The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 17 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.
Over the weekend, Donald Trump exploded in several tirades over media coverage of his Iran war. He accused news organizations of deliberately producing false stories about the war and even said they want us to lose to Iran. And then, in an angry rant to reporters, he rebuked other countries for refusing to help open the Strait of Hormuz—and things got truly weird.
All this comes as a new exposé about Trump’s handling of the war reveals shocking new details about his incompetence and derangement, showing that we really need the free press right now more than ever. Which raises a question: is Trump about to use the war to launch a domestic information crackdown? We’re talking about all this with Molly McKew, an international relations expert and author of a good new piece on the deeper stakes of this moment. Molly, nice to have you on.
Molly McKew: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
Sargent: So the big story right now is that Trump is trying to determine how to get the Strait of Hormuz reopened, with many of our allies rebuffing his demands for help, and Trump trying to decide whether to go all in for an extended commitment. Molly, can you bring us up to date real quick on where this stands and why it all matters?
McKew: I think we’re on what day 17 now of the strikes against Iran. No one is sure what the strategic objective is. In any war game tabletop exercise of should we strike Iran or not, one of the first questions has always been: can we keep the Strait of Hormuz open or not?
Because the impact on shipping, on global transit of goods—particularly energy and oil supplies—if the strait is closed, is catastrophic, as we’ve seen in previous instances in the ‘70s and otherwise. The impact on the economy, on energy prices, on prices we will pay for everything, on how markets fluctuate, will be extremely significant if there is not a solution to what Iran is doing right now.
Sargent: Well, Trump erupted in a wild fury at the media on Sunday night. Clearly this stuff is getting to him. One of his Truth Social posts said this:
“The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and other low-life papers and media actually want us to lose the war. Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts. They are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they caused the United States.”
In a second post, Trump accuses news organizations of deliberately suppressing the U.S.’s successes against Iran and hails Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr for threatening action against media organizations whose reporting on the war displeases Trump. Molly, there’s little chance the press curtails itself, but Carr’s threat is a serious matter. What’s your take on it?
McKew: I think in general, the president’s tone and his supposition that media is not telling his story—not telling the truth—is extremely problematic. And the use of government resources to now pursue these claims as if they are reality is something that should concern us all, in the same way they’ve pushed the line on defining what is a domestic terrorist or not.
The pursuit of people not telling the truth, using sanctions from the U.S. government, could be extremely significant. We’ve already seen people self-editing and sort of suppressing their views—in universities, in the media and other places—for fear of the kind of things Trump lashes out at.
And I don’t think this will be helpful. Americans deserve to know what is happening in Iran, what our objectives are in Iran, that more than 200 Americans have been injured in the pursuit of whatever our goals are in Iran, that more Americans are deploying to the region and why and what that’s for and what it will look like. And they deserve to know that this war is not a standalone thing, but connected to the bigger war being fought.
And the idea that the lies being told to the American public, quote-unquote, prevent them from seeing the truth—we’ve gotten so used to, as an American public, this sort of bombast from the president. And I think one by one so many institutions have caved to that strategy that we’re really in a dangerous place.
Sargent: The New York Times had an extraordinary exposé on Trump’s handling of the war against Iran. One big revelation is that a “frustrated” Trump asked Joint Chiefs Chair Dan Caine why the U.S. can’t immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and he was told gently that supertankers would be very vulnerable to even one missile in an attack. Trump’s also urging companies to show “some guts” and brave the strait, even though it’s obvious how dangerous this is. And Trump is trying really hard to get other countries to help reopen the strait after not consulting them before the invasion—and even saying recently that we’ve already won the war.
These leaks are absolutely devastating—they’re damning as hell. Molly, you’d think Trump would have known before all this started that, number one, it would be hard to reopen the strait and, number two, alienating allies would make them less likely to help him now. How is it possible that the commander in chief is this disconnected from obvious realities?
McKew: I definitely think part of the problem is he has already decided whatever he thinks is reality is reality—and that’s a challenge for anyone in charge of anything. I think that we know for sure that the people around him don’t give him the information. They give him the three bullet points written in crayon, or whatever, that he wants to see.
And we know that the intelligence being presented to him has been heavily edited in the context of this administration. It’s been presented—in a range of other stories we know from the past—to suit his views, to suit his needs. Obviously, they’re not talking about what Russia is doing. He doesn’t believe the story about how they’re helping Iran with intelligence, et cetera, et cetera. Everything he’s presented with is whatever is meant to prop up his view of the moment. And no one can make valid decisions living in the soup of lies.
Sargent: It sure seems that way. It’s really a disaster. Let’s check out what Trump said to reporters now. He was asked if he will be able to persuade other countries to help reopen the strait. He responded angrily. Listen.
