Trump and the Art of the Surrender with Ben Rhodes

0:26Ben Meiselas:We'll be right back. Save now at Whole Foods Market. It's the Summer Splash event. With great everyday prices on 365 brand ground beef for the grill and ice cream for dessert, they have yellow sales signs on ready-to-cook beef or chicken kebabs, too. Level up with savory marinades, spices, and rubs, and complete your cookout with a crowd-pleasing cherry pie and their balsamic chicken salad. Available at the prepared foods counter. Get Summer Splash savings now at Whole Foods Market. All hell has broken loose as Donald Trump's top Republican allies in the United States and elsewhere are turning against him after his unequivocal, unconditional surrender to Iran.

1:15Ben Meiselas:As one account notes, it takes truly keen political instincts to alienate your party's senatorial class just before selling out the U.S. to Iran and needing them to run cover for you. Top-notch stuff that was reposted by a right-wing guy named Eric Erickson. Now, we've heard from MAGA Republican senators like Roger Wicker after Donald Trump announced his surrender to Iran, after Trump promising that Iran would be the one that did an unconditional surrender. But Trump did an unconditional surrender and gave Iran everything they wanted, including $25 billion control over the Strait of Hormuz, and that Trump has agreed he won't even talk about nuclear issues with Iran for another 30, 60 days.

2:03Ben Meiselas:days. Here's what MAGA Republican Senator Roger Wicker says. The rumored 60-day ceasefire with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught. Let me just fact check him right there and fact check a lot of this. We should never have been in this unlawful and catastrophic war at all, period, at full stop. Donald Trump and Netanyahu are war criminals. They're genocidal maniacs. I'm just simply pointing out that Donald Trump promised a set of criteria that he said would show success, and he's failed in each and every one of them.

2:43Ben Meiselas:Ben Rhodes, former President Obama's speechwriter and deputy national security director, wrote the following. Nothing was accomplished by Operation epic fury, except putting the IRGC in charge of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. Then we heard from Lindsey Graham, warmonger Lindsey Graham. He writes, if it is perceived in the region that a deal with Iran allows the regime to survive and become more powerful over time, we will have poured gasoline on the conflicts in Lebanon and Iraq, a deal that is perceived to allow Iran to survive and possess the ability to control the strait in the future will put hezbollah in lebanon and the shia militias in iraq on steroids he then goes on to say if a deal is struck to end the iranian conflict because it is believed the strait of her moves cannot be protected from iranian terrorism and iran still possesses the capability to destroy major gulf oil infrastructure then iran will be perceived as being a dominant force requiring a diplomatic solution.

3:50Ben Meiselas:This combination of Iran being perceived as having the ability to terrorize the strait in perpetuity and the ability to inflict massive damage to Gulf infrastructure is a major shift of the balance of power in the region and over time will be a nightmare for Israel. I guess Israel first for Lindsey Graham. Also, it makes one wonder why the war started to begin with, if these perceptions are accurate. I personally am a skeptic of the idea that Iran cannot be denied the ability to terrorize the strait and the region cannot protect itself against Iranian military capability. It is important that we get this right.

4:31Ben Meiselas:Then you had Ted Cruz, and Ted Cruz posted as well that he thought that this was catastrophic, that the outcomes would be terrible. And he said that you couldn't have a worse solution to which you then had Donald Trump's MAGA influencers and people in the White House, like Alice Brusowitz said, cool, Ted, no one asked you, bro, stop trying to undermine the president and his administration. Cruz wrote, I'm deeply concerned about what we are hearing about an Iran deal being pushed by some voices in the administration. And then in response to Trump official Alex Brusowitz calling him out, Ted Cruz goes, hush child, the adults are talking.

5:15Ben Meiselas:I'm not your bro. And young political grifters pushing Iran appeasement are not remotely helping the president. One commentator noted, when you're having to tell Ted Cruz to shut up and be more obedient to Trump, probably not a great sign for normie voters. Then you had Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump's own former Secretary of State. He posted, the deal being floated with Iran seemed straight out of the Wendy Sherman, Robert Malley, Ben Rhodes playbook. Pay the IRGC to bill a WMD program and terrorize the world, not remotely America first. It's straightforward. Open the damn straight. Deny Iran access to money.

