The Art of No Deal: Trump’s Approach to the Iran War

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2:12Maybe it'll be a quiz show. Well, you're right, by the way, that it does seem to be a pattern here that the only cabinet members who get axed are women, right? I mean, I saw one of the late night hosts had a line that said something like, the only one who seems to have immunity in that cabinet is RFK Jr. You know, the truth is, Evan, I'm glad you brought that up. This is one of my rants, but I'm going to repeat it here. The caricature of femininity required to get oneself a place in Donald Trump. These women not only abased themselves, got rid of all principles previously stated in their political or legal careers, they had to physically change their presentation in order to win this place in Trump's circle.

3:00What is also amazing is, you know, you can thrash around in front of Congress, you can perform for the audience of one. And in the end, you still get cast into the dustbin of history. And, you know, there's it will be interesting to see what this presumably lucrative private sector job is that she's going to. It's such a diss, though. I mean, the private sector thing is just a way of saying there'll be no space in my administration for it. Even Kimberly Guilfoyle got an ambassadorship. Oh, she's in trouble now, by the way. I don't know if you read this, but she's already in trouble. Surprise. Wait for it.

3:37What do you think? Excessive overspending on personal projects in the embassy in Athens.

3:49Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane Mayer, and I'm joined by my colleagues Evan Osnos and Susan Glasser. Hi, Evan. Good morning, guys. Hi, Susan. Hey there. So great to be with you.

4:10What a week. A few hours before Trump addressed the nation on Wednesday, he said, tonight, I'm giving a little speech at 9 o 'clock, and basically, I'm going to tell everybody how great I am. And that's exactly what he did. Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks. Our enemies are losing in America, as it has been for five years under my presidency, is winning. and now winning bigger than ever before. Trump went on to boast that Iran's Navy is gone, their air force is gone, and their missiles are used or beaten up.

4:50Claims that are all exaggerated. Trump offered no case for how the war ends, only a vague mention of two or three more weeks. Evan, this is, of course, a strategy that Trump's used before. Oh, I mean, we've heard two weeks is his preferred time frame for all kinds of solutions. But I have to say, guys, just step back for a second. All of us in our lives are used to the moment when the president of the United States calls people for a primetime address on something as serious, as grave as war. We're sort of used to what that means. You're going to hear something from that president about where it's going, what's happening next.

5:33And this was, even by Trump's standards, a truly bizarre performance because you had all of that sound and fury. I mean, he frankly loves that word, epic fury. And then what? What he didn't tell us was actually where this enormously grave moment is going. How is the United States going to get out of this? How is the global economy going to return to something normal? Honestly, what it reminded me of, I think we all had some feeling of this. It was like he was using the formula that he adopted in his business life, the kind of real estate formula, and trying to graft it onto something in the world of war and human life.

6:17This idea of sort of confidence, bluster, whatever it takes, and then nothing. And what we know from history, and this is where I think you guys sense where we're headed, what's worrisome about this is that when you look over his life, that the way that he goes from a moment of crisis like this is escalation. He doesn't say, okay, we're going to figure out how to back out of this problem. His patterns are that he escalates. So that's my dominant takeaway from this moment. Susan, you wrote a brilliant column about this. What was your reaction on this? I mean, look, we are more than a month into the most consequential decision, certainly foreign policy decision of Donald Trump's decade in power, which is to unleash a war of choice in the Middle East with no clear aims.

7:10Definitely the plan is not to have a plan in that sense. It's going well. Look, there's the fact of the matter of his address to the nation, as Evan pointed out. This was 19 minutes of meaningless catchphrases. In fact, Jane, when I wrote in the column that it sounded like a 19-minute long true social posting, really it was a pastiche of all the true social postings that we've heard from the president over the last month. These are empty phrases. The quote that we just played here, America is winning like never before. Never before in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered. The American people, Donald Trump thinks, are really, really stupid if they think that this is an explanation for why this country should be doing something so consequential.

7:58So when I wrote that it sounded like there was no speechwriter but just an intern cutting and pasting the true social posts, this actually infuriated the White House communications director, Stephen Chung, who went crazy about this and, you know, said this is a terrible conspiracy theory.

