The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 29 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 just unleashed a barrage of unhinged threats toward Iran in a new interview with Fox News. He threatened to bomb all Iran’s bridges and power plants, and said explicitly that the entire population of Iran might soon be without electric power.
There’s a temptation to dismiss moments like these as bluster. But we can’t let ourselves lose sight of what exactly he’s threatening to do, just how sociopathic these threats really are, and just how terrible it is that the media is now largely numb to them.
This all comes as some MAGA figures are warning against escalation in some surprising new ways as well.
So we’re trying to make sense of it all with former State Department official Emily Horne. Emily, always good to have you on.
Emily Horne: Thanks, Greg, for having me.
Sargent: OK, so we’re in this weird holding pattern where Trump has held off on escalating and he just keeps making all these threats, and he keeps saying Iran is desperate to talk to him.
Yet at the same time, the reporting indicates that in reality the Iranians are not in any rush to talk to Trump at all. Emily, can you sum up the situation as of now?
Horne: The TLDR on that, to use bureaucratic terms, is that Iran has all of the leverage and all of the momentum at this moment in the conflict. I think they’ve shown that there’s a real willingness on their end to pass the cost of this war to the Iranian people, which, as terrible as that is, is a major asset for them. They are not particularly troubled by their own people’s suffering. And that, plus their control of the Strait of Hormuz, gives them a lot of incentives to maintain the status quo, and a lot of leverage over the status of negotiations.
They also continue to have a nuclear program, because Trump walked away from the JCPOA in his first term. So no matter what Trump has said at various points in Trump II about obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, again, that is something that Iran has as a bargaining chip, and they have been very clear that they’re going to control the direction of the conversation moving forward.
Sargent: Why is it that they don’t seem to fear Trump escalating, exactly?
Horne: I think part of it is that, again, they have the leverage here. As you and I have talked about before, this is an existential conflict for the IRGC. Many of them have lost family members, have already suffered greatly; they have already inflicted a great deal of suffering on the Iranian people.
And so there’s a tremendous sunk cost that has already been absorbed by the IRGC in this conflict. And from their perspective, maintenance of the status quo is fine by them—as much as that continues to put Trump in an impossible position, because again, he just doesn’t have a lot of leverage at this point.
But also, their strategy has been working for them. They don’t just control the strait, they are able to inflict a great deal of pain on the broader Middle East region, including by attacking tech infrastructure like data centers, attacking desalinization plants in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, attacking civilian infrastructure across the Middle East. And that again sends a signal that it is Iran’s momentum at this point in the conflict, not the U.S.’s.
Sargent: Well, in that context, let’s check out something Trump just said on Fox News. He starts by saying, I could knock out all the power plants, then it keeps going from there. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): I could knock out the power plants within one day. All of their power plants would be gone. And I let ‘em know that, you know, with negotiations. They say, look—people want me to do that. I think about 91 million people without power, without bridges, with that to live. And it’s a very, very delicate balance. So I think we have a very strong position right now. They know I’m going to do that if they don’t make a deal. The bridges are going to be gone. Literally, in less than a—I would say in two hours, most of the bridges, the major bridges, will all be gone. And the power plants in one day.
Sargent: Emily, I could be wrong, but I think this might be the first time that Trump has explicitly said not only that he’d knock out all the power plants, but also clarified that he really means knocking out electricity for all of Iran’s 91 million people. He said that. And that would be like a humanitarian catastrophe of unthinkable proportions. What would actually happen if he did that?
Horne: So if Trump were to follow through on his threats to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure like power plants en masse, then you would likely see an immediate and mass humanitarian crisis that would affect at minimum tens of millions of people. Remember, Iran has a population of almost 91 million people, many of whom are outside of the center capital of Tehran.
And so the power grid in Iran is already deeply stressed. Power plants and desalinization plants—which are so critical to Iran’s ability to function, with their limited access to freshwater—those are already deeply stressed as a result of this war.
You would likely see a collapse of Iran’s already stressed health system because of those effects, when you have tens of millions of people who are dangerously dehydrated, don’t have clean water to drink; diseases and waterborne illnesses will be spiking as sanitation is failing.
You would likely see supply chain disruption from all sorts of civilian infrastructure destruction, including things like damaged roads, which would probably cause a spike in food prices. There are already millions of people internally displaced within Iran. The latest estimate that I could find is from April, and that estimates 3.2 million people.
The humanitarian crisis already is so dangerous that tens of thousands of Afghan refugees—who fled Afghanistan to find safety from the Taliban and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan by going to Iran—are now returning to Afghanistan. That’s how bad the current humanitarian crisis is. And so you can only imagine how much worse it would quickly become were Trump to undertake these strikes that he is threatening.
Sargent: I just want to make one other point about this. I think in the West, in advanced democracies like ours, we think to ourselves, OK, knock out a power plant, it could just get back up and running pretty quickly. But that really isn’t the case here. It would sort of depend on what exactly Trump did. But if he really decided to make good on his threat—and again, he said this on the air on national television—if he really decided to knock out power for 91 million people and really demolish a whole lot of power plants, it would take probably months, if they were lucky, to get them back up and running. So we’re talking about a humanitarian crisis that would extend for months and months and months, right?
