Transcript: Trump War Takes Dark Turn as Leaks Unnerve Dems: “Madness”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 20 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.

Everything we’re learning now strongly suggests that Donald Trump’s war is about to get worse. First, word leaked that the Pentagon may demand $200 billion more from Congress. Second, officials let it be known that Trump is considering the deployment of thousands of troops on the ground. Meanwhile, Trump himself just suggested to reporters that he’s envisioning even more military actions that he hasn’t even explained yet.

All this makes it absolutely clear that Congress will not just be asked to fund Trump’s war, but also that the pressure on Congress to do something about this madness will intensify. So today we’re talking to Congressman Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, about what Democrats will be able to do when that happens. Congressman, thanks so much for coming on.

Adam Smith: Well, thanks for having me. It’s always good to see you.

Sargent: So let’s start with all the leaks about Trump potentially sending in troops on the ground. People familiar with planning told Reuters that Trump may deploy thousands of them. The options being discussed are deploying troops to the shoreline of the Strait of Hormuz to secure passage for oil tankers and possibly sending ground forces to Kharg Island, which is the hub for oil exports, which one official describes to Reuters as “very risky.” Congressman, you talk to people at the Pentagon a fair amount. Are you getting any indications of anything like this, and what’s your overall take on it?

Smith: Yeah, no, it’s very worrisome, because the bottom line is it’s clear that Trump is not going to be able to achieve anything meaningful in Iran—which is a change of the regime and a change of action. I mean, degrading their capability is one thing, but at the cost that we’re currently experiencing—13 service members’ lives already lost, massive economic disruption, 14 countries dragged into this, civilian deaths, the tragic killing of 150 schoolgirls in Iran—massive cost, just to degrade Iran a little bit. He wants regime change. He wants something different. That’s not happening under the current plan.

Now, I don’t think it’s going to happen if he sends in a few thousand troops either, but the pressure on him to escalate is growing in his own mind. The pressure is also growing on him to end this madness, stop this war, and recognize he’s not going to accomplish that. But we’ve sent 2,500 Marines—they’re now in the area. Another 2,500 are on their way. And you know, Marines don’t just sit in boats—they’re there for a purpose. And sadly, what we’ve learned in the last year is that when Trump masses forces, he uses them.

He did it in Latin America, first with the boat strikes, then with taking out Maduro. He did it in the Middle East when he massed these forces for the war with Iran. So if he sends troops to the region, it is distinctly possible that he’s going to use them. It would be an idiotic decision, because the ability of four or five thousand troops to really fundamentally change this war—I don’t think that’s going to succeed. But Trump doesn’t think in a linear way. He trusts his gut and his bones, apparently.

Sargent: Yes, clearly that’s what he trusts more than anything else. Congressman, I want to ask you about something you said there. You seem to suggest that you think Trump does want regime change, and that potentially the troops could be brought in to try to achieve that. Can you tell us a little bit about why regime change would be so hard to achieve, and what do you think he’s envisioning here with regard to using troops for that?

Smith: Well, a couple of layers to this. First of all, the idea that there was any sort of imminent threat from Iran is just ridiculous. There’s no evidence whatsoever that Iran was anywhere close to getting a nuclear weapon or ready to attack. So the notion that we had to do this because of an imminent threat is completely wrong. I mean, Iran is as weak as it’s been in over a decade.

But what does kind of make sense—even though I disagree with it—is the argument that, okay, we’ve been dealing with this threat from Iran for, gosh, going on 20 years now. They target Americans in a variety of ways. They’ve got ballistic missiles, death to Israel, death to America. They support militias like Hezbollah and Hamas. They destabilize governments in Iraq, Lebanon, in Syria. Enough—we are going to eliminate this threat. All right? The only problem with that is I’ve sat in the room now for 15 years and looked over the military options, and there’s really no good option for, quote, “eliminating the threat.” It’s just not an easy thing to do. So if he’s not going to eliminate the threat, then what is he accomplishing? Again, degrading. Is that enough? I don’t think it is. And I don’t think Trump thought this through in the way that I just described it.

