Transcript: Trump Hit by Damning Iran Leaks as Polls Turn Brutal Fast

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump’s rationale for waging war on Iran is coming under withering scrutiny. A new report in The New York Times shows that his deliberations were even more chaotic and unserious than we knew. This comes as the first round of polling has been brutal for Trump, showing shockingly low public support for his war. This looks very different from how initial debates over war typically unfold. What explains it? Mark Jacob has a good piece on his Substack, “Stop the Presses,” that links together Trump’s lawbreaking on multiple fronts. We’re going to talk about whether this already entrenched sense of Trump as a mad king is what’s turning the public against his war. Mark, good to have you on.

Mark Jacob: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So the Times has a new exposé laying out how Trump decided to go to war, and boy is it damning. It shows that Trump lurched between saying he wants to reach a deal with Iran on nuclear weapons on one side, and saying he wants to overthrow its regime on the other. It all shows his case for war rested on lies about Iran as an imminent threat. And Trump publicly misrepresented what his own top general told him. Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine told Trump that a war risks significant American casualties. But Trump said Caine believed war with Iran would be “easily won.” Mark, what do you make of all that?

Jacob: I think what we’re seeing is 11-year-olds with the most powerful military in the entire world, which is a pretty scary thing to see in action. And it also doesn’t really look, from the New York Times reporting at least, like Netanyahu just bulldozed Trump into this—that he said, well, we’re going and you’re going to get blamed for it anyway, so come with us and do it together. Which is no way for the supposedly most powerful country in the world to behave on the international stage.

Netanyahu is just in a position where he’s going to get as much leverage over Trump and as much influence over Trump as possible. And Trump, being really kind of a child about foreign policy, is just going to be easily swayed.

Sargent: Yeah, it looks like that’s exactly what happened. Now, as of now, four Americans have been killed and a number of others have been seriously injured. The Supreme Leader of Iran has also been killed, but Trump is now saying military action will escalate.

We just had a new CNN poll finding 59 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s action against Iran versus only 41 percent who approve. 59 percent say they don’t trust Trump to make good decisions here, and 60 percent say he doesn’t have a clear plan for handling Iran. Mark, you’ve been around for some time. Have you ever seen the public turn against a war right at the outset and quite this way?

Jacob: No. When I was working at the Chicago Tribune on the nation-world desk, I was editing stories out of the Iraq War every day. And in that war, Bush prepared the public for it — obviously prepared the public with lies, but nonetheless, there was this preparatory period in which he was bringing out evidence, false or true, and there was this drumbeat. And there’s a reason for that.

Obviously we’re seeing it now: when you prepare the American public, you have a discussion and you have consensus. He didn’t do that here. And this is, Greg, one of the main points of my newsletter today—there was no consulting Congress. There are laws in this country, and one of them is the Constitution, which says that Congress decides when we go to war. Another is the War Powers Act, which says that if you are not defending yourself, if you’re doing an offensive military action, you’ve got to go to Congress. And so Trump is clearly law breaking right now and being allowed to, which is really frightening. He’s operating like a king.

Sargent: Yes. And I want to get into that aspect of your piece in a bit. I would just point out also that in relation to the run-up to Iraq, that happened with George W. Bush after a major terrorist attack on the country. And also George W. Bush had only been in office for a very short time—the country wasn’t really aware of all the very profound shortcomings that he would ultimately exhibit. Whereas with Trump, there’s been no terror attack, and there’s also been a really long period in which voters have become accustomed to Trump’s terrible flaws. And so I think all these things working together make this situation politically much worse for Trump than anything Bush faced.

Jacob: Well, and throw into that the fact that Trump, for the whole last decade, has been talking about how he doesn’t want to get into wars of choice, how these foreign wars are killing us and all this stuff—which, I mean, I wasn’t fooled, and I’m sure a lot of other people weren’t either, because Trump never really does anything policy-wise that helps the people at large. It’s always insiders who benefit, such as in this case defense contractors and his donors.

But he was talking peace, and you talk peace for 10 years and then you do just an optional war in which your own people are admitting that there’s no immediate threat—what else are you going to get from the American people other than shock and disgust?

Sargent: Well, that is what we’re getting. A new Reuters poll is even worse for Trump. It finds only 27 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s attack on Iran. And here’s a key number: 56 percent say Trump is too willing to use military force. I think this shows how badly damaged Trump’s public image is already heading into this. What do you think?

