President Donald Trump has “dug himself into the deepest hole of his life” by starting the Iran war, and knows he’s at a disadvantage, one top foreign policy analyst says.
David Rothkopf told The Daily Beast Podcast that the president, after nearly six months of war and the expiration Monday of a truce deadline, faces several problems of his own creation, including weapons shortages, declining troop morale, and ego-fueled expenditures. Iran, meanwhile, has only become more emboldened.
“He has dug himself into the deepest hole of his life,” Rothkopf, the Daily Beast’s chief global affairs columnist, told host Joanna Coles. ”He was better off with his bankrupt casinos in Atlantic City than he is with this war in Iran.”
Rothkopf mentioned reports of worsening conditions for troops aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea in the region three months longer than initially planned.
“Contrary to what you might hear from [Pete] Hegseth or some of these other stooges that the administration rolls out, morale in the U.S. military is at an all-time low. They know we failed at this war, they know we’re out of weapons, they know they are being mistreated, they know the president doesn’t give a s--t about them,” Rothkopf said.
“When the president raises money for the Department of Defense, does he spend it on them? On Veterans [Affairs]? On schools for soldiers? On higher salaries? Heck, no. He spends it on ‘Trump class’ battleships, which we don’t need; a golden dome, which will cost $100 billion, which won’t work,” Rothkopf continued. “He spends it on things to grandize himself, and he thinks the rest of the Army and the Navy and the Air Force and the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard can go screw themselves.”
Meanwhile, Iranian leaders are capitalizing on Trump’s lack of leverage, Rohtkopf continued.
“The idea that somehow he would go and launch some major initiative, some major war without weapons, without morale, without allies, without budget in the middle of an election here is so ludicrous that of course the Iranians are taking advantage of it,” he said.
“This war is illegal. It has been mishandled. It has been bungled. It is going terribly. And if Donald Trump were to get on TV tomorrow night and say, ‘I believe that we should put troops on the ground and we will lose thousands of Americans,’ the country would go wild,” Rothkopf predicted. “No Republicans would win in November. You know, it would be the end, and he knows it. He knows he’s got no wiggle room here.”
Trump, 80, has actually improved Iran’s position relative to when the war began, Rothkopf argued. While he would deny it, Iran “has all the cards.”
“Donald Trump has done more to elevate the strategic position of Iran than any member of the Khamenei family, either of the Ayatollahs, the former leader or the current leader, than anybody in modern Iranian history,” Rothkopf said.
“Donald Trump, in one of the great kind of ironies of foreign policy cluster f---ery, has actually given the Iranians more strategic leverage than had they gotten a bomb and detonated it—because of the Gulf, because of the economics, because they don’t have to have the bomb, because they don’t have to endure those costs, because he is weakening the U.S. and weakening our alliances day in and day out, while they do nothing. Donald Trump is the atom bomb Iran wanted.”
When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle wrote that Rothkopf “is a far-left loser who clearly suffers from a severe and incurable disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has completely rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
As Iran’s supreme leader appoints hard-line military commanders to top roles, Trump on Monday not only lashed out at South Korea for spurning his request to get involved in the war, but threatened to “bomb the s--t out of” Oman, a backchannel intermediary.
New episodes of The Daily Beast Podcast are released every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday on YouTube, and on other podcast platforms the next morning. Follow our new feed on your favorite podcast platform at beast.pub/dailybeastpod and subscribe on YouTube to watch full episodes.
