Monday Morning Politics: Lindsey Graham, Trump and Iran

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
I am there on WNYC. Well, as so often happens these days, if you decide to take a news holiday to enjoy a summer weekend, you wind up getting surprised on Monday morning that all the stuff that has happened on Saturday and Sunday when you thought everybody was off. You probably know by now that Lindsey Graham died suddenly, apparently from a cardiovascular emergency. Maybe you know that the Iran War has gotten even more complicated in the last couple of days with the US and Iran's different understandings. It's now clear that they understand differently the ceasefire agreement and that this disagreement, this different interpretation is pretty significant regarding the Strait of Hormuz. Iran was attacking ships there again over the weekend, and the US was bombing Iran again. The website IranWarAlive, which tracks deaths and injuries on all sides, I often think we ignore the deaths and injuries too much, you know, and center the negotiations and the politics without remembering to say how many people have died. So this website that keeps track says nearly 10,000 total deaths since the start of the war in February.
It says more than 6,000 Iranians, and cites US and Israeli estimates for that number. 13 to 15 Americans, by different counts, more than 4,000 people in Lebanon, 57 in Israel, 119 in Iraq, and smaller numbers in some other Gulf states. And the standoff appears to be deepening, not resolving after this weekend's events. All right, also a big bipartisan housing bill took effect Saturday night or Friday night, I think, Saturday morning, despite Trump's refusal to sign it, holding out for his so-called Save Act to make it harder to vote in various ways. The Trump administration issued subpoenas, have you heard this one yet, to several New York Times journalists who reported on security deficiencies on Trump's new Air Force One presidential airplane. Graham Platner did officially drop out of the Maine Senate race, maybe you missed that, that happened late Friday, allowing Democrats to hold a convention to replace him, and deepening the internal finger-pointing about who didn't vet him well enough in the first place.
And by the way, while most Republicans, probably have heard this, were claiming, oh, our party would never let such a guy get as far as Platner got with the Democrats, guess who is kind of defending him? Here, you may have guessed it, is President Trump on his way home from the NATO summit last week.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:53)
It's really a question of whether or not you believe the woman.

**Jeffrey** (2:57)
A lot of people say big falsehoods.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:00)
A lot of questions about, the question is whether you believe the woman. A lot of people say big falsehoods. So with all of that is a Monday morning politics prelude. With us now is Elana Schor, Senior Washington Editor at Semafor.
Hi, Elana. Thanks for coming back. Welcome back to WNYC. Thanks for coming on.

**Elana Schor** (3:19)
Thanks for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:21)
Beginning with that Trump clip, while every Republican is piling on the Dems for choosing someone as flawed as Plattner, almost every Republican, why is Trump questioning the multiple women who accused him of various degrees of sexual misconduct?

**Elana Schor** (3:40)
Well, two reasons. One, I mean, think about Trump's own past and the way he's treated the multiple, multiple, far more credible cases of sexual misconduct allegations against himself, right?
He's predisposed to raise questions about women's accounts, regardless of who they're referencing. It's just kind of a fact about Trump. Two, I think Trump likes making chaos and creating uncertainty for the Democrats, and by sort of wading into their factional dispute over how the Plattner allegations and vetting of this candidate were handled, Trump's kind of playing his chaos agent role here.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:16)
Trump has been such a Teflon don on that issue from the Access Hollywood tape 2016, where he boasted about grabbing women by their private parts, to his actual jury trial, where a jury found he sexually abused the writer, E. Jean Carroll. Why do you think so much of the country has just continued to minimize that as a factor in his fitness for office?

**Elana Schor** (4:39)
I mean, it's unfortunate, but I think Trump and his appearance of just being anywhere between callous and abusive towards women is taken as a given by a lot of the electorate. I mean, I'm accepting probably a lot of your listeners, folks who are naturally predisposed to vote against Republicans and naturally predisposed to hear this and think, oh my god, this man is disgusting. But I'm speaking of kind of independent swing voters, just kind of assume that it's true, which can be hard to understand if you're not in their camp. But people cast their votes based on a number of crazy factors.