March 27, 2026 - "American Week": One month on, there's no end in sight to Trump's war on Iran

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Tom Swalbrick on LBC.

10-6 Friday evening, Tom Swalbrick here on LBC means, as you know, one thing.

It's all getting really rather serious.

So we deploy our big guns from Washington, D.C., Simon Marks, American Week.

Tom tomorrow is the one month anniversary of President Trump's faithful decision

to engage with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in war on Iran.

And one month later, the President is still not able to provide a fact-based explanation

for why the conflict was necessary.

There is no indication that Iran was either an imminent national security threat to the United States

or two weeks away from getting a nuclear weapon or planning to take over the entire Middle East,

which at various points over the last month have been the stated reasons for the war profit by the White House.

As to where things go now, nobody knows.

He has President Trump on Monday claiming that peace talks were underway with Iran,

so he was shelving plans to bomb the country's power plants and other energy infrastructure.

They called. I didn't call. They called. They want to make a deal.

And we are very willing to make a deal. It's got to be a good deal.

And it's got to be no more wars, no more nuclear weapons.

They're not going to have nuclear weapons anymore. They're agreeing to that.

Any of that stuff is no deal.

So that was Monday, and as you heard there, he was very willing to make a deal,

sounded almost excited about it. But yesterday, not so much.

They are begging to make a deal, not me. They're begging to make a deal.

And the great negotiators, I say they're lousy fighters, but they're great negotiators.

And they are begging to work out a deal.

I don't know if we'll be able to do that. I don't know if we're willing to do that.

We went from very willing to maybe not willing in the space of just 72 hours.

The credibility of the president is now so much in doubt that the White House spent much of the week dealing with questions

about whether he was even telling the truth about the existence of the negotiations,

a situation upon which the Iranians capitalized by suggesting that he wasn't.

It does indeed seem that Pakistan is involved in efforts to mediate between Washington and Tehran.

And again, yesterday, in case the point was lost on his interlocutors,

Trump made it sound like he's easy, either way, whatever the outcome.

I read a story today that I'm desperate to make. I'm not the opposite of desperate.

I don't care. I want to, in fact, we have other targets we want to hit before we leave.

Imagine being a member of the growing number of American military families whose loved ones,

the president is putting in harm's way, thousands more aheading to the Middle East this weekend.

And then you hear the president say, I don't care whether we reach a peace agreement or not.

That would be alarming enough, but then come the numerous contradictions in his storyline.

Here he was on Wednesday.

They have no air force left, they have no anti-aircraft equipment left, no radar left, no leaders left,

the leaders are all gone, nobody knows who to talk to.

But we're actually talking to the right people and they want to make a deal so badly.

You have no idea how badly they want to make a deal.

So they've got no leaders left, nobody knows who to talk to, but the United States is somehow miraculously talking to the right people.

And then when it comes to Iran's military prowess, on the one hand,

he keeps claiming the Iranian military is in pieces, obliterated a wreck.

But then also on Wednesday, he suddenly disclosed new news.

Think of it, they shot a hundred missiles at one of our aircraft carriers, Abraham Lincoln, one of the biggest ships in the world, actually.

And out of a hundred and one missile shot, every single one of them was knocked down in the sea.

Think of that.

Think of what that means.

Well, I'm thinking that means they've still got quite a lot of ballistic missiles targeting assistance from the Russians, more drones on their way to Tehran from Moscow.

And definitely a determination to continue attacking US bases and allies in the region,

and to maintain a chokehold on the straighter four moves.

Because Iran knows the fewer ships that can transit the waterway, the more global economic chaos will ensue.

This is now a race against the clock. The Iranians know there's only so much economic pain that Americans will tolerate.

This week alone, we saw one poll showing Trump with only a 25% approval rating for his handling of the economy.

And little wonder, given that in California this week, the price of petrol topped $7 a gallon.

But the White House needs time in some narratives as long as another month to get the ground troops in place that may be needed.

If Trump and Netanyahu ever hope to finish the war that they've begun, and on Capitol Hill among the president's fellow Republicans,

the alarm bells over that are already ringing.

I'll be voting against the funding if we're putting troops on the ground. I'm not going to fund that.

Okay.

I know you asked troops.

