The "Crude" Economic Reality of War in Iran

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Welcome back to the To the contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.

Oil prices are spiking at $100 a barrel. The work continues to spread. Donald Trump is

apparently decided he's going to lie about the bombing of the school children in Iran,

meanwhile demanding unconditional surrender while declaring mission accomplished. Where are we

and what kind of a week is this going to be? In joining us to start off the week,

our good friend Nicholas Grossman from the University of Illinois, the editor of our

digital Nicholas, how are you? I'm doing pretty well. All things considered. How are you?

All things considered. Well, I'm going to spare everybody my rant about daylight savings time.

It's an annual event around here, but we have too many other things to start with. Could we

start with something that I think that some people are going to think is relatively trivial?

And I wrote about this in my newsletter yesterday. There are things that are trivial,

and yet the triviality of mind of the people who are running this war is not trivial.

We had a couple of incidents. Donald Trump shows up at Dover Air Force Base on Sunday.

Wearing that Trump-branded USA cap. Again, in the great scheme of things, not great,

but as an act of just overwhelming disrespect. But I want to remind people of something that

happened last weekend. I know you saw this, Nicholas. The White House official account put out

these videos, these hype videos, just as the American way a caption read of a video posted on

Thursday night, along with an American flag and fire emoji. Video includes clips from superhero,

movies, top gun, brave heart, electronic music underneath the clips. It ends with a voice over,

saying flawless victory, which is audio from the victory, from the game, mortal combat.

Then because they thought this was so funny on Friday, they put out another video from

Grand Theft Auto with the caption, bleep, here we go again. As Tammy Duckworth's Iraq veteran

Senator from Illinois said, war is not a fucking video game. Just the juvenile mentality behind

the fact that the White House would post that. The official White House account.

I was pretty weirded out by that too. Things like you mentioned the baseball cap at what's

supposed to be a dignified ceremony and he's hawking merch and that's highly undignified and

disrespectful. It's also something I guess we've come to accept from this president or maybe

shouldn't be okay with, but at least we're not surprised by. But the mashup of real war and video

games and action movies really did strike me because it is something where it's blurring the line

between real and not real and so much of the White House, the Maga movement, a lot of the online

right, blur those a lot and it has gotten them into and gotten the country in the world into

highly consequential trouble, which is that things like people don't respond. They don't come back.

The death is real. Real world violence usually doesn't look cool and it has tons of other

reverberations that then have to be managed that in games are not part of that and they do this

with ice videos also of hyping up different members of ice and trying to make it look cool and

the thing that it reminds me the most of where I saw that type of video game action movie mashup

with real war was in ISIS recruitment videos. Oh that's great, that's wonderful. They did similar

kind of first-person shooter videos and blurred the two to try to make it seem cooler and it is

getting more detached from reality in a way that both on its own is weirdering me out but

has broader consequences because it's how they're not taking very serious love seriously.

No, I agree and you know the they're calling it gamifying the war, gamifying the war.

The one thing that at a time of war you do not want is for the leaders to blur that line between

reality and fantasy right to become detached from reality and yet there's a lot of indications

that this war feels detached from reality. Donald Trump, I think thought this was going to be one

and done and you know clean, you know clean, quote unquote clean like in Venezuela, you know and

you know the cliche is this is a war of choice but Nicholas this really feels like a

stranger choice as we go along especially as the global markets are melting down. I mean the

the oil prices are spiking the markets are crashing the world is saying what what the hell and

you have to ask why this war now and we are in the second third week of this war and we still

don't have a clue clue why we're there what we're doing. I'm pretty sure they don't know either

meaning the the Trump administration that people in charge of the war that the things that they've

already done wrong are ones that we the everybody who studies this stuff who has been following Iran

or various military tactics different US strategy with Iran for decades has been warning about that

