Clip: The state of negotiations to end Trump’s stalled war in Iran

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let's go to the war, and I want you to watch what the president had to say about the new supreme leader of Iran.

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

Donald Trump, U.S. President: I don't want to meet, but if I did meet, I'd be honored to meet him. 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 -- I don't know him. He's probably a professional. In some circles, he has a very good reputation actually, you know? Sometimes people say bad, but a lot of people say bad about me. It's totally false, of course.

Jeffrey Goldberg: My first question is, in what circles does Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei have a good reputation? Like your bowling league, PTA, I don't even -- I can't -- so, Nancy, make that make sense.

Nancy Youssef: I'll try. I mean, remember that that this was someone he called a 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 needed to fall, and that the U.S. was ready to do anything to make that happen.

Putting that all aside, I actually think that these kinds of comments hurt the U.S. in their negotiating because again, what it's signaling that the U.S. really wants a deal. And so at a time when the Iranians are closing the strait and can sustain that for months, while the U.S., it's much harder to keep that strait closed. It creates a ticking time bomb in terms of the impact on the global economy.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

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

Jeffrey Goldberg: All right. Steve, you and I have covered Middle East wars for 30 years. 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, yes, super, We could do that. I mean, where is this heading? And has he turned America's allies in the Middle East, not just Israel, but UAE and other Gulf allies, into kind of suckers here?

Stephen Hayes: 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 this is going.

Jeffrey Goldberg: If we had commercials, I would say, after the commercial break, Steve is going to tell us how the war ends.

Stephen Hayes: Nice tease. You're a T.V. pro.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Stephen Hayes: 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, 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 waging a war that he said today wasn't really a war. We're engaged in a 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 old regime.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Who's the wounded son of the previous leader.

Stephen Hayes: Yes. 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.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. Let's talk about this Netanyahu-Trump relationship because the one thing that -- and, Nancy, you know this, the Middle East correspondent, one thing an Israeli prime minister up for re-election can't be seen as is a sucker in his population. And it seems like Trump is yelling at Netanyahu now in a way that --

Nancy Youssef: That he did, yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: -- no -- I mean, he confirmed it in a way that no previous president ever spoke to Netanyahu, and 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?

Nancy Youssef: Well, as you know, the Israeli parliament dissolved itself 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 ally that wants to see this war end quickly and an Israeli population that wants to see resolution in these various Iranian-backed 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 waning support. It's one of the reasons the parliament was dissolved. And so 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.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Michael, I mean, Netanyahu put all of his chips on Trump. He kind of -- maybe the Democrats were leaving the Israel cause behind anyway, but he accelerated that. Where does this -- where do you think this heads?

Michael Scherer: 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 leader of Israel and the leader of the United States fighting with each other over what's going on every day in Lebanon, like why make a deal? This is a perfect situation for them to draw out.

Netanyahu's been on thin ice with American administrations for, what, a decade? I mean, like --

Jeffrey Goldberg: More.

Michael Scherer: Yes, more. I mean, like he has upset every president I've covered. And even before this Iran invasion, you know, I was talking to White House officials who were constantly complaining about the bad behavior of Netanyahu. And so he was always walking this fine line.

And I think, 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 I think, you know, it's safe to say that like the bipartisan unity behind supporting the U.S. 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.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Before we get to Maine oyster farming, I want to ask you, Nancy, one more question about the Iran war. Stockpiles of key weapons and munitions are very low. Iran is a third tier adversary of the United States. How does this look right now to the rest of the world?

Nancy Youssef: Well, it 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 ammunition, saying, we desperately need more, and the U.S. can't provide them, can't give them a sort of guarantee of what we're going to provide.

The munitions that the U.S. dispensed during the war will take years to replace and billions of dollars. They shot down drones that were thousands of dollars and take days or weeks to build. And that disparity is why the U.S. finds itself sort of limited in what it can do in terms of really being a power that can stand by allies and on multiple parts 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 U.S. strikes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: We'll talk about that in future shows obviously.

I want to go to Maine. Graham Platner, putative Democratic nominee for Senate, has 99 problems. Yes, let's start with one of them. Here he is with Chris Hayes talking about the small issue of the Nazi tattoo. Let's watch that.

Chris Hayes, Host, MS NOW: The Times basically reported that they saw texts of hers in which she's 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?

Graham Platner (D), U.S. Senate Candidate, Maine: Well, she certainly didn't send that text to me. So, whoever she sent it to and was talking to. That's -- I can't say why, but I will say that I certainly didn't know. And the text messages she's sending to friends who may have recognized it, that's -- they didn't tell me that. So --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Annie?

Annie Linskey: Yes, amazing.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Annie Linskey: Look, that's not a particularly satisfying answer to that question.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, you're the master of understatement.

Annie Linskey: Yes, I come from --

Jeffrey Goldberg: 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.

Stephen Hayes: And she's to blame because she never told me.

Annie Linskey: Right, right.

Jeffrey Goldberg: She didn't tell me that it's a Nazi tattoo but I told her it was a -- this is not flying.

Annie Linskey: This is -- no, it's not. Look, these are -- 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 ensuing, you know, 24, 48, 72 hours is really important. And 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 stop giving him money? Do they start -- stop appearing with him at events, and does more come out?

Jeffrey Goldberg: They need -- the Democrats need Susan Collins defeated to take the Senate. How panicked are the Democrats right now about this continuing this tsunami of ridiculousness?

Michael Scherer: I think the key word there is continuing. If this continues, it's a serious problem. Platner is this new breed of candidate whose whole appeal is, I'm not one of them, right? I come from a different world, I have 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, yes, I was drinking a lot, but I never grabbed anyone's arm, or, you know, things like that. If the drip, drip continues, his credibility's going to be shot, and that's going to undermine his candidacy.

I think if the drip, drip does not continue, we're a long way from the election. And he is a pretty good candidate on the trail.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Stephen Hayes: But 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 Democratic leaders, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others endorse him after the emergence of the initial story about this Nazi tattoo. It's not a Nazi-adjacent tattoo. It's not a Nazi-like 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.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, I think this is probably not the last time we'll be talking about Graham Platner and his various excitements. Maine politics has never been this exciting, 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. We hope to see you again here next week for a special one-hour edition of Washington Week, America the Next 250, in front of a live studio audience. That's next Friday right here on PBS.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.