Trump's Final Nail in the Coffin as Approval Ratings Hit Rock Bottom, Iran Destroys Him

0:00Joining me today on IHIP News is Ben Rhodes. He is a former deputy national security advisor for President Obama and the author of the book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity. Ben, how are you today?

0:14Ben Rhodes:I'm doing good. So far, so good. All right. Trump's lies about the Iran war have gotten so bad that he's getting fact checked by Fox News. Let's play this clip. President Trump claiming total control over the strait. Traffic has slowed really to a trickle. If you look at this before the conflict, more than 100 vessels a day were crossing Monday. Eight vessels crossed yesterday. Fourteen. Now, those are constraints and that's changing the government's energy. out. Okay. I've heard enough. Ben, these, these just the pathological lies coming from this man that even his own propaganda channel has to fact check him, fact check him.

0:59It's just, it's staggering to watch that the Republicans will not step in and stop this liar.

1:07Ben Rhodes:It is staggering. And I think the thing is he's lying about a war now, right? So it's one thing when he's lying about the Russia hoax from however many years ago or some media scandal that he's at the center of. There's a fucking war that he started. And there's physical reality to that war. There are people who are dead who would have otherwise been alive. There's Iranian nuclear material that still exists in the physical world. You can call it obliterated. You can call it dust. It's still there in Iran. There is a waterway, the straightforward moves through which 20 % of world's fossil fuel goes, and it's closed.

1:42Ben Rhodes:People know that because there's less stuff in the world. Gas prices are higher here. There's shortages to countries around the world. When he lies and says over and over that we won the war, we obliterated the nuclear program, or the strait is open, or we control the strait, there's actually a world in which people can see that is completely false. And the stakes are so high that I think even Fox at a certain point has to acknowledge we can't just keep regurgitating the idea that the war is over, we won, the straits open, everything's great. Yeah. Don't you think, I mean, the Republican party has gotten away with lying about certain things that the public just assumes because they propagandized it for so long.

2:25One of them is that they're so into national security and they're so into supporting the troops, just like they're so into trickle down economics. And it's such bullshit. Every Republican president of my lifetime start some chicken chick cockamamie war look at george w bush all the while championing i'm a i'm a national security conservative and a compassionate conservative they killed a million iraqis you know american foreign policy has has been by the way i see it more about um funding the oligarchs you know the military industrial complex than it really has ever been about securing our country.

3:07What's your take on that as somebody who worked as a national security advisor, America's foreign policy across different administrations?

3:18Ben Rhodes:Yeah, I guess like the very quick summary I give, because I agree with everything you said, is the Republicans forever presented as the tough guys on national security and there's Reagan and you would think that the Cold War ended just because he gave a speech saying, tear down this wall. And Bush after 9-11 reinvents himself as this tough guy starting wars all over the place. And they all end in complete and utter catastrophe. Trump tries to represent himself as a guy who doesn't like dumb wars, and he just keeps starting even dumber wars. The Republican Party, the one common thread is they serve their own self-interest politically and the interests of their friends, the oligarchs, who I'll come back to in a second, because let's not spare the Democratic Party.

4:03Ben Rhodes:Democratic Party talk about chicken shit. Like part of the reason the Republicans get away with this is Democrats are so afraid of their own shadow on things like foreign policy, so afraid of upsetting the feelings of some donors at AIPAC, like so afraid of being called weak by some columnist for a legacy newspaper that nobody reads anymore. I could go on like so just terrified to engage in actual debate about whether we should have a diplomatic deal with Iran instead of a war. I literally got chased out of Washington because of my involvement in the Iran nuclear deal, which now looks great. Everybody would take that right now.

4:41Ben Rhodes:I will tell you, you're right that if you want to look at what is constant, who benefits, who profits, defense contractors profit, oil companies profit. Their profits are way up because of the war in Iran. Now we have a whole new class of tech oligarchs who people may not know are in the defense business. They're the ones that are selling hundreds of billions of dollars of stuff to the Pentagon that we don't need now. They're trying to take the place. They're the same people that finance so much shit in our politics. Yes, I've talked a lot about AIPAC. They're just one of the special interest groups.

