Trump's Tehran nightmare: Are Republicans done with his Iran war?

0:02This is a global production. This is where the Iranians are delivering a masterclass in playing Donald Trump. It's sometimes feel that there is no situation so bad where a few well-chosen words by Pete Hegseth can't make infinitely worse. Even though he tried to project confidence, you could see there was a man squirming in his chair trying to explain what was very obvious to senators on both sides is clearly some kind of stalemate trending toward quagmire. You're asking for literally$1.5 trillion for a war that President Trump said he already won. You're asking for$1.5 trillion, unlimited money for bombs, but insufficient money for the American people for their health care, their food, their housing.

0:51The words you have used in the past don't add up. About Iran specifically, you said that we had obliterated, quote, unquote, Iran's ability to create nuclear weapons. The president made the same claim. Yet eight months later, in February of 2026, the president launched an active war claiming Iran was within two weeks of having a weapon. So, which is true, was it obliterated or wasn't it? What's the status? The nuclear sites under Midnight Hammer were obliterated, but Iranians foolishly continued to attempt to pursue nuclear capabilities, which is why we destroyed their defense industrial base and so many of the other capabilities to ensure they can't get to a nuclear weapon.

1:32We're staying laser focused on the objective and you're trying to make campaign commercials. It's sometimes feel that there is no situation so bad where a few well-chosen words by Pete Hegseth can't make infinitely worse. The situation in Iran is that the death toll is rising. The bill is spiraling. The cost of fuel at the pumps is going up again. And ways out of this are narrowing vanishingly. Is this chaotic war getting even worse for the administration? Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. It's John and there is no Emily today. So Miles Taylor, who was on the show last week, is acting, well, not exactly as her body double, but who will be joining us throughout this episode to talk about the situation in Iran and also to talk about what's happening in the Democratic Party, where its journey to the left is not without its bumps in the road and its own little difficulties that could cost the Democrats at the midterm elections in November.

2:41But we've got to start with the war in Iran, which supposedly was over. There was a memorandum of understanding. There was an agreement. There was going to be framework talks. They were going to conclude a peace deal which would wrap in Iran's nuclear programme, except for the fact that the last 10, 11 nights, There has been bombing by America and Iran has been firing missiles that have killed and injured a number of Americans. So Donald Trump will have to make the grim journey to the Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies of American servicemen and women are repatriated. The cost of this is ballooning.

3:18Pete Hegseth admitted to a bill of$37.6 billion. dollars. Everyone thinks that is a massive underestimate of what the true cost of this is. And yet, what is there positive to show? The Strait of Hormuz is still shut. Iran is still able to fire. The ways out of this, the off-ramp, as Americans like to say, just seems to be disappearing before our eyes. And of course, the midterm elections now are only three or four months away. And sure, what we heard in the introduction there was a Democrat senator, Kirsten Gillibrand from New York, having a go at Pete Hegseth. But Republicans as well are furious and desperate about the situation.

4:05Furious that the administration has got into this mess, desperate because they see the midterms looming and seeing disaster ahead of them. This is Republican Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana. I'm not trying to get you in trouble. I know your advice to the president is private, but this is serious as four heart attacks and a stroke. Now, what happens if we come home and end the blockade to the world? Sir, Iran has the potential to continue to be a threat, and we will need to prepare military options to do that. Will they toll the strait? Sir, that's a hypothetical question, and I don't know the answer to that.

4:54Oh, it's not hypothetical. We come home. It's not going to be hypothetical. You know that, General, and I do too. And I appreciate your discretion, but we're down to it. We need some hard answers and some straight talk. What will happen, Pete? Senator, I would agree with the chairman, but the likely outcome is they would try to impose their will on the waterways in ways that the world would not like. Call it a toll, call it a fee, call it an exchange, call it control. They would do something that they would try to hold to that issue. Yes, sir. Would they try to commence development again of a nuclear warhead?

