The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 26 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.
NBC News is reporting that Donald Trump gets his updates on the Iran War in video form. Compilations of the most successful strikes on Iranian targets are shown to him in a montage. This has his own allies worried that he’s only getting a partial view of what’s happening on the ground. At the same time, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt praised Trump’s handling of the war in ways that were truly strange during a briefing—and sounded like she was speaking only for the benefit of Trump’s ears and no one else’s. Which got us thinking: this is just not at all how a president and a White House should be conducting themselves at such a moment. We’re at the point where we’ve forgotten what basic leadership should even look like.
So we’re talking to Emily Horne, a veteran of the National Security Council and State Department, to get a sense of why all this is so deeply abnormal and what we should be demanding instead. Emily, great to have you on.
Emily Horne: Thanks, Greg.
Sargent: Emily, I think you have the distinction of being the only guest who’s come on twice in a row in such short succession. So congratulations.
Horne: Well, there’s a lot to talk about, unfortunately, in this case.
Sargent: Well, you’re perfect for this topic. So let’s get into it. We just learned that Donald Trump made some sort of offer to the Iranians in hopes of getting a ceasefire—some sort of 15-point plan. But Iran has rejected Trump’s offer. There do appear to be some sort of back-channel talks going on, but it’s unclear who’s talking to whom. What does seem clear is that Trump really wants to get out of this, but that that’s turning out to be really hard. Emily, can you bring us up to date on where the war stands and explain why it’s hard for Trump to find a way out?
Horne: So you said a word in that summary—”unclear”—that unfortunately is, I think, the perfect word to describe the current state of play. One of the things that makes this a very difficult situation for the American public to try to understand is that, frankly, we cannot trust the information that the White House and the Pentagon are putting out about this war.
When President Trump says that the Iranians have agreed to talk and the Iranians say they haven’t, it’s really difficult to know who is telling the truth. And as an American, that really alarms me—that I have to acknowledge that while I will never trust what the Iranians are saying, I can’t trust what the commander in chief is saying here either.
That’s pretty alarming for all of us. We still don’t have a consistent definition of what success looks like. We still don’t have a consistent explanation for why—whatever the U.S. aims are—they appear to be very different from those of the Israeli government. We still don’t have a description of what a diplomatic off-ramp could even look like. So there’s just so much that we don’t know and that we have never really known about what this war is about or why we’re undertaking it at this particular moment.
I think a good question for reporters to be asking when they’re in those briefing rooms—and a press secretary or spokesperson says victory is nigh or success is at hand—is, okay, well, remind me: what is your definition of success? What does victory look like according to this administration, and how will you know when you have achieved those objectives? Don’t just give them the easy win of declaring mission accomplished.
Sargent: Let’s listen to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt for a bit. Here she is after being asked whether Trump will be able to get our allies behind whatever he negotiates with Iran, or whatever the outcome is at the end of the day.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): I think the president has shown that he is absolutely the leader of the free world, the head of the most powerful military in the world. And in various examples—the 12-day war between Iran and Israel, the ceasefire between Israel and Gaza—the president has shown a very unique skill at getting our allies to get on board with what’s in the best interest of the United States, but also the world.
Sargent: Emily, this is extremely strange. Everyone in that room—except for maybe the hand-picked Trump propagandists—knows full well that Trump alienated our allies extremely badly in the run-up to the war, and that he’s been unable to get them on board to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Yet she just goes full cult right in their faces. What did you make of that?
Horne: You know, I’m not surprised. This has always been the administration’s MO—to just willfully assert their definition of reality and wait for others to react to it. These reporters in these briefing rooms have an opportunity to say directly to Karoline Leavitt’s face, directly to any spokesperson: what is your evidence for that? Why should we believe what you’re saying?
They have the opportunity to challenge this administration directly, and it would be doing a great public service for all of those who don’t have that opportunity—if they would be willing to be a little more pointed and a little bit more intentional about actually asking for backup when someone asserts that the sky isn’t blue, it’s red, or that the Pope isn’t Catholic today because we say so.
Sargent: Well, let’s just clarify what the truth is for people. Trump isn’t actually good at getting our allies together, is he?
Horne: I mean, he’s very good at getting our allies together insofar as they would be acting in coordination to not do what he’s asking them to do—as we saw when he tried to get our allies and partners together to support military action that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and everyone politely said, no, thank you, we will not be doing that. So perversely, yeah, he’s kind of great at getting our allies together—just not necessarily in service of whatever he happens to define as victory that day.
Sargent: Yes. Well, that is certainly true. So let’s listen to a bit more of Leavitt. Here she is saying that whatever Trump says is true by definition.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): If you’ve heard it from the president of the United States, obviously it’s true.
