213. Is Trump Planning A Nuclear Attack on Iran?

0:00Donald Trump just threatened to seize the Strait of Hormuz and claim it as U.S. territory, as rumors swirl of a potential nuclear strike on Iran. Can he do it? Let's just say I have my doubts. And Trump has changed tune on North Korea again. He now claims that he's best friends with his leader. But what does that mean for the future of Ukraine? Stay tuned to find out. This episode is brought to you by eToro. A tariff, a spending plan, a regulatory change. It can all start just as the first line of a speech, but it sets in motion things that can reach far beyond Washington and unfold for years to come.

0:41That's right, Katty. Markets move on expectations, not just events. Investors are constantly weighing what a decision could mean for company sectors and the wider economy. So eToro is an investing platform where you can access a wide range of markets and explore how political and economic developments could affect them. You could also learn from the global community of investors and see how people around the world are interpreting the same news. As with all investing, your capital is at risk. See eToro.com forward slash trip US for full terms.

1:25Welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Anthony Scaramucci. And today I'm joined by fellow ex-Republican White House Communications Director and host of MS Now's Deadline White House, Nicole Wallace. Thank you so much for being here and she's an awesome friend. But the one thing I will say about Nicole Wallace, which I have intense love for, is your Met fandom. You are a loyal Met fan. Okay? And we've got a lot of British football fans out here. You know, we love the Mets, unfortunately, you and me. I've come all the way around in the Mets. I've been through like all the stages of grief. I think the last time we talked, I was angry.

2:03And now I've moved into acceptance and I started watching again. So that's, I don't know, it's either moving through the seven stages or absolute denial. I have been in so much pain for 50 plus years. I'm just in full on acceptance every day. And unfortunately for me, I watch every inning. But let's go to Trump for a second. Okay. He's in my hometown, neck of the woods, Nassau County. He's campaigning for Bruce Blakeman, who's the Republican nominee, a MAGA guy. Who used to be a Bush guy. Used to be a Bush guy. Yeah. I like Bruce. I got along with Bruce. I know Bruce forever. Both lived out in Nassau County forever.

2:42He's the county executive, the Republican nominee. And he's there at the police academy. and the police are cheering this guy on, even though he's pardoning people who have committed violence against police officers. So that's a whole other weird thing to call. But I want to go to his comment. It was a flippant comment. He said, when the war is over, we're going to declare the Strait of Hormuz U.S. territory. Pretty soon, he said. Yeah, look, he's added to the list with Greenland and I think the Panama Canal, he was also going to declare, right, U.S. territory. I think he's finding, and I think the world is finding, or maybe found already, you'd know better than me, that his words are increasingly disconnected from reality or enforceable truths.

3:32And I think the thing with the Strait of Hormuz is perhaps one of the biggest geopolitical blunders in American foreign policy history. And I know that might sound rich coming from someone who worked for an administration whose foreign policies are still debated and polarizing in the Middle East. But I think the idea that he would say anything about the Strait of Hormuz that anybody would believe at this point is about the people that believe him, not about the things he says. Okay. So let me play a Trumpster for a second, okay? And I want you to respond. He's a 5D chess player. He's just this magnificent maestro.

4:08I don't even think he can play checkers. Okay. Well, my buddy Rick Wilson says he eats the pieces when he's looking at a chessboard. Okay. But let's say he's this magnificent maestro and this is an anchoring position for his negotiating. But in the meantime, the Iranian foreign minister says, we're a middle power that beat the American military and come to us, we'll show you how you can do it too. Look, I think you and I sometimes talk past each other when you step into the world as it is, and I cling to the world I wish it was. So I talked to some people more in your world, the real politic folks in finance who have to get through the next two and a half years without destroying their businesses and their sort of standing in the global economy.

4:59And here's what I would say. Trump doesn't know how to set up a chessboard, let alone play chess. Trump is a person with no shame and no sort of pathological ability to sort of pause and reflect. And so it gives him immense advantages in a lot of ways, but not with superpowers or super adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran. And I think the fact that he lost the tariff war against China has to do with the Chinese sort of DNA's ability to turn to hardship and nationalism and endure more pain than the American economy. And I think the same is true of Iran in a much more existential way. So I don't think Trump is playing chess.