5:40Part of the reason President Trump had to have the courage to do what he did after Midnight Hammer is that they didn't give up their ambitions, even though their nuclear sites had been obliterated. So this is a regime hellbent on nuclear ambitions and President Trump's will be the last one. We need straight answers. Guys, we need straight answers. It was John Kennedy asking the questions to Dan Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the most senior military officer in the United States, first of all, and then, of course, to the Pentagon secretary, Pete Hegseth, or the secretary of war, as he likes to badge himself.

6:13And I think underlines the frustration that is felt across Democratic Party and Republican Party. But of course, the Republican Party with control of the Senate and the House have far more to lose from this than the Democrats who are a political opportunity here. Well, let's bring in Miles Taylor, former chief of staff to the Homeland Secretary in Trump's first administration, writer and friend of the News Agents USA. Miles, good to see you. How are you? Great to be with you, my friend. I'm good. It's another day in Trump's Washington over here, which means another day of news. Yeah, always, always.

6:52But it doesn't look like the news is exactly the stuff that he would want right now, because the frustration and what's happening in Iran just seems to be spinning out of control. It is. And look, I think there is a sense, even among Trump's most fervent defenders, that his team is in a very difficult spot when they are testifying on Capitol Hill. In fact, you can feel the nervousness of cabinet members when they go up and testify. And nowhere is that more pronounced than with his national security officials. And we saw this with Hegseth's testimony. You could see the glistening on his face as he was testifying.

7:32And even though he tried to project confidence, you could see there was a man squirming in his chair trying to explain what was very obvious to senators on both sides is clearly some kind of stalemate trending toward quagmire. Yeah. And in a quagmire like that, it's hard to see how you merge either with a diplomatic solution because, you know, it's now, I don't know what, day 11, day 12 of successive nights of bombing and no sign that the Iranians are, you know, any closer to surrendering or giving up and no apparent way out of this. And yet you've got a political calendar that is ticking down towards the first Tuesday in November.

8:14Yeah, that's right. And I think that that was very evident in both what you heard in the defense secretary's testimony and what you didn't hear. You know, here here's the rule of thumb in any testimony before Congress during a Trump administration. And I say this as someone who had to prepare multiple cabinet members to go testify before Congress during the first Trump administration. And the rule of thumb is your audience is not the U.S. senators. Your audience is not the American people. There is an audience of one because Donald Trump, he watches these hearings. And if he can't watch them live, he asks for the recordings because he wants to see what his cabinet members say, Not because he's keenly interested in the policy nuances they discuss.

9:01He wants to know, are they being loyal? And I can't tell you how many times, John, I was on the receiving end of phone calls where Donald Trump heard about something someone said at a hearing. And I thought, oh, my goodness, he's actually paying attention to these hearings. Well, he is paying attention to those hearings because he wants to make sure his foot soldiers stay in line and don't say things he doesn't want them to say. And that's why you saw in the hearings, you know, Hegseth bending over backwards to not seem at odds with the president. But that's very difficult because you have a president who has repeatedly declared victory in this conflict.

9:38And it's clear that there isn't victory. And there was this exchange, John, that stood out to me between U.S. Senator John Ossoff and Pete Hegseth that showed that dissonance, that showed the delta between the things the administration claims and the reality. And even Hegseth wasn't willing to sign up for comments he himself made merely months ago. Take a look. On day 14 of this conflict, Mr. Secretary, day 14, nearly five months ago, you stated that Iran's military had been, quote, destroyed and, quote, made combat ineffective. That was on day 14 of the war. Was that an accurate statement? They didn't have a Navy any longer.

10:20It was completely sunk. Their missiles were buried underneath a lot of their underground facilities, and their defense industrial base has been almost completely destroyed. So as far as a military assessment of Iran's capabilities, it didn't mean by any stretch of the imagination absolute zero. Mr. Secretary, you stated that on day 14 of this conflict, in the second week of the conflict, you stated that Iran's military had been, quote, destroyed and, quote, made combat ineffective. Was that an accurate statement? Yes or no? Iran's ability to challenge the United States of America at the level at which we're capable of.

