Has Trump lost it?

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1:00be very helpful and the prime minister is a nice man i think he's a very nice guy he says well i'd like to ask my team i said you don't have to worry about a team you don't have a team you're the prime minister you can make a decision well i have to speak to my people i said you don't have to speak to anybody so it's very disappointing and then after we obliterated them and destroyed their military, the whole thing, and it became a much safer zone. He said, we're going to send over two aircraft carriers. I said, I don't want them anymore. I don't want them after we win. I want them before we start.

1:38Donald Trump is sounding like an angry man with no friends. He's looking for help in his war with Iran. But so far, none has been offered. Yes, he's called for assistance. No one wants to go near the Strait of Hormuz as it currently stands. This operation in Iran is called Epic Fury. But given his isolation, is Epic Fury a better description of Donald Trump himself? Welcome to the News Agents.

2:14the news agents it's john it's emily it's lewis and donald trump spoke at length yesterday at a news conference which was primarily uh pulled together to talk about the kennedy center in washington i mean sorry the trump kennedy center as it has now been renamed and closing for two years and donald trump had the various board members around the table but he was opining on Iran and what was happening there and a series of more jumbled more confused more contradictory more angry messages it was sort of hard to imagine as he railed against his allies he said the war was won no it wasn't won we need extra help but no we don't need extra help because all we've got all Iran is now is a paper tiger and they're not going to be firing in the Straits of Hormuz for very long and you thought well if you've got the strait of hormuz under control why is no shipping going through it and why aren't american warships of which there are many escorting uh the the the tankers through the strait uh answers to those sort of questions came there none yeah trump has asked france china japan south korea and britain to help secure the straits this is of course um only two weeks or so after saying he didn't need any help saying that Keir Starmer could stick his help in terms of sending aircraft carriers something number 10 has actually said he didn't uh offer president's own remarks seem to repeatedly contradict himself telling reporters really i'm demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it's their territory less than an hour later he said they should come and they should help us protect it you could make the case that maybe we shouldn't even be there at all because we don't need it We have a lot of oil.

4:01We're the number one producer anywhere in the world times two, which, of course, rather begs the question. But what on earth is this whole war about in the first place if American security interests aren't fundamentally involved? And I think what's so interesting this time is the response, because Trump's anger and his criticism of NATO allies is nothing new. But it's being met this time with a kind of shrug. and I think that tells us so much about how the rest of the world is now looking at this man at the centre of it. I mean, clearly this is a grave issue. It's a matter of war. So any actual policy decision is being taken very seriously by those of whom he's asking for help.

4:48But there is something about what we used to call the weave, the ramble, the contradiction. it's now sounding like a sort of Act 5, Scene 1 soliloquy of a kind of dying monarch. And I don't mean that in a literal sense. I mean somebody who's sort of seeing their power ebbing away. Because as we know, it is not really what Trump says that matters. It is how others respond to him. And a year ago, people would have been flustering around, trying to meet him, trying to do what was right, trying to work out what they had to gain, trying to work out if they could be ahead of their European allies, sort of edging each other out of the game as to who gets to, you know, please Trump the most.

5:33What I'm going to call the gold bar syndrome, you know, where you turn up in his office with a gold bar. And now I think it's best described as a kind of shrug, right? It's this mutual shrug, which is like, oh, yeah, it's almost, I don't know, slightly pitying. I think this is the week where the sort of collective delusion that so many in the West have had to cling to in Europe and in Britain as well, have had to cling to, which is that we treat Trump as normally as we can. That when he acts, he acts rationally and that there's always reason, a method to the madness. I think that this is the week and particularly even yesterday in that press conference, I think it was the week where all those delusions fell away.

6:17I think it is just worth just playing this montage. This is from CNN of just some of the contradictions in Trump's press conference that sometimes were quite literally moments or minutes apart. If we ever needed help, they won't be there for us. I've just known that for a long period of time. We have some that are really enthusiastic. They're coming already. This isn't need. Need would be one of the big boys. If we need their mind boats or if we need anything, any piece of apparatus that they may have because of a situation that they have, they should be jumping to help us. We want them to come and help us with the straight.