Iran is not like Venezuela in that the Iranian government are ideologues. They are religious

religious theocracy they are a movement they're people who believe in what they're doing at least

the bunch of them and so they don't have something where you can just remove the leader and it's

not a personalist regime like say you know Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-un right then you can

remove them and replace somebody else and it looks like in Venezuela all the US did was

remove Maduro everybody moved up a spot the regime is intact and in fact Trump was even

in trying to parry some reporter's question bragging about how the regime in Venezuela is intact

and that as if then what was the point of that war but it seems like the timing with Iran a

lot of it is that the Venezuela operation went pretty smoothly and as far as military operations

go and that they thought this would be relatively easy and the 12-day war with Israel and with

the US bombing Iranian nuclear sites last year also made them think that it would be easy that it

would perhaps be like that or that the Iranians would fold Trump really seemed to talk himself

and they do this with a lot of foreign policy stuff the idea of bullying is going to work you

just sort of bully people and they back down and they often seem surprised when this isn't the case

so we saw this with Greenland and with NATO right right didn't do and we've seen it with both Mexico

and Canada at various times where they seem surprised that those countries aren't eager to bow down

to us and then with Iran they expressed surprise Steve Whitkov the main negotiator for Trump

expressed surprise that the Iranians hadn't made a deal and it was not at all surprising to people

who've been following this issue for a while because Trump in his first term ripped up the deal

that Iran had signed with the United States which was a bunch of led to a bunch of domestic arguments

in Iran whether they should do it or not and the people who said that you can't trust America they'll

don't reneg on this they'll take whatever we give them and then they'll come back demanding more

those people won the argument when the argument internally thanks to Trump and so no they didn't

just make some sort of deal or capitulate they have big domestic and international incentives not

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well let's talk about the latest developments um in no number one um Donald Trump refusing to

rule out boots on the ground i'm still skeptical about that because uh that just uh wreaks of

of quagmire and endless wars um but what what do you make of his declaration he made two

uh contradictory declarations a one mission accomplished said we didn't even need help from the

brits because it's already won so mission accomplished on the one on the other hand demanding

unconditional surrender and i think the people auto step back and recognize that unconditional

surrender uh was believe it or not uh was a controversial decision in world war two because

most wars until then had ended with some sort of a negotiation and unconditional surrender

seems like the formula for extending this war much further what do you think of that particular

demand now trump can always back off from it he can always you know fudge it but still you know

that was that was the big declaration over the weekend i think it shows more that they don't have

a strategy and don't really know what they're doing and are thinking about this the way that they

think about various domestic political issues it sounds good right it sounds for for forceful

it sounds cool that uh unconditional surrender you can associate that with demands on uh

japan and germany and world war two and even then there were some conditions that the us

agreed to uh or that's what the union demanded demanded of the confederacy at epimatics um and so

i don't know it sounds cool it sounds kind of badass and it doesn't sound like he thought it through

where the you know the war was uh it's been about uh iran's nuclear program or iran's missile program

or iran's support for terrorism or it's about regime change or it's about democracy or it's about

attacks on protesters or it's about unconditional surrender or it's about his real security or it's

about allied security or they really do not seem to know and uh when it comes to things like domestic

messaging um or wars of words that that doesn't really have much consequences they can get away

with it but when it comes to a real war we're seeing all the problems that come up without being

able to have a strategy because you need to link military operations to a broader political goal

or it makes no sense well also you were talking before about the the the internal debate among um

the you know the iranians after trump tore up the deal so uh when he announced his unconditional

surrender basically saying there's there's nothing that we can negotiate and if in fact the the

dead enders in this regime have decided that we're just simply gonna hunker down we're gonna take

these blows we're going to survive this certainly strengthens their hands because he's essentially

saying you i'm not negotiating anything with you you can't make any compromise so it's either

you resist or die which would seem to uh i i would say you know send a message to the iranians

that they might as well continue to fight and shoot off these these drones it would encourage

the hawks in a ran right absolutely that uh the us has given them no off ramp no possibility to

know i'm right uh make some sort of face saving uh concession something at the us can call a victory

and then there can be a diplomatic resolution uh the new aiotola uh committee sun so uh the

second committee aiotola um is reportedly more hard line than his father he grew up in the

era or he's close to hardline factions in the iranian revolutionary guard and a so both the us

have signaled to them that um if you there's no possible off ramp for you that it's either you know

surrender and die uh or fight do the best you can but also those uh iranian hardliners especially

but iranian general will be thinking about what next so um already they must be thinking about

how do they make it that the cost of this war is so high for so many different people especially

in the region that no matter how it turns out it becomes a cautionary tale becomes something where

anytime anybody's talking about war on the run again you have people like uh the Saudis and the UAE

and uh also factions inside the united states or the europeans yeah and uh cutter and you know

co-aid and others who are then saying no no no bad idea you remember what happened last time um and so

the iranians are probably thinking about that now also and they don't need to win in the sense of

you know conquer washington they just need to survive survive to show that they took the hint they

did some damage and they're still around and not trying to remove them is going to be extremely

