The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.In this episode, we discuss this polling average showing support for the Iran war at 38 percent, this finding showing Trump’s net approval on immigration has lost 20 points since last year, and these terrible numbers for Trump on the economy.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.We’ve noticed an interesting pattern. Whenever the news gets particularly bad for Donald Trump, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s cult-like obsequiousness gets dialed up to 11. That just happened after Trump was hit with a brutal news cycle on multiple fronts. Those fronts include increasing signs that the U.S. might have bombed an Iranian elementary school, terrible new jobs numbers, and the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Trump’s presidency is in trouble, and it’s at moments like this that his sycophants really step it up. We’re trying to make sense of all this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who dissects Trump world as well as anyone out there. Amanda, always good to have you on.Marcotte: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So first, we apologize for doing two episodes in a row involving Karoline Leavitt, but we think this is really important. Here’s Leavitt’s latest. Donald Trump exploded on Truth Social insisting that the war will not stop until Iran commits to “unconditional surrender.” That sure sounds like regime change is the goal, so Leavitt tried to clean this up. Listen to this exchange.Reporter (voiceover): What does the president mean when he calls for unconditional surrender? Is he saying that the regime has to fully relinquish control?Leavitt (voiceover): What the president means is that when he, as commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury have been fully realized—then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender, whether they say it themselves or not.Sargent: Okay. I mean, that’s just insane. The Iranian regime must fully surrender; how will we know when that has happened? Not when it actually happens—just when Dear Leader says it has happened. This is just bizarrely cult-like. What do you think, Amanda?Marcotte: I had the worst flashback to George W. Bush in his flight suit with his “Mission Accomplished” banner in the Iraq War. I mean, he made the same mistake. He put a little bit more effort into the mistake—I think he maybe just didn’t fly completely by the seat of his pants—but he still made the same mistake, which is: if I say the war is over, if I say it’s done, if I say we have succeeded, then that will somehow make it so. And it just turns out that’s not actually true. I mean, how many years did the war drag past the “Mission Accomplished” banner? This is not how it works. You can’t just say they have unconditionally surrendered when they’re still shooting at you and throwing bombs and fighting back.Sargent: And who knows what could happen in the aftermath of this. The United States could essentially decimate the Iranian regime and then Trump could declare a victory at that point and go home—any one of these scenarios is possible. But what’s kind of alarming is this sort of setting of the table for Trump gets to say what reality is. That’s why I find this so disheartening, right? And so dispiriting to watch.You have Trump himself popping off and just posting on Truth Social: here’s the new war goal, the new war goal is unconditional surrender. And instead of hearing from people in the administration who know what they’re talking about, all we get is his chief propagandist telling us that that’s absolutely a brilliant way to describe what’s happening—and that he’ll get to say when it has happened. Do you know what I mean?Marcotte: Yeah. I will say maybe I’m just a Pollyanna, or maybe I’m just an eternal optimist, but I can’t help but see the escalating—everything is great, nothing is wrong, dear leader knows everything. And if dear leader says this one day and says the opposite the next day—or honestly, with Trump and the Iran war, it changes by the hour, what he claims the objectives are—they’re basically trying to assert not just that dear leader knows everything, but that there’s sense to be made out of this pudding-brain nonsense that’s coming out of him. And the louder and more insistent the clapping gets, the more I just feel like that’s all they have. There’s a stench of desperation coming from Karoline Leavitt.Sargent: Let’s check out a little bit more of Karoline Leavitt here. She was asked about MAGA’s anger over the attack on Iran. MAGA, of course, is supposed to be anti-interventionist, against foreign entanglements, et cetera. So she was asked about that.