10:56That's not what I asked you, Mr. Secretary. You said on day 14, Iran's military had been, quote, destroyed and, quote, made combat ineffective. Yes or no? Was that an accurate statement? What the American military has done to the Iranian military is a historic military defeat. Will you answer the question under oath? In that context. Yeah, he didn't really want to answer that question under oath because he knew what he would have to say. I think that's such a great clip to play. And I think it shows the dilemma of a cabinet minister. in Trump's administration. But Miles, you also wrote something I thought really interesting this week about how foreign leaders have to play him and how the Iranians are kind of delivering a masterclass in all of this.

11:39Yeah, I wrote this piece in the iPaper. Initially, I was going to talk about how we have seen foreign governments in a second Trump administration really master the art of praising Donald Trump to manipulate him. And this is something that we worried a great deal about in his first term inside his administration. We would see foreign leaders come in. They will have practiced their compliments to try to get concessions from the president and then walk out of the Oval Office having gotten those concessions. And there was an enormous degree of frustration among his team on his ability to be played by foreign leaders.

12:13But there were two sides to that coin. One side was praise. The other side was provocation, Because just as easily as Donald Trump could be swayed by flattery, he could also be swayed by taunts and schoolyard taunts. And this is where the Iranians are delivering a master class in playing Donald Trump is, you know, at the beginning of this war, some folks might have said, why are the Iranians doing this weird thing where they're producing AI generated videos of Legos mocking Donald Trump? Why are they producing memes? Why do they seem like, well, for lack of a better term, MAGA frat bros on the Internet doing all this posting?

12:51Well, the Iranians learned that these are the types of taunts that get Donald Trump's attention. Why does that matter? Because the recent taunts from Iran, not just the Lego videos, but the murals in Tehran of Donald Trump in a casket of his family members in the crosshairs are the types of things designed to keep him in the conflict, to bog the United States down by taunting the president in continuing a conflict that any other rational observer would say the Iranians should have ended. They should have taken this multi hundred billions of dollars deal that the administration put on the table.

13:26Why wouldn't they? Well, a more seasoned geopolitical observer would say because they have other patrons, the Chinese, the Russians, nation states that would like to see the United States continue to be bogged down in this conflict. And the Iranians know that they have a button to push for that. And it is taunting Donald Trump. And by all accounts, it seems to be working. The other thing that I've always thought about listening to Donald Trump is when he expressly states, I'm not concerned about this. You know, he is absolutely concerned about this. Black is white and white is black. And that is the world in which Donald Trump lives.

14:02And if he's saying I've absolutely kind of won here, there's nothing to see here. You know, he's invariably lost. And that's the way it goes. And I thought it was really interesting when he got asked again in the White House about the Iran conflict, about the timeline, whether he was concerned about the midterms. Of course, the denial came. Have a listen. They don't seem to be able to do anything about it. If they managed their forests, they wouldn't have the fires. Do you believe that Iran is trying to impact the midterm elections by threatening the street of hormones? They won't have any impact on me.

14:37I'm just going to do the right thing. I don't view it as, gee, we're having an election in a period of time. You know, everyone says, oh, I'm doing something before. Now, the election, I can't think about that having to do with this. I think people are very impressed. I mean, we took over Venezuela. We now have a great relationship with Venezuela. People are very impressed, he says, John. People are very impressed. Let me add to that category of impressed people. The Republican House Speaker, the top Republican on Capitol Hill, who this week said, basically, we need to wrap this up, doesn't seem very impressed with the war, doesn't seem very eager to go into the midterm elections with a quagmire wrapped around Republicans necks.

15:22And he is not the only one. We have seen Republican after Republican indicate that they want to see the administration bring this into the endgame. And that's why it was so interesting to watch this hearing yesterday, because the defense secretary was testifying to ask for billions and billions of additional dollars to continue this war. And there was another interesting moment in that conversation. I was covering the hearing live on MS Now here in the States, and there was this moment, this exchange with senators where Pete Hegseth admitted that the Department of Defense in the United States has been doing a lot of work domestically for the Department of Homeland Security.

