95. Trump, Iran & The Ceasefire Collapse: What Happens Now?

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Hi everybody, welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Kathy Kay.

I'm down in Nashville, Tennessee, home of country music.

For any of you listening from Nashville, it is great to be in your town.

Loving it down here.

And Anthony, back home.

A rare move.

I am back home.

The bombs are flying.

I'll be back in the air shortly.

Go ahead, heading to your beautiful country for the Chalk Book Festival or the Chalk History Festival.

So I'm going up there with fellow podcasters, James Holland, Alistair Campbell.

That's great.

Tony Pastor.

Be fun.

In the meantime, we're back having done our emergency podcast on Sunday, again, talking about Trump and Iran because things are moving so quickly that we decided to do something a little different.

For those of you listening, you're hearing this as a regular podcast, but we're also doing this as a YouTube live.

Join us.

We'll be taking your questions later.

We're going to do a separate episode of questions for founding members.

You can become a founding member at therestispoliticsus.com.

And we'll be looking at questions specifically about Iran because we've had so many of them since our episode on Sunday.

Thank you all for listening to that.

Thank you for sending us your your questions.

And then of course we'll be back as well on Sunday with our regular QA.

But this is going to be a kind of update on where we are with Iran.

Anthony, I know, has been speaking.

You've been speaking to people in the White House.

I've been speaking to former senior defense officials and to a member of Congress.

So we can tell you what...

the mood is in Washington.

But let me, shall I just kind of bring you all quickly up to date as we're recording this on Tuesday morning East Coast time.

So Trump has declared a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on Truth Social.

And then Israel accused Tehran of breaking that ceasefire within hours.

This follows Trump ramping up the rhetoric, floating the idea of regime change in Tehran, while his allies insist that that's not the mission.

And people in the White House separately have insisted that is not the mission.

Iran's parliament, meanwhile, has voted to approve a plan to shut the Strait of Hormuz.

We can talk about that as a retaliatory option, which would be the most critical oil choke point on the planet.

And then we we may get into the New York Democratic race because I do think that's important in the second half of the podcast, New Yorkers heading to the polls in the mayoral primary that's turned into a fight, really, for the kind of national soul of the Democratic Party.

I'll just give you a very, very quick timeline, and then I want you to listen to what Donald Trump has said within the last hour, leaving the White House for the NATO summit in Europe.

Just after 6 p.m.

yesterday Eastern Time, Donald Trump announces that Iran and Israel have agreed to a ceasefire.

At 1 a.m.

Eastern Time, Trump officially declares that the ceasefire is in effect.

At about 2 a.m., Israel says it's agreed.

to the U.S.

ceasefire proposal.

Iran said it would stop attacking if Israel did the same last night, but before the ceasefire took effect, both countries exchanged heavy fire overnight.

And the reports from Iran at the moment are that people in the north of the country are still hearing the sounds of explosions.

So it doesn't look like the ceasefire is holding.

And here is what Donald Trump said leaving the White House just about an hour or so ago.

We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Do you understand that?

So, President of the United States, standing outside the White House, drops the F-bomb on Israel and Iran, lays into both Iran and Israel, but particularly Anthony seemed really pissed off with Bibi Netanyahu and Israel breaking this ceasefire deal.

What are you making of where we're standing right now?

I like that Trump, by the way.

I don't dislike that.

You think that's a good look for the president of the United States to be saying, don't know what the fuck they're doing?

Nah.

That guy is the guy I grew up with in Queens.

That's the guy.

that I grew up with.

He talks like that, by the way.

And by the way, he never really talks like that in public.

He's a meat machine gun cursor.

He talks like that in private.

A lot of presidents swear.

Joe Biden was a swear, too.

Yeah, of course.

I mean, come on.

I mean, so the reason why I like that about him is he's expressing the frustration.

And whether you like Trump or dislike Trump, there is a strategy.

So just give me a minute on this, and I'd like you to react to this because I've got this from sources inside the White House, and I want to give them their fair due.

I want at least people to hear what they're thinking.

We can criticize it if we want to, but let's share what they're thinking.

So, point number one, hitting those nuclear power plants, whatever you want to call them, the enricher facilities,

it was to take the risk off the table of a nuclear Iran.

This is how they're framing it.

This is how the White House sees it.

Okay.

That's how they're framing it.

We don't want regime change.

We don't care about a regime change.

We don't want a forever war.

We don't want to go to war with Iran.

But Iran has been flexing for 30 years that they want to annihilate Israel, which is a very strong ally.

And they've been using proxies throughout the region to hurt American soldiers, as the president pointed out in his speech.

They've hurt the Israelis.

Hamas is one of their proxies that attacked Israel on October 7th.