5:15Ben Rhodes:It's AIPAC, it's defense contractors, it's fossil fuel companies, and it's tech companies. That's who benefits from American foreign policy. Most Americans get totally screwed by it. Okay, let's talk about Israel, because even Marco Rubio said that we went to war with Iran because of Benjamin Netanyahu, even though there's conflicting reports within this dipshit incompetent regime. Marco Rubio's office has said that. And with this propaganda that Republicans peddle that we're such badasses, right? And then we have this president that is such, pardon my language here, but he's such a pussy, right?

5:53like benjamin netanyahu can dog walk him to do anything the same we saw him in alaska for vladimir putin roll out the red carpet and then he's standing there clapping like a seal as he walks up and you know it's just pathetic it's just pathetic and it pisses me off that the democrats have such a hard time penetrating what is just such an easy layup of dismantling this faux masculinity this faux competence that these people have. And I think a lot of it has to do with the Democrats, a lot of them being bought by AIPAC as well. It was a real eye-opener for me when after Kamala loss, which was really devastating to go through for all of us, to find out that AIPAC gave Trump almost as much money as Elon Musk did and that they preferred Trump.

6:48to be president while lecturing everybody else that they're this great democracy and i'm like oh like you can lecture us about democracy when you want the insurrectionist to win talk about how corrupted establishment democrats are when they take money from the same packs whether it be a pack big oil uh big tech that is funding fascism right now

7:15Ben Rhodes:uh i think it's it's central like to what's happening um and not just a pack like all these interests but i'll i'll focus on it back in a second but the thing is if i could do one thing if i could stand my finger and do one thing to fix everything it would be just get money out of politics right because these are all distorted outcomes like these are all outcomes that are benefiting a smaller number of special interest that can afford to play in this space at the scale that they play at. Because otherwise, these things don't make any sense. So we'll just take the AIPAC example. I mentioned the Iran nuclear deal fight.

7:51Ben Rhodes:It's a good example because, first of all, it was harder to get a peace deal through Congress than a war. Congress doesn't do anything to stop a war, as we've recently experienced yet again. There's an insane war happening that nobody understands why it's happening. And Congress, which is supposed to have the power to authorize the use of military force in this country, like won't even take it up. Not going to go there. But you have a nuclear deal, a peace deal with Iran. And it's not even just a peace deal is the wrong way to say it. It's a nuclear deal that prevented them from getting a nuclear weapon.

8:23Ben Rhodes:Whoa, we got to vote on that. We have to have a debate on that. And we had to work like tooth and nail to get the Democratic senators to just hold on that. And we didn't hold them all, by the way. We lost some, including Chuck Schumer, who's a Democratic leader, opposed the signature foreign policy effort of a Democratic president. Now, why did that happen? Well, APEC spent$30 million against the deal. They were doing ads in people's districts. They're just pounding people. And look, after that, they lost that fight. Then what they started doing is, well, we're going to go into your primaries and we're going to, we're just going to drown you in money if you oppose us.

9:06Ben Rhodes:And the money is not even, at least in the nuclear deal, they were actually putting ads up about how terrible this deal was. Now they don't even mention Israel. Like they, they, they, they attack people on bullshit thing. You know, they'll say like he wants, they, they support ice. Like they'll act like they're progressives or we just went through this whole primary in Michigan where most of their ads were trying to create the false impression that Barack Obama had endorsed one of the candidates, Haley Stevens, because he said something nice about her on camera like 10 years ago, and they just played that in a loop, right?

9:33Ben Rhodes:I mean, how cynical is that? And so a lot of it is just the incentive structure for these politicians. It's expensive to run for office, and this is the easiest people to raise money from, and not just APAC, but the special interest groups, because that's easy. You go to one law firm, and everybody writes a check, and you walk out of there with hundreds of thousands of dollars. You don't have to sit around calling everybody. But then the second is they're afraid of the other side of the coin. which is that if I don't do what they want, all this money is going to come down on my head. And that is so obvious.

