The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 24 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.Speaking to reporters, Donald Trump made a strange claim about Iran. He said no one anticipated that Iran would attack other countries in an effort to widen the war. But in saying that, Trump revealed that he didn’t anticipate it—which is a striking admission about his own lack of foresight.We think this captures something broader. On one front after another, Trump plainly didn’t prepare for eventualities that most experts fully did anticipate. So how directly responsible are these failings for what we’re seeing right now—that by most indications, the war is getting worse for Trump and the U.S. on many fronts?Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, has a new piece on the deeper ideological failings that led to this debacle. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Matt, good to have you on.Matt Duss: Great to be with you. Thanks.Sargent: So the latest is that over the weekend, Trump threatened to bomb Iranian electricity plants if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Then on Monday, he abruptly postponed that threat, claiming that “very strong talks” are underway with Iran about them reaching an agreement to end the fighting. Iran quickly denied any such talks were underway. Matt, what do we know about where things are right now, and how badly is this going for Trump and the United States?Duss: Well, we know that this is going much worse than Donald Trump himself thought it would. We know that Donald Trump does not do the reading. We know that Donald Trump has the attention span of a fly. We know that he just makes stuff up all the time. Trump made this threat over the weekend to bomb power plants—which is clearly a war crime, to attack plants that produce power for civilians. And then I think he woke up and saw that the stock market is in trouble, oil prices are continuing to go higher. And I’ve said, and others have said for a while, that that’s the only thing that really gets Donald Trump’s attention—when he’s sitting there, you know, drinking Diet Coke, watching Fox News, and he sees the ticker going by on the bottom. And he understands that the market is in trouble. So he came out and said, well, we’re going to not do that because we are thinking about ending the war—we’re in talks. That doesn’t seem to be true at all, but that’s where Donald Trump is focused, primarily, because that is how he believes his presidency will be rated: whether the stock market is doing well.Sargent: Well, I want to come back to his claims and how things are going in a bit. But first, let’s listen to Trump. He talked to reporters on Monday and he tried to justify his handling of the war this way.Donald Trump (voiceover): You’re talking about a country that has been evil for 47 years. They’ve been horrible—death all over the world, not just us. Look at the way they attacked unexpectedly all of those countries surrounding it. There was not supposed to be—nobody was even thinking about it. But they wanted to take over the Middle East and they wanted to knock out Israel permanently. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they would have been able to do that.Sargent: So according to Trump, Iran has been evil for 47 years, yet no one anticipated that they might attack other countries if the U.S. attacked them. Doesn’t quite add up. Matt, is it true that no one anticipated that?Duss: It is not true at all. Everyone anticipated this. Every one of these countries that Iran has attacked—we should have expected it, whether it’s Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, obviously Israel. This is part of Iran’s defensive strategy. This is part of how they believe they were creating deterrence. Deterrence in the most basic sense is creating the belief in the mind of your enemy that attacking you will cause more pain than it’s worth, right? Whether we’re talking about nuclear deterrence—the United States and the Soviet Union—the idea is, well, if we attack them, they will attack us with nuclear weapons, and nobody wants that. Iran’s approach was, well, listen, we know that we can’t face off head to head with the United States militarily, but we do have ways of creating pain for the United States and for the United States’s partners across the region. And that was what they hoped would deter the United States.Obviously, that didn’t deter the United States. The United States and Israel attacked Iran a few weeks ago. And so Iran is following through—they have to follow through, in a sense, if they want to make sure that this doesn’t happen again in the future. So yes, to answer your question, of course people knew Iran was going to do this. Again, Donald Trump does not bother to do the reading.Sargent: Right.