So whether people like it or not, Israel has been at war with Iran, not direct kinetic war, but through proxies for a decade and a half, possibly more.

And so the president is trying to take the nuclear threat away.

We can debate whether it it was the right thing to do or not, but again,

I want you to hear their point of view.

Moreover, they've then gone to people in Moscow and they've gone to people around the world, adversaries and allies, and said, if we take the nuclear threat away, maybe we can bring Iran back in some way, shape, or form into the family of nations.

And oh, by the way, the Saudis have tried to do that reasonably successfully.

And the messaging to Israel is lay down your arms, get them to lay down their arms, and see if this is a wild thing to say, but are you ready for it?

See if we can bring them into the Abraham Accords.

If the Saudis can normalize with them and

the Saudis can normalize with Israel, is there enough connection to get the whole region to calm itself down?

And so the euphoria in the White House last night was, okay,

this is the start of a ceasefire.

Now, I tweeted out there may or may not be a ceasefire because it's a very rough neighborhood.

I'm in that neighborhood all the time.

And obviously, as I've said to people, I have visited the war zones and I understand the tribal conflicts and I understand the ancestral hatred.

And I understand that children on both sides have been murdered, Caddy.

And a result of which you're going to have a lot of hatred going.

It's sort of a Northern Ireland situation to apply context.

And so why the president is so frustrated, he's coming out of the White House and he's saying there is a historic opportunity here to have peace.

Okay.

It's not clear to me that

Iran,

you're the Brit.

How do you say it?

Iran or Iran?

How do you say it?

We say Iran.

Iran.

Okay, so we're going to use the British.

I'm going to do my best.

So Iran, see, I think they still have the access to the bomb.

Okay, and I think they've got 400 kilograms of uranium.

That's the flaw in all of this.

Yeah, they got tipped off by the Russians.

The Russians had to move their tech people out of there.

Where they're going to drop the bomb.

They got tipped off by Donald Trump, Tweeted.

Of course.

Of course.

We're bombing you.

And again, I'm going to talk like a very practical person.

Them having the bomb and Israel having the bomb, hopefully from a quadratic equation, cancels itself out.

But just the notion symbolically that the world perception is that they don't have it now, maybe we can get to the negotiating table.

That's their message.

That's his frustration.

And by the way, when he says, because I know this son of a bitch really well, when he says, do you understand that?

That's him lecturing you like you're a child.

Okay.

That's him yelling at Ivanka Trump in like 1987.

You know what I mean?

When he's like screaming at her because, you know, she made a mess in the kitchen.

How dumb do you have to be?

Right, right, right.

Do you understand that?

So that's him.

Okay.

Now, again, you could like or dislike the guy.

I'm just letting you know that's him.

And I got to give these guys credit because I get a lot of things wrong in life.

I'm willing to admit that.

If you can get to a ceasefire, and I'm not saying you're going to because of the ancestral hatred, but if you can get to a ceasefire and six or 12 months from now,

they're talking about an economic deal.

Okay.

Germany's our friend, Caddy.

Okay.

We were going after each other 80 short years ago.

Okay.

This is a little bit deeper.

This is a little bit more tribal.

It's a little bit more ancestral.

But you know what?

Like Northern Ireland, it's time for peace.

And it's time for people to recognize that we'll be way more prosperous if we pull ourselves together.

All right.

So that's anyway.

That's from the White House.

I just wanted to share that and get your reaction to it.

That's exactly what I have been hearing: that there is this separation, certainly in the president's mind, as I said on Sunday, between airstrikes and full-blown war.

And I think listening to members of Congress and Iran experts, and I spoke to a couple yesterday, I spoke to somebody very senior from the first Trump administration from the defense side.

There is more optimism as we are recording this.

And I am very careful about

sounding overly optimistic or overly pessimistic when we don't have all the facts at our disposal, which we still don't yet.

But there is certainly more optimism today

that this could give the chance for a ceasefire.

There are carrots on the table should Iran want to take them and come to the negotiating process and do away with its uranium stocks.

Now, that could be a point of contention.

It could be that America will have to get and Israel will have to give something on that and and allow Iran some uranium enrichment capacity.

I think the strikes against the Air Force base in Bahrain last night, the fact that absolutely no one was hurt, the fact that the Iranians signalled that that's what they were going to do, signalled through the Qataris and warned them that this is what was going to happen.

And it was clearly kind of perfunctory.

There was some feeling in the White House last night, I'm told, that that made them think, well, if this is the best Iran has, they really are depleted and that we are dealing with a very weak opponent here.

There are a couple of things I think that we need to be careful about.

One is the concern that I have heard from Iran watchers in Washington, D.C.

and from this senior Defense Department official, former Defense Department official, which is that what has happened to those uranium supplies?

