March 28, 2026 - Iran launches strike on US forces in Saudi as Trump projects invincibility

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Okay, it's time to talk to Simon Marx in Washington.

As ever, he's got a bit of a sparrows to talk to us,

which is fantastic.

But before we talk,

I want you all to listen to this.

After open up the straight of Trump.

I mean, harmless.

Excuse me for...

I'm so sorry.

Such a terrible mistake the fake news will say.

He accidentally said no.

Okay, the straight of Trump.

Accidentally, a bit of a Freudian slip.

That all was it.

And because as they say in America,

you break it, you keep it.

And this is another version of that, maybe.

Simon Marx, was he making a joke?

Or does he actually think?

Or was he actually channeling the fact that this is now his problem?

And this war has become his economic war and he's not winning it?

I don't think either of those choices, Matt.

I think he was sending a very clear signal to people in his inner circle.

But when this is over, he wants the straight of Hormuz,

renamed the straight of Trump.

I mean, when he says this stuff,

even when it's in a joky-poky way,

he means it.

And the delusions of grandeur.

That have been on display this week.

Have been incomparable, even with earlier appearances.

That made for TV.

It's not a cabinet meeting.

It's a cabinet gathering where members of his inner circle are required

to sit around the table for 90 minutes and basically massage his ego.

We actually saw Doug Burgham, the secretary of the interior,

who's just back from a trip to Venezuela.

Tell him that in Caracas,

they are planning the Venezuelans to erect a statue of Donald Trump.

And they told, Doug Burgham told Donald Trump

that the president's reputation in Venezuela

now surpasses that of Simon Bolivar,

the great liberator of Latin America in the 1800s.

And Trump actually loves this stuff.

He bought, I mean, he's naming everything after himself here in Washington, DC.

He's holding up funding for Dulles Airport.

An airport named after a former secretary of state John Foster Dulles

because he wants Dulles' name taken off it and he wants his name put on it.

He's-

And he's putting his signature on the dollar notes, isn't he, as well?

And putting his signature on the dollar notes this year to mark America's 250th birthday.

The first time any president has made sure that their signature appears

on paper money here in the United States.

So certainly this was the first time that he's floated the idea

that eventually the straight of hormones might be renamed the straight of Trump.

What it definitely isn't is him channeling any kind of sense of vulnerability

over this conflict even as while he was making those comments last night,

you know, we were getting news that another 12 American service personnel

have been- had been injured two of them seriously

in an Iranian missile and drone attack on Saudi Arabia, on American forces there.

This is the same Iranian military that Donald Trump every single day tells us

has been completely obliterated, eviscerated, they're on their knees,

they're begging to make a deal.

And yet they were still able to launch a very serious air strike

against those American interests in Saudi Arabia yesterday.

So Trump is behaving like the supreme leader.

Well, I think he certainly rather likes the idea of being the supreme leader.

I mean, at one point in that cabinet meeting, he said that after he left the presidency

of the United States, he might move to Venezuela and run for the presidency there.

And by the way, the government that he has propped up in Venezuela

of the remnants of- not the remnants- everybody but Nicholas Maduro in his regime.

This week had an approval rating in a poll, read this in the financial times,

of 4.2 percent. So if he's going to match what he's done in Venezuela

ultimately in Iran and basically prop up a government of clerical remnants of the regime,

he will, as he has done in Venezuela, be selling the Iranian people down the river.

Because you don't hear any talk at all about the need for elections.

And these countries are democracy and completely gone from all of the language that he has used.

Is any encouragement to the Iranian people inside the country to rise up and take control

of their own destiny? So who is there in this extraordinary cabinet of, you know,

Lixbytl's sick offense who actually stands up to the president in private or whispers into his

ear, even more in private, Mr. President sir, not a good idea?

Well, it's easy to answer that question by saying nobody.

