Trump’s View of the War

“As of this moment, the Trump team is still waiting on a response from the Iranians to a proposal that was sent over to them, which outlined broad deal points, baseline points to start a negotiation, to start a more serious and detailed negotiation, mostly focused on how do we prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and how do we get the highly enriched uranium out of Iran? Those are the two main issues involved. And Trump is very frustrated right now because nobody on his team... feels he can negotiate properly with the Iranians.”

“Despite all the bravado that you hear from the president and from Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, we have unlimited weapons, etc. They don't have unlimited weapons and they're very, very constrained when it comes to long-range strike weapons. What that means is if they do do what Trump has threatened, which is blow up every bridge and power plant inside Iran, they don't really have the long-range arsenal to do that. That means flying planes in, exposing your pilots to risk, potentially having more shoot downs.”

“He does not want something that is going to be very easy to describe as similar to the JCPOA—the Obama nuclear deal with Iran from 2015—that Republicans have been deriding for years and years and years for a variety of reasons. And so one of the first things he did was tear this deal up. He was very proud of that. He has talked about it constantly, and he has talked about why he thought it was a very bad deal. And throughout these conversations... that's what the president knows he wants to avoid.”

“What Donald Trump is focused on in this term, what he has been focused on, is making himself a capital G great figure of history. The amount of time he's spending on domestic politics pales in comparison to him taking really bold aggressive moves in foreign policy and also putting his physical imprint on the world, on Washington DC, designing monuments to himself, renaming institutions, ensuring that he achieved some level of immortality, building a grand ballroom, calling it the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

“In fact, I would argue that he is behaving like somebody who thinks that this changeover is probably going to happen anyway. He's kind of ambivalent about it in terms of control of the House, maybe the Senate. And so that only gives him six months to get done the things he cares about. ... He has been talking to allies about how prosecutions can move quicker. You are seeing Todd Blanch now work with—these are people who the president believes are going to do what he wants.”

“Trump papered over all of these disagreements and problems because he was Donald Trump. Now, we're starting to see the first glimpses of what a post-Trump Republican Party looks like. So what you then get is the disagreements, the fights, and all of these fractures. You get a bunch of people who voted for Donald Trump because he thought they were going to keep him out of foreign wars, who are now in foreign wars, angrily disaffected.”

“Metta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said it plans to cut 8,000 workers or about 10% of its staff. The company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he expects much of the work now done in tech to eventually be overtaken by AI.”