How Israel Convinced Trump to Wage War Against Iran (w/ Max Blumenthal) | The Chris Hedges Report

Max Blumenthal reports that a psychological warfare campaign orchestrated by Zionist interests targeted Trump to drive him into war with Iran.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

As the chaos and destruction of the war in Iran escalates by the day, a lesser known element of the conflict remains ensconced in the shadows of statespeak and bureaucracy. Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, joins Chris Hedges to explain how an Israeli psychological warfare campaign worked to exploit Donald Trump’s imbecilic intelligence and increasing paranoia with the ultimate goal of luring the President into a war with Iran.

Blumenthal says the Israelis and their allies convinced President Trump that Iran was trying to assassinate him – a fear first stoked when Trump began a vicious cycle of violence with the regime after he assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani during his first term.

The FBI played an active role in this covert lobbying effort, utilizing War- on- Terror-esque sting operations to manufacture threats in order to justify foreign policy measures. “Trump is an enigmatic figure,” Blumenthal points out, “less stable and predictable than a Bill Clinton or even a Barack Obama. However, he offers a massive opportunity because he’s totally transactional and entered politics essentially to make a profit.”

As the war drags on and thousands of lives are claimed in the process, the grim reality that cynical actors likely played a role in manipulating American leadership into carrying out the interests of the Zionist lobby, with stories like Blumenthal’s, becomes increasingly clear.

“Do you think [fear of assassination] was the primary motivation behind Trump’s support of the war?” Hedges asks Blumenthal.

“I think Trump has to answer for that.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Max Jones

Transcript:

Thomas Hedges

Crew:

Sofia Menemenlis

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Transcript

Chris

“The Israeli government mounted a sustained campaign to entice Donald Trump into a war with Iran. It assured Trump that once the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was assassinated, the fragile edifice of the Iranian Islamic State would crumble and a new pro-Western government would replace it. Part of this campaign also included manufactured plots to convince Trump that Iran sought to assassinate him.

“I got him before he got me,” Trump told a reporter when asked about his motives for authorizing the killing of the Supreme Leader on February 28th. Joining me to discuss the campaign to convince Trump to go to war with Iran—something Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has unsuccessfully tried to get past administrations to do for decades—is Max Blumenthal, the editor of The Gray Zone.

Max is also the author of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, The Management of Savagery, and Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, a book that, despite being nearly 500 pages long, was so captivating and so well reported, I finished it in a day.

“So Max, there’s been long pressure on the Trump administration. In your article in The Grayzone, you say this goes back to the very campaign itself. Explain how that worked. He was, of course, surrounded by pro-Israel advisors, both in his first term—figures like Bolton—and in his second term.

But just lay out the process. And of course, he survived two assassination attempts—which I didn’t know until I read your story—Netanyahu immediately linked to Iran.”

Max Blumenthal:
“Well, there’s the material political force that influenced Trump, that Israel applied to influence Trump. And then there is the psychological pressure, which is more sophisticated. It was a very sophisticated campaign that was—I think it’s more difficult for people to understand, because Trump is a difficult figure to understand.

I mean, if you’re a sensible person and you listen to what Donald Trump says now, you may want to try to apply some sort of rational logic to what Donald Trump is saying. Perhaps he’s playing three-dimensional chess, or maybe it’s three dementia chess. Or he may just actually be an extremely stupid, feeble-minded individual who is ornery and irrational.

But let’s say you’re Trump’s enemy—it’s less important than if you’re Trump’s frenemy in Israel, and you need him to fulfill your objectives, because you have the lobby that can convince and influence US policymakers to act against American interests in your interest. But Donald Trump is an enigmatic figure, less stable and predictable than a Bill Clinton or even a Barack Obama. However, Trump offers this massive opportunity because he’s totally transactional, and he is someone who entered politics essentially to make a profit.

So the Israelis were working Trump through their cutouts—many of the figures that came out of the mega group that was launched in the 1990s to support Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaigns and various pro-Israel objectives internally inside the US, who are like 12 to 20 billionaires. Netanyahu had a handwritten list of billionaires that he drew up to support his campaign back in 1996.

So you had those. The most important figure would have been Sheldon Adelson, who was succeeded by his wife, his widow Miriam Adelson. There are other figures like Paul Singer, who was sort of a mainstream neoconservative Republican. He had a gay son, so he was hostile to the Christian right, but he liked the Republican Party because he is a vulture capitalist who wants to pay very low taxes.

