Tuesday Morning Politics: Trump, Netanyahu, Zelensky and the Midterms

**Kusha Navadar** (0:10)
Good morning, you beautiful people. It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Kusha Navadar. I'm filling in for Brian today. Coming up on today's show, WNYC and Gothamist transportation reporter, Stephen Nesson will be my guest. He'll tell us about a new pilot program that will ask car owners to move their cars fewer times per week in the hopes that it'll increase compliance. Plus, some other reporting, Stephen Scott, on the city's efforts to make the buses faster. Later in the show for our health and climate story of the week, a look at why states are pulling back on incentives for homeowners to invest in solar panels and how much this is hurting the solar industry. We'll wrap today's show with a discussion about the value of art and relatedly art heists. I'm super excited about it. It's inspired by a new novel by the author of Joe Piazza called The Parisian Heist. She'll be my guest along with an art theft expert named Anthony Amore.
But first, there are two wars on the president's schedule today. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky are both at the White House this afternoon in separate meetings. For Netanyahu, it's his first sit down with President Trump since the two of them launched the war against Iran back in February.
Both men are expected across town at the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham. The war itself is in its fifth month. Gas is sitting at about $4 a gallon and a new Reuters and Ipsos poll out yesterday finds just one in three Americans support the war. It's the lowest reading since the conflict's early days.
69 percent are saying the president has never clearly explained what we are fighting for. So we'll start there. Then we'll get into what this war is costing Republicans who are on the ballot in November and the president's effort to change how Americans vote, which his Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on yesterday. With 98 days to go, we'll look at the Senate map. With me now is Jonathan Lemire, co-host of Morning Joe on MS Now, writer for MS Now and contributing writer to The Atlantic. Jonathan, good morning. Welcome back to WNYC.
Good morning. Always glad to be here. So you reported that late last week, the president was weighing a major escalation in Iran, and then he backed off. What happened?

**Jonathan Lemire** (2:37)
Well, there are a number of things at play. President Trump, four months now, has been trying to put this war behind him. It has not gone nearly as he thought. He was promised that it would last a few days, a handful of weeks at most. As you just say, we're now entering the fifth, it's now been five months.
After the memorandum of understanding was signed in Versailles, their identity from fragile ceasefire did take hold for a few weeks, but it was punctuated by sporadic violence on both sides. Then after Iran continued to exert control over the Strait of Hormuz, President Trump, about two weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago at this point, authorized a series of strikes. For nearly two weeks, the US and Iran exchanged fire, the US bombing the Iranian homeland, while Iran struck at our neighbors in the region, including hitting a military base in Jordan that led to the death of three American service members.
Trump was convened this meeting at the White House on Friday to see if he wanted to escalate further. That was the topic of debate. Did they want to return to an all out war that we saw back in February and March? Did they even want to consider inserting ground troops into the conflict for the first time? Something Trump has been loathe to do. But after discussions of several hours, he opted against fears raised about just dwindling munitions supplies, particularly those interceptor defense missiles that are needed to protect our friends and assets in the Middle East, as well as just the economic cost. It's obviously a very expensive war. And potentially the political cost. So for now, Trump opted against an escalation that has even brought to an end these new series of strikes, trying to give diplomacy another chance.

**Kusha Navadar** (4:23)
So what I hear you saying there is after months of basically a quagmire that was expected to be just a couple of days, there were three things really that made Trump decide to back off. One, you said was dwindling supplies. The second was the economic cost. And the third was just the political capital, like the political cost that would take to continue this. Did I hear all that correctly?