But I think the reason he wants regime change is because that’s really the only meaningful thing that he could point to as having accomplished, given the huge cost of this war. And what the experts have told me over and over again is: It’s a nation of 93 million people—they are dug in deep, their militia has a million dedicated members to this regime.

The notion that you’re going to do a four- or five-week bombing campaign and accomplish this—I mean, it would be hard even if we decided to do it Iraq-style, where you do a month- or two-month bombing campaign and then you send in—I forget the numbers—but 150,000 troops, basically. It would be really tough to do that. It might not even accomplish it. So what the experts told me is, as much as you might want to eliminate this threat, that option just really isn’t on the table. Even if you do all of what I just described, it’s a low-percentage chance that you’re going to succeed and the cost would be enormous.

Sargent: Yes. And I want to be clear, though—you think that his idea is to go in with troops on the ground and try to change the regime that way? I mean, does that make any sense? Like, how would it happen?

Smith: It doesn’t make any sense. But the idea in Trump’s mind—look, whenever Trump encounters an adversary of any size, he has pretty much the same approach: kick him in the balls, force him to say “uncle.” That’s pretty much the only card he’s got to play. Think about the way he ran his businesses—he sued people all over the place, he declared bankruptcy, he didn’t pay his bills. He’s now trying to prosecute enemies large and small across the government. He cut off like $500 billion in programs. He goes for the punch in the face, right off the bat. I mean, that’s his move. The problem is Iran has said, yeah, we took the kick—we’re not going anywhere. And then Trump doesn’t really have a play at that point.

So he gets frustrated and he’s like, no, you will bow to my will. And he tends to double and triple down. And again, in this case, we’re not talking about pulling Nicolás Maduro out of some weak, collapsing Venezuelan government. We’re not talking about the horrific crime that we are committing against Cuba right now—just choking off their oil and waiting for them to die. We’re talking about going into a country that’s dug in, of 93 million people with over a million troops and a passion to fight us. Remember how the Iranians fought in the Iraq War, and they were nowhere near as solidified or capable of defending their regime then as they are now. So Trump’s fantasies are confronting reality, and we all are paying a terrible price for that.

Sargent: Sure seems that way. So the second big leak concerns the Pentagon, which is trying to get the White House to ask Congress for $200 billion in additional military funding for the war. The Washington Post first reported this, and I thought it was striking that a senior administration official leaked it.

It almost seems like a warning flare to Republicans in Congress from inside the White House—or potentially at the Pentagon—someone in the administration who wants Republicans to wake up and say, you know what, guys, this isn’t getting any better. Can you just explain the magnitude of this $200 billion figure? In other words, can you help us understand how much war-making this would pay for? It’s a big number, right? And is Congress likely to do this?

Smith: During the height of the Iraq War, we had supplementals in the tens of billions of dollars on a yearly basis. This is $200 billion—on top of, by the way, the other thing that has been leaked, which is that the president wants to ask for $1.5 trillion in the regular defense budget, which is a 50 percent increase in the defense budget from what it was before. So that’s pushing up close to $2 trillion for defense in a nation that’s $40 trillion in debt—and they just cut taxes by $4 trillion. I mean, I think the problem is Trump—ever since he got in power this time—he wants to use every single tool in our government to advance his agenda. And I think he’s discovered that the military is a pretty nifty, capable tool. And he’s just going to use it all over the place.

And then connected to this, by the way—he gutted USAID, he’s gutted diplomacy. I mean, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were the only two people out there negotiating anything for us. And I always remember something that Bob Gates said to our committee, 15 or 20 years ago now, when he was secretary of defense: if you cut diplomacy, if you cut development, you better give me more ammunition, because we’re going to have more conflicts in the world. And that is the path that Trump is walking us down—even while, when he was running for office, he told us over and over again that he had learned all of those lessons. If you elect him, there will be no war. Peace will break out all over the world. It’s very clear that not only was he completely wrong, but he was just flat-out lying to us.