5:53I don't think Trump is winning. I don't even think Trump thinks Trump is winning. But I think that the debacle with Iran is so serious. People will be digging out for decades. Now, when you say that, though, take it to the extent. Imagine that you're the president of the United States, 2029. I'm going to stipulate that you're a non-MAGA president. is that you're likely a Democrat, okay? What is the rubble that you're looking at, okay? Take me into a national security briefing. You're sitting there. Likely, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, partially closed, potential tax on it. We are learning, Bloomberg reported over the weekend that there's a black market activity where people are paying the Iranians to let certain ships go through.

6:41What is that president going to be hearing, he or she, in 2029 January? I would argue that Marco Rubio will not run as a MAGA figure because MAGA will be so toxic. So it'll be a non-MAGA figure, Democratic or Republican. Nikki Haley, I don't think, would run as this version. She was the runner-up, if it seems like another lifetime. So a non-MAGA figure of the Democratic or Republican Party, is going to be rebuilding alliances. And I think they'd have to start in Europe. I think they'd have to rebuild NATO. But I think they'd also have to go and rebuild our alliances in the Mideast. I mean, they may still think Trump is the best bet, but they don't trust us.

7:25I think we're America. I think we're sort of like a bad boyfriend. We'll always be given a second and a third and a fourth and a fifth chance we probably don't deserve. But I think the next president will spend a whole lot of time and a whole lot of capital rebuilding alliances. And it's sort of like rebuilding the rule of law. Do you go back to what you had? Like, does NATO become what NATO was? Or are you in the region rebuilding new security packs? Some of it depends on what happens to Ukraine over the next two and a half years. Some of it depends on how far China goes in pushing its foreign policy ambitions.

8:01But I think the next American president is starting back, you know, 100 years in terms of rebuilding America standing in the world. It's interesting. The first thing I would say if I was in that room, let's break up our allies between or are used to be allies between those who will treat this as a one-off existential crisis for America and they're still our allies. And let's look at the ones that now actually are really, you know what, very mad at us. And we have a hundred year hole to dig out of. So under that theory, because I do think there are some, as an example, I do think weirdly, the UK will forgive us.

8:44I think France weirdly will probably forgive us. We were calling French fries, freedom fries in 03, they sort of forgave us. But there are certain countries that probably are not going to forgive us, right? Or do you think none of them are going to forgive us? Give me your opinion. I think it depends what happens, right? Like, I think if Russia strikes beyond Ukraine, I think if, you know, I don't want to say out loud what China could do, but if China of becomes aggressive in Taiwan. I think there are known unknowns, to quote one of my old bosses, that it's difficult to plan around. I mean, I guess what I worry about the most is that everyone is so paralyzed by, you know, Trump is more like having like a grizzly bear for president than a person.

9:31And so I think people are so paralyzed by wondering if the grizzly bear will, you know, us, attack us, be tamed, go back into hibernation, that they're not thinking about what you just talked about. And maybe they are. Look, I would have thought that businesses were in padded rooms figuring out how economies like Hungary's got through the first few years of Orban. But apparently people don't do as much looking around the corner as I thought they did, as I hope they would. But I hope that there are Democrats sitting around and thinking about it. But to watch all the political actors, and I'm not sure there are.

10:11I mean, if I were in the room, I would really sort of go back to first principles about shared security. But that requires a consensus on who the adversaries are. And Trump is so snuggled in for the night with known adversaries like Russia and North Korea that you almost, before you get to the security piece, have to reestablish the adversaries and the threats. So the, you know, Oman and Iran are negotiating. They're trying to get a memorandum of understanding together to manage this trade. And the president says, and I'm going to give you the quote, I'm going to bomb the blank out of them if they get in the way of our negotiations.

10:56So, and again, one of our allies, Oman has been one of our consistent allies on the Saudi peninsula, Arabian peninsula, for 70 plus years. Is he going to bomb one of our allies? What do you think the diplomatic chatter is now? This is just in a nonsense spewing. It used to be the American president had levels of authority and things that were said from his mouth were calculated, but now people are just like, okay, just the ravings of a madman? Or How do you think people are reacting to that? Well, look, you know the man better than I do, but I guess I would guess that he wants to have at least, like to me, his peer group, when he says things like the country's so hot, it's because when he's at Mar-a-Lago in the omelet line, people tell him the country's hot.