6:00Ben Meiselas:Take out enough Iranian capability so it cannot threaten our allies in the region. Overdue. Let's go. More and more warmongering. In other words, then you had Stephen Chung, Donald Trump's communication director, attack Mike Pompeo. And he said, Mike Pompeo has no idea what the fuck he's talking about. He should shut his stupid mouth. This is Donald Trump's head of communications in the White House. This guy's the top communications person in the White House. Leave the real work to the professionals. He's not read into anything that's happening. So how would he know? I think the only thing that people know is that Donald Trump said, here's what we're going to do.

6:39Ben Meiselas:Regime change. We're going to get rid of all the nuclear material. We're going to get rid of the conventional weapons that are a shield to the nuclear material. like the ballistic missiles and the Shahid drones, right? Trump said, here, all regime change, all these things were going to happen, and none of them happen. And Trump showed that America's security umbrella in the Middle East was a complete and utter failure. And now, you know, you have Donald Trump sycophants like MAGA Mike Johnson posting, President Trump is the only one who could have gotten Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism, to the negotiating table.

7:15Ben Meiselas:We are greatly encouraged to learn of a peace deal in Iran is underway and look forward to learning more about the specifics. Under Trump's leadership, our nation is stronger, more respected on the global stage and safer than ever before. You know, to which Eric Erickson, very right wing guy, says Obama got Iran to the negotiating table. And boy, doesn't the JCPOA seem like a great deal? I always thought the JCPOA was a great deal. Iranian enrichment, taking the uranium down to what under 4 % enrichment, weapons grades like 90 % enrichment. It had all these international mechanisms to ensure that Iran wouldn't get weapons grade, but could use for civilian purposes.

8:01Ben Meiselas:There was the buy-in by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, and there was all of these mechanisms. Fordow was turned into a research center. That's what you had there. Here, Donald Trump's base after all of this, after the war crimes, after Manab, after Lebanon, after all the horrors that were unleashed in the world, after all of this, after Donald Trump saying, here's what I'm going to do, here's how we're going to win. Donald Trump got a deal that was way worse, not even in the same league as was Obamas. If the Obama deal was the major leagues, this Trump deal was the peewee leagues.

8:44Ben Meiselas:That's who Trump always is though. You know who I want to talk to about all of this? I want to talk to the person who you had Pompeo and Cruz are all attacking. Someone who worked in the Obama administration, Ben Rhodes. As Ben Rhodes just wrote to Lindsey Graham also. This guy helps create a global catastrophe and then notices that his dumb policy has left Iran stronger. So of course, what's needed is even more war right there. Oh, and Ben Rhodes posted, DC's Iran hawks got two wars, nearly every conceivable sanction designation, a blockade through a wrench in the global economy, and will still claim that just a little more pressure, a little more war, a touch of more bombing will magically yield the concessions they still won't be satisfied with.

9:28Ben Meiselas:So right before this deal by Donald Trump was announced, probably another market manipulation thing as well, I spoke with Ben Rhodes and I had a great conversation with him about everything that's going on in the world in the Middle East. This is an exclusive interview I'd done with Ben Rhodes. Let me bring in my interview with Ben Rhodes. You're going to want to watch this. I mean, this was, I thought, a really powerful interview with Ben Rhodes. Let's Let's bring in Ben Rhodes, former President Obama's speechwriter, former deputy national security advisor. Great to see you, Ben. You're out with the new book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity, A History in 15 Speeches.

10:07Ben Meiselas:But I got to ask you from the outset with this geopolitical environment going on, you've been in the room with Vladimir Putin before. You've been in the most high level meetings with former President Obama. So we got to dig in there to start. but there's definitely a link with the book because projecting who we are as Americans is what pervades your book. So I'm trying to distill for our audience the kind of moment that we're in, which is filled with this kind of existential dread about domestic issues and foreign policy kind of being intertwined. And when you think about foreign policy, it seems if there's any consistency, which there isn't, It is attack our allies, whether it's Canada, NATO, Denmark, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, whoever, just attack them and then heap praise on the authoritarians, the adversaries who are working very openly to undermine and destroy us and aren't hiding that.

11:14Ben Meiselas:And Trump brags about his meeting with Xi, which to me looked utterly pathetic. Putin then shows up in China and then gets a hero's welcome where they announce a new multipolar world. You had Foreign Minister Aragji showing up right before Donald Trump goes there in Beijing. And so let's just talk macro and then let's drill down a little bit. Then let's get into the book. Macro, what are you seeing right now about what America is doing? To me, it's not projecting strength. It's projecting being like a predator and then attacking our allies and making us weaker.

