Dan Pfeiffer

Because if he's something different than Trump, he's never going to be the purest version of something different than Trump.

And so the worst thing that can happen to him is being seen as so disloyal by Trump that Trump does not back him because he needs Trump to back him to win.

It's probably the same person.

Let's come back to supplemental funding because I do want to get to Trump's messaging on the war.

Because I think that is the precursor to the larger political conversation about how it's going.

And it also, I think the messaging is also a proxy for the entirely...

messed up policy process that brought us to this.

Because if you can't explain why you did it, it's possible you didn't know why you were doing it.

But let's take a listen to some of the varying Trump administration explanations for what we're doing in Iran.

I think that was your old sparring partner, Peter Doocy, at the end asking that question.

But as a communications professional who's worked on high national security issues, what's your sort of take on what's been happening here?

He means incursion, but he keeps saying excursion.

For sure.

I think without a question, it's their worst message because they don't actually have a message.

It's just a rotating series of rationales that are often in conflict with each other.

It's Rubio saying the imminent threat was not – first, it's Trump saying Iran was going to attack Qasr's imminent threat.

Then Rubio says the eminent threat is actually Israel attacking Iran and then Iran retaliating against us.

Then there's Trump saying, no, no, we made Israel do it.

In the first several hours after the attack, Trump said the purpose was for the freedom of the Iranian people.

Then he said it wasn't regime change.