The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 7 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 is now facing tough questions about his threats to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges. Speaking to reporters Monday, he lost it at one of them who asked about this, attacking his news outlet and ranting that his colleagues seem to want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. This comes as another report says that Republicans may be reaching a “breaking point” with Trump over the war, which raises a question. If Trump seems ready to go through with his threat to carry out massive war crimes, will Republicans be willing to rein him in at that point? Probably not. And what would it mean if Trump can get away with war crimes without Congress raising a peep about it? We’re talking about this with one of our favorite analysts of this kind of thing, Columbia political scientist Elizabeth Saunders, who had a hair-raising thread on Bluesky about where we are. Elizabeth, good to have you on.
Elizabeth Saunders: I wish I could say it’s a pleasure to be here, but I seem to be only invited when things are truly terrible. So we have to stop meeting like this.
Sargent: Well, let’s start with Trump’s angry tirade. He was asked by a New York Times reporter about his threat to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges. And the reporter points out that this would violate the Geneva Conventions. And that triggered Trump. Listen.
Reporter (voiceover): Deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure violate the Geneva Conventions and international law.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Who are you with?
Reporter (voiceover): I’m with the New York Times. Zolan from the New York Times.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Failing. The failing New York Times.
Reporter (voiceover): Are you concerned?
Donald Trump (voiceover): Circulation way down at the New York Times.
Reporter (voiceover): Are concerned that your threat to bomb power plants and bridges amount to war crimes?
Donald Trump (voiceover): No, not at all, no, I’m not. I hope I don’t have to do it.
Sargent: So it’s worth clarifying something here. Trump is threatening to bomb all power plants and bridges in Iran, as opposed to merely targeting ones that might be connected to military uses in some way. Elizabeth, threatening to bomb all power plants and bridges is a clear and unequivocal threat of a war crime, right?
Saunders: If he’s really threatening to bomb all of them or to bomb them indiscriminately, then yes, it would be a war crime. He sees it as an escalation from where we have been, which has been mainly—not exclusively, but mainly—targeting military targets, regime targets. Of course, there have been civilian casualties as well.
But I think in terms of intention, and declaring openly that his goal is to bomb as many bridges—and I mean, he can’t literally bomb every power plant and bridge in Iran, it’s just too big—the fact that he’s saying that probably means it’s going to be indiscriminate. And that is clearly a violation of the law of armed conflict, of basic morality. I could go on. I’m no expert in international law, but it’s not—it also, you don’t need to be to see that that is just horrifying.
Sargent: So Trump kept on ranting at that reporter. He went on for over a minute. It continued this way.
Donald Trump (voiceover): If you think it’s OK for people that are sick of mind, that are tough, smart and sick, really sick—ideal, you know, from a policy standpoint, from any which way you want to say mentally—these are disturbed people. If you think I’m going to allow them, and powerful and rich, to have a nuclear weapon, you can tell your friends at the New York Times, not gonna happen.
Sargent: Elizabeth, note how Trump lashes out at the reporter by suggesting that anyone who raises questions about war crimes being bad is somehow okay with Iran getting nuclear weapons. He seems to have simply just discarded the idea that his use of American military power should be bound or constrained in any way by international law, by concern about civilians, or anything. There are no limits here. Your thoughts on that?
Saunders: I think that this particular exchange—including the attack on The New York Times—it’s like we’ve reached some sort of Trump norm-busting singularity, right? Like, there’s so many things that are wrapped up in this little exchange.
He’s denying that the press should have any right to ask basic questions. He’s attacking the press directly. He’s of course continuing to deny that there would be any problem with bombing these power plants indiscriminately. Throughout the press conference and in his statements over the weekend, he has continually said things about Iran not obtaining a nuclear weapon, when he promised that he’d obliterated Iran’s nuclear threat back in June.
Sargent: Punchbowl News had an interesting report that said this about Trump and the war: “We’re beginning to see tension and perhaps a breaking point with some Republicans.” For instance, Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah says he won’t support additional war funding without Congress formally voting on the war.
Elizabeth, I know it’s absurd to predict that Republicans will ever seriously break from Trump. But I will say this, the Punchbowl reporters are very well sourced inside the GOP and they’re pretty savvy people. And I read this as Republicans sending up a flare of some kind that Trump can’t go much further here. Is that too optimistic?
Saunders: I don’t know if I would say it’s too optimistic. I would never bet on Republicans constraining Trump. But I think that there are reasons to think first that it’s more likely that he will follow through this time on his threats in a way that is a serious breach of everything that’s come before. And that that will prompt some kind of Republican reaction. I doubt it will constrain him ahead of time. But if he does actually try to bomb Iran back into the Stone Age, it’s hard to imagine there’ll be no Republican pushback.
Sargent: Well, you had this great thread where you discussed how dangerous this moment truly is, getting at what you just said. You talked about how our institutions aren’t showing clear signs—or at least sufficient signs—of awareness of this.
Now look, one of these institutions is Congress. It’s beyond comprehension at this point that Congress is not stepping up here. Our lawmakers should have to go on record about this right now. They should have gone on record about the entire war. There should have been a vote authorizing or not authorizing Trump to go to war against Iran. And I think it’s bad in and of itself if lawmakers are spared that act, spared of having to take a position on these things. And here they’re not holding any votes and Trump is threatening war crimes on a mass scale.
Saunders: Well, you’re absolutely right that the system should be producing authorizations to use military force—or votes on whether to authorize military force, votes that the president can lose. Certainly George W. Bush believed that was important in Iraq.
It is true that we ought to have Congress authorizing war, but the system we have evolved concentrates all the power in the president and we essentially delegate it to one person. And that’s the world we live in now. So as a political scientist, sort of, I agree with you, but I also, like, we have to deal with the world we’re in now.