Horne: Absolutely. Probably years, probably generations, in fact—especially if you’re widening the aperture to talk about things like the effects of having tens of millions of people turned into refugees in their own country. I mean, that’s tens of millions of lives that are permanently disrupted. And the ripple effects of that are absolutely staggering to comprehend.
But I also want to make another point here, that what he is proposing is a war crime under both international humanitarian and human rights law, and importantly under U.S. law.
Sargent: It really would be. And I think another point to get out about this is that Trump is talking about knocking out power for all these 91 million people as if to kind of say, I’d be reluctant to take such a step. The tone is as if he’s being humane by saying that. But I really want to underscore this aspect of it.
In saying this, he actually stated straight out that knocking out power for 91 million people is something he’s giving serious consideration to. Listen to that clip. At the end, he says, I will do this if Iran doesn’t do my bidding.
Now, I think a lot of reporters hear this and say, he won’t do it, that’s a lot of bluster. But I don’t think that’s the right way to react. We should be saying, it’s unfathomably sociopathic that he’s even considering it, and an American president shouldn’t be talking this way. What do you think?
Horne: Well, as with so many things with the second Trump administration, multiple things are true simultaneously. So again, I cannot be clear enough about this: what Donald Trump is talking about here would be a violation of the Geneva Convention. Intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure like power plants—universally, human rights attorneys and organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International agree that threatening electricity, water, health care, other civilian infrastructure is a war crime. So that’s point one.
Point two, I think, yes—maybe someone on his staff got to him and made him realize that what you’re talking about is something that would be enormously disruptive to a country of 91 million souls, in addition to being outright illegal, and that that would have devastating humanitarian consequences that the United States, under your leadership, would be responsible for.
But then there’s also a third part here that I think is important to call out, which is, you know, Trump has threatened many times during this conflict—as recently as a week ago—to bomb civilian infrastructure like bridges and power plants and desalinization plants. And there have been strikes that have hit, reportedly, some Iranian civilian infrastructure, that have caused some disruptions to things like water supplies to Iranian villages, but nothing at the scale of what he’s talking about.
He hasn’t really done it. And the more that he talks about it but doesn’t do it, the more he sends a signal to the Iranians, but also to the global community, that he is all bluster—that there is no strategy here other than going on Fox and Friends and bragging about how big his bombs are. Which, I’m sorry, that’s not actually a strategy. And it’s certainly not going to be effective against the IRGC when, as we talked about before, they have most of the leverage in our current state of play.
Sargent: Even this is alarming as well, because the logic of it doesn’t lead to a good place. Donald Trump doesn’t want to end this whole thing in humiliation—that’s the big thing we know about this. It’s been reported that he’s urged his own advisors to find some way, any way at all, for him to be able to say that he got more out of Iran than Obama got during the nuclear negotiations of 2015.
And the idea that that’s what’s motivating him is just completely unthinkably loony. But putting that aside, Trump does not want this to end with him looking bad. He wants to walk out either looking incredibly strong and powerful, or with a world historical victory, or with some combination of that.
And so if he keeps opening the door to these really heinous war crimes, I fear that if Iran keeps kind of poking him and stringing him along, there may come a point at which he’s willing to do it. Is that unreasonable?
Horne: That’s the question. And I don’t know that anyone knows the answer to it, to be honest. Look, I think a week ago, this is what he was threatening to do. And the conditions were, as he wrote on social media on July 22—which, incidentally, was the day of the dignified transfer of four Americans who had been killed in the conflict, at Dover—he wrote on Truth Social that any time Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. will bomb and destroy one bridge or power plant in Iran.
And now, a week later, he’s going on Fox and Friends and saying that instead it is, we will bomb civilian infrastructure in Iran if there’s not a deal. And he’s not specifying what he wants in that deal. But if you listen to the full clip, he immediately starts talking about how Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.
Now, I’m always very reluctant to zoom in on any one particular Trump talking point and say, that’s it, that’s the new strategy—because frankly, most of the time, I don’t think he knows what the hell he’s even talking about. But it is kind of a tell to me that a week ago he was talking about Iranian missile or drone attacks on ships in Hormuz, and now he’s talking about Iran’s nuclear program and not talking about the Strait of Hormuz.
And that says to me, maybe his attention has moved on, maybe he’s gotten bored, maybe there’s a part of him that realizes that he can’t do anything meaningfully to change Iran’s dominance of the strait without incurring very serious U.S. military costs—that this war is incredibly unpopular, and it’s a real albatross around his neck as Republicans approach midterms. And he’s got to figure out a way to tie a bow on this that makes it look like there’s something he can claim as victory, to your point.
Sargent: Yes, and that’s not going to be easy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump Tuesday. Many MAGA figures are upset about this, fearing that a meeting will push Trump into escalating, and they don’t want Trump to do Israel’s bidding. Steve Bannon told Politico, “All of Trump’s most ardent non-Israel First supporters are furious.” Bannon called it a disaster for America First.