11:49They're crypto people. They're people that paid to have access to him. And I don't think that those people would tell him that the country's so hot. if he were to open up another front in the Middle East. I think it's predicated on sort of the enemy of our ally being the only one we're bombing back to the Stone Age, which is, I think, his quote about Iran. I don't personally think he's going to start bombing Amman. I also think that at some point, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is going to have to say, we don't have the munitions to open up another front and start bombing another country. I would hope that somebody would say, you can't win.

12:30I think that what he is addicted to is winning and the flexing of American power. I don't think he's necessarily addicted to a widening war. But again, you would know better than me. Yeah, I see. I think that, first of all, the crypto guys, because I'm here at our crypto conference, they're not happy. Because they did everything that Trump wanted them to do. And guess what Trump did? He rug-pulled every one of them. The legislation never got passed. He figured out a way to conspire with his family members to take$800 million for themselves out of the industry. And so if anything, they're the walking, talking statement for the bait and switch of Donald Trump.

13:12And so our allies are also bait and switched by him. We'll talk about South Korea in the second half. But I just find that this rhetoric and him always saying, you know, the war is ending Sunday night. We're de-escalating. We're minutes away. He said it last Thursday. We're days away from a negotiation settlement, Nicole. But we're 60 days into the memorandum of understanding that he signed in all places Versailles. And by the way, that's got to get extended now because nothing's happened. And this is the first time in my life that I believe the Iranians more than I believe a U.S. presidential administration because they're saying, hey, no negotiations are happening.

13:59Sorry, don't know what you guys are talking about. Well, they're also saying we're about to begin a military offensive against you, which doesn't necessarily mean bombs dropping in New York City, but it does mean on our allies and on our troops in the region. And I think back to all the mistakes that I was a part of in the Bush administration and the idea that Republicans are so silent and so neglectful and so dismissive, mistakes that are leading to injuries and death of our service members is just an unbelievable marker of how decimated the Republican Party is of courage or first principles or of caring about the men and women of the military.

14:39Um, I, I look pulling the rug out from under people who believed him is to me just too much of a psychological riddle. Like, why did you believe him? Right? Like, why did anybody believe anything he said in the first term? He lied 35 ,000 times. And then the Washington post stopped counting. But I, you know, again, this is, this is sort of our, our only ideological divide. You understand the world as it is. Um, and I still long for the way it should be, or could be. Well, I want the world to be the way you want it, Nicole. I'm just trying to live with, as a business person and somebody that is analyzing this.

15:14No, you're right. You're right, and I'm wrong. I mean, I'll eat this. But I would say to your question about who to believe, I think Trump tells us every night who to believe, and it isn't him. I mean, the idea that we even talk about that is the way we try to understand American foreign policy. He's sitting up there in the middle of the night, and I don't know why he's up all night, but if any celebrity athlete or celebrity actor or celebrity musician only posted on social media in the middle of the night, SportsCenter would be up talking about what's wrong with him and whether he's going to go on personal leave, entertainment tonight.

15:49Those journalists are harder on the mental health, public-facing signs of the icons in their industries than we are on the American president. Let that sink in. That's a good point. Oh, yeah. Well, he's anesthetized us, right? Well, just us, though. Like any other figure at the top of any other industry would be analyzed as having something wrong with him. If the only way we knew what he was going to do as it pertains to travel and policy were middle-of-the-night postings on an obscure website. Like if someone, if some icon in sports or entertainment were only posting on, again, not Twitter, not Instagram, but some obscure social media platform that they owned and sold to people who could make money off it, like we would have incessant conversations, but there's so much baked in to Trump's insanity that of course we believe Iran over Donald Trump.

16:37They don't act as crazy as he does. You know, it's stunning to say that. I mean, they've embedded themselves very well. They used their mosaic defense doctrine to stay in power. And they've also now created a playbook where people will look at it and say, okay, I got it. We just have to outlast the American military for four to five months. And they have nothing to do after four to five months, I guess, unless they're going to deploy nukes. And so this is a good segue because Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is now being called Marjorie Taylor Brown by Trump because Greene turns to brown when it wilts.