11:51Ben Rhodes:Yeah, that's a good summary. I mean, I think one way to approach this is like Trump clearly feels most at home in the autocrat club. You know, the people that he wants to spend time with are not even, you know, Republican members of Congress, certainly not ally leaders. It's Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and Bibi Netanyahu and people like that. But if you pull the camera back, you know, Russia has wanted to destroy the U.S.-led international order for some time now under Putin. Xi Jinping and China would like to replace that order with something that is dominated by the Chinese. And Donald Trump is the most useful, witting or unwitting partner in that project, because everything he is doing is accelerating the dismantling and unraveling of that international order.

12:41Ben Rhodes:So, you know, essentially, the international system doesn't function anymore. When you ever hear about the United Nations, he's dismantling U.S. allies. He clearly has no regard for NATO. That's our comparative strength, by the way, to the Chinese and Russians. And it's no coincidence that at that precise time, you have a massive war in Ukraine that shows no sign of ending despite Trump's promises to end it on day one. You have this bizarre, totally pointless and unnecessary and destructive war in Iran that is accelerating the loss of faith that people have in America, around the world. And at the same time, and this is where it becomes kind of existential to people, in this country, capitalism doesn't work.

13:23Ben Rhodes:Inequality is run amok. AI is coming online and creating all this uncertainty about the future. So there's a sense that everything is kind of unraveling and that the beneficiary of that is basically going to be a combination of Xi Jinping and the Chinese alternative, and then the people that are kind of looting the system in this country, the tech oligarchs and Trump cronies. And I just don't think it's a sustainable dynamic. It's going to require a pretty massive correction in the next couple of years.

13:55Ben Meiselas:Talk about the damage that you see arising out of this war that may not be so obvious. I think some of the obvious things, which I'm not downplaying, are the rise in gas prices, inflation increasing, the cost of the war in the hundreds of billions, a$1.5 trillion military budget because one trillion couldn't control the Strait of Hormuz, the loss of life most significantly of our brave men and women who were out there. There's that. And then there's the kind of American standing in the world, though, that to me is not getting enough attention, because that is when you think about your administration with Obama handing off a stable, predictable, certain kind of world that Trump used to say, look how great I am for the first two or three years, and then try to blame the remainder on COVID.

14:50Ben Meiselas:The point is you're a temporary occupant of the White House and you're supposed to pass on a better situation or a stable situation. And what I see, and you probably have a better perspective of this than just about anybody, the security umbrella America's standing, both in terms of NATO in the Middle East and Southeast East Asia is gone. Having an American military base in your country is a liability and is not even a strength anymore. And it makes you subject to American extortion and it makes you a target of other nations as well. And the offensive capabilities that America once projected were demonstrated, one, to be not reliable, but two, a defensive posture with all of these drones and the way modern warfare has taken place.

15:37Ben Meiselas:I think we've been exposed there as well, that these billion dollar, billion dollar THAAD and Patriot systems are important, but it's also not reflective of the modern warfare that we've seen, you know, play out in Ukraine and in Russia and now in Iran. So what do you see about the standing and a more significance in kind of a global world order structure?

16:00Ben Rhodes:Well, first of all, there's some other unseen short term costs, and then there are the longer term costs that you're speaking to. I just say that we've also not been told the truth by the Pentagon and by the U.S. military, frankly, about the extent of the damage. I mean, I talk to people in the Middle East, the extent of the damage to U.S. bases, facilities, embassies across the region. We just we have no sense of the price tag, the amount of devastation, how long some of those facilities are going to be offline. And to your point, we've also spent down an extraordinary amount of U.S. munitions that we brought from places like Asia, leaving South Korea more vulnerable to try to defend all these facilities and our allies.

16:39Ben Rhodes:And what have we learned? To your point, Shahzad Iranian drones that you can make in your garage have hit our bases, have hit our Gulf Arab allies. An aircraft carrier cannot stop a speedboat from closing the Strait of Hormuz. And so it undermines the entire concept that America is a security guarantor, both in terms of our predictability and reliability and our not doing something as stupid as launching a regime change war against Iran, but also just in terms of our capacity and our understanding of where war is moving, as you said, after Ukraine and Iran. Then I think there are going to be massive geopolitical shifts here.