Jacob: Yeah, well, certainly. I mean, he was already way down in the polls. There’s actually not that much farther he can go, considering that some people will support absolutely anything he does because of the whole cult mentality, which we’ve been talking about for a long time. He really has lost the country, opinion-wise. And one thing that scares me is that as that happens, he becomes more desperate and does more erratic and autocratic things.

Sargent: Well, this war really is one of those things. And I think this is going to be politically with us for a long time, potentially. The Times piece has more revelations that will keep giving. For instance, in a recent meeting with congressional leaders, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made no mention of Trump’s plans to pursue regime change. And JD Vance, who’s supposed to be anti-interventionist, actually argued internally for them to go big, which might have prodded Trump in that direction. Mark, you know, both Rubio and Vance are in the mix for 2028. I really wonder if this could end up being very problematic for them long term. How do you see this playing out?

Jacob: Well, I mean, you can’t predict wars. This could be over in a week. It could be not over by the time the midterms happen. There’s just no predicting. What he’s done is unleash a Middle East war—it’s not just an attack between Israel, the U.S., and Iran; all these other countries are involved now, and Lebanon is in it.

So he has sparked a wide war in the Middle East, and you don’t put the genie back in the bottle that fast. So I think it’s going to be very damaging. I think yes, it hurts Rubio and Vance. I hope it hurts Rubio and Vance, because they deserve to be hurt for having recklessly advised the president. And I think you may find some Republicans start saying, well, this is not a good idea.

And I mean, they’ll do it after the primaries, you know, Greg—that’s the really sad thing, is how cynical the Republican Party is at this point, to where they won’t move away from Trump until he has no chance to primary them. And then as soon as the primaries are over, they’ll probably move really hard to the center. I don’t think they’ll be very credible doing it, but they will attempt to.

Sargent: Yes. I think we should talk about the vulnerable House Republicans who are up for reelection. There’s a number of them and they’ve already been trying to run away from Trump’s tariffs and put distance between themselves and Donald Trump on health care and on the expiring ACA subsidies and so forth.

The big tell is going to be what those House Republicans start saying about the war, presuming it’s still going on a couple of months after the primaries are over. What do you think is going to happen there?

Jacob: Well, I think we’ll have to see, first, whether there’s a vote in Congress — whether that happens this week or any time. My suspicion is Republicans will try to block it any way they can, just because they don’t want accountability. They just want everything to lay off on Trump. The Republican Party is really a bunch of cowards at this point. They want to make no decisions. They want to have no responsibility. They want to have no accountability. And we didn’t really elect people to show up in Washington and sit on their hands, but that’s what’s happening.

Here’s the scary thing: the worse Trump does in public opinion, the more dangerous he is at this point. And you’ve already started seeing these moves toward fiddling with the elections. One thing about having a big war in the Middle East is you can get a situation where the federal government—Trump’s government—declares that there’s a bunch of terrorist threats, so we have to really clamp down on security, and therefore we’ll declare an emergency, therefore invoke the Insurrection Act, and we will federalize our elections. He’s talking about that. And I’m just worried that the more unpopular he gets, the more likely that is to happen.

Sargent: Yeah, you’re talking about domestically—that Donald Trump is going to use any continuing war to sort of maximize his powers at home, emergency powers at home.

Jacob: Right. And also to say that there are Iranian sleeper cells—and I mean, all kinds of stuff. They’re really good at making up stuff. They may have no credibility, but they sure talk a lot.

Sargent: Well, the big through line with Trump, connecting all these different things, is that he feels zero need to explain himself to the public and just doesn’t think he’s bound by the law in any sense at all. This connects with what we’re seeing in Minneapolis, where his forces are killing U.S. citizens with no accountability. And he’s killing supposed drug runners who are civilians in the Caribbean, and much more.

He’s just bombing them. There again, it’s completely illegal. He didn’t go to Congress for any kind of justification or approval for that. You get at this kind of through line well in your piece. It seems to me like the public kind of gets that overall arc—the lawless arc. The CNN finding that 59 percent don’t trust Trump to make good decisions underscores that, I think. What do you think?

Jacob: Yeah, I think so. The main theme of what I was writing was that Trump is behaving like a king—with the power to decide life or death for people without asking anyone’s permission or explaining himself in any way — which is not the way that a president operates. That’s the way a king in ancient times operated.