6:59My attitude is we don't need anybody. We're the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world. We don't need them. And of course, the question on everybody's lips over the past week, since Iran has successfully, even though its military has been seriously degraded, its capabilities seriously undermined, it has successfully used its own trump card, forgive the pun, which is straightening, which is closing the straits. And everybody has therefore been asking, how can this man who his allies claim plays three, four, five dimensional chess? What was his plan to prevent this from happening?

7:39Because, of course, everybody knew that one of the reasons that his predecessors have not done this is they knew that in extremis, Iran could unleash economic warfare with almost no capabilities whatsoever by closing these straits. Well, Trump, again, the same day claimed that he'd seen the whole thing coming 20, 30 years ago. So, yeah, he said, oh, I knew about the straighter form. I was absolutely clear about it. Well, really? I mean, we're used to Trump exaggeration. But then he uses a story, as you say, Lewis, going back to pre 9-11. And he tells this story of something that happened the year before the attack on the Twin Towers.

8:19Have a listen. I knew about the straight that it would be a weapon, which I predicted a long time ago, predicted all of this stuff. You guys were very generous in that. I predicted all of it. I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I made that prediction a year before he did it. I said, you better get him. He's a bad guy. I watched him be interviewed one time, and I said, that's a bad guy. You better get him. One year before exactly, I wrote it in a book. You can even check about a year before the World Trade Center came down. I wrote it in a book. You can even check.

8:57Well, if you do check, you find that that story is pure 100 percent fiction. He did not predict anything. He didn't say that the Twin Towers would come down. He didn't say anything of the kind about Osama bin Laden. So you're then in a land where Donald Trump is making stuff up. And the question I guess we've got to ask is, does he believe this? Is he in a land of delusion? Is he in a world of his own? And I think these are serious. I mean, I'm not saying this offensively, but my God, when Joe Biden was failing towards the end of his presidency, we were all asking, saying, whoa, is this right?

9:39Is this proper? Is surely someone is raising this. And here we have Donald Trump inventing stories about what was in a book. It is not in any book written in 2000 that Donald Trump had anything to do with. You don't even have to go to predictions. You just have to look at history. We're going to play you an extraordinary clip, courtesy, I have to say, of Scott Anderson, whose book, The King of Kings, will kind of tell you everything you need to know about how we got to this place with Iran. Iran has been playing the oil game for decades. This was the Shah, right? The last regime, the last autocrat, the Shah of Iran in 1975.

10:20He goes on CBS 60 Minutes. And he's asked by Mike Wallace, the host, if he has any concerns for Americans who have to struggle now without their oil because he's pushed up the price and he's created such tight conditions for releasing oil into America. Just listen to him here. Oil, that noble petroleum the Shah likes to talk about, that is at the root of the world's economic chaos. Not true, because according to the same statistics, the price of oil has been responsible in the United States for 0.5 % of your inflation, and in the countries of Europe for 2%. Japan, hardly a little more. That's all.

11:05And the huge sums of money piling up with the oil producers. Well, it's new to you. It's new. How could these strange people living, it's not our case, but living on sand have such money? It's maybe a little shock at the beginning, but you are going to get used to it. You're going to get used to it. All you have to do is take a peek at history to understand that Iran knew exactly the game that they were playing with oil and with the way they sanctioned their resources. You didn't have to be that brilliant. You just had to ask somebody who knew slightly more than you did if you were President Trump.

11:43And what was extraordinary in that press conference yesterday is that there were moments, apparently, of genuine self-reflection and lucidity from Trump where he himself seemed to acknowledge his worst, the worst criticism that is being made about him and about American foreign policy. Just listen to this, where he basically seems to suggest that the reason he's done this is because America has had a habit of attacking other Middle Eastern countries down the decades. We don't need, you know, we don't need oil. We have all the oil we need for ourselves. It's one of the great assets that we have.