He backed the entire career of Marco Rubio alongside the Adelsons, and Singer eventually got in with Trump when Trump made certain promises, which are now coming to bear right now in Iran and the West Bank and elsewhere. Singer’s an Israel-first guy. Other smaller figures: Ike Perlmutter, Bernard Marcus—we know these names.

And it’s obvious—Trump doesn’t even hide this—that they are essentially bribing him through our corrupt campaign finance system to allow Israel to de facto annex the West Bank, commit genocide in Gaza, punish the International Criminal Court for attempting to hold Israel’s military and political leadership to account for these crimes, and everything else, all the way up to war with Iran.

And then you had Donald Trump, the man who had to be manipulated. And I assume the Mossad and other forces within Israeli intelligence were seeking to first decode the enigma of Donald Trump’s psychology and then to exploit it, as they do with all of their targets—whether they’re targeting them for assassination or targeting them for an influence campaign.

Donald Trump has been targeted through this campaign of legal bribery and manipulation since his first campaign. He spoke, actually, at the Sands Casino in 2015, I believe it was, when he first started to emerge as a candidate. This is the casino owned by Sheldon Adelson in Las Vegas, for the Republican Jewish Coalition, which is a cipher for all the money from the right-wing Likudnik billionaires in the US—principally Adelson money.

And Trump said, ‘You guys like to make deals. Most of you are in real estate’—he’s probably thinking about his buddy Steve Witkoff—‘so let’s make a deal with the Palestinians. What would be wrong with that?’

And what Trump said there was just so unacceptable that he was denounced as an anti-Semite by the RJC. Then he immediately started to change his tune. And what did he say? What were the magic words? ‘We’re getting ripped off by the Iran deal that Barack Obama signed, and we’re giving the Iranians and the mullahs hundreds of billions of dollars.’

This was, of course, a humongous lie. We were just unfreezing money that had been stolen, essentially held up in international banks through sanctions.

Trump hammered this message again and again, and it was like a Likudnik bat signal to Adelson and all the billionaires of the mega group that they could now support him. And suddenly, he began to surge forward. He was making deals behind the scenes through his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who understood this world very well. Through his own family—Charles Kushner—the Kushner Foundation was supporting some of the most radical settlements in the West Bank, supporting exclusively right-wing, Likudnik-oriented activities.

The Kushner family was close friends with Netanyahu when he was opposition leader in Likud. Netanyahu would come over to their house, and young Jared would have to get out of his bed and sleep on the couch so Netanyahu could have a guest room.

I could go into the Kushner family for the next hour, but he was the fixer who helped align Donald Trump with this Zionist billionaire class.

Donald Trump enters office. Israel starts pushing Trump to—first of all, he rips up the Iran deal, so that was a major win. He announces the Abraham Accords, which is intended to encircle Iran with a Sunni alliance of family dictatorships in the Gulf—seated in the front row, the Adelsons and Jared Kushner.

It was all pretty clear what the agenda was. But Israel was making moves on the ground too, to escalate so that Trump would be pushed to wage war. Gareth Porter published a really important analysis with us at The Grayzone, a two-parter on how Netanyahu and Mike Pompeo—a Christian Zionist, subject of influence for not just the Israel lobby but also the MEK exiled Iranian regime change group when he was CIA director—basically teamed up to pressure Trump to authorize retaliatory attacks because of supposed axis-of-resistance attacks on US bases inside Iraq.

There was one key attack on a US base in—I believe it was Baghdad, it might’ve been Baghdad or Erbil—in 2019. And it turned out that no group affiliated with Iran or the Popular Mobilization Units had carried out that attack. It was, in fact, an ISIS attack. ISIS—a group that had essentially been defeated. Anyone could claim ISIS. Raises questions about whether it was a false flag.

And it was with that attack that Netanyahu and Pompeo both went to Trump and said, ‘You need to retaliate, and the way to do it is we’re going to take out Qasem Soleimani,’ the number two figure in the IRGC, leading figure, head of the Quds Force, responsible for all of this terrorism against Americans, they claimed—even though he had just worked with the US, hand in glove, to defeat ISIS.

And we know that he’s coming to Baghdad and will be getting off a plane to commit acts of terror against Americans—when in fact he was going to a diplomatic conference to negotiate diplomatically with Saudi Arabia.

