“This Is a FOREVER WAR!” Trump 'Revenge' Strikes Iran… Plus President Tucker Carlson?

25:25He's trying to pivot just like he would in business. He's a dealmaker. He wants an off-ramp. And in The Art of War, you guys have all probably read The Art of War, you give your enemy an off-ramp.

25:34Piers Morgan:Yeah, but the problem here, Andrew Callaghan, the problem here is that he's obviously looking for an off-ramp, but there's no obviously easy off-ramp. And I don't think Trump has the stomach politically, never mind anything else, to commit a load of American ground forces to this. So on this specific issue of the enriched uranium, for example, if the Iranians are just going to literally dig in and leave it buried deep under the ground and not seed, you know, one centimeter of enriched uranium, I'm not sure what the Americans can do about it. Yeah, I would agree with that 100%. Yeah. So I think the ground invasion.

26:14Piers Morgan:Well, let me let Andrew extrapolate that. You know, where do you feel we are with this war then? I mean, I think that I mean, I expected it to kind of wrap up, I guess, given the extreme amount of like, I guess, extreme lack of domestic support for the war. I expected it to wrap up around the first ceasefire. I'm disappointed and surprised to see that it's continuing. But I was just in Iran a couple of weeks ago and it was pretty hectic out there. And they seem pretty determined to see this through and are very resistant to any kind of regime change or making any kind of concessions to the US.

26:41So I'm not surprised that it's keeping going. And I feel like an end is probably nowhere in sight. And if that is the case, Andrew, where does that leave the Republicans, the midterm elections, Trump's legacy?

26:54Piers Morgan:I mean, I said right at the start of this, he could be torching the whole thing. If he's not careful, if you get to the, you know, August, September, October, and this is still going on, then this could cost him everything. Yeah, especially if you're talking about the Gen Z, right? Like on the 4th of July, I did some interviews at a patriotic event in Alaska. And you can see pretty much everybody under the age of 40 was staunchly anti-Trump, looking for a clean slate in 2028. Some even advocating to vote for Democrats in the midterms just to prohibit someone like Vance from being able to take office in the future.

27:31But then if you talk to older people like the more traditional, I guess, boomer, late Gen X mega crowd, they're still into the idea of the Iran war continuing, eliminating the threat of terrorism across the globe, as they say. But yeah, I think it's generationally split. I haven't seen any, like most of my, I guess, friends who were young MAGA back during 2020 in the previous election have now totally went away from it and are looking for a new candidate and a new right-leaning alternative.

27:54Piers Morgan:Curtis Leibold, welcome back to You to Uncensored. What's your sense about the political risk here for Donald Trump? The other night when I saw our president speaking about election integrity, Pierce, I heard Ozzy Osbourne singing Crazy Train in my ear. That was crazy. Didn't even mention this war will not address the American people. Keeps getting deeper and deeper and deeper in. And who got us into this war? Bibi Netanyahu. He sold the decapitation of the leadership to Trump and Trump signed off on it. Then Trump complained after they wiped out Ayatollah Sr. and 40 of the key leaders. Oh, we had the B group to deal with, but Bibi went in and wiped them out, too.

28:43Now this so-called Ayatollah Jr. refuses to surface. People have a hit on them by the defense minister Katz of Israel. Bibi needs to stay out of it because every time he gets involved, he gets us deeper and deeper. And let's face it, I'm proud of our vice president Vance for laying it out with Joe Rogan that B.B. and a certain number of his cabinet members and supporters do not want the peace process to work. I want peace. I think everybody should be advocating peace. B.B. does not want peace and he's trying to undermine it. So high five to Vice President Vance for laying that out, that B.B. is one of our biggest problems.

29:26And remember, he had his tactical air support, But Lindsey Graham, no longer with us, who didn't know a war, he didn't want us to get in. Bomb Mexico, annex Canada, take Greenland, invade Iraq, invade Iran, bomb Syria, bomb Libya. They're like two peas in a pod, warmongers, enough of this.