It's not the bomb.

They don't have a bomb yet.

It's not like the Iranians have the uranium and they've put it onto a missile.

That hasn't happened yet.

They're still about a year away from that, even if they have enriched uranium to weapons-making capacity.

But this Defense Department official said to me, listen, you could hide that stuff in a two-kilogram can.

This is not difficult to hide.

They got a heads-up from Trump because of his truth socials.

They got a heads-up from the Russians, quite possibly.

And the understanding, and we even heard that from members of the Trump administration, including the vice president, is that this has been put somewhere and we don't know where it is.

So they still have highly enriched uranium in Iran.

The proposition that you are laying out

would entail of the Iranian regime, not the people, but of the Ayatollah and the people around the Ayatollah and the clerics, that they fundamentally change.

that they fundamentally change their ambitions and that they take that enriched uranium and they say to the IAEA, okay, here it is, dispose of it as you will.

We will leave ourselves without this defense that we saw as fundamental to our national security.

Maybe that's possible.

Maybe it's possible that they will say, we'll go into the Abraham Accords, we will align ourselves with the Great Satan and the Little Satan, the United States and Israel, and we will forsake all of the things that we came into power to uphold in 1979.

It's quite a big ask.

It's quite a big cultural and political ask.

There's someone on the live feed that's saying, I brought up Germany, but there was regime change in Germany in order for us to become allies.

So so so maybe it's not possible.

I I know it's a rough neighborhood.

When a ceasefire was announced last night, I said, Okay, that's going to be very tenuous because these guys don't trust each other.

So there's no trust in the equation.

There's also hurt and there's also violence.

Again, imagine, God forbid, one of your kids killed in a terrorist attack or an Israeli bombing.

And now you're sitting there saying, okay, I want my vengeance.

I want justice for my family.

And you have to transcend all of those atavistic human emotions.

And you have to almost have a transcendental moment in your life, like a mandela, where you have to put down the hatred, the ancestral hatred, and you have to say that you're going to have peace.

I know you're not necessarily buying that.

I just think hard, cold self-interest is generally, you know, the pessimists in the Middle East have not been wrong over the last 40 years, and Iran has been part of that problem.

So, the idea that Iran is suddenly going to change or the clerics are going to suddenly change, it's possible that there is still regime change.

We haven't seen much indication of Iranians coming out, pouring out into the streets in protest since these attacks on their country.

In fact, the opposite, I'm told, is true, is that in the last week or two, Iranians have kind of rallied round the Iranian flag and the leadership.

So, this could have consolidated them.

I think the point of optimism now is actually not about Iran.

What I understand people are watching more closely is Donald Trump's relationship with Bibi Netanyahu.

And here's a couple of posts that Donald Trump put out this morning since this ceasefire was broken.

One, Israel, do not drop those bombs.

If you do, it is a major violation.

Bring your pilots home now.

And then, just to make sure that everybody understood, Israel is not going to attack Iran.

All planes will turn around and head home while doing a friendly plane wave to Iran.

Nobody will be hurt.

The ceasefire is in effect.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

I'm loving this.

Thank you to your attention to this matter, which is like the kind of subcommittee on agriculture.

But anyway, there's the President of the United States making it very clear to Bibi Netanyahu: I did what you wanted me to do, but don't expect me to get dragged into this further.

And don't think that you've now got me in your pocket.

And that's what I'm hearing.

And the source of the optimism that I'm hearing is as much about the Iranians' so-far failure failure to respond and the implementation of a ceasefire as it is about

it's even more so about Donald Trump taking on Bibi Netanyahu.

And if he carries on taking on Netanyahu this way, then I think the kind of cascading beneficial consequences of events in Iran, potentially even addressing the issues of Gaza, because this is a big distraction from what is happening in Gaza at the moment, which is terrible, where IDF forces are shooting at people who are trying to get food.

If that could also be folded into this, then there is some optimism.

And again, pessimists always win in the Middle East, but there is at the moment a little bit of optimism that you could have some kind of realignment that the Middle East is due for.

It has to depend on very cold, hard interests.

I think you're making a very important point.

And so I want to add a little bit of an exclamation point to it, because that is also...

rhetoric coming out of the White House.

The White House is saying, Mr.

Prime Minister, we did exactly what you asked us to do.

We took out those nuclear sites.

You're going overboard in Gaza.

You're hurting your brand in Gaza.

You're hurting the country.

You're hurting your country now in Gaza.

We did take out the nuclear risk.

You've gotten your pound of flesh in the retribution that you provided after October 7th.

You got to pull out of there now.

And we got to get to some type of structured peace.

That's the messaging.

And by the way, I always want to be objective here.