Donald Trump (voiceover): I don’t do a hard sell on them because my 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. But it’s interesting—I’m almost doing it in some cases, not because we need them, but because I want to find out how they react. Because I’ve been saying for years that if we ever did need them, they won’t be there.
Sargent: Two things here. First, he can’t decide whether he needs the help of other countries or not. And second, he can’t seem to fathom that he wronged our allies first. So he’s taking the refusal to join in this absurd and pointless war as a snub against us and him—and as an excuse to further weaken the NATO alliance, which he’s been weakening. What do you make of all that?
McKew: And he even sort of says it in that block of text, right? It’s, well, I’m just trying to prove the point I’ve always made that absolutely no one is going to show up and help us. Obviously, this is a false narrative, which he presents constantly. He has campaigned on it three times now, and it does resonate with a number of Americans who do believe that the American defense budget and other support outweighs those of our allies. I think that is a misrepresentation of history and the purpose of the alliance and the ways that our allies have responded to our calls for help over the past 30 years.
But that aside, I think this notion that no one’s going to come—and it will prove that they were never going to come and we don’t need anybody anyway—is absolutely ridiculous and juvenile, but also so dangerous and fraught. Everything that we have learned from Russia’s war in Ukraine, from what we should have learned from that on what the future of warfare is, on what the current state of warfare is, on how we will need to prepare to fight wars, is that we need allies. We need supply lines. We need integrated systems of interoperability and control. And anybody who walks away from what we should be learning—but clearly aren’t—with we’re just going to go it alone, is absolutely missing the point.
And Trump even knows this, because not just from the current phase of conflict—whatever we want to call it—in Iran, where we and our allies are shooting incredibly expensive missiles and interceptors at cheap Iranian drones and much cheaper Iranian missiles to try to defend our people and facilities from attacks by them. We had this previous year of the same kinds of asymmetric warfare in the Red Sea, where the Houthis are shooting barrels of fireworks at us and we’re using a $4 million missile to stop one from blowing up a NATO ship.
I mean, we know this is a challenge for how our defense systems work, how our defense industries have gotten crazier and crazier in terms of the lack of product and the expense attached to all of it. And the fact that since 2022 in particular, we have not overcome this production gap in our own defensive supplies—let alone figured out a way to produce enough for the war that Ukraine should win against Russia.
I’m just having a hard time with how none of those lessons learned—which are pretty obvious even for those of us who just, you know, live on social media sometimes—are not being reflected in the U.S. government’s planning for fighting a major, much larger conflict against the nation of Iran.
Sargent: Yeah, and Trump just isn’t capable of learning. And I think these reports are really just scratching the surface of how bad the decision-making process really is at this point.
There’s another extraordinary revelation in the big Times piece. It’s that Benjamin Netanyahu privately got Trump to believe that if an initial strike against Iran decimated some of its leaders, the protests would quickly restart. Trump took that—which he heard from Netanyahu—and used it in his own message to the Iranian and American people, saying the U.S. is striking Iran to help the protesters take back your country. And now Trump has kind of backflipped, resorting to claiming that it’s going to be very hard for the protesters to accomplish anything after all. It’s like he’s treating Iranians like the contractors he’s been stiffing for decades—like graduates from Trump University. It’s like he’s scamming everyone again.
It’s incredibly damning stuff. Trump seems to have gotten badly played by Netanyahu here, no?
McKew: I think there are two things that are really important. Whether you’re looking at what you just said—and it’s a really good subject of discussion—the first is whether it’s Netanyahu, or MBS, the Saudi princeling, or whatever other guy has a thing he wants to get done—and that could be a guy who wants to bomb Nigeria or a guy who wants some bill passed in the U.S.—everybody has figured out that Trump is highly influenceable, particularly if it involves some form of financial incentive.
And it’s crazy watching how willing he is—as, in theory, the most powerful leader in the world—to do the work of any guy, and some women, who want to use him for whatever their agenda is. And he just does it. And he thinks it’s great. And he thinks it makes him smart and powerful to be willing to help these people in this way. And it’s crazy because everybody is willing to take such risks to get him to do their thing while there’s the opportunity to do that. Nobody is planning adequately for whatever the outcome of the risk-taking is. And it’s kind of weird to watch.
I think the second thing that’s really interesting is that both in the case of Iran and in the earlier intervention—or whatever we call it—in Venezuela, while it does not seem to have been necessarily intentional on the president’s part, some element of the planning in these places directly discredited the democratic opposition in both cases. They took Machado out of the country before the attack on Maduro and basically proved the point that she had no clout. I mean, the second Maduro was gone, he says, she’s got no clout—it’s not going to be that lady. Like, here, I made a deal with the deputy dictator instead.