You know, if he had run and said, look, I’m a big tough guy—you put me in the White House, I’m going to use the military to try and kick ass all over the world, which is what he really is doing—I don’t think people would have voted for it.

Sargent: Certainly you’d think that a lot of those younger people who went over to him were clearly motivated by that. They clearly heard him telling them no new wars.

So about this $200 billion—can you give us a sense of the landscape in Congress on it? Will Congress do this? I mean, Republicans obviously are under Trump’s thumb in all kinds of ways, but you’re hearing rumblings that they don’t want to do this kind of level of funding. What do you think Congress would do with this request?

Smith: It’s going to be very tough to get it through. I think all Democrats should oppose it. I mean, I’ll oppose it for no other reason than I oppose this war and I want this war to stop. But look—you want to know something really funny? You know what Congress tried to pass yesterday in the House? A balanced budget amendment. The Republican House put that out—I mean, I’m not often speechless, but I’m close to speechless trying to explain that. So there will be some Republicans who will say, gosh, we can’t do this, it’s too expensive and all of that. But you know the pattern—they say it, and then at the end of the day, they do whatever Trump asks them to. So how many Republicans will actually oppose it? I don’t know.

Might there be a couple of Democrats who support it? One of the arguments is, well, even if you don’t support the war, we’ve gone to war, we’ve done it—don’t we have to pay for it? You know, forgive me, but fuck that. Okay. If you want to pay for it, I’m going to raise taxes. You want to raise taxes? I can have that conversation. The idea that we’re going to dig into the rest of the budget—we’re cutting Medicaid, food stamps, we’re cutting all of these programs—and then we’re going to pull $200 billion aside on top of a $1.5 trillion defense budget? Hell no. No Democrat should vote for this. And I hope the Republicans who care about fiscal responsibility will stand up and say no. But it’s a tough call. And then you get into the whole 60 votes in the Senate—did they get rid of the filibuster? I think it’s going to be really difficult to pull through this amount of money.

Sargent: Now just to be clear, Congressman—you’re a hell no on any new funding for the war, right? Isn’t that a position Democrats should be for at this point?

Smith: Yes. Yes. And once he stops this war, if you want to have a conversation about things that we need to pay for, fine. But then if you’re going to have that conversation, I’m not taking it out of the hide of all of these programs that are so important to my constituents. Put the goddamn taxes back on the table. You want war, you want a military this size, then fucking pay for it.

It is just so—as you can tell, it makes me angry thinking about all these Republicans running around saying, we’ve got to have a tough defense, we’ve got to have a strong defense. $4 trillion tax cut? I mean, there are stories out now about the billionaires—there was a story about Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and how many billionaires are showing up there—because all of these tax cuts have minted hundreds of new billionaires since 2017, so that we can all go into debt by $40 trillion and cut Medicaid? Bullshit. We should have a different approach to this.

Sargent: Right. So no Democrats should vote for another dime for this war, right?

Smith: Absolutely. They should not.

Sargent: Right. So, okay—Trump was asked about the $200 billion in funding that the Pentagon wants. And here’s another reason why Democrats shouldn’t vote for this. Trump has been saying the war is almost over because it’s been so successful. Then a reporter asks, okay, well, if the war is almost over, then why are you asking for $200 billion? Listen to this.

Reporter (voiceover): But the war is almost over. Why is the Pentagon going to ask Congress for an additional $200 billion?

Donald Trump (voiceover):
Well, we’re asking for a lot of reasons beyond even what we’re talking about in Iran. This is a very volatile world. And the military equipment, the power of some of this weaponry is unthinkable. You don’t even want to know about it.