29:49Piers Morgan:Josh Hammer, I want to play a clip from that J.D. Vance appearance on Joe Rogan, because it was very interesting how he answered some of these questions. Well, the narrative is that Israel has a very disproportionate effect on American politics. Yeah, I see that. I see that narrative. I mean, I actually think that they – look, do they try to influence American politics? Yes. But like I said earlier, a lot of other countries do. To the extent that Israel does, though? I think some are better at it than others. I think the Israels are definitely more effective at it than most. But I wouldn't say that they're the only effective country by any means that tries to influence American politics.

30:26I just think you have to be self-aware about it. I mean, why wouldn't you? It's a country of 9 million people. We have 330 million people. And so, of course, they're going to try to persuade Americans. They're going to try to move Americans in one direction or another. I think that's just the nature of the beast.

30:43Piers Morgan:I mean, Josh, that's the furthest I've heard a senior member of the Trump administration go to what people on the pro-Israeli side always try and frame as a sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. And yet he's doing it on a podcast with Joe Rogan. And by the way, the vast majority of people now would agree with him. So there were other things that the vice president said during the interview that I objected to. I did not like the insinuation that Jeffrey Epstein might have had some Mossad connection. That is pure speculation. There is literally not a morsel of evidence to support that that I've ever seen, like literally ever.

31:20There were lots of other things in the interview that I thought were quite bad and at times even borderline disgraceful. That clip right there actually appears. I did not really have personally a particularly big problem with it. I think it's axiomatic. It's basically self-evident that all sorts of foreign countries register foreign agents. They tried to lobby on Capitol Hill. Israel actually comparatively, for those who actually care about facts, has a much smaller foreign registered foreign agent presence than many, many countries. If I'm not mistaken, I think Qatar actually has more foreign registered agents in D.C.

31:49than any country around the world. Qatar has been pumping, of course, billions and billions of dollars into American higher education. China, the UAE, Saudis have all done the same thing for years and years. So I didn't actually have a huge problem with that clip. I do think it's worth addressing some of the things that Mr. Sliwa was saying. The notion that Bibi talked to Donald Trump in doing this, I think, is nuts. They met in Mar-a-Lago around New Year's, even late December. And the reporting at the time, actually, was that Donald Trump was the aggressor in that conversation. I'm not saying that Bibi didn't want to go in for Iran.

32:20In many ways, Ron has been the focal point of his entire public career. But Donald Trump, based on the reporting, the contemporaries report at the time, was the more aggressive one in that conversation. Yeah, but we now know, Josh, hang on.

32:32Piers Morgan:We now know from all the extensive New York Times reporting a few weeks into the war and also from the new book that's come out recently by two of their top journalists, we know what happened here. We know that Netanyahu went to see Trump multiple times in the build-up to his war. We know that it ended up with a meeting in the White House Situation Room with the head of Mossad joining remotely. And we know that they laid out a sequence of events. I've talked about this many times on the show. Yeah, but Pierce, you were talking to Michael Wolff before we came on here. And one of the things that Michael Wolff correctly talked about, and he's totally correct on this, Trump has been obsessed with Iran for his entire adult lifetime.

33:09There's literally clips of him talking about this during the hostage crisis.

33:12Piers Morgan:I'm talking about being persuaded to act when he did, because they presented a set of facts to him that involved that there was an opportunity to take out the Ayatollah and his top people. And that if that happened and America went in with Israel and did that, you know, mindful of the 12 day war the year before when Iran didn't put up much of a fight, that what would happen is the IRGC would collapse from within. The people would rise up. Everyone would be too distracted to worry about the Strait of Hormuz. Now, the first thing happened, but none of the rest of it happened. And now the Ayatollah has been replaced by his more radical son.

33:46Piers Morgan:He's surrounded by people who are probably even more radical because of what happened at the start of the war than their predecessors. The regime remains completely intact. There's been no public uprising at all. And you've got the asymmetric stuff going on with the strait and with the attacks on the Gulf state neighbours. And you put it all together and you have to conclude, if you have a rational mind about this, that not that Trump was told to do this and just went along like a lapdog. I've never believed that about Trump. But he was persuaded by the argument from Netanyahu that this series of events was achievable.