difficult if that is even as the plan this where you mentioned boots on the ground uh but that's

what you need to do to try to actually do regime change that the big country yeah you contrast

the Iraq war which had of course a lot of problems with it and i think there were a lot of

you know poor decisions made in it and i thought it was a mistake to do in the first place but

even so the bush administration put in the effort they both followed the constitution and then

conducted themselves more or less like professionals in that uh they presented a case of public

for the war to the public uh they got a vote in congress it was bipartisan super majority vote to

authorize it they had a lot of public support they lined up some allies uh they set up uh

positioned 150 some on thousand us troops additionally 30,000 british troops some uh from

australia from Poland um and then within two months after removing sedom they had a UN resolution that

was uh authorizing the occupation and then a bunch of other send resources and send troops and

that was because they uh did all this work and there were still so many problems with it i don't

want to try to uh downplay the problems of the way the bush administration handled the Iraq war

right but that highlights how uh how much worse the Trump administration has been conducting the

run where they have well that's right and and that is a that's a cautionary tale um you know for

for any of this and i want to get to the politics of this a little bit later maybe i probably

should have actually started with this because one of this the one of the developed actually two

developments over the weekend that are kind of mind-mending you know um the fact that we realized

we might need the help of Ukraine and dealing with the with with the drones but also what do you make

of this very strange series of events where we find out that the russians have been bright have been

providing intelligence to the Iranians to help them target american and israeli forces so the

russians are helping our enemies in this war and when Donald Trump and the White House are asked

about it they basically shrugged it off they have no problem um no criticism no sanctions whatsoever

in fact um in in in the wake of learning the russians are actually helping target american service

men uh Donald Trump lifts oil sanctions uh on on russia and so you know the the the whole

question of like this relationship between Trump and Putin has been this constant theme for the

past ten years but Adam and kinsie go over saying what the hell must russia have on trump that he

would look the other way while russia is providing real-time intelligence to targets american

servicemen i mean this you know i don't want this to get lost in the in the russia of events because

this is an extraordinary moment none dare call it treason what do you think so first the russia

helping Iran is the least surprising thing in the world another good example of stuff that we

knew well in advance and that we're part of arguments for years so uh one we know about russian

Iranian cooperation things like Iran helping russia with drones for the ukrain war that's recent

but also the u.s intelligence in the 1980s from the soviet union invaded afghanistan

was chomping at the bit to be able to do to the russians what russian intelligence did to the us

in vietnam and so the idea that the united states was helping ukrain resist russia for a few years

iran was helping uh russia attack ukrain in that period of time and then russia wouldn't help

iran tried to attack the united states this is something it's very beneficial for them because

i even at just a pure military level any resources and focus that go into the iran war are not

then available to go to help ukrain and uh we'll also strengthen arguments about how the us

uh can't help ukrain because it needs its weapons for other things right even get some of the europeans

now to move some of their air defense as it's elsewhere okay i understand why russia wants to

help iran why right but this moment where trump is asked about it i mean philips obrion wrote trump

is today telling every member of the u.s military that it is okay with him if russia helps iran kill

them everyone once again americans once again americans trump looks at the us military

personalists suckers and losers that he can sacrifice for his own glory and profit this is who

leads you this the the the the fact that you know we keep asking is there some red line for

donald trump this would normally be a red line for an american president it is an extraordinary moment

that donald trump is basically giving a pass once again to his bff latimer putin it's even more

than a pass in that uh they are encouraging russia to do it so uh with the negative effect on oil

prices one of the ways that uh the us has tried to scramble and respond to that is by then

allowing more oil sales to let more russian oil sales let more oil get on the market

and that can potentially try to reduce the price shock but it also means that the communications

of russia is effectively if you help iran beat america or at least do better against america in

this war then the united states will give you economic benefits will help you out economically

and so i mean i don't know about say with uh have something on him that that implies that trump

has been coerced into doing this exacting against his will in some fashion um and i'm pretty skeptical

of that that it seems there's a whole lot of useful idiot explanation for it in which he clearly

has a big affinity for putin in russia where um there's an element of jealousy of putin in that uh

remember in 2022 when russia first invaded trump was very positive about the war he called it

savvy and genius and said oh that's wonderful and uh probably i think because he expected the same

sort of just bullying here let me show you a bunch of toughness and force and you'll fold

and then it didn't work so uh yeah it's a lot of gift to russia in many different ways but i think