That is Congresswoman Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, speaking after she emerged from a classified briefing given to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

She and many of her fellow Republicans say they believe the president is considering some kind of boots on the ground operation in Iran.

And insist they will not back the Pentagon's call for $200 billion in additional funding for the war if highly risky ground operations are part of the deal.

She drove the point home on Wednesday night on CNN.

There was frustration that reverberated throughout based on the information that we were receiving.

And I'm Maga Mace.

I am a conservative Republican.

And I support President Trump. I think he's done an excellent job to where we are today.

But when we're talking about troops on the ground, that is a different stage in an operation or in a war that has a significantly greater gravity.

Which of course goes to the heart of the conundrum facing the president to engage in the protracted conflict that now seems needed.

Trump has to persuade his own grassroots to back him.

And that is difficult given how many of them feel betrayed by a man who promised not to get troops entangled in forever wars.

Just seven months from midterm elections that will determine the balance of power in Congress.

White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt found herself being challenged in the briefing room by Gabe Fleischer, an up-and-coming young political journalist here.

Speak a lot to young voters, many of whom voted for President Trump for the first time in 2024.

You're hoping to have no more wars and to have lower prices.

Now with the war taking place and with gas prices going up, here's what President Trump's message would be to those voters who kind of swung into his coalition in 2024.

President Trump is doing this for you. He's doing this for young people so that we are no longer threatened by a rogue terrorist regime in the Middle East.

Like everyone else, those young voters will be hoping to get their chance to cast their ballots in November.

And they may have other issues that are more front of mind than a war oceans away.

The future of big tech, for example. This week for America's big tech giants, some very substantial chickens came home to roost.

We continue with our breaking news coverage out of Los Angeles, where a jury found tech giants meta and Google liable for failing to warn its users about the dangers of their social media platforms.

Did Meta Know or should it have reasonably known that the designer operation of Instagram was dangerous or likely to be dangerous when used by a minor and a reasonably foreseeable manner? Yes, did Meta Know or should it have reasonably known that users would not realize the danger? Yes.

As reporter Lisa Rubin with MSNOW brought her viewers live coverage of the verdicts from Los Angeles, it became apparent that Google and Meta had lost across the board.

A landmark case comparable with the first legal rulings a quarter of a century ago that set the stage for the come-up and so big tobacco.

The case had been brought by a 20 year old woman who alleged social media had directly caused her anxiety and depression as a youngster.

And after a six week trial, the jury agreed with her, the winning attorney, Mark Lanier. This is a landmark moment. It will reverberate.

I'll tell you this. If the jury had returned to know the champagne courts would be popping in the boardrooms of Google and Meta.

But instead, Mark Zuckerberg has to take a phone call and the only thing he's waiting for now is to find out if there are going to be punishment damages.

The answer to that question was also, yes, a total of $6 million must now be paid to the woman who brought the case, but there are thousands and thousands of others right behind her, like Juliana Arnold, who's 17-year-old daughter died of fentanyl poisoning after buying the drugs from a predator on Instagram.

For the biggest tech executives, I want to say something. Stop blaming the parents. It's on you.

This is what this is showing today. And for parents, we now know that they were manipulating our children for profits while we were watching and trying to keep our families safe.

And also, it is fair to say, while successive American governments were doing nothing to rein the tech giants in, just as they're doing nothing today to curb the excesses of the artificial intelligence industry.

Although, at least in that regard, some Democrats are gingerly backing efforts to regulate AI, even if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris notably made no efforts to do so during their four years in power.

I want to end this week by going back to today's president because his 90-minute cabinet meeting yesterday, which is not really a cabinet meeting, just a televised gathering of top officials who then massage his ego with baby oil,

featured a threat about which I suspect we are going to hear more. For the first time yesterday, he indicated that because of his fury over NATO's refusal to join the war on Iran,

if the UK or any other NATO country is invaded by Russia, the United States may not come to their allies aid.

I'm so disappointed in NATO because this was a test for NATO. This was a test. You don't have to, but if you don't do that, we're going to remember.

Just remember, remember this in a number of months from now, remember my statements.

I think we probably should keep that in mind, Tom, because it is possible that he is now so soured on the transatlantic alliance that in a number of months from now,

he may seek officially to torpedo it.

From Washington, DC, Simon Marx, American Week.

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