Trump authorizes a drone strike to kill Soleimani getting off the plane. And it’s the first time that Iran retaliates against the US with ballistic missiles. They attack the US Al-Assad air base in Iraq. They, of course, give advance warning. Iran was always careful to avoid escalating beyond a certain point.”

However, the Israelis have achieved a major objective—not just militarily, but psychologically—because they had set Donald Trump up in an escalation trap where he would not only have to continue escalating against Iran every time it retaliated or face looking weak—which is another aspect of Trump’s personality; he always needs to save face—but also Trump would now fear his own assassination, because he had just taken out the second most important figure in the Iranian leadership hierarchy.

And that helps us set the stage for Trump’s comeback campaign and the various assassination attempts he faced after enduring the whole Russiagate saga, which was indeed a hoax intended to paint Donald Trump as a traitor.

The former CIA director, John Brennan, calls Trump a traitor on national TV. Trump’s looking over that shoulder. The Democrats impeach Trump in Congress over the Ukraine war. He faces lawsuits, accusations from women that he sexually harassed them in the past. It’s all coming at him so fast, and he develops this fear of assassination—and also this determination to claw his way back to power, to seek revenge against all the people that sought to take him out.

And so, for the Israelis, now the psychology of Donald Trump is clear: we just need to convince him that Iran is trying to kill him, and he’ll do what we want.

Chris
And, of course, that fear of assassination, as you point out, is well founded. He was nearly killed in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July of 2024. And then, two months later, there was another attempt—a potential assassin arrested who was hiding in the shrubbery outside of Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach.

So Trump was already primed for this, since there had been two close calls. You write that the FBI manufactured a series of assassination plots, successfully convincing Trump that Iran was hunting him on U.S. soil with highly sophisticated teams of hitmen. Can you give us the details—and I guess begin by talking about Asif Merchant?

Max Blumenthal
Merchant, yeah.

And so anyone who watched your intro will hear you quote Donald Trump stating, “I got him before he got me,” referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It’s not really in Iran’s doctrine to assassinate a foreign leader and risk war. It would easily trigger the U.S. to attack them. But this is what Trump believes.

So why does he believe it? Who convinced him? And what do we know?

Well, the first thing to know is that, as you said, Donald Trump’s fears of assassination are well founded. The main assassination attempt—which nearly claimed Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13th, 2024—is not well understood and still shrouded in mystery.

And it’s especially not well understood by people on the left because, you know, what do they care? The right is much more invested in trying to get to the truth. Republican members of Congress have gone as far as going to Butler to try to get to the bottom of it.

One of them, Clay Higgins, went to Butler, I think, two weeks after the assassination attempt. And he found that the body of Thomas Matthew Crooks—the would-be assassin who missed Trump, supposedly sliced his ear, and missed his head by like an inch—his body had been destroyed. It had actually been returned to his family. There was no toxicology report he could access. We later learned the toxicology report was faulty.

But there are so many instances of obstruction around Crooks. Christopher Wray, the FBI director at the time, said that Crooks had no social media history and was just this mysterious lone wolf. It turned out he had an extensive social media history on YouTube, for example. He was a prolific commenter declaring his intention to ignite a civil war by killing political leaders in the U.S.

He explicitly called for the assassination of Ilhan Omar in one comment. Other YouTube users were flagging his comments, but nothing ever happened to him that we know of.

So there are real questions—within Donald Trump’s support base—about whether Thomas Matthew Crooks himself had been recruited by the FBI at some point, and that Trump’s assassination attempt was a manufactured plot gone wrong.

And it gets even eerier when we look at this figure, Asif Merchant. He is from Pakistan and entered the United States through Houston to visit family. He had an Iranian wife, whom he met on a pilgrimage in Karbala. This wound him up on a DHS watch list when he entered George H.W. Bush Airport in Houston, I think in February of 2024.

However, Customs and Border Patrol waves him through after discovering his history and seeing the watch list. They gave him a kind of visa that enables law enforcement investigation. They basically decided to target him and manipulate him.

The question is: were the Israelis alerting them in advance? Was this done in tandem with Israeli intelligence?

Merchant enters the country. He’s a small-time businessman trying to meet partners. A man approaches him and says, “I want to help you sell shirts and get into the garment industry.” That man is an FBI informant. He was a former translator for the US Army in Afghanistan. We don’t know his real name.

