TRIGGERnometry
Iran Shoots Down US Helicopter - Iran War Update with Richard Miniter and Thomas Small
09 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What recent event escalated tensions between Iran and the US?
hello everybody and welcome to a very special edition of trigonometry we are here live with francis myself obviously but much more importantly two of our favorite expert guests when it comes to the middle east the war in iran israel lebanon we'll talk about all of that richard minitor investigative journalist based in dc author of numerous bestsellers and
Of course, some of our episodes with him, one of our episodes, over a million views. The conversation we had with him and Eamon Dean about this conflict a couple of months back, again, a million views. Thomas Small needs very little introduction. Co-host of the Conflicted podcast with Eamon Dean, again, has been on the show numerous times.
All of them have absolutely crushed it because he really does know what he's talking about. Welcome to you both, gentlemen. Thank you very much. Nice to be here.
Great to be here.
It's great to have you. We wanted to do the thing that Francis and I always like to do, which is go big picture and talk about where we are, what's the situation, why isn't there peace yet, etc. But while we were getting ready to go on air, we just received news that a U.S. Apache helicopter had been shot down, confirmed by President Trump. The pilots have been rescued.
Richard, what can you tell us about that and perhaps the impact it's going to have on this conflict before we get into the big picture?
So the shoot down happened last night. The rescue occurred late last night, Washington time. And the president and his people are scrambling to figure out what it means. So there are different factions trying to understand this event. It was apparently a Shahid drone. The question is, was it intentional or not intentional? This is a kind of very Washington question.
If it's intentional, it means that this institution called the government of Iran is signaling that it's no longer interested in peace and, in fact, wants to go back to war with the United States. But that's the question one faction is asking. Another faction is asking this question. Is the Iranian government a unified entity?
In other words, are there Iranian Revolutionary Guards units that were given orders before the late Ayatollah Khomeini was killed? that in the event of his departure from this earth, that he would, that they are to do the following. And are they then sort of blindly following the commands of a dead leader?
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Chapter 2: How does the US government interpret the helicopter shootdown by Iran?
If the Iranians seem to have all the leverage and President Trump needs to do a deal or is under pressure to do one, isn't it inevitable that the deal he will do will be a bad deal?
That's exactly what the critics of the president say, what you just said. Right. Why are they wrong? Because the usual groups are exerting their usual pressure. But does Trump feel pressure? It doesn't appear that he does. A man under pressure would do things differently than he's doing at the moment.
A man under pressure would either escalate in the hopes that that might somehow work or urgently take any deal. We don't see either one of those things happening. What amazes me about observers of President Trump is they never go and read his three books, especially The Art of the Deal.
if he was under pressure, he would be acting in the ways that he would outline how to get out of bad deals in The Art of the Deal. Instead, he still thinks that he has all of the important cards, and he does. There are things that his critics don't seem to be able to imagine, which are obvious next steps. Here's two of them. One, start sinking the Shadow Fleet.
Instead of interdicting them and chasing them around the world, just torpedo them and let them sink in the middle of long, cold, dark oceans. Iran will immediately notice that because if they can't turn crude into cash, they can't keep paying off their internal constituencies and stay in power.
The second thing he could do is to tell Qatar, you will no longer pay the $500 million rent for the South Pars gas field to Iran. Instead, you will pay it into a fund the US will control and hold an escrow for the rebuilding of Iran after this unpleasantness.
if either one of those things or both of those things happen, which there are other things Trump could do that are not kinetic military activity to increase the pressure on Iran. Also, I see that the public diplomacy of the State Department is finally moving forward with more Farsi language messaging, more messaging in Kurdish and Baha'i, and more attempt to now talk to the Arabs in Awaz.
That's the little bit of Western Iran that borders the southwest of Iraq. So they're becoming a little more sophisticated in trying to connect with Iranian opinion. There are various points of leverage. Trump can escalate from here. He thinks he has until the end of the summer, or certainly he's acting like he has until the end of the summer. I'm not a mind reader. And he might.
Right. I'm going to level with you. I'm not a gamer, even though I look like one. I'm not going to pretend I've been grinding through RPGs between recordings, although I have strong opinions about which Final Fantasy was the best one. I think it's Japanese, and I think there's a sword. That's genuinely everything I know.
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Chapter 3: What factions within Iran are influencing their approach to negotiations?
It takes a few minutes to set up. You open the app, swipe through the game offers, pick something that looks decent, play it, earn, redeem. That's the whole thing. There's a signup bonus worth up to $10 if you use our link, which is in the description of this episode. That's S-N-A-K-Z-Y, Snacksy. Click the link in the description to get started. And when you sign up, use the code TriggerPod.
That's T-R-I-G-G-E-R-P-O-D to claim your $10 bonus. And the app is mobile only. So click the link from your phone, not your laptop. And Thomas, the one thing that we always keep coming back to in this conflict is the Strait of Hormuz. Is there any way that the Americans can actually gain control of this strait or will it always be Iran's to close if and when they want it to?
Oh, gosh, I wish I knew the answer to that question, Francis. I mean, I'm not a military expert, particularly. At the beginning of the war, I thought it would be more or less achievable to win the the Arabian Gulf, the Persian Gulf for America's side in this conflict to neutralize the possibility that the Iranian regime would close the strait as it did.
I would have thought that's a very straightforward, the obvious thing to do. It did seem that that was on the cards. We saw the three aircraft carrier groups moving into the region. A lot of commando groups were moving in, American ones, including, it seems, based on things that have come out recently, to Israel, working together with the Israeli partners.
The whole idea was going to be to take those very strategically key islands in the Persian Gulf and control it. That might have required some troops to land on the Iranian shore to project that power you know, further into the into the mainland. Obviously, it wouldn't have been easy. You know, it's extremely mountainous there. There are lots of valleys.