8:15Evan Osnos:And the reason I mention it is because right now is a political crisis for Donald Trump such that he really hasn't experienced. And so he's unleashed a global economic crisis. He's unleashed certainly a global and geopolitical security crisis. And for himself, he's unleashed a political crisis. And for me, what that means is that we are at a moment. It's the moment that in some ways we've all predicted, braced for, worried about ever since this volatile character entered our national politics. But I feel like this is it. This is the moment that everybody braced for, that he would create an international catastrophe as well as a domestic one.

8:57Evan Osnos:Donald Trump is a rogue president, and he has now made the United States of America a rogue superpower. Well, before we go further, I feel I need to welcome you to the Stephen Chung fan club. He is the spokesman who tweeted about me, shut the fuck up. So we've been there, and that is actually part of the playbook that Donald Trump uses, which is attack the truth tellers and lie, lie, lie, spin, spin, spin your way out of this. I think you're right. This is the moment that we've dreaded, that somehow we escaped in the first term, which was, thank God he hasn't gotten us into a huge war. But if you knew his history, you knew it was entirely possible and probable, really.

9:43He has a history of creating disasters and then trying to maneuver his way out of it. And the stakes on this particular disaster are so much higher because he's taken it from the business world, the real estate world, to the world stage, and here we all are. And so today, what we wanted to take a look at is the box that Trump has put himself in and the world in, to borrow a phrase from David Sanger of the New York Times. First, where things actually stand in this war. Then, the Trump playbook, the long pattern of crisis, escalation, and improbable survival that has defined his career, and finally, what it means when the world is subjected to that playbook.

10:29It was interesting that this war started in the middle of a night, on a weekend, without any advance notice to the rest of the country. And so this finally, one month into it, was his attempt to sell the war to the public. Do you think he made the sale? Well, I think the clearest metric was delivered almost immediately, which is the markets responded very clearly. I mean, stocks dropped, oil prices climbed. In some ways, that's the coldest, clearest measure of whether or not he was able to reassure people. Look, it was most conspicuous by what was absent in that speech. People were seeking some sign, even if this was going to be him saying, we're going to declare victory and go home.

11:17He couldn't even do that. He said, we're going to be wrapping up combat operations shortly. Then he said, very shortly. And I think the point is that there are enormous questions here. Like, why is it that the United States is in fact still bringing troops into the region? I mentioned earlier the idea that his patterns historically are about escalation. So what does that mean? Does it mean that he's going to, as has been discussed, use those troops perhaps to try to seize Iranian oil facilities? Is it possible that there will be an effort on the part of the United States to try to go in and collect this highly enriched uranium?

11:55He has given so many mixed messages that it's the kind of thing that if you're, you know, in the midst of a domestic political negotiation and you want to sort of send mixed signals, fine. But when you're talking about something as serious as this, a war that is estimated to be costing a billion dollars a day that has these kinds of consequences. All it does is leave the world essentially captive to his whims. And I think that's why this ultimately, this address left the country and left the world, I think, worse off than had we not heard from him at all. Yeah. I mean, there are two things here.

12:28So first of all, there's the political crisis of Trump's own making, which is he already was in increasing bad odor with the American public. He's now sunk as a result of the war and the consequent economic crisis that it has generated. He's now sunk to his lowest approval ratings ever,

12:46Evan Osnos:which, by the way, are now really the worst for any president since recorded polling. CNN had a new survey out this week, actually just a few hours before the address, and it showed Donald Trump with a disapproval rating of 64 percent. That is basically the highest recorded disapproval rating for an American president, George W. Bush at the height of the sort of mess in Iraq before the surge that he ordered. Before that, he hit, I think, 63 percent disapproval. So 64 percent. We're talking close to two-thirds of the American people are not happy with Donald Trump. It's hard to see him climbing out of that.

13:20Evan Osnos:In fact, his personal disapproval is high. The disapproval of his policies, especially concerning the economy, inflation, are even higher than that. So did he dig out of the political crisis? I don't think so. Then there's the broader question of the war itself. And to Evan's point, what, if anything, did we learn? Why did the markets react in that way? The markets reacted in that way, not as a vote of approval or disapproval of Donald Trump personally, but because what they heard from it is, number one, the war was going to go on and the Strait of Hormuz was not only going to remain closed, but I think the big takeaway for me in that address was that Donald Trump was basically saying, screw it, I might have made this problem, though he'll never admit it, but I'm not going to do anything to fix it.