He winds up filming Merchant in a hotel room declaring his intention to carry out an assassination of unnamed leadership using a 25-person protest as a distraction, with a woman handling reconnaissance and a sniper. This is a guy with no military history, no experience with any of this.

Then he’s told by the informant, “All we need is $5,000.” $5,000 for this giant flash mob style assassination extravaganza is absurd. It turns out Merchant didn’t even have $5,000. The informant leads him around meeting other supposed collaborators—who are all FBI informants.

He flies back to Houston. He’s arrested on June 12th, 2024—24 hours before the Butler assassination attempt.

After Butler, he’s visited in his cell by FBI agents who want to know if he had anything to do with the attempt to kill Trump and Butler. They determine he didn’t. But one agent later said, “If we had demonstrated that this Merchant guy had been sent by the IRGC, it would have meant war. They would have had to attack Iran.”

Chris
And I just want to stop you there, Max, because as you know, immediately after 9/11, this was the Modus Operandi of the FBI—finding these dead-enders and essentially creating the plots themselves and supply them with the money. Something like 90 percent of these cases where they uncovered terrorist cells, they were essentially created by the FBI.

Max Blumenthal
Completely. Trevor Aronson, in his book The Terror Factory, found that over 90% of terror busts during the Obama era were manufactured plots.

The FBI agent overseeing the Merchant case was also involved in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, where Americans were told that these right-wing militia men had plotted to kidnap the Democratic governor Gretchen Witmer, which turned out to be largely orchestrated by FBI informants. None of the defendants conceived of the plot. The plot was conceived of by paid FBI informants. But they were all convicted.Anyway when did we learn about this ‘horrifying’ right-wing terror plot? In October of 2020, it was kind of like the October surprise that they dropped in order to further implicate Donald Trump as an extremist. I’m no fan of Trump but it was this was pretty clearly a political ruse. So the same guy was involved. He was found in contempt of Congress I believe for lying about evidence. The FBI has proven itself to be one of the most corrupt institutions in American society and one of the most dangerous.

Chris
We should also mention there was another FBI manufactured plot to supposedly kill John Bolton.

Max Blumenthal
Yes. That was another plot involving confidential informants that never amounted to anything. Even mainstream press concluded Bolton was never in danger.

And Mike Pompeo subsequently claimed that he was targeted by the same IRGC-run assassination network, but there’s nothing even in FBI or DOJ documents indicating that Pompeo was a target. It’s just something Pompeo runs around and says constantly in order to implicate Iran.

So, the IRGC operative who supposedly oversaw those plots is named Moghaddam. This was the guy whose assassination Pete Hegseth announced on day three of the war on Iran. How did Pete Hegseth know that Moghaddam had supposedly been killed? The Israelis told him that they killed him, and so Hegseth was thanking the Israelis for taking out the IRGC operative who he believed had overseen all of these plots against Donald Trump.

Except they’re not even said to involve Donald Trump. It supposedly involved John Bolton. What’s more, this would be like assassinating, I don’t know, Pete Hegseth because some American guy was in another country and killed somebody. Moghaddam, whoever he is, is so far up the food chain, it’s very doubtful that he had any command and control over this supposed assassination.

So, in every case, there are either confidential informants or witnesses who appear to have been confidential informants but aren’t named as such. And there never was a case in which any individual who’s accused of being instrumentalized by Iran to take out Donald Trump ever came anywhere close.

Asif Merchant said, “You know, I didn’t even want to do it. I just felt like I was being manipulated and pressured, and I thought I had to do it or my family back in Iran would be harmed.” But he said, “There’s no way I was ever going to succeed.”

But then there were imaginary plots that were conceived as well. I mean, we’re just talking about the manufactured ones. The most serious of these was when Donald Trump was told that there were IRGC operatives, or IRGC-trained operatives, in the United States who had shoulder-mounted MANPADS that could take out Trump Force One. This prompted Donald Trump to take decoy flights during the campaign on the private jet of his real estate buddy, Steve Witkoff.

Where did the FBI get that from? It looks like they pulled it from the indictment of Ryan Routh, who was the second guy who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in September 2024. He was the mentally troubled drifter who was seen pointing an SK-style assault rifle toward the golf course that Donald Trump was playing on, with Steve Witkoff, by the way. He was pursued and caught by Secret Service agents.

