Transcript: Trump-Pope War Has Ex-Aides Panicking about Mental Decline

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 16 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’s war with Pope Leo has taken an uglier turn. His vice president, JD Vance, warned that the pope should be careful when discussing theology. And House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to the whole battle, committed a howler by bringing up “just war” doctrine, which Trump and Pete Hegseth are serially violating. It’s notable that this comes as The New York Times just weighed in with an epic piece detailing Trump’s mental decline. In some obvious and not so obvious ways, Trump’s battle with the pope neatly captures that decline and then some.

Olivia Troye, a former national security official during the first Trump administration, got an unusually close-up look at Trump’s mental unfitness for office. She just announced a run for Congress [as a Democrat]. So we’re talking to her about all this today. Olivia, thanks for coming on.

Olivia Troye: Hi Greg. Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Let’s start with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Recently the pope criticized Hegseth for praying for maximal violence and killing of the enemy. The pope said that God does not hear the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them. Now listen to Johnson.

Mike Johnson (voiceover): You know, I was taken a little bit aback, just honestly, frankly, something that was said—I think he said several days back—that something about those who engage in war, you know, that Jesus doesn’t hear their prayers or something. You know, it is a very well-settled matter of Christian theology. There’s something called the just war doctrine. There’s a time to every purpose under heaven. I think what the president’s comments, what the vice president’s comments reflect is their understanding deep in the, you know, the SCIF and the classified briefings of the stakes that are so high and the situation that we’re facing, and the fact that you had the nation that was the largest sponsor of terrorism now having had that ability taken away from them.

Sargent: Let’s break this up into two pieces. Johnson said there that Trump has access to all this classified info that somehow makes our attack on Iran acceptable, seemingly meaning that the threat posed by Iran justified the attack. That’s not at all true, is it, Olivia?

Troye: From everything that we’ve seen in the intelligence community and the reporting that we’ve seen, there was no justification for this war. During the first Trump administration, there were many of us in national security—there were career people who were assigned to the White House, and I lived that firsthand. And Trump was specifically talked out of engaging with Iran.

This is something that he has wanted to do for a very long time, but the prevailing minds in the room were able to navigate the situation and show him what the ramifications would mean. One of those being the Strait of Hormuz, which we are seeing play out right now in very, very plain view—the complications of what happens when you do that. It ultimately impacts us here domestically.

Sargent: That’s really interesting because Donald Trump was told again this time by senior members of his administration that if he went into this, it would be much harder than he anticipated. And he brushed them off. Sounds like you’re telling us that he was actually talked out of it by those same voices, or by similar voices, during the first term.

Troye: The issue right now is that you have an ongoing escalation that is happening in this conflict, where now I don’t think that they even know where to go from here. I don’t think they know how to de-escalate this. I don’t know how they’re going to navigate this internationally. This has become more of a regional thing, as we’re seeing. In many ways, the United States—this leadership that we have unfortunately at the helm—has been outplayed.

Sargent: It really looks that way. The second piece of what Johnson said is really something—he invoked just war doctrine. But Trump and Hegseth are violating that doctrine’s most basic tenets very seriously. Those tenets generally involve prohibitions on needless wars without imminent threats, and they involve proportionality toward the enemy.

Yet Hegseth has talked about killing people who surrender, and our war has killed well over a thousand civilians. Can you talk about the perversity of Johnson invoking just war doctrine? It is absolutely clear that Trump and Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth are violating those tenets regularly, right?

Troye: Yes, absolutely. The bigger concern with Pete Hegseth is just their invocation of this being almost their holy war to fight. That’s the irony to me about this entire situation—of Trump having the audacity to take on the head of the Catholic Church and attack him for wanting a de-escalation of this conflict, for wanting less loss of life, for innocent lives not to be lost in this situation.

While then you have Pete Hegseth at the helm, who is waving his very strong, almost Christian nationalism flag in the way he is approaching this war. We’ve seen the rhetoric come out of him in terms of that. When you combine all of these things, that hypocrisy is pretty astounding across the board.

Sargent: It really is. Hegseth is just absolutely saturated in bloodlust and sadism. Let’s listen to JD Vance now. Here’s what he said about the pope’s criticism of the Trump administration.

JD Vance (voiceover): I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology. I think one of the issues here is that if you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth.

Sargent: That’s just amazing stuff. The pope needs to be careful about these debates, but Vance would never say that Trump needs to be careful when he viciously attacks a spiritual leader for a billion people. I’ve got to say, Olivia, it’s just so dark that they put Trump above the pope and treat Trump as a quasi-deity. It’s clear that these religious conservatives see their highest allegiance as being to Trump. I find this a mask-off moment. What do you think?

