Transcript: Trump Press Sec Boils Over in Fury as GOP Iran Angst Grows

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 6 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.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is very, very angry at the media for reporting on the six American troops who have been killed in Donald Trump’s war against Iran. She says the press is trying to make Trump look bad, as if Trump isn’t responsible for the fact that his war of choice is already producing terrible outcomes. This comes amid clear signs that Republicans are growing nervous about the politics of Trump’s war. Right now, they’re angling to avoid getting too closely tied to it. We’re talking about all this with Tori Otten, a deputy editor at The New Republic who’s been writing well about how Trump world is plainly trivializing matters of war, which is making the politics worse for them. Tori, nice to have you on.

Otten: Greg, I’m thrilled to be here.

Sargent: So let’s start with Karoline Leavitt. The background here is that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested this week that the media is making American troop deaths in Iran front-page news to make Trump look bad. Now listen to this exchange between Leavitt and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

Collins (voiceover): Given what Secretary Hegseth said this morning, is it the position of this administration that the press should not prominently cover the deaths of U.S. service members?

Leavitt (voiceover): No, it’s the position of this administration that the press in this room and the press across the country should accurately report on the success of Operation Epic Fury and the damage it is doing to the rogue Iranian regime that has threatened the lives of every single American in this room. If the Iranian regime had their choice, they would kill every single person in this room. And so we can all be very grateful that we have an administration and that we have men and women in our armed forces who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for the rest of us in this room.

Sargent: Leavitt then actually said that Hegseth didn’t make the suggestion that he plainly made. She absurdly accused Collins of being disingenuous. And then Collins pointed out that the media has a responsibility to cover troop deaths. Then this happened.

Leavitt (voiceover): We expect you to cover that as you should, Kaitlan, but you and your network know that you take every single thing this administration says and try to use it to make the president look bad. That is an objectable fact.

Collins (voiceover): I don’t think covering troop deaths is trying to make the president look bad.

Leavitt (voiceover): If you’re trying to argue right now that CNN’s overwhelming coverage is not negative of President Donald Trump, I think the American people would tend to agree and your ratings would tend to disagree with that as well.

Sargent: So Tori, that is remarkable stuff. Leavitt is suggesting that the media is covering U.S. deaths to make Trump look bad. I mean, everything has to be all about Trump at all times, right?

Otten: It seems that way. And also the reality of the situation is things are not going according to plan—because as Hegseth was making those comments, a report came out that Pentagon officials are actually pretty worried about U.S. air defense systems holding up against Iranian drone strikes. And we just saw some reports today that said CENTCOM is planning on the war potentially lasting until September, which is far longer than the four-week timeline Donald Trump has set out.

Sargent: So just to be clear on what actually happened with Hegseth, I’m going to read his quote—the one that prompted all this. He said, “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad. But try for once to report the reality.” He then goes on and says we’re succeeding brilliantly and all that. But there’s just no doubt that Hegseth absolutely did say what he said, right?

Otten: Yeah. In fact, one of the reporters who was in the room—I believe it was Nancy Youssef with The Atlantic—said that when he said that, his own aides looked stunned and lowered their heads, and someone, she didn’t identify who, but someone just sort of generally said, “That was the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard.”

Sargent: Yeah, and I think when you see Leavitt do one of these little outrage parades, you know things are going badly inside the White House as well, because these shows are always for the audience of one, right? Abuse the press and then that’s going to make the despot feel a little better about things. The truth is things are going roughly for them right now. And politically, we’re seeing signs that Republicans are getting anxious about it.

Punchbowl News had a remarkable report that says Republicans really don’t want Congress to have to authorize Trump’s war—which the Constitution requires—because, “Republicans would prefer to keep their hands clean on the conflict for as long as possible, especially given the uncertainty over how long this could last and how it’ll play politically.” Tori, I mean, that really explains why Republicans don’t want Congress to vote on this, right?

Otten: Yeah, and in fact it’s more than just trying to play hot potato with responsibility for the war. Some Republicans are actually openly speaking against it. Representative Warren Davidson, a couple of days ago, said “the country is sick of forever wars.” Then Wednesday night on the House floor he said, “Recall that Democrats needed help answering what is a woman. Unfortunately, Republicans now want to claim they can’t answer what is a war”—which is a nice little one-two punch of culture war for him there. But they’re really not supportive of this war, and I think they know that their constituents aren’t either.

Sargent: Yeah. And in fact, Punchbowl also reports that Republicans “want to keep the war in Trump’s hands for as long as they can without requiring further congressional action.” Now that, I think, really illustrates what’s going on in the heads of Republicans right now. They just want it to be Trump’s war. They will obviously back the commander in chief and all that, and they would never criticize anything Trump’s doing, but they want it squarely understood as Trump’s and maybe not as much theirs, right?

Otten: Yeah, and they’re certainly trying to talk their way around it at the very least, jumping through all of these major hoops to avoid saying that it is a war, or to try and take back [what they’ve said] when they do accidentally admit what it is.

Sargent: Yeah, in fact, I’m glad you brought that up because that’s another sign of rising Republican anxiety about the war. CNN has this great montage of Republicans doing what you just said—struggling to avoid calling our attack on Iran a war. Listen to this.

Congressional Republicans (voiceover): Nobody should classify this as war. This is combat operations. I wouldn’t call this a war as much as I’d call it a conflict that should be very short and sweet. I don’t know if this is technically a war. We have not declared war. So if we haven’t declared war, I don’t see that. The president hasn’t asked us to declare war yet, but they have declared war on us. Do you consider it a war? It’s a significant military operation. Strategic strikes are not war. They have declared war on us. I don’t believe in the semantics. We’ve talked about the language this morning. We’re not at war right now. We’re four days in to a very specific, clear mission and operation.

Sargent: Those are all congressional Republicans. And what’s funny—or maybe not so funny—is that Trump and his officials have been calling this a war themselves, nonstop. Tori, Republicans don’t want to call this a war for two reasons, I think: because it would reveal their own craven abdication of the responsibility to authorize it, but also because, as Punchbowl showed, they’re worried about where it’s all going. Your thoughts on all that?

Otten: Largely, this war is very unpopular, and it’s incredibly hypocritical considering Trump ran on being the peace president and getting America out of forever wars. But maybe he thinks because he stopped eight wars, he can start one of his own as a treat.

Adding to the anxiety among Republicans might be just how fundamentally unserious the White House is being about this in another way. We just saw the White House Twitter feed post this absolutely disgusting video which presented footage from the war—bombings and so forth—but packaged it as a video game, complete with dramatic music and the trappings of a video game visually on the screen. It’s just awful.

And so you’ve got on the one side Leavitt protesting that no, we’re not trivializing American troop deaths by making them all about Trump—but then you’ve got them absolutely trivializing what the troops are going through. You wrote a piece about this broader tendency of Trump world to reduce everything to a kind of video game fantasy realm. Can you talk about all that? What did you make of that video, and what’s the broader context?