Washington Week with The Atlantic

Jeffrey Goldberg: Tonight, big questions, is the United States still at war with Iran?

Is Iran still at war with the United States?

Does President Trump think the war is over?

Does the supreme leader of Iran think the war is over?

Is the supreme leader even alive?

If the war is over, who won, and who actually controls the Strait of Hormuz now, next.

Good evening, and welcome to Washington Week.

The Iran war is in a kind of state of suspended animation.

On Thursday, U.S.

forces actually struck Iranian targets after two U.S.

destroyers were attacked in the Strait of Hormuz.

But President Trump called this U.S.

response a, quote, love tap, and said that the exchange of fire did not represent a break in the ceasefire, even though ceasefires, in general, don't include two warring parties firing missiles at each other.

What we can take away from this episode is that Trump, who initiated the latest round of fighting in the 47-year-old war between Iran and the U.S., would like to do something else now.

I'll talk about this confusing situation, as well as some large domestic political developments, with Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Jonathan Lemire is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MS NOW, Amna Nawaz is a co-anchor and co-managing editor of the PBS NewsHour, and Vivian Salama is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me.

Amna, thank you for staying up late.

I appreciate it.

Amna Nawaz, Co-Anchor, PBS NewsHour: You're outing me as an old person on T.V.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I'm not outing you as an old person.

I just think w - -, you know, the NewsHour audience needs you to be rested.

Amna Nawaz: That's right.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, I appreciate you being here.

Amna Nawaz: Thank you.

So, let me start with you, give you the first question.

Amna Nawaz: Great.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, am I wrong to say that the Iranian regime has won this war first by surviving and second by maintaining more or less control over the Strait of Hormuz?

Amna Nawaz: I mean, that is their main leverage point right now, and I think it depends on who you ask, who's winning or who's losing.

Certainly, you can't say the United States has won the war, as President Trump has said.

And, look, the president has become sort of an unreliable narrator to all of this, right?

As you mentioned, he calls these strikes a love tap.

He said it's a diversion, a military incursion.

We are at war, and I think we need to be clear about that in whatever this state of a ceasefire actually is.

And I think we need to look at what we've actually seen happen rather than what the president says is going to happen, which was a punishing U.S.

bombardment.

The ayatollah killed, his successor put into place, and the Iranian foreign minister told me as a continuation of the Ayatollah Khamenei.

So, that wasn't really a regime change.

But we've also seen a throttling of the Iranian economy.

The president says it's going to cripple them soon, and now we have a new analysis that suggests that the regime could actually last months in this new phase of sanctions and the blockade on their economy.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, Vivian, if it does -- it does only last for months, and Trump has the staying power to see through the throttling of the oil economy, wouldn't that then count as a victory for the United States?

Vivian Salama, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: It depends how you measure victory, right?

I mean, politically, he is suffering.

The longer this war goes on, the more that he and, ostensibly, the GOP suffers.

You have midterm elections later this year, and they could really take a shellacking if they do not have the ability to lower oil prices, lower gas prices specifically, and just moderate the impact of this war.

But even just the depletion of assets, military assets, the sort of mental state of the country in terms of having to go to war at a time where a number of people, especially many of Trump's supporters, did not support this war.

All of that has a cost, ultimately.

And so President Trump is and the GOP will have to reckon with that moving forward regardless of whether or not there is an end date to this war.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, the question here is staying power.

Jon, you just wrote in The Atlantic today, quote, Trump is left with a vexing question, how do you end a war when your opponent won't budge?

And while Trump grasps for an exit, the hardliners in Tehran have used the war to tighten their grip on power.

Iran seems hell-bent on pulling off something it's historically done well, humiliating an American president.

So, to win here, does Iran just have to outlast a person with a historically limited attention span?

Jonathan Lemire, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Yes.

And President Trump is very ready to turn the page.

As one former adviser told me, he's bored of this conflict, but also because it's not -- Jeffrey Goldberg: The word they used was literally bored?

Jonathan Lemire: Bored, in part because it's not going the way he thought it would.

He thought this a matter of days, a matter of weeks at most, and it would be a resounding victory like he says we saw in Venezuela.

That has not been the case, and instead he's been made to look sort of weak on the global stage.