People know how I feel about Donald Trump.

That messaging, I am in support of.

You said to me, it's 12 months later, Trump took out the nuclear sites.

We have a constructive peace in Gaza, and we're going to have a international community rebuild, help to rebuild Gaza, and there's some type of structured ceasefire.

And there's some inspections maybe going on and some trust on both sides.

That's a win for the world.

Okay.

That's going to reduce tensions.

It will lower oil prices.

It'll increase economic activity.

And some of this, look, is Bibi Netanyahu, who has incredibly powerful political incentives to keep this going, to stay in office, to stay out of jail.

The White House also knows that.

But let me just say something as a market participant.

This is my 36th year of getting things right and wrong in the stock market, Caddy.

The market is telling you that this is going to get resolved favorably.

Okay.

And so take a look at the treasury market.

Take a look at the stock and bond market.

Take a look at the cryptocurrency market.

The market is telling you that these two sides, and maybe you're right, maybe the military is exhausted in Iran.

The 93 million people that live in Iran versus the 8 or 10 million people that live in Israel, they've been vanquished by sanctions, multiple decades of sanctions, and maybe Russians can't help them right now because of what's going on in Ukraine.

And I'm sure the Chinese are trying to help them, but the Chinese have their own problems.

And so this could be a historic moment where the needle gets thread.

And I will say this, the Saudis, and I'll give them some credit here.

The Saudis are working very hard on this behind the scenes, not just in Washington, but in Tehran and in also, believe it or not, Jerusalem, to try to get this to calm down because it's in their interest too.

They have their own problems.

They're trying to transition from a post-oil economy in Saudi, and they want the fighting to stop.

Okay, you got to give MBS credit for this.

So there's a lot going on in the region where people are pushing now for peace, slightly different from, let's say, 10 years ago when the pezmists were really winning.

The other thing, I think we're in a very different situation.

You're right.

We're in a very different situation than we were a year ago with Iran massively depleted.

We still don't know.

A couple of outstanding things that are worrying people.

One, as I mentioned, are those uranium stockpiles.

Where are they and what could they do with them?

And the second is

how much control Ayatollah Khameni has over the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which is basically a military.

And are they all in lockstep with an 84-year-old leader?

Or would some of those hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers feel they wanted to do do something different if the country looked like it was about to have a change of regime?

So there are still outsounding issues.

There are still things.

And we are, look, guys, we are always prone to being impatient.

And nobody is more impatient than anyone sitting in Washington, D.C.

And the temptation to call this thing after only three days is very, very strong.

But I can warn you that the Iranians have a longer timeframe and they are more patient and they will have strategized as well.

As you said on our podcast on Sunday, they're not dumb.

They knew this could happen and they will have plans of their own.

Can I say something cheeky before the break?

Because I've done the calculation.

Yes.

The ceasefire lasted

0.007 Scaramucci's.

I'm going to put it in the chat so everybody can see it, okay?

Anthony, that is 007.

That makes you kind of James Bond.

Yeah, well, not me, not me.

The ceasefire is kind of James Bond.

And I just want to point out to people that, you know, I'm not that great in math, and it took a while to really go through when the ceasefire was supposedly happening and then when the first bomb dropped, but I got it at

0.007.

Okay, we can take a break.

We're going to take a break and come back and talk about the politics of this.

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Okay, I think it is worth talking about the politics of this, both from the Republican side, from the Democratic side, but I think most importantly is the issue of Congress, Anthony.

And we talked about this on Sunday.

You've got AOC saying that Donald Trump should be impeached.

I can't find another Democrat who agrees with that position, who's in the kind of, you know, center of the party.

certainly, they are not happy that Congress was not briefed in the way that Congress is usually briefed in this kind of situation where the president before a strike like this would go to what's called the Gang of Eight, which is the leadership of both the House and the Senate on both sides and the heads of the Intel committees.

And those people were not told.

Now, the White House would say that was for operational security reasons, but the raid on Osama bin Laden, the Gang of Eight, was briefed beforehand, and you would think that you could trust eight people to keep that together.

It's interesting talking to people in the military how

they do say

the people I've been speaking to and the people in the intelligence community that I've spoken to over the last couple of days have raised this with me, and I hadn't really expected them to, saying, look, It is better in these situations to go to Congress if this is going to go any further.

The president had the right to do this, although even that is debatable.

He's calling this under the War Powers Act.

The War Powers Act gives the President the right to strike if America is being attacked, clearly it wasn't, or if America was about to be attacked.

And that's where we have to kind of, they'll be digging into the intel.

It doesn't look like America was about to be attacked.

The President does this anyway.

The War Powers Act gives him 60 days to operate.