12:12We have double, more than double, what anybody else in terms of oil production, we're at more than double any other country. So we don't need it, but we did it. It's almost, you could say we did it out of habit, which is not a good thing to do, but we did it because we have some good allies there. We have some great Middle Eastern countries there, Israel there. So we did it for a lot of reasons. And look, this is kind of, I mean, you know, this is probably 1 % of the stuff we could be playing, you know, from the same 60 minutes or 90 minutes or whatever it was the thing that i kept thinking about it is that phrase watching it is that phrase that that trump's uh friends and allies in the media and so on like to sort of bat around the head of those of us who've been a bit skeptical about the president over the years which is trump derangement syndrome well frankly watching that it's not trump the question isn't about whether we've got trump derangement syndrome the simple question is whether trump himself is deranged and and looking at where we are now he's three weeks into a war whose objectives he still cannot articulate, never mind to the world, but to the American people.

13:15He's got a defence secretary who's saying it's just the beginning. He's saying that it could be over any day. He doesn't know if the new supreme leader is alive or dead. I mean, this is a man who is not in command of events, right? This is a man who is currently being driven by impulse and whatever is in his head at any given moment. That press conference showed that. And this is why I think that foreign leaders, including Keir Starmer, are in this deeply invidious position now. Because on the one hand, they are having to choose between a situation where do they follow this man who clearly could be deranged into this conflict and commit their own militaries into harm's way for objectives they cannot understand and for an aim that is extremely difficult, i.e.

13:57clearing the straits might be militarily impossible. But if they don't do it, if they don't do it, it's clear from that press conference. Trump remembers. Right. Trump remembers. And this is an absolute. America is alone at the moment. And this is an absolute potential inflection point for Vladimir Putin. This is all of his dreams come true at once, because what will Putin be seeing an opportunity to say here to Trump behind closed doors? Mr. President, when your allies, Trump has said it himself, when your allies, when you needed them, when you called upon them, where were they for you? And you spend all this money and all this time defending them just at the moment when the Ukraine war, by the way, is that perhaps one of its most dangerous points for four years?

14:34I mean, you can flip that on its head and you can say it just so happens that if you consistently bully all your allies and threaten NATO, then big surprise, they don't come to your aid. I mean, but we are reliant on himself. I mean, yeah, well, if you listen to Trump now, then he's he's feeling pretty isolated and pretty alone. I mean, a lot of different European countries have said no to him in their various sort of euphemistic ways. And my favourite one, great spot by Anne McElvoy, was Poland's response, which was if you're asking for help, perhaps go to NATO, you know, see what they respond.

15:09But I do think there's been some really interesting shifting. Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, they're in the middle of an election campaign now, but their prime minister was on a televised TV debate, you know, last night. and she was asked whether she'd call the US her country's most important ally. And she just says, no, I can't do that anymore. It's pretty straight. You know, her Foreign Secretary Rasmussen, when asked if he would help, and obviously Trump has threatened Denmark via his attempt to seize Greenland, the Foreign Secretary just says, I think we'll keep an open mind, right? Keep an open mind is what we all say when we mean, I'm going to run a mile, but I'm not going to say that to your face.

15:50I'll keep an open mind. I mean, the Putin thing is really important now. And I think that explains partly why Zelensky is in Downing Street, seeing Keir Starmer as we record this, because Starmer is, I guess, trying to say this is not the only war in the world. The war that we're really focused on, that we should be focused on, that needs our focus, is what's happening to Ukraine now vis-a-vis Russia, who's just had all his sanctions lifted for a month. Yippee, free oil, loads more money. Yeah. And I think it's so interesting that there's a sort of phrase that Trump used with Zelensky that you can almost play back to Trump now in relation to the Strait of Hormuz.

16:32And that is Donald Trump. You've got no cards. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively blocked. If Donald Trump wants to unblock it, it's not going to take a few ships from Denmark or the UK or France. It's going to take ground troops that are going to be needed to go there in their thousands. What a trap is being set for Donald Trump. And he's got no other way out of this now. He either surrenders and allows the Strait of Hormuz to remain shut, in which case this is an epic fail and the regime is in place. or you put thousands of marines on the ground, you put swift boats into the Strait of Hormuz, you start doing all that stuff and it becomes, you know, a shooting fight.

