Do Trump & Putin share the same fatal flaw? With Matt Frei

**Matt Frei** (0:02)
This is a Global Production.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:05)
If Trump is not getting enough of the right information that he should, it's very much like Putin apparently not getting the information he should from his sycophantic and probably terrified group of intelligence officials, military officials, political officials. The war is going not just badly, but exceptionally badly for Russia. The average lifespan of a recruit to the front line is 20 to 30 minutes.

**Matt Frei** (0:32)
There's a kind of Game of Thrones going on. JD Vance doesn't like the war in Iran as little as Dan Driscoll liked the war in Iran. Where's Marco Rubio being? The Secretary of State. You barely hear him. He's gone into a witness protection program. So there are people inside the administration who are coalescing against Trump ever so quietly. Trump doesn't have anyone who basically tells him the truth.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:59)
Hello, everyone. It is me, Christiane Amanpour, with the Ex Files. Jamie is still on vacation, but I have a very, very special guest for us today, and he is Matt Frei. So he is a long-standing foreign correspondent, he's presenter and Europe editor for Channel 4 News, and a presenter for LBC as well. Matt and I have been to many of the same places over the last 30 plus years as foreign correspondents. We've covered so many things, including the Balkans in the 1990s, where we both came face-to-face, not just with the horrendous genocidal project of the Bosnian Serbs, backed by Serbia at the time, but the man himself, General Ratko Mladic, who died just a few days ago, and he was called the butcher of the Balkans. We're going to talk a little bit about what he did and why it still matters. We're going to talk about why, for me anyway, Russia's war on Ukraine triggers that war in the Balkans all those years ago. First, though, we're going to start with some very important news coming out of Trump's White House, the Trump-MAGA administration, and what looks to be basically an administration meltdown over the Iran war.
Let us welcome Matt Frei. Welcome, Matt. It's great to see you. Great to have you talking with us.

**Matt Frei** (2:12)
Thank you so much, Christiane. It's wonderful to be with you.

**Christiane Amanpour** (2:16)
As I came online, you were talking about the resignation of the very senior general in the US Pentagon. Take it away a little bit. Remind everybody his name, his job, and why this matters so much right now.

**Matt Frei** (2:31)
Okay, so Dan Driscoll was the secretary of the army. So he's the civilian. He was also in the military before, but he's not a general. He's the civilian in charge of the world's biggest army, or certainly the most important army, which is the American army, roughly one million men and women. Now he is had, and he's young, he's 41 years old. He was instrumental in developing the drone program for the Pentagon. And of course, as you know, Christiane, it's all about drones these days. And he was seen as the kind of future of what Pete Hegseth likes to call the Department of War.
Now he and Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News Sunday morning host, who is one of Trump's favorite people. He was one of the few people who was invited onto Trump's special plane, leaving Turkey after the NATO summit. So he very much wants to keep him alive. Pete Hegseth has fired something like 24 senior generals and admirals since he came to office.
And most of them, as far as we can see, on ideological grounds. This is something that this chap, Dan Driscoll, didn't like. And he has been at loggerheads with Pete Hegseth for a long time over this, especially during the Iran War, which has presented all sorts of problems. And so he decided to resign. Unusually, he resigned. He wasn't fired, although it may have come to that if he'd carried on. Now, we know a couple of things that are really important. I mentioned them briefly.
Dan Driscoll was a very close friend of a guy called Randy George, who was the Army Chief of Staff. Randy George was fired by Pete Hegseth for disagreeing with him on a number of key policy issues, especially the firing of very senior, very accomplished generals and admirals because they were men over their women or because they were black. There's an ideological bent here that many people in the military don't agree with, including this guy, Dan Driscoll. He went to see the president himself not so long ago, where he told the president how bad things had got inside the Pentagon and how many people had been fired by Hegseth. Apparently, the president was surprised by this, but the president is often surprised by bad news, whether he's actually surprised or just chose not to hear the bad news before or whether he's not telling the truth. We don't really know. But anyway, things got from bad to worse and now Dan Driscoll has resigned. This also comes just briefly after every single field commander, I mean, senior general and admiral involved in the war in Iran, wrote to the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth and said, you got to stop this. We've got to stop this war because we're running out of ammunition. We are very exposed to other threats from China or elsewhere. We've got to stop this. And Pete Hegseth, instead of stopping it, actually then fired on some Iranian targets over the weekend, rebooting this war that seems to not be going away at all.