But the advantage of going to the people, which is effectively Congress in this situation, which would approve this because he has majorities in the House and the Senate, is that you then, if the situation were to demand more from the American military, you have the population on board.

And I think there are people in Congress, sensible people in both parties in Congress, who are saying it would be good for the President to lay this out calmly, the rationale for doing this.

Do you think there is anything there in the failure to go to Congress?

I mean, and I'm not talking about the raw politics of this.

We can get into that in a second.

More in the sense of whether it would have been better given the stakes.

And look, we're talking at a time where the stakes don't, it looks like this has played out, right?

It looks like this has worked, but we need to wait much longer to know whether this has really worked.

Would going to Congress have been a better move?

In some form,

talking to the gang, giving the gang of eight a heads up?

So, I mean, yes, of course it would be a better move because it's more in line with

how we've done things in the past, and that would be a better move.

And Trump likes breaking norms.

Tim Kaine, the senator,

and the former vice presidential candidate was on TV last night discussing a re-litigation of the War Powers Act, which basically he wants the Senate and the House to reignite the War Powers Act.

So we, just for people's benefit, we let the War Powers Act go after the Vietnam War.

So what does that mean?

You want to declare war, the American president has to go to the Congress and ask them whether or not they want to do it, and then they vote on it.

And we haven't done that because the congressmen got blamed for the Vietnam War.

Many of them lost their seats, and they're like, Okay, let's just cede this power to the American president through emergency executive action, so we won't be blamed when we're going to war.

Now, the last time an American president went to the Congress and said, What should I do?

is with Syria.

Remember, we drew a red line, Assad crossed the red line.

Obama wavered.

And then he said, okay, let me go to the Congress.

And the Congress voted no.

Okay, and so he didn't do it.

And so that also sent a signal to Putin: oh, these guys are going to let me do whatever I want.

They just let Assad do what he wants.

Maybe it's time to take more of Ukraine.

Was the low point of President Obama's foreign policy?

Yeah, I understand we're talking about it, but the congressmen don't like it.

If you're behind doors with them, they're like, no, no, let the president do that.

We'll be able to complain about him.

If something goes wrong, we'll blame it on him.

And if something goes right, we'll try to figure out a way to take the credit because that's how these politicians operate.

But listen, for those of you on this live stream that are thinking that I'm overly kissing Trump's ass, I want to respond to that.

I'm not.

I'm just telling you their point of view because I think it's very important

if Caddy and I have a source inside the White House that wants to explain their point of view to people that are willing to listen to Caddy and I, I need to share that with you guys.

Now, look, by the way, can I just jump in there?

Because somebody is saying, Anthony, that you're a warmonger.

Anthony has been more skeptical of this operation than I have been over the last few days.

I've been the one saying that this, you've been the one saying they shouldn't do this.

I've been the one saying, look, it's a chance, there is a chance that this could work.

And that actually, because of the depletion of the Iranian

government and military forces, maybe this was a once-in-a-lifetime generation.

I don't know how this is going to work out.

We don't know yet.

I'm still told Iran has capabilities to respond.

And anyone who is feeling jingoistic and triumphant about this right now only needs to go back to May of 2003.

And as I said, on Sunday, George W.

Bush standing on that aircraft carrier under the sign mission accomplished and remember how that all worked out.

So

we don't know yet.

This could be, as one general put it to me, this could be a long and bloody war, and we don't yet know whether it was worth it.

But I think you're right, Anthony, it's incredibly important that we give our listeners access to the sources that we have.

And you've spoken to people inside the White House who have told you what they're thinking.

I think that's very useful to have.

I think it's important to share, and I think it's important to analyze, because if you

want an inside track to what's going on, you got to hear both points of view.

So, of course, I was against the bombing.

I didn't think it was the right thing to do.

I obviously think they either have the bomb or the fissile material to make the bomb, and they obviously moved it from the area.

There was no radiological

detection after the bombing.

So, first of all, thank God for that, because one of the things I was worried about was water contamination.

But that's also telling you, hey, Vlad, just give you a heads up.

I'm going to bomb your buddy's site.

You want to move your nuclear techs out of there?

Because we're going to drop a few bunker busters.

Okay, thanks, D.

I'll be back to you.

Okay, and they move everything.

They drop the bombs, very symbolic, very ceremonial.

Helps Netanyahu politically, internally.

But now Trump's like, okay, hey, I did that.

I'm not going further than that because my base hates this shit.

So I'm not doing it.

And get it together, guys, so that we can have some type of peace.

And by the way, I'm not saying that's going to work, and it may be too superficial for the ancestral hatred that goes on in the region.

I'm skeptical of the fragility of the people.

When people think it's something is existential, they behave differently, right?

