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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We gave Times employees a preview of Crossplay from New York Times Games. And here's what they had to say. I can finally play with other people. I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and coworkers. I have a J for 10 points. I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see. Tanga is a word. Oh. As an English as a second language speaker, I like to learn new words.
Crossplay, the first two-player word game from New York Times Games. Download it for free today. From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroff. This is The Daily. From the moment President Trump barreled into American politics, one of his central messages that resonated most with voters was his promise to keep the country out of endless wars.
But now, as the war in Iran enters its fourth week, leading figures on the right are questioning whether Trump may have gotten the U.S. into exactly the sort of complex and costly conflict he railed against for so long. Today, we talk to my colleague Robert Draper about Trump's political evolution on the question of war and the identity crisis it's caused for the Republican Party.
It's Monday, March 23rd OK, Robert, you cover the right and you functioned for us here at The Daily as our guide, really, to all the complexities of Trump and his party.
And right now seems to be a moment of reckoning within that exact group over the war in Iran, specifically the justification for it and whether Trump is explicitly violating a pact that he made with his base of not starting another war. So what is the level of tension that you're seeing right now inside the MAGA movement?
It's really a mess. You have people who are still steadfast in their support for what the administration is doing. There are an awful lot of people, however, and I'm talking not only about the right-wing influencer ecosystem, but also all the way down to voters who are saying, is this what we voted for? We thought no wars. We thought America first. What are we doing over there?
What's this about $200 billion that Trump now wants from Congress to appropriate? Where was $200 billion when I wanted to buy a home? It has really, really become a problematic matter for the Trump administration.
What you're describing sounds like real anger, right?
Yes, anger and disbelief, an inability to square what is happening in Iran with what Trump said on the campaign trail and what Americans face as domestic challenges.
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Chapter 2: What are the divisions among Republicans regarding the Iran war?
We have nothing.
And there, on that stage, Trump explicitly said that the Iraq War was no one's idea of a success, but instead was a tragic waste of American blood and treasure.
And we have to get smart. We can't continue to be the policemen of the world. We owe $19 trillion. We have a country that's going to hell.
And differentiated himself from other candidates who had basically repeated Republican orthodoxy about the Iraq War.
Donald is wrong on this. He is absolutely wrong on this. We're not going to be the world's policeman, but we sure as heck better be the world's leader. Can you just talk for a moment, Robert, about how remarkable it was to hear Trump say this? I mean, this was a break from the orthodoxy of the Republican Party for decades, right?
Yeah.
Yes. It was understood that thou shalt not speak ill of a Republican president, George W. Bush. And so for an office seeker, a Republican office seeker, to stand up and say that this war was just an unambiguous screw-up and you're never going to see me do this kind of thing was really singular and, I think, memorable to voters throughout the campaign.
Yeah, that was something Democrats were, of course, willing to say at that point, but not Republicans. Right.
No, that's right. So for Trump to do that really, I think, you know, opened Republican voters up to the notion that, you know, we don't have to embrace a militaristic viewpoint the way hawks on our side of the aisle are constantly urging us to, particularly when we have seen what it's done to a whole generation of Americans.
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Chapter 3: How is Trump justifying the war in Iran?
And when you look at the centrality of that message, both its resonance and how much he referred to it in that 2016 campaign, I think it seemed to a lot of people that this was the foundational principle of America first. Along with tariffs and immigration, this non-interventionism was core to what Trump stood for, to what he was going to do.
That's right, because it seemed like a very literal interpretation of America first, which is we look inward. We take care of people at home. And in the meantime, consider the outside world only when it suits us. But unless and until that happens, we take care of our folks at home.
And we should point out, as you've said, Trump has been very consistent with this messaging throughout his political career. It wasn't just in his first campaign, right? I mean, this was something he said in 2024. He was not going to start any wars. He was going to stop them.
Yes. I mean, he realized, Natalie, that this was a winning message, that people really responded to it.
We're tired of fighting. I'm the only president in the last 84 years that didn't start a war. Remember Crooked Hillary?
And so he realized as well that he could target his political opponent as the person who will prosecute endless wars. He said that about Hillary Clinton. He later said it about Kamala Harris. He said that she would get us into a war with Iran.
She would get us into a World War III guaranteed because she is too grossly incompetent to do the job.
And Trump, by the end of the 2024 campaign, was saying, I'm the peace president.
I said, no, no, no. My rhetoric is going to keep us out of wars.
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Chapter 4: What is the level of tension within the MAGA movement about the war?
