Trump’s View of the War

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**Michael Barbaro** (0:31)
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.
Today, an inside look at how President Trump is thinking about the war in Iran, the stalled negotiations to end it, and the political fallout for his party as it heads into the midterm elections. I spoke with White House reporters, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. It's Friday, April 24th. Maggie and Jonathan, welcome back.

**Maggie Haberman** (1:16)
Thank you, Michael.

**Jonathan Swan** (1:17)
It's good to be back.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:18)
It's really good to have you back. This is a really bigger than usual welcome back because just to explain, you have both been on leave for a few months, a joint leave you left together because you've been writing a book together about President Trump's second term.
And while we profoundly missed you as guests on the show, when you were on this leave, we are now the beneficiaries of all this reporting that you did for the book and the insights that you gleaned.
And what we want to talk to you about specifically is what you've uncovered in your reporting about how the president has been making decisions in the second term, his mindset, his process on a variety of fronts, but most specifically, most urgently around Iran. So let us start there. We're at a really key moment when the original ceasefire has ended. New talks are being offered by the US, but kind of rejected by Iran. How is the president approaching these peace talks, which on the surface look very precarious?

**Jonathan Swan** (2:21)
Well, so we're recording this Thursday afternoon. And the reason I timestamp it is because it's a very fluid situation. But as of now, 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, you know, you've got JD Vance, the vice president, you've got Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, you've got Steve Witkoff, his special envoy, dealing with the Iranians through the Pakistanis as an intermediary. And it's very frustrating to Trump because he doesn't feel he can negotiate properly with the Iranians. It's not clear that the Iranian negotiators are empowered to negotiate. It's very unclear the extent to which they're able to communicate in real time with the Ayatollah, who we don't have a clear idea of his health, his well-being. It seems pretty clear that he's in a bad way and that the negotiators are not able to get quick responsiveness from him. So you're getting a lot of mixed messages, a lot of silence. And so we're in this very uncertain moment. Trump has extended this ceasefire seemingly indefinitely, but at the same time, they've kept enormous military force in the Middle East and are poised to attack if this thing falls apart.
The other frustration for Trump is he's facing real constraints. 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- Once again. Exactly, potentially having more shoot downs. And Trump has shown great appetite for risk during his presidency. But when it comes to US casualties, service member casualties, that's not an area where he's willing to push it. So that's the real tension here. And Maggie and I talk about this all the time in our reporting.
He underestimated the Iranians. He thought this would be a fast war that they would capitulate. He did not expect the staying power that they've shown and their ability to disrupt global commerce, even as the US and Israel have just been pounding them with these bombing campaigns.