If the regime thinks this is an existential threat, which is why the other thing I'm hearing is: please, Donald Trump, stop tweeting about regime change.

Because if the regime thinks this is existential and what America is actually trying to do is get rid of the Ayatollahs and the Islamic Republic, then they respond in a different way to thinking, okay, well, actually, we can stay in power, we can hold on as Islamic clerics, we just can't have access or build towards a nuclear weapon.

We still don't know what's happening with that missing enriched uranium.

Anthony, I want to, before we go, I want to talk a little bit about the domestic politics of this.

I read something very interesting by Matt Lewis, who is a conservative critic of Donald Trump's, who wrote a good piece.

He's great.

I like him a lot.

He wrote a good piece yesterday where he said, listen, all these people who are thinking that this is going to lead to some kind of split in MAGA world,

because I've been listening to Steve Bannon over the last couple of days, he's clearly not happy with what happened.

He's very still on his we should not get involved.

This is not America's fight, let's get out, this is going to ruin Donald Trump's presidency.

But he's toning it down.

I mean, he's trying to cover a whole load of other issues.

He's going back to his soapbox issues of immigration and DEI and wokeness and California.

And he's spending a lot of time on his shows talking about that rather than Iran at the moment.

But

I think Matt is on to something because what Matt Lewis was writing is that people misunderstand MAGA.

And his point is MAGA is Trump.

And MAGA is not going to leave Trump.

They will follow Trump wherever Trump goes.

They're not going to follow Steve Bannon.

They're not going to follow an ideology.

There is no real ideology to MAGA.

The ideology is Trump himself.

So he's the person to watch.

And I think, I just thought that was a very, look up his piece, guys.

It's Matt Lewis is the guy.

And I just thought that was a very smart framing of it.

And it does kind of

jibes with what my sense of the MAGA movement, having traveled all around America and interviewed people who support Donald Trump, is that this is very personal.

So if Donald Trump decides to bomb Iran, they'll go with Donald Trump.

I don't think there's very much Donald Trump can do to lose the support of MAGA at the moment.

And people who are on the isolationist wing who feel that that is the true ideology of MAGA are kind of missing the point about, you know, how much power they can get from MAGA, how much power they can take away from Donald Trump.

Do you think this has political fallout for him?

Not yet, but I think it could.

And by the way, Marjorie Taylor Greene said something last night.

I was like, okay, you know,

she said, there may be a cult around Donald Trump, but I'm not in the cult.

I don't like this.

I don't want to go to war.

And I'm not just going to sit there and say, whatever Trump wants to do, I'm going to do and chant that I want to do that.

And I think she understands her base.

And I think most Americans, and I would include myself in that group of Americans, if you put a microphone in my face and say, do you want America to have a forever war with Iran?

Do you want to drop off two to three million troops in Iran?

It is absolutely.

Almost everybody's going to say no to that, but that's not what's happening.

Come on.

I understand that.

But the point is, if you're dropping bombs on them, you're opening up a portal where they're going to drop bombs on us.

And once they drop the bomb on us, then you're going to create a Gaza-like response for the Americans.

So,

guys, I don't want the bombs dropping.

Okay, what I would like is negotiated peace.

If you're telling me that there's too much fanaticism and there's too much ancestral hatred, then let's get to a stalemate.

Let's get to a status quo.

Okay, but I don't see how the bombs that we dropped over the weekend have really helped.

If you're telling me, yes, they did because it took the nuclear threat off the table.

You've talked to generals.

I've talked to generals that hasn't.

So let's not pretend that that has.

What we've done is we've helped Netanyahu.

And now we're turning to Netanyahu and say, hey, knock it off.

We did what you asked us to do.

You now need to do some things that we're asking you to do.

Otherwise, you're really going to fracture this relationship.

So they want to de-escalate in Gaza, and they want you to have some type of cold peace with the Iranians at this point.

And again, if that doesn't work, it doesn't work, okay, but that's where we are right now.

I think you could have gotten there without bombing those centrifuges, by the way, because I don't think it would have mattered.

The intelligence suggests that this was not imminent and that we have revealed how weak the Iranian regime was.

This is the nuttiest of Trump.

We hit, we blew, we obliterated the centrifuges.

Okay, but

you probably didn't hit the uranium, brother.

I'm just giving you the heads up.

So, look, I understand you're going to tell 40,000 lies in the four-year term that you got coming right now, but

people don't believe it.

So he's railing on MSNBC for telling the truth.

Fine.

Very quickly, we just wanted to add in, I think it's worth talking about totally different subject.

We've got a few minutes left.

The primary for the New York mayor's race, which may sound like the kind of, you know, very local politics of Antony's home city,

but has become something of a national story because it's become a proxy for the fate and the direction of the Democratic Party.