Sargent: And here’s Leavitt talking about what will happen to Iran if, well, things don’t go the way Trump wants them to.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): But the president’s preference is always peace. There does not need to be any more death and destruction. But if Iran fails to accept the reality of the current moment, if they fail to understand that they have been defeated militarily and will continue to be, President Trump will ensure they are hit harder than they have ever been hit before. President Trump does not bluff and he is prepared to unleash hell.
Sargent: So Emily, you’ve been part of this process a lot. This just doesn’t sound the way previous press secretaries have sounded. I mean, okay, press secretaries will spin—they will sometimes lie, they will do whatever they have to do to advocate for the boss. But this is another type of thing entirely.
To assert that things are true simply because Trump has said them, and to say Trump is going to “unleash hell”—that’s just not often how you hear press secretaries talk. Can you get into that a little bit? What’s wrong with that and why don’t we want it?
Horne: Look, these are serious times that demand serious people. I wouldn’t say, as a communications professional, that it’s terribly serious to hear a press secretary or spokesperson who treats matters of war and life and death as if they are a video game to be won—where by owning your opponents, you somehow dominate.
That’s really upsetting to hear, frankly, for someone who’s worked in national security for a very long time and has been in the room when decisions about deploying U.S. troops overseas were being debated with a gravity that was appropriate for the situation. You have to be humble if you’re going to be dealing with life-and-death issues. And I don’t hear a lot of humility or an understanding of the weight of those decisions in these kinds of conversations.
Sargent: Yeah, there’s a sadistic, relishing-of-domination aspect to all of this that I find incredibly off-putting. I mean, the Bushies—the people around George Bush—sort of talked like this a little bit; there was a lot of swagger. But to hear things like “Trump will unleash hell,” it’s just really, really grating and I think morally abhorrent in a way, because these are human beings on the ground and there has to be an awareness of that.
Horne: Look, ideally you would want a commander in chief who is centering the humanity of people who are going to be impacted by war when he or she is thinking about whether or not to send U.S. troops into battle. And that goes for not just those troops and their families and all American citizens, but also thinking about the civilians on the ground who are going to be impacted by American strikes or American military action.
You ideally, as a national security professional, try to avoid war—war is the last resort that you would go to. And so yes, it is very chilling to hear this White House talking about war as if it is a game to be won, when in fact it is not. You should not relish the idea of unleashing hell on the people that will experience it. That is upsetting to hear, certainly.
Sargent: Well, that brings us to the next topic here, which is NBC News is reporting—it’s amazing stuff—it describes how Trump gets briefed on the war. Every day since it started, U.S. military officials produce a video compilation that shows the biggest and most successful strikes on Iran over the previous 48 hours, according to NBC.
This is from current U.S. officials who seem to have leaked this to NBC. One official describes this as video of “stuff blowing up.” Now, Trump does get briefings from other sources, to be fair, but according to those officials, there’s concern among Trump’s own allies that he isn’t getting the full picture of what’s going on. Emily, you’ve been inside this process before. What do you make of that reporting?
Horne: So this is a wild story and I think everyone should read it—and they should also understand what it is they’re reading. And I’m going to tell you my little conspiracy theory about this story. I think this story is a White House plant. And here’s why I think that. There are always a couple of tells that you can kind of look at. One tell that I always look for as a communications professional is if there’s a round dateline, then that means that this story was written ahead of time—you know you’ve kind of gotten an exclusive, you’re not trying to race the competition for it and push it out as soon as it’s ready. So you can preload it into your CMS and have everyone vet it, and then it pops early in the morning—5 a.m. in this case, on the dot—and then it drives the day. That says to me that the communications team, or someone, planned this story. They seeded it.
You’ve got multiple sources, both current and former, who are all singing from the same sheet of music—which says to me, again, this is coordinated. This is a plan. So what does that tell us? That tells us that even though this is a story that on a casual read looks kind of embarrassing for the president—and is, I think, being treated as such on social media, like the president of the United States needs a greatest-hits compilation of CENTCOM strikes in order to understand how the war is going—I understand that reaction.
But to be clear, there’s a deeper message that I think they want planted in people’s minds, which is that this White House is now creating excuses for why the war is not going well and why the American people do not approve of this war. And one of the excuses that they are creating is, well, the president of the United States is not being fed good information by his military.
That is what they are trying to plant with this story, if—as I suspect—this is a planted story. They’re trying to create a paper trail and a narrative that says this is going badly not because Donald Trump made terrible decisions, but because his military leadership is not being honest with him about what is happening.
Sargent: Yeah, well, that certainly sounds very plausible. Let me ask you, though, on the substance of it. It absolutely is embarrassing—it sounds almost infantilizing. He’s presented with this video reel of things going boom, boom, boom. And then you can kind of see why Trump talks the way he does, right?
So the other day he went before reporters and he said something along the lines of, we’ve got them totally under our submission, our bombers are flying overhead and we could just bomb anything we wanted any time. And he spoke about it in this really kind of crude and stupid way. But when you realize that he’s getting fed video of things going boom, then you realize why he talks that way about what’s going on. I mean, it is extremely humiliating, don’t you think?