10:06Ben Rhodes:Anybody can see this. But if you talk about it, it's like, oh, you can't talk about that. Don't go there. Well, what planet are we living on? This is an organization, if you should say, like AIPAC, that has financed all these insurrectionist Republicans, that has poured money. Miriam Adelson, Adelson's been among the biggest donors to AIPAC, among the biggest owners to Trump. Sheldon Adelson, her husband, did you know that when they moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, they gave the old ambassador's residence to Sheldon Adelson? This is not subtle, how tight Trump is with these people.

10:43Ben Rhodes:And yet Democrats still think that these are friends of ours when they've financed three Trump campaigns? Give me a right okay why do you think it is that the israel lobby um goes to seek refuge and support in the republican party and this is the same party that the real anti-semitism the nazi group chats right that um jd vance refuses to condemn that are just blatantly racist despite him being married to a woman of Indian descent and having mixed race children. He will not condemn these Nazi chats. I go viral on right wing sites, as you can imagine, quite a bit. And they think I'm Jewish. I'm not.

11:28I'm an atheist. I mean, I'm just a European mutt. But it will say like, crazy Jew, all of this stuff on these right wing sites about me. And all of it kind of lives over in this right-wing world is this the same thing as like you know clarence thomas seeking refuge with these people i mean what what is the psychology i'm just curious about this like that they seek refuge with the people where i grew up in a red city i lived in oklahoma city for 50 years the most anti-semitic people i know are republicans they think the jews need to be in Israel for the rapture. Yeah.

12:10Ben Rhodes:I think it's pretty dark because, look, I get why they do it. If you're looking at the AIPAC and other organizations that are basically single issue organizations, all we care about is that the United States agrees with Israel. And by the way, that without even a point of whatever the Israeli government supports, that's what AIPAC supports, right? So part of what's happened, and I think that's important for people to understand, it's not like AIPAC has independent positions on what should happen in the Middle East. It's whatever the Israeli government's position is, AIPAC is going to support that position, you know, whether it's an arms sale or whether it's a policy in Gaza or whatever, or war in Iran.

12:53Ben Rhodes:And so as the Israeli government has moved like furiously to the right, and I'd say the far right over the course of, I don't know when we can start the clock, let's just say the 21st century, particularly since Netanyahu got back in there. They've just followed him there, right? Because that's what they see as their role. Then it's utilitarian. Well, they notice, and this is an important point you made. Well, they noticed that the Republicans are going to the right on Israel too, because of these Christian evangelicals who've gone nuts about the need to have total Israeli control of the Holy Land so that the rapture can come and kill all the Palestinians.

13:33Ben Rhodes:Meanwhile, a lot of Islamophobia on the right too. So that's useful too. Right? Like we all hate the Muslims too over here. So there are these other pools that they can swim in, in the Republican party that over the course of the last 10 or 15 years, they've gotten super comfortable doing that. They're parting with like anti-Semitic Christian evangelist, Christian Zionist, essentially, you know, at times, right? It's fucking weird, actually. It's really weird. And what bothers me, I'm a secular person, but I'm Jewish by background. My mother's Jewish. The anti-Semitism that scares the shit out of me is the anti-Semitism that killed my family, right?

14:11Ben Rhodes:Like I had family members who died in the Holocaust. It wasn't Palestinians who did that. It was fucking right-wing Nazis, right, in Europe. And so when we're talking about anti-Semitism and we all have to sit here and we have to issue statements about Hassan Piker said on the ninth hour of his stream like three years ago, while J.D. Vance flew to Europe and gave a speech lecturing Germans that they needed to let their neo-Nazi party back into politics. Like that's a thing that happened in the world. And I was like, well, you know, that's interesting. They have like right wing, like they all don't like immigrants.

14:47What do we – am I going insane?

