The Real Reason Iran Caved to This Trump Tactic

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1:21All right, everybody, I'm Dave Rubin. This is The Rubin Report. It is Friday, April 10th, which means it's time for another Friday Roundtable Extravaganza. And joining me are two returning Rubin Report all-stars, Brandon Tatum of The Officer Tatum Show and Dinesh D'Souza of many shows, although his new one, Dinesh, is the new weekly show. Gentlemen, welcome back to the program. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having us. Dinesh, before we do anything, can you show your glass again? Because you're a serious pundit. You're a very thoughtful guy, do a lot of interesting things. And it looked to me that you were drinking Hawaiian Punch before the show, and I just can't accept that.

1:57It's a very exotic cocktail, no alcohol, but it's by and large water with electrolytes, but it's got some nice color to it. And Brandon, how are you staying? I'm also doing electrolytes. How are you staying lubricated during the program? Oh, my gosh. Do any of us have an electrolyte sponsor? I own a company that does energy drinks, sleep drinks, stuff like that. Oh, all right. We'll talk after the show. All right, guys. So obviously we're going to recap the week. you know, just another nutty week on planet Earth. Obviously, a lot of Iran stuff and a very, very shaky ceasefire. But I thought we could just start with something fun.

2:41If either one of you can explain this seven-second video to me, dinner on me at whatever your fanciest, most expensive restaurant in the United States of America is, take a look. Deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. This is abhorrent. Dinesh, if you can tell me what that acronym is, if you can lay out all of those letters in one simple sentence without Googling or pausing, dinner at your restaurant of choice. Oh, man. I think it has something to do with murdered indigenous people and then, of course, the familiar, you know, Lesbian, gay, bisexual. Don't forget the two-spirit. That's the number two.

3:34Queer, and then bisexual, and then plus. Plus is I think everybody, make sure everybody else is included. I don't know if I got them all, but maybe I've qualified for dinner minus dessert. A soup and sandwich. Actually, we just did that. Pretty close, right? We really just did that so you would say all those crazy things so we could post it without any context. Brandon, do you want to add anything? I have nothing. I thought she was giving away a password or something. I don't know what she means. Flop that. It's the Google encryption. I saw somebody do that. They said it's a strong password. I might use that one day.

4:09For the record, Dinesh, you were pretty damn close. You're going to get lunch on me. It's missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual. Excuse me for a second. Wow. And now let's do a show. Okay, so let's start with what happened less than a week ago that sort of kicked off the craziness of the week, which was Donald Trump's Truth Social post. You all saw it. It was this on last Sunday. A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but probably will.

4:47However, now that we have complete and total regime change where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail. Maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen. Who knows? We will find out tonight one of the most important moments in a long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Rand. Just quickly, a quick correction. That was on Tuesday. So on Sunday, on Easter Day, was the F-bomb post that got everybody going crazy. That was before the 8 p.m. deadline. Then obviously the ceasefire was announced around 7 p.m.

5:19Let me just ask you at this point, guys, and I think the three of us largely see much of this in a similar lens. But Dinesh, let me start with you. Does anything about the Trump bombastic language, the F-bomb, the civilization will die, all of this stuff, does any of that bother you at any level at this point? Or do you view it as a strength of his? Or how do you look at all that stuff? I look at it as a part of the Trump lexicon, the Trump way of talking, which is over the top. In some weird way, I think Trump can be seen here as a global real estate guy. And here's what I mean. You listen to real estate people, they say the most preposterous things.

6:09You try to buy an apartment. It's right near a highway. It's extremely loud. They explain to you why this is a real plus, because you can jump right on the highway and get to work, even though you get this deafening sound coming from cars. So real estate people are known for making absurd statements. But if you look at their actions, they're very practical, right? They got to close deals. They got to make it work. If you look at Trump's actions going back to 2016, he's pragmatic, he's resourceful, he's bold, he's purposeful, he gets things done that nobody else even thought were on the table. And so I think we've all learned that Trump will say the craziest stuff.

6:53I mean, praise be to Allah on Easter Sunday. Now, you know, I can try to parse that and make sense of it. In fact, I did a post on social media relating that to what Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, basically mocking them and saying, hey, where's your God? Where is he now? What can he do? You know, is he taking a walk? Is he, you know, is he in the bathroom? And you can understand Trump that way, but I don't know if that was what was in Trump's mind. So Brandon, were you surprised that so many people on the right, it's one thing when the people on the left go apoplectic because he posts something, But so many people on the right, after 10 years of Trump doing all this stuff, genuinely thought World War III was going to kick off at 8 p.m.

