Trump Blurts Out Damning War Admission as GOP Panics: “What the Hell?”

During Donald Trump’s speech on Iran this week, he revealed too much. In a line that sounded partly ad-libbed, he declared that the Strait of Hormuz “will open up naturally. It will just open up naturally.” This should be read as a straight-up admission that Trump has no idea how to fix the colossal mess he’s made, and that he’s just washing his hands of it entirely. That’s utterly damning. Meanwhile, Politico reports that Republicans privately fear the speech did nothing to help them politically; as one put it: “What the hell did he just say?” Those things are related: The worse this war gets, the more it will hurt Republicans in the midterms. We talked to foreign policy writer and podcaster David Rothkopf, author of a good piece about the speech. We discuss Trump’s implicit admission of failure, the deeper reasons this is developing into such a fiasco, why it’s a trap for Republicans, and what the post-Trump Democratic Party should look like. Listen to this episode here.