34:21Piers Morgan:And actually, it's turned out to not be achievable. So a wrinkle... Fine, fair enough. But a wrinkle in this timeline is that they met in Mar-a-Lago around New Year's Eve, late December. Another thing that Michael Wolff said that's totally accurate, is that this administration, I think, was buoyed from their success in Venezuela. When did that happen? That was about a week, actually, after Bibi met Trump in Mar-a-Lago. So I think the administration absolutely was feeling a little bit cocky, a little bit full of itself, a little bit overambitious, a little bit overconfident as to what it could achieve in rapid-fire fashion on the world stage after the staggering success of Operation Absolute Resolve to get Nicolas Maduro in the dead of night, the Delta Force, etc etc so i i think that timeline deeply deeply complicates this this facile all too convenient narrative that that i think curtis wants to come in on that so curtis oh yeah oh hold on a second the president dropped the f-bomb on bb over and over he's effing crazy the president has told him because he's a new yorker like you know these buildings and pulverizing get out of southern Lebanon.

35:30Get out of southern Syria. The president of Lebanon is in Washington today meeting with our president at the White House saying, you got to pull Bibi back. He's bombing Gaza again. It's got to warmonger. He's covering us because he doesn't want to go on trial for corruption. OK, please. Well, the people of Israel will have their chance at the end of October to get him out. The sooner the better.

35:58Piers Morgan:Let me bring in Andrew. The sooner the better. And every time you challenge Bibi, you're called an anti-Semite. I'm called an anti-Semite. I have two Jewish sons. J.D. Vance is now being called an anti-Semite. We're condemning Bibi. We're not condemning Israel. And a lot of Israelis condemn Bibi too. That is true. Although a lot of Israelis also support his warmongering, which is an interesting contradiction. because internally, when he's at war, they support him. And yet he may well lose the election that's coming in later this year. Andrew, you went to Iran with Vice News in May. And part of what you reported on was the use of AI gifs and memes as a weapon against the US and stuff.

36:43Piers Morgan:Had the Iranians proven to be, in terms of modern warfare, in terms of their tactics, a lot smarter, perhaps, than the Americans and Israelis anticipated? Yeah, I would say not just smarter militarily, but also just like the average drive and political involvement of the typical person in Tehran was higher than you might see in the U.S. Like in the U.S. you have maybe like five to 10 percent of people who might say with their chest something like I'm willing to die for America. But in Iran, they see themselves as part of this like kind of this continuous threat of an ancient civilization. And just the resolve of the people was very like extreme.

37:20But at the same time, I also went on the invite or like with an approved press pass by the IRGC. So the places that I was able to go to were a bit limited. Like, you know, there's only free speech when it comes to public protests to the extent that the government sanctions it. So I'm actually not sure if the perspective that I got was reflective of like the standard reality and median opinion of Iranians. But definitely the people that I saw were more committed and intensely devoted to the success of the war or the defeat of the U.S. than anyone that I saw on domestic soil.

37:47Piers Morgan:I mean, Max Afterburner, from a military point of view, Trump keeps saying, look, we've destroyed their air force, their navy, everything is done, the ballistic missile capability, all these things. And then we wake up most mornings and the Iranians somehow seem to be attacking Bahrain, QA, you know, everything else. Well, these two things can't be true at the same time. What is actually going on here? I mean, it's very hard to work out who is telling the truth when we can only gauge it on missiles landing in these countries from Iran, who apparently have no military left. Yeah, well, Iran's gotten really strong, as everybody can see, right?

38:24So over the decades, they've been given money, they've been given time. And what they've done is built multiple ballistic missile bunkers inside of mountains, right? That's where they've taken all their money,$500 million a day, and built that. So Trump inherited a situation where this cancer has grown into a massive problem. These guys have gotten really strong. And I think the world is seeing that right now. So why lie about it?

38:47Piers Morgan:Why keep telling everyone we've destroyed all their military? Pierce, it's like a UFC fight, right? You could be absolutely crushing the opponent. But in round five, round six, the opponent can still get a jab in. So it's said that Iran started this conflict. I think it's more than a jab, Max. I mean, I look at it and I try and always be fair-minded about these things, right? I don't want to have a horse in the race. I want to listen to all the arguments. Which I appreciate. You bring on all sides, which I appreciate. Which I think is really important when there's all this stuff going on. But I'm really struggling to equate what Donald Trump posts on a daily basis with reality.