Troye: It’s pretty ridiculous for JD Vance to be the bastion of theology with the way he is approaching the pope. I also honestly think it’s shameful and it’s disgraceful. It’s a complete insult to any religious community of faith who is watching what is happening here by JD Vance and Trump and what they’re doing in terms of the Catholic community and the church—by their behavior ... attacking the pope on theology.

That’s pretty rich coming from these two individuals, certainly pretty rich from Donald Trump, who to me is like the antithesis of anything having to do with religion, considering how he conducts himself and the history of everything that he’s done in his life.

This is really just another level. But I will say this, Greg—I hope that this is an educational and enlightening moment for some of these individuals and communities who are watching this and are really seeing Trump for what he really is, the hypocrisy of this man in all manners. When it comes to religion, the way he uses religion as a cloak on himself.

That meme of Jesus was disgusting. It was atrocious. And also the hypocrisy of the no-wars campaign. We’re engaged in conflicts, we’re sending military service members, people are being killed. This is just so, so heinous that I just don’t see how it ends. I also think it’s only going to get worse the more unfit [he is] in his instability going forward.

Sargent: Well, speaking of Trump’s instability, I think it’s very clear that Trump himself wants this war with the pope to continue. Otherwise JD Vance and Mike Johnson wouldn’t be doing this. Now you’ve seen up close how the people around him operate. They are taking their cues directly from him. Can you describe that dynamic—how that works?

Troye: Yeah, absolutely. With this circle, unlike what I witnessed in the first Trump administration—back then there was some pushback, there was definitely recovery afterwards of like, How are we going to navigate whatever the madman in the Oval Office just said? This is a totally different dynamic where you have a circle of complete, all-in loyalist enablers who are there for their own power quest and enabling. They are not going to take this on. They are not going to be willing to put their own power on the line to push back on this, which is why this is so dangerous overall in terms of the demeanor.

They’re going to sit there, they’re going to watch what Donald Trump says, and they’re going to parrot what he says. I’ve seen this, where they parrot the talking points. At this point, I don’t even think that they’re coordinating. They’re just like, Whatever he said, now we’ve got to cover for him. Let’s say something more ridiculous so that way we can just pile on it and continue to perpetuate this narrative.

Sargent: The New York Times had this extraordinary piece with the following headline: “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate.” The piece ran through Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilization, his attack on the pope for being weak on crime—that was the first attack—Trump’s tendency to wander off on weird tangents, his confusion about basic facts such as mixing up Greenland and Iceland.

The piece very well documented that his former allies are talking about the need for the Twenty-Fifth Amendment now. This includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, former White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who called him “clearly insane,” former chief of staff John Kelly, who concluded Trump is mentally ill, and so forth. Olivia, as someone who ran with those people a little bit, I wanted to get your thoughts on that piece.

Troye: It’s absolutely accurate to say that he is mentally unstable, mentally unfit to be serving in the Oval Office right now. We have the leader of essentially the free world who is off his rocker. Ty Cobb absolutely is accurate. He knows Trump well. If anyone knows Trump, Ty Cobb certainly does. And he is calling it how it is.

Trump aside, what it is doing to the global dynamic and the disruption here is going to be the aftermath of this. It’s going to last for years, Greg. The rest of the world and the dynamics and how they have completely disrupted the world order—our allies don’t trust us. Why would they? They have no idea what’s coming next and they’re left to deal with the fallout. Europe is watching this conflict and they’re trying to figure out within themselves how they’re going to navigate this because it’s obviously impacting them as well.

Sargent: When you were in the administration, what was your direct impression of his sanity or lack thereof? What did the people around him say privately when he wasn’t around? I’ve got to assume that it was already very, very pronounced. It was all sorts of craziness in the first term, but it got much worse in the second one. What was your direct experience of this man and the people around him?

Troye: I would say that when I observed him, he was certainly unpredictable. Obviously, the last person in his ear manipulates him. So, easily manipulated. I think also just short attention span, inability to really take in information unless you really are drawing it like a cartoon artist on pencil and paper—drawing it out to make sure that you can take it in, because you certainly can’t take in intelligence briefings. So that is a kind of persona. Obviously he’s got the narcissistic qualities, the neurosis and the manipulation factor there. He’s very power hungry, always self-centered, always seeking the attention.

What is different from what I observed then and what we’re seeing now is I do think his health in terms of mental stability and the way he is conducting himself has gotten significantly worse this time around and throughout the past couple of years—which worries me, because we are one year and change into this presidency. We have several years to go. And my concern is that he is going to continue to get worse.

He’s going to continue to decline. This insanity and this recklessness is only going to get worse over time. And we are going to see someone that is going to continue to lash out, especially as he becomes a lame duck and his power is coming to an end. I just foresee him slash-and-burn in a way that we’ve probably never seen before, especially if he’s not all there.