16:05This is, of course, has been very controversial here. Troop deployments in U.S. cities, the Defense Department to try to help secure the border and work on immigration issues. And Hegseth admits that the Defense Department is still basically owed billions of dollars by the Department of Homeland Security for that domestic work. This was a rare opening for the Democrats because it shows that the administration could still pay itself from one department to another and maybe doesn't need to be going to Capitol Hill to ask for billions for the war. Right. The Department of Homeland Security owes the Department of Defense money.

16:44That's relevant because this may be the type of thing some Republicans and Democrats used to say, you know what, we're not going to give you any more money. You've got other pockets of money inside the government you can use to pay yourself. We're not going to support more for this war. Just the type of excuse they need to say no so they don't have to sign up again for supporting this war before the midterms. The thing that strikes me now is, you know, talking in the framing of the midterms, is that Donald Trump has bad options and he has worse options. The bad options are that you almost cut and run, you declare a victory, but everyone will know it's not a victory.

17:22You leave the Iranians in control of the Strait of Hormuz, which they weren't beforehand. And a war of choice has made something a whole lot worse. That would seem to be pretty terrible. The worst option is you really go in with an intent to win this war against the Iranians, which will take massive troop commitments and an awful lot more visits to Dover Air Force Base for the repatriation of American servicemen and women. And which would seem to me, come the midterms, even worse if gas prices are still over four dollars a gallon as they are today. Well, I would say that there's potentially a third option, John, and this is one that the administration has clearly not pursued, which is to go lean on Iran's patrons.

18:09This is something that the Obama administration recognized when they hatched their nuclear deal with Iran. And full disclosure, I was on the Republican side of Capitol Hill at the time and actively opposing Obama's nuclear deal. But what Obama realized was he couldn't just strike a deal with Iran, that the Iranians would rush to the Chinese or the Russians on anything that they needed to defend themselves. And so the Obama administration had to bring those powers into the conversation. This is something Donald Trump has been reluctant to do. He doesn't want to ratchet up the pressure on Vladimir Putin.

18:45He doesn't want to ratchet up the pressure on Xi Jinping. He wants better relations with the two of them. As a result, because he's not putting pressure on those two governments, Iran has a lifeline. It's got a lifeline. It's not under withering pressure from its closest patrons. And that closes off an opportunity to end this war. So if Trump would expand the international circle of negotiations, put pressure on more than just the Iranians, he might find another way to end this war without a massive ground invasion. We'll be back in just a moment with the Democratic Party and its drift in a leftward's direction.

19:44by the ICC. My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here. It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does, and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant. And I want to be equally clear. Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large. While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon, and we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people.

20:26I got to tell you, John, very interesting to see the New York City mayor making that statement. It says two things. One, we're going to talk about this. We're going to talk about the leftward drift of the Democratic Party and how democratic socialists are on the ascent, but it also shows how ambitious these folks feel. You've got this man who was just elected less than a year ago as mayor of New York City, talking about a major issue of U.S. foreign policy and arresting a foreign leader that comes into New York. Now, he says he doesn't have the power, but the fact that that's even talked about shows you the rapid ascent of Mamdani and the democratic socialists.

21:08Yeah, I think what's so interesting is that, you know, you go back to the Biden administration and Biden was on friendly terms with Netanyahu. Yeah, Netanyahu was a difficult son of a bitch to deal with. But, you know, the Democratic Party was pro-Israel. And you look at the Democratic Party today and if you ask the question, is the Democratic Party still pro-Israel? I think you'd have to give a very different answer. And I think that is one of the manifestations of the way that the party is changing and has changed. And I go back, you know, I remember sort of being out in the States during the 2016 presidential election.

21:43And, you know, of course, it's, you know, Hillary, it's Trump. But it was also Bernie Sanders. And Bernie Sanders was this kind of sideshow getting huge support. But it was one guy from Vermont who was, you know, a democratic socialist who was had a very different message when he was running for the democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. And you see the Democratic Party today. And it's not just Bernie Sanders. Then it became the squad, these various congressmen and women who kind of were a small clutch of democratic socialists or to the left. And now you're seeing it across the country, the proliferation of candidates where they are much further to the left than the Democratic Party traditionally is.

