Transcript: Trump Blurts Out Damning Iran Admission as MAGA Cracks Up

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 4 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 undermined his own case for war with Iran in some odd comments to reporters on Tuesday. He admitted that the worst-case scenario is that Iran might be ruled by terrible leaders later, and acknowledged that the leaders the U.S. wants in charge are already dead. The casual nature of these comments accidentally revealed how poorly thought through all this truly is. And all that comes as MAGA opinion leaders have turned hard against Trump over the war. We think there’s a good reason to track MAGA opinion on this. Along with the markets tanking, the splitting of the MAGA base might be something that could get Trump to declare a victory and go home and put an end to all this. So how real is all that MAGA anger? We’re parsing all this with The Zeteo senior political correspondent Asawin Suebsaeng, who has written a lot over the years on MAGA’s supposed anti-interventionist tendencies. Swin, good to have you on.

Asawin Suebsaeng: I wish you could once have me on to talk about something sunny and not fucking infuriating, but here we are every single time you invite me on your pod. How’s it going, Greg?

Sargent: Good, but Swin, there will never be a day that you’re invited on to talk about good news. So let’s start with Trump. As of now, Iran’s Supreme Leader has been killed along with some other leaders in the regime. Trump was asked by a reporter what the worst-case outcome in Iran is. Listen.

Trump (voiceover): I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen. We don’t want that to happen. That would probably be the worst—go through this and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who is no better. So I’d like to see somebody in there that’s going to bring it back for the people.

Sargent: Swin, you’d think he would have thought of that before. He suggests here that he doesn’t expect that to happen. But it seems to me that what he really revealed here is that he hasn’t even bothered to imagine what additionally could go wrong—badly undermining his case. What did you make of it?

Suebsaeng: Look, American lives on the line, not to mention other people, but even just talking about Americans and American military personnel—have already perished completely unnecessarily in this thing. And President Trump and the rest of the gang running the federal government right now are going about this with the exact same level of nobility and care and solemn posture that you or I would take while flipping through Hulu trying to find something new to watch.

For months, according to our reporting at Zeteo.com, in the run-up to Trump launching this illegal war on Iran, he was briefed repeatedly—in classified briefings, by senior intelligence personnel, other senior administration officials—about, look, we have spent time gaming out these different scenarios of what would likely happen if you took option A, B, C, D, whatever, on what kind of war you want to launch. A smaller-scale conflict lasting days or weeks, or maybe this spirals and goes protracted. Here are different potential U.S. casualty estimates; here are ways where things could go sideways, including the regime installing someone or something worse than the current Supreme Leader.

These were all things that, if he cared to pay attention, were put in his ear and in front of him over and over again in the weeks or months leading up to this thing. And you know what? Donald J. Trump said and decided firmly: I’m the decider. I think it’s worth it—fuck all that noise that you’re putting in my ear right now. We’re doing it. Let’s just do it and be legends. And he pulled the trigger on it.

In fact, the New York Times has reported that his top general had misgivings about the war and all he did was tune it out—just closed his ears to all of it. And that’s why right now he looks surprised when he mulls this sort of stuff in public. And it gets even better. He was also asked who’s going to replace the current Iranian leaders who are getting killed. Listen to this.

Trump (voiceover): Well, most of the people we had in mind are dead. So, you know, we had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty sure we’re not going to know anybody, but we have—I mean, Venezuela was so incredible because we did the attack and we kept the government totally intact.

Sargent: So a couple of things here, Swin. Again, he undermines his case by basically admitting to how poorly thought through the aftermath of this truly is. And then note how he says it’s a good thing that the leadership in Venezuela was left virtually intact.

So does Trump want a change at the top in Iran or not? Does he want regime change or not? This is something they just can’t answer. What’s your reaction to that?

Suebsaeng: He does want full-blown regime change in Tehran—in the same way that you or I would want to have a body that looks like Dave Bautista’s or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s without doing an ounce, or barely an ounce, of the heavy lifting, literal heavy lifting, that it would require to get there.

This is a MAGA imperialist, bloodthirsty wannabe God Emperor who wants all the things that a God Emperor would have if they were willing to throw 500,000 American lives at something to get it done—but he’s not willing to do that because he is very, very lazy. That was his position in all these other invasions and conflicts, including with Venezuela.

And the reason that seemed “successful” to him in a way he could stomach is because he cut a corrupt deal with the Maduro regime—preserving the repressive, violent Maduro regime while just getting his man, getting his oil deal, and being able to say, ha ha, I have Maduro in handcuffs, but you leave the regime intact. That was never going to be the kind of option available to him if he launched a war as he’s doing right now with the Israeli government on the Islamic Republic.

