The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 22 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.It’s now becoming clear that Donald Trump’s failed war in Iran will have far-reaching consequences for our country, and geopolitically as well. We’re only just beginning to get our heads around how disastrous this war and this presidency could very well prove over time. It’s a deeply consequential moment, and Trump is spending his nights tweeting crazed demands for adulation, insisting that his war was a world-historical triumph, and seething about the prospects for finishing his ballroom.This gap between what Trump is doing to this country and the world on one side and his megalomaniacal trivial obsessions on the other is really jarring and unnerving to witness. Paul Krugman has been writing really well on his excellent Substack about both sides of this divide, so we’re talking to him about how to make sense of it all. Paul, nice to have you back on.Paul Krugman: Good to be back on, although I wish the times were better, but anyway.Sargent: Exactly. Let’s start with the easy stuff. At 4:32 in the morning, Donald Trump posted this:“These fools who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran when the stock market just hit a record high and oil prices are tumbling down are either jealous, bad people, or stupid. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”Paul, Trump is very angry that he’s not getting more worshipful praise for the world-historical triumph that was his ceasefire with Iran, which basically just put a stop to the disaster he created. So we might as well start here: What did you think of the quote-unquote deal?Krugman: Obviously, it’s horrible. Iran won. Iran is in a much stronger position and the U.S. in a much weaker position than before the war started. And of course, the deal is vastly inferior to the Obama JCPOA that Trump ripped up in his first term—all of this at the cost of enormous outlays of money, depletion of weapons stocks, killed a lot of people. Basically, we’ve just shown the whole world that we’re maybe not quite a paper tiger, but a lot less of a power than we were supposed to be. So all of this is an enormous diminution of the United States.The hawks are saying, Why is Trump giving in? Why isn’t he following up on his victory? But there was no victory. This is actually the best you could do given how the war has gone. He should have made this deal about a week in when it became clear that the whole premise of his enterprise was not going to work. Sargent: He could have made a better deal before the war started. Krugman: Of course. He could have just done nothing—that would have been better. Going back in time, he could have kept that Obama agreement, which was doing a much better job of containing Iran.But it tells you something about where we are that there are apparently a substantial number of, at least until recently, pro-Trump people who really believe that we were winning the war or we had won the war. Which just shows you how detached from reality they are.Sargent: Well, they’re all in the same information bubble. Trump did another missive that was in all caps, saying this: “OIL IS FLOWING, IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON (THE WORLD WILL BE SAFE!), THE STOCK MARKETS ARE ROARING, JOBS ARE AT RECORDS, AND PRICES ARE DROPPING (AFFORDABILITY!). OUR COUNTRY IS STRONG, SAFE, AND RESPECTED LIKE NEVER BEFORE. ‘YOU’RE WELCOME!’”OK, Paul. He got nothing significant on Iran’s nukes and our country is weaker, less safe, and less respected. But we should step back. He’s making a bigger argument there, isn’t he? It’s that in every way, the nation is booming, strong, and leading decisively in the world. What do you make of that bigger argument?Krugman: So, the stock market is up. No question about that. Although the stock market rose a lot under Joe Biden, too—Trump would like you to put that down the memory hole. And stocks are up, by the way, around the world. There’s a stock market boom. I haven’t checked the numbers lately, but I believe that they’re up substantially more outside the United States than inside the United States. So this is stuff that is not really reflecting U.S.-specific developments and certainly not Trump-specific developments. Presidents do not control the stock market.But leaving that aside, the economy—it’s not booming. We basically have had slower job growth than we did in the last two years of Biden, and basically flat unemployment. So that’s not great—it’s not a catastrophe, but it’s not great.