17:13This is Trump's febrile and childlike mentality. She broke from him because he said, no more forever wars, we're in a forever war. You're going to get the Epstein files. Hey, lady, I'm in the Epstein files. You're not going to get the Epstein files. So she broke. She left the Congress early, but she's tweeting. I mean, this is what she did yesterday, Nicole. So she's tweeting that she is hearing, and quote unquote, it's real. I'm not speculating. This is right out of her Twitter feed or X feed. He is talking about a Hiroshima or Nagasaki-like event in Iran. Okay. So she provided no evidence, however.

17:57I want to just stipulate that. And she also said there's no confirming statement or anything like that. But what are your thoughts about her saying that? What would compel somebody like her to say it? And what are your thoughts about the president potentially using a nuke? And I want you to channel what you were saying to me before we started the podcast, Nicole, about what you think of the president and his fraidy cat nature. Well, a person you and I both know told me after a term one visit to India that he didn't eat the whole time because he was afraid of stomach upset in India. And so I think a president that doesn't want to, you know, have diarrhea isn't about to launch a nuclear war when the response is usually mutually assured nuclear destruction.

18:41I also think that, and you know this better than me, but even in the White House in which I worked, sometimes the things that are most alarming happening behind the scenes are aired out publicly to kill them internally. Because the best way to kill something inside is to have someone on the outside do it. And so one of the patterns that's very obvious to a former communicator is that something that is being debated and maybe viewed as intractable or someone on the inside is like, I can't fucking believe we're having this conversation, is to leak it to someone on the outside and to know for sure that people that Trump still listens to in the media will kill it is more effective than trying to prevail in a meeting.

19:22I don't even know where they have these meetings in Trump's orbit. The sit room seems to be taken over from managing the fallout from the Epstein files. But wherever they debate foreign policy, maybe it's at the tank at the Pentagon. That's where normal people debate foreign policy. Wherever those meetings are happening, sometimes you use a cutout like Marjorie Taylor Greene or some political ally to sunlight it. That's one of the things we used to say and get people on the outside inside the media ecosystem. He probably still listens to what you say, not me so much. But to try to get Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly losing their mind over Trump dropping a nuke, he catches wind of it.

19:59And then he'll go in and kill it, backing up the internal actors trying to kill it in an internal debate. So that's what it looks like to me from the outside. I really don't think that he will drop a nuke because I hope that there's still someone around that would say the response would be, you know, retaliatory. Yeah. Well, listen, but also it would make him a full-on war criminal. it would make the United States effectively the government of the United States have to have a trial at the Hague it would have you know incalculable consequences for the United States and many people now would put us in the rogues gallery of North Korea and Russia and China for these types of things but but but I guess my point about it coming up she's hearing it I believe and you could correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe she's hearing it from somebody.

20:52I don't think she just goes out unilaterally and wakes up on a Sunday morning and says, let me make up some stuff about what I'm hearing in the White House. So you think that. And so then the secondary thing is his state of mind. So I know from people inside the White House, he talked about nuking Iran and Trump won. General Mattis thought he was crazy. Rex Tillerson used words that were worse than that when they came out of the white house situation room discussing moron right right exactly and now so now he's talking about it again in trump too yeah you don't think you don't think he wants to do it because of the consequences associated with it but this is a weird guy you know this is a guy that like uh has this narcissistic compulsion towards power yeah it's not impossible right you can't you can't have it at a zero right you can't say this is a zero percent chance that somebody like Donald Trump would use a nuclear weapon in a theater capacity somewhere?

21:52Zero percent? Yeah, no, I wouldn't. Look, I wouldn't put anything at zero. It was my first point about the Strait of Hormuz. Like, I don't I don't think you can figure out how we get out of this until you know how it ends. So I wouldn't put anything at zero percent. What I would say is that Trump always wants what he wants, right? Like he like that he's prosecuting Comey isn't really a Trump story. You know better than me. He wanted to do this in 2017. No question. It's a Todd Blanch story because Jeff Sessions doesn't allow him. Rod Rosenstein doesn't allow him. Bill Barr doesn't allow him. Even Pam Bondi makes it difficult.

22:28It's a Todd Blanch story. So he may have mused about nuking people in the past. It becomes sort of a Mattis Tillerson story. Tillerson called him an effing moron. Mattis ultimately leaves for cause, but it's over something else, not his desire to drop a nuke. gets over his policy around the Syria-Turkey border, we're abandoning allies, Kurdish allies. But there were people around him with lines. I think we know Hegseth doesn't have a line, but we'll find out if Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Cain does. And so that's what I think the nuke story is. It isn't about Trump. He thinks these are his toys and he'll play with them if he wants.