Sargent: Congressman, I couldn’t help but notice that Trump seemed to say that this money would go to other things beyond the war in Iran. That seems worrisome, since we don’t know what he’s referring to. Your thoughts on that?

Smith: Yeah, that references back to a comment I made earlier—that now that Trump’s in the White House, he views the military as a new toy to go play with. And he’s got big ambitions. I mean, we’ve heard him: he wants to take over the Panama Canal, he wants to take Greenland, he apparently wants to take over Cuba, he wants to annex Canada.

So yeah, that is really frightening—that he’s like, hey, you know, there’s a lot more that I could do with the military, give me another trillion dollars, we’ll go start, I don’t know, four or five more wars somewhere. So yeah, that is very frightening.

Sargent: So, Congressman, just to clarify—you think that in Trump’s mind, he wants to use this money for things like invading Greenland? I mean, he’s kind of flipped around on that a little.

Smith: Yeah. I don’t think he has anything specific in mind. He’s just like, who knows who’s going to piss me off next? And I may as well have a military ready to go with it. I don’t think he has anything specific in mind. I think he’s just fallen in love with the idea that he can use the U.S. military to threaten and attack whoever displeases him. And given the amount of power he’s consolidating in his hands, that is scary as hell.

Sargent: And he doesn’t seem to think he needs to go to Congress to do anything.

Smith: Heavens no. He doesn’t think he needs to follow the law or the Constitution. He said it—the only bound on his authority is his own morality. He said it, he’s trying to live it—not just with the Department of Defense, by the way, but with the Justice Department, with the FCC, with Homeland Security, across the board.

Sargent: And I just would add that Trump’s morality, given the content of it, doesn’t seem like a great guardrail.

Smith: It’s not much of a check, no. And it’s also not the way a democratically elected president in a constitutional republic is supposed to act, regardless of what his morality is or is not.

Sargent: Well, let’s talk about that. Stepping back a little—big picture—he launched this war illegally. He never came to Congress, never consulted with Congress. Now he’s reportedly debating sending in ground troops. There’s no indication at all that he’s going to ask Congress to vote on that. So do you think all Democrats in Congress will draw the line here? I mean, it’s just absolutely preposterous that they could possibly be asked to fund something like this. Do you think they will?

Smith: I don’t know for sure. I think the overwhelming majority of them will. The better question is, are any Republicans going to draw the line here? Because this supposedly is against what they stand for too. A lot of them didn’t want any more wars, and almost all of them claimed to want to get the deficit under control.

Sargent: Yeah, well, that’s for sure. What’s your reading on how the war is going? You get briefings on this stuff. You talk to people at the Pentagon. It seems that the Iranian military is badly degraded, as you mentioned, but also that the regime doesn’t seem like it’s near toppling and nobody has any idea how to get the Strait of Hormuz reopened—and that’s not changing anytime soon. Is the war going badly? I mean, it seems like it’s going badly.

Smith: That’s a pretty good summary. Yes, we’ve degraded their missile capability, the launchers and their drone capability—we’ve degraded it a lot, but not entirely. There are reports today that an Iranian missile hit an F-35 and forced it to make an emergency landing. Two people were killed in Tel Aviv yesterday. So Iran—the threat is not eliminated. It has been substantially degraded, but the regime is no weaker—arguably stronger—than when the war started, because there’s a rally-round-the-flag effect. So we’re no closer to fundamentally changing the regime. And then yeah, we’re not opening the Strait of Hormuz.

By the way, this whole notion that we’re going to send in an escort—an escort cannot stop a ship from being hit, it can’t guarantee that that ship’s not going to be hit. And in the commercial sector they want a guarantee. They’re not going to go rolling through the strait if we say to them, we’re going to give it our best shot, we think we can probably protect you.

It’s not going to happen. The Strait of Hormuz is not going to be opened back up. So the economy is going to continue to be crushed and Iran is still going to have enough capability—certainly with drones—to inflict pain as long as this war continues. So yes, the war is going very badly.

