Debate: Are Trump's own words undermining negotiations?

[0:00] CNN has also learned that last week the U.S. and Iran were closing in on a deal, [0:05] but Trump's social media frenzy and media interviews hurt the negotiations. [0:10] Some Trump officials privately acknowledged to CNN that Trump's public commentary [0:14] has in fact been detrimental to these talks. [0:18] My sense is that the president doesn't have a clear idea of what he wants. [0:24] He has a general idea. I think if I were chief negotiator for Iran, [0:27] what I would do, I would do what the Iranians always do. I would just lie. [0:31] Say, we're going to give up our nukes, take them, we'll arrange this, [0:36] we'll negotiate the means and we'll get this done. [0:39] And then the reason being the real nuclear weapon is the Strait of Hormuz. [0:44] You don't have to go and mess around with A-bombs. [0:47] You have a choke point where the Iranians have humbled the whole free enterprise system. [0:55] They panicked everybody. Every American watching this program and walking the streets that has a car [1:02] is looking every day at the price of gasoline and their lives are up ended. [1:07] This was a war that they had no idea was going to last this long. It's so, so messy. [1:11] And no one knows really when it's going to end or whether the president will, [1:16] will, you know, drag his heels and, and, you know, pull as much as he can, [1:23] temporizing, ad hoc, improvising. [1:26] So Horace, to Geraldo's point, I mean, there's been, Reuters had an interesting story about European allies [1:33] being afraid that an inexperienced U.S. negotiating team is pushing for a swift, [1:37] headline-grabbing framework for Iran that would entrench rather than resolve deeper problems. [1:45] The concern, according to the diplomats, is that there won't, is not that there won't be an agreement, [1:50] it's that there will be a bad initial agreement that creates endless downstream problems. [1:56] Another negotiator said, it took us 12 years and immense technical work. [2:00] Does anyone think that this can be done in 21 hours? [2:04] I'm really surprised to hear that the chocolatiers of planet Earth are complaining [2:10] about the leadership that is being shown in this effort. We now know that they have, [2:17] they had developed a missile capacity that actually could reach the greatest croissant [2:26] and coffee bars in Europe. And yet, only America stepped in to act. [2:36] I was wondering where the chocolatier thing came from. I was wondering if I missed that memo. [2:41] Well, I mean, look, as we've discussed before, that may be true, but it also begs the question, [2:48] why didn't the Trump administration even bother to involve the Europeans in a decision [2:54] to go into this war? But then secondly, on the issue of whether Trump just wants a headline, [3:01] is it a risk here that he might get a headline, but that the real work of verifying, removing [3:08] nuclear materials, all of that gets left for someone else to deal with or gets left [3:13] for the indefinite future, in which we're just going back and forth with the Iranians for years [3:18] and years and years about how to actually make sure that this thing is verified? [3:22] Yeah, this gives new meaning to loose lips sink ships. I mean, literally, he is putting our safety [3:30] at risk by not being disciplined. And what concerns me most of all is that as I'm moving around Georgia [3:38] and talking to people, the affordability issue is still not being addressed. Gas prices are still going [3:44] up across his nation. And there is a concept for a plan of war. There is no plan. And it is creating [3:53] chaos in the lives of people. And I think you're going to see this reflected in the way that people [4:01] show up this election year, this midterm cycle to express their frustration with Donald Trump. [4:09] The president himself seems to be getting frustrated. The Wall Street Journal had a piece about this, [4:15] as we talked about in the in the introduction here. And he's distracted. He wants to get back to the [4:20] ballroom. He at one point mused that he should award himself the nation's highest military honor, [4:27] the Medal of Honor. It was a joke. That's how we joke. I mean, come on. Maybe it was a joke. [4:35] But Trump wants this thing done. And it's not done. And it may not be done. I mean, [4:40] he did extend the deadline. He extended it probably another day. So it may not be done, [4:44] even with that extended deadline. That's the biggest disadvantage he has in this negotiation. [4:49] He wants it resolved because he wants the oil prices to go back down. He wants the gas prices [4:53] to go back down. He wants inflation to go back down. And he doesn't have any control over that. [4:57] Iran still controls the straight of her moves. So that means he's in a position to make a bad deal. [5:01] And I don't think he wants to be in that position. But that's the reason why you have decisions that [5:06] are being made where they're keeping him out of the room because they're afraid he's so mercurial. [5:10] No, that's not why. That's not what the reporting said. [5:12] That's not what the reporting said. He's concerned. It sounds like he's nervous [5:17] that whatever comes out of this might be compared to the JCPOA he's been sending. [5:22] But he should be concerned about whether or not we're going to revert back to a plan that wasn't [5:26] particularly serving this country. But I guess my point is that if he thinks that it's even a close [5:33] call that what he might get out of this is substantially similar enough that people might [5:39] compare it to the thing that he pulled out of, that seems to indicate a state of mind here. [5:44] The Wall Street Journal, this report, made it clear that he's actually really involved and he's been [5:50] hesitant to make moves that could cost American lives. He's doing the opposite of what we were told [5:55] by a lot of Democrats early on that he was impulsive, that he's a warmonger. [6:00] The reporting suggests