14:04Evan Osnos:And if I want to leave the door open for myself to walk away from this war, hey, you allies in Europe, you Asian countries that rely on oil and gas that transits the strait, it's going to be your problem going forward. That meant essentially that the world's markets heard there is no solution for this enormous problem that Donald Trump has created with the war. So I think that explains in part the market reaction. More broadly, I think it suggests why Donald Trump, even if he talks about two or three more weeks of the conflict, is not actually in a position to deliver it. Many times in his life, he has just been able to walk away from messes of his own making.

14:47Evan Osnos:In this particular situation, Iran gets a vote. And I just, I want to underscore that because it's so astonishing, the gap between these empty, hollow, social media posting type exhortations that the president is giving us and the actual reality on the ground. Just a couple of weeks ago already, Donald Trump was claiming that he had destroyed 100 percent of Iran's military, 100 percent. Well, obviously, that is not only a lie, but it's actually one of those Donald Trump lies that's so ginormous that I think people have a hard time processing how untruthful the American president is. Not only did they not destroy 100 percent of Iran's military capacity, there's a new report from CNN that shows that something like one half of Iran's ballistic missile arsenal may have survived this first four weeks of attacks.

15:38Evan Osnos:That's a lot of missiles to still be fired. In fact, in Israel, on the very evening when Donald Trump was giving this addressed to the U.S. the first night of Passover, millions of Israelis had to take to bomb shelters and safe rooms in their houses because Iran was launching a major barrage of missiles on that country in response to the U.S.-Israeli war. And just now, on Friday, when we're taping this, we hear that Iran may have actually shot down a U.S. fighter jet, by the way, that costs millions and millions and millions of dollars. But again, their capacity has not been diminished militarily, never mind their capacity to hold the world's economy hostage through the Strait of Hormuz.

16:21Well, if you drill down on one point, you know, we've talked about the fact that he has given no indication of how the Strait of Hormuz will reopen. He used this really immortal phrase. He said it will just open up naturally. And I think the other day you said something that It was absolutely right, which is it was impossible not to read that and not be reminded of how he used to talk about the COVID virus. It was just going to go away. Magically. Magic. That's what I was thinking, too. It's magical thinking. Yet, you know, one of the other things he did was try to wish away in the speech the importance and the impact on the price of gas, even in the United States.

17:05and people are at the pumps and seeing it themselves. You know, can he just somehow get out of that particular bind? You know, Jane, it was remarkable to me that this address, which presumably was delivered for the political reason that the White House was worried about how the American public was viewing the conflict. And given that, it was more than 10 minutes into this 19-minute speech

17:30Evan Osnos:before Donald Trump even mentioned gas prices. And when he did, that's when he delivered this line that Evan speaks of, the magical thinking, don't worry, as soon as the conflict is over, dot, dot, dot, whatever that may be, and I don't think it's going to be any time soon, it will somehow return to normal. Now, of course, you know, I'm not an expert on the complexities of the world energy market. If you read and listen to what those people who are are telling us, what they're telling us is that the attacks on energy infrastructure in neighboring Gulf countries, as well as Iran's own, mean that there won't be some easy, magical snapback to normal, even were cessation, even were hostilities to cease immediately, you know, in the next few days.

18:18Susan, that really points to an observation that comes from Bob Woodward, who has interviewed Trump a lot over the years. And if you ask him, what is the single most important takeaway that he has from that? It's that Trump fundamentally does not understand the consequences of going to war. That fact, this is something he said long before the start of the war in Iran, is a function of an entire life of decisions and the absence of consequences of those decisions. And that, in a sense, is the deep text of how we ended up where we are. You know, Evan, I'm really glad that you brought that up because it brings it full circle to the quote that we began this conversation with, which is really a classic example of Donald Trump.

