to you in Indiana or Ohio or Pennsylvania. I'm in Florida, it's very low. That said, the American people don't have a lot of appetite for attacks based on what we've seen in the response to Texas and the Mamdani attack. So I think the likelihood that someone will get hurt is low. The likelihood that Americans will sit up and say, this is having an effect at home, that is high because we will see more action in the United States, I would say.

6:53Marcus King:And briefly, just in a couple seconds, it could be something like a hacking, too. It's not necessarily an attack. Yes. Hacking, to me, is less significant. We can defend against that and people don't die. When people die, that's when you sit up. And that's what we've been seeing in terms of the potential for violent attacks in America. We're going to see it. Phil Mudd, I guess, is what you're saying. We're going to see it. Phil Mudd, I guess. Yep. Former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and the FBI's National Security Branch. Thank you so much. Thank you.

7:29Colin Dueck:Coming up next, President Trump campaigned by accusing his Democratic opponent of being a warmonger. And has described himself as the president of peace. Now he's presiding over an unpopular war in the Middle East with no end in sight. After the break, a conservative analyst says that's fine, as long as he doesn't tank the economy. Stick around.

8:14Marcus King:They need. SelectQuote takes the guesswork out of finding the right life insurance policy. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50 % at SelectQuote.com slash anytime. That's SelectQuote.com slash anytime.

8:35Colin Dueck:Some of President Trump's high profile supporters are divided over the war in Iran. Here's Tucker Carlson on his podcast soon after Israel and the U.S. started bombing Iran on the last day of February.

8:47Marcus King:This is Israel's war. This is not the United States' war. This war is not being waged on behalf of American national security objectives to make the United States safer or richer. This war is not actually even about weapons mass destruction, nukes, chem bio.

9:04Colin Dueck:No, this war is waged purely because Israel wanted it. Colin Dewey is a professor at George Mason University and foreign policy advisor at the Conservative American Enterprise Institute. He tells Peter O'Dowd, Tucker does not speak for most Republicans.

9:22Marcus King:Most of the public opinion polls show that 85 or 90 percent of self-described MAGA Republicans support Trump on Iran right now. But it just shows you that Tucker is not, representative of the base of Trump's support.

9:40Colin Dueck:Oh, okay. So that gets to the question of why. Because President Trump campaigned for re-election on a message of ending foreign entanglements and wars. Here he is at Madison Square Garden in New York City in October of 2024.

9:54Marcus King:You're not going to have a war with me and you're not going to have a third world war with me. That I can tell you.

10:00Colin Dueck:So you can hear the cheers in the background there. Why is his base willing to overlook those promises now?

10:06Marcus King:Well, I think it's a couple things. One is, it's pretty clear that this isn't going to be another Iraq or Afghanistan in the sense of, you know, large numbers of boots on the ground, years of nation building. I think whatever Trump does and whoever this ends, he's not going to do that. So I think that's understood. And a third world war, this is not. I mean, for that to be the case, you'd have to be talking about some kind of mass conflict with Russia or China. So I actually think that this is the sort of the use of force that Trump supporters can accept and even support, particularly because it's him.

10:42Marcus King:In other words, they trust his instincts, they trust his judgment, and so they're willing to back him, at least for now.

10:47Colin Dueck:You say you don't expect this to be in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the president hasn't ruled out putting boots on the ground. What happens in that case?

10:54Marcus King:Yeah, he often, as you know, likes to keep his options open. and he says all kinds of things on any given day. But I think that that's to provide leverage. I think it's extremely unlikely that you're going to see, you know, thousands of American soldiers and Marines on the ground in Iran. It doesn't make sense. The White House knows that.

11:11Colin Dueck:And it's just, it's not going to happen. Polls, we've been talking about polls. They're just a snapshot of what's happening in this moment. As you know, things can change quickly. And I've spoken with Trump voters recently who say the thing they love about Trump is that he was able to lower gas prices. That was before the spike in oil prices because of this war. Do you think the president risks losing his base if the war drags on, even if there's not boots on the ground somewhere, but if over time the economy starts to take a hit? Well, that's an interesting point.

11:43Marcus King:I mean, he clearly is vulnerable on the economy, even apart from Iran and on affordability issues. So congressional Republicans, especially on the House, I think are worried that they're going to lose control and for good reason. And that has as much to do with pocketbook issues as anything. And again, there's no doubt Trump knows this. So you would think that he would have every incentive to wrap this up fairly soon and really try to tackle those pocketbook issues in time to sort of salvage congressional Republicans

12:13Colin Dueck:heading into November. But that's one of the issues here. We don't exactly know where the president stands on how quickly this war will end. And we know he's been giving mixed signals even in the last day or so about a timeline for getting out of this war. So you advise on national security to Republicans. What advice would you have for him today on waging this war if you could give it?

12:37Marcus King:Well, to tell you the truth, I mean the single biggest advice I would give is to wrap up these trade wars with U.S. allies. I mean the tariffs are going to do much more damage to your economy in the next few months. So I've written about that. But on Iran, you know, I think that in reality, the objective is to degrade Iranian military capabilities. And I think what he could say even in a matter of days is mission accomplished, declare victory and come home. And I think his base would be happy with that.

13:06Colin Dueck:Colin Dueck is a professor at George Mason University and a Republican national security and foreign policy advisor. Colin, thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you.

13:19Colin Dueck:Coming up, Peter takes a look at a troubling development in the war in Iran, the targeting of water infrastructure. That's after the break.

13:44Marcus King:For 40 years, SelectQuote has helped more than 2 million Americans understand their options and get the coverage they need. SelectQuote takes the guesswork out of finding the right life insurance policy. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50 % at SelectQuote.com slash anytime. That's SelectQuote.com slash anytime.

14:10Colin Dueck:With the war in Iran, we've been hearing a lot about oil in the past few days, but there is one resource that may be even more important for the arid Middle East, water. Over the weekend, two desalination plants came under attack. In Iran, state officials say the U.S. was responsible for a strike on a plant that supplies water for 30 villages. The U.S. military denies that claim. Meanwhile, Bahrain is accusing Iran of hitting back at one of their desalination plants. Let's bring in Marcus King. He's a professor at Georgetown University and author of the book Weaponizing Water. Marcus, welcome.