17:22Ben Rhodes:First of all, the Iranian regime, because of the war and the assassination of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, nobody is shedding a tear for, but it's actually more hardline now. Iran is now run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that has demonstrated that they can control the Strait of Hormuz through which 20 % of the world's fossil fuel energy flows. That is a huge deal, right? The Gulf Arab allies have played along with a concept in which we provide their security and they provide the energy. And that's kind of how the whole global economy works. Well, now their dependence on America has put them at risk.

18:00Ben Rhodes:They were attacked because they are American allies and we could not defend them. And that is going to lead them, I think, to start hedging against the United States and looking towards China. And then if you look around the world more broadly, to include our Asian allies and to include potentially even our European allies, who looks like a more stable and predictable actor right now? The Chinese Communist Party that maybe you don't like the terms of the deal, maybe you think they're bullies, but the terms never change. or the United States, where you have a president who's been imposing tariffs, launching wars, shaking you down for essentially, you know, tribute payments like he's done to the Gulf.

18:39Ben Rhodes:America is not the stable bet. We are kind of the rogue nation in the world. And so I think what you're going to see in the long run, it puts at risk the dollar as the world's reserve currency, the dollar. I think most Americans don't realize what what allows us to sustain our standards of living, which I already feel like they're at risk because of rising prices, is the fact that we can take on so much debt because the whole world transacts through the dollar. Well, and that includes oil trades, importantly. You're already seeing some nations begin to move away from that. And if that is the case, then that is truly the end of not just kind of American hegemony, but America's capacity to sustain its fiscal situation.

19:19Ben Rhodes:So there's a lot happening right now. Yeah.

19:22Ben Meiselas:And I want to put a little pin in that because I want to talk about that, because what do we do when the next Democratic administration comes into power in D.C. and all of this, these issues then get blamed and the arsonists blame the firefighter for trying to put it out. and then you have a corporate news of trillions of dollars that just push, you know, the day-to-day game. Well, I won't put a pin in it. I'll jump in it now and then I'll get back to the next point. But then it gets back to the gamification of, you know, oh, look, you know, all these problems are happening, but this is this mounting Ponzi scheme that we're seeing, you know, this shell game right now that we're seeing where things are bad right now, but in the future, 10, 20, 30, 50 years, they can get significantly worse.

20:12Ben Meiselas:And Trump's handing the successor a pile of crap in the worst possible situation. And then that person gets blamed for it. And then all of these MAGA people who are going along with golden ballrooms and arches and$1.8 billion J6 settlements where Trump waives claims against himself for like audits and all these people then are like, we're so against this. And how dare you, you know, Democratic president. Then they become China hawks in Taiwan, the exact things they were. How do you see having the perspective of an Obama, how do you combat when that happens? So we don't get into this constant seesaw of the Democratic president gets blamed and a new Republican like Trump emerges, then a Democrat fixes it.

21:00Ben Meiselas:Obama had to fix George W. Bush's mess. Took him a while, but fixed it, handed it over. Trump created a mess. Biden started to fix it. It's the blame for those first three years. Things were going good. Trump, Brexit. How do we get out of this cycle?

21:15Ben Rhodes:Well, I think, first of all, what we can do is we can kind of learn from the last two times because there are things that were done right, but there are also things that were done wrong. If you look at Obama comes in and there's a global financial crisis, remember that one, as well as the catastrophic war in Iraq. And while I think Obama did a lot of stuff right, there was also a sense that, hey, we're not going to look back. We're not going to kind of go after people. We're here to look forward and to build new things and to try to work together with Republicans. And that obviously left Obama in a situation where there was both a sense there wasn't accountability for those failures, but there's also a sense that, well, he owned things now because he's saying, well, this is normal.

21:57Ben Rhodes:I'm taking the handoff and doing what I'm doing. Biden very similarly came in with COVID and a lot of economic disruption, obviously, a lot of, you know, diminished U.S. standing in the world. And the idea was we're kind of returning to normal here. We're getting like the adults back in charge. And the same thing, there wasn't kind of a relentless effort to kind of spotlight just how much things had gone wrong and who was to blame for that and hold them accountable. Look, I think that the next Democratic president to come and things are going to get worse in the next couple of years. So first of all, I think it's going to be very apparent to Americans just how deep of a hole we're in by the time of the next presidential election.