The Iranians have prepared for a long time for that eventuality. So, you know, there would have been some casualties, of course. But it it strikes me as that was absolutely an obvious thing that should have happened. The fact that it didn't happen that Iran was able to close the Strait, it remains closed, really, is the thing that sort of stymies a lot of people truly to make sense of it.
Unless, as some people say, the military apparatuses, you know, the military, the materiel was not in place, was not enough to take it sort of with confidence.
Some people suggest that when those two American servicemen were rescued from Iran early-ish on in the war, just before the ceasefire, that that spooked the president a little bit, the idea that maybe Americans would have been captured by the regime,
who would have then been able to parade them in front of cameras, humiliating the Americans, humiliating the president in a way eerily reminiscent of the sort of scenes that were seen after the Iranian revolution, which brought, you know, some people say brought down Carter's chances of reelection and certainly sort of
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Chapter 4: How does the Iranian regime's history affect its current politics?
If, in fact, the Iranian regime did attack that helicopter with anything like intention, it may be because the Iranian regime is testing President Trump now to see how he will react. There's been a lot of back and forth in the last week between Israel and the regime, between Israel and Hezbollah. on truth social, being quite anti-Israeli, telling Benjamin Netanyahu to hold back.
Benjamin Netanyahu, it seems, ignoring that, instead attacking. But then perhaps behind the scenes, there's less truth to that than it seems. This might be political theatrics. Maybe Trump and Netanyahu are conspiring together in a good cop, bad cop kind of routine. Maybe the Iranian regime is trying to get a sense. Where is President Trump really sort of standing?
He makes a big sign about wanting a deal. He's been flattering the Supreme Leader. Now, Mustafa Khamenei calling him a genius, calling him a man of courage, all of these things, very strange language, given that two months ago, that's not the language he was using. I believe the language before was something like an animal who who deserved to be utterly destroyed along with Iranian civilization.
So the tune has changed. desire for a deal is clearly at the forefront of the president's mind maybe the iranian regime is trying to make sure that the president is you know is as irenic at the moment as he seems to be that's just that's just a guess
Because the thing is, Thomas, this crisis with the Strait of Hormuz, it doesn't only affect Iran. It doesn't only affect the Middle East. It affects the entire global economy. So this situation can't carry on indefinitely. And Trump must know that. And so must the Americans.
Trump must know that. I think Richard... probably can speak better to what might be going on in President Trump's mind. I find it to be almost impossible to make sense of much of what Trump does or thinks. I'm a little bit, I'm sure compared to Richard, a little bit less inclined to be generous to Trump. He doesn't seem to me to be anything like a strategic genius at all.
I think it's all pretty ad hoc. I think it is just possible that President Trump may feel that the political consequences of liberating the Strait of Hormuz and as it were finishing the job, which the hawks within the American security establishment still wish to happen, which his allies in the region wish to happen, certainly Israel, but also in the Gulf.
He may feel that the political consequences are just too costly to bear and that the world will adjust. You know, it is obviously catastrophic to the global economy that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for as long as it has been. It will not reopen, probably. all summer. The president is desperate that the World Cup in America and Canada and Mexico go without a hitch.
Eamon, my co-host, knows that the intelligence chatter is that the Iranian regime has under the surface definitely threatened to attack players, whatever, to have some kind of terrorist
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Chapter 5: What role does the Strait of Hormuz play in the conflict?
What were the events occurring when Donald Trump was in the early prime of his life? Hezbollah in the 1980s killed more Americans than any other terrorist group in history, with the exception of Al Qaeda itself. So there is no, there is a tendency in the Biden and Obama years to view Hezbollah the kind of way management deals with a union, right?
Like, we have to deal with them, but they're part of the landscape and they have a right to be here, kind of. We have to make the best deal we can. It's not how Donald Trump sees it. I guarantee you that if you were asked him what happened on the Akili Loro in 1985, he could tell you, right?
I guarantee you he could tell you about the various terrorist strikes and US Navy personnel who was murdered on a hijacked airplane, loudly saying the Al Father in English, by the way, as he was killed by his captors in front of a plane load of people, right?
This makes a deep impression on two important people, Donald Trump and Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, who this was a living adult memory for them. They lived through this. So the idea that they've decided that they're going to just separate the way the State Department would like to do Hezbollah from Iran and say, oh, we're going to have to live with Hezbollah. That's not the case.
I mean, this is as plausible. And if you look at the White House's reaction to the seizure of the Crusader Castle just north of the Latani River in Lebanon, you know what the reaction was? Nothing. No protest. No, oh, you've colored outside the lines. Just nothing. That took away a prime sniper and mortar position from Hezbollah because that was the high point on the far side of the river.
The fact that there are air raid warning signs now in Christian neighborhoods in Beirut, they are prepared to go north. And I don't think Trump will meaningfully attempt to stop them.
And for the Christian community of Lebanon, they seem to be saying, and I talked to a handful of Christian Lebanese leaders, not enough to really say definitively what the whole spectrum of opinion is, but the ones that- Yeah, they're not unified. Oh, no. And never have been, right? No. Like the Armenians and the Jews and the Kurds, like there's no one central view, right?
So, but they've gone from, oh my gosh, we don't want an Israeli invasion. That'll be a lot of useless slaughter to saying, well, if it gets rid of Hezbollah, that's the only way to save Lebanon. I mean, the Lebanese currency is functionally gone. People pay for things in supermarkets now with the US dollar.
If it weren't for the Hezbollah power in parliament, Lebanon probably would have dollarized a year ago. Um, so there is a real debate about how does Lebanon have a future? Um, with Hezbollah inside its borders.
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