Curt Mills of The American Conservative called it “DEFCON 1” and warned that Bibi will “argue for the essential logic of escalation.” And meanwhile, new polling shows a large chunk of MAGA turning on the war. What do you make of all that, Emily?
Horne: Well, one, I think it’s really important to note that a big chunk of that strain of MAGA that you just identified is coming at this from a really virulent and ugly antisemitic place. And we need to be really precise about separating out what is legitimate criticism of the Israeli government—and in particular Netanyahu’s approach to this conflict—versus something that does veer into a really, really ugly place that none of us should want to go. So I want to draw that distinction there.
But that aside, I think it’s really telling that there is not agreement within MAGA, within the Republican Party, on the best way out of this own goal that is Trump’s Iran war, his forever war, really. And even Trump alluded to this himself in his Fox interview this morning, where he talked about how there are elements of the Republican Party that want this to be over and done with, as midterms are approaching and everyone’s aware of how wildly unpopular this war is—how, as members of Congress are going back to their districts for August recess, they’re going to be getting an earful about gas prices and forever wars and politicians who are focused on the wrong thing.
And that there’s a continual hawkish wing that wants this war to just keep on going until, question mark, because again, there’s no strategy here. Nobody knows what Trump’s endgame is or what the strategy is. They’re clearly just making it up as they go along. And the only answer that they have for “the bombs haven’t worked so far” is more bombs.
And I’m sorry, but it’s pretty darn clear at this point that you cannot bomb your way out of this war, that Iran is not going to give up its nuclear program because of air pressure, that they’re not going to relinquish control of the Strait of Hormuz because they’re getting attacked from the air.
I think the only things that are ultimately going to get to a resolution on the nuclear issue are, one, what we already had—an agreement like the JCPOA that includes international monitoring and inspection to enforce its terms—or two, a big honking ground war that commits a lot of U.S. troops in perpetuity to a Trump-Iran war that I do not think anybody, even Donald Trump, has the appetite for.
So it’s really hard to see how this ends, but the best-case scenario is something like a return to the status quo that Obama had for us. You know, I was in the White House when the JCPOA was being negotiated, and we got a lot of criticism for it at the time from a lot of different voices in the Republican Party. And it’s really fascinating now to hear a lot of those same voices—maybe not in their outside voice, but in their inside voice—starting to come up with something that, boy, sounds an awful lot like the deal that we all had ten years ago.
Sargent: Yeah, that is pretty funny. To your point about how we’ve got to be precise about what MAGA is actually motivated by here—it’s worth saying that MAGA certainly doesn’t care about Iranians and whether they suffer through a humanitarian catastrophe or not. They have their own set of reasons, which you alluded to, for not wanting an escalation here.
I think there might be some elements of MAGA that are genuinely not for foreign entanglements and so forth, but a lot of it is really polluted with ugly sentiments, as you said. All that aside, when they hear Donald Trump talking about knocking out bridges and knocking out power plants, they too—meaning MAGA, again for their own reasons—I think probably say, shit, man, we’re really headed for an escalation here.
Horne: Look, and it is Americans that are paying the price for this war. I mean, obviously the Iranian people, as we have talked about at great length, are suffering tremendously. But this war has cost American taxpayers more than a hundred billion. It’s driven up energy prices. It’s contributed to global instability that is making everything more expensive. And last week the Trump administration went to Congress asking for another $350 billion to keep it going.
Meanwhile, our missile stockpiles have been massively depleted in a scarily short period of time, which leaves us incredibly vulnerable for the possible wars and conflicts of the future. And this bomb-and-hope strategy that Trump keeps on touting on Fox and Friends—it isn’t a real plan.
Iran’s already survived months of American bombing campaigns. And I see no evidence that more airstrikes, or bigger airstrikes, are going to eliminate their nuclear ambitions, or force them to surrender the Strait of Hormuz, or dislodge the new regime that is in place in Tehran. The only thing that more bombs are going to do is prolong this war, further destabilize the Middle East, and continue to drive up costs for everyday Americans.
Sargent: And paradoxically, I think that that dynamic actually points to the real possibility that he does end up bombing things like bridges and power plants. He may get it into his head that it’s the way the bombing was happening that essentially wasn’t forcing Iran’s hand. And it can’t possibly be that Iran can’t be bullied into this, for reasons that are intelligible if you actually put yourself in their heads, right? He can’t think that way. So he can only think, I need more force. And I just think we can’t really rule out the possibility that he makes good on some of these threats to start destroying infrastructure.
Horne: Unfortunately, I suspect that you may be right about that. We can’t rule it out. And one dangerous element that we haven’t talked about in this conversation is that Trump has systematically weeded out any military advisor who is capable of telling him, Mr. President, that is not going to achieve the impact that you hope it will, or, that’s not a good idea.
All of those people who are capable of speaking truth to power and speaking from their years of military experience have been forced out of our armed forces, or are essentially in hiding, because they know that to challenge the king is to end your career and possibly invite a whole host of retribution on your head. It’s an incredibly dangerous scenario where no one can tell the mad king that his decisions are not good ones.
Sargent: Boy, it’s really grim when you put it like that. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Emily Horne’s Substack. It’s called Spin Class. Emily, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much.
Horne: Thanks, Greg.