7:37Yeah, no. Or at least were saying that's what they did. Yeah, I don't know what they genuinely did. Yeah, I'm incredibly shocked that people would not see the writing on the wall with Donald Trump at this point. I mean, he say outlandish things ever since he was, you know, just doing real estate as a real estate mogul. And I think that it's a big game to Donald Trump. And I feel like every other president either doesn't have a strategy or two cowardice to actually say bold things to get things done. And so when I saw Donald Trump say it, I thought it was wild. Right. I said, man, Trump is wild.

8:06I mean, somebody steal his phone or did he really say that? But then I realized that Donald Trump is strategic. And so, of course, he's going to say that. And look at what the response is. I mean, it sounds crazy, but look how they're responding. And I think that they have to contend with do they really want to see Donald Trump actually do the crazy stuff that he's saying? because I don't think that they see him as a regular president. That's, you know, what they would say, controlled or measured. Donald Trump is radical enough that he probably would do it. And so they don't want to take that chance.

8:34So what do they do? They agree to a ceasefire. And I know that some people are squemish and maybe weak to the fact that Donald Trump says things like this. But look, I'm at the point where I'm OK with him saying whatever he thinks he needs to say to get things done. And then, you know, you could cry about it later. Yeah, I agree. I mean, at this point, the guy who's accomplished all of the things that everybody said could never be accomplished, and we want to fight about the language that he has just used for – it's well past – it's a decade in politics, but well past that, as you both pointed out, in real estate and everything else.

9:09So, of course, what happened? Well, we didn't get World War III. Trump, right before the 8 p.m. deadline, announced, based on conversations with Prime Minister Shabazz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Manur of Pakistan and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight in Iran and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to a complete and immediate and safe opening of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. I don't have to read the entire thing. Dinesh, you know, as it stands right now, we have, I guess what you would call a tenuous ceasefire, but that's probably the best outcome at the moment, right?

9:46I mean, I don't know. Yes, could we have continued to blow apart the country and could we have taken out power plants and punish the people? Nobody really wanted that. And that's, by the way, also why when Trump said the civilization thing, I was like, he's not interested in killing 90 million people or making sure that 90 million people don't have power. So to me, it seems like as tenuous as this whole thing is, I don't see where we would be better off at the moment than where we're at in a weird way. The Iranian people seem to get it. They wouldn't be calling for Trump and even Israel to keep going if they all thought that they were facing complete extinction.

10:21They recognize that so far the attacks on Iran have been very targeted and aimed at the regime. So I think on the right, I was kind of amazed that people were like, oh, we're going to end ancient Persian civilization going back to the monuments of Cyrus the Great. No, Trump is talking about a 50-year-old regime that has consolidated its power. Now, the funny thing to me about Trump is that, and this is what I call his real estate approach. You know, he says to the military things like, we're bombing these Iranian ships. He goes, what a waste of ships. Why don't we just capture the ships and like sell them?

11:03This is total real estate thinking, right? Or even more recently, he wants to, he raised the idea, extremely outrageous. Why don't Iran and we both charge tolls at the Strait of Hormuz and split the proceeds? I mean, oddly Trump would go there. And I think this is his way of looking at the United States as a large global real estate holder. And he's trying to essentially increase our holdings worldwide and increase our influence worldwide. So that's his view of America first. And I think if we put that lens in the camera, his actions become much more understandable rather than trying to superimpose some ideological lens, which is not the way he's thinks.

11:48And that's why it's not fair to judge him by that criteria. So subsequently we get, you know, again, shaky, tenuous, whatever you want to call it, ceasefire. But we still are keeping our military there. This from Trump. All U.S. ships, aircraft and military personnel with additional ammunition, weaponry and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded enemy will remain in place in and around Iran until such time as the real agreement is reached and fully complied with, et cetera, et cetera. Brandon, what would you say to someone on the right who just, I'm not talking about the real crisis.

12:27I'm talking about somebody on the right who's just an isolationist, just a pure libertarian. That's their ideology. And they're upset about all of this. What would you say to that person? Well, I think that we have to be educated on reality, right? I mean, in the utopian world, we could be isolationist and we don't have to get in any war. And somehow the money still comes in and trade still goes out and we don't have any, you know, any dealings in that. But the reality is we have to have some type of involvement around the world to keep America safe. Some of these wars or some of these conflicts need to be fought off American soil.

13:01A lot of trade, you know, some of the economic success that we've been having around the world, some of our enemies, we have to have an advantage over them, right? I mean, we cannot let China and Russia and some of these other places kind of take a stronghold around the world. And I don't understand how isolation is contend with this, because if we didn't have agreements and partnerships around the world in South America, in the Middle East, then China would. And then before you know it, a price of oil will be controlled by an adversary. And we don't need that. And it's unfortunate, but that's just the way we have to be.