39:22Piers Morgan:And maybe he is trying to game this, like his book, The Art of the Deal. I read it a few times. A lot of his playbook is from The Art of the Deal. But he's not dealing in New York real estate. You know, he's not dealing in, it's not a UFC fight. This is a real war with real people. And the Iranians, I think he's bitten off here more than he expected to chew. Well, they've gotten a lot stronger than they should have ever gotten. Like this action should have been taken a long time ago. But it said they started with 5 ,000 ballistic missiles at the beginning of the conflict months ago. Now they're down to around somewhere 2 ,000 to 3 ,000, which is obviously still a massive problem.

39:58But he's adapting real time. So you're basically seeing how a president negotiates with terrorists. We're watching this play out right now. It's not an easy problem to solve. I fought Iranian teams in Afghanistan. I fought them in 2012. They sponsored teams to go to Afghanistan, and they were causing havoc and chaos, killing civilians. So this problem has been going on for a long time. This proxy warfare, it's not a forever war that I think Trump wants, but it's a war that's been going on behind the scenes for decades. And now he's trying to actually solve it. He's trying to have a backbone. But I think he may, I want to bring Curtis back in.

40:33Piers Morgan:I think he's actually made things worse, potentially, right? Because I think that the Iranian regime, far from feeling imperiled, I think when they faced an existential threat, as they did, they've managed to game out a way of responding, which has proven highly effective. And, you know, for all the posturing from the Trump administration, they clearly still control the Strait of Hormuz. It's indisputable. You can just see the boats coming in and out on a daily basis. People are tracking it. And when they want to turn that tap off, they turn it off. And when they want to fire missiles at their neighboring, they just do it.

41:08Piers Morgan:And they do it every time they're attacked. So I just feel like - Look at the price of Brink Crude, though. Well, yeah, but the real problem here, it seems to me, and Kurt, I'd like your response to this, is that - Oh, yeah. They could actually feel emboldened now in the sense that they have discovered that the straight-of-form moves gives them way more leverage than they could have ever dreamed of. Piers, we've been down this road before. Remember the evil seed of Kim Jong-un mentally ill behind the rice cake curtain of North Korea? Bill Clinton in his memoir said, I was moments away from sending the jets in.

41:44They'll never get a nuclear weapon. Trump chose a different approach. He met with him twice. Guess what? North Korea, which was a threat to the world, we were told, oh, these crazy people, if they have a nuclear weapon, it's Armageddon. They got 15 nuclear bombs because they know what every country knows. When you have a nuke, nobody messes with you. Look what happened. It's different with them, though. Look what happened to the Ukraine. They gave up their nuclear weapons. You think Putin and Russia would have ever invaded the Ukraine if they still had their nuclear weapons? a nuclear weapon guarantees that nobody's going to attack your country.

42:24Piers Morgan:And the problem now, Andrew Callaghan, is that the Iranians now will probably push harder for a nuclear weapon precisely for the reason Kurdish just laid out, which is actually, given they've had an existential threat against their entire existence, that they've managed to survive, the best way to avoid this happening again is to arm themselves with a nuclear weapon. So in other words, it could end up, if Trump isn't very careful here, with them establishing the very thing he now says, the whole point of the war, was to stop happening. And I'm not sure how he can stop it. Yeah, I suppose whether or not they were enriching uranium and developing nuclear weapons prior to this current conflict remains to be seen.

43:09But now they definitely have a reason to, like you just said. So I think that in a sense, I can only imagine things getting worse before they get better. but then you guys have been around for longer than me. I don't know. Maybe there is going to be peace in the Middle East one day. What do you think?

43:21Piers Morgan:I wish I could say with any confidence that that is the case. But, I mean, Josh Hammer, you know, you and I have been dealing with stories in the Middle East for so long, right? I've been covering them for probably three decades. And I think it's as volatile right now as I've ever known it. And, you know, ultimately, I think all roads lead back to the Palestinians in Gaza, that's still a terrible mess. The West Bank is a terrible mess. Southern Lebanon is a terrible mess. Syria is a mess. You know, you look around, Iran, obviously, you look around and you just see all hell blazing away all over the place there.

