Tom Nichols

I shouldn't say day.

I think the president fully expected the regime to collapse in a matter of days.

And other people probably knew that wasn't going to happen or not happen fast.

And now they're all kind of tap dancing around what to do next.

And so is he talking to people with Donald Trump?

You just cannot ascertain the truth simply from anything the president says.

Yeah, that's not the way representatives, confident winning representatives of a superpower talk.

That's how jumped up teenagers talk.

The other thing about Hegseth that you really notice when the camera pulls back a bit is how much of every Hegseth statement is a

Trump, but you really can see all of the media training at work, the hand gestures, the punctuating, the careful cadences.

This isn't somebody who's trying to give information to the American public or establish the position of the United States.

This is somebody who's performing.

He's still a Fox host.

He's still on TV.

You're up there talking to us.

You're up there talking this way for the same reason every cabinet member talks like this, because you are trying not to get fired.

You are trying to keep your job.

And one of the things that really strikes me is, to go back to this point about regime change and liberating people of Iran, if you were somebody who was kind of in hiding, waiting for Liberation Day to come, and you're watching Pete Hegseth, you have to be kind of worried about how serious the United States really is, because

Now, you can see the sliding set of rationales.

Now, you know, Hegseth says, our goal, Iran never gets a nuclear weapon.