Already, Iran has -- even if the war were to end tomorrow, which it will not, that Iran has more control of the Strait of Hormuz now than it did at the start of the conflict.

They have shown they can shut it any time, and the pain that would accompany that to the global economy, as Vivian said, the president is in a tough political situation here at home.

Gas prices are up.

His poll numbers are down.

Very few of the U.S.

military goals have actually been accomplished there in Tehran.

And the president is looking desperately for an off-ramp, some sort of deal here, and that's why in part we see him continuing to extend the ceasefire even with incidents like this week where, clearly, you know, there was hostilities, but he won't escalate.

He keeps pushing it further on.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Amna, very interested in how Iran is responding to his idiosyncratic methodology here, but I'm also interested in understanding how China is understanding this.

Amna Nawaz: China's clearly watching this very closely, right?

And talking about how the Iranian economy continues to chug along, all those other countries like China continuing to buy that oil.

This also really complicates the president's upcoming visit to China.

There's a lot of other conflicting narratives and issues that they have to deal with at a time that the U.S.

and China have other things that they need to be talking about that deal directly with the U.S.

economy.

That's a real challenge for the president.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

And, Vivian, from a defense standpoint, obviously, the U.S.

is depleting its stocks of weapons that could be used theoretically to defend Taiwan.

So, China has to be looking at that.

Vivian Salama: China is definitely looking at that, realizing also military assets that had been stationed in the Asia Pacific that had been shifted to the Middle East so that it could support the war effort in Iran.

A number of, you know, just diverted interest that China sees as a door opening.

And its intense interest in securing its position in Taiwan especially since President Trump has not been sort of orthodox about wanting to outwardly defend the sovereignty of Taiwan even though officials tell me that privately the administration's policy hasn't changed.

He hasn't really been bullish on that because he's so keen to maintain good relations with China, perhaps extend some sort of a trade deal with China.

And so he's looking at the economic, the transactional opportunities with China less so than, say, the future of Taiwan all the while this war in Iran is going on, and it really opens the door for China to do what it wants to do.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Peter, stipulating that it can go any way and that Iran could collapse tomorrow and et cetera, et cetera, the story is not done, stipulating all that, who in the White House now has a realist view of what's going on, or a realistic view of what's going on in terms of the duration, the impact on America's global standing, the depletion of assets, et cetera, what's the fight inside the White House?

Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, I mean, have to believe Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has a pretty realistic view of this.

And he told them from the beginning it wouldn't be as easy as the president said it was.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He's getting the numbers.

Peter Baker: He's getting the numbers, and he's the one who told the president even before this started that the Iran could take the Strait of Hormuz and create problems.

The president brushed it off, according to reports saying, well, that won't happen.

They'll collapse before that happens, and even if they do, you guys can take care of it.

Obviously, that's not the case.

You have to look at J.D.

Vance who said from the beginning he didn't want this war, he didn't think it was a good idea.

He has stuck to that even as he has been publicly supportive of the president and participated in these peace talks.

But I think that his point of view looks a little stronger in some of these internal discussions to this point.

But he doesn't have an out for them either.

I don't think that any of them has the clear path to a resolution of the war that allows the president to claim victory, given the things that Jonathan just outlined, given the intelligence reports we've seen saying that they still have most of their ballistic missiles, they're still as close to a nuclear weapon as they were when the war started, and they have increased control over the Strait of Hormuz, what does that look like?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Jon, when did the president decide that he was done?

Jonathan Lemire: He's been done for a few weeks now.

I mean, I think -- Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, the war's only been going on for a few weeks.

Jonathan Lemire: Well, as you say, legendary short attention span, he thought this would be days.

I mean, he's looking for a deal even now.

Washington awaits a response to a - - from Iran on a one-page memorandum, which, at best, is like kicking the can down the road.

It just extends the ceasefire further.

They're nowhere near any sort of negotiation, and it's not clear that Iran is incentivized to deal with him right now, that they think, yes, maybe there will be economic pain.

Maybe the people will suffer.

Well, the IRGC running the place don't really care about that.

They feel like this is a moment to make a stand, and they are making the president of the United States look weak.

Vivian Salama: And Jonathan and I have actually written together that, you know, President Trump explored an off-ramp weeks ago, but of Gulf allies in particular had been extremely alarmed at the situation that he would have been leaving behind had he pulled out a few weeks ago because it's right on their doorstep.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, we'll stay on that.