44:01Piers Morgan:Do you see with any confidence a way to get to genuine peace? So, Piers, I'm only 37 years old, actually, so when you say you've been coming to this for a few decades... Well, I'm assuming you were coming from the age of seven because you obviously were a very curious child. I was like a second grade, I guess, when you started covering Middle Eastern affairs. My apologies for besmirching you on the age front. No, I'll take it as a form of flattery, actually. So I think you're analyzing this situation. I agree with your bottom line conclusion that peace is not in the offing. I see the region a little bit differently, unsurprisingly, than you do.

44:35You're focusing on the Palestinian question, on Gaza, Judea and Samaria, a.k.a. the West Bank, et cetera. The beauty of the Abraham Accords one of the crowning achievements of Donald Trump's first term was it took a half century of obsessive focus on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the so-called inside-out approach to regional peace, and it totally flipped the paradigm on its head. It showed that by having reconciliation and normalization between Israel and the non-Israelist Arab states in this kind of Iran containment alliance, you can do an outside-in approach to pressure the Palestinians and hopefully achieve something.

45:08If it's not peace, at least it's a stasis or some sort of equilibrium. One of my concerns about this second administration Trump foreign policy is I've seen signs. It's a little bit all over the map, to be honest with you. Sometimes it's very tough on Iran. Sometimes it's very tough on the Muslim Brotherhood, on Islamism, etc. But at other times, it's a little bit more dovish. So, for instance, the sycopycy at times towards Qatar, the sycopycy towards Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was a massive funder of the Brotherhood and Islamism worldwide. This is quite different than Trump's first foreign foreign policy, which in many ways was skeptical of Qatar, skeptical of Turkey, skeptical of the Brotherhood.

45:41And I say all that because I think it has the effect of undermining this Abraham Accords framework, getting us further away from an outside-in approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace and therefore regional peace. So all that to say that I kind of throw my hands to the wall and I say I don't really know, to be honest with you. I do know that the weaker that Iran is, the less they can fund their terror proxies all throughout the region, the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, etc., the more subdued they are. And I would argue the more subdued Erdogan and Turkey are. that I think will be the number one thing that could potentially bring us peace sooner rather than later.

46:11Piers Morgan:It would be fascinating to see how it plays out. Right, I want to end with a question, a very straightforward question. And I'm going to start with you, Max, after Burner. I want to show you a picture of one of my fellow countrymen. And I want you to tell me who this person is and what job they have. And I'll ask each of you individually. Do you know who that is? I don't. okay let's move on curtis who is that former ambassador to the united states okay let's ask the others uh andrew who is that man you know i don't know who that is man but he looks very sad and concerned about something so i hope he's all right josh who is it uh that's your new prime minister andy burnham who i do not have particularly high expectations for i don't i don't blame you guys because he's the seventh prime minister in 10 years, the fifth in four years.

47:08Piers Morgan:There is famously a cat. I was talking about this earlier, a cat called Larry, who was a stray cat who was brought into Downing Street in 2011, who's now out-survived seven different prime ministers. And I have a horrible feeling it might be eight before too long. But the fact that three of you had absolutely no idea who he is, is extremely damning about the farcical nature of politics in my country. So whatever faults I have with the American political system, trust me, you are way ahead of us. Thank you all very much for a fascinating debate. I want to end with a little clip from Andrew, because you've got a really intriguing interview from the promos I've seen between Hunter Biden and Nick Fuentes.

47:55Piers Morgan:Let's take a little taster of this. You said you want to ask me, why are you a Nazi? Inclusion has been our greatest strength. Diversity has been our greatest strength. White people do feel like we are being boxed out. A 26-year-old white kid doesn't feel like he has access because he's been cancelled. And the problem is black people. I didn't say the problem is black people. Well, you just did, Nick. You just said... I said the problem is crime. And we know who's doing the crime in Chicago. Do you get what I'm saying about the Holocaust thing? Oh, about that. It's fascinating. I can't wait to watch that.

48:26Piers Morgan:It's going to be just a clip. I saw it was really illuminating and an intriguing pairing. So congratulations on getting that scoop. Thank you. And thank you all very much. I appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Thanks. Thanks, guys. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent. The only boss around here is me. If you enjoy our show, we ask for only one simple thing. Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate and entertain. And we'll do it all for free. Independent, uncensored media has never been more critical and we couldn't do it without you.