Sargent: Well, here’s where leading MAGA figures enter the chat. They’re turning pretty hard on Trump over the war. The Bulwark had a good roundup of different voices. First, let’s listen to Megyn Kelly, who’s a very big MAGA personality.

Kelly (voiceover): I mean, I don’t know about you, but I have found the explanation lacking. I woke up on Saturday morning like the rest of you to his videotaped announcement where he was wearing the hat. Did not walk away with a clear understanding of what we’re doing. It was restatements of things we’ve known for years. Yeah, we hate Iran. They hate us too. We’ve known that. Why are we doing this now? What is the catalyst?

Obviously, President Trump does not want to say we did it because of Israel. What he said instead was, our objective is to defend the American people. Okay, so far that sounds good. Why do we need defending? By eliminating imminent threats, he said, from the Iranian regime. Okay, we’re under imminent threat now—what is it? What’s the imminent threat from the Iranian regime?

Sargent: So obviously a big part of this is that MAGA doesn’t want the U.S. to be doing Israel’s bidding, as she hints at there. And I want to get to that part in a bit, but let’s put that aside for now. First, Swin, note that she says directly there that the core rationale Trump has offered—that Iran posed an imminent threat—is bullshit. I think the idea that MAGA is anti-war or anti-interventionist is sort of generally nonsense, but here you do have a pretty direct questioning of Trump. What’s going on here?

Suebsaeng: Well, because this particular engagement is already thoroughly unpopular. He launched this war while the concept of this war was polling fairly aggressively for a lengthy period of time—I believe in the 20s or low 30s—absolute shit-show disaster territory. And he did it anyway.

Even after the war was launched, there was a hope, or more of an expectation within certain parts of the Trump world elite and within the White House, that maybe Republican support would pick up considerably for the war—because we saw that happen with the Venezuela-Maduro kidnapping, where support for it among Republicans at least skyrocketed after it happened. They’re opposed to things in concept, to the degree that any of them have a form of cohesive ideology or so-called principles.

But once the wannabe God King Donald Trump does it, usually that inspires a calculus shift. This has not shown all that much in the polling, even with just Republicans—not even Democrats or independents. But now that the war is well underway, do you support it? Republicans are hovering at half. Do not support it. That is astounding for a major Trump initiative.

When it comes to the people who have more flexibility—like the Megyn Kellys or the Tucker Carlsons out there—to criticize this war publicly, they know where the winds are headed on this, including with the MAGA orbit. Which is not at all anti-war, not at all anti-interventionist.

It’s just that they are looking at this and diagnosing that the juice is not worth the squeeze. This could fuck up the U.S. economy. This could mess up gas prices. And this could get a lot of people killed, including U.S. service members. And for what?

Sargent: And it could tank Trump’s presidency. They really don’t want that to happen, which is a real possibility. And I want to bring in the Israel angle here because it’s so big for MAGA.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, really stirred the pot here by saying that the U.S. knew Israel was going to attack Iran. And then he said: “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

MAGA jumped on that saying that it showed that we’re doing Israel’s bidding. The Hodge Twins, who are a pair of brothers and MAGA influencers, said: “We are at war for Israel. Thanks for confirming.”

Here’s Tucker Carlson: “This happened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel’s war.”

Swin, can you explain what’s going on here? What’s the MAGA animus toward Israel? How does it really work?

Suebsaeng: Well, there is a good amount of people in the MAGA coalition who still love the state of Israel and are okay with the Israeli government. But there is a growing contingent of people in the America First movement who—I would put it this way—would be willing to back, and have backed, a great deal of mass murder and mayhem that the Israeli government and Israeli military have perpetrated in recent months and years.

They just do not like the perception—or reality, whatever you want to call it—that Benjamin Netanyahu is able to dog-walk the United States into major foreign policy entanglements and expensive activity, both in terms of blood and treasure, that is not directly in the America First interest.

So if the Israeli government were just saying, okay, we just want to bombard Gaza as much as we want, can you please support us—that would get a lot more purchase in the MAGA orbit. But when they feel that Donald Trump and the U.S. military and the American government are being dragged into something for the benefit of someone like Benjamin Netanyahu—I mean, there are a lot of good non-MAGA reasons to be opposed to a concept like that.

And more and more MAGA influencers are not impervious to not just feeling those emotions, but also noticing that their online audience—their bread and butter—really, really don’t like that. So they are chasing that, not all of them, but you really do get the sense of people like Megyn Kelly kind of chasing their audience on this. In fact, she has sort of admitted it when she’s talked to people in past months, like Tucker Carlson, about how she started to get more skeptical of the Israeli government.