22:28And we saw the limitations of that when they kind of got Graham Plattner to run in Maine and suddenly it all goes to shit. And they're thinking, oh, no, oh, God, we've got someone here who we need to get shot as fast as possible. What a difference a decade makes, my friend, because, you know, after Bernie Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton years ago in the 2016 race, there were centrist Democrats who tried to write the obituary of the socialists within the party and say it's over. The centrists have won. Now here we are. The momentum is love it or hate it with a lot of these folks like Mamdani in the party.

23:07I also want to just say Israel is a very interesting bellwether about how this has changed. You wouldn't normally expect it. You wouldn't say you would say, what is Israel policy have to do with the leftward shift of the Democratic Party? Well, I'll tell you, because about 10 years ago, I sat down with Benjamin Netanyahu a number of times in his office in Israel. And what I can tell you is at that point in time, when we were fighting ISIS in Syria, when the United States was dependent on its Israeli allies to go after these terrorist groups, you had a Netanyahu who felt supremely confident in his understanding of American politics.

23:49He knew how to play Republicans. He knew how to play Democrats. When I would take members of Congress into Netanyahu's office in Israel, he knew more about U.S. politics than they knew. And I don't even say that as an exaggeration. The man knew races. The man knew results. He could quote chapter and verse, leaving those members of Congress walking out speechless. They would say, wow, he's a tour de force. What you see now with Israel so low in approval polls in the United States and especially in the Democratic Party is a country that's lost touch with American politics. But it also shows how quickly the scene has changed, how quickly the Mamdani's in the movement have ascended.

24:30There is one other piece to this, though, John, which is that Republican pollsters, many of them will tell you privately, they don't see this as a threat. They see it as an opportunity. They will say they want more Mamdani's to enter the Democratic Party and Democratic politics. They want more Mamdani's elected because they think they have a line in running against socialism. I think that that's such an interesting place to be now to discuss this, because it feels to me that the Democratic Party is making a very big bet that the kind of views of the people that you get turning up at rallies in New York City or Boston or San Francisco or L.A.

25:14or a representative of the country as a whole. and it's not clear to me that that is the center of political gravity in America. Sure, they're making a lot of noise and they are winning arguments and they are getting people onto tickets. But is that where the center of gravity is in America? Now, I probably think the Republicans are right to think there is an opportunity here, unless I've kind of completely misjudged America from my time living there. You've hit it straight on, John. I mean, And some people have described this as blue MAGA, the phenomenon as blue MAGA. Go back to 2016. Donald Trump didn't represent the majority of the Republican Party.

25:56He wasn't the consensus candidate. He represented a minority of the party that was the loudest minority. And he used that megaphone one by one to pick off his rivals and to ascend and to build an odd duck coalition to ultimately become the leader of the party. And then once he was atop it, to remake it in his own image. Now, their policies in many cases are very different. But the reason people will call this blue MAGA is you're seeing a similar phenomenon. The mom Donnies of the Democratic Party, by and large, don't really represent the majority of it in terms of viewpoints. But they are the loudest.

26:33They're the most charismatic. They're the most energetic. And they're going to use that faction that they have within the Democratic Party to grow their strength and to try to reshape the party in their own image. I'll tell you, I was on set at CNN the day after Mamdani won, and I was on with one of these Republican pollsters, and during commercial break, I asked him, what is going to be your number one line in the midterms? And he said, over and over again, we are just going to run clips of Mamdani, and we're going to warn about communism and socialism. That's it. That's what we're going to do.

27:08There was another Democrat on set with me who expressed anxiety about this and said, you know, the problem is the Mamdani's really aren't the majority of the party. And we had just seen victories in New Jersey and Virginia from two centrist Democratic gubernatorial candidates, Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, who that Democrat said, those are the people who really represent the majority of Democrats, centrist, pragmatic. And you could see it in the eyes of the Democratic operative on set that they were nervous about the whole party being painted as Mamdani, because in middle America, that would result in GOP victories.