It turned out he has his own shady history. He was attempting to recruit internationals to fight in Ukraine, including mujahideen from Afghanistan and including Iranians. And he had said—probably this was all bluster—but he had told some Iranian he was trying to recruit that he would give him a shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft weapon, like a rocket launcher.

So it looks like the FBI just finessed the Routh indictment into an imaginary threat against Donald Trump to keep him afraid of Iran on the campaign trail.

But going back to the supposed Israeli assassination of Moghaddam, The New York Times reported last week that they probably didn’t even kill this figure. I mean, this all came from Israeli intelligence. So this is the first time mainstream media has acknowledged that Israeli intelligence was behind the information that Donald Trump received that Iran was trying to kill him.

So it raises questions about the Israeli intelligence role in Asif Merchant’s case, about the Israeli intelligence role in convincing John Bolton that he was targeted, Mike Pompeo, and the phony plot to take down Trump Force One.

And then finally, Benjamin Netanyahu—after Israel launched an unprovoked assault on Iran in June 2025, the 12-day war—Netanyahu wanted to guarantee that Donald Trump got involved and authorized U.S. military action, because Israel was not doing very well at that point. Tel Aviv was getting hammered. Iran was retaliating after losing much of its IRGC command structure in a way I don’t think Israel expected.

So Netanyahu goes on primetime on Fox News—which is what Donald Trump constantly has on his TV—with Bret Baier, and he declares that Iran is behind two assassination plots, two attempts on Donald Trump’s life.

Bret Baier was stunned. It was a completely scripted interview, and this was the only follow-up question. He said, “What are you talking about? Do you have intelligence on this?” And Netanyahu said, “Yeah, we have intelligence,” but he was very careful to kind of cover up the fact that Israeli intelligence was manipulating Trump. He said, “We get this through proxies, through proxies.”

So it was very clear that Israel was trying to convince Donald Trump that Iran was not only attempting to target him, but that they had sliced his ear with a bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, and that Thomas Crooks was somehow an IRGC operative—this lone American boy who apparently was friendless and had never left the country. And Donald Trump, by this point, believed it.

Chris:
Do you think that was the primary motivation behind Trump’s support of the war?

Max Blumenthal:
That’s a great question.

I think Trump has to answer for that. He’s not being asked these kinds of questions. Often he deflects from questions with insults or amusing stories or just incoherent rhetoric. But when this war is over, it will have dealt such a blow to U.S. empire that there will be a lot to answer for. And I think his motives will come back into play.

And I think there are motives that he’s not able to address, such as his own personal fear of the Israelis—that Donald Trump wonders what would happen to him if he suddenly went off script after accepting so much money from this mafia-like coterie of billionaires—Adelson, Singer, Marcus, etc.

What does Donald Trump think about Charlie Kirk’s assassination? Who does he think did it? I know people around Trump have serious questions about that one as well. But watching Charlie Kirk get shot in the neck in the middle of a rally was probably not received well by Trump.

He’s not someone who wants to sacrifice his legacy. He’s there to make as much money as possible. He’s worried about his grandchildren and sons being targeted. His son, Eric Trump, actually stated on Fox News that he doesn’t believe the official story around Charlie Kirk or around Butler, Pennsylvania.

So I think there’s a fear factor as well. I don’t think Donald Trump likes Benjamin Netanyahu.

Chris:
I don’t think anybody likes Benjamin Netanyahu.

Max Blumenthal:
I think he’s afraid of him. I think he defers to him. And I think that Donald Trump is so feeble-minded and had so much hubris after Venezuela—the success he saw there—that he thought he could achieve the trifecta of Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran in a few months and would be seen as this hero.

And he was the subject of so much manipulation, financially and psychologically, that his brain had been rendered putty in the hands of the Israel lobby.

Chris:
I mean, Max, at the same time, he was getting heat on the Epstein files.

Max Blumenthal:
Yeah. I helped coin the phrase “Operation Epstein Fury.” That was my reply when the Department of War announced it was “Operation Epic Fury.” I just happened to be up watching the war at that time, and I responded “Operation Epstein Fury,” and my tweet got 52,000 likes.

I’m sure someone else would have come up with it. Many people understand that—I think liberals tend to see this war as a distraction from the Epstein files and the Epstein saga. There’s a running joke that Trump’s going to have to release more Epstein files to distract from his failures in this war.