If he continues in the pattern that he's going, in the direction he's going, which is finding any reason in the world not to reengage, and even when he has to reengage, calling it a love tap, where does that leave Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Israel for that matter?

Vivian Salama: All of them have been shown the very harsh realities of their vulnerability is with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the inability for them to export oil, which is their -- the primary generate fund generator for their economies.

And so this has been an eye-opening experience for them.

But beyond that, even if the Strait of Hormuz were to open tomorrow, they still have to reckon with the fact that Iran's nuclear program is still an open question.

And that is not going to be solved any time soon.

There could be a migrant flow at any moment because of the battering that Iran has taken.

They're right there on their doorstep.

Bahrain is less than 60 kilometers from Iran.

They have a very real -- a very harsh reality in front of them after this war ends of what the future of Iran looks like in the region as a whole.

Jeffrey Goldberg: One more question on this.

Peter, I assume this is the subject of your next book in 2029 or whatever, but you try to answer it now.

Peter Baker: Pre-order now.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But pre-order it now, yes.

But how did this happen given -- and answer it in 12 seconds if you can.

How did this happen in the sense that Iran is very good over the last four decades, almost five decades of messing with American presidents, the Iraq War, which was extremely well planned compared to this.

Peter Baker: Yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: How do they just drive right into this cul-de-sac?

Peter Baker: I think what you see here in his second term is a president who feels more comfortable with power, emboldened to do the things he didn't do in the first term.

Remember in the first term, he launched a strike against Iran over a relatively modest incident, and then pulled back ten minutes before the bombs were to hit because he just felt uncomfortable about it.

This time he feels comfortable.

He's emboldened by Venezuela.

He thinks that worked out really well.

He's emboldened by the strikes last June, which did seem to work out pretty well.

He did it for 12 days.

No damage, much damage anyway, to America or its allies.

And in theory, according to him, he obliterated the nuclear program that we now had to go back in and do again.

So, I think he felt emboldened, I think he felt empowered, and I think they obviously misjudged the total cost of how this was going to work out.

Amna Nawaz: Jeff, I'll say one more thing, because a former U.S.

negotiator with Iran put it to me this way.

There's two different pain clocks, right, on Iran.

They are fine to cause pain to their own population.

That's not an issue for the regime.

Here, the president has to deal with surging energy prices, low approval numbers, and midterms in about six months.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's interesting.

Our definition of pain is gas at $4.50 or $5 a gallon.

Their definition of pain is mass death.

But even there, the regime does not care about mass death on the part of their people.

I'm going to pivot now to landscape design, if you will.

So, yesterday, ABC's Rachel Scott, who accompanied the president on this visit to the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln and the Washington Monument, asked Trump, you're here against the backdrop of the war in Iran.

Why focus on all these projects right now?

By projects, she meant fixing the Kennedy Center, building an arch near the Arlington Cemetery and repainting the base of the Reflecting Pool.

And then the president insulted Scott in very nasty terms, but the question remains.

And all of us who cover him know this very well.

He seems much more engaged in architecture, interior design, exterior design, landscaping, hardscaping, than he is in managing the globe.

What's going on?

Jonathan Lemire: Well, he's a developer at heart.

But I think it's more just his eye towards legacy, that he does feel like -- he's looking beyond the midterms.

He's looking beyond the election.

He's looking for the history books, and I think that is in part connected to Iran.

He's trying to redraw the world's maps.

Greenland was like that, Venezuela.

Hey, maybe Cuba next.

But here in Washington, he's trying to leave his physical imprint.

That is what he cares about, the arch, the ballroom now perhaps costing the taxpayers a billion dollars.

And, yes, and that's why he's so sensitive to it because it's not just reporters' questions.

There are Republicans who have raised the same issues.

You've taken your eye off the ball, sir, they say with tears in their eyes, to say, this is not what got you and all of us elected last time around.

You've misplaced what Americans care about.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Amna Nawaz: There's two things going on here.

Can I just point out, one is the president has a tendency to attack female reporters in a particularly brutal way, black female reporters in particular.

Rachel Scott, as we all know, is a fabulous reporter and a wonderful person, and doesn't deserve that.

No one does.

