Trump's Final Nail in the Coffin as Approval Ratings Hit Rock Bottom, Iran Destroys Him

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IHIP News 35 min 1 speaker 8 chapters transcribed 18 days ago
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Who is Ben Rhodes and what is his background in U.S. national security?

Angie Sullivan 0:00
Joining me today on IHIP News is Ben Rhodes. He is a former Deputy National Security Advisor for President Obama and the author of the book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity. Ben, how are you today?
Ben Rhodes 0:14
I'm doing good. So far, so good.
Angie Sullivan 0:16
All right. Trump's lies about the Iran war have gotten so bad that he's getting fact-checked by Fox News. Let's play this clip.
Unknown 0:25
President Trump claiming total control over the strait. Traffic has slowed really to a trickle. If you look at this, before the conflict, more than 100 vessels a day were crossing. Monday, eight vessels crossed. Yesterday, 14. Now, those are constraints, and that's changing the government's energy output.
Angie Sullivan 0:46
OK, I've heard enough. Ben, these these just the pathological lies coming from this man that even his own propaganda channel has to fact check, fact check him. It's just it's staggering to watch that the Republicans will not step in and stop this liar.
Ben Rhodes 1:07
It is staggering. And I think the thing is he's lying about a war now, right? So it's one thing when he's lying about, you know, the Russia hoax from however many years ago or some media scandal that he's at the center of. There's a fucking war that he started. And there's physical reality to that war. Like there are people who are dead who would have otherwise been alive. There's Iranian nuclear material that still exists in the physical world. You can call it obliterated. You can call it dust. It's still there in Iran. There is a waterway, the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world's fossil fuel goes and it's closed. And people know that because there's less stuff in the world, right? Gas prices are higher here.
Ben Rhodes 1:47
There's shortages to countries around the world. And so when he lies and says over and over that we won the war, we obliterated the nuclear program or the straight is open or we control the straight. There's actually a world in which people can see that is completely false. And the stakes are so high that I think even Fox at a certain point has to acknowledge we can't just keep regurgitating the idea that the war is over, we won, the straight's open, everything's great.
Angie Sullivan 2:14
Yeah, don't you think? I mean, the Republican Party has gotten away with lying about certain things that the public just assumes because they propagandized it for so long. One of them is that they're so into national security and they're so into supporting the troops, just like they're so into trickle-down economics. And it's such bullshit. Every Republican president of my lifetime starts some chicken-chick cockamamie war. Look at George W. Bush. All the while championing, I'm a national security conservative and a compassionate conservative.

How does the Iran‑Hormuz conflict affect global oil flow and U.S. energy policy?

Angie Sullivan 2:48
They killed a million Iraqis. American foreign policy has been, by the way I see it, more about funding the oligarchs, the military industrial complex than it really has ever been about securing our country. What's your take on that as somebody who worked as a national security advisor, America's foreign policy across different administrations?
Ben Rhodes 3:18
Yeah, I guess the very quick summary I give, because I agree with everything you said, is the Republicans forever presented as the tough guys on national security, and there's Reagan, and you would think that the Cold War ended just because he gave a speech saying, tear down this wall, and Bush after 9-11 reinvents himself as this tough guy starting wars all over the place. And they all end in complete and utter catastrophe. Trump tries to represent himself as a guy who doesn't like dumb wars and he just keeps starting even dumber wars. The Republican Party, like the one common thread is they serve their own self-interest politically and the interests of their friends. the oligarchs, who I'll come back to in a second, because let's not spare the Democratic Party.
Ben Rhodes 4:03
Democratic Party, talk about chicken shit. Part of the reason the Republicans get away with this is Democrats are so afraid of their own shadow on things like foreign policy, so afraid of upsetting the feelings of some donors at AIPAC, so afraid of being called weak by some columnist for a legacy newspaper that nobody reads anymore.

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