And in Iran, there was this bizarre—clearly there was some effort to engage with Pahlavi, with the baby Shah—to sort of call on the people to come to the streets. And again, especially Iranian women have been taking such risks in the protests to try to bring change in Iran. And all of that—it’s like the way he looks at them: well, they couldn’t take down the regime themselves and they have no weapons and couldn’t possibly do it anyway. I guess there was never going to be change and we’ll just figure something else out.
The cynicism of all of this—but also it seems, in some element of planning, whoever is in charge of it—the deliberate attempts to discredit a democratic alternative for these places and try to make a deal with whoever can deliver the money into their bank account in Qatar faster, is very troubling.
Sargent: I’m going to predict right now one possibility: that Trump at the end of the day throws the Iranian protesters under the bus. What do you think of that?
McKew: I mean, he already did once. Certainly he’s happy to do it again—unless they want to pay him a whole bunch of money.
Sargent: Right. That is really what it always comes down to. What do you expect, Molly, on the domestic frontier? It seems pretty likely that Trump and people like Pete Hegseth—who lashed out in a wild fury at the press on Friday—are seriously entertaining some kind of press crackdown. They’ve got Brendan Carr out kind of at the tip of that spear. Do you fear that? And what could it realistically look like?
McKew: I think the reason I would fear it more than I normally would—in terms of their just, you know, yapping at the wind, like always—is they know they’re losing their own base, especially the Manosphere podcaster base, with this war. Nobody signed up for let’s-invade-Iran. I know there are plenty of people who are now on the bandwagon, who are transmitting the message that victory is near, that our huge military success of the first days proves we are the greatest and whatever. I understand that there are people who support this. And again, it’s not like anybody is in love with the mullahs and wants them to return to power—the same way we don’t want Maduro to be back in power. This is not the choice that anyone is making. But it is not popular. And it is clear there’s a lot of dissent in the influencer space that Trump pays a lot of credence to, in order to access younger, especially younger male, voters. They’re not happy. They don’t like this. The attacks on the press still resonate a lot with his base, and it will be a boost to him in the context of not winning on any other message.
Sargent: Right—as the Iran stuff goes sideways, he throws the base attacks on the press, and potentially government action against the press.
McKew: I think it’s a possibility for sure. And it seems to be an element of what they’re shaping into the same narrative right now.
Sargent: I think there’s actually one positive story that’s emerging from all of this, which is that—to those who may remember the run-up to the Iraq War—the media coverage was really, really sycophantic towards George W. Bush and not at all questioning enough of official assertions. We’re not seeing that now. This is the press as aggressive as I’ve seen it in some time, scrutinizing the rationale for going to war, the fake rationales, but also digging hard into actual things that are happening on the ground.
The reporting on the bombing of the school in Iran has been absolutely spectacular and revelatory. And there’s deep digging into what went into Trump’s decision-making, and what a disaster that was, what a fiasco it was, and how completely absurd the whole thing was. And it’s all being laid bare before the American people. So I think that also is probably working against Trump in a major way within some of the quarters of the Manosphere that aren’t too pro-MAGA, right? They’re probably seeing some of this stuff and being pretty damn horrified. And so then that creates more of an incentive—this incredible press aggression creates more of an incentive for some kind of crackdown.
McKew: I agree with you that there’s a little grain of optimism about some of the energy we see. And on the reactive side to that, what’s so interesting is the instinct—I mean, that Trump has developed over the last 10 years, but that this administration has sort of reflexively absorbed, because they all just mirror Trump’s behavior now. There’s no normal press secretaries. There’s no normal communications. It’s all just the same we’re-going-to-punch-you-in-the-face stuff—in the context of an actual serious thing.
They do not know what to do. If it was a vaguely normal administration, we would have done what we did all the times we hit a school in Afghanistan or whatever, which is you just say it’s under investigation, it is a likely targeting error, we’re sorry—you know, like, don’t even say sorry, but it’s likely a targeting error, we weren’t trying to blow up the school. Like, I think this is the case, right? It’s clear this piece of property was once a part of this base. Someone didn’t update the maps, probably because they were in a rush to make a targeting list, and they hit the school. Just admit it. Then everybody forgets and it’s like, we’ll never discuss it again—because that’s how we are as a population. We don’t really think about the human costs of war too much. But they just can’t—in any instance—present what they view as weakness. And I don’t think that the instincts that they have been able to coast by on for the last year are going to serve them particularly well in the context where reality is suddenly going to be biting us all a lot.
Sargent: Well, let me cue on that despairing note—let’s call it a day. Folks, if you want to check out Molly’s work, you can see it at the Great Power Substack. Molly, thanks so much for coming on.
McKew: Thanks for having me.