So, Anthony, just why don't you quickly lay out where we are in the race?

The primary is happening today.

It's the Democratic primary.

Basically, a Democrat is going to be the next mayor because Eric Adams has been so embroiled in scandal.

Whoever wins this primary has a very good chance of being New York City's next mayor.

And there are two candidates, there are a whole bunch of candidates, there are two candidates now left who are kind of neck and neck.

Tell us a little bit about them because I know you know one of them well.

And then we can talk about why this has become such a national story.

Phil, fully disclosed, though, I am a supporter of Andrew Cuomo's campaign.

I have donated to his PAC.

I've donated.

He's the former governor of the state.

He's the former governor of the state.

He's running for mayor now.

He was ousted due to accusations of sexual harassment.

He was forced out of office four years ago.

He's come back.

Now he's mounted a comeback campaign in the mayor Oriel race.

He's going up against a young man, Zoran Mandami.

He's 33 years old.

He identifies as a Muslim immigrant and a proud democratic socialist.

He's an energetic guy.

He's a charismatic guy, very good-looking guy.

He has an AOC-like energy about him.

He is

working his ass off, and he's very good on social media.

And there is a dilemma going on in this city that I love.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker.

I live out on Long Island, but for 36 years of my life, I've had my office in New York City.

I spent every week, day of my life in New York City, and I love the city of New York.

And I told Spikely, it's you and me, baby, we're going to be shutting the lights out in the city.

I'm not leaving, not going to Florida.

I'm a New Yorker, okay?

So I love the city.

But Mandami's onto something.

The cost of living in this city has gone stratospheric.

His whole campaign, as far as I can see, Anthony, seems to be around, he's really laser focused on the issue of affordability.

He is.

Of rent and food, and he's been around all of the districts of the city talking to people about affordability.

And he is right.

He is right.

He's right.

He's dead.

However, the policies to fix that are hard left policies.

They don't work.

They'll turn New York into Havana.

They'll turn New York into a failed socialist city.

Which policies?

Because I thought his policies of free buses, and he makes the point that the Staten Island Ferry is free and so you could have free buses as well.

I would think that free buses, more cheap housing is what New York needs, right?

Yeah, but you can't freeze the rent.

You may be able to offer more free stuff, but somebody has to pay for the free stuff.

Well, his idea is to raise taxes on the website.

They have to balance the budget in the city.

And Kathy Holco finally, the New York governor finally said,

Mondami's talking about raising the taxes on the rich.

Raise the taxes on the rich.

Well, the rich have happy feet.

And so you raise the taxes on the rich.

We lost 450,000 very high taxpayers to Palm Beach, Florida in the last seven years.

So raise the taxes on the rich.

They'll move out of the city.

They'll spend 182 days outside the city and they'll pay taxes, which are no income taxes in Florida or where you are in Tennessee, lower tax rate there.

They'll move.

The rich have mobility.

You need to set up a market-based incentive to promote affordability through the market forces and to get the rich to spend more money in the city, not less money in the city.

You know, AOC

really hurt us in Long Island City.

Even de Blasio, another socialist, supported this.

We were trying to bring Amazon into Long Island City.

It was 100,000 jobs with $150,000 a year.

But Amazon was going to get a forward tax abatement that was worth about $4 billion to them.

And AOC and her minions blocked it.

They said that's a fat cat freebie.

Okay, but Ms.

Ocasio-Cortez,

you want to incentivize them to come to give your registrants, to give your voters the jobs, and to improve the entire community, or you don't want to do that.

If you don't want to do that, that's fine.

Amazon moved to Virginia.

That area of Virginia, which is near where you live, is booming now as a result of that, and we're languishing.

So left-wing policies, okay, let me say something to everybody, and it's right there in the Bible.

The rich and poor are always going to be among us.

If you don't like the rich, I'm sorry, they're going to be here.

Let's lift the poor.

Okay, let's make the poor less poor, and we need to do it with market-based forces.

But this guy's running a very good campaign.

He's very charismatic.

And if he wins, it will send a signal, not noise.

It'll send a signal out to other Democrats.

We need to go harder left.

We need to be more socialist.

It's interesting because he's very different from what Virginia.

Virginia had a primary race for governor recently and the woman who emerged, Abigail Spamberger, the Democrat who emerged, is a former CIA analyst, very centrist, very market-focused.

And she beat the more progressive Democratic opponent, the more populist, because I think, Ma'am Dami, what it looks like is you've got a basically a populist again.

This is the kind of counter.

This is the left wing's counter of Donald Trump's populism.

If he wins, it shows to me that populism is alive and well in American politics, and we can expect more of that, whether it's from the left or the right.

And there are populists on both sides.