Sargent: It sure looks like that. So, Congressman, just to close this out—maybe you can clarify the range of alternatives Trump has here. Either he sends in these troops to try to secure the Strait of Hormuz, or what exactly? Like, what’s the alternative? Does he just keep bombing forever and hope it reopens the strait? Does he declare victory and go home? What do you think is going to happen?

Smith: Well, there are four major options. There are a couple of escalation options. One, you can start targeting Iranian infrastructure—bombing the oil infrastructure, kind of like the Israelis are doing. But that’s really risky and dangerous because Iran will do the same right back, and now you are attacking the Iranian people. So that’s one area of escalation. Two is what we talked about earlier—he could send in troops for some isolated mission, trying to open up the strait by taking out assets along it, or a couple of different options.

Three, he could try to declare victory and pull back. Or four, he could just sort of keep doing what we’re doing—and every day, Hegseth comes out and says, today will be the largest bombing we’ve done thus far. And that will continue to slowly degrade Iran’s capability; it will never eliminate it.

So I think for the moment, that fourth option is most likely. He’ll keep doing what he’s doing—remember, he said four to five weeks, and we’re three weeks into it—and cross his fingers and hope something shifts. But in the next week or two, those escalation options are going to be more seriously on the table.

Sargent: And then what happens?

Smith: I don’t think anything changes except the cost goes up. More lives are lost. More property is destroyed. The global economy is damaged further. And Iran continues to hold on.

Now, let me just say—I always like to say this in any interview—I could be wrong. You know, the future is—I don’t know. Maybe we all wake up tomorrow and the Iranian regime melts away, a brand new group comes in charge, changes everything, and it’s all a great success. I give about a one percent chance of that happening, but it’s possible. I just don’t think it’s likely. I think we stay in the same pattern for the next week or two, and then we just have to see what decision Trump’s gut tells him to make. I don’t think it’s going to be to stop this war—I think he’s going to keep trying for at least a little while longer, and the costs will continue to go up.

Sargent: Well, there’s a decent chance that Democrats control the House next year. It’s not guaranteed, but there’s a good chance of it. If so, you’d be in a very good position to shed a whole lot of light on what’s going on here and the run-up to this—more than Republicans would ever be willing to do. Can you talk a little bit about that? For instance, Pete Hegseth just essentially said, we’re done with the rules of engagement. What could a Democratic House do to really shed light on what that means? Couldn’t you guys probe?

Smith: A lot of oversight, a lot of hearings. I mean, look—to begin with, even as you and I are talking here, we’re three weeks into this war and there has not been a single, solitary public hearing in Congress on it. That is ridiculous and absurd. So we will force them to come forward and explain themselves. We will also pass various pieces of legislation to require civilian harm to be analyzed, to require them to publicly disclose this information. We will push for oversight.

Sargent: And can you talk a little bit about what that oversight looks like? In other words, Pete Hegseth has openly and explicitly said, screw the rules of engagement—we are going to punch down. He kind of shrugged about the killing of the schoolgirls, said there’s an investigation underway, wouldn’t deny Trump’s claim that Iran did it.

Smith: It’s nothing too complicated. We shine a light on it. We hold public hearings. We will probably—and we’ve never done this on the Armed Services Committee—subpoena people over at the Pentagon to come and publicly, under oath, tell us what’s going on, so that we can at least have accurate information.

The second piece is trying to pass legislation—we’ll have to work with the Senate, the president, everything—but we’ll put that stuff on the table, and even if it doesn’t pass, that too will shine a light on what’s going on here and increase public pressure to make it stop.

Sargent: Well, there’s another reason to want a Democratic House next year. Congressman Adam Smith, thank you so much for coming on. That was super illuminating. We really appreciate it.

Smith: Thanks, Greg. Appreciate you giving me the chance.