The other, to Jonathan's point -- Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, it was particularly nasty.

Amna Nawaz: It was.

To Jonathan's point, there's two ways you can create legacy as a president, right?

One is through policy.

The president ran on changing the American economy.

That is not going well.

It seems like he's leaning into the part that he can control, which is this idea of monument to self, build an Oval Office, paved over Rose Garden, his name on buildings.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to stay along this theme about the president and the way he's evolving in this term.

There was this very odd encounter in the White House this week.

It was an event about youth fitness.

And the president had this to say to a group of young people.

Just watch this.

Donald Trump, U.S.

President: We would have had an Iran with a nuclear weapon, and maybe we wouldn't all be here right now.

I can tell you, the Middle East would've been gone, Israel would've been gone, and they would have trained their sights on Europe first and then us, because they're sick people.

These are sick people.

And we're not going to let lunatics have a nuclear weapon.

The power of a nuclear weapon is something I don't even want to talk about.

But it's not going to happen.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Vivian, the sense of appropriateness is interesting here.

I want to ask you about it, but I want to read something that Peter wrote last month, and you can comment on it.

Vivian Salama: I love that.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I know.

You get the chance to like comment on Peter.

Peter wrote, Democrats who have long challenged Mr.

Trump's psychological fitness have issued a fresh chorus of calls to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from power for disability.

But it is not just a concern voiced by partisans on the left, late night comics, or mental health professionals making long-distance diagnoses.

It can be heard now among retired generals, diplomats, and foreign officials.

And most strikingly, it can be heard now on the political right among one-time allies of the president.

That was Peter writing last month.

You watched the -- Vivian Salama: Peter is always right.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You watched the -- that's not true.

Well, that'll be the subject of our next episode.

But I want -- talk about that particular episode.

It's the sense of appropriateness, of place of being totally discordant of talking about nuclear destruction with a group of eight-year-olds.

What are we seeing these days?

Vivian Salama: Most of us have been in the room with the president where we see that he tends to kind of drift into his own thoughts oftentimes often out loud, regardless of who's in the room.

He goes on tangents.

He has questioned the existence of Santa Claus in front of children visiting the White House, so this is not particularly surprising.

But you could see it is definitely a good window into his thought process.

Not only was he talking about the Iran war and potentially, you know, nuclear war as a result of the Iran war, he also went into a riff about how he made peace in eight different countries, and yet he was deprived of the Nobel Peace Prize.

All the while, these children were looking around the room, completely distracted, A, by the grandeur of the Oval Office, the gold grandeur of the Oval Office, and also just the fact that they had no idea what he was talking about.

And it's just a frame of mind at this point.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Are we seeing, yes a difference in the quality of thinking or appropriateness?

Jonathan Lemire: He also asked one of the kids if he thought he could take him in a fight.

I mean, that's where this was.

He -- whether it's changed or not, I'm not sure.

It's -- certainly, people do think it has.

But at the very least, he's even less burdened, not that he ever was burdened, to like keep a thought to himself.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Jonathan Lemire: You know, he, wherever he is, he feels like, I'm in charge.

I can say what I want.

I don't care who's here.

And I also think he doesn't suffer any sort of consequences.

He doesn't even have an aide afterwards telling him, I'm sure you shouldn't have said that.

Like that just doesn't happen.

Peter Baker: Yes.

You could find episodes, obviously, in his first term.

You could find plenty you know, to raise questions about stability.

But I think what is striking is it happening more and more, right?

Like every week seems to bring another example of people look at that and they scratch their head and say, oh my goodness, what is up with that?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Is that because of decline or because there's no John Kelly or Jim Mattis sitting there?

Peter Baker: It could be both, right, but there's a clearly a lack of inhibition, right?

You know, in fact, none of us is a medical professional, but there is a term called disinhibition, which increases with age.

And you see other things that have increased in the second term, more use of profanity.

He speaks longer.

And, obviously, he is less inhibited from doing some of the things.

He talked about doing the first term, but didn't actually follow through on.

Now, he's following through on them.

Maybe because he doesn't have a John Kelly or a Jim Mattis or an H.R.

McMaster, maybe because he's looking at his legacy and thinking about what history will remember about him.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Vivian Salama: And his 80th birthday is a month away.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

I want to pivot to -- I mean, maybe this is a disinhibition question in a kind of way.