And I had thought that Abigail Spanberger was the kind of canary in the coal mine and gave us the direction.

But maybe Virginia is just different from New York City.

But you're right that he's getting a lot of, there are a lot of young New York voters who are squeezed out because rents are 6x their income, whereas when you and I were their age, they were were 2x their income.

They are fed up that they can't afford to have somewhere to live.

They're fed up with the old guard of the Democratic Party, and Cuomo represents that, and they want new, young, fresher, more progressive, more populist faces.

So I think if he does win, and it's a very tight race, then it will, like you say, it'll send a signal around the country that

there is something to be had.

There are voters to be got

in that

part of the Democratic Party who feel they've been left behind.

I'll be out there campaigning for Andrew today.

And obviously, Mayor Bloomberg.

In the heat, make sure you take lots of water because that's another factor, right?

Is whether old people who might support Cuomo are going to turn out and vote because it's hot as hell.

It's 102 degrees here today, and I think that's going to hurt Andrew.

But I'll just say this:

you know, I think Andrew gets what Mondami is saying, but he's a more practical guy, and he wants to blend in a couple of Mondami ideas with some market forces.

If he wins, if he was smart, he'd bring him into his administration.

100%.

And try to

do this.

Keep the wealthy in the city.

That's what you've always said.

Bring people in.

Keep the wealthy in the city.

You guys want to tax them.

I get it.

They're going to leave.

That's all.

Okay.

You know,

I like when they're taxing the rich, and I don't like when the rich leave.

Okay, and by the way, I pay every tax that Sebru McGibbon.

I know.

You're a very good taxpayer.

Guys, thank you very much, all of you, for tuning into the live stream.

It was fun to do this show as a live stream show.

We haven't been taking your questions deliberately.

They're all great questions.

We will take them for our regular Sunday members-only feed.

We're going to do an extra episode for members on your Iran questions.

So, tune in for that as well.

And, of course, we will be back.

I like to say we'll be back next week, but you never know because there's so much news that we may be back before next week.

Maybe this NATO summit is going to be that, you know, it's going to be a wild NATO summit.

We're going to have more reality television to report on.

Thank you guys for joining us.

Thanks so much, guys.

We've had so many questions from you.

And even as we've ended this live stream, more news is coming out.

Trump has just posted the full screenshot of a message that he received from the NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutter.

It's, well, it's kind of revealing.

We're going to discuss it all and answer your brilliant questions in a bonus episode for founding members only out Wednesday.

Here's an extract.

Mark Rutter has sent the President of the United States, Mr.

President, dear Donald, congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran.

That was truly extraordinary and something no one else dared to do.

It makes us safer.

You are flying into another big success in The Hague this evening.

It was not easy, but we've got them all signed to 5%.

Here's the kicker.

Donald, you have really driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe and the world.

You will achieve something no American president in decades could get done.

Europe is going to pay in a big way as they should, and it will be your win, Mark Rutter.

Why is Mark Rutter sending that to Donald Trump first?

And Anthony's second question,

why is Donald Trump reposting?

what the Secretary General of NATO has so flatteringly sent him in a text message.

Well, first of all, I don't have a vomit bag here like they do in the airplanes, but I'm just

like not vomit on your keyboard at the moment.

Is this a video cast as well?

I want this is.

Okay, look at me.

Okay, I'm sorry.

I mean, are you kidding me?

Are you kidding me?

Okay.

Do you think Mark Rutter put into chat GPT right a flatter?

You gotta be kidding me, okay?

I assumed it was a fake.

Okay, but listen to me.

This guy, okay, has embarrassed himself.

Now, let me get into Trump's mind for people so they can understand what Trump just did to him.

Trump hates the ass kissing.

Let me once again say, go kiss Donald Trump's ass.

He's laughing at you.

Those cabinet meetings, he laughs.

He'll talk about it.

Well, he kind of loves it and hates it, right?

He loves it, but it makes him think less of you.

He hates, trust me, i'm telling you he loves the fact that you're on your knees because he's an insecure prick but he hates it too because he knows that you're only on it on your knees to try to manipulate him you see what i mean so marky mark is sending this to him thinking oh look at me everyone thinks i'm the genius trump whiskerer i'm won so much fan favor in europe mark knows how to handle the donald and trump is laughing at him so he put the whole goddamn text on true True Social.

Okay.

Kind of bad for that.

Guy.

I feel bad for myself.

Wake up.

Okay, now I told Caddy that Mark has ring around the collar, which is, you know, some collar stains.

We'll just leave it at that, Caddy.

I want to get more graphic than that, but I'm just letting you know, guy, stop the ass kissing.

It's revolting.

Okay, revolting.

We hope you enjoyed the extract.

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