Jonathan Swan

speaker

362 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 15 Jul

Jonathan Swan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Gold, secrets, never-ending meetings: Inside the Trump White House · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

Now, some of the other things that Netanyahu was talking about, you know, like degrading Iran's ballistic missile capacity, the agency thought were plausible.

But

the regime change scenarios they thought were divorced from reality.

So then Trump comes in and the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, described the CIA's findings to the president.

And he said that Netanyahu's regime change scenarios were direct, quote, farcical.

And then Rubio, the Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, used even stronger language to describe them.

So Trump was briefed, but Trump had a gut feel, just a strong gut instinct that this would be a fast war, that Iran would fold quickly, and that these scenarios that were being discussed, like a closure of the Strait of Hormuz and America running low on weapons, none of this would come to bear because the war would be over before any of that would happen.

It's complicated.

There are a lot of people who read our reporting and said, ah, see, I knew it.

Netanyahu was the puppet master who tricked Trump into the war.

And that very simple narrative ignores the fact that Donald Trump himself has long been

quite hawkish on Iran and much more hawkish than everyone on his team.

Netanyahu certainly made a compelling presentation, but the skepticism and the risks were briefed to Trump and he chose to ignore them.

Trump's not someone who would admit that necessarily in a direct way, certainly wouldn't blame himself for it.

But

It's pretty clear that is what he thinks.

It's pretty clear he realises that this war has not gone well, has not played out the way that Netanyahu pitched him or that Trump himself thought would play out.

And he's trying to get out of it.

I've covered Trump for quite a long time.

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