Sargent: Well, Elizabeth, just to sort of disentangle a few different things you said—one of them was really emphasized in your thread on Bluesky. I want to quote it: “This war may end up being the most devastating thing that happens to the U.S. and the world in the 21st century.” You got at that a little earlier in this discussion. Can you spell it out a little more for us?
Saunders: Well, I’m not one for hyperbole, but as I think about the effects already that this war has had on Iran and the civilians in Iran—that’s where I start. And clearly there will be casualties, further casualties for the U.S. military, and we can’t discount that. And then also in the Gulf, right? All these different Gulf nations. You are now talking about a further devastation of Iran through attacks on civilian infrastructure and in retaliation likely attacks on infrastructure all across the Gulf. Desalination plant attacks could result in a massive humanitarian disaster in the Gulf. And then you think about the price of oil and jet fuel and fertilizer, and that could end up impoverishing millions far from the battlefield.
That’s the kind of reach—the Russian invasion of Ukraine had some of those global effects, but actually this seems like it’s going to be worse. I mean, the oil and energy and economics people that I read—since that’s not my area—they definitely seem way more worried about this. In Asia, you already see signs of conflict over fuel. You could impoverish many millions with the cost of food, and farmers in the United States might be devastated. Even just the cost of living may reduce living standards in places like Europe, right? Which have already been under strain.
So when you think about the global effect of what Trump is talking about and the likely retaliation it would invite from Iran—I mean, it’s just, if he does this, that’s what they will do. The effect to me seems just beyond anything I can even wrap my head around. The Iraq War was absolutely devastating in so many ways. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is still devastating in so many ways. But just the sheer number of things that will reverberate from this, on top of the immediate human toll and civilian toll from the fighting, is kind of unfathomable.
Sargent: So Elizabeth, does this mean that there’s really one way out for Trump? And that would be something like Iran does climb down enough on the Strait of Hormuz to allow Trump to declare a victory. And if that doesn’t happen, what does Trump do? Does he actually go ahead with his threat? It’s a little hard for me to visualize what comes next, partly because the situation is just so awful.
Saunders: Yes, it is awful. And as I said in my thread, this is part of why I am more terrified than I was in any of the previous national security crises since 2017 that Trump has been involved in. In part because in the previous crises, he may have said things and tweeted things, but there were forces bearing down on him that restrained him. Some of those were his advisors in the first term. Some of those were structural things. The geography of North Korea and South Korea is just constraining in ways we could talk about another time.
In this case, Iran has the upper hand. It has no incentive to back down. It controls the Strait of Hormuz currently. The geography is punishing. And as I think we’ve talked about before, it’s hard to imagine a way that you could divide that or share it. What incentive does Iran have to give up any control over that? It’s figured out a way to make money, to have leverage over the U.S.—who needs a nuclear weapon now? They have the Strait of Hormuz.
So it’s not clear that Iran will agree to something that Trump can declare victory over. Let’s leave aside that Israel might not agree to walk away if Trump decides to walk away. So then you’re into a situation where Trump would have to basically walk away and leave Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf nations and Israel are not going to like that. And it’s a humiliating defeat.
So because the geography—which is just like an immovable, brute fact, like you cannot change that, right?—this just means that there’s no place where you have an overlapping bargain that can satisfy Trump and satisfy the Iranians. And the way that I know this is so horrible is that that’s a theory in political science that involves a lot of game theory and math and, like, we learn this and it’s super technical, but it basically boils down to, like, is there some basic way that these countries can agree?
And when I hear people in the media talk about it, that’s how they talk about it. They literally say there’s no overlapping agreement that can satisfy both sides. Like, that to me is like, they’re talking in game theory models. They get it. Like, everyone gets it that there’s no way to move forward here to find a peaceful bargain that satisfies both sides.
Humiliation or escalation are kind of the only ways out of that. And we’re not dealing with a rational actor in the U.S.—we’re dealing with someone who’s very angry and who got into this for reasons, I mean, we will probably be talking about it forever. So I don’t see what Trump can do—his usual tactics of showing up and saying, I’m not going to invade Greenland and we’ve got a great deal. He needs other people to play ball with him on that in a way they just will not.
Sargent: So basically, either Iran doesn’t give in and Donald Trump has to accept a humiliation that he can’t spin his way out of, or he reduces Iran to rubble and tries to drag it back to the Stone Age.
Saunders: Well, he doesn’t just try to drag it back to the Stone Age. He invites retaliation against the Gulf, against U.S. interests in the Gulf, against U.S. interests potentially elsewhere, and wrecks the global economy and the global food supply in the ways that we’ve talked about before.
And I think you can’t ignore Iran’s response in this. They’ve been quite rational in their dealings with Donald Trump since he pulled out of the JCPOA. They constantly calibrate their response. I mentioned this in my thread. They telegraph when they’re going to attack—before this war, they would telegraph when they would hit U.S. bases so that they could be, you know, evacuated and so forth. If he goes through with the threat he made over the weekend and reiterated today, they have no incentive to hold back. They don’t.
And I cannot imagine what that will look like. But as I sit here on Monday afternoon, thinking about what’s going to happen when his deadline expires—other than kicking the can down the road, like extending the deadline further, which is just going to prolong the inevitable—I don’t see what the choice between the humiliation and the massive escalation is. I wish, I want someone to tell me I’m wrong.
Sargent: Well, hopefully Republicans will finally step up if and when it comes to this, but God knows we’ve been disappointed so many times before that there’s absolutely zero reason to expect it. Elizabeth Saunders, thank you so much for that grim assessment.
Saunders: Thank you. Please invite me on some time to talk about something happy.
Sargent: I will try.