17:17And that is something that Donald Trump has wanted to avoid because the number of body bags that will be going back to America if you put thousands of ground troops there, let alone going to Isfahan and trying to retrieve the nuclear material, this could be epic. And Donald Trump has not got any cards left to play. so I think that he is in a right old mess now as a result of not having predicted any of this and I thought there was kind of one other bit about you know is Donald Trump mad deluded whatever he said in this rambling news conference about that he'd spoken to the previous presidents and one of them said to me oh yeah we wish we wish we could well let's hear it other presidents should have done.

18:00I spoke to one of the former presidents who I actually like, actually speak to some. I do like some people be shocking. And he said, I wish I did what you did. Could have done it. Other presidents, somebody should have done it. 47 years this went on. They call Iran the bully of the Middle East. So let's just go through that. Trump is the 47th president. Joe Biden is the 46th. He denies having any part and having had any conversation. Barack Obama was the 44th. He also denies having any conversation. Not a big fan of war. No, not a big fan of war. Not a big fan of Trump. Yeah. And then you've got the 43rd president, George W.

18:45Bush, and he says he's had no conversation with... So all three former living presidents... Clinton. Oh, sorry. And Bill Clinton as well also denied it. Do we think it might be Abraham Lincoln? Could it be... Grover Cleveland? Yeah. Clinton? No. Someone in his mind. Trump asked the 45th president of the United States who was... Well, I wonder. Yeah, the 45th president. I asked myself. In the mirror. I wish you'd done it. I suppose he could have wished he'd done it in the past. He himself. So, again, it's just the land of fantasy. But also, it's very easy to disprove these things, right? Quite.

19:18It's really... Just like when he says a lot of people have said yes and they are sending military aid and we're like, who? And he's like, I can tell you. Would anyone like to tell us? No, there is no country that has so far admitted signing up to Trump's call for military aid. Maybe this is just a sort of net result or the natural end point of living in fantasy land, which he does so often about so many things. You know, that 99 percent of the time, because of the kind of polarization of American politics, because a good proportion of the American electorate will or certainly the bag of base anywhere will believe whatever confected nonsense he may well believe to exist.

19:53But there are just some times, right, where confection and imagination doesn't win the day. and the Straits of Hormuz, to go back to your point, John, is either open or it's not. The oil price is either rising or it's not. Those are inescapable realities. And I think you put it exactly right, which is that he has set a trap against himself. Because the natural logic of this war now, it seems to me, is either regime change or bust. Because if you leave the Iranians, he could just declare victory and say, fine. But you leave the Iranians in place and actually the regime is cemented. They have shown to the entire world that when push comes to shove, even though, yes, their military capabilities have been severely, severely degraded, even though, yes, thousands and thousands and thousands of rockets have poured down upon them, they've survived it.

20:40And when push comes to shove, they can unleash economic warfare on the world. They might emerge stronger than actually going into the war in the first place. So the natural conclusion now, it seems to me, is that Trump either has to step it up further or he's lost and he cannot stand losing. I mean, what I would say is from Israel's perspective, and they're obviously the other player in this, they think that it's going much better than Trump does. Right. They can point to, for example, overnight the killing of Larajani, who's the head of the Secret Service. essentially the man who many think is responsible for the massacres of protesters on the streets of Tehran in January.

21:19They can point to another beheading. They can say this is part of our overturn of the regime. Others will say, actually, all you're doing is cementing the Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC in place. And if all this was about trying to kill Iran's nuclear capabilities, which from what we know, they still haven't touched. They haven't dented any further than they had last June. What is happening if you're Iran now? You're thinking, Jesus, the only way to protect ourselves in the future is to get a nuclear bomb. In other words, you are hardening up the stance towards that country's own defence in a way that was never as obvious before this conflict took place.

22:01If your objective is to say Iran must not get a nuclear weapon and therefore our military objective is to take all the enriched uranium that Iran currently has and remove it from the country, you're not going to do that by bombing from the skies. You are going to need troops on the ground who are prepared to undertake a military operation to seize all that material and to get near it. And that immediately means you are in a proper war with, you know, troops facing each other, tanks facing each other. Exactly what Donald Trump wants to avoid. Exactly what he promised would never happen. This goes back to the Mark Kelly line.