14:50Ben Rhodes:Sometimes I look at stuff, I'm like, am I going insane that, hey, these people you think are your friends? Like, I tell you, like Nazis are not my friends. Like, and I think we should – any conversation about any Semitism that kind of leaves out the European origin far right to focus on like college kids chanting river to the sea is to me a cynical conversation. Yeah, not to mention Elon Musk, who's getting more and more into his psychotic state. But do you think that it's so insidious that Benjamin Netanyahu and the powers that be that want to expand Israel, that want to Balkanize Iran, that want to displace southern Lebanon, do you think they are weaponizing anti-Semitism to rile up people?

15:41they were welcoming anti-Semitism to say, see, see, we're under attack. See, we need to do this. So they are assisting it in a way because it's valuable to them to get support in creating this fear that Jewish people are not safe. And the way I view this, the person who is making people, Jewish people, less safe is Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government. And when you get into the statements of Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, it's so evil. It's so unbelievable to read it, that it's current, that it's present, that it's present tense, and that we're allies with them. It's just it really shocks the conscience when you really dive into this story more and how manipulative the Israeli government is with their foreign policy.

16:36Ben Rhodes:Yeah, I think that this is a really dangerous way for them to approach this issue because it happens on several levels. One is they just try to shut down discourse. You can't talk about this. So like if I and I've been called an anti-Semite, I've been called the self-hating, you know, all these things. If you point out, if you just say, AIPAC spends a lot of money to influence American politics, like they will come out and say that was anti-Semitic. I wrote a piece for the New York Times that had a couple of paragraphs on this. And part of their pushback, and I don't have it in front of me, but was essentially like, I'm engaging in an anti-Semitic trope by suggesting that they use money to try to influence politics.

17:25Ben Rhodes:What else are they using money for? By the way, the NRA does too. What planet are we on? But guess what? It makes people pissed if they feel like someone's going around like whack-a-mole, calling everybody names that are incredibly potentially damaging to people, especially when it's not true. I'm many things. I'm not that. The second thing to your point, because there is obviously there's anti-Semitism, like there's horrible anti-Semitism on the right and the left. What bothers me is when you get a sense and this happened, let's go back to the late Biden administration, like in 2024, when you had those encampments on campus.

18:06Ben Rhodes:And there was almost like a hunger to find, like, let's find the single most offensive sign in a sea of people and stick a camera in front of that person and try to get them to say something that will be the – because the point is let's have the conversation not be about Israel's conduct in Gaza. Right. Let's have the conversation be about like some 19 year old kid that phrased things the wrong way or maybe is like said something that is anti-Semitic. But that person is not. And let's make that the main story. Like, let's make that. Let's point the camera at that so that the camera is not on the moonscape that is Gaza and the tens of thousands of killed kids.

18:53Ben Rhodes:And I think people see that. People aren't dumb. They're like, hey, you seem to just be charging everybody with anti-Semitism. You seem to be wanting to actually platform anti-Semitism because you want to elevate it. right? And when I say they, I'm talking specifically about the Israeli government, like, because they are behind a lot of this stuff. And I think it has the opposite of the intended effect. Because if you look at the polling numbers on support for Israel in this country, I think they're falling in part, chiefly because of what happened in Gaza and what's happening in Lebanon and Iran, but also because people are sick of this stuff.

19:35Ben Rhodes:They're sick of like getting lectured about like democracy and, and, and Bibi Netanyahu is going to lecture us on like, on, on, on respect for different religions and, and, and, and, and ethnic groups while, while massacring, you know, Palestinian kids. And while he's got people in his own government, Smotrich and Ben-Gabir that, that, that say genocidal stuff, like all the time. Like if, I often think if I just read out loud the statements, I was like, the Israeli government wants to do these things and just recited what Smodrich and Ben Gavir said, I'd be called any semi. They'd be like, how can you're trying to cast them in a certain way?