Sargent: Well, I will say that there is a major contingent of MAGA right now that’s pretty openly antisemitic. We’ve seen Nick Fuentes traffic in that, and sometimes Tucker dips his toe pretty deeply into it.

That’s really roiling MAGA in a big way—it’s kind of tearing it apart. And I just think that’s an interesting dynamic. I think a lot of these guys have to walk a very careful line—the ones who don’t want to appear overtly antisemitic, yet they know that they’re dealing with a mass constituency out there that’s really trending in that direction pretty hard. They want to hold on to those people without making it too obvious what they’re doing.

Suebsaeng: Right. They also have audiences, and they themselves—as influencers or as MAGA policymakers—are aware that the collapsing American empire has a resource-strain problem.

They would much rather have the might of the Trump administration and the U.S. military and our armed forces aimed inward, particularly on immigrants, than on places like the Islamic Republic and Tehran. So what Donald Trump is doing right now is effectively taking a little bit of a break from invading certain parts of the mainland United States so he can focus for a while on bombing and going to war with Iran.

There are a lot of people in MAGA who are thinking to themselves: wait a minute, that is not the resource allocation that we signed up for. You were supposed to be making war on the Twin Cities and Minnesota and Mexico. What are you doing with all of this bombing and potentially invading Iran bullshit?

Sargent: Right, Swin. It’s basically: you know what, stick to the dark people in our hemisphere, go after them, they’re the real problem. That’s what they’re saying.

Suebsaeng: Yes. And they had barely any problems with that. There were some—Tucker Carlson did not like the operation in the middle of last year when Donald Trump was bombing Iran, and there were MAGA figureheads and America First influencers who weren’t happy with that.

But by and large, the Republican Party and MAGA were okay with that. And they are okay with potentially invading Mexico soon. What they do not like is what we can all see unfolding every minute of every day recently—that Donald Trump is dangerously close to plunging us into Iraq War 2.0 for barely any reason at all.

He and his administration did not spend any time trying to sell this to the American people, to such a degree that even a good number of prominent Trump allies who I’ve spoken to in recent days—even they, who are acutely aware of what kind of personality Donald Trump is—were a little bit surprised that they spent such little time trying to sell the American people on this war and then just went ahead and immediately started it.

So not every single invasion is the same. And this thing, which is looking more and more like a quagmire with every passing hour, is something that they do not want—because they don’t want it to make them look like a bunch of fucking losers. And that’s what Donald Trump is risking doing to them right now.

Sargent: Yeah, it’s really interesting. And just to underscore your point, note that MAGA is absolutely over the moon every time Trump blows up a few people in a fishing boat. These are civilians—they’re alleged to be running drugs, but they’re not getting any kind of due process, of course. They’re just getting blown to bits by the U.S. military, and MAGA just loves that.

I want to close out by reading something from Matt Walsh, who’s a big MAGA influencer. He said the following to his fellow conservatives—here addressing people who are supporting the operation in Iran: “I can’t take the gaslighting, guys. I really can’t. Conservatives are now running around saying Iran has been waging war on us for 47 years. Okay, then why didn’t any of you call for an attack on Iran at any point until now?”

It’s a pretty good question. I’ve got to give it to him—he’s right about that one thing. And what I take from that is that you’re going to really see some very deep schisms open up here, because a chunk of the conservative movement is absolutely giddy with excitement over the blowing up of targets in Iran and the killing of people in Iran and so forth.

And yet there is a contingent of MAGA that just won’t have it, for all the reasons that you’ve said—given that Trump’s own lines about all this, that we listened to earlier, show how unprepared they are for what’s about to come. Where does this go from here? It seems like we’re looking at a quagmire potentially, and we’re looking at MAGA getting even more pissed off at their fellow conservatives who are going to continue to support it no matter what happens, right?

Suebsaeng: What Donald Trump wanted was a very successful, very quick, gangster-like drive-by shooting—something you may see in one of the Grand Theft Auto PlayStation games. That’s what he wanted, something like that is what he envisioned going into this.

And now he is getting drawn into a protracted, costly, spiraling, bloody mob war with different factions in different countries, where he and his administration are not the only ones who control the timeline of how far this goes and when this stops. And that is what is really pissing off a lot of his supporters in the MAGA upper crust—because he is very clearly biting off way more than he can chew, and everybody both here and abroad knows it.

Sargent: Well, I’d be saying that this is going to be a real fun thing to watch unfold as they kind of go at each other’s throats viciously—but unfortunately, this is all a potential catastrophe for the United States in all kinds of ways. Asawin Suebsaeng, always good to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.

Suebsaeng: Peace out.