Ben Rhodes

I mean, that's got to be a lesson they take.

So their desire to run this war by the news cycle

is so ahistorical because when you decapitate the regime of a country of 92 million people that is heavily armed, it's not going to end when you try to turn the news cycle off, which is what they'll do in four or five weeks or whenever it is.

And that – it's just astonishing to me how much they think – I mean that Venezuela thing must have gone to their head.

Oh, definitely.

That they thought that you could do the same thing in Iran, which is a fucking wildly different country and a wildly different part of the world where there's been a lot more war, conflict, and civil conflict.

A spine and a pulse would be the two things I'm looking for.

And again, I want to be clear.

There are a lot of Democrats, probably the majority of Democrats in Congress, who have been very good.

And, you know, again, Chris Murphy, Ruben Gallego, like the progressive caucus in the House, like many people, right?

But, you know, there's some people that are outwardly supportive.

And then there's some people who are kind of so anodyne as to you don't know where they stand.

Look, the point is that we are –

know a few days into this war it's clearly a show trump started on vacation um the the reason one of the reasons that he doesn't pay a bigger price for this kind of incoherence and insanity and doing something that is so against public opinion is that there's not a unified opposition party that is being vocal and aggressive and coherent and holding him accountable

And so it lets him escape some of the accountability that he should be facing for what's happening.

There's a couple kind of Democrats here that the people that are supportive.

I said this in our last episode, but there's an overlapping Venn diagram between who takes a lot of APEC money, you know.

But if you're going to be supportive, even if you hate the Iranian regime, to your point, Tommy, like the Donald Trump and Pete, that you would trust them with anything.

Um, is, is beyond the pale, but there's another kind of democratic response that I think we need to name, which is people who are like nervous.

Like, what if this goes okay?