Most Democratic voters, according to a poll commissioned by the outlet Dropsite, overwhelmingly believe that this war is a distraction from the Epstein files.

I don’t think so. I see it as synonymous with Donald Trump’s proximity to Jeffrey Epstein and to the class of grifters, elites, and oligarchs that existed within the transatlantic militant Zionist network of Jeffrey Epstein. It’s the so-called Epstein class.

And that’s why you’ll even hear from Iranians—who are very familiar with American and Western culture—that they’re at war with the “Epstein class” or the “Epstein army” or the “axis of Epstein.” It’s just a symbol.

Epstein has become a symbol for this decadent, militaristic Western elite that’s incapable of negotiation or humanity and worships at the altar of Baal or Moloch. That’s why, in Iranian pro–Islamic Republic rallies, when they want to show defiance against the U.S. and Israel, they burn effigies of the pagan god Baal and inscribe missiles with phrases like “This is revenge for Epstein Island victims.” That was actually inscribed on a ballistic missile.

So I think there’s a greater symbolism to Epstein and the Epstein files. If we read it too literally—just as if we read Donald Trump too literally and try to see this in a linear sense—we’ll misunderstand the true meaning, whether it’s the meaning to Donald Trump or to those he’s now placed under bombardment in Iran.

Chris:
So the war is not going well for Israel or the United States. We don’t know how much punishment Israel is taking because of very heavy censorship, but reading between the lines, it’s significant.

Iran has no interest in negotiating. It’s tried that route. It realizes these are not entities—the United States or Israel—that they can appease or negotiate with. Iran has the capacity to inflict tremendous economic damage. It’s already inflicting economic damage over the long term.

Where do you see it going, and what do you expect the response to be?

Max Blumenthal:
Well, just to continue with the theme of how Trump is being manipulated and moved: the reason that the Iranians won’t negotiate, I think, is who’s on the other side of the table—or down the hallway, since they negotiate through an intermediary in Oman. It’s Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

These are dedicated Zionist movement ideologues and operatives who used negotiations to weaken Iran’s ability to respond to an Israeli decapitation strike.

Steve Witkoff is a guy who carries a pager gifted to him by Benjamin Netanyahu in honor of the pager operation. He declared at a fundraiser for an Israeli group called United Hatzalah that his mother would be so proud to see him speak immediately after the former head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen. His sons are also very involved in the zionist world and in Trump corruption networks.

Jared Kushner wasn’t even supposed to be part of this administration. He emerged out of nowhere to lead negotiations and the “Board of Peace,” which is a board of war designed to replace the UN, with its first project being to profit from the biometrical controlled concentration camp of Gaza.

Those are the figures on the other line. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has said he constantly turns down Steve Witkoff’s attempts to negotiate.

Witkoff—after the US launched its war with Israel, assassinating Iran’s supreme leader and as many leaders as possible and killing many common people in the process—went on one of the Sunday shows and said Iran not only refused to end enrichment—which is a lie—but also claimed Iran refused to give up its navy and its ballistic missile program, saying they can’t have a navy because it would allow them to close the ‘Gulf of Hormuz’— he didn’t even know that it was called the Strait of Hormuz.

By saying that it was very clear what was going on in these negotiations. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were putting forward Israeli terms in order to make sure that Iran’s red lines were crossed at every point. What sovereign country is going to give up its navy or ballistic missile program that’s entirely legal under international law and which exists to deter these attacks that it continues to receive? It’s not going to happen.

And we were told in the media that these negotiations are only focusing on Iran’s nuclear weapons while Steve Witkoff went to Trump and said Iran can produce 9-12 nuclear bombs within a week because they’ve reached 60 percent enrichment and that got back to the Iranians and they said ‘this guys doesn’t know anything—you can’t produce a nuclear weapon at 60 percent. He’s an idiot.’

So you’re dealing with ideologically motivated zionists who are also complete morons who can’t even understand the basic technical perimeters to even come to a deal.

So why would Iran ever go back to the table? The only thing Iran can do now is impose an end to the war through force. That’s the only language the Trump administration understands.

Meanwhile, Iran is showing it can hit back. Just today the fuel depot at Dubai International airport was hit. It’s continuing to escalate. That’s shocking to someone like Donald Trump, who has been heavily manipulated and lacks the capacity for critical thought.