In other words, that he's not saying, here is... a core principle of what we believe in. Instead, he's saying, other people are doing it stupid. I'm going to do it smart. And in fact, he was actually saying that in real time during that presidential debate that I referenced earlier.
Back in 2015, you mean?
Yeah, yeah, November 2015, when he says, you know, terrible war, tragic.
And then he says right after that, And we should have kept the oil, believe me. We should have kept the oil.
And we didn't take the oil. That's what we should have done. We should have taken the oil. And then, in fact, the previous debate, he had actually said, I'm a very militaristic person. I'm a very militaristic person.
It's about judgment. I didn't want to go into Iraq and I fought it.
But you have to know when to use the military. So there he was explicitly saying, I'm not an anti-war president. I'm a smart war president is what I am.
You're saying this wasn't actually a genuine, heartfelt rejection of foreign intervention, of using military power abroad, that we might have interpreted it that way, but that wasn't necessarily what we were actually seeing.
Sure. Once Trump realized this was a winning message, then he began to say things that I think were very much against his core belief. He began to say, I'm the peace president. I'll never start wars or anything like that. But in fact, his core principle was, I believe in myself and I believe in leverage and I believe in the assertion of power. And in fact, I'm even a militaristic person.
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Chapter 5: What disconnect exists between Trump's campaign promises and current actions?
And what he's doing, Natalie, also is a reflection of what he had been doing at home, right? I mean, so from the beginning of his second term, he was bringing his might down on universities, on media conglomerates. on large American law firms that he believed were adversarial to him. He was putting the muscle to them and forcing them to make concessions.
That, in essence, was what he was doing to Venezuela. He has as leverage the greatest military and economic force in world history, and he is deploying that to gain concessions both abroad and at home. This, to Trump, is the way a smart, powerful person exercises their leverage.
OK, so basically the Iran bunker bombs, the Venezuela action, those really prove Trump's theory. Basically, strength equals power. You can achieve goals essentially by using that on the global stage and not necessarily suffering big political consequences for doing so. And then we get to the current conflict in Iran.
Yes. And what happens then is that Trump is in essence applying what he did in Venezuela and what he'd done the previous June in Iran to a far more audacious notion, which is to to decapitate the regime of a very powerful nation in the Middle East that had been adversarial to America for a very long time to do this and once again to suffer no negative consequences.
It's a real, real high wire act. So to apply all of that to not just a series of structures in Iran, but to human leadership in to this theocracy there was a very, very different game altogether.
Right. And we are now entering the fourth week of this war and learning just how difficult this is turning out to be for Trump. He can't just do what he did to universities, to the government of Iran.
He's learning that Iran is not Columbia University, is not Paul Weiss Law Firm, that it is a big nation that is smack dab in the middle of an extremely complicated region. And it is a hornet's nest that we have understood never to kick. And Trump, in doing what he did, it's as if he forgot the history lesson that citizen Trump, candidate Trump— was giving on the debate stage 11 years earlier.
And so what's the reaction to that? You know, how do people see this increasingly complex war and Trump's efforts to justify it?
Well, it depends on who you're talking about. There has been this clear fracture in the right-wing media ecosystem
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Chapter 6: How did Trump's views on military intervention evolve over time?
Yeah. I mean, it's clear that there is anti-Semitism baked into a lot of this criticism. The undertones are clear. But it does seem in this case, as The Times has reported, that Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was very much a driver of this joint war in Iran.
So if you're someone who's already predisposed to believing that Israel leads the United States into bad arenas, this feeds directly into that.
That's right. And I do think that people who'd never asked these questions before relating to Israel are starting to accept the framing of a Candace Owens or a Tucker Carlson that, well, this has been going on for a long time, which has, from certain angles and at particular times, metastasized into outright anti-Semitism in certain corners.
But there's no question that the role of Israel, and for that matter, support for Israel in America, is in a very different place than it was just a few years ago.
And then just recently, we saw the head of counterterrorism for the administration resigning over the war in Iran. This is not just some podcast host, not to denigrate podcast hosts, but this guy presumably has access to very real information, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, this guy is Joe Kent, who was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. This guy was a far right close ally of Donald Trump, a 2020 election denier. So very much a part of the MAGA community. No one's idea of a rhino.
And here he was submitting his resignation and walking out and making public exactly why he did resign, saying that in his belief, Iran did not constitute an imminent threat.
But at this point, Robert, what's your assessment of how much of a political issue this is becoming for Trump and for the Republican Party? Because, yes, the chattering classes seem to be very up in arms about this. But what about regular people, voters? What do they actually think? What do we know?
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