completely the opposite. I mean, part of the reason why they wanted to pull [6:04] him out of the room for some of the conversations on the rescuing of American pilots was because he [6:09] was eager to get minute by minute updates because he actually wanted to protect an American citizen. [6:16] That that's actually something that we would want from our president, although it can't get in the way. [6:20] Sure, we've all been in positions where maybe we're a little bit too eager for an update from [6:25] God knows what, but that's the reality. [6:26] He thought this war would be over in days. He had no idea. [6:30] He said from the beginning. [6:31] He had no idea that it was going to be this protracted struggle and this fight, this gutter fight, [6:38] this knife fight. He had no idea. And because it is improv, you never know where the, sometimes it's [6:45] genius and other times it's disastrous. What's going to happen in Islamabad if the Iranians say, [6:54] you have to blink first in terms of the straight of Hormuz? What's going to happen? And there'll be [6:58] an impasse. What's the president going to say? You're going to wipe out your civilization? [7:01] Well, we have, we have the leverage right now over Iran. We don't have to worry about anything [7:06] beyond right now the politics, which is an important piece of all of this. [7:09] What leverage do we have? What leverage? [7:10] We have double the amount of air forces right now in and around the region. [7:15] So you could say that the whole Western of Europe has an advantage over Iran. If you're, [7:21] if you were just talking about the United States muscle compared to Iranian muscle, [7:25] of course, the United States has the muscle. [7:27] Okay. So then we do have... [7:28] But it's the, it's the question of whether or not you really want to use all that to what? [7:32] What do you want to do? Blow up the bridges? [7:34] When the straight of Hormuz is slowed down or stopped, [7:40] does it hurt the United States as much as it hurts Iran economically? [7:44] That's a big piece of, that is a very big piece of the leverage that we have. [7:49] It's not like anything, but I'm sorry, but we do have an economic leverage. [7:55] We're in that place right now where the straight of Hormuz is shut down. [8:00] And we will find out exactly how much leverage that gives us because it's been a minute since [8:06] they've, the blockade has worked, but Iran is still, we're not at a deal yet. [8:10] We, we have not, we're not at a deal yet. [8:13] Iran has more cards than the Trump administration was ever willing to admit. [8:18] And we are the world's greatest military power. [8:20] What are the cards? We have, we have one, right? [8:23] We are the world's greatest military power, the United States. [8:26] We have a $1 trillion military budget. [8:28] We spend more on our defense than 10, the next 10 nations combined. [8:32] Iran is not even in that list. They're a middle power. [8:35] And yet after how many days has it been now? 48 days has been, [8:38] we've been at war with them and we still have 51. [8:41] We still haven't been able to defeat them because they control the straight of Hormuz, [8:44] something that everyone who thought about, everyone, everyone who thought about this [8:48] knew that that was likely to happen, except Donald Trump was so mercurial again, [8:52] he was willing to rush in without thinking about the consequences. [8:55] No, I know that that is a piece of the talking point. [8:58] No, that's the reality. [8:59] That's what's happening now. [9:00] What's happening now is from a military perspective, we could, in fact, destroy Iran. [9:04] We're choosing not to do that because that would be, in fact, a war crime. [9:06] Because that's genocide. [9:08] Exactly my point. [9:09] And Trump is serving genocide on a regular basis. [9:11] No, he's not. [9:11] He did so on Easter. [9:12] No, he didn't. [9:13] So, Jason, let me let you finish your point so we can understand where you're going with that. [9:17] Where I'm going is that we had clear military objectives, which we have achieved. [9:22] Which were? [9:23] We have a greater vulnerability that's not just for the United States, but for the world, [9:27] that the Strait of Hormuz has been under the control of Iran. [9:30] That is not in the best interest of anyone. [9:32] This right now is making that point. [9:35] The Strait of Hormuz is supposed to be open for every single country to travel through. [9:39] And if we're able to. [9:40] But it's not. [9:41] That was not a military objective. [9:42] The Strait of Hormuz was open. [9:44] Hold on, hold on. [9:45] So it's not, so. [9:46] Yeah, but if it was, would that not be a win for the globe? [9:51] Yes, of course. [9:51] Yes, it would be. [9:52] But that would also be where we're trying to go. [9:54] Just to be clear, that would be the status quo prior [9:56] to the war. [9:57] No, prior to the war, Iran had control of the Strait of Hormuz. [10:00] It was a different kind of. [10:01] No, I didn't know. [10:02] It was always under control. [10:03] I paid $3 a gallon. [10:04] I paid $3 a gallon. [10:05] The status quo prior to the war was that there was free travel through the [10:09] Strait of Hormuz. [10:09] But maybe to your point, Iran could have utilized, perhaps, control over the Strait of Hormuz. [10:17] That's always the threat. [10:18] But that's always the threat. [10:19] Yeah, but they didn't. [10:20] But they didn't. [10:20] So getting us back to where we were on February 28th, that would be sort of like the minimum [10:28] baseline consequence of this conflict. [10:31] It's not true at all. [10:32] It's not true at all. [10:32] It's not true at all. [10:33] It's not true at all. [10:33] It's not true at all. [10:34] It's not true at all. [10:35] It's not true at all. [10:35] It's not true at all. [10:35] It's not true at all. [10:36] It's not true at all. [10:36] It's not true at all. [10:37] It's not true at all. [10:37] It's not true at all. 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