23:05And it's not even that I think he won't do it because of consequences to innocence, because I mean, my daddy's even seen Oppenheimer, right? It's too long, too complicated. He'd be like the person that stops it and has to ask, you know, whoever, yeah, Natalie or whoever, what just happened, what just happened? So there's no way is any understanding of the consequences to humanity. But in terms of the consequences to himself, I don't think he would be scared away from something by being a war criminal. I think he would be scared away from doing something like that by someone who says no. Interesting, yeah.

23:38Because by the way, when he is pushed back, he always relents. And when the courts pushed back on him, he relents. When Tillis pushed back on him, he relented. Correct. And they got rid of the weaponization fund and all that other stuff. We're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about Trump in South Korea and the splitting of a relationship with the South Koreans that we've had for 80 years.

24:11Welcome back to the Rest is Politics US. I'm joined by Nicole Wallace. Caddy Kay is off this week. We'll see her next week. But you can see me and Caddy Kay in a city near you. That's right. You got to go to the restispoliticsus.com. Buy your tour tickets there. Tickets are selling fast, thank God. But we want to see you and we'll be answering your questions from that live stage. So please think about it. All right, Nicole, let's go back to Trump and South Korea. So yesterday, the president decides that his good friend, who I want to stipulate he's met with for a total of five hours in a diplomatic setting, that his good friend, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, put a propaganda video together of Trump bowing to him and subordinating himself to him.

25:01That's his good friend. And so as a result of his good friend and that relationship, he wants to slow down the joint exercises between the South Korean military and the American military, which we are obviously always done for deterrence. We've always done for military preparedness, but also for deterrence. And before I let you speak, I want to add one little thing to the ointment here, one little fly to the ointment. The North Koreans have deployed 50 ,000 troops in Ukraine to support his good buddy, Vladimir Putin. So this is a rejection of 80 years of national security and State Department and Department of Defense strategy in Asia.

25:51And what say you? I think it's an abomination. I think in normal times it's an impeachable offense. I think it reminds me of a couple things. When I worked for Sarah Palin and we were trying to prepare her for debates, not as someone who didn't know enough, but as someone who was running on a ticket with John McCain, foreign policy obviously meant a lot to John McCain. And we tried to explain what the six-party talks were in case you got a question about six-party talks. And she sort of, you know, had obviously never thought much about North Korea. So we showed her the satellite image, North Korea.

26:25And she said, why is it dark? And we said, well, Kim Jong-un is a murderous, repressive dictator. We showed her the growth charts, how much smaller North Koreans kids were than the kids in Korea. The brutality of the North Koreans has been obscured by the freakishness of Trump's obsession with Kim Jong-un. But he's brutal. He's shot and murdered family members. He's a hideous threat. You were probably in the White House when John Kelly, I think, felt like he was personally walking the line between Trump starting a war with North Korea. Fire and fury. Correct. I had just gotten fired. And then on August 3rd, Trump said that he was going to invict fire and fury on North Korea.

27:14And General Kelly was like, okay, this is absolutely crazy. From the outside, and you correct me if I have this totally off base, the love affair is sort of the best bad alternative to what was warmongering on Trump's part. And a lot of people around Trump, I think, were very worried he was going to start a war. I was working at the Today Show at the time. I remember going on every time they fired a missile. And I think that everything with Trump is like an overcorrection. So the love affair probably wasn't the intention. I also think I read somewhere that one of the things he took to Mar-a-Lago when he took classified material was his correspondence with Kim Jong-un.

27:52The obsession with Kim Jong-un and the personal affection he has for a murderer is a sign of something, again, that would be impeachable in normal times. And so I, in like the 10th year of covering the Trump story, try to step back and look at it, one, as the threat that it represents, and two, the indictment that it is of the party I was once a part of. I'm sure that none of them have gone to microphones and indicted the conduct. I'm sure that none of them have reached out to people in South Korea and said, hey, we'll make sure this doesn't happen. We'll make sure these happen. And I can't imagine that there is someone like Mark Milley who's brave enough to sort of stabilize our alliances when Trump is saying these things.