there's a good stupidity selfishness uh just messaging just trying to get through the day's new

cycle uh not having any long-term plan just putting out any fire that happens to come up

i think you're right um of trying to bullshit his way through it where no matter what the real

consequences are that maybe if uh people don't pay attention he can lie enough about it that it'll

be okay for him um and all of that fits also and so whether to some extent we have a compromise

president uh or just one that really looks up to putin and wants to be like him and is constantly

screwing up in ways that greatly hinder US national interest uh but maybe in some way advance his

personal interest which has always been his priority okay so um we're at this point of the

great irony and again this is uh this is philips o o brian is that um over the weekend while the US

was apparently begging for aid from Ukraine dealing with these drones it was providing protection

and a windfall of support for the power trying to destroy Ukraine russia so we have a situation

that the Ukrainians are helping the US and the US is helping protecting russia this must be the

lead story of the week but it goes to this larger theme that you've been describing of sort of the

lack of a planet and the the chaos the various things so let's just talk about the politics of all of

this because um you know number one um you know Trump's numbers are very low we're not seeing the kind

of rally around the flag phenomenon you would normally see usually um when a nation goes to war there

is um at least majority support sometimes you know large majority support that is not the case here

they didn't make the case so this starts off as an unpopular war but now as you and i are speaking

it feels as if there's this here comes crude reality shock as people realize all of the consequences

of this so here you have Donald Trump going into the midterm elections he's underwater they're facing

a potential shallacking one of the issues that's killing him is affordability and what does he do

besides and you know reimpose the tariffs he now starts a war which is causing a global economic

meltdown and and will probably result in higher prices across the board i mean in terms of political

choices that this really becomes um to we say problematic for for Donald Trump and we keep asking

why did he do what did he do it now it it seems as if you know if it's a war of choice he could have

done it earlier he could have waited later but he's done it now and it feels as if it's a perfect

storm of political disaster domestically for Donald Trump it does that uh one of the sort of

saving graces i guess we could put it of uh dealing with uh america's democratic backsliding is that

we could have had smarter fascists we could have had ones who tried to really boost the economy uh

throw money at their supporters there were a bunch of even the ones that we used as models uh

orbony and hungry uh spent years consolidating power institutionally and trying to

get ahead economy before acting more openly corrupt uh and before having more negative economic

effects so uh not only yeah it's we've never seen somebody try to go into an election by making

the economy worse and i think probably the answer is they either didn't think through that at all

um or thought it wouldn't have an effect that it would be over soon um and uh now they're also

again left scrambling to try to do it but this is not something that the economic damage

they're going to be able to fix it reminds me of covid in that sense that uh global energy markets

are something that is too big for Trump to be able to lie his way through it has uh too many

act on uh too many second third order effects of uh things like the one people aren't even talking

about yet but is the other petroleum products so not just things like oil and energy but other things

that are components in uh various metallurgy processes and in agriculture and uh the more

there is this bottleneck which is going to be very difficult to open up uh because the main

thing is not can the u.s. navy get there uh it's will insurance companies agree to underwrite

the tankers and will the shipping companies would be willing to take the risk of it and uh that

needs very little to be able to disrupt which is again some reason why a lot of us warned against

fallon war with Iran but so this these economic effects are going to not go away within a few weeks

okay so so to this point about the warnings i mean we were getting more and more reports of

intelligence warnings that hey you know this is not going to be easy this is not uh this regime

is not going to easily fall um there are leaks coming out of you know people saying well i was

cautioning him i was telling him to be caution there's a story that that even Marco Rubio and JD

Vance were cautioning or warning Donald Trump against it and he basically said fuck it i'm

going to do it anyway so you know in terms of the decision making process we've had this ongoing

conversation about you know the adults in the room and trump 1.0 and there are not adults around

but apparently there were alarm bells going off in the intelligence community in the Pentagon

about the cost of this war and it either so again we don't know so to Donald Trump not

hear the warnings did he hear the warnings and reject them what does this tell you about

the decision making process right now at the highest levels of the u.s. government because we were

warned and all of this was in many ways predictable and yet the president of the united states

decided to go ahead with guns blazing anyway i mean i am not totally confident that the things that

say Rubio presents in the press or maybe his staff leaks to the press about all the smart things

that he said behind the scenes is actually what he said when he was you know in a room in

privately with Donald Trump as opposed to you know sure sure yes sir you're so smart whatever you

say or some variation like that but even so so a lot of them are already a general cane is another