The sad thing is that all of his abuses aren’t equally felt by the public. I think that at this point the war in Iran is still pretty distant to people. Now, once we start having identification of the Americans who were killed, and once — we had three planes shot down accidentally today — there’s going to be a big mess when you create a big war, and that’ll be more of an attention-getter for the American people.

But I feel like, as far as the killing of the alleged drug traffickers in the Pacific and the Caribbean—he didn’t present any evidence of that. Who knows whether those people are fishermen? He keeps making jokes about them being fishermen, which is crazy. And even if they were drug traffickers, that’s not a capital crime. Present evidence, arrest people, take them and put them in jail if they’re guilty. But this idea that the President of the United States can just decide we’re going to whack those people — that’s not the way this country operates.

But Greg, my main point here is that what’s happening with the war of choice that Trump has done in Iran, and what he’s done with killing people in boats around Venezuela, doesn’t have as much impact on American public opinion as what ICE and Border Patrol have been doing in this country, because that’s right at home. Nobody thinks that the people of Minneapolis deserve this. And we see every day, if you’re paying any attention, that they’re creating a system of concentration camps around the country.

So what are you going to do with those after you’ve deported all the immigrants? What are you going to do with all that empty space? I think that people are really scared about having an autocratic leader who has no regard for human life and is just abusive, illegal, corrupt, and has no ability to show any empathy toward people. You saw that today when he was talking about the drapes and the ballroom when he should have been talking about American deaths and deaths of other people. So this guy is a disaster, but he’s a disaster with a whole lot of power right now. And I think that the American people are starting to wake up to that. I hope they are.

Sargent: Well, just to circle back to where we started—if you compare this situation with the run-up to the Iraq War and the early days of the Iraq War, there’s a basic difference here as well. Not only is there no actual crisis in this particular case, no rationale whatsoever, but voters—to go back to your point about the illegal killings in the Caribbean mattering less to voters than the assassinations or executions of American citizens in Minneapolis — the American people have had many, many months of getting bombarded by this imagery of outright lawlessness, outright lawless violence, extralegal violence being inflicted on Americans. They’ve been exposed to that fairly relentlessly. And I really think that seems to be conditioning them to see what’s going on abroad as something more alarming and more lawless than they otherwise might. Is that too optimistic?

Jacob: No, I think you’re right. And another point related to that is that Homeland Security systematically lied about almost every clash it had with protesters, observers, or immigrants. I mean, I’m here in Chicago and we had the same thing before Minneapolis did — people were getting shot by ICE and they immediately lied about everything.

A federal judge here in Chicago called them out for their lies. So it’s not my opinion that they were lying. And now here we are in a time of war, when there’s a lot of uncertainty, and when your sons and daughters may be killed serving their country — people want the truth from their government and they know they’re not going to get it from this bunch. And so I think the lack of credibility that they have wasted in Minneapolis and Chicago and Los Angeles and Portland and everywhere else is coming home to roost here.

Sargent: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. And I think it’s an important point. In the run-up to Iraq, I think in the early days of Iraq, people were shocked at the official lying that was going on—especially when it emerged that there were no WMDs in Iraq. In this case, the public has seen years and years of official lying from this bunch, and a level of lying that is unprecedented for a public official in the United States in modern times. And so it looks to me like there’s going to be a much harsher public judgment on this stuff up front. Where do you see it unfolding in the end?

Jacob: Well, one other point on that is that it’s not just that the American people feel like they’re getting lied to—which they did after the invasion of Iraq—but they think that the Trump administration doesn’t know what it’s doing. They haven’t even come up with a good lie. I mean, this whole: well, we want regime change; no, we don’t want regime change; we want the people to maybe rise up, maybe not; or we want to knock down their defenses.

And this thing about them kind of admitting that Iran does not have nuclear weapons, but saying now that they’re building up their defenses so that we can’t attack their nuclear weapons if they ever build them—well, what that means is that Iran is not allowed to have a defense. That means that no military action by Iran, even defensive, is acceptable.

In other words, unless they surrender the whole country to the United States, it’s not acceptable. Nobody thinks that makes any sense. So what we’ve got here is a giant war developing and we have an even worse explanation for it than we had in 2003.

Sargent: It sure looks that way. And I’m really heartened to see that the public is turning against this right at the outset, and boy do I hope it holds. Mark Jacob, awesome to talk to you. Folks, check out Mark’s Substack—it’s called Stop the Presses. Great to have you on.

Jacob: Thanks for having me.