What is Trump being told now that the war is going badly, by those who want to keep him in the war? There’s definitely a faction in the Trump administration that would like to get out of this that has buyer’s remorse. I think Marco Rubio might even be part of that faction. He wants to focus on Cuba and his little Donroe Doctrine.The people who are telling him about all these attacks—at U.S. bases, for example the US consulate in Baghdad (the embassy was evacuated this week), in Iraq, elsewhere, we’re getting hit by drones from Iran, from the resistance outfits in Iraq—and Donald Trump doesn’t believe it. He’s being told that this is all AI.

He even threw a tantrum on Truth Social and on Air Force One, screaming at the press and declaring on Truth Social that all of these videos of Iran’s supposed successes are AI and the whole media’s falling for it. He screamed at a reporter and said that a major rally of 250,000 people in Tehran, after he assassinated Khamenei was fake. The New York Times has verified the image. I don’t need to verify the images. I can see from all my acquaintances and sources in Iran that this is happening like every night there. The whole society is united and mobilized against this assault, or much of the society.

But Donald Trump doesn’t believe any of it. And Pete Hegseth, this glowering sociopathic dry drunk character who should have been fired over Signal-Gate and managed to stay relevant by bombing fishermen with drones off the coast of Venezuela, is now banning photographers from the Pentagon because he doesn’t like the way they make him look. They make him look like he’s angry and weary and under pressure. And he threw a temper tantrum at the Pentagon press corp just two days ago, screaming at the press: ‘you’re cheering for Donald Trump’s failure. That’s all you do’. And he declared he can’t wait for David Ellison to take over all of their networks, David Ellison being another billionaire asset who controls Paramount, CBS and will soon control CNN, VIACOM, TikTok and many other media assets

So they’re in panic mode. They’re blaming the press. This is not where they thought they were going to be. And Donald Trump is now being manipulated by being told that the entire failing war is a simulation and that he’s actually winning. But what are they doing? What are they hitting?

Most of the targets that the US is hitting are civilian residential targets. Over 17,000 residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed, according to the Iranian committee on the Red Cross. And the military targets they hit primarily are Iran’s Navy, naval ships that would not be useful in closing the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s Air Force, which was outdated and might have been useful in a regional conflict or to attack ISIS, but would have never been able to compete with the US Air Force.

But they’re not able to suppress Iran’s Shahid drones. Iran launched the 54th wave of Operation True Promise 4 just yesterday with ballistic missiles. And so it’s not working, and Iran is, I think, ready for a months-long conflict that could fully exhaust US empire. What they’re demanding is the withdrawal of US bases from the region. That’s what Donald Trump is fighting for now. He’s not fighting for regime change. There’s not going to be regime change. He’s fighting to simply maintain the US presence in the region and to open the Strait of Hormuz, facing global economic catastrophe.

The Europeans are not coming to his aid, because how did he treat them with the tariffs? He threatened them over Greenland. Europeans have more minesweeping ships than the US. He needs them, and they’re not coming to his rescue at this point. So we may be seeing the unraveling of Donald Trump through this war and the Trump administration, and we’re only like a year into that administration.

Chris:
My fear, Max—is that Bibi will reach for the nukes.

Max Blumenthal:
Why do you fear that?

Chris:
Because I think Israel cannot sustain this kind of war of attrition.

Max Blumenthal:
I think that’s a legitimate fear. I think one of the bigger stories of the year is that Israel likely tested a nuclear weapon in Dimona in, I think, early February. There was a massive earthquake near the secret nuclear facility in Dimona that was likely the result of the test of a nuclear bomb, and Israel was sending a message, but also preparing for the worst.

And I think we should consider the possibility that Donald Trump could detonate some form of nuclear weapon or tactical nuclear weapon if he’s unable to simply walk away. The Israelis do not want Donald Trump to walk away from this. He’s being urged to walk away by many of his advisors.

But the Israelis have all this leverage over him. So we should be concerned about whether they’ll drop a nuclear weapon. And this is why it’s completely rational and legitimate for Iran to develop a nuclear weapons program as a means of deterrence against these psychotic forces that are coming to destroy them.

Chris:
Yeah, exactly. Okay, all right. Thanks, Max, and I want to thank Victor, Sophia, Max, and Thomas, who produced the show. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.

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Photos

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