13:37You cannot sit in a bubble and act as if we can stay in America and all the economy is just going to work out just here without facing any conflicts. Other people are evil. They want to take over the world. They want complete economic dominance. They want America to not exist anymore, especially some of these ideological Islamic terrorists. They would love to take over America and it be an Islamic state. So we have to understand that and we have to appropriately address those things across the world. Dinesh, how much would you describe this as just sort of it's like a seventh grader's understanding of the world in that, yes, am I for peace?

14:16Yes. Do I like war? No. But just saying you are for peace and you're anti-war doesn't bring no war. And it certainly doesn't bring peace. There are, as Brandon points out, there are bad guys out there. That's just reality. So a certain set of people just seem to be caught in a very middle school way of thinking. Yeah, the way I would press them on it is something like this. I mean, take a guy even like Dave Smith who purports to be a libertarian. Now, a libertarian is supposed to be someone who defends freedom, stands up for freedom. So, all right, we have freedom in this country. What's it worth to have?

14:50Let's say freedom in Iran, okay? Now, he might think the price is too high to have military intervention. So you start at the beginning. You go, okay, Dave, listen, what if we could have freedom in Iran, a free country, a pro-American country in that part of the world, and it's going to cost us$100? Would you be willing to pay that much? And then you work your way up. Because if you think of this war, I mean, I cannot even believe how well it's going. And here's what I mean. You have a country of 90 billion people. It's an oil-rich country. It's got technological resources. It's fairly close to the nuclear threshold.

15:30It's been a menace for 50 years. And you have this lopsided, one-sided conflict, which you could never have predicted. I mean, if we go back to other wars, I mean, go back to the Civil War, right? The Union Army loses 4 ,000. Robert E. Lee loses 2 ,500. It's a big victory for Lee. He only lost 2 ,500 men. So the idea here that Iran is completely debilitated and our losses are minuscule by comparison. I mean, this is like a marvel of the modern era that we're able to pull this off. And therefore, when I see right wingers go, oh, we're doing terribly, you know, we're losing. Iran is celebrating.

16:07I'm like, what world are you living in? You are living in the fever of your own mind and you're projecting your own craziness onto Trump. So I want to show you guys, and hopefully we don't have to spend too much time on this. I'm really trying not to focus on the Tucker, Megan sort of portion of all of this. But I want to show you something that I think is interesting here. Tucker again did a show on this yesterday, and look at the tweet on this. Netanyahu launches terror attack on Beirut, destroying Trump's ceasefire. We need to detach from Israel immediately. Now, it's interesting that he's calling it a terror attack and he's connecting it to the ceasefire because, well, first off, a state stopping a terrorist organization, Hezbollah, from launching rockets into their territory that by no definition is a terror attack.

16:54That aside, it turns out that the ceasefire had literally nothing to do with Lebanon. Here's J.D. Vance on that. First of all, I actually think, and there's a lot of bad faith negotiation and a lot of bad faith, you know, propaganda going on. I think this comes from a legitimate misunderstanding. I think the Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon, and it just didn't. We never made that promise. We never indicated that was going to be the case. What we said is that the ceasefire would be focused on Iran, and the ceasefire would be focused on America's allies, both Israel and the Gulf Arab states.

17:28So, Brandon, whether Iran made a mistake in the translation or not, you have Tucker taking their side of it, calling Israel our ally in this, who's defending their own citizens, 300 ,000 people are not living in the North for the last two years because of this rocket fire, not only calling it terror, but basically saying it breaks the ceasefire, which it had nothing to do with. What is going on? And of course, he won't issue a retraction or a correction or say, actually, I did get poor information on this, et cetera, et cetera. Dave, it's all about hatred of Israel and Jews. That's what all of this stuff comes down to.

18:07I don't know what kind of psychological trauma that these people are going through in their mind, but for whatever reason, and I think majority of it is spiritual, they just hate Jews and Israel so much that everything has to be the fault of the Jews. Everything has to be the fault of Israel. He could have taken 30 seconds to do some deep dive research before he make a crazy accusation against one of our allies. All he had to do is take a little bit of time and listen to what Donald Trump had to say. Listen what J.D. Vance had to say. Do a little research online and put two and two together. But that's not their motive.

18:38None of these people have a motive that way. They're willing to betray the United States of America in the pursuit to hate Israel. I'm telling you, that's why his whole like the thing is that I've never seen any of these people talk about the Christians being slaughtered by Islamic terrorists. You never hear them say anything about Iran, slaughtered their own people. They cry day and night about Gaza and it's a genocide. It's a genocide. And we see, according to them, a genocide happened in Iran against their own people. And they hate Christians and they hate America and they won't even say anything about it.