22:40Mark Kelly was the senator of Arizona. We had him on the podcast a month ago and he famously put out this video along with other senators, other legislators that said warned the military not to get pulled into something that might be an illegal act. Now, I guess, you know, there has been no congressional sign off for this. There is still a question mark over whether this is in any shape or form an illegal war. But where would that leave troops now? I mean, I genuinely don't know the answer to that. Are you allowed to say no to your commander in chief if you think that you're being pulled into a war which is not in America's interest?

23:21Well, I suppose they would argue at this point that given the Iranians are attacking American military assets and so on, that it would be legal because it's a form of self-defense now. But I mean, one of the one of the one of the ironies, of course, now is that Trump's best hope if he if he is to avoid that kind of ratcheting up, ratcheting up and basically ending up in a kind of sort of death match against the Iranians is probably his best hope might well be the Chinese. Because the Chinese at this point, one of the few kind of, you know, major powers who might have some influence on the Iranians are currently in a position where it is their oil supplies which are being disrupted from the Straits.

23:54They will be deeply unhappy the longer this goes on. They're getting oil through. Well, they're getting less than they were before because there's almost nothing going through. So but the point is as well is that like the longer this goes on, the higher the price becomes. And, you know, countries are sort of bidding up the price over time and also for gas as well. So, you know, it introduces instability, which is something that the Chinese most appalled. But, you know, the net result, this is what I mean in terms of why all of the logic points towards a bigger and bigger war, which is, you know, if this were to end anytime soon, basically, what would the net result be for the Americans?

24:24I mean, the weird thing about that is that the Chinese are actually offering themselves up now as the kind of peace brokers. Well, indeed, I know. They're sort of trying to step into it and say, you know, we could be the world's policeman. If you don't want to play that role anymore, we'll see what we can do. I mean, it's a total turning of the kind of old world order on its head. It is. And the net result right now, if it were to end any time soon, is that the Straits either reopened on Iranian terms or they remain closed. Who knows, at least for a period. America has basically proven itself, when push comes to shove, to be basically allyless across the world.

24:55The Chinese power potentially enhanced. The Iranian regime embedded in place. The Russians suddenly, with a load more foreign currency reserves that they've got as a result of oil sales, an absolute foreign policy disaster. And just one other thing to add to that list, Lewis, is if you have got a situation where Iran, which controls the strait, says, yeah, we'll let our ships go from Haag Island and we'll go and export to our friends, but UAE, no. QA, no. Saudi, no. Then what you've done is America has lost those Gulf countries because they're going to think, well, hang on, we put our protection and our safety in America's hands and they haven't done it.

25:38We gave you a jet. Yeah, we gave you a German jet. We gave you a$400 million jet. And all you've done is fuck it up by allowing Iran to become even more powerful in that Strait of Hormuz. And that's why we need to look elsewhere for our friendships. Thank you, America. We're done with you. And so America strategically, in geopolitical terms, just seems to be losing and losing and losing. I don't think this is us with Trump derangement syndrome. I think this is just a realistic kind of looking at the state of play right now on the ground in Iran in the Middle East. Look, as we're recording, I have to say we've got some breaking news.

26:13And it is something we have rarely seen during this second Trump era, and that is a senior official resigning in protest. In this case, it is the director of counterterrorism, Joe Kent, who is resigning protests the war against Iran. And he has written quite a lengthy letter to Trump. After much reflection, I've decided to resign from my position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today as a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times. And as a gold star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people, nor justifies the cost of American lives.

27:02Yeah, it also goes on. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. And it's clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. So you've got to see this in the context of the battle that is going on within the MAGA movement, on which Tucker Carlson is the most obvious kind of spokesperson who says that Israel has got us into this war. Why are we doing it? And there are others as well. J.D. Vance thought to be quietly in that camp as well. And so this looks as much of being about kind of anti-Israel as it is about the war itself.

27:46But where I think it is very, very bad for Donald Trump is it undercuts his main reason for going, which was to say that Iran posed an imminent threat. And this guy, the head of counterterrorism, say, no, it wasn't. It didn't pose any threat whatsoever. Yeah. I mean, this is public, right? This is written on headed notepaper, director of national intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Centre. It is all over social media now. It is directly in Donald Trump's face. Somebody who went to war for his country 11 times. somebody who has lost their own partner, their own wife in combat, is saying this war makes no sense to me.