20:14Ben Rhodes:No, these are their own words. Yeah. Yeah. To the point about the college campus protests, I couldn't believe the hysteria surrounding that, because to me, it's like it wasn't a newsflash. college kids have famously protested wars forever. That's where you were so idealistic and you organized together to make the world better. And I couldn't believe that they were trying to, you know, all these kids are getting shot. The one thing that I couldn't get over, it was a real eye-opening moment for me, was this BBC report that's been confirmed by lots of others that the Israeli government assassinated children, Palestinian children, and they had their bodies where they were shot in the head and in the heart.

21:02And their argument to that was, oh, these college kids are the assholes. And I'm just like, oh, my God, they're standing up for, you know, universal human rights. And the sad thing about that is now the fascist project, Trump and his sycophantic idiots are using this as a means to get universities to capitulate as all fascist projects do. They want to dismantle education. But to me, it was like it was like as big of a newsflash as college kids smoke weed. Of course, they're protesting a war. That's what they do. All right. Let's let's shift gears out of that. And I want to gossip a little bit with you about Donald Trump slinking into the catering cart and getting into a different plane.

21:52And then using American citizens, his cabinet members and members of the press, which we know he doesn't care about, but also the pilots who are military, as a decoy to get shot down potentially by Iran. And whether that was a credible claim or not is another podcast for another day. but let's just assume here that it was. What do you think would happen? You worked with Obama. Do you think there are enough ERs in the United States that could receive Fox News employees if Obama did some chicken ship move like this?

22:27Ben Rhodes:No, I mean, this is a man, Barack Obama, that like, I remember one time he like saluted someone while holding a, you know, coffee cup. Coffee cup. And we had like a several week implosion on Fox. Like people were like fanning other people on air because they were passing out from like the revulsion at his conduct. And there's so many things that converge here. It's such a Trump story, right? Because it's all a grift. Like none of this would have happened if there wasn't a Qatari superjet that had become the new Air Force One. Totally. So let's not forget, the only reason that we're having this conversation is because he decided to change the whole Air Force One to this like gold plated interior design jet.

23:09Ben Rhodes:But then secondly, like the I mean, it will, you know, not to dwell on it, but the report in The Washington Post is that this is Israeli intelligence. Yeah, that was not not the CIA had low confidence. I when they tell you they have low confidence, they're telling you that they don't believe something like because moderate confidence, high confidence like this is the lowest of the low. So the reason that's interesting to me is that the Trump, it didn't matter. he's you know so self-obsessed that even when his own people are like i we don't really believe this he's like i i need a plan like you know i need extra layers of safety right and so for this fucking guy to to i mean we when we would fly to afghanistan we'd tell the press like we'd leave in the middle of night and we wouldn't you know release publicly and we'd like land with the windows down and it was super secret but we'd call in the press and be like hey this is what's happening and have your people ready to be there at this point of time.

24:04Ben Rhodes:And like, like the, the, the need to go to this length is, it's just so clearly unnecessary, you know? Um, and, and, and, and just the, the, the image of, of the commander in chief of the United States military in like a catering dumbwaiter elevator or something just to get himself somewhere else while sending off, not just like the press, but like, I think Marco Rubio and Pete Heggseth were on that plane. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't make a cut. Yeah. So clearly Trump thought that the threat was interesting enough to him that he needed to go somewhere else. But these people were just going to send up in the plane.

24:42Ben Rhodes:I allow myself one time a day to imagine what would happen if Obama did X. Because if you tried to do it more than once a day, you'd go completely insane. Once a day is probably already unhealthy. And this one is very high on the list. Very, very high. Okay. Okay. Trump has alienated so many of our allies. And I would imagine with your previous job with President Obama, that you know, you know, the relationships and an intimate level that, that a layman like me doesn't know. This whole idea of our allies kind of trying to placate to Trump the same way the oligarchs do. I feel like it's somewhat kind of dangerous instead of them just standing up to him and saying no you're not getting greenland quit around no you're not getting canada we're not doing this i feel like everybody just tiptoes around this fragile ego where it's whether it's um uh oligarchs really powerful companies um and really powerful countries like when uh the king of england king charles had the big dinner for him I was just like, why are they enabling this?