one is getting on the record of no idea and say that and trump claimed that cane said would be easy

and then cane leaked it that note he hadn't but that means either i suppose it could be that you

know trump is delusional or he's just shutting out other voices but um a lot of it speaks to all

the rejection of expertise rejection of the uh deep state and um any people who had said along the

way that various things wouldn't work that it's i don't know it's eggheads like me who said that

ending the Iran nuclear deal was putting us on a path either to war nuclear Iran and uh or who said

you know various other things about how i don't know the trump committed a lot of crimes and

attempted a coup and should go to jail and uh look he went and got power again so all those

things so you know they matted they discount tons of that but uh i think a lot of it speaks to that

just thinking that they can bluster their way through and actually had to speak and bluster

had a thought just more about the midterms which is that um it's possible that they already

thought that they were in such trouble or maybe were in such a bubble that they're discounting

regardless but that the economy's bad the polls are bad they're likely to lose and so they've

been trying a lot of manipulation and malfeasance already and so it's possible that they didn't

really think much about the political implications of the iran war uh or they maybe thought this will

be a you know a glorious triumph and then we'll get to uh look strong and run on that

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i think in in many ways parent way is mental health the these days um there's a school of thought

and i am at least curious or adjacent to that school of thought things that the Donald Trump um

wants a crisis that will allow him to declare an emergency which will open up various powers

to mess with the midterm midterm elections i know that david from has made this

suggested one of the scariest things about Donald Trump as a wartime president is that wartime

presidents in american history have done some you know constitutionally questionable things

Donald Trump as a wartime president wielding what he thinks or the emergency powers

um is a look that's a real prospect so at at at one level the more chaos the more emergencies

the stronger trump's hand is your thoughts um i'm skeptical on that last part of uh

stronger his hand is because um they already violate tons of laws violate norms um lie as an

excuse to try to do a lot of these things uh we're already conducting all sorts of manipulation

of the midterm not only things like gerrymandering but uh voter intimidation or trying to do voter

disenfranchisement um or uh potentially posing a threat to polling places like you know sending

ice goons out to polling places in minority areas for example and they were already moving a lot

in that direction so while uh it i it is true about all the dangers of Donald Trump as a wartime

president a lot of that because of the war itself were things that he might try and excuse at home

but the situation at home doesn't change much which is that they are trying it they've already

dismantled a lot of the checks and balances of liberal democracy they've already broken rule

of law and they are limited by their capacity not by their willingness to do it uh it's how many

people can they get to go along how many um the so and this is a similar thing like we trump in

the insurrection act that uh so many times that talks about or this with Minneapolis you know it's

i'm gonna invoke the insurrection act or what if we do it and he's always doing it like a

a tv producer teasing a thing that's coming never actually does it seems to like having

he's still gonna do it reaction of people going oh no don't invoke the insurrection act uh but

what would that actually do it uh authorizes the president to have uh military forces uh in support

in uh domestic operations and uh the trump head already been trying to do that and um already

has you know a army of secret police that they then sick on various cities especially ones where

they don't agree with the politics and um so the insurrection act would not really get him a

much greater ability to do that it would be something to be tied up in the court there would be

questions about orders they were the uh courts already that reversed national guard deployments

and that the administration has followed that order um so the this is where i do think paranoia is

a healthy expression uh in these days but where i get wary of it is that authoritarianism to a

decent extent takes place on our heads and that the if we think the government has more power than

it actually does and we start acting as if it has that power because we're afraid of it

then we granted that power or at least some of it and so i agree well i do think vigilance is

warranted and it's good to think through the negative scenarios it's also important not to

go too far and grant them greater capabilities and they have demonstrated or that they physically have

yeah i i i i i think that i think that's a that's a balanced approach you know uh that uh

the the authoritarian wants to live in your head and tell you that resistance is futile because they

are so all powerful on the other hand i think that we have suffered from a lack of imagination of

what Donald trump is capable of doing what he is willing to do um and i don't want to make that

mistake again i i don't want to fall into that believe that oh you know um you know he's going to

make a lot of noise after the 2020 election but nothing really serious is going to happen um and

i think i was pretty adjacent to that particular point of view until very close to the the end so

again um you know caution against hysteria or you know numbness on the one hand but also the lack of

imagination um on this um speaking of the the the the election interference again over the weekend

it's kind of amazing all the things that happen uh Donald trump is apparently going all out for