Sargent: Yeah, and especially if he senses his power slipping away from him, which it absolutely is. You’re running for Congress in Virginia. You’re in a crowded primary. There’s been some debate among Democrats—this is sort of an obsession of pundits—the take has sometimes been anybody who talks about Trump’s mental illness or his unfitness for the presidency or his erratic nature and derangement and so forth is missing what voters actually care about; voters only care about the kitchen table, they only care about their wallets, they only care about what’s absolutely immediate to their material lives.

I’ve never bought this line before. It seems to me a lot of Americans don’t want to have a madman as president. I want to ask you, as you sort of embark on this candidacy, are you going to talk about this kind of elephant in the room, so to speak? That the president is a nut?

Troye: Absolutely. You can’t discount what we have at the helm right now of the United States and the free world. But here is what I will say, Greg: The issues of affordability, the issues of rising gas prices, rising grocery prices, rising fertilizer [prices] for farmers—think about the Strait of Hormuz and what is happening there. Also health care, the ACA, things that actually everyday working-class Americans like the family that I grew up in—I’m the daughter of a truck driver, I’m the daughter of a Mexican immigrant—these are things that are tangible. Yes, kitchen table issues.

Never mind the fact that my mom, who’s 82 years old, is actually fearful right now because of ICE and what ICE is doing to torment our communities because they’re targeting people like her. When I look at the combination of this—yes, we care about affordability. We care about economic issues. But a lot of these things are driven from the very top. They’re driven by Donald Trump’s actions and his recklessness. That is what I plan to do: I plan to tie it back to people and explain to people as much as I can, to educate people that I want to work on that.

I plan to focus on health care because I have an aging mom and I know that there are a lot of people like me in my situation who are trying to figure out how we afford this. Or there are a lot of people who, like my husband, didn’t have health care for a long time—he has an autoimmune disease and couldn’t get affordable medication, so it took over his body and he got worse. These are things that are very real.

The issue is that Trump at the helm, and MAGA Republicans and what they’re doing, are actually making our lives worse by the legislation and the things that they are focused on and passing, that feed back into that loop of these issues. That’s why it doesn’t help to have a madman and unstable individual in the office who’s getting us into global conflicts that actually impact the kitchen table issues on a daily basis—and govern in this type of way. That is where my concern is as someone who witnessed this firsthand. I was there as a career person serving. Plenty of people are there in a career capacity right now that are having to live this daily nightmare firsthand and trying to navigate inside the government.

Sargent: It’s interesting the way you position all this, because it’s really an important factor that the Iran war is almost like a double whammy for Trump in the following sense. First, it shows how unhinged and how unfit to govern he is. At the same time, it also is having this very palpable impact on prices and on people’s everyday lives. In a certain sense, the war with Iran is like the perfect issue to capture all the profound pathologies—the whole bundle of madness and destructiveness that this presidency has ushered in.

Troye: Yes, 100 percent, because it all boomerangs here domestically. Instability, conflict—he’s making our world less safe. He’s making our communities less safe. He’s also creating the increases in the things that he ran complaining about. Let’s not forget during the campaign, he blamed Kamala Harris. They said, If you elect Kamala Harris, there would be war with Iran. The price of eggs. All of these things were the Republican narrative in 2024 that I was out there countering every day on the campaign trail when I was traveling to swing states. That is what you would hear. Well, guess what? We’re in those situations right now that Donald Trump has gotten us into.

Sargent: I want to close on this thought: When Donald Trump threatens to obliterate Iranian civilization, which would kill tens of millions of people, I don’t think that should be treated as just Trump being crazy Trump. It actually matters to a lot of Americans to hear their president do something that deranged and sadistic.

Can you talk a little bit about that? We don’t want the president to be saying that we’re going to use the American military to commit mass atrocities and extraordinarily serious and grave war crimes. We want our president to not do that kind of thing, correct?

Troye: We would want the United States presidency to exhibit diplomacy. We would want him to be a leader in foreign policy, to bring people to the table, to be a negotiator, not be threatening exactly what you said—war crimes, destroying an entire civilization.

To me, when I saw that, actually, my concern was the aftereffects and the implication of watching the president of the United States use such language globally and how the international community and how everyone perceives that. What that does: It antagonizes people against the United States. It radicalizes people against the United States. It makes people angry and overall it makes everyone much less safe.

Sargent: Well, you’re a very good voice to explain this to voters. So we’re glad that you’re running, if only for that purpose: to explain to people from a national security perspective just how unhinged and dangerous this guy really is. Olivia Troye, best of luck with your congressional run. Thanks so much for coming on.

Troye: Thank you. I appreciate the support. And if you want to learn more about me, visit OliviaTroye.com.