Horne: I mean, there’s a lot there that we could unpack, and I am not a therapist. So perhaps there are some roads we should not go down. Again, though, what I will say is, when you are the president of the United States, you do live in a bubble. You are reliant on your staff to bring you information and to tell you the truth of what is happening.
And if this president is not getting good information from his team, then that is a problem. And as Americans, we should all be concerned about that. Even if you don’t agree with the decisions that the president is making, you still want them to be informed and to have the information that they need to make better decisions. So if that’s not happening, then yes, that is a problem.
That said, you do not need a CIA briefer to tell you that this war is not going well, that it is not an unalloyed success and that it is not just things going boom. You can look at your phone, which we know the president does a lot. You could talk to reporters, which we know the president does a lot. You could turn on the television—and even if you watch only Fox News, as we know the president does—you would still see things like the news out of the Strait of Hormuz being shut for now well over a week. You would see reporting on gas prices soaring. You would see reporting on allies saying, no, thank you, we will not be participating in this war with boots on the ground, Mr. President. You do not need bespoke intelligence information to understand reality.
And so again, what I see here is just—as yesterday the president started to point the finger at Secretary Hegseth and say that Pete, you were the one who first started this—I see them starting to cast about for whose fault this really is, and laying the predicate for the buck stops anywhere but with the commander in chief.
Sargent: Well, Karoline Leavitt reacted angrily to the NBC story. And I think this is interesting because what her imperative here is, is to push back really ferociously and angrily against the thing in the story that makes it so humiliating and infantilizing. So she said it was false and she added this: “He actively seeks and solicits the opinions of everyone in the room and expects full-throated honesty from all of his top advisors.”
Emily, I found that comical because anyone who’s watched those cabinet meetings he holds will notice that one top advisor after another slathers him with the most absurdly obsequious praise imaginable and lies endlessly about how triumphant his presidency has been. He’s incredibly prone to manipulation by falsehoods about his greatness and everyone knows it. But Emily, it would be good if he did expect full-throated honesty from his advisors. Isn’t that what we need right now?
Horne: Absolutely. But those are not the dynamics he has created in his administration. Again, the loyalty tests, the purges of people who tell him things that he does not want to hear—all of this, regardless of whatever his spokesperson says, I think actions speak louder than words.
Sargent: Well, how is this process supposed to work? How would a normal president be getting updated, and how would he or she be conducting these conversations about the latest information and the latest intelligence in the war? What would we like to see happening?
Horne: You want to hear from your team as much as possible when you are conducting a war. You want to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly. You want to have your team be honest with you about how things are going. Every president needs a team that will be honest with them. And the job of a president’s team is not to rein them in or move them in a particular direction—it is to bring them vetted options that have been stress-tested, that have been carefully reviewed, that have been tested against what the reality is on the ground. So you have a plan, but is this going to work as we thought it would, given all of these other factors?
And you bring them that information so that they can make informed decisions. You keep them from making preventable mistakes. And presidents cannot do that if they are not getting real-time, honest, accurate information about—again—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And war is full of unexpected moments where things do not go according to plan. If you as a leader create the dynamic that you are going to punish your team if they bring you bad news, or punish them for things that they don’t want to hear, then you’re not going to get good information from them. And I think that’s one of the many differences between good leaders and bad leaders.
Look, what we are seeing with this administration—again, actions are speaking louder than words. No matter what Karoline Leavitt says, it is very clear that this is an administration that punishes people who do not toe the company line. And the company line for this administration is that Donald Trump is always right and can never be wrong. And unfortunately, we’re seeing the consequences of that right now.
We’re seeing it in casualties that are piling up across the Middle East. We’re seeing it in gas prices rising. We are seeing it in costs here at home being borne by the American people. We’re seeing it in our allies and partners who are backing away slowly from the chaos that he is creating. And we’re seeing it with a lot of confusion over whether a diplomatic off-ramp is even possible now.
Sargent: The way they talk about the war, the way they talk about Trump’s world-historical greatness, has kind of boxed them into a place where they can’t even compromise without it looking like failure. And of course the despot never fails, right?
Horne: Yeah. And again, I think we should all be prepared for them to keep moving the goalposts—and no matter what the end result of this is, eventually they’re going to declare total victory, because as you quite rightly note, they’ve created a dynamic where they can’t have anything less than that. And their base will probably believe it—they’ll believe whatever they’re told.
But for the rest of us, I think we should keep pressing for that definition of success. We should keep holding them accountable for the impact that this is having on all of us, as we live through the impact of their terrible decision-making here and the lack of a plan as they’ve started this war.
Sargent: Absolutely. 100 percent. We really can’t let them slither away and claim total victory here. We need them to define what success is and stop lying to us all the fucking time. Folks, make sure to check out Emily Horne’s Substack—it’s called Spin Class. Emily, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Horne: Thanks, Greg.