19:11but they are willing to fix their mouth to come up or concoct a fake story that has to do with Israel and hating Israel. Dinesh, let me ask you a slightly different version of that. I agree with what Brandon said there, but like, let's get giving him every benefit of the doubt, which I don't think he deserves, but I'm going to really just try to offer him everything right now. Let's say he really thought it was part of the ceasefire. Okay. Five minutes later, JD comes out. It's not part of the ceasefire. Trump has now said was never part of the ceasefire. The fact that he will not correct it, I have no problem saying there is zero chance he will correct it.

19:48Maybe he'll watch this and then be drugged into something. But we just know he won't because he's been caught in a million lies. What does that tell you about what he's doing? I mean, I suppose it's what Brandon just laid out. Well, I think Tucker is careening out of control, but on a trajectory that can be plotted out. In other words, it's not as if Tucker suddenly comes out, I like Sharia, Bin Laden wasn't such a bad guy, we should apologize to him. It didn't start like that. It started with Netanyahu. Netanyahu is the bad guy. Then it went from Netanyahu is the bad guy to Israel. Israel is the bad guy.

20:28Stage three was it's not just Netanyahu, it's not just Israel, it's the Jews. And that's why you bring in the killing of Christ. But this is the starting point. It's important to recognize that Tucker's pro-Islamic and even pro-Hamas and pro-Iran stances all came much later. And pro-Sharia, by the way. And pro-Sharia. So I think Brandon's right. It starts on the pivot of Israel and the Jews, and then Tucker's whole world spins out of control off of that axis. So all these later discoveries of how wonderful the Muslims are, Tucker, the old Tucker would never have said that, but his starting point changed.

21:09It became a new like fulcrum, a new axis. And now his whole worldview has to be turned around in order to accommodate that new starting point. This is the new Tucker. That's well said. You know, it's just, I know we can point out the hypocrisy and the shift and all that all the time. I think pointing out the direct being caught in a lie, we all talk for a living. We all make mistakes. Like, there's just no doubt about it. However, when I make a mistake and someone points it out to me, I address it and move on. So it's, to me, it's like it's insulting to the audience, if nothing else. If you don't want to have a little personal integrity, at least care about your viewers.

21:45And just to end this real quick, so subsequently, since the ceasefire had nothing to do with Lebanon, well, this is just in from Disclosed TV. The first ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Lebanon will be held at the U.S. State Department in Washington. And of course, as you guys know, it's a little tricky because Lebanon's not even in charge of their own country, but we'll leave that there. Let's continue to the other part of this all week, which was that Trump really does seem to be laying the groundwork to leave NATO. And I think it's probably very deserving. Listen to this from Trump on Truth.

22:17NATO wasn't there when we needed them and they won't be there if we need them again. Remember Greenland, that big, poorly run piece of ice. I mean, guys, it seems to me we foot the bill on NATO. Some allies kind of offered up mealy-mouthed statements like the UK. Spain completely closed their airspace to us, although Trump said, you know, we could still take it and land if we want. They're not going to do anything. I think NATO's on its last legs. And if Trump, if somehow this thing starts wrapping up, that will be Trump's next international move. What do you think about that, Brandon? No, I think that that's 100 percent appropriate.

22:52You know, and this is just from a layman's perspective, just the average American. If we're contributing to something that's not benefiting America, then we just divest from it. I mean, it's very it's that simple. Donald Trump is showing and displaying for the world that NATO is not supportive in the efforts that we're doing to liberate people in Iran and make America a safer place by eliminating the threat level in the Middle East and also supporting our allies. And we're also supporting the UAE, Saudi Arabia and all these other countries that want peace. But then NATO don't want to contribute because they're cowards.

23:26And so what Donald Trump is saying is like, look, when we needed you the most, although we're giving you guys all this money and we're funding and we're supporting your military, you know, we're supporting the defense and safety for you. We're going to keep a track. We don't keep track of this. And we're going to divest from some of these places that not benefit in America. And I hope that he actually does it. To your point, here's Caroline Levitt on the test that NATO failed. NATO Secretary General a little bit later this afternoon. I have a direct quote from the president of the United States on NATO, and I will share it with all of you.

23:55They were tested and they failed. And I would add it's quite sad that NATO turned their backs on the American people over the course of the last six weeks when it's the American people who have been defunding their defense. As you know, President Trump will be meeting with Secretary Ruta in a couple of hours here at the White House, and I know he looks forward to having a very frank and candid conversation with him. So, Dinesh, because one of the symptoms of Trump derangement syndrome is if Trump says something, you have to say the opposite. Suddenly, all these Democrats and certain Republicans are like, oh, my God, NATO.