I think that he's largely true, but there are probably three figures within the administration

who can occasionally bend his ear. The vice president J.D. Vance, the secretary of state Marco Rubio,

and perhaps most importantly of all the Treasury Secretary Scott percent, who certainly over

the last year on various occasions, appears to have saved Donald Trump from some of his worst

ideas and worst excesses, although he wasn't able to head off completely. Obviously the madness

of the tariff regime and the declaration of a global trade war on all the country's trading partners.

But those three men, I think, have some capacity occasionally to say, are you sure?

You sure you really want to do this? Is that in evidence right now though in Iran?

Is that in evidence in this country? Exactly.

Exactly, absolutely not. I mean, we know that J.D. Vance did not support the idea of this war

beginning and said if you do this, you've got to go big and go fast, which at least gives J.D. Vance

ultimately the plausible deniability to be able to say, well, I told him to go big and go fast

and he didn't go big and fast enough. Marco Rubio, if he has doubts about the wisdom of this

policy, never shows any of them publicly. You know, often tension and stress is etched in his

face in the Oval Office. We saw that, for example, during the rubbing of Volodymyr Zelensky last year,

but look, there are no real restraining influences in his inner circle. And more than that, Matt, as you know,

there's no vibrant national security council producing all of these competitive papers

that argue with one another about policy options that exist for the president, as we've seen

in every single past administration, including his first term, by the way, in this administration,

the thing that you survive by, the thing that you are judged by is your sickofancy and loyalty

to him. And that leaves him out on a limb because he is currently a naked emperor pursuing a strategy

free war now going into its second month in Iran with no evident off-ramp at his disposal.

Right. What about Pete Hexif, the man who likes to call himself Secretary of War?

The kind of action man of this conflict. We used to think that Donald Rumsfeld in the Iraq war,

you know, was a bit outrageous. But this guy, Hexif, has taken it to a new level and, you know,

is behaving like an extremist fear crowd, especially when he's got, you know, prayer sessions

at the podium. I mean, again, do the American people look at this and say, oh, you know,

the ones who kind of quite like Trump still do, they say, well done, Pete, go for it as the president

does, or do they think come off it? This is not what this country is about. Depends on the American,

right? I mean, Trump loves him. Trump thinks he's come straight from central casting with his

chisel jaw. His made for TV looks because, of course, he was selected from TV. He was a Fox News

weekend breakfast presenter that Donald Trump quite like watching, and he thought nothing wrong

with weekend, nothing wrong with weekend breakfast presenters at all. But, you know, perhaps not

in one of the highest offices of state. I mean, he is, he is a cross between a kind of a

militaristic version of a Kendall and Baghdad barb in terms of the mendacity of much of the

information that he is promulgating to the American people. But he plays a role. He's a performing

seal for Donald Trump, and Trump loves it. I mean, there are going to be millions of Americans

taking to the streets to participate in no King's marches, as you know. And many of those,

of course, will be driven by antipathy, not just to the Trump administration writ large,

but towards this war, particularly, and the kind of bravado, the, frankly, the joy

in killing people that Pete Hegseth appears to exhibit coupled with that Christian nationalism

underbelly that drives him and others in Donald Trump's inner circle.

I know. It's deeply alarming stuff. Final one to you, and keep it short, please, because we're

running out of time. I mean, we've got more American troops going into the Gulf. I think

an extra 10,000. We've got another aircraft carrier heading into the region. This is beginning to

look a little bit like mission creep, isn't it? Vietnam. Yeah, very much so. Very much so. I mean,

I think everything in the next few days and weeks, Matt, is going to hinge on one thing.

The extent to which the Iranians are able to compete can continue strangle-holding the

straight-of-war moves and continue with their ability to create global economic havoc.

They know if they are able to do that, they will be creating political circumstances here

that are unsustainable, even over the medium term, for President Trump. But if he can find a way

of taking control of the straight and maybe Harg Island, even if that involves a very dicey ground

operation, then we could be looking at a very, very protracted conflict. As I said at the beginning

of the program, war has a way of teaching everyone a bit of geography, especially in America.

Simon Marx has ever thank you very much. Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz. I'm the host of Big

Technology podcast, a longtime reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC. And if you're like me,

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