22:33Ben Rhodes:I think you have to come in with speed. You are not coming to restore normalcy. You're coming in an emergency situation. I mean, I think the analogy would be, and I just spent, you know, four years in American history because of working on this book. The analogy would be FDR, who was one of the chapters in my book. But when he came in, it was not normal. We're moving fast. We're doing huge things. And I think that we have to come in, hold people accountable. We have to reveal all the corruption. Don't hesitate from looking back. I mean, I'll leave it to the justice system to deal with people who have committed crimes.

23:14Ben Rhodes:But beyond that, I think there should be a relentless focus on spotlighting the grift and corruption and dismantling of the U.S. government that was done. There has to be a rapid effort to uproot anything that is entrenched in the U.S. government that is MAGA ideology or grift. There has to be a reconstruction of how the U.S. government works. There has to be an enormous reform agenda. And this is another thing I found in my book after the Gilded Age is when you got the direct election of senators, you got women's suffrage, a similar level of ambition in just transforming how politics is financed, how politicians are held accountable in this country, how you can assure Americans that the government is actually going to work for them and not just a set of special interests.

23:57Ben Rhodes:And then globally, I think a real effort to say, this is over. We're dismantling this forever war apparatus. We're not just drawing down some troops. We're taking the whole thing apart. We're an anti-war party now. We're not going to do the dumb war thing anymore. And we're going to re-engage the world as a country that wants to deal with issues that people care about. Like, how do you put guardrails about artificial intelligence? How do you deal with the threat of climate change? So I think all that adds up to the Democrats needing to not come in and try to make things feel normal, but to come in and act as FDR did with the sense that there is an emergency that is of a scale that everything is going to have to be different going forward.

24:37Ben Meiselas:I think about the State of the Union address that you put in January 6, 1941, FDR, when he says the nation which had looked inward was now committed to an all-inclusive national defense to defending not just the Western Hemisphere, but people who are resisting aggression and to rejecting any negotiated peace with dictators. These principles, as you write, would not shape not just America's approach to World War II, but its policies for 80 years, as you talk about the speech that he gave. And here we are now seeing a complete reversal of that Donald Trump coddling with dictators. And as I go through, you know, as I go through your book, I mean, as you say, you know, these words, these speeches have a way of redefining, setting the direction and tone of American history and just how important words are.

25:25Ben Meiselas:I mean, you as a speechwriter were very careful when you would be drafting these speeches. I can't even imagine the amount of work that went into the famous speech that you and Obama did in Cairo. I mean, these are every word comma had a meaning that was that was embedded, that was past looking, forward looking, present looking, that communicated messages to parties that that understood it. And in this particular moment right now, as you also pivot in the book to talk about Trump's assault on democracy, it's also an assault on on words and language. And the mean by when he does these speeches, if you even want to call him that, which is just verbal diarrhea and it's all over the place.

26:09Ben Meiselas:It is kind of an affront to the idea of words matter, what America says matter. And in and of itself, the verbal diarrhea is a destructive exercise akin to siding with our enemies over our allies through the verbal diarrhea. That's one of the things I took out of the book, even if that's not what you said it's about.

26:32Ben Rhodes:Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And look, to connect these conversations, because I think it's really important how you framed it. Trump has kind of dismantled the idea that we have a shared national identity, or even a shared reality in this country. Now, underpinning that is a deeply reactionary story that has always been part of the American story, right? It's a kind of white Christian nationalism that rejects or subordinates other identities and basically says that there's a group of people in this country, and with Trump, it's a very small group of people who are allowed to do whatever they want.

27:09Ben Rhodes:And then alternatively, there's a more progressive sense of national identity, a progressive story that I trace, you know, all the way back from the Constitution through the abolitionist movement and Lincoln and through FDR and Kennedy and King up through Obama that says what America is about is a country that is founded on a creed, an idea that we pursue equality and that we're extending that effort across the United States and around the world. And I think that this has been missing in this country and in how this country talks to the world. Right now, there's a sense that people have everywhere that it's not working, that the American experiment is in some ways unraveling, that I don't think that the life for my kids is going to be better than my life, that I don't know how the economy is going to function with AI.