Jeremy Scahill

I think that's what we're seeing here.

The Maduro thing is interesting that you bring up.

So they go in, they kidnap Nicolas Maduro and his wife, they fly them to the United States, but then they cut a deal with Delcy Rodriguez, the vice president, and they basically say to her, you can continue to talk about how you have a Bolivarian revolution here, you know, you do whatever you want, as long as our oil companies get to do whatever we want them to do.

So they come in.

Trump then, and I heard this from sources that were in some of the briefings on this,

Trump starts to get drunk on this, like they're getting high on their own supply in a way, and they're saying, ooh, can we export this model?

This is a great thing we've invented where you just chop off the top, you make a deal with number two, and you move on.

And so they start talking about this.

And the military guys, though, in the case of Iran, start saying to Trump,

Iran has a very sophisticated missile program.

This is a highly educated country.

This is a multi-thousand-year civilization, and they've been building horizontal state institutions for 47 years.

By the way, they've been preparing for decades for this kind of war, and they certainly have been preparing since last June when you lied to them about negotiations and then bombed them again.

His military advisors understood what's happening.

But then when you have the political people yapping in the room and saying, oh, don't listen to the naysayers.

So why was it that on day three of this war that started on February 28th, I'm hearing from Iranian officials that the US is reaching out to Iran and saying, can we start talking about this?

Because I think they realized by the third or fourth day of this war that the Trump people realized this isn't going the way we thought it was going to be.

They thought they'd kill the Supreme Leader, and then it's like there's going to be an uprising.

Well, that didn't work.

You don't hear Trump talk anymore at all about the Iranian people.