Let's go to the war.

Um, and I want you to watch uh what president had to say about the new supreme leader of Iran.

And we've heard you want to meet with the new idol, the new supreme leader.

I don't want to meet, but if if I did meet, I'd be honored to meet him.

I I'd like to see if we make a deal.

But if we make a deal, it's possible that I would meet him.

I'd be okay with it.

I would say I'm not his favorite person.

But with that being said, he's probably a prof.

I don't know him.

He's probably a professional.

In some circles, he has a very good reputation actually.

You know, sometimes some people say bad, but a lot of people say bad about me.

It's totally false.

Of course.

My first question is in what circles does ayat much have a good reputation?

Like your bowling league, PTA, I I don't I can't.

So, Nancy, make make that make sense.

I'll try.

I mean, I'll remember remember that um that this was someone he called the lightweight, someone whose father he killed, someone whose family members he killed, someone whose country he invaded and said his regime and that of his father um needed to fall and that the US was ready to do anything to make that happen.

Putting that all aside, I actually think that these kinds of comments hurt the US in their negotiating because again what it's signaling that the US really wants a deal.

And so it it at a time when the Iranians are closing the straits and and can sustain that for months while the US it's much harder to keep that straight closed.

It it it creates a ticking time bomb in terms of the impact on the global economy.

So, I think it hurts the the deal itself that they're trying to reach and also it goes against the the the stated um objectives of this war and what Israel wanted to see out of this war, the the US partner during the invasion and the attacks itself.

Right, Steve?

You you and I have covered Middle East wars for 30 years.

Um th the these latest round of comments from the president strike me as a kind of a guy who walks into a car dealership and says, "I'm not leaving here without a car."

And the salesmen are like, "Great.

Yeah, super.

We can we could we could do that."

Uh I I mean where where is this is this heading?

And has he turned um America's allies in the Middle East, not just Israel, but UAE and other Gulf allies into kind of suckers here?

I mean, I'm glad you asked me where this is heading because I know exactly and I'm prepared here to tell you exactly where if we had commercials, I would say after the commercial break, Steve is going to tell us how the war ends.

Nice tease.

You're a TV pro.

Look, I don't have a clue where this is heading.

I mean, I think part of the problem is the president will say one thing one day and he'll say something entirely different the next day.

you know, ear earlier this week, he said that he couldn't care less about the negotiations at all.

He was bored of them.

He didn't care where they were going.

He was sort of done with it.

And then he had this, you know, blow up with Benjamin Netanyahu because he believes that Israel is threatening the success of the negotiation.

So on two different days, he's saying two completely different things.

And that, I think, is basically what we're seeing with his approach to the entire war.

I mean, we're we're waging a war that he said today wasn't really a war.

We're engaged in a ceasefire ceasefire.

That's not actually a ceasefire.

We wanted regime change.

We haven't changed the regime.

And now he wants to meet with the leader of the new regime, which is basically the same as the who's the wounded son of the previous.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just incoherence all around.

And we can try to make sense of it, but we're probably better off saying, you know what, it's just incoherence.

Yeah.

Let's talk about this Netanyahu Trump relationship because the one thing that Nancy, you know, this is a Middle East correspondent.

One thing an Israeli prime minister up for re-election can't be seen as is a is a sucker in his population.

And it and it seems like Trump is yelling at Netanyahu now in a way that no Yeah.

I mean, he confirmed it um in a way that no previous president ever spoke to Net He's been around for a long time, obviously.

What do you make of where this relationship is going and how does this actually affect Netanyahu's own standing in his own country?

Well, you'll, as you know, the the um Israeli parliament dissolved itself um in preparation for elections.

So, we know that they're coming up soon in a matter of weeks.

And Netanyahu now finds himself in a position stuck between an American um ally that wants to see this war end quickly and and an Israeli population that wants to see um resolution um and these various um Iranianbacked factions posing a threat to him.

And so, he's stuck in between.

And I think you've seen in the polls in Israel itself the the waiting support.

It's one of the reasons the parliament was dissolved.

And so um it is again another reason where I think it makes negotiations harder when you have this seemingly strong alliance being fractured over how to end the war that they had started together with such lofty aims.

Michael, I mean put all of his chips on Trump.

He kind of maybe the Democrats were leaving the Israel cause behind anyway, but he accelerated that.

Uh where does this where do you think this heads?

Well, I think in the short term it gives Iran more leverage because this is one of Iran's goals to split these two powers away from each other.

So why make a deal now?

I mean, if you've got the the leader of Israel and the leader of the United States fighting o with with each other over what's going on every day in Lebanon, like why make a deal?

is a perfect situation for them to draw out.

Um Netanyahu's been on thin ice with American administrations for what, a decade?

I mean like more.

I mean like like he he is he has upset every president I've covered and even before this Iran invasion um you know I was talking to White House officials who were who were constantly complaining about the bad behavior of Netanyahu.

And so he was always walking this fine line.

