Dan Pfeiffer

Yeah, I mean, there is – look, there's no messaging strategy that helps – that sells a war, a protracted war in the Middle East that leads to huge spikes in gas prices.

Like, there is not.

The place where I think that it is fair to be critical – and I will also say it's not the communications department's job to come up with the reasons why you go to war.

It's the people – we're supposed to have that reason before we go to war.

But where I think they did make a fundamental mistake that is making their problems much worse than they otherwise would be, and they would be pretty bad under even the best of circumstances, is that they spent no time before the war trying to explain why we would go to war.

Like Trump gave the longest State of the Union in history and spent like two minutes on Iran.

I think it was the Tuesday.

And then we went to war that Friday night, Saturday morning.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Let's stipulate you're not defending Stephen Chung.

Yeah, it's very – because when you see in the polling, right, the polling is all very bad for this war.

But how bad it is really depends on how the question is asked.

Like there was a poll out this morning which asked the question in terms of whether you approve of the war to take out the Ayatollah and stop their nuclear ambitions.

That poll is much better than do you support the war with Iran?

And, and so like, like it's all bullshit because they were, Trump told us a few months ago that he obliterated, not even a few months ago.

He told us like two weeks before the war that he had so obliterated their nuclear capacity that we would have to bomb the dust, right?

The leftover dust.

But if you, there was a, there was a way, like if you want to take the country to war, you have to do, you have to have a reason to do it.

You have to do an immense planning process for what happens after the first bombs drop, which they did not do here.

They absolutely did not do.