19:05Evan Osnos:He said, I'm going to give a speech to the American people in which I'm going to talk about how great I am. At the core of Trump's case, in his own mind, to the American people were a couple lines embedded in this speech, which essentially say, I am doing something that all of my predecessors as president of the United States failed to do. So we're left pretty squarely where we began here in this conversation, which is one man has taken upon himself and somehow, let's be honest, we the American people have let this happen, have taken upon himself to wage war, even possibly a war that many, many Americans and many people around the world could understand had some worthwhile cause embedded within it.

19:51Evan Osnos:He has taken upon himself to do this in the most reckless, unaccountable, and risky way, not only for the United States of America, but for so many people around the world. I saw a clip, you may have seen this too, a little video clip of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski speaking about taking on Iran 14 years ago. This is a country of 80 million people, and they know that while we can inflict enormous damage on them, they can hurt us a lot. Can you imagine what the consequences would be for us if the conflict in Afghanistan expanded because of the Iranians, if Iraq was massively destabilized, if Bahrain was set on fire, if the northeastern oil fields in Saudi Arabia were attacked?

20:39Do they have the capacity to ignite all of that? To ignite, yes. To prevail, no. But in the meantime, the consequences, the costs would be cumulative. And oil prices would go through the roof. Yes, and the global economy will be affected. So we're playing with fire here. Anyone who knows Brzezinski knows he was a hawk. It's not that he was afraid of military action. But what he's saying is you don't want to get into war with Iran. It's not that they are going to defeat the United States, but they can create just endless amounts of trouble. And he predicted all of the energy problems that would come out of this and specifically many of the actions that we're looking at, including about the Strait of Hormuz.

21:24And it was foreseeable. And so Trump casts this as he's the only one who has the brilliance to do it, what his predecessors didn't, or the courage to do it, when in fact they had the wisdom not to do it. And there was a reason they didn't. And, you know, here we are stuck with the consequences. Well, in a minute, you know, what at least to me is of interest here also is that Trump has a long history of self-inflicted crises. He almost thrives on them. And so far, he's managed to somehow wriggle his way out of accountability for most of them. But I think it might be worth looking back at the past, his M.O., and how that bears on where we are right now.

22:16Political Scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

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23:26Now, I want to turn to Donald Trump and his long history of dealing with crises, many of them self-inflicted, and the different ways he's gotten out of them. Evan, I know you've been looking at his history. What do you see there? Yeah, you know, I feel like I need to promise our listeners we are not going to do a potted history of Donald Trump's life here, because what we actually see are these really clear patterns, this formula that explains in a lot of ways how he got into this situation and where he may be going. I was thinking about this beforehand, guys. There's that great quote, you know, attributed to the ancients that show me the boy at seven and I'll show you the man.

24:04In this case, it's more like show me the boy at 27 and I'll show you the man. You know, when Trump was in his 20s, there is this moment that set the template. He and his father, of course, were sued by the federal government for systematically discriminating against minority clients in their rental properties. And what did they do? They countersued, of course, at the council of Roy Cohn. They sued the federal government for$100 million. So they sort of punch back. Now, we know that he's a counterpuncher. That's the way this has always been described as shorthand. But the point of it is he got out of there ultimately after two years of agony here, of fighting, of press conferences, of muddying the facts, of confusing everything.

24:47He eventually settles without admitting wrongdoing, and he has carried that language with him forever, talking about it even as a presidential candidate in 2016, the fact that he admitted no wrongdoing. That became a recurring move. And in a way, that sort of self-narrative that he is beyond conviction, he's immune to any possibility of accountability, that became not just one of the ways he tells his own story, but actually how he imagines history will unfold in his hands. I mean, I think that business of not admitting wrongdoing sort of translates to what we see about Trump, the politician, which is he never admits failure, no matter how terrible the situation is that he's in and has created.

25:35And that then somehow sprinkles fairy dust on him where the public sort of buys into his retelling of himself as an endlessly successful businessman and politician. I don't know, Susan, you then went on, as we all know, the next phase is casinos, which people look at as the kind of business that you always make money in. And he managed to go into bankruptcy in them. Yeah, I mean, look, I think the problem is, is that we, as Evan said, you know, we're 10 years into this phenomenon of Donald Trump, the politician. We were familiar with the story. We've seen the playbook. You know, he has a very clear playbook.