And I think I you know he's a survivor.

I don't know what's going to happen and I don't know Israeli politics very well.

But um but I think you know it's safe to say that like the the the the bipartisan unity behind supporting the US relationship with Israel that has reigned for decades in the United States is basically reset now.

And I don't see in the short term a clear path for it to be rebuilt.

Definitely in the Democratic party and I think increasingly in the Republican party.

Before we get to main oyster farming, I want to ask you, Nancy, one more question about the Iran war.

Um, stockpiles of key weapons and munitions are very low.

Iran is a third tier adversary of the United States.

Uh, how does this look right now to the rest of the world?

Well, looks like that we are not the force that can go after multiple threats in Asia and Europe and the Middle East at the same time.

For example, Ukraine is asking for more munitions, saying we desperately need more.

And the US can't provide them, can't give them a sort of guarantee of what we're going to provide.

The munitions that the US dispensed during the war will take years to replace and billions of dollars.

They shot down um drones that were thousands of dollars and take days or weeks to build.

And that disparity is why they the US finds itself sort of limited in what it can do in terms of really being a a power that can that can stand by allies and on multiple parts of the of the world.

And so it's a real problem and I think a factor in the president's inability or unwillingness to go back and do more strikes because the threats are not just to the munition stockpiles that we have but for Gulf allies who have taken the brunt of Iran's response to US strikes.

We'll talk about that in future shows.

Obviously, I want to go to Maine.

Graham Platner, puditive Democratic nominee for Senate, has 99 problems.

Um, let's start with uh one of them.

Here he is with uh Chris Hayes talking about the small issue of the Nazi tattoo.

Let's watch that.

The Times basically reported that they they saw texts of hers in which she basically said that you had a quote Nazi tattoo and she joked about how she's going to go volunteer for Collins.

This is in August.

How does she know it's a Nazi tattoo in August of last year?

And you don't know it's a Nazi tattoo in August of last year.

Well, she certainly didn't send that text to me.

So, uh, whoever she sent it to and was talking to, that's I I I can't say why, but uh I will say that I certainly didn't know.

And, uh, and the text messages she's sending to friends who may have recognized it, uh, that's they didn't tell me that.

So, Annie, amazing.

Um, yeah, look, that's not a particularly satisfying answer to that question.

You're the master of understatement.

Yeah, I got to cover the My ex-girlfriend knows that my tattoo on my body is a Nazi tattoo, but I don't know that it's a Nazi tattoo, but her friends say that it's a Nazi tattoo because it's not working.

And she's to blame because she never told me.

She didn't tell me that it's a Nazi tattoo that I told her is this is not flying.

This is No, it's not.

Look, um, these are when when there's a major event like a major story that comes out like this, like the New York Times piece did, how a candidate responds to it in the the ensuing, you know, 24, 48, 72 hours is really important.

And that that was probably not his best moment in moving on from this.

I mean, the thing to look for is does he start losing support from Democrats?

Do they start um stop giving him money?

Do they start stop um appearing with him at um events?

And does more come out?

They need the Democrats need Susan Collins defeated to take the Senate.

How panicked are the Democrats right now about this continuing this this this tsunami of ridiculousness?

I think the key word there is continuing.

If this continues, it's a serious problem.

Platiner is this new breed of candidate whose whole appeal is I'm not one of them, right?

I'm I come from a different world.

I had PTSD.

I drank a lot.

I've done bad stuff, but I can talk straight to you and I'm going to give it to you like it is in a different format.

The problem is his credibility is core to that message.

And when he's on Chris Hayes giving interviews like that and saying, "Yeah, I was drinking a lot, but I never grabbed anyone's arm."

Or, you know, things like that.

If if if the drip drip continues, his credibility is going to be shot and that's going to undermine his candidacy.

I think if it drip drip does not continue, we're a long way from the election.

And and he is a pretty good candidate um on the trail.

Yeah.

I think what makes that problematic is this is the continuation, right?

I mean, this story broke what six, eight, nine months ago.

So, and you had Democrat Democratic leaders Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others endorse him after the emergence of this the initial story about this Nazi tattoo.

It's not a Nazi adjacent tattoo.

It's not a Nazilike tattoo.

It's a Nazi tattoo.

We know it's a Nazi tattoo.

He's a military history buff.

His initial denials that he didn't know what it was were preposterous, and they all chose to set those aside.

Then there was this wave of Reddit posts that he made that suggested, man, we thought the Nazi thing was bad.

These are bad, too.

And they said, "We're doubling and tripling down."

And they were doing that until just the last couple weeks.

U well, I think this is probably not the last time we'll be talking about Graham Platner and his uh various excitements.

Main politics never been this exciting.

Uh but we are going to have to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our guests for joining me and I want to thank you at home for watching us.

Uh we hope to see you again here next week for a special 1-hour edition of Washington Week, America the Next 250 in front of a live studio audience.

Uh that's next Friday right here on PBS.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.