something called the save act i have not talked about this a lot this is uh this is the

act that he they are they're pushing it as as a national voter ID now voter IDs are actually quite

popular um but the save act is much much more extensive uh than that it would basically require every

american citizen to produce documentary proof of citizenship a passport or birth certificate

to register to vote not just new voters anytime you update your registration move to new apartment you

change your name um after a marriage or divorce you switch your party affiliation under this law

you have to show up in person at your election office with your documents every single time

election officials face criminal charges it kills mail-in voter registration entirely for practical

purposes so um Donald trump is now saying they will not sign any legislation until this is passed

you have Ken Paxton down in Texas uh saying he will only drop out of the senate race

if the senate republicans abolished the filibuster to pass the save act so there's a lot of political

capital being put on this one piece of legislation um how big a deal with this be in the midterms

i think it's hard to say um in that it could be uh potentially damaging a big deal um but it's not

clear entirely who that would help in partisan terms that uh part of it is driven by uh trump

maga conspiracy theories about both uh voting by mail and uh voter fraud of where it's hard to know

how much do they believe their own bullshit about the uh tons of voters uh that you know fake

voters in all different sorts of places or illegal immigrants voting which is incredibly low numbers

and for very obvious reasons that the punishments of getting caught doing that is very large the

benefits of one vote uh almost never swing an election and so the benefit is virtually non-existent

nobody knows that you did it so it's not like they can uh pay you or thank you or something

afterwards for it um but so the those numbers are very low but they do seem to uh the administration

seems to believe it at least to some extent so we're if they end up passing it where it would

disrupt things like uh vote by mail where a lot of older people uh vote by mail add a number of older

people vote well it would create chaos again it creates chaos and concern and the goal is very

clearly um voter suppression on a mass level and i'm guessing the question is whether or not

republicans will be able we know be willing you know so willing to do Trump's bidding that they

would i mean for us to get to the point of the impact they would have to abolish the filibuster

to ram this through on a strict partisan line and that strikes me as uh at least a three or four

alarm fire for democracy that the the republican party is that committed to supporting Donald Trump's

election interference campaign uh so yeah i find that very concerning i really don't want to

sound like i'm downplaying it and i think the chaos point is a good one because even if

uh no matter how it plays out what it would do was throw a lot of things into question

allow greater opportunities to challenge results by claiming that uh areas didn't follow this new

law that uh which they might not even have enough time to logistically prepare for if it gets

passed um but there looks to be quite a bit of opposition to it uh one because uh Trump is much

like with the war of the run changing the goals on the fly there was a another thing added in for

where he demanded something having to do with trans people uh added into uh this act the

um i don't know if the house would have to pass it again the democrats at least in the senate and

i saw said it uh leader Chuck Schumer has been adamant on you know where uh we are blocking this and

if that means that there's no additional legislation so what there's no supplemental funding for the

run war there's uh no more funding for dhs and the network of uh concentration camp like warehouses

that they're building um for democrats perspective for the pro-democracy opposition perspective those

terms are acceptable um but we'll see if he can actually get it through i think on balance if i had

to guess i'd say that probably not that it's going to run into roadblocks in the senate both that

the democrats will put up enough of roadblock and republicans especially as they're starting to

look to the future and think that they're going to lose their majority uh are not going to be eager

to get rid of the filibuster now just as they weren't in uh earlier uh during the government shutdown

for example and where the democrats held for a while republicans could have easily passed that

themselves just gotten rid of the filibuster and they kept it so um i would be surprised especially

as the political capital is draining from there's economic damage and there's the war and uh the

republicans even if they do have a cult like devotion to him uh that doesn't mean that they're going

to do something if they think it's going to jeopardize their personal job prospects too much

no well they've had plenty of chances to abolish the filibuster in the past uh every political

party falls in love with the filibuster at certain times um if if republicans did have the votes to

pull the filibuster this would have happened before now um and you know this is one of the very

few issues on which uh senate leadership has been willing to basically tell Donald Trump no i

know what you want but i'm not going to give it to you i think this is going to be another big test

and right now i don't think that Donald Trump has the political capital to be able to ram that through

Nicholas Grossman thank you so much it is always great talking with you thank you for

you thank you for joining me on today's podcast sure it's my pleasure great to be with you

and thank you all for listening to this episode of to the contrary podcast i'm Charlie Sykes we

continue to do this for the duration because it is so important to remind ourselves that we are not

the crazy ones thank you

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