But, you know, there's always drama around his cabinet, his top officials.

As you all know, The Atlantic has been reporting on Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, for the past several weeks, raising concerns -- people around Patel, people in the FBI are raising concerns about erratic behavior, about excessive drinking, charges he's denied.

Obviously, he's also filed suit against us.

And this week our reporter, Sarah Fitzpatrick, reported that Patel has been commissioning and distributing Kash Patel-branded bourbon bottles.

And here's one of them actually.

This is something that we acquired.

This is the first use of a prop on Washington Week in approximately 60 years, by the way.

No, we are not discussing where this came from, but it is real.

It is absolutely real.

And, Jon, let's talk about how this sort of behavior and these kind of stories in another kind of administration would be dealt with.

Jonathan Lemire: Oh, I mean, he would've been gone long ago, I mean, for the -- and not just well beyond we got to this particular moment, and it is a magnificent prop there in front of you, Jeff.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Thank you very much.

Jonathan Lemire: You know, but even in Trump 1.0, he probably wouldn't have had patience for this.

We know he was prone to a lot of turnover.

This time, we have seen a few dismissals just in the last couple of months, but his first year was very much the no scalps policy.

Don't let the media get a win.

Don't let Democrats say you should fire this person and then do so.

And I think with Kash Patel, though, we should be clear, there's not exactly been a vociferous defense from the president for the FBI director, but he also still has his job despite questions about his job performance, including raised within the ranks of the FBI.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Amna, give us your sense of this tension in the White House between no scalps, I'm not firing anyone, versus people who are highly controversial and diversionary.

Amna Nawaz: Well, I think that's a calculation the president has to make person-by-person, right?

The folks along the way where he has changed path, on immigration, for example, at DHS, pulling Gregory Bovino from the field and replacing him with Tom Homan.

The effort to have Mr.

Bovino out in front was a very aggressive sort of messaging, machismo, sort of take no prisoners approach to immigration enforcement.

When that backfired and he faced backlash from the public in particular, there was a replacement there.

And so I think, in some ways, if there is a line to be drawn or one we should be looking for, it's when there is that kind of backlash and more of a public sentiment shift that the president is responsive.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to shift to another topic, although I'm going to leave the bottle here because it goes so well with the table.

The Virginia Supreme Court struck down a Congressional map that would have added four Democratic seats in Congress.

It's obviously a big win for the Republicans.

Jon, 2026 is really turning into the Hunger Games of redistricting.

Jonathan Lemire: Yes, it started with the president asking Texas to do so.

We saw Democrats respond with California, and then it's been a tit-for-tat.

It is an arms race, if you will.

And this was a -- Democrats were really invested, both financially, but also psychologically, in Virginia.

So, that was seen as a real blow today for that.

And then you, on top of that, we, of course, had the decision from the Supreme Court last week, which has now given a green light to seemingly most of the South to suddenly try to redistrict all of their Congressional as well, from Alabama to Florida and beyond.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Vivian, in Indiana, Trump just had a big victory in the primaries.

He wanted to knock off some state senators, Republican state senators, who did not go along with the redistricting map.

And that seems to show us that he's got some juice.

Vivian Salama: Yes, he's still got some juice within the party, for sure, and especially in certain parts of the country where they do believe that Trump's support is the ultimate support.

And so for them, you know, siding with Trump's chosen candidates against those who have supported his agenda was a priority, regardless of whether or not in some cases you had these lawmakers that were there for decades.

They did not fare as well, and that's because they spoke out against redistricting and other political priorities.

Jeffrey Goldberg: What -- Peter, last word to you.

What does what does 2026 or 2028 look like if this trend continues in terms of polarization?

Peter Baker: Yes, I mean, you can understand why Democrats decided to respond to Republicans, but basically the bottom line of this is we have made gerrymandering even worse.

The polarization that has been afflicting our politics now for some years will only get worse, because if you're going to have seats that are all conservative or all liberal, and you're not going to have people having any incentive to move in the middle.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, fascinating conversation.

We are going to have to leave it there for now.

Thank you for joining me at the Woodford Reserve.

Thank you to our guests for joining me, and thank you at home for watching us.

For more on what the president really thinks of the Iran war, please read Jon's story at theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.