Transcript: Trump-Pope War Has Ex-Aides Panicking about Mental Decline

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 16 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.Donald Trump’s war with Pope Leo has taken an uglier turn. His vice president, JD Vance, warned that the Pope should be careful when discussing theology. And House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to the whole battle, committed a howler by bringing up just war doctrine, which Trump and Pete Hegseth are serially violating. It’s notable that this comes as The New York Times just weighed in with an epic piece detailing Trump’s mental decline. In some obvious and not so obvious ways, Trump’s battle with the Pope neatly captures that decline and then some.Olivia Troye, a former national security official during the first Trump administration, got an unusually close-up look at Trump’s mental unfitness for office. She just announced a run for Congress [as a Democrat]. So we’re talking to her about all this today. Olivia, thanks for coming on.Olivia Troye: Hi Greg. Thanks for having me.Sargent: Let’s start with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Recently the Pope criticized Hegseth for praying for maximal violence and killing of the enemy. The Pope said that God does not hear the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them. Now listen to Johnson.Mike Johnson (voiceover): You know, I was taken a little bit aback, just honestly, frankly, something that was said—I think he said several days back—that something about those who engage in war, you know, that Jesus doesn’t hear their prayers or something. You know, it is a very well-settled matter of Christian theology. There’s something called the Just War Doctrine. There’s a time to every purpose under heaven. I think what the president’s comments, what the vice president’s comments reflect is their understanding deep in the, you know, the SCIF and the classified briefings of the stakes that are so high and the situation that we’re facing, and the fact that you had the nation that was the largest sponsor of terrorism now having had that ability taken away from them.Sargent: Let’s break this up into two pieces. Johnson said there that Trump has access to all this classified info that somehow makes our attack on Iran acceptable, seemingly meaning that the threat posed by Iran justified the attack. That’s not at all true. Is it, Olivia?Troye: From everything that we’ve seen in the intelligence community and the reporting that we’ve seen, there was no justification for this war. During the first Trump administration, there were many of us in national security—there were career people who were assigned to the White House—and I lived that firsthand. And Trump was specifically talked out of engaging with Iran. This is something that he has wanted to do for a very long time, but there were prevailing minds in the room that were able to navigate the situation and show him what the ramifications would mean. And so one of those being the Strait of Hormuz, which we are seeing play out right now in very, very plain view—the complications of what happens when you do that. And it ultimately impacts us here domestically.Sargent: Well, that’s really interesting because Donald Trump was told again this time by senior members of his administration that if he went into this, it would be much harder than he anticipated. And he just brushed them off. Sounds like you’re telling us that he was actually talked out of it by those same voices, or by similar voices, during the first term.Troye: I think the issue right now is that you have an ongoing escalation that is happening in this conflict, where now I don’t think that they even know where to go from here. I mean, I don’t think they know how to de-escalate this. I don’t know how they’re going to navigate this internationally. And this has become more of a regional thing as we’re seeing. And I think that in many ways, the United States—this leadership that we have unfortunately at the helm—has been outplayed.Sargent: It really looks that way. The second piece of what Johnson said is really something—he invoked just war doctrine. But Trump and Hegseth are violating that doctrine’s most basic tenets very seriously. Those tenets generally involve prohibitions on needless wars without imminent threats, and they involve proportionality toward the enemy. Yet Hegseth has talked about killing people who surrender, and our war has killed well over a thousand civilians. Can you talk about the perversity of this, of Johnson invoking just war doctrine?I mean, it is absolutely clear that Trump and Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth are violating those tenets regularly, right? Troye: Yes, absolutely. Look, I think the bigger concern with Pete Hegseth is just their invocation of this being like almost their holy war to fight.